We Made It All Up, page 4
The restrooms occupied a corridor off a small foyer that led to the roadhouse’s back door. Crypt-deep voices from the foyer stopped me in my tracks.
“What the fuck, Thorssen. You meet a bear?”
“Halsey get rough during a special moment?”
Guffaws. And then a softer, abashed laugh that I somehow knew was Joss.
I pressed my back against the wall of the corridor so they couldn’t see me but I could half see them. Broad shoulders in letter jackets plus a piece of ratty carpeting and a cigarette machine that was probably installed in the 1970s.
They were all so big. Athletes. Town heroes. Man-sized boys who could get away with anything.
“I went in the hole for my stuff and tripped coming out.” Joss’s tenor voice again. “Busted my eyebrow.”
“Looks like you got coldcocked,” one boy said.
“Ah, he tripped,” another said in a mocking whine. “Tough to walk in high heels, huh?”
“Cut it out, Gibsy.” That was Tanner again.
I inched toward the foyer as Tanner lifted Joss’s chin, holding his face into the light. “That cave, she keeps kicking your ass, man,” he said with a weird solemnity. “Better learn to respect her, proxy boy.”
“Fuck you, McKeough.”
As Joss shoved Tanner away, I finally saw what they were all looking at. A lattice of Band-Aids above Joss’s right eyebrow didn’t quite cover the edges of a nasty gash. A bruise glowed on the same temple.
He’s not perfect. He can be hurt.
Ice prickled down my thighs, followed by a flush of heat. I looked away and wanted to look back, the same way I’d felt in class when Joss knelt in front of Seth. My own temple throbbed gently as I imagined raising my hand to Joss’s face and dabbing the dried blood away.
“I just think it’s funny that the only fights you get in are with rocks,” Tanner said. “Hit of Jim Beam?”
Brandishing a flask, he led his friends past me into the main room. I froze, but they didn’t look at me, except for Joss. When I raised my eyes, his lips were curved in a faint smile.
“Thanks for that thing yesterday,” he said.
Before I could think of a reply, he grinned—not a mean grin—and vanished with the rest of them.
And I was left alone in the ugly little foyer that still smelled like them: weed, musty basement, liquor, and sweat, sour and sweet at once.
Now
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 9:21 AM
As we shuffle out of the assembly, the businesslike tromping of hiking boots drowns out the sniffling. Sarah Blessingham sits on the lowest tier of bleachers with a boy’s head in her lap, stroking his hair.
Where’s Vivvy? My legs carry me automatically toward first-period physics—past the admin offices, where Sheriff Palmer now stands blocking the doorway, deep in conversation with the principal.
Students give him a wide berth, some freshmen skittering comically close to the wall. Small as he is, the sheriff has a way of looking at you as if you’re a cockroach, making you draw in your shoulders and avert your eyes.
He beckons to someone in the crowd, and for an ice-cold moment I think he means me. But then I see Halsey trudge toward him, pretty and heart-faced and scowling like she’s mentally debating the option of shattering his tibia and making a run for it. Not exactly the face of a grieving girlfriend, but then, she and Joss haven’t been together since October.
The sheriff extends his arm, ushering Halsey into the offices. I turn my eyes to the wall and keep walking.
Halsey’s bitch face has jogged the memory of the note in my locker. Someone knows something.
Someone could tell, which means Vivvy, Seth, and I should come clean. We need to go to the office and tell Palmer we were with Joss outside the cave on Saturday night, and why. I should do it right now, but I can’t, not alone, because I don’t know how to describe what happened. I don’t know how to say it in words the sheriff will understand.
For now I just want to sit in physics and stare at the soapstone counter and let its light-absorbent blackness absorb me, too. But there are eyes on me, and when I turn and see one of Joss’s friends, I freeze.
Freezing, always freezing, whenever they get too close or look at me wrong—drawing myself in tight and pretending nothing’s happening. Not boldly meeting their eyes, not asking what they want, not doing a clever song and dance to keep them at arm’s length, just going numb. It never really helps at all, but here I am doing it again, as Joss’s friend plunks down beside me and says, “Shit, are you okay? Can’t believe it.”
He’s a big, rangy hockey player with shaving scars and raw red eyes. Patrick something, someone I’ve never spoken to in my life. His huge hand closes on top of mine, and if I could, I’d jump up and run.
I don’t know you. What does he think? What has he heard?
Patrick must sense my terror, because he releases my hand. “It’s gonna be okay,” he says. “They talk to you yet?”
The sheriff. A cold hand squeezes my throat and jams my breath. “No.” I exhale for four-count, then try to make my voice sad but not too sad. “I didn’t know Joss all that well. I only came here in August. What about you?”
“Wait. Weren’t you guys, I dunno… kinda together or something?”
My right thumb and pinkie have gone numb. It takes me a moment to gather myself, to remember everything I learned in acting workshop, and to look Patrick in the eye. “No. We never even really hung out. We were just getting to know each other.” Despite what that note says.
Whoever wrote the note felt like they had a claim on Joss. It could be Halsey, for sure, or one of a dozen girls with crushes on him. It could even be Seth, maybe. It wasn’t Patrick, but if he thinks we were “together,” who else does?
He looks confused. “You’re the French girl, right? The one who sang that song in French?”
He’s talking about the Les Mis audition. My right hand hurts; I look down and realize I’m gripping it with the left, digging short nails into the webbing between thumb and forefinger.
“Joss really liked your singing. And at the Halloween party, I thought—”
I interrupt, trying to sound sympathetic and detached at the same time. “Joss was always really sweet to me. I can’t believe he’s gone. But there wasn’t anything like that.”
Part of me is still in denial, telling me Joss is up there hiding behind the cedars, playing a trick on us all. But the other part of me, the calculating, frozen part, knows I’m in grave danger.
If Joss told his friends where he was going Saturday night, soon we’ll all be hauled into the sheriff’s office. I can already see the disgust mixed with titillation that would crinkle Sheriff Palmer’s eyes if he heard about spin the bottle and everyone kissing, and the disbelief that would narrow them as I told him about the black hole in my memory.
I’m done with letting old men ask me questions about my sex life. Done forever.
“But…” Patrick looks confused.
Mr. Portman switches on the SMART Board and raises his arms like an orchestra conductor, commanding our silence.
“So, you and Joss, you really weren’t, like… close?”
You don’t really know anything. You don’t. I shake my head. He keeps staring at me, and I stare back, frozen again.
Once, in Montreal, as we walked past an enormous, lit-up ice sculpture, Frank said to me, “You could live in there. Princess of a frozen castle.”
That’s me right now: frigid. Here in my castle of ice, where I can pretend I’m safe, I’ll go over everything that happened, everything that led to today, until I figure out what to do.
“Celeste?” Patrick is whispering now. “You okay?”
I nod, then shake my head. “We weren’t close. No.”
But he won’t be the only one asking questions, and I can’t stay frozen forever. If someone points a finger at me and says I killed Joss, I need to be ready to tell everyone what really happened.
Then
TWO AND A HALF MONTHS AGO
(FRIDAY, AUGUST 30)
I know Joss just got there,” Vivvy said in the car, pulling out of the roadhouse lot, “but I couldn’t take game night a second longer.”
“Same here.” Relief flooded me, along with a traitorous hint of disappointment, because Joss was still back there. Joss had told me thank you.
“Before we were so rudely interrupted, I wanted to ask you something. Why didn’t you stay with your mom instead of moving to a dump like Kray’s?”
My hand went instinctively to my phone. Sixty-eight days had passed since the last text from Frank.
There was no way to tell her I couldn’t be in the same city with a man, a grown man, who claimed to love me. Who thought I owed him something because he’d built up an image of me in his head. You remind me of a depressive Chekhov heroine. I couldn’t explain to anyone how hard it was, when you met that person on the street, not to start becoming the thing he wanted you to be.
So I said, “I want to go to college in the States”—the very best college, far, far from home—“and my parents thought being here would help. Plus, my mom’s always getting new boyfriends, and I’m kind of done with that.”
“Your mom sounds like my Aunt Valerie. She’s dated practically every eligible person in town, and that’s person, as in all genders. She just likes dating.”
“That’s so weird,” I said, and then realized that came out wrong. “I mean, not liking people of all genders. Liking dating.”
“The part I think is weird is liking people, period. I mean, not that I hate people, but I’m very selective.”
“Me too, I guess.” Warmth in my cheeks. Was she trying to tell me I should feel lucky she’d selected me? I did, but it made me wonder what she wanted in return.
“Val just thinks all people are fascinating. She even had a thing with the mayor, and he’s super old and gross.”
Now I knew why I felt safe being open with Vivvy; she was one of those people who liked to be the biggest sharer in the room. “Beware of gut spillers,” my dad told me once. “They’ll spill your secrets, too.”
But I was up for the risk. Talking about myself gave me a dizzy rush, like turning in circles under the big sky.
“You saw Joss in there, right?” I asked. “Did you see his bruises?”
She gasped. “What bruises? He was too far away, and Halsey was all over him. Tell me!”
I told her everything I’d seen and heard, including Tanner McKeough’s taunting. “He called Joss ‘proxy boy.’ Does that mean anything?”
“Maybe it’s a hockey thing.” Vivvy shot me a birdlike glance. “They get bruised up all the time, but you think this was different?”
“Maybe.” I told her what Tanner had said about the cave, implying Joss hurt himself in there. “I thought Fish and Wildlife posted it.”
“Like they care. If they want to get wasted in the cave, they’ll get wasted in the cave. And Joss lives right down the hill from the entrance.” Her voice was tight with excitement, and it made something fizz inside my own chest. “Want to see?”
We surveyed Joss’s house from behind a giant juniper bush, surrounded by the keening of late-summer cicadas.
It wasn’t like he was in it. We weren’t stalking him.
The house stood weathered and unpainted: three modest floors, a front porch, and a slate roof. Behind it, the mountains hulked, enormous against the darkness. The Ford F-150 in the dirt driveway sported a gun rack.
“Joss’s truck is way older,” Vivvy whispered. “A pickup. See the attic? That’s his room. Not what you expected, right?”
I peered up at an oily reflection that might have been a window. “Not really.”
“Things have been rough since his dad died.” Vivvy wrapped her arms around her knees. “Mr. Thorssen was the county sheriff back before my aunt Val got there. When Joss was little, his dad gave him a ram’s-head belt buckle because Joss is an Aries, and now he always wears one. He has, like, ten identical buckles.”
To get here, we’d walked a quarter mile straight uphill from the highest paved street of Kray’s Defile—Vivvy’s street, she said—using scrubby bushes as cover. Below us winked the grid of the town. Above, yellow grass sloped upward to the jagged mammoths on the horizon.
Hollow mountains, full of pitch-dark passages and bats. That cave, she keeps kicking your ass, man.
All evening I’d been avoiding the topic of Joss and Seth. Vivvy had put the image of them kissing in my head when we first met, and if she went there again, I might blush so hard she’d think I was actually obsessed with them.
But now, as we crouched there like a pair of spies, I didn’t care. “So, I mean, is there an actual reason Seth acted like that in class? Did something happen with the two of them?”
Vivvy kept her eyes on the house. “When we were in middle school,” she said, “this bully Nate Carlsson went after Seth, and Joss decked him. It was pretty spectacular, blood and everything. After that, I’d see Joss and Seth together on the jogging path. We’d all hang out. I think maybe Seth was selling Joss weed, but they never smoked when I was there. I never saw them together anywhere but the woods, and then I stopped seeing them.”
“Did they have a fight?”
She shrugged, like the story made her tired and sad. “No idea. I was never really friends with them individually. Just in that one place, together.”
“And is Seth actually…”
Bang! A door slammed open. Footsteps thudded on the splintery wood of the porch.
I flattened myself to the earth. Beside me, Vivvy curled into a ball.
A broad-shouldered, slightly bowlegged man strode across the yard, beneath a floodlight, into a shed. He emerged with a clinking six-pack and grunted his way back up the porch steps.
“That’s the stepdad,” Vivvy said after the door closed behind him. “Let’s go back to the car.”
We crept back down the hill to the little park where Vivvy had parked the Impala. She cranked her window wide, and air whooshed in as she drove the three blocks to my house.
“I could afford a better car than this,” she said. “When Mom and Dad died, I got their trust. But I suffer for style. Anyway, to answer your implied question, yes, Seth likes guys. He told me that much when Joss wasn’t around. He also told me he doesn’t expect to do much about it till college, because the pickings are slim in the Defile.”
“I can see how that would be.” I knew how Seth felt, waiting for his real life to start. “So, Joss’s stepdad. Do you think he could have…?” I imagined the bowlegged man cuffing Joss on the temple, knocking him sideways. The only fights you get in are with rocks.
“Joss could kick his ass. But maybe. I’m skeptical of the cave story.”
“His friends were joking about Halsey hurting him in the heat of passion.” The phrase made me blush; why was I such a prude?
Vivvy snorted, rolling to a stop in front of my rental ranch house. “She’d hurt him, all right. But she’d probably scratch her name on his back with her nails to claim him.”
I cringed. “You don’t like her.”
“I don’t care one way or the other about Queen Halsey Halstead. I’m just a student of human nature. Check this out.” She scrolled on her phone and thrust a photo in my face: Halsey and Joss in a locker room, him dressed for hockey and her in the powder-puff flippy skirt. Halsey had an arm wrapped around Joss’s waist, gazing adoringly at him. Joss had a spacey smile, his attention drifting out of frame. “Happy couple, huh?”
“He doesn’t look too into her,” I conceded, opening the car door. She was probing me, gauging my response—my skin itched with it. “Why do you have that?”
“Because I fantasize about Joss.”
I turned back but couldn’t see her expression, only her shrug as she went on. “I mean, duh, I already basically told you. And I’m not embarrassed, because having fantasies is normal and totally different from acting on them—which I don’t, by the way. Sexually, I mean. Not yet. I’m still figuring all that out.”
Something about this speech made my throat go dry. I’d never heard a girl my age admit she didn’t have “it” figured out already.
The only way I knew to be safe was to keep myself in lockdown, a princess sealed in ice. But when Seth called Joss out in front of the class, I’d felt heat roiling inside me, seeking escape. Whether that heat had to do with Seth or Joss or both of them, I didn’t know, but now I wondered if it was okay just to feel it. Fantasy. Not real.
Imagine feeling okay to feel.
“I’m figuring it out, too.” I slid out of the car so I wouldn’t have to meet her gaze.
As I crossed our gauntlet of whispering cottonwoods, Vivvy called, “I can tell we’re going to be friends.”
Now
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 12:37 PM
All morning I’ve been looking for Vivvy. Suddenly, at my locker after third period, there she is, her tiny fingers firm around my wrist and her gray-green eyes fixed on me. “Has Sheriff Palmer called you in?”
The halls are still reverberating with grief and gossip and speculation, shock waves moving outward, but no one else has assailed me the way Patrick did in physics. I shake my head.
Vivvy mouths, “Outside.”
It’s lunch hour, so we slip behind the big juniper bush on the edge of the unofficial smokers’ area, shivering against a stiff breeze.
We look at each other, and then we’re both really shaking. Her image blurs.
“How?” Because of her aunt being the undersheriff, Vivvy often knows things before other people do. “How did it happen? Have you heard anything?”
Her voice seems to come in fractured pieces like the sheriff’s through the bad mic, only it’s because she’s trembling. Or because I am. “Someone hit him—just once, they think, and not that hard. But sometimes that’s enough.”
I raise my hand to my right cheek. The one I sometimes slap hard enough to sting. “How long have you known? Since yesterday? Vivvy, I was waiting for him to text this whole time.”
