“It’s never a waste of time if you learned something in the process,” Tori preaches.
“Reading your mom’s self-help books again?” I ask her.
“I know. I should stop. Those books are obviously full of crap. My mother wouldn’t be boinking other guys if her life were so evolved.”
Jeannie shudders once again.
It isn’t until after five that Tori pulls up in front of my house, after having dropped Jeannie off at home.
I give her a hug. “Call me for anything, okay?”
“Does anything include adoption?”
“You want this new baby to be adopted?”
“No, I want myself to be adopted.”
“By my parents?”
She puckers her lips in thought. “Okay, maybe not. They’ll sense my mediocrity before the papers are even signed.”
“Are you kidding, my parents love you”: the truth. Another truth: my mom has said on more than one occasion that Tori is very sweet, but that she’s also as flighty as an airport. “Call me, okay?” I blow her a kiss and step out of the car.
As usual, the house is empty. At least when my parents were together, they made it home for dinner, but now there’s really no point. I’m sixteen, old enough to eat by myself and keep busy with my studies.
In other words, I’m pointless.
In the kitchen, I load up a bag of food, wondering how long it’s going to take my mom to notice that our groceries are evaporating faster than beer at a fraternity house. I also fill a box with more donation clothes and bathroom essentials. Arms full, I take everything out to the barn and rap lightly on the door.
Julian opens it up.
“Hey.” I smile.
He smiles back, but I can tell he doesn’t want to; I can see the resistance in the tightening of his lips.
He takes the box and peeks inside, plucking out the pair of scissors I packed. “This is very trusting of you.”
“If you really wanted to hurt me, you’d have done it by now.” I glance at my dad’s toolboxes. They’re filled with enough sharp objects to stock a hardware store.
“How do you know for sure?”
I don’t know for sure. “Do you want this stuff or not?” I ask, pretending to be tougher than I am.
He turns away, sets the box down, and picks up the hand mirror I packed him. “Wow,” he says, looking at his reflection.
“Wow…different?”
“Wolflike.”
“I actually saw a picture of you recently, pre–Teen Wolf.”
He looks up from the mirror. “Online?”
“On a poster, at a coffee shop in Decker—”
“The Pissy Ragdoll?”
“That’s the one.” I grin.
“Was the picture sitting underneath the word WANTED?”
“Being wanted isn’t such a bad thing,” I say, trying to be funny, but quickly realizing how wrong it sounds.
Julian nods, glancing at my mouth before turning away again.
“Some of your classmates were there,” I segue. “A boy with red hair, a girl who plays soccer…There was also a really tall girl and some guy with a faux-hawk.”
“And what were they saying?”
“It seems you have at least a couple of people in your corner: The girl who plays soccer and the boy with the faux-hawk…I’m pretty sure they think you’re innocent.”
“And the others?” Julian moves to sit on a bale of hay.
I sit down beside him and pull the tape recorder from my pocket. “There’s actually something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
He looks down at the tape recorder, but he doesn’t make a comment, and so I push RECORD.
ME: Someone at the coffee shop mentioned your mother might’ve been seeing someone else.
JULIAN: Misty said that, right?
ME: I don’t know anyone’s name.
JULIAN: The girl with straight dark hair, dressed in soccer gear. She also works at the coffee shop.
ME: Yes, that’s the one. Why would she say that? How would she know?
JULIAN: Because Misty’s friend used to ride at that guy’s ranch.
ME: That guy?
JULIAN: The one my mom used to cheat with. He owns a horse ranch in Brimsfield. Their relationship happened a long time ago. I’m surprised Misty’s still talking about it.
ME: How did you know about your mom’s relationship?
JULIAN: I remember coming home and seeing a truck parked in front of our house. At first I thought it was part of a surprise for me. The sign on the door said Hayden’s Horse Ranch, and I’d always wanted to try riding. I was around eight or nine at the time.
ME: But it wasn’t part of a surprise…
JULIAN: My mom and that guy were kissing inside the truck. They didn’t see me coming.
ME: How long did their relationship last?
JULIAN: Not long—maybe a couple of months.
ME: How do you know it didn’t last longer than that?
JULIAN: That’s what my mother told me.
ME: Did your dad know about the relationship?
JULIAN: No.
ME: So it’s possible that your mom and this guy could’ve still been seeing each other.
JULIAN: I doubt it.
ME: But it’s possible.
JULIAN:…
ME: Was he questioned at all—this ranch guy, I mean?
JULIAN: I don’t know.
ME: Did the police ever talk to you about him?
JULIAN: No.
I press STOP. “You need a good lawyer—someone who’s going to ask these questions and interview the right people.”
“No lawyer would be able to help me unless I turned myself in.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”
“I thought you wanted to help me.”
“I do. It’s just…this is way too important to screw up.”
“So don’t screw up.”
“No pressure or anything.” I take a deep breath and let it filter out slowly. “Can you talk about your grand plan?”
“My grand plan?” His face is a giant question mark.
“You escaped from juvie, laid low, found my barn, and got sick. But then what?”
“Then I met you.”
“But what if you hadn’t? What were you planning to do? Where were you planning to go?”
He bites his lip, mulling the question over. Is it possible that he had no plan—that he was just taking things day by day? Was the juvenile detention center really that awful?
“If I’m going to help you, you have to be honest with me—about your planning and your parents, about what happened at home, and everything that’s going on in your brain.”
He’s not even looking at me now. He’s angled away, facing the wall. I reach out to touch his forearm, and suddenly everything else stops: my babbling, his lip-chewing, the sound of hammering outside…
Julian’s eyes lock on my hand. “This is all kind of new to me.” His voice is fragile—like it could shatter with just the right words.
“What is?”
He pulls his arm away, putting an invisible wall between us. “You really need to go.” He gets up and goes for the door.
“Tell me first.”
“Go!” he shouts.
His tone cuts through my core. A chill runs down my spine.
I get up and wrap my hand around the pepper spray in my pocket. “You don’t scare me,” I lie.
His hand balls into a fist, like he wants to strike out. “You should be scared. You should go home and forget you ever met me.”
I move closer, just a few feet from him now. “I already am home. This is my barn. And I don’t have to go anywhere.”
He opens the door a crack, as if about to leave, then shuts it instead and turns to face me. His jaw is stiff. His eyes look red.
I position my finger over the nozzle of the pepper spray, just in case. “You won’t hurt me,” I say, nodding to his fists; both of them are clenche
d now.
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re not a monster.”
“How do you know?”
I take a step closer, feeling my insides shake. He’s shaking too. Maybe it’s because he’s holding himself back. Or could it rather be that he’s just as scared as I am?
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” he asks, after several moments.
“Like what?”
“Like being with your boyfriend.”
I maintain a poker face, wondering why he’s asking. Could it possibly be that he saw me with Max? My gut reaction is to correct him, but I keep silent instead, because he doesn’t need to know.
“What did you mean before,” I ask, “when you said that this is all kind of new to you?”
“I meant this. You. Us. Talking to each other, that is.” He peers over his shoulder, as if there’s anything there to look at besides a stone-cold wall. “Aside from my one friend, I never really told anybody anything. I just wrote stuff down.”
“Journals are great”—I take another step—“but they can’t replace real people, real relationships…those we can trust.”
“They can when there’s so much to hide.” His gaze roams all around the room—at the toolboxes, the mowers, the ceiling, and Dad’s golf stuff—except at me.
“I really want to help you,” I say, eager for him to hear the words again, to know he has someone in his corner—for now at least, until I have reason not to be.
Tuesday, October 20
Evening
Day put her hand on my forearm, and I don’t know what it was, but I totally lost my shit. My head went spinny and my heart started to race like I’d just run a marathon. I bolted for the door, but I couldn’t bring myself to go, and she wouldn’t leave.
Finally, I searched the room for something to distract myself, digging back into the box she brought. I took out a comb. I hadn’t seen one in weeks.
“I thought you might want to spruce up a bit,” Day said. “I mean, no big deal—just if you want…”
I attempted to run the comb through my hair—to show her I was so far beyond sprucing. As expected, it got stuck.
“I actually have a trick for that.” Day grabbed a jar from the box. The next thing I knew, she was sitting me down, standing behind me, spreading peanut butter on my hair.
“You really don’t have to do this.”
She maneuvered the comb free, then unscrewed the cap to one of my water bottles. Water spilled over my head like a baptism. She washed my hair next. The shampoo smelled like strawberries and felt like an egg yolk. She massaged it through, scrubbing every inch of my scalp.
“I can probably handle things from here,” I said, feeling ridiculously self-conscious.
She rinsed my hair again, and then started to comb it once more. This time it worked. No knots. Smooth sailing. She grabbed the pair of scissors. “Would you like a cut too?”
I knew that she should go, and part of me really wanted her to. But another part would’ve sat for an entire head shave if it meant spending more time with her. I watched as chunks of my hair fell to the floor.
“This is going to be great,” she said, angling the scissors around my ears and clipping strands from in front of my eyes.
Several minutes later, she scooted down in front of me. Sitting between my knees, she pulled at the ends of my hair, checking to make sure that the length was even. In doing so, she accidentally bumped her hip against my leg, sending a wave of heat straight down my thigh.
“Can you imagine?” She laughed. “A lopsided frizzball…It was pretty hilarious.”
I pretended to be listening—to know what she was talking about—but she lost me at the thigh bump. “Pretty funny,” I said, trying to play along, unable to help staring at her lips. They were so completely distracting: the color of dark roses. The corners of her mouth turned upward as she pushed back my layers.
“So, do you?” she asked.
I opened my mouth to answer, but no words came out, because I didn’t know which ones to use—words to describe a bad haircut I once got, or to explain why I had no idea what she was asking me.
She continued to pick at my hair, moving strands forward and back, like I had anyplace to go.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I told her.
Her fingers slid down the sides of my face. It was almost too much to handle—her attention, her touch.
I wanted to stand up. I should’ve moved away. What the hell was I still doing here?
“Never trust a woman,” my father used to tell me. “They’ll mess with your head and take everything that’s yours, including your every thought.”
Her fingers stopped at the cut below my eye. “Where did you get this?” she asked.
“When I left the detention center.”
“When you escaped,” she said to clarify, not letting me forget: I didn’t just leave. I wasn’t simply released.
“When I escaped.” I nodded. There was so much I wanted to tell her—so much she didn’t know. “My face met a jagged piece of metal fencing.”
“Lucky that it didn’t meet your eye.” She sat back on her heels. There was a weird expression on her face, like she was suddenly confused about something.
“For the record, I don’t really care if you screwed up my hair.”
“It’s just that you look really different.”
“Different good?”
“Different different.” There was something else on her mind. “Here,” she said, forcing the mirror into my hands.
I peeked at my reflection, less than interested in my hair. I would’ve given almost anything to read her thoughts or to kiss those dark rose lips. “It’s great,” I said, noticing that it looked a lot like it had before my arrest—shaggy, just an inch or so past my ears, longish layers, and waved to the side. “Do you do this for a living?”
“If I did, I’d have to charge you.” She got up from the floor. She smelled like the shampoo—like something I wanted to bottle up and wash all over me. “So, do you think you could give me some names?”
“Names?” I asked.
“Yeah. The names of the people I should talk to about your case, or a list of the things you’d like me to check out. Think of me as your very own private investigator.”
“Except once you start asking questions and probing into the case, people will find out who you are. And then figure out where I am.”
“Not if we’re smart about it.” She looked at me, waiting for a response, so excited about the prospect of helping me and saving the day.
I wanted to believe she could. But instead my dad’s words continued to play in my mind’s ear: “Don’t trust ’em for a second. They’ll promise you the moon, stab you in the back, and leave you more alone than ever.”
In my room, I curl up on my bed with a slice of blueberry pie, eager to feed this ache: this stirring sensation inside my heart, the weight of Julian’s loneliness on top of my own. In one way, I wish I’d never even started this investigation—this view into a world that’s so much darker than my own—but in another way, I wish I were back inside the barn, holding Julian’s hand, and giving him back a bit of light.
I grab my phone, seeking some sort of connection, noticing a missed call from Max. I dial Tori instead.
“Forgot to ask,” she says, in lieu of hello, “did you manage to score any numbers this afternoon? I was so focused on my own score sheet that I lost track of you and Jeannie.”
“As if the Pissy Ragdoll is a score-sheet kind of place.”
“Did I not spot you in a swarm of hunky hotness sipping something tall, dark, and delicious?”
“Um, huh?”
“I scored two numbers, for the record, thanks for asking.”
I take another bite. “I was only eavesdropping on the swarm. I kind of wish now that I’d actually talked to it…them.”
“Which has got to be one of the most overrated of pastimes, if you ask me—talking, that is.”
/> “Maybe if our parents did more talking, there’d be less family drama going on.”
“And maybe if our parents did less talking, there’d be more lusting going on.”
“Okay, that’s gross.”
“You’re right, but I’m feeling a little bit better about things, FYI. Of course, the guys at the coffee shop helped. Bojo told me that he has six half siblings he’s yet to meet—and those are just the ones he knows about.”
“Bojo?”
“Remember this: Bojo equals boho.”
“As in, from Bohemia?”
“As in free-thinking, unconventional, totally nonconforming.”
I look at the receiver, suddenly wishing I’d called Jeannie instead. “Have you tried talking to your mom?” I ask, in an attempt to switch gears.
“Talking, overrated, remember? Though there was one thing that Bojo said that really hit home: the choices our parents make—that we all make, for that matter—have a distinct purpose that may not seem apparent on the surface.”
“For the record, my head is officially spinning.”
“This is Life School,” she says. “And there are specific lessons we need to learn in this lifetime. And so we choose different paths, based on how we respond to those lessons, thus creating our own unique consequences.”
“Are you sure Bojo didn’t slip you a special brownie with that double-fudge latte?”
“My mother’s decision to cheat on my dad is part of her journey,” she says, ignoring me. “Hers, Santa’s, the electrical baby-daddy’s…and mine as well.”
“How is it part of your journey?”
“That’s the best part, because I don’t know yet. It’ll be one of my many life’s missions to figure it all out.”
I lean back in bed, almost jealous of her newfound perspective—even though I don’t quite get it. “You sound so evolved.”
“Bojo is ah-maze,” she says. “I just spent the last two hours on the phone with him.”
“Even though talking is overrated?”
“I’m just so glad I met him,” she says, ignoring the comment. “And see: our choice to go to the coffee shop after school…it was meant to be, because I met him.”