I heard him get up and walk across the lawn toward me.
I wanted to start running, through my backyard and into the next, and on and on until there was no breath in my lungs and nowhere left to run. So I turned around instead, because it felt like the same thing.
He stood before me, too close, and I had to tilt my head up to look at him.
“And now?” I asked quietly.
“And now . . . here you are,” Scott said, in the same hushed tone.
I didn’t stop him from bending his head. I didn’t dodge his mouth when it touched mine, or protest when he angled his head for a deeper, better fit. I didn’t question my own arms circling his waist, or the pounding in my chest, or the dizziness that had nothing to do with alcohol.
He pulled away slightly, and his eyes slammed into me, looking for something.
I didn’t run. I hardly breathed.
And whatever he was looking for, he found. He smiled, and my toes curled.
And when he tumbled me down into the grass, he made me feel lost and beautiful and sexier than I could remember ever feeling before.
I never said a single word.
“I used to dream about you,” Scott said.
We were lying side by side in the grass. I might have been paralyzed. I felt battered and bruised. And wonderful. I felt like someone else entirely. I could hear him breathe next to me, and fancied I could feel it in my own chest.
“I imagined what you would be like when you were all alone,” Scott continued in that same quiet voice. “When you weren’t following after your brother and Jeannie, thinking your smile made up for the things they did. Sometimes, though, it almost did.”
I thought I had slept, although I wasn’t sure, as I couldn’t entirely remember waking up. I should sit up soon, I knew. There were clothes to hunt around for, and the long walk back to the house from where we lay. But I knew that as soon as I sat up, I would have to think. I was afraid of what would happen then.
“I never forgot about you,” Scott said, his voice still low. “When I got to college and started being who I wanted to be, instead of that loser everyone thought I was. The thing is”—he sat up so he could look down at me—“it made me hate you.”
I stopped looking at the stars and warily turned my attention to his face, intent against the night.
“Do I want to hear this?” I asked.
But I still didn’t move.
“Doesn’t really matter,” he said. “You’re hearing it.”
I sat up too. As I’d suspected, it was unpleasant. I blinked, and fumbled for my T-shirt. I could see him reach for his own clothes from the corner of my eye.
I was trembling—visibly, I realized when I pulled the ball of my jeans and underwear toward me.
“Is this the way you always act after—” But I couldn’t say it, because I didn’t know what to call it. His smirk kicked in.
“After what?” he taunted me. “This was an exorcism.”
I pulled on my clothes quickly and not necessarily correctly, and jumped to my feet. Emotions were buffeting me in rapid succession, too quickly to identify or name. But there was a unifying theme: shame. I bolted for the back door, as quickly as I could move without actually running.
He caught me before I could make it up the steps to the porch, grabbed me by the arm, and whirled me around into one last kiss.
I hated myself with a searing pain, because I could feel that kiss flood through my senses and down my legs to the soles of my bare feet.
I shoved him away, and he fell back willingly enough, but I was all too aware that it had taken me crucial moments to push him away at all.
I wanted to curse at him, yell at him, hurt him, but nothing came to mind. He only watched me, that damnable smirk like a slap, and waited. And I had never wanted to scream as much as I did then, but when I opened my mouth, nothing came out.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice rich with amusement and satisfaction. “That’s what I thought you’d say. See you around, Meredith.”
He turned around and sauntered back toward the yard, presumably to locate the rest of his clothes. I didn’t stick around to find out. I ran into the house, and then came to a complete standstill in the kitchen. My brain was flooded with lurid images, and I starred in every one of them. What I had done. How I had moved. What could I possibly have been thinking?
I ran for the stairs, and didn’t stop until I was standing naked under the hottest shower spray I could take, as if I could shower away my behavior, or at the very least blame it on anyone other than myself. Fifteen minutes later, I had to admit defeat. I wrapped myself in a towel and shuffled toward my bedroom.
“That good, huh?” Hope was reclining across my narrow little bed, looking far too pleased with herself.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” I said, blinking at her.
“No,” Hope agreed. “You sure didn’t.”
She couldn’t possibly mean . . . ?
But of course she did. I knew she did.
I tried to hold out.
“I was in the shower,” I said. “I think I got that lasagna sauce all over me.”
“Uh-huh,” Hope drawled. A huge grin crept across her face. “I’m in complete shock, Meredith. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I never would have believed it!”
“Believed what?” I asked through my teeth.
“My big sister, Saint Meredith the Perfect,” Hope said with slow delight, “is a slut!”
I winced, and had to close my eyes for a moment.
“Was that really Scotty Sheridan? Does he actually suck? In either sense of the word?” Hope giggled. I folded my arms over my chest, mostly to protect myself.
“You should never have told him about that,” I said. I tried to loosen my neck by rolling my head around, and Hope laughed again. “I’m glad you think this is funny!” I moaned.
“I think that you’re actually human,” Hope retorted. “Who knew? I wasn’t even sure you had sex.”
Since Hope wasn’t going anywhere, and I really didn’t want to answer her, I moved around the room as if she wasn’t there. I very deliberately did not look out my window and across the street, and why would he be at his mother’s this late anyway?
“I feel it’s my duty to tell you that Van Ick the Horrible spends more than a few of her evenings with her face plastered to her windows,” Hope told me, still lounging. “This I know from tragic personal experience. Only in Peter Dworkin’s wildest fantasy did anything happen between us, yet Van Ick told Mom there was a guy in my room, and boom! I was grounded. You should be prepared for the possibility.”
“Fantastic,” I moaned. I entertained the hideous mental image of Gladys Van Eck at her window, watching scenes I wished I could delete, and then reporting them in scandalous detail to my appalled mother.
I actually felt faint.
I pulled on the coordinated summer pajamas Travis’s mother had given me for Christmas and crawled into the bed as if Hope wasn’t sprawled across the foot of it.
“I didn’t know you and Travis broke up,” Hope said.
She ignored my feet when I tried to forcibly dislodge her, moving over on top of them and pinning them both down with a roll of her hips.
“Doesn’t surprise me, though,” she continued calmly. “He was such a frat boy.” She picked at one of her nails. “I just thought that’s what you liked. It’s kind of nice to find out you don’t. Scott’s all . . . edgy and sexy, don’t you think?”
Travis, I thought, and the shame deepened and flooded through me, threatening to drown me.
I had been deliberately—very deliberately, so that it required all my concentration—not thinking about Travis. Not once all night, not really, and not much in the days before.
It was just a phase, I’d told myself. Our relationship was about taking care of details, and that was harder to do on the phone than in person, obviously. Things were a little bit strained, not that “strained” meant anything. He just sounded kind of di
stant and I found myself sort of nagging . . . It was just the long-distance thing.
But then tonight. The backyard. Scott’s hands—
“Hope!” I barked out desperately. The words poured out of my mouth. “Travis and I haven’t broken up as far as I know so actually I really am a slut and I just can’t deal with having this conversation, okay?”
Hope looked startled. I held my breath.
“Well,” she said. She took in my flushed face and what I imagined was the beacon of self-loathing emanating from within. “That makes things more complicated.” She shrugged. “But this is the kind of stuff I can deal with.”
“What does that mean?” I was almost afraid to ask.
“You know,” Hope said, and shrugged again carelessly. Her smile then was genuine, and something else I had never seen before—a combination of wicked and bashful. “I get into a lot of these situations.”
I frowned. “Define ‘a lot.’”
Hope grinned. “That’s not the point. The point is, you feel bad and you shouldn’t. Nobody knows but me.”
“I know!” I moaned.
“Tell me what happened,” Hope commanded.
It occurred to me to feel strange about sharing anything with Hope, who had long been, at best, a complete mystery to me. But as the story crept out of me—first haltingly, and then when Hope exhibited no judgment whatsoever, like a torrent—I forgot that it should have been strange. And she was right—this was definitely the kind of stuff she knew how to deal with.
“Exorcism?” she hooted. “I can’t believe he actually said that!”
“I haven’t let myself think about it yet.” I shuddered. “But it may be the most horrible thing anyone’s ever said about me. Much less to me.”
“It’s not nice,” Hope agreed. She was lying on her back, having long since released my feet from underneath her, and had propped her head up on her hands. “But he completely played himself with the parting kiss.”
“He did?” I could only remember the heat of it, and how much I had wanted to be disgusted and repulsed. And how much I wasn’t either of those things.
“Totally he did,” Hope said. “Maybe he planned the whole scene with the exorcism line, but he should have just left, hate-fuck accomplished, so you could feel bad about it for the rest of your life. But running over and having to have that one last kiss? I don’t know, it seems to me that he liked the mechanics of the exorcism more than he wanted to. I bet he still has a crush on you.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” I said quickly, although it did. “It’s not like I plan to ever see him again.” I buried my face in my hands. “What am I going to tell Travis? How can I ever face him again?”
Hope was quiet for a moment. Her eyes searched my face.
“I wouldn’t tell him, actually,” she said at last.
“You mean I should betray him a second time by not telling him I betrayed him the first time?” I demanded.
“If you want to be a complete drama queen about it, yes,” Hope said. “What he doesn’t know really won’t hurt him. And this isn’t a normal situation. He doesn’t live here. He really doesn’t have to know, and it’s not like you have to stress about running into Scott somewhere when you’re with Travis, or someone else telling him ‘for his own good.’” She made a derisive noise in her throat. I sensed Hope was familiar with those situations, although she didn’t elaborate.
“I don’t know . . .” I murmured.
“I don’t see any benefit at all in confessing,” she said matter-of-factly. “Maybe it makes you feel better, but it’s only going to make him feel bad. An ongoing affair is one thing. That’s different, I guess. But one night after a lot of drinking? Stuff happens. To everyone.”
“I don’t know,” I said again. “Lying by omission is just as bad as lying directly, isn’t it? That’s how you get into terrible relationships. The next thing you know you’re conducting secret fish experiments in the basement and your wife is too busy traveling the old country to visit you after you have a car accident.”
I wasn’t sure where that had come from. Possibly the alcohol still sloshing around my system. Anyway, it seemed like an obvious slippery slope to me.
“Meredith, come on.” Hope snickered. “We’re not our parents.”
“You’re not,” I agreed immediately. “You’re not like anyone in this family. But I’m sure you know that.”
“I just know what I can get away with,” Hope said. Her hazel eyes were ripe with mischief. “If they think you really will go nuts, they stop provoking you. So I get to do what I want. Look at the alternative.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning Christian, who was a bully when he was younger and is a fuckhead now, and why? Because he got treated like the little maharajah his entire life and thinks it’s his role as ‘the son’ to boss the rest of us around.”
“I always forget that he really was kind of a bully,” I mused, thinking of Scott’s undying dislike. It wasn’t exactly undeserved.
“Or,” Hope continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “You. Miss Perfect. Saint Meredith. Selfless, dependable, and reliable to a fault.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I demanded.
“Not a thing,” Hope said. “Except it’s not real. Who made you responsible for this family? Who told you it was up to you to take care of us?”
I think my jaw actually dropped open, but I was silent.
“And I get to be the wild, unmanageable brat,” Hope said softly, when it was clear I couldn’t find any words. “It might be just as fucked up, but at least it’s real, and I get to do what I want.” After a beat, she continued quietly, “Of course the bad part is that this is the first time you’ve ever treated me as something other than a pain in the ass.”
Much later, I lay wide-awake in my bed and wondered if I would ever sleep again. My mind leapt from one thing to another as if pausing on any particular thing might force me to self-destruct. Had I put my mouth there? When had Hope become so wise, and how had I never noticed a whole personality behind the brattiness? Had he really done that thing with his hands?
I turned over and punched the pillow, and then, in a rush, hurled it across the room.
My entire life had plodded along on course, until tonight, when it had suddenly become someone else’s life. I didn’t do things like this. I wasn’t that girl. I couldn’t be.
Hope might be able to navigate a world where people could do the things that I had done in the backyard with Scott Sheridan and then go on with a normal, reasonable, presentable, and happy life in Atlanta, never a word to anyone, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly live with a deep, dark secret. I was no good at secrets and deceit. I didn’t have to give it a try to figure that out.
Filled with something almost as horrible as righteousness, I leapt out of bed. It was just before three, but I didn’t let that stop me. I padded down the stairs, through the sleeping house, and grabbed the phone in the kitchen.
I dialed the number and played with my bottom lip when it rang. Once. Twice. A third time.
“Hello . . .” His voice was groggy and asleep.
“Travis.” I could barely say his name. The sobs were sudden, silent, and huge, and racked my whole body.
“Darlin’,” he drawled, though muffled. “What’re you doing? It’s three in the morning. You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I whispered. I shoved a fist into my stomach.
And thought: How do you blurt that out? What do you say? “Sorry to wake you, honey, but I just wanted to let you know that I spent the better part of the night rolling around naked in my parents’ backyard with some guy I went to high school with who my brother used to beat up. How’s work?”
“Are you sure?” Travis asked, sounding slightly more alert. “Is your dad okay?”
And I couldn’t do it.
“He’s okay,” I whispered. “We’re all okay. I’m sorry. I just . . . wanted to hear your voice.”
It was the hardes
t sentence I’d ever uttered. I thought for a moment that my vocal cords might defy me, that the truth would blurt itself out and make me the honest person I’d always believed myself to be.
But only the lie came out. And it was easy.
After I hung up the phone, I stood like a statue in the dark and wondered if I would ever feel like me again.
Chapter 7
It wasn’t enough for her to watch me mow the freaking lawn,” Christian said, outraged. “Oh, no. That woman kept stopping me to tell me all the ways I was doing it wrong. Is she kidding? I’m still pissed off about the time she ratted me out to Mom and Dad about that party senior year.” He shook his head. “One more word and I would have shoved that drop-kick dog of hers down her throat.”
“Honey, please,” Jeannie said. “The manly posturing is cute, but Van Ick could eat the likes of you for breakfast.”
They smiled at each other.
We were standing around a Saturday night barbecue, out on the back porch. I was scanning the backyard for signs of my bad behavior the week before. Something subtle, I thought—like a huge scarlet A scorched into the earth. The freshly mown grass was green and unscorched, however. Which didn’t exactly make me feel better.
Meanwhile, Jeannie had taken over the grill, having claimed that a new recipe she’d found—presumably while surfing the Web, too busy to handle her future in-laws—would force us to worship her as a god.
Needless to say, I was skeptical.
Behind me, the soon-to-be-married couple was getting silly.
“Are you saying that a seven-hundred-year-old woman could take me?” Christian demanded with mock bluster. “This is the kind of faith you have in me?”
Jeannie grinned up at him and stuck out her tongue. She squealed when Christian grabbed her in a complicated sort of headlock, and then kissed her.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Christian said, releasing Jeannie and looking at me.
“It’s been a long week,” I said shortly.
I didn’t paste on my usual smile, and Christian looked a little bit thrown. His form of rallying was to head back inside, muttering something about spatulas.