She caught me. “No skinny-dipping.”
Stella pouts her bottom lip and I pop my neck to the side. Dang it, she’s sexy.
“Do you live your entire life so seriously?” she taunts.
“No.”
“Then frolic with me and the fishes.”
“No.”
“Cuddle with the koi?”
“Same answer.”
“Gallop with the gigantic goldfish?”
“How many more of those you got?”
She squishes her lips together. “I’m done.”
“Good. The answer’s still no.”
Stella’s mouth forms this glorious smile as she steps out and sits on the brick edge of the pool. “Touch your face.”
Uh... “What?”
“Do it.”
Once again, I do as I’m told with this girl and the shock registers. I am smiling. A real smile. Not forced. Not fake. And beyond the smile on the outside, I lost a few weights from the inside.
Wow.
“Thanks, Stella.”
“No problem.”
We hold each other’s gaze. One second. Two. It goes into three. With a flutter of her eyes, she glances away and red paints her cheeks. My own heart beats irregularly and it’s not from panic but from the fact I’m so alone with her.
Water drips from her long, tanned legs and for a second I wonder what it would be like to touch them. To feel them rub against my legs. And my gaze wanders to her lips. How soft would those—
Ah...no. Stella’s been good to me and I need to be good to her. Even in my mind.
“Can we do this tomorrow?” I ask.
“Maybe,” she answers. “Rick says it’s going to rain.”
Jonah
Stella plants the fall mums I bought for Lydia’s grave around the edge of the flat stone, creating a colored pattern of purples, oranges, and golds. “So Joss tells the guy that if he wants to steal her car, then go ahead, because she’d love to file a police report and get some money from the insurance company.”
We’ve been meeting at the cemetery nearly every day for the past month. The October weather is warm, not as hot as September, and both of us are in jeans. A shame since I highly admired Stella’s tan legs. Stella wipes at a trickle of sweat falling from the purple hair she’s pulled into a tiny ponytail. While she’s successful in removing the bead, she is also successful in smudging dirt across her face.
“Here.” I reach over without thinking and the moment my fingers sweep along her face, her gorgeous gray eyes snap to mine.
“There’s...ah...dirt.” I don’t lower my hand.
“Okay,” she whispers and it’s the closest Stella’s given me to permission to be in her space. I rub at the dirt and it easily transfers onto my fingers, but I caress her skin again because her cheek is soft. Warm. And I like the blush forming there.
Stella’s chest rises as she inhales and as she slowly releases the air, I find myself breathing out along with her. Wow. What was that?
I drop my hand and clear my throat. “Did he steal the car?”
Stella blinks several times and I decide to help her out. “You were telling me how Joss found someone trying to break into her car.”
“Oh.” Stella stabs the ground again with my mother’s garden spade. “No. She told him that the engine was going out and he decided to leave.”
I chuckle. “You make up half your stories.”
I expect her to laugh, but instead she mumbles, “I wish.”
“So is Joss your stepmom?”
“What did I tell you about personal questions?” she says.
She told me that if we hung out together, not to ask them. In exchange she said she’d forget who I was friends with. Not wanting to face my past decisions of either laughing or saying nothing when it came to Stella, I agreed. I also promised that I’d give her space at school, but as each day passes that I spend time with her outside of class, the urge to break that promise grows stronger.
“You bring up Joss a lot but you never mention your mom or dad. Is she your sister?”
Stella pauses mid-dig, my mother’s spade suddenly resembling a weapon more than a garden tool with that darkness radiating from her face. “You made a promise.”
I hold my hands out in a white-flag motion. “Consider me backed off.”
“Good,” she says. “We’ll need to pour water over these mums. There’s a spigot across the way in the other section, but we’ll have to bring a container to lug it.”
“I’ll do it.” I glance over at James Cohen’s grave. No one has visited that I know of, and it creates a hollowness inside me, a feeling that reminds me of loneliness.
The wind blows and a few orange and yellow leaves float to the ground. Stella brushes them off her newly planted masterpiece then sinks from her knees back onto her butt. “There. Now Lydia has more.”
A few strands slip from her makeshift ponytail and spill onto her face. She doesn’t move them as she focuses on her favorite grave.
“Why do you come here?” I ask.
“That sounded awfully like a personal question.”
“It wasn’t one.” It is. “It’s like discussing the weather.”
“Why do you keep visiting James Cohen?” she replies.
Answering a question with a question. Nicely played. “I asked first.”
Her lips twitch. “Well, I asked second.”
“Like you don’t know why I come here,” I answer.
She raises one eyebrow. “If I did, I wouldn’t have asked.”
The meaning of her words hits me like a shockwave. “You don’t know?”
“Uh...no.”
“You don’t know who James Cohen is,” I state.
She tilts her head. “He’s a dead guy. Over there. And you’re obsessed with him.”
I’m numbed by the fact that she knows nothing and has never, until now, asked. That’s all everyone does—ask.
Everyone asks, but I can never speak. I don’t know how to explain what happened or what it was like, because the nightmare is tucked away behind a see-through wall. The memories, they torture me every second I’m awake and at night while I sleep, but the wall prevents me from connecting with it, talking about it, and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.
I’m unnerved when Stella inches over into the sunlight and begins her daily ritual of sunbathing. No one’s abandoned this conversation before. While I’m grateful, part of me wants to matter to her because she matters to me. “Talking with you, being with you...it’s the only time I feel normal.”
The leaves crackle as her head moves and I know Stella’s scrutinizing me, but I don’t have the guts to meet her gaze. “You feel normal hanging out with me?”
Strangely enough. “Yeah.”
“You realize most people think I’m weird and will tell me that—as often as they can.”
I inwardly flinch. She means Cooper. It’s what he mock-mumbled when she walked into American Lit today and once again, I said nothing in her defense. When she’s only experienced Cooper’s bad side and doesn’t know how he’s been a friend to me, it’s hard to make her understand. “He’s not that bad a guy.”
Stella’s off the ground, her arm barely missing hitting me in the process.
I jump up after her. “Stella!”
She doesn’t run, but she’s fast. My heart drums like it’s in the final stages of a death march. I don’t want to lose the feeling I have when I’m with her. “Stella!”
I catch up and when she doesn’t stop, I take her hand. Stella grinds to a halt and while still facing forward, she tries to yank her hand away, but I wrap my fingers around hers to keep her there. “Please don’t go.”
She whips around and I’m ho
rrified by the wetness in her eyes. “You laughed! Year after year, you laughed!”
It’s like she jolted me with a stun gun and thousands of currents of electricity are invading my body. I cringe and her hand slides away from mine.
“I’m sorry,” I say pleadingly.
“Are you? It seems to me sorry is the convenient thing to say when people want something. Because if you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have laughed.”
I knead both of my hands over my face, feeling like I’m standing at the gallows watching a noose swing in front of me. I’m on trial for crimes I committed, crimes almost everyone perpetrates, but never have to encounter judgment for. “I am sorry.”
“Because you want something from me,” she repeats.
I stare straight into her eyes. “I didn’t always laugh.”
She blinks once and something moves inside me: a boulder that had been bracing back the sludge I try to repress when it comes to Stella. Call it guilt. Call it my conscience. Either way, there’s no denying what I have and haven’t done.
“You know that already, don’t you?” I say.
Stella already knows when I laughed and when I didn’t. She could probably tell me each article of clothing I wore the times Cooper made her the butt of his jokes. I know this about her, because I could tell her every sound and every taste in the air the night James Cohen died. When horrible things happen your mind will never let you forget.
The knowledge in her eyes—it’s like a movie screen that plays the recordings of all the previous years of her life.
“It doesn’t matter,” Stella whispers. “Not laughing doesn’t make it okay.”
“No,” I agree, and not because I want something from her. It’s because she’s right. “It doesn’t.”
Stella turns to walk away, then stops. “You need to go. Not me. This place is mine and I’m not the one who doesn’t belong.”
I shove my hands in my pockets and move in the direction of my car. I’m here because James Cohen died. He’s in the ground and buried and I know I can’t continue to live like this.
Stella
Ten minutes before the bell signals we can head to our lockers and go to class, I’m wandering the stacks of the library. Lots of classics, and while a ton of girls at my school eat up anything that has the words ’tis or thee or long-ass descriptions involving powdery sheep on rolling hills with millions of twinkling stars, I don’t. I always have a worn copy of something written by Gena Showalter to keep me company at lunch.
In fact, I should be tucked away in the beanbag chair on the other side of the library reading about true love and all that, but since my fight with Jonah last night, it’s hard to concentrate on the words on the page. It’s as if I developed post-traumatic dyslexia.
I run my fingers along the bindings of the books and pause when a single red rose clutched in a fist pops through the shelving space less than a foot in front of me.
“Hey, Stella.” The voice is faux high-pitched, but I’d recognize Jonah anywhere.
I cock a hip to the side and cross my arms over my chest, glaring at the “talking” rose. “What?”
“Jonah’s sorry.” The rose moves from side to side to mimic a puppet talking.
I glance around, but we’re so far back in the stacks that no one else notices. I’ve replayed the fight we had again and again in my mind, trying to figure out how something I’d been enjoying over the past couple of weeks went toxic so fast. What bothers me more is that it went so wrong on the day he bought flowers for Lydia.
The rose tips all the way to the side. “Still with me, Stella?”
Am I? “I know he’s your friend, but Cooper’s a jerk.”
The rose droops and then disappears back into the stacks. In a second, Jonah walks around the corner with the rose in his hand and a baseball cap on backwards. “I’m the jerk. I know what he’s done to you—what I’ve done—and I never should have tried to defend any of it.”
He stares at me. I stare at him. He’s saying the right things, but I’m not sure I’m ready to forgive him. “How do I know you aren’t playing me for some big senior prank that you’ll sit around and laugh about when you’re a bald, fat forty-year-old loser? I’m Trash Can Girl and you’re Jonah Jacobson, best friend of the great Cooper Higgins.”
Jonah twirls the rose in his hand and a redness forms along his neck. “I like you, Stella. There are times Cooper’s been a real friend to me, but he’s been an ass to you and I don’t expect you to see him as anything else.”
I huff out a surge of air and Jonah continues, “I can’t ask you to trust me but I can ask you to let me earn your trust. If you want me to tell Cooper we’re friends, I will. You can sit next to me at lunch—”
I slice my hand over my throat to cut off that awful idea. “I got it. You’ll publicly announce that we share a strange fascination with cemeteries.”
Jonah shrugs, unable to look at me. “It’s more than that.”
A tremor courses through me at the word more and I close my eyes. More belongs in the realm of fantasy.
The bell rings and I open my eyes to see Jonah holding the rose out to me. “Whatever terms or conditions, they’re yours, but I want you to be my friend.”
When I make no effort to move or talk, Jonah places the flower on the shelf. “If you take it I know you’re still my friend, and if it’s still here by the end of today I know I’ve destroyed the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time.”
With that, Jonah turns and walks away.
Jonah
In American Lit, my pencil taps repeatedly against the top of my desk until Cooper turns around and slams it to a stop. “What is your deal?”
I yank the pencil out from under his palm. “Nothing.”
“Maybe if we got you laid, it would help.”
I glare and Cooper shakes his head as he returns to his conversation with a junior caught in his snare. Another minute ticks off the clock. Stella’s usually early. Not late. If she were going to take that rose, she’d do it now. She’s an all-or-nothing type of girl.
I’m on the edge of my seat, waiting, wondering, praying...I don’t want Stella out of my life. She’s beautiful and she’s funny and—I spot her shoes first. My heart swells to my throat and with a quick glance up, I run a hand through my hair in victory.
The release of nervous adrenaline causes the need to yell, clap my hands and hug her, but the sly look she sends me as she heads to the back corner says she’d decimate me into miniscule pieces if I did.
Stella owns the rose in a way only she would—pinned into that purple hair.
Stella
I’m early by twenty minutes. That’s what happens when Joss drinks Red Bull during the last hour of her shift and is shaking from a caffeine high.
Sitting cross-legged in the waiting area of the front office, I finish filling in the purple strip of the rainbow I’ve created on my left hand. Satisfied with the multicolored arch, I click the top back into place and toss it back into the bucket of other markers I swiped from the secretary’s desk. It’s not one of my better creations, but it will be enough to distract the guidance counselor from over-questioning my decision to drop from the college prep track to the co-op track.
A knock on the window behind me makes me glance over my shoulder. In the hallway, Jonah stands all hot with his hat on backwards and brown hair pushed back away from his forehead. He tips his chin down the hall and I know what he wants.
I nod and try to quench the warm fuzzies in my stomach when he grins at me.
The two of us belong in totally different universes, but for the past couple of weeks, we’ve been denying the space-time continuum and meeting at the cemetery. At school we coast by with an occasional glance. Sometimes a slight spoken word to confirm plans. But he stays in h
is world and I stay in mine. I have to admit, I like it that way.
Except at moments like this.
I stand and the school’s receptionist notices. “I need to use the restroom. Can you tell the counselor I’ll be back in a second?”
“Sure.”
I leave my folder, notebook, and pen there and practically skip out the door to weave through the students hanging in the main hallway until the first bell rings. Jonah found this spot, off a hallway that’s off the hallway—a nook that is most often empty. An area that’s away from prying eyes and the outside world. That’s where we go and talk.
Rounding the second corner, my breath catches in my chest. Jonah’s leaning with his back against the wall in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt spread taut across his muscles. We’re friends, I guess. Just friends.
I affirm my barrette’s in place and when my fingers slide against the silky petals of the fake rose, I continue forward. “What’s up?”
His lips stretch into this beautiful smile when he looks at me and I respond in kind. Oh my God, what is happening between us?
“I wanted to make sure you’d be at the cemetery today,” he says.
I rest my shoulder against the wall and he angles his body so that he’s a mirror of me. He’s close enough that the heat from his body is creating a bubble for us, and if I did do the whole fantasy thing I’d be dreaming of him touching me. But I’m Stella and he’s Jonah and I don’t believe in fairy tales.
Inhaling, I smell freshly cut grass and my stomach sinks. I love the smell, but it means he’s been to the cemetery again—this morning. Sure enough, his sneakers are darkened with dew and a few stray pieces of green grass rest over his laces. “Jonah, this has got to stop.”
Jonah
I went to the cemetery again and Stella knows it. When James died, I promised myself that I’d only go once, but then I went again and I just kept going. Then I met Stella. She’s helped...a lot. She helps me forget, but then I woke up this morning to find a note from my parents stating that they rescheduled with the reporter. All the chaos I thought was slipping away has returned.