Then
Emma is fighting with Mom and Dad again. Juliette can’t hear the details, and doesn’t care to. There’s always something. She hears a name—Gabriel—and remembers her parents’ earlier discussion, but it still makes no sense. Emma doesn’t hang out with boys. Ever. Dad makes comments here and there, jokes that aren’t jokes about how she’d better be careful or people are going to start thinking she’s a lesbian.
Of course, one can’t be too interested in boys, either. Juliette has learned to walk that careful line. Learned it well, after she came home at fifteen with what her mother deemed a whorish amount of makeup and her father asked her if she’d done anything with that boy she ought to be ashamed of. She promised she hadn’t—they hadn’t even held hands—and he held her chin and stared into her eyes, and with his thumb smeared the peach-colored gloss from her lips. “Keep it that way,” he said, and she did.
For a while.
Juliette puts her headphones on, turning up her music. The screaming is upstairs now. There comes a yell and a thump and then fleeing footsteps, and the front door slams. Juliette closes her eyes and hums, her body tense.
If Emma keeps provoking them like this, she thinks, someone is going to wind up dead.
At just past nine o’clock, less than six hours before she is going to die, Irene Palmer knocks on the door and pushes it open. Juliette takes off her headphones. Her mother’s cheeks are flushed, her hair messy around her face, and she covers her forearm with the opposite hand in an odd way. “We’re off to bed. I wanted to check in on you.”
“I’m fine. Tired. Probably just going to sleep,” Juliette says. It isn’t yet ten o’clock. She isn’t the least bit tired.
“Good, good,” her mother says. She sighs. “At least there’s one of my children I don’t have to worry about.”
“I love you, Mom,” Juliette says. Her mother gives a tight smile and shuts the door. Juliette listens for the master bedroom door closing. Once Mom has checked on her, she’s good for the night. Dad never pokes his head in, and Mom knows—believes—she doesn’t need to check in again, like she does with Emma and Daphne. This is the advantage of playing along that Emma has never understood.
Just past eleven, Juliette throws back the covers and swings her legs out of bed. She goes to her closet and opens the box labeled WINTER SWEATERS. She removes the two sweaters on top and takes out her boots—Doc Martens, her prize possession—and a change of clothes. Jeans, a blue sleeveless top with a V-neck that slashes right down past her bra. She pulls on the boots, tying them tight. They’re way too big, but if she laces them up and wears thick socks, she can walk in them all right. She found them at a thrift shop. Nina has a pair just like them.
Juliette’s cheeks get a bit hot. She wonders if Nina will be there tonight. Nina with her smoky laugh and the short, messy curls she is constantly fiddling with, piling them on top of her head, sweeping them all to one side, stretching one coil out to its full length in front of her face and letting it spring back. She was a year ahead of Juliette in school. She left for college but often comes back over breaks. She’ll be gone again at the end of the summer, but Juliette tries not to think about that.
She finishes changing and listens again for the sound of movement in the house, but there’s nothing. Dad will be in his study, drinking. Mom will be in bed with her glass of wine. Juliette eases up the window and swings a leg over the sill, then wriggles the rest of her body out. She closes it softly behind her, making sure it doesn’t latch, and then it’s easy to climb over to the corner of the house and scramble down the trellis there. She keeps to the edge of the lawn, out of sight of the kitchen in case someone is grabbing another drink, until she gets to the trees.
Her path takes her under the tree house. A light glows inside, and as she walks underneath, Daphne peers out. They look at each other, Juliette on the ground, Daphne up top, and Juliette presses a finger to her lips. Daphne does the same, retreating inside again.
Daphne won’t tell. Daphne keeps everyone’s secrets.
Juliette sets out through the woods, toward where she knows Logan is waiting for her.
She’s seen Logan around plenty, but she doesn’t think they actually had a conversation until last fall. She’d just had a fight that wasn’t a fight with her parents. A rare slipup. She asked to skip a recital so that she could do a college visit trip with Stacy, and when Mom reminded her that she could look at colleges only in commuting distance, she pushed back.
“Disrespecting your mother,” her father had called it, and applied what he terms a swift correction. Just one quick strike to her stomach, so she’ll remember.
She doesn’t think she can complain, not really. It doesn’t happen often, and it rarely even leaves a mark, and she lives a comfortable life. More than comfortable. They’re rich, basically, and she has everything she could ask for, wants for nothing; it isn’t like her parents are violent drunks who lock them in the basement.
But she was still smarting and still angry when Logan pulled his car up alongside her. He called over to her. “Hey, Princess, want to have some actual fun?” She isn’t certain which one of them was more surprised when she said, “Sure.”
His car smelled of cigarette smoke and the glass cleaner he used obsessively. The seat was split, the foam padding bulging out, pockmarked like acned skin. The AC was broken, and she remembers the sweat trickling down her spine as Logan asked her where he could take her.
“Anywhere but here.”
He took her to the Saracen house.
Each night she leaves, there is a moment of pleasurable adrenaline, a moment when she thinks, You have no idea who I am. A moment when that statement is a triumph, instead of a fearful whisper.
Who am I? I am a secret, she thinks, every part of me concealed.
Someday she will show them who she truly is.
Someday she will show them that she doesn’t belong to them at all.
Logan is waiting for her at the edge of the clearing where the Saracen house stands. He grins when he spots her, flicking his cigarette onto the ground and stomping it out. He’s striking, with strong cheekbones and pale eyes. He’s twenty-five, but Juliette has trouble thinking of him as any older than she is; he acts like an overgrown kid.
He drags her in close and presses a hard kiss to her lips. He tastes of cigarettes. The kiss is all teeth. He gropes up under her shirt with one eager hand and she shoves him away with an exasperated sound.
“Cut it out, Logan,” she says. His smile is crooked and unbothered.
“Just happy to see you,” he tells her. She snakes an arm around his waist, her lips tingling. Walking next to him like this is awkward, making her steps uneven. His bony hip digs into her side. His fingers manage to dangle just over her cleavage. “Here. Take this,” he says. He tucks a single pill into her palm.
“What is it?” she asks.
He shrugs. “Nothing too intense. You need to relax.”
She sets it on her tongue; he follows the gift with a flask and she washes it down with what tastes like turpentine but is probably cheap bourbon. She needs something to take the edge off. This—the house, the crowd, and especially Logan—stopped being new months ago, stopped being fun shortly after. Without chemical assistance, it’s turned deadly boring, in fact, but she isn’t ready to admit it yet, because she’s got nothing else.
Inside, a few of the usual faces are already there. A couple of them lounge on the couch, others sit splay-legged on the floor. It looks like a D.A.R.E. video, she thinks, and smothers a giggle that draws an odd look from Logan.
There is tinny music playing from someone’s phone, a slow-rolling conversation that Juliette can’t catch the thread of. Logan keeps his arm around her shoulder and kicks someone off the couch so they can sit there, the closest thing to royalty their little gathering has.
It’s both exactly what everyone says about the Saracen house and far less interesting. At first the mere presence of alcohol and drugs—mostly prescription pills lifted from parents’ medicine cabinets, plus Logan’s premium supply—felt shocking, electrifying. The novelty has worn off.
Whatever Logan’s given her, though, it’s giving her that pleasant, floaty feeling. She burrows against Logan, and his hand finds its way inside her shirt again, stroking her hip. Kaitlyn is telling a story she’s told a half-dozen times before, gesturing broadly and putting on voices. Elaine examines her fingernails, leaning against the wall with an expression that suggests she’s just as over all of this as Juliette.
Then Nina walks in. Is it everyone who turns to stare at her, or is it only that she becomes all Juliette can see? She wears her standard uniform, a simple top under an unbuttoned flannel shirt, rolled up to the elbows. It’s unpretentious, dressed up only with a few silver bangles. A tattoo of a sword decorates her forearm. She spots Juliette and walks toward her, stepping over a couple of people to get there.
“Scoot,” she orders. Juliette wedges herself more firmly against Logan to make room; he grunts in annoyance as Nina drops into the gap she’s created. The older girl taps a cigarette out of a pack and then holds up the pack to Juliette. “Want one?”
“She doesn’t smoke,” Logan says, but Juliette nods. Nina winks. Hands Juliette the cigarette and then, as Juliette lifts it to her lips, takes out her lighter. It’s silver, with a bee and a flower etched in the metal. Juliette’s eyes fix on her fingers as they flick it open, light it.
“Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” Nina asks. Then she laughs, tosses her head. “Never mind. Nothing interesting has ever happened here.”
“Hey, remember when Seth sliced his arm open and had to go to the ER?” Kaitlyn asks.
Nina lets out a plume of smoke. “Oh yeah. That was kinda cool. Come on, we’re sitting around like a bunch of losers. At least play some decent music.”
Decent music is procured. Juliette manages a few puffs of the cigarette. When the ash gets too long Logan confiscates it with a laugh and puts something new into her palm; this time she doesn’t ask what it is. It doesn’t matter. It’s something to make this anything other than depressing. It makes the colors bend, blur. It makes time braid into new shapes, so that she isn’t sure at what point she stands up—Nina pulls her up—and starts to dance with her.
Juliette can never tell if Nina likes her. She’s friendly, physical, quick to loop an arm through Juliette’s or sling a leg over hers on the couch. But she teases Juliette, too, calls her Logan’s pet, calls her prissy, taunts her for being a lightweight and having a curfew.
But here, now, the music is pounding and Nina is holding both of her hands and they’re spinning around, and both of them are laughing, Nina’s hands are around her neck, her hands are on Nina’s waist, Nina is throwing her head back with a wild grin. She doesn’t know if it is the alcohol or the pills or the simple intoxication of Nina’s beauty, but it is like she isn’t touching the ground at all. The whole rest of the world is gone, but that’s fine, because the whole world is contained in the places where her skin touches Nina’s, and this is the only thing that matters, the only thing that has ever mattered.
Nothing here counts. That’s why she keeps coming back. It isn’t real. None of these people are real, none of the things they write on the walls mean anything at all, nothing Juliette does is real or matters at all, and so it doesn’t matter that she wants, more than anything, to kiss Nina. It isn’t real, so she can have it. Just here. Just for a little while.
But then someone says “Kiss her!” and someone else whoops, and Nina, laughing, leans forward, and Juliette doesn’t pull away, and they are kissing, to hoots and cheers, and Nina’s hands are in her hair and her tongue is in Juliette’s mouth. It is a few seconds, no more, and then Nina pulls away and she looks at Juliette with a grin, and Juliette stares back at her, feeling cracked in two, feeling real again, and broken, and Nina’s mouth suddenly rounds in an O.
“Shit, I didn’t—” she says softly, and then Juliette turns and runs.