Heather McIntire is in all the general-track classes at school and is exactly the kind of girl who wraps herself around boys like Marshall—too much eyeliner, not enough shirt. He’s holding her in his lap, touching the outside of her hip, her thigh. I lean against the wall and wait for him to notice me.
As I watch, he moves higher, fumbling for her breast. I’m conscious of my mouth suddenly, how dry and empty it is. How untouched. CJ Borsen materializes in my head and stays for exactly one unenticing second. I can’t even imagine kissing him the way Marshall’s kissing Heather—all lips and hands and too much tongue. The scenario is impossible, not to mention vaguely repulsive.
Heather clearly has no such reservations about Marshall. He’s got his head tipped back, eyes half-closed. She attaches herself to his neck, writhing against him like a squid.
He sighs, slipping his hand down the back of her jeans. And I can’t help it—I laugh. I don’t know what else to do. I laugh because the scene is so profoundly uncomfortable.
His eyes fly open and pin me where I stand. He goes rigid, sucking in his breath.
Heather must think he’s demonstrating ecstasy, because she kisses him harder, apparently under the impression she’s improving on her technique. He’s staring over her shoulder, eyes fixed on my face. When I smile, he yanks his hand out of her pants.
“Hi,” I say.
He flattens himself against the chair, shaking his head, and mouths the word what?
Heather turns in my direction, but her gaze doesn’t quite connect. “Are you talking to someone?”
Marshall doesn’t answer, only shakes his head and untangles himself from her arms. She slides out of the chair and onto the carpet, looking indignant, but he just stands up and steps around her.
“Hey,” she says, sounding shrill and confused. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
The music is a thrumming racket of bass and suburban angst, and he walks out of the room and toward the back of the house.
“What the hell?” she calls after him, but she doesn’t sound angry, just hurt.
After a minute, I push myself away from the wall and follow him. The house is dim and smells like popcorn. The carpet is itchy. Every surface feels very, very real.
I find Marshall in the little back-porch laundry room, wedging his way past an umbrellaed patio table to lean against the washing machine. I stand in the doorway while he lights a cigarette. He doesn’t smoke it, though, just holds it. He’s looking through the porch screen, into the backyard.
“You should put that out,” I say, and his whole body jerks like I’ve electrocuted him.
I slip past the table to stand next to him. “Didn’t you hear? They found tentative evidence suggesting smoking kills you.”
He’s huddled against the washer, leaning away from me. His mouth is so tight that his jaw looks wired shut. “What is wrong with you?” he says in a hard whisper.
I smile, but it feels breakable. “Nothing’s wrong with me.”
He laughs in a tired, breathless way that lacks conviction, but makes me feel small anyway.
I draw myself up—shoulders back, chin raised. “Nothing’s wrong, except that you’re breathing your sad chemical dependency in my face, and secondhand smoke is the silent killer.”
“Seriously.” His expression is rigid and he still won’t look at me. “Why are you here?”
Under the reek of the cigarette, he smells like beer and pot and a girl’s sugary perfume. I gesture behind me to the living room, where Heather is probably still sitting on the floor. “Hey, I’m not the one making a cornucopia of poor decisions. Why are you here?”
He glances at me, then mashes the cigarette out in a chipped saucer. “Why am I at my brother’s house? He’s my brother. Am I not supposed to visit my brother?”
I look at him so long he looks away. Finally, he scrubs his hands over his face and sighs. “Fuck, it’s complicated. I mean, come on, don’t you have problems?”
I don’t answer. It’s not the kind of question that you answer. Everyone has problems.
“Just…things are kind of shitty right now, okay? Sorry if I don’t feel like talking about it with someone whose entire life revolves around good grades and being popular.”
He looks angry, and under that, tired. I think of how he starts to doze in class, like there’s no way to keep his eyes open when the transitive verbs come marching out.
“You could, you know. Talk to me.” When I say it, my voice sounds very soft, like it’s not coming from me, but from the girl who wrote well-meaning advice on the wall today. The one who has a place in her disposition for tenderness, even if it’s small. “If you wanted.”
He laughs dryly, turning to stare out into the yard. “Look, all I want right now is to go back inside and get a beer and act fine and okay and normal.”
Act, he says. Act, not be. He’s standing with his back to me, like he wishes he were still kissing Heather.
“It is completely appalling to get drunk and make out with strangers.”
“It’s normal.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Well, you know what they say—everyone loves a self-medicator.”
“Shut up.” He says it flatly and I can’t figure out if he sounds bored or mad or just hopelessly, profoundly hurt. “That’s not what I meant. And she’s not a stranger. She’s just…she’s Heather.”
His voice is scaring me a little. It makes him different from Marshall in class—the boy who gives bored, insolent answers or sleeps through unit review. The boy who shoved a hall pass at me and gave me a look like I was negligible. Nothing.
He’s fidgeting with the dead cigarette, squeezing it, picking at it. The paper bleeds tobacco from a collection of little wounds.
I reach over and take it away from him, dropping it in the saucer. “Stop it.”
Instead of arguing or taking it back, he squints at me. “What the shit happened to your hand?”
I turn my palms up. The porch light is dim, but it’s enough to illuminate a dusting of soot, a small, shiny burn on my index finger. In the saucer, the cigarette has a black smudge on it the size and shape of my thumb.
“Nothing. A science experiment.” I look away and wipe my hand clean on my pajamas. “I was lighting matches.”
Out in the yard, someone is setting off a handful of bottle rockets. They tear across the sky, leaving a trail of sparks, followed by the small, hollow pop as they explode.
He doesn’t ask what I’m talking about, just digs in the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a red plastic lighter. “Try this next time.”
I move closer, a little, almost touching his arm. Here in the laundry room, it’s just the two of us, me and my strange, nocturnal phenomenon. Everyone else is far away.
“I don’t sleep,” I say.
Marshall shakes his head, still holding up the lighter. “What?”
“You asked if I had problems. I never sleep. That’s my problem.”
He doesn’t answer. He watches me so long I start to feel awkward, like he’s actually seeing me.
“I could do better,” he says finally. His voice is low, like we’re trading confessions. “At school,” he adds. “It’s just that my whole life is completely buried under all this other stuff. But I could.”
“But you don’t,” I say, when what I want is to whisper it like he’s on his deathbed. Like the tragedy it is.
Marshall sighs and rakes his hair back from his forehead. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Because you know I’m right.”
“Fine, yeah, you’re right. Can we just skip this part?”
“Which?”
“The part where you tell me I’m lazy or a slacker or—or not worth anything. I already know how pathetic my life is.”
Neither of us says anything else. I’m the one who looks away first.
Out in the yard, another round of bottle rockets goes off. The shower of sparks is industrial and beautiful, like someone’s welding crossbeams in the sky. I wonder where a person gets bottle rockets, how much they cost. Maybe I’ll invest in some. I like things that increase velocity and then explode.
“I look at you,” Marshall says, and his voice is very gentle suddenly. “I look at you and I think, why is that girl so sad? Why are you sad?”
I turn to face him, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m not sad.”
Slumped against the washing machine, he looks broken. His face is wistful, half lit by the dull yellow glow of the porch light. And he smiles. “I call bullshit,” he says. “I’m calling bullshit all over that one.”
I stand with my shoulders back. “Forgive me if I don’t think unbiased evaluation of someone else’s emotional state is really your area of expertise.”
He shrugs. “Whatever. Not like it matters, but you’re not fooling anyone.”
“I’m fooling everyone,” I say, and know it’s the truth.
Everyone except him.
I can feel my blood thinning, becoming air or water. My hands are weak, losing my hold on the world, losing track of Waverly, and I dread the moment when I wake up in my own bed.
“I’m sorry,” he says abruptly, staring out into the yard.
“For what?”
“For this—for not being…” He stops and takes a breath like he’s about to say something else, but in a second, when the words stop eluding him. His mouth is open and I can see the frustration as he struggles for it. I want to jump in, start suggesting conclusions to his sentences, but I wait.
Instead, he holds out the lighter, offering it to me, but when I reach to take it, my hand is tingling and numb. The way he’s looking at me is so cautious, so impossibly kind. Suddenly, I can’t feel the cracked linoleum or the cold or anything at all.
“Better,” he whispers as I start to disappear. “For not being better.”
I wake up breathless, with a squeezing feeling in the center of my chest like my heart hurts.