TWO DAYS EARLIER
THURSDAY
When I wake up, I’m staring at Carlos Santana.
I close my eyes in an attempt to ward off the jackhammering in my brain. Santana poster, twin bed. I’m not in my room.
I blink until a black electric guitar propped up in the corner comes into focus; a Les Paul, found on eBay last year after his old Fender strat was stolen from a show. Kat and I pooled our money for his birthday so we could buy him a new guitar.
Jesse is at his desk, his back to me, watching a Marvel movie trailer on YouTube, headphones in.
“Jesse,” I say, but he doesn’t move. I lob his pillow at him.
He swivels in his chair so he’s facing me and tugs out his earbuds. “She lives.”
I scramble into an upright position, the back of my skull knocking on the headboard. “What time is it? I have work at noon.”
“It’s ten-ish. You’re good.” Jesse moves toward the bed, eyeing me like a dog that might bite. He perches at the edge, leaving a safe two feet of space between us. On his carpet, I spot a pillow and a lump of a blanket.
“You didn’t have to sleep on the floor,” I say, even though we both know that’s not true. His bed is a twin, and Jesse Salpietro would not leave a drunk girl to sleep on the floor.
“It’s fine,” he says around a yawn.
I prop myself up against the headboard. When I close my eyes, I see Ben, following Anna Markey up those stairs.
I think I might puke again. “Do you know what happened to my phone?”
Jesse tosses it to me. “We texted your parents saying you were staying at Kat’s.”
Scrolling through my phone is a brief reprieve from the awkward silence. No calls or texts from Ben. The only new message is a reply from my mom. Tell Kat hi.
I set my phone down, swallowing hard and praying I won’t cry in front of Jesse.
He is watching me, carefully, as if he wants to say something.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.” Jesse swivels in his chair so he’s facing away from me, a little too quickly. “I can take you to get your car whenever you’re ready.”
My stomach curls like ash, and a horrifying thought rises up in me. Me, babbling to Kat about how much I love her.
I am not religious, but I say a silent prayer to whoever that after I professed my undying love for Kat, I had the presence of mind to keep my goddamn mouth shut about how I feel about her boyfriend.
Anna Markey’s car isn’t in her driveway, saving me the humiliation of being spotted picking up my car looking like a sewer rat in last night’s clothes. Jesse idles at the curb.
“Thanks.” I pause, my hand on the door.
What would it cost me to say it? I miss you. I miss how things were.
Jesse moved into town in the sixth grade. The first day of school, I picked a seat by the front of the bus for the afternoon ride home, squashed to the window and hoping Noah McKenna wouldn’t sit next to me, because he sat behind me in social studies the year before and snapped my training bra strap every day.
When he plopped down next to me, Jesse’s long, dark eyelashes were clumped together. For a moment, I thought it was the rain outside, but his cheeks were splotchy.
I couldn’t remember ever seeing a boy cry at school, in front of people, since kindergarten. “Are you okay?” I’d asked.
He shook his head. “I forgot my key. I have to wait outside until my mom gets home at six.”
“Can you go to one of your neighbors? Or call your mom at work?” I asked.
He shook his head—just barely, careful not to disturb the tears welling in the corners of his eyes. I took the hint and stuck in my earbuds. It was hard to look away from him. The birthmark at the corner of his right eye. Soft, brown curls. The Oreo dirt under his fingernails.
The next afternoon, while I was smashed up against the window of the front seat, I saw him getting onto the bus. I held my breath. Scrambled for my headphones, praying I looked convincingly absorbed in untangling the wires.
Someone plopped into the seat next to me. “Hi.”
I tamped down the urge to put a hand to my lips, to cover the dopey smile blooming there. “Hi.”
“What are you listening to?” Jesse asked.
I handed him one of my earbuds, and we listened together. I’d been listening to “American Girl” by Tom Petty, my favorite song, and I’d been hoping he’d ask because I wanted Jesse Salpietro to know everything about me.
He told me he played the guitar; I’d just watched my favorite movie, Almost Famous, for the first time that year, and I told him it was my dream to write for Rolling Stone one day.
“Good,” he’d said. “You can write about how awesome my band’s music is.”
We spent the next few years making crazy plans like that. On the bus, at the merry-go-round at the marina playground.
“Claire,” Jesse says, bringing me back. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I unbuckle my seat belt and climb out of the car without looking back at him. “Thanks for the ride.”
My parents are at work when I get home. Mom is a psychotherapist who sees patients from an office forty minutes from our house, Dad is a librarian with a rotating schedule, and I work at a restaurant, which means the three of us are rarely home and awake at the same time.
I shower and take a twenty-minute nap that makes me feel even worse before dragging myself to Stellato’s Italian Table.
I’ve had a job there since I was fifteen, first as a busser and then a waitress. Serg, the owner, has been letting me hostess for the past month or so, since the last girl quit and no one inquired about the Help Wanted sign in the door.
No one wants to work these days, he always grumbles. Really, no one wants to work for his wife, who is a nightmare of a human being. The kitchen staff is a revolving door.
Serg’s wife has sent me home crying a handful of times, and I think about quitting once every two weeks, but I’m too comfortable to ever go through with it. Comfortable with the regulars, who slip me an extra twenty around the holidays. Comfortable knowing exactly where everything is and never having to ask.
I slip through the kitchen entrance, where Carlos, the chef, is stirring a stock pot of Bolognese. The smell makes bile rise up in my throat. When I cover my mouth, Carlos says something to the dishwasher—a boy I don’t know—in Spanish, and they laugh.
“Stop making fun of me,” I say.
“How do you know we’re making fun of you?”
I scowl. “What does resaca mean?”
“Didn’t pay attention in Spanish class?” Carlos clicks his tongue, shakes his head.
“All we ever did was watch movies,” I tell him. “The only thing I know how to say is ‘¿Dónde está Nemo?’ ”
The dishwasher boy laughs again as a girl’s voice says to my back: “He’s saying you’re hungover.”
I turn. Kat is standing in the kitchen entrance. Carlos keeps the door propped open to make stepping out for his hourly chain-smoke easier. Kat’s golden retriever, Elmo, is tied to the fence post behind her, his nose in the air.
I look at Carlos, then at Kat. “You know Spanish too?”
Kat took French, and she speaks near-perfect Italian, a byproduct of living on the Aviano Air Base in Italy for three years.
Kat shrugs. “I mean, it’s obvious he’s calling you hungover.”
“She’s right.” Carlos whisks past us, headed for the back lot, cigarette between his lips. He gives Elmo a pat on the head; when the dog sees me, he begins to whine and paw at the gravel.
“He misses you,” Kat says.
I step forward and rub Elmo’s ears with my thumbs. “He just thinks I have food for him.”
The Marcottes live around the corner from the restaurant. Kat passes it on her dog-walking route. She knows I could get in trouble for this, so she only ever does it when she sees Serg’s truck missing from the back lot. It’s been weeks since she’s come by.
We both know things are weird, because Kat wouldn’t have stopped coming to see me at work unless she knew things were weird.
I guess the weirdness became a tangible thing when college admissions letters went out in April.
Kat got into Boston College and NYU, her dream schools. I was too embarrassed to tell her I got rejected from mine—Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. So, I lied and told her that I’d changed mine and hadn’t bothered applying to Northwestern since I wouldn’t get in anyway.
Now, Kat glances at the patio seating area. The empty tables I have to set up before we open at noon. “Want help?”
“Sure,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”
I duck into the linen closet at the back of the kitchen and grab a stack of tablecloths. Kat’s waiting on the patio when I return. She watches how I arrange one of the tables before grabbing a tablecloth from the stack.
“Have you talked to Ben?” she asks.
“No,” I say, shaking a tablecloth open.
“Are you going to?”
“No.”
There’s nothing more to say; dating Ben Filipoff was a failed experiment. But that’s not why she’s really here. This is a recon mission: How will my breakup affect our weekend plans?
I try and fail twice to lay the tablecloth on evenly before Kat is at my side, grabbing the other end.
“I don’t know if I should go with you guys,” I say, looking up at her when the tablecloth is finally on straight.
Kat’s face falls. “Claire.”
We’ve had our plans in place for weeks. Unlike the rest of our classmates who will be vomiting Smirnoff slushies into toilets in beach houses in the Hamptons or on Fire Island, Kat, Jesse, Ben, and I were going to spend the weekend upstate, at Kat’s grandma’s lake house in Sunfish Creek, just the four of us.
I was going to pretend to like all that outdoor shit—hiking, canoeing—so Ben would think I’m cool like Kat, who has skied the Dolomites in Italy and hiked the fjords in Norway. Epcot is the closest I’ve ever been to leaving the country.
“Ben was supposed to drive me up there,” I say.
Kat chews the inside of her lower lip. She and Jesse aren’t going to prom; that’s how this all started. They said they didn’t want to, but it’s obvious the real reason is because Jesse can’t afford it. The tickets alone were a hundred bucks each this year. I thought about saying screw it too and blowing off the dance to be with Kat and Jesse, but I could tell Ben cared about getting the cheesy pictures and drinking watered-down Diet Cokes and fist-pumping to “Mr. Brightside.” So, the two of us were going to go to the dance and then drive up to meet Kat and Jesse after.
“I mean, you could obviously just drive up with Jesse and me tomorrow afternoon,” Kat says. “Unless you’re still planning to go to prom?”
I stare at Kat. “Alone? That would be even more awkward than being your third wheel.”
Kat’s face falls. “Claire. You’re still coming.”
I don’t say anything. I have no defense that will betray the real reason I don’t want to be alone with Kat and Jesse.
“Please,” Kat says. “I want you there.”
I nod, a bobblehead, powerless around her as always. It’s impossible to win against Kat. The summer before sophomore year, she made a PowerPoint presentation to argue to her mother why our local high school was just as good as the Catholic school she’d gone to for ninth grade.
The world bends the way Kat Marcotte wants it to, and it’s not just because she’s beautiful.
The fact that she’s beautiful is almost an afterthought, a genetic bonus. She has a volleyball spike that makes girls in the next county nervous. Kat makes even the most burned-out, jaded teachers write amazing job on her work. She’s seen more places in seventeen years than I probably will for the rest of my life. She’s been everywhere, while I live only in my head.
So why was I still surprised that Jesse fell in love with her?