“Ada! Wait!” Nick catches up with me as I’m leaving the luau place. “Hi.”
“Hi.” We stand for a while, frozen in the awkwardness of what’s supposed to happen between us Saturday night.
“How are you?” he asks finally. “Did you get to go paddleboarding?”
“No,” I admit. “But thanks for your help with Marjorie.”
“Any time,” he says.
We’re standing on a platform next to a tram stop, which is full of hotel guests waiting to catch a ride. I need to catch a ride myself, back to Ocean Tower and Afton. I need to talk to Afton now. We need to form some kind of game plan.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I’m still feeling light-headed. “I’m fine.”
“Do you still feel like tea?”
It takes me a second. “Yeah. Of course. Yes. If we can find some condoms, that is. I looked for them myself, today, and you’re right. They aren’t easy to locate.”
“If at first you don’t succeed.” He smiles, but it’s a queasy sort of smile.
“No gas station condoms,” I repeat.
“I know. That’s what you said.” He doesn’t sound super enthusiastic.
“What’s the matter? Are you having second thoughts? That’s okay, if you are. I mean, I’m not, but if you are, that’s okay.”
Nick holds up his hand, indicating that he’d like me to stop babbling so that he can speak. But then his lips press together, like he’s unsure of what he’s about to say.
“I don’t know how to say this,” he says.
“Just say it,” I tell him. He thinks I’m ugly. He’s realized that having sex with me might be a risk, as I outweigh him by fifty pounds and could squash him like a bug. He’s realized that . . .
“Are you evil?” he says.
I scoff. “Say what now?”
He crosses his arms over his chest in a protective measure. “I thought I knew you, Ada, and I thought you were nice, but now I’m starting to think that you’re . . .”
“Evil? Because I asked you to have . . .” I glance around. There are so many people. “. . . tea with me? Like you’re Adam and I’m Eve, and here I am offering you the apple?”
“No,” he says quickly. “It’s not about the . . . tea . . . It’s that I thought you were a good person, but . . .”
“But what?”
He sighs. “I saw you put pepper in Billy Wong’s drink tonight.”
Now it’s me who doesn’t know what to say. My brain churns with excuses, but none of them work. “You were there, and you didn’t say anything?” I say, looking for some way—any way, really—for this not to be my fault. “You thought you’d just, like, spy on me?”
“I wasn’t spying,” Nick sputters. “I waved when you came in, but you didn’t see me. You were too busy trying to poison a guy.”
“I wasn’t trying to poison him!” I object. “Did you know that pepper actually has many medicinal qualities? Some people drink pepper in their water every day. It helps with their metabolism.”
He stares at me like I’ve grown an extra head.
“Oh, all right!” I burst out, exasperated. “I was trying to—well, not poison him, exactly, but yes, do something mean.”
“Which brings me back to you being evil.”
“I’m not evil. I just . . .” I can’t tell him why. “I just don’t like Billy Wong.”
Nick shakes his head. “But why?”
I shrug.
“Billy’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” he says.
“Maybe you should get out more.”
His gray eyes flash. “Ask anybody. He’s the coolest, nicest, most all-around great guy who comes to STS. Add that to the fact that he’s a surgeon, and you and I both know how surgeons can be, and Billy should win an award or something.”
I thought so, too. Before this week, anyway. But now things are different.
I put my hands on my hips and glare at Nick. “Maybe nobody knows the real Billy. I mean, come on, how well do any of these people know each other, really? We see each other for seven days, once a year. I don’t even know you very well, and we’re about to—” Another group of hotel guests walk up to wait for the tram. “—have tea together.”
Nick sits down on one of the benches, like he’s decided to wait for the tram, too. “I guess I don’t know you that well, either.”
I sit down next to him. “I’m sorry. I wish I could explain why, but—”
“I saw you do it, and I thought that maybe you were messing around with your own drink. Sometimes I play with those little packets of sugar if they’re on the table. I thought it could have been sugar, but the package was the wrong color. And right after you did it, you left the table.”
Because I’m a coward, I think.
Nick looks down at his shoes. “So I went over there and checked, and yes, it was pepper. Billy even turned to pick it up, so I just grabbed it and gave it to a waiter who was cleaning up dishes.”
“It was you! You stopped him!” I gasp, part of me angry again, that Nick would interfere. “This was none of your business, Nick. You shouldn’t have—” I sigh. “Okay. That was probably fine.”
The tram arrives. Everyone around us surges toward it.
Nick gazes at it thoughtfully. “This morning there was a woman who was struggling to get her stroller on the tram. Billy saw her and got off and lifted it on for her, and then he gave her and her baby his seat.”
I wince. “That doesn’t prove anything. Everybody likes babies.”
“I saw him at lunchtime, too. He found a tiny spider on his table and he used a napkin to carry it outside.”
“That doesn’t make him a saint,” I say stiffly, struggling to hold on to the image I most want to forget: Billy and my mom in the dark hotel room. Cheating on us all. “And now that spider is probably going to bite a person, thanks to Billy.”
The tram leaves.
Nick’s eyebrows squeeze together. “I don’t get you. Billy’s the best.”
“Then maybe you should sleep with him!” I stand up and walk away like I’m going to leave, then change my mind and come back. “I have a good reason to not like him, Nick, and I don’t have to tell you what it is, because I don’t owe you anything. Can’t you just—I don’t know—trust me?”
But even as I say that, I think, But why would he trust me? He’s never seen me save a bug’s life or help somebody in need.
Another tram arrives. “I should go,” I murmur.
We both stand up.
“I’m sorry, I—”
“I get it. You don’t know me, either.” I get on the tram. The doors shut between us. Nick steps back and watches as I’m spirited away.
I’m angry as I walk back from the tram to the room. Not at Nick. At Mom. Still. Again. Perpetually.
I’m quiet as I enter the room, in case Afton went to bed early. Monday night, I went to bed early. Just to get that horrible day over with.
But my sister’s not in the room. She’s not in the bathroom. Instead I find my sketchbook in the middle of her bed, open to the landscape I did today, the one of the beach and the two figures.
Mom and Billy. Who knows what else she saw in that sketchbook.
And my sister is gone. Still. Again. Perpetually.