Hard to Get (8 page)

“Hey, who's talking to you?” Travis turned on Randolph, with Brian right behind. “Butt out, dude.” His voice rose.

“
I'm
talking to Val here,” Kevin bellowed.

“No, you're not, jerk-off.” Brian faced him, his fists clenched. The other guys closed in with interest. I quietly edged toward the door, and when I was in reach, lunged for the doorknob and the sanctuary of the porch beyond.

I pushed open the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. The cold night air was fresh against my cheeks after the crush of the house. I sank onto a cushioned porch swing, half-hidden behind a thick white pillar. I leaned my head back and gazed at the deep black sky, where a few inky clouds were scudding across the crescent moon. I closed my eyes. Dave's face reared up in the darkness behind my eyelids. He gestured to me apologetically and put his arm around Taylor, whose orange-painted lips were stretched across her teeth in a victorious grin. Together, they waltzed across my field of vision, smiling into each other's eyes. Then the rattle of voices nearby startled me out of my half doze.

“Dude, he was totally making out with her and she found them in the parking lot,” a guy's voice was saying.

“She
saw
them?” a girl squealed.

I raised my head. A small group I hadn't noticed before was sitting in the shadows at the other end of the long, deep porch, perched on drawn-up chairs. I could see the tips of cigarettes glowing like orange pinpricks in the dark.

“How awful,” another girl breathed, her voice dripping with false sympathy.

I sank back on the cushions, wishing it were possible just to melt away and ooze onto the lawn. I might as well just parade the school hallways wearing a sandwich board reading this girl was jilted by david strauss. But then I'd be depriving everyone of such a fun opportunity for juicy gossip.

I leaned back farther in the porch swing, ignoring the creak of the chains, and curling myself in a tight ball. The creaks grew louder. Suddenly, I heard the sound of wood splintering and then the seat of the swing tilted up dramatically, dumping me backward, over the porch railing behind me and into a row of spiky yew bushes.

I yelped and thrashed around like an
impaled fish. Sticks were poking me everywhere and the bushes smelled ominously of cat pee. “What was that?” someone on the porch said, and then there was a general scraping of chairs. I yanked at my T-shirt, which was snarled in a clump of branches. With effort, I stuck one leg out of the shrub and, grasping a branch just over my head, pulled myself out of the bushes. A row of faces appeared over the porch railing like a series of small moons. Any chance I'd had of hiding was now utterly gone.

“Hey!” someone said. I couldn't face a horde of gossipmongers right now. I fled around the corner of the house toward the backyard and skidded to a halt as I came in full view of the pool, now full of splashing juniors, including Kevin and Brian, who had apparently
not
killed each other inside.

Their backs were toward me but I could be spotted at any moment. I glanced around. A weathered gray trellis stood to my right, and on a sudden impulse, I darted behind it. I paused, panting. A stand of cypress trees created a thick piney wall that pressed against my back. I huddled against the prickly needles. At my feet, a narrow path of thick, mowed grass led back through the cypress
trees. I'd never seen the path before, but then, I usually didn't spend much time lurking around the outskirts of Kelly's yard.

A group of girls, screeching with laughter, passed just a few inches away. Even though I knew they couldn't see me behind the trellis, I stepped back a few feet, then turned and, pushing through the branches, followed the path back into the shadowy, silent grove. Through a gap in the trees, I could see a sliver of the pool and the bright colored lights strung around it. The splashing and shouting voices were muffled, as if the party were much farther away than it really was. All around me, the cypress trees pressed thick and cool.

I followed the narrow path as it twisted around one tree trunk and then another, my feet leaving silvery footprints in the dewy dark grass. I was walking what seemed like an incredibly long way. I had to be off Kelly's property by now. I probably should go back, I thought, instead of wandering around randomly in the bushes like this. But the grass was so cool under my feet and the walking was soothing, like a massage.

Then I rounded a hairpin bend and gasped. There in front of me a perfect garden glowed like
a little jewel set in dark branches. Mowed paths meandered among beds of rosebushes, which hung their pink and red heads over the path, strewing it with petals. Banks of purple irises massed along the borders and the air was heavy with the fragrance of the wisteria intertwined in the arbors. The moon shone its eerie silvery light over everything.

I wandered into the deep shadows under one of the arbors and emerged into the moonlight again. I rested my palm on a mossy stone bench in front of me. The pitted stone still held the warmth of the day. I sat down and leaned back on my hands, letting the stillness drape over me.

Then a paperlike rustle disturbed the silence. I sat up on the bench and peered into the darkness. The moonlight clearly illuminated the paths, but deep shadows crowded the edges of the garden. I leaned forward. The rustle came again.

“Is someone there?” I called out. I guess I should have been scared but I just wasn't. This place seemed too magical for anything bad to happen. I tiptoed softly over the grass toward the rustle. I still couldn't see anything. I ducked under an arbor and bumped into something large and warm.

“Hi,” a voice said.

I shrieked and jumped. “Who're you?” I squeaked, backing out of the arbor fast. He remained standing underneath it.

“Um, Adam,” he said from the darkness. I heard the rustle of paper again.

“Why don't you come out here?” I suggested.

He stepped forward into the moonlight. Icy blue eyes and a shock of brown hair. He was tall and lean, wearing a faded blue zip-up hoodie that looked like it had been nibbled by mice and then run over with a truck several times, and a pair of canvas slip-on shoes.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” His voice was surprisingly deep. “I'm Adam. Um, did I already say that?”

I giggled involuntarily. “Yeah, you did.”

He grinned. “Sorry about that. I've been hanging out with my grandfather too much.” He glanced around. “So what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

I groaned and rolled my eyes at the insanely cheesy line. “I could ask the same thing about you. How come you're hiding back here in this garden instead of at the party?”

“I
was
at the party until about half an hour ago,” he said. “But the naked water polo was a little too much for me. I needed a break.” He grinned. I noticed he had very white teeth.

I laughed. “I'm Val,” I said.

Adam stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you.” His palm was hard and callused as it rasped against mine.

“So, do you go to Longbranch?” I asked.

“Yeah. I'm a senior.”

I nodded. That explained why he didn't know me. Our school is giant, and he wasn't the type we hung out with anyway. He looked like one of those guys who took AP Drawing and Painting and spent a lot of time reading little books in the halls, or crouching over the developers in the darkroom. He did have nice eyes, though.

There was a little silence. Suddenly, I felt like we were standing too close, even though he was a couple of feet away from me. I took a step back. “This garden is amazing, huh?” I said, just to say something.

He glanced at the flowers all around us. “Yeah. It's a Shakespeare garden.”

I blinked. “A what?”

“A Shakespeare garden. The guy who
owns the place is completely crazy for Shakespeare, so he made this garden like it would have been in Shakespeare's time, same flowers, everything. My dad's a contractor—he did some renovations on the house, that's how I know.” He paused as if something had occurred to him. “Hey, what are
you
doing back here?”

“What? I, um, back here?” I fumbled, still caught up in the whole Shakespeare thing. What a weird coincidence. “Uh, just taking a break, you know. Getting some air. Heh-heh.” I let out a weird little laugh.

But Adam didn't seem to notice anything strange. “So,” he said, shoving his hands in his sweatshirt pockets. “You want to go back to the torture chamb—oops, I mean, party?”

I giggled and he grinned.

“Sure,” I said.

He drew his hand out of his pocket, and at the same time, a piece of crumpled paper dropped to the ground.

“Hey, you dropped something,” I said. I reached for it and cracked my forehead against his as he bent down at the same time. “Ow!” I straightened up fast, rubbing my head.

“Uh, thanks,” Adam said, quickly reaching for the paper. “I got it—” His voice faltered as I smoothed it out. “That's nothing, just some scribbles …” I stared at the rough charcoal sketch. My own face stared back at me.

I looked from the sketch to Adam and back again. “This is me,” I pointed out. He had drawn me in profile, my ponytail curling over one shoulder. I was leaning forward, my chin resting in my hands, flowers and vines swirling behind me. I looked up at Adam again. I wasn't sure whether to be flattered or creeped out.

Adam cleared his throat. “I was sitting here and I saw you come in but you didn't see me and you were sitting there on the bench, so …” He blushed. “I don't know. So I just sketched you. I don't know. Sorry.” He held out his hand to take the paper back but I held on to it. He didn't seem that creepy, I decided, just shy and awkward.

“Can I keep it?” I asked. “No one's ever drawn a picture of me before.”

His eyes widened. “Sure,” he said.

“Thanks.” I slid the paper into my back pocket. Then I noticed the purple swelling on his forehead. “You're getting a giant bump.”

“So are you,” he said. Only then did I feel the throbbing on my own forehead. I brushed my fingers over the hard swelling.

“It hurts,” I confessed.

“Let's go get some ice for it,” Adam suggested.

I followed him down the path toward Kelly's. Inside the house, the vast stainless-steel kitchen was deserted. I banged cabinets, looking for dishcloths, while Adam extracted ice cubes from the freezer.

I studied his hands as we held little matching bundles of damp blue-striped dishcloth to our heads. Long fingers, knobby knuckles. Then he shifted his grip on the ice and I noticed with a shiver that he was missing the tip of his ring finger on his left hand.

“So, what were you, an FBI informant in your previous life?” I teased. He looked at me, startled.

“What?”

I pointed at his missing fingertip. “That's a gruesome injury, I have to say.”

He lowered his ice bundle and glanced at his hand. “Oh, that. Yeah, I was wearing a wire and the Mafia realized it.”

I laughed. Adam grinned. “Um, yeah, I
sliced it off cutting mats last year,” he said, dumping the ice in the sink and pitching the dishcloth on the counter. “It was great—I bled all over my junior project.”

I shivered. “Ick. Did you freak out?”

“Yeah, it was kind of freaky. But I had a great excuse for postponing my calc final.”

We laughed. Adam gently removed my bag of ice and inspected the bump on my forehead. My face tingled as his fingers brushed my skin and I suddenly thought of the GNBP. Was this a violation?

No, I decided, studying Adam as he turned away and opened the fridge. He'd taken his sweatshirt off and was now wearing a much-washed black T-shirt that read twisted sister. I never went for the self-consciously ironic retro hipster look.

“So, the soda's all gone, but there's, like, thirty different kinds of Arizona tea in here,” Adam said, his head still buried in the fridge. He craned his neck around to look at me. “Want one?”

I nodded and sank down in one of the kitchen chairs. This day seemed like it had started a very, very long time ago. I'd just taken a gulp from the frosty bottle of peach-mango Adam had set down in front
of me when the kitchen door swung open and Becca stumbled in. Her blow-out looked electrocuted and her eye makeup was smudged—of course, because it was Becca, instead of resembling a sloppy drunk, she just looked attractively tousled. “Val,” she started to say. Then she stopped and glanced from Adam to me and back again. Her eyes narrowed.
“Val,”
she said pointedly.

“Bec.” I widened my eyes and tried to subtly indicate
not a risk, not a risk.
Was she blind? Couldn't she see he was utterly not my type?

“I've been looking for you for an
hour
.” Becca came over and tried to yank me up from the kitchen table.

“Hi,” Adam said—politely, I thought, since Becca hadn't even acknowledged that he was sitting right there.