Places No One Knows (27 page)

The party is never, ever going to end.

After an interminable debate with Maribeth over whether or not I've ruined everything by neglecting to give my heart to CJ, I escape into the hall, and then the aggressively outdated dining area, milling around with everyone else, bumping from room to room. This is where I live now.

Autumn has outdone herself when it comes to homemade movie posters and colored lights, but everything else is just like any other party.

The beer tastes thin and bitter. It's cold, though, and that's appropriate and fitting, because I am cold. I drink it fast, like penance, and go get another.

Time is stretched. It's relative—a perceptual miracle. I've never liked the dumb, despondent haze of being drunk, but I love how the minutes pass in quick, untethered jerks. I wonder if Einstein ever had occasion to notice, if he devoted any calculation or causal hypothesis to the temporal properties of beer.

Autumn is camped out in the kitchen, sitting on the counter by the stove, swinging her feet and drinking something offensively blue and fittingly unidentifiable through a twisty straw.

“Waverly!” she screams in mock delight. She's wearing a beaded dress and combat boots. She looks beautiful. Her wide-eyed rapture is half ironic and half because she is actually that glad to see me. “I have a present for you!”

My blood alcohol level is telling me now that sure, I'll do this. I'll flirt and smile and act coy and careless and effervescent like everyone else. I lean against the stove and raise my beer can. “Is it a pony?”

Autumn shakes her head, twirling the twisty straw between her fingers and smiling wickedly. Her teeth are stained a pale, venomous blue. “It's better. Come on, I put it in my mom's office for safekeeping.”

She leads me through the house, thundering like a goddess in her black boots. Her hand fits neatly in mine, her way of saying without saying that we are together in this, whatever this is. She drags me along, pulling me close, but sends me down the last darkened hall alone—a scene befitting a horror movie.

I shuffle toward the office, wondering what she could possibly have put aside for me. A homemade Hadron collider, complete with hand-stenciled electromagnets and glitter-covered compressors. The preserved skin of some obscure eldritch horror. I can wear it as a costume—make my surface match my inside.

I push the door open and stop.

Marshall Holt is standing under a confusing piece of contemporary art, with his shaggy hair and his slacker hoodie and his deep, uncomplicated wanting. My whole body feels warm.

“Waverly,” he says. That's all. Just three aching syllables.

My heart starts beating faster before I even reach him. He looks immaculate and defenseless against the statement painting—three circles and a huge smudgy triangle. This is Autumn's present to me. The wish I'd blow out birthday candles for. “What are you doing here?”

He doesn't answer, just offers me a piece of heavy paper. It's a pencil drawing of Audrey Hepburn, backed by a fantastical city, overgrown with stylized art deco vines like the ones that Autumn drew coursing down my arm. In the middle, directly below Audrey's pearl-wrapped throat, it says:

Merry Christmas, Marshall Holt

“This is bad,” I whisper and as soon as I say it, I know that it's the truth.

His eyes are wary, terribly unsure. “What is?”

But for a second, I can only shake my head. The truth is that I'm dangerous. The brutal sum of everything that made it so impossible to be gentle with him behind the bleachers or follow him to the dugout.

Every way I break it down, failure is inevitable. The limited amount I have to give won't be enough. I'll disappoint, be found insufficient. And when I finally ruin the last vestiges of what I have with him? Then I'll just have nothing.

“This.
This
is bad. We can't be here, Marshall.
I
can't.”

“Hey, I'm sorry,” he says, taking back the invitation, shoving it in his pocket. “I just—I was having a bad night. You haven't been around at all and I really wanted to see you.”

“And then what?” I say, holding perfectly still. The need to reach for him is fierce, and I am terrified to touch anything for fear that it will break.

“I don't know,” he says. “Go somewhere, do anything you want. Coffee, the park, the goddamn
grocery
store. I'll drive you around Fullerton Heights to look at bulldozers or abandoned warehouses, I'll take you to see one of your psychopathic splatter flicks.”

I look away and squeeze my beer can hard enough to make dents. My heart is slowing down again. “No you won't.”

He shakes his head. “Don't tell me what I'd do. You know I'll do whatever you want.”

“
Shouldn't,
I mean. You'd hate it. You shouldn't do things you hate just because it's what I like.”

My voice is empty. Sad. I think that I have never in my life felt quite this sad. Instead, I've spent years feeling brittle and angry. All I wanted was to make out with Travis Bickle, Tyler Durden, someone who wanted to watch the world burn. Marshall is the complete opposite of a psychopath. We are not a symbiotic species.

He shrugs. “I'd take you anyway.”

The gaping ache in him is tangible, there in his face and his voice, worse than ever. He needs me to be here in a real, honest way. A way that there's no going back from. Alcohol is humming in every capillary in my body. My skin feels tingly.

Magically, we've moved closer. I can already feel the magnetic charge between us. Too definite, too intimate. And still, I find myself crashing toward him. My hand is a discrete entity, floating a millimeter from his cheek.

Then, just as I reach for him, someone behind me lets out a harsh, incredulous breath.

We stop, caught in a rapidly decaying orbit, my hand already veering away.

Kendry is standing in the doorway. “Oh, wow,” she says. Her shirt is hanging off one shoulder, and her weirdly nude lip gloss has migrated halfway across her face.
“Wow.”

Marshall and I jerk apart like we've been electrocuted, and Kendry doubles over, covering her mouth with her hands so it's just her wide, gleeful eyes staring up at me. “Waverly, Jesus! I knew you didn't get out much, but god
damn.
”

From out in the hall, people are already trickling in, crowding into the doorway, anxious to see what the commotion is about.

Kendry is shrieking now, howling with mirth. “Give her two beers and she'll throw herself at anyone!”

Everyone is poised, breathless—watching us, waiting for the next delicious thing. The sensation of their eyes is in my blood like ice.

Then, like a lecture slide changing over, Autumn is there, grabbing Kendry, turning her by the shoulders. “You're one to talk, Drunky McGlitter-Face.”

Kendry gives a high-pitched little squeak, then hiccups once, but her laughter cuts off abruptly.

Beside me, Marshall is standing with his hand held out like he wants to reach for me, but I don't reach back. My defenses are cracking now, too fragile to withstand any but the most quarantined environment.

Autumn's standing with her hand on Kendry's shoulder, waiting to see what I'll do, but it's Maribeth who breaks the silence. “Waverly.”

She says it without inflection. Without articles or verbs. She doesn't have to say anything else.

I stare back at her, trying to remember that we are standing in front of fifteen people, all crowding up behind each other in the doorway. A wasteland opens inside me at the thought of being seen. Not my skin or my naked body, but the true, inarguable shape of me.

This is not supposed to happen, not in front of Maribeth, not to the boy with the quiet voice and the bleeding heart. Love is a sparking, arcing power surge that shorts out everything and I am shivering with it, desperate to get someplace where everyone will stop looking at me. Someplace safe.

“Take me home,” I say, reaching for her.

The words are all wrong. Even as I say them, I understand that home is not a place I can get to from here. It's not my room, it's Marshall's, but to choose him now would mean giving up…everything. My seamless facade, all the stupid little conventions that define my life. Admitting weakness, admitting need.

It would mean giving up myself, and more than that, giving up Maribeth. There is no room in her carefully ordered world for a Waverly who longs to be more than a machine.

She reaches back clumsily, catching hold, tugging me closer. Her palm is warm and sweaty. The brass key on her necklace of romantic aspirations is long gone. She barely glances at Marshall. “Waverly, I'm in the middle of King's Cup. You should come play. Anyway, we're
way
too drunk.”

I do a quick check, comparing the proposed state against my actual condition. I still have access to basic chemistry, and the formula for distance. I plow through all the presidents in order, conjugate
destruir,
run a diagnostic on Hamlet's third soliloquy.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
I'm nearly paralyzed by the ferocity of my heartbeat.

Autumn is the one who breaks the silence, appearing in front of me with the dignity of an iceberg. “What is your problem? You're acting like a possessed person. Seriously, are you having a stroke, because I will call an ambulance!”

Marshall glances at her, shaking his head. “It's fine,” he says, and the edge in his voice twists hard against something in my throat.

We stand in the office, arrayed in frank disorder, and through it all, Maribeth just looks at me. The shape of her mouth is studious. Inevitable. I jerk my hand away and head for the door, pushing hard at the crowd until they part. I walk out in a daze, propelled by the force of my own adrenaline.

Marshall catches me in the mudroom. I'm already struggling into my coat.

“Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“I'm giving you a ride.”

And part of me leaps at the promise of being alone in the dark with him. It's immediately overwritten by the panicked loop that circles in my brain.
I can't, I can't, I can't.
That voice is louder than any other thought, and I have finally found something that Waverly is simply incapable of.

I grab my purse and slam my empty can down on the bench, then start for the door.

“You can't walk home,” he says behind me. His voice is low and even. “Your feet are too messed up. Just let me give you a ride.”

I whip around, nearly toppling into the coat rack before I right myself. “Don't tell me what to do.”

The look he gives me is inappropriately kind. “Go outside while I find my coat. I'll be there in two minutes.”

I stand at the top of Autumn's driveway. I could start walking. I could leave, but I know I'll only get a block before Marshall catches up with me. He'll pull up next to me and say
get in,
and I'll do it, because he'll be right.

But even the introduction of stone-cold logic won't be enough to power off my red alert. The emergency siren has been activated, blaring in time to the warning light that flashes in my head. The hull is breached. All nonessential sectors are on lockdown. It's so hard to love someone when you have to do it in the open. The second you expose a thing to air, it has already begun to oxidize.

When Marshall comes out a minute later, head down, hands in his pockets, I'm still standing at the curb.

He leads the way to a rust-speckled car, unlocks the passenger door, and I get in. The interior is shabby and smells like smoke and exhaust and him. He flops down in the driver's seat and turns the key. The engine sputters and coughs before it evens out.

“This isn't okay,” he says.

I lean against the window, feeling drunk—but only in the tingling numbness of my lips, the pressure behind my eyes. The rest of me is immovable and stiff.

He takes a breath before he continues. “I'm serious, Waverly. I can't keep doing this. I want something that's an actual life.”

“You have a life.”

“No, what I have is you, and then a whole bunch of other shit.”

It's hazardous, though, being that much to someone. When you're the yardstick that everything else is measured against, eventually, you just fail.

“Every morning, I wake up alone,” he says.

“So do I.”

He keeps going like I haven't said anything. “I wake up and everything I had before is gone.”

I nod with my forehead pressed against the glass.

“No,” he says. “You don't
have
that. I go to school every day and I watch you float around someplace I can never get to. You don't
lose
anything. You just go back to your real life and I'm not there.”

I close my eyes and think of everything I have. The transcripts and the course times and the clubs, performances, activities, all worth so much on paper, the currency for a better, brighter life. They're quantifiable, measurable, valuable, but they're not
mine.
They're a collection of accomplishments designed to prove that I'm good and capable, but all they really mean is that I'm not a failure. Not a total loss, and that's scientifically invalid. You can't define anything by what it's not.

I thought the two of us together would be enough, that we'd just stay safe in the blurry territory of nighttime and it would all be fine. But there is no escaping the reality—I run on jet fuel and pistons. Even here in the privacy of his car, I am not reachable.

“You don't have to keep working so hard to love me,” I say, and my voice sounds strangely clipped. Professional. “It's okay if you don't.”

“God
damn
it, would you stop acting like you're defective or something? There's nothing wrong with you.”

The pronouncement is so ridiculous, though. I laugh—a tiny digital laugh. He has no idea.