Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always (23 page)

“You want to hang with me?” Darin shouts it in my direction, but he keeps his eyes on the stage, nonchalant.

I nod and take a half step closer to him.

“Awesome,” he says, and he holds something out to me.

I look down. “What?” It’s a pad of Post-it notes, the classic light yellow. Two stick people are standing, a bit off-center, on the first sticky note.

“Watch,” he says, but I have to read his lips, and then with his other hand he flips through the sticky notes in rapid succession, and I watch his little stop-motion animation. In Darin’s stick-figure world, the stars come out one by one while the two little stick people watch and point at each one and draw constellations in the darkening sky. In the last picture, the two stick people are holding hands.

It’s the perfect film of a stick person romance. Darin flips through the book only that one time, and then he turns, stuffs the sticky notes into the side pocket of my backpack, and focuses on the stage, his cheeks a little pink.

The music pushes against my pulse, quickening, and I’m thinking about the rocket ship and Darin’s made-up constellations as I take hold of his sleeve, to keep us together in the crush as Kayla’s boyfriend takes the stage.

35. Something
worth saving …

The club is not large; we’ll see Kayla again before the show is over. We actually see her twice before she finally disappears, messed up on whatever she’s been messing up with and draped over the arm of the drummer, giggling. (Okay, so this drummer. Bryan. He’s hot, yes, but it’s in that … dangerous older guy kind of way that’s hotter when it’s unattainable. The way he curls his arm so tightly around her waist, like he owns her—I can’t stand him. I can’t even recognize the girl I used to play Magic 8-Ball with.)

“So should I … like, save you?” I say. I raise my eyebrows at her, and she waggles her own, which are penciled in thin and dark above her dramatic eyes. I wonder if I could have saved her if I had paid more attention, months ago.

“You can come with us,” she says, still with that high-pitched giggle. “We’re going … for a drive.”

I’m torn. I don’t want to let her go with this creep, but … I look back, over my shoulder. “Darin—” He’s leaning against the wall, holding my sweatshirt for me. He tosses his hair a little and gives me an encouraging wave. Very dorky. I sort of love it.

“I mean … don’t come if you’re not into …
joining in
.”

This is not my best friend. Her face is pink, her eyes glassy. Still, she holds my gaze while she’s all sleazy and shit.

“
What
? K, I’ll call your sister.”

Her eyes narrow, the dark black rings ominous and mean. “Don’t touch that phone.” Her grip is tight on my wrist.

“Easy, easy,” Bryan mumbles, his eyes flitting back and forth between us with mild interest. “No need to fight over me, ladies.”

“
Leave me alone
, Cass, I’m serious. God … you need to get a clue about partying. This is … this is what my world is like, baby girl. You call my sister … and we are
through
. You and me, Cassandra. Don’t fuck it up.”

Okay. So I turn around, you know? What else am I going to do? It’s not like I can stop her. I cross half the distance that separates me from Darin, my ears full of her slurred laughter, before I look back. She has her arms around him and they’re facing away from me. Her right hand in his back pocket. But she looks for me, over her shoulder sort of, and her one hand snakes out of his slimy pocket and gives me the finger.
Fuck off, Cass.

And it’s so stupid, I know. It’s stupid, but I’ve lost my best friend, and I can see now that this was all a mistake coming here, lying to my parents, using Drew—all of it was useless because Kayla’s been like a shadow to me for so long, and I had myself convinced that if I met her challenge and found a way to go with her, I’d really be
with
her. But this … this isn’t me. This is me chasing after her all over again.

My eyes get all soupy and the whole world blurs. The stupid crowd is barely a crowd anymore—everyone’s filtering out and crowding into their stupid cars. Into their stupid purple hearses. What’s even more stupid is what comes bubbling up to my lips, these stupid words. “Dear God,” I find myself whispering, “please don’t let Kayla die because I didn’t stop her.” A stupid prayer.

“You tried,” says Darin, putting a plastic cup in my hand.

I look down. Ice and brown liquid. Bubbles. “Look, I’m not saying I don’t ever drink, but … ” But not like this, abandoned at a weird concert
and my former best friend gone off the deep end.

“It’s an energy drink,” he says. “Thought you might be getting thirsty.”

“Okay. So it’s an energy drink?”

He smiles, his steady gray eyes on mine. “Of course.”

“I don’t … she was my ride.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he says.
We.
It’s a good word.

“Did you drive?” Maybe he’ll give me a ride to Kayla’s sister’s apartment, except how am I supposed to go there now? I mean, maybe she’s used to K going MIA, but it’s still so awkward. I wish … it’s lame of me to want this, I guess, but I wish I were back at home right now, snuggling the piggies and talking with Eric. I’d work out a reading for that kid who doesn’t want to play sports anymore and sneak onto the computer to post it. And since I’m being lame, right now I’d even rather be hanging out at Drew’s house.

“I … ” Darin looks around, shrugging his narrow shoulders. The DJ is playing the music loud, and Darin is practically whispering. “My car isn’t really reliable enough to make it here and back, so I took the bus down. I didn’t really know … I didn’t know if I’d see you, or what to plan for after … but I mean … there’s a bus … tonight … going back up north.” He tugs the bottom of his T-shirt, which has that Internet comic strip on it, the one with the stick people.

“I thought you planned this out a while ago.” I take a gulp of my drink, wincing a bit as a sliver of ice slides down my throat.

Darin is quiet for a second, and his face turns pink. “Well, you weren’t supposed to find out,” he says, shaking his hair into his eyes.

“Find out what?”

“Find out that … I never had tickets to Categorical Denial like I said. I bought them after I heard you and Kayla were going. I just … wanted a chance to see you again. Outside of English class, you know?”

“Like … ” Like a
date
? There’s no way I can say that out loud.

“Yeah, I guess.” He raises his index finger and wiggles it at me, the inky smiley face making me grin, and then, so quickly I think I could have imagined it, he brushes the finger lightly across my dimple, and then my lips. “Gotcha,” he says, and ducks back beneath his hair.

“Well, as far as my parents know, I’m here with Drew Godfrey at a baptism until tomorrow afternoon, and I have no idea where I should stay now, or … ” My smile fades.

Darin twists a ring around his middle finger as he thinks. “This is going to sound so dumb,” he says at last.

I cross my arms and give him the stare-down.

He smiles, and when he does, he could be a little boy for an instant. And then I’m pretty sure I have a close-call moment where I almost lean in and kiss him. But I don’t, and we don’t, and at last he shrugs and says, “I have a … well, it’s sort of a tree house. In the woods.” He laughs. “I mean, it’s my studio, and it’s in my backyard, but that’s like, the woods. We could sleep there.”

“Until tomorrow?” Is that even possible? Won’t we freeze to death?

“Until whenever,” he says, and for a moment I allow myself to imagine that—to imagine living with this boy in a tree house in the woods
until
whenever
. “I stay out there all the time,” he adds. “There’s a woodstove.”

“In your
tree
house?” I raise my eyebrows.

“Mostly house, I guess,” he says. “There’s a ladder up to its roof, and from there, stairs go up to a platform in the tree. My sister and I basically grew up in it.”

I laugh. “You are so weird.” It could have been the wrong thing to say. But Darin grins.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he says.

I take another sip of my drink, which is sweet and heavy on my tongue. “So there’s really a bus going back home this late?” I’m glad I grabbed my backpack from the hearse when we got here. I can’t believe Kayla really took off and left me with no one. Well, that isn’t true. I have Darin, and a tree house, until whenever.

An image rises, in my head, of Drew. Not as I usually think of her, but as she was the other night when we baked cookies at her house. Drew, gospel-singing, out of place in the perfect kitchen yet thoroughly in place at the same time, a splash of white flour across the front of her sweatshirt. What if I really had come with Drew for the weekend to attend her cousin’s baby’s baptism? What if I would actually rather be her friend than Kayla’s? Or Annika and Britney’s, for that matter. But it’s too late for that now, unless I want to come clean to my parents, and as Kayla knows, I’ve always been too chicken to face them with any kind of conflict, any kind of truth.

“This used to be the bus station,” says Darin, helping me into my sweatshirt. We walk toward the door, tossing our empty plastic cups in the garbage as we pass. “Now it’s a couple blocks that way.”

“Perfect.” We walk, our hands swinging free. Darin’s shoes are silent, but my boots make a clop-clopping sound on the sidewalk, and the rhythm of my steps forms a little pattern in my head, soothing me. I can almost believe that everything is going to be okay—that Kayla will be fine and we’ll still be friends and my parents won’t catch on and I’ll stop feeling bad about using Drew, and Darin won’t find out how boring I am and Eric will find a way to be happy and what the hell, maybe I’ll find a cure for babies dying and be a hero and get the Nobel Prize or some shit.

“Did you see the latest Divinia Starr reading? Because you should have.” Darin breaks the pattern with this question, and it surprises me.

“What? No, I’ve only read the first one.” Nice, Cass. Call his attention to the fake reading about the English class crush whose origin is suspiciously close to home.

“Oh, that one.”

Is he blushing?

“I thought it was cute,” I say. Blurt.

Darin clears his throat, and there’s a brief awkward silence. Then he clears his throat again. “No, uh … this one was for someone who wants to give a boy a promise ring at the Winter Carnival, and I thought maybe you’d read it because … well, I’m pretty sure it’s your brother.”

“Some girl wants to give my
brother
a ring?” I don’t understand.

“No, like, I think your brother is the person. I think … I think Eric wants to give his boyfriend a ring. You know. In front of his sculpture of Northstar.” Darin pulls his wallet out of his pocket, trailing one of those long chains from his pants.

“What? Eric would never … ”

Darin buys our bus tickets, and we shuffle off to one side of the door to wait. I think back. It all falls into place. Nervous Nellie, the reactions “she” was worried about. I remember the ending—dramatic and possibly devastating?

Darin hands me my ticket and I stare at it, but I can’t read any of the information in front of me. “How do you even know about Eric?”

Darin shrugs. “Your brother came to talk to me about something, and I … ”

I swear Darin’s face goes red again. I’m so confused.

“I offered to help him with his snow sculpture.” He looks back down at the ticket in his hand. “We’ve got a little time before this bus leaves.”

“Wait—what did my brother come to talk to you about?” The heel of my left boot digs into my foot. I’m going to have a blister, and worse, I’m going to ignore the blister as it forms to avoid looking like a dork in front of a boy. It really is the apocalypse.

“Well, that’s also going to sound a little stupid,” Darin says. He ducks his head, hiding under his hair once again. “He heard I was talking to you in English, and, well, maybe he heard that I was asking around about you. A little.”

“
What
? Did he make you get a background check or maybe fingerprint you while he was at it?” Wait. He was asking around about me? “And you
are
a stalker, aren’t you?”

Darin smiles. “Eric’s a cool guy. He just wanted to know, you know. Who I am. And then he told me about the sculpture, and I started helping him after school, and, well … ” He shrugs. “You should come and help us. Monday after school, at the carnival grounds.”

I nod. “I will, yeah.” I fiddle with my gloves, pulling them loose from the ends of my freezing fingers, wondering what it would feel like to take a risk, to take his hand.

36. A time you
got caught …

The sway of the bus lulls me—not all the way into sleep, but into a sort of semi-conscious state. I keep my head from drifting over onto Darin’s shoulder, but I dream, in a way, of tree house adventures. In my dreams, questions about keeping warm don’t matter, and I don’t fret over who will sleep where and wearing what. I imagine peering down at the woods through a rustic window, hanging out in a tree all day and all night. I float in the space between waking and sleep, my head full of images of rope ladders and pirate swords and signs that say
No Girls Allowed
.