Suffer Love (3 page)

“My pillow smells like Grammy's house,” she says after several minutes of silence.

“Baked beans and gardenias?”

“Yep.”

“Yum.”

“It's disgusting.” She flips the pillow over and inhales. “Ugh.” Then she rips the sunshine yellow pillowcase off and tosses it into a box-covered corner.

“I don't know.” I sniff dramatically. “Better than this place.” Earlier today, when I first swung open the front door, the stale, unbreathed air snaked out and smacked me in the forehead. “This house reeks like an open grave.”

Livy laughs. “I do miss Grammy, though. It was nice . . . having someone else around.”

Grammy, Mom's mom, was the rubber around the Bennett bumper cars this summer. Good ol' Grammy lacks any kind of internal filter. Her constant chatter, which used to grate on my nerves, saved Livy and me from having to interact with Mom too much. When Mom wasn't snapping at Grammy to give her a moment of peace or casting worried glances in Livy's direction, she was scouring the Internet for jobs or locked in her room or out doing who the hell cared what.

Whatever she was doing, she spent all summer perfecting the art of ignoring her only son as much as humanly possible, which, as it turns out, is a lot.

“Check this out,” I say to Livy, clicking on my lamp.

“What?” She squints against the sudden brightness.

“Just wait a minute.”

She huffs out a breath. I throw my leg off the bed and find her head, ruffling her hair with my foot. She yanks my leg hair.

“Ow! Jeez.”

“
Sooorry,
” she croons, a smile in her voice.

“All right, here we go.” I turn off the light and the ceiling ignites.

“Whoa! That's a ton of stars. Wish my room had some.”

“We'll get you some tomorrow. They're . . .
luminous.
”

A beat. “Shiny.”

I grin in the dark and tuck my arms under my head, settling in for our game. “Bright.”

“Glittering.”

“Radiant.”

“Shimmering.”

I scrunch up my nose, trying to think of another synonym. Mom started this game around the time Livy entered kindergarten. “It's a great way to increase vocabulary,” she said when I'd asked why she kept chirping out words like “Pretty” and “Beautiful” and “Cute” to my confused-looking five-year-old sister. Once Livy caught on, though, she loved it. Sometimes she'd just play by herself, happily spitting out synonyms in the back seat of the car or while practicing her handwriting. Dad and I would join in every now and then, but it was really Mom and Livy's thing.

Until last April.

I find myself pulling Livy into the game more and more lately. She always plays along, usually with a little pucker between her eyebrows. I'm pretty sure she knows why I want her to play all the time, as if this stupid word game can somehow keep her connected to the wide-eyed, curious girl she used to be before life shit all over her.

“Do you surrender?” she asks.

“Never!” I shake my head and concentrate. “Oh! Sparkling.”

“Incandescent.”

“Damn, that's a good one. I got nothing after that.”

She giggles and I smile. It's worth getting my ass kicked at this game over and over just to hear her laugh.

She says good night and rolls over. I do the same and my eyelids just start to grow heavy when her voice startles me awake again.

“Sam?”

“Mm?”

“You think Dad'll come visit us here?”

I shift to my back and release a sigh to the fading stars.

“I don't know, Livy.”

“Yeah.”

Her breathing eventually grows soft and even, but mine stays hitched in my chest. It's stuck on what I didn't tell my sister, what I really think about Dad and the possibility of him coming back to Nashville.

Not a chance in hell.

Mom pulls the car up behind five or six school buses at Woodmont High School and says something. I yank out my earbuds. “What?”

She exhales through her nose, but doesn't look away from the visor mirror as she slicks on bright red lipstick. “I said, is it okay if I drop you two off right here. You'll have your car back tomorrow and I don't want to be late this morning.”

“Fine.” I grab my messenger bag from the floorboard, stuffing in rogue papers before slinging it over my shoulder.

When I reach for the door handle, Mom stops me with one finger on my arm. She looks at my sister in the back seat. “Guys, listen. I know things have been hard and that moving back here was sudden, but I really think things will be better for all of us now. Please make an effort.”

Better.
I look at my reflection in the window—hair way longer than I'm used to, dark circles under my eyes, a thin layer of stubble over my jaw because I couldn't even drum up the energy to shave. In the back seat, Livy's tight clothes are strategically placed to give Mom a coronary. We're starting school more than a month later than everyone else here. No friends. No dad. Just a mom who's pissed off half the time and lost in her own world the other. Oh, I'm sure this year will be a huge improvement.

“Olivia, you have your inhaler, right?” Mom asks as we climb out of the car.

“Mm.”

“The nurse has one on hand as well, if you need it. Don't hesitate to go there at the first sign of tightness or wheezing. The last thing we need right now is a bad asthma attack, and you know how stress—”

“I've got it, Mom. Jeez.” Livy stomps across the lawn. I can't hide my smirk as I follow her.

Livy tugs at her ass-tight black skinny jeans (the ones that make me want to wrap her in a tablecloth), while other pairs of ass-tight skinny jeans and hipster glasses swarm around us on the school's front lawn. We make it through the front doors and I pull Livy to a stop alongside the rows of puke green lockers. From my bag, I take out the schedules Mom picked up on Friday before she dragged me to the gym to talk to the baseball coach and dropped off Livy's inhalers. I scan them and find where Livy's homeroom is located. We head down the hallway in silence.

“So you'll be okay?” I hand her the schedule in front of her classroom.

“Yeah.” She starts walking through the door.

“Hey.” I tug on her backpack and stop her. “Text me if you need anything. I mean it.”

“I won't need anything.” She lifts her lined eyes to mine and gives me a smile before she takes a pull on her inhaler. “But thanks.”

I watch her meander through the rows of desks and find a spot in the back. Plenty of eyes follow her. Plenty of guys blatantly stare at her ass as she walks by. I force myself toward my own class before I embarrass her by knocking their teeth down their throats.

Homeroom is predictable. First period Calculus, mystifying. American Government, one big snore. I get more than enough curious glances, which I don't return. This whole thing would be a hell of a lot easier if Ajay were here, but I'll manage. I'm not here for new friends. I'm not here to avoid them either. As far as I'm concerned, that kind of shit just sort of happens whether you want it to or not.

“Hey. You Bennett?”

Case in point.

“That's me.” I slip my new books into my locker before third period English. I close the squeaky metal door to find a guy with light brown hair and a tight purple shirt leaning against the lockers. I recognize him from homeroom. Or rather, I recognize his shirt.

“I saw you coming out of Coach Torrenti's office last week,” he says. “You play ball, right? Pitcher?”

“That's what they tell me.”

A smile tugs at one corner of his mouth and he jerks his chin at me. “Josh Ellison. Third base.”

“Sam.”

He nods. “So, listen, I know the season doesn't start until January, but a bunch of us usually get together at the field to play and get in some batting practice if you're interested.”

“Maybe. When?”

“Every Wednesday.”

I pucker my lips, considering, when really there's a little girl squealing inside my head. With my dad licking his wounds in Boston, I haven't played decent ball since last spring. I got in a little play with the team from the school I went to in Atlanta for the past month, but they sucked ass.

“I'll be there.” I hitch my bag higher up on my shoulder.

“Awesome.” Josh claps me on the back. He opens his mouth to say something else, but quickly snaps it shut and turns his body toward the lockers, hugging them so close, it's almost indecent. “Shit.”

“Uh, something wrong?”

“Nah. I'm fine. It's just . . .” He cuts his eyes toward the hallway again. “Ah, fuck.”

I look around for the source of his turmoil and spot a girl walking down the hall. Sure, there are a lot of girls walking down the hall, but this one has dark eyes leveled at Josh like she wants to deep-fry his balls and shove them down his throat.

She's also holy-shit gorgeous.

When she gets closer, she hesitates, and I think she's going to lay into him right there in the middle of the hallway. Josh stays pressed against the locker, pretending to fiddle with the lock. Finally, her face slackens and everything softens. It's like watching an entire story—a history of some unknown world—shift and unfold right in her eyes. I just stare at her until she moves on down the hall. Then I keep staring at her, because, God, how can you not? All eyes and mouth and curves and tangly dark hair down her back.

“She's gone,” I tell Josh as the warning bell rings.

“Oh. Thanks, man.” He turns around and rakes a hand through his hair. “Only for the moment, though. She's in my next class.”

We start down the hall. “Who is she?”

“Hadley. And don't even think about it, dude.”

“Think about what?”

He just smirks at me. “Yeah, she's hot.”

Hot?
Hot
is not the word I would've used.
Unsurpassed. Magical. Wistful
. But you can't say that kind of shit to guys without being called a pussy, so I keep my mouth shut.

“But she also gets her kicks out of rendering your junk completely useless for half an hour, if you know what I mean.” Josh clicks his tongue as he pops into a classroom, which, as it turns out, is also mine.

And hers.

I hover in the doorway like a dumbass for about ten years before the teacher, Ms. Artigas, finally calls me in to sit down. Josh grins as I slide into an empty desk behind him near the door. The room separates us from Hadley, who sits near the windows with her arms folded. All her previous softness is gone and she's staring machetes at Josh again.

“What did you do?” I whisper as Ms. Artigas calls roll.

“Nothing you wouldn't do.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“Mr. Bennett?” Ms. Artigas's voice cuts through the room. Hadley flicks her eyes to mine before I can look away.

“Ma'am?” I ask in my best compliant-southern-boy voice.

She tosses her clipboard onto her desk and sits on its edge. She's sort of plump and pretty, with that kind of relaxed, satisfied look of teachers who know they've got you by the balls.

“All right, everyone, this is Sam Bennett,” she says, gesturing toward me. “He'll be joining our merry band of fools for the rest of the year, so try not to embarrass yourselves.”

“Don't you mean try not to embarrass you, Ms. A?” A huge guy, who I can only assume is some sort of wall on the football team, winks at Ms. Artigas.

“That too, Mr. Cone.” She picks up a stack of papers from a file box on her desk. “Before we continue with act two of
As You Like It,
let's go over the unit projects. You and your partner will rewrite an act of your choosing from the Shakespeare play you are assigned.” She starts walking up and down the aisles and I breathe a sigh of relief that she didn't make me stand up and tell three truths and a lie about myself or some crap like that.

A girl in the back with glasses and two pencils stuck through her hair raises her hand.

“No, Miss Kendall,” Ms. Artigas says, “you may not choose your own partner.”

The girl puts her hand down and a few other kids grumble, but I'm relieved. Not knowing anyone, I'd have probably been left picking my nose for five minutes while everyone paired up with their friends.

“Your partner's name is listed next to yours at the top of your packet.” Ms. Artigas heads down my row. “Pick up a copy of your play from my desk, get with your partner, introduce yourself if need be, and set a time to meet. Remember, this assignment is about interpretation, theme, setting, characterization, and creativity, not about how many times you can refer to various body parts in one monologue.”

Josh snaps his fingers like he's disappointed as Ms. Artigas drops a packet on my desk. I pick it up and read my fate.

Sam B./Hadley S.

I stare at our names for a minute, not sure if I feel excited about the prospect of getting a closer look at this girl or a little nervous about her clear disdain for the male species. Then again, maybe it's just Josh.

“Aw, dude. Good luck with that.” Josh smacks me on the back of the head and walks down the aisle to join Pencil Girl. “You might want to bring your strap and cup next class,” he whisper-yells over his shoulder.

“Get moving, Mr. Bennett,” Ms. Artigas says from behind her computer.

I grab my stuff, a copy of the right play, and find Hadley across the room, scribbling furiously into a neatly divided notebook. I slide into the desk next to her and wait while she writes. And then I wait some more while I try not to look at her lips, which proves to be more challenging when she pauses in her writing and slicks on some shiny stuff, the palest shade of pink. Now I'm trying not to think about all the ways I could find out if her mouth tastes like a strawberry Starburst.