Unfriended (6 page)

“I’m just saying,” I said, sliding closer to Nate as his truck took a corner, “that I don’t buy it.”

He laughed, and then glanced over at me with one of his slightly crooked smiles, and I felt my heart, as always, begin to pound a little faster. Jonathan Ellis—known to all except his parents as Nate—and I
had been going out for three whole months now, but I still got butterflies in my stomach when he smiled at me. And that was to say nothing of what happened when he kissed me.

These days, it seemed like things were better than ever with us. Right after the prom, Nate and I had had a breakthrough conversation, when we’d both realized that we hadn’t been talking enough about the things we needed to. And ever since then, we were opening up to each other more. It was really tough at first—much harder than I’d thought it would be. But as I’d told him more and he’d told me more, it got less scary. And now I felt even closer to him. It was strange—lately, he’d almost begun to feel like not only my boyfriend but my best friend. I was trying my very hardest not to think about the fact that, come September, he was going off to college. Because it was only June. We had the whole summer, filled with fireflies and ice cream dates and fireworks, still ahead of us.

We had just had a date at the New Canaan Drive-In movie theater, seeing a double feature of
Moulin Rouge
and, of all things,
Troy
. It was Nate’s theory that the drive-in had been losing revenue of late, and so was trying to market to couples by showing a chick flick paired with a guy’s film. Nate had suffered through
Moulin Rouge
, which I adored, and then I’d suffered through
Troy
, which I did not adore. I mean, parts of it were fine—like, um, Brad Pitt’s triceps—but mostly, there seemed to be an excessive amount of funeral pyres.

Nate had loved it, though. And for some reason, when the huge wooden Trojan horse was wheeled inside the palace walls, he had unexpectedly let out a laugh.

“What?” I’d whispered to him.

“Nothing,” he’d said. “It just reminded me of something.” I was about to ask what, but then the Greeks had leapt out from the horse, shocking the Trojans, who hadn’t realized that they’d just been tricked into bringing the enemy inside the gates, and my attention was drawn back to the movie.

And because Nate’s truck had bench seats, we’d watched the movie sitting right next to each other, his arm around my shoulders. This had almost made up for having to watch sword fighting for two hours.

“Don’t buy what, my Mad?” Nate asked me now as I adjusted the bag of takeout between my feet. Even though we’d finished off a big bag of buttery popcorn (movie #1) and split a box of Sno-Caps (movie #2), both of us were still hungry. So we’d just picked up takeout from Putnam’s diner, the Colonial. Nate had gotten pancakes, and I’d gotten my current diner usual, grilled cheese with waffle fries, extra ketchup.

I had been complaining about
Troy
, which I knew was dangerous, as it left me open to
Moulin Rouge
mockage. “I guess I don’t buy that that huge war would have started over one person,” I said. “I mean, really, Menelaus couldn’t have found another wife? He was the
king
. He had to throw all of Mesopotamia into disarray over Diane Kruger?” And, on that note, if Brad Pitt and Eric Bana are walking around with no sleeves, does any
girl in her right mind really choose Orlando Bloom in a tunic? I think not.

Nate was quiet as he paused at a stoplight. “I buy it,” he said, and I looked at him, surprised. “I think …” He cleared his throat before continuing. “I think if someone is your true love, you have to go to any length to try and get them back.” He gave me a quick smile, and I felt my heart begin to beat faster.

There was silence, nothing but the rumbling of the truck’s engine, and I was suddenly seized with indecision. Was this the moment when I should tell Nate that I loved him? I could feel my pulse racing. But before I could decide, the light changed and Nate put the car into drive.

“I’ll tell you what I don’t buy,” he said, arching an eyebrow at me. “I don’t buy Nicole Kidman lying and pretending she doesn’t love Ewan McGregor. What kind of way is that to treat someone?”

I smiled. “No, that makes total sense to me,” I said. “She loves him
so
much that she is willing to risk him hating her to save him.” Nate frowned and opened his mouth to argue, but I laughed. “I think they’re actually the same thing,” I said. “To sacrifice for love. But that’s the girl version. Guys do it with wars, that’s all.” I looked out the truck window and realized that we were almost to our destination … the Bluff.

My father had come home from Cooperstown that evening (he’d sent me a text asking me if I knew how to work the stove), so my house was not an option as a place to, um, hang out. And unfortunately, Nate’s parents
were home, too. I’d met Nate when his family and mine had ended up on the same trip to the Galápagos Islands. And Mr. and Mrs. Ellis seemed to think that because we’d shared this experience, all Nate and I ever wanted to do when we were at their house was to watch videos of the trip. And apparently, Nate’s father had just re-edited the footage of the tortoise.

I actually had a soft spot for tortoises, though. I’d given Nate one of a pair of carved tortoises when we’d first started going out, and kept the other for myself, since tortoises stay together for life. We hadn’t really talked much about it, but I knew that Nate had understood the significance—after all, in the Galápagos, he’d had to sit through all the same lectures I had, all about “The Magnificent, Monogamous Tortoise.” And the last time we’d been iChatting, I’d glimpsed his carved tortoise sitting on his bedside table—the exact spot where mine was.

So with both of our houses not options, we headed for what had become our go-to makeout spot. The Bluff was a place that Nate and I had discovered together, by accident. (I was actually really glad about this. I wouldn’t have wanted to go someplace where he had possibly made out with other girls.) We had found it in late May, when we had been trying to get to an end-of-year party that Sarah Donner’s boyfriend, Zach Baylor, had been throwing at his house in Hartfield, the town that was twenty minutes outside of Putnam and Stanwich.

Nate and I had driven through the unfamiliar streets of Hartfield, getting increasingly lost, until I conceded
that we should just get directions on my phone—something Nate was gracious enough not to mention that he’d suggested half an hour before. Just as I’d taken out my phone, Nate had pulled down a deserted-looking driveway to turn around, but then had stopped. I paused in scrolling through my phone, which had suddenly lost all service, and saw where we were. “Wow,” I’d murmured, just taking it in. Nate had nodded and smiled at me, then killed the engine, and we got out of the car to look at what was in front of us.

It was a large, empty plot of land. There was nothing on it—just an open expanse of overgrown grass. It was a huge piece of property—there were houses on either side, but far enough away that all you could really see of them were occasional lights through the trees. We had walked across it, as though an explanation for it would be found somewhere. But it was just empty—like a very rare New England tornado had swept through and picked up this one house, leaving everything else around it untouched.

“Check it out,” Nate had called to me from the very edge of the property, and I walked to join him. In driving in circles around Hartfield, we must have been moving uphill, something I hadn’t registered until now. We were pretty high up—and had a great view of Hartfield spread out in front of us.

“What is this place?” I’d asked, looking from the view to the open space behind us—a space so large that Nate’s truck, at the end of it, looked impossibly small.

“I have no idea,” Nate had said. He’d taken my hand
then and pulled me close to him. “But whatever it is, it’s ours.” Then he’d leaned down and kissed me.

Ever since then, we’d been coming back to the spot whenever we wanted some uninterrupted time together. Nate had named it the Bluff early on, even though technically, it probably didn’t have enough of an overhang to qualify it as a true bluff. But whatever we called it, it was an ideal spot. We’d learned after the second time that it was located in some kind of strange dead zone. It was almost impossible to get cell service, and neither of our phones were able to connect to the internet—which meant, in terms of Constellation, that we dropped off the map entirely. When my friends had gotten concerned after this had happened, I’d told them about the Bluff, but vaguely: I didn’t want Lisa and Dave—or Ruth and her boyfriend, Andy Lee—to start using it as
their
makeout spot. It was my place with Nate, the one spot that was entirely ours, and I loved it.

Nate killed the engine and we got out, taking the Colonial Diner bag, along with the blanket Nate always kept in his truck for our visits here. Nate left the doors open and kept the stereo on, so we’d be able to hear the music. We walked to the center of the property and spread out the blanket on the ground.

“So, I have a new theory,” I said as I sat down cross-legged. Nate stretched out across the blanket and rested his head in my lap.

“Tell me,” Nate prompted. We liked to put forward guesses as to why this land was just sitting here empty. They ran the gamut from the aforementioned tornado to
a very large sinkhole that had somehow miraculously repaired itself, to a shoddy construction job.

“Really, really efficient termites,” I replied, and Nate burst out laughing. I joined in, and then we both fell silent, soaking in the night air. I ran my fingers through his soft, curly brown hair and Nate turned his head and looked up at me.

“I think there was a house here,” he said, taking one of my hands in his—the one that wasn’t stroking his hair—and running his fingers across my palm, making me shiver. “I think that there was a really perfect, really beautiful house here once.”

“And what happened to it?” I asked as Nate rested my hand on his chest, brushing his fingers across the back of it.

“I think that it got torn down,” he said, his voice strangely thoughtful and sad. “I think that this was a home for two people who were really in love. And something happened.”

“What happened?” I asked, feeling myself getting swept up in his story, as though there was a real answer, as though Nate wasn’t just wildly speculating.

“What always happens,” he said, glancing up at me. “Betrayal. Hurt. Misunderstandings. And I think the other person didn’t want to be in the house without them. So they tore it down.”

I looked at the land surrounding me and suddenly felt sad, even though Nate was just making all this up. I almost preferred his cursed-ancient-burial-ground theory to this one. “But maybe it was that
and
termites,”
I said, trying to lighten the mood, and was rewarded when Nate laughed and leaned up and kissed me.

What started as just a light kiss quickly turned more serious, and we stretched out on the blanket together, the takeout bag pushed to the side and forgotten.

Making out with Nate lately had been better than ever, and it was because I knew absolutely where we stood. Nate wasn’t a virgin, like me; he’d slept with his ex-girlfriend Melissa when they were still together. (I had tried very, very, very hard after I’d learned this not to hate Melissa irrationally, as she actually was a really nice person.) We had decided that we weren’t ready to sleep together yet, which took pressure I hadn’t even realized had been there off our makeout sessions. Now, we would just make out for hours, and when we began to move a little closer to new bases, we always checked in with each other to make sure it was okay.

But lately when Nate and I were making out, I tended to get totally lost in him and in the moment, and often it was Nate who moved us back to more familiar territory. And frequently, as we were kissing, I’d be struck by how amazingly right it all felt—that this was Nate, who made me laugh and who I could talk to about anything—but it was also
Nate
, who could literally make my knees weak when he ran his lips over that one spot on my collarbone, and whose kisses had the power to remove all rational thought from my head. It seemed too wonderful to me that both of these things could be found simultaneously in the same person.

After we’d been kissing on the blanket for a while—
I had absolutely no idea how long it had been. Making out with Nate seemed to take place in some strange wormhole where I completely lost all sense of time passing—we paused and caught our breath.

“Wow,” he murmured into my hair, kissing me on the forehead.

“Yeah,” I agreed, opening my eyes, blinking at the surroundings, and trying to remember where I was. Things came slowly into focus. Nate and I weren’t on a balcony in the South of France. We were at the Bluff. Nate smiled at me, and I sat up, straightening his shirt and my own. “Dinner?” I asked, reaching for the bag, and glad that while we’d been otherwise occupied, some hungry woodland creatures hadn’t made off with our food.

“Absolutely,” he said, sitting up as well. I reached for the takeout bag and unpacked our picnic. My grilled cheese was stone cold, but I’d actually come to enjoy the taste of them that way. Nate’s pancakes were chocolate chip, with extra syrup, and looking at them, I felt my stomach rumble and hoped that he’d share.

“Fry?” I asked, angling the container closer to him.

“Why, thank you,” he said, taking one. Then he opened his plastic container and poured syrup over his pancakes. I leaned over, looking at them hopefully. He smiled and held out his fork to me, and I cut off a piece of pancake. It was cold, but also chocolatey, and syrupy, and I cut off another piece before handing the container back to him.

“How are they?” he asked. Rather than answering, I leaned over and gave him a slightly sticky kiss. “Those
are
good,” he said, and I gave him a smile before leaning back and picking up my own food. “Question,” he said after a moment of both of us eating in silence. It was amazing what a good makeout session could do for the appetite.

“Shoot,” I said, taking a bite of my grilled cheese.