Tease(53)

I get off my bed and come over to him. I hover behind the chair for a second, knowing he might throw me off if I try to hug him. So instead I kneel down on the floor so I’m looking up at his face. His eyes are still shut, but he’s breathing evenly, and I don’t see any more tears.

“It’s not going to happen, Tommy,” I say again. “Mom’s right, the lawyer’s right. I’m going to sign the plea agreement thing, and we’re going to settle. It doesn’t matter what really happened—I mean, it does, but not anymore. I don’t want you to worry, okay?”

He takes a long breath, then opens his eyes and looks down at me.

“I’m gonna apologize,” I tell him. “It’s all going to be okay. It’s all going to be over soon.”

For the briefest of moments, I think I might be right. Tommy nods and even smiles a little. He says, “Okay.” We both stand up and I offer to take him and Alex to get ice cream.

But when he leaves my room to get his brother, I remember.

It’s never going to be over. And now—now that I know I’m just going to give up, I don’t have any choice, I have to just plead out and hope it’s not completely awful—now no one will ever hear my side of the story.





March


“YOU GIRLS SHOULD go now.” Mrs. Putnam’s eyes are cold. Her whole face changed as soon as the words were out of Brielle’s mouth. She obviously recognized us right away, but maybe she thought we were here to apologize or something.

“We just thought you should know,” I say, but the words get half stuck in my throat. The sky is a cold, dead gray behind us, and my feet are turning to ice in my ballet flats.

It’s really terrifying to be talking to this woman face-to-face. I hate her daughter so much I can taste it, and that makes me hate Mrs. Putnam, too. But she’s an adult; I’m automatically supposed to be scared of her. And I am. Brielle thinks adults are stupid, but I think they can get you in trouble.

But I guess Mrs. Putnam isn’t doing anything to get her daughter out of trouble. Which is why we’re standing here. We got out of school early for teacher conferences today, and we happen to know that Emma is out with Dylan right now.

“What I really think is that you should leave my daughter alone,” Mrs. Putnam says. Her left hand is gripping their front door tightly, keeping it as closed as possible so Brielle and I have to stay shivering on the front porch. “I don’t know how many times I have to call the school about you two before you get the message.”

“Mrs. Putnam,” Brielle says, and I can hear her best parent-speak tone coming through. That voice that seems to hypnotize everyone, that just flows so easily. “We’ve made some mistakes, but now we’re really worried about Emma. She’s still new to our school, and she’s already had so many boyfriends, and they’re all so much older than she is, like Jacob, and now Dylan, who’s almost eighteen . . .”

The magic voice doesn’t seem to be working so well on Emma’s mom. Mrs. Putnam yanks herself back, as if someone pulled her, and slams the door in our faces.

“Delusional bitch,” Brielle mutters under her breath, her voice back to normal. She spins around and stomps down the porch stairs, leaving me standing there like a frozen idiot. Especially frozen—it’s literally like four degrees out here—and particularly idiotic, with my one whole sentence in this conversation echoing in my cold head.

We thought you should know. Is that what we thought? I guess that could be true. I mean, I guess Emma really could be in trouble. Troubled.

And now Mrs. Putnam knows.

Brielle drives us to the mall, and for a while we don’t talk about anything important. We try on perfumes at Sephora and split a pretzel at Auntie Annie’s. In the food court, I’ve almost forgotten about Emma for two seconds when we see Kyle, Jacob, and Noelle coming toward us.

“Hey, bitches,” Noelle says, smiling prettily. She sits down next to Brielle. Jacob settles into the seat across from her, and Kyle grabs a chair from the table next to us, turns it around, and straddles it like a cowboy. “What’s up?”

“You know, plotting to take over the world, the usual,” Brielle says.

Noelle laughs and I can tell she’s heard this joke before. I squirm in my chair, suddenly hyperaware of Jacob next to me. Over-eighteen Jacob. We’re friends with him, at least sort of. What’s going to happen when he finds out about our visit to Emma’s house? Is he going to find out?

For a second it occurs to me that maybe Jacob didn’t sleep with Emma. I mean, it’s possible, right? Like when I was little and I’d watch movies where the couple would be kissing and the screen would go dark and I’d think they were just going to keep kissing. I know that’s not usually how it works—usually they’re having sex—but maybe sometimes they’re not, right? What if we’re wrong about Jacob? Or what if Emma—

“Dude, when’re your parents going out of town again?” Kyle asks Brielle, and I snap back to the conversation.

“Dude,” she replies, “it’s your turn. Why do I always have to be party central?”

“Whatever, my house is the worst,” he says, slouching over the chair back. He doesn’t seem bothered by having the “worst” house, though. Then he turns toward me and says, “What about you? It’s just your mom, right?”