Everything I Never Told You(69)

And while Jack stared, Lydia took a deep breath, as if she were diving underwater, and kissed him.

She had never kissed anyone before, and it was—though she didn’t know it—a sweet kiss, a chaste kiss, a little-girl kiss. Beneath her lips, his were warm and dry and still. Beneath the smoke, Jack smelled as if he had just been out in the woods, leafy and green. He smelled the way velvet felt, something you wanted to run your hands over and then press to your face. In that moment Lydia’s mind fast-forwarded, the way movies did. Past them clambering into the backseat, tumbling over one another, their hands too slow for their desires. Past untying the knot at the nape of her neck, past the peeling away of clothing, past Jack’s body hovering over hers. All the things she had never experienced and, in truth, could barely imagine. By the time Nath came home, she thought, she would be transformed. That evening, when Nath told her everything new that he had seen at Harvard, everything about the new and fabulous life he was already beginning, she would have something new to tell him, too.

And then, very gently, Jack pulled away.

“You’re sweet,” he said.

He gazed down at her, but—even Lydia understood this instinctively—not like a lover: tenderly, the way adults look at children who have fallen and hurt themselves. Inside, she shriveled. She looked down at her lap, letting her hair screen her burning face, and a bitter taste bloomed in her mouth.

“Don’t tell me you’ve grown morals all of a sudden,” she said sharply. “Or am I just not good enough for you?”

“Lydia,” Jack sighed, his voice flannel-soft. “It’s not you.”

“Then what?”

A long pause, so long she thought Jack had forgotten to answer. When he spoke at last, he turned toward the window, as if what he really meant were outside, beyond the maple trees, beyond the lake and everything beneath them. “Nath.”

“Nath?” Lydia rolled her eyes. “Don’t be afraid of Nath. Nath doesn’t matter.”

“He matters,” Jack said, still looking out the window. “He matters to me.”

It took Lydia a minute to process this, and she stared, as if Jack’s face had changed shape, or his hair had changed color. Jack rubbed his thumb against the base of his ring finger, and she knew that he was telling the truth, that this had been the truth for a long, long time.

“But—” Lydia paused. Nath? “You’re always—I mean, everyone knows—” Without meaning to, she glanced at the backseat, at the faded Navajo blanket crumpled there.

Jack smiled a wry smile. “How did you put it? Everybody thinks, with all those girls—but that’s not who you are.” He glanced at her sideways. Through the open window, a breeze ruffled his sandy curls. “No one would ever suspect.”

Snatches of conversation floated back to Lydia now, in a different tone. Where’s your brother? What’s Nath going to say? And: Are you going to tell your brother we’ve been hanging out, and I’m not such a bad guy? What had she said? He’d never believe me. The half-empty box of condoms gaped up at her, and she crushed it in her fist. I know you, she heard herself say again, and cringed. How could I have been so stupid, she thought. To have gotten him so wrong. To have gotten everything so wrong.

“I gotta go.” Lydia snatched her bookbag from the floor of the car.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? For what? There’s nothing to be sorry about.” Lydia slung the bag over her shoulder. “Actually, I’m sorry for you. In love with someone who hates you.”

She glared at Jack: one sharp wince, as if she’d splashed water in his eyes. Then Jack’s face grew wary and pinched and closed, like it was with other people, like it had been the first day they’d met. He grinned, but it looked more like a grimace.

“At least I don’t let other people tell me what I want,” he said, and she flinched at the contempt in his voice. She had not heard it in so many months. “At least I know who I am. What I want.” His eyes narrowed. “What about you, Miss Lee? What do you want?”

Of course I know what I want, she thought, but when she opened her mouth she found it empty. In her mind words ricocheted like glass marbles—doctor, popular, happy—and scattered into silence.

Jack snorted. “At least I don’t let other people tell me what to do all the time. At least I’m not afraid.”

Lydia swallowed. Under his eyes her skin felt flayed away. She wanted to hit Jack, but that would not be painful enough. And then she knew what would hurt him most.

“I bet Nath would love to hear about all this,” she said. “I bet everyone at school would. Don’t you think so?”

Before her eyes, Jack deflated like a pricked balloon.

“Look—Lydia—” he began, but she had already shoved the car door open and slammed it behind her. With each step, her bookbag thumped against her back, but she kept running, all the way down to the main road and toward home, not stopping even when a stitch knotted her side. At the sound of every car, she wheeled around, expecting to see Jack, but the VW was nowhere in sight. She wondered if he was still parked up there on the Point, that hunted look still in his eyes.

When she passed the lake and reached her own street, slowing to catch her breath at last, everything looked unfamiliar: strangely sharp, all the colors too bright, like an overtuned TV set. Green lawns were a little too blue, Mrs. Allen’s white gables a little too dazzling, the skin of her own arms a little too yellow. Everything felt just a bit distorted, and Lydia squinted, trying to squash it back into familiar shape. When she reached her own house, it took her a moment to realize that the woman sweeping the porch was her mother.