Put Me Back Together(38)

Wow. Yeah, there was no turning back now.

“Another thing Em told me about you is that you used to be a slut,” I said. I suppose I should have felt bad for being so blunt about it, but there was a porch full of girls chanting his name. Blunt was sort of unavoidable.

“Did she?” Lucas said. We were both still watching the house instead of each other. “She’s right, I used to be. But I’m not anymore.” He took my hand and squeezed it and when I glanced at him he gave me a friendly smile, dropping the stoic mask he’d been wearing.

He could easily have been bullshitting me. That was what players did, wasn’t it? My distrustful nature should have been telling me to run, but it wasn’t. The old Katie and the new Katie, both our brains and both our hearts were telling me that what he said was true. Who was I to argue?

“Let’s go in already,” I said. “It’s colder out here than I thought.”

We crossed the street and joined the party.



Entering a party—my first party—with Lucas was your basic terrifying experience. If I’d come in alone I would have been pretty much ignored, and could have slunk to the back and hid, clutching my red cup of beer. But I’d come in on the arm of Lucas Matthews, which meant all eyes were on us.

The house was pretty big, the entrance opening up onto a staircase leading upwards with rooms on either side, all of which were filled with partygoers in varying states of drunken splendor. There were people sitting and standing on the stairs, lining the hallway that led back to the kitchen, sprawled over the rug and on the couches and around the dining room table, where they seemed to be playing strip poker. One guy wasn’t wearing any pants, and another appeared to be down to his socks and underwear. It satisfied me to see that the two girls at the table were fully clothed. The scene matched perfectly the American college party sketch I’d drawn in my head with details I’d gleaned from various movies and TV shows and stories Em had told me, though I was glad no girls were wearing bottle caps as pasties. Although the night was still young.

Moving through the crowd was slow going, because everyone seemed to know Lucas and wanted to greet him. I couldn’t really blame them for wanting to be close to him. There was no chance in hell I was leaving his side—that was for sure. But dear lord, we’d barely moved an inch from the entranceway. At this rate we’d never make it to the keg, which I’d caught sight of sitting next to the fiWith, and which was looking pretty tempting right about now. And I didn’t even like the taste of beer. I’d already been introduced to so many people whose names I’d already forgotten and had gotten the evil eye from at least three girls, one of who actually tried to have a conversation with me—she’d asked me why I was wearing my hair “like that,” and made a face.

I was still watching her walk away when a big bear of a guy with a full beard came barreling toward us, his arms open wide.

“That’s Oleg,” Lucas explained moments before he was engulfed in his friend’s arms and lifted off the ground.

It was Oleg’s party.

“Lucas, my good friend,” Oleg boomed. “How wonderful of you to join us on this joyous March evening. Where’s your drink and who’s your friend? I think Taylor is looking for you, and she’s—”

The name “Taylor” triggered a memory that wouldn’t quite surface. I knew I’d heard her name before, but I couldn’t place where.

Lucas leaned forward and spoke quietly in Oleg’s ear, and then Oleg’s big brown eyes landed on me with a wide, merry grin. He looked a lot like a younger version of Santa.

“My lady,” Oleg said, taking my hand and placing a chaste kiss on my knuckles. I gave Lucas a puzzled look. What exactly had he whispered in Oleg’s ear? “You know, you look like one of my kin. Are you a fellow Jew? Maybe Moroccan?”

I sighed quietly while giving Oleg a warm smile. “Nope,” I answered. “I’m half-Danish, half-Indian.”

“Well that’s an interesting combination!” Oleg said.

Then Oleg looped an arm over each of our shoulders and began to guide us down the hall, his considerable girth creating a kind of battering ram effect in which people were either mowed down ahead of us or forced to get out of the way.

“Let’s get the two of you a drink!” he said, depositing us in the kitchen, at which point he was instantly distracted by a game of quarters taking place on the stove—it really was just like the movies!—and abandoned us.

I pressed my stomach into the edge of the kitchen counter as yet another friend came over to greet Lucas. We were in the very centre of the party now, surrounded on all sides, and with no jolly Oleg at my side and Lucas distracted, I really started to feel claustrophobic. I tried to remind myself to breathe. But it wasn’t easy. It was sort of like being at The Limo again, that panicked feeling of being packed in a room with so many people, that feeling of being so incredibly out of place. I’d never felt safe in a crowd, not in six years. I’d always thought it was because it reminded me of school before and during and after the trial, all those kids watching me, wondering when I would break, their eyes judging or pitying—it didn’t really matter which—and watching, always watching, as I disintegrated in front of them. But now, as yet another girl walked by and gave me a puzzled once-over, I realized it wasn’t a flashback to high school misery I was having. It was the trial itself I was remembering, that very particular feeling of being in a fishbowl, those moments when I’d taken the stand and I’d known I wasn’t just imagining all their looks; it was really happening. All eyes had been on me. All ears had been directed at that microphone as I’d opened my mouth and spewed one lie after another after another.