Sign Here(53)
“I refuse to work with that asshole, and you should too. He’s not like us, Cal. He’s so stupid, he’s dangerous.”
“I didn’t realize I had been promoted to your category.”
“I haven’t told anyone but you about this plan,” I whispered. “And I won’t. I know this might make me an idiot, but I trust you.”
Cal took one step toward me then, followed by another, and another, until she was close enough that I could see each one of her eyelashes. The elevator was small, but the space we took up inside it was so much smaller.
She traced the seam of my belt with her fingertips, and rubbed the leather against itself like she was starting the slowest of fires.
“Cal,” I said, swallowing.
“I trust you too. And I want to help you, Pey. I do. But this thing we’re doing?” She paused long enough for her bottom lip to go between her teeth before pulling it, slowly, free. “It only works if the trust goes both ways.”
The elevator door dinged and, just like that, she was back on her side.
“Let’s talk to Trey,” she said, rubbing my stolen paper between her fingertips, the universal sign for currency, “and we can all get what we want.”
SILAS
SILAS LUGGED ANOTHER BAG of rocks from the trunk. He could get the car only so far into the woods, but it was worth it, he thought as he wiped dirt and sweat from his forehead. The place had been a robbed grave for too long.
The first time he built the firepit was with Philip. He could almost see the way his brother wrinkled his nose in concentration as he selected the best of the rocks that Silas pried from the dirt with his grubby little hands and delivered, arms outstretched. This was going to be their place, Philip said with each discarded option. Just theirs. So it had to be perfect. Silas dug until he couldn’t feel his fingers that day and cried when the sun went down.
He tore open the bag of rocks, ignoring the nagging feeling of inadequacy for buying them from Home Depot. He was an adult now. He couldn’t spend a whole day pulling rocks like old teeth from the soil. He used his hands to dig into the middle of the firepit, sifting through wet leaves and ash until he hit aluminum, which he pulled out and threw over his shoulder into an open garbage bag. And then again. And again, and again. It was like meditating, he thought. At the very least, he was communing with nature.
During the trial, everyone found out Phil had feelings for Sarah. Lily said she already knew—she said anyone with eyes could tell. But Phil was not the type to run his mouth. Plus, he didn’t have the kind of friend group Silas had; he didn’t have anyone to brag to or confide in, except Silas. And Phil never told him a word about it. He didn’t find out until the rest of the town did, when every thought, every feeling Phil ever experienced, became hard evidence or fodder for horrified fascination. When Phil had lost the public privilege of being a person capable of love. When he became nothing but an animal and the conversation became about nothing but the size of his cage.
If Phil had told him, Silas thought as he threw a worn-down shard of glass into the bag, he would’ve stopped. But even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t true.
Lily didn’t know that Silas had been sleeping with Sarah. No one did. At first, he kept it a secret because that’s what you did with a girl like Sarah Kelly. A girl like Lily for the football games and prom, a girl like Sarah for the nights in between, and nothing but opportunity looking forward. But after a while, when Sarah had never asked him why she entered his house only through his bedroom window, when she’d never bought a new dress or dropped hints about meeting his parents, it started to bother him. He hadn’t planned on climbing back into his bed so carefully after she snuck out, just to leave her imprint on his pillow undisturbed.
By the time his summer party was approaching, the dual life had become too much. Silas couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah whenever Lily kissed him. He was closing his eyes more and more everywhere that Sarah wasn’t, opening them only when she was real, right there in front of him and close enough his hands could prove it. He decided to end things with Lily once and for all. To make Sarah Kelly his girlfriend, and fuck what anyone had to say about it.
But then Lily told him she thought she might be pregnant, and his whole world stopped.
Men talk a lot about that moment. The moment they learn that they’ve made something new, something no one else could’ve made. The stories they decide to tell are full of giddy nervousness and reckless joy, with a dose of healthy, humbling fear. But the kind that’s still delicious, the way a static shock leaves a warm tingle on the skin. That was not Silas’s story. Not until he decided to rewrite it later. Now he couldn’t imagine himself without his kids. But back then, the news felt more like the arrival of death than that of life.
Silas could still remember driving to see Sarah after Lily told him. It was May, so close to graduation, and spring had sprung all over their small town. He drove the whole way with shaking hands, Lily’s tears still wet on the collar of his T-shirt. When he pulled into the school parking lot, he saw Sarah waiting for him, bare legs nestled in the grass of the baseball diamond.
The truth was this: in Silas’s brief but only time on this earth, happiness had been a beautiful lie. An intended kindness, like Santa Claus or God, just convincing enough to make him feel ashamed of his skepticism, and double down. But then he kissed Sarah Kelly for the first time, and he knew that his happiness was only a fraction of the real deal. The appetizers at a buffet. A cut drug. But happiness can be cruel. If they hadn’t gone for that first walk, if he hadn’t felt her tongue in his mouth as they pressed against that tree in the dark, Silas would’ve thought—rather satisfied—that the happiness he had known thus far was as much happiness as any one person could know. He would’ve felt lucky for his crumbs, mistaking them for meals. Because the truth was he didn’t know he was starving until he tasted her. Until then, he believed himself fed.