White Rabbit(3)
Dating Sebastian Williams was both the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. In a lot of ways, being with him made me feel as if maybe I’d never really been alive at all before. I was like a violin—an object that hasn’t much purpose until someone touches it, fills it with resonance, draws things from it that it can never produce on its own. Sebastian had been the one to draw music from me, and it’s why the end was so bad; before him, I’d never actually realized how painful the silence was.
But the hardest part of our breakup was also the hardest part of our entire relationship: having to keep it all a secret from everyone we know.
I cast a glance in his direction as we loop through a traffic circle, light gliding across his face in a way that I’ve tried to capture in photographs a million times without success. He’s so good-looking it still takes my breath away, even when I’m wishing I’d never known him. With dark skin, flirty eyes, and a cocky smile, he’s too handsome for his own damn good—and that’s before you consider his long-legged, slim-hipped, and perfectly toned body.
Fuck.
It’s only been six weeks since he suddenly, and without explanation, stopped answering my texts; five weeks since he officially stomped my heart out like a spent cigarette in the most painful way imaginable; and only one week since I stopped entertaining pointless fantasies that, one day, he would take me back again—or at least give me the chance to tell him to his face exactly what I think of him. Imagine my surprise, then, when he turned up out of the blue at Lucy’s house, saying that he needed to speak to me, that it couldn’t wait. But we’d barely gotten into the subject before my phone began ringing in my pocket, April calling with her baffling emergency, and now here we are, sitting mere feet apart in an uncomfortable silence as the night gets weirder and weirder around us.
Whatever’s on his mind, I know it has to be something big—big enough for him to figure out where Lucy lives, anyway, since he always made an emphatic point of avoiding my friends throughout the four months we dated. Even so, I’m determined to have my say first, to unburden myself of all the poisonous, caustic feelings that have eaten their way down into my marrow over the course of six long weeks. I’ve rehearsed this scene so many times in my head that delivering my righteous rebukes should be simple … only, seven days of training myself not to think about it at all—out of some asinine, self-helpy notion that all the negative emotions were hurting me—has caused my crystal-clear accusations and arguments to become hopelessly tangled together. Answering April’s call had partly been a simple play for time to sort my thoughts.
“It’s gonna be an hour to get out there and back,” Sebastian remarks conversationally, his voice jarring in the silence. “You can’t ignore me the whole time.”
“Challenge accepted,” I return icily, instantly indebted by my own perverse stubbornness to suppress the vengeful words a little longer. It’s so stupid; I really want to tell him off, but if it’s what he wants, too, then I’ll be damned if I give him the satisfaction. I once grudged my way out of tickets to see Death Cab in concert because they were a peace offering from my friend Brent—with whom I was in the midst of a Blood Feud—and I didn’t want him to feel better about whatever it was that he’d done to piss me off.
I can’t fathom what Sebastian has to say to me after all this time, though—what could possibly have compelled him to track me down so late on a night when he should, by all rights, be at a party with all his cool friends—and I admit that I’m more than a little intrigued. Even if I don’t want to be. And neither can I begin to fathom the reason why April called me of all people, said I’m the only one she can trust. None of it makes sense; the whole evening has turned so bizarre so quickly that I actually squeeze my thigh until it hurts, just to remind myself that I’m really awake.
“This isn’t some kind of a trick, is it?” I finally ask, my voice rusty as Sebastian steers the Jeep onto the two-lane causeway. The sky is freckled with stars, and the lake is a sheet of rippling black metal spreading out to either side of us.
“What do you mean?” He wrinkles his nose again.
“I mean, I’m not being lured into some kind of ambush, am I?”
“April wouldn’t do that to you,” Sebastian answers assuredly.
“Yes she would. She has.”
*
When I was in the fifth grade, before I knew enough to truly distrust the Covingtons, April approached me outside of school one day following the final bell. I had just unlocked my bike when she appeared at the end of the long metal rack, looking tense but excited.
“Rufus, I need to talk to you!” She hissed urgently, glancing about with her large, robin’s-egg-blue eyes. We weren’t supposed to speak to each other, and I assumed she was nervous we’d be seen. “It’s really important. It’s … it’s about my dad and your mom?”
“Um, okay,” I said, only a little suspiciously. She was acting oddly, the words not sounding entirely natural, but I didn’t know what to make of it. “What about them?”
“Not here—in private!” She started backing away. “Meet me behind the gym, okay? I don’t want anyone else to find out.”
“April, what—” I started, but she was already running across the playground, heading for the large brick extension that housed our elementary school’s gymnasium. After a short inventory of my doubts, I secured my bike again and trotted after her.