White Rabbit(4)
Rounding the corner, I walked straight into a trap. April stood against the wall, her blue eyes wide and solemn, and she watched with silent fascination as our older brother, Hayden, and two of his friends spent the next four minutes beating me into a quivering, bloody pulp at her feet.
*
“You guys were little kids back then,” Sebastian says, familiar with the story, dismissing the experience as if it were no big deal—as if it weren’t just one small part of a very big hell from which I have literally no escape.
“Some people don’t change,” I reply rigidly. How can I explain to him, for all her winsomeness, how dangerous April really is? How she was raised in such a bubble that she’s simultaneously helpless and ruthless, immured from the consequences of her actions by a family that refuses to see her actions in the first place?
“It would be kind of a shitty trap. I mean, she knows you don’t have a car, so how could she be sure you’d—”
He stops short as he finally catches up to the rest of my insinuation, and his voice takes on a thorny quality that is immeasurably more pleasing than his attempts at friendliness. “You think maybe I’m in on it.” I respond to the charge with silence, and he states gruffly, “I wouldn’t do something like that, Rufe. Not to you. You know I wouldn’t.”
“I don’t know what you’d do,” I shoot back, and six weeks of hurt and doubt and raw anger break the surface like an underwater explosion, venom scorching my throat and pricking my eyelids. Embarrassed, I turn my face to the window.
We leave the causeway and head inland on Route 2, rolling past the apple orchards and farmhouses of South Hero Island, the crack-boom of fireworks still intermittently punctuating the night. Presently, Sebastian turns off the main road and onto a narrow lane, heading toward the western shore through a corridor of lushly overgrown trees. The darkness is total, isolating, and the island suddenly feels terribly remote. My hands drift to my seat belt, worrying the fabric with rhythmic motions as the road turns from pavement to hard-packed dirt beneath the Jeep’s tires. Where the hell are we going?
Eventually, the tree line breaks before us, Sebastian’s headlights stabbing out into the moonlit void of Lake Champlain, and he turns north again to parallel the water. We pass a few cottages—mostly vacation rentals—before we finally reach our destination and the Jeep begins to slow.
On our left, a gravel drive snakes through a copse of aspens and pines, leading to a craftsman-style cabin with peaked gables that form an upper half-story. Massive bushes cluster beneath a wraparound porch, and a detached carport shelters a black Range Rover. A Playboy bunny decal on the imposing vehicle’s tailgate flares under Sebastian’s headlights and, recognizing it, I shift in my seat. The SUV belongs to April’s superdouche boyfriend, Fox Whitney.
Fox is seventeen, a senior-to-be at Ethan Allen, and an absolute prolapsed rectum of a human being. He’s also the youngest of three boys, sons of a corporate attorney and a dermatologist, and is therefore nearly as spoiled as my sister. I blink in confusion at his car, even more ill at ease than before we pulled up; if Fox is here, why does April need me? And, come to that, why me and not the brother she’s allowed to associate with—or one of her many popular friends?
“This is it,” Sebastian says a little uncertainly as he shoves open the door of the Jeep and jumps out. I follow suit, a welcome wagon of mosquitoes instantly gathering around me, and I almost regret my choice to wear a tank top to Lucy’s party. I say “almost” for two simple reasons: 1) my arms and legs are already stuccoed with bites, so what can a few more hurt? and 2) I’ve been working out a lot over the past six weeks, determined to be hot as fuck the next time I crossed paths with Sebastian, and my arms actually look pretty good.
My ex-boyfriend leads the way to a set of wooden steps that ascend to the porch, and I try to ignore how good his arms look—how the muscles in his calves flex before my eyes, how the scent of his dumb cologne still makes me dizzy in a treacherous way after all this time—and concentrate on what I might be walking into. Lights burn in the cottage, every window ablaze, and I can hear music pumping from inside.
Sebastian knocks at the front door and peers through the beveled glass insets, and I feel like telling him not to waste his time; I’ve been calling and texting April repeatedly on the trip over and haven’t gotten any response. If she’s in there, she’s not going to answer. Reaching past him, I try the knob, and the door swings open.
“April?” I call out apprehensively. A pinewood foyer extends into a family room decorated in a style an obscenely wealthy person might call “rustic”—the kind of down-home, country charm that requires raw silk slipcovers and objets d’art imported from Provence—but it hasn’t been treated well; the furniture is out of alignment, red Solo cups and abandoned bottles are everywhere, and fragments of broken glass and ceramic litter the floor like bloodthirsty confetti. My sister is nowhere in sight.
Cautiously, I step over the threshold, my concern mounting. Still, I’m hyperaware of Sebastian’s presence immediately behind me, and I wonder—not for the first time—how he intends to explain what he’s doing here. There’s still a chance this is a ruse, that he’s tricked me into another ambush to prove something to his asshole friends—who, for all I know, have somehow sussed out the truth of our relationship. Maybe he’s about to pass some kind of ruthless social test at my expense. “April, it’s Rufus. Are you here?”