Expelled(24)

“Jude, we have to go,” Sasha says urgently. “I hear someone coming.”

“Art is not a crime,” he insists.

But then we all hear the footsteps, and so we run away like it is. When we stop, lungs aching all over again, Sasha leans over to catch her breath and says, “Fuck this place.”

Jude says, “What?”

Sasha stands up and throws her head back. “Fuck this lame-ass town and everyone in it! Fuck everyone but us! ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here!’” She turns to us. “I know you don’t like me to explain my references, but that’s Shakespeare, The Tempest, you dipshits.”

Jude shoots me a look that says What’s with the sudden mood shift?

“Sasha?” I say hesitantly.

She whirls to face me. “If that stupid picture on your lame-ass secret Twitter is basically the most scandalous thing to ever happen in Pinewood, this town suffers from a serious lack of imagination!” she yells. “They have no idea what real crimes are. Some might be going on right under their noses!”

“Have you gone… temporarily insane?” Jude asks politely.

“We should tag more things. We should slash tires. Break shit. Smash the windows! Smash the patriarchy!” In the half-light, Sasha’s eyes look like the pinwheels Jude put in his graffiti, and I feel like maybe he was right to question her sanity. She’s gone wild and weird all of a sudden, with a nervous bouncing energy. Jude reaches for her water bottle and takes a sniff. He makes a face, then tips it up and drinks.

Then he spits onto the ground. “Warm vodka?” he practically hollers. “That’s disgusting!”

“Don’t be such an aesthete,” Sasha says.

“I don’t even know what that word means,” Jude says.

“At least you know what a cravat is,” I point out.

“The point isn’t how it tastes, you idiots. It’s how it makes you feel.” Sasha holds her arms out and starts to spin around. Her dark hair flies around her head, and she looks like the girl in the scandalous picture—albeit with a shirt on.

Then she stops abruptly and stares at us like she’s surprised to see us. Like we’ve just shown up on this random street in the middle of the night and she doesn’t know why we’re here. Or why, for that matter, she is.

“Are you okay?” I ask quietly.

Sasha cocks her head at me and squints. “Am I okay? No, I am not okay. I am a lot of other words and none of them is ‘okay.’ Okay isn’t even something I’m interested in being. Okay is boring as shit. I am…” She stops.

She is what? I’m dying to know. Her wild eyes pass from me to Jude and back again.

“I’m tired,” she says finally. “This stupid town, this ridiculous punishment, this wandering around in the middle of the night because we have nothing better to do with our lives. Do you understand how pitiful this is? We are wastes of oxygen. Forget what I said about the patriarchy and the tires. My dad’s probably passed out by now, which means it’s time for me to go home.” And then she turns around and starts walking away.

I’m about to follow her, but Jude stops me. “Her house is, like, six blocks away. Just let her go.”

So I stand there, feeling helpless and confused but most of all abandoned, as Sasha disappears into the night.





22


It’s 11 a.m. a couple of days later and the sun’s already blazing across the Property. Jude sits shirtless in the shade of the gazebo, thumbing through an Us Weekly, while I wrestle with a replacement board for a railing that’s gotten dry rot.

This is the kind of repair I used to do with my dad on Saturdays: we’d walk around the whole Property, checking on everything from the floating dock to the pole-bean trellises and noting what needed fixing. It didn’t seem particularly fun back then, but now, of course, I miss it. Miss him. Miss every single thing about the life that used to be mine.

Considering I don’t know how much longer the Property will belong to us, I’m not sure it makes sense to put my sweat into repairing the deck. I guess I’m doing it because I’m trying to keep my mind off Sasha.

I was hoping she would meet us here, but she still hasn’t shown up. She hasn’t answered any texts since Friday night, and her phone goes straight to voicemail. Jude tried to assure me that Sasha was just sleeping off a killer hangover, but after a weekend of not hearing from her, I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. She was acting so strange that night.

Jude puts his magazine down and strolls over, yawning. “Did you know that Damien Hirst is worth over a billion dollars?” he asks.

“As long as you’re here, hold that end of the two-by-four steady, right on top of the post. Who’s Damien Hirst?”

Jude grabs onto the wood, and I position the nail and start pounding.

“He’s the world’s richest artist, and he’s a former juvenile delinquent,” Jude says over the beat of my hammer. “He was a shoplifter, for one, and he was accused of check fraud. He had an actual criminal record!”

“Don’t get any ideas,” I say. “Your painting Friday night was criminal enough.”

“I’m just pointing out that if our movie doesn’t work out, there’s still hope for me,” Jude says. “Some people think bad behavior’s sexy.”