What Happens Now(11)

It still hurt, with Lukas. To not-quite-see each other this way. He was the third person I ever kissed, and the first who ever wanted to call me his girlfriend. His hands, which had been all over my body. His lower lip, which I’d held lightly between my teeth. How he made me sigh on the plaid couch in his basement, wanting more but not wanting more, desperate to lose control while gripping it as tightly as I could with white knuckles.

I didn’t want to think about that other part of him, which I could almost still feel on my fingertips.

“Hey, Lukas,” my mouth said without consulting my brain.

He looked straight at me now, and I was reminded of how much we resembled each other. It was one of the things the Mock Trial kids said from the beginning. They called us “the Siblings,” but Lukas took it as a sign we were supposed to be a couple. He had the same wavy, dirty blond hair and brown eyes I did. As prosecuting attorneys, we’d seemed united.

“Ari,” he said. Simply and flatly, like my name alone told the story of the cruel way I cut myself off from him. Lukas turned and walked away. Brady shrugged at us, then trailed after his friend.

I had made that, what had just happened.

“Do I get points for trying?” I asked Kendall, blinking the sting from my eyes.

“Sure, but I’d say you’ve got a big deficit to make up. You messed the guy up bad.”

“I never meant to do that.” I shook my head hard, shook that thought out. “I’ll never forgive myself for it.”

Kendall must have sensed how serious I was. “Would it have been so hard to simply, you know, break up with him?”

“I thought it would be easier to ignore and avoid him until he finally got the hint,” I replied. “Easier for me, I guess. For him, not so much.”

I winced at the memory of Lukas’s emails, the note he left in my locker.

Please, please tell me what I did. Is this about what happened after the party?

I’m sorry if I pushed you too far, but you never told me to stop. We can dial it back.

Talk to me, Ari.

I don’t deserve the silent treatment.

He was right. He didn’t. But my fear of confrontation beat out my sense of what was mature and, you know, kind.

Kendall put a hand on my shoulder. “He was your first boyfriend. How the hell were you supposed to know what to do? Now, at least, you know better.”

“I know a lot of things better,” I added.

“Then take that and do what you need to about Camden Armstrong. Otherwise, you are not allowed to pine for him from a distance and then talk about it all summer. Agreed?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay, then. Let’s go figure out what the hell Hester Prynne was thinking with that creepy Arthur Dimmesdale who was so not worth the hassle.”

I followed her down the hall, happy to have orders.





4




I was loading up the car after a morning at the lake with Dani, and suddenly there he was. Lashing his bike to a rack in the reservoir parking lot. Like a normal human being who, you know, exists. It had been a full week since the Bathroom Incident and I’d replayed the scene so much in my head, it was easy to forget he was three-dimensional and could move of his own accord.

I looked away and wasn’t going to glance again but of course I did it anyway, when I was reaching up to pull the hatchback down. Naturally, this was when Camden saw me. My arm caught in midair as if I were waving. He waved back.

My adrenaline level went from Zero to Holy Crap in a millisecond.

Now he was walking toward me. I unfocused my eyes so all I really saw was the bright white of a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, set against the brown skin of his arms and the dark blue of his jeans.

In the middle distance, two other people pulled into the parking lot on bikes. Eliza, and the other boy from last summer, so tall he made his bicycle look like a toy. And Eliza, well. All I noticed at first was that she still had lips. The ones Camden had kissed.

I closed the hatchback and leaned against it for support in case I’d have to see them do whatever they were going to do together, as a couple. Camden kept approaching, and in a moment of terror, I wondered if he was not actually coming over to me but headed somewhere else, and this was going to be even worse than the restroom.

“Hey,” he said, finally stopping a few yards away.

“Hi.” It somehow came out normal. Maybe this would be fine.

“That was you the other day, in the men’s room.”

“Yes.”

“It was funny.”

“It was?” Come on, Ari. Say a complex sentence. With clauses and stuff. “I thought it was a little bit devastating.”

“Eh. Men, women. Toilets are toilets.”

I laughed. He made me laugh. “At least nobody was changing in there.”

“True. You got lucky it was just me.” He paused. “You’re Ari, right?”

He knew my name. His voice saying it made me flush. I could only nod.

“I’m Camden.”

“Hi, Camden.” I made it sound as if I didn’t know, and that felt like a lie.

Now the other guy and Eliza were walking up behind Camden. I’d forgotten how the boy teetered as he moved, with all that height, and how nonchalantly stunning the girl was. Like she glowed and knew it and didn’t let it change anything.