Where the Staircase Ends(32)

I watched his fingers grip and un-grip the vinyl steering wheel, each hand placed perfectly at ten and two as he looked at the wide expanse of trees at the edge of the field we had parked beside, his breath ragged and angry. My palm stung from the second slap, the skin tingling like I’d dragged it back and forth across a layer of tacks. I rolled my skirt back over my bare legs and sat quietly against the tilted seat. My hands were shaking too badly to reach for the lever and pull it upright.

“I’m sorry,” Logan said after a while, his face turned away from mine. It was dark in the car, but I could make out a red handprint on his right cheek and an angry scratch running across the length of his jaw. “You just make me so crazy.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything at all. When he looked back at me, moisture pooled in his eyes, and some of my anger melted away. He looked sorry, and I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe he hadn’t meant for things to go so far, even though my mascara had run down my face and my throat was raw from yelling stop, stop, stop.

The next day I found a real flower taped to my locker instead of the usual drawings—a single, perfect red rose. Inside of my locker there was another one of Logan’s pictures, this one of a giant heart with my name inside it, each letter a different color of the rainbow. The words “please forgive me, please forgive me, please forgive me” were scrawled in teeny, tiny perfect cursive over and over again around the outer edge of the heart, so small I had to squint to read them. It must have taken him hours, and I found myself smiling even though I was still angry about what happened.

Some days it took all my energy not to pick up the phone and dump Logan, and other days, like the ones when I found the drawings in my locker or the cute little text messages (“I <3 U”) on my phone, I thought I was pretty lucky in the grand scheme of things. It was nice to be wanted, nice to have someone who texted and wanted to spend time with me. And in those moments when I did think about ending things with him, I thought of the picture he drew of me, of the flawless, beautiful girl with the pensive eyes. What if Logan was the only person who would ever see me that way?

On the night of The Fields, Logan was in rare form. When I checked my phone there were six missed calls and seven text messages from him, all some variation of “Where r u?” and “WTF?” and “Tell Justin hi for me.” Like he was my parole officer and I was supposed to check in with him every five minutes. It wasn’t my fault he decided to show up to The Fields on time. Who did that?

We arrived later than I told him we would, but that’s to be expected when you’re with Sunny. We had to park far down the road because all the good spots were taken, then cut across the freshly sodded grass to get to the party. It took an annoyingly long time because Sunny decided to wear four-inch stilettos that kept getting stuck in the grass. It required two of us to pull them free, and they made this awful suck-pop sound every time we yanked one loose from the wet ground.

“Can’t you just take them off?” I asked her, trying to hide my irritation. She gave me one of her WTF looks and released another heel with a suck-pop and an eye roll.

“No, I can’t ‘just take them off.’ It’s part of the look, and I don’t want to get my feet dirty. If you’re in such a hurry to get to the party, then by all means, go right ahead.” She waved her hand in front of her like she was dismissing me, and I pressed my lips together to keep from saying the thing I really wanted to say. Instead I meditated on my vow for the night: be cool, relax.

Greg Younger’s truck was parked in the center of the main field, the doors open and the bass pumping loudly from inside the cabin. It sounded like one of the speakers was blown, so the music that poured out was a bass-y thump, thump, thump, with the occasional inaudible word that sounded a lot like sex, or slut, or some combination of the two. A group of girls had assembled a makeshift dance floor near one of the open doors, all of them giggling and bouncing to the rattling music. Tracey Allen hovered on the edge of the group, shaking in a too-tight black-skirt-and-top combination, and shimmying her shoulders at one of the girls in the crowd. I wondered if she was still dating pervy Mr. Thomas. It always amazed me how Tracey handled her reputation, wearing the gossip like a crown rather than drowning in the shame of it. It was almost as if she wanted us to keep talking about her.

“Isn’t it a little early for the skank patrol to be out?” Sunny asked as we passed the group, raising her voice to make sure they heard her over the thump, thump, sex, slut chorus.

Tracey scowled in response but kept dancing, mumbling something that sounded an awful lot like “stupid bitches” in our direction.

We headed out of the glare of the headlights to the crowd gathered around the keg, grabbing plastic cups from the stack on the ground and standing in line to get a beer even though we’d brought our container of vodka and OJ. No point in wasting perfectly good free beer.

Logan stood near the keg glaring at me the way my parents did when I missed curfew. His eyes narrowed and his jaw muscles twitched, reminding me of the Logan from the previous year—the one who loved a good fight. Sunny saw him and muttered an “uh-oh” to the other girls, motioning for them to steer clear of the drama that was clearly about to explode all over my night. They all mumbled some lame excuse about hitting The Ladies’ Room even though it was obvious they weren’t going there. The toilet paper was tucked safely in my purse, and Sunny would never dream of hitting up The Ladies’ Room without it.