Читать книгу Wicked Games - Sean Olin - Страница 6

“Are you sure you’re okay?” said Carter.

“Yeah. I said before, I’m fine. Everything’s fine,” Lilah responded, tucking her crossed arms more tightly across her body.

It was the first Saturday in March of the last semester of their senior year, and they were cruising in Carter’s black BMW convertible up Magnolia Boulevard toward his friend Jeff’s luxurious Spanish-style mansion on the north side of town, for what promised to be an epic, “What happens at Jeff’s house, stays at Jeff’s house” party.

“You don’t seem okay.” Carter waited for Lilah to say something in response, but she just stared up at the tops of the palm trees streaming past one by one, and rolled her eyes. “If you don’t want to go, it’s okay. I can take you back home and go by myself. I won’t be mad.”

“I want to go. Look. I got dressed up and everything.”

She was wearing a white halter-top sundress with small, red embroidered flowers along the hem and a pair of thin-strapped sandals. She looked elegant, but anxiously so, like she’d worked too hard to give this appearance. Carter knew she’d be the most dressed-up person at the party. He himself was proudly wearing the gray T-shirt festooned with the blue-and-red UPenn shield that he’d bought on his campus visit last fall.

“You sure? ’Cause you’re acting sort of like you don’t want to go.”

“I want to go and I don’t want to go. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

Carter didn’t push it.

He kept his hand on Lilah’s leg, twirling his finger on the smooth skin of her knee. He could feel the tension in the muscles as he rested his palm on her thigh. They hit the red light at Pelican, and as Carter rolled to a stop, Lilah peeled his fingers off her skin and emphatically placed his hand on his own lap. She seemed, if anything, to be becoming more resentful and nervous by the second.

“Are you ever going to tell me what’s going on with you?” he said.

“There’s nothing going on,” she said with a clipped voice.

“But there is. You’ve been acting weird ever since your parents took us to dinner to celebrate us getting into UPenn.”

“I haven’t been acting weird.”

“Really? Lately it seems like absolutely everything makes you angry. And like you don’t want to talk to me anymore.”

“We’re talking right now.”

“You know what I mean. It worries me when you try to shut me out.”

Lilah spun in her seat and leaned forward against the seat belt. Her face was red with rage, an angriness heating up in her freckles. “God! Carter! So I don’t want to go to a stupid party with your bozo friends. Is that a capital crime?”

Carter took a deep breath and held it for a moment to keep himself calm.

“It won’t just be them. Everybody’ll be there. The whole school, probably. That’s not the point, anyway. I’m trying to say, I’d hate for what happened last time to happen again.”

“It won’t,” said Lilah, spitting the words out with a great deal of spite. She hated herself when she was like this, hated especially that she couldn’t control it. She turned again, this time to face the window. She sunk low in her seat and stared at herself in the passenger-side mirror.

The light turned and Carter drove on. He tried to concentrate on the warm wind whipping across his face, but he couldn’t stop thinking that her behavior now reminded him of junior year. For a few weeks then, Lilah had stopped sleeping. She’d had a particularly tough swim meet against a girl named Melissa on the team from Coral Gables. Melissa had beaten Lilah badly, worse than she’d ever been beaten before, and as she stewed over her loss, Lilah had flickered with a rage Carter had never seen in her before. Over the following two weeks she couldn’t talk about anything—not a single thing—except this Melissa girl and how she must be doing steroids. In her manic exhaustion, she searched down the phone numbers not only of Melissa but also of the Coral Gables coach and the principal of the school. She’d called them so many times that they’d reported her to Coach Randolph and Lilah had been kicked off the team.

“I mean,” he said to her as they reached the dead end where Magnolia ran into the beach and turned onto Shore Drive, “you haven’t gone off your meds or whatever, have you?” he asked quietly.

Lilah’s face fell in disbelief. “Are you really asking me that?”

“Like I said, I’m worried about you,” Carter said.

“Well, don’t. I can take care of myself.”

It occurred to Carter that she hadn’t answered his question. “But have you?” he said.

Lilah didn’t answer. In fact, Lilah didn’t say a word to Carter for the rest of the ride to Jeff’s place.

They made their way up Shore Drive past the neon-lit entrances to the glitzy hotels and on to the north side of town, where the beachside mansions and the weathered gates leading to their private beaches paraded past.

When they pulled into Jeff’s circular, crushed-shell driveway, they had to navigate around the tangle of everybody else’s cars, and then seeing that all the good spots were already taken, they looped back out and parked a ways away down the sand-strewn street.

“We’re here,” said Carter.

“Looks like it,” Lilah responded sarcastically.

They sat there, neither of them moving for a moment.

“So, listen,” Carter said. “Before we go in, I want to say—” She was fiddling with the red plastic bracelet she’d been wearing every day since she’d gotten her job as a lifeguard last summer. “Will you look at me a sec?”

She did, and Carter caught her chocolate eyes and held them. She seemed so fragile, so scared, in that moment in the car. He took both her hands in his and held them out in front of himself.

“The girls from the swim team might be here, and—”

Lilah’s head bobbed forward and she covered her face with her hands, but Carter pressed on.

“—I know you think they hate you, but really, they don’t. I promise you. Just … try to relax and let yourself have a good time. And if you can’t, then let me know it’s too much for you and we’ll leave.”

“Okay,” said Lilah, glancing back up at him with a sharp glare. “Are we gonna go in, or what?”

“Yeah. Let’s go in.” Carter carefully tucked a loose strand of wavy light-brown hair behind her ear. He cracked a sad grin. “This is going to be fun. You’ll see.”