Wicked Games

Jeff had really stocked up for this party. There were two kegs of beer and a whole mess of bottles of vodka, rum, gin, and bourbon, along with any mixer she could have possibly wanted. There was even a bottle of Moët champagne.

She poured herself a Captain Morgan and Coke and poked a straw into the cup. Then, knowing she’d need even more fortification, she splashed an extra dose of rum into her cup.

Carter would want beer. He wasn’t a big drinker, and one beer, hidden inside a red cup, could last him for hours.

She staked out a place in the scrum that had formed around the kegs, and waited for Paco Bermudez, a cool kid who was already making money spinning records sometimes and who dressed just a little more fashionably than anyone else in the senior class—tonight he was wearing a Gucci fedora and a pair of clear Ray-Bans—to finish pumping the foam out.

While she waited, she sipped at her drink, sucking it through the straw. Then, still waiting, she realized that her drink was gone, and she wasn’t feeling any different, so she ducked out of line and poured herself another.

By the time she’d managed to get Carter his beer, her second drink was almost gone as well.

Finally, a slight buzz had kicked in. But looking around the room, she saw all these people, her classmates, kids from all walks of life—from the lowliest stoners in their torn army jackets and heavy-metal T-shirts to the slickest, most glamorous, Prada-wearing divas in school—having fun together like they actually liked one another. It was all too unbearable. Especially Kaily and Teresa over there, flailing after the Ping-Pong ball as it soared past their paddles, pretending that they didn’t know how to play in order to impress a couple of linebackers.

She pushed past Paco Bermudez and squeezed back up to the drinks table, refreshing her rum and Coke one more time.

A drink in each hand, she slid the screen door open with her foot and stepped out onto the patio to deliver Carter’s beer to him. She had to watch out for flying beach balls and diving revelers as she walked past the pool, and each time she stopped, she took the opportunity to gulp down another swig of her drink. Part of her worried that by the time she got to Carter, her cup would be empty again. And then what? She’d be left with her worries and nothing to knock them out.

So she took another swig of rum and Coke. She couldn’t get drunk fast enough. It was the only way she knew how to escape the feeling that everyone here was laughing at her behind her back.

When she arrived at his circle of friends, Carter held out his arm, beckoning her to his side and inviting her into the group. She handed him his beer.

“Mmm. Warm beer. My favorite,” he said to her, putting his cup to his lips. She knew he wasn’t criticizing her—he was just trying to be funny, or cute or something. But she couldn’t help but feel like he should have just said thank you.

His core group was all there. Jeff, of course, and Andy and Carlos and Reed. They were a multicultural group. Carlos was Cuban, Andy was African American (his mother was white and his father was black), and Reed’s real name was Ranjit—they called him Reed because he was so skinny. What bound them together was their sense of humor, goofball stuff—they loved Seth Rogen especially—and the fact that they were slightly smarter than their classmates.

“You doing okay?” he whispered to her, ducking his head toward hers for some small semblance of privacy.

She shrugged and adjusted the dress strap around her neck. “We’re here,” she said. “So … whatever.”

Carter smelled the alcohol on her breath—she could tell by the sour face he made, the sharp look of disappointment in his eyes—but he didn’t say anything about it. Instead, the two of them turned their attention back to the guys.

Jeff was a great mimic, and Lilah recognized that right now he was doing his Paco Bermudez imitation—thus the oversized glasses. He arched his back so he looked like he was sitting in a convertible, slowly bobbed his head, looking from side to side, and mumbled with a slight Latin accent, “Yeah, man. Yeah, man. Killer beat, man. Yo, that’s how we do. Yeah, man.”

Even though Carlos and Andy chuckled, Reed knocked the giant sunglasses off Jeff’s nose and frowned. “That shit is so stale, dude. You need to broaden your range.”

Carter leaned in and whispered in Lilah’s ear. “Aren’t you going to miss this?”

“Yeah,” she said, trying to be cheerful. In truth, she looked forward to the day when Jeff made good on his promise to move to LA and try his luck in the film industry; then she and Carter could be alone, building a life together without the constant distraction of Jeff gobbling up all of Carter’s attention.

She went to gulp down some more of her drink and discovered that it was empty again.

Carter, who was always conscious, carefully attentive of Lilah at his side, watching her out of the corner of his eye even when he seemed to be giving all his attention to something else, noticed that she stabbed her cheek with the straw before finding her lips.

“Do Rollo,” said Andy, egging Jeff on. Rollo was the captain of the wrestling team, a legend around school for his excessive appetite and his exceedingly small brain.

“Me Rollo,” said Jeff. “Me eat. Me eat you.” He held his arms out Frankenstein-style and went toward Lilah with them, but then seeing that she wasn’t into the game, he stopped and said, “Man, you know? Sometimes I wonder. How’s Rollo ever going to survive once he’s got to be out there in the real world?”

Lilah didn’t hang around to hear the answer to the question. “I’m going for a refill,” she said.

“You sure?” Carter said. “It’s going to be a long night.”

“Yes, I’m sure. Anyway, you’re the one who told me to have fun and relax. That’s what I’m doing.”

“It’s just—”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Carter said. “Go ahead, get your drink.”

“Thanks, I will.” Lilah could feel her face turning red.

Reed, who was quieter than the rest of the guys and always attentive to the subtleties of what was going on around him, looked at her with his wide, dark eyes, confused. Jeff, seeing Reed look, started gawking at her, too.

“That’s right, drink up, dude,” said Andy, always ready to lighten the mood, even if he did so in all the wrong ways. “Par-tay! Par-tay! Par-tay!” To prove his point, he tipped his red cup to his mouth and guzzled his beer, spilling half of it down the sides of his chubby cheeks.

God. It made her want to die. And though she knew he hadn’t really done anything wrong, she couldn’t help blaming her boyfriend. “You know, we can’t all be perfect like you, Carter.”

“Come on, Lilah,” he responded. “I didn’t—”

But she’d already stalked off for more rum and Coke, determined this time to get the balance right—ninety-nine percent rum, and a splash of soda.

3

Twenty minutes later, Carter and the guys were still hanging around on the deck and Lilah still wasn’t back. Though the party continued to swirl crazily around them, they’d moved into a lower key, sitting on the cushioned wooden platforms of the chaise lounges and feeling the sea breeze on their sweaty heads as they compared notes about their college-admissions statuses.

“Looks like I’m down to my safety school,” said Andy with a sigh. “Tallahassee, here I come.”

Jeff smirked and leaned back onto an elbow. “Tallahassee’s not so bad. Maybe you’ll come home next summer with a mullet.”

“At least I get to major in alligator wrangling, like I’ve always wanted to,” said Andy, trying to laugh off his disappointment.

“Jeff can come out from UCLA. And I’ll drive down from Duke,” Reed said. “We’ll film you getting your arm bitten off. We’ll be like the next wave of Jackass.”

“Ha.” Jeff slapped the cushion next to him and fell over himself laughing. “The United Colors of Jackass,” he said.

Carter tracked all this with half an ear. Mostly he was wondering where Lilah had gone, and fighting the urge to go find her. He sat slightly apart from the guys, his chin on his forearm on the deck railing, gazing at the water. It was calm out there tonight.

Noticing Carter’s mood, and wanting to bring him into the group, Jeff asked, “What role would Carter play?”

Carter smiled out of the side of his mouth. He ran his hand through his sandy hair and pulled his attention back to his friends. “I’d be the one who scientifically explained to you all the possible ways the alligator could kill you. Just so you’d know.”

“They couldn’t kill me,” said Andy, grabbing his belly with two hands and shaking the rolls he trapped there. “It takes a whole lot more than the razor-sharp teeth of an alligator to get through all this.”

Everyone laughed, and then one of those natural pauses in the conversation fell over them. They listened to the thwacks of pool noodles on bare skin and watched the bikini-clad girls in the pool, doing battle with one another from the shoulders of Rollo and his wrestling buddies.

Reed was looking around, taking everything in as usual, his head bobbing on his thin neck like it did. Gradually, his attention settled somewhere up high above them. His wide eyes widened even further. Touching Carter’s elbow, he whispered, “Don’t look now, but you might want to check out what’s happening up there.”

When he looked up, Carter couldn’t believe what he saw. There was Lilah, scrambling clumsily on her hands and knees over the curved terra-cotta shingles of the steeply angled roof, her white sundress streaked in places with thick, black grease. She appeared to be trying to raise herself up to stand from a sitting position, but Carter could see that she was too drunk to do this with any confidence.

“Jesus,” he said. He stood up and studied the stucco walls of the house, searching for a climbing path to the roof.

“Jeff, you seeing this?” asked Reed. “You might have a liability issue on your hands.”

Jeff and Andy both saw it now. They all stood up. They all craned their necks to stare at Lilah, three stories up on the roof.

“How’d she even get up there?” asked Carter. He had both hands on the top of his head, holding his hair back as he tried to figure out what to do.

“There’s a ladder built into the wall around the side,” said Jeff.

Lilah had now managed to get herself into a standing position. Her sandals swung from one hooked finger, sometimes slapping into her thigh. She gazed out over the deck, swaying drunkenly as she surveyed the scene down there: the chicken fights in the pool; the clusters of people in the corners of the deck; the wet, tattooed guys in their knee-length, tropical-print swimsuits ducking in and out of the pool house. And of course, Carter and his friends, staring up at her as though they really cared. As though Carter really cared, she thought.

Her body tilted to the right until she lost her balance and lurched. She caught herself before she fell, but just barely.

Carter shouted up to her. “Lilah! Sit down.”

“No,” she shouted back.

“You have to, Lilah,” he said. “You’re going to fall.”

“I’m not gonna fall,” she said defiantly. “You don’t know. You don’t know anything.”

She stumbled again and took two stagger steps toward the edge of the roof before catching herself.

People were noticing. The kids in the pool had stopped their game. The girls had slid down from the shoulders of the guys and they were all staring up at her now.

“I’m gonna find a way up there, Lilah,” said Carter. “Just … sit. Okay? I’ll come help you down.” He turned to Jeff and whispered, “She’s totally bombed. Where’s that ladder?”

Jeff pointed to the alley between the pool house and the main house. “Around that corner.”

“I like it up here,” said Lilah. “I don’t want to come down.” She tried to do a little twirl to prove her point, but she stumbled again, two more feet closer to the edge.

The people inside had started streaming out the sliding glass doors and congregating below her on the deck. She could sense that she’d become the center of attention. She didn’t care.

“Please, Lilah. Sit down. I’ll be there in two minutes.”

“I don’t have to do anything!” she shouted. “You don’t own me, Carter!”

He pushed his way through the throng of sweaty people gathered on the deck. They made a path for him. He was part of the show now.

“Just wait right there,” he called.

“Quit telling me what to do!” Lilah screamed.

Then, as though to make her point more dramatically, she reeled the sandals over her head and whipped them as hard as she could at him. They flew together toward the edge of the roof, one losing momentum almost immediately and plopping down to the rain gutter, the other soaring out toward the mass of people gathered below her on the deck before falling with a splash into the pool. The sound made her smile.

She peered over the edge.

“You have to scoot up away from the edge, Lilah.” Carter was pleading with her now.

“I said, stop telling me what to do!” she screeched.

And then she reared up and leaped off the edge of the roof. Arms flailing at her sides, legs pinwheeling below her, her skirt billowing out around her, she flew through the air and landed in the pool with a splash that cascaded onto the deck and drenched the three rows of people standing there.

People gasped. People clapped.

For a second people gawked at her floating there, waiting to see if she was okay.

She raised her head and shook her hair out. She looked at the clear black sky and laughed, and then she started sidestroking toward the shallow end of the pool.

When she reached the ladder, Carter was right there to help pull her out.

“Come on, Lilah,” he said, reaching out a hand for her to pull herself up with. “Let’s get you home.”

She scowled at him. “Just leave me alone.”

When he tried to take her hand, she slapped him away, so he stepped back and let her pull herself up out of the pool. Not knowing what else to do, he fished her sandal, which had migrated toward the diving board, out of the water.

She grabbed it from him and staggered away through the crowd.

He took a step after her, ready to do what it took to calm her down and get her into the car and home, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him.

It was Kaily, Lilah’s old friend from the swim team.

“Don’t,” she said. “It’ll just make it worse. Me and Teresa were about to take off, anyway. We’ll get her home.”

“You sure?” he said.

“Yeah. You hang out. Have fun.”

Before he could protest, she was on her way, following after Lilah around the side of the house.

Whether or not he wanted to admit it to himself, it was the first time he breathed all night.

4

Reeling from everything that had just happened, Carter needed some space to think.

He snuck through Jeff’s parents’ coral, Mexican-themed bedroom and slipped out onto their private deck off the side of the house. It was smaller than the back patio, just big enough for a Jacuzzi and a small glass table with a shade umbrella over it. The deck was on the second floor, but there was a staircase leading down from it to the grassy path that opened out into Jeff’s family’s private plot of beach. It was peaceful out there. The sounds of the party were distant and muted.

Sitting at the table, breathing in the warm sea air, Carter stared at the waves lapping against the sand, at the half moon in the sky and the constellations around it, and tried to imagine a future for himself with Lilah. He couldn’t do it. Not tonight. This made him sad. It made him angry, too, but he tried not to think about this side of his emotions.

“Whatcha thinking about?” said a voice behind him.

He turned to see who was there. It was a girl named Jules Turnbull. She was leaning against the railing of the deck, holding a lit cigarette between her long, elegant fingers. The red skirt she wore hugged her hips, exposing the smooth skin of her abdomen, and her long black hair hung loose down her back.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “Lilah and … matters of life and death.”

“Yeah,” said Jules. “That was pretty intense. It was admirable, though, how you tried to help her. I don’t know if I could have done that. It takes so much patience when someone’s screaming at you like that.”

“I guess …,” he said. He stared at his faded, green, old-school sneaker, for a second and then looked up at her. “It doesn’t feel admirable right now. It feels pretty hopeless.”

He didn’t know Jules that well. They ran in different circles. Her friends were artsy theater people and they kept mostly to themselves, spending their time in rehearsals. He’d seen her onstage when he and Lilah had gone to see the fall musical—they’d done Camelot and she’d played Guinevere—and he remembered thinking that she had a nice singing voice.

“You’re an actress, right?” Carter said, to change the subject.

“Yeah,” she said.

“And your name is Jules. I saw the show last fall. You were great.”

Jules blushed and scrunched up her nose. “Oh,” she said. Then, “I mean, thanks. Sorry. I’m still learning how to accept compliments.”

In the awkward silence that followed, Carter couldn’t help but notice how pretty Jules was. She had large, unusually expressive almond-shaped eyes that were a deep shade of greenish blue, and there was something striking about the shape of her face, something both soft and angular all at once. In the flowing red Mexican skirt that she wore low on her hips so the top of her bikini bottoms peeked out, she had an elegance, it seemed to Carter—a grace. He could imagine her dancing slowly, by herself.

“UPenn,” she said, pointing to his T-shirt, across which a big, bold, thunderstruck blue-and-red P was festooned.

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“My acceptance letter came two weeks ago,” she said.

“You’re kidding. Mine too. Maybe I’ll get to see you act again, up there.”

“I’ll make sure to invite you.” She flashed a smile and Carter was struck again by how beautiful she was. How had he missed all this before? Or maybe, more urgently, was it okay that he was noticing it now?

Carter stood up and gazed out at the sea for a moment, leaning over the railing, careful not to invade Jules’s space, or study her too obviously. A warm breeze lilted through the salty air. The music of the waves rocked gently beyond the dunes. A lone pelican glided low and dark over the water. A nervous tension coiled in Carter’s heart.

“Look,” he said, pointing at a bird flying low over the water. “A pelican.”

She edged up to the railing next to him, and joined him in gazing out at it.

“Nice,” she said.

They watched it fly for a while.

“I love nights like this,” said Jules. “It’s like everything’s alive and at peace with the world somehow, and you just want to stay there and hold on to that moment for as long as you can. You know what I mean?”

“Totally,” said Carter. But he didn’t, really—not tonight. It was hard to find peace after everything Lilah had just done.

She pointed at the pelican, which had made its way south along the shore without a single flap of its wings and was now directly across from them. Carter noticed that she’d painted her fingernails a nice shade of bright yellow. He couldn’t help comparing it to Lilah’s haphazard attempts at giving herself manicures. Lilah went for the ruby reds, and she had a habit of biting her nails when she was nervous, and picking at the polish until there were nothing more than a few chips scattered like tea leaves above her cuticles.

“Where do you think it’s going?” Jules said.

Carter wondered. “Maybe into the Everglades? Maybe it’s out hunting, trying to scrape up enough fish to feed its five insatiable chicks?”

“I don’t know,” Jules said. “I think it’s more adventurous than that. I think it’s a loner and it’s restless. It’s got it in its head that there’s more to see in the world than the other boring pelicans think there is, and it’s decided to take a risk and soar out to sea. It’s getting ready to hopscotch over the keys and find a rocky island out in the Caribbean where no other pelican has ever gone.”

The vision made Carter smile. “You know what?” he said. “I think you’re right.”

He relaxed a tick. He couldn’t help it. She was so comfortable with herself—you could see it in her posture, in her easy conversation, in the way she was able to look at the things outside herself without worrying about how they related to her—that she put him at ease.

He let himself look at her. She had a mass of string bracelets in every conceivable color tied around her right wrist, and she was wearing a tight white tank top that rode up above her belly button.

His phone—which he kept at all times on vibrate—buzzed in the cargo pocket of his shorts. Two short bursts. A text. Maybe the guys trying to find out where he’d disappeared to.

He did a quick check. It was Lilah. “WHYD U MAKE ME GO TO THAT PARTY?” it said.

Carter put the phone back in his pocket without replying.

“Everything okay?” asked Jules.

“Yeah,” he said. “As okay as it can be, anyway.” Before she could ask more, he said, “So, UPenn. It’s crazy that we’re both going there next year. It’s not the sort of place many kids from Chris Columbus apply to.”

“Yeah. It takes a certain kind of dork to risk venturing up into the snowy north for something as unimportant as an education.”

He laughed. “I know what you mean. Who’d want to do that?”

“Well, you for one.”

“And you for two.”

His phone buzzed again. Another text. It had to be Lilah. He could feel her anxiety teleporting itself into the phone. “IM SORRY, IM SUCH A MESS,” it said.

He was too exasperated with Lilah to get into an extended texting session with her. Instead, he focused his attention on Jules. “So, if you’re going to college next year and I’m going to college next year, then we’re obviously both seniors, which is weird,” he said. “I never really see you at the parties or anything.”

“I keep a low profile,” she said. “Junior CIA. The goal is, I see you and you don’t see me … until it’s too late!”

“CIA, huh. So, spy, what dirt have you uncovered about me?”

Jules tapped her lip with one finger. “Well,” she said. And to Carter’s shock and amazement, she ran down a list of facts about him. His four-year relationship with Lilah, of course. But also, his taste in clothes—button-down shirts in bright, colorful checkerboard patterns and baggy chinos worn over an ever-changing collection of kicks. He used to be on the track team—the 400-meter dash—and his best time was 1.03 minutes, back in freshman year in a race that he’d won. She knew about his love for science and that last year he and Andy had tried to cultivate a coral bed in one of the aquariums in Mr. Wittier’s biology lab.

Another buzz-buzz. Jesus, Lilah! It was like she was trying to make what had happened tonight his fault. But it wasn’t his fault. He’d done the best he could.

Forcing Lilah out of his mind, he said to Jules, “Wow, that’s a lot. You’ve been doing your job well. But now that I know who you are, I mean, you’re compromised, aren’t you? What’s to stop me from telling the whole world?”

She raised one eyebrow and nodded her head knowingly.

“Uh-oh,” he said.

“Yeah, you guessed it. Now I’m going to have to kill you.”

“Can I plead for my life?”

“Sure. But it’s not going to help. Protocol and all that,” she said.

He straightened his shoulders. “Okay, I’m ready. Take your best shot.”

Jules mimed cocking the bolt on a sniper rifle. She aimed at Carter’s heart. She made two short, sharp whistling sounds. “Twhoo-twhoo.” Then by way of explanation, she said, “We use silencers.”

Carter put his hands to his heart and made his best I’m-dying face, reeling backward like he’d just been shot. He fell into one of the ornate wrought-iron deck chairs that circled the table.