“The Maxwell Base?” I force myself to repeat.
“Instead of third base, it’s known as the Maxwell Base,” Meghan informs me. “Because our good friend Jake Maxwell just so happens to get head a lot. It’s traditional, and it looks like you’re up next.” She and Tiffani laugh.
“You guys are so gross,” Rachael says. “Eden, don’t listen to them. You don’t have to do anything.”
“We’re gross?” Tiffani gasps, pressing a hand to her chest in mock disbelief. With a shake of her head, she locks her gaze back on me. “Eden, here’s the honest truth: Meghan’s specialty is jerking guys off and Rachael’s is blow jobs.” I can see the two nail technicians rolling their eyes and shooting each other a look. I bet they can’t wait for us to leave. “You’ll find them in the spare bedrooms at any party with any guy. Usually with Rach, it’s Trevor. I’m the classy one.”
“Hey!” Rachael and Meghan both protest, but they don’t exactly object. Rachael does, however, quip, “I didn’t know hooking up in the American Apparel fitting rooms was now considered classy.”
“That doesn’t count,” Tiffani argues, biting her lip as the nail technician finishes off her right hand. “At least I’m in a relationship with the person.”
The entire conversation is completely awkward, but I find myself glancing up from beneath my eyelashes to see if Rachael or Meghan will muster up a reply. The two of them just exchange a quick glance, their lips forming two perfect frowns, but they say nothing.
I catch Rachael’s eye and raise my eyebrows at her, questioning their sudden silence, but she only offers me a minute shake of her head, as though to tell me that now isn’t the time.
She clears her throat and decides to put the conversation in reverse, saying, “So Saturday should be fun, right?”
Chapter 15
I receive an urgent text from Rachael at 3:27 p.m. that Saturday. Her parents have just left—four hours later than planned—and we now have only five hours to prepare the house for a reckless high school party. Rachael wants us to come over right away, and for me, this is easy to do.
“I’m going to Rachael’s,” I tell Dad as I’m untangling the laces of my sneakers by the living room door. “Guy drama,” I add. “We’ll probably just order food, so I don’t think I’ll be back for dinner.”
He mutes the TV, glancing over at me, almost considering whether he should object. “Remember we’re taking Jamie and Chase to the Dodgers game tonight. We’re leaving in an hour, because it’s just north of downtown. Can you fend for yourself for the night?”
“Oh yeah.” Perfect. No need to lie about why I’m heading across the street. “I won’t be back before you leave, so have a good time. Bye, Ella.”
Ella smiles, her head resting on his shoulder and her hand on his thigh. I’m trying to like her, but I really can’t. “Have a good night with your friends.”
I nod my head in farewell and close the door behind me, heading outside and across the road. Now that I’ve been here a couple weeks, I’ve gotten used to the sunshine and the street has become familiar, but I’m still not sure where I stand with the girls I’ve been hanging with. Are Rachael and Meghan my friends now? With the amount of time I’ve been spending with them, I feel like they are. Tiffani, on the other hand, has yet to make it clear if we’re friends or not. Sometimes I think we are, others I think she hates me.
I walk through Rachael’s front door at 3:31 p.m., and as expected, I’m the first to arrive. She’s dragging a vacuum cleaner along the wooden floor, searching for an outlet, and looking exasperated and worn out. We haven’t even started yet.
“I couldn’t start anything until they left,” she explains, the vacuum cleaner trailing behind her. “They would have gotten suspicious if I’d randomly started cleaning.”
“It’s fine, Rachael,” I say slowly, my voice gentle. “Calm down, we’ve still got five hours.”
“Five hours, Eden!” she yells. She kicks the vacuum cleaner to the side and throws her hands into her hair. It’s wavy today and it really suits her. “Five hours to clean and hide all the china and buy booze and food and update my iTunes! Why did I offer to do this?” She stares at me, her eyes wide, and I can’t help but laugh.
“Rachael.”
More staring. “What?”
“We’re helping you, remember?” I arch my brows, nodding encouragingly in an attempt to calm her down. The only thing she needs to worry about is getting caught by her parents. “Tiffani and Meghan are on their way, right?”
“Right,” she breathes. Pressing a hand to her chest, she uses the other to pull down her sunglasses and then swivels around to plug in the vacuum cleaner.
“Right,” I echo. “So we’ll help you clean and we’ll all go to the store and we’ll help you put together a playlist. We’ve got enough time.”
Without replying, she starts up the vacuum cleaner and forcefully rams it into the floor. I decide not to question her about the sunglasses or her mental stability.
“I’m here!” a voice yells from behind me over the noise. I turn around to find Tiffani, her hands overflowing with crackers and dips. I feel guilty for not bringing anything. “Is she wearing sunglasses inside?”
I only shake my head in pity. “She’s a little stressed.”
“We’ll take the kitchen,” Tiff tells me, rolling her eyes at Rachael’s frantic vacuuming. “Let’s leave her be.”
I follow her through to the kitchen, where she dumps the crackers on the counter. There’s not much to clean, only some plates and some knives, which Tiffani quickly tosses into the dishwasher. I open up the back door and peer outside. Clean enough.
“So how many people are coming?” I ask as I shut the door again.
“Around forty,” Tiffani says. I can still hear Rachael vacuuming the other side of the house. “We’ve tried to keep it small. Declan Portwood’s crew isn’t invited, so that eliminates around fifteen people who usually turn up to parties.”
“The people who do drugs in the backyard, right?” I ask, just for clarification.
“Something like that,” she says quietly, then arranges the crackers in a row along the counter, neatly aligning them with the dips.
“Isn’t Tyler in that circle?”
She immediately stops what she’s doing. Her eyes meet mine, and it’s then that I realize I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s evident from her expression that it’s a topic that shouldn’t be brushed upon. “No,” she says unconvincingly.
I know perfectly fine Tyler is friends with Declan and all the other potheads and crackheads. I should know; I went to a party with them all. “Yes, he is,” I argue.
“What the fuck are you trying to prove to me?” she snaps. Her outburst takes me by surprise. I didn’t mean to provoke her. Getting on her bad side is the last thing on my mind.
“I was just saying,” I murmur. We exchange a long glance before she looks away. Clearly her mood has shifted, and her eyes are narrower. She returns to setting out the crackers and dips while I just watch, not quite sure what to do.
“I don’t like talking about it,” she confesses after a moment of tense silence. “It’s embarrassing having people know what I put up with.”
She doesn’t like talking about it because it’s embarrassing for her? Shouldn’t she be worried about Tyler’s well-being rather than people’s opinions of her? I frown. “I think he should get some help.”
She glances over at me again, this time with a patronizing smile on her lips. “To be honest with you, Eden, I highly doubt he cares what you think.”
I don’t know how to reply. The only thing I can think about is how irritated I feel and how I want to bite back at her. Thankfully, I don’t have to muster up anything, because Meghan slides into the kitchen with a concerned expression forcing creases onto her forehead.
The first thing she asks us is, “Can someone tell me why our friend is vacuuming a coffee table while wearing sunglasses?”
* * *
; We spend two hours prepping Rachael’s house, which I find increasingly pointless the more I think about it. It’s most likely going to end up trashed by the end of the night. We vacuum, we hide Dawn’s knickknacks that Rachael says have been in their family for decades, we mop the floors, we lock her parents’ room. The other three bedrooms—Rachael’s and two spares—are all open, for optimism.
Once the house is declared suitable for a party, we head out to gather in the necessities—alcohol and condoms. We wait outside a cheap liquor store in Rachael’s car as Tiffani makes her way inside, swinging her hips and pouting. Fifteen minutes later, she rushes out with a cart overflowing with a variety of beer and spirits, including the most deathly of all: tequila.
“It was the Indian guy,” she says as we help her load the bags into the trunk. “He asked for my number this time. So I gave him yours, Meg.”
We make a stop by a grocery store called Ralph’s, and we spend thirty minutes pacing the aisles and grabbing whatever soft drinks and chips we can find. Rachael wants to ensure there’s an unlimited supply of snacks to go around. And once we’re completely stocked up on alcohol and potato chips and the car is weighed down so much that it struggles to get going, we agree that we have successfully got everything ready within our five-hour time frame. In fact, it’s only taken us three. There’s time left over for a quick trip to the promenade, and I pick out an outfit for the night with the help of my three friends. Tiffani picks the color, Rachael decides on the style, and Meghan pinpoints the details. I end up coming home with a coral keyhole dress, which is very tight and very short but is apparently up to standard.
“I hope your parents don’t call mine,” Rachael murmurs once we get back to her house and start unloading the car. She has no reason to be worried. Dad and Ella will be ramming nachos into their mouths while watching a messy football game.
“They’re watching the Dodgers game,” I say. “We’re lucky they like football.”
Rachael, Tiffani, and Meghan all stare at me, and slowly Rachael asks, “Eden, you know that the Dodgers are a baseball team, right?”
“Same difference.”
She shakes her head, laughing as she nods across the street. “Go get yourself ready,” she says. “It’s almost seven. I told people to come any time after nine. The same goes for you, Tiff. Me and Meg can handle the rest of this.”
Before we go our separate ways, I agree with Tiffani that we’ll come back just before nine. It’s a rule that if your friend is hosting a party, you must be there before everyone else. Meghan is staying at Rachael’s to get ready. After all, the party is for her.
When I get back into my own house, thirty seconds after departing Rachael’s, I carefully carry my new dress upstairs toward my room. But it’s not long before a brooding figure stops me at the top of the stairs.
“Looks like it’s just you and me,” Tyler says as I near him. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in two days. He disappears often, and Ella doesn’t even question it. Maybe once upon a time she did, but it seems that now she’s just given up on asking for explanations. My dad, on the other hand, is still adamantly trying to enforce rules that just don’t exist in Tyler’s mind. “They’re at the Dodgers game. The Angels are totally gonna lose.”
“I know,” I say. “Can you move, please?”
“Sure.” Surprisingly, he steps to the side to let me by. I furrow my eyebrows at him as I pass, and I even hesitate before I enter my room. He looks tired. “What?”
“You’re coming to Rachael’s tonight, right?” I ask, even though I already know that he is. It seems that he’s a permanent fixture at parties.
“Yeah,” he says. He tilts his head, his eyes slightly narrowed. I can’t quite figure out what sort of a mood he’s in right now. He can go from relaxed to furious and back again within the space of a minute. “You’re gonna be there too, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool,” he says. “What time are we heading over there?”
“What do you mean ‘we’?” I almost snort as I push open my bedroom door, my dress still resting over my arm. “I’m walking across the street on my own. Not with you. You can head on over there, Tyler, any time you want.”
“Chill,” he mutters. Pressing his lips together, he shakes his head and saunters downstairs, leaving me in peace to get ready. It’s okay for him to waste time. He’s a guy. They take ten minutes to get ready: to shower and pull on a fresh shirt.
So while I hear him turn on the TV downstairs, I head into my bathroom and throw myself into the shower to carry out tedious womanly duties involving shampoo and razors. My hair doesn’t take too long to dry afterward, and I decide to go for loose curls tonight. I don’t put in too much effort, mostly because there’s no one in this city that I’m trying to impress, so once I’ve got a comfortable amount of makeup on, I slip into my dress and a pair of heels and check the time: 8:49 p.m.
I step out of my room at the exact same time Tyler does. He looks as though he’s ready to leave. He’s wearing a white T-shirt underneath a black leather jacket, and despite how simple his outfit is, it looks extremely attractive on him. The more I think about it, the more I realize he always seems to look good whether he’s wearing boots or sneakers or a shirt or tank top. There’s the strong scent of cologne lingering in the air too, which only adds to how perfectly put together he looks right now. It reminds me of the cologne Tiffani was complimenting him on that day in the American Apparel fitting rooms. The Bentley one.
And so I give in. “I’m about to go over. Are you coming with me?”
Slowly he runs his eyes over me, making me feel super self-conscious about the keyhole aspect of the dress. Finally he murmurs, “I actually gotta head out real quick.”
“Where?”
“Just somewhere,” he says, and it’s abrupt, like he doesn’t really want to answer me. “Just go over. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“But where are you going?” I press. There’s something in his eyes that’s making me feel uneasy. Suspicious, even. He can’t look at me, his hands balling into fists by his sides, his lips almost twitching.
“Damn, Eden.” He throws a hand up in frustration, turning away from me and storming back into his room. So I follow him into the dull room with the closed curtains and no lamps on, and I squint at him through the darkness.
“Why are you getting mad?” I question as he runs his hands through his hair. For some reason, he’s getting really stressed out. “I’m just asking where you’re going.”
“I’m going to meet someone, alright?” he almost yells at me, his entire body rigid as he locks his eyes on mine. “I’ve got shit to pick up and you gotta back off about it.”
I stare at him, noticing his eyes and the way they shift so quickly, changing shades and growing deeper. I can even see his chest moving, almost feel his heart racing. “You’re meeting Declan,” I state. It’s not even a question. It doesn’t have to be—it’s obvious. “He’s not going to the party so you’re going out to meet him instead. Right?”
His shoulders sink, his eyelids collapsing shut as he exhales. I listen to his breathing as he shakes his head. And when his eyes open again, he’s livid. “Just go to the fucking party already.”
“No,” I say firmly, standing my ground. It’s about time someone did something to fix the problem rather than ignoring it. “I’m not letting you go out to meet him.”
“Eden.” He swallows, the quiet force of him saying my name only infuriating me even more, and he takes a step toward me, leaning down a little so that we are level in height. His eyes pierce mine in a way that is almost terrifying. “You can’t do anything about it.”
“You’re right,” I say, my voice growing harder, if not a little shakier. His face is in such close proximity to my own that I feel as though he’s stealing my oxygen, and I find myself struggling to keep the words coming out. But I force myself to keep going, because I can’t back down now. “I can’t do anything about it, because you
don’t care. You don’t care about the fact that I’m worried that you’re going to overdose one night or have a bad reaction or end up dead. You don’t care about the fact that you’re seventeen and hooked on coke. You don’t, do you?” He doesn’t speak, only stares back at me, his eyes somehow growing even narrower. “You only care about looking cool at parties, trying to impress people with this whole badass image you’re trying to pull off. It’s pathetic.”
Tyler shakes his head. “That’s not why I do it.”
“Then why? Is it because you’re trying to fit in with those lame friends of yo—”
“Because it’s a distraction!” he snaps. He presses a hand to his forehead and exhales as he squeezes his eyes shut. There’s a long, intense silence. “It’s a fucking distraction,” he softly murmurs. He opens his eyes again, fierce as ever, and his acidic tone is back as he turns back to look at me. “And right now, I could really do with a goddamn distraction.”
The anger at him, the fury, the irritation at everything he has ever said to me, it all somehow comes together at once within me. It’s like a sudden surge of adrenaline and insanity rushing through my veins and triggering something I can’t quite comprehend. His words have only just left his lips when I reach out for him, grasping his face in my hands and feeling the warmth of his skin. I slam my lips into his, overwhelmed by the sensation as my eyelids flutter closed and a deafening silence consumes us. It’s agonizing the way my heart thuds against my chest, but exhilarating the way his lips feel against mine. And then the reality of the situation comes flooding back, and it’s only a matter of seconds before he’ll become enraged at me again, and I slowly pull away from him.
I take a step back, feeling sick to my stomach as Tyler stares at me, his eyes wide. I’m waiting for him to explode, for his firm voice to ask if I’m insane, to which I will have to reply yes.
“That wasn’t me,” I babble, my words catching in my throat as I stutter some kind of an explanation. “I don’t—I don’t know what that was. I—I don’t—I’m—I’m sorry. I was trying to—to distract you—I—”