She looks nervous. Good. She should be nervous. I have a very biting tongue when I want to. But before I can decide what, exactly, I want to say, Lyla says, “Wanna go to the snack bar? I could use a soda.”
Then I realize she’s not nervous about my biting tongue, she’s nervous about Derrick being close enough to overhear whatever it is I’m about to say to her. Which is silly, since we’re definitely too far away for him to hear anything. And I don’t want to go to the snack bar. I need to get back to my room and make sure I have everything ready for my interview tomorrow. I have to make sure I research the position, go over my notes, steam clean my suit! “Not really,” I say.
Lyla rolls her eyes. “We’re going.”
Wow. She’s acting pretty bratty and confident for someone who should be worried about me blowing up her spot.
But whatever. Fine. If she wants to choose the snack bar as the place where I yell at her, then I guess that’s her prerogative. I start walking toward the main part of the beach, where the snack bar and the public bathrooms and showers are all housed in a huge pavilion. It takes me a second to realize Lyla’s not following me. When I turn around to look behind me, she’s just standing there on the sand, looking lost.
“Hello!” I say. “Are you coming or not?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m coming.” She rushes to catch up with me.
When we get to the snack bar, she gets in the line for food, which makes no sense. She actually wants to eat? I thought she just wanted to make sure she was away from Derrick when I started yelling at her for what happened this morning. But apparently not. Apparently she’s hungry.
“What can I getcha?” the guy working the snack bar asks. He’s way too chirpy for the kind of mood I’m in.
“Just a soda,” I say, kind of rudely, even though he hasn’t done anything wrong. But I don’t want Lyla to get the idea that we’re going to be hanging around here too long. She can get a drink and bring it right back to her spot on the beach when I’m done with her.
“Don’t mind her,” Lyla says to the guy. “She’s kind of . . . uptight.”
“No, I’m not!” I am so not uptight. Case in point: what I did last night.
Lyla orders a bag of chips and a soft pretzel. I guess she’s not worried about what processed carbs and trans fats are going to do to her insides.
“So listen,” I say when the snack bar guy goes to get our food. “I just wanted to tell you to please stop following me.” I don’t know why I say please. I mean, here I was, all set to yell at her, but now the wind has gone out of my sails. Something about her calling me uptight has kind of ruined the mood.
“I wasn’t following you,” she says. “Beckett said you might be in trouble, so I wanted to make sure you were okay. Excuse me for caring about you.”
“Oh, right, like you just care about me so much.” I roll my eyes.
“I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you, if that’s what you mean.”
Wow. What a liar. “Really? Then why did you let me leave the room like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like I was going out to try and find a random guy to hook up with!” Does she not remember the fact that I came out of the bathroom dressed in a completely inappropriate outfit? Does she not remember that she asked me if I was okay, and that even though I obviously wasn’t, she still let me go? I mean, talk about too little, too late. Showing up at Abram’s house after we already slept together? God forbid something had happened to me. She would have been way too late.
“I’m not your keeper, Quinn,” Lyla says. “I tried to say something, but you—”
The snack bar guy returns to the window. “That’ll be sixteen dollars,” he says happily.
“Sixteen dollars?” Lyla asks. She blinks. “For a bag of chips and a soda?”
“Well, and the pretzel,” he says.
Lyla reaches into her cover-up and pulls out a crumpled-up ten-dollar bill. “I guess I’ll put the chips back,” she says sadly, like it’s some big tragedy.
But she still doesn’t have enough money. Without the chips, it’s twelve dollars. So then Lyla and the snack bar guy start getting into a fight over whether she can give the pretzel back, too. Apparently there’s some health regulation that says you can’t put pretzels back once they’ve been served. Which doesn’t make any sense. The guy’s wearing gloves. So who cares if he puts the stupid pretzel back?
So then Lyla says, fine, she’ll keep the pretzel and put the soda back, but apparently she can’t do that either because the soda’s already been poured. Which makes more sense than the pretzel, because hello, obviously you can’t put liquid back into a machine.
“Oh, for the love of god,” I say, because I can’t take listening to the two of them for one more second. I drop a ten-dollar bill onto the counter next to the one Lyla’s already put there. “Here. Take it.” How is it that I’ve somehow become responsible for paying for Lyla’s unhealthy snacks? I came here to yell at her, not pay for her overpriced treats. It’s actually kind of upsetting.
“Thank you,” Lyla says politely.
The guy at the window seems annoyed, like he can’t believe how stupid we are for not realizing how much things were going to cost. Which I guess makes sense. Lyla shouldn’t have ordered so much food if she didn’t have any money. Why did she go out on the beach with only ten dollars anyway? Doesn’t she know any refreshments you buy on the beach are going to be crazy expensive?
Once Lyla’s gathered up her food, she starts walking over to one of the picnic tables under the big stone pavilion. “Would you like a bite of pretzel?” she asks politely once we’re sitting down.
“No.” One, they’re full of grease and fat. And two, I don’t want to take anything from her.
“So what, exactly, do you want to say to me now?” she asks. “You already told me to leave you alone. So I’m leaving you alone. I won’t chase you down at any other random guys’ houses.”
“Good,” I say, thinking about telling her I won’t be at any more random guys’ houses, so she won’t have to worry about it. But I don’t. Let her think I might still be participating in scandalous hookups.
“Where’d you meet that guy anyway? He was seriously hot.”
“At a club.” Well, sort of. Technically we met on the beach. But I’m not going to tell Lyla that. I like her thinking of me out at a club, dancing and flirting.
“Really?” Lyla raises her eyebrows.
“Yeah. Why?”
“I dunno. It just doesn’t seem like something you’d do.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t know me anymore.” I’m saying it to hurt her, but she seems unfazed.
“Apparently not.” She takes another bite of her pretzel. “You don’t know me, either.”
Obviously. Since she was cheating on her boyfriend. “Yeah, since you were cheating on your boyfriend,” I say.
A flash of guilt passes across Lyla’s face, but she recovers quickly. “I was not cheating on him! I told you, Beckett came to my room and told me you were in trouble.”
“And since when are you such good friends with Beckett?” I can’t help myself. I’m interested. I don’t want to be interested, I don’t want to be wondering what’s going on in her life, why she was with Beckett when she’s supposed to be with Derrick, why she just looked guilty if nothing is going on. But I can’t help it.
“I’m not.”
“Does Derrick know?” I press.
“Obviously not.”
I shake my head and resist the urge to ask more. It doesn’t matter. Like everything else in Lyla’s life, it’s none of my business. “Well, whatever. I don’t have time to get caught up in your drama.”
“My drama? You’re the one who hooked up with some random guy.”
I open my mouth to bite back with some smart retort, but then I change my mind. It doesn’t matter. And besides, Lyla’s kind of right. How can I judge her for possibly cheating on Derrick when the stuff I’ve done is just as scandalous?
<
br /> “Sorry,” Lyla says, and she sounds sincere. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s really none of my business.”
It’s the same thing I thought just a few moments ago. But something about her saying it hurts. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but suddenly, I want it to be her business. I want her to be involved in my life, and I want to be involved in hers. I want to know what’s going on with Beckett, and not because it’s good gossip or because I want to hold it over her—I want to know because I miss her. And I want to be able to tell her about Abram, not because it will make me feel better, but because she’s smart and she’s caring and she’s always given me really good advice. I want our business to be each other’s because I miss her. A lot.
“Did you get the email?” I ask softly.
“The one we sent to ourselves? Yeah.”
“Are you going to do what it says?” I ask. “Learn to trust?” That’s what Lyla wrote to herself in the email she sent. Before graduation, I will . . . learn to trust.
She swallows hard and her face softens, like she’s touched that I remembered what her email said, that I care enough to ask her about it. “Quinn . . . ,” she says, and for one wonderful moment, I think she’s going to tell me she wants to be friends again, that she misses me, that she forgives me, that whatever happened in the past is in the past, that we can forget about it, or even if we can’t completely forget about it, that we can at least talk about it, that we can figure it out.
But the silence stretches on, until I realize she’s not going to say anything. And when it becomes apparent that she doesn’t care as much as I do, my heart closes up.
“Never mind,” I say, standing up. I can’t believe how stupid I was to think there was even a chance she might care about being friends again. “Just stay out of my life, okay?”
And then I turn around and walk away.
TWELVE
I NEVER MEANT TO TELL LYLA’S SECRET.
It wasn’t something I did on purpose, to ruin her life or make her feel bad. In fact, at the time I did it, I had no idea it was going to alter the course of our friendship so drastically. If I had, I never would have said anything.
On one of the first Wednesdays of our sophomore year, Lyla announced to Aven and me that her parents were getting divorced. She seemed okay with it—her parents hadn’t been getting along, and she didn’t even see her dad that much. But a couple of weeks later, while they were shopping at the mall, Lyla told Aven her dad had asked her to come and live with him. (I wasn’t there because I was doing volunteer work on a political action committee—another way that my Stanford obsession was messing with my life.)
Later that same day, Aven came to my house to spend the night, and she told me what Lyla had said about her dad and his invitation. Usually, Lyla would have been at my house, too, but she didn’t come that night because she said she didn’t want to leave her family, with everything that was going on. It was weird, because Lyla kept insisting to us that she was fine with her parents’ divorce, that her parents hadn’t been close for a while, that she hardly saw her dad anyway, and so the fact that he was moving out didn’t change anything. She said it was business as usual at her house, that her parents weren’t fighting, that the vibe there wasn’t even any more tense than it usually was.
But she didn’t come to my house that night. I thought maybe Lyla just needed some time alone to process things, until Aven told me about how Lyla’s dad had asked her to move with him to New Hampshire.
Aven and I were upset at the prospect of losing our best friend, so we ordered pizza and discussed the best way to handle the situation. We’d be devastated if Lyla moved away, but we decided we couldn’t let our emotions stand in the way of what was best for her.
We’d support her. If she needed to go, we’d be the best friends ever. We’d help her pack her stuff and take a bus to New Hampshire after she moved to help her set up her room.
“What if she makes new friends?” Aven had asked, taking a sip of her orange soda.
“Of course she’ll make new friends,” I’d said. “But they won’t be friends like us.” I knew it was silly to think that Lyla wouldn’t make friends at her new school—of course she would. But I couldn’t fathom the idea that they’d be as close to her as Aven and I were. The three of us were best best friends—the kind who were more like sisters, the kind you could call any time of the day or night, the kind you could have fun with even when you were doing nothing. I could count on Aven and Lyla more than I could count on my own family. They knew me. They saw me. They understood me.
“Yeah,” Aven said thoughtfully. She scraped the cheese and toppings off her pizza with her fork and then deposited them on my plate, knowing I would want them without even having to ask. I scooped them up onto my slice. “But what if she forgets about us?”
“She won’t,” I said, picking up my double-toppinged pizza and biting into it. “We’ll make an effort. We’ll take buses to see her, we’ll beg for rides. And in a year we’ll have our licenses and then it won’t matter—we’ll get to see her whenever we want.”
This seemed to settle Aven down. “Don’t say anything to anyone,” she said. “I don’t think Lyla wants anyone but us to know.”
“Of course.”
We spent the rest of the night watching movies and eating Ben & Jerry’s. I think about how naive I was back then, how I thought that nothing could come between the three of us. But the reality was that just a few days later Lyla wasn’t speaking to me, she wouldn’t return my texts or my calls, she wouldn’t even look at me when she passed me in the halls at school.
But that night, at least, I wasn’t super concerned. I was worried about Lyla, of course, but I wasn’t mad at her for not telling me, or for wanting to move in with her dad. I was sad she might be moving away, yes—but I loved Lyla. She was my best friend (along with Aven), and all I wanted was for her to be happy. And not in that fake way where people say they want the other person to be happy while secretly judging them for everything they’re doing. I really, truly wanted her to be happy.
I wasn’t even annoyed at Lyla for confiding in Aven about her possible move before she told me. I knew at some point she would tell me—she just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. That was the amazing thing about the friendship I had with them—there was never a feeling that two of us were closer than the three of us, no feeling of being left out ever. I knew that kind of thing was rare—I’d been involved in enough middle school friendships and seen enough from the outside to know that girls can be ruthless, and when you’re in a threesome, most of the time someone is going to get left out. But it was never like that with us.
Anyway, when Aven left the next morning, I was thinking about Lyla, but only because I was worried about her. I knew that even though she said she was fine, she must have been feeling at least a little weird, since she’d skipped our sleepover in favor of staying home with her family. I thought about calling her, but I didn’t want to push it. I didn’t want her to feel like I was forcing her to talk about things before she was ready.
So I brewed myself a coffee and sat down at my dining room table and did what I always did when I wanted to avoid thinking about something that was going on in my life—I lost myself in schoolwork.
I pulled out my math book and started doing the practice problems our teacher had given us for review. It was kind of a joke—math was (and still is) my best subject, and the problems on the review sheets were always the exact same problems that were on the tests. I guess our teacher figured most kids wouldn’t do the review sheets, and so if they did, she’d give them a bit of a reward.
I always did the review sheets, not because I needed the practice, but because I liked knowing the problems that were going to be on the test. If I got one wrong on the review sheets (the answer key was in the back of our textbook), I could just make sure I corrected it. Then I would memorize all the problems and the solutions, and just make sure to do it right on the test.
It was a
fabulous system that had earned me a one hundred average in math. (It was actually above a one hundred, because I’d done a bunch of extra-credit sheets, but you couldn’t get more than a one hundred, obviously. But whatever.)
Anyway, there I was, my math book open in front of me, trying to forget about Lyla and hoping she would call me. I kept checking my phone, hoping I’d have a text from her, or at least from Aven, letting me know that she’d talked to her and that she was okay.
But there was nothing.
I started to feel restless, and even my math problems couldn’t calm me down.
I wandered into the living room to see what Neal was doing, but he’d fallen asleep on the couch in front of CNN. I picked up the remote and made a big bunch of noise turning off the TV in an effort to wake him up, but he didn’t budge.
Finally, I wandered outside to where my parents were working on their organic garden. They were trying to sell our house, and they’d gotten it into their heads that an organic garden was going to add value to the property. Updated bathrooms and granite countertops with a marble backsplash weren’t enough for them. Someone had told them that organic gardens were the new “it” thing. And apparently getting the garden started was a huge pain in the ass, so if your house already had one, well, then it would be very in demand.
“Hey,” I said, when I got to the corner of the backyard where they were working. “What are you guys doing?”
“Just starting some seedlings,” my mom said, like it was totally normal to be planting a garden you had no interest in actually taking care of or using.
“Isn’t it a little too cold to be planting a garden?” I asked.
“We’re not planting into the ground, Quinn,” my mom said, like she was some kind of agricultural expert. “We’re planting them in pots and putting them under a light in the garage. We’ll let them grow all winter, then transfer them outside when it gets warmer. Spring is the best time to put your house on the market.”
“Oh. Okay.” I didn’t care that we were moving. We never left the school district, so it wasn’t like I had to worry about changing schools, and if I didn’t like the house, it didn’t really matter, because we’d be moving again soon. I still had boxes of stuff in my closet at this house that I hadn’t even unpacked. What was the point? We’d just be leaving before I had a chance to use anything anyway.