A fireplace in the center of the wall. A coffee table set in front of it and between two chesterfield sofas in ivory velvet. Soft cream deep-pile carpet Harper told me I was crazy to put down. Crisp, Hessian-colored walls, lush oyster silk curtains that draped the bay window and pooled on the floor. A small country-modern kitchen of cream-colored cabinets with a Belfast sink and thick oak countertops. I had a few paintings on the wall, and the odd ornament. Scatter cushions on the sofas.
Everything precise, perfect, and in its place.
And for some inexplicable reason I wanted to take the half-opened bottle of wine on my kitchen counter and dump its contents all over the room.
Nerves shaken, feeling lonely when I never felt lonely, I decided it was jetlag. It was the only explanation, so I got ready for bed, despite the early hour, and willed sleep to come and take me away from thoughts of Arcadia and the intrusive stranger I’d met in an airport.
Nine
ARCADIA, ARIZONA 2002
Curled up on a small armchair beside the patio doors in my bedroom, I stared out at the pool lit up by the lights my dad had installed in fake rocks around it. Mom had told me our house was built back in the sixties. It was all on one level with lots of glass and gray brick curving around a huge backyard and ridiculous outdoor pool. And by ridiculous, I mean it had a mini waterfall rock feature.
Sounds of my parents’ party filtered down the hall to my bedroom and I squeezed my knees closer to my chest. My parents were social. To the point that they’d started throwing parties for their friends at our house nearly every month. Parties that went on into the early hours of the morning. Parties I was not invited to because that would mean my parents would actually have to spend time with me.
Nope. I was ushered into my bedroom and told to stay there.
The music and laughter made me feel resentful and I glared at my bedroom door.
My parents were not like other people’s parents.
The thing that really made them stand apart from my friends’ parents was the fact that they never bothered to hide the act of sex from me. Sure, they’d never openly started going at it in front of me, because that would have been traumatizing, but they also didn’t do sex quietly like my best friend Gemma’s parents. At least, Gem and I assumed they were doing it quietly. Either that or they never had sex. But Gem thought they got along too well for that to be the case.
And then she asked me to stop talking about it. Which was, like, totally fair enough.
My mom and dad lacked consideration for me, and these loud parties were just another way in which they didn’t seem to care how I felt. When I told Gem about the parties my parents were throwing, she felt bad for me. That didn’t bother me. What bothered me was Nick’s reaction.
He was worried about me, and Nick never worried about anything. However, at fifteen he was a year older than us, so maybe he knew something we didn’t. Whatever he knew, his unease made me anxious, creating horrible butterflies in my stomach as I listened to the party beyond my door.
“I want you to come to me if you ever feel scared,” Nick had said.
I’d nodded but wondered what I had to feel scared about. It was just a loud, annoying party.
Still, something made me get up out of bed that night. It made me stare at the door. And it wasn’t the dry, heady heat of a July in Arizona, because I had a separate air-conditioning system in my bedroom suite, and while my parents liked it tepid in the rest of the house, I liked it cold. Gem said she didn’t believe for a second I was born in Arizona. Surely, I should have acclimated years ago. I hadn’t. And when I was older and I didn’t have to live with my irresponsible parents, I was moving to a state that had all four seasons.
No more Christmas in the sun.
I wanted snow.
I even used to ask Santa for it when I wrote him letters back when I believed in him. It sucks that he isn’t real, I moped. If he was real, and I was wishing for things, I’d ask him to abduct my parents and replace them with the kind that remembered parent evenings and taking me to dental appointments and, you know, feeding me and stuff. I started cooking my own meals at the age of seven.
A creak of the floorboards outside my room made me tense.
My pulse started racing so hard I struggled to hear anything over the whooshing in my ears. I saw my door handle turn. I saw the door open and the crack of light that spilled into my dark room.
Goose bumps erupted all down my arms and spine as a tall masculine figure stepped into the room, his head turned toward my bed. I couldn’t make him out in the dark, but I knew it wasn’t my dad. He was too tall.
Seeing I wasn’t in my bed, the man turned his head toward me and he grew still at the sight of me on the chair. After a moment’s hesitation, he closed my bedroom door behind him and then began unbuckling his belt.
Instinct made me jump up and lunge for the patio door. I was running barefoot across the backyard and climbing the stone wall into our neighbor Mrs. Munro’s backyard before I could even think about what was happening.
Tears burned in my eyes as I ran in my pajama shorts and tank, heading toward Nick’s house three blocks away. The streets were quiet, empty, as I ran faster than I did in my tryout for the cross-country team.
By the time I climbed the fence into Nick’s backyard, my tank was damp with sweat, my feet stung, and I was shaking so hard my teeth chittered together. I grabbed a pebble from the multitude of pebbles that made up Nick’s mom’s patterned landscaping, and I threw it gently up at Nick’s bedroom window. He didn’t hear it, so I threw another.
I saw his light come on and then his head appeared at the window.
Nick pushed it open. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. Lately, ever since joining JV football, Nick had taken to half-nakedness. I was used to nakedness à la my moronic parents. But not Nick’s nakedness. And even though he was only a year older than me, he looked older than that. He had just sprouted this last year and filled out too. When he first moved on to high school without me and Gem, I thought he’d forget us, think of us as babies.
But he didn’t.
I put it down to history.
It had been the three of us since preschool. Even though he had guy friends, including his best friend, Judd, he still hung out with me and Gem.
“Ava?” he whisper-shouted, squinting at me under the moonlight.
“It’s me,” I acknowledged, my voice trembling.
He must have heard it, because he instantly disappeared and a few minutes later the French doors in the kitchen opened. Nick rushed out to me in a T-shirt and long shorts, as tall as my dad at five foot eleven already and still growing.
“What happened?” He took hold of my arms, concern in his soulful dark eyes.
And without meaning to and completely mortified, I burst into tears.
Nick enfolded me in his arms, his voice shaking as he said, “Now I’m really worried. Talk to me.”
I managed to calm, scared I’d wake his parents and have to explain why I was there in the middle of the night crying my eyes out. And then I whispered what happened. Nick’s hold on me tightened.
“He didn’t touch you, though?” He bit out.
I shook my head. “I got out of there.”
Gently prying me from his chest, Nick gave me a severe look, seeming so much more like a man than a boy in that moment. “We have to tell my parents.”
“No,” I whisper-shouted. “Nick, no, please. I don’t … I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, okay? My parents won’t care anyway.”
“If they won’t care about that, then they won’t care if you live here instead.”
“Your parents will never go for that and … look … I don’t want anyone knowing, okay? I don’t want to be the girl whose parents let a pervert into the house.”
We had a staring match. Something he and I had gotten good at from the age of four.
I always won.
With a heavy sigh, Nick kept a strong arm around me and led me toward the house. “Fine. But I’m putting a lock on your bedroom door. And anytime your parents say they’re having a party, you either stay here with me or stay with Gem, okay?”
I nodded in agreement, relief flooding me that I didn’t have to go home.
“You can sleep in the guest room.”
I grabbed his hand, not wanting to be alone. “Can’t I stay with you?”