She nods. “My parents dropped the restraining order so I could come give you this.” She tosses me a rectangle of white fabric, tied closed with a plastic bow. It looks suspiciously like a piece of the sari she wore to Pres’s funeral.
I untie the ribbon and fold back the cloth. My shark’s tooth pendant spills out onto my palm. The cord is mostly burned away, but my breath catches in my throat as I finger the sharp point of the tooth. “Thank you,” I say. “But how?”
“I stole it out of the evidence locker.”
“Parvati! You’re going to—”
“I’m kidding,” she says. “My mom heard that Adam confessed to setting the fire. I knew they wouldn’t need it anymore. We went to get my dad’s gun back, and I asked her to pull some strings. I think she might have had to sign that she was part of your legal counsel to get it.” Her eyes flick up to meet mine. She tugs at the ends of her hair. “I guess I should go so you can be with your family, huh?” The muscles in her jaw strain against her skin. I can feel how scared she is as she waits for my response.
I make her wait longer than I should, but there aren’t words for everything I’m feeling. Or if there are, I don’t know them. Finally I say, “You don’t have to leave.”
Her dark eyes grow damp and she immediately turns away. She counts to five under her breath and turns back, her face a mask of composure. “Do you want me to stay? Because if not, I don’t need your pity.”
“I mean, you got yourself shot and still managed to save my ass,” I say lightly. “That’s probably worth a cupcake.”
The joke falls flat. “You don’t owe me anything.” Parvati starts to stand. “I know how bad I hurt you.”
I reach out and touch her arm. “Hey. I want you to stay.”
She exhales a single, shaky breath as she lowers herself back to the porch. “Really? It’s just, you didn’t come see me in the hospital. You didn’t even call.”
“Sorry. Once we knew you were going to be okay, Darla started bugging me to catch up on schoolwork, and then I had to deal with all this legal stuff. The awesomeness that is my lawyer helped me get my charges reduced, but what’s left still scored me a month of suspended-sentence jail time and about ten million community service hours.” I rake a hand through my hair. “I guess I wasn’t too eager to get in more trouble by violating a restraining order.”
“Oh.” Parvati’s voice is barely a whisper. “I thought maybe you didn’t even want to be my friend anymore.”
“Is that what you want?” I ask slowly. “To be friends?”
Her eyes water again, and this time she doesn’t fight it. “No, but I don’t want to lose you totally, so I can settle for that.”
I snort. “Parvati Amos? Settling? I’ll believe it when I see it.”
A smile plays at her lips. “I still want to be with you, Max. But maybe I don’t get to have everything I want. I feel like we broke up. Did we?”
“I sort of stopped thinking of you as my girlfriend when I found out you dated me as a dare.”
“I guess I can understand that.” Her lower lip trembles and a single rogue tear cuts a slick path down her cheek. “You want to hear the whole story?”
“Probably not,” I admit. “But it’s okay if you want to tell it.”
She nods. “I was going to tell you everything after the funeral, I swear.” Her body trembles slightly. She looks down at the porch. “I met Pres, Adam, whoever, freshman year. For some reason I just . . . liked him. He was different from most of the kids at Bristol. More raw. More real.” She laughs bitterly. “Or so I thought. We got up to all kinds of trouble, and I told myself we were besties, partners in crime. In reality I was just some girl he screwed when he was bored.” Her thick eyelashes glisten with tears. “I never should have listened to him. What I did was thoughtless and cruel.” She looks up. “I was so blind. I let him use me to hurt you. I know how pathetic that is.”
Sometimes I think I’m the worst sheep of all. I remember the tiny flash of vulnerability I saw the night of “Preston’s” New Year’s Eve party. Adam played her, just like me. And I can understand what it’s like to do dumb things for something that feels like love.
She turns away from me and blots at her eyes again. “I hate being pathetic.”
I reach out and touch the back of her arm, squeezing gently. “You’re not pathetic,” I tell her. “You’re just human, that’s all.”
She shakes her head. “I know I let you down, just like I let down my parents, and everyone else.” She turns back to face me, her emotions once again under control. “I’m sorry.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in apologies.”
“I’m beginning to think I was wrong about everything.” She sighs. “I have so much to make up for. I can’t believe I have to leave in a couple of weeks.”
A fist clenches in my stomach. My feelings for Parvati are all tangled up, but I can’t imagine surviving the spring semester without her. Still, maybe her parents are right. Maybe she does need to get away for a while. “It’ll probably be good for you, you know? Help you with the coke thing.”
“I don’t have a coke thing, Max,” she huffs. “I only did it every once in a while, and I quit soon after we started dating. Unfortunately, I had a little left and my mom found it in my room.”
“You quit using because of me?”
“You made me realize I didn’t need it,” she says.
As I try to figure out what she means, she continues, “Remember our first date?”
“Yeah.” I took her to this place called Rings Rock that you can only get to at low tide. The ocean rolled in and we had our own private island for the day. We ate sandwiches and went swimming, and when we were in the water together she kissed me in a way that pretty much guaranteed I could have whatever I wanted from her. I feel kind of sick thinking about it, now that I know it was part of a dare.
“You went on and on about how pretty and cool I was, about how much you liked me.” The edges of her mouth turn upward.
“Did I? God, what a loser.”
Her smile gets bigger. “Of course I thought you were just trying to get in my pants, which was perfect since it’s what I had planned from the start. But then you rejected me.”
“I wouldn’t say I rejected you. It just didn’t feel like the right time, you know?” Mostly I was scared I’d disappoint her or get caught with my trunks down by the Jacobsen brothers.
“Yeah.” She nods. “But then I realized all that stuff you said—you really meant it. You liked plain old me. No coke. No craziness. You didn’t want to hear about my future plans. The person I was at Rings Rock was enough for you.”
“More than enough.”