As if I’d broadcast that thought into the room, she set her half-full bottle on the counter and said, “I’ll see you Saturday then?”
The words hung between us, thick and unsaid: Dare you, Pearl. “I close up at three on Saturday, but I’ll have some end-of-week bookkeeping to do, and I’ll need to clean up. Get Dad ready.”
She rolled her eyes and laughed, and I pulled her into a hug for another round of self-torture.
Pearl
As I backed down the driveway, Boyce watched me from the top step of his trailer, both hands tucked into his front pockets. The tarnished porch lamp mounted next to the door left his face in shadow but shed a weak blue light over his shoulder, accentuating the shadowed lines of muscle along his arm—biceps brachii, brachialis, brachioradialis, triceps brachii, extensor carpi radialis and digitorum… I wanted to trace each one with my fingers, skimming the rock-hard curves and the valleys between them.
Back home less than two weeks and my long-concealed addiction had returned full throttle. I’d been so sure that college would abolish it—the two-hundred-mile separation, the thousands of guys on campus (there’d only been seventy-something boys in my entire high school), the parties and rushing and pledging, and last but not least the pressure that came with attending an academically distinguished university.
With my course load and sorority obligations, I hadn’t had much time to date, so I’d only had two official relationships: freshman year, lasting a whopping six weeks, with a frat douche named Geoffrey who had no clue what the title of “boyfriend” actually entailed, and two years later, Mitchell. Between them there were a series of standard hookups and almost-but-not-quites, most of those encounters so clumsy and unsatisfying that they were happily forgotten.
In four years, nothing had erased or even dimmed my memories of Boyce. His kiss. His touch. The disorienting intensity of his gaze. I was a different person now, and so was he, but apparently those transformations didn’t matter to this thing I felt. For my heart, he was a grounding wire, the needle of a compass, a gravitational pull.
For him, in high school, I’d been no more than a fixation, a conquest to be won. Before that, who knows? An obligation, perhaps—some odd sort of debt incurred the moment he’d saved my life. As I turned the corner at the end of his street, I glanced in the rearview mirror where he was still framed, half-eclipsed by the dark, a motionless silhouette.
My introverted psyche had always preferred to leave the acting out to others, so that on the surface I seemed to be the proverbial good girl. Focused and guarded. The soul of discretion and the mind of rationality, head to toe. But I had a secret center, and my flashes of rebellion were internal. My heart—carefully concealed and never worn on my sleeve or any other visible place—turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to reason. It craved what it wanted, and for years, it wanted one thing against all better judgment: Boyce Wynn.
The moment I resolved to give in to those inner desires took place in the middle of my high school graduation ceremony. Talk about never seeing something coming.
I sat next to Principal Ingram, waiting to deliver my inane valedictorian address to my forty-two classmates, their families and friends. Boyce sat in the audience, not-so-covertly texting or playing a game on his phone. Swinging my eyes away from him to avoid glaring while facing all those people, I spotted Mama, who was snapping dozens of photos of me, her lipstick-perfect smile wide beneath a black Nikon worthy of a professional photographer. I was graduating at the top of my class, with a full scholarship to the best university in the state, and her maternal pride was as insuppressible as it was embarrassing.
Thomas sat next to her wearing his crooked smile. He’d taken me aside that morning after Mama made me try on four different pairs of earrings, two necklaces (including her pearls, to which I put my foot down), and I don’t even remember how many pairs of shoes (all-important, she explained, because they would be the only part of my ensemble showing beneath the royal-blue commencement gown).
“I know the spotlight is awkward for you, Pearl,” he said. “But she’s been waiting for this day all your life. You might as well grin and bear it.”
Awkward was an understatement. I hated public speaking like nothing else. I would’ve faked a fever to get out of it, but my doctor-stepfather would have seen right through a feigned illness. I’d been screwed into near-perfect high school attendance; my only absences had been due to that bout of mono sophomore year.
I’d planned to resist looking at Boyce at all once I stood to give my speech, but that intention lasted about a minute. I wanted to know if he would watch me. Maybe because the things about me that everyone saw—my intellect, my potential—weren’t what Boyce saw. Boyce saw me. He sensed my mushy center. He seemed to somehow know the body I was too self-conscious to show off, as if he could see right through my clothes. He stared at my lips like he wanted another taste of them. Like he might devour me, given the chance. Lord knows I didn’t need to dwell on that while attempting to enunciate clearly for ten minutes straight.
On accident, I glanced Boyce’s way to find his attention was pinned on me instead of his phone. My cheeks warmed and then my neck, as if caught beneath that spotlight Thomas had mentioned. I fought the temptation to fan my face with the index cards in my hand. My voice warbled, and I had to clear my throat. “Sorry,” I murmured, soldiering on with the hollow we will make the world a better place section of my speech, cheerfully insisted upon by Ms. Ingram.
And then—Boyce winked at me. If I hadn’t been marking my place with my finger, I’d have lost track of what I was saying completely. That wink shot straight through me, scrambling my insides and giving them all a solid yank. The hundred-degree stare that followed said he wasn’t mocking me—he was sending me a signal. A dare, even. I shifted my gaze away from him, phony smile fixed in place while scanning the audience, unable to distinguish one face from another. Though it took monumental effort, I forced myself not to look at him again.
As I finished (thank God thank God thank God) and turned back to my chair, everyone cheered—more for the fact that the ceremony was nearly over than anything I’d said. But none of that touched me, because Boyce Wynn had, with a solitary wink, issued a dare. And I had resolved to take it.
chapter
Nine
Boyce