“Aren’t you happy to see me? You sure seemed to be two minutes ago.”
“Yeah, right.” But I didn’t bother arguing. I heard what the girls were trying to tell me, and I was feeling around in my pockets. The pockets of my cargo pants—there were many—and my coat pockets, too, inside and outside, every last one. Then I was down on my knees, there at Luke’s feet, searching the snow to see if I’d dropped them when I passed out. I was drunk, probably, and I was seeing ghosts, definitely, and now to top it all off I’d lost my van keys.
With my movement, the motion sensor made the back porch light flick on. It spotlit us, beaming down on the crown of my head.
Luke laughed again, and I realized how this looked to him, where I had myself positioned on the ground, with such easy access to his zipper. “You’re something else, aren’t you?” he said. I had absolutely no idea what Abby saw —sees, even still—in the guy, why she got so intoxicated by him and took off in the middle of the night on her bike to see him and let him stomp on her heart.
But then I wasn’t looking up at him anymore. The side door of the house had come open, and the person standing there let go of the door and let it swing closed.
When it slammed, Luke turned toward it, too.
“Hey, man,” Luke said, all nonchalant, when he saw it was Jamie. “What’s up?”
This was what the two girls had been trying to warn me about. Now I knew.
Nobody wanted Jamie to get the wrong idea.
“I was looking for you,” Jamie said— to me, not to Luke. His voice was flat; I couldn’t decipher any emotion from it.
His hair had fallen over his eyes like it always did.
“Oh, I’ve got her,” Luke said, a game in his voice and a hard hand on my arm, pulling me up to my feet so he could jerk me closer.
I pushed him away and disentangled myself, fumbling on clumsy legs but at least standing on my own without his help. “He doesn’t,” I told Jamie. “This wasn’t . . . It’s not, it’s not anything.
What?” I turned fast, in the other direction. One of the girls was talking to me, trying to tell me what to say to fix this, but I couldn’t make out the words because there was this panic in my chest and it was cold and there was all the wind.
“That’s not what she said before,”
Luke said.
I turned around to see Jamie backing up, away from us. That was it. He was going to believe that liar over me, thinking I’d gotten together with this sleaze so soon after our breakup. He was watching me with a strained, strange look on his face. But he didn’t leave.
Luke cracked up laughing. “I’m kidding, man. Dude, just kidding. She’s all yours. I’m going inside for a beer.”
Jamie stepped away from the door and let him through. But he didn’t join me in the pool of light, where I was still standing.
“I . . . that wasn’t what it looked like,”
I told him.
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m only talking to him because she wants me to.”
“She, who?”
“She . . . oh.” I stopped. I had to quit saying things out loud. I couldn’t talk anymore about her or about the others.
Not then, not to him. “Never mind. I’m not supposed to say.”
He shifted a little, a flinch almost.
Like I’d said something that scared him.