“No.”
It’s the no you don’t want to poke with a stick. That no.
“Fine. So life is going along fine. Alex supposedly loves me. Everybody still thinks I’m all that. Then his girlfriend shows up.”
“Connie Marino just happened to be taking a walk across your property?”
“I told you, she was a stalker. Who follows her boyfriend to the next state? You figure out he’s a dog, and you dump him. But she follows him! She shows up. She’s parked down the street from my house. And God, Jack, the minute I saw her, she was so pretty and in love with him, plus she wanted to make him hurt as bad as he hurt her. Which I totally get. Only she thought it was my fault. My fault! She won’t stop screaming at me.”
Jack is looking at me like I’m a piece of stinky cheese.
“Jack! She was going to tell everyone I was a slut. Everyone was going to believe her. She was going to tell my dad and everyone. I felt bad for her. I didn’t even want to look at Alex again. I wanted her to get in her car and take him back to Michigan and shut up. I didn’t want her dead, I just wanted her to be quiet.
“So I’m telling him to make her be quiet. Steve’s going to hear. I’m going, ‘Make her shut up!’ and Alex is going, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ and I’m going, ‘You’re freaking Alex Yeager. Think of something!’?”
Jack says, “Shit, no.”
“Oh God, Jack. There’s so much screaming. I run into the trees to make him stop, but he’s waving his knife at me. He’s covered in blood, like, he’s dripping! Then he’s on the phone to some guy to come help him, and he tells me to go inside and stay in my room and don’t come out and don’t say anything to Steve or anybody or I’m next. I’m next! And she’s dead.”
Jack’s head is in his hands. He says, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”
“I’m on the edge of the woods yelling, ‘Do something! Make her shut up!’ at Alex freaking Yeager—how is it not my fault?”
90
Jack
When she pulls herself together, she says, “I can’t see you. You understand that, right?”
“We could at least communicate, couldn’t we?”
“I was in love with you when you were there to kill me.”
She was in love with me? I start to say her name, but she says, “Don’t you want your life back? Talk about something else.”
How do you talk about something else? We go inside and sit in two upholstered chairs facing the window, me stealing glances at her, her not looking back.
I say, “Mendes wants my head, right?”
“Of course he does. But not everyone’s dad kills people, all right? Just don’t show up at my house.”
“I won’t. I’m sorry.”
She brushes against me as she heads for the door, her skin against my skin. I still want her. Maybe she’s not a candidate for sainthood, but what did she do that was anywhere close to what I did? I want to buy that plantation on an island somewhere and take her there.
She says, “It’s going to be fine. You’ll see.”
And then she’s gone.
Jack Says
So here I am in college, spring semester. My life is supposed to be rolling along down the same path as usual, with a minor interruption between the end of high school and now.
I spent fall semester doing a gap thing, built an orphanage in Oaxaca, learned carpentry, went to bed exhausted, and not with anybody. The girls were great, very dedicated, very cute. But they weren’t Nicolette.
I did months of heavy labor. I told my mom I was exhausted and she wrote back, Be grateful you’re not in prison. Stop complaining and plaster some walls.
I wasn’t complaining, it was a statement of fact. Not only am I grateful I’m not in jail, I’m grateful for all the other things I deserved but I got out of.
Agent Birdwell kept saying, “We have our eye on you,” as if there were a big, disembodied eye that the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation could program to follow me around while I ate refried beans in Oaxaca and beam pictures of my fork scraping across my plate back to headquarters.
But I’m not even on any kind of probation, thanks to Nicolette lying like a rug on my behalf.
My mom keeps dabbing her eyes and saying, “I don’t understand,” about everything she doesn’t want to understand.
“It’s not just Don who grew up in that house,” I say.
She says, “I don’t care if you’re eighteen. You’re on a six-inch leash.”