Adam kept his finger at his lips and pointed to the hallway. Jess rushed to the hall and ducked into the bathroom, hiding behind the door.
She heard Adam open the door, the murmur of voices. She closed her eyes, crossing her legs tight at the ankle. The bathroom smelled of pine cleaner. Her foot hit the spring bumper on the bottom of the wall and set off a loud twang. She held her breath, but the voices didn’t pause. Tears stung her eyes, and she clenched the key in her pocket. What was she doing here? What the hell was she thinking? She thought of Dani, curled up asleep in her twin bed, sure her father was asleep down the hall, not in a stranger’s house in the middle of the night with her best friend.
The door shut, and after a moment Adam called, “Jess? It’s okay to come out.”
She returned to the main room. Adam stood next to the blanket.
He said, “A neighbor called. Saw movement. Thought it was a breakin. I told the officer I was alone, doing some paperwork.”
“So, not safe after all.” She gave a twisted smile.
He shoved his hands in the pockets of the windbreaker, his head bowed. Seeing him like that, in an ugly jacket with his baggy shorts and sneakers, it was as if someone had snapped the lights on. A father. Dani’s dad. This was not what she had been imagining. This was not what she dreamed.
He held up a hand. “Nothing happened. It’s okay. But we can’t tell anyone. This is—”
“Wrong.” As in abnormal.
“Yes,” he said.
“I won’t tell,” she said. Not her mother, not Dani, obviously. The only way she could tell would be to write it in her notebook, but she already knew she wouldn’t write a word about it. Because she didn’t have the words.
“No harm done,” he said.
Except that wasn’t true, was it? If they could tell no one, especially not her best friend? If she had the sick sense of carrying a secret inside?
“I have to go,” she said.
And go she did. She ran to the front door and bolted through it. With her long legs, she leaped off the low step, her tennis shoes crunching on the gravel walkway and then thudding on the pavement. She ran all the way home, the key bouncing in her pocket, chased by the rustling darkness, by what she had wanted, by what she had almost done, by what she could not tell.
Normal. Okay. She could do this.
Days, she walked the halls. She went to physics and learned about chaos theory and Schrodinger’s cat and mass and gravitational force. She went to AP English and learned about comedies and tragedies, about the nine circles of hell, and wrote about the meaning of the color yellow in The Great Gatsby. She recited French phrases to her French teacher, she ran the spongy track in PE. She slumped in desks, taking tests, taking notes, taking in her teachers’ wisdom, ignoring the desire that surged through her body like a virus. Days, she ate lunch with Dani, Paul, and Warren. She rode in the Squareback with them to pick up burgers and fries from the Patty Melt and tacos from Casa Verde, snuggling with Warren in the back seat, whispering to him about meeting over the weekend. Normal. A girlfriend moving to the next level with her nice boyfriend. Days, she did her homework. She studied with Dani at the library but stayed away from her house, claiming her mom wanted to spend more time with her this last year, her final year of high school. Nothing out of the ordinary. A regular teenager.
Nights, she met up with Warren, both with her mother’s knowledge and without. Young rabbity Warren with his sweet dry pecks, his earnest rubbing through his jeans. She grabbed him and tumbled down with him into the rabbit hole of sex. They fumbled and twisted in the back seat of his car, wishing they had more space, and she whispered, I know a place. They parked at the end of the street of the For Sale house and, bent low, snuck through the unfenced yard to the back door, where she pulled the silver key from her pocket. Warren, caught up in the moment, didn’t even ask how she got it. Into the house they went, naked house, bereft of furniture and light. She, too, stripped naked, clothing wadded on the carpet, as she tamped down the memory of the man she first came here with, of the face that still showed up in her dreams. She moved out of her head into her body, happy to find that this boy had more finesse than the first one, with his hurried thrusts and clumsy hands. Lit by the moon through the window, she moved atop him and beneath him—voracious bodies, celestial bodies, entwined. She replaced her secret desire with this one, her jawline rashed from that enthusiastic boy’s stubble.
In October, nights grew crisp. Pumpkins appeared on porches, and clusters of crimson and yellow dotted the Black Hills. Jess pulled her red puffy coat out of the closet again for those nights that dipped into the forties and her breath turned white. Those nights, her coat became a pillow on the flat floor, soft against her neck and spine as her heels and knees dug hard, as she braced herself against walls and doorjambs. Teenage sex, condom wrappers, trying out new positions in a stranger’s house they snuck into. Normal. This was normal.
“I love you, Jess,” Warren said. “God, God.”
And Jess, her night self, said it back, on her back: love, Warren, God, her own kind of trinity, not sure which one she was calling for. She rolled over and straddled him, rocking faster, making herself believe.
Days, she turned in papers late and zoned out in class. Her grades fell as the SATs and college application deadlines loomed.
Days, she woke sore, her hips and thighs aching. The raw, dry air stung her chafed skin, and she rubbed lotion on the carpet burn on her knees and backside. She looked to the side of the mirror, unable to meet her own gaze, this day person, this peripheral girl with the shadowy eyes.
Days, her mind broke through the surface, gasping. Love, Warren had said. Love, she’d said, too, but she knew it wasn’t true, at least not how she felt for him, the boy to whom she’d transferred her desire. As to what she felt in her secret heart, she didn’t know. Capital L something, all right. She checked the thesaurus. Lustful. Lewd, Libidinous, Licentious, Lascivious. Liar. She filled in the blanks of herself: I am, you are, she is.
Days, she touched the marks on her locker where those hateful words had been scrubbed off: slut, cunt, Jess Winters spreads. Not true before, but now they were—at least the last part, and even then she shivered with the force of her night desire, the image of someone pushing her knees outward. She rubbed the marks with her thumb, shut the locker door with a soft click, holding her bag tight to her chest. She looked at her feet instead of finding a spot on the wall. She shuffled. She did not leap.