Sean Olin - Wicked Games

She regretted every single thing she’d done, and her regret made her hate herself, and her self-hatred filled her with an uncontrollable need to hear Carter tell her that everything was okay.

Now he’d gone AWOL. And it was all her fault.

At eight thirty a.m., unable to stand it any longer, she called the landline at his house. Maybe his mother would be able to get him on the line. And then Lilah could say she was sorry, and everything would be okay again. She could hear her heart beating in her throat as the phone rang and rang.

Finally, Carter’s mother answered, and the sound of the sweet Georgia drawl she’d picked up while they’d lived in Savannah almost broke Lilah in half. “Hi, Mrs. Moore. Is Carter there? Can I talk to him?” It took all of her self-control to squeeze the words out.

“Oh, Lilah, no. He’s at Jeff’s house,” Mrs. Moore said.

Lilah refused to believe that this could be true. “Are you sure?” she said.

“Sure as the sunrise.”

“So … he’s okay?”

“He seemed fine when he called to say he was sleeping over,” said Mrs. Moore. “Are you okay, honey?”

Lilah definitely wasn’t okay, but she didn’t want to make the mess she’d created any bigger. “Yeah. I’m … I’m okay,” she said. “Just, he’s not answering his phone.”

“You know Carter,” his mom responded. “It’s Saturday. He’s not going to be awake till noon.”

“He didn’t answer last night, either, though. I called him, like …” Afraid she’d said too much already, and not wanting Carter’s mom to think she was crazy, Lilah stopped herself. “I called him. And I sent him some texts. He’s, like, disappeared.”

“I’m sure his phone just died,” said Carter’s mom. “You sure you’re all right, sweetie? You sound a little—”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Moore. I’ve got to go. Thanks!”

Lilah hung up before Carter’s mom could probe any further.

In a daze, she stared at the pink walls of her room, at the line of intertwined roses her father had painted along the baseboards, at the white dresser and the white bedside table and the white carpeting on the floor. She studied the poster of Allison Schmitt—an action shot of Allison bobbing out of the water, with her arm stretched in front of her as she won her gold medal in London—that she hadn’t had the nerve to take down after her own dreams of Olympic competition had combusted.

Then, finally, her eyes drifted to the huge, round mirror above the antique cherrywood dressing table she’d inherited from her grandmother. Among the photos she’d taped there was one she especially cherished. CARTER + LILAH carved into that bench. “Forever,” he’d said.

But did forever really mean forever? Maybe not, after what Lilah had done last night. She couldn’t help but wonder if he’d taken the first steps toward leaving her—if he’d hooked up with some other girl after she’d left, it would explain why he hadn’t been answering his phone. The old familiar hurt tickled the edges of her heart, that dark hopelessness she sometimes felt when she was alone, the flip side of her manic behavior the night before. She felt herself moving across the room, sitting on the stool in front of the mirror. Staring at that photo like she was in a trance.

Her hand reached down and opened the bottom drawer of the dressing table. She rummaged through the old lipsticks and mascara cases there, digging around until she found what she was looking for. There it was: the tiny cartridge of razor blades she’d managed to keep hidden from her mother.

As her fingers touched them, she shuddered, horrified at herself.

“Stop it,” she told herself. “Don’t do it.”

She threw the cartridge back into the drawer and slammed it shut.

Throwing on a pair of baggy gray sweatpants and a black sports bra, she slammed out of her room and stomped down the stairs and through the bright sunlit kitchen of her house.

“Mom, I’m taking your car,” she called out.

Then, before her parents had time to surface from wherever they were and interrogate her, she grabbed the key to her mom’s Dodge Caravan off the hook by the garage door and headed to Jeff’s house in search of Carter.

Jules took her time walking home.

She lived on the southern side of town, in a neighborhood called the Slats because all the houses there were the same gray clapboards, perched on stilts, lined up tight next to one another. It was a three-mile walk from the ritzy opulence of Jeff’s neighborhood, but today Jules didn’t mind.

She swung her sandals in her hand and brazenly trespassed through the five or six private beaches between Jeff’s house and the hotels, watching the perfect rows of red and blue umbrellas lined up above the sun-bleached chaise lounges grow incrementally closer. She waved at the strangers parked under these umbrellas—the few who were out at this early hour. She tracked the waves as they tumbled and crashed. She watched the early-morning surfers catching waves, the seagulls hopping along the shore, and a few bright-eyed families setting up their chairs on the glimmering white public beach.

She couldn’t stop grinning. The sun felt warm and alive on her skin. She was electric today, tingling all over. Her brain fizzled with a sensation of uncontrollable freedom. She knew she should feel guilty for having slept with Carter, but she just couldn’t find room for the guilt inside her.

Life, the world, it was all so beautiful. She had to keep checking herself, stopping herself from imagining a life in some hazy future where Lilah didn’t exist anymore and she and Carter were an actual couple. It felt wrong but it also felt unfathomably right.

By the time she’d made it to the Slats and cut in the three blocks from the beach, walking along the sandy side streets of her neighborhood toward the little house where she lived with her mother, she’d almost given up on trying to care about the damage she might have wrought on Carter and Lilah’s relationship. He’d seemed so miserable. She hoped that when he thought about what they’d done, he’d see her as a force for good in his life.

Her mother was already up, sitting at the table on the deck of their house. She looked free and easy as ever, her blond-streaked hair hidden under a floppy straw sun hat, her hands around a warm cup of herbal tea. Enjoying the moment. Practicing her Buddhist presentness.

They waved at each other as Jules made her way up the creaky wooden stairs, and Jules felt lucky again that her mother was more a friend than a parent, the kind of person who let her come and go as she wanted.

Flopping into the chair across from her, Jules closed her eyes and drank in more of the sun. The female singer-songwriter music her mother liked so much lilted softly through the open window from the kitchen. The Shawn Colvin Pandora channel, Jules suspected.

“Good night?” her mother asked.

“The best.”

Her mother scooped some organic strawberries into a bowl and slathered Greek yogurt on top of them.

“Here,” she said. “Breakfast. Tell me all about it.”

She could honestly say that her mom was her best friend. Her dad had died six years ago of a heart attack, when she was eleven, and since then it had been just the two of them. They talked about everything. Her mom never judged. And through her, Jules had learned that the world had a way of working things out as long as you didn’t try too hard to war against it.

Jules picked at the fruit in front of her. “Well, there’s this boy,” she said.

A wisp of a smile floated across her mother’s face. “Of course there is.”

Jules laughed. She’d had this very same conversation with her mother many times before, but from the other side, listening to her describe her excitement about this or that new guy in her life.