Sean Olin - Wicked Games

And he listened, too, as Lilah told him about her friends from the swim team—Kaily and Margarita and Teresa—and how terribly, terribly much winning meant to her. She talked about her parents and how weirdly awkward and formal they were.

“They’re like people from an alien ancient culture where high tea and the church coffee hour are the center of life,” she said. “I mean, they get dressed up to go to the mall. And my mother. You’ve never seen anybody so anxious. You can see it in her eyes. They dart all over the place, everywhere except at the thing she’s supposed to be paying attention to. She’s so worried about what people think. And she does it to me, too. It’s unbearable sometimes. She’s just so high-strung.”

“That must put a whole lot of pressure on you,” Carter said.

Lilah’s hand had been resting on the bench between them, and he reached out and placed two fingers over her thumb, testing to see if she’d accept the comfort he was offering her. When she did and he knew it was okay, he went ahead and held her hand.

They let the silence and the salty sea air wash over them. There was something so comfortable about it. Lilah felt like she’d been holding his hand her whole life and had only just now realized it.

The next five minutes felt like they lasted forever. Their heads stutter-stepped inch by inch toward each other. They slowly stopped watching the ocean and began to watch the deep seas in each other’s eyes. Then their faces were touching, just barely, and then they were kissing, arms wrapped around each other, pressing the emotions that had been building up inside themselves onto each other’s bodies.

“I’ve been wanting to do that all night,” he told her. His face had gone deep red.

Leaning in close, Lilah whispered, “Me too.” She nuzzled her smooth cheek against his, just for a second, and he felt the ticklish sensation on his skin work its way all the way down into his stomach.

They laced their fingers together and gazed into each other’s eyes again, and then they both chuckled, embarrassed.

There were things Lilah was afraid to say to Carter, small admissions about her insecurity. She still marveled at the fact that he’d asked her out—she didn’t think of herself as the prettiest or most popular girl in school. She had freckles and plain brown eyes, and she could never seem to get her wavy not-quite-blond hair to go in the direction she wanted it to.

“Why me?” she said suddenly, not meaning for the words to come out of her mouth.

He thought for a moment before letting himself speak. “You’ve got a spark in you. Like a drive, you know what I mean? Like the way you convinced me to break the rules and run out onto the beach tonight. I’m always so worried about doing the right thing that I wouldn’t have dared do that without you.” He thought for another moment, taking in the smooth skin of her cheek and the sleek swimmer’s body she hid under her loose jersey dress, and then he let himself say it: “And you’re crazy hot and you don’t even know it.”

Embarrassed, she grimaced ironically. She looked away, then back to him.

“You know, every girl in school is curious about you,” she said.

He blushed. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s true, though,” she said. “You’re different from the other boys in Dream Point. You’re, like, a gentleman.” Then she felt a kind of shame, like she’d spilled an important secret and if he knew there were options, he’d lose interest in her and find some flighty, sexy other girl to spend his time with.

“Well, they can’t have me,” he said.

“You mean that?”

“Yeah. Here. I’ll prove it.” He took a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and started carving in the bench between them. He shielded what he was doing with his left hand.

“Breaking the rules again,” teased Lilah as she watched him work.

Looking up and smiling in her direction, Carter said, “Yeah, well, I’m learning.”

When he was done carving, he revealed what he’d written:

CARTER + LILAH

“That’s a promise,” he said.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

The serious expression on his face was so intense that she had to believe him.

“Okay,” she said. She dug her iPhone out of her purse and snapped a photo of the graffiti. “But I warn you, I’m going to hold you to that.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” said Carter.

“Yeah. I said before, I’m fine. Everything’s fine,” Lilah responded, tucking her crossed arms more tightly across her body.

It was the first Saturday in March of the last semester of their senior year, and they were cruising in Carter’s black BMW convertible up Magnolia Boulevard toward his friend Jeff’s luxurious Spanish-style mansion on the north side of town, for what promised to be an epic, “What happens at Jeff’s house, stays at Jeff’s house” party.

“You don’t seem okay.” Carter waited for Lilah to say something in response, but she just stared up at the tops of the palm trees streaming past one by one, and rolled her eyes. “If you don’t want to go, it’s okay. I can take you back home and go by myself. I won’t be mad.”

“I want to go. Look. I got dressed up and everything.”

She was wearing a white halter-top sundress with small, red embroidered flowers along the hem and a pair of thin-strapped sandals. She looked elegant, but anxiously so, like she’d worked too hard to give this appearance. Carter knew she’d be the most dressed-up person at the party. He himself was proudly wearing the gray T-shirt festooned with the blue-and-red UPenn shield that he’d bought on his campus visit last fall.

“You sure? ’Cause you’re acting sort of like you don’t want to go.”

“I want to go and I don’t want to go. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

Carter didn’t push it.

He kept his hand on Lilah’s leg, twirling his finger on the smooth skin of her knee. He could feel the tension in the muscles as he rested his palm on her thigh. They hit the red light at Pelican, and as Carter rolled to a stop, Lilah peeled his fingers off her skin and emphatically placed his hand on his own lap. She seemed, if anything, to be becoming more resentful and nervous by the second.

“Are you ever going to tell me what’s going on with you?” he said.

“There’s nothing going on,” she said with a clipped voice.

“But there is. You’ve been acting weird ever since your parents took us to dinner to celebrate us getting into UPenn.”

“I haven’t been acting weird.”

“Really? Lately it seems like absolutely everything makes you angry. And like you don’t want to talk to me anymore.”

“We’re talking right now.”

“You know what I mean. It worries me when you try to shut me out.”

Lilah spun in her seat and leaned forward against the seat belt. Her face was red with rage, an angriness heating up in her freckles. “God! Carter! So I don’t want to go to a stupid party with your bozo friends. Is that a capital crime?”

Carter took a deep breath and held it for a moment to keep himself calm.

“It won’t just be them. Everybody’ll be there. The whole school, probably. That’s not the point, anyway. I’m trying to say, I’d hate for what happened last time to happen again.”

“It won’t,” said Lilah, spitting the words out with a great deal of spite. She hated herself when she was like this, hated especially that she couldn’t control it. She turned again, this time to face the window. She sunk low in her seat and stared at herself in the passenger-side mirror.

The light turned and Carter drove on. He tried to concentrate on the warm wind whipping across his face, but he couldn’t stop thinking that her behavior now reminded him of junior year. For a few weeks then, Lilah had stopped sleeping. She’d had a particularly tough swim meet against a girl named Melissa on the team from Coral Gables. Melissa had beaten Lilah badly, worse than she’d ever been beaten before, and as she stewed over her loss, Lilah had flickered with a rage Carter had never seen in her before. Over the following two weeks she couldn’t talk about anything—not a single thing—except this Melissa girl and how she must be doing steroids. In her manic exhaustion, she searched down the phone numbers not only of Melissa but also of the Coral Gables coach and the principal of the school. She’d called them so many times that they’d reported her to Coach Randolph and Lilah had been kicked off the team.