Wicked Games

“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.

“I mean,” he said to her as they reached the dead end where Magnolia ran into the beach and turned onto Shore Drive, “you haven’t gone off your meds or whatever, have you?” he asked quietly.

Lilah’s face fell in disbelief. “Are you really asking me that?”

“Like I said, I’m worried about you,” Carter said.

“Well, don’t. I can take care of myself.”

It occurred to Carter that she hadn’t answered his question. “But have you?” he said.

Lilah didn’t answer. In fact, Lilah didn’t say a word to Carter for the rest of the ride to Jeff’s place.

They made their way up Shore Drive past the neon-lit entrances to the glitzy hotels and on to the north side of town, where the beachside mansions and the weathered gates leading to their private beaches paraded past.

When they pulled into Jeff’s circular, crushed-shell driveway, they had to navigate around the tangle of everybody else’s cars, and then seeing that all the good spots were already taken, they looped back out and parked a ways away down the sand-strewn street.

“We’re here,” said Carter.

“Looks like it,” Lilah responded sarcastically.

They sat there, neither of them moving for a moment.

“So, listen,” Carter said. “Before we go in, I want to say—” She was fiddling with the red plastic bracelet she’d been wearing every day since she’d gotten her job as a lifeguard last summer. “Will you look at me a sec?”

She did, and Carter caught her chocolate eyes and held them. She seemed so fragile, so scared, in that moment in the car. He took both her hands in his and held them out in front of himself.

“The girls from the swim team might be here, and—”

Lilah’s head bobbed forward and she covered her face with her hands, but Carter pressed on.

“—I know you think they hate you, but really, they don’t. I promise you. Just … try to relax and let yourself have a good time. And if you can’t, then let me know it’s too much for you and we’ll leave.”

“Okay,” said Lilah, glancing back up at him with a sharp glare. “Are we gonna go in, or what?”

“Yeah. Let’s go in.” Carter carefully tucked a loose strand of wavy light-brown hair behind her ear. He cracked a sad grin. “This is going to be fun. You’ll see.”

2 (#ulink_ea94bd86-1a8e-5e30-a328-4c5f4270ac25)

Inside Jeff’s house, the party was blazing at full speed. The music—Nelly and Mac Miller and Nas—blasted from the surround speakers mounted in the corners of the cavernous, arch-ceilinged main room, and the whole senior class seemed to have already arrived. People Carter and Lilah recognized and people they didn’t raced barefoot around the swimming pool, pushing one another in, swatting at one another with neon-colored pool noodles.

She squeezed his arm, hoping he’d notice her insecurity and buck her up again like he’d done in the car, but he was preoccupied with searching the faces in the crowd, looking for Jeff, probably.

“I’m gonna go find the drinks table,” she said.

“Lilah,” he said, the concern for her showing all over his face, “you know you can’t mix—”

“I’ll have a Diet Coke, Carter. Stop monitoring me already.”

The worry on his face relaxed. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry.”

“You want something?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Where will you be?”

“I don’t know—” Carter was up on his tiptoes, ducking his head back and forth to see over the crowd. “Oh, wait, there he is.”

He pointed across the house and out the window, to the backyard patio where Jeff was stationed with a bunch of other guys. He was wearing a pair of gargantuan red sunglasses—each lens must have been six inches tall—and doing some sort of goofy dance that had the other guys hunched over with laughter.

“I’ll be out there,” Carter said.

Before she could say, “Okay, I’ll meet you in a minute,” he was gone from her side, down the marble steps and ducking around people on his way toward the sliding glass door that would lead him outside to his comedian friend.

Lilah made her way into the massive open-plan living room. As she headed toward the kitchen island where the drinks were set up, she saw that a Ping-Pong table had been erected in the corner of the cavernous space, and Kaily and Teresa, her old swim-team friends, were playing a girls versus boys doubles match against two guys from the football team who’d carved their uniform numbers into the sides of their faux hawks.

Her heart sank.

Before she could duck and hide her face with her hair, Teresa saw her. “He-e-ey!” she shouted, her almond-colored face breaking into a smile. She pointed her Ping-Pong paddle out toward Lilah like a gun. “Look who’s decided to grace us with her presence.”

Kaily looked, too. “L to the ah,” she said. “Where’ve you been? Get yourself over here, girl! We need help whipping these guys’ asses!”

Lilah waved. She forced herself to smile. Part of her felt the urge to take Kaily up on the offer.

One of the football guys, number sixty-four, beat his paddle rapidly against the table and said, “Come on. It’s your serve. Are we playing, or what?”

Kaily unleashed her long red hair from its hair band and bent forward to throw it in a wave over her head before rebanding it loosely behind her back again.