Wicked Games

He snuck through Jeff’s parents’ coral, Mexican-themed bedroom and slipped out onto their private deck off the side of the house. It was smaller than the back patio, just big enough for a Jacuzzi and a small glass table with a shade umbrella over it. The deck was on the second floor, but there was a staircase leading down from it to the grassy path that opened out into Jeff’s family’s private plot of beach. It was peaceful out there. The sounds of the party were distant and muted.

Sitting at the table, breathing in the warm sea air, Carter stared at the waves lapping against the sand, at the half moon in the sky and the constellations around it, and tried to imagine a future for himself with Lilah. He couldn’t do it. Not tonight. This made him sad. It made him angry, too, but he tried not to think about this side of his emotions.

“Whatcha thinking about?” said a voice behind him.

He turned to see who was there. It was a girl named Jules Turnbull. She was leaning against the railing of the deck, holding a lit cigarette between her long, elegant fingers. The red skirt she wore hugged her hips, exposing the smooth skin of her abdomen, and her long black hair hung loose down her back.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “Lilah and … matters of life and death.”

“Yeah,” said Jules. “That was pretty intense. It was admirable, though, how you tried to help her. I don’t know if I could have done that. It takes so much patience when someone’s screaming at you like that.”

“I guess …,” he said. He stared at his faded, green, old-school sneaker, for a second and then looked up at her. “It doesn’t feel admirable right now. It feels pretty hopeless.”

He didn’t know Jules that well. They ran in different circles. Her friends were artsy theater people and they kept mostly to themselves, spending their time in rehearsals. He’d seen her onstage when he and Lilah had gone to see the fall musical—they’d done Camelot and she’d played Guinevere—and he remembered thinking that she had a nice singing voice.

“You’re an actress, right?” Carter said, to change the subject.

“Yeah,” she said.

“And your name is Jules. I saw the show last fall. You were great.”

Jules blushed and scrunched up her nose. “Oh,” she said. Then, “I mean, thanks. Sorry. I’m still learning how to accept compliments.”

In the awkward silence that followed, Carter couldn’t help but notice how pretty Jules was. She had large, unusually expressive almond-shaped eyes that were a deep shade of greenish blue, and there was something striking about the shape of her face, something both soft and angular all at once. In the flowing red Mexican skirt that she wore low on her hips so the top of her bikini bottoms peeked out, she had an elegance, it seemed to Carter—a grace. He could imagine her dancing slowly, by herself.

“UPenn,” she said, pointing to his T-shirt, across which a big, bold, thunderstruck blue-and-red P was festooned.

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“My acceptance letter came two weeks ago,” she said.

“You’re kidding. Mine too. Maybe I’ll get to see you act again, up there.”

“I’ll make sure to invite you.” She flashed a smile and Carter was struck again by how beautiful she was. How had he missed all this before? Or maybe, more urgently, was it okay that he was noticing it now?

Carter stood up and gazed out at the sea for a moment, leaning over the railing, careful not to invade Jules’s space, or study her too obviously. A warm breeze lilted through the salty air. The music of the waves rocked gently beyond the dunes. A lone pelican glided low and dark over the water. A nervous tension coiled in Carter’s heart.

“Look,” he said, pointing at a bird flying low over the water. “A pelican.”

She edged up to the railing next to him, and joined him in gazing out at it.

“Nice,” she said.

They watched it fly for a while.

“I love nights like this,” said Jules. “It’s like everything’s alive and at peace with the world somehow, and you just want to stay there and hold on to that moment for as long as you can. You know what I mean?”

“Totally,” said Carter. But he didn’t, really—not tonight. It was hard to find peace after everything Lilah had just done.

She pointed at the pelican, which had made its way south along the shore without a single flap of its wings and was now directly across from them. Carter noticed that she’d painted her fingernails a nice shade of bright yellow. He couldn’t help comparing it to Lilah’s haphazard attempts at giving herself manicures. Lilah went for the ruby reds, and she had a habit of biting her nails when she was nervous, and picking at the polish until there were nothing more than a few chips scattered like tea leaves above her cuticles.

“Where do you think it’s going?” Jules said.

Carter wondered. “Maybe into the Everglades? Maybe it’s out hunting, trying to scrape up enough fish to feed its five insatiable chicks?”

“I don’t know,” Jules said. “I think it’s more adventurous than that. I think it’s a loner and it’s restless. It’s got it in its head that there’s more to see in the world than the other boring pelicans think there is, and it’s decided to take a risk and soar out to sea. It’s getting ready to hopscotch over the keys and find a rocky island out in the Caribbean where no other pelican has ever gone.”

The vision made Carter smile. “You know what?” he said. “I think you’re right.”

He relaxed a tick. He couldn’t help it. She was so comfortable with herself—you could see it in her posture, in her easy conversation, in the way she was able to look at the things outside herself without worrying about how they related to her—that she put him at ease.

He let himself look at her. She had a mass of string bracelets in every conceivable color tied around her right wrist, and she was wearing a tight white tank top that rode up above her belly button.

His phone—which he kept at all times on vibrate—buzzed in the cargo pocket of his shorts. Two short bursts. A text. Maybe the guys trying to find out where he’d disappeared to.

He did a quick check. It was Lilah. “WHYD U MAKE ME GO TO THAT PARTY?” it said.

Carter put the phone back in his pocket without replying.

“Everything okay?” asked Jules.

“Yeah,” he said. “As okay as it can be, anyway.” Before she could ask more, he said, “So, UPenn. It’s crazy that we’re both going there next year. It’s not the sort of place many kids from Chris Columbus apply to.”

“Yeah. It takes a certain kind of dork to risk venturing up into the snowy north for something as unimportant as an education.”

He laughed. “I know what you mean. Who’d want to do that?”

“Well, you for one.”

“And you for two.”

His phone buzzed again. Another text. It had to be Lilah. He could feel her anxiety teleporting itself into the phone. “IM SORRY, IM SUCH A MESS,” it said.

He was too exasperated with Lilah to get into an extended texting session with her. Instead, he focused his attention on Jules. “So, if you’re going to college next year and I’m going to college next year, then we’re obviously both seniors, which is weird,” he said. “I never really see you at the parties or anything.”

“I keep a low profile,” she said. “Junior CIA. The goal is, I see you and you don’t see me … until it’s too late!”

“CIA, huh. So, spy, what dirt have you uncovered about me?”

Jules tapped her lip with one finger. “Well,” she said. And to Carter’s shock and amazement, she ran down a list of facts about him. His four-year relationship with Lilah, of course. But also, his taste in clothes—button-down shirts in bright, colorful checkerboard patterns and baggy chinos worn over an ever-changing collection of kicks. He used to be on the track team—the 400-meter dash—and his best time was 1.03 minutes, back in freshman year in a race that he’d won. She knew about his love for science and that last year he and Andy had tried to cultivate a coral bed in one of the aquariums in Mr. Wittier’s biology lab.

Another buzz-buzz. Jesus, Lilah! It was like she was trying to make what had happened tonight his fault. But it wasn’t his fault. He’d done the best he could.

Forcing Lilah out of his mind, he said to Jules, “Wow, that’s a lot. You’ve been doing your job well. But now that I know who you are, I mean, you’re compromised, aren’t you? What’s to stop me from telling the whole world?”

She raised one eyebrow and nodded her head knowingly.

“Uh-oh,” he said.