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He was lying on top of her, his chin on her breastbone, and for a brief moment, their stares lingered in each other’s eyes. Then he rolled off her and gazed up at the sky, and she wondered why he hadn’t kissed her then. Maybe he was shy, less sure of himself than she’d thought.
Eventually, they gathered themselves and stood up. Carter dumped the sand out of his boat shoes. He shook out the short-sleeve green linen shirt he was wearing and did a little wiggly dance trying to get the sand out of his tan pants. Lilah found her flip-flops where they’d scattered, and she brushed off the lion. They walked back to the manicured grass that buffered the beach from Shore Road and began heading the long way back along the promenade toward the center of town.
“So, I guess that’s it,” she said. “Time to go home.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Carter said, smiling at her softly. He checked the time on his Gucci watch. “We’ve already blown our curfew. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Let’s sit for a while, then.”
They found a bench and Lilah set the lion down and they watched the tide roll in, talking through the night.
He told her about Savannah, Georgia, where he’d lived before his parents divorced and he and his mother had moved to Dream Point. He talked about rap music—Lil Wayne, Outkast, Jay-Z, and Snoop—and the variations in the sound and style and attitude toward the world depending on which region of the country the artist came from. Lilah could hear his deep, overriding passion for the music in the force and timbre of his voice. She could see it in the way his whole body got involved as he illustrated the difference between an East Coast beat and a West Coast beat and a Chicago beat and a Dirty Southern beat.
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.”
PART one (#ulink_9da67d5c-e3fb-57bf-a0da-765ca8ed9f24)
1 (#ulink_689f2dc4-a264-512d-a5dc-db22577c2972)
“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.
“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.
