Complete Nothing Page 21
“Really?” I asked, dubious. Lauren had never been one to not form her own opinion before. “I mean, you did try to warn me off him in the beginning.”
“Oh, that.” She waved a hand. “So he broke Felicity’s heart. Doesn’t everyone break a heart or two at some point?”
“Um . . . I guess.”
“Just because he didn’t like her, doesn’t mean he can’t like you.” She slung her arm heavily around my shoulder as Mia and her friend Alicia traipsed in the door, followed quickly by Lance’s one male compatriot in our class, Craig Churgin. The room began to fill with conversation as everyone chose stretching spots and got down to work. “In fact, I think you should invite him to the recital.”
I felt a shock of nervousness at the mere suggestion of this.
“Isn’t that a little . . . soon?” I asked as I rolled one ankle, then the other. “I mean, he’s not even my boyfriend. Not technically.”
“It’s not like you’re asking him to marry you,” Lauren said, finishing off her banana. She released me, folded up the peel, and shoved it in the side pocket of her bag. “You’re asking him to sit on his butt for two hours and watch some pretty spectacular dancing, if I do say so myself.”
For some guys, that’s actually worse than a marriage proposal, I thought.
“If he’s into you, he’s going to want to be there,” she said, standing. “Ballet is your first love. Any guy you’re with should respect that, right?”
I looked up at her, cool trepidation filling my chest. “I guess.”
She paused, lifting one heel and then the other, loosening up her feet. “Unless . . . you think he’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t support you. Do you think he’s that kind of guy?”
“No.” I stood up and reached back for my right ankle to stretch my quad. “No. He’s definitely not. He thinks it’s cool that I’m into ballet. He said it the first day we met.”
“Then ask him,” Lauren said, walking to the center of the floor and dropping down into a split. Her brown eyes were clear when she looked up at me and seemed huge as they reflected the track lighting overhead, pink and yellow and white. “What’ve you got to lose?”
“Nothing,” I said, even as my stomach clenched. “I’ll ask him tomorrow.”
I sank down next to her and mimicked her pose, reaching for one toe and then the other, trying to figure out why I suddenly felt so uncertain. Was it that I didn’t think Keegan wanted to come, or was it that I didn’t think I wanted him to come? Part of me felt like dance recitals were for families, friends, boyfriends. People who truly mattered. People who would appreciate my hard work and sweat and tears. Did Keegan fit that bill?
“Good evening, class!” Madame Helene called out, emerging from her office. She walked over to her iPod and switched it on. The opening strains of her usual warm-up music flowed from the speakers. The class scrambled to its feet. “To the barre, please?”
We scurried noiselessly to the barres along two adjacent sides of the room and began our drills. I breathed in and out as I lowered into plié after plié, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Keegan. About how I would ask him. About what he would say. But every once in a while, Peter’s face would creep into my thoughts. His voice would sound in my ear, asking . . .
You’re really going to ask that tool over me? You really want him there and not me?
I remembered the expression of pride on Peter’s face after The Nutcracker last year, the one show he’d been able to attend. How he’d kissed me on the forehead and handed me a single red rose. How he’d pulled me close and whispered in my ear, “I told everyone in my row that you were my girl. I couldn’t stop smiling.”
I felt sick, suddenly. Sick and hot and tearful. How could he have said that to me then, but not want to be with me now? What had changed? What had I done wrong?
What I wouldn’t give to hear him say that to me again.
But it didn’t matter. Because he was never going to come to another of my recitals. I was with Keegan now. And I liked Keegan. He was laid-back. He was chill. He was so easy to laugh and let everything roll off his shoulders. There was so much about Keegan that I liked. Not the potential sexting, but everything else.
Lauren was right. I should ask him to our recital. I just hoped he liked me enough to say yes.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
True
I walked into the house after an insane shift at Goddess Cupcakes that night, tense from spending the entire walk home looking over my shoulder, waiting for Artemis and Apollo to jump out from behind a car or a potted plant or a Dumpster and slay me. I locked both locks behind me and let out a massive breath. The house was quiet. I glanced down the hallway toward Hephaestus’s room, and the crack under the door was dark. My mother would just be leaving the mall now, having been on the closing shift at Perfumania. I had plenty of time to do what I needed to do.
Heart pounding from side to side and back to front, I raced upstairs and into my room, closing the door silently behind me. At my desk, I placed Wallace’s hand-me-down computer next to the sand timer, which was getting ominously low. So ominously low, I felt as if I could hear every last grain of sand hitting the growing pile at the bottom of the hourglass, sliding down the hill and hitting the thick sides. I pulled my sweater off and tossed it over the thing. Right now, I needed to concentrate.
“Please work, please work, please work.”
I opened the computer and turned it on, sitting down and kicking my shoes off as it booted up. Then I opened the camera program like Wallace had taught me to do back at the library and clicked open the screen marked “Recorded Footage.” There was seven hours, thirteen minutes, and forty-two seconds of it.
“Yes,” I said under my breath.
Salivating, I moved my finger over the touch pad—I now knew it was called a touch pad—and clicked the triangle that, I’d also learned today, meant “play.”
The footage began. Hephaestus’s room was empty and still. And it continued to be empty and still for a good fifteen minutes until I finally remembered that he’d worked a shift at the garage right after school today, and I hit the double triangle button, which meant “fast-forward.”
I sat back and watched the unchanging screen. The only evidence of the passage of time were the minute movements of the leaves on the trees outside his window, fluttering now and then in the breeze. Finally, once I’d scrolled through three hours plus of the same thing, the door opened, and Hephaestus entered. I sat forward like a shot and hit play again.
Hephaestus hoisted his book bag onto his bed, then wheeled over to the window. He used a metal hook to reach up and lower the shade. My heart skipped in excitement. This was it. This had to be it.
Then he started undressing. I gulped. Hephaestus tugged off his jacket and hung it in the closet, then pulled his T-shirt off over his head. That was when I started to sweat.
Hephaestus had the single most perfect torso I had ever seen on a human being. There were muscles everywhere. Big, defined ones. And his arms were sinewy and strong, bulging whenever he moved. I could see a tattoo on his left pectoral muscle, just above his heart, and I leaned in for a better look, but then he turned and pushed his chair into the bathroom.
Five minutes later, the shower came on, and it was more fast-forwarding until, finally, he emerged in a clean T-shirt and jeans, looking refreshed. He pulled his books from his bag and brought them over to his desk.
Great. Now I was going to watch the guy do his homework? I was just about to hit fast-forward again, when his head popped up and he looked at the mirror. My eyes darted to it as well. The frame was glowing.
I leaned forward in my seat, my fingers itching, my heart in my throat. Hephaestus quickly shoved his computer and books aside. I waited for a face to appear in the glass, wondering if that was even how it worked and wondering if that face would be my sister’s or someone else’s. Then Hephaestus gripped the handles on his wheelchair with both hands and pushed himself up until his legs hovered inch
es above the seat. With one mighty grunt of effort, he flung one arm out to touch the mirror.
There was a flash of light, and the screen in front of me went black. Not the entire computer, just the small window opening that had been showing his room.
“No!” I shouted. “No! No! No!”
I clicked the play button a thousand times. Clicked fast-forward. Clicked everything. The timer was still running, which meant the camera still thought it was recording, but there was nothing. Nothing but an infuriating black screen.
The power of the mirror, once activated, must have fried the transmission. It took some serious self-control not to rip the computer in half at its hinge. Instead I got up, tore the pillows from my bed, flung the bedspread to the floor, and pounded on the mattress as hard as I could with both fists. I picked up the biggest pillow and whipped it over and over and over into the wooden footboard, sweat popping out along my brow, tears squeezing from the corners of my eyes. I wanted to see my sister. I wanted to know if it was she who Hephaestus was talking to, or some unknown enemy. I needed to know where Apollo and Artemis were. What they were plotting. I couldn’t take the not knowing anymore, having no news from home, no contact with those I loved, no clue as to whether I was going to be suddenly attacked and mortally wounded at any second.
It wasn’t fair that I didn’t get to know. It wasn’t fair.
Finally, after a few minutes of this humiliating fit-having, I ran out of steam. I sank to the floor of my room atop a pile of folded and crushed pillows and breathed. A few tears streamed down my face, but I didn’t sob. I was angry and frustrated more than anything. I felt weak. I felt impotent. I felt out of control.
These feelings didn’t sit well with me. I was a goddess. I was supreme. I was not this sniveling, desperate wuss.
“I just want Orion back,” I said aloud, resting my head down on the nearest pillow and clutching the corner in one hand. “I just want to go home.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Claudia
As I walked down the long family-photo-lined hallway of Keegan’s second floor on Tuesday afternoon, peeking into rooms with him, I could feel the weight of the recital ticket in my backpack, tugging at the vinyl, pulling down on the straps so heavily my shoulders were tilting backward.
What was he going to say? What would I do if he laughed?
“And this,” Keegan said, opening a thick wooden door and flicking on the lights, “is my room.”
Suddenly the ticket no longer mattered. I eyed Keegan nervously. It was a weekday afternoon, no one else was home except his little brother, who was glued to the Wii in the basement two floors below, and there we were, standing at the threshold of his bedroom. Did he really expect me to just walk in there like this moment wasn’t loaded with a thousand different questions and expectations? But then, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he had no intention of doing anything other than showing me his autographed baseball collection.
Yeah, right, Lauren’s voice said inside my head. Because that’s exactly what guys think about when showing the girl they’ve been Frenching all weekend their room.
Keegan walked inside and stood back against the door. I could either slip in past him or make an excuse to bail.
“What do you think?” he asked. “I cleaned it up just for you.”
“Yeah?”
Now it felt like I had to go inside, so I did. It was perfectly male. Blue-and-gray-plaid bedspread, football posters on the dark-blue walls. Dark wood furniture. A scent that was both flannelly and sweaty at the same time. It reminded me of Peter’s room, except that it was bigger and there was more furniture. I had always thought guys were supposed to be messy, but neither one of these guys were. Every book on Keegan’s shelves was lined up and pushed back, every shelf dusted, every piece of sports memorabilia set and angled in its place.
He closed the door, and the silence surrounded me.
“It’s nice,” I said, because I had to say something. “Very clean.”
“Glad you like it.”
He was right behind me now, his breath tickling the skin of my neck. He nudged my backpack off my shoulders and it hit the floor, the fingers of my right hand curling instinctively around the strap and holding fast. Before I could turn, his lips touched my shoulder, bare thanks to my wide-necked T-shirt, and then he was inching that neckline wider, kissing down toward my arm. When the fabric wouldn’t stretch any farther, he made his way back, across my shoulder to my neck and slowly up to my ear.
Was this really happening? No parents, the door closed, alone in the room with a guy I’d known for less than a week? What was I doing? This was so not me. I had to get out of there.
And then his hand slipped around my waist, gripped my shirt at the front, and turned me around. I took one look into his deep-brown eyes and my brain actually said, Oh, who cares? Then my body took over.
We kissed. A lot. Standing there in the middle of his bedroom, we kissed and kissed and kissed, his hands traveling up and down my back, into my hair, down my spine, over my butt and back up again. I gripped the back of his striped polo shirt with both hands, feeling childish and grown-up at the same time. Childish because I had no clue what to do with my arms or legs, grown-up because wasn’t this the definition of a grown-up moment? Kissing a guy I was just getting to know in the middle of his bedroom alone with a zillion possibilities of what might happen next vibrating around our bodies like thousands of tiny supercharged ions?
After what seemed like forever and also like five seconds, he started to walk me backward, inching his feet one at a time toward his bed.
Suddenly my brain started working again.
I couldn’t let him get me to the bed. If I let him get me to the bed, that was like saying I was open to doing things that I wasn’t entirely sure I was open to doing. Things I’d never even done with Peter.
Peter. My heart stopped when my brain landed on his name.
I pulled my lips away from Keegan’s. At that moment, the sides of my T-shirt were clenched in his fists at either hip, exposing a strip of skin above my waistband. He looked me up and down like I was the single sexiest being on the face of the planet, and for that split second, I wanted to say, Oh, who cares? again.
But I didn’t.
“Wait,” I said instead.
“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he rasped, although I could tell in his eyes that he was hoping there wasn’t anything I didn’t want to do.
“No, it’s not that.” Even though it was. And now I had to figure out exactly what it was. My eyes fell on my bag, which was now behind him. “I wanted to ask you . . . before I forget . . .”
I went to my backpack and bent down self-consciously to pull the ticket out of the back zipper pocket. Putting distance between us, even momentarily, felt good. I felt solid again. Like I could think straight.
“Do you—I mean—would you . . .”
The ticket fluttered in my trembling hand. Apparently my mouth was not keeping up with my brain.
“Would you come to my recital on Friday night?” I asked. And I held my breath.
Keegan glanced at the ticket. His face was blank. It was as if he’d never seen a ticket before in his life and didn’t know whether he was supposed to take it from me, swat it to the ground like a bug, or crumple it up and eat it. After a long, breathy pause, he finally plucked it from my fingers.
“Sure,” he said. “I’d love to.”
The force of my elation hit me so hard I was shocked. I didn’t know until that very second how much it meant to me that he say yes. And when he did, I wanted to throw myself into his arms.
So I did.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Anytime,” he replied, touching his lips to mine. “I bet it’s awesome, watching you dance.” He moved my hair behind my shoulder, and his expression turned serious. “I bet you’re the most beautiful dancer there is.”
Everything inside me went liquid, molten and hot. “Really?”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Peter
“How long do we have to do this for?”
Big Tom, the elderly man across the serving table from us, shot me a look like Who the hell is this girl? Honestly, I was right there with him. Ever since the moment we’d walked through the door of my church’s basement, where the soup kitchen was located, Josie had been whining. Whining about the smells, whining about the people, whining about having to stand the whole time. Unbelievable.
I carefully ladled mashed potatoes onto Tom’s plate.
“Enjoy, Tom.”
“Have a good night, kid,” he replied. But he looked like he couldn’t imagine how I possibly would.
I waited for him to lumber away to the gravy bowl before I turned to Josie. “I told you. Gavin and I signed us up for a two-hour shift.”
“Two whole hours?” she moaned, bending slightly at the waist. She was wearing a white tank top with her breasts pushed up inside it, and tiny blue shorts, her long hair tied into two braids. Every male in the room, from the homeless family men to the other youth group volunteers to the ancient security guard in the corner, had checked her out at one point or another. It wasn’t like I was going to tell anyone how to dress, but if she thought that was an appropriate outfit for volunteering . . . well, she was wrong.
“Why don’t you talk to some people?” I said. “Have some fun.”
“Fun?” she griped, staring down at the salad tray. “This place is a crap hole. No one has fun in a crap hole.”
Marcy Fiore happened to be walking by with a full tray of chicken at that exact moment. I swear I thought she was going to dump the whole thing over Josie’s head. I took Josie’s wrist and steered her a few feet away toward the dessert table.