No One Can Know(43)
Juliette’s cheeks get a bit hot. She wonders if Nina will be there tonight. Nina with her smoky laugh and the short, messy curls she is constantly fiddling with, piling them on top of her head, sweeping them all to one side, stretching one coil out to its full length in front of her face and letting it spring back. She was a year ahead of Juliette in school. She left for college but often comes back over breaks. She’ll be gone again at the end of the summer, but Juliette tries not to think about that.
She finishes changing and listens again for the sound of movement in the house, but there’s nothing. Dad will be in his study, drinking. Mom will be in bed with her glass of wine. Juliette eases up the window and swings a leg over the sill, then wriggles the rest of her body out. She closes it softly behind her, making sure it doesn’t latch, and then it’s easy to climb over to the corner of the house and scramble down the trellis there. She keeps to the edge of the lawn, out of sight of the kitchen in case someone is grabbing another drink, until she gets to the trees.
Her path takes her under the tree house. A light glows inside, and as she walks underneath, Daphne peers out. They look at each other, Juliette on the ground, Daphne up top, and Juliette presses a finger to her lips. Daphne does the same, retreating inside again.
Daphne won’t tell. Daphne keeps everyone’s secrets.
Juliette sets out through the woods, toward where she knows Logan is waiting for her.
She’s seen Logan around plenty, but she doesn’t think they actually had a conversation until last fall. She’d just had a fight that wasn’t a fight with her parents. A rare slipup. She asked to skip a recital so that she could do a college visit trip with Stacy, and when Mom reminded her that she could look at colleges only in commuting distance, she pushed back.
“Disrespecting your mother,” her father had called it, and applied what he terms a swift correction. Just one quick strike to her stomach, so she’ll remember.
She doesn’t think she can complain, not really. It doesn’t happen often, and it rarely even leaves a mark, and she lives a comfortable life. More than comfortable. They’re rich, basically, and she has everything she could ask for, wants for nothing; it isn’t like her parents are violent drunks who lock them in the basement.
But she was still smarting and still angry when Logan pulled his car up alongside her. He called over to her. “Hey, Princess, want to have some actual fun?” She isn’t certain which one of them was more surprised when she said, “Sure.”
His car smelled of cigarette smoke and the glass cleaner he used obsessively. The seat was split, the foam padding bulging out, pockmarked like acned skin. The AC was broken, and she remembers the sweat trickling down her spine as Logan asked her where he could take her.
“Anywhere but here.”
He took her to the Saracen house.
Each night she leaves, there is a moment of pleasurable adrenaline, a moment when she thinks, You have no idea who I am. A moment when that statement is a triumph, instead of a fearful whisper.
Who am I? I am a secret, she thinks, every part of me concealed.
Someday she will show them who she truly is.
Someday she will show them that she doesn’t belong to them at all.
* * *
Logan is waiting for her at the edge of the clearing where the Saracen house stands. He grins when he spots her, flicking his cigarette onto the ground and stomping it out. He’s striking, with strong cheekbones and pale eyes. He’s twenty-five, but Juliette has trouble thinking of him as any older than she is; he acts like an overgrown kid.
He drags her in close and presses a hard kiss to her lips. He tastes of cigarettes. The kiss is all teeth. He gropes up under her shirt with one eager hand and she shoves him away with an exasperated sound.
“Cut it out, Logan,” she says. His smile is crooked and unbothered.
“Just happy to see you,” he tells her. She snakes an arm around his waist, her lips tingling. Walking next to him like this is awkward, making her steps uneven. His bony hip digs into her side. His fingers manage to dangle just over her cleavage. “Here. Take this,” he says. He tucks a single pill into her palm.
“What is it?” she asks.
He shrugs. “Nothing too intense. You need to relax.”
She sets it on her tongue; he follows the gift with a flask and she washes it down with what tastes like turpentine but is probably cheap bourbon. She needs something to take the edge off. This—the house, the crowd, and especially Logan—stopped being new months ago, stopped being fun shortly after. Without chemical assistance, it’s turned deadly boring, in fact, but she isn’t ready to admit it yet, because she’s got nothing else.
Inside, a few of the usual faces are already there. A couple of them lounge on the couch, others sit splay-legged on the floor. It looks like a D.A.R.E. video, she thinks, and smothers a giggle that draws an odd look from Logan.
There is tinny music playing from someone’s phone, a slow-rolling conversation that Juliette can’t catch the thread of. Logan keeps his arm around her shoulder and kicks someone off the couch so they can sit there, the closest thing to royalty their little gathering has.
It’s both exactly what everyone says about the Saracen house and far less interesting. At first the mere presence of alcohol and drugs—mostly prescription pills lifted from parents’ medicine cabinets, plus Logan’s premium supply—felt shocking, electrifying. The novelty has worn off.