Page 5 of Ringer
Kristina had suggested she invite Pete, and he came dressed up, as she’d known he would, in a loud-print Hawaiian shirt he proudly announced he’d purchased from the gas station during a week of random travel promotions. Gemma couldn’t understand how he pulled it off, but he did. The shirt showed off his arms, which were long and tan and just muscle-y enough, and deepened his eyes to the rich brown of really good chocolate.
There were ribs smoking in a rented barbecue, honeyed ham with grilled pineapple, coconut shrimp circulated by waiters wearing grass skirts over their jeans. The grown-ups set up a game of bocce, but Gemma and April soon took over, making up their own rules so they wouldn’t have to learn the real ones, and Pete refereed and narrated through a fake microphone, using made-up terminology likethelooping cruiserandthe back-switch hibbleputzthat made Gemma laugh so hard she nearly peed.
Gemma had determined that at the party she would ask April whether she’d had any luck getting into Jake Witz’s computer. April was sure Diana could get past Jake’s security measures and had come up with a convenient excuse to get her mom on board: the computer, she claimed, hadbeen left at the public library, and they needed to get into the system to find a registration and return it.
Gemma had bugged April for days after turning it over, until April threatened to karate-kick her spleen if she didn’t stop. That was ten days ago. Gemma had figured she would slip it into conversation when April was relaxed, when they were having a good time, after she had proven she wasn’t obsessing, like April said she was.
But somehow, she couldn’t. For the first time in weeks she actuallyfeltnormal—she felt happy, and she wasn’t faking it. Neither Pete nor April was staring her down like she was in danger of morphing into a feral animal. Geoff and Kristina were actuallydancing—there, on the deck, in front of everyone—as the sun broke up into layers of color and the fireflies lifted out of the dark. Pete had his hands around her waist, humming into her neck to the cheesy eighties music her parents still adored. His breath was warm. The sky was big, the stars new and shimmering, and though the world was large, she was safe inside it.
Standing there, she even thought that maybe, just maybe, she could choose to forget after all. April was right—lots of people had fucked-up childhoods—and Pete was right, too, that what had happened at Haven was too big for them to make better. Lyra and Caelum had a place to live, and her father had promised he would figureout a way to get Caelum papers so he could be legal, so he could exist. It wasn’t like they’d been trying to reach her. They hadn’t called her, not even once, since they cleared off. Maybe they were doing just fine—maybe they, too, wanted to forget.
If they could, she could: forget where she’d been made, and how. Forget about Emma, her little lost shadow-self. Maybe there was nothing to being normal except the decision to do it. You had to simply step into the idea, like wriggling into a sweater.
She should have learned, by now, that nothing was ever so easy.
Pete had moved off to check out the party’s main attraction: a full-on spit-roasted pig to be wheeled out and served before the hired Hawaiian dancers shimmied and hip-jiggled their way through dinner. But he came back and found her, his hair smelling sweetly of smoke, his hand warm when he interlaced their fingers. He was wearing half a dozen leis around his neck, on his wrists, even looped around his head.
“Come with me,” he said.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
He turned briefly to bring his mouth to her ear. “Somewhere we can bealone,” he said, and his eyes were bright and alive with reflections. Her stomach dipped,not the way it usually did when they began to kiss and she felt herself seize up with panic, but like when riding a roller coaster: like good things were about to happen.
He pulled her up the stairs onto the deck and toward the sliding doors. Luckily, all her parents’ friends had the sleepy-blissful look of tipsiness and were too wrapped up in their own little dramas to do more than wave. In the kitchen, Bernice was hustling the caterers around. When she spotted Gemma, she winked.
The hall felt even cooler after the dampness and warmth of outside, and when Pete stopped her and pushed her up against the wall to kiss her, she could smell charcoal in his hair and on his fingers. For once she didn’t feel like a monster, didn’t feel ugly or badly formed, and she stepped into him. He put his hands on her waist, slid them up her stomach, fumbled at her bra....
Down the hall, a bathroom door opened, and Gemma heard the sharp rise of a woman’s voice—Melanie Eckert, one of her mom’s country club friends, sounding drunk. “Itoldher too much filler would split her like a pumpkin. Have you seen her now?”
Gemma launched herself across the hall and yanked open the door to the basement, practically shoving Pete down the stairs before Melanie could see them. For a second they stood together on the landing, breathless and giggly, until Melanie’s voice had faded.
“Is this where you murder me?” Pete whispered, bumping his lips against her neck in the dark.
She knew he was kidding, but a sudden vision of Jake Witz returned to her the way she’d last seen him, standing at the door, angling his body so she couldn’t get inside, trying to warn her. Trying to save her.Jake Witz is dead.She was glad she hadn’t seen the body but had read, anyway, that people sometimes choked on their tongues when they were hanging, or broke their nails off trying to loosen the noose.
She hit the lights, relieved by the bland normalcy of the carpeted stairs leading down to the basement.
“You wanted to be alone,” she said, taking his hand, eager to get back the good feeling she’d had only a minute ago.
The basement was a clutter of old furniture, dusty table tennis equipment, a pool table with stains all over its felt (Gemma’s father kept a second, nicer pool table in the library upstairs), and old toys. Metal shelves, like the kind you might find in a library, were packed with massive jugs of bottled water, Costco-sized packages of toilet paper, cartons of canned soup, enough ketchup to fill a bathtub.
“Nothing says romance like industrial-sized rolls of toilet paper,” Pete said, and she laughed. “Are you guys preparing for the apocalypse or something?”
“Prepared. Past tense. In case you haven’t noticed,my dad’s kind of a freak.” She drew him between the shelves, moving deeper and deeper into the basement. It was like a spiny city built out of boxes of shredded wheat and stacks of Dove soap. And despite the musty smell of the basement and the bright overhead lights and the cheap gray wall-to-wall carpeting her parents would never have allowed anywhere else, Gemma felt in that moment, with Pete’s hand in hers, that it was the most beautiful place she’d ever been.
They started kissing again: first they stood, and then, when Pete bumped her against one of the shelves and nearly toppled it, they lay down together. He got on top of her. Her whole body was breathless and hot, as if she were nothing but breath, nothing but the inhale-exhale of their rhythm together. He was struggling to get her shirt off and fumbling with her bra, and for once she wasn’t worried about anything or even wondering how far things would go. Her nipples touched the air and he pulled away to look at her, to look at the long Y-shaped scar on her sternum that had earned her the name Frankenstein at school.
“Beautiful,” was all he said, touching her scar gently, with a thumb. She was liquid with happiness. She believed him. Weeks ago, someone had thrown a Frankenstein mask through the window. She knew now that it had been a warning from Lyra’s father, Rick Harliss, butat the time she’d been convinced that it was from Chloe DeWitt and the pack wolves.
But maybe everyone was wearing a mask. Maybe no one was completely normal.
Maybe shewasbeautiful.
She wanted him. The want, the desire, was so huge she felt it incinerate her in a split second, burn her up to a single driving instinct: closer, more. She loosened his belt and undid his jeans without any trouble; it was as if she’d been practicing her whole life, as if she’d carried the knowledge of him in her fingers.
Suddenly, the basement door opened and footsteps came down the stairs.
“Glad you could come. Thought you might’ve gone back to town already...” Her father’s voice. Of all the stupid luck. She’d never onceseenher dad use the basement.
