Tradition Page 10

  At the mention of her name, I loosened. I should have known it was something the two of them were up to. “Where are you guys going?”

  “I tell you what.” He grinned. “Want to come with?”

  I went to my window. My room was the only one on my floor that had a window that did not face either the main street in front of the dorm or the main backyard. All you had to do was swing your leg over the sill and step down onto the grass. Magic.

  “Come on, hurry up,” Javi insisted. “Jules and Aileen are waiting for me. You’ll make four—it’s perfect.”

  Jules. Working together as we had been, we’d found that a door had opened between us. I’d stepped through it, briefly, and she the other way, and we’d gotten a glimpse into the private rooms within us. It felt safe.

  What the hell, I thought. I quickly changed, threw on my coat, and followed Javi outside. We pulled down the window, allowing enough room to pry it open from the outside. We stuck to the shadows as best we could, until we got to Old Main, and then we sprinted down the middle of the street like a pair of dogs let loose in a field. I would have howled, if Javi had.

  He led me downhill, away from school, and for a minute I thought we were just leaving the girls behind, until I realized Jules was ahead, leaning against a tree on the shoulder of the road. Aileen was right beside her. Once you were beyond the stretch of street that ran through campus, there weren’t many streetlights.

  “Okay,” Javi said. “I think this is going to work.”

  “Yeah,” Jules said, nodding to me. “And we have room for four?”

  “Whatever. He’s here now.”

  Jules pulled out a tube of lipstick and began applying. Her lips turned dark blue, but speckled with starry glitter. “You?” she said, dipping it toward me.

  “No thanks.”

  Aileen smiled. The same blue stars were spread across her face.

  “Wow,” Javi said. “I don’t know if that is amazing or even too weird for me.”

  Jules socked him on the shoulder and I just stood there, soaking up the way they always seemed so at ease with each other, as if they’d left their nerves back in the dorms and out here in the world they were just plain free.

  Not me. I couldn’t help it. “I thought you said you don’t get into trouble,” I said to Jules.

  She puckered her lips and blew me an air-kiss. “What trouble?”

  “We’re just getting out of here,” Javi said. “One night of absolute freedom.”

  “And your favorite band,” Aileen added. “This is on you if it goes south.” She glared for a second at Javi, but then relented.

  “You can still turn back,” he said.

  “No,” Jules said, pulling us all together. “We all need it. An escape. Forget Fullbrook for one night.”

  Something in me swelled. It’d been a long time since someone had pulled me into the huddle. The smallest dose of that goes a long way.

  “But I don’t know.” Jules nodded and tossed me a teasing grin. “Can we trust him?”

  “What? With sneaking out at night?” I asked. “I don’t care.”

  They all exchanged glances.

  Jules reached out and held both my shoulders. “Even if we leave campus?”

  “Tonight?”

  Javi must have heard the fear in my voice because he laughed. “Yup,” he said. “Wendell Phillips College. Their own mini-Ultra.” Javi danced ahead of us. “And we’re going to it.” He spun back around. “All of us.”

  My voice was trapped in my throat. All I could think of was Coach O staring at me across his desk if I got caught. What would happen? It just didn’t seem fair. None of them had as much to lose as I did.

  “Come on,” Aileen said, grabbing a handful of my coat. She bounced my ribs with her fist. “Live a little.”

  Jules smiled as she glanced back and forth between me and Aileen. “Hey, live a little,” she echoed.

  Aileen and Jules stepped the four of us back out into the street, and I suddenly realized neither of them was wearing pants. They always wore pants; they never wore those fancy cocktail dresses so many of the other girls wore to class every day. Instead, they were both in tights. Jules’s were dark. Her coat was unzipped and beneath it she had on a kind of supernova dress of DayGlo swirls and stars. Her hair was gathered in a bunch of floppy horns, sprouting from parti-colored scrunchies. Aileen wasn’t in her usual goth-black. Instead, she was in neon green tights and a shimmering silver trench coat.

  “Am I underdressed?”

  “Just be yourself,” she said. Despite the costume, she was the same old Aileen, with the same spray of freckles rising up her cheeks when she smiled.

  I followed them down the road to the farm stand, closed and shuttered for the season. It stood at Old Main’s junction with the narrow, single-lane Route 17, and one dull, squash-colored light hummed atop a pole in the parking lot. Everywhere else—the fields along the road, the woods behind the farm stand, the street in both directions—was shadows, dim outlines fingering out of a darker background, until a pair of headlights drifted toward us.

  The black sedan pulled into the parking lot and stopped beside us. The driver’s window sank. “Ms. Devereux?” he asked skeptically, when he caught sight of her glittering makeup.

  The three of them sat in the back, chatting away, and they stuck me, Long Legs, up front. The sedan slipped past the farms around Fullbrook and swung up onto the larger highway. I’d never been to a live show. I’d never been to a college party. I’d never been to a college campus, even. Sure, I was supposed to be in college, but it wasn’t about that. I felt like I barely knew how to talk. I couldn’t get a thought together in class, where I was supposed to think and speak—how could I ever say anything coherent at a college party?

  Before long, we turned off and took the exit to Wendell Phillips College. We passed another long stretch of farmland before finally coming to the gate, where Javi instructed the driver to drop us off.

  The party, the concert, the show, whatever it was, turned out to be in one of the giant barns off on the side of campus, a gray rickety mess, a giant house of splinters that would have been the perfect set for a horror film if the swirling blue, red, and green lights and the trippy electronica hadn’t been bumping out from inside. Javi paid for all four tickets, grabbed Jules by the hand, and ran inside.

  They spun in a circle and pushed forward into the crowd. I couldn’t move. My feet felt like they were back at Fullbrook, and my head seemed to have drifted into someone else’s dream. It was like a circus—just one of a whole other kind. Aileen took me by the hand and led me in.

  The stage was against the far side of the barn, and staggered across the enormous dance floor between it and the doors were four huge cages on raised platforms. Men, women, people not much older than me, writhed along with the goofy music. Everywhere people were dressed like Jules, Aileen, and Javi, swirls of their own colors, spinning, grinding, some shirtless, and above them all, disco balls hanging from the weathered crossbeams threw parti-colored diamonds of light across the crowd.

  I don’t know how long I’d been standing like that, gawking, mouth agape, when Jules suddenly tugged my arm and dragged me into the crowd after her. “Follow my rules,” she said to me. “Don’t drink anything unless it’s bottled water and the cap is sealed. Don’t eat anything. And whatever you do, don’t get sucked away into the crowd by some older woman. Don’t get lost on your own. We’re here for us!” She smiled with an open mouth, head cocked to the side, and danced as she dragged me toward Javi.

  He was eating a brownie. “What about him?” I yelled.

  A light show of green flashes rained down over us. “He has his own rules,” Jules said, and laughed.

  Javi grinned with a mouthful of brownie. “Zoom, zoom, zoom,” he said.

  The crowd packed tighter around us. The music dissolved into dreamy shattering of glass, like a thousand chimes blowing gently in the breeze. The lights all went out, and then, in the darkness, a
n electric keyboard and guitar started weaving a melody between them, and a man’s voice that mewled like a cat whined the first lines of song. The lights exploded to life in a hullabaloo around the barn and a thumping beat rattled in my bones. Javi and Jules screamed along with the rest of the crowd.

  Although I didn’t eat one of the brownies like Javi, the night slipped into a dream. Everyone danced around me, and Jules and Aileen poked me until I started to as well. As the crowd packed tighter, people slipped in between me and Jules and Aileen, and soon we were all dancing with other people. The guy in front of me was dressed in a silvery, skintight jumpsuit, and he dropped and bobbed down at my knees, then slowly inched upward until I felt his hot breath on my nose. He spun and found another guy who would gyrate in unison with him.

  Time zipped and slowed. Javi dancing like a grounded bird, wings flapping at the air around him. Aileen rolling in and out of sight and then back beside me.

  Jules popped out from a thicket of men and glanced toward me, lunging, smiling, spinning. She slid up between me and Aileen, wiggled once, and then spun back to another group, this time all women, and wove herself into their web of limbs, something like sunlight warming their skin, but from the inside.

  Aileen stepped closer. No one could squeeze between us. Like me, she moved more hesitantly, bound tighter. She looked mostly at the floor, to her feet, and when she looked up and raised her arms above her head, she closed her eyes, kept her world private and protected. She spun around behind me, did a butterfly stroke so our backs kissed and released, kissed and released.

  I looked up into the rafters above us, wishing I could see the dark roof beams above the mosaic light. I’d felt this way once before. Heather finishing a one-arm handspring in the grass alongside the track, no one else around, the afternoon sunlight glowing in the glass of the gymnasium behind her, smiling to herself, a smile that was for herself, until she turned and offered it to me. I held that smile inside me for months, where it warmed me like a hot coal—until she stopped returning my texts.

  Eventually, Jules and Javi found us again and motioned toward the back of the room. We staggered outside and stumbled up the slope of the hill toward the main path to the gates, the music still pounding in my ears. Javi slipped in the grass and laughed as he tumbled to the ground. Jules dove next to him, and even though it felt silly, I crashed down alongside them. Aileen did too. We all rolled onto our backs and looked up into the sky, Javi and I bookending Jules and Aileen. Jules waved her hands in the air above us. She stopped and froze them, palms up to the stars.

  “Does it ever feel like it could all just come crashing down on you at any time?” she asked. “Like if you don’t hold it up there above you, everything’s going to collapse around you.”

  “Yes,” Aileen said. She seemed to withdraw, as if she was scrunching her shoulders in toward her head.

  “Awww, man,” Javi said. “Let’s not go there.”

  “But it’s real,” Jules said. “I feel like that sometimes.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Yeah, right,” Javi said. “Mr. Manly Man.”

  “It does,” I said. “It has.”

  Everyone was quiet for a moment, as if they were waiting for me to say more, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t. I wished I hadn’t said what I’d said.

  Javi leapt to his feet. “Get on up here, girl,” he said, grabbing Jules’s hands and pulling her up. “On the count of three, I’m going to lift you even higher. Stuff those stars back up in that sky.”

  Conspiratorial joy lit up her face. “One, two, three.” She leapt into his arms.

  I turned to Aileen. “You want a boost?”

  She sat up. And then, like that, the world stopped moving, at least for me, because the whole world glittered in the corner of her eyes as she looked down at me and smiled. Light from I don’t know where played in her eyes, little jewels glinting to let me know they were there.

  “Hold me higher,” she said.

  I crouched like a linebacker at first and Aileen stepped into my hands, and I lifted her into the air. Her shin was pressed against my shoulder, and when I looked up, all I could see was the underside of her chin—her face was pitched to the moon.

  “Yes!” Aileen yelled. She glanced toward Jules, wobbled, but regained her balance. “Higher! Send me to the stars!” Aileen yelled down to me.

  “Make your legs stiff,” I said. She did, and I held her legs and pressed her up. I’d done it before and I knew what I was doing. Heather had taught me.

  Jules slid down Javi, and once she was on the ground again, she looked up at Aileen and howled. “Higher, higher!”

  “Woooo-hoooo,” Javi cheered.

  “I’m alive!” Aileen yelled. She teetered. “Am I going to crash?” She laughed nervously. “No, seriously.”

  She wobbled again and I tried to keep balance for both of us. “Fall right down into me,” I said. “I’ll catch you. I promise.”

  She squealed, and then she dropped, and I found myself swooping into motion. Muscle memory. I could have done it with my eyes closed, I realized, my arms cradling her like a hammock.

  “All right,” Jules said. “Let’s get out of here. Your turn, Javi.”

  He searched his pockets. “Oh shit,” he said.

  “No,” Jules said.

  “You don’t have yours, do you?” he asked her.

  “No! That was the plan. No purse, no nothing for me or Aileen. That was the point. I left mine at home after I called for the car.”

  “So did I,” Aileen said.

  “Where’s yours?” I asked Javi.

  “Gone,” he said. He breathed slowly through his nose. “But whatever. I’ll just get a new one.”

  It blew my mind how things like this just never bothered him. Phones, shoes, jewelry, all of it mattered, in that he always needed them, but none of it mattered because everything was replaceable for Javi. It must be nice to be so rich. I still made sure to switch back and forth between my two pairs of non-sneaker shoes every day so I wouldn’t wear down the soles too quickly.

  “Yeah, but not ‘whatever,’ ” Jules said. “How are we getting home?” She looked at me. “Let’s use yours.”

  “Can’t. I need to be on Wi-Fi.”

  “Why?”

  “I can only use it on Wi-Fi. Roaming, I can’t.”

  “Oh Jesus, Bax,” Javi said. “Just use your damn phone like a normal person.”

  But I wasn’t a normal person—not normal for Fullbrook. I had a phone, but a plan with unlimited data was too expensive for my family. “No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I never use it, not unless I’m in my room or something.”

  “What?” Javi said. “Who doesn’t have his phone with him all the time?”

  “Um, you, now,” I said.

  He shoved me playfully. “But for real?” He looked at Jules.

  “This is on you,” Jules said to him.

  “Fine.” Javi shook his head. Then he brightened. “Oh, I know who I’ll ask.”

  He ran back down the hill, and the three of us wandered over to one of the big trees and sat down beneath it, staring toward the barn, which still glowed with the party inside. Jules played with the strings on her coat, twirling them in her fingers and letting them unravel. “I’m glad you came, Bax.” She hesitated, then bumped my shoulder with hers. “For real. You’re all right. Didn’t think I was going to like you. But I do.”

  She remained leaning against one shoulder, and Aileen slumped into my other one. “Bax sandwich,” she said. She laughed at herself quickly. “That was stupid.”

  “No it wasn’t,” I said.

  They were both quiet as we watched the front door of the barn for Javi. Seconds passed like minutes. A wall of bricks kept getting kicked over in my gut, as Aileen’s and Jules’s shoulders rose and fell on either side of me, the two of them almost in unison, and I was warmed in the space of their breathing.

  I listened for a moment. One of them might have sniffled, or
whimpered, or I might have made that all up just straining to hear something in the little bubble of silence around us. My pulse whacked a furious beat in my wrists and ears, I could almost feel my body bouncing as I sat there with my back against the tree.

  Javi popped out of the barn and sauntered up the hill toward us, walking alongside one of the guys he’d danced with earlier. We all met down along the street.

  “And they say it’s too hard to meet a nice guy,” Javi said. He glanced coyly at the tall, skinny guy in a loose T-shirt. He had a tattoo of three birds swooping around his arm, like if he pointed to the sky, they’d take off and fly.

  “It was already on campus,” Birdman said.

  “Oh, no,” Javi said. “So soon?”

  The car crept down the street toward us and Birdman waved it down. He told the driver to take us to Fullbrook. Luckily it wasn’t the same driver. It was another car altogether. He looked like he could have been one of our fathers.

  “I can’t even take your number down,” Javi said to Birdman.

  “Nope,” he said. He smiled. “Why don’t you graduate first? Find me then.” It wasn’t mean. It was tender the way he said it.

  “I need to graduate like right now,” Javi said. He looked like he was going to go in for a kiss, but Birdman took a step back and waved. He smiled and pointed to the backseat.

  “Get in that car,” he teased. “And get home safe.”

  On the way back, we all yawned and nodded off a little. And when the driver dropped us off at the farm stand, he gave us his own version of a lecture. “I should really drop you off at your dorm. I should tell the school about this,” he said.

  “Please don’t,” I said drowsily. “These are my only friends.” I hadn’t meant to say that. It just tumbled out, my sleepy mind having shut down all my filters.

  We stumbled out of the car, exhausted. We waited for the driver to pull away, to make sure he didn’t trail us up the street. When he was gone, Javi hugged me.

  “You’re sweet, Bax.” He held me out at arm’s length. “Yes. Yes, you gentle giant.” He grinned. “Yes, we are friends.”

  Jules wrapped me up from behind, her arms squeezing at my ribs, her tiny hands on my chest—I could feel how cold they were through my shirt—and Aileen pressed in from the side. I stepped back so Jules could slide over between me and Javi, and I wrapped the three of them in a tight hug.