That Girl, Darcy Read online

  “I’m performing at the homecoming dance,” he said excitedly. “You have to come. I already talked to the guys about it and everyone else is down.”

  I was glad he couldn’t see my facial expression over the phone. Mark played the guitar and wrote his own songs, but he did both terribly. None of us had the heart to tell him flat out that he sucked, and he probably wouldn’t believe us anyway. He was convinced that he was the next Jeff Buckley.

  “I dunno,” I said reluctantly, “I may have to work.”

  “You don’t. I already checked.”

  Nice. “I’ll get back to you.” I had no intention of going to the homecoming dance; I’d gone last year and I didn’t see the point. But I wasn’t in the mood to tell Mark no, either. He was like an annoying younger brother, even though we were the same age.

  But he was a cool guy, once you got past the annoying part. We’d met at a comic book store downtown a few years ago, and we had almost identical tastes in superheroes, which, in my book, was a surefire friendship starter.

  “By the way,” I said, “Lucas is having a party tonight. Are you coming?”

  “Another one?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  There was a long pause. “Can I bring my guitar?”

  “I’d ask Lucas.” Hopefully Lucas would have the good sense to ban any and all musical performances from Mark.

  When I got off the phone I went to the bathroom across the hall and started the shower. While I waited for the water to cool down, I took off my clothes and inspected myself in the mirror. The fall hadn’t done any lasting damage; there was an oblong bruise just under my left knee, but no cuts or scrapes. I was somewhat disappointed. The scars I did have—some crisscrossing my forearm, a few on my shins—were stories, proof of the work I’d done to nail a trick.

  Fortunately, despite my lack of new scars, the rest of me told a better story. After spending the better part of two years looking like Slender Man—all stringy arms and legs ending with hands and feet that looked like they belonged on someone else’s body, which were topped with a pencil neck and a bulbous head—my body had finally decided to stop embarrassing me and fill out a little. I was still lanky, but I was lean now, not doughy. The veins in my arms and hands were more pronounced. My stomach was flat, and while you couldn’t exactly wash your dirty laundry on my abs, it beat having a paunch.

  I showered, wrapped myself in a towel and shaved—I didn’t have a heroic jawline, but things were at least symmetrical. I only nicked myself once. After I dried off I went back to my room, opened my dresser drawers and stood there like it was really a question as to what I was going to put on. The bulk of my wardrobe could be summed up with two items: jeans and graphic T-shirts, nearly all of which were branded with something science-fiction related. Quite simply put, I was a geek. I knew more about fictional galaxies than I did real ones. I could quote A New Hope in its entirety from memory. A model of the USS Enterprise sat on my desk, and a Klingon Bird-of-Prey dangled from my ceiling. Somewhere in my closet was a Podracer, and my walls were adorned with more Ralph McQuarrie art than George Lucas’s office. Mom liked to tell me that I’d never see a girl in my room with all this stuff in here. She was already wrong about that, just like she was wrong in assuming that my having a girl in my room meant we were doing anything.

  I settled on a navy shirt with two clashing lightsabers on the front, pulled on a pair of black jeans I found on the floor and slipped into a beaten pair of sneakers. Then, in case it was cooler out tonight, I put on a gray button-up.

  The sun was setting by the time the others showed up at my place a few hours later. Together we started for Lucas’s house at the other end of my neighborhood. By this time both Kyle and Liam had worked themselves into a craze. They were like sharks in a feeding frenzy, except there were no fish to be found and neither of these sharks would know what to do with a fish if they caught one.

  “So who gets first crack at the new girls?” Liam blurted as he practically skipped down the curb. I assumed he’d showered too because he didn’t stink anymore. Instead, he smelled like he’d emptied at least half a bottle of aftershave on himself. The scent was a mixture of burnt wood and motor oil. I had to keep a few feet between us to keep from gagging. “I think, in all fairness,” he went on, “it should be me, because I thought of it.”

  Liam had recently discovered James Dean, and was now styling himself a greaser. He wore a plain white T-shirt and jeans—501’s, the same pants Dean wore, as he was quick to point out.

  “I think it should be first come first serve,” countered Kyle. “That’s fair.”

  Kyle was much more sensible when it came to his fragrances. I didn’t smell him at all, but I couldn’t help noticing that his loud yellow-green shirt looked like it’d been woven at a nuclear power plant.

  Yes, we were a fashionable bunch.

  The brothers both paused, waiting for either Jake or myself to throw in our two cents. Jake, who was trailing slightly behind, said nothing.

  “Come on, guys,” I said. “We all know who’ll be noticed first.”

  That shut them up. But only for a moment.

  “It is hard to compete with Mr. Abercrombie tagging along,” Liam begrudgingly admitted, pointedly glancing back at Jake.

  “Sure is,” Kyle added. “Why don’t you hide that pretty little face of yours for tonight, Cheekbones? Give the rest of us a fighting chance.”

  Jake shoved his hands into his pockets and kicked at the rocks on the curb. “I’m no more likely to meet a girl tonight than either of you,” he muttered.

  Liam scoffed. “How’s that? Did tall, dark, and handsome fall out of fashion or something?”

  “Loud and annoying did,” I interjected.

  I looked over at Jake. I couldn’t quite argue with either Kyle or Liam as far as Jake was concerned. He did look like an Abercrombie model. The funny thing about being mixed is that you never know what the gene pool’s going to create. Jake’s parents were Native American and French, and he seemed to have won the genetic lottery and inherited the best of both combined worlds. He was just under six feet tall, with golden skin and dirty blonde hair that he had this quirky habit of flicking or running a hand through when he was nervous. He also had green eyes and a face that looked like it had been carefully sculpted from some rock, all sharp jaw and dimples. He rarely got a zit, and his teeth were nearly perfect and whiter than they had any right to be, which was hard to tell seeing as his mouth was closed most of the time. He looked at everyone and everything with the same perpetual look of innocence on his face, like the world was completely new to him. He wore his khaki skinny jeans, white V-neck T-shirt and black canvas sneakers with a casual, I-look-great-but-I’m-not-trying-to air about him.

  Being his cousin, I’d never noticed anything different about Jake until freshman year, when he’d been voted Mr. Photogenic in the yearbook superlatives. Then I began to realize that what I saw when I looked at my cousin was vastly different from what other people saw. Jake became “the gorgeous one,” or “the dreamy one,” and all of a sudden I’d gained a flock of “friends” eager to grill me about my cousin. That type of attention would ordinarily get to someone’s head pretty quickly. But not Jake. Jake was good. He couldn’t stand the attention, and gradually the fanfare faded, until his looks were just another fact of life and nothing to get excited about.

  Even though I was mixed as well, I was nowhere near as impressive a specimen. I was, for all intents and purposes, average. Average height, eyes that people sometimes said were nice, a nose that wasn’t anything special, and hair that I didn’t bother paying attention to even when it wasn’t crammed underneath a beanie. I was plain. And I had no problem with that. Let someone else be special, that’s the way I saw things. I was just fine being left alone to my own devices.

  I could hear the party well before I could see it. The second we stepped onto Lucas’s block, Liam and Kyle took off, doing an odd hurrying-but
-trying-not-to-look-like-it sort of walk, abandoning Jake and me in a rush. There was a small group of five or six people standing around on Lucas’s front lawn. He, as I expected, was at its center. The rest of the festivities were taking place out back, and from the sound of it, it was quite the carnival.

  “Nervous?” I asked Jake as we slowly made our way across the street toward the house. Once, when we were six, he’d gotten lost in a crowd at IKEA. It had taken us fifteen minutes to find him, and ever since then Jake tended to avoid crowds, even though he claims the incident had no lasting effects.

  He shook a lock of hair from his brow and plunged his hands even deeper into his pockets. “Of course not.”

  That meant yes. I didn’t pry. For Jake, parties meant attention, which he didn’t seem to know how to handle. He was a wallflower, and we were walking right into a beehive. I was all too familiar with his way of dealing with things. So I knew not to question when he slowed to a stop a few feet from Lucas’s lawn, staring at the ground in front of him. He had to prepare himself before joining in, and I made a mental note to keep a close eye on him and be ready to leave the moment he needed to.

  I went over to Lucas’s circle and when he spotted me he raised his hands and yelled. “Now it’s a party!”

  He reached out and pulled me right into the center of the gathering. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  Standing next to Lucas was one of the girls from earlier, the blonde one with the ponytail. She was rocking on the balls of her feet, nursing a drink in a styrofoam cup. Up close I could see why Lucas had been impressed. She was radiant, with a charming, giddy face and excitable blue eyes. She wore a white shirt with a sequined smiley face across her chest, and multicolor sneakers that looked like she’d dropped a birthday cake on them.

  “This is Bridget,” Lucas announced. “Bridget, this is Elliott, my brother from another.”

  Bridget waved and flashed me the widest smile I had ever seen.

  Something happened then that I never would have guessed in a million years. It was several things, really, but they happened all at once in what I before would have deemed an impossible sequence of events. Firstly, Jake squeezed his way into the group and came to stand beside me.

  “Hey, Lucas,” he said, his voice barely audible.

  Secondly, Bridget turned to greet him. Her eyes, already wide to begin with, grew until it looked like they might pop out of her face. Her face flushed and her lips parted, but no words came out.

  “Oh, Bridget, this is Jake,” said Lucas.

  I glanced at Jake. His face was a mirror image of Bridget’s. They were staring at one another like they’d seen each other before but couldn’t quite remember where.

  Thirdly, Jake reached his hand out and said in a voice that was clear and steady, “Hello, Bridget, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Jake.”

  I was dumbfounded. Jake never, ever introduced himself. To anyone. Not even family. During our last reunion more than a few of our uncles and aunts had spent the first few hours thinking he was mute. But now here he was, making small talk with a perfect stranger. It was the metaphoric equivalent to pigs flying.

  Bridget, for her part, seemed to have lost her ability to form coherent speech. “Hey—er, hi, Bridget. Jake. I mean, I’m Bridget,” she stammered. She took his hand but neither of them did any shaking.

  I tugged at my wristband in confusion. “I’ll . . . go find the others, I guess.”

  “Yeah, and I should check on . . . something, or whatever,” said Lucas, slowly backing away from the two while he gestured for the others to disperse.

  Our words fell on deaf ears, because Jake and Bridget had left for their own little world. They were still holding hands, awkwardly looking at each other.

  “What’s up with them?” Lucas asked when we were out of earshot.

  I could only shrug. “Beats me.”

  Lucas watched the pair for a moment more, and then threw his hands up. “Oh well. C’mon, the party’s this way.”

  He waved me through the gate that led to the back of the house.

  There were at least a hundred people in Lucas’s rectangular backyard. There were four portable speakers at each corner, blaring electronic dance music. Next to the old shed there was a table full of pizza rolls and nachos, along with two full coolers. If it had been anyone but Lucas, I would have wondered how it was possible to arrange all this in the space of a few hours and when exactly his parents would be here to shut it all down. But because it was Lucas, I knew that his parents were probably out here somewhere, and more than likely they had been the ones to fund everything in the first place.

  Someone yelled Lucas’s name, and he slapped me on the back. “Gotta run, bro. Dive in!” He vanished, and I tried to figure out what to do with myself, diving in not among my options. I only recognized half the people here. I greeted a few of them, and spotted both Liam and Kyle on the other end of the yard ogling a group of girls dancing a few feet away. I rolled my eyes and looked the other way.

  Standing across the yard, leaning against the brick wall, was the girl who had been with Bridget earlier. She was very pale, with large, deep blue eyes. Her mouth was a thin, straight line that just started to curl downwards at the edges. She was propped against the wall with her arms crossed, unmoving and unblinking. I started apprehensively toward her. She looked about as uncomfortable as I was beginning to feel. She’d been abandoned by Bridget, probably the only person she knew here. She was intimidatingly beautiful, which could explain why she was alone here. I figured the least I could do was try and keep her company while her friend was otherwise occupied. But either she didn’t see me coming or chose not to acknowledge my approach, because she stood stone still, not looking at anyone or anything in particular.

  As I leaned against the wall beside her, keeping a good enough space between us, I noticed what she was wearing: a conspicuously long-sleeved gray shirt with a picture of Jimi Hendrix across the front, dark jeans tucked into slick black boots, and a thin, silver necklace. I didn’t know what to make of her. Some people could wear anything and make it look cool just by virtue of the way they wore it, and she was most definitely one of those people. She looked like she was ready to knock someone’s teeth in at a moment’s notice, and like she could care less about the traditional conventions of fashion. However, the purse she had slung over her shoulder was, if I wasn’t mistaken, Louis Vuitton, which I recognized only because of how often my mother lamented her inability to afford one. Meaning she had to care, at least a little bit.

  It wasn’t often that I had trouble talking to girls. They were people, after all, not mythical beings that spoke some secret language. But right now I was at a loss for words.

  “Hey,” I said finally. “I’m Elliott.”

  “Can I help you?” She asked without moving.

  The boredom in her tone matched her posture.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked in case I’d heard her wrong.

  She slowly inclined her head toward me and gave me a quick inspection. Her face remained indifferent and utterly unimpressed. “You came all the way over here to speak to me. You must want something.”

  Surprise, then indignation grew in my chest. “I actually just wanted to introduce myself.”

  Her face remained unchanged. “Oh.”

  Silence. Her eyes never wavered from mine. It was frustrating and unnerving at the same time. If this was a game I was not keen on playing much further.

  “So . . .” I said after a few awkward seconds of our staring match.

  “So what?” she asked, her monotone voice quickly becoming the most irritating sound in the world.

  “What’s your name?”

  She raised her eyebrows, the first real reaction I’d seen from her. “Darcy.”

  Was that disdain in her voice? Yes, that was exactly what it was. I swallowed my anger. Her demeanor made her opinion of me impossibly clear. And mine of her was quickly forming. I prepa
red a particularly sharp parting word, but before I could deliver it, Liam and Kyle shoved themselves into our presence.

  “Dude, where the heck have you been?” Liam asked, oblivious to both Darcy and my own irritated expression.

  “Yeah,” added Kyle. “We’ve been on the hunt since—”

  He fell silent mid-sentence because Liam, who had just noticed the girl, had jabbed him in the side. He took one look at her and fell into his usual befuddled self.

  “Oh . . .”

  Liam licked his lips and rubbed his hands together. “Well, hello,” he said in a falsely smooth voice.

  Never before had I seen a person’s nose turn so far up as Darcy’s did then, and I couldn’t blame her. I subtly shoved Liam away from her and edged him back, giving him the eye as I did. No one spoke until she was far out of earshot.

  “Not tonight, Liam,” I grumbled. “Please?”

  “What?” Liam protested. “That’s what we’re here for, right?”

  “Did you call dibs already or something?” Kyle asked.

  I winced at the volume of their voices. Everyone in a twenty-foot radius could probably hear them.

  “No,” I whispered. “I did not call dibs. I don’t think anyone will be calling dibs on her. Which, again, you can’t actually do on a person.”

  “Wait, so you talked to her?” Liam asked. “It didn’t look like it. What’d she say?”

  “What’s she like?” asked Kyle.

  I paused to find the right word.

  Rude. Stuck up. Condescending. Scarily pretty.

  “She’s a jerk.” I had no desire to go into the specifics because it would only make me angry all over again.

  Liam laughed. “Well, Jake seems to be pretty impressed with her friend.”

  I followed the direction of Liam’s eyes. Sure enough, Jake was still with Bridget. They were dancing, hanging onto each other like their lives depended on it. My eyes all but exploded. I could recall only one time that I had seen Jake dance, and it had been on a dare followed by a serious bribe.