AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Then the door bursts open, and in comes Julio with a giggly girl who I recognize as Stacey, a curly redhead with a husky voice and sharp green eyes. She was cast as a lead in a play my freshman year, then dropped theatre immediately after to do cheerleading. I always thought she was gay for some reason, until I heard rumors that she worked her way through the whole football team. She always struck me as someone with ambition, though I could never quite pinpoint what it was she wanted—other than what hid in the jocks of every football player at Spruce High, that is.
The latest of which seems to be Julio, whose arm she’s hooked on as they stumble into the living room. When Julio notices me, he narrows his eyes in suspicion, but the moment is short-lived as his attention is at once pulled to the kitchen by his other buddies. And as the evening slowly gives way to night, the small crowd of bored, horny heterosexuals gets louder and more obnoxious. Some of the guys start an impromptu wrestling match in the living room. One particularly animated brawl nearly knocks into the chair I’m in, so I relocate to the couch. But then Julio and Stacey plop down next to me and start (aggressively) making out, so I head over to the kitchen. After opening the fridge looking for (and failing to find) something to drink, I notice G-Man and another guy through the back window with a suspicious cloud of smoke around them. And after one quick walk through the house, I’ve lost sight of Hoyt, the only guy I really know in this place. Add that to the growing list of things I never thought I’d hear myself say.
I slip out of the house and take a seat on the front step, which overlooks Wicker Street. I wince against a cool night breeze that introduces itself to me, and at once, I’m thinking of a set of arms that could shield me from it. Is there anything lately that doesn’t just immediately remind me of you? I pull out my phone yet again, flip to that same selfie, and stare. Vann smiles back at me in his lopsided way frozen in a piece of time—now just a collection of compressed pixels and digital info chunks on my phone. This was the night I gave myself to him … the night we made love.
The night my heart changed forever.
The door behind me swings open, and a person who is not Hoyt stumbles out, then nearly trips over me, not having seen me. When he rights himself, he squints my way. “Hey.”
I pocket my phone and look up. “Hi, Julio.”
Julio wears a suspicious scowl on his face I’m not sure how to interpret. After a second, he nods at me. “So are you and Hoyt friends now or somethin’?”
I shrug. “Sure.”
He keeps staring at me, waiting for more of an explanation. When he doesn’t get one, he says, “Your boyfriend’s a hothead.”
“Isn’t everyone when they’re provoked?” I retort, lifting my chin challengingly at Julio—which is quite a feat for me to do to someone so tall while pretty much sitting on the ground.
Julio scoffs at that. “I didn’t provoke him.”
“Yeah, you did. And,” I go on, “you painted my whole costume in Mrs. Strong’s fruit punch. Needless to say, your contribution didn’t add to my character’s color scheme, and I couldn’t compete in the contest like I wanted to. That’s on you.”
“But that wasn’t my fault.”
“Okay, fine, whatever you say,” I mutter, annoyed, rising from the step and preparing to head back in. “You ‘accidentally bumped into the punch table’. Whatever you wanna call it, Julio …”
“I meant it wasn’t me who tipped the bowl over. It was Hoyt.”
I stop. “What?”
“It was Hoyt,” Julio repeats in a tone that suggests I ought to have known already. “All I said was ‘oops’ at Vann ‘cause I thought it was funny and he looked stupid. But it was Hoyt who tipped the punch bowl over. Not me.”
“Hoyt?” Would Julio lie to me? Why would he lie? He has nothing to gain. Hoyt, however … “He’s the one who tipped it over? Not you?”
The front door swings open again, and Hoyt himself appears. “There you are!” he cries out, throwing an arm over my back. “I’ve got a bet going on in the living room between me and Benji that you need to settle. Alright, so he thinks he can take ten—”
“Did you tip over the punch bowl at the Halloween party?” I ask, cutting him off.
Hoyt’s eyes gloss over. His lips go slack. “W-What …?”
Julio snorts and shakes his head. “This is between you two. I was just comin’ out here to grab something out of my console.” He heads off toward a car parked across the street, leaving us be.
