I look pallid on the screen and my eyes are red and watery. “It’s been a few weeks since I saw Quinton at the ice cream parlor and I’ve been spending a lot of time feeling adrift. A couple of nights ago, I woke up from this dream, where Landon was still alive and we were married and happy. In the grogginess of exhaustion, I ended up getting out of bed and wandering across the street in the middle of the night to the hill where I last saw Landon alive. For a moment, I swear I could envision us both lying there in the grass together, but then Landon slowly faded and eventually so did I.
“I’m not even sure what compelled me to go there, but I couldn’t seem to find a reason to leave until morning when the new owners of the house came out and yelled at me for trespassing. I think they thought I was high or drunk or something, and that’s kind of how I felt—so detached. I’ve been overanalyzing why I did it… why I just walked over there in the middle of the night, like I was sleepwalking or something, and honestly I have no idea…”
I fight to keep my voice even as I tuck my hair behind my ears. “Anyway, I woke up this morning and forced myself to feel different—less weighted. I randomly decided I needed a change from the lack of purpose and that I needed to do something magical.” I pull a disgusted face at my cheerful choice of word. “Well, maybe magical isn’t the right word—more like out of the ordinary, at least for me, which is a really big deal because I don’t do out-of-the-ordinary very well.” I tip the camera to the side as I pull my knees up and wrap one arm around them. “So I did something completely and utterly difficult for me—I did the first thing that popped into my head and came over here to ask Quinton to go to the concert with us, even though the idea of going to one makes me want to vomit. I think it might be my inner conscience telling me that I need to get to know him. Delilah says he’s been through a lot, but Dylan and Tristan wouldn’t give her the details. They’ll only say that he’s had a lot of death in his life lately and that he’s messed up in the head.”
I pause, picturing the heavy sorrow in his honey-brown eyes, and then I picture Landon’s. They match, at least in my head they do. “I want to help him, though.” I bite at my lip. “I blame it on the dream I had about Quinton last night, which is a complete change from the ones I’ve been having about Landon. Quinton was drowning in the ocean, which is weird because I’ve never been to the ocean, but anyway, he was drowning and I was watching him drown and he was begging me to help him, but all I would do is was stand on the shore and watch him drown.” Guilt clouds my eyes and they look strange on the dim, low-resolution screen. “God, that makes me seem really twisted, doesn’t—”
I hear knocking on the door. “Nova, are you in there?” I flinch as Delilah’s voice carries through from the other side.
“And are you talking to yourself?” she asks. “Or are you making a movie in the bathroom, because that would be weird.”
I quickly shut the camera off, stand up, and hang the towel back on the rack before opening the door. “I was actually going to the bathroom.” I point over my shoulder at the toilet. “That is what those things are known for.”
She sticks out her tongue, then stands on her tiptoes to peek over my shoulder. “Are you sure you weren’t doing anything weird in here? I’m picking up a vibe.”
I shake my head and gesture her out of the door as I shuffle forward. “You’re crossing the lines of our friendship boundaries, Delilah. Seriously.”
“I guess so,” she says, sounding suspicious, but she shrugs and ambles up the hall, tracking her finger along the wall. “So what’d you say to him?”
“Who?” I count the cracks in the paneling on the walls as I follow her.
She tips her head to the side and peers over her shoulder at me. “Quinton. Dylan says he’s been in his room for like three days and he just came out. Plus he suddenly decided he was going to go to the concert.”
“I just asked him,” I say with a casual shrug, but my heart squeezes in my chest a little. He’s been in his room for three days. “And he said okay.”
She eyes me skeptically as she stops at the end of the hall and bends her knee, bringing her foot up to refasten the strap on her sandal. “Just be careful.” She returns her foot to the floor, tugs down the bottom of her leather skirt, and then leans in toward me. “Guys like Dylan and Quinton are not easy to date, if that’s even what they’ll call it.”
“You should take your own advice,” I tell her in a low voice, flicking a piece of ash out of her hair and it lands on her arm.
“I’m a lot different than you, Nova,” she says, dusting the ash off her skin. “Besides, my mom raised me to be a skank, so that’s what I am.”
“Delilah…,” I start, but she scowls at me, so I wrap my arm around her shoulders and pull her in for a hug as we round the corner.
Quinton and Tristan aren’t in the living room, but Dylan is sitting in the torn up recliner near the television. Music flows from the speakers—“Blue” by A Perfect Circle—and two lit joints are balanced on an ashtray on the coffee table. There are blankets hanging over the windows, blocking out the sunlight and reducing the circulation, and it makes the air misty and fortified with smoke.
“Shit, what’d I miss?” Dylan asks. He takes in the closeness of Delilah and me, and his eyes shadow over. He has his boots kicked up on the table and a newspaper piled with green flakes on his lap. “And why was I not back there watching it?”
Delilah picks up a cup on a nearby table and chucks it at Dylan’s head. “Don’t be such a pervert. If you want a show, watch some porn.”
He doesn’t move quickly enough. The cup hits him in the forehead, and some of the liquid in it spills on the weed. “Fucking watch it, Delilah, or I’ll kick your goddamn ass out.” There’s a sharpness in his voice; he’s no longer playing around as he shifts his weight forward and carefully lifts the newspaper away from his lap.
Delilah narrows her eyes as she marches up to the coffee table in front of Dylan with her hands on her hips. “Don’t you talk to me like that. I’m not one of your little sluts. You can’t just do and say whatever you want to me.”
His eyes darken as he sets the newspaper down on the table and rises to his feet. A bright red welt is forming on his forehead from where the cup hit him. “That’s not what you said last night,” he says darkly as he slowly stalks around the table toward her. A vein in his neck bulges. “In fact, if I’m remembering right, you were pretty much begging me to do whatever I wanted with you.”
“I was…” She peeks back at me and her expression tenses before she looks back at Dylan. “I was high, okay? I would have said anything.”
I press my back against the wall, fiddling with a strap on my dress. I wonder if she lied to me when she said she hadn’t smoked weed since college—and if she did, why? Why is everyone always trying to shelter me from it? I’m not about to ask her in front of Dylan, though, who’s pretty much scaring the hell out of me at the moment.
Dylan’s eyes stay fastened on Delilah as he gets in her face with his hands balled at his sides. “Is that the real reason you’re with me? For my fucking pot?”
She shakes her head and lets out an uneasy breath as she cautiously places her hand on his chest. “You know that’s not true.”
“Then prove it,” he says and then his hands dart forward, fingers curled, mouth set in a line.
I think he’s going to hit her, but instead he roughly snags her by the waist and picks her up from the ground. She goes a little rigid as he grabs her butt and forces her legs around him. Then he strides by, nearly running into me, and heads for the hallway, carrying her with him.
I give her a what-the-hell look as her eyes lock on me from over his shoulder. “Delilah…”
She shakes her head and mouths, I’m fine. Just wait out here.
I don’t want to wait out here. I want her to do what she wants to do, and from the look on her face, she doesn’t want to go back with Dylan, but she leans away and kisses him deeply as they duck through the curtain and disappear down the hall.
She makes me so nervous sometimes. Dylan’s always been a jerk, but that was a little intense even for him. I wonder if he was really contemplating hitting her and then backed out at the last second. If he’d tried, would I have really tried to stop it? I’m not sure, because from past experiences, I’ve never been one to intervene in people’s personal business. Maybe it’s time, though. Time to start living life differently. But which direction is the right one to follow? And what are my choices even? Go to school, pick a major, and hope it’ll make me happy?
I drop down on the couch and stare at the pile of weed and the joints burning in the ashtray, wondering if I should put them out because there’s a lot of potent smoke flooding the room. But my hands remain on my lap as I ponder what the world looks like after someone smokes it. What did it make the world look like to Landon? Why does Delilah do it? Or Quinton? Or even Dylan and Tristan? What is so enticing about the stuff? Or is enticing the right word? Addictive?
My thoughts drift to the first time I ever found out Landon smoked weed. We were sixteen, and I was so naïve, I thought his bong was some crazy art piece—he was always creating weird sculptures all the time.
“Don’t touch that,” he’d warned when I’d gone to pick it up off his dresser.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, backing away, letting my hands fall to my sides. “Is it breakable or something?”
He let out this low laugh, the one he used on me whenever he was amused by my aloofness. “Yeah, but that’s not why you can’t touch it.”
My gaze swept around his room and I noticed that there was smokiness to the air. “Wait a minute… is that…” My eyes widened as my gaze landed back on the dresser. “Is that a bong?”
He used the laugh on me again and it made me flustered. He shook his head, and then wound around the foot of his unmade bed, coming to a stop in front of me. I tipped my chin up to meet his sad eyes, and he cupped my cheeks in his hands.
“I love that you have no idea what it is, Nova,” he said, grazing the pad of his thumb down my cheek, almost looking like he was going to cry. “You’re too good to know what it is.”
“I know what it is,” I protested. “But why are you doing that stuff and how did I not know about it? I thought we knew everything about each other.”
He smiled sadly as he traced a path with his finger across my bottom lip. “Trust me, Nova. You’re better off not knowing half of the shit that goes on inside my head. You’re too beautiful and good for that.” He nodded his head at the bong on his dresser. “For any of this.”
But I’m not. Just talk to me was what I thought. But what I said was nothing. Nothing.