Wicked Games. Sean Olin

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       4

      Reeling from everything that had just happened, Carter needed some space to think.

      He snuck through Jeff’s parents’ coral, Mexican-themed bedroom and slipped out onto their private deck off the side of the house. It was smaller than the back patio, just big enough for a Jacuzzi and a small glass table with a shade umbrella over it. The deck was on the second floor, but there was a staircase leading down from it to the grassy path that opened out into Jeff’s family’s private plot of beach. It was peaceful out there. The sounds of the party were distant and muted.

      Sitting at the table, breathing in the warm sea air, Carter stared at the waves lapping against the sand, at the half moon in the sky and the constellations around it, and tried to imagine a future for himself with Lilah. He couldn’t do it. Not tonight. This made him sad. It made him angry, too, but he tried not to think about this side of his emotions.

      “Whatcha thinking about?” said a voice behind him.

      He turned to see who was there. It was a girl named Jules Turnbull. She was leaning against the railing of the deck, holding a lit cigarette between her long, elegant fingers. The red skirt she wore hugged her hips, exposing the smooth skin of her abdomen, and her long black hair hung loose down her back.

      “Oh, you know,” he said. “Lilah and … matters of life and death.”

      “Yeah,” said Jules. “That was pretty intense. It was admirable, though, how you tried to help her. I don’t know if I could have done that. It takes so much patience when someone’s screaming at you like that.”

      “I guess …,” he said. He stared at his faded, green, old-school sneaker, for a second and then looked up at her. “It doesn’t feel admirable right now. It feels pretty hopeless.”

      He didn’t know Jules that well. They ran in different circles. Her friends were artsy theater people and they kept mostly to themselves, spending their time in rehearsals. He’d seen her onstage when he and Lilah had gone to see the fall musical—they’d done Camelot and she’d played Guinevere—and he remembered thinking that she had a nice singing voice.

      “You’re an actress, right?” Carter said, to change the subject.

      “Yeah,” she said.

      “And your name is Jules. I saw the show last fall. You were great.”

      Jules blushed and scrunched up her nose. “Oh,” she said. Then, “I mean, thanks. Sorry. I’m still learning how to accept compliments.”

      In the awkward silence that followed, Carter couldn’t help but notice how pretty Jules was. She had large, unusually expressive almond-shaped eyes that were a deep shade of greenish blue, and there was something striking about the shape of her face, something both soft and angular all at once. In the flowing red Mexican skirt that she wore low on her hips so the top of her bikini bottoms peeked out, she had an elegance, it seemed to Carter—a grace. He could imagine her dancing slowly, by herself.

      “UPenn,” she said, pointing to his T-shirt, across which a big, bold, thunderstruck blue-and-red P was festooned.

      “Yeah. How did you know?”

      “My СКАЧАТЬ