I disentangle myself from Mom with a little difficulty, making an excuse about homework so I can go upstairs and check my texts. There’s a string of apologies from Lilly, more mundane kindness from Heath, and a few pile-of-poop emojis from Brooke.
And one from Isaac.
Want to see something?
I definitely do. Preferably not my parents’ faces. I text him in the affirmative.
Cool. Come out to the glif.
It takes me a second to figure out what he’s saying, since spelling is part of our communication barrier. The petroglyph is one of our little town’s dubious claims to fame, a wall of granite out by one of the streams that an ancient tribe of forever ago carved pictures on. There’s definitely a fish, a couple of concentric circles, and if you look hard you can make out little stick men. The historical society ran a fund-raiser when I was a kid to get a shelter of sorts built over it, and occasionally some stuffy types wander out there to do charcoal rubbings. But in general the glyph is relegated to school field trips, the painstaking effort of someone from thousands of years ago explained to little kids who try to spit in the dead center of the circles.
I head out to the glyph, leaving Mom and Dad behind me, Shanna tucked safely inside, ready to see Isaac. I can feel her quivering, her anticipation sending electric shocks into my fingers and toes. The parking lot is empty in the dying fall light, except for Isaac’s bike, which I park next to. Apparently we’ve got the glyph and the surrounding woods to ourselves, which can only bode well. I smile as I take the path down to the stream, ready for whatever he has in mind.
Which, it turns out, is a picnic.
“Hey, what’s . . .” I fade out, taking in the improbable image of Isaac Harver setting out food on a blanket. “Food” might be stretching it, since it looks like we’ll be dining on gas station subs and Pringles, plus a couple of cans of the cheapest beer in the world. But it’s nice. A weird kind of nice that makes my heart—her heart—stutter as we come closer.
“This is different,” I say, coming up behind him.
“Thought I’d try it.” He smiles at me and pops his can of beer. I sit down next to him, and he opens the other one before handing it to me. All the medical and social reasons not to drink beer leave my mind the second I drink it, leaving me with the most obvious drawback. It tastes awful.
“Cheap stuff, sorry,” Isaac says when he sees my face. “I had to choose between cheap beer and cheap wine, so I thought we’d go with the one that’ll make you piss before the one that makes you puke.”
“That’s lovely,” I tell him. It was supposed to be sarcastic, but it doesn’t come out that way, because the image of him standing in the gas station and trying to decide which crappy drink will cause me the least damage is oddly endearing.
“Do you have a fake ID or something?” I ask him, tearing the plastic wrap off my ham and cheese sub.
“Nope, my cousin was working.”
“Hmmm,” I say around a mouthful of food.
“So I don’t know, I thought . . .” He takes his own swig of beer, then another before finishing his sentence. “I know you had a bad day with the band thing, or whatever. And I thought, maybe this would help.”
It does help; I don’t even want to admit how much. Brooke encouraged me to fight for my spot back, Lilly laid low, and Heath . . . I can’t really remember what he did, other than say things that sounded like there was a teleprompter over my left shoulder. Isaac did something real, broke whatever this twisted routine between us is and took me on something resembling a date.
And I like it.
“I did have a bad day,” I tell him, popping open the Pringles can. “The weekend was, amazingly, even worse.”
He takes half the sleeve of chips from me. “Why’s that?”
“I told my mom about Shanna. I think she kind of . . . saw us.”
Isaac stops midchew. “You shitting me? What’d she say?”
“About you? Not much.” I shrug. “After I told her about Shanna, that kind of took precedence.”
“How’d that go?”
“Like a bull in a china shop,” I tell him, tossing back another swallow of beer.
“Whatever it don’t break, it shits on,” he says, somehow sounding wise.
I laugh. “That pretty much sums up my dad’s reaction.”
I tell him about throwing my dinner, how my parents were fighting when I left. “And my dad’s having an affair,” I add, which wasn’t supposed to come out. The beer might be cheap, but I’ve never been a drinker.
“Sucks,” Isaac says.
“Yeah,” I agree, finishing the last warm drops in the can. “He sucks.”
“My dad would never do that.”
“Why? Because your mom would kill him?”
“Uh, no, because he’s a good guy,” Isaac says, tossing his beer can into the plastic sack. “That so hard to believe?”
“No,” I say carefully, watching him as the shadows of the trees around us lengthen. I have never met his parents and don’t intend to because I can’t imagine a future for us. One where we have to get into an argument when we move in together because my antique bed won’t fit through the door of his trailer.
“My parents like each other,” Isaac goes on. “So much that I’ve gotta be careful not coming home unexpected, you know?”
“Nice, that’s . . . great,” I say, trying to summon enthusiasm for his sexually active parents. If I can get them out of the picture though, I mean, we do have a blanket. “So, your text said you had something you wanted to show me?”
I say it just right, so that he knows what I mean. He smiles and picks up the rest of the trash first. “Littering is bad, remember?”
I smile and lay my head back to see the first of the stars coming out, pinpricks of light. My head swims a little, and I know it’s going to be very easy to let Shanna have her way this evening. When Isaac comes to me I’m surprised when he pulls me up instead of joining me on the blanket. He leads me down the glyph, where the shadows have already fallen.
“All right, so. Before I show you this . . .” Isaac takes a deep breath. “What you said before about your dad having an affair, how do you feel about it?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Bad, I guess.” And I think I did at first, before I realized I could use it to my advantage.
“Bad,” Isaac latches on to that. “So, I’m kind of feeling the same way.”
“Why?”
“Really? Sasha, I walk past you in the hall every day with him, and it’s like, yeah, I’m banging the valedictorian and her dick boyfriend doesn’t know it. And I should feel good, like he’s the system and I’m fucking his girl, so, whatever. But really I just feel like shit. Like you’ll hold his hand and let people see it, but me, I’m the guy you screw in the dark and don’t tell anyone about.”
I shake my head. “It’s not like that. What am I supposed to do, Isaac? Tell everyone about how Shanna needs you? They won’t understand.”
“I don’t understand,” he yells, his voice bouncing back at us from the glyph wall.
I don’t like being yelled at. Sasha Stone does not stand in mud and get yelled at by Isaac Harver. “You said that if I told you that was the deal, then that was the deal. That I’m smart, and if I say Shanna is real, then she is.”
“What about this?” Isaac asks, his voice softer now, his body coming closer to mine, his hands capturing my fingers so that I don’t know where my sister ends and I begin. “You’re saying this isn’t real? Because this is you here, right now, with me.”
“I don’t know,” I say, those words always bubbling to the surface when he’s around, my voice losing conviction in his presence.
“Know what I think?” Isaac goes on, his hands now crushing mine. “I think you want me to be stupid, do whatever you say and believe whatever you want. Me for the night, him during the day.”
“Isaac . . .”
“What about what I want?” he says, letting me go and fumbling in his pocket for a lighter. “Maybe I’m the kind of guy that doesn’t like cheating. Maybe I’m a better person than you thought. Maybe I’d like to hold your hand in the hallway and have people see us together. Maybe I want to try being good.”
“That’s just . . .” I don’t get to finish my sentence, because he flicks his lighter and I see what he wanted to show me.
ISAAC & SASHA is scored into the rock, right under the fish glyph. I wipe my hand over it, once, twice, frantically. But it’s no use. He used a knife, scratching deep into the rock and leaving something permanent and profane alongside the ancient and sacred.
“What did you do?” I seethe, cupping handfuls of water and tossing them over the letters. It only makes the rock around them darker, throwing our names into bright relief.
“I put it out there,” he says calmly.
My fingers trace our names, running over the fin of the fish left behind by another hand from another time. “This is bad, Isaac.”
“I guess that’s just what I am,” he says, and turns to leave.
I spend a few more moments trying to undo what he’s done, but it’s no use. As the moon comes out and I hear him start his bike and drive off, I’m left staring at the new carving. A boy and a girl, etched in stone, together forever.
It would be so sweet if he had gotten her name right.