Rhode Island
Senior Year
“Ryan Andrew Murphy, this room is a disaster.”
I stepped around a pair of jeans and a polo shirt that were crumpled on Ryan’s bedroom floor, like a second skin he’d shed and then left there. Ryan took better care of his car than some people took of their pets, but you’d never know it by looking at his room.
There were two paths of uncluttered blue carpet, one leading to his desk and one leading to his bed. The rest of the floor was strewn with schoolbooks, college pamphlets, clothes, baseball memorabilia, and empty bowls with spoons in them. Ryan had a habit of eating cereal after dinner every night, and the routine didn’t always include bringing the bowl back to the kitchen.
“I know,” Ryan said with a guilty smile. His dimple made it a little harder to be disgusted. “My mom’s been on me all week.” He flicked on the TV, then pulled his sheets and white and blue plaid comforter into some semblance of neatness. He sat on the bed, patting the spot next to him. “Come over here. We’ve got a few minutes before Crowley and Candle get here. We can watch TV.”
Watch TV, my ass.
Sure enough, the minute I’d settled in next to him, he rolled onto his side and kissed my earlobe. I kept my body stiff, trying not to wrinkle my white blouse. Matt and Candy and Ryan and I were going out to dinner, and I didn’t want to get to the restaurant looking like I’d been playing Seven Minutes in Heaven. We’d invited David and Violet too, much to Ryan’s chagrin, but David had gone back to Connecticut for the weekend to visit friends.
I tried not to think about which ones.
Ryan’s lips grazed over my cheek, my jawbone, then my ear again, and soon I was giggling as he nibbled away. It wasn’t long before his hand slid beneath my shirt, skimming over the bare skin of my stomach, and he leaned over me to kiss my lips.
Ryan had put his hands on my stomach plenty of times before, and he’d kissed me plenty more. So why my mind chose that particular kiss, that touch, to flash back to the last time someone who wasn’t Ryan had held me that way, I’d never know.
It came back in a rush: warm, exploring fingertips on my skin, the taste of mint on his lips, the tenderness in the way he held me. . . .
I had to turn away from Ryan to catch my breath. He tried to move right back in and continue the kiss, but I pushed against his chest and turned my face. “Ry,” I said. “Stop it. They’ll be here soon.”
Ryan moved to my neck, undeterred. “I can’t think of a better way to kill a few minutes, can you?”
“Yes.” I squirmed out from under him and straightened my shirt, sitting up on the edge of the bed. “We’re going to clean up this room.” To take the edge off my rejection, I added, “We can pick up where we left off later. Go wash your crusty cereal bowls and I’ll put some of this crap away.”
Ryan groaned, but he turned the TV off and did what I asked. I grabbed a pile of dirty clothes from the floor and took them to the hamper in the bathroom, then went back to his room and threw his closet doors open. He had at least three piles of clean, folded clothes in various locations that needed to be hung up, so that’s where I started.
As I tried to get a third shirt onto a hanger, Ryan’s cat brushed against my leg and scared the ever-living crap out of me. I dropped the shirt on the floor, but when I bent to pick it up, I got distracted by all the haphazard piles of shoes and tried to straighten them out. That’s when I spotted a plastic shopping bag in the corner. I was half afraid I’d find ancient dirty underwear inside, or worse, dirty magazines or some other horror to make me regret my snooping. But curiosity won out, and I grabbed for it.
What I saw inside made no sense at all.
Normally I wouldn’t have thought twice about finding a baseball jersey in Ryan’s closet. Except that the number on the back was thirty-three, and the white letters across the shoulder blades didn’t spell Murphy—they spelled Kerrigan. Why would Ryan have part of David’s baseball uniform hidden in his closet?
I lifted the jersey out of the bag and saw four or five pouches of something green at the bottom. For a second I thought it was weed, and I felt rage bubble up inside me. For all his talk about wanting a scholarship and needing to play baseball in college. But my anger melted into confusion when I looked closer and realized the leaves inside were broad and spoon-shaped, and resting on top of Mrs. Murphy’s gardening gloves. I opened a bag. This wasn’t weed. It was . . . poison ivy?
“Hey, look who’s—”
Ryan cut off when he saw me sitting there, jersey in one hand, bag of poison ivy in the other. I looked up to see Candy and Matt standing in the doorway with him.
“What is this?” I said.
Matt and Ryan exchanged a look. A look that told me I’d caught their asses in the act of something. And they’d better tell me what.
“It’s nothing, Kelse,” Matt said. “Ry’s mom was ripping up some poison ivy in the yard the other day, so we stashed some. We were just going to play a prank on him, rub it inside his jersey. You know, haze the new kid a little. Harmless stuff.”
I glared at both of them but mainly at Ryan. “You were going to put poison ivy in his jersey? What is this, fourth grade? Why would you do that?”
Ryan shifted uncomfortably and rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s no big deal. We just wanted to throw his game a little, make sure he couldn’t show off. The team was fine without him and he’s so fucking cocky.”
I shot a questioning look at Candy, and from the wide-eyed look she gave back, I knew she hadn’t been in on this. I got to my feet, my jaw clenched and my hands still gripping the jersey and the poison ivy.
“ ‘Cocky’? How can he be cocky when you haven’t even had a real game yet? You sound like a jealous three-year-old, Ryan! You can’t sabotage one of your teammates because you’re holding out for some eleventh-hour scholarship! You need to face the fact that you’re running out of options.”
Candy mouthed the words Oh, shit and grabbed Matt by the arm, motioning for him to follow her and leave Ryan and me alone. “It’s my fault, Kelse,” Matt said as Candy tried to drag him away. “My idea. All me. Honest.”
I held up the jersey. “Then why is this in his closet?” My death glare shifted to Ryan before Matt could answer. “I can’t believe you’d do something so juvenile. If you’re that worried about college, didn’t it ever occur to you to study?”
It was a low blow, but I felt only a mild twinge of guilt. Ryan wasn’t stupid by any means, but he had a devil-may-care attitude toward school and that was no one’s fault but his own. It had never bothered me before, but at that moment it bothered me a lot.
Ryan stormed over and grabbed the bag of poison ivy from my hand, snatching up the larger bag that contained the rest of them while he was at it. “Fine,” he said, slamming everything into the trash can. “Happy now? I’ll leave your precious friend alone.”
Oh. So we were back to that again.
“Ryan, this is an idiotic thing to do to anyone. I don’t remember Steve Koenig getting ‘hazed’ last year when he joined the team. Go ahead, try to tell me you’re not doing this because you’ve had a problem with David since the second you laid eyes on him.”
As the words left my lips, David’s voice echoed in my head: He’s not the great guy you think he is.
“Oh my God,” I said, interrupting whatever response Ryan was about to make. “Has this been going on all year?” I stepped closer to him, every part of me daring him to lie to me. “Is that what the fight in the hall was all about? You started something with him, didn’t you?”
Ryan’s face turned bright red and his fists clenched and unclenched at his sides. “Go ahead, take his side!” he exploded. “You would! You would think it was me!”
“I’ve asked you a hundred times to tell me what happened and you won’t! How do you think that looks right now, Ry?”
Matt came over then, spreading his arms between the two of us. “Guys, enough.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Kelse, you’re right. The poison ivy thing, it was a stupid idea. We’ll wash the jersey and I’ll give it back to David and pretend I took it by accident, and we can act like this whole thing never happened.”
“And do you know what happened in the hall that day?” I asked pointedly.
Matt looked at Ryan through the corner of his eye, so quickly I thought I might have imagined it.
“All I know is that David came at Ry. That’s all.”
I inhaled and looked back at Ryan. “If there’s something you need to tell me, please tell me now.” My tone was softer, more pleading.
“Give us a minute,” Ryan mumbled to Matt, who nodded and walked out, closing the door behind him.
“Babe.” Ryan reached for me, and while I let him pull me closer, I kept my limbs stiff as boards. “I’m sorry,” he murmured into my hair. “I didn’t start the fight in the hall, I swear. But—but I know what really happened with you and Kerrigan.”
My heart missed a beat. “ ‘What really happened’?” I repeated.
“I know how you kissed him once.”
I pulled away from him, eyes wide and heart racing. “What? Who—”
“I tricked your sister into telling me.” My mouth opened, but Ryan held up his hand before I could say anything. “Don’t be mad at her. Or me. I told her you’d already admitted it.”
I wanted to be angry, but I had no right. I’d lied to him, and he knew it. No wonder he’d been acting like such an ass.
“Ryan . . .”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The anger from a few moments ago had disappeared. When I looked into his eyes, I saw only hurt. It killed me.
“I didn’t want to upset you over nothing. You were so jealous when I hugged him; why would I tell you about a kiss that happened before I even knew you?”
“I don’t care that you kissed him, Kelse—”
“He kissed me.”
“And you, what? Slapped him across the face? Kicked him in the nads?”
My hands twisted together. “No, but—”
“Then I don’t care who started it if you didn’t stop it. But I do care that you’d try to cover it up. I care about that a lot.”
I sighed. “Ry, I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be shady. You understand not wanting to talk about something, right? You didn’t start the fight in the hall, and yet you don’t want to talk about it, which doesn’t make any sense to me.”
I knew it was a cop-out. We were both being less than honest, and I’d basically implied that he didn’t have to show all his cards if I didn’t have to show mine.
And Ryan took the bait.
“Putting poison ivy in someone’s jersey doesn’t make much sense either, but I still thought it was a good idea,” he said. I folded my arms and Ryan smiled. “Okay, not funny. I get it. I promise you, this is the first and last time I try to play dirty.”
“First and last?”
He kissed the top of my head. “Unless it’s with you.”
I let him kiss me then, but it felt wrong. The nagging feeling that I’d missed something, that I’d been deliberately left in the dark, wrapped itself around me like thick fog.
Like David’s shirt, still wrapped around my fingers.