I turned around, barely.
“Nice shirt.” She smiled.
She knew that our same shirts were not a good thing for me, so there was no reason to smile about it. I did not smile back.
“Laurel, how are you doing?” She said it the way she does, like a question that might as well be a loaded gun.
“Fine,” I said. Though I wanted to tell her I wasn’t doing well at all, if she must know. I also wanted to ask her what the hell she was doing ruining my life shopping at Wet Seal.
Instead, I mumbled, “I’m late,” and ran out the door.
I knew I’d have to see her again in chorus, because she co-teaches it with Mr. Janoff. And Sky’s in chorus. When I got the shirt, secretly I had hoped that Sky would notice me in it and see who I could be. Maybe he’d feel a pang of regret over losing me. Now that clearly would not work. So I ditched. My grade in chorus is going to pretty much suck, between my mumble-singing and skipping class a couple of times. But at that moment, I didn’t care. Tristan always ditches eighth period to get stoned, so I told him I wanted to come.
“Oh, the shirt thing?” he asked. Clearly everyone knew by then.
I just gave him a look. With Tristan, I never have to say anything if I don’t want to. He always gets it.
“Well, in a who-wore-it-better poll, you’d smoke her. You look really pretty.”
That was kind, and it made me laugh a little as I followed him out through the alley and down to the edge of the arroyo. It was still filled with shiny dry leaves leftover from winter that glinted below the budding trees.
I’d actually never smoked pot, so I think Tristan thought I was just going along to sit with him. But when he pulled out his pipe, I said, “I want some.”
He raised his eyebrows at me, but he passed it over.
Before I started to try to figure out how it worked, I said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Hit me.”
“Do you think it’s true, what you said about being saved? Do you think Sky found someone better at saving him? Like Francesca? Maybe I just couldn’t do it. And maybe she can. Maybe he’s happier now. Like really happy.”
“You’re too good for him, Buttercup. You deserve a better man. As for her, she couldn’t save a ladybug from a rainstorm if you gave her a fifty-foot umbrella.”
“But what about my sister? Why couldn’t I save her?” My voice wavered, and I could feel myself tilt inside. Maybe outside, too. I never say things like that out loud.
Tristan paused for a minute and got very serious. But not quiet the way most people get about these things. He looked at me and said, “I was wrong.”
“About what?”
“What I told you about saving people isn’t true. You might think it is, because you might want someone else to save you, or you might want to save someone so badly. But no one else can save you, not really. Not from yourself,” he said. “You fall asleep in the foothills, and the wolf comes down from the mountains. And you hope someone will wake you up. Or chase it off. Or shoot it dead. But when you realize that the wolf is inside you, that’s when you know. You can’t run from it. And no one who loves you can kill the wolf, because it’s part of you. They see your face on it. And they won’t fire the shot.”
A long moment passed with me looking at him. I knew what wolf he was talking about. I feel its teeth all the time. And I understood, too, that even though Tristan seems tough, he is afraid, like me, that there is something inside of him that could eat him alive.
Then he said, “Laurel, you couldn’t have saved your sister. But, love, you’ve got to save yourself. Do that for me, okay? Because you are worth it.”
No one had ever said that to me before.
I realized I was still holding the pipe when Tristan said, “Do you want to pass that over here? You don’t need it.” So I did, and smiled at him. It was already almost three o’clock. Tristan was waiting for Kristen to come out, so I said bye and started walking back.
I went past the alley, on my way to the bus stop, and I nearly bumped into him. Sky. In the corner of my eye, I saw Francesca pulling away in her yellow car.
“Hey,” I said, startled. I was closer to his body than I’d been since we broke up, and it hurt how badly I wanted him to touch me.
“Hey,” he said back. He shifted awkwardly. “How are you?”
“All right.” It was quiet for a moment. I knew that I should just walk away, but I couldn’t do it. Everything in me that was angry at him for leaving started bubbling up to the surface. I thought of his arms around Francesca now, the way they’d been around me, and of his voice hot and gravelly, the way it would get when he said things that he meant. I kept telling myself not to cry, but the tears were already coming to the edges of my eyes. I wiped them away with the sleeve of the stupid lavender velvet shirt. “How could you do that?” I asked. “How can you just … be with her?”
I could see the muscles in his body get tense, and his voice was, too. “’Cause that’s my way of dealing. You have these great friends. I don’t. So yeah, it’s nice to have someone around. It’s nice to just be with someone who’s easy to be with. I’m not proud of it. But that’s what happens sometimes.”
“But you said you love me. You don’t just leave after that.”
Sky was speaking low, like if he let himself go, he would explode. “Yeah, I did. You were the only girl I’ve ever said that to. You think it’s just you who got hurt, but it’s not like that. How do you think it was for me when I saw you climb up on the edge of that balcony? How do you think it was watching you cry all the time and not being able to do anything about it? I wasn’t lying when I said I love you. How do you think it feels watching you in the fucking middle of the street waiting for a car to come and hit you?”
Sky was angry at me. Although maybe it’s messed up to say, it felt good in a way, because it meant he cared. I guess when you love someone and they put themselves in danger, you are supposed to be mad.
I thought about what he said. That I’d hurt him. I’d never actually realized that. We do things sometimes because we feel so much inside of us, and we don’t notice how it affects somebody else. I’d been selfish. I remembered the feeling of Sky’s moths fluttering, looking for a light. I felt like a street lamp that had gone out.