Subtext: unlike Kayla, who clearly has so much in common with Leo. Kayla is likable. A good swimmer. Funny. Athletic. Undeniably attractive.
“She looked upset,” Kayla murmurs. “I felt so bad for her.”
Oh, and great, Kayla is nice, too.
Leo smiles, a kid-seeing-a-baby-kitten type smile, because he’s come to the same conclusion. “That’s so sweet. You’re a really good person, Kayla.”
It’s too much. I stand up. “You know what, fuck you, Leo,” I scream, and everybody in the parking lot turns to stare at us. I shoot a killing glare at Kayla, nice or not. “And fuck you, too.”
I’ve never said that before to anyone: fuck you.
Which is literally about sex.
Which is something I’m not going to be having anytime soon.
7
When I arrive home an hour later, I’ve calmed down a little, but not a lot. My first stop is the kitchen, where I find Afton and Abby at the table watching Moana on Abby’s iPad in preparation for Hawaii. Pop is out somewhere, thank god, because this afternoon’s developments call for drastic action. I grab a heavy-duty trash bag out of the pantry and head upstairs. A few minutes later I come down again lugging the trash bag, which is now full. I slip out the back door and into the yard.
By the time Afton comes outside to see what’s going on, I’m halfway through the process of building a fire in the large cast iron bowl our family uses as a firepit. I found some firewood in the garage and gathered up dry grass and weeds to use as kindling. Once I have a good fire going, I open the trash bag and pull out a shirt. Leo’s. It’s a blue-and-green-plaid flannel. It’s comfy. Even holding it away from myself I can detect Leo’s boy smell on it, mixed with his musky cologne. Which I used to think was sexy. I used to hold this shirt to my face and breathe in and think about him.
I throw the shirt on the fire.
Afton sidesteps over and puts her hand on my shoulder, to let me know she’s on board with whatever. “So we hate Leo now?”
I stare into the flames. “Yes.”
“What happened at the swim meet?”
“I surprised him.” I take another shirt from the trash bag. The wine-colored tee. I took it off upstairs. Afton instinctively reaches out to stop me from burning it, but she’s too late. Onto the fire it goes.
“You surprised him, and . . .” prompts Afton.
“And he was kissing Kayla,” I say.
Afton obviously doesn’t know who Kayla is, but she understands sisterly loyalty. “Well then, screw Leo.”
I smile grimly. “I think Kayla’s got that covered.”
I burn several other things in quick succession: photos of Leo and of Leo and me together, a few ripped-out pages from my sketchbook, the pair of red lacy underwear I bought today, so new they haven’t been washed yet, the dried rose corsage I wore at prom a few weeks ago, followed by my prom dress, which takes a surprisingly short time to burn. Lace, it turns out, is highly combustible.
Then I get to the final item, the stuffed white horse that Leo won for me at the boardwalk at Santa Cruz. I hold it up and gaze into its glass-marble eyes.
Afton takes a step closer. “You don’t have to—”
I toss the horse into the fire. It smokes and smokes, horrible black puffs that smell awful, like when something plastic ends up on the heating coil of the dishwasher. Then the wind shifts and blows the smoke directly at us.
“We’re probably inhaling toxic chemicals right now,” Afton says, but I don’t move out of the path of the smoke. The horse finally catches fire and burns, its ears blackening, first one and then the other. Then the entire thing kind of melts into a sludge.
I cough. I’m being melodramatic. I know that. But I can’t shake the urge to destroy everything in my life that has ever touched Leo. Those things are tainted now. They need to be cleansed.
“Did the horse have a name?” Afton asks somberly.
“Bucky.”
“Farewell, Bucky the horse,” Afton says.
The screen door bangs. It’s Abby holding a bag of marshmallows. “Can we have s’mores?”
“Why not?” I say.
We put more wood on the fire until it’s burning cleanly again. Then we find chocolate and graham crackers and settle around the firepit, roasting marshmallows on the metal poles we use for camping. Abby soon gets bored and goes back inside. Afton and I stay and watch the fire go through its stages, first hot and fierce and a little bit out of control, then steady and warm, then glowing embers. I scooch my chair close to the fire like I’m cold, even though it’s 75 degrees outside. I wrap my arms around myself and stare into the flickering glow.
“Are you going to live?” Afton asks after a while. This is something Mom used to say when we were little and fell off our bikes or skinned our knees.
I scoff. “I’m not going to die over a boy, thank you very much.”
“That’s quite sensible of you.”
I stir through the coals with a fire poker. “This whole time he was hooking up with other girls.” It feels like a joke, like a bad plot twist in a movie, so predictable, so clichéd, that it couldn’t be true.
“He’s an asshole,” Afton says.
“Yes, yes, he is,” I agree wholeheartedly.
“So really it’s a good thing.”
I turn to look at my sister. “What? What’s good about it?”
“That you didn’t sleep with him. You deserve for your first time to be better than my first time. It should be special.”
She’s right, and I know it, but this also feels like an I-told-you-so.
“It was special,” I snap. “I thought he loved me.”
Afton arches an eyebrow at me. “Yeah, and yesterday you were freaked out about that because you didn’t feel the same. But today you’re pissed because he clearly didn’t love you. The point is, it wasn’t right between you.”
My face burns. Leo doesn’t love me. He never did. Sure, it’s true that I don’t love him, either, but that doesn’t seem like an important distinction at the moment. I think about the way he told Kayla how we met. That’s all I was to him. One of his mom’s art groupies. A walking compliment. A fangirl.
Afton reads my expression and backpedals. “I get that it hurts, though. It’s the principle of the thing, or whatever. I know.”
“How would you know?” Afton’s never been dumped. She’s never been cheated on. Her boyfriend clearly adores her and doesn’t have a difficult time with the definition of the word boyfriend. This kind of thing would never happen to Afton.
“I know because . . .” She stops herself, because she sees I’m right. “Trust me, it would have been a mistake, sleeping with Leo. You would have regretted it. So you should be glad.”
“I’m a lot of things right now, but glad isn’t one of them.” What I am is tired of Afton telling me how to feel. Some part of my brain understands that my sister is only trying to help, but another part wants to punch her in her perfect upturned nose. Especially since Leo isn’t here to get his nose punched. “You can’t ask me to be happy about this, okay?”
“I get that,” she says. “But in my experience—”