I’ll come help you down.” He turned to Jeff and whispered, “She’s totally bombed. Where’s that ladder?”
Jeff pointed to the alley between the pool house and the main house. “Around that corner.”
“I like it up here,” said Lilah. “I don’t want to come down.” She tried to do a little twirl to prove her point, but she stumbled again, two more feet closer to the edge.
The people inside had started streaming out the sliding glass doors and congregating below her on the deck. She could sense that she’d become the center of attention. She didn’t care.
“Please, Lilah. Sit down. I’ll be there in two minutes.”
“I don’t have to do anything!” she shouted. “You don’t own me, Carter!”
He pushed his way through the throng of sweaty people gathered on the deck. They made a path for him. He was part of the show now.
“Just wait right there,” he called.
“Quit telling me what to do!” Lilah screamed.
Then, as though to make her point more dramatically, she reeled the sandals over her head and whipped them as hard as she could at him. They flew together toward the edge of the roof, one losing momentum almost immediately and plopping down to the rain gutter, the other soaring out toward the mass of people gathered below her on the deck before falling with a splash into the pool. The sound made her smile.
She peered over the edge.
“You have to scoot up away from the edge, Lilah.” Carter was pleading with her now.
“I said, stop telling me what to do!” she screeched.
And then she reared up and leaped off the edge of the roof. Arms flailing at her sides, legs pinwheeling below her, her skirt billowing out around her, she flew through the air and landed in the pool with a splash that cascaded onto the deck and drenched the three rows of people standing there.
People gasped. People clapped.
For a second people gawked at her floating there, waiting to see if she was okay.
She raised her head and shook her hair out. She looked at the clear black sky and laughed, and then she started sidestroking toward the shallow end of the pool.
When she reached the ladder, Carter was right there to help pull her out.
“Come on, Lilah,” he said, reaching out a hand for her to pull herself up with. “Let’s get you home.”
She scowled at him. “Just leave me alone.”
When he tried to take her hand, she slapped him away, so he stepped back and let her pull herself up out of the pool. Not knowing what else to do, he fished her sandal, which had migrated toward the diving board, out of the water.
She grabbed it from him and staggered away through the crowd.
He took a step after her, ready to do what it took to calm her down and get her into the car and home, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him.
It was Kaily, Lilah’s old friend from the swim team.
“Don’t,” she said. “It’ll just make it worse. Me and Teresa were about to take off, anyway. We’ll get her home.”
“You sure?” he said.
“Yeah. You hang out. Have fun.”
Before he could protest, she was on her way, following after Lilah around the side of the house.
Whether or not he wanted to admit it to himself, it was the first time he breathed all night.
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
