A Twist of Hate (11 page)

              Brian’s heart painfully swelled. How alone she must have felt in those horrible moments with Michael. But she wasn’t alone now. Camden, nurturing and protective, did all the right things to stop her tears.

              “I should be getting home, guys,” Brian reluctantly told them.

              “I’m gonna stay here awhile.” Camden walked Brian to the window. “Thanks for everything tonight.”

              “No problem.” Brian threw a leg over the windowsill and into the night. “I can pick you up in the morning on the way to school. If you’re gonna be here all night.”

              Camden replied with a lopsided half grin. “I’ll meet you on the corner at 7:30.”

              With a final, longing look at Siobhan, Brian wished them goodnight and quietly disappeared.

***

              “Courtney called,” Brian’s mother told him the second he walked into his house. “Twice. It must be important since she called the house line.”

              “How was the dress rehearsal?” Brian’s father panted.

              “Courtney didn’t tell you?” Brian stuck his head into the family room. The white and chrome art deco furniture was pushed to the walls, and a big, bright blue exercise mat was centered on the floor. His parents wore light, baggy pants and loose, sleeveless tops. His father, with his mother’s assistance, arched into a backbend in the center of the mat.

              “I thought you guys were giving up yoga.” Brian joined Drs. Wendell and Carol Livingston on the mat.

              “Your father turned the corner,” said Mrs. Livingston. “Just when it became easier, he decided he liked it. Jitu just left.”

              Jitu Kapadia had spent the better part of three months twisting and stretching the Livingston doctors into flower and animal shapes, hoping to share the ancient relaxation and fitness techniques of yoga. “She must be really glad you guys decided to stick with this mumbo jumbo,” Brian said.

              “Be fair, kiddo,” his mother said. “Yoga is a legitimate therapeutic practice. Your father has never felt better.”

              “Maybe I should give it a try,” Brian mumbled.

              Mr. Livingston’s long, skinny frame awkwardly crumpled onto the mat. Mrs. Livingston slipped on a pair of wire-framed glasses that were almost exactly like Brian’s.

              “Michael Littlefield jumped Siobhan at rehearsal tonight,” Brian said.

              “Jumped?” Mrs. Livingston pulled the ponytail holder from her hair, which fell to her shoulders in a spill of wheat-blonde streaked with new silver.

              “Jumped,” Brian repeated. “Like a mugging. It was harsh. I’m surprised the Prescott Town Crier didn’t tell you about it.”

              “Who?” Mrs. Livingston asked.

              “Courtney.”

              “Is Siobhan all right?” she asked anxiously. She got to her feet. “I should call Damon.”

              Brian stopped her. “Don’t, Mom. Mr. Cleese and the headmaster have already talked to him.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Everything is so messed up. It makes me feel sick.”

              “That’s understandable and natural, son,” Mr. Livingston said, peering at him over the frameless lenses of his glasses. “She’s your friend.”

              “It’s more than that. I can’t do more for her and it’s tearing me up.” Brian stared through the large windows along one wall of the room. “It makes my stomach hurt.”

              “Your caring is enough, darling,” Mrs. Livingston said.

              “Nor for me,” Brian replied. “I…more than care about her.”

              “What about Courtney?” his mother gently asked.

              “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I love her. But I don’t get her like I get Siobhan. It’s hard to explain.”

              “Are you sure you aren’t confusing your concern and instinct to protective with something else, given the trauma of the situation you endured?” Mr. Livingston asked.

              “Dad, don’t analyze me.”

              “Your father has a valid point,” Mrs. Livingston told him. “It’s quite logical for your feelings toward Siobhan to intensify following—”

              “When I saw Camden holding her, I wanted to throw him out her bedroom window and take his place,” Brian cut in.

              “That’s very specific,” Mrs. Livingston said.

              Brian started backing out if the room. “Maybe things will seem clearer in the morning.”

***

              Siobhan turned off her bedside lamp and climbed into bed. Camden closed the window, locked it, and opened the sheers, inviting in the moonlight. He went to the bed and slipped off his sneakers. “What are you doing?” Siobhan asked.

              “I’m sleeping with you.” He froze in the midst of unfastening his belt. “I mean, I’m sleeping with you, not
sleeping
with you.” He stripped down to his flannel boxers and joined her under the covers. She rolled onto her right side and into his arms.

              “Is this your way of protecting me?” She settled her head more comfortably on his shoulder. “It’s working.”

              “I’m sorry I didn’t protect you at school.” He spread her hair over his chest. “I’ve known Michael my whole life and I don’t understand a thing about him. I never have.”

              “He envies you,” she said. “You’re everything he isn’t. He’d take your life in a heartbeat.”

              “You mean trade lives?”

              A shiver tripped down her spine. He held her closer.

              “How did your dad take what happened tonight?”

              “He wanted me to go to the hospital to literally have my head examined, but I calmed him down. He wants the police to handle Michael. He doesn’t think Prescott will give him an appropriate punishment.”

              “What does he think an appropriate punishment would be?” Lying in secret in Siobhan’s bed, Camden had a keen interest in how Damon Curran handled matters concerning his daughter.

              “Let’s just say it involves testicles and the samurai sword Dad was given in Seki City.”

              Camden shuddered. “Is your dad coming to the play?”

              “He wouldn’t miss it. I’m trying to get my grandmother to come too.”

              “I finally get to meet her?”

              “Maybe.”

              “Why not definitely?”

              “I don’t know.”

              “Have you told her about me?”

              “She knows your name is Camden Dougherty, that your dad’s a prominent attorney, that you live in Adler, and—”

              “That I’m white.”

              “Your name told her you’re white. I wouldn’t have said anything about you, but Dad blabbed when she tried to force me to go to her church’s youth picnic. She’s always trying to fix me up with the grandsons of her church friends.”

              “Why didn’t you tell her about me yourself?”

              “I don’t like fighting with her,” Siobhan said. “When she was young, my grandmother encountered people who treated her a lot worse than how Michael treated me tonight. She’s got wounds that still haven’t healed, at least that’s how my dad explains it. I’ll tell her more about us when I’m ready. I’m not ashamed of you, Camden, but I don’t want the pain of my grandma’s history seeping into what I have with you.”

              “I tried to tell my dad about you this morning,” Camden said. “He already had an idea. He heard us walking around the house last night.

              “Who is Janie Mills?”

              Camden’s heart surged beneath her cheek.

              “Courtney told me about the notorious Miss Mills.”

              “Of course, she did. What did she say?”

              “The same thing ten other girls have rushed to tell me lately,” Siobhan said. “I’d rather hear the truth about such a torrid love affair from the horse’s mouth.”

              “Horse’s ass is more like it.” He wound a lock of her hair around his finger. “Do you really want to know about me and Janie?”

              “Not if you don’t want to tell me.”

              His silence led her to a different question. “Tell me the real reason you wanted to be here tonight.”

              “I thought you might be afraid.”

              “I am,” she admitted. “So are you.”

              “I’m not scared of Michael,” he chuckled lightly.

              “I didn’t say that.” She nestled into his side. “You’re scared of the same thing I am.”

              “What’s that?”

              “That Michael could have really hurt me.”

              “He’s gonna get nailed tomorrow. Mr. Edwards takes no prisoners. This kind of thing will trash Mike’s transcript. He’s such a fool.”

              Siobhan yawned. “This is your last chance to tell me about Janie. I’m fading fast.”

              “Janie graduated last year,” he began. “We dated for about a month. She called me all the time, took me to all the senior parties and stuff like that. I wasn’t dumb enough to think she liked me just for my conversational skills but I wasn’t smart enough to tell her that I wanted more than parties and making out. She seemed to think the privilege of being with her should have been enough for me. She invited me to the senior prom, and afterwards, we went to the suite she had reserved at a hotel downtown. She told me she’d picked me, special, just for prom. She wanted to have this earth-shattering experience. I let her down.”

              “She wasn’t happy with your performance?” She smothered a giggled.

              “There
was
no performance. The curtain didn’t even rise.”

              “You couldn’t…” Siobhan slowly raised her right thumb. “Courtney said Janie Mills was the kind of gorgeous that sent guys howling into the street.

              “I
didn’t
, not couldn’t.” He took her right hand and pressed a kiss to the backs of her fingers.

              “Then what was the problem?”             

              “I didn’t like her enough. I wanted my first time to be with someone who excited all of me, not just one part. I wanted it to be with someone who filled my whole heart. Janie didn’t. She dumped me that night.”

              “Just because you wouldn’t have sex with her?”

              “She let everybody think we did. I guess she had a reputation to maintain, in a backward kind of way. She didn’t want anybody to know some dumb junior had turned her down.”

              “I’ve been led to believe that you were this mighty, snorting, stamping stallion,” she teased. “You’re just as pure as virgin snow.”

              He tickled her until she begged him to stop. “Are you as pure as virgin snow?”

              “I’m a virgin, if that’s what you’re asking, Mr. Dougherty.”

              “Completely?”

              “No, about eighty-three percent.” She pinched him. “Of course, completely. What the hell kind of question is that? Are
you
a complete virgin? Has someone other than the limber and imaginative Janie Mills claimed a percentage of
your
virginity?”

              “I came close, that one time with Janie, but we didn’t.” The moonlight turned his eyes into precious gems. “I couldn’t. Not with her.”

***

              “Damn cat.”

              Michael sat in the doorway of his treehouse, his feet dangling twenty feet above ground. He popped open another beer. One backyard away, through an orderly line of well-pruned oaks and conifers, he eyed the wall of the tree house set in the tall sycamore tree on the Dougherty property.

              Almost ten years ago, he had watched a team of professionals erect the unusual structure in the ancient sycamore in Camden’s backyard. Mrs. Dougherty had been gone a full year, and the desire for a treehouse had been the only interest Camden had shown in the world around him. He’d drawn what he wanted—his first architectural design—and told everyone at school that he and his dad would build it together.

              Camden gave the drawing to his father. The following Saturday, a crew from Mastery Treehouses arrived. The circular loft with tinted glass walls was nothing like the modest, shoebox structure Camden had envisioned. Mr. Dougherty had spent the day at the office while Michael, Camden, his new friend Brian Livingston, and Camden’s nanny had hung out all day on the Dougherty’s pool deck, watching the fancy treehouse go up from its first green oak plank to its last nail.

              Michael was the first one inside once it was finished. Twenty-five feet up in the canopy of the tree, the loft was accessed by a wide staircase that spiraled around the sycamore’s trunk. The wide trunk of the tree formed a center column. Titanium diffuser beams angled from the oak platform that formed the floor. Shelving, cabinets, and spaces for a mini fridge and a microwave oven had been built into the walls. A week later, electricians wired the structure for lights and electricity, satellite television, internet, and a phone.