Page 7 of August Lane

Luke had always figured his first time would be momentous, ideally with someone he cared about who also cared about him.

But Jessica had said I love you so early in their relationship that it hit his ears with high-pitched feedback.

He’d gone rigid, with all the right responses bricked inside his mouth.

Her face had reddened and she looked close to tears, so he’d said the first thing that sprang to his mind.

“I’ve never had sex,” he confessed, which only made her flush more. So he added, “I’ve been waiting for the right person,” because it implied he’d been waiting for her.

Jessica liked to believe she was special.

Unique but not different. If someone served her chocolate cake with sprinkles, she’d say, “I haven’t eaten sprinkles since third grade,” not, “No thanks, I like vanilla,” because not liking chocolate made you weird.

It was the same with Luke. She enjoyed having a boyfriend who was saving himself just for her, but he had to be someone everyone else wanted—her big, strong football player.

And Luke went along with it because she was fun and beautiful, and he’d chosen to be that guy.

But it also meant that the girl who claimed to love him couldn’t possibly love all of him.

Jessica must have been bragging about his celibate status to one of her friends because the rumor spread like wildfire.

That’s when she realized that something that felt romantic in private could seem odd and pathetic to everyone else.

The entire football team started giving him repulsed “Who the hell doesn’t want to fuck?

” looks, so Luke let go of romantic notions about his first time being special.

They were probably a side effect of cramming his brain with too many love songs anyway.

That Sunday after the fair, they had sex in her bedroom.

It was too slow, then too fast, and then so intense it was humiliating.

When it was over, they lay together in a loud silence that seemed to press against his skin.

He said I love you because it felt like he should, and her answering smile convinced him he was right.

But Monday morning, when he picked her up for school, she barely made eye contact as she slid into his truck.

By that afternoon, everyone knew he and Jessica were having sex, often and everywhere, in positions he had to look up online.

Three days later, the gossip mill decided he’d been cheating on her with three other girls, former friends who’d exacted their revenge by sucking him off behind the bleachers.

He got backslaps that made him feel like shit.

No one wanted to hear his denials. Luke’s a nice guy, of course he wouldn’t admit it.

It was like they looked at him and saw someone else, the version of nice that ruined people’s lives behind closed doors.

It made him think of Richard Green bragging he’d bagged “celebrity pussy” in their locker room.

But lately, everything reminded him of August.

He saw her everywhere now: at lunch, in the hallway, at the back of his English class, sullen and silent as she gazed out the window.

The morning after the fair, he sat at a slight angle at his desk to keep her in his line of sight.

The next day, he’d sat in the back of the room, convinced it would help him focus, but all it did was give him a better view of her.

He was supposed to be learning about sonnets, but by the end of class, he hadn’t taken a single note on iambic pentameter.

Instead, he’d memorized the constellation of freckles behind her knee.

When the state shut down Eastside High, it had tripled the Black student population at AHS.

Although Luke was excited to feel a little less alone in the locker room this year, he hadn’t been brave enough to approach the daughter of his favorite country singer.

He’d been intimidated by how she carried herself, like she was seconds from whipping out a knife.

But that night at the fair had changed his perspective.

August didn’t barrel through the hallway looking for a fight.

She was bracing for an attack while covered in armor.

After four days of staring, the perfect opportunity to speak to her again finally presented itself.

They were the last two in the classroom, finishing a quiz that would have taken him half the time if he’d actually studied.

August always finished her work last, which was probably intentional.

She wanted to avoid her classmates. The bell rang, and they stood in unison, on a collision course for the pile of completed tests.

August eyed him like an unexpected traffic jam while Luke tried to think of something clever to say. He looked at his paper, staring blindly at the wall of multiple-choice questions. “What did you put for number six?”

Her annoyed expression didn’t change. “C.”

Luke nodded like he remembered which question that was. “C’s always good. Reliable. Good odds of being right. ‘None of the above’ fucks things up though.”

She looked at the stack of quizzes. Then at his test. “Are you trying to cheat off me? I have a D in this class.”

“No!” He threw his paper down like it had caught fire. “I don’t cheat.”

Her expression shifted to pity. “Was that flirting?” Her tone made it clear she hoped it wasn’t.

“No,” he repeated, and then immediately broke out in a bold-faced-liar sweat. “I was just making conversation. Being nice.”

August glanced at the hallway, which was filled with slow walkers who stared at them as they passed. “Don’t let anyone else hear that.”

“Hear what?”

“You being nice to me.” She put her test down and neatened the stack.

“Why not?” Luke asked, even though he already knew.

People talked about her like they were posting comments on some message board: Passionate hate because she stole someone’s boyfriend.

Vicious ridicule because her mother sang country, which meant the whole family was ashamed of being Black.

Sleazy fawning that sounded vaguely threatening, like the way Richard crowed about how much he’d love to get his hands on her again.

Luke had never joined the supportive leers and fist bumps, but he never pushed back, either. He’d stood still and silent, blending with the walls while his teammates reduced her to horny shower fantasies.

Looking back on those moments made him hate himself. He might not have been able to stop it, but he could have done something.

“They’ll think I’m fucking you,” she said, with little emotion.

Luke was embarrassed and irritated because she was right. “They’re saying stuff about me too,” he pointed out. “That it’s all I’m after.”

“It’s not the same.”

He couldn’t argue with her. Stories about him sleeping around only made people like him more. They avoided August like a new strain of the flu.

“None of it’s true,” he said, because he needed her to set him apart. Those guys are assholes, but then there’s Luke .

August shrugged. “Even if it was, you’d still be fine. They all think you’re a good person.”

“That’s ’cause I am,” Luke said, and gave her a half smile that had always worked for him in the past. “Or at least, I’d like to be if you let me.”

Something flashed across her face before she smothered it, a look he only caught because it was so familiar.

Sometimes when Luke was alone and forgot to dodge the mirror, he’d see his hunger, the parasitic need that only grew bigger the more he fed it friends, trophies, and Facebook likes.

Maybe she was starving, too. Maybe they were both just ants addicted to sugar.

August studied him and he did the same to her, since it was the first conversation they’d had with the lights on.

Her eyes were large and heavy-lidded, like she’d just stumbled out of bed.

She had a wide nose and lips that were almost too perfect, a hard cupid’s bow painted with cartoonish precision.

It was jarring how pretty she was. With her standoffish attitude, her beauty was easy to overlook, but once it gripped you, it held you by the neck.

“You’re cute,” she whispered, almost like she was talking to herself. Then she dismissed him with a tiny head shake. “Save it for your girlfriend.”

August picked up her books and left. He watched her, so lost in his own thoughts that he nearly overlooked the small black Moleskine she’d dropped on the floor.

Luke only noticed that August carried a notebook everywhere because he did the same thing.

His was a black-and-white composition book he’d picked up at Walmart last year, now creased and curled from his constant handling.

Inside was an incoherent cloud of lyrics and music notes he was starting to think would never be more than that.

He guarded that book like it held the keys to the universe, or his universe at least.

August was protective of her notes, too.

She would dump her books so carelessly on a desk that half the stack would slide to the floor, but the black Moleskine was always gripped in her hand or pressed to her chest. Seeing it on the floor triggered something tight and impatient inside him, like she was offering another secret and daring him to take it.

Because he already knew what it was. Keys to her universe.

But that seemed like a dangerous thing to want from August Lane.

High school was made of boxes. And so far, Luke had done a good job of figuring out which ones he fit inside and which ones he should avoid.

Football was a gilded box. It was a social lubricant and a wide-open path to being every teacher’s pet.

It was guaranteed girlfriends and a place on the homecoming court.

It was knowing that every day he walked these halls, anyone who made eye contact with him would do it with a smile.

And he needed that in his life. People who were genuinely happy to see him.

But it came with other boxes that he didn’t like as much.

He was lumped in with the rich kids, even though his family didn’t have much.

His position in that group was tenuous. If he admitted that he’d never left Arkansas or had only recently learned that Pabst Blue Ribbon was a cheap beer, they’d toss him aside.

Which might not be a bad thing, but he wasn’t sure what would happen next.

Maybe all the other boxes would collapse like dominoes, and he’d be left on some island on the outskirts of a high school maze.

He couldn’t survive that. Luke was soft in all the wrong places. He knew perfectly well the world could eat him alive, so it was better to bow to the natural order it imposed. And most days, he was fine with that. On others, he’d end up suffocating slowly in the dark.

August was the first person who’d ever seen him at his worst. Meeting her made him realize how lonely he was.

There’d been an instantaneous shift—one minute, his body was being twisted and stretched to the brink of cracking, and the next, she was holding his hand.

It was the best feeling. A balm over everything.

But it was also like putting on a strong pair of glasses after a lifetime of eye strain.

You couldn’t know how bad your vision was until someone showed you a clearer world.

August leaving her notebook behind had to be a sign. He’d always believed in things like karma and destiny, so that’s what he told himself as he stuffed it into the bottom of his backpack, that everything happened for a reason.

Her handwriting was neat and elegant, with artistic swoops that reminded him of calligraphy. He’d expected something more like his blotted mess of emotions, but August didn’t have the same problem he did. She knew exactly how to put her feelings into words.

How do you tell a beautiful boy that you’re wasting away in front of him / He could never understand / He could never love a girl who’s always waiting for something better.

She hadn’t written the songs for him. But it didn’t matter. Luke saw his own hunger on the page, and at that moment, he knew he couldn’t keep going on the way he had. And it felt good to accept that, let it settle over him while he read and reread those words until they felt like his.

He thought back to her voice at the fair, the way it had trembled as she’d squeezed his hand. Years later, he’d wonder if that was when it happened. That maybe he fell in love with her that night. Just a little.