Page 75 of Oleander

“Um, I don’t...have I?” I looked around, thinking.

“I promised you a truth. In return for yours.”

My cheeks warmed from the reminder of mine.

“Oh, yeah, that’s right.” I tried to think of something. It wasn’t that I didn’t have things I wanted to know the true answer to – I had plenty. It was that I didn’t know which I wanted to know the answer to more.

I wasn’t going to ask him anything about Xavier Blackwell. I wouldn’t waste this kind of opportunity on him.

In the end, I went with something I had asked myself over and over and over these last few weeks. Something only Caspien would be able to answer. Something I’d tried to ask him in my many letters and something I had asked him in my texts and voicemails but which he had failed, as yet, to answer.

“Why did you leave?” I asked.

I could tell I’d shocked him. Maybe he’d been expecting something about Blackwell. Maybe he’d been expecting something along the same vein as what he’d asked me.

He stared at me, and I thought maybe he wouldn’t answer. He looked so unsettled by the question that I was sure that when it did come, it wouldn’t even be the truth.

Finally, he said, “To protect someone.”

“What does that mean?” I frowned.

“One truth, that was the agreement. Goodnight, Jude.”

And then he was gone, and I was left with those three words rattling around my head for hours until I finally fell asleep.

Twenty-one

My English Literature mock was the following afternoon. I’d flown through the critical appreciation question with enough praise for Percy Bysshe Shelley’sSt.Irvyneto fill eight sides of paper.

The second question, on whether the most fascinating characters in Gothic Literature were its villains, I’d managed to, quite miraculously I thought, compare the spectre of Dracula haunting the pages of Harker’s diary with the unravelling psychopathy of Frank inThe Wasp Factory.

Whether it was the nightly calls with Caspien – and the way they’d filled the huge gaping void that had stopped me concentrating fully on anything else – I didn’t know, but the last two (French and Maths) had gone pretty well, too, I thought.

Caspien had made fun of the note I’d given to Gideon, though he was happy I hadn’t written anything obscene in it because he was sure Gideon had opened it and read it before giving it to him. He’d brushed off my praise about the painting, calling it a ‘very low-effort undertaking’. The low-effort undertaking now had pride of place on the shelf above my bed. Though, I took it down and put it in the wardrobe whenever Ellie came over. I wasn’t in any way equipped to deal with the questions that might arise from her seeing it there.

Now that her grounding was over, she came over twice a week. On Saturdays, we’d have sex while Luke and Beth were out. Each time I got better, she got a little louder, and I felt a little less guilty about telling her I loved her.

I didn’t always say it, though I was normally inside her when it would slip out from between my lips, gasping and unbidden. I was beginning to think that I did, in fact, love her, but in a way that felt easy and normal and completely unimaginative. I was sixteen, and she was my high school girlfriend, so, of course, I loved her. It took no thought or effort to love Ellie.

What I felt for Caspien was more bewildering, labyrinthine, and like a cryptic puzzle that changed and evolved every time we spoke. More adult, more serious, more frightening.

It was on our fourth or fifth call when he first asked me about sex with Ellie. At first, I’d wanted to lie about it, to deny it was even happening, but I remembered his words on the first call. Iwasa horrible liar.

Then I thought that sharing it with him could maybe go some way to smoothing over the lines that had been drawn between my feelings for him and Ellie and how they could continue to exist at the same time.

“What...do you want to know?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said casually. “How it feels? If you enjoy it? If she enjoys it. Whatever.”

“I think she does.” I shifted on the bed.

“You think?” he said. “God, I feel sorry for her already.”

“Shut up. She does okay. I know she does.”

He smirked. “Do you, though? They can fake it rather well, I hear.” He’d already said enough for me to know that he’d never had sex with a girl. These things he’d always heard from ‘some’ or ‘they’; the sort of knowledge boys picked up by social osmosis rather than personal experience.

“She doesn’t fake it.” I wasn’t certain about this, but I did know she wanted to have it more than I did. I figured that if she weren’t enjoying it, then she’d be less intent on us doing it so often.