After thinking about it for a while, I decided that there were a lot of benefits to being the Duff.
Benefit one: no point in worrying about your hair or makeup.
Benefit two: no pressure to act cool—you’re not the one being watched. Benefit three: no boy drama.
I figured out benefit three while we were watching Atonement in Jessica’s bedroom. In the movie, poor Keira Knightley has to go through all of this damn tragedy with James McAvoy, but if she’d been unattractive, he never would have looked at her. She wouldn’t have gotten her heart broken. After all, everybody knows the “it’s better to have loved and lost…” spiel is a load of crap.
The theory applies to a lot of movies, too. Think about it. If Kate Winslet had been the Duff, Leonardo DiCaprio wouldn’t have been after her in Titanic, and that could have saved all of us a lot of tears. If Nicole Kidman had been ugly in Cold Mountain, she wouldn’t have had to worry about Jude Law when he went off to war. The list goes on forever.
I watched my friends go through boy drama all the time. Usually, the relationships ended with them crying (Jessica) or screaming (Casey). I’d only had my heart broken once, but that was more than enough. So really, watching Atonement with my friends made me realize how thankful I should have been to be the Duff. Pretty screwed up, right?
Unfortunately, being the Duff didn’t save me from experiencing family drama.
I got home at around one-thirty the next afternoon. I was still recovering from the sleepover—where no one slept—and I could barely keep my eyes open. The sight of my house in a state of complete devastation woke me right up, though. Broken glass sparkled on the living room floor, the coffee table was upside down, like it’d been kicked over, and—it took me a minute to register this—beer bottles were scattered around the room. For a second I stood frozen in the door, worried that there’d been a burglary. Then I heard Dad’s heavy snoring in his bedroom down the hall, and I knew the truth was worse.
We didn’t live in a coatrack home, so it was perfectly acceptable to keep
your shoes on when you walked on the carpet. Today it was pretty much required. Glass, which I figured out had come from several broken picture frames, crunched under my feet as I made my way to the kitchen to get a trash bag—one would be necessary to clean up this chaos.
I felt oddly numb as I moved through the house. I knew I should be freaking out. I mean, Dad had been sober for almost eighteen years, and the beer bottles made it pretty fucking clear that that sobriety was in danger. But I didn’t feel anything. Maybe because I didn’t know how to feel. What could have been bad enough to knock him off that wagon after so long?
I found the answer on the kitchen table, neatly masked by a manila envelope.
“Divorce papers,” I muttered as I examined the contents of the opened package. “What the fuck?” I stared down at my mother’s loopy signature in a twisted state of shock. I mean, yeah, I’d kind of seen the end coming—when your mom vanishes for more than two months, you just get that feeling—but now? Really? She hadn’t even called to warn me! Or Dad. “Damn it,” I whispered, my fingers shaking. Dad hadn’t seen this coming. God, no wonder he was suddenly boozing it up. How could Mom do this to him? To either of us.
Fuck this. Seriously. Fuck her.
I tossed the envelope aside and went to the cabinet where we kept the cleaning supplies, fighting the tears that stung my eyes. I grabbed a garbage bag and headed into the demolished living room.
It hit me all at once, causing a lump to rise in my throat as I reached for one of the empty beer bottles.
Mom wasn’t coming home. Dad was drinking again. And I was literally picking up the pieces. I gathered the largest shards of glass and the empty bottles and tossed them into the bag, trying not to think about my mom.
Trying not to think about how she most likely had a perfect tan. Trying not to think of the cute twenty-two-year-old Latino she was probably screwing.
Trying not to think about the perfect signature she’d used on those divorce papers.
I was angry at her. So, so angry. How could she do this? How could she just send divorce papers? Without coming home or warning us. Didn’t she know what it would do to Dad? And she hadn’t even thought of me. Let alone called to prepare me for this.
Right then, while I made my way around the living room, I decided that I hated my mother. Hated her for always being gone. Hated her for shocking us with those papers. Hated her for hurting Dad.
As I carried the trash bag full of destroyed picture frames into the kitchen,
I wondered if Dad had managed to break those memories—the ones of him and Mom that the photos had captured. Probably not. That’s why he’d needed the alcohol. When even that hadn’t erased my mother’s face from his mind, he must have thrashed around the room like a drunken madman.
I’d never seen my father drunk, but I knew why he’d quit. I’d overheard him and Mom talking about it a few times when I was little. Apparently Dad had a bad temper when he was smashed. So bad that Mom had gotten scared and begged him to quit. Which I guess explained the overturned coffee table.
But the idea of my father drunk… it just didn’t compute. I mean, I couldn’t even imagine him using a swear word more offensive than damn. But a bad temper? I couldn’t picture it.
I just hoped he hadn’t cut himself on any of the glass. I mean, I didn’t blame him for this. I blamed Mom. She’d done this to him. Leaving, disappearing, not calling, no warning. He never would have relapsed if he hadn’t seen those stupid papers. He would have been fine. Watching TV Land and reading the Hamilton Journal. Not sleeping off a hangover.
I kept telling myself not to cry as I sat the coffee table back up and vacuumed the smaller pieces of glass out of the carpet. I couldn’t cry. If I’d cried, it wouldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that my parents were getting divorced. That wasn’t a shocker. It wouldn’t have had anything to do with missing my mother. She’d been gone too long for that. I wouldn’t even have been mourning for the family I’d once had. I was happy with the way life was, just me and Dad. No. If I had cried, it would have been out of anger, out of fear, or something else entirely selfish. I would have been crying because of what it meant for me. I had to be the adult now. I had to take care of Dad. But at that moment, my mother, living like a star in Orange County, was acting selfishly enough for the both of us, so I had to put the tears aside.
I’d just rolled the vacuum back into the laundry room when the cordless phone started ringing.
“Hello?” I said into the receiver. “Good afternoon, Duffy.”
Oh, shit. I’d forgotten about working with Wesley on that stupid project. Of all the people to see that day, why did it have to be him? Why did this day have to get worse?
“It’s almost three,” he said. “I’m getting ready to drive over to your place.
You told me to call before I left…. I’m just being considerate.”
“You don’t even know what that means.” I glanced down the hall in the direction of my father’s snores. The living room, while no longer a death trap, still looked rough, and there was no telling what kind of mood Dad would be in when he rolled out of bed. I just knew it probably wouldn’t be a good one. I
didn’t even know what I would say to him. “Look, on second thought, I’ll come to your house. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
Every town has that one house. You know, the one that is so freaking nice that it just doesn’t fit in. The house that’s so lavish that you almost feel like the owners are rubbing their wealth in your face. Every town in the world has one particular house like that, and in Hamilton that house belonged to the Rush family.
I don’t know if it could technically be called a mansion, but the house was three stories tall and had two balconies. Balconies! I’d gawked at the place a million times as I drove past, but I never thought I’d be going inside. On any other day, I would have been a little excited to see the interior (of course, I never would have told anyone that), but my thoughts were so wrapped around the divorce papers on my kitchen table that I couldn’t feel anything but anxious and miserable.
Wesley met me at the front door, an annoyingly confident grin on his face. He leaned against the door frame, arms folded across his broad chest. He was wearing a dark blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And of course he’d left the top few buttons undone. “Hello, Duffy.”
Did he know how much that name bothered me? I glanced at the driveway, which was empty except for my Saturn and his Porsche. “Where are your parents?” I asked.
“Gone,” he replied with a wink. “Looks like it’s just you and me.”
I pushed past him and walked into the large foyer, rolling my eyes with disgust. Once my shoes were positioned neatly in the corner, I turned to Wesley, who was watching me with vague interest. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Don’t you want the grand tour?” “Not really.”
Wesley shrugged. “It’s your loss. Follow me.” He led the way into the enormous living room, which was probably as big as Hamilton High’s cafeteria. Two large pillars held up the ceiling, and three beige couches, along with two matching love seats, were arranged around the room. On one wall I saw a huge flat-screen TV, and on another I found a giant fireplace. January sun spilled in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, lighting the space with a natural, happy feeling. But Wesley turned and started walking up the stairs, away from the comforting room.
“Where are you going?” I demanded.
He looked over his shoulder at me with an exasperated sigh. “To my room, of course.”
“Can’t we write the paper down here?” I asked.
The corners of Wesley’s mouth turned slightly upward as he hooked a finger over his belt. “We could, Duffy, but the writing will go much faster if I’m typing, and my computer’s upstairs. You’re the one who said you wanted to get this over with.”
I groaned and stomped up the stairs. “Fine.”
Wesley’s bedroom was on the top floor—one of the rooms with a balcony
—and it was bigger than my living room. His king-size bed hadn’t been made yet, and video game cases were scattered on the floor beside his PlayStation 3, which was hooked into a big-screen TV. Surprisingly, the room smelled nice. It was a mixture of Wesley’s Burberry cologne and recently washed clothes, like he’d just put laundry away or something. The bookshelf that he walked toward overflowed with books by different authors, from James Patterson to Henry Fielding.
Wesley bent over at the waist to look at the bookshelf, and I looked away from his Diesels as he pulled his own copy of The Scarlet Letter off the shelf and moved to sit on his bed. He gestured for me to join him, and I did, reluctantly. “Okay,” he said, thumbing absently through his hardcover book. “What should we write the paper on? Any ideas?”
“I don’t—”
“I was thinking we could do an analysis of Hester,” he suggested. “It sounds cliché, but I mean an in-depth characterization. Mainly, why did she have the affair? Why did she sleep with Dimmesdale? Did she love him, or was she just promiscuous?”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh my God, do you always go for the simplest answer? Hester is way more complicated than that. Neither of those choices shows any imagination.”
Wesley looked at me with one raised eyebrow. “All right,” he said slowly. “If you’re so smart, then why did she do it? Enlighten me.”
“For distraction.”
Okay, so maybe it was a little far-fetched, but I just kept seeing that damn manila envelope. Thinking of my selfish bitch of a mother. I kept wondering what my father was like drunk for the first time in eighteen years. My mind searched for anything—anything— that would distract me from the painful thoughts, so would it be too ridiculous to think that Hester felt the same way? She was lonely, surrounded by hypocritical Puritans, and married to a completely creepy, absentee English guy.
“She just wanted something to get her mind off the bad shit in her life,” I mumbled. “Some way to escape…”
“If that’s the case, that didn’t go well for her. It all backfired in the end.” I didn’t really hear him. My mind was rushing back to a night not long
ago, a night when I’d found a way to push my worries out of my head. I remembered the way my thoughts had gone silent, letting my body take over. I remembered the bliss of nothingness. I remembered how, even after it ended, I’d been so focused on what I’d done that my other worries barely existed.
“… so I guess that idea could make sense. It’s definitely a different angle, and Perkins likes creativity. We might get an A.” Wesley turned to look at me, and his expression grew suddenly concerned. “Duffy, are you okay? You’re staring off into space.”
“Don’t call me Duffy.”
“Fine. Are you okay, Bian—?”
Before he could say my name, I closed the space between us. Quickly, my lips moved against his. The mental and emotional emptiness took over instantly, but physically, I was more alert than ever. Wesley’s surprise didn’t last as long as it had before, and his hands were on me in seconds. My fingers tangled in his soft hair, and Wesley’s tongue darted into my mouth and became a new weapon in our war.
Once again, my body took complete control of everything. Nothing existed at the corners of my mind; no irritating thoughts harassed me. Even the sounds of Wesley’s stereo, which had been playing some piano rock I didn’t recognize, faded away as my sense of touch heightened.
I was fully conscious of Wesley’s hand as it slid up my torso and moved to cup my breast. With an effort, I pushed him away from me. His eyes were wide as he leaned back. “Please don’t slap me again,” he said.
“Shut up.”
I could have stopped there. I could have stood up and left the room. I could have let that kiss be the end of it. But I didn’t. The mind-numbing sensation I got from kissing him was so euphoric—such a high—that I couldn’t stand to give it up that fast. I might have hated Wesley Rush, but he held the key to my escape, and at that moment I wanted him…. I needed him.
Without speaking, without hesitating, I pulled my T-shirt over my head and threw it onto Wesley’s bedroom floor. He didn’t have a chance to say anything before I put my hands on his shoulders and shoved him onto his back. A second later, I was straddling him and we were kissing again. His fingers undid the clasp on my bra, and it joined my shirt on the floor.
I didn’t care. I didn’t feel self-conscious or shy. I mean, he already knew I was the Duff, and it wasn’t like I had to impress him.
I unbuttoned his shirt as he pulled the alligator clip from my hair and let the auburn waves fall around us. Casey had been right. Wesley had a great body. The skin pulled tight over his sculpted chest, and my hands drifted
down his muscular arms with amazement.
His lips moved to my neck, giving me a moment to breathe. I could only smell his cologne this close to him. As his mouth traveled down my shoulder, a thought pushed through the exhilaration. I wondered why he hadn’t shoved me—Duffy—away in disgust.
Then again, I realized, Wesley wasn’t known for rejecting girls. And I was the one who should have been disgusted.
But his mouth pressed into mine again, and that tiny, fleeting thought died.
Acting on instinct, I pulled on Wesley’s lower lip with my teeth, and he moaned quietly. His hands moved over my ribs, sending chills up my spine. Bliss. Pure, unadulterated bliss.
Only once, as Wesley flipped me onto my back, did I seriously consider stopping. He looked down at me, and his skilled hand grasped the zipper on my jeans. My dormant brain stirred, and I asked myself if things had gone too far. I thought about pushing him away, ending it right where we were. But why would I stop now? What did I stand to lose? Yet what could I possibly gain? How would I feel about this in an hour… or sooner?
Before I could come up with any answers, Wesley had my jeans and underwear off. He pulled a condom from his pocket (okay, now that I’m thinking about it, who keeps condoms in their pockets? Wallet, yes, but pocket? Pretty presumptuous, don’t you think?), and then his pants were on the floor, too. All of a sudden, we were having sex, and my thoughts were muted again.
