Girls Never Go Out of Style - A Kaylor Fanfic

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

"Taylor! It's been hours!"

"Just where were you, young lady?"

Taylor had returned home to find her party dispersed and her parents a mixture of furious and concerned.

"I went for a walk," she said. "I got lost. I'm sorry."

But she wasn't sorry. She barely heard her parents' fading protestations as she walked up the stairs to her room. She took off her party dress and washed off her makeup. When she slipped between the covers of her bed, she still smelled like Karlie. Smiling, she dropped into an easy sleep, selfishly mindless of the rest of the world.

It would be different this time, she knew. This time, it would work.

--

Happiness, just like a broken heart, was a funny thing. If you didn't let on, no one was the wiser that it was there at all, even though your chest was brimming with sunshine.

It was a truth Taylor learned well in the weeks to come. She knew the role that she had to play, and she played it perfectly. It was easier to be the ideal daughter, the ideal normal eighteen-year-old girl, the perfect student, knowing that Karlie was close by, thinking about her as she thought about Karlie.

This time, the girls were taking no chances. Karlie stayed away from the Swift house. No more afternoons doing homework in the dining room. No more weekend dates, days spent driving around, nights holding hands in the dark of the drive-in theater.

"What happened to your friend? Karlie?" Andrea asked one afternoon.

Taylor could hear the ill-concealed interest in her mother's voice. She was trying to sound nonchalant, but she wasn't as convincing an actress as her daughter was. Either that, or she just didn't realize how well Taylor could read her.

Taylor barely looked up from her homework. "We're not as close as we were."

"Oh? Did you have a fight?"

Taylor shrugged. "Not really. Things are just really busy right now."

"That happens. Friends grow apart. And you have a lot on your plate right now. Getting ready to graduate. Seeing Charles so frequently..."

And Taylor did. Where Karlie's fixed-up car used to pull up to the curb on weekends, now did Charles's spit-shined Thunderbird.

Taylor sat across from him in restaurants and at family dinners. She sat beside him at the movies, letting him hold her hand in his sweaty clutch. She blushed and demurred when he reached out for her at the end of the night. She let herself be kissed, but she refused to go farther than that. because she was a good girl.

And Charles made a show of being let down but understanding. Because he was a good guy, the perfect all-American boyfriend.

Taylor would end each night with a well-practiced smile before slipping through her front door and up to her room, where she would pull out a box from beneath her bed. Not the one with the letters from Emily, but another one. A new one. She had found it in the little antique store on th town square, the same one where she had admired an old dress when Karlie had given her the tour of the town. In this box she kept notes from Karlie, all the I love you's and I miss you's and other tender sentiments Karlie slipped into her locker when no one was looking.

Taylor would read these notes, would bring them up to her nose to smell the scent that was purely Karlie, the smell of soap and girl and, now that she was working in the mechanic shop, a faint and not unpleasant undertone of grease. She would inhale and remember touching Karlie's bare skin in the backseat of her car, and she would ache for her, wondering when the next time she got to touch her would be.

Taylor, for her part, kept Karlie's locker well supplied with replies written in her swirling feminine script, her own sweet nothings and everythings, fragments of the songs that she wrote at night.

Their words were fire and rose petals on the page, but when the girls saw each other in the halls, they pretended not to know one another. They didn't even look away; they looked through.

They worked. They waited, for college acceptance letters, for the end of the year, for their future to begin.

And so they kept each other safe, no matter how much it hurt.