TEN
Primrose
Friday...
How old were you when the sexual contact began?
Eighteen.
Were you under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time?
No.
Did you consent to engaging in sexual contact?
Yes.
Were your parents aware of your relationship with him?
Not before today, I don’t think.
Has your mother ever hit you before?
Not really.
Has Frank Cole?
No.
Do you feel threatened or unsafe returning home?
I don’t know.
Do you have any friends or family you could stay with?
Maybe.
When they took me to the nearest precinct for questioning, I’d imagined a dented steel table and a two-way mirror. Instead I got a wooden bench in the lobby and a Dixie cup of water. Cops breeze through the swinging doors, cracking jokes and trading stories, while I answer the detectives’ intimate questions about my sex life.
Why was your shirt ripped?
I asked him to.
Ah…
At least they allowed me to change before coming in, but I wish I’d put on more layers than just leggings and a flannel. Cold night air rushes in every time an officer swings open the doors. After hours of interviews and statements in the chilly precinct, I’m frozen, starving, stiff, and exhausted. It’s after nine o'clock before the weary detectives finally wrap things up. As far as they can tell, Mom and Frank are the only people who seem to have done anything illegal. Neither get arrested.
The seat in the back of the cruiser is hard plastic, cast into the mold of a normal car seat. There’s so little leg room I have to twist my knees at an angle. I’m not sure how Dan ever fit in the back of one of these. No siren wails but red-and-blue lights swim in the night.
“This the place?” the officer up front asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks.”
One yellow window glows behind a canopy of black leaves. The cop opens my door and the night air makes me shiver. Hugging my chest, I cross the patchy lawn while police lights flash behind me. The chipped paint on the front door glows blue, red, blue. The doorbell shrieks under my finger. My heart beats in time with rapid footsteps on the stairs inside.
I’m not welcome anywhere anymore. Maybe not even here.
“Hannah.” My voice breaks and hot tears burn my eyes just as soon as she opens the door. I lied to her, I tricked her, I locked her out. She has every reason to hate me.
“Oh my god, Sophie.” Her arms tighten around my back and I fall, shaking, against her. “What happened?”
My tears dampen her shoulder and she rocks me from side to side but I only cry harder. Each inhale sounds like the gasp of a drowning person. My shoulders heave. The words won’t come. She closes the door against the police lights and half carries me upstairs. In her room, she pets my hair while I sob. Explaining what happened makes it all feel real. The gist amounts to this—friction made sparks, sparks started fires, fires burned bridges. There’s no coming back from this.
“Honestly,” she says, “it’s kinda hot.”
“Oh my god. Shut up.” I wipe my eyes.
“No, I mean… Just, Dan’s really, really hot. Like, panty-droppingly hot. And apparently he’s really nice too. If he’d moved in with me, I probably would have tried to jump his bones within a week. And you!” She brushes hair out of my eyes. “I mean, it’s not just that you’re the smartest person I know. The things you say sometimes—a lot of people just think about what they’re having for lunch or who cheated on who. You have actual ideas. You make everything sound so interesting and important. I dunno…” She sighs. “You guys’ parents are stupid if they thought they could make you two live together but not get together.”
“But…” I search the cottage cheese ceiling as if it might give me some answers. “What do I do now? I fucked up everything.”
“Not everything.” She shakes her head. “Not necessarily. But now you have to ask yourself a question: was all of this just sex, or was it something more? And more importantly, what do you really want, Sophia?”
Saturday...
My brain is a complex organ. One hundred billion neurons, each with an average of seven thousand synaptic connections to other neurons. Millennia of evolution have enabled it to imagine and reason and think.
My heart, by contrast, is a pump. It moves blood around.
Sophia Ramos listened to her head. She made good grades so she could get into a good school and find a good job. Mirror-Sophie studied because ideas made her feel. She wanted to go to Stanford because it was somewhere else, and offered literature courses with names like American Madness and Wastelands and The Sacred and Profane.
Sophia Ramos’s life is over. Long live Mirror-Sophie.
It’s a little after nine in the morning when Hannah’s mom comes home from her shift. We creep down the stairs as soon as we hear her snores start to drown out the sound of a daytime talk show. A name tag still dangles from her rumpled blue vest. Padding on her tiptoes, Hannah lifts her mom’s keys off the coffee table. They jingle. Her mom rolls over and we freeze.
Finally, another snore grumbles and Hannah and I breathe. We slip through the front door toward her mom’s pre-owned Pontiac Aztek. Hannah adjusts the rearview mirror.
“You ready?”
“No,” I say and my stomach twists. “But I have to be.”
The engine shudders to life. Late morning light filters green through the trees lining the streets as we twist through the sleepy suburbs. I pull down the visor to block the sun but there’s no cover over the mirror. The way my jaw clenches and eyebrows furrow, I don’t look as scared as I feel. I look determined.
Cruising past the identical houses dotting East End Road, I lean back in my seat and tug up my hood. The calloused pads of my fingers tap the taupe armrest. Hannah rolls past my house without stopping. A U-Haul truck sits parked in the driveway.
“Shit,” she hisses, rolling to a stop a few doors down. “What’re you gonna do?”
“Be quick, I guess.”
The seatbelt alarm dings as I unbuckle and climb onto the sidewalk. Staying low to the ground, I cut across the sunbaked lawn toward the porch. A spare key waits in a damp ring of dirt under the pot of dead flowers. When footsteps thud louder inside, I scramble over the porch rail and crouch down into the corner. The screen door whines open. Frank drops a cardboard box onto the rotting boards—clothes, DVDs, the lamp he brought with him.
I peek my head over the sill of my bedroom window then drop back down again. My door is still hanging on its hinges.
Frank murmurs something and my mom replies, “You can’t be fucking serious.”
“It’s my couch, Aud.”
“Only because you made me get rid of mine to make room.”
Peering through my window again, I watch Frank tear throw pillows off the sofa. When the crocheted blanket dislodges between cushion and armrest, out pops a pack of white-and-emerald cigarettes. My mom turns it over in her hands before opening it. Reaching into the crack, she pulls out another pack of Maverick Menthols. Then another. And another. None of them are empty.
Her scream billows in the warm morning air and I creep along the side of the house to the basement door. When I twist the key, the sight of Dan’s room brings a sharp pain. Shards of blue glass glint on the carpet and my uniform sweater still sits rumpled in a pile on his futon. I carefully close the door behind me and step down the stairs.
“You’re the one who decided I had to leave,” Frank bellows from above.
“I’m sorry but I didn’t think you’d do something as stupid as quit your job.”
“If I hadn’t quit, you’d still be sitting up here as happy as a clam while your whore daughter fucked that boy downstairs.”
A heavy crash echoes from the kitchen. The latches on Dan’s guitar case snap shut. I repress the urge to slam the door behind me and cross the grass at a brisk pace before breaking into a jog.
“Let’s go,” I tell Hannah.
The wheels are already squealing with acceleration by the time I shut my door. In the rearview mirror, I watch the crumbling household recede into the distance. Soon we’re shooting down 8 Mile Road.
Gas station spires rise into the sky. Powerlines crest and fall between skeletal towers. Daisies bloom through cracks in the pavement. Hannah presses play on a mixed CD I made her. I roll down my window and press my hand into the wind.
“You know how, in experimental design, you’re supposed to test one variable at a time?”
Hannah looks at me sideways and furrows her brows. “I guess?”
“Well yeah. You’re supposed to isolate the variables to figure out what does what.”
“Sure.”
“I feel like that now,” I say. “No school, no home, no phone, no parents.”
“See?” She laughs. “You say the weirdest things. But I think I know what you mean.”
“Here.” I recognize a turn-off onto a rough road edged by warehouses.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I say but my heartbeat quickens. While I’m sure I’m right about the location, I’m not sure what I’ll find. Maybe nothing.
A concrete wasteland sprawls around us—empty, unfinished, but not forgotten. In the distance, a vintage Chevrolet shines turquoise. My heart leaps. At the same time, a lump hardens in my throat.
“Hannah.” My eyes start to sting.
“Hey,” she says. “You deserve to be happy. Also, I’m selfish and I don’t want you freezing me out again because you’re depressed.”
I laugh against escaping tears and she pulls me into a hug.
“You better call me.” She gives me a firm squeeze. “Promise?”
“Promise,” I sniff. “I love you, Han.”
“I love you too, Soph.”
I wipe my eyes, grab the handle of the guitar case, and climb out of the stolen SUV. “You should get back before your mom wakes up.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She sighs and shifts into gear. “Remember…this isn’t goodbye.”
“Definitely not.” I shake my head.
No buildings block the wind and I swipe back my hair to watch Hannah disappearing up the road, back to the highway. When she’s gone, no more variables remain. All that’s left is me.
Clarity comes crisp. With everything else stripped away I feel very sure of what I want. Wind blows hot and I walk toward it.
Wrenching open the rear door of the Chevy, I find Dan asleep in a twist of blankets. A dark bruise rings his eye. Red lines scab over the bridge of his nose and the curves of his lips. Sweat plasters sandy hair to his brow. I brush it away.
“Sophie?” Eyes blink open, as clear and green as the sea. “Wha—? How did you…?”
I shrug. “You told me.”
He tries to sit up and winces.
“Shhh.” I press his shoulder back down and peel back his t-shirt. Angry purple marks swell across his side. “Does it hurt when you breathe?”
“Yeah.” He winces again.
“I think you have a broken rib.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says. “I’ve been beaten up worse than this.”
“I know.” I nod. “That’s why you stuck around, isn’t it?”
Before, I never understood why Dan didn’t just move out and get his own place. He had enough money, after all.
“Hannah told me that the sort of people who hit always need someone to hit. If their favorite punching bag goes away, they just move on to the next closest target.”
“Listen.” He shakes his head. “I don’t want you to go thinking… Just, you don’t owe me anything.”
“I know.”
He almost smiles, then doesn’t. With a grimace he heaves himself up and steps gingerly out of the truck. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”
“What?” I scramble after him. “How is that what you got from this?”
“Fuck, Sophia.” He tosses his arms into the air. “Haven’t you noticed that I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to you? I ruined your entire life.”
“No you didn’t! At least, not without my help.”
“This is crazy. You know it’s crazy.”
“Listen, Hannah told me something else. Once someone starts hitting, they don’t stop.” I tuck my hair behind my ears and turn my pinkened cheekbone toward him.
“Holy shit,” he breathes. “Did Frank—?”
“No. My mom.” I bunch my sleeves up into my fists. “I dunno, maybe part of us was just us acting out or trying to get attention, or whatever else a psychologist would say. But this—this happened. And that—” I flail one arm east, in the vague direction of our house. “We were both in that. So yeah, maybe this is stupid or crazy. But we did this together, so right now you’re the only person in the world who feels how I feel. I’m not losing that.”
Dan runs one hand through his hair. “I care about you, Sophia.”
“I know. I care about you too.” I bury my hands in my pockets. “So that’s something. Let’s start there.”
Circling the side of the Chevy, I tug open the passenger door and hop into the bucket seat. Then I reach across the cab and open Dan’s door from the inside.
He turns the key in the ignition and sighs. “I lied.” The engine grumbles and he reverses, setting a course back to the highway. “I don’t just…care about you. More like, I’m kind of madly in love with you.”
“I know,” I say. “And full disclosure: I’m sort of madly in love with you too.”
He smiles. So do I. We drive.
Cranking down our windows, we let our hair blow wild in the wind. I dig in the glove box for a tape I made years ago but never tried to play. Arcade Fire strikes up and Dan turns the volume louder.
Abandoned factories soon give way to empty fields. Then banners announcing Casimir Pulaski Day. Then cornfields rolling like oceans. When the sun sinks over the Nebraska state line, we drive into the blaze.