—10—
January.
Dull. Gray. Dead.
I spent lunches in the library writing college application essays. Sometimes Britt would join me. Sometimes she would ask, timorously, about Mr. Wilke. She’d heard he’d gone to another school. She’d always thought he was so nice. I stared at her as if she was talking about a stranger.
She was.
Hiyam and I ended up in Art Appreciation together. When she asked if I wanted to hang out after school, I laughed in her face, loud and cold, and for a moment she actually looked hurt. Then she smiled and said, “You bitch,” in a way that was both scoffing and admiring.
Every now and then I’d pass Wesley in the halls. He kept his head down, but he was too tall to hide. I looked at him and felt nothing. No hate, no regret. Just dull gray deadness.
Hiyam kept pushing me for larger amounts of coke. I told her no. Gary had prepped me for this: if I ever got caught, I wanted to be charged with possession, not intent to deliver. Both were felonies, but possession for a first-time offender would likely result in probation. Anything more than an 8-ball would look like intent to deliver. Plus he didn’t trust me with that much powdered cash.
“You’re a smart girl, sweetheart,” he said when I met him in a restaurant, “and that’s why I don’t trust you. You’d rip me off and disappear, and you’re clever enough to get away with it.”
He asked what I thought of his product, and I told him I had no idea. I didn’t use. This made his eyebrows go up.
“Very smart girl,” he said.
Now that my two-faced teacher was gone, I could’ve stopped dealing. Hiyam was no threat. But part of me thought: fuck it. I’d never gotten a call back from all those job apps. Wesley, whose family had money, who had the luxury of stalking me with his expensive camera, was the one who got a job. I got fuck-all and a mom who stole my college fund. The universe seemed intent on presenting me with narrow, unsavory options. Maybe it was time I accepted it.
For a horrifying moment, I could understand how my mother made certain choices. Sometimes life just shoveled endless shit in your face until you threw down your spade and said, Fuck it, I’ll find another way.
I sat in my classes, staring at the bleak brown landscape pulverized by snow, decaying from the inside. With Him, winter had been glitter and auroras and feathery snowflakes falling out of the sky. Now it was smashed up and filthy, banal. Rust and rot and endless gray.
Things I didn’t expect to do my senior year:
Become a drug dealer.
Become my mother.
Find and lose the love of my life.
#
One Saturday I went downstairs and Wesley was sitting in my living room.
“The fuck is this?” I said.
“Babe,” Mom said, “he says he wants to apologize.”
“Maise,” Wesley called.
I was halfway back up to my room. “What,” I said. Not a question. The banister creaked under my hand.
“You have every right to hate me. What I did was wrong, okay? Really, really wrong. I’m sorry. Can I talk to you, please?”
Mom stood watching us both with interest.
“This isn’t a soap opera,” I snapped at her. “Go amuse yourself elsewhere.”
Her eyes narrowed dangerously, but Wesley’s pleading look assuaged her. She wandered into the kitchen.
“So talk,” I said.
“Here?”
“Do you want to come up to my room? Do you want to pet my hair and put your arm around me and tell me it’s all right? Just say whatever the fuck you have to say.”
Wesley grimaced, shrugging uncomfortably in his duffel coat. “Look, I know there’s no excuse, okay? But I want you to know I’m sorry, and I feel like shit.” He lowered his voice. “I thought he was using you. Hurting you. I guess I wanted to see it that way, and I tried to make you see that, too. It was wrong and I’m sorry, Maise.”
I stared at the wallpaper running along the stairwell. In normal families, there’d be pictures here. Mom and Dad. Nan and Pop. Beloved daughter. Our wallpaper just had a yellowish film of cigarette smoke.
“Why were you at the carnival that night?”
“Summer job. I ran the darts booth.”
I laughed. I’d probably looked right at him and not given him a second thought.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, glancing at him. “You always knew it was Evan.”
I still thought of him as Evan. It was his middle name, according to Google.
“I don’t know.” Wesley sighed, cheeks puffing out, hair flopping over his eyes. “Because it was your secret. I wanted you to tell me yourself. I wanted you to trust me with it.”
“You didn’t deserve my trust,” I said.
He looked at the stairs.
“This is all moot anyway. I’ve got to study.”
Wesley wiped a hand across his face.
Oh my god. Was he actually crying?
“You were right,” he said, still facing the stairs, his voice deep and shaky. “You were right when you said you’re my only friend. You’re the only person I care about who’s not family. I don’t expect you to ever trust me again, but I’m sorry. I miss you. Mom misses you. She was so pissed—don’t worry, I didn’t mention Mr. Wilke, but she’s told me how stupid I am a million times.” He sniffled. “I wish I could undo it. I put your private life on display for everyone. I thought I was saving you but I was just being a fucking creep. It’s messed up. I know that. I’m sorry.”
He finally raised his head, but only managed to face the banister, not me. His eyes were glassy, a sheen of wetness on his cheeks.
“It’s not an excuse, but you’re right. I’m younger than you, Maise. Way younger. You’re years and years ahead. And I didn’t mean to hurt you or fuck things up with him. I’m just a fucking idiot kid.”
He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
I swallowed, too. My throat and the back of my eyes felt tight, pinched. “Siobhan didn’t call you stupid,” I said. “I know her. She probably called your actions stupid.”
“Isn’t that what I said, Captain Obvious?” he muttered miserably.
I stared at him. “No,” I said, and started to laugh. “You didn’t, you sorry asshole.” My laughter died as quickly as it had come. “You didn’t screw it up with me and Evan. You were right about him.”
Wesley finally looked at me.
“He isn’t who I thought he was. And I guess I’m not who I thought I was, either.” I shook my head. “You know who I am?”
“Who?”
“Same as you. A fucking idiot kid.”
#
Slowly, over weeks, Wesley and I started talking again. Eating lunch together, sometimes walking for miles when the roads were plowed, the fields flat and quilted with snow, our breath trailing mist as we talked about post-graduation plans. Siobhan invited me over for Valentine’s Day dinner and I melted into her arms, struggling not to cry. She didn’t say a word about Evan but I knew she understood everything, and just seeing her, this amazing person I looked up to who’d survived her own affair with a teacher, was enough.
“To the only love that lasts,” she said when we raised our champagne glasses. “The love of family and friends.”
I clinked my glass with theirs, but it rang hollowly.
#
Hiyam’s audacity knew no limits.
“I’ve got big plans for spring break, O’Malley,” she said as we sat in the back of Art Appreciation, waiting for the bell. “I need you to come through for me.”
She hooked her elbows over the back of my chair, leaning close to my ear.
“Get me a key.”
I burst out laughing. “You’re hilarious.”
“I’m totally fucking serious,” she hissed, scraping a fingernail against my jaw. “You know what kind of cut you’ll get? You and your creepy boyfriend could move to Hollywood.”
She had taken to calling Wesley my creepy boyfriend.
I turned around. “There is no reality, parallel or otherwise, in which I would do this. You’re delusional.”
“I’m disappointed, O’Malley. I thought the chance to blow this shithole would appeal to you.”
“It does. But I don’t believe even you have that kind of money.”
Her face turned sly and vulpine. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
“Right. Your dad’ll just let you take twenty grand out of your trust fund.”
“I’ve been withdrawing small amounts for years. I’ve got thirty K he doesn’t even know about.”
I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. I’m not risking my life for your Scarface fantasies.”
“You should reconsider,” she said, leaning forward, “or I’ll have to reconsider whether this arrangement is working out.”
I stared her dead in the eyes. “He’s gone. I haven’t seen him in months. That threat means nothing to me.”
“I didn’t mean him going to jail,” Hiyam said, smiling. “I meant you.”
#
“Hiyam’s blackmailing me again,” I said to Wesley as we sat on milk crates up in the water tower. “She’s threatening to narc.”
I’d told him everything that had happened with Evan, including the blackmail and dealing. He listened without judgment. He said it would make an incredible movie. I couldn’t disagree. We spent hours thinking up titles. White Town. Snowglobe City. The Lights Every Night. In a way, this was his penance for stalking me: acknowledging the secret I’d bottled inside for so long. Listening to me crying, laughing, raging, sighing over it. I could finally talk openly with someone who knew me, who knew how much of my life it had consumed. Now that I hadn’t seen Evan in months and had started to forget the feel of his body, the chemical trance it put me in, the thing I missed most was simply hanging out with him. Watching movies together. Walking through St. Louis, pretending to be characters from films. Staying up all night talking in bed. The way we’d be sitting silently in the car or a theater and see something ridiculous and look over at each other, smiling. The way we’d look at each other in class, through the absurdity of the lives we had to live, and sigh, knowing we’d be in each other’s arms that night.
I missed the mundane things most. The precious minutiae I’d taken for granted.
Wesley had asked why I still wore the Claddagh ring if it was over, and I stared at it, not even realizing. I’d taken it off but kept it in my pocket, touching it sometimes, like a talisman.
“How can she narc on you when she’s the buyer?” he said now, shooting a stream of clove smoke at my face.
I chipped at the ice on the driftwood with my shoe. It was so cold my eyelashes felt like a brittle fringe of frost that could crumble away in the wind. “I don’t know, but I need to get out of this. It’s like I’m in the middle of Goodfellas. This is way too serious to be my life, Wesley.”
From up here the world was white on white: white ground, white sky, the clouds shining mutedly and rippling with silver like mother-of-pearl. There was a crystalline tension in the ground waiting to be shattered, all the buried living things raring to burst free and breathe again. That same feeling was in me. I was tired of this chrysalis of ice and frozen tears. I wanted out. I wanted to feel the sun again.
Wesley had taken Computer Animation as his art elective. He didn’t have a camera glued to his eye anymore—now he was always lugging his laptop around, doing kinetic typography: text unfolding and cascading and flipping, word into word, a visual poem. I was pretty sure he’d shifted focus because of me and the stalking. I knew he missed looking at the world through a lens.
“Hey,” I said. “I just got an idea.”
“You have that crazy Irish glint in your eyes.”
I leaned toward him, doing my best Gary Rivero. “I’ve got a job for you, sweetheart.”
“Maise, I’m your friend, but I am not getting involved in the trafficking of controlled substances.”
“No,” I said. “I need your particular skillset. And, more importantly, your willingness to be a creep.”
He shrugged self-consciously. “What did you have in mind?”
#
March. Acceptance letters. A small pile of cash growing in my private bank account. A dream of freedom and Southern California sun.
And always, in my pocket, in my skin, in the back of my mind, the hollowness where he used to be. The empty circle where my finger used to fit into the ring. The crimson flakes and ruby dust strewn across the ledges of my ribs.
There were words for this feeling, but none of them conveyed the bone-deep ache of it, the grinding of cell against cell. It pulled my body into itself, a black hole consuming me from the inside, turning my bones supermassive, as heavy as I was on the Gravitron that night. When I thought I would finally collapse into myself I realized it was him, pulling at me. My skin stretched tight. My heart pressed right up against the bars of my ribs. I lay in the snow and watched the stars and even the Earth wasn’t strong enough to hold me down. A stronger gravity pulled at me. And pulled. And pulled.
#
It was a strange-looking building, more like an aerospace firm than a high school, steel struts curving gently against the sky with a sense of unfolding wings. The campus was huge, and I spent nearly an hour walking around before I found the car I wanted. I was cold in my wool leggings and skirt and thin coat. I caught my reflection in a car window: the bones of my face too prominent, too chiseled, the hollows faintly violet. Not eating well. Not sleeping enough. The cold got in because there wasn’t enough stuff between my bones and skin, just nerves hanging like spiderwebs, silvery and thin, undisturbed.
I sat on the hood of the car like I had a lifetime ago.
Kids milled around the lot, yelling and laughing. Two cheerleaders walked past, one brown-skinned and one tan, ultra-white fluoride smiles. Go Terriers, I thought.
He wasn’t paying attention and didn’t notice me until he was a dozen feet away.
He stopped, the tension in him slowly unraveling until he stood there, slack and shocked. Jeans, dress shirt, blazer. Smooth-shaven, his hair shorter than it used to be. That face I had been seeing in my dreams.
I swallowed as he walked toward me. His eyes never left mine. The closer he got the more bewildered he looked, and I thought, ridiculously, He doesn’t recognize me, but he dropped his messenger bag on the ground and raised his arms and I slid off the hood and hugged him, viciously. We stood like that for a long time. My eyes were closed. I breathed too deeply, drinking in the familiar smell of him, insanely thinking I could hold it in me, preserve it. The chest rising and falling against mine felt like warm summer earth, radiating stored sunlight into my bones. I never wanted to move again.
After a minute or forever or two he leaned back and looked at me, still wearing that bewildered expression.
“Hi,” he said in a soft voice, half breath.
The last three months of my life rose into the air and dissolved like mist.
“Hi,” I said.
He touched my hair gingerly, let his hand drop. Pulled me close again, then leaned away and touched my face. He couldn’t seem to figure out where the proper boundary was.
Answer: there wasn’t one.
He unlocked the passenger door and looked at me and I got in. I closed my eyes again as he picked up his bag and came around. The car smelled so much like him, like warm suede and candle smoke. Like home.
I had promised myself not to cry until I’d said something appropriately dramatic, but I was about to break that promise.
Evan got in, still amazed/bewildered/stunned, and saw my face. He reached for me.
Then I was incoherent for the next ten minutes, sobbing my stupid heart out, clinging to his jacket, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m ruining your jacket,” and when he laughed that beautiful kind laugh and said, “Ruin it, it’s yours,” I cried even harder, accepting his invitation.
It’s somehow a lot easier to be courageous when you’re a weeping mess. When the waterworks stopped I slid away, burying my face in a tissue, everything a million percent more awkward. I had utterly forgotten why I was here. I had just wanted—needed—to see him, to touch a little, verify his existence. Well, mission fucking accomplished. Now what?
Evan seemed to sense this and started the engine.
He drove aimlessly for a while, glancing at me with giddy confusion.
“Do you want to get some coffee?” he said.
Slow head shake. Meaningful eye contact.
His gaze lingered on me. Then it shifted back to the windshield and stayed there.
He pulled up to an apartment complex. I followed him upstairs. We didn’t speak. Dingy white walls, boxes on the floor. An unlived-in feeling. He walked straight to the fridge and took out two bottles of Blue Moon and leaned there while I leaned on the counter across from him. We each took exactly one sip before we put them down and met in the middle of the kitchen. He clasped my face in his hands, his thumbs hard against my cheekbones, holding me still as he kissed me so, so lightly, as if pressing his lips to a dandelion he might accidentally scatter.
Then he stopped, looking at me.
For three months I had forgotten what the sweet hot rush of blood in my veins felt like. How alive my body was, not only in the obvious places but in the thriving red marrow, the chill prickling my scalp, the curl of my toes. I’d become as numb as if I was the one snorting all that coke. When Evan touched me I became aware of kitten-soft wool rubbing against my shins, the fine hair on my forearms standing on end, his hands unbuttoning my coat as gently and intently as if removing a bandage.
“Wait,” I said. “No.”
His hands dropped.
God, what was I doing? What was this? I took a step back, walked out of the kitchen and through the apartment. It looked like an art gallery without art. Geometrical patterns of light and shadow slapped across white paint and hardwood. I went through every room, seeking signs of life. Mattress on the bedroom carpet. Beer bottles lined up on windowsills. Shampoo, toothbrush, razor. My reflection in the bathroom mirror, mouth swollen and claret red, eyelashes lacquered with tears, more alive than anything else here.
“Is this what you wanted to see?” Evan said behind me. “My shell of a life?”
I turned around and walked past him. My footsteps echoed violently in the empty rooms. If I spoke too loudly, glass might shatter.
“I didn’t come here to gloat,” I said.
“Then why did you come?”
“I don’t know.” I turned again, hands raised. “To see how you’re doing. If you like your new job.”
“If I’m over you.”
Yes. “No.”
He stepped closer. His face was blank, his words a soft growl. “I’m not over you. I dream about you every night. I watch that fucking video over and over just to hear your voice. Does that make you happy? Is that proof I cared?”
This was the first time he’d ever seemed truly angry at me. I made my backbone iron, refusing to shirk. “No, I’m not happy. I’m fucking miserable. My life is a huge joke.”
He walked off, paced a bit, came back.
“Don’t do this,” he said. “Don’t come here to fuck with my head and play games. You don’t test someone’s love by leaving them.” He rocked on his toes, his fingers clenching and unclenching. “It was so easy for you to end it. So goddamn easy. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you used me. You had your fun playing at being an adult and then it got difficult and scary and you bailed.”
My fist was in my coat pocket, trembling. “I didn’t bail. I didn’t go anywhere. You’re the one who left.” I stared to laugh, humorlessly. “And it was difficult and scary from the fucking beginning, Evan. Wesley was right. He saw how messed up it was.”
Evan laughed back, and his was cold. “You said you didn’t know how to have a grown-up relationship. Well, here’s your first lesson, Maise. When it gets hard, you don’t run away.”
“Don’t you dare try to teach me something.”
We faced each other, blazing and feverish, a blade of hot kitchen light slanting between us. Dusk bruised the apartment with deepening shadow. If I’d had a car, I would have stormed out. Calling a cab was a lot less dramatic.
“What are we doing?” he said suddenly, in a harsh whisper.
“Being stupid,” I said.
“Yes.”
I opened my fist in my pocket, letting the ring tumble out. I rubbed the smooth groove in my palm where it had marked me.
“I’m fucking starving,” Evan said. “You want some dinner?”
“Yes.”
We ate Chinese food on a blanket on the living room floor, using cardboard boxes as tables. He had to unpack a lamp. We split a carton of beef chow mein and finished our beers, then opened more, sitting across from each other and not touching except for when he handed me a bottle, and my arm tingled as if I’d hit my funny bone. Safe subjects: his new class (interesting, mostly about managing stage fright), my new class (boring, mostly about managing boredom). I told him how ridiculous it was being “friends” with Hiyam and he told me about his new students, one of whom was a dead ringer for Wesley (“Maybe he’s outside right now, filming an exposé on us,” I said, and we peered through the blinds, laughing, his hand brushing my leg). We laughed easily, effortlessly. It was all too absurd. You really had no choice. We carried the leftovers to the kitchen and I stood at the sink, rinsing my hands, and Evan came up behind me and breathed against my hair. I didn’t move. Cold water on my skin, his heat on my neck. A live wire ran up my spine straight to my brain stem. I turned and he lifted my face and kissed me, and I let him, my wet hands falling to my sides. My chest felt tight and heavy. He let go and I dried my hands and kissed him again, harder but still close-mouthed. Beer and almond cookies. Buzzing fluorescent light, linoleum smacking beneath our shoes. My shoulder blades knocking against the fridge. The kiss grew intense and we stopped simultaneously, pulling away.
“What are we doing?” I said.
“Being stupid.”
He didn’t sound sincere. I swallowed.
“I should get home,” I said, thinking, Ask me to stay.
He didn’t say anything.
In the cab I clutched the ring so hard it felt like it was carving through my bones. I was almost home when my phone vibrated.
Come over this weekend, he texted.
Immediately, I replied, Yes.
#
When I got there Saturday afternoon, Evan and Park were carrying a couch up the front walk.
I ran to hold the door for them. Evan merely said hello, but Park grinned and winked at me. I navigated them up the stairs. Park brought up the bottom and pretended to doze off, bored, then snapped awake and did lift reps with his end of the couch, and I laughed.
“Showoff,” Evan said, out of breath.
The apartment almost looked like an actual apartment now: tables, chairs, framed posters. Evan said he’d had his furniture in storage because he wasn’t sure how long he’d be here. Our eyes caught and held for a moment, then I went to the kitchen to grab beers. The two of them stood there in a shaft of dust-flecked sun, sweaty T-shirts plastered to their torsos, tipping their throats back to guzzle longnecks, and I sat on a box with an appraising look. Park laughed and did a few bodybuilder poses, veins bulging, then went to shower.
“So you’re staying here,” I said to Evan.
“Not sure yet. But I think I’ll live here a while, instead of merely surviving.”
I looked away, sipping from my bottle. My other hand was buried in my pocket, clutching the ring.
Park showered like a marine. He was out in three minutes, immaculate and combat-ready. “Borrowed a shirt, E,” he said. “I look better in it anyway.”
Evan and I glanced at each other, smiling. “E” seemed to fit him. Both old and new.
Park took off for St. Louis, and I spent most of the day helping Evan get settled. The whole time I thought, Tell him. Tell him not to get comfortable. Tell him you’re going. But I couldn’t. He was starting to seem like his old self, relaxed, that flashbulb smile catching me unpredictably, always making something in me go still, dazzled. The light waned and we didn’t touch the lamps. We sat on the couch in the last dregs of dusk, searing blood-red rays slowly cooling into cobalt. I lay against Evan’s chest, my head moving slightly with his breath, as if drifting on gentle waves.
“I can’t tell if this is a beginning or ending,” he said.
“What does it feel like?”
“Both.”
We ordered a margherita pizza and drank chianti and sat on the floor, watching indie films on his laptop until we became more interested in making out than watching. It was relaxed, too, not meant to lead to anything, slow and light and sweet, our mouths brushing and parting as if we kissed accidentally while trying to whisper to each other.
“Why did you leave me?” he said as I knelt over him, my knees astride his waist. The only light was the bluish glow from his laptop, painting us on one side. My hair coiled in dark tendrils around his neck.
“Because I saw us the way everyone else did. I thought I was just a type to you. Student. Young girl.”
“Teacher,” he said of himself. “Older man.”
I shook my head, my hair rippling.
“Why did you come back?” he said.
Because I love you, I thought. But I’m going to leave you again, in a few months. For good this time.
“Evan,” I said.
I was going to tell him. I really was. But he pulled me to him and kissed me again, and the lightness of it became him lightly lifting my shirt and me shrugging it off as if it was smoke drifting away, then rolling down my leggings, then opening his fly. His dick was hard and hot in my hand and all the old feelings came flooding back, his solid masculinity setting off a tripwire in me, a sudden intense vibration. He let me touch, his eyes closed, a faint groan coming out of him like he’d relinquished his hold on something delicate. I was in a trance. I wanted him but I was also outside myself, watching this happen to us. It was all me. My body atop his, my legs spreading, my fingers digging into his shoulders as I took him inside of me. The sound I made was full of pain and a sort of intolerable relief because I had missed this so much. It was less like fucking than nursing an ache, cradling him in that bruised, tender place inside me. I moved over him slowly, my bare knees burning on the cold wood floor. He still had his jeans on and they rubbed the insides of my thighs raw. The laptop cast our shadows on the wall and I turned my head, watching the slim, sinuous lines of my body joining to his, the rolling curve of my spine, my hair slithering and lashing like some strange spidery creature. He felt so thick inside me, so excessive. Pushing me to the limits of my skin. To the edge where my body met the world, where reality blurred with internal fiction, and I wasn’t sure who I was anymore aside from hollowness and fullness, ache and relief, repeating over and over. It had been so long that I couldn’t control myself, I started to come and gaped at him with a ridiculous look of surprise. His expression was serene, dreamy, the only change being his hands tightening on my hips when he came.
We stared at each other, motionless. Something flashed between us and broke open on his naked chest, leaving a glittering scar. A tiny diamond. Then another. Then another.
“Maise,” he said, touching my wet face.
I couldn’t stop. I pushed myself off of him and folded my legs beneath me, his come running warmly between my thighs. I covered my face with my hands. He sat up and pulled me close, holding me. After a while I felt a hot point at the crown of my head, trickling down through my hair, and realized he was crying, too.
#
It was different afterward. I said good night without kissing him and tried to sleep on the couch, watching shadows tilt slowly across the room as the earth turned beneath the stars, but when I was still awake at two in the morning I crept into his bedroom. He was awake, too, sitting up in the dark. Faint light drifted through the blinds like luminous breath, a sigh of night air. I climbed onto the mattress and sat beside him without touching. Our feet rested side by side.
“Can’t sleep,” I said.
“Me either. I kept thinking about you out there, wishing you were in here.”
Tiny firefly wings flitted in my chest. I imagined my heart pulsing, a miniature red glow.
“Wish granted,” I said. I kicked his foot, gently. “Remember the stepping stones in St. Louis?”
“We pretended to be pioneers on the Oregon Trail.”
“You lost all your bullets and food. You had to eat the oxen.”
“Yeah, but you died of dysentery.”
I laughed. “Live hard, die young, leave a disgusting corpse.”
He kicked my foot back. “Have you heard from any colleges yet?”
Deep breath. I faced him.
“I got into USC.”
Evan sat bolt upright. He turned to me, laughing in disbelief, his hand finding mine and squeezing so hard it hurt.
“I got accepted to a bunch, actually,” I said. “So did Wesley. We decided on USC.” Another breath. “I’m going to LA, Evan.”
“I am so proud of you.” His voice was a loud whisper. He was smiling.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Then why are you happy? I’m leaving.”
“I know.”
I wrenched my hand away. “So you’re fine with it? You don’t care if I go?”
He put his hand on my bare leg. He was shirtless, his body like carved marble in the eerie, milky light. “I care if you go,” he said. “More than you know. But I’m happy for you. This is your dream, Maise.”
It was. But I had another one, and it was about being loved, completely, for who I am. Body and mind. Flaws and strengths. Fears and dreams.
“Is this why you left me?” Evan said. “Because you knew you’d be leaving anyway?”
“I don’t know.”
His fingertips moved over my thigh, making my nerves shimmer with warmth. Then he took my hand again, softer now. “I’m not pulling the age card, I swear. But there’s something I believe. You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you’ll lose it someday. We lose everything. If you’re trying to avoid loss, there’s no point in taking another breath, or letting your heart beat one more time. It all ends.” His fingers curled around mine. “That’s all life is. Breathing in, breathing out. The space between two breaths.”
Wesleypedia told me once that you take about seven hundred million breaths during your lifetime. Not until this moment had that number meant anything to me. Now I was counting every single one.
“Come with me to LA,” I said.
Evan smiled, lowering his eyes.
“I’m serious,” I said.
“I know.”
I reversed his hold on my hand and clutched his fingers in mine. “This is real. We’re still in love, and I miss you so much, Evan. I miss seeing the world with you. I miss your body, I miss your voice and your laugh and your smile and the way you make me feel like a child, in the best way. Afraid and full of wonder and totally alive. This is me telling you, without reservation, that I love you. Come with me to LA. Let’s find happiness.”
He was giving me that sweetly mournful look, and even as I said the words I knew they weren’t quite right. We didn’t need to go anywhere to find happiness. It was here, now, and if it ended in June when I got on a plane, the only choice was whether to be happy or miserable in this moment.
“Let’s not make any plans yet,” he said. “This is all so new. We’ve only just found each other again.”
I winced, turning away, and he touched my face and turned it back.
“You’re right, though. I am still in love with you.”
No kiss. No bombastic love ballad swelling from hidden speakers. Just a simple declaration in a dark room that was beginning to lighten.
I leaned against the wall and talked to him all night. I didn’t want dawn to ever come.
#
“Where were you this weekend?” Wesley said.
I popped the last of my grilled cheese into my mouth and gave him a long look. The cafeteria was loud, kids nervy and restive, dying to go wild during spring break next week.
“In Carbondale,” I said. “With Evan.”
“Did you sleep with him?”
“Yes.”
Wesley didn’t blink. “Are we still going to LA?”
“Yes,” I said, and took a sip of 7-Up. “I’m not giving up my future for a man.”
“Even a man you’re in love with?”
“Even a man I’m in love with.”
He shrugged. “Guess I’m more romantic than you, then. I’d give up my future for true love.”
“That’s not romantic, that’s stupid. You sound like one of these girls whose only career aspiration is housewife.”
“I like to subvert gender roles,” Wesley said, and I laughed.
In the lab later, I pulled him aside to a quiet corner. “How are we on footage?”
“Pretty good. Still waiting on your pièce de résistance.”
“Friday,” I said. “Do or die.”
“Do, and hopefully not die,” he said.
#
“Here’s the deal,” I told Gary, sitting with him at the back of a restaurant. “If my friend comes through, then Yvette is even with you, and I’m out.”
Gary’s eyes narrowed shrewdly as he smiled. “Everyone says that, sweetheart. ‘I’m only in until I get X amount. As soon as I hit X, I’m out.’” He took a hit of scotch. “It gets its claws in you, one way or another. You get addicted to the merchandise or you get addicted to the money.”
“Well, I’m different. I don’t want either.”
“You’ve made a pretty little sum so far, haven’t you?”
“Yes, but I’m not keeping it.”
He stared at me over the rim of his glass as he drank. I could tell he was curious about me. Someone my age who was so sure, so savvy. So practical.
“Your choice,” he said. “But if you worked for me over the summer, you could go to Hollywood with a nice nest egg.”
I knew I could. The temptation was real, and torturous. Every night I weighed it in my mind. Siphon what I could from Hiyam and Gary and their ilk, and go to California with full pockets, without the pressure of fighting other starry-eyed fledglings tooth-and-nail for shitty jobs and shittier apartments? How could Evan say no if I told him he had a year to find a job he truly loved, a year while we lived freely in the sun? But I couldn’t. It was a trap, not a shortcut. The more money you made, the deeper in you got with these scumbags. They’d collect dirt on you. Then it became an endless game of bluffing, everyone constantly poised to destroy each other Game of Thrones-style, and your only choice was to keep working your way up, waiting to be dethroned. That’s what Mom never understood. It was a zero sum game. Your gain came at the expense of someone else, and eventually someone else would gain at your expense. The best you could hope for was to live and keep playing a little longer.
Or you could walk away before they had you that deep.
“I know what I’m doing,” I said.
Gary gave me that sharky smile. “You know, sweetheart, sometimes I think you do.”
#
Hiyam wore a dress conservative by her standards, a heart-shaped neck framing a pillow of satiny bronze cleavage, her hoop earrings flashing. On the cab ride to the restaurant I thought about hooking her up with Park, and began to laugh. Totally his type: the uber-hot alpha girl with a planet-sized ego to match. He’d be trying to ditch her within two minutes flat.
“What’s so funny, O’Malley?”
“Nothing.”
“Then maybe you should shut the fuck up, or I’ll start having second thoughts.”
I wiped the smile off my face. “Hiyam.”
“What?”
I looked her straight in the eye. “I’m going to see Evan tomorrow. And I’m going to fuck the shit out of him, just like I did last weekend.” I raised my eyebrows innocently. “Do you want me to say hi?”
She frowned. This must be confusing for her, the slave showing backbone, willingly divulging information. She didn’t understand I had nothing to fear from her anymore.
“You still see him?”
“Yes.”
“So you really do have a thing. It wasn’t just, ‘Fuck me, Mr. Wilke?’”
“Oh,” I said lazily, “I still say that.”
And I burst out laughing at the look on her face.
“You crazy bitch,” Hiyam said, part misgiving, part awe.
In the restaurant Quinn gave us both pat-downs before we sat, which Hiyam seemed to find equally offensive and erotic. I traded glances with the tall, dark-haired boy in a borrowed waiter’s uniform. Hiyam, being Hiyam, never noticed him. He was just the help.
“Mr. Rivero,” I said, “I’d like you to meet my friend, Hiyam Farhoudi.”