FIFTEEN MISSED CALLS FROM DARREN.
Eight missed calls from Bane.
Five missed calls from Pam.
Darren
Sweetie, I’m so sorry. I snapped. I apologize. Please come back.
Bane
?
Darren
We can work this out. Worse things have happened. My own father used to belt me when I was a kid. It’s no excuse for what I did, but it happens.
Bane
Snowflake, where you at?
Darren
Jesse, please call back.
Pam
You’re not ruining this for me, you little bitch, so you better drag your skinny ass back to El Dorado, because Darren is going crazy and we need to sort this out.
I couldn’t face any of them, but I also had nowhere to go.
Mrs. B was in El Dorado, the last place I wanted to be, so that was out of the question.
Instead, I crashed at Gail’s. She lived in one of the pink-yellow villas on the promenade. Gail was understanding. She didn’t call me a freak when I asked for her sneakers and yoga pants and announced that I was going for a run on the beach before I’d even dumped my backpack in her living room.
“I wish I had the urge to run every time I was anxious, as opposed to polishing off an entire tub of Chunky Monkey.” She sighed dramatically, smiling to herself.
Of course, I didn’t tell her what it was about. I just turned off my phone and asked that if Bane called, to tell him I was not there. She thought my problems were boy-stuff, so she wasn’t too anxious.
“He’s my boss, Jesse.”
“I know,” I said.
“And he’s crazy about you. He would kill me. Do you want me dead?”
I looked at her flatly.
She rolled her eyes. “You better give me a hell of a eulogy, bitch.”
Taking the stairs three at the time, I poured out to the salty fresh air of the promenade and started running. I plugged my headphones in, needing to drown the demons in my head. “Can You Feel My Heart” by Bring Me the Horizon poured through the earbuds. I put all the pieces together. Everything Darren had said and all the things Roman had probably wanted to explain before Darren beat him to it.
SurfCity.
Six-month contract.
Six million dollars.
To coax me out of my shell.
Like I was a fucking crab.
For him to throw into the boiling water while still alive.
Put on a plate.
Crack. Break. Devour.
Nausea crawled from the pit of my stomach up to my throat, but I didn’t slow down. No. I ran faster, feeling my hot tears flying in the air beside me. They felt so hot on my cold face.
In the time after The Incident, I’d always wondered what it was in my judgment that had caused this disaster to happen. She asked for it was thrown in the air too many times. I’d guessed if I’d had my dad around, he’d have said that there was no such thing. He’d been a social worker, a poet, and a dejected drunk. But he was also smart. It wasn’t anything I’d worn or said. It wasn’t my quest to fit into a place that had decided that I was different—much like Roman—before I’d even opened my mouth. It wasn’t because I’d been raped, and yes, I told myself, I had been raped before.
It was simply my messing with the wrong crowd. The wrong crowd who looked like the right one. Pristine white smiles, ironed clothes, good manners, and straight As. Sometimes you just couldn’t know, and I needed to let go.
Let go of the past. It’s no longer yours, Mayra had said to me once, when I’d poked at my missing memory again.
But, of course, my past was mine—the only thing that was mine were the moments that made me who I was. When Bane had come into my life, so had the flashbacks. I liked to think of it as a way for Artem—Pam called him Art, she was embarrassed enough to admit she’d fallen pregnant by a Russian immigrant—to give me some of my sanity back.
I wanted to remember.
My legs hit the sand quietly, and I stared down at my own shadow, trying to regulate my breaths. I miss you, Old Sport.
Everything was falling apart around me, but I felt oddly tranquil. Free.
I looked up at the open sky, and it stared back at me. It was forming into a deeper and deeper shade of dark blue, like water spreading over a cloth, and I was trying to chase an invisible sun at the end of my track.
Why did you have to have an affair, Dad?
But it was obvious, and even I knew it. My mother had never been a good partner. They were never married. The way Pam had explained it to me one drunken night, when she’d stumbled back from her friend’s wedding and come to my room to check that I was still alive, was that they’d met at a dive bar. She’d studied classical literature in college, and Artem knew all about Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. They’d hit it off and ended up in bed the same night. They were both the wrong kind of wasted, and when morning came, so did their senses. He left her dorms, but then when she found out that she was pregnant with me, they’d tried to make it work.
I sometimes thought that my mom had her heart in the right place when all of this had happened, and maybe that’s the worst part.
She’d tried to be a mother, and a wife, but never consistently. She used to kick my dad out of the house for the smallest things. Because he hadn’t taken the trash out or had accidentally cut my bangs wrong or was late from work because he’d gotten caught up on a demanding case. Then the small stuff became big stuff, because he was just too frustrated. He’d drunk too much. He went MIA on us too much. He’d shown her that he loved her less and less. As with all loveless partnerships with children, they’d remained together hoping that someway, somehow, this would disappear.
It had rained the day he died. No, not rained, poured. I remembered thinking God was crying with me. I remembered thinking God was unfair, because I was already unhappy, and I hadn’t even done anything wrong.
At his funeral, there’d been a redheaded woman standing a few graves across, hiding behind big glasses. She was staring at us. I didn’t know why.
I now knew.
Then I remembered Darren stepping into the picture, conveniently close to the time Dad had died. The whole timeline of that year was a blur. Twelve is a bad age to lose a parent. You’re on the verge of a hormonal revolution, your body is blooming, your innocence is wilting, and everything feels personal.
At first, I thrust myself into Darren’s open arms willingly.
I’d been so thirsty for love, so unbearably lonely, I gulped up his attention like it was water in the desert.
And Pam had loved it. Us. For the first time since I was born, she’d looked at me with a smile on her face. Granted, it was because I’d played right into her second-family plan, but she’d enjoyed it nonetheless.
Then it happened.
It happened.
The flashback came, and with it, the terrible realization of how I’d gotten here, to this beach, at this hour, betrayed and stripped out of every meaningful relationship I’d ever had.
That night.
His back.
As he closed the door.
Locked it.
Put the key above the tall cabinet I couldn’t reach.
Turned around and said, lisplessly, “Hello, Jesse.”
I collapsed, my knees hitting the sand, my hands trying to grasp at it like it was ropes I could climb. Ropes leading to the entire flashback that was now so clear, so vivid, so real.
I shouldn’t have been there.
But I was.
I remembered the vodka bottle he placed in front of me.
It’d had a snowflake on it.