I must have scared Heath off last week. He hasn’t come over since he bolted at the sight of my bra, but I’m happier with Vivaldi’s company anyway, perfecting his idea of what spring would sound like. I’m considering moving on into summer when my phone goes off. I stop midmeasure, too aware that the impenetrable mantle I usually shroud myself in during practice time seems to be awfully wispy these days. I glance at the screen and know that I’m looking at Isaac’s number, even if I didn’t program it into my phone. My hands are stopped in place, stuck on an endless F sharp that my lungs refuse to give life to because I’ve been holding my breath to see if he leaves a message.
Disgusted, I pop the clarinet from my mouth and try to wipe away the orange-tinged ring on the reed, a diluted mixture of mom’s spaghetti and my spit. It’s chipped anyway, the ragged end like a fingernail that hasn’t been buffed. I’ll probably find bits of reed in my gums again tomorrow, ground deeply in by hours of practice and then emerging toward the light for me to pluck out. I loosen the ligature and pop the reed free, hands going through the motions blind, because my eyes are on the phone.
“You’re an idiot,” I say to myself.
He doesn’t leave a voice mail, but seconds later a text comes in, the vibration of the phone matching the one in my chest.
we need to talk
I’ve got a nasty response already composed, one I’ve used to reject everyone but Heath since eighth grade. But my hands type something else entirely.
OK when?
I study the text a second before sending it, aware of the door it will open. My thumb makes the decision for me, hitting send before I’ve given full thought to what might lie on the other side.
Now. Face-to-face.
I don’t know what world he lives in, but I’m not a citizen of one where Sasha Stone talks face-to-face with Isaac Harver at eleven at night on a Sunday.
I’m outside
“Bull,” I say under my breath, then I hear the purr of a motorcycle in the driveway. I tear my curtains out of the way to see his silhouette give me a little mock salute. How he found out where I live, I have no clue, but I need to get rid of him before Mom and Dad notice.
I pull on some flip-flops and a hoodie, poking my head into my parents’ room as I head down the hall. Mom’s propped in bed scowling at a romance novel and doesn’t notice when I click her door shut the rest of the way. Dad is sprawled on his recliner in the living room with his earplugs so deep they’ll have to be surgically removed.
The only thing standing between me and Isaac Harver having a conversation by the light of a full moon is common sense, and I pause with my hand on the doorknob. That day at the courthouse Isaac had my attention, and he knew it. My mouth was inches from his and not wanting to retreat before his probation officer interrupted. And that was in a public place. After the dream I had I’m not sure if I trust myself alone in the dark with him, but for some reason that feels like more of an incentive than a warning. My feet are cutting through the yard to the driveway before my brain sends them the signal to reconsider.
“Hey.” His voice is low and conspiratorial, yet filled with complete familiarity, as if he has every right in the world to be leaning against his motorcycle in my driveway, eyes going up and down my body. I cross my arms against my chest, half to cover the fact I’m not wearing a bra, half in fear that my furiously pounding heart is about to leap free.
“Hey,” I say, when it was supposed to be, “What do you want?”
He watches me carefully, and I keep my distance.
“Why are you being so weird?” he asks.
“Me? I’m being weird? You show up at my house past bedtime—”
“Bedtime?” He doesn’t actually laugh, but I can hear amusement in his voice.
“You think this is funny? You somehow get my number and text me out of the blue, show up at my house in the middle of the night, and imply to my boyfriend that you know what color my sheets are.”
I realize too late that I’ve crossed the space in between us while I ranted and that Isaac is a full foot taller than me.
“One”—Isaac holds up a finger in perfect imitation of me—“you gave me your number. Two,” he says loudly before I can interrupt, “eleven ain’t the middle of the night. Three, I wasn’t implying anything about your sheets; I know exactly what color they are. And four, I hate it when he touches you.”
His voice hitches a little on that last statement, the words bouncing off a speed bump of emotion in his throat. I feel my own constricting at the idea that Isaac would have any opinion at all on Heath touching me, let alone hating it. I don’t have a response for this naked feeling, this matter-of-fact statement that Isaac throws out there without any thought to his own defenses. I’ve had battlements built around my feelings for so long I don’t know how to react to bare honesty.
“Something you ain’t telling me?”
“Aren’t,” I correct automatically, and he flinches.
“Fuck you. Never mind. Jesus.” He’s turning away from me, climbing back onto his bike, and I feel panic rising, a soft crescendo starting in my belly and bursting out of my throat, my hands following my words.
“Wait. Stop.” I grab him, my hand closing around his wrist, the cuff of his leather jacket rubbing against my skin. He doesn’t pull away, just stares at me with a careful blankness, one I know well. It’s the face of a closing door, one that will remain shut once it clicks home.
“Listen . . . Isaac.” I don’t let go of his arm, and I can feel his pulse jump when I say his name. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
I haven’t started a sentence with “I don’t know” since kindergarten. I can barely get the words out and have to force them, a reverse of the time Heath talked me into trying calamari and I choked it down. The words are as awkward as the squid had been, rubbery and unnatural in my mouth. But I said them, and I said them to someone who may as well be a stranger.
And maybe that’s what made it easier.
Or maybe it’s something else—the feel of Isaac’s skin against mine, the way his eyes are drinking me in, like if he looks away I might disappear. Maybe it’s because he’s turned his palm upward against mine and his thumb is making little circles at the base, making my blood pound through my veins more quickly until our pulses are synchronized, hearts beating in time.
“You don’t know what’s going on about what?” he asks, anger evaporated. “Is this about . . .” He stops, bites his bottom lip. “What’s going on with your heart? I heard your—I heard him say something Friday.”
“My heart? No. I . . . I don’t know what to do,” I say, and my face contorts, muscles pulling my mouth downward into a sag that feels like it will never stop, my eyes squeezing shut against the pressure of tears. I turn away in embarrassment, but Isaac’s hands are on me in a second, pulling me into him, into the warm nook under his chin and against his chest. A place I somehow fit perfectly.
“You can tell me,” he says, and I listen to his voice echoing inside his chest. “If it’s over, then that’s it. But I’m going to make you say it.”
I shudder against him, partially in fear at all his words imply, but also because I may be losing something I never knew I had. I step back from him, my hands sliding down his arms. Our fingers intertwine automatically, out of habit, and it feels as natural as holding a clarinet. And that’s how I know we’ve done this before, stood here staring at each other in the dark of night. I’ve touched him and been touched, and as I feel our blood leaping toward each other through the pulse of our hands, I know we both want whatever this is to continue.
“You’re right,” I say. “We do need to talk.” I glance back at my house, which is lit up against the night, warm and welcoming. I don’t want to go inside.
“Can we go somewhere?”
He pretends shock. “In the middle of the night?”
I take a smack at him, but he evades it easily, like a dance we’ve performed before. And I know the next step is for me to swing up behind him onto the bike, the warmth of his back against my chest, the cold fingers of the wind in my hair as he heads for the old trestle bridge on the county line that trains stopped crossing twenty years ago. It’s a skeleton in the woods, one whose bones go deep into the ground, resolutely doing its job even though the heaviest weight it’s held in two decades is the aftermath of a kegger.
There’s no one there now though. We have the whole bridge to ourselves as Isaac eases the bike over the boards of the old footpath, their unevenness sending small shivers up our bodies, mine shaking more than his as my fear of heights settles in. We’re three hundred feet in the air, the river below and the only thing separating us from it is a safety barrier built as an excuse for jobs during the Depression.
Isaac swings off the bike as calmly as if we were in a parking lot, taking my hand to help me. He doesn’t let go, leading me to the edge where he sits, legs dangling into empty space and elbows resting on the bottom rung of the wooden fence that started deteriorating the second the tree was cut down almost a century ago. I sit down beside him because I know he thinks I won’t.
“Sasha Stone.” He shakes his head, as if my name is amusing to him somehow, while lighting a fresh cigarette.
My feet are dangling over rushing water, I’m sitting next to Isaac Harver above a three-hundred-foot drop and getting lung cancer from secondhand smoke. Not one of my better days. Yet, I feel awesome.
“Yeah, I hate it when he touches you,” Isaac repeats what he said in my driveway, as if our conversation wasn’t broken by a midnight ride to a broken bridge. And I remember why I’m here. And want to be here. At least, part of me does.
“So what’s up, lady?” he asks, smoke that smells just like my bedroom pillow exhaling with the words.
He might be able to say what he’s feeling as easily as he smokes, but it’s something I’ve got to warm up to. So I stall.
“If I’m Lady, what’s that make you? The Tramp?” I ask.
“Definitely.” He says it with total assurance, and any barriers I had inside of me come down with his conviction.
“You know what color my sheets are,” I say.
“Yep.”
“And I gave you my number.”
“Uh-huh.”
He offers his half-smoked cigarette to me, the tip bobbing in between us as I shove it back toward him.
“What? You don’t want to smoke with me?”
“No.” It’s an easy answer, one trained into me long ago.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s bad,” I say automatically, the abject truth so obvious I don’t understand why he starts laughing.
“It’s bad,” he repeats, taking a long draw, then flicking what’s left into the river.
“Littering is bad too,” I tell him, but there’s not a lot of bite in my words because his hands are on my face, framing my cheekbones and trailing a line down toward my lips.
“I must be a pretty bad guy then,” he says quietly. And for whatever reason I can’t agree with that. Maybe it’s because his hands are callused but his touch soft, or that his eyes are a cold shade of blue but somehow look more inviting than my own house.
“You’re not,” I say.
“And you don’t know what to make of that, do you?”
I don’t, but admitting that isn’t easy either. I pull back from his touch, suddenly wishing I had taken the offer of a cigarette just so I had something to do with my hands as I explain to him about the woman I’m supposed to become, an older version of Sasha Stone who has everything she deserves for doing all the good things and none of the bad. The girl who gets what she wants because she always does the right thing.
“And that stuff matters,” I say. “I’ve been following my class rank since seventh grade, it’s that important to me.”
“Oh yeah? And what are you?”
“I’m number one,” I tell him, my chin lifting up as I wait for him to tease me about it.
“Number one, huh?” He doesn’t disappoint, raising his middle finger. “So what?”
“Being valedictorian will help me get into a good school,” I say, and he rolls his eyes.
So I tell him about college and how those of us who go pick our universities, most of them yoked to our careers. We add them to the timeline as we fulfill our destinies within the machine of progress. Class rings become graduation caps, college degrees swapped out for doctor whites or, in my case, a sensible black pantsuit that will set off my clarinet nicely on the stage.
Except lately I’ve been thinking that pantsuits are a little too sensible, and maybe I want to wear a pencil skirt that makes Isaac Harver look at me.
“And that’s a problem,” I tell him. “Because it’s not me.”
Isaac makes a noise in his throat like maybe he understands, but then I realize he was just clearing it because the next thing he does is spit into the river.
“That’s disgusting,” I tell him.
“So all this time you been telling yourself you get a reward for being good. Know who else thinks like that?”
“Who?”
“A dog,” he says, looking at me hard. “A dog that’s been trained to act a certain way because someone told him so. Thing is, you can train a dog right, but you can also train it wrong, know what I’m saying?”
“You mean like dogs in a fighting ring?” I ask.
“What? No. I mean . . .” He trails off, eyes on the river and the rippling line of light the moon casts there. “More like, okay, so you teach a dog not to shit in the house by rewarding it when it goes outside, right? But you could switch it up, train a dog the wrong way by giving it a treat whenever it pisses in the kitchen.”
“Why would anyone ever do that?”
“I’m not saying they would, I’m saying they could,” Isaac goes on. “The dog knows the difference between good and bad only because of who trained it, and the trainer decided for the dog what was right and what was wrong.”
“So you think I’m just a trained dog?”
“I think you jump through the hoops real nice,” Isaac says, and it’s so close to how I feel about school that a shiver runs through me.
“And maybe I don’t like seeing a girl who’s smart enough to make up her own mind swallow what everyone tells her hook, line, and sinker.”
“You’re mixing the metaphor,” I tell him. “I went from being a dog to a fish.”
“Fuck metaphors,” he says, and lights another cigarette.
“And I don’t do what everyone tells me,” I argue. “Dad wanted me to be an accountant, and I’m going to major in music.” I don’t add so there, but it’s all over my voice.
“I didn’t say you do what everyone tells you,” he clarifies, and somehow I feel like my tone didn’t quite get through to him because he definitely thinks he won that one.
“You always do what good people are supposed to do,” he goes on. “But I don’t think you always want to. There’s a little bit of bad in you, Sasha Stone. And I think it needs to get out more.”
This time I take the cigarette when he offers it to me. I have no idea what I’m doing, how to hold it, how much to breathe in, whether to leave the smoke in my mouth, my throat, or my lungs. I end up coughing it all back out in a cloud, and dropping the cigarette as I hack. The ember falls between my feet, its light disappearing long before the river extinguishes it.
“You’ll get better at it,” Isaac assures me. “If you want to.”
I think about the future Sasha Stone in her sensible clothing, her current boyfriend refusing to take her virginity. Pins and needles have taken over my feet, and I sag against Isaac, suddenly tired.
“I want to,” I say, staring down at the black abyss between my feet. “If you’ll be my Virgil.”
“I’m definitely not one of those,” Isaac says, and I smack him again. This time he catches my hand and keeps it.
“Vir-gil,” I clarify. “He was Dante’s guide to the underworld in The Divine Comedy. Have you ever read it?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s bad,” Isaac says, in yet another dead-on impersonation of me.
I want to hit him, but instead I start laughing, the cold night air invigorating. “You read The Inferno and I’ll smoke a whole cigarette. How’s that?”
“Deal,” Isaac says, pulling me closer against him as a gust comes up off the river.
We share heat for a moment, my forehead resting against his tattoo, his pulse beating against my eyelid.
“I had a dream about you,” I say.
“Oh yeah?”
I tell him about taking my shirt off and how it hit the fan, and we ended up on the bed. I don’t explain that I tried to reenact it later with Heath and achieved different results.
Isaac pulls away from me, eyebrows drawn together. “See this is where you start to worry me, lady. ’Cause I had that dream too. But I was actually there and you sure as hell weren’t asleep.”
I sigh and drop my head into his chest.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” I say. “Take me home. There’s something I need to show you.”