—5—
My bare feet propped on the dashboard, sun blazing in my heart-shaped glasses (I bought a pair before we left), singing along at the top of my lungs to Modest Mouse’s “Float On” as we drove up I-55: this was going to be an awesome day.
Things I learned about my teacher: He had pretty good taste in music, despite being born in 1980. He could cook and had been dying to cook for me. He was terrified of geese. (“Bad experience in a petting zoo.” “How old were you?” “Twenty-six.” I laughed.) He’d never been married, but was briefly engaged. (“College mistake. She cheated on me with her psych professor.” Awkward smile. Subject change.) He cried every time he watched Casablanca. (“We’ll watch it sometime.” He’d said that already. I think it made him nervous.)
Hot asphalt cut through woods so green they looked unreal. At the end of summer everything swelled with life, almost grotesque, bloated and overripe. The sky was so full and pregnant you could punch a hole in it and douse the world with blue paint. I’d been to St. Louis as a kid for a Cards game, but had only a vague memory of a giant pretzel I held with both hands and Mom letting me sip her beer, my nose wrinkling. I watched for the Arch like a hawk, occasionally sitting up at a silvery glint in the distance.
“Is that it?” I said.
Evan just smiled.
We followed I-55 up the Mississippi, through lazy suburbs rolling into city blocks. Finally the Arch appeared, like magic: a huge silver ribbon arcing over the skyline, stropped with white licks of sunlight. It looked like a handle on the world, as if God could reach down and pick us up and fling us into deep space.
Then we were in the city proper. St. Louis was a knot of rivers tied into a loose horseshoe heart. Sun baked the streets, everything glazed with light and soaking with color. Skyscrapers scaled in mirrored glass tinted sky blue. Old red brick factories. A boulevard with an artery of thick lush green running down the middle. People everywhere, wearing shades and drowsy smiles. I couldn’t peel my face off the window.
“Hungry?” Evan said.
We found a restaurant with a patio. He took my hand when we got out of the car and I froze, instinct kicking in.
“No one knows us here,” he said.
I relaxed, but a tiny live wire still vibrated somewhere in me.
We ordered scallops and a bottle of white wine and I had the most adult meal of my life. I savored the sweet buttery meat, the dry clarity of the wine. Evan fed me scallops by hand, his fingertips brushing my lips, my teeth lightly scraping his skin, goosebumps racing up the backs of my arms and legs, and then he leaned over and kissed me in front of everyone. My heart didn’t know where to settle in my chest. It still felt like we held a secret, but at the same time I was beginning to accept this openness. I ran a hand over his thigh under the wrought-iron table and his muscle tensed. His eyes, usually so changeable, burned gas flame blue.
After lunch we walked around downtown, Evan’s arm casually circling my waist. Another first in my adult life: window-shopping with my boyfriend.
Was he my boyfriend? Secret lover? Person abusing his position of authority or trust?
“You’d look amazing in that,” he said, eyeing a diaphanous sundress, sheer and breezy.
A few stores down, I said, “You’d look amazing in that,” nodding at a store clerk stripping a mannequin.
Evan gave me that sly smile that I felt as a warmth deep in my belly.
I glanced at our reflection in the plate glass as we walked on. If only you could see this, Wesley, I thought. I’m not ashamed at all.
We stopped to listen to a guy busking with an acoustic guitar and a voice like liquid velvet. His skin shone russet-brown in the sun. He sang without seeming to care whether anyone listened, his eyes half-closed, his smile private and inward. I felt like a voyeur watching, but couldn’t look away. That’s how I wanted to be. Creating something beautiful without caring who noticed. Doing it for myself, for sheer joy.
When the guy started singing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” I nearly lost it. I pulled out a bill without looking at it and dropped it into his guitar case. His smile flickered at me for a moment, then receded back into itself.
I walked away, trying to swallow the tightness in my throat.
“What was that about?” Evan said when he caught up.
I shook my head. How do you explain that everything is too beautiful for words?
If Wesley had been here, he would’ve filmed the moment, captured it. Raising the camera was his first impulse; mine was to feel, to let the world crash against my skin.
What if I was wrong about what I wanted to do with my life? What if I really just wanted to live, and hadn’t truly come alive until I met Evan?
I stood in the middle of downtown St. Louis, staring at sun-beaten concrete.
“Maise.”
I raised my face.
He didn’t say anything else. We stood there as people streamed around us, like we had in the hallway at school. My brain simmered with wine and summer heat. I felt lost.
Evan did something he couldn’t have done back home. He wrapped his arms around me, pressing my face against his.
When we returned to the car I felt lighter, unburdened. We drove up to the Tivoli Theatre, an old-time movie house with a huge neon sign and a legit marquee. Stepping inside took us straight back to the Golden Age: velvet ropes and red carpet, classic Hollywood posters. The auditorium looked like a ball room with chandeliers dripping from vaulted ceilings, rows of plush seats, even a curtain over the screen. I stared at everything, starry-eyed. Evan watched me.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
He smiled. “Tell me about it.”
Remember the rollercoaster?
I zoned out during the film, which was a lot of vague, dreamy dialogue anyway. I was thinking about how far I’d come in five weeks, and how far I would go until I reached an ending of some kind, and Evan’s hand, warm and solid, holding mine.
I was quiet in the car on the way to meet The Friend.
“He’s sort of a douche,” Evan said apologetically. “You won’t miss anything.”
Because they were going to meet in a club, where I couldn’t go, because I was eighteen. Because I was pretending to be an adult in his world full of actual adults.
He left me with his car. “Two hours, I promise. Not a minute more.”
Quick kiss. His hand on the side of my face. An earnest look into my eyes.
Then it was just me and the stuffed pony, alone in the city.
“You need a name,” I said.
A hundred names leapt out from the streets of St. Louis.
“Louis,” I said.
My creativity was legendary.
Louis and I drove around aimlessly for a while. Twilight came on faster here within the forest of steel and glass, neon signs popping out, streetlights making cigarette burns in the darkness. The city smelled like hot asphalt and the weedy tang of the Mississippi. There was something melancholy and restless in me, magnified by seeing people together, laughing, holding hands, free with each other. I ditched the car in a parking garage, leaving Louis perched atop the wheel. I wasn’t far from the river.
I walked past the Old Courthouse, the great dome lit up and the molding looking like a wedding cake, with the Arch shining behind it. The closer I got, the higher it seemed to rise into the sky. The city thrummed around me, a live passionate thing full of hearts and hands and desires, and all of it seemed to concentrate here in a collective defiance of gravity. I took a photo from a nearby park: a silver bend in the night sky, the trail of something that had tried to escape the earth but not quite made it.
Okay, so I was being morose.
I sat on a bench in the park. A dad and his little girl walked by, the daughter gripping a handful of black-eyed Susans. She grinned at me shyly as if I’d seen a secret. Her dad smiled, too, but his smile dipped to the bare legs I crossed before he looked away.
For the first time in ages, I didn’t feel good about that. I felt confused. I was eighteen, out in a big city doing whatever the fuck I wanted with an older man, but I was too young to go with him to a club, or to have my own real place, real job, real life. Wesleypedia told me once that human brains don’t fully develop until age twenty-five. Seven more years until I was a full person.
What the hell am I? I thought. Too old to be a real teenager, too young to drink. Old enough to die in a war, fuck grown men, and be completely confused about what I was doing with my life.
You’re right, Evan, I thought. No one knows us here. I don’t even know myself.
I thought about the man with the guitar. A nobody on a street corner, but better than a million somebodies on TV. He didn’t care—he did it for love. Love was what made it good and beautiful and ephemeral. And I thought about the man I was waiting for, the way my eyes had been gradually opening, sincerity replacing sarcasm, the way I felt I was constantly waking up and yet slipping deeper into a beautiful dream.
And it hit me—what my semester project was going to be about.
#
By the time Evan called, the night was heavy and complete. He asked where I was and said he’d meet me. I was nervous about seeing him again, because something inside me had changed. An acknowledgment of things forming and fitting together into definite shapes. I thought it would show on my face.
He got out of a cab and my heart pulsed in my throat.
“How did it go?” I said.
His hair looked messier now. His collar was open wider, his skin gleaming with a fine rime of sweat. He put his hands on my shoulders, his fingers flexing. “It’s a deal. Two hundred a month and it’s ours every weekend.”
So we’re doing this, I thought. We’re going to move our affair across state lines. Was it legal in Missouri? Did it matter? We could be ourselves here the way we couldn’t in Illinois. No worries about who would see us, recognize us. I felt my heart echoing through my whole body. Jesus, I am actually going to do this with him.
I let my breath out. “That’s way cheaper than Lolita motels.”
He laughed. “I don’t care what it costs. I care that you get to be yourself. That we don’t have to hide.”
He was slightly drunk. I felt a twinge of—something—at the fact that he was drunk and I wasn’t, but I let it go, because my giddiness was greater. This man didn’t just want to fuck me. We were making plans for some kind of actual, lunatic life together.
You were so wrong, Wesley.
“Let’s go look at this ridiculous thing,” I said, taking Evan’s hand. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
The Arch was freakishly huge. Each leg was as large as a house, plated in sheets of stainless steel the length of cars. Looking up gave me instant vertigo. You had to admire this kind of pointless audacity, planting something so bold and stunning and utterly useless right in the navel of America. It was supposed to be a monument to going west, growing the country, Lewis and Clark and Manifest Destiny, but all I saw was a big gorgeous fuck-you to the universe. The steel was inscribed with graffiti from the ground to well over my head.
“Typical,” I said. “Someone makes something saying ‘I was here,’ then a million people put their own ‘I was here’ on it. We’re so vain.”
Evan eyed me wryly. “You’re so cynical.”
“Not true.”
“Prove it.”
I took his face in my hands and pulled it down to me. Looked at him the way he’d looked at me earlier, my hands full of fire and my skin a veil of flame. Then I kissed him. There was alcohol on his breath and smoke and cologne on his clothes and I didn’t care. He put his arms around me, pressing me against the steel. My eyes closed but I felt that knocked-over sense of vertigo again. My heart curved up into the sky just like the absurd beautiful thing behind us. I turned my face away, laughing, breathless.
“Did I prove it?”
He turned my face back to his and kissed me again, fiercely.
His hands slid to the small of my back. He pulled me into him. I kissed him like his lips were water and I could not get enough of it. We were part of this place, the blood thrashing inside the steel heart of this city, the crimson in its stone veins. We were the cells burning like stars. People like us. Passion like ours.
I didn’t even realize there were other people around until I laid my head back against the metal. Two men strolled past, middle-aged, hand in hand, and one smiled at us. And I knew then that no one saw anything wrong. They only saw two people who were crazy about each other.
I could get used to this.
I asked a woman to take a picture of us beneath the Arch. I looked at the camera, but Evan looked at me.
“Two hours until we’re home,” I said as we walked out of the park, arm in arm.
Evan gave me an unreadable glance. He didn’t say anything.
We kissed again in the garage, and when he leaned me against the driver’s window and pressed his thigh between my legs, I gave serious consideration to another first: sex in a parking garage. I was wet and he knew it, and he was grinding his leg between mine and making me insane and sullen and miserable with want. My wiser self won out. We were doing things right. No need to risk everything now, on the cusp of…getting away with it.
Still there. That kernel of wrongness. That thing I didn’t entirely want to lose, because the nasty little Lolita in me liked it.
“I’ll drive,” I breathed against his ear.
We were quiet on the way back. A tense, moody quiet at first, almost hating each other for not consummating this awful desire. Then the miles smoothed it away, and the starlight and tail lights soothed us. Evan had his eyes on me most of the ride. After a while he ran fingertips over my ear, my jaw, my collarbone. Not distractingly. Just enough to draw a pleasant shiver. To keep me awake.
It was late when I finally pulled into town. Before I could head for my house, he gave me directions to his.
My heart sped up. It didn’t make sense to go there first. How would I get home?
Answer: I wasn’t going home.
“Tomorrow’s a school day,” I said, staring at the windshield. “I have a class with you.”
His hand circled the back of my neck. “I need you tonight.”
Has there ever been a more effective line in the history of pickup lines than “I need you?”
My teacher lived in a second-floor apartment in a staple-shaped group of buildings surrounding a parking lot, as if it were some kind of gemstone, something to gaze upon admiringly. There were other cars in the lot, other eyes in the windows. We walked inside without touching, but his stare was palpable. I followed him upstairs. My mind checked off every mistake I’d made since the beginning: kissing him in school, Wesley seeing the call from E, Britt handing Evan my phone as he took me home, and now this. Were we sabotaging it? Were we trying to heighten the danger to eke out some pathetic erotic thrill? Did we want someone to know, to stop us?
In retrospect, you know all the answers. You know the shadowy throes of your heart.
In the moment, you’re a teenage girl walking into your teacher’s apartment and your heart is beating like hummingbird wings, a wild red blur in your chest.
He opened the door.
When I stepped inside my whole body tingled, as if I’d passed through an enchanted gate. The lights in the parking lot filled the rooms with a soft sepia wash. Smell of new paper and fresh laundry. Everything looked simple and clean and sedate. No messy effusion of emotion, no clash of warring desires like in my whirlwind-wrecked room, that spiral galaxy of torn-out magazine pages and printed quotes from the internet and the random debris of my childhood, swirling around an explosive center. This place was fully formed, solid. I was a trespasser here. A girl spy in the land of adults. The crescent moon winked through balcony doors and I crept toward it, and there they were, those carnival lights he’d watched, thinking of other people’s happiness, of me.
Wish you were here, I thought. And now I am.
Hands around my waist.
His body against mine, warm and hard. I turned my head to one side and his face grazed my cheek. The tickle of his stubble sent a charge through me, my nerves lighting up like neon. We kissed the corners of each other’s mouths, his hands slipping under my shirt, running over my belly, the arch of my ribs. When he reached my breasts his fingers became possessive, rough. His body was rigid and unyielding behind me, his hands almost tearing at my flesh—it felt like he wanted to take me apart. That meanness I thought we’d left in St. Louis returned with a vengeance. I dragged my hand up the inside of his leg, grabbing his dick through his jeans, and he took my earlobe between his teeth, painfully. I felt the shock in every extremity, my toes, my nipples, my fingertips. I dug my nails into his thigh.
We made our way to the bedroom in fits and starts, stopping to tear clothes from each other. Even when I was naked he seemed to want more, wanted to strip me to the bone. He kissed me so hard it left my lips raw, the inside of my mouth bruised, and I couldn’t get enough. I wanted it rougher, harder. Everything that had stewed in me all day came boiling to the surface. He was driving me back toward his bed when I grasped his face, making him look at me.
“Who am I to you?” I said, my voice hoarse. “Maise, or your student?”
The animal single-mindedness lifted for a moment. His chest heaved, but his eyes were clear and colorless in the moonlight. “Both,” he whispered.
I felt chills.
“Then fuck me, Mr. Wilke.”
He turned me around to face his bed. My heart hammered. I knew what to do. Got on my knees, palms splayed across the sheet. My hair fell around my face. The sheet wrinkled in my hands, moonlight scrawling over it in wet white ridges. I felt totally vulnerable and terrified and perfectly calm all at once. Noises behind me, a drawer sliding, something crinkling, then his weight and heat were pressing me down into the bed. He clutched my hips. I felt his stomach tighten against my back, his abs furrowing, and even though I knew it was coming I gasped when he thrust inside me, my hold on myself unraveling, my hands and feet instantly going numb. He held me tightly in place and fucked me slowly and it felt like I was coming apart from the inside. My fingers curled in the sheet. His stubble rubbed against my shoulder blade, his breath hot on my skin. As soon as it evaporated that spot turned cool until he breathed again. We’d been doing this to each other for weeks, but this was the first time we acknowledged that there was an element of wrongness in it. That we liked the wrongness. I finally understood what he meant when he said wish you were here—he wanted to do this to me, take me into his home as his student and fuck me on my hands and knees. Possess me completely. His hands moved to my breasts and he pulled me against him and fucked me deeper and it almost hurt. So intense, too intense to feel directly, just a sensation of being full to my core, of my body wrapping itself with crazy anaconda strength around him, taking him in as deeply as I could until I thought I was going to scream, cry, cease to exist. At some point I became aware that I was saying, “Fuck me, Mr. Wilke, God, fuck me, fuck me,” in a high pleading voice, an edge of my old accent bleeding through, and that the sharpness on my shoulder was his teeth. I couldn’t come and I didn’t want to. I just wanted to be dominated. So I called him by his teacher’s name and let my tense numb body slap against his and when he groaned and slowed down I said, “Please don’t stop, please,” and he didn’t, and he didn’t hold back, every muscle coiling, giving all of himself to me.
There’s a very strange clarity when you get close but don’t come. Your whole body feels like an exposed nerve, everything painful and grating but also miraculously clear. You don’t have that sadness, the post-coital tristesse. The world is hard-edged and bright.
Evan held me, one arm around my hips, the other at my neck. His chest rose and fell against my back. Neither of us moved for a while. We knew what we were going to have to face when we looked at each other.
Our bodies separated. I sat on the bed, crossing my legs self-consciously. He sat beside me. We both faced the wall. The refrigerator buzzed in the kitchen. A man shouted unintelligibly outside.
“I’m sorry,” Evan said.
“For not making me come, or for being my teacher?”
He was silent a long moment. “Both.”
“Don’t be.”
He looked at me. I kept looking straight ahead.
“I’ve felt like this since the beginning,” I said. We spoke in whispers, for some reason. Maybe truths weren’t as harsh that way. “I wanted you because you were older. I don’t feel anything for boys my age. And when I found out you were my teacher, something clicked in me. It felt wrong in the best possible way. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
Now I looked at him. “You like me because I’m young.”
“That’s part of it.”
“A big part.”
“Yes,” he said, and I smiled a little.
“Good,” I said. “I like that you’re kind of fucked up, because I’m kind of fucked up.” I uncrossed my legs, slipping one behind his. Ran my toes up the light hair on his calf. “I’ve been obsessed with you since that first night. Not just with you, but the way you make me feel.”
“How do I make you feel?”
Alive. Real. Valuable. Whole.
“Like myself,” I said. “More than I’ve ever been.”
He touched my cheek lightly. “Who are you?”
“Your student.”
He shook his head. “No. You’re the one teaching me.”
My smile became full and genuine. I wrapped my arms around him, and we lay back on the bed together, quiet and calm, moonlight draping over our bare skin in a luminous sheet.
“Stay here tonight,” he said after a while.
The first wrong note of the evening. It jangled inside me, discordant. Stop, I told myself. Why are you scared? Has he given you any indication he’s going to leave you? What are you afraid of, being loved?
“I’ve been gone all day. My mom will freak out. I need to butter her up for St. Louis.”
I need do no such thing. Mom hadn’t cared where I spent the night when I was thirteen, and she sure as hell didn’t care now.
Evan kissed my forehead, but I saw the disappointment in his eyes.
“Next weekend,” I said, “we’ll be doing this in a new city.”
Waking up in the morning together. I had never woken up in the morning with anyone else.
“Are you nervous?” he said.
“No.”
That’s another thing about lies: if you convince yourself they’re true, they become true. A lie is a discrepancy of belief, not fact.
#
Wesley skipped Film Studies on Monday. I looked for him in the cafeteria, but he wasn’t there either. Maybe he’d ditched the whole day.
It felt depressingly empty without him.
Britt and Hiyam didn’t mention the party.
Mr. Wilke smiled at me, relaxed, peaceful. Beatific.
I hit the computer lab after school.
My phone took shitty video, but it wouldn’t matter for this project. This was about impressions, experiences. The feeling of being there, the blurry bright overwhelming way real life looked as you lived it, not the surgical precision of HD after the fact. I scrubbed through my clips, looking for the bones of the story I knew was there.
Somehow, the photos captured what I was looking for better. Receding tail lights on a dark street. Evan’s back, roped with muscle, his arms raised as he put on his shirt in a motel. The little girl with the black-eyed Susans, walking with her dad beneath the Gateway Arch. A series of leavings, endings.
My old life ending. A new one beginning.
There was more to film than live action. I put headphones on, streaming music from my phone, and started scribbling.
you don’t want friends
wise girl lovely too
i’m looking for some coke
just a trail of fire in my hands
I set the text over the photos in a video editing app. Each image flashed onscreen for a couple of seconds, then cut to the next. Tail lights/trail of fire. Little girl/looking for some coke. Jarring. Weird. Kinda disturbingly beautiful. Closer to what I was trying to say, but I still wasn’t quite sure what that was yet. Like Siobhan said, maybe it would emerge.
I missed Siobhan.
And her stupid, stupidly-in-love-with-me son.
#
“I’m cooking tomorrow night,” Mom announced when I got home Thursday.
I flung my bookbag at the couch. This week had been a trial. Evan and I thought it best not to see each other outside of school until the weekend, in case anyone had noticed our slip-ups. Wesley thought it best not to see me inside or outside of school until I dropped dead.
I was in no mood for Mom’s tweaked-out bursts of chemical enthusiasm and trying to be a Real Mom.
“I’ve got plans this weekend,” I said.
“I bought food already. Steak’s marinating.” She pronounced it meer-uh-nay-ten.
I looked at her dully. “The only thing you know how to cook is meth.”
She did not find that amusing.
“What are you even cooking for?” I said, grabbing a jar of sweet pickles from the fridge.
“We’re having company.”
I froze. “Who?”
“Mr. Gary Rivero.”
“Who is Mr. Gary Rivero?”
“A very important man. A very wealthy man.”
I narrowed my eyes as I laid out bread for a sandwich. “That doesn’t sound shady at all.”
Mom sat at the kitchen table, sparking her lighter.
“Could you not smoke in the house, please?” I said.
“I ain’t.”
She stirred the ashes in a terracotta pot. I gave up trying to get her to quit smoking indoors; my only condition was she not do it while we breathed the same air. Sometimes I could not believe this woman and I shared DNA.
“Mr. Rivero is very interested in meeting you,” she said.
“Stop calling him Mr. Rivero. That sounds like a teacher.” I did not like that association attaching itself to her skeezeball friends. “Why does he want to meet me?”
“Because I told him what a smart, pretty girl you are. How you’re going to college and all.”
I paused in peanut buttering my bread and glanced at her. That was almost a compliment. My mother’s compliments were never without ulterior motive. “Why does he care if I’m smart?”
“I don’t know, babe. Maybe you should talk to him and find out.”
I had zero intention of doing that. “Like I said, I’ve got plans. I’ll be gone all weekend.”
“Where you going?”
“None of your business.”
Mom scooted her chair back and loomed. She had a good three or four inches on me. Mentally, rationally, I knew this woman couldn’t do shit to me. But I imprinted on her, and my brain remembers how to light up the fear circuits when she glowers.
“Long as you live under my roof, everything’s my business.”
I couldn’t meet her stare. I addressed the peanut butter. “I’m going out of town with a friend.”
“A friend? Your boyfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“That man who was here the other night?”
“Yeah.”
She mused over this, her makeup almost moving in sync with her facial features.
“Well, I just need you here Friday night. You can go first thing Saturday.”
God fucking dammit. This was not worth fighting over. Fighting with Mom tended to result in the molecular destabilization of household appliances. Lately, she had made threats against my laptop.
“Fine,” I said, slapping pickles into the peanut butter.
Mom finally noticed what I was making. She frowned at the sandwich, then at me, and said with a dry, croaking laugh, “What are you, pregnant?”
Heart failure.
It only lasted a moment, and then I laughed back, right in her face. She couldn’t tell the difference between sincerity and sarcasm anyway. Birth control was one thing I’d gotten right in my ridiculous life. I never missed a pill, and Evan was paranoid about protection for some reason I’d eventually cajole out of him. That, at least, would not be the drama that destroyed us.
Still smiling, I said, “What are you, a mom?”
#
By Friday afternoon I was utterly miserable. No one to talk to or sleep with or bother all week. Being miserable is even worse without an audience. I would’ve welcomed Wesley’s senior citizen wisecracks right then. Go ahead and talk about how decrepit my mystery boyfriend is, I thought. The same one whose jokes you laughed at third period. The same one Hiyam was imagining fucking in her head.
Wesley had found some clandestine place to eat lunch, so I stopped showing at the cafeteria, too. It was a bad idea, reckless, but I spent that lunch period in Evan’s empty class, mostly talking and only kissing him for about five minutes out of forty.
“This is poor risk management,” he said, pressing me against the whiteboard during those five minutes.
“I want to fuck you in this classroom,” I said.
He exhaled slowly through his teeth.
“On this desk,” I said. “While you’re wearing your shirt and tie, and I’m wearing nothing but socks.”
He kissed me to make me stop talking.
Before I left, he said, “This is torture.”
“I could always drop out.”
He looked horrified.
“Kidding,” I said. “Relax, guy.” But I ran my hand up his arm wistfully, adding, “I can’t wait till tomorrow.”
He embraced me, and said into my ear, “I’m going to fuck the shit out of you.”
I lost my breath.
It was crude, it was unexpected, and it set me on fucking fire.
#
Mom insisted I wear the new clothes she’d bought. Suspiciously pleasant aromas leaked from the kitchen. It was possible she was concocting something actually edible in her cauldrons.
I was 99.98% sure Gary Rivero was a druglord. The 0.02% was the possibility he was my father, reentering my life at the precise moment I cauterized the wound he’d left in me. Still, because I was forced into this and because fucking with middle-aged men was my favorite pastime, I put on a wispy skirt that showed generous thigh, a snug tank, and a brass locket from Nan. No makeup but a dash of eyeshadow that made my eyes look feral, staring eerily from a shadowed cave. My hair decided to behave and do the milk chocolate waterfall thing. My body looked sleek and tight and new. I took a selfie and sent it to Evan.
Can I kidnap you? he texted.
Is it kidnapping if I give permission?
A delay before he responded. Sometimes I can’t believe you’re real.
I felt a weird, bittersweet sort of elation. Me either, I thought.
Mom didn’t react when I came downstairs except to hand me a bowl of potatoes with the instruction, “Peel.”
I hadn’t bothered painting my nails, so I didn’t care. I was not going to let Mr. Rivero think I gave more than the minimum Mom-mandated fuck about him. It irked me that she’d actually made an effort at cleaning. For once, the house smelled more like Pine Sol than smoke and despair.
“So how do you know this guy?” I said, shaving potato skins into a pile.
“Work associate.”
“Does he run a cartel?”
Mom clanged a lid onto a steaming pot. “Rule number one: no business discussion unless Mr. Rivero brings it up first.”
“He’s not even here yet.”
My logic did not move her.
“If this gets sketchy, I’m out of here,” I warned, handing her the bowl. I watched her dirty up the ladles and dishes no one had touched in years. “Mom.”
She looked at me. Her makeup was understated tonight—she didn’t quite look like a corpse who’d escaped from a funeral home.
“Thank you for the clothes.”
Her eyebrows made a sad arrowhead pointing up. Jesus, please don’t say you love me.
“You look beautiful, babe,” she said, and dropped the potatoes in the pot.
I left the room, relieved and slightly queasy. I didn’t want to hear her lie. I wanted her to actually love me, but I guess “you look beautiful” was about as close as I’d get. Some girls had mothers who never called them beautiful but swore their love up and down. It’s all the same, really. All bullshit.
I answered the door when the bell rang.
Two men stood on our porch, both in dress clothes, no ties. The older one wore a suit coat. I immediately pegged him as Mr. Rivero. Salt and pepper hair, dusky Italian complexion, aquiline nose, Mediterranean green eyes. Very Robert DeNiro-ish. Handsome and slim for his age. He smiled easily and took my hand as he stepped inside, squeezing. I half-expected him to kiss it.
“You must be Maise,” he said.
“I must be.”
Mr. Rivero’s easy smile crinkled at the corners. “I’m Gary. This is my friend, Quinn.”
I wasn’t sure whether Quinn was a first or last name. He was built like a bear, more hair on his hands than his scalp. He nodded at me silently. Hired muscle.
I seated them in the dining room and poured drinks. Maker’s Mark on the rocks for Gary. Water for Quinn. Mom was still busy in the kitchen, so I poured myself some Maker’s, too. Quinn’s eyes moved around the house, lingering on the windows. Gary’s eyes lingered on me.
“So,” I said. How the hell could you talk to a middle-aged man without mentioning business or sex? “Lovely weather.”
Gary’s smile said he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Your mother’s told me a lot about you.”
“Like what?”
“You want to go into the movie business.”
“True. What else?”
“You’re the smartest girl in school.”
Had she actually said that? “Debatable. What else?”
“You’re a stunning young lady.”
I sipped my bourbon to mask the warmth in my face. I was aware of him watching every move, my hand setting the glass down, fingers poised on the rim. “Is it true?” I said.
“Very much so.”
Pots clashed in the kitchen. I leaned toward Gary. Quinn’s eyes darted to me.
“I don’t do what my mother does,” I said under my breath. “Any of it. Whatever you came for, you’re wasting your time.”
Gary didn’t blink. His eyes were shrewd, intelligent. “I’m certainly not wasting my time,” he said, and sipped.
The ribeyes were black outside, vivid pink inside. Perfect. There were three different vegetable dishes and a lemon custard pie. Quinn ate more than all of us combined and never stopped scanning the room. I stared at my mother, unsure if I was impressed or furious. She had the capacity for this and had let me grow up on microwave meals.
“What kind of movies do you make, Maise?” Gary said.
Plus one, Mr. Rivero. Thank you for not assuming beauty is my only asset.
“Experimental stuff. I’m interested in playing with the boundary between reality and fiction. True stories mixed with fantasy, in a way that makes both of them more true and more false at the same time.”
I blushed. The alcohol had gone to my head.
Gary took a drink. “That reminds me of something I saw earlier this year. The one about killing bin Laden.”
“Zero Dark Thirty,” I said.
“That’s it.” He swirled the melted amber in his glass. “There’s always controversy about things like that. You have all these people with their own version of the truth, trying to tell one story.”
“And then we all interpret it our own way,” I said, “and it becomes a million more truths.”
Gary smiled. “What about you? What truths do you tell?”
“I haven’t finished anything yet. I feel like I need more life experience before I can make something worthwhile.”
Life experience that I was racking up rapidly with Evan.
“Quite a mature attitude.” Gary tore the steak gently with his fork. He watched me as he chewed. It was like Mom and Quinn didn’t exist. Mom was unusually quiet. “You show a lot of self-awareness for someone your age.”
Backhanded compliment. “Thank you,” I said. “You show a lot of cultural awareness, for someone your age.”
Gary laughed. Mom pinched my knee under the table. I despised her. You don’t even know what we’re talking about, I thought. You’re just reacting to tone. Like a dog.
“Anyone for pie?” she said.
Gary excused himself to smoke, brushing my wrist as he stood. “Join me,” he said.
My pulse jumped. Whatever he’d come to ask, he was going to ask it now. I followed him to the back porch, Quinn behind us like a shadow on a leash. October had just started, a sharp, ice-toothed bite in the air, tearing the skin off the earth. Leaves rustled in the yard, a sound I’d always thought of as dying. A thousand cells shivering, delicately giving up their ghosts.
Gary offered me a cigarette. I shook my head.
“Smart,” he puffed.
You are some bigshot druglord, I thought. You have a personal bodyguard who could rip a Bible in half with his hands. What the hell do you want with me?
“It’s important to me that I understand all angles of a problem,” Gary said. “I don’t like to make uninformed decisions.”
He looked at me then, and I shivered, hard, understanding: I am an angle of the problem.
“What decision?” I said.
His gaze slid away from me, unhurried. He was not the kind of man to be rushed. “Raising a child alone is very difficult. I don’t begrudge your mother her choices. But I do require her to be accountable.”
A chill started to shimmy its way under my skin like a fine knife. Require had never sounded so ominous.
“Sweetheart,” Gary said, eyeing me again, “your mother owes someone a lot of money.”
“I’m not part of her business,” I said immediately.
“No, but you’re part of her life. And when someone owes a lot of money, the people in their life become collateral.”
I went cold all the way to my marrow. This was suddenly way too Godfather. I stared into the ghost-filled yard, seeing nothing.
“I’ve worked with her for several years. She’s never disappointed me. I knew she had a daughter, and I knew she kept her daughter in the dark about certain things.”
My eyes darted to Quinn. I wondered where the gun was on him. In his waistband? Strapped to his calf?
Gary put his hand on mine on the railing. It was warm and papery. He smelled like tobacco.
Holy shit, I thought. My life is a movie. A fucking drug thriller, happening right now, in my backyard.
“Please,” I said, “I don’t want anything to do with this.”
“I understand. But she made you part of it without asking.”
My mind filled with terrifying images. Having to sleep with this man. With Quinn. Being passed around a bunch of skeezy dealers. Snorting coke to numb myself to the horror. I was shaking.
I could call Evan. Let’s run away tonight, I’d say. Let’s start over in St. Louis. Or LA. As far as possible from this shit.
“What do you want from me?” I said, my voice like those rustling leaves.
Gary took his hand away. “As I said, you mother has never disappointed me. I’m willing to help with her debts, smooth things over with some people. But I can’t do things like that out of the goodness of my heart. That’s not how a successful businessman stays successful.”
“Okay,” I said. “So answer my damn question.”
When you realize you have nothing to lose, it’s easy to be brash.
He merely smiled. Nothing I had said or done affected this man. He was a lizard, everything pinging off his scaly surface. “I don’t want anything from you. I just wanted to meet you. Yvette’s daughter.”
He held my gaze, and I understood. I don’t want anything…for now.
“Does this make you feel good about yourself?” I said quietly. “Scaring the shit out of little girls?”
“You’re not a little girl.”
He was wrong. At that moment, I absolutely was.
“How much does she owe?” I said.
His eyes got a shuttered, closed down look. “That’s business, sweetheart. Not for you to worry about.” He stubbed out his cigarette and put an arm around my shoulder. It felt like a shackle. “Let’s go in, before your mom gets the wrong idea.”
I was too dazed to process the rest of the night. When they were gone and I was sitting in my room, my eyes full of water but not spilling, my entire body trembling, I suddenly remembered the squeaky bank teller.
I should have known what was coming. The foreshadowing was so obvious.
I logged into my bank account.
Balance: $0.00.