—6—
Rain ran down the windows in rivulets thick and silvery as mercury. The world looked like an ashtray full of soft soggy grayness, headlights fizzling in it like cigarette cherries. All I heard was a crackling sound, rain and wet tires, as if one long strip of Velcro was endlessly peeling.
Evan had seen how somber I was and let me brood in peace. I put on music for a bit, then turned it off and listened to the rain. I should have told him before we left. I shouldn’t have left with him, dragging him into my doomed orbit, toward this black hole I was slowly circling. The seat was cool and I pressed the bare backs of my legs against it. I felt like I needed to shiver from a place deep inside of me, one not connected to my nerves.
Traffic slowed as people tried not to die in the rain. Evan took a hand off the wheel and laid it atop mine. He didn’t speak.
We reached St. Louis well past noon. The Arch was a faint shadow in the downpour, almost frightening, a shape without context. It could have been the leg of an alien ship touching down. Rain washed the color out of everything. We hunted the hot blurs of traffic lights, hitting every red. Even the universe was telling me to stop.
Evan pulled into an underground garage. I got out, leaving my bag in the car. He looked at me with concern but remained silent, and I appreciated this.
We took a haunted freight elevator up six stories. It rattled as if possessed and screeched when the gate opened and closed.
“Nothing says ‘welcome home’ like poltergeists,” I said.
Evan smiled nervously. He seemed relieved I’d finally spoken.
We walked down a dim brick hallway to a steel door, and when he opened it my bleak mood lifted for a moment.
The Friend’s loft was huge, a couple thousand square feet of bare concrete and brick. One entire wall was windows, flooding the space with pearly gray light. The open floor was divided into groupings of furniture: leather couches arrayed around a TV, a dining table and bar, a bed framed by bookcases. Stairs led to a walled area above the kitchen—bathroom, probably. There were canvases everywhere, big, messy abstract paintings, all motion and color, no form.
“This is really nice,” I said, feeling infinitely small. I didn’t even notice my voice crack.
Evan’s hands on my shoulders. “Maise.”
He turned me around. I felt a dangerous rearrangement of my facial features in preparation for tears.
“What’s wrong?” he said. His face was doing that big-eyed, furrowed-brow thing that I could not lie to.
I started to cry. “I’m sorry I made fun of the elevator.”
He laughed a little, helplessly, and pulled me close. “That’s not why you’re upset. Is it?”
“No.”
“Can you talk, or do you need to cry?”
“Need to cry,” I said like a child, and did.
At first I tried to keep my dignity, but once I started it became a runaway train, and the best I could manage was to hold on while an unstoppable force moved through me. I got the worst out standing there in Evan’s arms, the loft as blurry as the rainy world outside. Mother. Witch. Whore. Devil. Stealing my money, the money her own mother had given me as compensation for being part of this fucking family. Putting my life in jeopardy. Ruining my future and the happiness I had with this man. All because she refused to get a real job, because she was forty and still thought she could cheat the world and get ahead without working as hard as all the other suckers.
Evan led me to the kitchen. Wiped my face with a warm washcloth, listened to me blow my nose and mumble semi-coherently.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” I said. The tears never stopped, merely waned. “I have to—we have to stop.”
He looked frightened until I explained that it was because of Mom.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but I never found the right moment. ‘Hey, by the way, my mom’s a drug dealer.’ Is there a greeting card for that?”
“Tell me everything,” he said, sitting with me at the counter.
After an hour he knew the gist of my sordid family. He listened without comment, handing me tissues, stroking my hair, staring sadly at my swollen, ruddy, childish face.
When I quieted, he said, “I can’t believe you’ve been dealing with this your whole life.”
“Well, now you know.” I wasn’t crying anymore. My voice was raw, husky. Like Mom’s. “I’m sorry about all of this.”
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
“Yes, I do.” I made myself look at him. “We can’t keep doing this, Evan. It’s not going to work.”
“Why?”
“Because I might be on a hit list somewhere? Because my life just became The Sopranos?”
He took my hands. “I’m worried, okay? No, I’m terrified. This is some seriously fucked-up shit, and I have no idea how to handle it. But it doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “You’re the mob wife. You won’t leave me, even though there’s a price on my head.”
He stared at me for a second. Then we both burst out laughing. Wild, brittle laughter, on the edge of hysteria. He pulled me close, pressing my forehead to his chin.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “You should run away.”
“If I ran away, I would be crazy.”
Somewhere in my cavernous chest, another sliver of light chipped into my heart.
I leaned back. “Maybe I should run from you again. For your own good.”
He looked at me with that sweet pout and I knew I couldn’t. Though he never mentioned it, leaving him that first night had shaped the way he saw me. The shooting star he couldn’t hold. Sometimes he’d touch my hands and my face as if to check whether I was really there.
God, if I could only go back to that night and tell myself to stay. Tell her, There’s something so beautiful waiting for you. Don’t run from it. Run toward it.
“What would your mother think,” I said, “if she knew what kind of girl you got mixed up with?”
His eyes tightened. He looked through me for a split second. Then he focused on my face, a mask sliding over his with a smile painted on it. “She’d think, ‘I am not surprised.’ Now, if you’re done trying to break up with me, I’d like to cook for you. You can reevaluate whether you still want to break up afterward.”
There’s another hidden story about your past, I thought. Now you owe me two.
#
Things I did for the first time in my life that day: shopped for groceries with my boyfriend (we spent an hour walking around a fish market in our sunglasses calling each other Mr. and Mrs. Smith, pretending to be undercover assassins); made out in an elevator (haunted or not haunted—both firsts); took a shower and shaved my legs while my boyfriend watched, spellbound (“I’ve been fantasizing about this.” “No touching. Is something burning?”).
When I stepped out of the bathroom there was a trail of lit candles leading down the stairs.
Oh sweet Jesus, I thought.
I followed the light and the smell of sweet tomato and whitefish. Evan moved around the kitchen like a maestro, lifting a lid, stirring, gliding over to the oven just as it dinged. I watched him with an awed, goofy gape until he enlisted me to chop fresh basil.
“What are we making?” I said.
Besides an insane love story, obviously.
“Pine nut-crusted flounder, roasted vegetable medley in herb and butter sauce, and tomato bisque.” He paused behind me, raised my hair, and kissed the nape of my neck, all while taking a dish out of the cabinet above me. I stared at my hand, wondering what would happen if I put the blade to my skin. I didn’t think it would cut. I didn’t think I was awake.
Whose life is this? I thought. How did I sneak into it?
“Who taught you to cook?” I said as we set the table. “Your mom?”
Again, that millisecond flicker in his eyes. “My dad, actually.”
“What’s your dad like?”
He looked at me for a moment like he couldn’t remember who I was. Because I was young. Because the concept of dead parents hadn’t yet occurred to me. I had only two concepts for parents: Gone, and Wish You Were Dead.
“He was better than we gave him credit for,” Evan said.
I stared at a fork, wondering how to take back my question.
“He was a mechanic,” Evan continued, his good humor returning. “Strongest guy in town. A car fell on a guy he worked with, and he lifted it by himself till they pulled the guy out. It messed up my dad’s back, so he had to stop working. He started taking cooking classes out of boredom. Imagine the Hulk in an apron, but less green. Same approximate radius of destruction.”
I smiled. “Who’s ‘we?’”
“What?”
“You said, ‘better than we gave him credit for.’”
Evan’s gaze shifted away. “Me and my sister.”
Another mystery sister. First Wesley, now him. It was like every XY I knew didn’t want me to know he was related to an XX.
We stood there with our secrets and mistakes, a beautiful dinner waiting for us.
“Let’s forget all the bad stuff for tonight,” Evan said.
“Deal.”
We ate by candlelight in the sepulchral loft. Storm clouds obscured the real stars, but the city came alive, a horoscope of earthbound constellations spreading below us: meteoric tail lights, neon pulsars, twinkling and shimmering all the way to the horizon. It made my heart ache. The city at night gave me the same melancholy twinge I’d felt as a kid watching Mom plug in the Christmas tree. Something beautiful and full of promise, but something you knew you could never touch.
The food made me feel good and strange, too. Light, sweet flounder broke apart and dissolved on my tongue, and the bisque was so creamy and savory I wanted to drink it straight from the bowl. It was overwhelming. He’d done this for me. All of this. I watched him carry our plates to the sink, thinking, All of this came from one night. If I hadn’t gone to the carnival, you would’ve looked at me like any other student when I walked into your class. And that made my heart ache, too—the thought of how much happiness lay scattered across the universe, unrealized, in fragments, waiting for the right twist of fate to bring it together.
“If we hadn’t met, where would you be right now?” I said.
Candlelight danced over his face. His eyes were embers. “Watching the lights.”
We stood at the windows, looking out over the rainy city. He held me to the cold glass and kissed me, slow and intent. Our mouths tasted like pinot grigio. We moved to the couch, him atop me, crushing the leather, but after a while we ended up simply lying there.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “My mind is all over the place.”
His arms tightened around me. “Don’t be sorry.”
I watched the dark, glittering city.
“Did your dad love you?” I said.
“In his way.”
“Did you feel loved, when you were a kid?”
“Not really.”
“What about your mom?”
His body went rigid. I breathed as shallowly as I could, not wanting to disturb whatever was happening inside of him.
“My mom is an alcoholic. She pretty much ruined our family.”
I glanced at him. He had that lost, X-ray-through-the-world look again.
“How?”
Evan sat up. He laid a hand on my leg to show me it was okay, then let it fall.
“My dad hit her, and she drank. I never knew which came first, but they fed each other. My mom was a nasty drunk. She’d say horrible shit, call my dad stupid and worthless, call us all names. She was miserable and abused and clinically depressed and never got the help she needed. She’d drink herself into blackouts.”
I thought of Mom and her gray-outs. “Jesus,” I said.
“One day, she was in the backyard with Beth, my little sister. I was in the garage so I didn’t see it, but I’ve thought about it so much I feel like I was there. Beth was in the pool, in the shallow end. She had water wings on. Mom was drinking at ten in the fucking morning, guzzling gin. I hate gin, by the way. The smell of it makes me sick. So Mom was drinking, and she passed out, and Beth was playing by herself when her foot got too close to a drain. It sucked her down and the wings couldn’t keep her above water. She kicked and splashed and screamed, and then she drowned. In three feet of water, in bright sunlight on a summer morning. And the whole time my mother was lying right there, five feet away, while Beth screamed for her.”
I stared at him, my mouth open, eyes wide. I didn’t know what to say.
He looked at my knee. “For years, I hated my mom. I wished I could’ve switched places with Beth. That any of us had died instead, because we all deserved it. She was innocent.” He sighed, his frame sagging, succumbing to gravity. “But you know what? It changed my mother. She finally stopped drinking. She went to church, though she was only looking for forgiveness, not faith. She cried all the time. She said she’d do anything to make sure I was happy, because now I was her only child.”
“Did she?”
“I don’t know. I left when I was sixteen, and I’ve never been back.”
We sat there in the shadows, full of unspeakable things.
“Now I know,” he said, touching me again, “why I was drawn to you. We have the same darkness inside.”
“Our fucked-up parents?”
“Our lost childhood.”
I curled against him, running my hands over his arms, his chest, lightly, reverently, as if I’d just discovered he was breakable. How bizarre, I thought. Mr. Wilke has a psycho mom and a shattered family, too, and that’s why we understand each other. Why did everything beautiful come from pain?
“You don’t seem that much older than me,” I said. “Do I seem young to you?”
He kept stroking the same lock of my hair absently. “In school, you seem older than everyone. With me, you seem young. But I feel young with you, too.”
“We have no age. We exist outside of time. We’re timeless.”
Evan smiled. “Like Jack and Rose.”
“Or Lady and the Tramp.”
He laughed. “The nurse and the English patient.”
“Louis and Lestat.”
He took my face in his hands. “You are the bravest girl I’ve ever met. You’ve been living with this crazy family shit and never said a word.”
I shrugged. “Or maybe Louis and Claudia. I’m the little girl you’ve frozen in time because you plucked me like a rose and made me a vampire. We live together for a hundred years and I hate you and yet I’m in love with you.”
Oh my god. I had actually said it. As a joke, but those were the words, in the proper order and everything.
“Maise.”
“You’ve been living with a dead sister and never said a word. Is it brave, or just how things are?”
His hand moved against my face. “You are so worldly,” he said, and it was both a compliment and a regret.
We kissed again, and his body lay over me and pushed me into the cloudy vagueness of the couch and I thought, Do what you want, I relinquish myself to you. But I guess he saw the disconnection in my eyes, because he stopped, and breathed against my throat, holding me. Just holding.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “I want you to.”
He looked into my face. “That’s not what I want.”
“What do you want?”
“All of you.”
It seemed like such an incredible thing to ask of a person.
“I don’t know where all of me is right now,” I said, feeling silly and young.
He kissed my temple, my eyelids. “It’s all right. I’m happy. I could spend this whole weekend just talking to you and be perfectly happy.”
“Me too,” I said. My voice was strained. “So if we’re both so happy, why are we sad?”
Evan laughed, and we kissed again, without expectations.
#
Going to bed was awkward. I didn’t know the protocol. Should we brush our teeth together? Little kids brushed their teeth with an adult. Just pretend you’re alone at home, I told myself. I took everything off but my underwear and a T-shirt. He stood on the other side of the bed in his boxers. We stared at each other.
Then we both laughed.
“This is so weird,” I said, echoing Wesley on homecoming night. Where was he? Was Siobhan kissing him good night? Did she do that?
“Weird because I’m your teacher, or because you’ve never done it before?”
Good question. “I can’t even tell.”
We sat on opposite sides of the bed.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Is this how it is for married people?”
“Awkward and distant? Yes.”
I grinned. “Let’s pretend we’re a troubled married couple.”
“I feel like you’re trying to test if I can actually act.”
“I hate how you do that, John. You always think I’m testing you. I guess our kids are just a test, too.”
He looked at me, trying not to laugh. “Well, Martha, maybe if you didn’t hand me a questionnaire every time I want sex.”
“And when is that, John? At midnight, after I’ve spent all day babysitting your spawn? Or when your secretary isn’t available to blow you on the weekend?”
“Come here.”
“I think we should see a marriage counselor.”
“Maise, come here.”
My heart skipped. I sat beside him, our backs to the brick wall. In the darkness the loft reverted to a factory, mysterious machines hulking all around us, sitting in abandoned silence. The sadness of factories, I thought. Once upon a time they’d made things. Now they were all slowly decaying, like used-up mothers. My eyes traced the maze of pipes and beams that made up the ceiling, all the messy guts shoved together. Evan put his arm around me. I felt the contours of his muscle and bone through my shirt, the hard lines of this body I had taken into mine.
“Are you scared?” he said into my hair.
“Yeah.”
“What scares you?”
I kept my eyes on the ceiling. “That this is too good. That it won’t last. That you’ll leave.”
Fingertips ran up the smooth plane of my thigh. Goosebumps, everywhere.
“And you?” I said.
“Same exact thing, but about you.”
I turned to him. That boyish face, scruffy with stubble, almost like two different people looking at me. He wasn’t perfect. His lips were a touch too full, too sulky, his forehead a little too tall, and there was a permanent trace of mourning stamped into his features that sometimes made him look helpless, but all his imperfections fit him perfectly. I adore this face, I thought. How is it possible he’s scared of losing me? Never in my life had I considered I might be something someone worried about losing.
“Statistically,” I said, “we’re doomed, you know.”
“Statistically, everyone is doomed.”
“Right, but we are specifically doomed. Wesleypedia told me that at the beginning of a relationship, your brain releases tons of dopamine. You literally make yourself high. But after a few months it stops, and then you’re basically going through withdrawal while trying to figure out why you’re in bed with this person and sharing germs.”
Evan wore a rueful smile. “What made you so grim?”
Life, I thought.
His hand moved up the back of my knee to the inside of my thigh. He looked at my face as he touched me, watching each layer of irony and cynicism splinter, crack, fall away. I didn’t move. I let every cord in me tighten, slowly pulling into a knot in my center. I was so finely-tuned I felt my nipples graze my shirt as I breathed, the hair on his arm tickling my thigh. He pushed my legs apart and I bit my lip.
“Look at me,” he said.
I did.
His voice was soft and gritty. “This is what I think about in class.”
His fingers rose to the crease of my thigh. He dragged a nail along the edge of my underwear, and I shivered and couldn’t stop, as if a low electric current ran through me. He didn’t touch me directly, but traced every boundary until I couldn’t sit still. My mouth was open, my breath spilling wildly. All the electricity in me surged to predict where his fingertips would brush, like one of those glass balls full of plasma that shoots to the surface when a hand gets near. Every subtle shift of fabric was unbearable. My skin was too hot, too ripe with blood, a summer creature full of too much life and lust and desperately in need of release.
“Please,” I said.
His hand spread across my thigh and squeezed. “I think about you saying that, too.”
My breath was still out of control, but I said, “And what else?”
“I think about undressing you.”
I leaned forward and shrugged out of my T-shirt. My body felt elastic and sinuous, like a snake. His hand ran up my belly, between my breasts, never quite touching the places I ached to be touched.
“I think about your skin,” he said, his thumb moving over my collarbone. “Your mouth.” He opened it, put his index finger between my teeth. “The inside of you.”
I closed my lips over his finger, looking at him. I felt so womanish, suddenly. You think you’re the one corrupting me, I thought, but I’m fucking you up, too. My eyelids lowered. The power was all mine now. I took him deeper, almost to the knuckle, curling my tongue around his finger, scraping my teeth over it lightly as he withdrew. When he pulled away I took him into my mouth again. He groaned. So I did it again, and again, enthralled at how his body responded, leaning closer, softening, giving itself up to me. God, it felt so good, having all the power. I could get used to being the teacher.
He pulled out finally and pressed his face to my shoulder. “What are you doing to me?” he said, his voice far away. “This is all I think about. I’m obsessed.”
I swallowed. I could still taste his skin, clean and warm and faintly salty. I put my arms around him, and we lay down together, and were lost in each other until morning.
#
The day was half gone when I woke. Evan was up already, working on school stuff. He called me sleepyhead and kissed me and sat on the bed to watch me dress. Funny, how even clothes going on my body was absolutely mesmerizing to him.
We walked around the neighborhood in search of food. The city looked like an old-time photograph tinted the colors of coins, silver and nickel, its edges blurred with mist. Headlights made bright lighthouse beacons in the fog. We walked close and slow, arms around each other’s waists. Trees still saturated with rain from last night seemed to glow a hyper-pigmented green. The streets were full of a dizzying brew of wet concrete and brick and asphalt. On one side of my body, Evan’s heat; on the other, the cool lick of rain-dampened air.
We bought coffee and almond croissants at a cafe and sat on the patio, watching the world flow past.
“I got you something,” Evan said.
He took his hand from his pocket, something small and shiny in his fingers.
My body went into slow-motion. I looked up at him slowly, breathed slowly, felt the long, slow strokes of my heart ticking like a close-up clock in a movie.
“I was going to give it to you yesterday,” he said, eyes lowered, “but the timing wasn’t right.” He turned the ring in his fingers. “I keep pretending I’m okay, looking at you in class and playing Mr. Good Teacher, when all I want to do is take you in my arms. And I wanted you to know that even though we have to do this, the hiding and pretending, there’s not a moment that goes by when I’m not thinking of you, wishing it was different. So I thought maybe this would remind you. That this could hold you when I couldn’t.”
He finally raised his eyes. He looked so young right then.
“Do you know how to wear this?” he said.
I laughed, part disbelief, part giddy wonder. “I’m fucking Irish, Evan. Of course I know.”
He smiled. He knew I did.
It was a silver Claddagh ring: two hands clasping a heart with a crown atop it. Every part of it was symbolic: the heart stood for love; the hands, friendship; the crown, loyalty. Depending on how you wore it, it meant different things. On your left hand, heart pointing out, it meant you were engaged; heart in, married. On your right hand, heart out meant you were looking for love; heart in, you were in love.
He held the ring out to me, and I took it, swallowing. My skin flashed hot and cold at the same time. This, I thought, is going to become a memory: the way I’m shivering but so warm inside, the way the sky is trembling above us, threatening rain, and the way your eyes are bluer than I’ve ever seen. I slid the ring onto my right ring finger, its heart pointing inward, toward mine.
Our gazes met across the table. There were a million things I wanted to say at the same time, so I said nothing.
Evan opened his mouth.
A huge stiletto of rain hit the table, splashing onto my half-eaten croissant.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
In three seconds flat, it was pouring.
I was so surprised and happy and overwhelmed by everything, the whole weekend, the craziness of my life, the ring on my finger, that I stood up and shrieked, joyously. Evan tried to save the food, but it was destroyed in moments. We took off running down the block, him laughing and me still screaming happily, like a kid. I was drenched and blissful and ran across a street where a car sat at the red light, and kissed my hand and slapped it on the hood. The driver gave me a funny little frown and I beamed at her. I fucking love you, lady, I thought. I love this entire world and everyone in it.
We reached the old factory building completely out of breath, our hair plastered to our skulls, clothes heavy as iron with water. Evan started to unlock the door and I snatched the keys away and he pushed me against the door, kissing me. A wild, rough, messy kiss that tasted like rainwater and rust. It was elemental, a force as raw as the one that tore the sky apart over us. We went in finally but stopped outside the elevator, and he lifted me under the legs and held me against the wall, kissing me viciously, his tongue thrusting hard into my mouth. Rain darkened his hair from gold to brown. I ran my hands beneath his wet shirt, his skin searing. I would have fucked him right there. I didn’t care. But we got on the elevator, and it took forever to get to the loft because we stood there with the door open, kissing madly. I took his shirt off and dropped it. He took off my shorts. We left our shoes and socks strewn across the hallway. My bra at the front door. His jeans and everything else on the stairs up to the bathroom.
My skin was clammy, hair stringy, and I turned on the shower, but we didn’t get that far. He lifted me onto the bathroom counter, my ass on the freezing tile, and I decided that that was far enough. That was where I wanted to be fucked. I wrapped my hand around the back of his neck, the ring cool against his burning skin. He didn’t stop for a condom and when he entered me the heat was a shock. I leaned back, arching my spine. In the harsh halogen lights his body looked carved out of stone, his skin polished with rain and sweat, every muscle rigid. We hadn’t fucked in a week and the tension was insane. The veins in his arms stood out. My own body felt hard and brutal, my breasts bouncing every time he thrust into me, and it didn’t feel so much like sex as smashing my nerves with a hammer, blunt and savage, primitive. He held my hips and fucked me roughly and fast and I felt a heavy wave of lava surging up my thighs and could not. Hold on. To myself. And I said, “Please, come. Please, please, come in me.”
His hands tightened, painfully, and he pulled out and clutched my body to his, gasping.
I stared at the wall behind him, bewildered.
“Evan?” I whispered.
His body heaved against me, frantic, breathless.
I pulled back, trying to look at his face. His head was down. He wouldn’t let go of me, wouldn’t look at me.
“Evan,” I said again, my voice sharper than I’d intended. I’d been so close to coming, and after the week of no sex, I couldn’t help my frustration. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
I managed to lever him away so I could look at him. My skin was flushed, tight as a drumhead. He was still hard but his face was pained. God, what the fuck? So awkward. So fucking awkward.
“You can’t keep doing this,” I said. “Tell me why it freaks you out so much.”
He winced at my words, turned his head away. Please, I thought. Don’t be like this. Don’t be another high school boy who can’t handle his own feelings. You’re supposed to be a grown man.
He leaned against the wall. Raked a hand through his hair, propped his forehead in his palm. We looked like two crazy people, naked and covered in rain and sweat. I slapped my hand down on the counter and the ring rapped loudly, startling us both, making us look at each other.
“Talk to me,” I said, gentler now.
“I am terrified for you,” he said. His voice was low and hoarse.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t ever want to put your future at risk. Even in the slightest way.”
I sighed, my tension uncoiling. “I won’t let that happen. I’m not careless, you know that. I’m going to college, and I’m going to get a real job, and I’m not even going to think about having a family until I’m like, thirty.” I looked him full in the face, willing him to understand. “I’ve had to take care of myself most of my life, and I won’t let that go to waste by getting knocked up at eighteen. So you don’t need to safeguard my future. I’ve got it covered.”
The anxiety drained from him. He looked defeated, embarrassed. “Here I thought I was being responsible, but you’re way ahead of me.”
“Well, it means a lot, that you care about my future.” I raised my hand. “Come over here and be awkward with me.”
He did, wrapping his arms around me, sighing. He’d gone soft, and the edge of my frustration had dulled. This was just an embrace, tender, tired. I rubbed my finger over the silver band.
“You gave me a ring,” I said.
“I did.”
I leaned back, a small, cocky smile on my face. “Who else have you given a ring?”
“No one.”
“Not even your fiancée?”
He shook his head. “Broke up before we went ring shopping.”
I stared at him, my heart beating fast. “I’m the first?”
He put his hands to either side of my face. His eyelashes were matted, sparkling with water. He looked like a little boy who’d been playing in the rain. “You’re the first. You’re the first of so many things.”
My gaze shifted from his eyes to his mouth, his lips red and full, and I kissed him, delicately, like a little girl kissing a little boy. It was all lightness, softness. His hands drifted airily over my back. I pressed myself against him as if I weighed nothing, as if we floated underwater. None of the savagery of earlier. But somehow that tenderness grew and he hardened against me and I took him inside without my breath or pulse changing at all, as if this was no different from that. I wrapped my legs around his waist. He kissed me as he moved inside of me, his eyes closed, his eyebrows raised in bliss. I was still a little numb but something gentle and sweet collected in my belly, a warm rain building up. Both of us got close to coming, and looked at each other, and didn’t say anything, and when I let my eyes roll back and all my being condense to the line of pure heaven shooting up my spinal cord, he came, too, cupping my body against himself like something precious, breathing his rapture in my ear.
He held me like that for a while. Eventually I felt the counter again, the cool imprint of tile. There was a whole world full of ticking clocks and calendar days out there. I kissed Evan’s shoulder, his neck, his throat flecked with fine stubble, drinking in the smell of him. He straightened and pulled out and the soft hot rush of wetness between my legs made my heart stammer. This was completely, completely real.
He stroked my jaw, giving me a sleepy smile.
Something went very tight and sharp in my chest. God, this is happening, I thought. You’re taking over my heart and I can’t stop it. I don’t want to.
“Will you tell me why?” he said.
“Why what?”
“Why you were so insistent.”
I ran my hand over the downy hair on his belly and up to the place above his heart. I listened to it beating through my skin. “Because I want all of you,” I said. “Every part.”
He whispered back, “It’s yours.”
#
Evan decided my film education should work backwards from when I was born, going through movies decade by decade.
First up: the 1980s.
“I can’t believe I was a little kid watching this shit,” he said as we sat down with The Lost Boys. The Friend had a huge, expensive TV, and we’d made popcorn and drinks and everything. Legit date night. “This whole decade was so dark. Everything now is safe and colorful and sanitized. Everyone’s scared of giving kids psychological scars.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I grew up with the internet pumping filth into my brain.”
He laughed. “Good point.”
I saw what he meant about the darkness. Even in a campy vampire film full of mullets and feathered hair, there was an undertone of ugly, almost chthonic horror. Not the ultra-real yet somehow ultra-clean gore of the Saw generation. This was a sleazy, leering, scummy feeling, a glimpse of a time when adults weren’t so terrified of terrifying kids. There was something refreshing about it. Life without the shrinkwrap.
As I sat there with his arm around me, his easy laugh in my ear, I thought, How different are we? We came from such different times, his era murky and analog, mine bright and digital, and yet we got each other’s jokes, had a similar way of looking at the absurdity of the world and laughing. How much of it was real, and how much the chemical honeymoon my brain was on? I twisted the ring on my finger.
Next up was The Breakfast Club. I fell in love with it immediately. The cheesy 80s clothes, Molly Ringwald and a hot young Emilio Estevez, the razor-sharp dialogue, everything. Change the clothes and hair and add cell phones and you had any modern high school.
“Oh my god,” I said when it was over. “I’m Allison.”
“You’re a compulsive liar?” Evan said.
“No, I’m a total weirdo. But maybe I’m lying about that.”
“I had the biggest crush on Ally Sheedy.”
I grinned. “Which one were you, in high school?”
“Guess.”
“The bad boy.”
“Nope.”
“The jock?”
“Nope.”
I frowned. “The nerd?”
“Is that such a shock?”
I climbed across his lap, pushing him back against the couch. Popcorn spilled out of the bowl beside us.
“No,” I said, wrapping my hands in his shirt. “It’s fucking hot.”
He smiled that perfect Hollywood smile and gave me a drowsy, knowing look, all smoky desire, and we had sex again right there on the couch, using a condom out of consideration for The Friend, my knees sinking into the cushion, my head thrown back and Evan gazing up at me, entranced. This is mine, I thought as he fucked me. This body, this act, this man, all mine. This belongs to my heart and my skin and no one can take it from me because it is etched there, indelibly. I came hard and stayed atop him, my hands on his shoulders, a woman in total control. When we stood up afterward I saw the silhouette of our bodies in sweat on the dark brown leather, evaporating in the chill.
#
I took my sweet time getting in the car. Reality intruded on my thoughts like war flashbacks, depressing images of Mom and Gary Rivero and my big fat zero bank balance.
“Why even go back?” I said. “Let’s start over here.”
Evan looked at me across the roof of the car in the underground garage. He almost seemed to be considering it.
“Running never works,” he said finally.
Tell me about it.
I flipped open the glovebox to toss my sunglasses in, and a pile of papers cascaded onto my feet. Evan was backing out of the parking space and slammed on the brakes. That made the rest of the junk fall out.
“Sorry,” I laughed. “I’ll get it.”
He helped me stuff everything back in hurriedly, but something caught my eye. The car was registered to ERIC WILKE of WESTCHESTER, IL.
“Who’s Eric?”
Evan took the paper and slipped it inside a folio. “My brother.”
“You have a brother, too? Jesus.” I sat back. “Evan, Eric, and Elizabeth. Am I missing anyone?”
His eyes were cloudy. He didn’t look at me. God, another dead sibling? Or just another sad story he didn’t want to tell?
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like an idiot.
“Don’t be. I’ll tell you about him sometime.”
But not tonight, apparently.
The highway at night looked like a movie flashing past us in fast forward, all the lights receding, out of reach. Autumn was spreading its golden disease through the woods, Midas trailing his fingers over the treetops. Dying things became extraordinarily beautiful at the very end. I pressed my hand against the window, the ring gleaming. Where was the lens between me and the world? Was it my eyes, my skin, my mind? Where did reality stop and my perception of it begin? Suddenly, horribly, I missed Wesley. I felt too embarrassed to talk to Evan about shit like this. Wesley was just a boy. I didn’t care what he thought of me.
“Maise,” Evan said.
I turned to him.
“If things don’t work out with your mom, and you need somewhere to go, you can stay with me.”
Cardiac arrest.
“You have options. Bad ones, maybe. Maybe they’re a little like the premise of an after-school special. But they’re options.”
I stared at him, every muscle in me slack.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
“What is an after-school special?”
He laughed. He knew I was trying to make him feel old.
“I’m also thinking the night I met you was like someone handed me a winning lottery ticket and said, ‘You can only have it if you don’t tell anyone.’”
He gave me a sad smile. “I feel like that too.”
“Do you start to wonder if it’s even real?”
“All the time. Like maybe I made you up when I got on that rollercoaster.”
“You could’ve imagined me with fewer problems,” I said.
“You must be real, then.”
I tapped my fingers on the window. “Can we stop somewhere? I need to pick up some rat poison to feed Mom.”
It was actually getting close to my period, and I was out of tampons. We pulled up at a Walgreens when we got into town, parking in the far corner of the lot, just in case. Back to the espionage game. I swallowed my pride and asked to borrow money.
“Just until I get a job,” I said. “I’ll keep track of every cent.”
“You don’t have to worry about it.”
“I want to worry about it. I want to be equal in this with you.”
“You are.”
We stared at each other in the dark car. Why did this bother me so much? Because I didn’t want to give him any excuse to see me as a teenager? But I was a teenager. Maybe I was the first girl he’d given a ring to, but he was my first everything.
He handed me some bills.
“Besides,” I said, “if you’re going to insist on protection, I at least get to pick.”
I jumped out before he could respond.
The store was deserted, bright lights blasting, some swoony radio singer pouring her heart out to the emptiness. No one at the register. I dawdled in the aisles, not wanting the night to end yet. It felt ridiculously erotic to browse through the condom section. A man turned into the aisle, saw me, and turned right around. I laughed. That’s right, I thought. I’m a gorgeous teenage girl buying condoms for my boyfriend to fuck me with. Can you handle that? Guess not.
I dumped my stuff on the counter at the register. Still no cashier.
“Hello!” I yelled. “I would like to exchange money for goods and services.”
There was someone back there after all. He’d been kneeling, shelving cigarettes. At my voice he stood up, all six-foot-three of him.
Wesley Brown.
Our eyes locked, wide with surprise.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey.”
We stood there like morons.
“You work here,” I said stupidly.
“Well done, Captain Obvious.” His words were mocking, but his voice was gentle. He cleared his throat. Mine was dry and twisted.
I missed you like crazy, I wanted to say. Why aren’t we friends? This is stupid.
Instead I just stood there.
Wesley glanced at the counter. So did I. We both looked at the box of condoms, then back at each other. This time his mouth hung open a little while my face turned traffic light red.
He scanned the box. I stared at his hands, mortified.
He said some numbers.
“What?” I shook myself. “Sorry.”
Our skin brushed when I handed him a bill. My ring flashed so brightly I swear it made a little ping sound. Wesley stared at it, then shoved the money into the till. He laid my change on the counter.
“Wesley,” I said, not knowing where to go after that.
“Have a nice night,” he deadpanned.
I walked out of the store.
It felt twenty degrees colder outside. When I reached the car, I opened my door and leaned on it, not getting in.
“What’s wrong?” Evan said.
I grabbed my backpack, stuffing the shopping bag inside. “Wesley works here. I’m going to wait until his shift’s over and ambush him.”
Evan raised his eyebrows dubiously.
“He’s ambushed me enough times. Turnabout’s fair play.” I knelt on the seat. “I’ll get a ride home, okay?”
“You sure about this?”
I kissed him. “Nope. But I have to try.”
“Text me when you get home.”
“I will.”
We looked at each other in the weak, watery car light. This is the part in the script where three words go.
“I’ll miss you,” I said.
Not the right three words.
He brushed my cheek with his knuckles. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll still miss you.”
He kissed me again, pulling me farther in, and I climbed across the seat to kiss him like I had when he drove me home in the rain, urgent, desperate, losing myself in him. This will be different now, I thought. I’ll see you in class and remember what you told me, how every time you look at me you imagine everything we’ve done and everything we’re going to do. How am I supposed to get through the week? How am I supposed to sit still with this supernova inside me?
We pulled away from each other.
Say it, I thought. You have to say it first.
But he already had. It was on my finger, saying itself constantly.
Cheater.
“Good night, Mr. Wilke,” I said.
I sat on a curb in a pool of whiskey-colored light, skipping gravel and shards of broken glass across the asphalt. The storm front had finally broken, tatters of cloud pulling apart like cotton candy and sprinkling the sky with the bright sugar grains of stars. It felt like one of those timeless nights, not any season or year in particular, simply a snapshot of twenty-first century loneliness. Far away a train horn wailed, a sound out of a post-apocalyptic landscape. I felt like the last person alive on Earth.
Half an hour later, Wesley exited from a side door and immediately froze. We faced each other across the lot. He started toward me, and I stood.
“What are you doing here?” he called.
“Saving our friendship.”
He snorted. “There’s nothing to save.”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
He reached me and stopped, shaking his head. In the harsh orange light his features looked stark, mask-like. “What do you want, Maise? You want to taunt me some more about your awesome love life?”
“I never taunted you.”
“Whatever.”
I took a step toward him. “Look, shit got weird. It’s not the end of the world. I miss you, okay?”
“You miss having an audience.”
“That’s completely un—”
“You know what I realized?” He pointed a finger at me, damning. “I’m not your fanboy. I’m not some sycophant who follows you around and pets your ego when you need it. If you really want to be friends, it has to be equal.”
My mouth dropped.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right.”
Wesley’s eyes narrowed beneath his fringe of dark hair.
“I wasn’t treating you like an equal. I’m a jerk. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged and glanced away, uncomfortable with winning. We stood there awkwardly.
“I’m on my way home,” he said.
“Is Siobhan picking you up?”
“I think I’ll just walk.”
Then he looked at me with a tiny glint of hopefulness in his eyes, and my heart lifted.
“I think I’ll just walk, too,” I said. “It’s a free country.”
We didn’t go home, but headed for the water tower. We walked on the dirt shoulders of roads, past fields shredded to flinders from the harvest, a billion matchsticks strewn across the earth. In the cold starlight they looked like scenes of massacre. I was shivering, and when I stopped to pull a sweater out of my bag, Wesley crouched beside me.
“Did he give you that ring?”
“Yes.”
He flicked a pebble into the road. “Is it ‘E?’”
“Yes.”
I swallowed as the silence stretched. If he’d asked me right then, Is it Mr. Wilke?, I would have told him the truth. But he didn’t ask anything else.
“When did you get the job?” I said as we walked on.
“I started Wednesday.”
“Do you like it?”
“I can feel my neurons dying. This week was boring as shit.”
I laughed. “Trade you my week.”
He glanced at me guardedly. “What happened?”
I told him about Mom and Mr. Rivero, and his eyes got progressively bigger until he looked like an anime character. When I got to the part about St. Louis, I told him that, too. Not the details, but the gist. I’m seeing an older man. I’m ecstatic and terrified at the same time. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, because the truth is, I wasn’t ready to accept it myself. It’s only now starting to feel real.
We reached the reservoir then, which gave us an excuse to let the conversation die. I dropped my bag and followed Wesley up the ladder. Our legs dangled off the platform, and when he lit up the familiar smell of sulfur and cloves made my throat sting.
“Fair’s closing soon,” he said.
“Maybe I have time to die on a rollercoaster before I get shot.” I paused. “Maybe they’ll shoot me on a rollercoaster.”
Wesley ashed an arc of sparks into the night. “That would actually be kind of awesome.”
“The end of my life would be ‘kind of awesome?’”
“You really think they’re coming for you?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I over-dramatize.”
“You? No.”
I stabbed a finger into his ribs. “But I think Gary’s going to ask me to do something I don’t want to do.”
“What if he does?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s an after-school special that says what to do when a druglord propositions you.”
Wesley frowned. “What’s an after-school special?”
I started laughing, and it caught like wildfire, sweeping through me. God, what a ridiculous world. I lay back, giddy, laughing at the sky. Wesley raised his eyebrows, but a grin crept over his mouth.
“Are you in love with me?” I said impulsively.
The grin fell. He managed to maintain eye contact, but he looked like he was staring at a wild dog, hoping it wouldn’t bite. “I don’t know. I just like you.”
“Still?”
“I dunno. Yeah.”
I sat up. “I can deal with that, if you can. And if you can respect me being in a relationship.”
He averted his face.
I touched his hand, carefully. Not too intimate, but not some half-assed there-there pat, either. Would he understand? Usually the thought process for a seventeen-year-old boy went girl touching me > omg > boner. But if he wanted me to treat him as an equal, he’d need to deal with complicated, uncomfortable adult feelings, too.
“I like you,” I said, “as a friend. And I kind of like flirting with you, too, but I like flirting with everyone. That’s who I am. You get it, right? Because that stuff about filming me—it weirds me out. I can’t be your manic pixie dream girl. I can’t be the girl who teaches you how to open your heart and embrace life and all that bullshit, because I’m trying to figure out how to do that myself. I need a manic pixie dream boy of my own.”
I let go of his hand and he stared at me, and I worried that this was pointless, that I was trying to explain quantum mechanics to someone who thought gravity was just apples falling. But then he nodded, slowly.
“That actually makes a lot of sense,” he said. “I never thought about it like that.”
“That girls are human, too?”
“That you’re human.”
I flicked his ear. He chuckled. And just like that, we were friends again.
We stayed up in the crow’s nest for a while, shooting the shit. I texted Evan so he wouldn’t think I’d run into an axe murderer, and Wesley watched. Not my phone, but my face, my body language.
“What it’s like with him?” he said quietly.
I lay back on the planks, bouncing my heels on the edge. “Intense,” I finally said.
“Good or bad?”
“Good. Amazingly good. And also weird, and scary, and beautiful. All at the same time, in equal measure.”
“Are you in love with him?”
I rolled my head on the plank to look at Wesley. “I don’t think I know what being in love is yet. But this is different than anything I’ve ever felt.”
“What’s it feel like?”
“Remember when you thought I was jumping off to kill myself?”
He winced.
“It’s like that,” I said. “But no one catches you. You’re just hanging over infinity.”