Love Under Glasse

by Kristina Meister

  Jay had been talking, but she wasn’t paying any attention. At last, he pulled away from the park, ending El’s moment of peace. He took them to the drive-in restaurant, all the while carrying on. When her name followed something sounding like it might have been a question, El drifted back to this reality.

  El blinked at him. “I wasn’t listening to you.”

  “What is wrong with you? You’re in my car! If you’re in my car, you listen to me.”

  “Why should I? All you ever talk about is the team, what stupid, cruel thing you’re going to do next, and what I’m supposed to be doing to make you happy. I don’t care about any of that stuff.”

  The waitress’s voice came over the ordering speaker, but was silenced by an irate boy. “The fuck did you just say to me?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Why are you being such a bitch? Is it that time of the month?”

  “To realize I dislike you to the point I don’t actually want to date you anymore? Yes, I think it’s that time of the month.”

  What could he do? Hit her? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been hit before. Numb to all consequences, she stared straight ahead and waited to see what would come of her rebellion.

  “Why are you being like this? What did I do to you?”

  “I think the real question is, what have you done for me, because I can’t think of a single time you’ve ever cared about what I want. Do you know that Tamara got flowers on her birthday? Matt took Kayla to Disneyworld with his family over Easter. All you do is order me around and call me names. Well, that and try to have sex with me whenever you can.”

  He looked so stupid with his mouth hanging open that she couldn’t help but laugh. In a moment, his face had turned crimson, his brows knitted together, and something in his eye changed. They’d been dating for almost a year, and it was the first time she’d ever seen thoughts register on his features. My, how they trudged through that muddy gaze, coated in mental muck by the time he muttered, “Do you want a hamburger or a hotdog?”

  “I don’t want anything, thank you.”

  “This is dinner,” he spat. “If you don’t eat this, you don’t eat.”

  She had to suppress her smile as she calmly pointed out that she had a refrigerator and a cook at home. “I’ll be just fine. Take care of yourself. You do anyway.”

  “I’m getting sick of this. I wonder what your mom would think of how you’re acting.”

  In the past, that threat would have frightened her. It still did, truthfully, but the fear was secondary to a greater purpose. “Are you going to tell her? Because I’m happy to just break up with you right now and get it over with.”

  The car lurched away from the stall. In seconds, Jay was steering away from town toward the forest. As the buildings grew farther apart and his speed picked up, a nagging doubt pricked at El’s courage, threatening to burst that bubble before it ever even had a chance to float skyward.

  “You want to go on a trip? Let’s go on a trip! I was going to use my money to get a new stereo for Heather.” Jay loved his sports car almost as much as he loved himself. It was like an extension of his anatomy, and El was fairly certain she could identify the exact body part.

  “What money? You don’t have a job.”

  “I do too.” He stifled whatever he was about to say. His hands were gripping the wheel as if to bend it, and his eyes kept flicking to her in a weird kind of rhythm. “Let’s go on a trip! Where do you want to go?”

  “With you? Nowhere.”

  “You said you wanted to go somewhere!” He was shouting now, and the car was beginning the winding ascent through the range. El’s pulse picked up speed with every quarter mile.

  “This isn’t about a vacation, Jay. I don’t like you! You don’t like anything about me. I don’t understand why you even want to date me!”

  The car swerved off the main road onto an old logging trail and came to a dead stop in a patch of cool shade. Out of insults with which to goad him, she undid her seat belt and waited, her muscles tense. Jay stroked the wheel and took measured breaths, though she wasn’t sure she understood what was upsetting him. He had never acted like this before, but then again, she’d never challenged him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last, though his voice was strained. “You’re right. I haven’t been a very good boyfriend.”

  Stunned, El turned to get a better look at him. Something was off. Jay never apologized.

  “I promise I’ll be better. It’s just that . . .” Suddenly, he was a perfect rendering of contrition, his knee braced against the steering column, his face twisted in anguish. “I never know what you’re thinking. I can’t figure you out. I can’t tell if anything I’m doing is right.”

  Unsettled, El could not form words. Even her thoughts were a nonsense of incongruous impressions and half-framed realities.

  “I really do want to make this work, because I really do like you!” He carried on inexplicably. “I mean, I want to talk to you more, and get to know you better! I don’t even know your favorite color! We’ve been dating a year, and I don’t know what kind of music you like. You’re so pretty, Elyrra, and you get amazing grades. But you’re like some kind of sphinx.”

  That was the second time she’d heard that word today, and yet it sounded so different. As she stared at him, El knew that this sort of act might have worked on other girls, but she was completely immune. Firstly, because he held no attraction for her, and secondly, because where she came from, compliments said in that tone were always weapons.

  “Why would you ask me out? Why would you even want to date me?”

  It had been so awkward. He’d come to her lunch table one day, after a fresh breakup with Claire, a girl he’d been dating off and on for years, and just insinuated himself into her day. Then all of a sudden, he was offering to take her on a date and wouldn’t accept no for an answer. He’d even shown up on her doorstep to formally request becoming a suitor in antebellum fashion. She wouldn’t have gone out with him at all, if not for her mother’s encouragement that “he seemed like a clean-cut, blue-blooded American boy” that any girl would be lucky to snatch up . . .

  El’s body went painfully cold, her limbs cramping with the magnitude of the realization as if she’d awoken to an icy blizzard raging around her.

  Her mother had always known her secret. Jay made eyes at Claire, but took El out on dates. And any time there was a moment of doubt about dating Jay, her mother did all she could to pacify or threaten El into staying with a boy she’d never even wanted to know. Jay had spending money, but no job.

  “Oh god . . .” she whispered.

  “I’m being serious, Elyrra. Look, I won’t have much time this summer, what with the internship, to spend with you, but I don’t want it to ruin things. I know I’m an asshole, and I’m trying to get better, but I need help. I need you!”

  The internship—how could she have forgotten that? The elite position of working for a senator in his final year of high school was an opportunity an ambitious young man like Jay might do anything to have. Anything. Like covering for said Senator’s amoral, homosexual daughter.

  She’d assumed it had been arranged because he was her boyfriend, but what if it was just part of the payment?

  Could it be a mistake? Could Mama have done it to protect her from being made fun of or picked on? El thought backward on all the times her mother had openly humiliated her and knew there was no way Mama had done it for her. Mama only ever did things for herself.

  El brought her hands to her face, but they were shaking so badly, she couldn’t blot out the green-filtered light. All this time, Jay had been working for Mama! That meant their few sexual encounters had all been setups. She’d been sold to him. She’d been trapped, and hadn’t even known to fight her way out. She’d just taken it . . . thinking she was doing something to protect herself, when in fact it was being done to her.

  Every breath became a shudder. Despite all the tears she’d already shed, her soul found
them anew.

  “Don’t cry, baby,” Jay murmured. His hand settled on her knee and moved upward as he tipped over the console and pressed his face to her neck. “Come here. Let me make you feel better.”

  El’s heart stammered as he nibbled at her ear, and then slammed itself back to a ferocious cadence. With coursing rage, El shoved at him. Her voice, sounding like it had come from the darkest, oldest part of her brain, commanded him to stop. And when he gave no sign that he would listen . . .

  Her fist broke the spell.

  Something hot spattered her face. He let out a howl like a wounded dog and tumbled back. Her fumbling hands could make no sense of the door. Her bag was forgotten. In a tumult of swearing and wrath, Jay started the car and threw it in reverse.

  “You fucking dyke. I’m bleeding!”

  The car was rolling, but it was no longer about declaring herself. It was about survival. Her fingers caught the handle and tugged. The door swung outward just as he skidded onto the road. The tires bumped, she tipped outward, and a moment later collided with the blurred ground.

  She lay there dazed, as the racing stripes on the door came into focus. Certain he’d come after her, El forced herself upright, but the boy was huddled inside the car, clutching his nose and gurgling. Clambering up, she realized one of her shoes had been torn from her foot and had vanished. Her bag was just there, inside the open car door. In it was her cell phone, but most importantly, her book.

  She took a tentative step. As if he could sense her, Jay hurled himself toward the door, his face a brilliant shade of purple. With a glare the likes of which she’d never seen, he slammed the door shut and flipped a perilous one-eighty across the double yellow line.

  Coming level with her, he rolled down his window. “Walk your ass home then. Maybe by the time you get there, you’ll have stomped some fucking sense into your head and realized how much better your life is with me in it.”

  The car roared down the road, leaving El beneath the trees. The adrenaline flowed into her legs, making every joint ache and the very skin sore. Unable to stand, she sank to the dirt and sobbed.

  As she worked, Riley took the liberty of arranging her sweet revenge. This involved putting tape across the back door latch and positioning her laptop on the filing cabinet so that it had a lovely view of the manager’s desk.

  Russel was his usual charming self, which of course meant he was a complete prick to her, but she took every passive-aggressive comment in stride, delivering ice cream to patrons with a perfect smile. Not surprisingly, the secret flavor did not sell well, but on her break, Riley was in such a good mood, she gave it a second try.

  It failed.

  While Russel hovered around her, obtrusively trying to read what she was writing, Riley gave her review for Sam, their elderly shopkeep. He could make a custard base as smooth as silk, but Riley was convinced he was losing his sense of smell. Any man, however, who gave his employees free ice cream deserved eternal loyalty as far as she was concerned.

  She clocked out precisely half an hour before closing, just like Russel always scheduled it. She removed her uniform and tucked it into her locker, checked on the computer, and set up the camera to record to a remote hard drive using the wi-fi.

  Russel watched her walk out the front door. She took her usual route, for once thanking the city council for passing the noise ordinance that made it mandatory for her to walk her bike out of the downtown area after business hours. She’d been habitually obeying it, and vocally lamenting it, just so that the nerdy creep would be off his guard. Parking in the alley behind the shop, she waited. With the signal relayed to her phone, she watched. When the sleight of hand and fuzzy math were at an end, Riley slipped in the back and made sure her knife was ready, just in case.

  “So lemme run something by you, okay?”

  Russel leapt from the chair. “Holy shit, Riley! You scared me! How did you get in here?”

  Riley kept her hands in her pockets, but leaned her backside against the safe. “I dialed the latch while you were putting the chairs up.”

  Suddenly, he couldn’t seem to make his eyes work properly. They wandered all over the place. “What? Why would you do that?”

  “I’ll get to that. Just let me do this right.”

  “Do what?” He scowled suddenly. “Disabling locks is vandalism—”

  “Russel,” she said in her customer service voice, as she drew her knife from her pocket and set it on the safe. “I’m gonna tell you what this is, and you’re gonna listen.”

  “Are you . . . are you robbing us?”

  Riley let out a ha, removed her phone from her pocket, and showed him what was on the screen. “Hey, Fuckwits . . . Sit down and shut up. You can’t rob a robber. That’s called returning stolen property and it’s what we’re going to do tonight, get me?”

  His face was so white, his blemishes looked like fresh blood, as if all of a sudden, he’d acquired a deadly disease and his organs were seeping out of his pores. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the twenty bucks in your pocket.”

  His knees gave way. He hit the chair with such force it rolled backward a few inches. Riley crossed her arms and released a long, bedeviled sigh.

  “Tyler’s fourth birthday party, last month—you remember that, right? Spoiled brat who pegged you with a slingshot? Like twenty screaming toddlers and one of them dropped a sundae on the ground? Anyway, the next day, Tyler’s mom came back and wanted another copy of her receipt. You were off that day. So I went in here to look for it. Only . . . I found something odd. Five voided cash transactions, totaling about thirty dollars. Except those transactions were mine. I know they got their ice creams and shakes, so why were the transactions voided in the system? And why was the money gone? Being the lowly employee that I am . . . I can’t void transactions and I certainly didn’t take the money.”

  Russel looked as if he was about to toss his ice cream cookie sandwiches all over his regulation shoes. He said nothing as she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. It was one of about thirty, all photocopies of the voided receipts. The amounts were tallied nicely, and she was about to drop math on his head like a fucking piano.

  “Every day you’ve worked, for the past month at least, you’ve been voiding about twenty to thirty dollars’ worth of transactions, or writing off waste, or ringing up less than what people actually order. You’ve been skimming the till. For how much? I have no idea. I can only track what I can see, what I can prove, and I’ve crunched those fucking numbers into powder.”

  Russel pitched forward, burying his face in his hands. She liked him that way. It suited him.

  She picked up the knife and opened it idly, tapping her chin with the blade. “I can prove that you’ve taken about thirty dollars a day for almost an entire month, which . . . I think, is about nine hundred dollars, right?”

  “Come on, man . . .” he whimpered. His voice was honestly terrified. He looked up at her with fear in his eyes, and she knew he’d probably never done this before. He was a terrible thief because he lacked experience.

  “Let me tell you how the law interprets these facts, Russel, because I feel like you need to know. Our state defines the receiving of stolen property in value of one thousand dollars or more to be larceny, which is a class H felony here. You know what that means?”

  He sniveled like a child throwing a tantrum fueled by bubblegum swirl and began to rock in place. “Oh man . . . oh man . . . oh man.”

  “That’s right! It means prison! You are so smart, Russel. I can see why you’re the manager.”

  “Please don’t tell.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to. I’m not a snitch.”

  She grinned, wider and wider as the silence stretched open. He had all the horrifying space he needed to fall in over his head.

  “I don’t have the money. I spent it all.”

  Riley’s smile remained at full wattage. “Oh, I know! On that awesome big screen and that new Xbox your
bros are always panting over!”

  “Yeah, so . . .” His voice squeaked. “So I can’t pay it back.”

  She waved a hand in good-natured dismissal and shoved it into her pocket. “Don’t worry! It’s fine! See, I know people!”

  With a toss, he was holding a roll of what looked like twenty-dollar bills; in actuality, it was a roll of ones surrounded by a couple twenties. For an instant only, his eyes gleamed in feral lust, but then the look was gone. He was learning. That was good.

  “What is this?”

  “A loan! From a really nice guy back in New York. See, he steals identities for the Russian Mafia, and it pays super well. He’s totally cool and was more than happy to dish out a small loan on behalf of one Russel Stilles from—”

  “No! No, it’s okay! I will put the money back. I’ll put it back!”

  Riley licked her lips. This was easier than she thought it would be.

  “Well, I don’t see how you’re going to do that. I mean it’s a lot of money, Russel. Let my friend help you out. Of course, the interest is pretty high, and he will cut off your feet if you don’t pay him back.”

  “Oh my god . . .”

  “But it’s totally fine! I mean, you’ll have like what? Three months? Maybe a little less? Before he breaks out the saw. If you’re nice, I’m sure you can make up at least half of it in tips. Maybe get another part-time—”

  “No, I swear! Give it back to him. You can do that, right? I swear I will put it back. I’ll just not pay myself for two hours every day, but work the same shift. See? It’s cool.” He held the roll out to her.

  She gave it a long look of consideration and hesitated dramatically. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes!” He seemed all too happy to be rid of the money, hands up as if in prayer. “I will put it back myself. I’ll do it.”

  “Well, okay, if you say so. But I’ll keep this money on standby, and let my friend know that you’re still thinking it over, okay?” He was shaking his head constantly, a human metronome of absurd groveling. “Let’s move on to my second condition.”