Sixteen

by Megan Mccafferty

  Dad flicked the spoon clean with his tongue, stalling for time. Then he put it in the sink and said, “Never. No. I will never die.”

  “And Mummy will never die?”

  “No, your mother won’t die.”

  “And I will never die?”

  “No. None of us will ever die.”

  I remember my mother, in the doorway hissing, “Adam! You can’t say that to a child! You’re giving her a totally false—” and I don’t remember the rest because he shushed her and took me to the park to ride the swings.

  And then, the fucker, he has a heart attack and drops dead. Nine years after the promise, it’s true, but a promise is a promise. Of course, a lot of stuff happened first. The investigation. Dad’s court case. Him winning but Mum leaving. The divorce. Mum’s remarriage. Dad’s demotion. And then . . . and then . . .

  One day I woke up and all I could think of was the way my dad used to wipe bread in butter. He misappropriated many foods (salt and vinegar potato chips crushed and used as sandwich filling, golden syrup spread on toast) and I’ve given them up one by one.

  I can’t eat the food he ate but I can listen to the records he loved. I rolled my first joint to “Rain Dogs” by Tom Waits. My dad taught me how. He had awesome taste in music, cataloged in an immaculate vinyl collection. I was a whiskey-grizzled middle-aged man trapped in the body of a little girl. Dad led me to my peers: Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Townes Van Zandt.

  Dad liked my records, too. He liked Jeff Buckley and Primal Scream and he loved Chan Marshall, especially her song “Good Woman,” which he played over and over. We played it at his funeral, but the tape sounded tinny and no one could really make out the words that explained why he thought Mum had left him:

  ’Cause I want to be a good woman. And I want you to be a good man.

  The idea seems so novel and so obvious: that you leave when you love someone, because you love someone. That kind people try hard and it’s still not enough. That song came out the year Mum moved out. But he was wrong to apply it to her. He looked at her photo and played the song over and over until he could believe it. But he was wrong. She didn’t leave because she loved him. She left because she didn’t love him anymore. It goes off, I guess, like milk. My new stepfather and my stepbrothers, well, they were good people, nice people, but to me they were mere holograms, facsimiles of family, cutout paper dolls I couldn’t be bothered to cut out.

  “Good Woman” is how I met Lara. I had left Mum one Saturday to go shopping in town and found myself in the basement of a chichi West End boutique looking at dresses I couldn’t afford, stroking them longingly like a pervert on the subway. Lara leaned behind the counter, laughing on the phone, her feather-cropped black hair nibbling at her long dark neck. The cordless phone pressed against her ear and I noticed that her red shift dress had sleeves that extended all the way down her wrists and hooked over her thumbs. Combined with her voluminous bosom, it leant her the air of a medieval wench who spent her days toiling on the land, not a modern-day shop girl folding overpriced underwear.

  A mix tape blared from the speaker and I could tell she had made it herself. I could also tell that she was a motivated person, as the tape was full of instructions: “Call Me!” snarled Blondie, “Express Yourself!” shrieked Madonna, “Don’t Stop the Rock!” intoned an early eighties breakdance outfit that I remembered but could not place. I caught myself dancing in the mirror, then I saw her dance behind me and we exchanged glances and smiled. Her teeth were white and Chiclet small.

  I went into the dressing room and pulled over my head a succession of cotton minidresses. Then the eighties instructional tape shifted gears in the most alarming way, and out of fucking nowhere, “Good Woman” started playing and I lost my fucking shit. I was halfway into a blouse when I wandered out of the dressing room, unbuttoned, my bra showing, people on the floor staring. And, again, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, but this time I was not dancing, I was sobbing, sobbing hard enough, it was almost like a dance.

  Lara was so kind to me. I didn’t know she, too, was only sixteen, on a summer job, visiting London from New York, or that the manager had gone for a long lunch and left her in charge, and she was probably freaking out. She made me herbal tea (“You want chamomile, ginger, lemon zinger?”), and just the flatness of her American accent soothed me.

  What draws us to people is what we eventually hold against them. The American accent came to drive me mad. When I met her I loved her softness, those acres of chocolate truffle skin. By the end the very chocolate truffleness seemed a cruel joke—for an extremely rich person she ate the nastiest, cheapest chocolate bars.

  She told me she was rich the third time I saw her. In fact she told an invisible girl who had bothered her in line at the cinema, conjured after-the-fact in the comfort of her Sloane Square pad because she had not been able to think of the fitting response at the theater. It came to her in a flash:

  “I’m rich and you’re not. Ha-ha!”

  The conjured girl, suitably chastened, vaporized.

  The wealth on her Colombian father’s side was vague and mysterious; on her WASP mother’s, public and dull old money. Her father was sexy as hell but seemed sad. He wanted to be whiter than her mother, as though to spite her for taking so much in the divorce, and so he wore monogrammed Savile Row suits and never spoke in Spanish.

  Dad would have been impressed with the apartment in which Lara and her mother lived that summer, although he’d have tried to hide it. Dad grew up in East End poverty and taught himself to read when he was nine because no one else was going to. He used to read two books a week. Lara was very well read because the wealthy get to be well read. They get to study art and learn languages. As a child she took sailing, rock climbing, and ice skating lessons: the world’s free geographic beauty condensed into monthly payments and required uniforms.

  Our trip to Paris was one of several holidays she would take in a year, this one to reward her new best friend for getting through the grief of her father’s death. That’s what she implied when she handed me the first-class train ticket. That it would be a healing distraction. But that was forgotten somewhere in the planning and it morphed into a full-on sixteenth birthday celebration for Lara, even though she had only four months to go before she turned seventeen. Lying together in her four-poster bed, we planned what we would wear for her birthday dinner. She pinched my hip.

  “You’re getting thinner.”

  “I’m thin.”

  “You’re thinner than you were.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. Christ, do you think they picked on Audrey Hepburn like this?”

  “I bet,” said Lara, hugging me, “she had at least one friend who did.”

  She fell asleep next to me and I watched her snore, the way her mouth fell open in an obscene O, a reminder of the blow jobs she gave freely—she had hooked up with three boys in the month she had been in London. Curious, the American belief that oral sex is somehow not intimate. She once told me she would rather blow a man she didn’t know than kiss him. Lara loved sex. She felt slightly offended that I didn’t, and she was also slightly offended that I wouldn’t drink with her. I just was never a drinker. And I always liked getting people home, putting them in cabs, tucking the sheets under their chin. I had a history of doing that for best friends.

  I had traveled the Channel Tunnel with dad once. As I marveled that we were really and truly under the ocean, he took a box of Crayola and drew fishes on the window of the train.

  “I want your first trip to Paris to be with the one man who will love you for the rest of your life,” he said.

  He fucked up and the hotel didn’t have a record of our reservation, so we had nowhere to stay and ended up at dinner somewhere dreadful, where I threw up in the dingy bathroom. Then we went to a shitty hotel across the street from the train station. They had one room left and, to my thirteen-year-old dismay, it had no TV.

  It was different with Lara’s d
ad. He had reserved two suites at the Hôtel Georges V, one for me and Lara, one for him and his girlfriend, Jessica. Jessica, like his ex-wife, was blond and elegant, slim, coiffed, immaculate. She tried frequently to engage Lara in conversation but Lara would have none of it. She had been pretending not to hear her for three years.

  Even Lara was impressed with our room, which boasted a cornucopia of fine antiques, among them a real Georges de la Tour on the wall, and a claw-foot tub with gold faucets in the marble bathroom. Our first night in Paris we stayed in and Lara took photos of me in the tub. She said she was trying to prove to me that I was anorexic. I had taken to going to bed hungry, it was true, but I wasn’t anorexic. I knew I was skinny and furthermore that the bones jutting from my hips actually suited me.

  My whole life, the life in which I knew him, my dad was overweight. But in all the photos from before I was born, he was built like a Greek god. Did it change the second my mother got pregnant with me, as though he, ever the gentleman, had opted to lose his figure instead of her? Inspired by the Greek god photos, I used to tell people my dad was Freddie Mercury. I had a history of outlandish lies rooted in truth. The truth was, like Freddie, he had a mustache and a lot of teeth. I also used to tell people I had won the London Marathon, when, in truth, Dad had carried me on his shoulders for a children’s fun run when I was five.

  The next night had been officially designated Lara’s celebration. Her father took us to a five-course dinner of crab, steak, snails, and foie gras—a checklist of things you would never want to put in your mouth—followed by three birthday cakes. Lara tried to bully me into having a forkful of angel food cake, but I kept my mouth shut, even when, in front of the adults, she forced a fork jokingly toward my pursed lips as if playing a game of choo-choo train. Soon the waiter poured her enough champagne that she was distracted half out of her dress, her father tugging up the straps as she danced on her chair.

  By two A.M. she was splayed drunk on the bed in her Galliano gown. Her dark hair was sticking to her forehead in clumps. Her lids were growing heavy and her mouth was falling into its familiar O. I watched her breathe, her milk-maid bosom straining at the green satin that encased it. It took fifteen minutes to muster the courage.

  Finally, “Lara,” I breathed. “Lara? Can I kiss you?”

  “Mmmpf,” she answered, and since it wasn’t a no, I very gently touched my lips to hers. Her mouth moved imperceptibly against mine and I grew bolder. Moving a hand to the buttons at her chest, I slowly, painstakingly, as though afraid of waking a giant, freed one of her breasts. Placing my mouth on the dark brown nipple, I sucked, ever so gently, waiting to feel her wealth, her confidence, her happiness slide down my throat and into my heart. But it didn’t. And when I heard her begin to snore, I stopped, and crawled into the bed, my arm around her waist.

  In the morning Lara was briefly hungover, but after scrambled eggs and coffee, she was ditzy with exuberance. Either she was pretending not to remember what had happened, or she really didn’t remember. Either way she said nothing. We swam in the hotel pool, she in a fifties vintage costume, me in a tank and shorts. Her father dove from the deep end, a blur of broad shoulders, tan, thick black hair. Jessica climbed neatly down the steps, displaying the kind of body that would have been beautiful if it didn’t betray such vanity: You could see each and every hour with her personal trainer, each dollar shading each muscle. Such an abundance of rude health, it made me think of Dad. . . .

  All those nights I sat up crying because my parents would die one day and still I had not inoculated myself one bit. He’s fat, I thought; he lifts heavy things for a living. And then it happened. I was in the house. I was the one who called the ambulance. And he was talking . . . he was walking even when he got in. He said he was going to be okay and that I should go to school. So I let him go to the hospital alone. I didn’t go with him. And he never came back.

  Looking at my tearstained face in the gilded mirror of the marble hotel bathroom, I noticed frown lines on my forehead. Lara was on a private shopping excursion with her father, so I called down to housekeeping and charged a hundred-dollar jar of face cream to the room. Then I felt for my soul like a packet of cigarettes—where did I leave it?

  For dinner, Lara wore the midnight blue Prada dress her dad had bought her. I had on a gray silk dress that had belonged to my mother a decade earlier. She had it taken in for me. I fumbled my way through dinner, pretending to dip forkfuls of filet mignon in béarnaise, bringing them to my mouth and then putting them back on the plate as though it were all an elaborate acting exercise under the watchful gaze of Lee Strasberg.

  When dessert arrived—tiramisu and chocolate gâteau because Lara couldn’t choose—I went to the ladies’ room and on the way back slipped my debit card to the waiter. I signed the bill with a flourish and no idea how it translated. It could have been forty dollars, four hundred dollars, or four thousand dollars. I didn’t care anymore. I knew I had Grandpa’s money in my checking account and that I was supposed to use it one day to travel. “Here I am,” I reasoned to myself, “traveling.”

  When Lara’s father realized what I had done, he pleaded with the maître d’ to reverse the charge and put it on his black Amex, but they couldn’t. Jessica looked at me quizzically. Lara was inexplicably enraged. She could hardly make eye contact, she just kept shaking her head. Her dad took Jessica to the hotel bar and in the elevator back to the room Lara hissed, “You don’t get it, do you? It’s rude. It’s an insult to my father.”

  Sometime during her shopping expedition with her dad, Lara had managed to slip away to score a bag of coke. She looked so sad, in her beautiful thousand-dollar dress, with her luxurious dark skin and cheap white flakes around her perfect nose. Soon enough, she wanted to go clubbing and decided it would be amusing to check out the hotel disco. I knew what to expect: banality and bad dancing. Strange aristocrats grinding against one another like outtakes from an unfinished Stanley Kubrick movie. Italian girls with bleached hair and Arabs with bleached teeth.

  Hoisting her new dress around her thighs, Lara danced furiously to “Who Let the Dogs Out,” which seemed to be the urgent query of the night, so often did the DJ play it. It was too awful. I left her with a floppy-haired Hugh Grant type and went back to the room. As I put the key in the door her dad came out of the elevator. I could see he was drunk, his bow tie askew, top buttons open, dark hair sprouting like rumors on his chest.

  “Hello there, moneybags,” he said when he saw me. “Where’s Lara?”

  “Dancing with a man who looks like Hugh Grant’s after-birth. Where’s Jessica?”

  “Mad at me. Stormed off into the Paris night in a huff . . . which is, at least, cheaper than a limo.”

  I laughed.

  “So thanks again for dinner. I don’t know when a girl has ever bought me dinner before.”

  “You’re welcome. Thank you for bringing me to Paris.”

  “It’s my absolute pleasure. We love having you here.”

  Then somehow I—because it was I who started it, that’s the honest truth—was kissing him, as he steadied himself against the corridor wall.

  In his suite, he locked the door and unzipped his pants and took it out. It was huge, just offensive really. What is seen is different from what is felt and I knew I couldn’t do it. He held it in front of my mouth and I looked at it and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t . . . I just . . . I can’t.” Not in Paris. Not in a hotel room.

  I remembered the dingy room without a TV, the way my father had pleaded and then cried. He hated himself. He couldn’t help it. “If you loved me,” he said.

  And I did love him.

  “Hey, that’s okay.” Lara’s dad stroked my hair. Then he asked, “Can I eat you?” and I said, “Yes.” That was what I wanted since I could not eat: to be eaten. I wanted to disappear and maybe he could help me. He kept asking me if I wanted him to stop and I said no, it was okay, as though I were being very brave. I made too much noise. I heard it, like hearing yourself s
ay something dumb but not being able to control yourself. When he was finished I scooped my dress back over my head as fast as I could. Once all your clothes are off, there is nothing left to do but put them back on again. I crept back to my room.

  That night I dreamed about falling. I know falling dreams are supposed to be terrifying, but I didn’t mind. I let myself fall. When I woke up I felt cheated. I didn’t get to hit the floor. I didn’t get to watch myself burst.

  I slid in bed beside Lara and stroked her hair, which seemed to have grown three inches in the three months I had known her. Her eyes popped open like a Victorian doll’s and she slapped my hand away.

  “You went off with that guy!”

  “Which guy?” I asked, nursing my whipped fingers.

  “The Hugh Grant guy!”

  “I did not!”

  “Well, you left and then he left and then I was alone. I went back to the room but you weren’t there.”

  “I didn’t go off with that guy.”

  She climbed out of bed.

  “Girls don’t do that to each other,” she huffed.

  Lara went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth so angrily, I thought they would drop out of her head. Lara and her father were going on to Switzerland. My train home left the station in an hour.

  “I’m sorry, Lara,” I said. “I’m sorry. I only went off because I wanted to be with you and it didn’t seem as though you wanted to be with me.”

  “I don’t want to be with you!”

  Before I left, Lara’s dad gave us both little Eiffel Tower pendants encrusted with diamonds. By that point she was no longer speaking to me. As I stepped into my taxi I thanked her for taking me on holiday and tried to hug her, but she wouldn’t let me. I knew what she was thinking: I took in a damaged person. I sat next to a fat man on the Channel Tunnel home. He had a musky odor that, over the course of the journey, I pinpointed as the smell of sour defeat. When I got back to my mum’s house, I stuffed my jeans and T-shirt in the washing machine.