by Mary McCoy
“Why me?” I asked, softening my voice.
For a minute I thought he was disappointed in me, like he’d trusted me with all of these secrets, and I’d failed to make anything different. Like I’d let him down. But then he looked down at his feet and a streak of pink crept up past the collar of his white button-down shirt, and he said, “Because you are a force for good in the universe.”
And that was when I realized that when Kian asked if I’d been getting his notes, he wasn’t just talking about the ones from Deep Throat. He was talking about how he’d felt about me for the past two Valentine’s Days and who knows how much longer before that.
Time slowed down as I combed my brain for a response.
I’d spent the past year trying to bury my feelings for Hector Estrella. Now, when I tried to dig them up, they were gone. I didn’t notice when it happened exactly. Once, I’d been the kind of person who could lose a weekend devastated because the boy I liked didn’t buy me flowers for Valentine’s Day. Once, I’d been the kind of person who fell in love, who wanted romance, even though I was afraid of it. All I wanted then was to be left alone, to have my books, and maybe a little space in my life for someone who cared about me, if that person existed. Now, those Valentine’s Day bouquets and those simple little wants seemed like things that had happened to another person.
Of course I didn’t say any of it out loud. As far as Kian knew, I was sitting there trying to figure out how to let him down easy.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Forget I said anything about it.”
“You don’t even know me.”
I’d always thought my best shot at love was to get to know someone and slowly win them over until they liked my quirks right along with the rest of me. That someone would fall for me from a distance was incomprehensible. It did not fit into my worldview. It was like handing an iPhone to the Salem witches and telling them to use it to save themselves.
Maybe Kian realized that, or maybe because he’d already revealed so much, he figured he didn’t have anything left to lose by saying the rest.
“Do you want to hang out over spring break?”
The weird thing was, I was intrigued. It was intriguing to be wanted like that.
If Hector had wanted me, he would have done what Kian was doing. If he’d cared, he would have tried.
“What about after that?” I asked.
I already knew the answer, and that was the other thing that made it so appealing. It could only be spring break. It wasn’t like I could start dating my informant, but during those ten days, we could be away from Imperial Day, the Honor Council, the Senate. We could be other people together. We could get to know each other like none of the problems that currently engulfed us even existed.
“We could see,” Kian said.
“The last person I went out with died,” I said.
“I know,” Kian said, and immediately, I wished I could take it back and say what I actually felt instead of these tossed-off, callous things.
“You were there that night, weren’t you?”
Along with Cal and Chris Gibbons and Hector and Esme, his was the name that I’d heard enough times to believe it might have been the truth.
“Not as a guest. My cousin owns a catering company, and she was short-staffed, so I said I’d help her out. I didn’t know there were going to be Imperial Day people there or I wouldn’t have done it.”
So that was why they called him Kitchen Boy, I thought. Lovely that Cal and Chris Gibbons’s main takeaway from the night Soren died was a cruel new nickname for their colleague.
“Cal came into the kitchen and started hounding my cousin for booze. Then he tried to get her to go into the pantry with him.”
I curled my lip in disgust. Knowing Cal, he probably thought that the help were his to harass and fondle at will.
“When he saw me come around the corner with an ice bucket, he was, like, ‘Nice apron, Kitchen Boy,’ and I said, ‘Thank you,’ and that was the last I saw of him that night.”
“Did you see Soren, though?”
“He came into the kitchen at about ten looking for a cup of coffee. There wasn’t any made, but I told him I’d brew a pot, and he wouldn’t let me. He went into the pantry and found the filters and made it himself. He wasn’t fucked up, Claudia. We sat there and he asked me about the chess team. I didn’t even know he knew I was on the chess team.”
I could almost see the story unfold before my eyes as he told it, Soren’s hands wrapped around the coffee mug, the intense way he had of looking at you when you were talking to him, like he was listening as hard as he could. At 10 p.m. on the night he died, Soren was still Soren, and even though it didn’t change anything, knowing this flooded me with peace.
That was when I knew for sure that I wanted to know Kian Sarkosian, the person who had been my ally all along. Since my sophomore year, he’d warned me of danger, tipped me off, given me insider information that no one else was supposed to know, steered me through the minefield that was my Honor Council hearing. And on top of all of that, he’d even bought me flowers.
“Why do you always wear the same thing?” I asked. I knew the question was a little blunt, but Kian Sarkosian and I seemed to be in blunt territory now.
He considered his answer for a minute, then grimaced. “It’s weird.”
“You’re talking to a girl who wears neckties and Nixon t-shirts,” I reminded him.
“I don’t like using my clothes as a shortcut way of telling people what kind of person I am. I like things simple. No affectations.”
“Isn’t the absence of affectation an affectation?” I asked, smirking to let him know I was just messing with him a little bit.
He smiled, and I felt myself melt.
“For what it’s worth,” he added, “I like your neckties.”
I thought about what freshman-year Claudia might have said. That was who I wanted to be when I was with Kian, the person who’d never run for Senate or fallen for Hector Estrella or gone out for tacos with Soren Bieckmann.
“What do you want to do over spring break?” Kian asked me.
“Old things,” I said at last. “I want to go look at some old things.”
XLVI
You Deserve Better
The first time Kian texted, he asked me to go to the silent movie theater on Fairfax. We watched a Rudy Valentino movie from the 1920s, then afterwards he took me to the Jewish deli down the street for pastrami sandwiches and pickles. We paid at an antique cash register that was operated with a hand crank, and even though we were the youngest people in the restaurant by at least three decades, I looked at Kian and said, “Older.”
The day after that, we went to the Central Library and looked at microfilm and found out all the horrible crimes that took place on our birthdays during various years of the 1800s.
“Older,” I told him.
The third day, we met at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Kian led me through the German expressionists, the French impressionists, the Flemish portrait painters, the Italian Renaissance, medieval England, past all of it until we came to a room with two giant Assyrian reliefs covering the wall. The sculptures were part bird, part horse, part human, part god. They’d been taken from a palace in Nineveh, the city Jonah, in the Bible, was supposed to save from its wickedness before he chickened out. Kian stood before the reliefs, his eyes soaking up every detail, every feather on the eagle’s neck, like he was storing up the view until next time.
“This is my favorite place,” he said. “I come here when I need to think.”
“Why here?”
“Because these are 17,000 years old, and they were basically some king’s wallpaper. It puts things in perspective. Nobody knows what’s important or what will last.”
I nodded. “Everything we do matters. Nothing we do matters.”
“Exactly,” Kian said, and that was when he kissed me.
Assyrian reliefs are not very popular in museums. You can kiss in front of them
for at least a minute before someone comes barging into the room. You can slip a hand up under a sweater, clutch a hip. You can feel a person’s breath on your neck, the nip of his teeth on your earlobe.
It was spring break. Everything mattered. Nothing mattered.
I don’t remember our walk to the car, only that by the time we got there, I was breathless. I climbed into the backseat and he climbed in after me and slammed the door shut, and beyond that, I do not think what happened is relevant to my testimony.
On Saturday night, I invited him over to my house to watch documentaries, much to the astonishment of my parents, who were going to some kind of company party in Santa Monica, one of the ones where they got all dressed up and came home after two. I could tell this scenario hadn’t crossed their minds and they had a moment’s hesitation about leaving me alone in the house with a boy. But they were computer nerds. I saw them calculate the risk in their heads based on what they knew of me, what they could deduce about Kian from a first impression, and I guess they liked the odds because they gave Kian some stern looks, made some vague comments about trusting me, and then left.
Five minutes later, my phone buzzed three times in quick succession, then Kian’s did the same. I assumed it was my parents doing a paranoia check, but it was Hector. Some people were going over to Esme’s to watch movies, and I was invited if I wanted to go. And where had I been all week?
I smiled as I looked up at Kian.
“Who was that?”
“Esme,” he said. “Inviting me over. You?”
“Hector. Same thing.” My smile widened. “Nobody knows where I am.”
Kian smiled back. “Nobody knows we’re doing this.”
The thought was delicious, not only for this reason, but because no one anywhere would have suspected that I was alone in my house with Kian. He was my secret.
“If Cal knew I was with you . . .” Kian trailed off, the smile fading from his face in a way that made me realize he’d been about to add he’d kill me.
That was when I realized the other reason I couldn’t resist doing this. I liked Kian. In fact, the better I got to know him, the more I liked him. What was not to like? A guy who thought up elaborate places to take me, the way he hung on everything I said like he really did believe I was a force for good in the universe. And then there was the way he kissed. Not that I had much—or any—prior experience in that field, but when his lips touched mine, I felt a shock from the back of my neck to the base of my spine. My toes curled up in my shoes. I felt reckless, electrified, not just the first time he kissed me, but every time. If it would be dangerous to be caught together, I didn’t care. I took his hand and led him upstairs to my room.
An hour or so later, we went back down to the kitchen and made an oven pizza, a bag of popcorn, and root beer floats, and ate everything. It was there at the kitchen table, sluggish and content with the dual pleasures of eating junk food and fooling around, that Kian decided we needed to talk and basically inject a dose of horrible reality into what had been an otherwise unimpeachable week.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
“Watch some television?” I suggested. “Or a movie? I don’t care.”
“I mean next week. At school.”
It was the conversation we’d been putting off, the thing I’d managed to avoid thinking about altogether. I thought about trying to carry what we had over into the real world. Was that possible? And more than that, was it even what I wanted? Kian had already surprised me plenty of times in the past week, but I was in no way prepared for what he said next.
“Because I think we should keep doing this. In public.”
“We’d be arrested,” I said, because making a stupid joke prevented me from having to answer the question. Kian knew what I was doing, though. Kian knew exactly what I was doing and rolled his eyes.
“Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
If I’d left things alone there, it might have turned out differently. I would have hurt Kian, he would have hated me for a while, but in the end, it might have been preferable. Instead, though, another impulse took hold of me. I was exhausted. I was sick to death of pushing everything away. I was tired of acting like there was no one I needed and nothing I wanted. Kian deserved better than that. And I imagined that maybe Soren was watching, that wherever he was, he’d be proud of me for trying to tell the truth.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just . . . this week. This week was such a good thing in such a year of shit.”
Every one of those words stuck in my throat, unwilling to be pried out. My tongue was unused to sincerity, and it did not come easily, but I kept going.
“I like talking to you. I like kissing you. I like your stupid face. I want us to be together, too.”
Kian’s face lit up as I spoke, his smile spreading almost to his ears. I hated that I had to keep talking.
“But it can’t happen. As long as Cal is running things at Imperial Day, I don’t see how this can work.”
“I don’t care what he does to me,” Kian said.
“You should,” I said. It was bold and reckless and romantic for Kian to say something like that to me, but it was a terrible idea. A year’s tuition at Imperial Day was more than most people in the world earned in a year, and if Kian’s parents could afford to send him there without a scholarship, it was only just barely. They were banking on him. He was an investment. They were sending him to Imperial Day so he wouldn’t have to spend holiday weekends rolling canapés at a Nick Jr. star’s house party.
So that was part of it. I wasn’t going to let Kian throw away his life for a chance to hold my hand in the hallway at school.
But it was also more than that.
“You want to take Cal down, right?”
“Of course I do,” Kian said.
“The only way we can do that is if we go on like we’ve always been. If you and I are a couple, Cal will be suspicious. We want him thinking that everything is normal and fine.”
“Do you have a plan?” Kian asked.
“I’m close to one,” I lied, and for a second, things felt back to the way they’d been. He was Deep Throat; I was Woodward and Bernstein. Nothing more.
Kian looked impressed, and I reminded myself that I was doing him a favor. I was protecting him from whatever he thought he was willing to sacrifice to be with me.
“And if it works? What about then?” he asked, leaning toward me, and I let my kiss be my answer.
I’m sorry, Soren, I thought. I’m not as good at the truth as you were.
In one of the moments in between kissing and talking, Kian picked up a Whole Foods receipt from the kitchen table and started nervously fiddling with it. He wrapped it around his index finger as many times as it would go, then he folded it up into a triangle, then he unfolded it and smoothed it flat.
“Is that a nervous habit?” I asked.
“Sort of,” he said. Then he picked up a pencil from the table and wrote in the blocky letters I’d come to know so well:
SOMETIMES YOU MAKE ME NERVOUS
I laughed. Kian served on the Honor Council week after week with Cal Hurt, an unpredictable psychopath with a hair-trigger response, and I made him nervous?
DON’T BE NERVOUS, I wrote back. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING.
“It doesn’t seem that way,” Kian said, in a slightly eyebrow-waggling tone of voice that I supposed was a compliment.
I LIKE YOUR EYES, he wrote next.
YOU’RE A GOOD KISSER, I wrote back.
“This paper is magic,” Kian said. “You can say anything on it, as long as it’s the truth.”
Then he wrote, I WANT YOU TO BE MY GIRLFRIEND.
I’VE NEVER BEEN ANYONE’S GIRLFRIEND BEFORE.
IT DOESN’T MATTER.
But it did matter. I acted like the reason I’d never been anyone’s girlfriend before was because I wasn’t pretty enough. Or because of my stutter or my limp. But for a long time, I’d been beginning to suspect it was s
omething else.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FIGURE OUT I’M A TERRIBLE PERSON?
YOU ARE A FORCE FOR GOOD IN THE UNIVERSE.
Would he ever get tired of saying that? I wondered.
Yes.
He would.
Once he got to know me, it wouldn’t take long before he never wanted to say it again.
YOU DESERVE BETTER, I wrote.
Kian took my hands across the kitchen table and said, “I can’t do this, Claudia. Write one nice thing about yourself. One nice thing, that’s it.”
I stared at the Whole Foods receipt, imagining the frivolous things on the other side of it: sea salt, rice crisps, and infused olive oils that no one in my house would ever use. I made no move to pick up the pen.
“The magic paper is a safe space, Claudia.”
For a moment, I thought about picking up the pencil and doing what he’d asked, but instead, I shook my head and pushed the receipt back across the kitchen table at him.
“You should go,” I said, and when he started to protest, I pressed my fingertips to his lips. “My parents will be home soon. I’ll see you on Monday.”
Kian’s goofy smile disintegrated, was replaced by his indifferent Honor Council poker face, which, since we’re being honest here, I actually preferred.
“If that’s what you want,” he said. The chair scraped along the tile floor as he got up from the table and walked out of the kitchen. He let himself out. I waited until I heard his car starting in the driveway to get up from the table and lock the front door.
I was glad Kian was smart, that he’d gotten it on the first try and hadn’t made me say out loud that when I saw him on Monday, it would be like none of this had ever happened.
I didn’t know then what was coming or what was going to happen, but there was one true thing I knew and it was this:
Whatever Kian thought this was, however he thought he felt about me, I needed him to know that when the time came, and all of this came crashing down, he should save himself. He shouldn’t bother wasting the truth on me.