“Of course you are.”
“Well, if I’m not, then I’m really going to regret all these late nights in the newspaper office that require me to walk home across campus at two a.m. straight into the sights of dudes who are a hundred IQ points dumber than I am but who are also, maddeningly, about a hundred pounds heavier.” I glanced over my shoulder at him. Was he…smiling? Not really, just the slightest hint of a smirk was tugging the corners of his mouth, maybe, and it disappeared the moment I registered it. But still. “Sometimes a crime in support of the greater good is justifiable,” I said.
After filling a bowl with ice from the soda fountain, it occurred to me that since we were in a cafeteria, I should probably nab some food for my cranky, always-hungry knight. Besides, my late night at the newspaper office had made me peckish, too. “Come on,” I said, leading the way into the kitchen hidden behind the buffet where we always lined up with our trays. “I’m starving.”
I started opening cupboards, looking for something portable. “How about sandwiches?” I said, pulling out an extra-long loaf of Wonder Bread and moving to a wall of refrigerators. “We just need to find something to put in them—aha!” I held up a laughably large package of turkey cold cuts. “Oh, and industrial cheese, too!”
He had opened the next fridge but popped his head out from behind its door, doing the almost-smiling thing again. “Would madame desire some mustard?”
I burst out laughing at the enormous jug he held out. It must have been a gallon at least. “I’m more of a mayo girl,” I said when I recovered myself. But then he silently produced an even bigger container of Hellmann’s, and I totally cracked up again.
“Shhh,” he said. “I admit, I didn’t peg you as a criminal, but if you are one, I’m going to bet you’re not a stupid one, so shut the hell up.”
I clamped my mouth shut, hefted my groceries in one arm, balanced the bowl of ice in the other, and gestured with my head for him to follow me. I about lost it again when he did so carrying both supersize condiments with an unnaturally straight face. How he managed them with the backpack and oversize portfolio he also had, I don’t know.
Somehow, we managed to make it from the crime scene to my second-floor room undetected. I dumped the food on my desk. “You want to just dunk your hand in this bowl?”
“Nah, I’m okay.”
“You are not okay. Did you hear the sound when your fist connected with his face?” I started rummaging around in my half of the closet for something to use for a makeshift ice pack, settling on an old T-shirt that had seen better days. I spread it flat on my desk, dumped the ice on it, and tied up the opening at the bottom to fashion an ice pack. “You saved my ass out there, so humor me.”
He rolled his eyes, but he took the homemade pack and wrapped it around his hand as he lowered himself onto my bed, sitting across it perpendicularly with his back against the wall it was shoved against. “Things did seem like they were about to get a little dicey out there.”
There was my opening. I still wanted to tell him. And not because I hoped it would somehow make him want to help me with the art building. It was more just a strange compulsion to tell someone coming over me gradually but inexorably, like a tide. I had been keeping this secret for three and a half years, and I didn’t want it anymore. And Matthew, as unsettling as he could be, made me feel safe. And that was…really, really weird. But if I examined the thought too much, I would lose my nerve, and more than anything, I needed to let my secret out.
“Yeah. Royce was one of the leaders of my freshman orientation group. I… God, this is so embarrassing now.” I turned my back and started making sandwiches so I wouldn’t have to look at him while I talked. “For about a millisecond there, I thought he was cool.” I braced for the incredulous reaction I deserved, but it didn’t come, so I kept going—with the story and the sandwich. “He kind of…fixated on me. Assaulted me with his charm, if you will. And I didn’t know anyone at Allenhurst. I’m not from around here.”
“Where are you from?”
The question surprised me. I think it might have been the first time Matthew had asked me something about myself. “Oregon. Just outside Portland.” I turned and handed him a sandwich. “I was nervous,” I said, returning to my story, trying to tell it without sinking myself back inside it. Usually when my mind went back to that night, I felt the emotions as strongly as ever. Now, though, I wanted to recount what happened in a detached way. I took a deep breath. “I was trying to make friends. I had been kind of…straitlaced in high school.”
“You don’t say.”
He was grinning, so I perched on the bed next to him with my sandwich and used my free hand to punch him in the shoulder, but I made sure it was his uninjured side.
The teasing actually helped—a lot. It grounded me in the present, allowing me to stay outside the story as I told it. “Yeah, so Royce seemed…cool. Which, again, I realize makes me seem like an idiot.”
“Nah. Royce seems like a master manipulator. If you didn’t already know him, I’m sure he could seem appealing.” He cocked his head. “Actually, no, he couldn’t. But go on.”
“Okay, well, the second night of orientation, there was a party in Hannover House. A bunch of guys with adjacent rooms opened them up for the party. They were all freshman pledges to one of the frats on campus, and lots of the older brothers were there, too, including Royce. I…drank too much.”
“As I’m sure everyone did.”
I shrugged, the casualness of the gesture belying the fact that I was actually clinging desperately to my vantage point as a detached storyteller. “I didn’t have a lot of experience with drinking, and it kind of came on me all at once. I got up to leave, and Royce noticed I was unsteady on my feet. He asked if I wanted to come to one of the empty rooms and watch a movie.”
“And you said yes.”
“Of course I said yes,” I didn’t even bother trying to keep the self-disgust from my voice. “He was the coolest guy in our class.” I didn’t know what was worse, actually, what happened that night, or the fact that I walked right into it.
“I’m sorry, Rainbow Brite.” I whipped my eyes to his face. He’d spoken so quietly, so…sincerely, that it startled me. I don’t know why a genuine, calm expression of sympathy was such a shock, but it was.
“It wasn’t…what you’re thinking. I wasn’t adverse to a little, um, experience.” I cleared my throat because my voice had become embarrassingly scratchy. “But not, you know, much beyond first base.”
“I fucking hate that metaphor. But I’m guessing Royce had different ideas about things.”
“Yes. And when I kept pushing him away, he tried to force me.”
“But you said it wasn’t—”
“Well, I was drunk, but not so drunk that I couldn’t knee him in the groin.”
“Ha!” He barked a triumphant laugh. “Atta girl.”
“And that’s it, pretty much.” I sagged back against the wall, and though I hadn’t maintained the detachment I’d been going for, strangely, the story didn’t have the same power over me it’d had just minutes ago. In fact, now that it was out, I wasn’t sure why this had been weighing on me so much. I was embarrassed even. Some dumb freshman got her boobs groped by a jerk. What else was new? “Sorry. I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but—”
“I think it’s a big deal.”
My breath caught. I wanted to kiss him for saying that, for understanding. But that would be stupid. Plus, I was having trouble meeting his eyes. I didn’t know how to be with this Matthew, the sympathetic, nonconfrontational one.
The phone rang. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed, because I knew who it would be. No one else called me in the middle of the night.
Matthew curled his lip. Ah, there was the surly boy I’d come to know. “You have a phone in your room?”
I sighed and picked up said phone. “Hi, Dad.”
Matthew
Who was this girl? The fucking queen of Portla
nd? I thought of all those phone messages she had left me. For some reason, the idea that she had been making those calls from her room on her own personal phone riled me. Reminded me who she was. I had been starting to feel a little sorry for her, with all this Royce stuff. She was vulnerable under all her bluster. She was kind of funny, too. But she was also—like everyone else at this school—a rich kid with no idea how the world actually worked. It was good, though, because it reminded me who I was and why I was at this school. It snapped me back into my place. In two months, she’d be using her trust fund to cushion herself while she willed her way into an entry-level journalism job, and I’d be in a vermin-infested shithole room in Boston trying to hold out as long as possible before I caved and got a restaurant job.
“Listen to me. Dad. Listen.”
She’d been talking this way to her father for a few minutes. It was hard to figure out what was going on. She would listen for a while, then start lecturing him, but then seem to get interrupted.
“The little white pill, Dad. Did you take your pill at breakfast?”
There was a long silence, during which she looked at the ceiling and—goddamn, was she crying? She wasn’t making any noise, but a few tears were leaking from the sides of her eyes. I’d been eating my sandwich while she talked, planning to get up and go once I was done, but dammit, I didn’t think I should leave her like this.
“This is a manic episode, Dad. It will pass.”
More silence. She shook her head as she listened to him. “Dad. Listen to me. This is the last thing I’m going to say. You are going to hang up the phone now and go to bed. If you can’t sleep, you’re just going to lie there until the sun comes up. If you don’t promise me, right now, on Mom’s grave, that you are going to do what I’m telling you, I’m going to call an ambulance.”
Some more silence, then a quiet “I love you, Dad.”
She hung up the phone, but she didn’t move at first, just sat there with her shoulders slumped, frozen. After a few beats of silence, I watched her straighten her spine like she was steeling herself for battle. I recognized the posture. It was pretty much how I went through the world every day. When she finally turned, she caught me looking at the phone. Well, really, I’d been looking at her hand. When she’d replaced the receiver in its cradle, she’d started drumming coral-tipped nails on the baby-blue plastic. “I know you think I have a phone in my room because I’m a rich, spoiled brat,” she said. “But really, I have a phone in my room because my father has problems, and I’m afraid he’ll kill himself if he can’t call me when he’s having a…spell.”
Jesus. Her voice shook, and she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
I had no idea what to say, so I just went with “Come finish your sandwich, Rainbow Brite.” When she didn’t move, I leaned forward, grabbed her hand, and tugged her back onto the bed with me. She came, and we sat side by side on her bed, our backs to the wall.
She picked up the sandwich she’d abandoned early in the story about Royce. “Thanks for rescuing me tonight.”
“I have no doubt you would have castrated that fucker yourself had I not stumbled on the scene.”
“Still. It was nice to have an ally.”
I chuckled, noticing that she hadn’t denied the castration part. She yawned. It was contagious, apparently, because I did too.
Chapter Three
Matthew
When I woke with a start, I initially had no idea where I was. My first clue was the Scott Baio poster on the far wall of a room that looked like a squadron of My Little Ponies had pooped sparkly girl accessories on every flat surface. My second clue was the throbbing pain and huge bruise on my right hand.
My third clue was the fact that Rainbow Brite was going through my stuff, which, of course, jolted me fully awake. “What the hell?”
She turned, and she didn’t even have the good grace to look guilty. “What part of ‘investigative reporter’ did you not understand?”
I vaulted off the bed, where I had apparently conked out, but it was too late. My stencil and cans of paint were all over the floor. She had seen everything.
“You’re the anti-Reagan-graffiti person, aren’t you? Your stuff is all over town!”
There was no point in denying it. I started repacking my bag and gathering my shit, trying not to panic, trying to think what I could say or do to convince her to keep this to herself.
“I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me. Of course it’s you. Oh my God! I love your work.”
That surprised me. But then, I had learned in the past few hours that Rainbow Brite, with her breaking and entering and her dickweed-prepster balls-kicking, had a bit of a dark side underneath all that sparkle. “Yeah, well, I’m poor. My family’s poor. I come from a poor town in a poor state. But that doesn’t make us stupid. And trickle-down economics is an insult to our intelligence.” I started putting the paint cans back into my backpack. “But so help me, Jenny, if you tell anyone about this, or…” Shit. She was the editor of the newspaper. I was fucked. What if she told on me? Would Curry drop me? Would the school call the cops?
“You just called me Jenny.”
I hadn’t even noticed.
“And don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.”
“It is?” I thought her whole thing was truth over all, investigative reporting, blah, blah. “Isn’t that, like, against the whole raison d’être of journalism?” Though I didn’t know why I was arguing. I could be in deep, deep shit if she told anyone.
“Well, considering that not only did I tell you my humiliating Royce story last night, but you also found out my father is insane, what do you say we just call it even? Agree to keep each others’ secrets?”
I remembered those tears. Her tone as she spoke to her father, as if he were the child and she the parent. Her hunched shoulders, carrying too much.
As incredible as it seemed, I could trust her. So I stuck out my hand for her to shake.
She smiled. A great big megawatt smile that lit up her whole face.
Then she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, her lips impossibly soft against a day’s worth of stubble.
She pulled away before I could fully take stock of the astonishing sensation of those lips. “I gotta go. Lock the door behind you when you leave.” She grinned. “Hope your day is totally mint.”
And then she was gone, the soft, baby-powder smell of her the only sign that she’d been there at all, leaving me blinking and looking up at a picture of Charles in Charge.
Jenny
Matthew shouldn’t have been surprised when, at one in the morning, he emerged from his dorm room to find me sitting on the floor in the hall outside of it. I had thought he was smarter than that.
But no. He reared back, almost as if someone had hit him, and then he nearly tripped over me.
“Did you really think I was going to let this whole ‘I’m the crusading social-justice graffiti-artist man-about-town’ thing go with no further discussion?” I asked as I scrambled to my feet. “I mean, just because I promised not to tell anyone about it doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk about it.”
He rolled his eyes, pulled up his hood, and took off down the corridor.
Whoa. I guess our little détente of yesterday evening had only been a temporary thing. Still, I was undeterred. “How come your roommate doesn’t get suspicious?”
“I’m in a single,” he said, walking so fast I practically had to jog to keep pace with him.
“What about the other guys on the hall?”
“I’m kind of a loner.”
“You don’t say.”
He was waiting for me at the door to the courtyard, holding it open for me. I shot him a grin as I sashayed through and pulled up my hood, trying to cover my surprise that not only was he letting me follow him, he was being kind of chivalrous about it.
Again with the eye rolling. But he said, “At least you didn’t wear that horrible pink thing you can see from a mile away.”
“Give me a l
ittle credit.” I didn’t bother telling him that I’d had to borrow the navy windbreaker I was wearing from Nessa, as it turned out I owned nothing suitable for skulking around alleys committing crimes. It was making me question whether I’d need to make some wardrobe changes before launching my investigative reporting career. I trotted after him as he turned from the block of dorms on to the campus proper. “So where are we going?”
“Rule number one: no talking.”
“That rule is not going to work for me.” I tried not to pant—he was still keeping up quite the pace.
He stopped then, but I had too much momentum going, so I couldn’t keep from crashing into him. He growled. He actually growled. Then he turned and stooped so he could get right in my face. With his green eyes glowing in the streetlight and his head otherwise concealed by his hood, he looked like a supernatural creature. Or, you know, a petty criminal with really pretty eyes.
“Listen to me, Rainbow Brite. This is my show. If you’re coming with me, you’re playing by my rules. I’ve been doing this for three and a half years, and I haven’t gotten caught yet. I’m not about to start now because you can’t keep your goddamned mouth shut.”
Well. Okay, that was fair, I guess. Honestly, I was surprised that he had accepted my presence at all. I’d been prepared to fight to get him to let me come. So I made a show of shutting my mouth and miming throwing away the key.
It was hard, though. Oh, it was so hard! First of all, just walking in total silence for ten minutes. Who does that? All I could do was sneak glances at him as I loped to keep up with his long, determined strides. There was something about him tonight. An intensity. Well, there was always an intensity about Matthew, but it was even more in evidence as he led the way through the gates that marked the southern edge of campus. Then, when we arrived at our destination, which was a construction site in the town proper, and he pulled out his stencil, I wanted to lob a thousand questions at him. How do you decide where to paint? Do you even consider it painting? How many different stencils do you have? What does this one mean?
The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom Page 3