Red Blooded

by Caitlin Sinead

  Breathe, just breathe.

  “So, let’s get into this book!” I read several pages about a little boy who wakes up each morning with different colored eyes. I do the different voices for his mom and dad and even his talking cat.

  Just as I’m about to get into the part where the cat explains that being colorful is a grand thing, Janey tugs on my jeans. “He’s still looking at us,” she whispers, this time more quietly. Perhaps a knack for subtlety can be acquired. I glance back at Dylan. He stares at me. He doesn’t look away, at least not immediately. His gooey grin reemerges.

  God, I want to kiss that grin.

  Heat swells up in my chest as he turns back to his tablet.

  Or at least he tries to. Janey asks him something in Spanish and he looks up, eyebrow raised. But he smiles and responds slowly. “Después de las elecciones.”

  Janey giggles and looks at me all moony. Dylan has this sly smile, before he gets up and strides over. “Need a break? I can take over.”

  I push away thoughts of running my fingers along Dylan’s chest, like I did at Tristan’s party. Nothing more will happen. He needs to focus. We both need to focus. And I really need to stop embarrassing myself in front of him.

  I calm myself down and sit cross-legged on the floor, allowing the smaller kids to take turns sitting in my lap as Dylan finishes out the story. He does a hilarious, quasi-gruff voice for the cat and after funny lines he makes silly expressions that get the kids, and me, giggling.

  “And that’s why you should always welcome surprises,” he finishes, holding the book out and slowly moving it around for the gaping kids to take in the illustrations. He closes it and looks at me. “What next?”

  “Well, we could—”

  Dylan’s phone vibrates in his pocket. He pulls it out and frowns. “It’s Lisa, I better...” He gets up and motions toward the door.

  “Of course,” I say.

  Janey still has a silly smile.

  “What did you ask him?” I whisper to her as the other kids talk about the end of the book and dare each other to touch a small beetle in the corner. Poor little bug. I’ll intervene as soon as I get the info from Janey.

  “I asked if he was going to ask you to be his girlfriend,” she says with a big grin.

  I laugh. “I told you he’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Well, not yet.” She giggles.

  “Janey...”

  One boy is about to spear the beetle with a pen. I save the small creature just in time and try to ignore the hammering in my chest. Maybe Dylan and I need to focus now. But what about later? When I’m no longer the girl Dylan has to manage, maybe I could be a lot more to him?

  * * *

  As we walk back to the metro, Dylan squints at me and says, “I’ve been thinking...”

  “Well, just don’t make it a habit and I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  He laughs. “No, seriously, I want to ask you something, but I don’t want to offend you, so I—”

  “It’s okay,” I say, rubbing my hands along my jeans. “Ask away.”

  “Well...” He looks to the left. “Before your mom was the VP pick you spoke a lot about learning disorders and education reform. But now, you don’t seem as interested. Why not?”

  Oh, that. I breathe a little easier. “I’m very interested. It’s just, Lisa and Bain keep shooting me down when I say I want to talk about it. I think there’s a lot we could do to improve our education system, and one of the big things is to work with teachers’ unions and get them to revise their current policies. As you can imagine, though, that’s not exactly something the campaign wants to talk about.”

  Dylan nods. “We get a lot of support from teachers’ unions.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “And anyway, it’s not like I have any really new ideas. Other people are saying what I think too.”

  “But you have a soapbox.”

  “One I’m not allowed to use.” I sigh. We get on the escalator, me first. I turn around and, because he’s so much taller than me, we’re still not quite at eye level. But I don’t have to look up quite so much.

  “Maybe Bain and Lisa will come around,” he says.

  I shrug. “Maybe.”

  He taps his fingers on the escalator railing. “In the meantime though, think about what you want to say. Write down your talking points. You never know when an opportunity might come up. Make sure you’re ready for it.”

  “I will.” I don’t volunteer that I’ve already gone over exactly what I want to say. When the opportunity presents itself, I’ll be ready.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  If you only watched the news channels, you’d think all congressional Republicans hated all congressional Democrats. But if you watch C-Span, or visit DC and sit above the senate chamber, you’ll see not only a fair share of handshakes across the aisle, but hugs, shoulder squeezes, smiles and even the occasional guffaw when someone shares a really good lawyer joke.

  And no one is more magnanimous, more likely to elicit smiles from Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, green party members, independents, than Sylvia Murray. I’m not sure Jen would have made it through her first year in the house if it wasn’t for her.

  * * *

  The knocks come fierce and pound at my door, reverberating in my achy head.

  I’d gotten back late, after a long dinner and then drinking games with Annie and Jason. We poured one out for Senator Sylvia Murray, who died yesterday at 83. And by pour one out I mean we dripped a couple drops in the sink. Sylvia wouldn’t have wanted us to be messy or wasteful.

  Annie stayed at Jason’s, unsurprisingly. Sometimes I feel like I have a single room. As Dylan walked me back, shuffling his feet, he gave me a sleepy nod before he meandered off, knowing I was ensconced safely in my dorm.

  But now a crazy person is beating on my door. I need to call Dylan. I need him to be here.

  I shuffle in my bag for my phone, but it’s dead. I plug the cord into my kaput phone and stare at it, waiting for it to come to life. I pull at my lower lip and pace around the room wondering what I could use as a weapon. My hair dryer is pretty bitchin’ but...

  Dylan’s booming voice pervades the barrier. “Peyton, open the door, we have to talk.”

  Now my heart races for an entirely different reason. I unlock the door and Dylan stands there, tablet in hand.

  “That was cute.” He storms in. “You thought you might take a class next semester on genetic diseases?” His eyes flash with anger as he shoves his tablet at me. The headline reads bold and clear: Peyton Arthur Asked Genetics Expert to Help Find Biological Father.

  I open my mouth, unsure of how to close it. “That’s not even...I didn’t ask her...” But my words fall flat. While the headline misrepresents things, I can’t deny that I asked questions about my biological dad. I slip down to the floor, slowly. I’m jittery but panic mode hasn’t set in—yet—as I read the rest of the article. A reporter followed us. That’s what the article implies. Because after we left, the reporter zoomed into the professor’s office. He didn’t get much out of her, so he kept trying, day after day. And finally, she broke: “Peyton and I talked about how, genetically, Richard Arthur could very well still be her dad. The so-called science that Vulp News is trying to perpetuate isn’t accurate.”

  She wasn’t out to get me, but she gave in to get a reporter off her back. Maybe she even thought she was helping things, clarifying that I could, in fact, genetically still be my dad’s daughter. But it doesn’t help.

  I close my eyes and try to force air into my hollow lungs.

  “You know this is going to be a thing, right?” he says as he tenses. “Everyone is going to be talking again about how even you don’t trust your mom. I’m trying to do my job here, Peyton. I’m trying to keep you out of the headlines, but you’re n
ot working with me. This is one of the worst things you could have—”

  “I know,” I yell, raising my hands.

  “Do you? Because it seems like you’re trying to fuck up the election.” His voice is raw and his angry eyes bore into me.

  “I would never do that!” My throat strains and hot tears line my eyes. “I want to do whatever I can to help them win.”

  “Then why did you do this?”

  “I have to know,” I whisper. My legs shake, so I sit down on the floor and close my eyes.

  Dylan squats before me. I hug my knees to get away from him. “Know what?” he asks.

  I bite my lip and swallow hard. “He wasn’t my dad.”

  Dylan’s going to contradict me. He’s going to roll his eyes and be dismissive.

  He gets all the way down on the floor with me and sits cross-legged. His fingers stretch and expand, hesitantly, until they find their purpose. They take my hands, wrap them in his warmth. The soft pads of his palms squeeze me.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I overheard my mom saying something to Bain. He said, well, he said that she should tell me the real story. He said I’m curious and he thought I might keep looking into it. If I knew, though, then I’d stop. But my mom said no.” Tears flow down my cheeks and over my lips, the salt getting on my tongue.

  “What did your mom say?” Dylan asks. I can’t tell if he’s still angry, but there’s definitely an edge to his words.

  “She said...” I shake my head so much that strands of red hair fight free from my ponytail. “He’s not my dad. He’s not my dad.”

  Dylan’s breath dives out of him. “Shit.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Peyton’s favorite game was hide-and-seek. She graduated from hiding under laundry baskets and behind doors to climbing to the top shelf of the pantry, or removing the soda in the fridge so she could fit in the bottom rack.

  So we stopped playing hide-and-seek.

  * * *

  Despite me dropping perhaps the most important revelation of my life, we don’t have the luxury of lingering. Bain wants me out of the dorm before members of the media are able to get up, pull on pants, slug their coffee and gather outside, ready to fire questions at me. Footage of me leaving or entering the dorm is still footage. Saying “no comment” would be the right course, but it would make me look guilty. They don’t want me on camera at all. No footage equals no story. Or at least less of a story.

  I stuff a few things in a bag and don’t even change out of my pajamas as we leave the dorm. The halls are still. Who’s awake at 5:30 a.m. in a college dorm?

  We walk toward the main stairwell. My legs swipe fast against each other, ’cause we’re in a hurry, until Dylan grabs my hand and pulls me back.

  “What the—”

  He presses his finger to his lips. He nods to the stairwell. Sure enough, there are the echoes of footsteps clamoring up. And they’re not sleepy, walk-of-shame steps, or even drunken, it’s-still-night-to-me steps. They’re professional, tempered steps.

  If my deductive reasoning on the steps wasn’t enough, a whisper rushes through the hall. “Yeah, I got in. Dorm 332. I’ll try.”

  332. My room.

  Dylan and I pivot and jog as silently as possible to the back stairway. But we aren’t fast enough.

  “Peyton!” the reporter yells, running to catch up. “Peyton, why do you think your mom lied to you about who your dad was?”

  Dylan’s hand touches my lower back, the thin fabric of my T-Shirt barely separating his fingers from me, as he pushes me along. I look back. I shouldn’t have. The reporter is ready with his camera. Snap.

  Dylan takes my hand and pulls me inside the stairwell as the reporter continues to yell. We rush down the stairs.

  “Faster,” he says. I take the steps two, three at a time.

  We push through the door, right into two other reporters. I freeze as a jumble of questions about genes and trust and my dad and my mom swoosh by my ears. Dylan’s hand finds mine once again and he tugs me along. He stops me at a Zipcar on the side of the road.

  “Get in,” he says.

  “This is yours?”

  “Yeah,” he says, in a curt way that indicates now isn’t really the time to chitchat about transportation methods. I get in just as the reporters are catching up with us. Dylan puts his hand on my headrest as he swerves in reverse faster than you should swerve in reverse. He straightens out—we leave the reporters in the dust. As I try to tame my breathing and his knuckles whiten around the steering wheel, he drives me off campus and past the colorful townhouses and the inklings of autumn leaves on the trees in Georgetown.

  “That was bad,” I say.

  His jaw pops and his knuckles grow even whiter.

  “What do we do now?” I ask.

  “We lay low.”

  I don’t ask about the intricacies of this laying low plan, but eventually he pulls up alongside an apartment building and thrusts a ring of keys at me. “The big one gets you in the building, the small one gets you into Apartment 3B. Okay?”

  “Are you co—”

  “Yes, just go,” he says. I pop out quickly and as soon as the door shuts behind me, he drives away.

  The front door sticks but I manage to get it the third time I bang my left shoulder into it. I walk down a narrow hallway to get to Apartment 3B. It’s a studio. A rather neat one actually, with a gray couch and black coffee table, along with polished, white kitchen counters. Nothing is on the floor, nothing is amiss. Except for the bed, which is a mess of twisty, turny sheets.

  I lean against the couch and cross my arms. Shit. What are those pictures going to look like? Me, in my skimpy pajamas, running from reporters who asked me about my dad?

  Dylan walks in and rubs his head as he locks the door. He whizzes to the windows, drawing all the shades. Shadows grow over both of us.

  He turns to me.

  “Is this your place?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Well, until November.” He sits down on the couch and holds his forehead, rubbing his temples with his thumb and forefinger.

  “You think they’ll find us here?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Who knows what a reporter can find out? But it’s not like I’m in the phonebook.”

  I pull at my fingers until it’s too awkward to stay standing. After sitting on the other side of the couch, I put the throw pillow on my lap and twist a loose thread around my finger till my skin turns white.

  “Now they have pictures of me avoiding them.”

  “Yeah, they do,” Dylan says as he rubs his hands on his knees.

  “So, maybe—”

  “I have to call Lisa.” He stands up sharply. For some reason, calling Lisa requires leaving the apartment. While he’s gone, I stare at the wall, continuing to wrap the string around my finger over and over again. Have I ruined everything?

  Maybe two minutes pass. Maybe twenty. I’m too lost in the nervousness in my stomach to notice the time.

  Finally, he comes back. He sits down next to me, but doesn’t say anything. He rests his head in his hands and stares at the floor.

  “So, what’s the plan?” I ask, my voice as shaky as my body.

  He sighs and shifts his bent right leg fully onto the couch so he can face me. “Peyton, have you tried asking your mom about what she said about your dad?”

  “Shouldn’t we talk about, you know, my latest fiasco and how to handle—”

  “This is me handling it,” Dylan says. “Have you asked your mom about it?”

  “I tried.”

  “And...”

  “She didn’t reveal anything. I mean, she told Bain she didn’t want to tell me.”

  “So you went to this geneticist because...why?”

>   I curl my hair behind my ears. “I know it’s sort of silly, but I have no idea where to begin. I thought maybe if genes were like an algebra equation and 2 plus x equals 5, then the geneticist could solve for x. You know, solve for my dad. What does 3 look like? I realize now, of course, that it doesn’t quite work like that.”

  He speaks slowly. “Have you done any other...research?”

  I concentrate really hard on the fabric on the couch. “I talked to Tristan. Our families go way back. But, if you remember, you sort of interrupted that whole interaction.”

  “So Tristan doesn’t know what your mom said?” His gaze narrows in on me.

  “No.” My shoulders slump. “But even if he did, he wouldn’t say anything.”

  “I know you trust him, but the less people who know, the better. You can’t look into this anymore. At least not until after—”

  “The election. I know, I know.” I rub my cloth infinity symbol, which I’d fastened to my pajamas before we left, and close my eyes.

  “I’m serious, Peyton. Lisa’s not going to be able to make this go away. We’re lucky it happened on a weekend, and we’ll lay low here till Monday, but nothing else about your dad can come up.”

  “What? I’m staying here till Monday?”

  Dylan nods. “They probably won’t look for you here. This is still going to be bad, but as long as we don’t add anything to it, maybe we can make it a blip on people’s radar and not a full blown thing.”

  I swallow and nod.

  “But it can’t happen again. I know this is important to you, but it’s just a few weeks till the election is over. You have to wait.”

  Waiting implies that we all have oodles upon oodles of time. But my dad, the man who raised me, taught me we don’t. And now that he’s gone, every little bit of my being yearns to make any family connection I can. “Dylan, my biological dad is out there. And I know nothing about him. I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize the campaign, but I want to find out who he is.”