Different for Girls

by Laura Lippman

  Three months later. The clocks had been turned forward and the days were milder. There was another dance at school and Sofia was going this time. Things had changed. She had changed.

  “Why isn’t Joe picking you up?” her mother asked.

  “We’re meeting there,” Sofia said. “He’s not a boyfriend-boyfriend.”

  “I thought he was. You’ve been going to the movies together on weekends, almost every Saturday since St. Patrick’s Day.”

  “Just matinees. Things are different now. We’re just friends. This isn’t a date. But he’ll walk me home, so you don’t have to worry. Okay?”

  “What time does the dance end?”

  “Eleven.”

  “And you’ll come straight home.” A command, not a question.

  “Sure.”

  Sofia shouldn’t have agreed so readily; it made her mother suspicious. She studied her daughter’s face, trying to figure out the exact nature of the lie. Reluctantly, she let Sofia go, yanking her dress down in the back as if she could extend the cloth. Sofia had grown some since her birthday and the pink dress was a little short, but short was the fashion of the day, as were the platform shoes she clattered along in. She had practiced in them off and on for two weeks, and they still felt like those Dutch shoes, big as boats around her skinny ankles, Olive Oyl sandals. Thank God they had ankle straps or she would have fallen out of them in less than a block.

  Two blocks down, where she should have crossed the boulevard to go up to the school, she turned right instead, heading for the tavern. She didn’t go in, of course, but waited by the back door, which was just a back door on Saturday nights, nothing more. Within five minutes, a red Corvette pulled into the parking lot.

  “Hey,” said the man in the driver’s seat, a man she now knew as Brian. He wore his leather jacket with the collar turned up, although the night was a little warm for it.

  “Hey,” she said, getting into the car and pulling her dress so it didn’t bunch up around her.

  “Never seen you in a skirt before, Gino.” That was his joke, calling her “Gino” after Gino Marchetti.

  “And I’ve never seen you in anything but that leather jacket.”

  “Well, technically, this is our first date. There’s a lot we don’t know about each other, isn’t there?”

  Sofia smiled in what she hoped was a mysterious and alluring way.

  “Maybe we should get to know each other better. What do you think?”

  She nodded.

  “My place okay?”

  She nodded again. It had taken her three months to get to this point—three months of careful conversation in Gordon’s parking lot, which began when she threw the ball at the red Corvette, presumably in a fit of celebration upon scoring a touchdown. Brian, who had just pulled up, got out and started screaming, but he settled down fast when Sofia apologized, prettily and tearfully. Plus, she hadn’t damaged the car, not a bit. After that afternoon, he would stand in the lot for a few minutes, watching them play. Watching her play, she was sure of it. He brought sodas for everyone. He asked if they wanted to go for ice cream. He took them, one at a time, on rides around the block. Sofia always went last. The rides were short, no more than five minutes, but a lot can happen in five minutes. He told her that he managed a Merry-Go-Round clothing store, offered to get her a discount. She told him she was bored with school and thinking about dropping out. He said he had been married for a while, but he was single now. “I’m single, too,” Sofia said, and he laughed as if it were the funniest thing in the world.

  “Maybe we should go out sometimes, us both being single and all,” he said. That had been yesterday.

  The date made, it was understood that he would not come to her house, shake hands with her father, and make small talk with her mother while Sofia turned a round brush in her hair, trying to feather her bangs. Other things were understood, too. That it would not be a movie date or a restaurant date. Sofia knew what she was signing up for. Her only concern was that he might want to drive someplace, stay in the Corvette, when she wanted to see where he lived.

  So she said as much, when he asked what she wanted to do. “Why don’t we just go to your place?”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Why not?” He passed her a brown bag that he had held between his legs as he drove and she took a careful sip. It wasn’t her first drink, but she recognized that this was something sweet, liquor overlaid with a peppermint flavor, a girly drink for someone assumed to be inexperienced. Thoughtful of him.

  Brian lived out Essex way, in some new apartments advertising move-in specials and a swimming pool. She hoped it wouldn’t take too long because she had only so much time, but she was surprised at just how fast it happened. One minute they were kissing, and it wasn’t too bad. She almost liked it. Then all of a sudden he was hovering above her, asking if she was fixed up, a question she didn’t understand right away. When she did, she shook her head, and he said, “Shit,” but pulled a rubber over himself, rammed into her and yelled at her to come, as if he were a coach or a gym teacher, exhorting her to do something difficult but not impossible.

  “I . . . don’t . . . do that,” she panted out.

  He took that as permission to do what he needed. Once finished, he pulled away quickly, if apologetically.

  “Sorry, but if you’re not on the Pill, I can’t afford to hang around, you know? One little sperm gets out and my life is over. I’ve already got one kid to pay for.”

  That detail had not come up in their rides around the block.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You ready to go back?”

  “Can’t we watch some television, maybe try again?”

  “Didn’t get the feeling that you cared for it.”

  “I’m just . . . quiet. I liked it.” She placed a tentative hand on his chest, which was narrow and a little sunken once out of the leather jacket. “I liked it a lot.”

  He chose the wrestling matches on channel 45, then arranged the covers over them and put his arm around her.

  “You know, wrestling’s fixed,” she said.

  “Who says?”

  “Everybody.” She didn’t want to mention her father.

  “So? It’s the only decent thing on.”

  “Just seems like cheating,” she said. “I don’t like games like that. Like, for example . . . poker.”

  “Poker? I hardly knew her.” He gave her rump a friendly pat and laughed. She tried to laugh, too.

  “Still,” she said, gesturing at the television. “It doesn’t seem right. Pretending.”

  “Well, I guess that’s why you don’t do it.”

  “Wrestle?”

  “Fake it. You know, it wouldn’t hurt you to act like you liked it, just a little. If you’re frigid, you’re frigid, but why should a guy be left feeling like he didn’t do right by you?”

  “I’ll try,” she said. “I can do better. Maybe if there could be more kissing first.”

  He tried, she had to give him that. He slowed down, kissed her a lot, and she could see how it might be better. She still didn’t feel moved, but she took his advice, shuddering and moaning like the women in the movies, the R-rated ones she and Joe had been sneaking into this spring. At any rate, whatever she did wore him out, and he fell asleep.

  She didn’t bother to put on her clothes, although she did carry her purse with her as she moved from room to room. When she didn’t find the velvet box right away, she found herself taking other things in her panic and anger—a Baltimore Orioles ashtray, a pair of purple candles, a set of coasters, a Bachman-Turner Overdrive eight-track, an unused bar of Ivory soap in the bathroom. Her clunky sandals off, she was quiet and light on her feet, and he didn’t stir at all until she tried a small drawer in his dresser. The drawer stuck a little and Sofia gave it a wrenching pull to force it open. He whimpered in his sleep and she froze, certain she was about to be caught, but he didn’t do anything but roll over. It was the velvet box that had made the drawer stick, wedged against the top
like peanut butter on the roof of someone’s mouth. But when snapped it open, the box was empty. In her grief and frustration, she gave a little cry.

  “What the—”

  He was out of bed in an instant, grabbing her wrist and pushing her face into the pea-green carpet, crunchy with dirt and food and other things.

  “Put it back, you thievin’ whore, or I’ll—”

  She grabbed one of her shoes and hit him with it, landing a solid blow on his ear. He roared and fell back, but only for a minute, grabbing her ankle as she tried to crawl away and gather her clothes.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m thirteen.”

  He didn’t let go of her ankle, but his grip loosened. “Bullshit. You told me you were in high school.”

  “I’m thirteen,” she repeated. “Call the police. They’ll believe me, I’m pretty sure. I’m thirteen and you just raped me. I never had sex before tonight.”

  “No way I’m your first. You didn’t bleed, not even a little.”

  “Not everybody does. I play a lot of football. And maybe you’re not big enough to make a girl bleed.”

  He slapped her for that and she returned his open-hand smack with her shoe, hitting him across the head so hard that he fell back and didn’t get back up. Still, she kept hitting him, her frustration over the long-gone necklace driving her. She struck him for everything that had been lost, for every gift that had come and gone and couldn’t be retrieved. For Brad’s bicycle, for her mother’s candlesticks, for Shemp. She pounded the shoe against his head again and again, as if she were a child throwing a tantrum, and in a way she was. Eventually, she fell back, her breath ragged in her chest. It was only then that she realized how still Brian was.

  She put her ear to his chest. She was pretty sure his heart was still beating, that he was still breathing. Pretty sure. She put on her clothes and grabbed her macramé purse, still full of the trophies she had taken. She checked her watch, a confirmation gift. There was no way she could get home in time without a ride. She helped herself to money from Brian’s wallet, and it turned out he had quite a bit. “I’ll meet you outside,” she told the taxi dispatcher in a whisper, although Brian didn’t appear to be conscious.

  It was almost midnight when she came up the walk and both parents were waiting for her.

  “Where were you?”

  “At the dance.”

  “Don’t lie to us.”

  “I was at the dance,” she repeated.

  “Where’s Joe? Why did you come home alone, in a cab?”

  “He came with another girl, a real date. Another boy, someone I didn’t know, offered to walk me home. He got . . . fresh.” She pointed to the red mark on her face.

  “Who was he?” her father demanded, grabbing her by the arm. “Where does he live?”

  “All I know is that he was called Steve and when I wouldn’t . . .” She shrugged, declining to put a name to the thing she wouldn’t do. “At any rate, he put me out of the car on Holabird Avenue and I had to hail a cab. I’m sorry. I know it was wrong of me. I won’t ever take a ride with a stranger again.”

  “You could have been killed,” her mother said, clutching her to her chest. Sofia’s father simply stared at her. When she went up to her room, he followed her.

  “You telling the truth?” he asked.

  “Yes.” It seemed to Sofia that her father’s eyes were boring into her macramé bag, as if he could see the stolen treasures inside, including Brian’s cash. Even after the cab ride all the way from Essex, there was quite a bit left over. But maybe all he was seeing was another object that he would raid, the next time he was caught short.

  “Daddy?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t take any more of my stuff, okay?”

  “You don’t have any stuff, missy. Everything in this house belongs to me.”

  “You take any more of my stuff, I’ll run away. I’ll go to California and do drugs and be a hippie.” This was about the worst fate that any parent could imagine for a child, back in Dundalk in 1975. True, the Summer of Love was long past, but time moved slowly in Dundalk, and they were still worried about hippies and LSD.

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would.”

  “I’ll drag you home and make you sorry.”

  “I’ll make you sorrier.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “I’ll go to the police and tell them about the game at Gordon’s, in the back room.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would. I’ll do it this very Friday night. But if you promise to leave me and my stuff alone, I’ll leave you alone. Deal?”

  He didn’t shake on it, or even nod his head. But when her father left her room that night, Sofia knew he would never enter it again.

  That was the spring that Sofia learned to bluff, and once she started, she found it hard to stop. She would never have called the cops on her father because it would have killed her mother. She was sixteen, not thirteen, but she knew that she could pass for thirteen. All of a sudden, Sofia could bluff, pretend, plan, plot, trick, cheat, cajole, threaten, blackmail. Even steal if she chose, for while the necklace belonged to her and she would have been within her rights to take it back if she had found it, she had no claim on the other things she had grabbed. Brian hadn’t stolen from her, after all. He knew nothing about the necklace or who owned it or what it was worth, except in the most literal terms. He had probably pawned it soon after accepting it for payment, or given it to another girl who went for rides in that red Corvette. For several days, Sofia checked the paper worriedly, reading deep into the local section to see if a man had been found dead from a beating in an Essex apartment. She even considered getting rid of her shoes but decided that was a greater sacrifice than she needed to make. Whatever happened to Brian, his red Corvette was no longer seen up and down Brighton Avenue.

  She used part of his money to buy a padlock for her bedroom door, a fancy one with a key. She used the balance to buy a lava lamp from Spencer’s at East Point Mall. At night, her homework done, she watched the reddish-orange blobs break apart and rearrange themselves. Even within that narrow glass, there seemed to be no limit to the forms they could take. Her father stewed and steamed about the lock, saying she had no right to lock a room in his house. He also criticized the lava lamp, saying it proved she was on drugs because what sober, right-minded person could be entertained by such a thing.

  But for all he complained, he never tried to breach the lock, although it would have been a simple thing to pry it off with a hammer, not much harder than slicing through a set of guitar strings. He was scared of her now, just a little, and incapable of concealing that fear no matter how he might try.

  It was a new sensation, having someone scared of her. Sofia liked it.

  Announcement

  Continue reading for an excerpt of Laura Lippman’s new novel, Sunburn, that everyone is raving about.

  “Laura Lippman continues to push the envelope of modern crime-writing. Sunburn, her take on noir, may be her nerviest novel yet.”

  —Harlan Coben

  "A masterful mix from a total pro.”

  —People

  “Cool and twisty.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Sunburn is a dark, gleaming noir gem. Read it.”

  —Gillian Flynn

  “Sunburn delivers one of the year’s most intriguing mysteries.”

  —Associated Press

  “Spellbinding [. . .] this corkscrew of a book, with its psychological insights and sensual charisma, proves once again that Laura Lippman, as a writer, is sui generis.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  An Excerpt from Sunburn

  1

  JUNE 11, 1995

  BELLEVILLE, DELAWARE

  It’s the sunburned shoulders that get him. Pink, peeling. The burn is two days old, he gauges. Earned on Friday, painful to the touch yesterday, today an itchy soreness that’s hard not to keep fingering, probing, as
she’s doing right now in an absentminded way. The skin has started sloughing off, soon those narrow shoulders won’t be so tender. Why would a redhead well into her thirties make such a rookie mistake?

  And why is she here, sitting on a barstool, forty-five miles inland, in a town where strangers seldom stop on a Sunday evening? Belleville is the kind of place where people are supposed to pass through and soon they won’t even do that. They’re building a big bypass so the beach traffic won’t have to slow for the speed trap on the old Main Street. He saw the construction vehicles, idle on Sunday, on his way in. Places like this bar-slash-restaurant, the High-Ho, are probably going to lose what little business they have.

  High-Ho. A misprint? Was it supposed to be Heigh-Ho? And if so, was it for the seven dwarfs, heading home from the mines at day’s end, or for the Lone Ranger, riding off into the sunset? Neither one makes much sense for this place.

  Nothing about this makes sense.

  Her shoulders are thin, pointy, hunched up so close to her ears that they make him think of wings. The front of her pink-and-yellow sundress is quite a contrast, full and round. She carries herself as if she doesn’t want to attract any male attention, at least not tonight. On the front, he can’t help noticing as he slides on a barstool, she’s not so pink. The little strip of skin showing above the relatively high-necked dress has only the faintest hint of color. Ditto, her cheeks. It is early June, with a breeze that makes it easy to forget how strong the sun is already. Clearly a modest type, she wears a one-piece, so there’s probably a deep U of red to go with those shoulders. Yesterday, fingerprints pressed there would have left white marks.