Callboys

by SororityProblem

  “Well, follow your gut, then,” he says. “What does your gut want?”

  “I don’t know. A corn dog?”

  “Forgive me,” Mr. Cohen laughs. “I forgot that twenty somethings don’t even know themselves enough to know what they want. Seems I’m not the only one with the stupid questions here. Sometimes I forget that your generation is having a hard time growing up.”

  “I’d prefer to call it ‘pressing the snooze button on adulthood,’ but whatever floats your boat.”

  Mr. Cohen laughs again and then, for a long moment, he simply stares at her.

  “You know,” he finally says as he sets a hand on the table, “when I was growing up in the rough Russian section of Brooklyn, I knew I was a smart boy. But I also knew I wasn’t the smartest. That would have been Paul, the golden boy in the front of the room, who got perfect scores on all his tests and never answered a teacher’s question incorrectly. And I also happened to know that he had a habit of smoking cigarettes behind the cafeteria during lunchtime. Then one day, a contest was announced- a representative from New York University came to administer a test, and whoever got the highest score would earn a free spot in their summer law program with everything paid for- room, board, the works. I knew I wanted to be a lawyer, and I know this might’ve been my only opportunity to ever become one, as I came from the poorest family on my block. But I also knew Paul was going to beat me…and most importantly of all, I knew that he could be taken care of with one anonymous note to my principal directing him to visit the cafeteria’s back door during lunch. So what do you think I did?”

  Marissa fidgets and picks at her arm. “Well, I mean, you’re sitting here today, aren’t you?”

  His eyes sparkle knowingly. “Jackpot. I’ve been around for a long time, Marissa, and if I’ve learned anything about this life, it’s that the world doesn’t exist in black and white, like I was taught as a child. Truth, integrity, morality- all of these things are what you make of them. Forget about the back and white and find your own truth in the shadows of life. That’s what I did, and things have worked out swimmingly for me.”

  Marissa sits taller, some weird weight lifted off her shoulders. “Thanks. That helped, actually. I think I’m gonna go eat the nastiest carb-fest of my life to celebrate. Thanks again.”

  “And Marissa?” Mr. Cohen asks after she grabs her bag and heads for the door.

  “Yes?”

  “If you ever need any more advice, or just want to grab a glass of wine after a long day, just remember that this dirty old lawyer is always available.”

  “Stop it, you sicko,” she smiles as she heads for the waiting room. “You’re making me blush.”

  As she pushes through the front door and bursts out into the soft, filtered December sunlight, Marissa weighs her options: she can go to the party totally solo and be a complete embarrassment, some pathetic sad sack, or she can use a fraction of some of her newfound millions, call ManCard, and show up with the hottest date around. Sex from an iPhone app: it seemed totally ludicrous, and yet it didn’t. Marissa could order food and buy movie tickets and purchase yoga clothes from apps on her phone, so why wouldn’t sex be the natural next step? And if every guy her age was an emotionally stunted man-child and she wasn’t going to find commitment any time soon anyway, why not just say fuck it and hire a rent-a-boyfriend for the evening? ManCard was like Tinder, except you knew exactly what you were getting, and it’s not like the money would be hard to come up with.

  But basically paying for a date? she asks herself. And possibly (okay, hopefully) having sex with him afterward, if all goes well? That’s gross. And weird. And maybe illegal. Marissa Frost would never do something like that. Ever. She knew it all the way down to her guts.

  …Didn’t she?

  VI

  The Edge

  Ten blocks away Nate sits in Child Services, a nondescript office building next to sad car wash and an even sadder diner. After storming away from Rochelle, he’d gone to every government building he could find, only for them to all be dark and locked, useless. Only after bursting into the police station and basically forcing them to give him information under the threat of an epic beatdown did someone inform him of where to find the woman who had been assigned jurisdiction over Addie’s case. Nate rode straight to her office and waited three hours for it to open, and once all the employees arrived he demanded the first time slot available for a meeting. All of this had led to Nate tapping his foot on the dirty tile floor across from a woman named Tammi in a dimly lit office with wood-paneled walls haphazardly covered with diplomas and government certifications, waiting for the next step. Nate had been driven to the edge of sanity, and he knew in the back of his mind that he could tip over it at any second if something didn’t happen soon.

  “Well, Mr. Henry,” Tami says as she inspects her screen with friendly hazel eyes, “I’ve just pulled up the file in question, I assume that’s what you’re here for?”

  “Let me see her.”

  She looks up at Nate, her gaze softening. “I’m afraid I can’t arrange that right now, Mr. Henry. Visitation details will take a few days to hammer out, and-”

  “Do it right now or you’ll regret the day we were born.”

  “Honey, don’t think I’m not used to angry family members coming in here and trying to threaten their way into beating the system,” Tammi says as she motions through the window at the armed guard standing in the hall. “Don’t get edgy with me, young man. I can assure you that Addison is safe, and that she is being taken care of. But there’s a system in place that we have to deal with, and it’s in place for a reason. I’ll do whatever I can to assist you, but you’re not helping yourself with this attitude here.”

  “I don’t care about the damn system. Let me see my niece.”

  She sighs. “Just hold on, son. Let’s work through this one step at a time.”

  Nate shakes his head and grips the side of his chair. He wasn’t stupid- he’d heard the horror stories about foster care, and he knew what happened to little girls who got caught up in “the system” everyone kept talking about.

  “Alright, I’ll do whatever you say. But if anything happens to her,” Nate says through gritted teeth, “if I found out that anyone has hurt her, I will come here and kill you. And I mean that from the floor of me.”

  “Mr. Henry, please, it’s too early for death threats. And if you want to know, she’s not even in foster care yet. She hasn’t been processed. She’s at a government childcare center. As far as she knows, she’s at daycare, and that’s exactly what the facility looks like, anyway.”

  She inspects her screen again. “Normally, the first step to getting Addison out of there would be to file a paper stating that you want to take temporary custody of her. The filing fee for that will be about four hundred.”

  “Four hundred?”

  “Is that a problem?” she asks.

  “No,” Nate lies. “I have some money saved up, I just wasn’t expecting to, um, hear dollar amounts just yet.”

  He looks away. There was no money and they both knew it.

  “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet, it might not be so simple,” Tammi says. “First things first. Is it true that drug use was happening directly in front of the child? The superintendent at the townhouse complex claims she looked into the window one day and saw the mother smoking something out of tinfoil in the living room while the child was watching cartoons.”

  Nate digs a thumbnail into his palm. “Listen. I do my absolute best for that little girl. But I can’t afford daycare, and I can’t control what her mother does in front of her when I’m not around. I don’t know what else to do.”

  Tammi sets her glasses down on the table and gives him an appraising look. “You want to know what I think you should do? Take custody from the mother. She’s unfit in every way.”

  “I wouldn’t even have to take anything from her,” he sighs. “Rochelle would gladly hand over Addie to me if it meant getting to
go off and do what she wants, and who she wants.”

  Tammi frowns. “Okay, we can work with that. We can get official legal custody transferred to you, but it won’t be easy. You’ll have to get a steady job, a child-safe home, and file all the necessary documents, which can take months. For the time being, though, Addison’s fine. She’s in perfect care right now.”

  “Months?”

  “Well, a lawyer-”

  “Will cost thousands of dollars, and I’m a twenty-four-year-old with no parents,” Nate interrupts. “I can’t even afford gas for my bike.”

  “I don’t know what else to tell you,” Tammi says. “When a child is involved, the sums of money can add up very quickly.”

  Nate sighs and fingers Ryan’s business card in his pocket from last night. Things were getting out of control. He had no more options. Become homeless and drop out of school and lose Addie forever, or drop his pants for some desperate housewife out in the suburbs a few times a month?

  “Can I ask you a question?” Nate asks after a moment. The light in Tammi’s eyes becomes more sympathetic.

  “Of course.”

  “Well,” he begins slowly, “if you had the opportunity to get something you really needed, but that meant doing something sort of bad in the process…would you do it?”

  Tammi laughs and leans back in her chair. “Honey, I came from a mess of a family myself. Why do you think I took this job? I like to see things work out for people, and I know you want this to work out. You want the best for your niece, and I believe that you are the best option for her. If I were you, I’d do what I had to do in order to secure her future.” She leans forward. “By the way, we’re not talking drugs or anything, are we?”

  Nate looks down at his cuticle, which he just realizes he has been picking. “No. Not exactly.”

  “Murder?”

  “No, no, no. Nobody would be getting hurt. It would be the opposite, actually.”

  “Then do it. Time is of the essence,” she says as she slaps the pile of papers on the table. “But Nate? If it is something illegal, we never had this conversation.”

  “Gotcha. Thanks for the help. And one more thing.”

  “Anything.”

  “I’m going to write a note for Addie,” he says. “I don’t care if you’re not allowed to give it to her. You’re going to, and then you’re going to read it to her.”

  Tammi stares at him for one long moment and then takes a pen and Post-It note from a pile of junk on her desk. “You know, I’ve got to admire your tenacity, even if you do seem like sort of a difficult little prick.”

  “Thanks, I guess,” he smiles. Biting his lip, he leans over and writes simply, Addie: you are my life now. Natie’s coming for you, sweetie. See you soon.

  He hands Tammi the note and smiles again. He’d always hated the nickname Natie as a kid, but when Addie had first started talking she was confused and always wanted to call him Daddy. So he compromised and let her call him Natie, which sounded enough like Daddy without making him feel like he was stepping on his brother’s toes.

  “I’ll make sure this gets to her,” Tammi says with a wink. “Now get to work, Natie.”

  Five minutes later Nate walks out into the faint December sunlight, and suddenly the prospect of working for ManCard didn’t seem so far-fetched. He tried to think of it like any other job offer: he had something he was good at, and he was going to get paid handsomely to do it. And it was easy. And fun. And it came naturally to him. What’s really the difference between this and a homeowner commissioning an artist to paint a mural on their wall, he wondered? Or a landscaper getting paid to trim someone’s bushes? Sure, he’d be trimming a totally different type of bush, but in the end isn’t it all just money being exchanged for a service rendered? All he had to do was look at sex as a transaction, and nothing else. Hadn’t he said he’d do anything to save Addie? He was simply adapting to his current circumstances. If he failed and didn’t come up with the money and made her have to go into foster care, he’d never be able to live with himself.

  But still…this was prostitution.

  Nate did the math in his head. At his current wage, he’d have to work for two, six, eight…

  He kicked the sidewalk. Eight months. He’d have to work at the restaurant for eight freaking months to afford a lawyer, and by that time Addie could be in an orphanage, on the streets, or worse.

  Truth be told, this wasn’t the first time Nate had been faced with losing a girl he loved, he notes as he gets on his bike and heads home to sift through the mess with the landlord.

  Ahh, Courtney. Even after all this time, her name was still like a cool breeze in his mind- a breeze that stung a little too much. She was only girl he had ever loved, and still loved, he realized every time he got drunk and had his way with the girl of the weekend and then felt as cold and empty inside as the bottles he drank to ward off the loneliness. Her eyes still stared up at him sometimes from the strange, deep parts of his soul that he hadn’t quite gotten to know yet, and they probably always would. They fell for each other one summer at the end of high school, and it was the classic star-crossed sob story. From the beginning her parents had looked down their finely sculpted noses at Nate and his clothes and his family and everything else about him, but their distaste was of the silent variety. They didn’t say anything and they didn’t have to. They knew Courtney would come to her senses eventually and go after someone she deserved. And she did. That was how the world worked, and in the end not even their love could save them from it. When Courtney accepted an offer to play tennis for the University of Alabama, Nate knew the end was coming. They spent one last holiday weekend together at her family’s beach condo in Savannah, and those few days were perfect and shining and golden, the two of them suspended in happiness like a baby floating in the womb. They were on the edge of forever and nothing at the same time and they both knew it; it hung in the air like any truth ever had. On Sunday night Nate gave her his grandmother’s ring and asked her to stay with him like a fool. She started crying and ran down to the beach, and in that moment he had never been more scared of growing older. He wanted to stay in that moment, young and strong and hopeful and fearless, forever, but that bitch called time was knocking on the door louder and louder every day, and the fear of it wrecked him.

  The next day Courtney left for school and never came back. To him, at least. She never answered his question, and she didn’t have to. Her silence was louder and more oppressive than any words could ever be. He saw the updates whenever he checked Facebook, until he grew tired of it and stopped using his account altogether. She had found some douchebag frat boy with family money and an easy smile, of course, and was probably months away from getting a ring and settling down with him. And Nate was left right where he had started. Alone.

  But sometimes, as he lay in the dark at night, when things got still, he wondered if he should try again. Besides Addie, Courtney was still the love of his life, and he wasn’t ready to imagine a future without her yet. But he knew it was useless. What would he do, show up at her front door with his net worth of six hundred dollars and promise her a good life? It just wasn’t realistic.

  Unless…

  Unless he turned things around. He could work for ManCard for just a few months, legally adopt Addie, and save up enough capital to do anything he wanted. Finish his degree and go to grad school; start his own lawn business and hire five or ten migrant workers; buy a fixer-upper and renovate it himself before flipping it for cash and starting it all over again. But would that be enough? If he showed up in a brand-new sports car with a Rolex on his wrist, would Courtney ditch the frat boy and fall into his arms?

  And that’s when Nate decided it: he was going to test this out. He had to. There were no other options. He wouldn’t stop panicking until Addie was safe in his arms, and ManCard was the only way to do that. It would take months to save up the money to hire a lawyer by working construction and doing a random modeling job here or there, and who knew wh
at could happen to Addie before then. Nate had heard of the atrocities that happened in foster care, and he’d rather die than see her swallowed up in that world. She was teetering on the edge, and her fate was completely up to Nate now. He was all she had in the world. If anything else, it was worth a try.

  As blood pounds in his ears, Nate fishes for his phone in his pocket, types out a short message, and presses Send:

  Hey, it’s Nate. I’m down to check it out. What now?

  VII

  The World Alone

  Marissa had always loved the holidays in Atlanta. The streets downtown bustled with shoppers and sightseers, the malls overflowed with ribbons and glitter and tinsel, and the air outside was comfortably crisp, but not so cold that it made leaving the house miserable, like in New York or Chicago. The light poles were decked out in holiday swag and the suburbs sparkled with lights, but something about this season was a little less dazzling without someone by her side.

  But Marissa hoped she was about to change that. In a very big way.

  She pulls into the Taco Bell parking lot and turns off her ignition. She still had no idea how to celebrate, because how do you mark the occasion when the occasion feels like a fever dream? She had thought about catching a matinee, but all the theaters ever played anymore were either terrible disaster movies, the latest animated film about talking gerbils aimed at hyperactive six year olds, or one of the five million Tyler Perry movies basically called Tyler Perry Presents: A Tyler Perry Production: Tyler Perry’s Tyler Perry (Written and Directed by Tyler Perry). So in the end Marissa decided to just play it cool, and she thought that getting Taco-Bell-wasted on a few Crunch Wrap Supremes sounded like a good start, because carb hangovers still felt better than loneliness.

  But first she had to do something- something she didn’t want anyone to see or know about.

  Just after leaving Mr. Cohen’s office, as Marissa thought about what he’d said, she saw a puddle in the road. The edges were a murky gray, but the water became an inky black in the middle, and it got Marissa thinking about right and wrong coming in all different shades. At synagogue as a girl, Rabbi Mendelsson had always taught Marissa that right was right, and wrong was wrong, and that was it…and then he’d promptly gotten arrested for stealing funds from the church’s dining hall and then using them to give hush money to his teenaged mistress. What are morals, exactly? What is right? What is wrong? And who decides which is which? At the end of the day, who was anyone to say that Marissa’s actions belonged in the black center of the puddle, and not somewhere on the murky, gray fringes?