by Leah Raeder
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I took my sweet time getting in the car. Reality intruded on my thoughts like war flashbacks, depressing images of Mom and Gary Rivero and my big fat zero bank balance.
“Why even go back?” I said. “Let’s start over here.”
Evan looked at me across the roof of the car in the underground garage. He almost seemed to be considering it.
“Running never works,” he said finally.
Tell me about it.
I flipped open the glovebox to toss my sunglasses in, and a pile of papers cascaded onto my feet. Evan was backing out of the parking space and slammed on the brakes. That made the rest of the junk fall out.
“Sorry,” I laughed. “I’ll get it.”
He helped me stuff everything back in hurriedly, but something caught my eye. The car was registered to ERIC WILKE of WESTCHESTER, IL.
“Who’s Eric?”
Evan took the paper and slipped it inside a folio. “My brother.”
“You have a brother, too? Jesus.” I sat back. “Evan, Eric, and Elizabeth. Am I missing anyone?”
His eyes were cloudy. He didn’t look at me. God, another dead sibling? Or just another sad story he didn’t want to tell?
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like an idiot.
“Don’t be. I’ll tell you about him sometime.”
But not tonight, apparently.
The highway at night looked like a movie flashing past us in fast forward, all the lights receding, out of reach. Autumn was spreading its golden disease through the woods, Midas trailing his fingers over the treetops. Dying things became extraordinarily beautiful at the very end. I pressed my hand against the window, the ring gleaming. Where was the lens between me and the world? Was it my eyes, my skin, my mind? Where did reality stop and my perception of it begin? Suddenly, horribly, I missed Wesley. I felt too embarrassed to talk to Evan about shit like this. Wesley was just a boy. I didn’t care what he thought of me.
“Maise,” Evan said.
I turned to him.
“If things don’t work out with your mom, and you need somewhere to go, you can stay with me.”
Cardiac arrest.
“You have options. Bad ones, maybe. Maybe they’re a little like the premise of an after-school special. But they’re options.”
I stared at him, every muscle in me slack.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
“What is an after-school special?”
He laughed. He knew I was trying to make him feel old.
“I’m also thinking the night I met you was like someone handed me a winning lottery ticket and said, ‘You can only have it if you don’t tell anyone.’”
He gave me a sad smile. “I feel like that too.”
“Do you start to wonder if it’s even real?”
“All the time. Like maybe I made you up when I got on that rollercoaster.”
“You could’ve imagined me with fewer problems,” I said.
“You must be real, then.”
I tapped my fingers on the window. “Can we stop somewhere? I need to pick up some rat poison to feed Mom.”
It was actually getting close to my period, and I was out of tampons. We pulled up at a Walgreens when we got into town, parking in the far corner of the lot, just in case. Back to the espionage game. I swallowed my pride and asked to borrow money.
“Just until I get a job,” I said. “I’ll keep track of every cent.”
“You don’t have to worry about it.”
“I want to worry about it. I want to be equal in this with you.”
“You are.”
We stared at each other in the dark car. Why did this bother me so much? Because I didn’t want to give him any excuse to see me as a teenager? But I was a teenager. Maybe I was the first girl he’d given a ring to, but he was my first everything.
He handed me some bills.
“Besides,” I said, “if you’re going to insist on protection, I at least get to pick.”
I jumped out before he could respond.
The store was deserted, bright lights blasting, some swoony radio singer pouring her heart out to the emptiness. No one at the register. I dawdled in the aisles, not wanting the night to end yet. It felt ridiculously erotic to browse through the condom section. A man turned into the aisle, saw me, and turned right around. I laughed. That’s right, I thought. I’m a gorgeous teenage girl buying condoms for my boyfriend to fuck me with. Can you handle that? Guess not.
I dumped my stuff on the counter at the register. Still no cashier.
“Hello!” I yelled. “I would like to exchange money for goods and services.”
There was someone back there after all. He’d been kneeling, shelving cigarettes. At my voice he stood up, all six-foot-three of him.
Wesley Brown.
Our eyes locked, wide with surprise.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey.”
We stood there like morons.
“You work here,” I said stupidly.
“Well done, Captain Obvious.” His words were mocking, but his voice was gentle. He cleared his throat. Mine was dry and twisted.
I missed you like crazy, I wanted to say. Why aren’t we friends? This is stupid.
Instead I just stood there.
Wesley glanced at the counter. So did I. We both looked at the box of condoms, then back at each other. This time his mouth hung open a little while my face turned traffic light red.
He scanned the box. I stared at his hands, mortified.
He said some numbers.
“What?” I shook myself. “Sorry.”
Our skin brushed when I handed him a bill. My ring flashed so brightly I swear it made a little ping sound. Wesley stared at it, then shoved the money into the till. He laid my change on the counter.
“Wesley,” I said, not knowing where to go after that.
“Have a nice night,” he deadpanned.
I walked out of the store.
It felt twenty degrees colder outside. When I reached the car, I opened my door and leaned on it, not getting in.
“What’s wrong?” Evan said.
I grabbed my backpack, stuffing the shopping bag inside. “Wesley works here. I’m going to wait until his shift’s over and ambush him.”
Evan raised his eyebrows dubiously.
“He’s ambushed me enough times. Turnabout’s fair play.” I knelt on the seat. “I’ll get a ride home, okay?”
“You sure about this?”
I kissed him. “Nope. But I have to try.”
“Text me when you get home.”
“I will.”
We looked at each other in the weak, watery car light. This is the part in the script where three words go.
“I’ll miss you,” I said.
Not the right three words.
He brushed my cheek with his knuckles. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll still miss you.”
He kissed me again, pulling me farther in, and I climbed across the seat to kiss him like I had when he drove me home in the rain, urgent, desperate, losing myself in him. This will be different now, I thought. I’ll see you in class and remember what you told me, how every time you look at me you imagine everything we’ve done and everything we’re going to do. How am I supposed to get through the week? How am I supposed to sit still with this supernova inside me?
We pulled away from each other.
Say it, I thought. You have to say it first.
But he already had. It was on my finger, saying itself constantly.
Cheater.
“Good night, Mr. Wilke,” I said.
I sat on a curb in a pool of whiskey-colored light, skipping gravel and shards of broken glass across the asphalt. The storm front had finally broken, tatters of cloud pulling apart like cotton candy and sprinkling the sky with the bright sugar grains of stars. It felt like one of those timeless nights, not any season or year in particular, simply a snapshot of twenty-fir
st century loneliness. Far away a train horn wailed, a sound out of a post-apocalyptic landscape. I felt like the last person alive on Earth.
Half an hour later, Wesley exited from a side door and immediately froze. We faced each other across the lot. He started toward me, and I stood.
“What are you doing here?” he called.
“Saving our friendship.”
He snorted. “There’s nothing to save.”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
He reached me and stopped, shaking his head. In the harsh orange light his features looked stark, mask-like. “What do you want, Maise? You want to taunt me some more about your awesome love life?”
“I never taunted you.”
“Whatever.”
I took a step toward him. “Look, shit got weird. It’s not the end of the world. I miss you, okay?”
“You miss having an audience.”
“That’s completely un—”
“You know what I realized?” He pointed a finger at me, damning. “I’m not your fanboy. I’m not some sycophant who follows you around and pets your ego when you need it. If you really want to be friends, it has to be equal.”
My mouth dropped.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right.”
Wesley’s eyes narrowed beneath his fringe of dark hair.
“I wasn’t treating you like an equal. I’m a jerk. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged and glanced away, uncomfortable with winning. We stood there awkwardly.
“I’m on my way home,” he said.
“Is Siobhan picking you up?”
“I think I’ll just walk.”
Then he looked at me with a tiny glint of hopefulness in his eyes, and my heart lifted.
“I think I’ll just walk, too,” I said. “It’s a free country.”
We didn’t go home, but headed for the water tower. We walked on the dirt shoulders of roads, past fields shredded to flinders from the harvest, a billion matchsticks strewn across the earth. In the cold starlight they looked like scenes of massacre. I was shivering, and when I stopped to pull a sweater out of my bag, Wesley crouched beside me.
“Did he give you that ring?”
“Yes.”
He flicked a pebble into the road. “Is it ‘E?’”
“Yes.”
I swallowed as the silence stretched. If he’d asked me right then, Is it Mr. Wilke?, I would have told him the truth. But he didn’t ask anything else.
“When did you get the job?” I said as we walked on.
“I started Wednesday.”
“Do you like it?”
“I can feel my neurons dying. This week was boring as shit.”
I laughed. “Trade you my week.”
He glanced at me guardedly. “What happened?”
I told him about Mom and Mr. Rivero, and his eyes got progressively bigger until he looked like an anime character. When I got to the part about St. Louis, I told him that, too. Not the details, but the gist. I’m seeing an older man. I’m ecstatic and terrified at the same time. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, because the truth is, I wasn’t ready to accept it myself. It’s only now starting to feel real.
We reached the reservoir then, which gave us an excuse to let the conversation die. I dropped my bag and followed Wesley up the ladder. Our legs dangled off the platform, and when he lit up the familiar smell of sulfur and cloves made my throat sting.
“Fair’s closing soon,” he said.
“Maybe I have time to die on a rollercoaster before I get shot.” I paused. “Maybe they’ll shoot me on a rollercoaster.”
Wesley ashed an arc of sparks into the night. “That would actually be kind of awesome.”
“The end of my life would be ‘kind of awesome?’”
“You really think they’re coming for you?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I over-dramatize.”
“You? No.”
I stabbed a finger into his ribs. “But I think Gary’s going to ask me to do something I don’t want to do.”
“What if he does?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s an after-school special that says what to do when a druglord propositions you.”
Wesley frowned. “What’s an after-school special?”
I started laughing, and it caught like wildfire, sweeping through me. God, what a ridiculous world. I lay back, giddy, laughing at the sky. Wesley raised his eyebrows, but a grin crept over his mouth.
“Are you in love with me?” I said impulsively.
The grin fell. He managed to maintain eye contact, but he looked like he was staring at a wild dog, hoping it wouldn’t bite. “I don’t know. I just like you.”
“Still?”
“I dunno. Yeah.”
I sat up. “I can deal with that, if you can. And if you can respect me being in a relationship.”
He averted his face.
I touched his hand, carefully. Not too intimate, but not some half-assed there-there pat, either. Would he understand? Usually the thought process for a seventeen-year-old boy went girl touching me > omg > boner. But if he wanted me to treat him as an equal, he’d need to deal with complicated, uncomfortable adult feelings, too.
“I like you,” I said, “as a friend. And I kind of like flirting with you, too, but I like flirting with everyone. That’s who I am. You get it, right? Because that stuff about filming me—it weirds me out. I can’t be your manic pixie dream girl. I can’t be the girl who teaches you how to open your heart and embrace life and all that bullshit, because I’m trying to figure out how to do that myself. I need a manic pixie dream boy of my own.”
I let go of his hand and he stared at me, and I worried that this was pointless, that I was trying to explain quantum mechanics to someone who thought gravity was just apples falling. But then he nodded, slowly.
“That actually makes a lot of sense,” he said. “I never thought about it like that.”
“That girls are human, too?”
“That you’re human.”
I flicked his ear. He chuckled. And just like that, we were friends again.
We stayed up in the crow’s nest for a while, shooting the shit. I texted Evan so he wouldn’t think I’d run into an axe murderer, and Wesley watched. Not my phone, but my face, my body language.
“What it’s like with him?” he said quietly.
I lay back on the planks, bouncing my heels on the edge. “Intense,” I finally said.
“Good or bad?”
“Good. Amazingly good. And also weird, and scary, and beautiful. All at the same time, in equal measure.”
“Are you in love with him?”
I rolled my head on the plank to look at Wesley. “I don’t think I know what being in love is yet. But this is different than anything I’ve ever felt.”
“What’s it feel like?”
“Remember when you thought I was jumping off to kill myself?”
He winced.
“It’s like that,” I said. “But no one catches you. You’re just hanging over infinity.”
—7—
October was the longest month. Not in days, but in the way the hours dragged as we tilted farther away from the sun, the shadows stretching longer and longer, curving thin blue fingers over the earth. There was an Indian summer, a blush of heat and a warm wind stirring the gold foil leaves. One hot afternoon I jumped into Wesley’s pool with all my clothes on, the water deliciously cool beneath the skin of sunlight on the surface. He took his shirt off and jumped in after me, particolored leaves swirling around us like kaleidoscope pieces. Siobhan stopped by to laugh and offer towels. Wesley tried to pull her in, and she casually threatened to remove him from her will. When we climbed out there was the obligatory pause when we saw each other soaking wet, his long hairless torso glazed with water, my shirt molded to my boobs. I smiled; he didn’t. Siobhan helped dry my hair and caught my hand, raising the ring to the falling sun. I couldn’t read the look she gave me. It seemed deeply knowing.
October 19th was Evan’s birthday. The night he turned thirty-three, we ate sushi at a place near the Cathedral Basilica. The cathedral looked like an illustration from a storybook, almost every inch of it lined with mosaic tiles scintillating in the candlelight. I wore the sundress he’d seen in that shop window, and eyeshadow, and flat little-girl shoes, refusing to be pigeonholed into an age group. He wore his pinstripe shirt and tie, looking more like Mr. Wilke than Evan. It was the first time I’d had sushi, and the only real conclusion I drew was that it was very sensual. Like eating something still alive. When we staggered into the haunted elevator later, tipsy on sake, I did something else for the first time: I gave him a blowjob. His body melted in my hands, his fingers running through my hair softly, so softly, every part of him boyish and submissive except for the hard dick in my mouth. Another experience that was purely sensual. I swallowed when he came, warm saltiness in the back of my throat, the faint taste of the sea. He pulled me up and kissed me, and I said, “Happy birthday, Mr. Wilke.”
I told Wesley I wanted to work on my own project for Film Studies, and he agreed. But we shot videos together, too, just for the fuck of it: Hiyam holding court with the Mean Girls, causing one of them to run off in tears. Two boys, both in varsity football, kissing under the bleachers, muscular silhouettes merging against the deep purple sky. I wasn’t the only one with a secret. In the grand scheme of things, my secret wasn’t even as dangerous as some of theirs. One day at lunch, half the cafeteria ran out into the hall, and we caught the tail end of a fight in front of a locker where someone had scrawled COCK SUCKING FAG in Sharpie.