by Elle Wright
Your turn.
Ace
Ten days later
Gio
Can I move in with you, Ace? No, really. What I wouldn’t give for uncomplicated.
I’ve had the week from hell. It started with one of our best players breaking his ankle in practice two days before an important away game. We played like shit, and we were the odds-on favorite. We should have won. Coach nearly broke all the blood vessels in his face yelling at us on the bus back to school. Fun times.
Then I stumble into the quad at butt fuck hour in the morning, ragged from the exertion of the game, from losing the game, and from coach tearing us new ones, and who’s sleeping on the lumpy sofa in the quad? My sister, who is three months away from finishing her junior year in HS, and who seems to have driven here all by herself.
Just as I’m ready to flip my shit, H comes stumbling out of our room and motions to me. I went into the room, he closes the door behind us and proceeds to tell me my sister showed up on Saturday night around eleven o’clock, crying her eyes out. Thank god, H was there and knew who she was. He calmed her down, gave her some water and a blanket, and told her to camp out on the couch and wait for me to come back. He had no idea what was wrong. She told him she’d only talk to me.
I went back out to the couch and tried to figure out if I should wake her or wait. Nature and O solve that one. He had to pee, and the flushing woke my sister. The minute she saw me, she broke out in tears. I nominate H for sainthood since the dude comes out with his pillow and blanket and tells me to take my sister into our room. She can have his bed.
It took me ten minutes to calm her down enough to tell me what the fuck was going on. I’m still so fucking angry I can hardly bang this out on the laptop. Her BF hit her and she didn’t want to tell our mother because she would tell our father and my sister knew what would happen if he found out. My dad is old school in the worst way. Telling him what happened would not have gone well for anyone involved. So now I have to drive her back home in her car. I wasn’t going to let her drive. She was too much of a mess and we needed a plan.
The good news, my mother thought my sister was sleeping over at her friend’s house. I made her call the friend and tell her we were coming over. The sun’s coming up as we sneak in through the rear entrance to the GF’s house. The girl takes one look at the shiner over my sister’s eye and says, “That motherfucker. I’m going to kill him.”
I turned to my sister and asked, “This isn’t the first time?” She shook her head and bust into tears again.
Somehow we get up to the friend’s bedroom without waking the whole fucking house, and now we have to come up with a story that will be plausible and verifiable to explain my sister’s shiner. We decide my sister will call our mother in a couple of hours to tell her that she’s hanging with her friend on Sunday. Then the girls are going to go to a touch football game a couple of towns over. The friend will make sure she throws a football at my sister’s face, and the story will be that’s how she got the shiner.
I take a Lyft back to school. Don’t ask how much that cost, and I barely make it to the quad. I hit my bed for a hard sleep, wake up five hours later, then I have to decide what to do about the fucking BF. Gotta admit, part of me wanted to tear into him. But I know better. My sister’s friend had given me the BF’s address and telephone number. It took me a while, but I figured out the best course of action.
The next day, I call my sister and she confirms the touch football story worked. My father took one look at her face and insisted she go to the doctor and stay home from school for a few days. Perfect. Now she won’t be out in the world and run into that asshole.
After I talk to my sister, I make an appointment with a local attorney who handles a lot of divorces that involved domestic violence. I saw her on Tuesday and gave her the rundown. She’s a smart one. She waited until dinnertime and called the BF’s house and asked to speak with the father. She figured the BF beats on girls because his father beats on him, and probably his mother too. Some fucked-up shit, to be certain.
Sure enough, when I call my sister’s friend a couple of days later, she tells me that the BF got the shit kicked out of him and lost his car privileges. He’s ghosting school and no one’s seen him.
The attorney had told the father that she represented a group of girls who had dated his son and that the boy had assaulted each of these girls and that they were going to sue the boy’s family for damages. She didn’t intend for the BF to get hurt. She only wanted the father to put a lid on his kid.
Don’t ask what the attorney cost. I’m so broke, I can’t buy a lottery ticket to try to make back the money I spent.
Which still leaves the whole why my sister thought it was okay for a guy to beat her on the regular issue. I’m trying to get her to go see a counselor, but I’m not holding my breath.
I’m so fucking tired I want to sleep for a week.
Your turn.
G
One week later
Mirabelle
For two hours, Mirabelle had been stuck on “her BF hit her.” Ten thousand images had flashed through her mind, all of them involving beatings, falling down stairs, black and blue marks, bruised and broken ribs, concussions, and blood. The nightmare that had been Mirabelle’s former life played like a horror movie on a continuous loop. You know how they say, “Wherever you go, there you are”? Welp, nothing could have been truer for Mirabelle than when she read G’s letter.
Déjà vu all over again.
Now she had to make a decision. Should she render advice hard learned from experience, or keep – to quote G – her yap shut?
She decided to sleep on it, figuring her brain would spit out some wisdom in REM sleep that would provide illumination and elucidation to the matter. But that plan didn’t go so well. She spent about an hour staring at the dark ceiling. She spent a half hour resting on her left side staring at the closet door, then a half hour on her right side staring at the bathroom door.
At two in the morning, she sat down and decided to write G a letter. As in write with a pen. She figured even if he was a weirdo stalker, which she knew in her gut he wasn’t, a handwriting analysis of an anonymous letter would yield nothing. Unless he had friends at the FBI crime lab who could run her fingerprints, but that wouldn’t turn up anything. She’d never been arrested or had been fingerprinted. She knew all about that shit. She’d made sure a certain motherfucker would spend the rest of his goddamn life in jail.
Now his fingerprints were definitely on file.
She had done everything in her power to effectuate that result.
Her version of outcome engineering.
Hey, G. I thought a personal touch was called for given what you’ve been through. I hope things are better now. If you don’t mind me stepping in it a little, I wanted to let you know that you shouldn’t let up on getting your sister into therapy. She’s young enough to turn herself around as long as she has professional help. I get why keeping your ’rents out of the equation is necessary here, and I know it’s hard to keep an eye on her when you’re not living at home. Maybe you can conscript her girlfriend into helping get your sister to a therapist once a week. GFs can put hella pressure on a girl, and from what you shared, it sounds like the GF is a tough chick. Your sister needs someone with backbone to stand beside her. And since you seem to be plenty resourceful, I’m betting you’ll find a counselor a few towns over from your home that your sister can see.
Okay. That’s it for me sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong.
Dancing to country music is better than I imagined it would be. I’m more Halsey than Thomas Rhett, but I have enough space in my music brain to expand my library. So six of us went to the bar with live music last Saturday night, and while the band wasn’t ready for MSG, they got the job done. The place is about 40 years old with lots of wood and the requisite neon beer signs, some tables, and lots of stools at a long bar. The dance floor was big enough to accommodate a packed house. Again, sm
all-town life – this is the woo-hoo entertainment around here.
The six of us were able to cop a table and two of the guys don’t dance – what is it with guys and dancing anyway? But that meant we didn’t have to worry about our drinks and jackets, etc. Turns out the one guy who does dance is a funny dude. He works on his family’s farm and is going to school part-time, but he intends to get his B.A., which means when he finishes with community college, he’ll have to drive 2.5 hours each way to get to the closest university. Commitment, right? Next week we have to read our most recent writing assignment to the class so I’ll let you know if he’s any good.
Mrs. B is on her last nerve about her grandnephew not getting with the stop-fucking-up program. Seems the more beside herself she gets, the more she bakes and cooks. And since it’s only her and Mr. B at home, all that extra food makes its way into our breakroom. I have a lasagna and a pecan pie in my fridge at home. And while I hope F gets his shit together like yesterday, I’m not complaining about the fantastic food Mrs. B is throwing my way.
I’m an okay cook, but I’m lazy. Between working at the hardware store, school, and studying, I’m not particularly motivated to come home and make spaghetti sauce from scratch, which Mrs. B does, and with tomatoes from her garden. I’ve never been to her home, but I heard she has a greenhouse that is extraordinary.
My world literature prof is stressing me out. She’s given us The Changeling by Kenzaburō Ōe to read by next Wednesday. It’s about 500 pages long, and so far it’s not what I’d call light reading. I’ll let you know what I think when I get done, but I don’t see dancing to Luke Bryan this weekend in my future.
Ace
Eight days later
Gio
Ace. So cool of you to put pen to paper. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a handwritten letter before in my life. Maybe one from an old distant family member, but if I can’t be sure, it wasn’t memorable. And you aren’t sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. I wouldn’t have told you about all that shit if I didn’t expect some input. So thanks for the suggestions. Actually, I’d come to the same conclusion about my sister’s friend, and I hit her up about getting my sister to see a counselor. There were A LOT of phone calls back and forth between me and my sister, my sister and her GF, and me and the GF. Some yelling (my sister at me, my sister at her GF), some crying (my sister with me, my sister with her GF), and, finally, Jesus, God, finally, my sister agreed to see this therapist I found who deals mostly with teens. Her first appointment is tomorrow, and the GF is driving my sister to the shrink and walking her in and everything. The GF deserves a fucking medal.
I can’t cook worth a fuck. I can reheat real well in the ’wave, and that’s the extent of it. Me and the Food Channel do not have a relationship. But you know who does? H. The guy loves the cooking shows, and especially the cooking competitions. He’s watched Chopped marathons like he’s going to get quizzed on them. Sometimes I come back from practice and he’s the only one in the quad, and he’s sprawled out on the couch, which is a piece-of-shit, lumpy, fugly thing, watching The Great British Bake Show. A brilliant weirdo.
Now that I’m talking about food, I’m starving. The cafeteria food here sucks. Most of us scrounge food off campus. I have a better meal plan than most because I’m a member of a sports team. It doesn’t mean I get better food, only more of it. They can’t ruin PB&J sandwiches, bags of chips, and fruit, so I stock up on those. We have a half-fridge in the quad, but I don’t put a damn thing in there. O, I, and T are food thieves straight up. Lesson learned after week one, so I hide my stockpile in H’s mini-fridge, which he forgot he has. It’s hidden behind a bunch of I don’t know what kind of shit he has beside his desk, so no one knows the fridge is there. Best hidey-hole in the quad.
Harsh reading from your lit prof. Soldier on, Ace.
Your turn.
G
Nine days later
Mirabelle
This behavior falls under the things-we-do-to-keep-ourselves-sane column. Before class every Tuesday, and some Thursdays, depending on his movements, Mirabelle spent an hour in front of the computer checking the major newspapers in Providence, Rhode Island, Boston, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut. She figured that covered enough bases to keep track of the whereabouts of the man who could and would intentionally end her life.
He was prominent enough to appear in the business sections of any of those publications, and she figured business magazines weren’t worth looking at since they did interviews and articles months in advance of publication. Newspapers kept track of the daily, and she needed to keep tabs on the SOB.
For the most part, he did the usual charity/awards party circuit, as well as the Rotary and Chamber of Commerce stuff. Every now and then he did a country club thing, but he wasn’t a golfer, and he didn’t have horses so she never saw his name or picture attached to any of those social events. He was old enough to be her grandfather, but he was as lethal as a young cobra. For the rest of his life, she’d be watching him and looking over her shoulder. She knew he had private investigators trying to find her, and that was why she lived so far off-grid. Not that she missed social media. She hadn’t lied to G about that. It was too much noise. But she knew people were tracked by social media, credit cards, bank accounts, and their phones. She didn’t have any accounts anywhere.
While everyone else got regular paychecks, EJ – whose real name was Edward James so that moniker was accurate, he’d laugh if he knew she called him El Jefe – paid her in cash because Eddie was a wonderful man. She couldn’t tell him the truth. NOBODY knew the truth, but she’d told him she had moved to Fiddler’s Rest because her ex-BF was stalking her, and she wanted to stay below the radar. Eddie was mortified that she had anything less than butterflies and rainbows in her life 24/7, and agreed to pay her wages in cash.
She kept two burner phones charged but shut off. One was in her backpack. The other was in her apartment. They were for absolute emergencies. She hadn’t turned them on since the day she got them from a big-box store in Lincoln, Nebraska.
I love PB&J, G. What kind of jelly? My default is boysenberry, but I’ll do grape if I have to. No go on raspberry, can’t handle the seeds in my teeth, and blech on orange marmalade. Strawberry anything gives me hives, so that’s out, and apricot jam is all right in a pinch, but most of the time it’s too tart. Crunchy or smooth PB? I’m a crunchy girl all the way.
Such good news about your sister. I hope she keeps going and gets the help she needs.
So, hang on to your shorts. In a twist that no one saw coming, EJ and B are adopting a little girl from China. Apparently, they didn’t know if they’d find a surrogate, and they were hedging their bets by putting in applications to a bunch of agencies, and bam! One came through with this ten-month-old girl from China. B is flying out on Friday, and he’s supposed to be back with her in a week. R is over the moon that the kid she’s carrying will have a sister.
When EJ showed the baby’s picture to everyone, Mrs. B asked if she could have it for a couple of hours, and she came back after lunch with a poster-size blow-up of the kid’s photo, which is now hanging in the breakroom. The entire town has a baby naming pool going. Yes, everyone knows, not that EJ and B were keeping it a secret, but duh, Mrs. B went to the drugstore to get the photo blown up, and Mrs. R, the woman who works in the photo section, makes Mrs. B look demure, so it took about ten minutes before everyone was notified by someone on a phone tree. And, of course, the baby-naming pool is hanging in the breakroom. So far there are four top contenders: Pearl, which is too predictable IMHO, Lily, which is also too predictable, Lila, which I adore, and Stephanie. I don’t know how the hell Stephanie got in there. It’s so not EJ and B. But this is the town’s pool, which doesn’t have any bearing on what EJ and B decide. I think they’ve picked out a name already and they’re letting the town have its fun. I’ll keep you posted.
The Changeling was so heavy I had to read two romance novels after it to clear my palate. Well
written, and a must-read if you want to be worldly and important, but Marley and Me it ain’t.
Remember I told you about the dancing dude who’s funny in my writing class? He got a standing O after he read his assignment. No lie. It was that good. Farm boy is deep. His name is Q, btw, and he’s really smart in a humble, unassuming way. He asked me to go dancing with him this Saturday, and I said yes since I don’t have any wrist-slitting books to read before next week. Q says it’s rock ’n roll night this Saturday, so I’ll let you know if it’s Led Zeppelin or Blink-182.
Ace
Ten days later
Gio
Gio lay on his bed in his bedroom in his parents’ house, cursing that he had to be there at all. But it was spring break, and tomorrow was Easter Sunday, and the day after was his b-day, so he couldn’t blow off the obligation visit. He was glad to be spending time with Sofia, though, who, thank you Jesus, liked her therapist and said it was nice to have someone to talk to who wasn’t a relative or a GF, and who didn’t judge.
Gio got that on so many levels. M was his salvation.
But what the fuck with farm boy? No, she wasn’t jonesing about the guy, and the first time she went out with him was with a group, but this dancing thing definitely sounded like a date. She didn’t say it was a date, but Gio knew if he’d asked a girl to go out dancing with him, it would be a date. Which meant he’d buy her a drink, something to eat, get up close when a slow song was playing, and…absolutely the fuck not. Farm boy was not getting up close with M and doing the grind.