Almost Wrong

by Aubrey Parker

  I’ve thought only of myself so much that I’ve started to overcompensate. More charity. Being overly friendly. Listening to Samantha’s yammering about my image and trying to seem better in the public’s eyes.

  I steamrolled over Angela as an asshole kid. By the time I was established and wiser, it felt too late to go back. What was I supposed to do — drive up to the house and speak to Angela alone, explain that it was unfair to paint her with the same brush I’d painted my dad and her mom? To tell her that even though she’d never been friend or family or a date, she was still someone worth knowing … and maybe worth saving from all she’d been forced to endure?

  I’d waffled on that for years. There was no solution. Angela came with baggage: two deadbeats I wanted out of my life. I’d jettisoned Bill and Maria, but she never would. It was a no-win situation. I solved the problem by stuffing it down, sweeping it under the rug, and forgetting all about it.

  But that card.

  Seeing her name.

  Imagining her face.

  Before today, I hadn’t seen her in years. I still think of Angela as that obnoxious, pretentious drama girl: full of life, the insistent center of attention, sure she was so special. The girl who looked younger than her years on the surface but older than her years once inspected. The girl who, it turned out, had blossomed just as I’d known she would.

  I watch her across from me as she sits three-quarters on the plush black leather, the bar with its crystal decanters a foot ahead of her. She stares at the passing streets as the limo takes us from the wrong side of the tracks to the right. From the hard streets to the sparkling uptown. From the place I once lived to the place I live now.

  She’s quiet. Her skin is smooth and looks soft. She’s a shade or two darker than me, with an Italian complexion mixed with something I can’t place and never cared to ask about — Slavic blood, maybe. In profile, her eyes are slightly narrow. Her eyebrows are long, thin, and striking. Her hair is long, and she’s gathered it into a neat but no-nonsense ponytail, still slightly oily with sweat. She’s changed from her running clothes into a simple short-sleeved yellow top and jeans, yet still manages to be striking.

  She probably thinks she looks like a pig. But Angela’s different from someone like Samantha. Sam is meant to primp. Properly fixed up, she’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, but she’s anything but glamorous with her makeup off and workout clothes on. Angela, by contrast, is meant to be real. It doesn’t matter whether she tries to dress up or if she tosses on jeans and pulls her hair into a ponytail. As long as she’s authentically herself, she’s breathtaking.

  Not that I should be thinking any of this. Angela is my stepsister, and has been for thirteen years. When I saw the birthday card, I was thinking nostalgically about helping a good girl who deserved my assistance by virtue of taking care of a shitheel dad I wanted nothing to do with. When I was having sex with two women earlier, I got distracted by Angie’s (not Angela’s) name and nothing else. I’d never think of Angela that way. Not now that I’m a responsible adult, free of the confused, troubled thoughts that plagued my traumatic youth.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  She answers without looking. “No thanks.”

  “Do you drink?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What’s your drink?”

  “Chardonnay.”

  “I have chardonnay.”

  “I doubt you have the kind I like.”

  Doubtful. The limo is well stocked. I have the best stuff in the world, in wine and in everything else. “What kind do you like?”

  “The cheap kind.”

  I almost laugh, but I realize that would be a bad idea. “I have some stuff I know you’ll like.”

  “Is it cheap?”

  She looks over, finally. I can see anger and resentment in her eyes. She wears those emotions well. Any man who wasn’t her stepbrother would probably find the look lustful and exciting.

  I shake my head.

  “Then I doubt I’ll like it.” Again she looks forward.

  I wonder if I should press. The point of this ride was to talk, yet Angela won’t meet my eyes. I’ve tried a few times to start, but she cuts me off with the shortest possible answers. I’m left outwitted, clutching a conversational bag with nothing inside.

  If she were Samantha, I’d barrel ahead and say what needed saying.

  But Angela isn’t Samantha.

  The buildings around us grow taller, and Angela finally speaks. She turns fully toward me, knees together, face uncompromising. It would be easy for someone watching us to believe she owns the limo and I’m the stray.

  “Where are we going?”

  “My apartment.”

  “Why?”

  “To talk. I wanted to talk.”

  “I thought we were going for a ride?”

  “We can do either.”

  She sighs. “What do you want from me, Hunter?”

  And that’s when I realize something. She seemed hard, almost dominant — but really, Angela’s furious. And tired, as if she’s been angry forever and it’s been difficult to hold. I see a chink in her armor. Her eyes, for a moment, are less steely than they’ve been.

  I wonder if this is how it’s always been. Her anger today looks like her pretentious air all those years ago. She looked bulletproof back then because she seemed to think she was perfect. Today, her Kevlar is pride. She just looks worn out, and I wonder if it’s been an act all along.

  My shrink said something once about me dressing the world so I could play the character I desperately wanted to be. That thought recurs now, and I think of Angela’s plays, her singing, her performing, her always being on.

  “Just to …” But I can only repeat myself. “To talk.”

  “We could have talked at my place. Or even better, on the phone.”

  I’m not sure of my motives. After I finished with Samantha and Angie-not-Angela, I expelled them from the penthouse and stalked my commons for an hour. I’d taken a few pills to calm an agitation I couldn’t fully explain. When those didn’t work, I took a few more, along with a few belts of scotch. My normal way of hushing the demons didn’t work. Before I knew it, I was in the car, heading toward yesterday.

  I don’t know what to say, so I say the truth. “I didn’t really want to talk to my dad, or let him know.” I meet her eyes and give her a little, vaguely apologetic shrug. “Or your mom.”

  “Just me.”

  “Just you.”

  “Why?”

  It’s a good question. It’s almost as good a question as why she came with me at all.

  “I can’t explain it,” I say.

  “So now what?”

  “We could talk, I guess.”

  “Okay,” Angela says, then falls silent.

  Talk about an inviting lead-up. She’s staring right at me, now seeming more hurt than mad.

  “How are you?” I ask. “How have you been?”

  “Tired. Beat. Overworked. Stressed out.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “How about you?”

  “Busy.”

  “Must be hard, doing all you do.”

  I nod. But it’s a trap. I scramble on, trying to sit up taller. “There’s a lot of people to manage. And too many deadlines.”

  I already feel myself wanting to apologize for my money. What’s better — to pretend I do nothing all day, or to feign an impossible schedule? My work must be nothing compared to hers, so that choice might be insulting. But implying I lie around and eat peeled grapes is so much worse.

  Angela came on this errand, so some part of her must want to be here. “So,” she says, “things have really changed for you, haven’t they?”

  I sniff the comment for double meaning, wonder if I’m being baited. She seems to be genuine. “I guess so.”

  “Rolling Stone said you’re worth well over a billion dollars.”

  I cringe. “On paper, maybe, but —”

  She smi
les a little. Just a little. Then she holds up a hand to cut me off. “I understand why you did what you did, Hunter. I’m trying not to be mad.”

  “But you are.”

  “I’m trying,” she repeats.

  I suppose it has to be good enough.

  After a minute, she adds, “I don’t like him either.”

  “Who?”

  “Bill.”

  “It’s not that —”

  “It is. It’s okay. But he is who he is. He’s been with Mom forever now, though, and he doesn’t hit her, so I guess I have to be okay with it. It was my choice to stay with them.”

  I don’t want to say that she could have left them, too. I don’t want to say that there were times, during the turbulent period after I first left, when I told her that exact thing, in those exact words. But she knows, and doesn’t want to hear it.

  I’m wired to be callous. Angela is wired to be responsible. Just one of many ways we were mismatched from the start.

  “I don’t want to talk about them,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  “But you don’t want to talk about money.”

  It’s true; I don’t. There’s no good way to discuss it. Looking at Angela now, a thousand money-related thoughts run through my mind. I want to tell her that I’ll pay her bills. I want to tell her that I’ll buy her a house — not the one she’s living in with Bill and her mom, but a new one. I want to invite her to live in one of my building’s posh, available units. I want to offer her a job.

  But those thoughts are all conflicted. Any money I give Angela filters to my father, seeing as he and Maria would tag along to any house I buy her unless I bought them one as well. And any offer I make — from cash to employment, would be seen as charity.

  It’s ironic. I’m always looking for new charities to take my money, and there’s one right across from me that I want to endow with millions for a reason I barely understand. But she’d never accept it. She’d never consider herself a charity, and be enraged the second I suggested she was. Because Angela’s always been that proud little drama girl who sang in plays, demanding the spotlight she was so sure she’d earned.

  “So what should we do?”

  I have an idea. I whisper to Brian, who then raises the partition to make a call.

  Angela gives me the first genuine smile I’ve seen from her in a decade. It’s curious and devilish. It makes me feel, finally, like heading into the old neighborhood might have been a good idea after all.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ANGELA

  The day after Hunter beat Carter Grimm nearly to death, I remember finding him in the bathroom, smearing antibiotic cream on his knuckles. Water was still running in the sink. The mirror was fogged from his shower, so he didn’t see me as I approached from the hallway.

  He’d wrapped himself in a faded maroon towel, then opened the hallway door to vent the steam. His brown hair was a mess, blackened with water. His gaze was down, and the sound of the faucet drowned my footsteps. His door was open to the world, but I still felt like a voyeur, peeping on an intimate moment I wasn’t meant to see.

  I hadn’t realized how rough Hunter looked — not just today, but always. He normally had a shirt on, of course, and I hadn’t paid attention when he’d run between his room and the bathroom for showers. Today, my eyes went to him almost automatically, and I noticed that he had several long-healed scratches down one side and a mothership of a scar near one shoulder.

  He must have taken some bruises when Carter knocked him to the floor, because I could also see fresh black-and-blues and a few small red abrasions. He was lean like an animal, the striations in his muscles shifting as he worked.

  The cuts on his knuckles seemed to have healed, but they looked nasty. He’d left quickly the day before, after I’d urged him out and told him I’d find a way to shut Carter up. Based on the slip I found in the trash, Hunter seemed to have gone to a clinic and, possibly by pulling out Bill’s city-supported insurance, had an X-ray. I assume his hand wasn’t broken because he wasn’t wearing a cast, but still it was a mess of red, raw skin.

  I stood behind him for maybe thirty seconds, increasingly sure that I should announce myself rather than leering unseen like a vulture. But I found myself newly captivated — perhaps inappropriately so. I’d always understood, intellectually, that Hunter had a fine jawline and strong arms. I’d known that other girls thought he was hot, but I sure hadn’t seen it. Not until now.

  Once I noticed, I didn’t want to stop. I’d never seen his scars. Or the round tattoo on the back of his left arm. These were things he kept private, and here I was seeing it all.

  I knocked on the open door.

  Hunter turned, his look almost dismissive. It wasn’t rude, just sort of there. He’d acknowledged my presence, without a word.

  “Is it okay?” I said.

  “Is what okay?”

  I took a step closer, now leaning on the doorframe. Hunter had always scared me a little. It felt dangerous to be so close to a predator licking his wounds.

  “Your hand.”

  “Oh. Yeah. It’s fine.”

  “I can’t believe you did that.”

  He glanced at me then back at his hand. His smooth skin moved over his lean frame, muscles rippling. “Sorry.”

  “No, no. Not like that. I just mean …”

  “What?” He turned to meet my eyes again. His were the same color as mine, but a thousand years older.

  “Nothing.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t have got involved.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. He really shouldn’t have. It was none of his business. He’d overreacted, beating Carter badly enough to send him to the emergency room. He’d chosen violence before diplomacy, like a cave man. He’d butted into something private, and I felt a tad violated with him seeing me vulnerable. I didn’t like that I’d cried in front of Hunter Altman. He was the kind of person who would use weakness as a weapon.

  But somehow, despite knowing I should have been angry at Hunter for what he’d done, I couldn’t be. I didn’t understand what had set him off.

  “And I guess I’ll get a visit from a cop, huh?”

  I looked at his sweat-slicked skin, still perspiring from his hot shower. I wanted to touch it. The thought made me feel wrong, dirty. Reprehensible. If I understood my confused feelings correctly, I might be having inappropriate pangs for the boy who lived in the next room — who was, on paper, as far as everyone was concerned, part of my family.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said.

  Hunter looked back again. This time, he turned fully. He had another tattoo on his chest, near his left shoulder. I’d noticed that one before, just as I’d noticed the effortless, no-gym-required cut of his six-pack.

  “Why?”

  “Because Carter didn’t turn you in.”

  He laughed. “So he says.”

  I shook my head. “I was there. They asked him what happened, and he said he fell down onto a bike rack while trying to leap it.”

  His eyes on me: “Why did he do that?”

  “I told him to.”

  “Why did he listen to you?”

  The truth was that I’d given him a hand job, and promised more. I don’t know why it shamed me, but it did. I was sixteen fucking years old, and my friends had done far more than getting sticky hands, but being in drama club was like being wrapped in naiveté. Half the guys were gay, and most of the other half were even more socially retarded than I sometimes felt.

  Carter wasn’t going to get hand or head from anyone outside the club. He’d huffed and puffed plenty, but really I was his only shot. Our fight had been half about my prudishness to begin with, but I’d decided to break my palm’s cherry, like two or three years after the other non-drama girls. It was no big deal, but somehow I felt bought.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, but he did.”

  Hunter looked at me for a long moment. I wondered if he believed me, or if he suspected there was more to the st
ory. If he suspected, though, I was sure he wouldn’t suspect the truth. I’d hidden my time with Carter and had never broadcast the tiny, mostly-kissing dalliances I’d had before him. Hunter was a player, and I was a nerd. He would never think I was capable of making a guy come. He probably thought I wore a chastity belt and still thought fairies brought babies.

  “Hmm,” he said, then turned back to the sink and the slowly defogging mirror. He didn’t seem remotely bothered that we were conducting our entire conversation with him in a towel. It wasn’t the same as him being shirtless at the pool, or going from his room to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

  I wondered if I’d be as comfortable talking to him if it were me wearing a towel after my shower. I’d be more covered than in a swimsuit, but a shifting of fabric would be all it would take to expose myself to him. I wouldn’t be comfortable with that at all — and yet for some reason, I was plenty uncomfortable now, despite being fully dressed.

  I wanted to thank him again, but that wasn’t what I felt. In the moment, “thank you” felt like the best thing to say. But my true feelings were somehow deeper, and something I didn’t entirely understand.

  After another minute or so, Hunter turned to gaze at me again, an are-you-still-here look on his face.

  “What?”

  What indeed. It was too tangled. I only knew that I wanted to keep standing by that door. I wanted to help him apply ointment to his knuckles then wrap them in gauze. I felt the need to be there but had no idea why. I found I liked looking over his shoulders — at his shoulders. I wanted him to turn again and look at me fully. I couldn’t help thinking that a few minutes ago, he’d been in the shower rather than standing outside it. I couldn’t help imagining myself later that night, in that same tub. It was all a bunch of random nothing, but deep down I knew it wasn’t.

  I felt somehow weak, standing beside him.

  I felt gratitude for the brutish thing he’d done — not because I’d been in danger but because he’d done it for me. For my honor, maybe, as corny as that sounded.