Secrets of Southern Girls

by Haley Harrigan

  “The front door was unlocked,” she said in a low, breathless voice. She snapped on the radio on his nightstand. She was wearing little gym shorts and a tank top, no bra, with a big cardigan sweater over her arms. What was she doing there? Had she lost her goddamned mind?

  “Lucky you didn’t run into Jules,” he mumbled. “The only other person who would sneak around at this hour on Thanksgiving lives in this fucking house, you know.”

  “Shh.” She held a finger to her lips. She didn’t usually show up like that, especially not that late. The whole scene had this weird, dream-like quality, almost like he’d taken something before bed. He hadn’t, though.

  “Reba, what are you doing here?”

  Before he was even fully awake, she was straddling him, her mouth clumsy and frantic on his. She kissed him hard, teeth scraping against his lips, and he was confused—was she angry, or horny? She kissed him, bit him, his lips, his neck, his ears. His hands caught her hip bones and pulled her to him, the thin sheet separating her body from his. “Jesus Christ, Reba,” he moaned.

  “It’s your fault,” she whispered into his ear as she attacked him with her mouth, her fingernails scraping at his arms. He tried to understand what she was saying, but she wouldn’t let up, and he was scared shitless and more excited than he’d ever been in his whole goddamned life.

  “What?” he gasped as she pulled the sheet out of the way and reached for him. “What’s my fucking fault?”

  Her eyes were watery when she looked at him, and he didn’t know if she was going to fuck him or cry on him. “It’s your fault I’m like this,” she whispered. “You made me this way, didn’t you? You turned me into this.”

  He was wide awake and on top of her before she knew it, sheet tossed to the floor and her wrists pinned above her head with his left hand.

  “Uh-uh,” he said, his free hand roaming her body. “I didn’t make you come here. I didn’t do a thing, other than give you what I knew you wanted.”

  “Don’t,” she said as he pushed down her shorts. “Don’t,” she repeated, as she arched herself up to him.

  He didn’t know what her game was, but he didn’t like it. “Reba,” he said, his voice harsh and confused. “Do you want this or not?”

  He couldn’t tell if she was crying, didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Hold her? Tell her it was going to be okay?

  He really didn’t need this shit.

  “Say yes, Rebecca,” he groaned into her ear. “Say yes, or this stops.” He’d been holding her down, but he eased up, pulled away. Let go of her wrists and, for some reason, trailed her collarbone with chaste kisses before looking at her again.

  Her wide-open eyes were killing him, that look of lust and terror and God knows what else. Her wet, raw lips parted, and the curtains rustled and moonlight shone on her gorgeous face while “Glycerine” played on the radio.

  “Yes. Yes.” Her legs wrapped around him and pulled him in close, and it was the sweetest fucking place he’d ever been.

  Sad thing is, he’s thirty years old now, and he’s still never had anything better. There is nothing better than her. He collapses onto the floor of his gallery. He can feel her eyes on him, and he knows it isn’t real, but it’s soothing all the same.

  63

  Julie jumps away from the diary, her fingertips tingling as though the pages have singed them. She looks around, surprised to find herself still in this hotel room and not in the Lawrence Mill of ten years ago.

  She leaves her room in a hurry, barefoot, without really knowing where she’s going, only that she has to put some distance between herself and that damned book. The hotel carpet is flat and firm beneath her feet, and when she presses the button for the elevator, she finally knows where she’s headed. She takes the elevator to the third floor, the highest floor of the hotel, and then turns down a hallway that she knows leads to the back staircase. There’s a metal ladder there, and if she climbs it, she’ll find herself on the roof. She’s been up there only a few times, with men she met at Southern Saddle back when she was a teenager. But it seems like a place where she might find some clarity.

  She climbs up, her bathrobe sweeping against the metal rungs. The trapdoor is heavy, but she manages to push it open. It’s deserted up here, as she knew it would be, the concrete of the roof level coated with rain-washed yellow pollen and a line of bulky air-conditioning units humming along the perimeter of the roof. She finds a corner and sits. The white hotel bathroom will be covered in yellow after this.

  She’d stopped reading just before the Thanksgiving entry. She wasn’t ready. That Thanksgiving night is vivid in her mind. The night she caught Reba, though she had no idea what she’d actually caught her doing.

  Back then, Julie and Toby shared a hallway bathroom. At night, when Toby was home and Molly was away at work, Julie crept like an intruder down the hall when she needed to pee, using her hands and the sliver of light that escaped from under Toby’s closed door to guide her through the dark hallway. It wasn’t Toby himself that she was trying to avoid (not that she ever welcomed his company). But Toby, at least, was an enemy she knew. What made her hurry was her attempt to avoid, whenever possible, accidental interaction with one of his “clients,” either accompanying him up the stairs to his room or slipping out of his bedroom, product in hand.

  He invited them into the house with no thought of danger, no worry of hidden policemen or drug-induced threats. Julie couldn’t believe that Molly didn’t know, that she hadn’t heard rumors. But maybe she had. Maybe she only pretended not to know about Toby’s dealing and Julie’s late-night adventures. Easier not to deal with it. Or maybe no one talked at all, maybe Julie was just paranoid. Maybe no one cared enough to talk.

  It would happen, occasionally, though, that Julie would be opening her bedroom door or the bathroom door at the exact moment someone was coming or going. And she couldn’t resist watching, couldn’t resist seeing who would come to a college kid’s house in a small-town neighborhood in the middle of the night, pockets filled with wadded-up twenty-dollar bills, to get a fix. Mostly they were the usual suspects—Toby’s friends, long-haired boys in bands. But sometimes she was surprised. The middle-aged manager of the gas station on the corner of Magnolia, the cashier at Piggly Wiggly. Her tenth-grade science teacher.

  But the biggest surprise of all came that Thanksgiving night, when she stood in her bedroom with the door cracked and watched the lovely blond-haired girl hurry from Toby’s room, arms across her chest and eyes to the floor.

  Julie’s world crumbled as easily as a handful of dead flowers. As soon as she heard the front door click softly closed, she banged her fists against Toby’s bedroom door, the noise of it echoing down the hallway. When he didn’t respond, she flung it open on her own.

  “What the hell did you do to her?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice at a reasonable level despite her panic. Toby loved to get under her skin. The room was smoky and completely dark, except for the moonlight slipping in through the window.

  Toby flicked on the bedside lamp. There were things everywhere—a square mirror lying flat on the nightstand, wayward bits of powder clinging to it, sheets and pillows strewn about the floor. She could see newly painted vines, so detailed, crawling up one wall, and the start of a woman—lithe legs, pink-painted toes, slender thighs—on another. Toby was lying on the bed, body twisted from leaning to turn on the lamp and naked except for boxer briefs, black. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he mumbled. “Doesn’t anybody knock anymore?”

  “What did you do to her?” Julie shouted, quickly losing the fight to control her emotions. She picked up a pillow and hurled it at Toby, and it hit him in the face. She couldn’t imagine Reba, her Reba, in that room, with Toby. Toby, who dealt drugs and got high and painted full walls with tiny paintbrushes.

  “What are you talking about?” Toby sat up in the bed. His chest was streaked red with scratches,
like he’d been fighting someone. Like someone had been fighting him.

  “I saw her leaving your room. I saw her. Why was she here, and what the hell did you do to her?”

  “What? Nothing. She wasn’t here,” he muttered.

  “Don’t lie to me.” Julie snapped on the overhead light, and the room was bright with artificial daylight. Toby covered his eyes with his arms.

  “Fuck you, Jules,” he said. “Go to bed.”

  “Tell me. Tell me what happened in this room, or I will tell every single person I know about your little drug business.” Her face burned red; she could feel it. She hurled another pillow at him. “Why are you so scratched up? Did you hurt her? What did you do?”

  “Goddamn it, stop!” he yelled, throwing a pillow back at her. “I thought you wanted to know about her, not me. And I didn’t do anything to her. Nothing she didn’t want, anyway.” He leaned back against his headboard and closed his eyes.

  “What does that mean?”

  “What do you think? You’re the one going on and on about my ‘drug business.’ The girl’s got a habit, okay? She’s a client.”

  “She’s what?”

  “A client.” He looked her up and down. “Happy?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe it, baby. Nothing heavy, a little pot here and there. So, relax already. Maybe you could use some yourself.”

  “Why? Why would she do that?”

  “I don’t know, Jules. I’m her dealer, not her therapist. She wants it, I’ve got it.”

  “It’s three thirty in the morning. Why now?”

  Toby rolled his eyes. “Isn’t it obvious?” She didn’t answer, because nothing was obvious anymore. Five minutes before, she would have sworn that her best friend would never touch drugs. Obviously. “Because she doesn’t want you to know.”

  “Reba doesn’t do drugs.”

  “She does now.”

  “Why is your chest all scratched up?”

  “When did you get so damned nosy?” he asked, leaning forward. “Unrelated, Jules. If you really want to know, I had a date tonight. Earlier. With a girl who likes it…rough.” He laughed. “And who am I to deny her?”

  “You’re disgusting.” Her voice was low and scary, even to her own ears, when she said, “If you sell Reba anything that hurts her in any way, I will find out about it, and I will hurt you.”

  “You’re so full of shit. I don’t believe a word that comes out of your slutty little mouth.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Believe it, baby.” She slammed his bedroom door behind her and stomped back to her room.

  “Turn off the fucking light, Jules!” he yelled, but she pretended she didn’t hear.

  64

  REBA’S DIARY, 1997

  Jules looked me in the eye when we met at the foot of Molly’s driveway for school. I felt scrutinized, like a math problem where the answer is wrong, and I wondered what she knew. I didn’t have to wait long, because Jules has never been the subtle type.

  “I saw you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Leaving Toby’s room on Thanksgiving night. I saw you.”

  I could feel my eyes widen. “Jules, it’s not what you think…” I’d been so desperate for Toby, so stupid, that I’d forgotten to be careful. I’d needed him. I didn’t even check, when I was leaving, to make sure Jules wasn’t around. It was my own fault.

  “You don’t have to make excuses. He told me about the drugs.”

  “Whatever he said… Wait, what did he say?”

  “That you do drugs. Pot. That he’s your dealer. Is that true? Unless you were doing something else in his room that night.”

  Toby has made me careless; both of these boys have. Confused me, messed with my pretty, simple world. And now Jules has caught on.

  But Toby… He lied about it? Why? “I don’t know…” I said weakly, my voice trailing off as I tried to think of what to say next.

  “I don’t understand you anymore. We tell each other everything… At least, I thought we did. What’s with the hiding?”

  My only experiences with drugs are the nights when Toby passes me a half-smoked joint, sometimes before we do…what we do, sometimes after. What to say next… That I wasn’t really doing drugs after all, that I was seducing Toby that night? That we were making love in his bedroom? I want to think of it as making love, because it sounds less depraved when I turn the phrase over in my head. But I know that what we do together is something completely different, something bigger and more complex than that. Making love is what happens when August and I are together, and it feels like betrayal to use those same words, even in my mind, to describe the things Toby and I do to each other.

  “Um…I don’t know. I guess I’m just trying it out, Jules. I’ve been kind of stressed lately. My dad and the job thing, and school, and…I don’t know, stuff. Don’t make a thing of it.” I don’t usually talk to Jules this way, and I could see that she was taken aback.

  “I’m not making a thing, Reba, I just didn’t…know that you were doing that.” She looked hurt and…something else. Jealous?

  “Oh,” I said. “You’ve never done it before?” I assumed that Jules has tried all kinds of different things, what with all of the experiences she’s had with the older guys and the alcohol.

  “No,” she says. “You’d know if I had.” It was a lie, though. I know that Jules keeps plenty of things from me, always has. Protecting me, I bet she would say if I were to call her out on it.

  “Probably not,” I said bitterly. “We don’t really see each other anymore. You’re busy, remember?” It was the easiest way I could think of to let Jules know that things are different now. I can’t confide in her anymore, not without all of this judgment.

  I bet that if she could, she would keep me sweet like the untouched bloom of a flower forever.

  “It’s not like that,” Jules said. “You know it isn’t.”

  “I know.” I sighed. “I’ll see you in class, okay?” And I sped up, walking as fast as I could. Jules didn’t even try to catch up.

  There are so many secrets now that it’s hard to keep them all straight.

  65

  Julie jumps when the door to the roof groans open. Dazed from reliving her own violent memories, it takes a moment for her to recognize that the person climbing up onto the roof is August.

  “Hey,” she says. This time he’s the one who’s startled. He looks around, finally sees her in her little corner. She leans back against the cool concrete roof. She’s wearing pajamas beneath her bathrobe, and she tugs the robe tighter around her body, modest suddenly in his presence.

  “What are you doing up here?” he asks. He’s wearing the same clothes from earlier, except that his shirt is untucked, top buttons undone.

  “Just needed some fresh air…a place to think,” she says.

  “I can go, if you want to be alone.” He hovers near the door.

  “No. Stay.” She should tell him about Toby and Reba, but she’s still in shock herself. She doesn’t know how to say it; she hasn’t processed it yet. August leans against the concrete wall, rests his elbows there, overlooking the city.

  “There’s no way you killed her, Jules,” he said, “if that’s what you’re thinking about.”

  For the first time, she wonders if that could be true. She’s been wrong about so many other things, hasn’t she? But even this recent revelation about Toby and Reba isn’t enough to absolve her. It doesn’t change the fact that Julie remembers being in the forest, remembers arguing with Reba.

  “How’d you know this was up here?” she asks.

  “Didn’t. Just guessed. The office building where I rent workspace has a rooftop like this. No one ever goes up there but me.”

  It strikes her, then, how little she knows of him. It’s probably better t
hat way, but she finds herself wanting to know more. The only genuine details she has about him come from Reba’s diary, from when he was a teenager. She thinks about how much she, herself, has changed since those teenaged years. She doesn’t want him thinking that’s who she is anymore.

  “Tell me about your work,” she says.

  “It’s…you know…work.”

  “Do you like it?”

  He nods, shrugs. “Yeah, I like it. I mean, it’s what I always thought I would do, taking pictures, so it’s good.” She doesn’t have to ask what’s missing from his life. The loneliness emanates from him; it enrobes him, makes him seem like some kind of martyr.

  “Do you date, August?” He doesn’t look at her, doesn’t answer.

  “I mean, I know you said that you haven’t had anyone special…not since…but do you date, ever?”

  He shrugs again. “I guess. I’m not celibate, if that’s what you mean. But they know I’m not looking for a relationship. I…you know, I can’t.”

  It isn’t fair. Julie had always thought August changed everything for Reba, but she can see now that Reba also changed everything for him. In an alternate world where they had never met, August could be out there somewhere, happy, at peace. He could be tangled in a lazy embrace on a sofa, watching TV with his wife while his children slept upstairs. He could be a completely different person from the one standing before her now, the loneliness and guilt and anxiety wound through every cord of his muscles, from his tight shoulders to the clench of his hands atop the low wall overlooking Opal. All that for a girl who may or may not have even loved him.

  He pulls a bent cigarette from his pocket and lights it, a soft plume of smoke floating out into the night air. She watches it, her head back against the hard concrete, watches the smoke drift out into nothingness, break apart, disappear. There’s something to it, some truth that she can almost grasp, and then it’s gone again, evaporated, nothing.