That all felt like a million years ago now, those hazy, humid summers with her cousins and Kate, the four girls gabbing about faraway things, about what they hoped to do with their lives once they were older.
Kate always said then that she wanted to be a veterinarian, but she was now getting an English degree. “Too much science,” she’d said of vet school. She’d told Skyler about her big plan to not apply to veterinary school—a plan her grandparents fully endorsed—in the very same car that Kate might have just died in. They were driving somewhere, to the Fenway movie theater or maybe to Coolidge Corner; all Skyler remembered was they were off to see a movie. And Kate said, “Yeah, I don’t want to do it, turns out. I think I just wanna, like, read books and write stuff. Maybe teach.”
Skyler had no doubt she could do it, but it was surprising to see her sister, her steady, level sister, make such a big, sudden swerve in her life. School was only a few months away, and now there was this bombshell. Kate hadn’t yet told their grandparents, and Skyler certainly wasn’t going to blab. So for a while it was just their secret, one on top of a pile of many.
At the time, Skyler was holding back a big secret, a big fact of her life, from her sister. And she’d wanted to tell her that day in the car, now that her sister had divulged the truth about school. She almost did. But then she caught herself, knowing after she told her sister about Danny, about what was happening, that there would be no going back. Not once Kate knew. She’d never let it go until it was done. So she said nothing, just let Kate ramble on about her big plan, the car zooming down the Jamaicaway, fast but safe.
• • •
When Skyler became a teenager, some innate presence in her, maybe some genetic rebelliousness inherited from her long-gone mother, kicked in. So when she met Danny, two grades above her, a not terribly close friend of Kate’s friends, she felt an irresistible pull toward him.
“He’s an asshole,” Kate said when she first found out that Skyler and Danny had hooked up. “Seriously, Sky, he’s, like, the worst. I don’t think Owen and Ryan even want to be friends with him anymore.”
They’d met at a party in Roslindale, Kate taking Skyler along after a week of begging. It was at some Xaverian boy’s house, a shabby place that could have been nice with a little paint and attention. As it was, though, it had sallow shag carpeting and fading, smoke-stained wallpaper. The lighting was dim, and the downstairs—cramped living room and dining room, grim, dated little kitchen in the back—was crowded with kids, red cups strewn everywhere, a pulsing Zedd song blaring from unseen speakers.
Skyler quickly lost her sister in the crowd, near immediately regretting coming to this party full of strangers. She wished she was just hanging around Copley with her regular friends, joking about dumb things and taking turns on the one skateboard shared between them. But here she was, alone at a party of juniors and seniors who didn’t even go to her school. Skyler was clinging to the wall by the staircase, the upstairs looking dark and ominous, save for one light coming out from under a closed door, when she felt a tap on her shoulder.
She turned around and there was a boy, rangy and red-haired with a pronounced Adam’s apple, a little beery-eyed but still staring, intense and focused, right into her eyes.
“You alone?”
“Huh?” Skyler asked, stepping up a stair to get some distance from him.
“Sorry, sorry,” the guy said. “That sounded really fuckin’ creepy. I just meant, like, did your friends ditch you?” He smiled, his teeth surprisingly white and gleaming.
“Uh, no, not exactly. I’m here with my sister. Kate Vong? Do you know her?”
The boy thought for a second, then shook his head. “I do not remember.”
“Well. That’s my sister!”
The boy nodded. “And what’s your name?”
“Skyler,” she said, over the din of the party.
“Like Miley?” the boy asked, looking confused.
“No, not Cyrus, Skyler. Like, uh, Sky.”
“Oh, Skyler!” the boy said. “Like in Good Will Hunting.”
Skyler shrugged. “I haven’t seen it.”
The boy pretended to be taken aback and then leaned in, closer than before. “Well, I guess that’ll have to be our first movie date then.”
It was a bad line—was it really even a line?—but something about this boy’s shiny white teeth, his freckles, and Skyler’s utter aloneness at the party made her not care. So when he leaned in even closer and said, “Well, listen, my name is Danny, and I know this is kinda lame, and I swear I’m not trying anything, but would you want to talk upstairs? It’s so loud down here,” Skyler agreed to go with him.
They walked up the stairs and past the closed door with the light on. “I think that one’s, uh, in use,” Danny said with a little smile, keeping things feeling breezy, casual. They found another room, dark with the door open, and when Danny turned on the light it appeared to be a child’s bedroom, full of little gold sports trophies, with bunk beds in a corner.
“A kid lives here?” Skyler said.
“Well, he did. But I’m not a kid anymore.”
Skyler turned to him, mortified. “Oh my God, this is your house?”
Danny smiled, nodded. “Yeah. It’s kinda busted, I know. But, hey, it’s home. Half the time, anyway. I mostly live with my dad.”
“I’m sorry,” Skyler said. “I didn’t know.”
“Hey, it’s O.K.,” Danny said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
He seemed easygoing, which relaxed Skyler, and soon they were both sitting on the bottom bunk, leaning on their elbows, introducing more of themselves to each other.
“My mom left when I was a kid,” Skyler told him at one point. “She was, like, this grunge girl in the ’90s or whatever. She went to Seattle and then came back with the two of us. We were just babies, and she basically dumped us on my grandparents—well, my grandma and my step-grandfather—and then a few years later she disappeared.”
“That’s rough.” Danny sighed. “And I thought my parents’ divorce was bad.”
“I’m sure it was! I didn’t mean . . .”
Danny turned to her, looking kind and handsome in the dim light of the bedroom. “I know you didn’t. Man, you’re so . . . polite.”
Skyler grimaced. “Is that an Asian joke?”
Danny’s eyes widened. “No! No, not at all.”
She smiled. “Just kidding.”
Danny laughed and leaned back onto his elbows, this time a little closer to Skyler.
“So you came here with your sister?”
“Yeah, Kate. I mean, she’s my sister but she’s kinda also like . . . an aunt or something. Maybe even a mom. She’s only two years older than me, but she basically raised me. Back when my mom and my grandparents were fighting all the time, before my mom left. Kate, like, protected me from all that.”
Danny nodded. “That’s cool, that’s cool.”
Skyler felt dumb. Like she’d been talking too much, about way too much personal stuff. They were supposed to be talking about, like, school and music and Netflix shows. Not her family trauma. “Sorry, I—” she started, but before she could finish, Danny leaned over and kissed her. She was startled, and pulled back.
“Is this O.K.?” he asked, his brown eyes peering into hers. Skyler froze for a second but then nodded her head. “Yeah, yeah, it’s O.K.,” she whispered, and they were kissing again. And then Danny was getting up to turn off the light, and then, a little while later, they were having sex. It wasn’t Skyler’s first time, but it almost felt like it was, in the comfort of Danny’s childhood bedroom, Danny seeming so kind and quiet, with just a little bit of mischievousness—or was it danger—about him.
Even though Kate insisted to Skyler that Danny was an asshole and best avoided, that he had a reputation for fucking with girls’ heads and possibly worse, Skyler quic
kly started dating him, fooling around with him up in her cluttered room on many afternoons after school when Kate had practice or a club meeting or whatever it was she was always so busy doing.
At first, Danny had been sweet, and generous. He was the youngest of a big Irish Catholic family, and was very into his Irishness. He gave Skyler a Claddagh ring, told her to wear it with the heart facing toward her, so people would know she belonged to someone. That word, “belong,” so chilling later, then seemed romantic and old-fashioned, like Skyler finally had a place in the world that had nothing to do with Kate, or her grandparents, or her mother, who they thought was maybe living in California somewhere. (They’d gotten a postcard at Christmas when Skyler was thirteen, a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge on it. Her mother had written, “You girls would love it here,” but there was no invitation to come visit, or any indication that that was even where she lived.)
Danny made Skyler feel special and free and all those things it was hard to feel in her buttoned-up house. Maybe this was the feeling her mother had been chasing all these years, a sense of looseness and sexiness and excitement.
Skyler was fifteen when she and Danny started dating, and by the time she was sixteen, Skyler was in full, consuming love, most waking moments of the day taken up by Danny or thoughts of Danny. She loved the wiriness of his red hair, his skinny but muscled frame, the dumb shamrock tattoo he’d gotten on a trip to Montreal, the gold cross he wore around his neck, a gift for his confirmation.
She loved the way he always had her pulled close to him, whether they were wandering through the Prudential Center or at parties in the Arboretum, everyone drunk on Bud Light cans, all the other girls named Meghan or Ashley, the boys Tommy and Timmy and Mike. Danny always had an arm firmly around her waist, his hand often traveling down to give her butt a squeeze. She liked being Danny’s girl, liked playing up whatever hint of a Boston accent she had.
And she liked, even though she knew it was wrong, that Danny was often jealous, that he had once knocked a tooth out of a Latin Academy kid’s head for talking to her at a party. She liked his roughness, the way he almost devoured her during sex, pinning her arms above her head, that gold cross dangling above her. It all felt very grown-up, somehow, that Danny had such an obvious passion for her, that she felt so protected by him, provided for. Danny worked as a caddie at The Country Club in Brookline in the summers, and he must have gotten good tips, because he always had money, was always insisting that he pay when they went to see a movie, or got ice cream at J.P. Licks, or, on special occasions, dinner at Bertucci’s.
Still, there was a small, nagging voice deep inside Skyler, which sounded a lot like her sister, telling her that this was all going to turn bad someday, that the dangerous flicker she saw in Danny’s eyes sometimes—rarely at first, but then more and more as they became more intertwined, when he was drunk or was swerving between cars on Arborway—was eventually going to turn its dark, frightening glare onto her. She never told Kate about these worries, as Kate had mostly opted to let Skyler make her own mistakes, greeting Danny coolly whenever he came over and raising her eyebrows in skepticism whenever Skyler told her sister about a nice thing Danny had done. So Skyler let this fear, a little gray bead lodged somewhere in her, stay quiet, mostly unaddressed and ignored.
There was a sick kind of relief, then—the strange satisfaction of having a persistent fear finally manifest itself—when, on the night of Danny’s senior prom, Skyler learned what it felt like to have Danny’s anger pointed directly at her.
Skyler spent all afternoon getting ready, Kate helping her with her hair and makeup, wanting to make her sister look nice for the dance, if not for Danny.
“You know, you could always skip,” she said to Skyler, the two of them in Kate’s room, Skyler with her hair up as Kate did her makeup. “We could go get a fancy dinner somewhere instead.”
Skyler sighed. “Come on, Kate. I’m going to the dance.”
“I know. I know.”
“He’s really not like what people think he’s like. He’s sweet.”
“Yeah, but aren’t they always sweet in the beginning? Isn’t that how they get you?”
Skyler laughed. Kate was being so dramatic. “What would you know about how ‘they’ always are, Kate? When’s the last time you even dated someone?”
Unfazed by Skyler’s teasing, Kate took a step back to examine her progress with Skyler’s makeup. “You know fully well that I went on a date with Chris Chen last month.”
“Chris Chen?” Skyler laughed again. “Chris Chen is gay.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t know that yet. So it counts as a date.”
“That is so sad.”
Kate shrugged and gave her sister a goofy smile. “I think you’re ready,” she said, getting out of the way so her sister could see herself in the mirror. Skyler liked the job Kate had done—it was a subtle amount of makeup, but it still made her cheeks glow, her eyes sultry and inviting, her lips pouty and sophisticated.
“He’s gonna love it . . .” she murmured appreciatively.
“The important thing is that you love it,” Kate said, a pointedness in her voice.
“I do, I do. Thank you. What time is it? I should get dressed.”
The dress Skyler had saved up for was a pale blue two-piece, satin and hugging with a thin layer of chiffon over the skirt. It was lovely and ethereal. When Skyler first tried it on she felt like some sort of ancient goddess, powerful and graceful. There was only the slightest hint of midriff showing. It was strapless, but nothing plunging or otherwise risqué. It was the kind of dress that Skyler wasn’t afraid to wear in front of her grandmother, so she certainly didn’t anticipate Danny taking any issue with it. She hoped he’d think she looked good, that he’d be proud to have her as his date. It was a good dress, and had cost her all the money she had saved from work, plus a little from her grandmother, who said, “For your party” when she gave Skyler the check.
Skyler unzipped the dress bag, laid out carefully on Kate’s bed, and looked at the gown with admiration for a moment before slipping it on, Kate helping her with the zipper in back, then letting her sister’s hair down—a kind of casual beach wave look that had taken hours to get right—and saying, “O.K. Take a look.”
There in the mirror, Skyler saw someone elegant, someone ready for a beautiful night. “Wow! Not bad, huh?”
“Not bad at all,” Kate said, fixing a stray strand of hair and hiking Skyler’s top up just a bit. “We could also still just go have dinner, even with you dressed like that.”
“Kate . . .”
“I know, I know. I just hope . . . I hope you’ll be careful tonight. With him.”
“Ew! Kate!”
“Not like that. Well, yes, like that. But just . . . Don’t let him control the night, O.K.? I know it’s his prom, but it’s your night too. And you look too good to be told what to do.”
“O.K.”
Skyler heard a car pull up outside and then the doorbell ring, and she felt a shiver of excitement. She couldn’t wait to see Danny’s face when he saw how good she looked, some mix of awe and love and lust that would bode well for a magical, memorable night.
But when he walked in, Danny took one look at Skyler—posed expectantly and sort of embarrassingly, halfway up the stairs, waiting for him—and his face changed, becoming tense and angry.
“Are you going to wear something over that?” he asked with a scary, strained tightness in his voice.
It was the end of May and seventy-five degrees outside, so Skyler had not thought about wearing a wrap or anything, and she certainly didn’t have anything to match the dress. “No,” she said cautiously, walking the rest of the way down the stairs. “I was just gonna go like this.”
Danny laughed a little, incredulously, taking a step toward her. From the smell of him, Skyler could tell he’d already been drinking, probably with his friend
s in the limo, which was waiting outside. “Baby, what if it falls down or, like, rides up?”
Skyler put her hand on Danny’s arm, trying to reassure him, to calm him down. “It’s not going to, I promise. It’s fine.”
He pulled his arm away, a violent yank, and stepped in even closer. “You’re not going to my prom to show your tits to everybody,” he said in a low voice. The lewdness of that word, “tits,” mingling with the sourness of Danny’s breath, startled Skyler, and her stomach plunged. Danny put a hand around her arm, tight, and she was about to try to wriggle free when she heard Kate’s voice at the top of the stairs.
“Hey,” Kate said warily but loudly. Danny backed off, shooting his gaze up at Kate with a menacing look. Then Skyler’s grandmother, either not picking up on the tension or wanting to defuse it somehow, said, “You look so handsome, Danny. And Skyler looks so pretty. I want a picture!”
She made them pose on the stairs, Skyler with her back to Danny, his arms around her waist. She could feel his heart beating; his breathing was deep. He was still worked up, but he didn’t say anything else. He posed for the pictures, put the white corsage he’d brought around Skyler’s wrist, and took her hand and led her out to the limo, where the Meghans and the Ashleys and the Timmys and the Tommys were waiting. They all gave a little whoop when they saw Skyler, Ashley Costello saying, “You look fucking hot!” and Tommy Keegan passing Skyler a half-empty fifth of vodka as she settled into the car.
Danny was stony and silent the whole ride to the hotel in Natick where the prom was being held. When they got there, she quickly lost sight of him.
“Have you seen Danny?” she asked Meghan Murphy at one point. Meghan was one of the nicer girls in Danny’s friend group, but she still had a hard edge to her, a chip-on-her-shoulder iciness.
Meghan gave Skyler a pitying look and said, “Drinking in the bathroom, probably.”
“Oh,” Skyler said, trying to hide her disappointment. “Right. Sure.”
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