“What?” Wolf looks stricken, like he thinks you’re about to go completely insane on him here in Madison Campbell’s mother’s ugly bathroom. It’s possible he knows the truth about you after all. “No, I’m not saying anything’s wrong with your friends, I just—”
“You didn’t seem to have a problem with them when you were tracking your dirty boots all over their houses and drinking their beer,” you say snottily—and that’s good, you think with some nasty satisfaction. That’s exactly the kind of thing the old you would have said. “Back when you were doing that, they were all just fine.”
Wolf’s eyes go hot and injured. “I didn’t drink anything of theirs,” he snaps. His whole body is suddenly made of angles, all shoulders and knees. “Me and Jared, we stopped and got beers on the way over here. We aren’t freeloading.”
He sounds so upset that you feel yourself soften. “No, I know,” you say. “I didn’t mean—” But you did mean, a little bit, and both of you know it. You were picking a fight, using him as some kind of messed-up scratching post. Your mother would be appalled. “Sorry,” you say finally, leaning your head back against the door. All the energy has drained out of you at once. “That was bitchy.”
Wolf doesn’t contradict you. “You don’t know anything about me, either,” he points out. “Do you think this is, like, my dream? Like I’ve spent my whole life just dying to be stuck in a bathroom at some lame party with you? Princess Hailey Adkins?”
That stings. Not the nickname—God knows you’ve been called worse—but the idea that he’s doing you some kind of favor. You don’t want anybody’s pity. You never have. “A lot of people at school would die for exactly that chance, actually,” you retort. “Which is more than I can say for you.”
Wolf blows a breath out, shakes his head a little. “Wow,” he says, disbelieving. “You’re kind of exactly as horrible as everybody says you are, huh?”
“So then what the hell are you still doing in here with me?”
Wolf shrugs. “That’s a good question, actually,” he says, and gets up. “See you, Hailey.”
You remember something else then, pulled from the depths of your brain like a slimy scrum of seaweed: seventh grade, piss in Wolf’s gym sneakers in the locker room, all the boys hooting gleefully about it down the hall. You didn’t piss in them yourself, certainly. But you didn’t help him, either. You’ve been thinking that a lot lately, all the teeny tiny choices that can change your entire life. That boy’s got enough problems without you adding to them.
“Wolf, stop,” you say, reaching out and grabbing his ankle before you can think better of it. It’s warm and surprisingly solid through his jeans. “Can you just wait for a second?”
“What are you—?” Wolf shakes you free, but gently. “Why?”
You sigh loudly, and then you just say it. “Because I don’t want you to leave.”
Wolf makes a face at that, openly skeptical, but he does what you tell him—sitting back down beside you, closer than he was before. He smells like soap and grass and leaves, nothing like you remember from when you were a kid. “What,” he says, his voice low and flat.
You think for a moment. “What’s your favorite thing?” you ask him. “About working on the farm?”
Wolf rolls his eyes. “Riding the tractor,” he deadpans immediately. “Picking my teeth with hay, ma’am.”
“Can you stop?” you say, knowing you sound cranky. “I’m asking you a sincere question. You’re right, I don’t know jack all about you. But I’m asking.”
Wolf exhales loudly. “All right,” he says, leaning his head back against the door, the skin of his throat pale and exposed. “I like sleeping outside in the summer, I guess. My cousin Jared, who I came here with? We camp out most nights, instead of staying indoors, and that’s what I like.” He shrugs. “Sorry if it’s not farm-specific enough for you.”
“That sounds nice,” you lie. Actually it sound terrifying, but to be fair, these days you’re not exactly a good gauge of what’s scary and what’s not. You imagine it, staring up at the sky with nobody else around, like if you weren’t careful you could fly right off the face of the earth and never be heard from again.
“So what about you?” Wolf asks. He’s not mad at you anymore, or at least he’s decided not to act like he is. You feel disproportionately relieved. “What’s your favorite thing about being the queen bee?”
“I’m not the queen bee,” you say automatically, which is also a lie, and both of you know it. But part of the power is in never having to admit it out loud. You’re the most popular girl in your grade—or at least, you were before everything happened. Now you kind of don’t know what you are. A curiosity, maybe.
Wolf snorts. “Okay.”
You shrug. The truth is that your favorite thing about being popular is being able to control when and how people look at you and what they see when they do, like you’re the curator of a fancy museum and your only exhibit is yourself. The problem is that lately you haven’t been able to do it. You’ve lost control of your own story, somehow, since everything happened. You can’t figure out how to get it back.
“I like having a lot of friends,” you tell him finally.
It’s a bullshit answer, but Wolf doesn’t push. “Yeah,” he says, putting his hand down besides yours on the cool bathroom tile. “That sounds nice, too.”
You look at each other for a minute. You remind yourself that Jay is right downstairs. You and Jay have been dating on and off since last fall, and by all high school metrics he’s a decent-to-good boyfriend: Lord knows he got more than he bargained for when he asked you out that day by the fountain at the Clearview Mall. Still, every once in a while while you’re talking you can see that he might as well be on planet Mars for everything he’s actually hearing. There is something about Wolf Goshen that makes you think he’d listen for real.
Then again, you think, even as your pinky inches closer to Wolf’s on the tile, maybe he wouldn’t. You’re dimly aware that you’re making him up in your mind even as he’s sitting here, like you’re writing yourself into a story. You’re dimly aware that Wolf is making you up, too.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe, for as long as you’re in here, you can both be whoever you want.
You pull your legs up underneath you, look at him through your eyelashes in the dark. “It was your dream a little bit, though, right?” you ask him, smiling a little. “To be in here with me?”
Wolf laughs at that. “Are you serious right now?” he asks, but he’s blushing, and you know you’ve won. “You are something else, truly.”
You’re about to tell him he’s right—that you are something else, and that something can be his for one night only—when you hear a familiar voice trilling out across the driveway. “Jay!” she’s yelling. “Jay Montalto, are you in there?”
“Oh, Jesus.” You scramble across the bathroom and peek out the window like a prairie dog, but you already know what you’re going to see: It’s Jay’s mother, a big-haired Italian woman who has hated your guts from the time you started dating her son and continues to hate them now, which gives you a grudging kind of respect for her. It takes a set of brass balls to be mean to someone like you. Squinting through the screen you can see a handful of faces you recognize: Jillian’s parents, and Harper’s; even Nicole’s parents’ Volvo is parked down the street. “Shit,” you say, turning back to look at Wolf. “Okay, this part has never happened before.”
“They called people’s parents?”
You shrug. “Some people’s.”
Wolf looks at you sharply. “Fuck,” he says, and you think you’ve alarmed him in the moment before you realize he’s talking about his own. Maybe you really are as selfish as he thinks you are. For the first time all night he looks sincerely afraid. “You don’t think—”
“No,” you tell him honestly. “I don’t think anybody would have thought to call yours.”
Wolf looks reassured by that, though not entirely. “No,” he echoes.
“I guess not.”
You’re quiet for another minute. You can’t stop staring out the window, even though you know somebody’s going to see you. You guess it doesn’t matter at this point. You guess none of it really does.
Here is what will happen next: You’ll go home with Nicole’s parents and sleep on the spare bed in Nicole’s bedroom, just like you have been for the last two months. Because your parents aren’t out there waiting for you in the silver SUV you learned to drive on, angry at you for drinking and disrespecting authority but relieved, at the end of the night, that you’re safe. Your parents are in freshly dug graves at Woodlawn Cemetery six miles away from here, where they’ve been since two drunk juniors from your high school T-boned them on their way home from a dinner at TGI Fridays at the end of the summer. If they were still alive you like to think they would want you to go out and live your fucking life.
“Come here,” you say, holding your hand out for Wolf in the darkness.
“Why?” he asks, getting uncertainly to his feet.
“Because,” you say, letting the nonanswer hang there. You have never been the aggressor in a situation like this in your entire life, and you find you do not hate it.
Wolf comes closer, cautious. He’s taller than you are by nearly a foot. You reach up, put your hand on the back of his warm, shorn head, and kiss him. You don’t hate that, either, it turns out.
He pulls back after a moment, blinking at you. “What was that for?”
“Keeping me company,” you say, which is sort of the truth.
“Okay,” Wolf says, and smiles, kisses you again. He’s not a great kisser, unpracticed and a little spitty, but you actually don’t care about that at all: there are tiny explosions going off all over your body, like sparks flying up out of a campfire. Wolf puts both hands on your face. You want to stay like this forever even though you know it’s impossible, that it’s just a weird stopover, like how during the Revolutionary War the two armies took breaks and had Christmas together, then went back to shooting each other with muskets after the roasts were gone. You aren’t sure where you got that fact, actually—you didn’t read it in any of your dad’s old books—and you don’t know if it’s true or just something someone made up to make the world seem less brutal. Here in this bathroom with Wolf Goshen, it feels like maybe it could possibly be real.
“I’m not breaking up with Jay,” you blurt finally, your face on fire, your whole body buzzing like a burned-out neon sign. It’s hot in this bathroom, even with the window open. “I can’t—I mean. I’m not breaking up with Jay.”
Wolf laughs at that, a quiet baffled sound. “Jesus, Hailey, did you hear me asking you to?” he says, but he bends down and kisses you again then, his hands finding yours by your sides, and you’re opening your mouth to tell him maybe he should ask you to, you’re actually about to say that, when you hear the cops coming through the front door downstairs.
“Everybody out,” a man’s voice is yelling; through the crack under the bathroom door you can see that the lights have been flipped on in the hallway. Your heart is a siren wailing deep inside your chest.
“Somebody must have let them in,” Wolf says. He’s still holding your hands, your fingers twisting absently together, and it’s like you both realize it at the same time, letting go too fast.
“I bet it was that fucking freshman,” you say, clearing your throat and pushing your hair behind your ears. You’re already thinking about how you’re going to make her life a living hell come Monday. There are some benefits to being the queen bee.
“Hailey—” Wolf begins, but you hold both your hands up. Suddenly you know just what he’s going to say.
“Don’t,” you interrupt, and you’re surprised by how steady your voice sounds. You need to remember him as not knowing, even if that’s not how he actually is. “I mean it. Whatever you’re about to say to me, I just . . . really want you to not say it.”
Wolf looks at you. “Okay,” he says quietly. “Yeah. Of course.” He wipes his hands on his jeans and blows out the pumpkin candle, motions toward the door. On the other side of it you can hear people shouting like the goddamn end of the world. “You ready?” he asks.
You won’t even see him in school, you realize. By the time he turns up again in January you’ll probably both have forgotten all about this. You swallow down a sour taste like panic in your mouth.
“Yup,” you say, because there’s nothing to be done about it. There’s nothing to do about any of it but to keep going. “I’m ready.” Wolf moves aside to let you past him, your shoulders barely brushing. You’ve got your hand on the doorknob when he changes his mind. “Wait,” he says then, and, “Hailey.” When you turn around to look at him, his eyes are dark and wide.
You rest your forehead against his chest for a moment, breathing. Wolf holds very, very still. You can hear the sound of his heartbeat, steady, drowning out the sound of the mayhem raging on the other side of the door.
Print Shop
— — — — — —
NINA LACOUR
A HIGH SCHOOL parking lot at eleven p.m. My car under the bright light of a single streetlamp, a lit-up classroom in the distance, and you next to me, asking how all of this started. You are so new to me. Minutes new. And you’re probably wondering why I’m trembling, and I might be reading too much into the way you faltered before you said hello, the blush that washed over your face.
But I don’t think so.
It’s early, I know. We’ve only just met. But this might be a love story, so I want to tell it the right way.
— — — —
I should start with Print Shop. The romance of it: the dark wood and the ink smell, the papers everywhere, sheets of it cascading off every surface. The old lights on the desks and the framed monotypes and screen prints. The mugs of steaming tea and Eduardo with his accent and Neve with her pregnant belly and especially Alexander—the shop owner, the artist—holed up in his office at all hours while his husband, Terry, calls and sighs and eventually shows up with a frown and dinner on a tray.
And me, the bell jangling as I walk through the door in the beginning of the summer for my interview. I chose this shop because it was the only one I could find that didn’t work digitally. They didn’t even have a website. Everyone is always telling my generation that we aren’t going to know how to engage with people. We’re all going to end up with computer chips implanted in our brains and screens stuck in our eyes like contact lenses. But no one gives us any solutions, so I decided to find my own. Plus, I wanted to learn how to make that kind of magic. Ink and metal and screens and paper. I wanted to do something with my hands.
Neve introduced herself and led me to two stools. Somehow, I had expected to be meeting Alexander, the owner, but I didn’t. I heard his footsteps in the lofted studio above us, though, and I sat in the glow of one of the skylights that lit his space, prepared to give my best answers.
“We need someone to help out and cover for me while I’m off,” Neve told me, hands resting on her belly, explaining that the shop had a staff of only three. Alexander did all the printing, while Neve handled customers and Eduardo managed the finances and the “back end.” My dad had told me it’s good to ask questions. It shows you’re interested, he said, and that you’ll be a quick learner.
“What does the ‘back end’ consist of?” I asked.
“Behind-the-scenes stuff. Ordering the ink and paper. Basically he deals with supplies and keeps the roof over our heads. I get sales. Alexander makes magic. So when the baby comes, it’s going to be tough. Even the appointments have strained things a little. Every time the doctor calls we’re down two-thirds of our staff. The phones just ring and ring because Alexander refuses to talk to anyone.”
I glanced across the room to Eduardo, who was busy with a catalog. So he was the father? This was a question about which I was sincerely curious, but I didn’t want to get too personal. But then Neve leaned forward and said, “We’ve been basking in a
seemingly eternal youth, and now, shit, I’m thirty-seven. I told Eduardo now or never and threw the condoms away.” She leaned back and laughed. “Okay, thanks for tolerating my overshare. I like you. You’re hired.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks!” I shook my head to rid it of the image of the two of them having sex, and stood up to shake her hand. That’s another lesson my dad taught me: the importance of a firm handshake.
And thus began my eleven-week wait.
I spent my mornings researching print techniques so I could talk knowledgeably when customers called. And I’ll be honest: I wanted to impress Alexander. I thought that maybe—after so many years of doing this all on his own—he would want an assistant. An apprentice. I wanted to impress him so that maybe he would let me watch him work. In between learning printing terms—bleed (when the ink prints beyond the edge of the page), debossing (when an image is pressed into the paper instead of printed onto it)—I tried not to check Instagram for posts from my ex-girlfriend. We’d been broken up for three months. She was headed to another state for college and I was stuck here in my hometown for another year. So we were trying to be “friends,” which, since school got out, seemed to mean very little to her. As soon as the days got hot enough, a group of us would gather at Becky’s or Kirby’s house, the two of our group with pools in their backyards, and nibble away at their seemingly endless snacks. I always kept my phone near me, not for news or gossip, but in case the shop called me. At the end of July, I broke down and called to check in, fearing they’d changed their minds. But Neve assured me they were just behind, so swamped that it would still be a few more weeks.
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