No one had ever asked Patrick that, funnily enough, not even Tiffany. In fact, it took his mind away from the moment and it made him resent Tiffany in a strange way. That a girl he barely knew would ask him such an important question and genuinely care, while Tiffany had never even broached the topic. “My girlfriend never asked me that before,” he told her shyly.
“Well, I wouldn’t hold it against her,” she replied. “She must have no dreams herself and wouldn’t know to ask.”
It was a pointed thing to say, but he found some truth in it. “I suppose I want to be a psychologist, like Adler or Jung. A transcendent figure.”
“Maybe you’ll be like Skinner.”
“Ugh. I hope not. But I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.”
She clapped her hands gleefully in applause.
She understood my dumb quip? Holy shit. “How do you know about B.F. Skinner?” Patrick asked.
“I like to read. But I don’t know much about him, honestly. I could probably only write a sentence or two.”
“Still, that’s…” he looked at her, then looked away.
She kept her eyes fixed on him; he could feel them burning holes in his skin.
“Why haven’t you made a move on me yet?” she asked.
He was hit with surprise but managed to laugh it off. He didn’t know how it was possible, but she was making him a bit nervous. “Because you haven’t earned it yet,” he replied half-heartedly.
“C’mon, don’t front on me like you do everyone else. Am I not pretty or something?” She had twisted in the chair to face him directly, and the top of her crossed legs lifted and stretched out long to point at him.
His eyes ran down the shiny length of her leg. “Did you just think I was going to pounce or something? You’ve been here like thirty minutes.”
“So you are going to fuck me?” she asked, face straight as an arrow.
“Is this some kind of test?”
“You text a girl and she agrees to come over to your house. What did you think you were getting into?”
He sighed, tossed the book on the nightstand, and threw his legs over the side of the bed to sit up. “I’m not just a dick to jump on, Reagan, despite whatever you may have heard.”
“I haven’t heard a thing, actually. But maybe I should have asked around, now that you’ve brought it up. It’s just, I think you’re cute, and I only have about three months left before I go off to California. I want to have fun, is that so bad?”
“No,” he answered, “it’s not bad. Of course it’s not bad. But I usually don’t discuss sex like it’s a business deal.”
“Well.” She stood up slowly, and with a seductive prowl, came over to the bed and straddled him once again. She pushed him down onto his back. He felt the warmth from between her legs. “What about now? Does this feel like business?”
As she looked down at him, the lightning bolt came loose from the collar of her dress and dangled there over his chin. He stuck out his tongue and licked the very tip and she laughed.
In a swift motion, he grabbed her hips, and rolled her off of him. She screeched as she went rolling over the mattress. Her black dress hiked up and he caught a glimpse of her nice butt and black thong. If she hadn’t been wearing one, it wouldn’t have surprised him at this point.
“Point taken,” she said flatly, got off the bed and started gathering her things.
“I have a girlfriend, is all, Reagan. It’s not personal.”
“Bullshit, Patrick. You wouldn’t have told me to come over if that were a deal breaker.”
She was right. He felt sleazy, justifiably so, but it apparently didn’t bother her, as she was here and had just offered herself up to him. “Listen, it’s just—”
“What?”
“You’re seventeen!”
That stopped her from gathering her things. She cocked her head back and laughed. “That’s your hang-up? That I’m seventeen?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much. I mean, the last thing I want is to end up in jail over a girl. Though, it would probably be my luck.”
“The age of consent in Colorado is seventeen. You’re in the clear.”
“Did you actually research that before you came over?”
“Please.” She went to the desk and stacked her notebook on top of her textbook and then headed for the bedroom door.
“Reagan, wait.” He grabbed her hand gently, keeping her from leaving. “Listen, I just know that with this kind of stuff, there’s a gray area sometimes.”
She looked annoyed and ready to leave.
“Well, how about this?” he said. “When do you turn eighteen?”
“In three weeks, why?”
“Let’s see where this goes. If we can both still stand each other at that point, then maybe—”
“Wow,” she said, dropping her books back onto his desk with a thud. “You’re a real piece of work.”
“I do think you’re cool, and smart, and definitely sexy, if that suffices.”
She seemed to contemplate whether he was being disingenuous. “You mean it?”
“I wouldn’t lie to a child.”
“Shut up.” She seemed to soften a bit. “What about kissing? Are you paranoid about that too?” She came closer, and closer, until she was right at the edge of the bed.
His eyes went up to the ceiling, mocking deep contemplation. “Can’t they find my DNA in your mouth?”
“One way to out.”
What came next weren’t soft kisses. Their lips clashed hard, their tongues glided against each other, her teeth bit his lower lip until he winced with pain. Patrick felt his heart beating fast and his arousal was pressing into his jeans and she told him that she could feel it and that it was warm and hard.
They fooled around for a good twenty minutes with clothes on, grinding into each other, kissing, and laughing. At one point she was on top of him, acting as the aggressor, when suddenly, she pulled away and sat upright on him. She brought her dress all the way down so that it was around her waist. She had a black strapless bra on. The lightning bolt was there. But so was something else—a tattoo running down the side of her ribs. Patrick took her shoulders and twisted her torso so that he could get a clearer view of it.
It was a hand, palm-up, grasping for something that was just out of reach. And all around it were beautiful flowers and vines. It looked like an arm was being eaten by the jungle, consumed so that all that was left was the hand.
“Unique,” he remarked, still examining the details.
“I went to a clinic for four months,” she replied, “you know, for the alcohol. And when I got out, I stole three hundred dollars from my Mom’s wallet and got it done. They told me when I was in the clinic that the only way I could defeat my addiction was if I submerged myself in self-love. They said that my parents may not give me all the love I need, which is true. My dad spends all his time making money, and my mom spends all her time thinking of ways to spend it. They also said, my friends probably can’t be relied on to always love me, especially the friends I had at the time. They said the only person I could rely on for true love was myself, and that I wouldn’t be strong enough to overcome the addiction if I didn’t love myself more than anything in the entire world. And so I got this tattoo. The plants and flowers are a world of beauty and love, and the hand is all that’s left, the rest of me is submerged.”
“Why leave out the hand?” he asked.
She thought to herself, picking the right words. “I guess because there will always be a part of me clutching at the addiction. I need something to remind me of the pain I went through. The hand is sensitive, it feels pain at the tiniest prick. The hand represents the part of me that ‘feels’ the way, lets me know if I’m on the right path. Ninety-nine percent love, one percent pain. As long as the rest of me is submerged, the addiction will always be just out of reach.”
Patrick smiled and she smiled.
“You ever going to tell me what this is about?” He ran hi
s hand up her firm belly, between her holstered breasts, and slid it beneath the lightning bolt to hold it in his palm. “It’s pretty. Was I right about it, when I tried to guess what it was when I met you in the store?”
“It’s just a silly necklace,” she said, her cheeks turning slightly red as she looked away.
“C’mon, Reagan, don’t front on me like you do everyone else,” he said, mocking her.
She faintly laughed, and then seemed struck with a bout of seriousness. “You’ll think I’m a freak. Really.”
He sighed and leaned toward the nightstand. He picked up his textbook, his arms straining with the hefty weight. “You know what Adler said. He said that the only normal people in the world are the ones you don’t know very well yet. And I’m getting to know you, and you’re getting to know me. So just tell me.”
She took the lightning bolt and rubbed it between her forefinger and thumb. “You were partly right, with what you said about me in the store when our moms were shopping. I did have a special guy that I lost my virginity to. It was inside the clinic. He was older, you were right about that too. He was twenty. Kind of looked like you, actually. He always wore this necklace. When we finally got out, he gave it to me.”
“And what? Then he dumped you?”
She shook her head. “We got out and he relapsed after about a week. He was plastered drunk and had taken painkillers. He fell asleep at the wheel, drove his car over the rim of the college and killed himself.”
Patrick had heard about that happening last year. The college sat on a plateau above town and the steep drop-off on the north side of campus was considered the rim, where he remembered seeing a crane hoist a totaled car up off the side of the slope from about a hundred feet down. He didn’t remember the guy’s name. He hadn’t even gone to the college but had been up on campus driving around for some reason.
“This was his good luck charm,” she said. “He gave it to me, and died six days later. It couldn’t have been just a coincidence.”
“Did you love him?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she replied. “He’s dead. Once you’re dead, nothing really matters, wouldn’t you say?”
“Come here.” He pulled her down off him and let her curl up under his arm. She seemed comforted by it. Patrick stroked her hair.
After they had lain there quiet for about ten minutes, she asked, “What about you?”
“What about me?” he answered.
“Well, you know more about me. Tell me about you. You think you maybe want to be a shrink, what else?”
Patrick didn’t have some life changing event to shock her with, but he told her about his mom, how he grew up, sports, a little about girls and Tiffany, told her how she reminded him of his sister in certain non-creepy ways. It was nice to talk with someone. Someone who was enjoyable to just lay there on the bed with in the afternoon light.
“Why do you cheat?” she asked him finally, putting him on the spot. “Your girlfriend, she seems okay. What gives?”
He didn’t like to think about the things he did very often. It wasn’t fun to think about. But he considered it for a moment, peering into the darkness within himself for just a little while. “I guess I’m always running from something. Or running toward something, maybe. I guess I feel alive at the idea of the next girl. And I hate not feeling alive.”
“Maybe,” she said, “you can get girls to like you in the beginning pretty easily, you put on a good show, but you never stick around long enough to see them be let down when they realize you aren’t all they imagined.”
It hurt him to even imagine that was true. “Who’s to say they’d be let down?”
She shrugged, still nestled under his arm. “That’s just it, who’s to say? But Skinner would look at your actions, and I think he’d probably agree.”
“Fuck Skinner,” he said.
“It sounds like you don’t ever let them get that close to you, but you won’t break up with them either, because that would mean hurting them. But I can tell you, you’re going to hurt them a lot worse in the long run if you keep doing what you’re doing.”
He rolled his head away from her and painfully closed his eyes. He thought about Simone, and even Mallory a bit. The girls he’d felt like he actually had a real connection with. And now there was this girl, young and sharp, amazing him more and more each minute. “I’m drawn most to the girls that I can’t have,” he admitted. “Why is that?”
She was quiet, thinking. “You’re afraid of being hurt, just like everyone else.”
“No.”
“Yes. You pursue the girls that you can never really have in the long run because as long as you have the cat and mouse game, you never will have to really settle down and have someone get close to you. You’ll never have to let someone in.”
“What about Tiffany? We’ve been together a while.”
“Do you feel close to her?” Reagan asked. “Does she really know you? Does she know what you’re doing right now? Does she know the half of what you’ve done?”
He had to answer ‘no’ to all of those. “I feel pretty happy though. Maybe I don’t need to have anyone close to me.”
“Are you happy, Patrick?”
He stayed quiet and they laid there for almost a half hour together, close and warm.
Reagan wasn’t perfect; he definitely wasn’t. But it felt right to spend more time with her. For the first time in a long time, he felt a tingling all through his body with her lying there next to him. He felt something that he could only describe as awake.
She had to get home after that or her mom would ask questions. She got put together and he walked her out. They happened upon Josh in the living room. Patrick introduced them, and Josh asked her if she was a freshman.
“No, I’m a senior,” she told him.
“Really?” he replied.
“Yeah, really. In high school.”
Patrick gave a nervous laugh, hugged her, and watched her give Josh a sassy look as she went out the front door.
Josh glared at him once she was gone. “You’re fucking high schoolers now?”
Patrick didn’t even look at him or respond, only watched through the window as Reagan went to her car. Almost never, in three years of college, had he been sad to see a girl walk out his door. Until now.
Simone
SIMONE’S HANDS FIDGETED WITH THE plastic wrapping she was tearing open. Something was off. It didn’t feel right to be doing this, but she knew it had to be done.
She finally got the pregnancy test out of the wrapping, dropped her pants, and sat down on the toilet. She reached for the box and scanned over the instructions. She’d taken one before in high school. There wasn’t much to it. She took two deep breaths and then peed on the stick.
The results were supposed to show up within a minute or two. She could only stare at the bathroom floor, not wanting to bring her eyes back to the test. Her stomach felt like it was being folded into an origami swan.
Look, damn it.
She forced her hand to lift the test up into her eye line, and inside the small rectangle on the test were two pink lines. She lurched off the bowl, yanked her pants up, and leaned on the sink. A violent chill had shot through her. She couldn’t breathe and couldn’t blink her eyes. She had the test clenched tight in her hand.
Looking down at it again, the two lines were still there, even more poignant than before.
Pregnant.
She snatched the box off the shower mat and read the directions again. It was clear as day in a well-illustrated picture on the box. She twisted and sat against the countertop, feeling her heart straining and stretching like it never had before. Breaths were hard coming in and burned going out. She slid down the cabinets to the floor, and folded her forearms over her knees and rested her cheek on them, surprised with her own tears.
Tiffany was home, so Simone kept her crying as subdued as she could manage, tried to cut off the tears outright. It was several minutes before she could pull hers
elf together enough to rationally think through the situation.
What would she do now? Who should know? Her mom? Her dad? No, they couldn’t know. Friends? No. She couldn’t tell anyone. She decided no one would know until she decided what to do.
There was a gentle rap at the door. A jiggle of the knob. Simone breathed relief that she’d locked it.
“Honey? You okay?” It was Tiffany.
Simone wet her lips and swallowed before answering. “I’m fine, thanks.” She must sound so pitiful.
“I heard you crying. You sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. No biggie.”
There was nothing more from the other side of the door. The loneliness swept in on her again. She wanted dearly to tell Tiffany, her best friend, but couldn’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
The box was still there, next to her on the floor, somewhat dented now. With a franticness overtaking her, she flattened it and then stood up. There was a trashcan in the cabinet; Simone scooped out used tissues, floss, and everything else inside so that there was room to bury the box. Tiffany might be right outside the door when Simone went out, she didn’t want to get caught carrying a pregnancy test box. The swollen, red-rimmed eyes would tell Tiffany everything she needed to know, everything Simone wasn’t ready for her to know.
Once she piled the tissues and the other detritus back on, the box was sufficiently buried. She then slid the test stick into her front jeans pocket. She took one glance in the mirror to make sure her makeup wasn’t running.
When she opened the bathroom door, the upstairs hallway of their apartment was empty. She heard a sink running and dishes clinking downstairs—Tiffany was cleaning up. Simone went to her room, hid the test, and lay down on her bed in a lifeless pose.
***
All she could think were ugly, negative thoughts while lying there on her side, staring out the window at the tops of the trees across the parking lot, a light wind rustling the new spring leaves sprouting from the branches. It was a beautiful day, but Simone didn’t see the beauty. She was too busy being trapped in her mind to actually see anything.
An hour of tears and grief and shock and now she felt sick. To the point where she became light-headed if she tried to sit up, almost nauseous.
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