Ty laughed wryly. “You watch too much TV.”
“It’s not funny. I’m a terrible person to be wondering these things at his funeral. A boy is dead. A nice, popular, smart boy. I mean we worked on our Ohlone project together in fourth grade when I just moved here and knew no one. He was so nice. This isn’t a stranger, but I feel this weird detachment of wondering why instead of just…grieving and crying and wearing those golden ribbons like the other girls are.” I pulled on my shirt where a golden ribbon should be.
Ty scoffed. “I’m not wearing a stupid ribbon, either. Am I a terrible person? You’re completely overthinking this.”
“Am I? I don’t know. I see the looks on everyone’s faces, and people aren’t just sad…they’re scared.”
“They’re probably relieved they have one less guy to compete with.”
I blinked. “That was a terrible thing to say.”
“Fuck you,” he said with a snort.
“Fuck you back,” I said, pissed. Who the hell was he to talk to me like that? And to make fun of the dead? Awful. Ty was awful. Why’d I let him in here?
But instead of getting angry back, he palmed his chest and gasped. “Did you just CURSE? I’m telling Mom.”
That was our one joke. The “Mom” and “Dad” we used ironically in passing.
“Tell Mom to get more toilet paper.”
“Tell Dad to move his tennis racket out of the hall.”
I’d always been curious about Ty. Since our parents’ whirlwind dating (they met online on one of those weird websites) and then my stepdad’s cross-country move to meet her spun into a quickie marriage before I could catch my breath. It all happened so fast I barely had time to question it, never mind complain. And Mom seemed happy. For the first time in forever she actually smiled. And laughed. And sometimes stopped working long enough to actually enjoy a meal. So I went along with it, not wanting to pop her bubble.
When Ty moved in with us a few months ago, I tried to get to know him, but he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. He answered and then disappeared into his room. He was tall. He’d obviously just had a growth spurt because his dad was always commenting on it. He moved in a slightly loose way—a boy uncomfortable in his own bones. Lots of ducks and sideways gestures as he slunk around the house. Like he was trying to be invisible. His dad once referred to him as “ The Invisible Man.” “I saw you more when you lived in Brooklyn,” Phil had joked, and Ty looked at him funny.
At the time, Ty spoke mostly in mumbles.
I think he hated his dad, but he never shared that, not with me anyway.
His dad was fine. My stepdad, I should say. He was a nerdy tech sort who clearly adored my gorgeous mom. He sprang up every morning making her coffee and bringing it to her in bed like he won the lottery.
But Cornell’s death sparked something in both Ty and me. Ty was taller, darker—he looked more like the mom I saw in a photo on his desk. She’d stayed in New York where she ran her own private practice. He didn’t say he missed her, but the photo did. He was polite with my mom, but distant, like he was with me.
Maybe we needed to bond with someone and it was just…proximity. But suddenly it was like he could see me and I could see him and then we were laughing. Well, I was sort of choking and making this awful high-pitched hyena sound—further proof of my descending from banshees.
His dark blue suit was too big for his narrow shoulders and hung on him like he was a kid playing dress-up. His tie was loose. Tugging his fingers through his dark hair, I noticed Ty was oddly good-looking. Not in a perfect Golden Boy way, but in an interesting way. He had an edge to him. Dark. Dark hair, tan skin. The whiff of secrets that was further enhanced by his light green eyes, the only trait he seemed to inherit from his father.
Ty was an anomaly at our School for Perfect Children.
This shrug of indifference that made girls watch him in the hallway, wonder about him as he fiddled at his locker, as he walked by, usually alone. He smoked outside by the 7-11 after school. I never told on him, and maybe he appreciated that. Maybe that’s why he talked to me. He didn’t have many friends, a group of skater guys he ate lunch with, but didn’t really socialize with them on the weekends or hang out with them after school all that often. He always said he was too big of a dick to keep friends around for long. But since he was funny, they put up with him.
At home, he was mostly on his computer or lying on his bed thumbing to the beat of whatever he was listening to on his earbuds. It was like part of him still lived in New York. His body was here but going through the motions. His eyes reminded me of a cat. Or maybe it was just his demeanor. They always had this slightly aloof, faraway look to them. We had a little of that in common, I guess.
Girls asked me about him a lot. His aloofness both confused and intrigued them. When my friends spent the night, they’d linger outside his closed door wondering what he was up to. He pretty much ignored us all. He didn’t do more than glance at my friends, even the really good-looking ones. When he started paying attention to me, I chalked it up to boredom. Or maybe the stuff with Golden Boy was bothering him as much as it bothered me?
Ty was a mystery to most. I had to admit, even though he lived down the hall, he was mostly a mystery to me, too.
A lone purple petal rested on his shoulder. It was so weird. Where had it come from, this purple petal on my hard stepbrother? I brushed it off with a graze of my fingers. He twitched when we touched. I frowned, a little confused both by why I did it and his reaction.
Past him, the mirror reminded me my cheeks were smeared with mascara. Loose hairs stuck out from my bun like popped wire. My lipstick smeared red.
“Jesus. I look like Bette Davis in that freaky old movie.”
His cat eyes never left mine. “You know who Bette Davis is?”
“Yeah. My dad and I used to watch old movies all the time.”
“On that ranch?”
“Yeah. On his VCR.” I laughed.
“Ain’t no shame. Bette Davis is hot.” That’s when he reached out and brushed the pad of his thumb across my cheekbone. I saw him doing this in my reflection. I felt him doing it all over.
I didn’t pull away. His touch felt cool and exciting. Like his thumb was asking if I wanted more. If he should turn up the heat so I would be more comfortable.
I didn’t want to be alone. He knew who Bette Davis was. We had something in common other than our parents being married to each other.
My forehead moved into the hollow of his chest, my skin against the scratchy navy blue wool suit, and I couldn’t see myself in the mirror anymore.
Later I realized he’d talked about Bette Davis in the present tense, even though the old movie actress had been dead for years.
Chapter Nine
Now
“Mornin’,” Jake says with a tap of his hat, and I chastise the icy walls for thawing a bit at the sound of him snapping his whip over the horses in the corral, at the thunder of hooves pounding the dirt.
Nothing should make me feel pleasure anymore—not this scene lifted straight out of a postcard, not the Palominos’ and Pintos’ and Appaloosas’ manes dancing in the breeze, and especially not the view of the cowboy in the center of it all.
“Morning,” I say. I avoid his eyes and, instead, stare down at the black flip-flops standing on the second rung of chipped fence; my pedicure now looks as mangled as my mind. Jake’s “Yeehaw” noise is a concentrated version that hits the air with a punch, “Y-A-h!” and the horses immediately respond. After piling a mix of alfalfa and hay into the feeder, he saunters toward me.
“When are the guests arriving?” I ask.
He blinks. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
I don’t want to state the obvious. That unless he tells me something, I have no way of knowing it. Dad can’t talk and Anna doesn’t like me. Jake is it. He’s my lifeline. He must read that in my expression because his jaw loosens.
He leans his arms over the fence in a way only a
cowboy can pull off and says, “Unless we can get this place into shape by next season’s start, we have to close the ranch for tourists.”
“What?” I’m shocked. Close the ranch?
“We’re closing the—”
“No. I heard you. I just can’t believe—The place doesn’t look that bad.”
Jake’s shrug is more like an I’m Too Polite to Argue With the Boss’s Daughter than an agreement. It doesn’t look great like it used to, but isn’t it fixable?
“Sure the fences need a little bit of mending and the road could use some improvements, but overall it looks pretty much the same as…”
Before.
You haven’t been here in years, Paige. You don’t know shit.
Jake’s head tilts away from me. All I see is the rim of his hat when I hear his question, “You see Anna up in the house?”
“Strawberry Apron Anna?”
He sticks a piece of straw in his mouth. It hangs out of the corner like an olden day movie star, which immediately reminds me of Ty and Bette Davis, and a rush of guilt and pain overwhelms me. “Well, Anna and I are it, as far as help goes.”
“What?” I’m remembering a scene from Butch Cassidy—Paul Newman sucking on straw like that. We used to watch that all the time, Dad and I. I wonder if he still has it. Maybe we can watch it later.
He looks up, still chewing. “Me and her…we’re it.”
I blink. Focus. “I can’t believe that. Dad used to have a huge amount of help here, full staff.”
He shrugs again.
“But when?”
This time he doesn’t look away. His eyes lock on mine. They’re the color of a blue, blue sky, cracking open and letting rain fall. “A couple years back.”
Another thing Mom didn’t tell me.
It was more than just my father’s deterioration. It was the ranch’s, too. All that’s left of his legacy, of our family’s legacy, is disappearing along with him.
“How much is left?” I hate to ask.
“Money wise? Not sure. Anna takes care of that end of things.”
Anna again.
I narrow my eyes. “What, exactly, is Anna’s relationship to my father?”
“You don’t know about Anna, either?”
That’s it.
My voice tumbles out like a growl. Like a scream, it roars up from my insides and suddenly my words are everywhere, filling this corral. “No, Jake. I don’t know about Anna. I didn’t even know my father was in a wheelchair, okay? My mom didn’t tell me a damn thing about it. I knew he had a terminal disease that was getting worse. My dad himself wrote me telling me not to bother visiting. He was too busy with appointments and ranch details and said that I should have a nice summer in Europe, blah blah. And in the end? It was all just bullshit. He’s dy…” I can’t say it. I groan away the lump and focus on what I can say. “And now his ranch is falling apart, too.”
Jake’s jaw tightens, but he rests his hand on my shoulder. I’m too upset to shy away from his touch. I let it ground me like his words, his voice. “I’m doing my best to stop that from happening.”
The morning sun is already noon-hot. It beats against his arms, exposed at the rolled-up sleeves. I dig my knuckle hard into my eye, in an effort to avoid sinking into them.
Do not look at him like that. Do not let him comfort you. They are dead. You are alive. You escaped for now. It doesn’t mean you deserve comfort.
I stare right into the punishing sun. “You know why I came here, Jake?”
Everything turns white.
“A bit.” Then, “Stop looking into the sun. You’ll go blind.”
I do as he says and turn away.
“What do you know?” I ask softly. Hoping it’s not a lot. Cringing, I wait in a pause so long, I open my eyes to see if he’s still there. My spotty peripheral vision sees his shadow spit the chewed-up straw onto the dirt. It crumbles under the heel of his boot until it’s just grit, reminding me of Elena’s ripped up rejection notice from Harvard that turned to a glue-y mess in her mother’s sink. Elena. The second. I haven’t thought of her since I left California.
“Enough,” he says.
Shit.
“Paige.” He says my name like, what? Like he wants to help?
He knows. If not about Ty, he knows something. He knows about the trains?
“I have to go,” I say, shakily. I can feel his eyes on my back as I run away. My hands are shaking so hard as I scurry up the ladder in the barn, and my words come out wobbly on the page. But I have to write it down.
Chapter Ten
Then
“Hey!” I said.
Spotting my friends was easy. We always sat on the same table under the oak tree in the quad.
“Hey!” Lucy waved. “We got you a latte.”
I kissed her cheek and swept the hot to-go cup out of her outstretched hand. “You are a life saver, Luce. Seriously. Top notch.”
“You’re welcome.”
I took a sip. The burning hot, non-fat sweetness coursed down my throat. In an instant, my synapses fired more accurately.
“Seriously,” I said, pointing at the cup of heaven, “if I attempted the test without this, I would fail miserably.”
“You? Failing? I doubt that,” Elena said, with a half-smile that could be interpreted in many ways, none of them kind. “Have you ever scored below an A+ in your life?”
“Sure. I didn’t used to get that good of grades. I used to run around my ranch at home all the time.”
“Ranch?” Elena cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, right. I forgot, you come from the country.”
“She’s been here since elementary school, though,” Luce said, defending me.
“And it doesn’t make my mom any less of a perfectionist,” I added. “She’s obsessed with me going to business school like she did.”
“My mom, too,” Luce said. “If I don’t get into medical school, she’ll die. I got an A- and was grounded for a semester. You remember that, Paige, in 7th grade?”
“Yes. It was horrible,” I agreed, remembering. “You had to skip the spring dance and do an extra hour of violin.”
“My mother wouldn’t let me go to bed until I’d practiced for three hours instead of two. Because certainly I’ll be a violinist at Carnegie Hall one day.” She laughed wryly.
“Of course!” I said, laughing, too.
As much as Luce tried to blow it off, the pressure her parents put on her had taken its toll. I worried about her. Since elementary school, she’d had a full day of regular school, plus four hours of Chinese school, then homework, and then violin. She wasn’t allowed to have play dates, so the only time I saw her socially was school functions. When those were taken away, we only had “brunch” at school or lunch. It sucked eggs. But Luce was still one of my best friends. She was worth the small amount of time we had together. My friends were always telling me I didn’t get the pressure. And it was true. My mom expected me to get good grades but it was more a, “try your best” than a, “straight A’s or get locked out of the house!” which was what seemed to be the case with Luce and Elena. Another one of our friends, a guy, was beaten if he didn’t get straight A’s. BEATEN. It was mindboggling. Why didn’t anyone call CPS on these abusive assholes?
Lucy scooted over for me. I cuddled in next to her and nuzzled my head into her shoulder.
“Pet, pet,” she said. I made a purring noise.
Since her parents moved here from Brooklyn via Hong Kong via London via France, Lucy had been my best friend. Her worldliness earned her immediate street cred with me. She claimed her genius was due to her schooling abroad, but I didn’t believe that. She was born with an exceptionally brilliant brain and a generous heart to match.
Elena glared at us. She didn’t get our friendship. “You two are crazy.”
“Whatever. Find your own girlfriend,” I said, jokingly, but Lucy didn’t laugh. She stopped playing with me and sat up as if Elena’s look jerked her back straight.
“Katy Pe
rry, your break is almost up,” Suri said from my phone.
“Thanks, girl.”
“You’re welcome, Katy Perry.”
“Why do you do that?” Elena said. “It’s so lame.”
“I think it’s funny,” Luce said.
I smiled. “And that is why we’re friends.”
I chugged down the rest of the coffee while Elena regained Lucy’s attention with Advanced Chem talk.
Elena was Lucy’s other best friend. Equally brilliant academically, Elena used her powers for evil. Couldn’t blame her really. Her parents were brutal. She wasn’t allowed to go to dances, watch TV, or date. They had one shared computer in the kitchen, which her extremely traditional mom monitored to make sure she was doing schoolwork only. The one time I’d been to her house, her 8th grade party, I noted the crazy amount of Harvard posters wallpapering her room. She’d bragged that she had absolutely no intention of pleasing her parents once she escaped her home prison “lock down” and was accepted into Harvard. “It’s going to be all about the boys and all about the booze,” she said, but I didn’t believe it. Elena said a lot of shit. Mostly to impress Luce.
“Let me see your phone,” Elena said to Lucy.
Lucy handed her iPhone over.
Elena’s forehead wrinkled as she scrutinized her Friends list, reading their updates like it was BBC news.
I was sick of Elena hogging her, taking advantage of her. “Your mom still won’t let you get your own phone?”
Elena looked up at me with cold eyes. “Why would you ask me something you already know the answer to?”
“Paige,” Lucy said, a pleading tone in her voice that made me even angrier.
“What? I’m just asking.”
Her eyes were all freaked out. I wasn’t going to back down this time. I pounced back, adrenaline rushing through my core.
“Don’t you think it’s slightly obnoxious to bogart Luce’s phone all the time just to check Facebook? Why don’t you go to the library or something?”
She stood up, facing me. “Why don’t you,” she paused, “fuck off.” Her long black hair hung in one straight sheet.
Paint My Body Red Page 5