by Barry Lyga
Kim stood close to him and touched his elbow. He was so much taller than she was. “It’s going to be okay. She’s getting the help she needs. It’s okay.”
He dropped his hands loosely at his sides. No tears dropped from his eyes, but crescents of them clung to the undersides of his lids. She took note of his lashes. Why did boys always have such astonishingly, effortlessly beautiful eyelashes? It was unfair.
“Thanks,” he said. The word cracked halfway through, became a husky whisper.
He leaned in close, but not too close. She remembered something Dean had said once: Jay is all balls and no dick. By which he’d meant this: Jay will take any risk you can imagine, as long as it doesn’t make him vulnerable.
But now, in this moment, he was vulnerable. Whether he knew it or not. It had perhaps snuck up on him, tripped him from behind when he least expected it, and he was lost and flailing.
He was never going to do it, so she did, extending up on her toes to press her lips against his. Unlike Dean, he shaved every day, his smooth chin and upper lip a contrast to the rasp of his dry lips.
Unmoving, he let her kiss him. She used her lips to pry his open, seeking his tongue with her own. When the tips of their tongues touched, the sparked circuit electrified something within him, waking him from his statue-like stupor. He enfolded her in his arms, thrusting his tongue into her mouth, aggressive and needy, so unlike Dean’s delicate probings.
The sofa was behind them, and then it was under them.
She had been told it would hurt. She’d been told there would be blood. (Hers, of course—Only women bleed, went the song.)
Neither turned out to be true. There had been no blood at all. Oh, there’d been some discomfort at first as he’d entered her, a sense of distending that was both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. She never really saw his penis in all the hurry, but she certainly felt it. It felt enormous, but there was no way to be sure.
And then his first thrusts had been increasingly uncomfortable until she put a hand on his shoulder and pressed slightly, slowing him. He obeyed wordlessly, and she settled into his rhythm.
It was good, but not great. She knew that the first time wasn’t supposed to be terrific for women, so she had no high expectations.
It took longer than she thought, but then his arms convulsed around her with surprising and frightening strength and he groaned as though in pain. For a fleeting instant, she thought he’d hurt himself somehow, but then she felt him ejaculate inside her, a sensation that shocked her more than his sudden death grip on her. No one had ever told her she’d be able to feel that.
I could get pregnant.
But she’d just finished her period. She thought she was probably safe. Probably.
In any event, there was nothing she could do about it now. It was done and over with. She knew where there was a clinic, if it came to that.
Collapsed atop her, he withdrew suddenly, and the loss of his weight and his penetration felt like new breath. She pulled her legs together and up, tucking them under herself as she sat up. Her underwear hung from one foot.
In a cloud of flustered chaos, he scrambled at the other end of the sofa, zipping up his pants, tucking in the tails of his shirt. He didn’t look over at her.
She had to know.
With the least needy tone she could adopt, striving for utter neutrality, she said, “How was it? For you?”
Buckling his belt, Jay didn’t look up at her. “It was good,” he said. He could have been describing a Whopper.
“Good,” she said. And meant it.
“We can’t tell Dean,” she added a moment later.
Now he looked over to her, his eyes clear and bright. “Right. I wouldn’t.”
And then, after a pause: “I won’t.”
She nodded, lips set in a thin line of grim gratitude. It was difficult to project thanks and understanding with your underwear crumpled at your feet, looped around one ankle, but she did it nonetheless.
1986: KIM
Monday morning, Dean sought her out in the library. She was there to renew her copy of Jane Eyre. Twitchy stamped the book and handed it back to her with a spastic little smile.
“Can we talk?” Dean asked with an urgency that was whispered yet fierce.
She wondered if he knew. Had Jay kept his word? Had he said nothing?
She’d spent the previous night and most of the morning wondering if she could truly trust Jay. Pondering, too, how she had changed.
Or, more accurately, how she had not.
A virgin no longer, she expected some difference in the world just beyond her fingertips. She had been prepared for either a brighter world, open to possibility, or a dimmer, grimmer one, with expectations and hopes ground underfoot like a glimmering cigarette.
But she felt no different, and the world boringly turned in its courses as always, the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.
Virginity, she decided, was a scam. She had lost nothing the previous day that mattered except maybe a dollop of her self-respect.
But now she was face-to-face with Dean, and she knew she could not expect him to adopt her attitude. He would feel betrayed. Because he had, in fact, been betrayed.
Twitchy had faded back into the woodwork as librarians were supposed to. She led Dean toward the stacks, and they huddled together in the lee of the Dewey decimal system. She couldn’t help but think of The Scarlet Letter. A creeping blush of self-recrimination seeped like lava along the back of her neck and up to the tips of her ears. Had Dean seen Jay already? Had they spoken last night?
“I’m really sorry,” Dean told her, hands crammed into his pockets. He wore black slacks with a crisp pleat, a bright yellow collared shirt, matching yellow socks, and black loafers. “I made a mistake. It was really stupid. Two mistakes, really, and they were both really stupid.”
She knew what he meant without needing further explanation: the original mistake of following the delivery guy and then the mistake of snatching the phone from her so violently.
But she knew something else, too, something she hadn’t known Saturday night: She knew what it felt like to err so grievously, what it felt like to steep in a gaffe, the clammy crawl of its steam on your exposed skin. She had lost her virginity to her boyfriend’s best friend. She’d done it willingly. Hungrily, even. Multiple layers of betrayal, stacked atop each other. Even Hester Prynne would cluck her tongue, no doubt. Jay was no Reverend Dimmesdale.
It could have been worse, she supposed. It could have been Brian.
“It’s okay,” she said, and some part of her thought that maybe she could absolve herself, too.
“It’s not. You’re right—I’m going to call Nico’s and apologize to that guy.”
Kim choked out a cough in order to throttle the laugh that wanted to burst from her throat. “No,” she said into Dean’s alarmed surprise, “no, don’t. Don’t bother. No one came to my house. It’s all over now. Just… don’t.”
He tilted his head and beheld her with a mix of bemusement and gratitude. “Are we…”
“We are.” She lifted herself on her tiptoes and pecked him on the lips before Twitchy could see and stop her.
She convinced herself that that kiss made it all better, like toddler scrapes and baby bruises.
EP. 005
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS
INDIRA BHATTI-WATSON, HOST:
This is No Time Like the Present, an NPR podcast. I am Indira Bhatti-Watson, reporting from Canterstown, Maryland.
(SOUND BITE OF MUSIC)
BHATTI-WATSON:
The trail seemed cold. The interest and the mood of the reporters who’d flocked to Canterstown on the promise of a juicy story about a teen girl, a mystery from the past, and danger in the present were waning. As the case stalled and the sheriff’s office continued to issue no comment in the name of protecting the investigation, reporters started to grumble to themselves and to one another that the window of opportunity had closed.
And
then it happened. It happened at the perfect time, as though it had been scripted.
Just when the reporters were getting bored. Just when the editors and podcast producers and section chiefs were looking at their budgets and deciding that there was no story in Canterstown. Time to pull out. Leave some business cards behind just in case something pops, but otherwise, move on to the next tragedy, the next trauma, the next drama.
It happened.
Violence and fear at Elayah Laird’s house. Another late-night police visit to a house that had already suffered enough. A new mystery.
And no one left town.
TINA SEDGWICK, DAY CARE OWNER:
I guess I had sort of forgotten about it. I mean, there weren’t as many stories coming out, and I figured everything was winding down and it would be one of those things where years later, we’d know what happened. But it looked like there would finally be some peace and quiet again.
BHATTI-WATSON:
But that was not to be.
THE PRESENT: ELAYAH
For the first time since the attack, Elayah not only slept that night in her room, by herself, but also with the door closed. She considered this a personal triumph.
It took her a long time to fall asleep. Her mind whirled: with the mysterious Peej and equally mysterious Katie, with Liam, with her dad and her uncle, with the man at PSYCHIC ADVICE, resolutely saying nothing even after Elayah attacked him.
You’re the ones who know everything already.
What did that mean, anyway?
It hadn’t been that many days ago. It felt like a lifetime. But not in a good way. Not in an I’ve almost forgotten about that bad thing I did way. More like in an I’ve had so much time to marinate in my own badness from that thing I did way.
She hadn’t hurt the man because she wanted information; she’d stabbed him because she wanted to. Because she wanted to balance the scales somehow, blood for blood, pain for pain.
It was the first time she let herself think it. She would have kept stabbing him if the others hadn’t stopped her. That man with a wife and a baby. Without even knowing if he’d done anything to deserve her wrath.
I can’t be that person. I don’t want to be that person.
Was it in her genes?
She promised herself she would do better. And then she counted backward from one hundred in her head, a trick she hadn’t used in years, but by the time she hit seventy-nine, she was mixing up numbers and the next thing she knew, she’d drifted off.
Only to be awakened by a crashing sound.
A moment later, she heard her mom shriek: “Marcus! No!”
Elayah’s mind screamed for her to run to the door, to throw it open. But her body had yet to figure out where it stood on the whole fight-or-flight proposition, and while it worked through its menagerie of hormones and other assorted chemicals, it froze her in place, the sheet pulled to her chin, her head twisted doorward so hard that her muscles throbbed.
A moment later, another shout, this one indecipherable. And then her mother bashed through the door, swinging it shut behind her and locking it.
“Someone’s in the house!” her mother whisper-cried. She pulled Elayah from the bed and dragged her into the closet, where the two of them huddled on the floor.
“Your father went after him.” Mom was shaking, her body vibrating against Elayah’s, as though she were sitting on a dryer. “Oh, God. Damn it, Marcus. Damn it, damn it, damn it.”
She could barely touch the numbers on her phone, the only light they had in the closet.
“Hey, Siri, call 911,” said Elayah, and her own phone, charging on the nightstand a couple of feet away, chirped to life.
Mom dropped her phone and started laughing, which turned into crying, which turned back into a sort of laughing hiccup as they clutched each other in the darkness.
LIAM
Liam sat up in bed, back propped against the headboard, forearms resting on raised knees. He stared into the darkness until it wasn’t dark any longer, his eyes adapted to the meager glow leaking in around his blinds from the outdoor lights and the little blue LED on his phone-charging pad.
Motes and colors danced in the darkled room.
He could turn on a light. He could just close his eyes and go to sleep. But no, not Liam.
It was a stupid thing to do, sitting up in the dark. Which was perfectly on-brand because Liam was a stupid thing, too.
She’s still angry about what you said about Antoine. She can’t stand you. Which makes two of us. At least we have that in common.
With an angry growl, he swung out of bed and started pacing back and forth in his dark room. There had to be a way to fix this. It was El. He had to fix it. Because he didn’t deserve her, but he was a man obsessed and obsession didn’t cling to inklings of entitlement. Ahab didn’t really deserve the whale, right?
Or maybe he did. Liam hadn’t even bothered with the Wikipedia entry on Moby Dick. Life was too short and the book was too long. He had a solid C in English lit, so that was fine.
Argh! He shook his head fiercely. This was his problem. He couldn’t focus.
There was a knock at his door.
Which… it was, like, two in the morning. What the hell?
Pop eased the door open and didn’t seem surprised when he saw Liam standing in the middle of the floor rather than asleep in bed.
“No one sleeps in this house any more,” Liam cracked weakly. “We’re like the house where sleep goes to die.”
“Dad just called,” Pop told him. “There’s been another break-in at El’s house. I thought you would want to know.”
ELAYAH
The two of them got the all-clear from the sheriff himself, who stepped into Elayah’s room and hunkered down before sliding open the closet door. “It’s all right,” he told Elayah and Mom. “It’s all over.”
Elayah didn’t want to step into the room. She also wanted to launch herself into the sheriff’s arms because the man had a gun, and right now that seemed supremely important. She realized that this must be how white people felt about cops all the time, even the ones they hadn’t known from kindergarten potlucks.
Dad was in the kitchen, making a pot of coffee and grumbling to himself under his breath. Mom ran to him and they held each other.
“It’s really okay?” Elayah had said nothing as Liam’s dad walked them to the kitchen.
“The guy never got into the house,” the sheriff said calmly.
“He was in the damn garage!” Dad shouted.
“I guess that’s technically the house,” the sheriff allowed. “But he never got into the house proper. I think he was after the time capsule stuff. I don’t think he wanted to hurt any of you.”
“Are you crazy?” Dad slammed his mug down on the countertop, and it actually shattered right there in his hand. Mom squeaked out a shocked little mew and fetched up against the wall. Dad seemed not even to notice.
“This is the guy who came into my house and slashed my little girl’s throat!” Dad went on. As though it somehow strengthened his point, Dad motioned for Elayah to come stand by him.
She wasn’t about to do that. Not with his anger purling off him like fog from some dark, foreboding swamp.
Instead: “You’re bleeding,” she said.
“What?” He looked down at the alien appendage grafted to the end of his arm. “What the hell?”
Elayah slipped away down the hall to the bathroom. There were bandages in the medicine cabinet there. Antiseptic and Neosporin under the sink. She thought of Lisa De Nardo’s bathroom. Her heart thrummed; her blood raced. She didn’t know what she was feeling, but she knew it was strong and forceful and untamed. Fear, still draining through her. Shock and surprise. Worry. Love, for her mom. And, yeah, she thought, for her dad. Who might have maybe possibly killed his own brother, but the level of utter rage boiling from him in the kitchen—his voice clear even down the hall—could not be feigned. No one was that good an actor. His fear for her life and his zeal in
protecting it were real. That still meant something.
She marveled at her hands, which did not shake as she collected supplies. When she returned to the kitchen, Mom was dumping the broken pieces of mug into the trash while Dad kept yelling at Liam’s dad.
“Antoine had the right idea!” Dad ranted, unstoppable even by the balm of Mom’s hand on his shoulder. “This town’s never been worth a damn. We all shoulda left a long time ago. What the hell?”
“Marcus, man, please calm down—”
“Please calm down? Please calm down? Be straight with me, man—if we lived over in Cobb’s Point, you’d’ve had someone sitting on this place twenty-four seven, wouldn’t you?”
Cobb’s Point was an elevated enclave on the west side of town. Elevated in more ways than one. It was literally higher than the rest of the town, sitting on a bluff that overlooked Canterstown. It was generally richer.
And whiter.
The sheriff’s jaw tightened. Finally, he said, “This town’s only been getting Blacker for twenty years, Marcus, and somehow I keep getting elected sheriff. What’s that tell you?”
Dad spat out a “Ha!” and made a curt, cutting gesture with his hand, as though the very notion were too risible to contemplate, much less rebut.
“And one other thing: I’m here to serve and protect, but if you tell me to ‘be straight’ again, we’ll have a problem.”
Dad ground his teeth together. “Screw you. You know I didn’t mean it that—”
“Enough.” Liam’s dad cut him off with a single raised index finger. “I can’t stand here all night and do this with you. I have to get my team to work.”