by Tess Sharpe
Sheriff Adams: That’s an order, Reynolds. You stay back, too.
O’Malley: Like it or not, I am leading this negotiation. When this is over and everyone’s out safe, you can have all the credit and the glory. But if you continue to get in my way and something happens to the hostages, you’re going to be blamed. So you need to move back about three steps and let me take care of this for you. Do we understand each other?
[Pause]
Sheriff Adams: Yes.
O’Malley: Then I’m going to make the call.
Sheriff Adams: If this goes to hell . . .
O’Malley: It won’t.
[Pause. O’Malley dials bank number. Three rings.]
HT1: Is everything in place?
O’Malley: The welding machine is ready.
HT1: I want all the cops in the front. If I see anyone but you waiting for the hostage in the back alley, we’ll start shooting.
Sheriff Adams (background): Fucking A.
O’Malley: It’ll just be me.
Sheriff Adams (background, muffled): Fucking madness. Fucking PIs.
HT1: Five minutes.
O’Malley: See you there.
[Call disconnected]
Sheriff Adams: Someone get O’Malley a vest! What have you got on you, O’Malley?
O’Malley: My Glock . . . and my Winchester’s in the truck.
Sheriff Adams: I’d strap the rifle to my back if I were you.
O’Malley: It’s a rare moment when you and I agree, Sheriff. I’m gonna take it as good luck.
Sheriff Adams: Get in that vest. And don’t get shot. I’ll never hear the end of it.
[Muffled noises and voices, unable to transcribe. Time passed: 3 minutes, 18 seconds. From Official Report: Deputies retreated to the front of the bank, leaving O’Malley at the back entrance.]
O’Malley: Milwaukee. Akron. Austin. San Francisco. Seattle. Rochester. Milwaukee. Akron. Austin. San Francisco. Seattle. Rochester. Milwaukee. Akron. Austin. San—
[Banging sound]
O’Malley: Hands where I can see them!
HT1: I thought we were being civilized about this.
O’Malley: Is that what you call pointing a gun at a middle-schooler?
HT1: Desperate times.
O’Malley: Let the kid come toward me, you get the welding machine pushed toward you. Deal?
HT1: Deal.
O’Malley: On three. One. Two. Three.
HT1: Go.
[From Official Report: Hostage #1 (ID: Casey Frayn, age 11) crosses the alley and into police custody. O’Malley kicks the dolly with the welding equipment toward HT1. He retreats back inside the bank.]
O’Malley: Hey, hey, you okay? Did they hurt you? What’s your name? I need paramedics down here!
Casey Frayn: Are you Lee? Are you her sister?
O’Malley: Yes. Is she okay?
Casey Frayn: She told me to tell you that he’s a Raymond. Do you understand that? He’s gonna kill them. All of them. She didn’t think I knew, but I could tell. I could feel it. She told me to . . . Here . . . I have it . . . She—
Unidentified Deputy: Ambulance will be here in two minutes.
O’Malley: Take her. Get her out of here. And for God’s sake, someone call her mother.
Deputy Reynolds: What’s that?
O’Malley: Nothing.
Deputy Reynolds: Lee. You just put something in your pocket.
O’Malley: No, I didn’t.
Deputy Reynolds: Lee. I—
O’Malley: No. I didn’t. Now let’s go figure out when the hell SWAT is gonna arrive. Otherwise it’ll take a miracle to get everyone safely out of the bank.
— 30 —
The Pool
Two Months Ago
When Iris and I start dating, we keep it secret. I feel guilty that I’m relieved she’s not ready to be out to her mom, because I know hiding is hard. But not telling anyone makes things so much easier for me. It surrounds us in this little bubble that I don’t want to pop with the real world.
I’ve been living in a world of truth with Wes and Lee for years now, and when I have to close shut doors I’ve flung open, it hurts. I’m delaying the inevitable with Wes by not telling him about Iris, and lying to Lee about certain things is just the way it is, but Iris is . . .
I have a blank slate with her, and the last time I had that, it was with Wes. I filled it with lies and thought they were written in permanent ink, but really, they were chalk, and they wore away as love and safety worked me free of them. Wes saw through them.
Iris will see through me. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But she’ll figure it out unless I figure out how to tell.
Her ponytail is silk against my arm, her head resting on my stomach. It pleases me more than I can say, getting to play with her hair. I thought it might remind me of the fall and the swing of blond against my back, the heat of it in the summer, my mother’s hands weaving it into each girl’s hairstyle, but it’s different when it’s not mine. Iris’s hair smells like jasmine, like the bush that’s in front of our mailbox that only blooms at night, and it reminds me of the place it took me forever to think of as home.
“Your phone’s buzzing,” she tells me, and then she reaches over to grab it from the desk set next to her bed. I take it, and see that it’s Terry calling.
Terrance Emerson the Third is Wes’s best guy friend since kindergarten and the heir to an almond empire. He’s sweet to the point of gullible, he’s stoned most of the time, and he gets into trouble constantly but never stays in trouble because of the whole heir-to-an-almond-empire thing. He’d be the easiest mark in the world, like taking candy from a very rich, very sleepy baby, but Wes loves him and he’s a good guy—fun if you guard your junk food around him.
“Terry? What’s up?”
“Nora? Oh thank God,” Terry says. “You’ve gotta come.”
“What’s wrong?”
Iris sits up at my question.
“Wes is high. He can’t go home like this.”
“What?” Now I straighten up, and Iris mouths, What’s wrong? I hold up a finger. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t dose him, if that’s what you’re implying!” Terry says, all wounded.
“Terry . . .” I grit my teeth.
“Okay, it is kind of my fault because I had a bunch of cookies in a bag and they weren’t marked.”
“He ate pot cookies? Oh, shit.” I start to button up my shirt. “How many?”
“He went through half the bag before I got back upstairs.”
“Terry!”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry, but—” Is that off-key singing in the background? Probably. Wes gets very emotional and melodic when he’s stoned.
“You know what happened last time.” I want it to come out as an admonishment, but it’s strangled, too thick with the memory.
“That’s why I called you,” he says earnestly. “I can’t keep him here—when my parents come home and he’s like this, it’ll get back to the mayor.”
“Just keep him in your room until I get there.”
I hang up and Iris looks at me expectantly.
“I’m really sorry,” I say. “I have to go.”
“Is Wes okay?”
“How did you know I was talking about Wes?”
She arches an eyebrow. “I don’t mean this in a bad way, but who else would it be? You don’t really hang out with anyone else.”
“I hang out with you.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’ve never been the kind of person to have a ton of friends,” I say, trying to make it breezy, but she stares at me in that perceptive way of hers.
“Is he okay?”
“Yeah. I just need to take him back to
my house until he’s normal. I don’t want him to get in trouble.” I keep my voice level, but my heart is beating violently against my chest like I’m fifteen again, walking up those stairs and opening the door to his bathroom, knowing what I was going to find. I need to go. I need to get him.
“Can I come with you?” The way she asks is careful, and the look in her eyes is guarded, like she’s almost daring me to say no.
I’m so focused on getting out of there that I don’t think about it deeply. “Sure. I’ll drive.”
Terry answers the door with a bag of Doritos in his hands and a gazillion apologies on his lips. “I only left him alone for a few minutes,” he tells me as I march up the staircase, the sound of singing getting louder and louder. Wes has a terrible voice. He can’t carry a tune to save his life, and usually he remembers this, but when he takes a few hits, he starts acting like he’s in an opera.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Iris says reassuringly to Terry, but when he just shakes his head grimly at her, she frowns a little. Terry doesn’t do grim, and it’s unsettling, but he knows what’ll happen if the mayor finds out.
Terry has Wes stashed in the entertainment room, and he lights up when he sees us. I can’t help but smile back, because it’s been a while since he’s looked this unburdened.
“You guys are here!”
“I heard you ate some cookies.”
“I thought they were normal.”
“You should know by now that food in Terry’s room is probably full of pot,” I point out.
“But they had toffee chips.” He actually pouts after saying this.
“Oh, well, then, you had to,” I say, and he nods seriously, my sarcasm totally lost on him. “Get up. You’re gonna come home with me and sleep it off.”
“Lee will probably want a cookie. But I ate them all.” He laughs a little too long, and I grab his arm and pull him up. I get him downstairs and into my car, though it takes him three tries to buckle his seat belt and his eyes start to droop on the drive home. He has such a shit tolerance for booze or weed.
I don’t think it through before opening the door to what was once the guest room but is now understood to be Wes’s room. His clothes are in the dresser and his shoes are on the floor and his laptop is on the desk, open with that screensaver of him posing with some of the shelter dogs in various costumes. He throws himself onto the bed with a sigh and pulls the rumpled blanket over himself like he’s done it a hundred times, because he has.
It only hits me when I turn and see Iris standing there in the doorway, taking it in, that she has never been in here before. That the unspoken agreement that Lee and I have in this house—that Wes is welcome anytime, day or night, for as long as he needs—wasn’t clear to Iris until now.
I’ve skirted around it. I told myself I didn’t need to tell her. But now that I’m holding my secrets and Wes’s secrets and some of Iris’s, my loyalties are split, and I don’t want them to splinter as well.
“You gonna rest?” I ask him, and he nods underneath the blankets. “Okay, we’ll be out by the pool.”
I keep the door open halfway and then tilt my head toward the back door. “Do you want?”
“Oh yes, I want,” Iris says, and the crispness to her voice sinks to the bottom of my stomach like a rock hurled into a still pond. She’s upset and she deserves to be, because it’s one thing to be best friends with your ex, it’s another to kind of live with him.
We go outside and I wait until she’s settled on one of the chaises that Lee built from wood pallets and I found cushions for at a rummage sale.
“So,” Iris says. “Are you going to say I can explain?”
I sit down on the edge of the second chaise, flipping the tag on the cushion back and forth between my fingers.
“I like that you two are friends,” she says when I don’t offer up any explanation. “I really do. But I didn’t . . . Does he live here?”
“Not officially.”
“Almost every time I’m over here, he’s here, too, unless he’s with Terry or at the shelter,” Iris says slowly, like she’s just realizing it. “Last week, Lee was helping him with a practice essay for college. There’s those onion crackers he likes in the pantry, and I know you think they’re gross. And he has a room in your house. Across from your room.”
“Please don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s sordid or something. It’s not.”
“Then what is it? Because I’m confused,” she says, with such earnestness that it kills me. “No one at school knows why you two broke up. I asked around when I became friends with both of you. I got the same story from everyone: that one day you were together and the next, bam, broken up, no explanation, ever, and you went back to being friends like nothing happened.”
“That’s not how it was.”
“Then how was it?” she asks. “How is it? Because now I’m wondering if I’ve stepped into the middle of some prolonged break that’ll mend someday. And I’m not doing that, Nora. I am not the bi diversion in act one of the rom-com where you end up back with the hot guy in act three.”
“You aren’t a diversion from anything,” I say fiercely, because I don’t know how to deal with hearing her fear like that. “There’s nothing to be diverted from. You . . .” I let out a breath. “You terrify me,” I blurt out, because that? That is the truth.
And that is probably the wrong thing to say to her, because it makes her scowl.
“That’s not something you want your girlfriend to tell you.”
“You make me want to tell you everything, right here, right now,” I continue. “Every mistake I’ve made. Every secret. Every scar and bruise and thing that’s hurt me. Being with you . . . I didn’t know things could be like this. I am terrified of fucking it up. If I do tell you everything about me and my mistakes, I’m afraid that will fuck it up. But it’s not because I’m pining for Wes or he’s pining for me. Did you see how he was looking at Amanda giving her speech last week? That’s what he looks like when he’s pining.”
“He really needs to just ask her out,” Iris mutters.
“I know. She’s great.”
“How do you think she’d react to your living arrangement?” Iris asks, and God, she is sharp like a brand-new box cutter . . . the kind you have to assemble yourself and pray you don’t slice your fingers in the process.
“He’s my best friend,” I say.
“So you both have told me.”
“His dad sucks, Iris.”
“I know they don’t get along,” she says like it’s some offhand thing. “But—”
“No, Iris, listen,” I say slowly, staring at her, trying to convey the truth beyond my words, because if I use my words, I’m betraying him. “His dad sucks. Do you understand?”
Her head tilts, her ponytail swinging free of her shoulders at the movement.
The back door bangs open before she can tell me, and we both turn at the noise just in time to see Wes streaking across the scrubby lawn and cannonballing into the pool, splashing us both with water.
Iris shrieks and jumps to her feet, and I just sputter as he bobs up out of the water, delighted.
“Wes! This belt has eighty-year-old gelatin sequins! They gum up if they get wet.” Iris shakes her head, fanning her skirt in front of her to better dry it. “You’re so—” She glances up, and her voice dies right out when she sees them.
He took his shirt off before he jumped into the pool. He doesn’t take his shirt off in front of people. He doesn’t go swimming anymore unless he’s here with me and Lee. He’s been careful for a long time.
But he’s not careful right now, and Iris sits down hard on the yellow chaise cushions with a soft “oh.”
He has shorts on, thank God. And he’s splashing around in the water like a human-sized golden retriever, so he
doesn’t see or hear or realize. My eyes are on Iris as her horrified gaze fixes to his shoulders, and there’s no way I can even begin to spin the truth into fiction when she finally tears herself free of the shock.
I try to see the scars through first-time eyes, but I know him and them too well. My heart has a piece of Wes wrapped around it like a bandage. My skin will hold the memory of him as permanent, because you don’t forget the first person to touch you with love after life’s taught you all touch is fear and pain.
I say her name, trying to break her of the spell of Oh, God, what happened? When she whips toward me, whatever anger there was before has flipped to concern.
“Are you okay?” I ask her. “Do you want some water or . . .”
She shakes her head, staring at the ground as she puzzles it out. Her eyebrows are drawn together so hard, I wonder if the V between them will scrunch there permanently.
“Why didn’t you just say something?” she asks finally.
“He’s my best friend,” I say, like a broken record.
She just nods at this. A quick, decisive bob. “So he stays with you and Lee so he doesn’t have to be at home.”
“That’s part of it,” I say. I could just let her think that’s all of it, but I can’t let her think Wes is some sort of charity case. I don’t want her to think it’s like that. But I also don’t want her to think it’s like that. The idea that she’s been looking over her shoulder, wondering when I’d drop her hand for his makes me sick to my stomach. That’s not something I want or Wes wants, considering he’s spent half of last semester staring after Amanda like her dimples hold the answers to the universe. They might; as we have covered, Amanda and her dimples are really great.
“And the other part? Parts?”
I sit down next to her, tilting my legs and body toward her. I fight the urge to reach out and grab her hand. I don’t know if she wants me to touch her right now. I don’t know anything. Is this it? I don’t want it to be.
“Wes and I broke up because of me,” I say. “I fucked up. We can talk about all of it someday, but it’s not the kind of conversation you have after dating for a month, Iris. I’m sorry, but it’s not. I’m not—”