The Girls I've Been

by Tess Sharpe

  “Just hold it,” he orders.

  “I can’t,” she says. “I don’t need to pee. I need to empty my cup.”

  It jerks his attention back to her. It’s brilliant, and I try to hide my awe as she continues. “You know, my menstrual cup?”

  He starts shuffling as soon as she says the word menstrual. “Not gonna happen.”

  “You don’t understand,” Iris says. “I have a condition.” She folds her hands together; she is so dainty and prim in her dress, and you can’t think anything diabolical about her when her cheeks are pink like that and her eyes are downcast just so. “A heavy bleeding condition. I need to change my cup. I’ve been waiting and waiting.”

  “I told you, it’s not gonna happen.”

  “Do you know how much liquid a menstrual cup holds? If it overflows, blood will be everywhere.”

  “Not my problem.”

  She shakes the watercolor-squiggled skirt of her dress at him. “This is a 1950s Jeanne Durrell dress!”

  He rolls his eyes. “I don’t care about your dress.”

  She looks like she’s seconds away from stomping her foot. “You should, because if you don’t let me empty my cup, forty milliliters of menstrual blood is going to cover my dress and run down my legs and the deputies out there are going to think you shot me.”

  He frowns.

  “I just need ten or fifteen minutes in the bathroom, and my purse.”

  “I’m not leaving her alone with him,” he says, jerking his thumb at me.

  “Well, good, because I need her help in the bathroom,” she says, and it makes him frown further.

  “No way.”

  She bristles. “Do I have to go through the entire cleansing and disposal process with you?” she asks, and her voice trembles so delicately. “This is embarrassing! You’re making me beg you to let me change the modern version of a tampon. Why do you have to do this to me?” And then, to top it off, tears begin to form in her eyes. I have no doubt they’re real. She’s in a lot of pain on a normal day, but especially when she’s on her period, and none of this can be helping. I’d be curled up in a ball on the ground right now if I had cramps as bad as she gets.

  “Why do you need her?” he asks.

  “Like I said, do you need me to go through the entire process with you?” Iris asks, her eyes wide and so innocently outraged that I’m reeling. She is good at this. “Don’t you have the internet? Sisters? A girlfriend? Or are you one of those guys who thinks periods are gross?” She’s shooting questions at him rapid-fire and he doesn’t like it, his confusion and embarrassment over her talking about menstrual blood reddening his face.

  We’re more alike than you know. She’d said that to me once. I’d tucked the knowledge inside me like I was a locket and she was a secret message written on a slip of paper. I’d turned it over and over in my mind like another girl would fiddle with jewelry, wondering if it was truth.

  And here is the truth playing out in front of me: Iris Moulton is a natural.

  Because the next thing I know, out of sheer discomfort and the desire for her to stop saying menstrual blood over and over, Iris’s purse gets shoved in her hands after he searches it one more time, and then we’re in the women’s restroom in the back of the bank.

  “You lock this door, I will shoot the doorknob off,” he tells her.

  “We’ll be fast,” Iris promises with a shaky smile.

  “No heroics,” he says to me. “No tricks. I’m blocking you in. Bang on the door when you’re done.”

  The door closes and Iris swings toward me, and finally, agonizingly, we are alone. There is not enough time and there is so much to say and explain and ask forgiveness for and there is too much to do and we need to move, we need a plan, I need—

  She kisses me. She pushes me right up against the bathroom door and cradles the unhurt side of my face against her palm and kisses me like she thought she wouldn’t get to again, and I kiss her back like a last kiss is an impossibility.

  Her fingers curl in the short hair at the nape of my neck, restless little circles as she pulls away just far enough to rest her forehead against mine.

  “I am so mad at you,” she whispers.

  My eyes close against the hurt in her voice and in me. “I know.”

  “Is your plan working?”

  I shake my head.

  She lets out a breath. “Okay,” she says. “Then we’re going with mine.”

  — 44 —

  Ashley: How It Begins

  You can’t con a con artist. Isn’t that what they always say?

  Once, I thought it was true. Absorbed it with all of her other teachings and my baby food. But I’ve proved the adage wrong, haven’t I?

  I learned from the best. No—not her.

  Him.

  Seven Years Ago

  After Washington, after I have to snap out of Katie but have no new girl to step into yet, everything is rushed and weighty. We bolt—we’ve never had to before, and she’s furious. I can feel it in her silence, in what she’s not saying, in the few words she does. It’s this persistent pulse inside me: This is your fault, you shouldn’t have done anything, you should’ve just dealt with it.

  When we arrive in Florida and she doesn’t give me a new name or a new hairstyle, it feels like punishment instead of a reprieve. Like she’s taken something from me, because what’s left if I’m not one of them or preparing to be one? I hate the feeling; a knife’s edge that’s cutting shallow into my neck as she leaves me in the hotel room for long stretches.

  Katie is gone, but what happened isn’t, and I don’t know what to do with that except try to put it all in a box somewhere deep inside me. I want to cry all the time, but I can’t, because . . . am I a girl who cries? I don’t know. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. She’s given me nothing to grasp—no comforting hairstyle, no orderly trio of traits, no carefully chosen clothes, no mark’s insecurities to build a girl to cater to.

  One day stretches into night, and she’s still not back. I stay awake waiting for her as long as I can, panic and sleep finally getting the better of me around 3:00 a.m. The next thing I know, something heavy’s being thrown on the foot of my bed. I jerk awake just in time to see her toss another bag of clothes down.

  “Up,” she says. “Bathroom. We’ve got work to do.”

  I blink at the Nike bags, and then she claps sharply and I’m scrambling up—away, far away from the bags and what they represent—and toward her, because where else would I go?

  She hums as I trot into the bathroom, and when she begins to brush my hair in front of the mirror, my skin crawls. It should lull me, but the last two weeks of her dodging me has made me needy, desperate for her attention, unable to settle in the scraps of her presence. And the last two months have made me skittish in a way she didn’t raise me to be. I’m supposed to be accessible. My hair is hers to choose, just like my clothes, my name, and my future; nothing on my body is mine. My body doesn’t belong to me.

  Nothing does.

  She sections off my hair, drawing a ruler-straight part down the middle of my head. She begins to braid, tight and efficient, and she won’t meet my gaze in the mirror.

  Can she not look at me? Am I that horrible?

  Mom secures each plait with a little plastic tie, reaching forward to pluck the bobby pins from the pile on the counter. “I’ve reserved a court each afternoon this week at the club,” she tells me as she winds the braids around my head, pinning them in place. “I haven’t had the time to research any possible targets. So this will be a good lesson for you: how to spot the right one, then how to bring him to me. What do I say about hardship?”

  “It makes you better, if you’re smart.”

  She tucks the end of the braids behind the plaits, pinning them tight.

  “Our last job,” she says. “It was a mistake.�
�� And for a moment, my heart leaps, and then she crushes it. “You’ll prove to me you’ve learned from your mistakes, won’t you, baby?”

  It hangs there: my mistakes.

  The shame barrels out of the box I put it in, her confirmation that of course it was my fault. (It’s not, it’s not, but I don’t know that then, because she tells me it is, right then and there, she cons me into thinking it because it’s easier for her.)

  “Yes,” I croak out.

  She finishes my hair, her hands settle on my shoulders, and finally, for the first time in weeks, she meets my eyes in the mirror. It makes me sick. It makes me joyful. And her next words send relief rushing inside me so fast I’m dizzy enough to grip the sink.

  “Ashley,” she says. “Your name is Ashley.”

  “Ashley,” I repeat, because I have to be dutiful. Katie wasn’t, and look what happened.

  She smiles. “There.” She smooths my too-tight braids. “Isn’t that better?”

  I nod. Of course I do.

  I want so badly for it to be true.

  * * *

  —

  I spend a whole week sweating on the tennis court at the country club she’s using as her hunting ground.

  She is Heidi this time, to my Ashley. My skull aches from Ashley’s hair, the milkmaid braids pinned close to my scalp with too many pins. Ashley is homeschooled, all focus and drive and Nike gear. Wimbledon by seventeen, Heidi tells the parents at the club, even though that’s ridiculous. I’m an okay tennis player, but there’s only one thing I’m a prodigy at.

  I perform like the dancing bear I am, my guilt that we’re in this situation heavy as a rock in my belly. But every time I slam the ball over the net, my body sings like it’s something close to mine. It’s almost good. It’s nowhere near enough. I try to pretend it is.

  She sits on the sidelines with her knitting and her pristine silk shell and skirt and her sunglasses, like she always does. Men approach her on the sidelines throughout the week as I practice my volleys, introducing themselves to the fresh meat at the club. She smiles and tosses her hair, but her attention slides back to me immediately. She’s not interested in the kind of man who approaches her first; she wants one whose focus is on both of us.

  I’m realizing how boring all the prep work of finding someone to lay a trap for is, because I’m feeling all kinds of impatience as we head into a second week of me at the net, against that ball machine that rattles every two balls. The swish, swish, rattle makes me twitch. When I miss four balls in a row, I let out a frustrated noise.

  “Don’t let it get to you, baby,” my mother calls encouragingly.

  “It’s annoying,” I complain. “Can we see if someone can fix it?”

  “Everyone’s gotta push through distractions,” she reminds me. “Try to make it work for you.”

  She shifts her sunglasses to her head before going back to her knitting. It’s a signal: Someone’s watching us. I need to keep on the objective. All I’ve been doing for the past week and a half is lifting things from people’s wallets, because the cash Mom has won’t last us forever. Especially with the way she spends.

  I keep at my volleys, and the third time I miss in twenty minutes, I drop the racket, my mouth twisting.

  “Hey now, don’t pull a McEnroe on me,” she calls.

  “That’s a super-dated reference, Mom,” I inform her, and she tosses her head back and laughs in that way that tells me whoever she’s got her eye on, he’s watching.

  “Always putting me in my place,” she says, winking at me.

  “Excuse me?”

  I look over my shoulder to my right. He’s in the court next to ours, grinning at our little display.

  “The rattling throwing you off?” he asks me.

  I smile. Not my smile. Ashley’s smile. It’s brighter, with no hesitation. Ashley doesn’t know about being wary. “Totally.”

  “I’ll see if I can talk to maintenance about looking at it later today.” His eyes slide to my mother, who’s watching him, then back to me as he grins. “Pulling a McEnroe on the ball machine will just make it rattle more.”

  “Listen to the wise man, honey,” Mom says, the smile in her voice more than her face. She won’t give him a smile yet, not until he earns it. That’s how it works. Thank you, she mouths at him over my head, a little secret between them, outside of me; another kind of reward.

  He lifts his racket as a sort of goodbye before jogging back to the center of his own court, where his tennis partner is waiting.

  I spend another twenty minutes hitting balls, trying to ignore the rattle of the machine and the gaze I can feel on both of us from time to time as he glances over between his own sets.

  Mom finally checks her watch and waves me in. “I’m going to take my steam and you need to eat lunch, young lady,” she tells me, plucking a stray bobby pin from my braid and sliding it back into place. “Please don’t fill up on just garlic fries. Order a meal with a whole grain or a crunchy vegetable or maybe even two crunchy vegetables, please, I beg of you.” She holds out her hands clasped teasingly, and I know it’s for him, the man who’s still watching us out of the corner of his eye, but it’s like going from invisible to seen after weeks, and I can’t help but want to melt into the safe glow of it.

  This is what we do. I can do this. Even if I made mistakes with Katie, like she said. I can make up for it.

  I have to.

  “I promise,” I say, packing up my tennis racket and chasing after all the stray balls with the ball basket before she slings an arm over my shoulder and we make our way to the club locker rooms.

  “Ready?” she asks after I’ve showered and changed out of my tennis skirt and into a sundress. I nod. We split at the locker room door, me to the club restaurant and her to the bar across the way that still is a good vantage point into the restaurant. She’s half hidden by the palm fronds or whatever greenery they’ve got stashed everywhere.

  I get a table for two and order a heaping mound of garlic fries. I page through my phone—Ashley watches tennis videos on Instagram and has kitten GIFs saved to her files—until my food arrives.

  I can feel eyes on me the whole time. Setting down the phone, I dip the fries into the aioli the waiter brought and munch away, waiting.

  I feel him before I hear him. The barest brush of air at my right before he sits down across from me.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to order just garlic fries,” he says.

  My eyes go big. I project my guilt, dropping the fry on the plate.

  He grins, taking a fry off my plate and eating it. “These are better than whole grains,” he agrees. “Not as healthy, though. You’re a pretty decent tennis player.”

  The bam, bam, bam of his words is like a tennis play in itself, and it sets warning tingling down my spine. It’s rapid: agreement, followed by a criticism and right into a veiled compliment.

  It’s a tactic Mom’s taught me to use. It sets my teeth on edge instantly.

  “Thank you,” I say. “Are you a coach?”

  He shakes his head. “I own some gyms here in Miami. Your mother . . .” He trails off, like even the mention of her is distracting.

  “Heidi,” I supply helpfully, like I’m supposed to. When the marks decide to approach her through me, it’s supposed to be a cute little dance. I’m supposed to be helpful and smiling and giggle at the right moment when they fumble finding the right words.

  “Heidi,” he says, and the way he says it . . .

  My teeth grind together so hard my jaw hurts, and I don’t know . . . I don’t know if it’s my gut or if it’s because of what happened with Katie, what I’m feeling, which is Go, run, now. I’m caught in the indecision, a fish in a net, unable to flop out or breathe deep.

  “And you are?” he asks me.

  “Oh, sorry.” I hold my hand out with a little flourish
. All the girls have good manners. “I’m Ashley.”

  He shakes it. “Raymond.”

  “Nice to meet you.” I drop his hand as quick as I can while still being polite. “I ordered a grain bowl with extra avocado, too,” I tell him, lowering my voice conspiratorially. “I wouldn’t disobey her.”

  “You wouldn’t, would you?”

  “Mom knows best,” I say cheerfully.

  “You’re very good,” he says.

  “I thought I was pretty decent.” It slips out of my mouth before I can stop it, so I follow it up with a smile for softness.

  “I’m not talking about your tennis game. I’m talking about how you lifted the credit card out of that golfer’s wallet yesterday when you bumped into him.”

  I go cold as I remember the lift I made yesterday, the black card that I had already used to buy a thousand dollars’ worth of gift cards, which can be better than a bank card if you don’t want to be traced.

  “You’ve got quick hands,” he continues. “And you’re smart with your targets: Man like that, he won’t notice a missing card for a few billing cycles. Did your mother teach you?” His gaze rises over my head, scanning the room before settling back on me.

  I can’t freeze or flush. I can’t. But I’ve never been made before. I’ve never had to spin out of being caught at all, let alone so fast. I skate over the possibilities like I’m on thin, dark ice. Play dumb. Lie. Chatter. Tell the truth.

  I pop another fry into my mouth, scrunching my nose up. “Huh?” My eyes skitter to my screen, like his weirdness isn’t as important as my phone.

  He smiles. I catch it out of the corner of my eye. “Talent, skill, and you look just like your mother. She must be very proud. You are quite the asset.”

  He looks me up and down like I’m a car he’s about to buy, and that clinches it for me, because it pisses me off enough to break through any numbness and fear. I don’t know then that this man will make me redefine enemy and father, two things that are already purposefully entwined in my head. All I know is that I’m outnumbered. I need to get away from him.