by Callie Hart
“Allotted torture session. Hah. That’s funny.”
God, she’s one of those people. The I’m-going-to-tell-you-that-you-said-something-funny-instead-of-just-fucking-laughing people. I am so turned off right now.
Zen flutters her eyelashes, pouting a little. “You know, Kacey might be off the table now that she’s dating Jake, but there are still three other Sirens for you to choose from. I just wanted to introduce myself, and, y’know. Mark your card.”
I stare at her blankly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Come on, Alessandro.” She blushes in a way that feels practiced. “This is the twentieth century. We’re progressive here at Raleigh.” She reaches out and lays her palm against my chest. “Most guys consider it a compliment when a Siren hits on them.”
Oh, my good god. What the fuck is happening right now? This has got to be a joke. Gingerly, I take hold of her hand and remove it from my chest. “Alex,” I say. “My name is Alex. And…you do know it’s the twenty-first century, right?”
She blinks, her brows pulling together. “Dude. Of course. That’s what I said.”
“All right. Well…” I don’t have time for this. Or the fucking energy. I turn around and walk away, leaving her standing there. This time, mercifully, she has enough common sense to let me go.
8
SILVER
Wrangling Max during the twins’ lesson is easier than I anticipated. It costs me five bucks and a Hot Pocket, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay. When Dr. Coombes arrives to collect the boys, flustered and all over the place, I feel so bad for him that I offer him a cup of coffee and a chance to sit down for a second. It never occurs to me that he might accept, but when he looks at me, his eyes a little wild and distant, I realize that he probably hasn’t simply sat down to drink a cup of coffee in a very long time.
He's way older than Mom and Dad, somewhere in his mid-forties. Mom always used to take me to him to get my eyes tested when I was a kid. Everything about him is normal. He wears regular, smart clothes. His hair is a medium brown, and his eyes are a steady, reassuring blue. He was calm, and always nice to me—and in return, I was always terrified of him. I hated going for eye exams. I hated having to put my chin on the metal stirrup. I hated having a light shone in my eyes until I could see the alien, weirdly textured back of my own retina. Most of all, I was afraid that I was going to fail, that Dr. Coombes was going to tell my mom those three, awful words that would signal the end of my life as I knew it: ‘She needs glasses.’
Sitting at the counter now, staring into his coffee, Dr. Coombes’ presence no longer fills me with a deep sense of dread. I just…I feel sorry for the guy. I shift awkwardly from one foot to the other. “I’m so sorry about Mrs. Coombes. Have they said anything? Is she getting better?”
Dr. Coombes scans the kitchen, as though he’s misplaced something, but he can’t quite remember what. “Uh, no. No, they haven’t said anything. Just that she’s stable. They’re not really sure what’s going on with her.”
I don’t know what to say to this. Outside, Max is showing Gregory and Lou the fort he made two summers ago. It’s raining, the sky a roiling mass of grey, and it feels as though the weight of the heavy clouds overhead is pressing down on top of the house and the walls are about to buckle under the strain. “I’m sorry to hear that, Dr. Coombes.”
He waves me off with a flick of his wrist. “You can call me David now, Silver. You’re, what? Sixteen?”
“Seventeen.”
He nods. “Seventeen. Okay. Wow. Time seems to be speeding up every goddamn day.”
“Yeah. My Nona keeps warning me that it only gets quicker, too. She keeps on telling me, Appreciate your youth, Silver.” I imitate Nona’s heavily accented, raspy voice. “Appreciate your figure. Appreciate your health—”
“Forget that shit,” Dr. Coombes says. “The thing you really need to treasure, the only thing you should value above anything else at your age is the complete and utter lack of responsibility. No mortgage. No bills. No taxes. No impossible decisions, or people looking to you for comfort. Shit gets real, Silver, and it gets real fast. Nothing in here really changes.” He taps the side of his head. “You start finding grey hairs. You notice a few more lines on your face. Your back starts to ache when you sit down for too long. But everything else…the whole ‘older and wiser’ line they spin you in high school. Don’t believe a fucking word of it. It doesn’t matter how old any of us get. We’re all still fumbling around in the dark, pretending like we know what the fuck is going on. What the fuck we’re supposed to do. But when we climb into bed at night, we’re still gripped by the same sense of panic we felt when we were teenagers. Believe me. We are all just making this shit up as we go along.”
“Well. That’s one way to make a girl feel optimistic for the future.” I take a sip of my own coffee, wanting to hide my entire face inside the mug.
“God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be such a downer. I’m just…I’m so fucking tired.” He looks it, too. The large, puffy bags under his eyes have aged him at least ten years. He lifts his head, watching his sons out of the kitchen window as they follow my brother into the copse of trees that marks the boundary of our yard and the beginning of the Walker Forest. Max’s yellow rain jacket is easy enough to spot through the bare, spindly trunks of the trees. Gregory and Lou’s matching green jackets are a little harder to see, though. I go to the back door and yell their names into the impending dusk.
When I turn around, Dr. Coombes is on his feet, putting his own coat on. Out of nowhere, he pulls me into a quick, tight hug and then releases me just as quickly. “Thank you for listening, Silver. It’s nice to be heard for a couple of minutes.”
The boys barrel into the kitchen, whooping, full of energy, tracking mud all over the tiles. “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. Where are your paper towels?” Dr. Coombes scans the kitchen counters, but I stop him before he can get carried away.
“It’s fine. Please. Get on the road before the rain worsens. I’ve got this. It’s no problem.”
He sags with relief, as if I’ve just told him I’ve seen the future and his wife is going to wake up, happy and healthy next Tuesday, and his life is going to go back to normal really, really soon. “Thanks again, Silver. You’re a good girl.”
Absently, he places down three twenty-dollar bills on the kitchen table, and it feels as though he isn’t paying for the guitar lesson I just gave to the twins. It’s as though he’s paying me for something else: the moment of peace and quiet I gave to him, while I let him sit in the kitchen and stare into an untouched cup of coffee.
Later, I sit with Max on the couch, watching Jeopardy, thankful that he’s oblivious to most of the shit that’s going on around him. He’s small for his age—almost the shortest kid in his class. He’s still obsessed with comics and loves animals. If Max could have a dog, his life would basically be fucking made. His hair is fine like Mom’s but dark like Dad’s. There’s something delicate about him. He isn’t rough and tumble like other boys. I worry sometimes that something hard will happen to him one day, the same as something happened to me, but it won’t galvanize him. It will break him instead, and I will have gone off to college and left him here alone with our absentee parents.
Max wriggles his toes, digging his feet underneath my legs—something he’s always done when his feet are cold. “Do you think Greg and Lou’s mom’s going to die?” he asks. He’s still fixed on the television screen, still scooping melted ice cream onto his spoon and ladling it into his mouth, but I can feel that his attention is now on me. This question’s obviously troubling him.
I squeeze his calf, and he grumbles, jerking his leg away. Turns out physical reassurance from his big sister isn’t cool anymore. “I don’t know, Maxie. I don’t think the doctors know, either.”
“How can the doctors not know? They know everything.”
I remember still believing that doctors were infallible, all knowing, all powerful beings that never p
Sometimes, there’s nothing that can be done. Sometimes, people just fucking die and no matter how hard we object, or fight, or battle with that, it can’t be changed.
I don’t want to be the person to tell Max any of that. Our parents brought Max into the world. They need to be the ones to break it to him that occasionally it’s a cruel, hurtful, horrible, fucked up place, where sometimes Moms get hit by cars, and they don’t wake up from comas.
“I don’t know all the answers, Maxie,” I murmur. “Things are complicated sometimes. Would it make you feel better if I called Mom?”
He blinks owlishly at the T.V. “No. It’s okay. It’s just really sad for Greg and Lou. That’s all.”
I move his legs and scoot across the sofa, drawing him into my side. He doesn’t shrug me off this time. “I know, Bud. It is, isn’t it?”
9
ALEX
The bar’s heaving, packed to the rafters, the smell of damp lying heavy in the air. Every time a new customer walks in through the door, a good-natured roar goes up inside the Rock, the patrons already parked at the bar and crowded around the pool tables hurling a shower of peanut shells at the offenders guilty of letting the heat out.
The jukebox has been cycling through White Snake and ACDC all night, sporadically interrupted by the sounds of The Eagles and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Behind the altar, the name the Rock’s locals call the huge, sticky slab of mahogany that forms the length of the bar, Angela and Maisy have been busting their asses for the last six hours, working their hardest to make sure everyone has a drink in front of them at all times.
And me? I’ve been clearing tables, running food, watching the drunkest guys for any signs of hostility, and fielding the unwelcome advances of at least three middle-aged women who all seem intent on ‘making me a man.’ This always happens when I’m working at the Rock. Women get it into their heads that, because I’m young, I’m still a retiring wallflower virgin who’s never had his dick touched. Little do they know I could spend the night teasing them into fits of hysteria if I wanted to. They’d forget their own fucking names and lose all motor function if any of them could coax me to slide in between their bedsheets. They won’t, though. Unlike other guys my age, I’m capable of maintaining focus once the subject of potential sex comes up, and besides…I don’t shit where I eat. I have nothing against older women. Older women can be sexy as hell. But I like my job, and I like bringing in a paycheck, and I’m not dumb enough to risk any of that for one night getting my dick sucked.
“Hey, Alex! Alex, Montgomery’s asking for you!” Maia hollers across the bar. She’s in the middle of pouring three different drinks but she still somehow manages to hold up a black, corded handset to show me that the owner of the bar is waiting for me on the other end of the line. I spit out the toothpick I’ve been toying with between my teeth and vault over the altar, accepting the phone from her.
“Hey, man. What’s up?”
“Got a girl out back. Wants to try out,” a gruff voice informs me. “She’s young. Probably too young. Get out there and clock her. Tell me if you know her face.”
Montgomery runs with a club. A dangerous one. On the weekends, it amuses him to have girls strip for his buddies, and sometimes he calls on me to wait with the girls, to make sure none of his boys gets too handsy with them. Every once in a while, he has me head out back to see if I recognize them before he lets them out onto the bar floor to perform. Bad for business, he says, if a chick below the age of eighteen shows up, trying to earn herself a cool grand by artlessly taking her clothes off on a Wednesday night. Doesn’t work out in anyone’s favor, especially if the cops show up and shut the place down. It’s happened before.
“Sure thing.” I hang up the phone and head through the back, stepping over a pile of empty Corona boxes that have been tossed back here by the girls. Past the kitchen, and then past Monty’s office, I hurry down the corridor and boot the back emergency exit open, throwing my shoulder into the door when it sticks.
In the alleyway behind the Rockwell, a startled girl with bright blonde hair nearly jumps out of her skin when the door swings back and hits the wall by the dumpsters. Her dark eyes shine brightly. She’s wearing a coat with a fur trim around the collar and red PVC knee-high boots with a heel that could be used as a fucking prison shank. She nearly shits herself when she sees me.
For once, I do recognize her, and I don’t know what she’s told Montgomery, but she is not eighteen. This girl is in my fucking biology class; her name is… fuck, it’s right on the tip of my tongue. She pales when our eyes meet. “Oh, shit. It’s you.”
“Likewise.” I turn to head back inside. “Look, I can’t lie to the boss. He wants to know if you’re old enough to dance, and you’re not, so…”
“Please. Wait. Alex, right? I need the money, okay. My mom’s blown her entire paycheck at the casino. Again. We can’t be late with the rent this month, or our asshole landlord’s going to kick us out. I can—”
“Stop. You have to be eighteen. There’s nothing I can do.”
Her eyes have grown round. Bright with unshed tears. This is obviously not an act; I’ve borne witness to enough of those before to see this for what it is: sheer desperation. I’m not unsympathetic to her situation. Far from it. I’ve been corralled into some seriously dark corners when I’ve been struggling to make ends meet, too, but lying to Monty is just something that I cannot, will not do. She looks like she’s about to burst into tears. “Look. I can take you in to see Monty. Maybe there’s some other way for you to earn out tonight, but I’m going to be honest with him. You read me?”
Somehow, I’ve conjured hope into her eyes with this suggestion. I immediately kick myself. Monty’s hardly a bleeding heart. Definitely not one for sob stories. Still, this is all I can do for her, so it is what it is. She follows me into the building, unsteady in her stripper heels. I have to catch hold of her at one point to make sure she doesn’t topple over. She shoots me a grateful smile, but not a single word is passed between us as I lead her back up the corridor toward Monty’s office. I knock once and wait for him to call us in before I push the door open.
Montgomery’s office is not what you might expect. It’s clean, for starters, while everything else at the Rockwell bears a patina of grease and sticky, spilled alcohol. On the wall, landscape paintings depict balmy summer scenes from Tuscany and Provence. Behind Monty’s white marble desk (completely clear, besides a computer screen and a single framed photograph of Montgomery’s dear departed mother, Babs), the man himself sits, wearing a bright red Christmas sweater with Rudolph emblazoned across the front of it.
“S’up, Kid,” Monty mutters. He’s yet to look up at me from his computer screen. His bright hair is long, tied back into a ponytail with a leather thong. Angela always says he reminds her of Brad Pitt from ‘Legend of the Falls.’ For a nearly sixty-year-old guy, he’s in pretty decent shape.
“Well?” he asks.
“Seventeen. Senior at Raleigh,” I tell him.
Montgomery huffs. He finally looks up, his eyebrows forming one, bushy line. He quickly glances at the girl beside me and sighs. “What are you doing here, sweetheart? You’re still a baby. This place ain’t for you.”
The girl takes a deep breath and shrugs. “I don’t have any other choice. This is the end of the road. I either come in here and I make money, or my family is out on the street. End of story.”
“I don’t like when need drives young women to my doorstep. If they don’t want to dance, then they’re not gonna be good at it.”
“I am good at it. And I can fake enthusiasm just like all the other women you’ve ever met, believe me.” Her voice doesn’t shake, which is pretty fucking impressive.
Montgomery leans forward across his desk. “Forgive me for saying so, Sweet Thing, but you don’t look like you got much meat on you.”
“Forgive me for saying so, but you’re wrong.” She unfastens the fur-trimmed coat and lets it drop from her shoulders, revealing a heavily doctored Raleigh High cheerleading outfit. The skirt barely covers the top of her thighs, and the cropped top had been hacked low around the neck, displaying her considerable cleavage. The girl has tits, that’s for sure. Montgomery’s eyes her critically, like he’s assessing a horse before buying it, testing to see if it’s sound.
“All right. Point made,” he concedes. “When’s your birthday?”
“December eleventh,” the girl replies.
“Fine. You can dance here, starting tonight, but you don’t get naked until December twelfth. Understand?”
She nods, covering herself with her coat again.
“And you dance upstairs only. No dancing down in the basement.”
“Why, what’s in the basement?”
Monty squints at her. He’s deciding whether or not to tell her the truth, but in the end, he doesn’t have much of a choice. If she’s gonna dance here at all, she’s gonna find out all of the Rock’s secrets soon enough. “A club. A kink club. People go down there to fuck. If you’re smart, you’ll give the place and the customers a wide berth. You stay upstairs on the bar floor, you strip down to your underwear, and then you take whatever tips you make and get out of here. I see so much as a nipple and you’re done. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Polite. Good. I like that. What’s your name?”
“Halliday, Sir.”
Monty grunts. “Whenever you walk through the door of this establishment, you’re no longer Halliday. You’re Billie. Your very first stripper name. Lucky you. Consider yourself christened. Now get the hell out of here before I change my mind.”
-->