“This too close to you, Romy?” he pants. “Gonna cry rape?”
Air burns my throat and my lungs beg for reprieve, but I can’t slow. I need my body to tell his I will always be able to get away, that he should quit now and find someone weaker.
Sweat soaks the back of my T-shirt, pools underneath my breasts. I fall behind, coming shoulder to shoulder with him and as soon as I am, he snakes his foot out and hooks his ankle around mine and an explosion of words fills my head.
Tripkneesteethliphit the ground running, that’s what I do.
The track bleeds into my knees and my knees bleed it back out. My face eats the dirt, drives my lips into my teeth. I taste my own metal and salt. The breath is out of me. I let the pain. I let the pain mute color, sound, mute everything but itself until rough hands turn me over and Coach Prewitt’s face is inches from my own. I reel air back into my lungs while she gives me her spiel. It never changes.
“You eat, Grey? You eat today? Hydrate?”
“It’s not that,” I manage.
“Then what happened here?”
I wipe my mouth on my arm and leave a thin red line on my skin. Everything I say next comes out in slow bursts as I try to catch my breath around all the hurt.
“He—tripped—me.” I pause to cough. “Did it—on purpose.”
Prewitt turns to him. “This true, Garrett?”
“Like hell I did.” But he lacks conviction, breathless as I am.
“He was chasing me.”
“It’s track, Grey. Was everyone behind us chasing you too?” A few people laugh. He shakes his head, smirking. “Her legs went right out from under her. Damnedest thing.”
“If you weren’t running so goddamn close—”
“Enough of that,” Prewitt says. I struggle to sit up, but she claps a hand hard on my shoulder, keeping me still so she can inspect the damage. “Bit your lip. Knees took the worst of it, but you’ll live.” She grabs my hands and turns them over. My palms are, somehow, mercifully unscathed. “Head down to the nurse’s office and get yourself cleaned up.”
She pulls me to my feet. Blood trickles down all my newly opened spaces. I take a few cautious steps, legs stiff and ankle protesting. Prewitt notices.
“She’s faking,” Tina mutters.
“Yeah, that’s fake blood, you stupid—”
“I said enough,” Prewitt says sharply. “Young, walk her to the nurse’s office.”
Penny steps forward. I step back.
“I don’t need that,” I say. “Her.”
“You’re hurt. She’ll take you in.”
“No.” But no is a dead word. “I can get there on my own.”
“That’s not how we do it here.” Prewitt squints at me and all those lines around her eyes scrunch up. “And you know that.”
I’ve got another no on the tip of my tongue, but Prewitt’s just daring me to say it and I’m tired, so I part the crowd by limping through it. Penny has to jog to catch up and after that, we’re evenly matched. She might even be slowing down for my benefit, which makes me angrier than I can say, but if I could speak I’d tell her I hate her. I hate you. I want my silence to carry that to her, somehow, because she should know it forever and ever amen.
We reach the building. Climb the stairs up. The movement pulls at my split skin and God and Christ, it hurts. I watch my blood dot the floor as we reach the fork in the hall. Penny moves left and I go right.
“You’re supposed to go to the nurse’s office,” she says, but I keep putting distance between us. “You should get cleaned up.” A second’s silence. “Brock tripped you?”
I turn and walk backward so she can see me in all my wrecked glory.
“What do you think, Penny?”
I hobble to the showers and rinse off, watching the water turn pink before swirling down the drain. I get a better view of my torn skin. It does look bad enough for the nurse’s office. I finish up and get dressed, carefully edging my shorts up past my knees, trying not to stain them with blood.
I’m pulling my shirt over my head when the faint trilling of girl reaches my ear. The door swings open a minute after that. Tina leads the pack. When she sees me, she gives me the kind of look everyone else is glad they’re not getting.
“Brock tripped you?” The other girls quiet as they begin undressing because everyone always gets quiet when they’re about to witness something worth repeating later. “Jesus, what boy don’t you lie about?”
The stupid thing is, I used to like Tina. Coveted her whole who gives a fuck? attitude more than I did her breasts, even though I wanted those too. I admired her, for the longest time, because she seemed so above it all. She’s not—she was waiting for her moment to be right at the center of it. She took my place as well as she could. She’s not Penny’s best friend by a long shot, but she’s the girl Penny calls when Penny needs a girl. Sometimes, I think Alek chose her for Penny, after the disaster that was me. Tina’s father owns the Grebe Golf Club and damn, if that isn’t Sheriff Turner’s favorite way to spend his free time.
“Seriously, why is she still here?” Tina turns to Penny. “She lies, right? She lies and Kellan—” My body is an alarm gone off. My body is not my body. My skin tightens enough to suffocate, keeping me in this moment where I stop and she doesn’t. “—has to leave. How is that fair? ‘I want him.’” She does the kind of vocal gymnastics that make her sound like a breathy, love-struck girl and I want to be the violence in her life. “‘I dream about him.’”
Because teenage girls don’t pray to God, they pray to each other. They clasp their hands over a keyboard and then they let it all out, a (stupid) girl’s heart tucked into another girl’s heart. Penny, I want him. I dream about him. I needed someone to hear my prayers and did Penny ever make sure of that when she forwarded my fucking e-mail to everyone in school.
“Tina,” Penny says. The way she says it makes the room still. Her voice has this admonishing tinge to it, like she’s defending me with inflection alone.
But that can’t be right.
“What?” Tina must hear it too, for the edge it puts in her own voice.
“Stop talking and help me get my necklace untangled from my hair.”
That I deflate is the only way I know I wanted it—for her to defend me. And then I’m ashamed of the part of me that still wants that.
“You’re supposed to take your jewelry off before we run…”
“Yeah, well, I forgot. Help me.”
I push out of the locker room on wasted legs. They’re bleeding again. There’s a name in my head and I want it out of my head. It’s amazing what a certain combination of letters can do, how it can string itself around your heart and squeeze.
Nurse DeWitt takes one look at my knees and says to me what he says to everyone: I’m old enough to take care of myself now. So that’s what I do. I sit in the corner of the room and pick at my wounds, painting my nails even redder before finally slapping a Band-Aid on every part of me that needs it.
When I’m done, I turn my phone on. A missed text from Leon, asking if I know whether I can come to his sister’s yet. I debate texting him back just to tell him parts of me are covered in blood because maybe he’d forget about the part of him that likes me. But I don’t. Instead, I text I DON’T WANT TO IMPOSE, which feels weirdly formal but I can’t think of another way to put it. It only takes a minute for him to reply.
CAN I CALL YOU NOW?
SURE.
Why did I say that? I run my thumb lightly over the side of my phone until it buzzes. I glance at DeWitt. He doesn’t care. I’m not breaking any rules, but I wish I was, so this could be stopped. I bring the phone to my ear. “Hi.”
“I keep telling my sister, Caro, about this girl I like at Swan’s and how I think maybe she likes me too.” I twist, hunching my shoulders. If DeWitt looks, I don’t want him to see what Leon’s voice does to me. “Anyway, she doesn’t believe it.”
“Is it that hard for her to believe?” I sound steadier than I
feel.
“Yeah. So even if you don’t come … you like me too, right?” He pauses. “Because then I could at least go with that in my head.”
“Maybe,” I say and I can almost hear him smile.
“If you did come, I asked her before I asked you and it doesn’t bother her. You wouldn’t be imposing. You’d be welcome. It’s a party. We’d have fun.”
I close my eyes and I see a quiet house waiting at the end of a long stretch of driveway and soft, golden lights shining through every window, a hint of music behind their glass. A pickup truck parked in the driveway and it’s so clear and ugly in my head, I forget who I’m talking to and I wonder who Leon thinks he’s talking to.
“What do you say?” he asks.
I open my eyes. I need Leon to tell me who he is in a different kind of language because really, if he’s safe, there’s only one way to find out. It’s not through talking.
i find the pink-and-black lace push-up bra on my bed like it’s meant to be there, a natural part of the landscape. I pick it up. Mom. She thinks she’s doing a nice thing for me.
I push my fingers into the padding. Soft as it is pretty. I rip the tag off the bra and unhook the clasp. It’s okay to try on here, alone. I take off my shirt and the bra I’m already wearing and toss them on the floor. I turn my back to the mirror on my bureau and start sliding my arms through the straps, but they need some adjusting. I fight with them for a minute, almost ruin my manicure trying to slide the little piece of plastic down. I adjust the cups, feel what little breasts I have settle inside. I do the clasp up. It’s a little tight.
I face the mirror.
My heart races in a weird way, like I’m doing something I’m not supposed to be doing, but I’m allowed to do this. I turn to the side and I like my profile even more, the way the bra holds me. I’m so used to being flat but the bra lifts and brings my breasts closer, forcing a kind of curve between them that resembles cleavage. It looks—good.
But I can’t wear it.
If something happens—I don’t want to be wearing it.
I put the pink bra away and pick up the other from the floor, slide it back on. I put on a skirt and then I make it cargo pants. I add a long-sleeve shirt and I’m sweating. I switch out the sleeves for an off-the-shoulder tee and the cargo pants for a pair of shorts. I did my nails earlier, so all that’s left is to reapply my lipstick and then I’m ready.
I sit on the step and breathe the stale air while everything that’s ahead of me turns my empty stomach. Mom is at her job—she cleans an office building every other night—and Todd is at the hardware store buying storage containers for leftovers from the move. They both think I’ll be at Swan’s because I didn’t tell them otherwise. Me on a date with a boy. I didn’t want to see what that looked like on their faces because however they gave it back to me would come from some place I don’t want any part of.
I hear the low rumble of Leon’s Pontiac before I see it. He rounds the corner and takes the street slowly, eventually easing up to the curb. He turns the car off and gets out. He’s wearing dark blue jeans and a gray V-neck T-shirt that hugs his body in all the right ways. He shoves his hands in his pockets, which is okay by me because his hands are forever distracting, all the things they could do.
“Parents around?” he asks, staring at the house.
I stand. “You want to meet them?”
“I thought I’d go for a good impression.”
“They’re not around.”
“Too bad.” He looks me up and down and frowns, reminds me of how busted up my legs are because I’m letting them heal out in the open now, all scabs. “What happened?”
“I ate track in Phys Ed. Not a big deal.”
“Looks like it hurt. You a good runner?”
“When I’m not falling on my face.”
“Fair enough,” he says, and smiles. “Ready to head out?”
No. I nod and follow him to the car. The air conditioner is on but the radio is off and I sink low in my seat as we make our way out of Grebe. I don’t want anyone to see me with Leon. I don’t want him to be a question in anyone else’s mouth.
“So where are your parents?” he asks.
“My mom has this cleaning job and Todd—her boyfriend—he’s out.”
“Boyfriend? Your mom and dad divorced?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“My dad kind of walked out. I don’t think he signed anything.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not.”
It’s awkward for a minute and then Leon starts telling me about how his parents live in Godwit. They had Leon pretty late in life. His mother is a visiting professor at the university there, his father is a dentist. He tells me how he lives on Heron Street in a basement apartment he rents from an old woman who looks after her granddaughters every Sunday. She makes them cookies and always sets aside a dozen for him. He can’t bring himself to admit to her he hasn’t really got much of a sweet tooth.
He tells me how his sister, Caroline, is twelve years older, that she’s a dentist like their father. She and her husband, Adam, a pharmacist, are expecting their first child. They want Leon to move in, rent-free. All he has to do is look after the baby and the house when she goes back to work. It’d be a chance for him to save up for whatever he wants to do next instead of giving his money away to someone else. I wonder what his family would make of mine. My mother, one failed marriage behind her and a boyfriend too broken to work. And me. What am I? Dentists and pharmacists and professors … I pick at the thread on my shorts and stare at my knees, wondering why I didn’t cover them.
“Are you going to do it?” I ask.
“Not sure. Not a big fan of babies. I can’t think of anything less thrilling than looking after one all day and then heading to Swan’s for the night. Might cut into my insane social life.” It makes me laugh, a little. He grins. “Be nice to get ahead, though.”
The path to Wake Lake flies by Leon’s side. Shortly after, we pass the YOU ARE NOW LEAVING GREBE sign and I sit up and watch the houses beside the road give way to farmland.
“What are you saving up for?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. All I know is everything costs something.”
Can’t argue that.
we turn down a private lane where the houses are spaced far apart from each other and they all say money in a way that pretends to be modest, but if you added it up, you could send a kid or two to college. None of the flowerbeds out here are dying and the lawns are green, but the weather hasn’t changed—it’s as hot as it ever is—so that says it all.
Leon drives us to the last house at the end of the street, tucked into woods just waiting to be razed for more houses. I hear music, a steady beat my heart sets itself to. Leon slows and finds a spot to park between two much nicer-looking cars. My palms sweat. I rub them on my thighs.
“You don’t have to be nervous,” Leon says.
“I’m not.”
He smiles and gets out of the car. I take a deep breath and do the same. He meets me at my door and wraps his fingers around mine, and he takes me up the driveway and around the house before I can even really think about his fingers, wrapped around mine.
I can’t remember being invited to anything so nice, except for maybe Grebe Auto Supply’s employees-plus-family-only picnics and parties. There’s a fancy spread of food to pick from and pretty little tables set up close by. I’m acutely aware of my lack of age in this small, classy crowd who seem way more socially adept than me.
Leon leads me to the beautifully decorated gazebo at the back of the yard, where a tall, painfully pregnant-looking woman holds court. Caroline. Caro for short, Leon tells me. She’s in a burgundy maternity dress and matching lipstick that perfectly complements her black skin. Her brown hair is cropped close to her head and her hands rest on her stomach in an almost absently protective way. She’s smiling, but I can tell by the way she shifts from foot to foot that she probab
ly wants to sit down. I see the girls at Swan’s do that all the time when their feet are hurting. I’ve done it myself. When she sees Leon, her eyes light up and it makes my heart stutter. I can’t remember the last time a girl lit up when she saw me. Or maybe I can. I just didn’t know I missed it until now.
“Hey,” Caro says.
“Hey,” he says and he gives her a hug, or at least tries to. “Christ, Caro. I can barely fit my arms around you.”
“You really know how to make a girl feel great about herself,” she says. When they part, she turns to me and I disappear in that second’s worth of scrutiny, worried she’ll see more than I want her to. She smiles, though, so she must not. “Romy. Leon’s told me about you.”
My name sounds so … welcome out of her mouth, it makes the next thought in my head: I want you to be my friend and the thought after that: that’s pathetic.
“You have a beautiful place out here,” I say.
“Thank you.” She crosses the gazebo and grabs two beers from a small table of drinks behind her, one for Leon and one—for me, which makes me feel as adult as everyone else here, which makes me like her even more. A tiny look of longing crosses her face as she watches me twist the cap off my bottle. “Enjoy, because I can’t.” Then she nods at my legs. God, she’s like her brother. Doesn’t miss anything. “What happened?”
“Tripped over my own feet.”
“In track at school. She’s a runner,” Leon explains. “Fast one, apparently.”
“That’s awesome.” She points at her belly. “I can’t even remember what walking is like, let alone running. All I do is waddle now.”
I take a swig of the beer. “Congratulations on…” I nod at her stomach because it feels weird to congratulate someone just because they’re going to have a kid. People have been doing that for as long as there have been people. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Hey, do you babysit? Because Leon doesn’t.”
He rolls his eyes. “Don’t get on me about that tonight.”
“Boy or girl?” I ask.
“Parasite.” She grins at the look on my face. “It’s the truth! It’s sucking me dry. I’ve never been more tired or sick in my life. I’ve hated every minute of this pregnancy.”