before the last bell, Principal Diaz comes over the PA and tells us to be safe, be good, be sober. The impossible dream. Everyone’s humming with the excitement of the lake ahead but if they took a minute to think about it, they’d realize they could get drunk and fuck things up anywhere. Everywhere. But I guess it’s not the same. Not as epic.
It’s good for me, though. In a few hours, there will be stolen kisses and fights and after the weekend, everybody will be talking about someone else—at least for a little while. It makes me feel some kind of lightness and that’s nice. I hold on to it until I get to Swan’s and then I let Leon take its place.
“Break later?”
He asks it as soon as I come in and in that moment before I put my apron on, I swear he can tell what’s different underneath my shirt. It makes me feel warm and weird and maybe not as ready for this as I thought—but I’m wearing the pink bra tonight, either way.
I reach behind me, knot my apron strings, and nod.
“Oh, to be young again,” Holly says, watching us.
“You’re not old,” Leon tells her.
“You’re my favorite, you keep that up.”
It’s the kind of night that’s slow and impatient. No one’s got anywhere they need to be but they all want to be somewhere else, so they’re not happy. If my dad taught me anything, it’s that you can’t make people like that happy. You just have to survive them as best you can. I deal with a woman determined not to tip me no matter how fast I bring out her food and how wide I smile. A man who asks for another waitress when he sees the healing scabs on my legs. An elderly woman who requests Holly, but who refuses to move to her station to be served by her. A boy who sends his burger back four times just because he feels like it.
By then, my break with Leon is staring me down. I glance back at the kitchen. The door swings open and I glimpse him at the grill. His hands. I go to the women’s bathroom and touch up my lipstick and then I think I could be ready for whatever is going to happen with him next. I wash my hands and step back into the diner.
What I thought was the diner.
This is the place where truckers stop to fill their bellies before they hit the road again, where Ibis College kids come to soak up the alcohol after drinking at Aker’s farm; this is the place where the booths are green and the floor is a grimy gray linoleum and the walls are covered in nostalgia pieces and the radio only plays country music. This place, where I work five nights a week and no one knows my name—is not that place anymore.
Across from the wall with the vintage Coke sign, sitting small in a booth, is a girl. Her long blond hair reflects the golden light above, making it look lusher, and the rest of the diner duller. She’s so different from everyone here, so immaculate, she’s impossible to miss.
Penny.
She turns her head my way. I stay perfectly still, like she couldn’t see me if I was still. What if she’s not alone? I look to the window, my gaze sweeping the parking lot for Alek’s Escalade or Brock’s busted-up Camaro but I only find her white Vespa. A gift from her parents to make the divorce easier, like that made any sense.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch Holly making her way over and if I know anything, it’s that I don’t want Holly at Penny’s booth. It’s her station, but she can’t have it. I rip my order pad out of my pocket and pull the pencil from behind my ear. I know I’ll get hell for it later, but it’s the better hell. I cut Holly out. I go to Penny, plant my feet in front of her. She stares at me calmly. I smooth my apron with my trembling hand, trying to figure out how I’m going to do this. How do I do this? It’s your job.
So I do it like it’s my job.
“Can I take your order?”
My voice wavers. I hate myself for it. And there are all these questions in my head, demanding answers. How did she find me out? Her mom? She spends her weekends in Ibis with her mom, but this isn’t the kind of place a Young would eat.
Penny picks up the single page, laminated menu and pretends to look it over.
She says, “I’ll start with a drink.”
I’m supposed to ask her what kind she wants because that’s my job and I need to do this like it’s my job, but seeing her here, in my space—all I know is I want to hurt her until she’s out of it. She asks for a Coke. That’s all. I write it down like an idiot.
When I head back to get it, Holly corners me and she’s pissed.
“What the hell are you doing, Romy?”
“I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “You can take the next two of mine. I just—I thought it was someone I knew. I’m really sorry, Holly.”
“Even if it was, you could’ve asked—”
“I know. I’ll never do that to you again. I wasn’t thinking.”
“You better not.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Holly steps into the kitchen, shaking her head and muttering to herself. I disrespected her and it’s not okay but it is so small compared to what I’m up against right now. I grab the Coke and head back. The country song playing in the background is blurring into one long, sad note and when I reach Penny’s booth, I’m shaking with anger I can do nothing about. I set the glass down, spilling some of the drink onto the table. I watch a little of it waterfall onto the floor. I take a rag from my pocket and sop it up quickly.
“What do you want to eat?”
“Nothing. I want to talk to you.”
“What?”
“I want to talk to you and then I’ll leave.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen, Penny, so I guess I’ll get the check—” She grabs my arm. I try to jerk away but she holds fast. Touching me without permission. There should be a death penalty for that. I watch her pink nails dig into my skin but I don’t feel it. “Let go.”
She says, “Please.”
I can’t remember Penny ever saying please to me, not even when we were friends. Why waste time on a word like please when you’re going to get what you want anyway? It’s not right coming out of her mouth. It’s so wrong, some part of me thinks she shouldn’t have to say it, ever.
“How did you know I work here?”
“Grey, we’ve always known.”
She says this and I feel some small part of me leaving.
She lets go of my arm.
“Sit down,” she says and I do, but not because she asked me to—because I need to.
I ease into the booth and the back of my thighs instantly stick to the vinyl. The diner sounds swell, people eating, talking, dishes clattering in the kitchen, the sizzle of the grill. I don’t look at her. Don’t say anything.
“So is it true?” she asks. “About the DUI?”
It forces eye contact. Maybe this close she’s not as perfect as I’ve said. Maybe she’s got flaws or maybe I need to see them so badly right now, I’m pretending. Maybe that’s a sunburn across her nose. Maybe her lips are dry and maybe her skin is flaking a little, just under her chin. She chews her bottom lip.
“I know it’s not true,” she admits. “And I didn’t know about the underwear.” I give her a look that doesn’t believe it. She concedes: “I knew Brock got Tina to take it for Alek, but I didn’t know what they were planning.”
“What do you want, Penny?”
She smiles but it’s not really a smile, just a twitch that briefly takes both corners of her mouth up. She brings her hand to her forehead like a thought wants out but she’s not sure of it enough to say. A memory skips across my mind, lays itself over this moment. Her, excited, about to change lives.
The Turners’ house. It’s going to be you, me, Alek, and …
Not here.
“Shouldn’t you be at the lake?”
You, me, Alek and …
“Kellan,” she says, like she can see inside me. I flinch. His name is hard enough to think, but spoken aloud it’s a weapon. That hard Kel—a knife going in sharp and easy the less resistance it has to meet—lan.
“No,” I say.
“I—”
; “No.” I say it louder because she must not have heard it if she’s still talking.
“Alek took me to Godwit for my birthday. We stayed with Kellan,” she says, and I stare at the little beads of condensation slowly dripping down the outside of her glass while her voice—her voice. “We went to a club he likes, Sparrow. He and Alek went to get drinks. There was this girl—she came up to me.” She pauses. “She saw me with Kellan. She told me it wasn’t safe to be alone with him. She wouldn’t say why, but the look on her face…”
Less real, I think. I need this to be less real.
“The look on yours.”
It’s not—my face. I shake my head, my eyes still on the glass. No—no. Fuck her. Fuck her for saying that. You can’t just see something like that on someone’s face.
You can’t.
“You didn’t report it. You can still report it,” she says and I reach under the table, dig my nails into one of the scabs on my knees until the wet tells me it’s open. “I looked it up. You still have time. If you do it—something would have to happen.”
I almost laugh, but my voice has left me. The chance of that happening is as dead as the girl Penny’s talking about and that’s what I really want to say to her. She died, Penny, you know that? You know all the ways you can kill a girl?
God, there are so many.
“I wasn’t even going to tell you. But then I saw you in the hall picking at that mannequin and I—” She looks away. “I can’t make it right. I can’t make it right with you, Romy. I know that. But what happens if another girl—”
“Then get her to report it,” I say.
I have to get out of this booth. I need to get out of this booth and do my job but I can’t move. Penny waits. She waits and I don’t move and I don’t say anything and then she goes into her pocket and tosses a few bills on the table. More than enough to cover the order. She slides out of the booth and I sit there stupidly, staring at the crumpled money.
“What are you doing, Romy?”
I look up and Holly is looking down at me, like I’ve done so much that’s wrong tonight. I open my mouth but nothing comes out and she says, you can’t stay in this booth like I didn’t know that. I stare at my hands, at my nails until they blur red.
“Romy,” Holly says. She sounds different now. “Are you all right?”
I move out of the booth so fast, she has to step back. I push through the door and I run into the parking lot. The thin roar of Penny’s Vespa engine reaches my ear.
I watch her leave.
NOW
a wolf is at the door.
He’s not wearing his uniform. It’s strange, seeing the sheriff not in his uniform but this doesn’t have to be anything official, yet. I’m just here today, parent to parent.
Her mother. Doesn’t know what to do, hasn’t known what to do since she found her daughter in the shower, under the running water, still drunk and crying, babbling the truth to the tiles. That next morning, her mother, in tears, asked about it.
Romy, you said something last night. I need to be sure of what you told me.
A truck bed and a boy.
A text, later, from her best friend: YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING STUPID, DID YOU?
Devastation roots her family if denial is not moving them forward. Her father disappeared, couldn’t handle it, and she stayed inside with her mother, trying to figure out what they needed to do and how they needed to do it. She’s any girl and they’re any family, but this boy. He’s special and his family is special.
And now, a wolf at the door.
So let him in.
Paul was at the bar the other night and laid out some pretty serious accusations. You know how word travels around here. He said my son raped your daughter. And then, as they process this one thing, her father (sleeping last night off upstairs) taking it to the world before she knew if that was what she wanted, the sheriff says, of course, no one believes it but that still doesn’t mean he can go around saying it. I want to know why he’s saying it.
God, they are so flustered, so sick, so looking for direction, any direction, they invite him in, they sit him at the kitchen table, they let the conversation start out with coffee, with one sugar or two and do nothing when it moves to the crush she’d been nursing on his son these months and you can’t deny you were attracted to him.
No, she can’t, is what her silence says back to him. She can’t deny that for months she imagined his son’s hands on her body, in that truck, in a bed, anywhere. She pictured it over and over except in her head, she wanted it and her eyes were open.
She hates her heart, that misguided organ in her chest.
Why didn’t it warn her?
You were drunk at my house, Friday night. I’ve talked to my sons and I have talked to Penny. No one else was drinking. You’re underage. I could pursue it, if I wanted. But I won’t.
Because he’s just here today, parent to parent.
Thank you, her mother says, without thinking.
He says, they say you chase after him. That you wore an outfit, hoping that you would catch his attention. Short skirt, skimpy shirt. They? And, reaching into his pocket, unfolding a piece of paper, tell me about what you wrote in this e-mail here:
Penny, I want him. I dream about him.
This cuts a thousand times, her e-mail in his hands. There’s only one place he could have gotten it. The betrayal is more than she thinks she can bear; the one girl who believed in her, doesn’t believe her.
You know what they’re saying? They’re saying Paul’s telling people my son raped your daughter to get back at Helen for firing him. Now maybe they fooled around and maybe she was a little too drunk at the time, but rape? You can’t just call it something like that.
Then what do you call it?
He says, nobody believes it. They think it’s ugly. I think it’s ugly.
He says, I hope we can get this sorted out before you make it worse for yourselves.
He says, but I want to understand, Romy, so you tell me what you think happened.
And it’s not that she tells him it didn’t happen, it’s that by the time he asks, she no longer has a language of her own. But that’s enough. It always is.
Every time I close my eyes, there’s a memory. Every time I open them, I’m still on the road. I’ll never get off this road, not alone. But I’m not alone, I remember. The footsteps stopped. A shadow across my body. Maybe someone nice—but I’m too afraid to look.
“You with me?”
Dirt against my hands. I’m so heavy with heat, my head struggles against it, tries to tell me important things like this is not a safe place and leave.
But I can’t leave if I don’t know how to stand.
“You with me?”
I don’t know what that means. I don’t know anything except this, the air—too dry—the small movements I’m making—hurt—the sun—hot—the sky—it makes me dizzy. I finally squint up at the face above and am relieved to find, not a wolf, but a woman, just like me.
Until I see the uniform.
“romy grey, you hearing me?”
The deputy crouches, setting a bottle of water in front of me. It teeters on the ground, the water sloshing against its plastic sides before settling still as anything, as still as the—lake.
“Oh,” I whisper. My first word in this after.
I try to make sense of her, the deputy. It’s hard to focus at first but when I do, I see brown eyes, curly red hair, a smattering of freckles across a pointed nose. Leanne Howard. Morris Howard’s daughter—he teaches at the elementary school. She’s just shy of thirty.
“You okay?” she asks, but I don’t think she’d ask if I was. I stare at her. “You got a lot of people worried about you, you know that? How’d you get all the way out here?”
Too many questions.
I want—Mom. I reach into my pocket for my phone and only find my lipstick. My phone is gone but I had it last night. I know I did. I look down at myself, at the uneven alignment of my bu
ttons and my heart seizes but—wait. I did that. I did that before Leanne’s car pulled up, remember … I did that because—my shirt was open. And something’s wrong underneath … I remember that too. My bra. I feel it now, undone.
Oh.
“Hey,” Leanne says and she looks past me, over my shoulder. “You alone? How’d you get out here? Can you tell me how you got out here?” My gaze travels from my buttons to my bare, scraped legs, worse than they were from track. “Romy. How’d you get out here?”
“The lake,” I mumble. It comes to me sickly fast, in flashes. Penny. Leaving the diner, biking the highway. The path to the lake—the path. And my feet on it. And the music, music thrumming, bass thumping, thump, thump, thump, I squeeze my eyes shut but that thumping, the pulse pounding in my head, it goes on. The lake. There. I was there. And lights and eyes were on me, and just after the path opened to the water, it cuts to—nothing.
I reach for more but there’s nothing.
I was at the lake.
I’m not anymore.
“Are you hurt?”
I need to be standing. No more … no more questions before I’m standing.
I bring my arm to my mouth and cough into the crook of my elbow before I press my hands to the ground. I get to my knees and bite back the urge to hiss at my raw palms meeting earth. I am hurt. But that has to be where the hurt stops.
“Your mother called us, said you were missing.”
Leanne offers her hand but I ignore it. I find my feet on my own and then I’m standing but I don’t feel like I’m standing.
“My mom—”
“You alone? Penny with you?” she asks. I shake my head and this is a mistake. The world tries to throw me off. Leanne reaches for me. I step back. My body isn’t working the way I need it to, to get out of this. “Come sit in the car. I’ll get the cold air going. I have to call this in and then we’ll get you to a hospital, get you checked out—”
“No.” I’m not letting anyone look at me before I look at myself. “No—” Leanne tries to insist, you need it, Romy, you need to be checked out, and all I can say is, no, no, no and the word gets louder the more she makes me say it, and for once someone finally hears it coming out of my mouth. She says, “Okay, okay—Romy, just—I said okay—”