My eyes adjust to the red emergency light glowing halfway down the wall where more stairs descend.
When the door slams, Reeve pinches my arm.
Ow. “What is this place?” I ask as she brushes by, hip-checking me into the railing.
“Robbie calls it the pit of Acheron,” Reeve says.
God, she’s fast; I have to run to keep up. She has on this really short skirt and platforms, the pink crop top. Such a beautiful blur.
“Robbie found this place, like, the first week of school and we’ve been coming here.” Reeve’s voice echoes. “Nobody knows.”
A burst of excitement jets up my spine.
Reeve flips on a light switch and an underworld labyrinth illuminates. Fluorescent bulbs flicker and buzz; metal glints. Tubes and aluminum boxes and vertical poles; horizontal vents snake and maze across a mile of concrete flooring. It’s the school’s heating and cooling system.
“Here!” Reeve calls. Her voice bounces. She ducks behind a floor-to-ceiling steel column, and when I circle it, she’s gone.
“Over here.” Reverberation. I twist.
“No, this way.”
I spin around.
She laughs.
“Reeve.”
I hear her plats clopping.
“Back here.”
I suck at hide-and-seek.
Between two coffin-like units I come out at a drainage pit. Reeve jumps off a pipe and lands behind me.
I yelp.
She clasps her hands around my waist and turns me around.
Don’t let go. I grab her hands and hold them there. We hook eyes.
“Come. This way.” She breaks free and we navigate through a sea of aluminum poles, boxes, vents. At the farthest end is a door. “It was locked,” Reeve says, “but Robbie fixed that.”
He fixed it by bashing in the door until it splintered and the latch broke loose.
Reeve palms the door open and steps inside. She curls her index finger at me. As I move up next to her, her finger touches the tip of my chin. I think she might pull me in and kiss me, but instead she flips on the light.
I squint at the sudden brightness.
There’s a short sofa, like a loveseat, with the foam popping out. A couple of plastic tubs shoved together for a table. Reeve’s eye-shadow kits and eyeliner pencils, mascara, brushes, paintbrushes in all different widths and textures, glitter and beads and sequins.
Reeve says, “It’s awesome, isn’t it?”
With her here, yeah. But basically it’s a pit.
She takes my hand and twirls me around under her arm. I have to duck to make it. She pushes me onto the loveseat, then hovers over me. “You’re the only one I’ve ever brought here,” she says.
Thank you, God or whoever.
She lowers herself to sit next to me. “I don’t bring my girls down here.”
“So … I’m your first?”
A smile tugs her lips. “You wish.” Her head angles up at me and we hold eyes so long it almost becomes a contest.
I blink first.
“What did you want to talk about?” she asks.
I hate to break the communion, or whatever this is. “Robbie.”
She drops her eyes. “What about him?”
I want her focus back on me—us. “I just need to ask you … to show you …” My backpack traveled with me through the labyrinth, it’s such an appendage. I fish out the spiral with Robbie’s essay in it and pass the folded pages to Reeve.
“I’m sorry you got stuck with him,” she says, taking the essay. “He needs to graduate.”
“No, it’s all right. He’s…”
Her eyes slit.
“Funny,” I finish.
“In the head,” she mutters. She shifts on the loveseat to pull one leg underneath her. “He almost died when he was a baby.”
“Really?”
“No, I’m lying. You can’t believe a word I say.” Her one plat clunks to the floor and she pulls off the other. The pages rustle in her lap. She reads aloud: “‘May 23 I kill my mother. May 24 I killed my father.’”
Reeve stops. “Nice.”
“That’s only the beginning.” I remove the first sheet.
She reads the second page to herself, and the third. Her eyes dance across and down the pages and she doesn’t breathe. She bends at the waist and her hair falls across her face so I can’t see her reaction. When she gets to the end, she says, “You should correct his spelling and punctuation.”
“What?”
“He has an IQ of a hundred and sixty, you know.”
“Really?”
She clicks her tongue, like, Yes, you should know. What do I know about autism?
Reeve rereads something. As she does, she plucks eyelashes out of her eyelid. I notice then how almost all the eyelashes on her right eye are missing.
“Is any of it true?” I ask.
“It’s Robbie’s interpretation,” she says.
“What’s your interpretation?” What did she write in her essay? “Is he … Are you …?” God. How to ask this? “Are you guys being molested?”
Reeve laughs.
My face flushes.
“I’m sorry.” She claps a hand over her mouth. “It’s just…” She laughs silently behind her hand.
She’s laughing at me. My eyes skim up and down her arm, any square of exposed skin I can see. What do cutting scars look like? I just blurt it out: “Do you cut?”
She stops laughing. Releasing the leg from underneath her, she arches away from me and says, “Johanna, you can’t begin to understand.”
Is she right? Because I don’t understand any of it. My own tragedies are so … ordinary.
“Don’t ever ask me questions you can’t handle the answers to.” She stares down at Robbie’s essay.
She thinks I’m naïve. Which, okay, maybe I am.
I reach over and place my hand on her leg. “I want to know you.”
She sucks in a breath, like my touch burned her, or my words did. I remove my hand and she exhales. “All that stuff happened in the past,” she says. “It’s shit from Robbie’s childhood. Nice childhood, huh?”
It was yours too, I think. “So,” I say, “it’s over?”
Reeve pushes to her feet and the essay sails to the floor. “The asshole’s gone. He’s been gone for years.” She drops to her knees by her makeup, picks up a tube of mascara, and unscrews it.
“But who’s that guy at your house?”
“What guy?” She opens a lighted mirror.
“That guy who beat up your mom.”
She slaps the mirror down. “Is that all you wanted to talk about? My crappy home life?”
“No.”
“What else?”
The tension crackles. “Us.”
She shakes her head. “There is no us.”
“Not yet,” I say. “But I want there to be.”
The atoms between us charge and split. Reeve says slowly, “Can’t you hear? Did I not point it all out? You can’t handle me.”
“You don’t know what I can handle.”
“Fine,” she says.
“Reeve.” In one breath, I let out the life I’ve been holding in. “I want you. I don’t care what baggage you bring. I’ve—I’ve got stuff too.”
This shakes her visibly. She pushes to her feet and heads for the door. I shoulder my pack. “Don’t forget Robbie’s memoir.” She points to the floor and I stoop to reassemble the strewn pages.
“He’s supposed to write about high school, isn’t he? Make him start over.”
“Okay,” I say. We’ll start at the beginning. You and me, Reeve. Let’s begin.
“Will you toss me my shoes?”
I do better than that. I gather the pair of plats and kneel in front of her to slip them onto her feet. I clasp her right ankle and her toes curl under. I run my index finger across the bridge of each toe.
She closes her eyes and opens her mouth.
I rise to face her and the ligh
t extinguishes. She says, “Forget it.”
“No.” I take her hand. “I know what I want, Reeve.” Enough wasted time. “I know what I can handle.”
Chapter 13
“Johanna, there you are.” Tessa sits up in one of the lawn chairs out back, crocheting a square of pink and purple yarn. Her yarn bag overflows with similar squares, like she’s making quilt blocks. I check out her stomach to see if there’s a change. “Come over here,” she says.
I almost say, You come here. I know what she’s going to ask.
“Your graduation”—Tessa continues to work—”is on May twenty-third, right?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Do you want a party?”
“A what?”
“If you want, we can plan a graduation party.”
We, as in you and me? Or you and Martin? “That’s okay,” I say. “Novak’s having one.” Novak’s mom is planning this extravagant celebration. Now that Novak’s being evicted, though, are the party plans canceled?
“So, you could have one too,” Tessa says.
Who would I invite? Novak’ll be busy that day. Reeve? Would Reeve come to my party?
Tessa glances up, shielding her eyes from the sun. My eyes laser into her belly. I think the bulge looks bigger, which is a relief. The miscarriage happened right before she flew home to talk to Mom about “making arrangements.” I never got to tell her how excited I was about becoming an aunt, getting a niece or nephew. I love babies.
Thank God I didn’t say anything then. It was like Tessa was avoiding me, anyway. Novak had brought over a knitting project she said wasn’t turning out right and she needed Tessa’s help. They were in the dining room when I came out of Mom’s bedroom. Tessa was bawling her eyes out. Novak said to me, “She lost the baby.”
Novak hugged Tessa. I went over to be with her too, but Tessa got up fast and left. I ended up consoling Novak.
Tessa shoves her crocheting in her bag and stands. “We’re coming to your graduation.”
“You don’t have to,” I say.
“We want to.” She starts past me.
I scrape my foot in the dirt. “I don’t even know if I’m going. Hardly anyone goes.” That’s probably not true. Everyone is talking about announcements and rings and the slogans they’re painting on their caps. Novak complained about the limited number of tickets she got for family members because all her aunts and uncles and cousins are flying in.
Tessa snipes, “Well, let me know, okay? I already put in for the day off. And so did Martin.”
I snarl behind her back, “Oh, you’ll be the first to know.” Believe me, I’ll send you a personal announcement.
Reeve says, “Hi.” It stops me in my tracks. She adds, “I thought I’d find you here.” She’s seated at the teacher’s desk.
She was looking for me?
“He’s starting over. He needs supervision, discipline.” Reeve stiff-fingers Robbie at his desk. “Get to work, wanker.”
Robbie goes, “I only cooperate with Johanna.”
I say, “Then get to work, wanker.”
Reeve smiles at me.
God, wipe me off the floor.
She orders him, “Use proper English and punctuation. Don’t be lazy.”
Robbie thumbs his nose at her, then lowers his head and begins scribbling on a clean sheet of paper. Reeve gets up and comes toward me. She’s wispy. I expect her to rise like a balloon with a string. Then I’d reach up and pull her down.
She clenches my upper arms in both her hands and pushes me out the door. Without taking her eyes off me, she says, “Keep working, Robbie. We’ll be back.” She steers me across the hallway and keeps going until I hit the wall. “What have you done to me?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t stop thinking about you.”
My heart thumps.
“You bewitched me,” she says. “You did some kind of juju spell.” Her eyelids glimmer in iridescent pinks and blues, a sequin on each tear duct. She can’t. Stop thinking. About me?
“It’s mind control,” I say. “You will succumb.”
She pooches her lips. “I’m so mean to you.”
My tailbone still hurts and I found a bruise where she pinched me. “No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.” She drops her hands and steps back. “I don’t want to be.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” She looks off to the left. “It means I like you.” The trace of a smile on her lips. “Isn’t that stupid? It’s so wrong.”
“No, it’s not.”
She shakes her head.
“The liking me part. That’s right.”
“There’s this party at Amanda Montero’s. Do you want to go? You’ll be risking your life if you say yes.”
“Yes,” I say.
“I mean it.” Her face and voice are serious. “I’m not a nice person.”
I look into her very soul. All I see is beauty.
Reeve says, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Robbie fills the doorframe and announces, “I’m done.” He walks up to me and thrusts his papers in my face.
“Watch it.” Reeve jabs him in the gut. “You almost hit her.”
I absently scan the papers and think, It’s nowhere near long enough. “When’s Amanda’s party?” I ask.
“Friday night.” Reeve clubs Robbie on the arm and he steps back, out of our space. I automatically think, Don’t hurt him.
“You want me to pick you up?” I ask.
“No. God, no. I’ll come and get you.”
This is happening, right? It isn’t a hallucination, or a mental stimulation. “When?”
Reeve pushes Robbie toward the exit. “Like, nine o’clock?”
Wait. “I have to work Friday.”
“Then forget it.”
“Only till ten. Or ten-thirty.”
“Can I come to the party?” Robbie asks.
Reeve stops and slugs him on the arm. “Don’t be a moron.”
His expression doesn’t change, but something does. Reeve’s eyes soften. She blinks up at me and says, “Can he come? We could put him on a leash and tie him to a tree.”
Okay, this is weird. A date with both of them? “Um, sure,” I say.
Reeve smiles at me, apology and tenderness and sexiness in that smile. She goes, “Did I forget to mention, you go out with me, you get benefits?”
Benefits? Or burdens? Never mind, I think. I’ll take any piece of Reeve Hartt I can get.
The three of us head outside, where the bus is slowing at the light. “Let me give you a ride,” I tell Reeve. “I’ll drop you at the corner or something.”
“No.”
Robbie says, “You can drive me.”
“Shut up.” She kicks him. “Okay. But leave us off at the 7-Eleven. And promise you won’t go to my house—ever again.”
“I promise.”
Her arm grazes mine, igniting a skin fire. A car length into the parking lot, Reeve skids to a halt and Robbie plows into her.
There’s someone in my car. Leaning out the passenger window, Novak flicks an ash off the end of her cigarette.
Reeve says, “On second thought.”
I catch her arm.
She twists out reflexively and shoves Robbie backward.
“Wait.” I grab her arm again.
She chops my hand down.
Ow. That hurt.
Reeve’s face pales. She hustles away with Robbie in tow.
“It’s fine,” I call. “Reeve—”
“Just forget it,” she barks over her shoulder. “Forget it.”
“Was that Reeve?” Novak has her shoes off and her feet up on my dashboard. “Who was the guy with her?” she says.
My eyes stray back to Reeve and Robbie, loping to catch the bus. “Her brother.”
“Flatliner is her brother? God, Johanna.” Novak flicks her ash. “You sure know how to pick ‘em.”
I snap, “What does that mea
n?”
Novak sits up straight. “Reeve Hartt’s a cold, hard bitch. And you’re too good for her.”
I get in and crank the ignition. “Who the hell are you to be giving me advice about who I should date?”
Novak’s head lolls back. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I just can’t believe you like her.” She tosses her still-lit butt out the window. “Does she like you?”
“I know it must seem impossible to you.”
Novak casts me that withering look. “You’re taking everything I say wrong.” As I back out of the space, she tells me, “I’m moving in with Dante. I have no choice. His mom says I can sleep in the basement with the cockroaches.”
If that’s supposed to make me feel guilty …
“It’ll be cool,” Novak adds quickly, forcing a smile. “There’s a futon down there, and a TV. Mold and mice to keep me company.”
Dante’ll sneak down. It won’t be that bad.
“Could you do me a favor?” she asks. “Drive me home? Not my home. To my parents’ house.”
“Where’s your car?” I slow at the intersection.
“Dante has it. He totaled his on Sunday.”
“What?” I turn to Novak. “Is he all right?”
“Yeah. Oh yeah.” She clutches a knee to her chest. “He fell asleep and jumped the median, then hit a retaining wall. He walked away. The wall didn’t.”
“Geez,” I say.
“So I gave him my car.”
“You gave it to him?”
“Loaned it. Whatever. What’s mine is his.”
I hope she doesn’t tell her parents that. “I’m glad he wasn’t hurt.” I guess.
She opens her purse and lights up another cigarette. There’s something she isn’t telling me.
“What?” I say.
She billows a cloud of smoke from her open mouth. A sneaky grin creeps across her lips. “So, lonely lesbo has a fuck buddy.”
I hit the speed bump hard. Damn. Straight.
Soon.
Chapter 14
Reeve isn’t in school the rest of the week and I don’t see Robbie either. I don’t even know if we’re going to the party or not. Why didn’t I get her phone number? How did we leave it? Did she really ask me?