* * *
I’m in the bathroom at Brice’s house. His parents (or grandparents, I guess) are away for the evening, but he says he wouldn’t care if they were here. Brice is undressing me. I’m trying to protest.
“Olivia, I saw you practically naked already,” he’s saying. “And you’re hurt. We have to clean out all these cuts.”
I flash on being underneath Brice in the dugout, how nice his lips felt on mine. I let him take off my shirt. “It’s mostly my arms,” I say. I remember that I curled into a ball to protect myself.
Brice runs his fingers over my ribs, where Vincent punched me. A large greenish bruise is already starting to form. “Jesus, Olivia, who did this?”
“Vincent,” I mutter. “He’s jealous.”
“He’s crazy.”
I don’t disagree. I let Brice put bandages all over me. I take the ice pack he gives me to put over my eye, where Vincent’s fist exploded against my cheekbone. It’s pretty clear I’m going to have a black eye.
“He can’t do this to you,” says Brice.
“He did,” I say. “He called me a weak little girl. He’s right. I never realized...” Maybe all this time I should have been taking self-defense classes and learning how to punch. I never thought my own cousin would beat me up. Family is supposed to matter. But it seems like nothing’s sacred these days. Not anymore.
“You’re not weak,” says Brice. His eyes slide over my body. “And you’re not a little girl.”
“I couldn’t fight him back. I just let him hit me. I couldn’t stop him.” And something worse than Vincent’s punches hits me cold in the gut. I’m afraid now. I’m afraid of Vincent. That was why he did this. Not because just because he wanted to hurt me. Because he wanted to dominate me. And he’s done that. He’s succeeded.
Brice pauses, holding the Band-Aid he’s about to apply to my forehead. “Maybe you shouldn’t have to fight him.”
“No, I do. If I want to make it in the family, I have to be just as tough as they are.”
“Why do you have to make it in the family?”
“I just do. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve worked so hard to fit in, so they’d think I was one of the guys. So they wouldn’t dismiss me as a girl. And then Vincent has to go and make me into a girl. Make me vulnerable.” I hate him.
“It’s not bad to be a girl.” Brice smoothes the Band-Aid over my skin. He looks into my eyes. He seems so concerned for me. We look at each other like that for several seconds. Neither of us says anything. And then Brice’s face moves forward, and he’s kissing me.
Instead of feeling nice, it hurts, because my face is so messed up. I wince.
Brice moves away. “Sorry.”
I’m not sure whether I wanted him to keep kissing me or not. I mean, if it hadn’t hurt. Because everything’s too weird right now. I never wanted a boy to distract me from my goals, and Brice is a berserker, and... “It’s just—”
“The virus,” he interrupts. “I know.” He starts to gather up the leftover parts of the Band-Aids to throw away.
“Maybe I have it anyway,” I say. It takes a month for the virus to gestate. We don’t know either way. “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”
Brice drops them in the trash can. “Why would you think you had it?”
“Well, we were kind of really close to... You were almost...” Inside me. But it’s really hard to find the voice to say that aloud to Brice, because I’m not drunk the way I was in the dugout, and the whole thing is embarrassing and weird.
“We didn’t fuck,” Brice says.
I’m startled by the coarse way he puts it. “No, we didn’t.”
“You’re fine. You can be happy I have a really idiotic knowledge of female anatomy.”
“Brice.” I put a hand on his arm. I want to comfort him somehow.
He just walks away from me. “I’ll get you some other clothes,” he throws over his shoulder.
Brice returns with one of his t-shirts and a pair of drawstring shorts. I’m grateful because my own clothes are bloody and torn. But if Nonna sees me in Brice’s clothes, she’ll assume the worst. I’m not sure I even want to go home tonight. I can’t handle lying to her. I can’t handle hurting her. I pull Brice’s shirt over my head.
He’s waiting outside the bathroom for me. I think it’s funny that he didn’t watch me get dressed, but he had no problem undressing me.
“You can’t get it from kissing me, you know,” he says.
“My face hurts,” I say. I duck back into the bathroom to grab the ice pack. I press it against my eye, almost as if I’m illustrating my point.
“Right.” He leans against the wall of the hallway outside the bathroom. He looks at his feet. “Why’d you do it, anyway, Olivia? Why’d you come onto me at all that night?”
“It had been a bad day. I was drunk. You seemed like the kind of guy who wouldn’t make it, you know, mean anything.”
He gives me a funny look. “What?”
“Because you’re popular and cute, and girls are always fawning all over you. I figured if it couldn’t be anything more than one time, you’d have lots of other girls to move on to.”
Brice is looking back at his feet again. “You know, even if I hadn’t found out that I was a berserker, I wouldn’t be like that, don’t you?”
“Brice, you were the heartthrob of our high school. Don’t act like you never noticed.”
He shakes his head. “I guess I was too busy trying to pursue this acting stuff. People were always nice to me, but I didn’t... You misjudged me, Olivia.”
I don’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.”
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” he says. “If the world you live in includes you getting beaten up like this, I couldn’t handle it.” He starts down the hallway. “You should probably go. It’s getting late, and I’m going to change.”
Right. Every night at midnight, Brice becomes a berserker. Brice drove my car here, and it’s in the driveway. “Thanks for bandaging me up.”
He grins. “No problem, Calabrese.”
Why is he calling me by my last name again?
Chapter Eight
I don’t go home at all. I’m at the deli when it opens, still in Brice’s clothes. I must look awful, covered in cuts and bruises. I’ve helped myself to food that’s in the cooler, so when Tommy shows up, I’m sitting in the back, eating a sandwich and drinking a Coke. Despite everything, I’m feeling strangely calm. And I’m going to distract myself from this Vincent issue by figuring out what the heck my mother knew. That’s all I’m going to think about.
Tommy is carrying a big paper bag with meat in it. He drops it when he sees me. “Olivia, what happened?”
I just keep eating my sandwich. “I’m fine.”
Tommy rushes over to me. He lifts my chin so he can look at my face. “Someone did a number on you.”
I yank my head away from Tommy and take another bite of the sandwich. “It’s not important right now.”
“Not important?”
“Tommy, what do you know about the spells we use on the charms we sell?”
“Who hit you?”
“Are they different than other jettatori families’ spells?”
“You tell me who hit you, and by God, I’m going to find him and—”
“No, Tommy. You’re not going to do anything. That will just make it worse.” I stuff the rest of the sandwich into my mouth and chew. “You think we could get our hands on an Ercalono charm?”
Tommy glares at me. He shakes his head, and he goes back to pick up his bag. He starts thrusting packages of meat into the cooler. “Did the Ercalonos do this? Is that what you’re telling me? I thought we’d smoothed that over.”
“It wasn’t the Ercalonos,” I say. “It was Vincent.”
Tommy stops what he’s doing. “Vincent? But he’s family.”
I laugh. “Exactly what I thought.”
“I’m going to throttle him within an inch of his li
fe.” Tommy shoves more meat into the cooler, emptying the bag. He slams the cooler shut.
“If I weren’t a girl, Tommy, would you still be rushing out to beat Vincent up for me? If were a guy, what would you say to me?”
He leans against the cooler, considering. Then he nods. “You’re right. It can’t be me. If you weren’t a girl, I’d tell you to go and teach him a lesson. I’d tell you that the only way you could save face was to beat him worse than he beat you.”
And there’s the problem, isn’t it? Because I can’t beat Vincent. “He’s stronger than me.” I get up, taking the plate I was using for my sandwich to the front of the deli and depositing it in one of the sinks. I could wash it, but Tommy pays someone good money to wash dishes.
When I come back into the back room, Tommy says, “Who says you have to use your fists?”
I don’t understand for a minute, and then I nod.
Tommy comes over to me and inspects my face again. “You’re very tough, Olivia. I know a lot of guys who’d be crying for their mommies after a beating like this. You belong as the head of this family. You’re built for it. Don’t let Vincent try to convince you any different.”
“Thank you,” I say to Tommy. And I’m filled with a surge of rightness, as if all the things I was worried about last night when I kept asking myself why I was part of the jettatori somehow don’t mean anything. I was built for this.