I started to decline but Brian spoke for me. “Going out for breakfast.”
Brian reached into the strainer in the sink and pulled out a handful of blueberries, popping them into his mouth. His fingertips were purple. His mom—Paula—shook her head. “Don’t let him touch your white shirt with that hand.” Shirt was kind of an overstatement. It was a tank top, tight, nearly transparent, so anyone could see the detailing on the top of my pink bikini. I folded my arms across my stomach.
Brian grinned, reached his fist into the colander again, and squeezed a handful of berries. His hand came out coated in purple. He walked toward me, smiling. I backed up against the wall, looking from him to his mother. “Brian, leave the poor girl alone.”
But he didn’t. He leaned into the wall, blocking me in, which was way too intimate for his mother to see, and apparently she agreed because she looked away. He whispered, “Won’t hurt a bit.” Then he pressed his right hand around my upper arm, leaving behind a tattoo of his imprint.
And seeing as Paula was pretending we weren’t there and had her head in the refrigerator, I strode to the sink, squeezed the cool berries in my hand, felt the juice coat my fingers, and planted my hand on his upper arm.
“You own me now,” he’d said, and he grabbed the bottom of my shirt, balled it up, and pulled me toward him. It was stained now, I was sure. I squirmed away from him, because his mother was right there, and also because he was ruining my shirt.
I turned my back to him and washed my hands in the sink. And then I felt him beside me, sharing the same water.
Then a boy in nothing but boxers barged into the room. “What the—”
Paula spun around, cutting his sentence in half. “Dylan, this is Brian’s friend, Mallory.”
“Yeah, I know who it is. I’m just wondering why my lab partner from chemistry is in my kitchen at nine in the morning.” And there was another question lingering in the air as he cut his eyes from me to Brian.
Paula narrowed her eyes. “Your lab partner?”
I looked at the floor, not because of his mom’s question, but because of Dylan’s look. And because Dylan was in his boxers. With Brian standing right there. Like Brian might see something in the way Dylan was looking at us, or he might see something in the way that I was looking at Dylan. I leaned into Brian’s side, hoping it hurt Dylan to see.
It did. I could tell. “Seriously?” Dylan said. And I was worried he wasn’t going to stop there.
“Brian,” Paula said, “a word, please?”
Brian laughed and ran a hand through his hair. “Don’t worry, Mom. She’s eighteen. Right, Mallory? Tell my mom so she’ll get off my case.” I liked Brian. I liked Brian in the way that girls like boys when they see them surfing. And the way girls like boys slinging their arms over them in front of their friends. And I liked the way he reminded me of Dylan, only he was Dylan times two. More outspoken, easier to read. And best of all, he didn’t already have a girlfriend.
Maybe I’d come to like him more than that, but I didn’t know him well enough yet. We’d never crossed paths when we were in the same school, and he’d been away at college this past year. He’d be going back there soon enough. I was still New Girl, and he was still a little intimidating, which was something I wasn’t used to.
“Eighteen,” I said, my breath coming too fast. “I’m just pretty bad at science.”
Brian laughed at the lie and Dylan cringed, while Paula’s eyes moved from me to Dylan to Brian to me again. Like she was assessing my age, holding my face next to each of her children for comparison. I knew she could tell. I should’ve been with Dylan.
“I didn’t realize you guys knew each other,” Brian said.
“Just a little,” I answered, because after that first lie, the next came easy.
“Yeah,” Dylan said, like he was trying to mock me, but it didn’t come out right. I couldn’t understand how Brian didn’t notice. Probably because he didn’t pay that much attention to his little brother. Or maybe I had just spent way too long paying way too much attention to Dylan, trying to pull meaning from every shift of his expression. I was still doing it right then, trying to decipher his words: was there an inflection where there shouldn’t have been? Was he secretly directing his words at me? Was there meaning just below the casual phrase? I’d always thought there was. But maybe I’d been imagining it.
Brian planted a kiss on his mother’s cheek and pulled me down the hall again. And when I said good-bye, her mouth was a tight line. Her eyes creased. Her shoulders tensed. It was like, even then, she knew I’d somehow ruin his life.
She was right.
I’d marked him with my handprint. And two weeks later, he was dead.
Now she had marked me.
The stain on our door was dry. I picked up a rag from the sink, doused it in vinegar, and started rubbing. That’s how I got his handprint off my arm later that day. Brian kept his on. It took three days to fade.
“Stop,” my mother said as I scrubbed the back door. “Stop. The fingerprints. You’re ruining it.”
Seemed to me like I was fixing it.
Semantics.
Dad helped me scrub, but the stain wouldn’t budge. And the whole time, I felt this prickly feeling along my back, the kitchen charged with this energy, and it grew and grew until it felt like the entire room would burst from the tension.
I threw the rag on the floor and retreated to the living room. Dad said, “I’ll take care of this,” like it was up for discussion or something, and disappeared into the garage. He returned with a bucket of leftover white paint and applied a thick coat over the entire door before he left for work. I watched from the safety of the living room.
We had to leave the door open for the paint to dry, so Mom sat at the kitchen table, staring out the open door.
Mom used to fight to keep the doors open as soon as spring hit. “Let the outside in,” she’d say.
Dad would position himself in the entranceway, like he was doing the door’s job, and say, “The bugs, Lori.”
She’d turn to me and mouth the bugs, and I’d smile. “They won’t stay forever,” she promised. But Dad hated bugs. Stomped them with his work shoes, using twenty-thousand times the necessary force. Or he’d chase them around with a flyswatter, stalking them from room to room.
But he always caved to her. We both did. Everyone did. I think maybe it was her smile. Or maybe the way she’d laugh at you, but also kind of with you. Or the way she’d just declare something and expect that that would be the end of it.
But now she was terrified of what might come through open doors. Or open windows. Even unlocked bedroom doors.
The new version of my mother had two gears. One where she sat still and stared off into the distance, like now, and another where she fluttered unpredictably around the house, never making eye contact. She fluttered when she woke—paused through the middle of the day—and fluttered again before bed. She darted from window to window, diagonally across the room and back again, with no real pattern. She revisited the same window two, three times. She flipped the locks, open, closed. She turned the deadbolts, unlocked, locked. She checked the upstairs windows.
And three nights ago, I waited in the hall outside my bedroom door. I waited for her to finish and retreat into her room. I held out my hand to steady her, to ground her again. To make her look at me. I touched her elbow and she flinched. I drew back my arm.
Then she locked eyes with me for a fraction of a second and said, “Good night, Mallory,” backed into her bedroom, and shut the door.
And then she turned the lock.