“Good. If she and Deshani get angry enough, maybe they can push the case to Ward’s boss.”
He can still remember the first time he met Priya, how relieved he was at her fury, that it meant she was that much less likely to cry, because he stopped being good with weeping girls the first time he was faced with one who wasn’t Faith. But it’s been five years since they met, and while pissed-off Priya is a decidedly entertaining thing to watch, he doesn’t want that fury to focus. Not when he knows what it takes for her to flare from irritation (default) to rage (exhausting). Not when he knows how badly she comes down from that kind of anger, how fragile it can make her and how long it can last.
He promised her he’d never lie, not even to make her feel better, and she said she didn’t want to know anything about any of the other girls, but somewhere along the way, honoring that request started to feel like a lie. Two years ago, it started to feel like lying, but he kept his silence, because she didn’t want to know and he didn’t want to scare her, not when some of that anger had finally started seeping away.
Vic’s battered loafers nudge his ankle. “She’ll be okay. She always is.”
But he knows better than Vic what Priya struggles with when she tries to make sense out of all of this, when she tries to frame her sister’s murder into a bigger picture. Because Vic already had so much to worry about, and Eddison not enough, so he’s kept that secret for Priya and Deshani, and has never mentioned the food binges that leave the girl sweating and vomiting on the bathroom floor because her sister is gone—just gone—and there will never be a way to make sense of that.
When Faith got taken, he started smoking, not in spite of the surgeon general’s warning but because of it, because he knew it was slowly killing him and that made more sense. He didn’t try to stop until a couple of years after Vic took him under his wing, didn’t actually stop until Priya wrinkled her nose and told him he smelled worse than the boys’ locker room at her school.
Somewhere in asking her how she knew what the boys’ room smelled like, he’d forgotten to finish reaching for the cigarette. It’s still there sometimes, the gesture, the need, sometimes even the cigarette, but it isn’t the same as it was. Maybe because of Priya. More likely, because once he saw the impulse manifested in someone else, it didn’t bring the same comfort. So still because of Priya.
This time it’s Ramirez who kicks him—gently, because the pointed toe of her monstrous heels hurts like a bitch when she puts a swing behind it—and nods. The pen shifts, but doesn’t let go of her hair. “No matter how many times they break, they always put each other back together. Deshani’s there to catch the pieces if she falls apart.”
What was it Vic told him, back in November? Some people stay broken, others put themselves back together with all the sharp bits showing?
He’d meant Inara, but it served just as well.
Taking a deep breath, he pulls his phone out of his windbreaker pocket and opens her message thread. No Oreos, okay? Try?
Less than a minute later, he gets back We smashed all of them up to make truffles. Better/worse? And I’ll try.
It shouldn’t even surprise him that his phone buzzes again a minute later, this time from Deshani’s number. I’ll keep an ear out; her room is snack-free, so I’ll hear her on the stairs if she gets itchy.
And she will, because she’ll probably be sitting on the floor of her bedroom, back against the door, and listening through the night to hear the creak of stairs or shuffle of carpet. Deshani is probably what God had in mind when he made mothers so fiercely protective.
“In Colorado, it’s illegal for anyone under the age of eighteen to have or use a stun gun,” he says finally, and both partners give him the slightly jaundiced look that comes of really not trusting where this is going. “She’s already got pepper spray, so what’s the next best thing we can give her?”
“Baseball bat?” suggests Ramirez.
Vic pinches the bridge of his nose and slowly shakes his head.
Her name is Libba Laughran, and the first time you see her, her multi-layered prom dress is hiked up enough to show the shoulders of the boy with his face between her thighs. She’s sitting on the hood of a car, one hand holding up her skirts, the other in his hair, throaty cries filling the night as if they’re not right out in the open, as if no one could possibly hear and come investigate.
Her dress is so bright a pink it nearly glows in the night, but on the wrist of the hand in his hair, you can see a corsage with a white carnation, the edges of the petals deep red like they’ve been dipped in blood.
You see her holding his hand at church, their bodies an appropriate distance from each other but their hands always reaching out to the other whenever one steps away. You see them at the movies, walking to and from school.
Fucking each other in the hammock in her backyard and laughing each time they nearly fall out of it.
They love each other, you think, at least as much as they can understand it when they’re so young. They whisper to each other, end every phone call and conversation with it. Neither of them even seems to notice anyone else.
There’s something to that, maybe, but it’s not going to save her. This isn’t a thing that good girls do, no matter how in love they might be. It isn’t respectful, it isn’t right. She’s young, so it’s understandable, but you can’t let it go unremarked. You can’t let her friends think this is forgivable, acceptable.
It isn’t until they’re caught—her mother comes home several hours earlier than expected, when they’re still naked and involved with each other in the backyard—that you realize just how young she is.
Fourteen years old, and already a harlot.
Her mother is weeping as she chases the half-dressed boy through the yard and away from their property, ignoring her daughter crying behind her. You lean against the other side of the fence and listen to the mother’s lecture, all the ways she and her husband taught their daughter better than this.
You’re not surprised when Libba sneaks out of the house that night to go find the boy she loves.
You’re not surprised when she fights you, because she’s clearly a girl who goes after what she wants, and she wants that boy, she wants to live.
You just can’t let that happen.
This boy may treat her gently, but she’s too young to know what men will do, so you have to show her.
You have to show her all she’ll ever be to men when she stops being a good girl. It’s not something she can get back, after all.
You start to leave her there, on the church floor, but she’s only fourteen. So you drape her rags back around her, enough to cover the important bits, and lay the carnations over the cloth.
White, tipped in red that bleeds down through the petal veins into the heart.
You remember.
Mum shoos me up to bed around one. I sit on my bed, shadows dancing across the walls from the flickering light of the electric tea candle in front of Chavi’s picture. It’s the same one we have downstairs, though this frame is made out of chips of colored glass and sweeps of metal. It’s the same ring of yellow silk chrysanthemums.