44
Before
“What are you wearing?” Sawyer wanted to know.
I glanced at myself in the mirror as I cradled the phone between my ear and shoulder. It was the Friday after I’d gotten my letter from Northwestern; he was supposed to be picking me up in twenty minutes for what, he promised, was going to be a Very Big Date. “Why?”
“Because I want to make sure we’re not wearing the same thing.”
“Shut up.” It was the middle of May, uncomfortably hot. “Everything I put on makes me sweat. So maybe nothing.”
“I see.” He was smiling, I could hear it. “Now there’s an idea. Be ready in ten, yeah? We’re celebrating. My girlfriend got into college this week.”
We drove to South Beach that night, windows of the Jeep rolled all the way down; the air conditioner had finally given out a few weeks before, and I smelled ocean and summer. Charley Patton twanged out into the heat: Took my baby to meet the mornin’ train… Sawyer kept one hand on my leg as we made our way down 95, breaking contact occasionally to rub at a twitching muscle in his jaw.
“I like your wrists,” he commented suddenly, glancing over at where my hands were resting in my lap. He traced the underside of my forearm with the tip of his finger.
I looked at him skeptically. “My wrists?”
“Yeah,” he said, half smiling as he switched lanes. “Relax. I don’t have, like, a weird wrist thing. I just like yours. They’re small. Like bird bones.”
“Bird bones,” I repeated.
“Yeah.” He paused. “See? Now you ruined the moment.”
“You were making a moment?”
“I was trying!”
I laughed. “Sorry. Do it again.”
“No!” he said. “The moment is over.” But he was laughing, too.
South Beach was shiny like a carnival, all Art Deco buildings and neon storefronts, but the Breezeway, where we wound up, made the Prime Meridian look like the bar at the Ritz. We had to walk down a dark, garbage-strewn alley to get to the door, and I wondered how Sawyer knew where he was going. You drove all this way to bring me here when all of South Beach is lit up like Christmas? I wanted to ask him, but I wasn’t in the mood for a fight.
Sawyer held my hand as he expertly wove through the crowd, pulling me along like deadweight. It seemed to me that he liked crowds, big noisy crushes of people. It seemed to me that he was good at them.
He let go when we got to the bar, peering through the smoke like he was looking for somebody. “Wait here,” he said in my ear. His breath tickled, set my dangly earring swinging.
“Why?” I squinted, suddenly suspicious. I had to raise my voice to be heard over the music, something thumping and loud I didn’t recognize. “Where are you going?”
“Just wait a sec. We’ll go grab dinner right after this, I promise.”
I sighed and headed for the bathroom. I’d downed a soda on the ride. When I was finished, I killed time by reading the graffiti on the wall next to the empty Tampax dispenser, making up stories in my head to go with the scribbled initials, the doodled hearts, the swears. I was getting very good at killing time. My shoes were sticking to the floor, and I was picking my way toward the exit when I heard one yell, a woman’s, rise above all the others.
“What’s going on?” I asked a slightly inebriated guy as I rounded the corner from the small hallway that housed the restrooms. It had gotten more crowded since I’d been gone, and I couldn’t see the action.
“Two idiots got into it,” he told me, after looking me up and down in a way that made me shudder. Then, as if perhaps that wasn’t clear enough: “Fight.”
I looked around for Sawyer, saying a quick prayer that I knew was useless even as it ran through my brain. Standing on my tiptoes, trying to see over the crowd, I realized that one of the two idiots getting into it was absolutely my boyfriend. Suddenly, our little trip to the Breezeway made a lot more sense.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, realization dawning bright and harsh. I could see the bouncer and the bartender moving in to break it up, and I stood frozen for endless seconds, debating whether to move toward them or flee. I whimpered as a fist connected with Sawyer’s cheek, and felt the acid rising up in my throat as he reared back and slammed his knuckles into the other guy’s mouth. He was a good fighter, I realized dully, then turned around and pushed through the crowd toward the door.
I was on my heel and into the alley even before the guy Sawyer had talked to at the door pulled him out of the bar. “Dude, I’m not wasted,” he was saying, but the bouncer didn’t seem to care. “He started it, I swear.”
“He belong to you?” the man asked me.
I almost said no. Sawyer looked at us sullenly. “Yeah, I guess,” I replied. “Thank you. Sorry.” The bouncer nodded and shrugged and turned to go back inside, and I pulled Sawyer’s car keys from his back pocket as we walked toward the street. I was tired of driving home. “Get in the car,” I said.
“Reena, that was supposed to be so quick, but that guy—”
“Don’t talk,” I interrupted.
“We were going to go somewhere else—”
“I said don’t talk to me!” I started the car. “Is that why you brought me all the way down here?” I demanded. He didn’t reply—because I’d told him not to, I suppose—so I barged ahead. I was close to tears, I was so angry. “Seriously? And you tried to make it look like a date. Because I got into college? Jesus. I don’t believe you. I seriously do not believe you.”
“It was supposed to be a date,” he muttered. “I was going to take you someplace else. It would only have taken a second if that guy hadn’t been such a douchebag.”
“Right. It’s his fault. It’s your drug dealer’s fault.” I flinched just looking at his ruined knuckles. There was blood seeping from them. “This is ridiculous.” I glanced out the window, put my blinker on. “Do you know that this is ridiculous? This isn’t real life. This isn’t how I operate.”
“What are you doing?” he asked, instead of answering me.
“I’m stopping at Walgreens.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to get stuff for your hand! Jesus!”
“I’m fine.”
“There are teeth marks! You want to get rabies?”
He barked a laugh. “Nobody’s getting rabies.”
“You want to get AIDS?” I almost gagged on the words. I turned off the Jeep in the Walgreens parking lot and, after debating for a minute, pocketed the keys.
“Nice,” he said. “Where exactly do you think I’m going to go? You think I’d leave you here?”
“Who knows what the hell you’d do?” I slammed the door and headed into the store, where I spent all the cash I had on me on peroxide, gauze, a tube of Neosporin, and another soda. I wished for my father, for Shelby, for Soledad, for Lauren even. I didn’t want to go back out to the car. I could feel him receding, going so far that I couldn’t catch him, and I didn’t know how to stop it.
The cashier surveyed my purchases and looked at me half-sympathetically and said, “Hope your night gets better.”
“Thanks.” I had to look into the fluorescent light to keep from crying.
“Goddamnit, Sawyer,” I hissed, switching on the overhead light in the Jeep. He looked worse than I’d thought. He was going to have a shiner. I thrust the soda at him, and he applied it to his rapidly swelling eye. I hoped he had a headache. “You know, why would I even want to go to college when I can stay here and play Florence Nightingale to you?”
“Beats the hell out of me. Shit,” he said, when the peroxide hit his knuckles, breath hissing from him like a balloon. “That hurts.”
“Good.”
“Look, don’t even bother,” he said, pulling his hand away. “I’ll take care of it myself. Let’s just go.”