And on, and on.
So Grace had smiled at her date and suggested that maybe they weren’t that hungry after all, maybe they should go, and then she sneaked out the side door like a psychopath or a sure thing, depending on his expectations. He followed her out and she went home with him. How strange it was to feel safe only with strangers! She had sex with the bartender, trying to fully participate in this made-up life she was so determined to have, and shared a cigarette in his kitchen under a yellow light. Grace didn’t smoke, but Julie did.
Two weeks later, the bartender showed up near the Clignancourt metro. Grace was on her way home, and she saw him there on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and talking on his cell phone. She hadn’t given her number. She had slipped out of his apartment while he slept.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
He’d laughed, a little meanly. “My sister lives here,” he said, nodding toward the building next door. “I’m waiting for her to come down.”
At first, she hadn’t believed him. She understood that she was paranoid, but that didn’t mean she held the cure. Her new life would have to be very small indeed.
II
Garland
3
A bad apple. Grace had first noticed her mother say it about the tabby kitten Grace’s father had brought home when they’d first moved to Garland. He’d found it mewing behind the Dumpsters at his work. “There’s coolant around there,” he told Grace’s mother when he brought the kitten home.
“He probably already drank some of it,” Grace’s mother said.
“Well,” her father said, which was how they agreed to disagree.
Grace named the kitten Skyler—“How about Tigger?” her mother had asked—and watched it grow, under their haphazard care, into a mean adolescent who would beg to be petted, bumping his head against their legs, and then promptly sink his fangs into the wrist or fleshy palm of whoever fell for it and tried to show him affection.
“That cat is a bad apple,” Grace’s mother said. “He can’t help it; he’s just rotten.”
That Skyler could not help his nature kept Grace tender toward him for longer than her parents were. Then her cousin, a boy of eighteen, went to jail for stealing credit cards out of the neighbors’ mail.
“He’s just a bad apple,” Grace’s pregnant mother said, leaning over the sink to wash her hands. She was a home health aide and always washing her hands of something. “He stole from his own mother. You know, I caught him once, going through her drawers.”
“You got to drop that,” her father said. “He wasn’t any older than Grace is when all that happened.”
Her mother raised her eyebrows. Well. “It isn’t Regina’s fault. They did their best.”
Her father took the cat—he wasn’t referred to by name once he was gone—to the shelter after he bit Grace’s ankle, unprovoked. Grace’s mother was nearly due; they couldn’t have him attacking the babies.
In the grotesque chaos that followed the twins’ birth, Grace had assumed there was simply not enough love to go around, and the babies needed all of it. Fair enough. But the more attention her parents gave them, the more attention the suckling tantrum machines demanded. Witnessing her parents’ transformation into frazzled, intent, TV-censoring caretakers, Grace found herself evilly hoping that one of the twins would turn out to be a bad apple. She thought they were both rotten—their sopping faces, their gaping, toothless screams, their hanging drool, their fountains of diarrhea, their rashes and allergies and insomnia and sudden, terrifying squalls.
“We didn’t think we’d have more children,” Grace’s mother said to a neighbor, who beamed back, nodding.
One afternoon, Grace was hiding out in the basement, where it was quiet, reading a pile of old Life magazines that a neighbor had thrown out the week before, when the idea, terrible and unthinkable, crept up her shoulder like a spider: She was the bad apple. That was why her mother didn’t act right toward her, not the way she acted with the twins. It wasn’t Grace’s fault that she was a bad apple. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, but it did explain a lot of her feelings, her secret thoughts. Being rotten was like being poor, but in your heart. Nothing to be done. You get what you get and you don’t get upset.
And she had done wretched things. That year, Grace had stolen a hundred dollars from a classmate, Deanna Passerini. Grace loathed Deanna, who would grab whatever she wanted from her classmates’ hands and lunchboxes: markers, pretzels, colored-tissue stained-glass art projects. “You’re going to break it!” someone screamed at Deanna almost every day. On her birthday, Deanna came to school brandishing a card from her aunt in Massachusetts. The card held a hundred-dollar bill, which she whipped around for all to see. How much money a hundred dollars was to a ten-year-old—a thousand! A million! That anyone would give horrible, grubby, grabby Deanna a hundred dollars seemed unholy, as if the universe had rewarded her for being so repulsive. Deanna said she was going to use the money to buy a crystal sculpture of a horse she’d seen at the mall. Grace knew she would have broken the horse right there in the store. And then she thought: I’ll show you how to take something, Deanna P. You don’t grab it.
After lunch, when they all had bathroom break, Grace went into the stall next to Deanna’s. The four stalls were full, and a few other girls were crowded around the two sinks, washing and chattering and cranking the paper-towel dispenser. Deanna had put her new troll doll, a half-eaten bag of chips, her list of spelling words, and her birthday card right on the bathroom floor. Grace sat on the toilet with her pants up, waiting, and when she saw Deanna stand and turn to flush, she took the card. She stuck it in the waistband of her jeans, in the back, and pulled her shirt over it.
She was at the sink when Deanna began to scream. Grace held up her empty hands, and Deanna immediately blamed Amber White, because Amber White was poor and dirty and often in trouble for misbehaving in some humiliating way—cussing obliviously or picking at her nipples through her shirt during reading circle. Grace thought then that another line on Amber’s rap sheet wouldn’t matter. Amber pushed Deanna, who roared in rage that Amber had touched her. Grace went to get the teacher and reported the theft.
Deanna got in trouble with her parents for taking the money to school. Amber couldn’t produce the money and their teacher let the matter drop, but the other children tormented her with new vigor. Deanna, on the other hand, ascended in her victimhood. And while Grace had never seriously considered coming forward, once she saw how much further someone like Amber could fall, she knew she would never confess.
But she didn’t know what to do with the money. She worried that it would incriminate her. She rolled the hundred in a couple of one-dollar bills and dropped it in the Salvation Army donation box just before Christmas, skinny Santa clanging the bell next to it. He smiled at her.
She remembered Skyler, probably gassed at the shelter, with a pang of commiseration. They may not have been able to change their natures, but she could hide hers. She would have to.
? ? ?
In middle school, Deanna began to straighten her hair and go to the tanning bed. Amber White’s chest grew too big, too fast. Grace met Riley.
You could be bad and still be a good girl, if you tried hard enough. She hadn’t tried hard enough before.