TWO
He’d looked different in high school. No suits in his closet back then.
The Bryson Vaughn of Silver Spring Secondary had been something of a contradiction: a baseball star, a basketball forward, and a bad, bad kid. The kind of guy mothers warned their daughters about. The unsupportive legend went: “a kid like Bryson could turn a valedictorian into a teenage mom in ten minutes.” At least that’s what Romy’s foster mother had liked to say, as she sipped her teetotaler’s soda with lime through perpetually pursed lips.
Back then, he’d worn only leather jackets and grimy t-shirts when not in uniform. He’d yet to get his first ink, but was never without a bona fide diamond stud in his left earlobe. Plenty of cheerleaders had harbored secret crushes on the brutish Vaughn—his greasy hair always falling into his eyes in just such a dream-beau way—but he wasn’t what any lady with self respect would ever consider “boyfriend material.” She remembered that he used to take girls out to the abandoned quarry on the edge of the city. The girls he took out there would never give any juicy details about what went on at these “dates,” but after the fact, they did tend to smile smug little smiles to themselves—like members of an elite club.
Before Romy had really known what sex involved—she’d been two grades behind Bryson in school—she’d overheard a beautiful upperclassman girl make a befuddling remark of the swaggering Vaughn: “He was so well endowed, I almost couldn’t. But then...a lady shouldn’t say…”
When he wasn’t deflowering homecoming queens, Bryson got into fights with other boys. These dust-ups were often in the name of what had then seemed like vague concepts: honor, integrity, “a man’s good name.” Then again, this kind of behavior wasn’t so unusual when your whole family was a part of the no-good hustling motorcycle club, Devil’s Aces. She remembered him on his own first bike—a fire-engine red Ducati that used to get a lot of complaints from the Neighborhood Watch about its conspicuous lack of a muffler.
Romy’s recollection trailed here, because by the time she was really old enough to start paying attention to Bryson Vaughn, he’d all but drifted off the face of the earth. At the beginning of his senior year, he was kicked out of varsity basketball when a coach found a dime bag in his locker. A dishonorable discharge from the baseball team wasn’t far behind. Bryson rarely went to class, but when he did, he slept. Girls started spinning elaborate fictions about what he stayed up all night doing that made daily life at Silver Spring such a torture.
In two years of overlap at a tiny high school, Romy and Bryson had taken a single class together: Chemistry 101. They’d been lab-partnered for a single assignment on nucleotides. She’d worn her best dress to the library on that day when they were supposed to meet after school and work. She’d prepared a dozen veiled, nerdy come-ons...but of course, Bryson Vaughn hadn’t shown up. She felt foolish that she’d even imagined wooing the school hottie via homework. He was Bryson Vaughn. He didn’t “show up” for chemistry labs.
And right around this incident, Romy met Kellan.
If Bryson was the bad boy, Kellan was the sensitive artist—he was rarely spotted after sophomore year without the company of a creaky electric guitar, which he played and sang along with in the courtyard during lunch. Kellan’s hands were always covered with ink stains, thanks to the doodles he fashioned through every single class. And where Bryson’s body was athletic and ripped, Kellan’s was slender and sinewy. He wore band t-shirts and skinny jeans as a rule. Lots of the hippie girls liked him. Oh yeah, he also wrote poetry.
Romy had kept to a tight-knit bunch of ambitious, dorky girlfriends while in high-school, and so Kellan was the natural object of a lot of her friends’ affection. He was a kind of blessing: in their corner of Reno, where a mere handful of women expected to finish college without winding up saddled to some bum working for the city, here was Kellan: a boy who thought about the world, had opinions, and loved art. Romy was drawn to him spiritually before sex even factored in. The pair started having weekly meet-ups in the courtyard during which he’d practice songs on his guitar and she’d talk to him about all the novels she was reading. Together they hatched wild plans to leave Reno. Then one day, Kellan brought in a song he’d written especially for her:
Don’t tell me you can’t feel it
with your body next to mine
wish I had you in my bedroom
wish you lived there all the time
He was no Shakespeare, but she wound up seeing the inside of that bedroom. Though all of her girlfriends stopped talking to her once the fling was “sealed.”
And for some reason, Romy Adelaide was the last person in school to connect the dots. Bryson was never around, for one. Kellan, in all of his sentimental reveries, never once mentioned having an older brother. Sure, the boys shared a last name, a hunky jaw line and certain goading expressions...but plenty of people were distantly related in Reno. It took two weeks of going steady and a brief meeting with his parents to learn the perfectly plain truth: Bryson and Kellan were brothers. Always had been.
The dalliance didn’t go much past a fumbling dash for third base in his attic bedroom and a few more artistic courtyard meet-ups—Romy grew preoccupied with school, while Kellan began to follow his brother’s academic example. By school’s end, Romy was a rueful egghead whose only dream was skipping town, while Kellan had followed Bryson all the way into the motorcycle club’s inner circle. She hadn’t seen the younger brother in years. She hadn’t seen either Vaughn boy, really, since graduation day.
“You know him?”
“My God—you know him?”
“Body that fine should have a nice driver.”
“Why didn’t you ask for his number?”
“Why didn’t he ask for your number?!”
“Trifling.”
“Men are scum.”
“But did you see his—”
Romy secured a moment to drift away from her “union break.” The other women would be content to talk about Bryson for the rest of the night. Truth was, Romy couldn’t stand to be the subject of their motherly pity and unsolicited advice. She didn’t need another mother—mothers, in her experience, were nothing but coincidental baggage. She far preferred to navigate romantic waters alone.
Though then again, why hadn’t Bryson asked for her number? What would be the point of his whole “remember me” act if he didn’t want to see her again? Romy felt a feeling she hadn’t allowed herself to feel for years: neglected. With a heavy heart, she began her binding trudge back to the pit. At least her shift was almost over.
Before she reached her table, Romy felt a hand on her shoulder. For an eighth of a second, she imagined it was Bryson—come back to kiss her, to carry her out of the casino onto some waiting Harley, a madcap adventure unspooling before them...but when she turned around, she saw only the rodent-y little face of the pit boss. Lou.
“Where you going, sweetcheeks?”
“Back to work, Lou. I’m just off break.”
“I don’t think so.”
Ugh. Lou Valentine was among the creepier of Romy’s immediate employers. He ogled and pinched freely, and had uncanny skill when it came to trapping people in unpleasant conversations. He was also a round little man with a preposterous toupee and breath like the devil’s dog. “I’m taking you somewhere.”
“I’m not in the mood, sir,” Romy said. She began to pull away from him, but Lou merely tightened his grip on her forearm.
“And I’m not playing around. Seriously, Adelaide. Boss wants to see you. Follow me.”
Romy’s stomach tightened. The boss? She knew of no boss beyond Lou. She turned towards her co-workers, but the unofficial break party had broken up at the manager’s approach. She imagined that Paulette and Kali and Anisette were each furtively avoiding her gaze at their own tables, already aware of some horrible truth in her future. Was she getting fired? Had the mystery bosses been taking note of how tired she seemed on her feet lately? Helluva way to go, Romy thought to herself, while Lou scurried through the crowd before her. Meet dream guy. Don’t get asked out. Lose job. Sounds about right for my luck.