This gives me a surging satisfaction, mingled with disappointment in myself and, of course, guilt. Ma always says I have serious inclinations toward sadism, and for the first time I understand what she means. Part of me did it to see if he would call me out. If he would say, You’re lying, Jade Dixon-Burns, because I know you. I’ve seen you. I remember you and you are a liar. But we’ve pulled very far apart—for the first time, probably ever, Zap takes my word at face value. He believes me.
“You’re wrong,” Zap says halfheartedly. “It was that freak. That freak that always stood outside her window. I saw you two this morning, coming into the funeral. You’re trying to protect that pervert.”
“Jade?” comes a quiet voice from behind. Mrs. Arnaud’s arms are crossed.
“Thank you for coming over today,” she says, but it’s not in her usual husky voice. She’s heard me.
I calculate the distance between me and Zap. It’s no more than five feet, but I swear, I’ve never felt further from someone. It’s like what Zap used to say about Alpha Centauri, the closest star in the sky. It looks so close, he would tell me, but did you know it’s actually 4.37 light-years from the earth?
It should have ended a month before that Fourth of July. Late May, sophomore year. The same semester we built the fort.
It was past midnight. I’d never gone to Zap like this before, and we were already beginning to fall apart, but I had a red stain in the shape of Ma’s palm ironed across my cheek and the acute sense that spending the night alone would crack something irreparable inside me. One of Ma’s fat rings had broken the skin just below my eye. I didn’t cry—salt water wouldn’t help.
I’d stumbled to Zap’s house in a pair of broken flip-flops, drowning in self-pity and the memory of Ma’s vodka-laced voice. Useless little shit. I rubbed my arm where I knew it would bruise. I read somewhere that if you pushed hard enough on an unformed bruise you could stop it from flowering. This doesn’t work on me. My skin is too thin. Poor circulation.
Zap answered the door in a black T-shirt and a pair of blue plaid boxer shorts. His skinny white legs stuck out the bottom. I rarely saw Zap’s knees; they were round and knobbly, naked outside the familiarity of his pants. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. He made a shushing motion, pointing upstairs. Mr. and Mrs. Arnaud were long asleep.
We tiptoed up the creaky stairs and into the guest bathroom, which had a gold soap tray and embroidered towels. Zap clicked the door shut and flicked on the lights—the bulbs were harsh. Hot on my face.
“My God, Jay,” he whispered. “What did she do to you?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Doesn’t even hurt.”
I poked the small cut under my eye to show him how much it didn’t hurt, but my finger came away bloody. When I sucked on the nail, I tasted iron.
“Jesus,” he said, pulling one of the embroidered towels off the rack and running a corner under the faucet.
“Don’t,” I said, when he tried to lift the spotless white towel to my face. “Your parents will notice.”
“Here.” Zap pulled his black T-shirt over his head. The static made his hair stand on end. “I have a million of these. We’ll just throw it out, okay?”
He wet the sleeve and pressed it to the lacerated skin. The fabric was cool.
“It was the TV remote,” I said. “I got the wrong batteries.”
“What?”
“Ma freaked out. Said she’d given me specific instructions, and if I couldn’t get a pair of fucking double A batteries how was I supposed to do anything? I told her to stick the triple As in her vibrator.”
Zap opened his mouth the way he did when he laughed really hard, though he wasn’t laughing.
“I don’t need your pity,” I said.
“It’s not pity,” he said. “I’m just worried.”
We stood in the midnight glow of the vanity lightbulbs that lined the bathroom mirror, and he pressed the cloth against my face. I’d seen Zap shirtless plenty of times, at the pool in the summer. He looked more naked here. I’d never noticed the way his skin changed color from his neck to his chest. A ripening peach.
“What’s this?” His hands moved to my arm.
A straight red line branded across my bicep, already purpling.
“The upstairs banister.”
Zap ran a thumb over the tender skin, shaking his head. It wasn’t disbelief—he expected this from Ma. We both did.
“Do you still want to leave here?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Remember? You said we would move away. Go to New York.”
“I remember.”
Zap’s thumb wandered my arm, roving over goose bumps so softly I looked down to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. I wasn’t. His thumb was there, his nail clean and neatly cut, knuckle wrinkled in folds.
Zap had three chest hairs. I’d never noticed them before. His stomach was a slate, his torso a triangle. A trail of hesitant fuzz crept from the seam of his boxer shorts, painting a straight line to his belly button. For the first time, I recognized Zap for what he was: a man.
We both watched his hand crawl up my arm. The heat. The surface of his fingers slid up my shoulder and across my collarbone, into the hollow of my neck, up to the base of my skull until he was holding my jaw with gentle cupped hands that didn’t know where to go from there. His fingers shook. Small earthquakes.
I’d never touched someone like that. I explored his waistband, tentative. He pressed against my stomach with parts of his body I knew existed but had never considered. And then we were all hands, all motion, breathing too fast, not knowing how to move forward or back. I pulled my shirt over my head. Unclasped my bra. I stood there in my jeans and flip-flops, letting Zap see all the parts I could hardly bear to look at myself. The bathroom mirror taunted me, but I wouldn’t look, for fear I’d start crying. I reached into his shorts and held him, stiff and heavy, silk in my palm.
Zap stopped. He opened his mouth, like he couldn’t figure out how to push us back to a moment before all this, a moment before we were both unclothed in the bathroom and he was hard in cotton boxer shorts—he couldn’t figure out how to tell me he hadn’t meant for this to happen.
I hadn’t meant for this to happen, either. He never gave me the chance to say it.
“Jay,” he said. “We can’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t want to.”
That was enough.
For a long time following, I’d repeat these words to everyone I could, if only to wear them out, wring them of meaning. Take out the trash. I don’t want to. Ms. Dixon-Burns, why don’t you write the answer on the board? I don’t want to. Take your sister to school. I don’t want to. Talk to me, please, Jade, I’m only trying to understand you. I don’t want to.
And that night, before I stormed out the front door with my bra unhooked. Please, just put your clothes back on. I don’t want to. Don’t you understand? I don’t want that. I don’t. I don’t want to.
Cameron
Things Cameron Wondered as He Stood Outside The Hayeses’ House at 3:37 p.m.:
1. How do you know if you deserve the world’s sympathy?