“You memorize poetry? Hand over the borderline illiterate card.” I hold out my hand and she slaps it, palm to palm, as if we were playing the game where you extend your hands to see who has faster reflexes, and she wins.
“I’m not completely ignorant,” she says.
Then she throws back her head, laughing, her mouth lining up with mine. How am I supposed to resist this? I pull her back onto my lap, and she melts into me like warm wax, perfect fit, soft lips, her hands in my hair—for thirty seconds.
Then she says, “I’ve gotta go to work. Right now. Go write yourself a sad poem.”
36
Cat
I’m sitting on the bed (alone) finishing off the doughnut holes with a chaser bag of Funyuns. I’m staring down at my thighs as if I could see them expand before my very eyes. I’m moaning into the burner.
This is because I made him go away before I was ready. I told him I had to work. Right then. That minute.
Total lie.
Then I got stuck waiting for a computer at the library so I could talk to Olivia. And when I finally got a computer, after this tiny girl finished playing a video game with Barbies and twinkly sea horses, no Olivia.
She checks her phone constantly. Where is she? Probably eating dinner with her folks. I can see her on her screened porch, eating Mrs. Pastor’s famous (kind of bad) tuna noodle casserole.
I can see the look on Steve’s face when Mrs. Pastor offered to show Rosalba how to make it. Me, later, begging Rosalba to make it. Rosalba batting at me with a wooden spoon that had tomato sauce all over it because she was using it to make something that actually tasted good.
The kid who’s signed up to use the computer after me taps me on the shoulder. I gasp so loud, he jumps back.
I’ve let an eight-year-old creep up on me.
He could have been someone else. He could have slid a switchblade from between the pages of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, cut my heart out, and fed it to a flock of magic pigeons. While I’m thinking this gruesome thought, he’s staring at me.
And so’s his mother.
I bolt.
What am I doing?
Seriously, if J had said, Hey, babe, let’s run away to Bora Bora for forever, I would have started packing.
Nothing like total deprivation of pretty much everything to make a person crazy.
He makes me feel safe. I lay my head against his chest, and it’s like I’ve got a bulletproof wall between me and everything. Or maybe it’s that he distracts me so much, I don’t think about being unsafe.
I think about how much I like him.
And contraception.
How stupid it is to be with someone I like so much, I’d even be thinking about that?
The library’s out of the question, I’m out of my mind, and the burner is out of its container and in use.
Olivia says, “I don’t care if he’s God’s other son, you can’t have a boyfriend. Aren’t you supposed to be living in a cave until you look unrecognizable? You said.”
All true.
“But I like him so much! Liv, he’s so nice! And no matter what I do, there’s no way I’m going to start looking like a frumpy twenty-five-year-old until I’m twenty-five.”
“That’s a long way from looking like yourself with bad red hair.”
I swear, if there were no burner phones in the world, I would curl up and die.
If I had to spend years without anyone looking at me or touching me or caring about me.
If I had to be completely alone until I grew out of being at all like my current self.
If there were no J.
Olivia says, “Well?”
“I was wearing mom jeans, all right? But I still didn’t have to encourage him.”
“Do. Not. Encourage. Him!”
“I’m joking. We’re only slightly past first base.”
“What’s wrong with you?” she shout-whispers. “Do you want to end up with a baby? Do you?”
“I’m not getting pregnant.”
“Said fifty thousand other girls just before they had to hit Planned Parenthood. And that’s not the only reason he’s not safe!”
“I’m getting off the phone. I really like him. And if he was going to do something to me, why didn’t he just put a pillow on my face the first time he came over?”
“He knows where you live? Are you crazy?”
“Yeah, well, next time it’s at his house.”
37
Jack
One minute it feels like I’m a normal guy moving in on a normal girl. I want to hang out with her, make her like me, protect her. The next minute, the fact that I’m the person she needs to be protected from is making me choke on the dessert she’s feeding me right now.
I knew all the roads were dead ends when I started this.
If I don’t do it, Yeager comes after my family.
If I do it, I’m a murderer, and Nicolette is dead.
If I don’t do it, everybody still ends up dead.
Even the variation that has me hiding out in a dark corner of the world with Nicolette and the Manx money leaves my mother dangling in the wind.
Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.