She says, “You don’t have to do this.” Then she eases my T-shirt up past my pits and over my head.
I wish I could see her face, but she’s behind me now on the bed, her legs pressing against me on either side. I think, Perfect, this is the A-number-one position to get garroted, one thin stretch of wire to my neck, quick, followed by instant death.
I’m in the A-number-one position for a stupid guy who trusts a girl, shirtless, without anything between me and the truth, between me and her. I’m acting exactly like a person who trusts people, specifically her, the girl I just invited to a South American country, whom anyone in his right mind would know not to trust.
I feel her eyes on my back, fixed on the expanse of skin where my biography is etched.
I feel her finger tracing the scar that runs across my back, first the faint lines and then the one where it’s hard for me to feel anything but a vague pressure, where I can’t feel the location of her finger on my body unless she pushes down hard, because the sensation is gone: the ugly one. The scar twists across my back in uneven knots of hard white skin, like a deformed centipede.
She says, “Who did this to you?”
The story is that Don did it. It goes, we were playing with fencing swords, one of them with the dull tip broken off, leaving a jagged metal point. The story is that we were too young to understand the danger, that we both thought we were Zorro until I started to bleed through my cut-to-ribbons Sunday School shirt.
I don’t know why I put the Sunday School shirt in there, nice detail though.
The story is a lie.
“?‘Two paths diverge in a yellow wood,’?” she misquotes. “Are you going to tell me or not?”
The idea that a month ago I was sitting in AP English and cared what Robert Frost had to say is remarkable. It’s amazing how false it feels for that to be my memory, as if high school and AP English and raising my hand and being called on could never happen to the thug I am now.
But the AP English in me speaks. “Roads. It was roads that diverged.”
“Show-off. Are you going to take the path where you tell me what happened to you?”
I try to get myself to feel better about this so I can keep some semblance of control here. I say to myself, I might as well tell her, she already suspects. She’d probably admire someone who could cut up a kid, her being such a master of cutting up humans.
But it feels as if the girl who’s a slasher and the girl on the bed this close to me are two different people. I don’t want to hurt either one of them.
I want her to know, God knows why.
I try to convince myself that coming out with it would have a strategic advantage. If I go with the truth about this thing, it will make me look honest as hell. I could be the trustworthy guy who gets to unhook the bra.
Okay, there’s that. I’m trying to have sex with her, which, under the circumstances, makes me a monster—a respectful monster, but a monster.
I say, “I tell people my brother and I were playing with a broken saber.”
“But that’s not true?” I’m not sure if this is a question or a statement.
Suddenly, I’m not turned on. She’s put my T-shirt on herself, snuggling now at my side. The shirt hangs like a charcoal gray tepee, which on her could still be arousing. It’s not arousing now.
“My dad had an anger-management problem.” The words come out slowly. They feel stuck in my mouth.
“That’s one way of putting it,” she says, her fingers still wandering the surface of my back, between the shoulder blades and down my spine as she curls around me. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
She can say that, but she’s waiting for something.
“My dad beat on me.” It doesn’t even sound like my voice. “Not often. Jesus.” She’s moved to where she’s next to me, holding me, touching my face. My face is in her now-black hair where it gets fluffy around the neck, soft as a cat.
Her arms wrap around me. She says, “I’d never have kids if I thought I’d do that once.”
“You don’t think anyone can lose it if they’re angry enough? If everything lines up, perfect storm?”
She’s hanging on to me from the side, straddling me, clinging the way those stuffed animal toys with hinged arms and legs cling to the ends of pencils. “You seriously think anyone could beat on a kid with a meat cleaver?”
I have to stop myself from saying You should know or Got hypocrisy? or What the fuck were you doing with a knife and Connie Marino’s jugular vein?
But I don’t say any of it. I say, “Belt buckle.”
I’ve told the other story so often that the truth feels like a lie. Having Don shred my back sounds a lot more plausible than my dad losing it. Of course, my dad losing it isn’t what happened either. My dad always did what he intended to do. He didn’t lose it.