It’s hard to breathe because my throat is closing. I force words out across my tongue and through my lips, which are freaking quivering—quivering! I don’t get like this. I will not.
I say, “It wasn’t his anger-management problem. He didn’t realize how much it would show. It was a big PR disaster.”
Maybe I can’t breathe because she’s holding me so tight. She’s pressed against me so hard everywhere, I couldn’t get any closer unless I were literally inside her. But I’m the opposite of turned on.
Her hands are kneading my shoulders. She has a lot of hand strength for a small girl: surprise, surprise. I lean forward, away from her. The places we were skin to skin peel apart with a little stripping sound.
I’m making satisfied noises against my will.
She says, “Do you want to keep having this conversation?”
“No! I don’t ever want to discuss this again.”
“Don’t yell at me.”
“Sorry.”
“When I was joking about wounded, sensitive guys? The part where I said they can’t stand me and they make me sick. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not wounded. And I’m not sensitive. Give me back my shirt.”
She pulls it right off, slides it fast over my head and down my shoulders. Once my eyes are uncovered, there’s the pink polka-dotted bra. It’s a don’t-touch-me, purest-girl-on-the-cheerleading-squad, don’t-think-about-going-all-the-way bra.
I wish beyond wishing that the truth wasn’t true. I wish Connie Marino were alive and well and acing nursing school in Michigan. I wish this girl with the unfettered evil streak didn’t make me feel this way—this crazy protective want-to-be-with-her-all-the-time way.
51
Cat
Pull on the snag, and the sweater unravels.
Everyone knows that.
I know that.
I didn’t mean to unravel him. I would knit him back up if I could. But all I get to do is hold him, sensitive and wounded, leaning back against me on the bed.
I want to say, Be all right. Don’t let me mess you up. I can knit. Let me fix this.
I know there’s no way to fix this.
If I could face down the man who did this to him, the so-called father with the belt, I would—with my own hands, with the rush mothers get that lets them lift boulders off their half-crushed babies—give him what he deserves.
I hum and stroke J’s head, the babysitting move that puts the kid to sleep.
He relaxes into me.
I want to be a real girl holding a real boy. Not a fake person from a fake trailer full of fake religious zealots pretending to care about someone she’s going to ditch ASAP because her whole life is all me me me, staying alive.
The plan is to slide from place to place. Score a birth certificate. Get a real job. Save up. Go to college online. Get plastic surgery. Do everything intentionally missing people on TV shows do, and come out as a living person who’s not me.
The problem is, I hate this plan.
Tell me how it’s being alive if you can’t stop for one freaking second and care about someone? And not just because he’s distracting you with charm and hotness. When he’s not one-upping you with his macho boy thing. When you just accidently pushed him into his own personal dark cellar full of spooks and things that snag and snag and snag.
Please, please get out of the cellar.
Said the fake girl to the real boy crashing into her. Through his T-shirt, I feel the raggedy line of the strand I yanked on. I feel it in the scar across his back and in the tension in his shoulder blades.
I say, “Please. I’m so sorry I did that about your shirt. I’m an idiot.”
He says, “No harm done.” Touches his neck. He’s so lying.
Harm done.
“Tell me how to make you feel better. Anything.” Then I wish I could take back the anything because it sounds like I’m offering up sex like it was Krazy Glue to stick broken guys back together.
“Anything?” I can tell it’s a tease.
“Not that anything. Some other anything. Where I’m not an idiot and I bake you a pie.”
“I’m not getting psychoanalyzed for a metaphorical pie.”
“Actual pie. I don’t do metaphorical anything, duh. I’m not literary, I’m practical. Do you want it or not?”
He swings his legs over the side of the bed. His face looks semi-normal.
I say, “Don’t even answer. All straight guys want pie and bra removal. It’s a fact of life.”
He shakes his head. “Is this chiseled on stone tablets? Because I wouldn’t want to mess with the eleventh commandment.”
“On bedrock. Do you mind store-bought crust?”
You can tell he’s so glad he’s not fending off a conversation about his back, his father, or anything that makes him seem, look, or feel weak, he’d eat crust made of crushed gravel. This guy likes weakness even less than all other guys like weakness.
It seems like I actually see him, weirdly so, since we’re busy burying his actual feelings in pastry. Even from this place of total fakeness, I get him. I do. Not Cat. Me.
“Store-bought?” He shakes his head. “I might have to dump you.”
“Ha! I’d have to be your girlfriend for you to dump me, and I’m so not.”
Only maybe I am.