“I’m terrified,” said Ryder. “You do realize you’re basically an accomplice, right?”
“Aw, she’d never tell,” said Marlena, swiveling around in her seat to give me her Ryder-is-an-idiot look—eyes cast up into her lashes, mouth a frown. “Peaches is a vault.”
“Barney?” I asked. Accomplice?
“I love you, you love me,” Ryder sang. He had a good voice, too. “Big purple Chester the Molester? Greg thinks people feel safer buying something named after a childhood memory. I think people buy drugs because they’re drugs, but the best leaders loosen their chokehold every now and again, to give their serfs the illusion of control. So Barney it is.”
“Does Greg know you refer to him as a serf?” I said.
“No,” Marlena said. “Because Lord Ryder only has the balls to say such things around us meek wittle girls.” Ryder laughed and ruffled her hair with one hand, continuing to steer with the other. I could never tell when teasing was going to make him angry or amused; I’d seen him furious over far less. Marlena didn’t seem to care either way.
I dropped the baggie back into the peanut butter jar, twisted the lid until I couldn’t tighten it anymore, and handed it to Marlena. She deposited it into the glove compartment. My fingers felt funny after. I rubbed the tips together, trying to determine if any dust or residue was left on my skin. Accomplice was a pretty word.
We drove through downtown, Ryder and Marlena singing along to some dumb old country song about barbecue stains. Every time Marlena flopped on my bed and confessed their break’s latest slip-up—we made out again, she’d sigh, but it didn’t mean anything—I felt a glimmer of jealousy. An idea had slipped into my head, in the weeks of their cooling. If Marlena wasn’t with Ryder, that meant he might begin to like someone else. The thought was sticky, and it expanded whenever he paid me any particular attention. Like now—how he pitched his voice under hers. How when she told him to change the song, he waited for me to agree before saying yes.
We turned into a cul-de-sac just a few miles from downtown Kewaunee, where mansions like the ones I cleaned with Mom made a neat ring around a circular drive. Marlena and I waited in the van while Ryder jumped out and banged on the door. At seventeen, Ryder probably weighed no more than a hundred and forty pounds. Standing straight, he wasn’t much taller than Marlena. Without a shirt, he was all sinewy, activated muscles, part animal and part boy. Marlena’s body, my body, our bellies rippled into accordion-folds when we sat, and the very difference between our two sets of breasts—hers small and broad, nipples like a Hershey’s kiss, mine bigger, sillier—seemed almost careless, as if God or whoever hadn’t bothered to come up with a blueprint for a woman’s body. When you looked at Ryder, you didn’t picture how else he could look. When I looked at myself, I saw a million different possibilities. A little less weight there, my breasts lifted just so, tanner skin, a different haircut, with pubic hair, without. Which one was the best? Which one would he like the most?
He banged on the door again, his palm flat.
“I hate when they don’t answer,” Marlena said. “I always think it means they called the cops.”
Ryder pulled his phone from his pocket and brought it to his ear. His hair was tongued into a coppery cowlick above his neck, and when he stood in profile you could just make out the faint tear of the birthmark etched against his cheekbone. From a distance, that mark gave him a tint of sadness that morphed, as he grew closer, into something else, something wild, like he was a pot of water seconds away from boiling over. He banged again.
The door opened a sliver. Ryder’s mouth moved and the door opened all the way. Two guys about Jimmy’s age stood in the open space. They both wore Polos, collars popped, a stupid, shit-eating grin on the face of the one who traded Ryder the peanut butter jar for a wad of cash.
“Richie Riches,” said Marlena.
After the guys disappeared back into their palace, Ryder stood there counting the money. He folded it up and tucked it into his pocket before returning to the van. The entire transaction took no more than a couple of minutes. Even rich boys, college kids, bought meth. I’d already lost any sense that it was something to be afraid of—that these guys did it too, in their big house, made it seem even more everyday.
That, of course, was another mistake.
We picked up Greg (standing outside the 7-Eleven, hands in his pockets, face a shriek of red), who blew into the backseat beside me in a whirlwind of chilly smoke, and went into Taco Bell. At the counter, Ryder ordered a party pack of twenty-five tacos (I’d only seen one of those in action once before, when a parent brought them to a Concord soccer game) and four extra-large pops. He paid with a fifty-dollar bill. I was starving, but allowed myself a single taco—I didn’t want Ryder and Greg to see me pigging out. The adrenaline rush from the morning was making me giddy; I spat Mountain Dew through a straw in Marlena’s direction.
“You slut!” she screamed, dousing my taco with hot sauce.
The cashier came over and told us our two options were to “zip it or go act like fuckwads somewhere else.”
*
“How anxious would you say you feel in social situations?” said Cher, resting her elbows on her knees like we were BFFs trading secrets. Her bangs drifted into her eyes. “Do you feel, do you think, with all the changes in your home life, depressed? Like nobody’s paying any attention to what you want and need? To how you, Catherine, feel?”
“I made a bad decision,” I said. The taste of ink, from the pen I’d chewed, spread bitterly across the roof of my mouth.
“She really has never done anything like this before,” Mom said. “I’m just so surprised. This isn’t Cathy. This isn’t how she is.”
Cher tossed her head, a kind of silent whinny, and looked at Mom like, You would say so, wouldn’t you.
“It is important,” Mrs. Tenley said, spitting out each word like a pit. “For you to let her talk for herself.”
It was almost refreshing to see myself as she did: a screw-up, a troubled girl, instead of the ass-kissing perfectionist I’d been my entire life. I needed to lead them far, far away from the reality of where I’d been spending my time. Not just for myself, but for Marlena, for Ryder, even for Greg. For us, I found myself thinking. What else could I do?
So, of course, I lied.