“It was nothing,” I agreed. IhateyouIhateyouIhateyou. I tilted my head so my hair would better hide my face.
“You were always too good for your own, well, good, I thought. A little rebellion is healthy for a kid. When I was your age, I was a real pain in the ass,” he said. “And hey! I turned out okay. I’ll never be the president of the United States, but I’m okay.” He told me about the time he’d thrown a firecracker into a sewer grate on Calyer Street and flooded an entire city block, about the time he’d guzzled bong water out of a fishbowl and “tripped balls” for a week, about the time he stole Poppy’s speedboat and drove it fifty miles up the bay during a thunderstorm to visit some upstate girl whose name escaped him now. Becky wouldn’t stop touching him, pinching the back of his neck, running her hand across his arm, tilting her forehead onto his shoulder. At one point he brushed her hand away like it was a wasp. He might not want us back, but he sure as hell wasn’t in love with her, this silly Becky. Dull as she seemed, she knew it, too.
After hugging me goodbye, he pressed a folded bill into my palm. “Don’t tell your mom,” he said, making a cuckoo sign near his head and looking at me like, Know what I mean? “And, Cath? Whatever you’re doing with the cigarettes—knock it off. I can smell it in your hair.”
As I watched them drive off, the woman from inside the restaurant was pacing the sidewalk, a cell phone clamped to her ear. She lifted her hand and gave me a startled smile. I smiled back and unfolded the crumpled bill, a fifty.
The next time I saw him, I was seventeen years old and a day away from leaving Michigan for New York City, for a future that would be defined in part, by his failure. By then it was too late. I would never forgive him for how he’d had me fooled.
*
Mom laughed with the cashier as she paid for our gas. A man held the door for her as she walked out. She pulled her coat around her body as if to protect it from him. I watched him watch her pass. He stared at her behind so long, adrenaline started pumping through me, spelling danger. If there were no men except Jimmy in the entire world, I wondered how much better life would be for me and everyone I loved. Mom climbed into the car, bringing the cold with her and the interest of the man, still watching her, now us, as he smoked a cigarette beside a Dumpster. Before turning the keys in the ignition, Mom unpeeled a Hershey’s bar and took a bite, handing me the rest. We hadn’t talked about seeing Dad, except when she asked me if he’d set another time to meet. He had not. The chocolate was so sweet it made my tongue sting.
“What did you wind up eating, that night,” I asked, as she steered the car out of the parking lot. I could still feel the man’s eyes, even though I could no longer see him. “After he left?”
“Weird question. I ate Rice-A-Roni. Carbs from a box. I remember it because I did a freaky pregnant thing—I cracked a raw egg into it, and stirred it all together.”
“That is disgusting,” I said, but we could both tell my heart wasn’t in it.
We were driving by Kewaunee High School, just twenty-five minutes from Silver Lake, before I spoke again. The sky had turned hard and nickel gray, a color that, if you knocked on it, would make a tinny sound. Sometime soon it would rain or maybe snow. I looked out the window at the landscape that would always have a claim on me, that would call me back for years after I left, and pressed my forehead against the glass until I could feel the cold needling into my brain.
“If you knew that early on that he was so bad, why were you with him in the first place?”
“He was charming,” she said, after a while.
“That’s it? He was charming?”
I hated what the phrase He was charming suggested—a setup at a mouse-ridden pizza place, gray slush on the road, a futon that smelled like dog hair and old popcorn. I hated that I was the result of that.
“He made me laugh. I had my first orgasm with him.”
“Oh my God. Boundaries, please.”
“If I teach you anything, let it be to not be blinded by good sex.”
“Noted.”
“Speaking of sex—”
“Yeah, no, stop.”
“Just, if you’re having it, you can tell me.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay, well, if you do.”
“I won’t.”
“You won’t ever have sex? All right, honey. Whatever you say.”
I just wanted to get home, where my friends were, where Marlena was waiting. She’d been so nice since that night at the barn—it helped dispel my last lingering doubts that she really and truly wanted me around. I was in the peril of my life, and I did not know it. While Mom was filling the gas tank, Marlena’d texted me again.
Hurry up!!!
*
How can I describe the horrible pleasure of being not good? Even at fifteen I wasn’t dumb enough to glamorize Marlena’s world, the poverty, the drugs that were the fabric of everything, but I was attracted to it all the same. I always wanted more, more, more; what I had was never good enough. Instead of public school, I had to have Concord Academy, with its courtyards a whirl of fall leaves, my initials monogrammed on my collar, the textbooks full of whole worlds of language I was desperate to understand. And yet, how easily I’d replaced my desire for that place with my desire to fit in seamlessly in Silver Lake.
Perhaps that was why I was so afraid of the terrible electricity, the terrible self-rootedness, that overtook me those sleepless nights, when I slid my hand down my stomach, below the band of my pants, and discovered a need that was completely my own. With it had come the sense that if I surrendered to that edge-of-cliff feeling, afterward I would be transformed. I would belong to myself in some new way. Every time, I stopped too soon.
*
Marlena came by as soon as she saw our car pulling into the driveway. Still six months from November, our friendship half over, both of us, or me at least, blind to what would end it. I didn’t even know Bear River existed until they found Marlena there.