no
I set my phone to vibrate. So Ryder was annoyed. So what. I brought the fantasy Ryder back and put him there, on the bed next to me. “I want to lick your pussy,” that other Ryder whispered in my ear, and I told him okay, and I touched myself where my underwear was damp, and this time, I did not stop. And after, there was no shame at all. Nothing but me, alone in the room with a buzzing phone.
helloooo cat?
hello?
real cool
wtf? where r u?
*
Mom kept a few pregnancy tests deep in the back of the cabinet under our bathroom sink, behind the cleaning supplies. I found them one day while I was looking for backup conditioner. Marlena and I had laughed about it for hours. So when she told me she hadn’t gotten her period in almost two months, we somberly shut ourselves up in my bathroom. She sat on the toilet and held the white stick between her legs. “How are you supposed to do this without pissing all over yourself,” she asked, as her urine splattered into the bowl. She pulled up her pants and washed her hands, placing the test on the lip of the sink. A single blue line appeared. Two minutes, three, and then four—the line remained alone.
“No plus,” I said, relieved I wouldn’t have a niece or nephew, or have to wonder if it was my brother’s or someone else’s.
“Weird,” she said, and we took the pregnancy test out into the woods, where we buried it goofily, a fake ceremony, so my mom wouldn’t find it in the trash.
*
It was the sucked-dry, ragged end of August, the air soupy and buzzing with insects even at ten in the morning, when the police came. I watched from the window as they traveled in a silent line. The first car parked in Marlena’s driveway, and another sped between our houses, off-road, flossing itself through backyard junk. It picked up the two-track near the jungle gym and zipped into the pines, nothing left to see but a red light that blinkered out in seconds.
I pulled on cutoffs and a tank top and went outside. I’m sorry, I thought. I didn’t mean to. To stop the trembling in my hands, I wedged them under my thighs, right up against the baked wood of our makeshift stoop. I’d have two deep splinters in my right palm when I stood up. A cop knocked on Marlena’s front door. His fist dropped and he cocked his head, as if he had all day to wait. I knew Sal was in there, thinking about whether he should let them in. “I’m a little kid,” Sal liked to say when he was trying to convince us to let him stay over longer, to let us keep him around. “I won’t bother you.” We always cracked up at that, how he thought he was less trouble just because he was small.
Marlena shot out of my house, pushing past where I sat on my front steps, pulling her hair into a ponytail as she jogged barefoot across the yard. She’d been over—but not with me. This happened sometimes; days would go by without her and Jimmy talking and then one morning there she’d be, drinking coffee at the kitchen table with my mom, looking at me like, Whoops?
“Excuse me,” she called. “That’s my house.” She wore a T-shirt of Jimmy’s over a pair of shorts that barely peeked below the shirt’s hem. Her legs were long and tan and both cops nibbled them with their eyes, up and down, up and down.
“That’s your house what you doing over there, this time in the morning,” the cop asked. His partner leaned against the car, watching, his arms crossed over his chest.
“I don’t see how that’s relevant to anything.”
“That where your boyfriend lives?”
“Do you have a warrant, officer?” I’d never known she was experienced at talking to cops.
“Pretty convenient walk of shame. More like a couple steps.” The other cop laughed, shuffled his feet in the dirt, looked at Marlena again like she was a snack.
“I asked a question.”
“We’re following up on a tip. We been getting reports about illegal activity happening here, minors running around late at night, smoking and boozing, and we know you got a little kid in that house.”
“Sal is fine.”
“You’re not old enough to take care of a kid alone. Your daddy here?”
“I’m almost eighteen. You never met an eighteen-year-old with kids?”
“We just have to take a look,” said the other cop, walking over to them. “You get that, right? Someone calls in, that’s our job. We gotta look around, make sure it’s all okay, make sure nobody is in a bad situation.”
“If you don’t have a warrant, you’re gonna have to come back another time.” Marlena folded her arms over her chest. Perhaps their eyes had just reminded her that she wasn’t wearing a bra. “You’re gonna have to come back when my dad’s home.”
“Where’s your daddy at?”
“I don’t know. I’m not his wife. I don’t keep track of him.”
A voice came in on the car radio, shouted numbers and static.
“We’ll be back,” said the one getting in the passenger side. “Try’n get your story straight.” They took off, following the car that had gone ahead into the woods.
*
More cop cars down the road, and then a big nondescript van, all heading the same way. Inside the barn, Marlena dialed her dad’s number over and over again. The fourth time, when he didn’t pick up, she threw her phone against the wall, just as he’d thrown that water bottle full of ice and wine. “Fucker,” she said. “Where is he.” The battery flew out and skittered across the floor. I could see his silhouette in the rage on her face, in how quick she could be to lose control. Like one tracing laid over another, both sets of lines showing through. Our parents were with us always; no surgery could cut them out. Sal stood in the middle of the big downstairs room in a nightgown-length T-shirt, his feet bare. “It’s okay, Sal,” I said, and he slid a hand into my empty one. I squeezed his sticky palm. He didn’t react.
“Call your brother,” Marlena told me, trying to jam her battery back into her phone.
“Did you break it?”
“Just call him.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Say that I need him to come home. Tell him to make something up, that he’s sick or it’s an emergency.”
I called Jimmy. No answer. He never answered when he was at work. Jim, the cops are in the woods behind our house. Marlena says she needs you. Call us, okay?
“He probably can’t hear it ringing. He has to put it in those lockers.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she said. “Goddamn fuck. They found it, Cat.”