Loo clutched the blanket. She wished she could stuff the words back inside his mouth. Together they had been flying along the edge of something, but Marshall was making the world ordinary again. And so she kissed him, and for a moment they connected. He touched her shoulder. He ran his fingers over her back. All the places where he’d touched her with his pen. A part of her thrilled to this. A part of her wanted to pull away.
He took hold of her hands and pressed them over her head. He kissed her neck. Then he stopped and rested his forehead against hers and they waited like that, breathing into each other. He was there, with her, in the room. And then he wasn’t. He slid his palms away. He crawled back to the edge of the bed and started pushing through the blankets, looking for his clothes.
“I can’t lie anymore.”
“About me or the petition?”
Marshall grabbed his boxers and slipped his legs through. Then he picked up his pants. Coins fell out of the pockets and scattered across the floor, rolling into the corners.
“Both,” he said.
“Then tell your mom the truth.”
“I don’t think I can,” said Marshall. “Things got weird at the police station. She already made me promise not to see you anymore.”
“My dad was just being protective.”
“It wasn’t your dad. It was you,” said Marshall. “You shoved her into a vending machine.”
“She lifted my shirt.”
“It doesn’t matter what happened. You can’t hit my mom. She’s my mom.”
Loo stared up at the ceiling. There was a crack in the plaster, directly over the bed. When she tilted her head to the right it looked like a monster and when she tilted her head to the left it looked like an alien. The more Marshall talked, the more alone she felt, and the more she tried to avoid looking at the spot, the more it drew her attention. She edged her chin back and forth. Alien. Monster. Monster. Alien. The image refused to hold form one way or the other. Her memories of her own mother were the same way. Sometimes she didn’t know if they were real or Hawley’s, a fabrication made from old photographs and snippets of stories or facts she’d read in Mabel Ridge’s scrapbook.
“I need you to promise,” said Marshall. “Not to hurt her again.”
It would be so easy to say yes. But Loo was already curling around the soft places inside her that had been exposed. She thought of the whale dissected on TV by Marshall’s stepfather, the giant liver and intestines, lungs and heart strewn across the beach. He had opened the creature and spilled all that was inside her into the world.
Marshall made Loo feel the same way. Ripped open. At times, she could barely stand it. The boy wanted to kiss her, even though she had broken his bones. Even though she had smashed Mary Titus’s head open until it bled across her bathroom floor.
“You should be glad you even have a mother.”
Marshall sat back down on the bed. “You know my dad drowned, too,” he said. “A dead parent doesn’t make you special. It just makes you sad.”
She wanted to agree but no part of her did. Loo pulled the sheet from under him. “They eat the eyes first,” she said. “Fish. And eels. But your dad was in the ocean, so it could have been a shark that got him. It would have been fast, if it was a shark.”
The boy looked so startled that Loo did not tell him the rest of what was on her mind, all the facts she’d been collecting, all the bits and pieces she had learned from Mabel Ridge’s newspaper clippings—that it had taken them a week to find her mother, that the police had to drag the lake with a net. She did not say, Think of that. Think of your mother at the bottom of a lake. She did not tell him how deep the lake was: more than half a mile. She did not tell him about the list she had made, of the different kinds of fish that swam in that particular lake, so that she would know what kind of fish had eaten her mother.
“I’m sorry I said anything.” Marshall reached for his watch. He’d taken it off earlier, when the winding pin got caught in her hair. Now he pulled the strap tightly around his wrist.
Loo stayed beneath the covers. She wondered how to put her clothes on without revealing herself to him, even though, only a half hour earlier, Marshall had explored every inch of her with his tongue.
“I think…” said Marshall, and then he stopped. He stood and yanked his pants on quickly, with his back turned to the bed. His belt came next. And then he was searching around on the floor, picking up the coins that had fallen out of his pockets.
Across his back was a heavy, dark bruise, just starting to yellow at the edges, where Hawley had thrown him into the wall at the police station. And now, as he slipped the quarters and nickels back into his front pocket, Loo noticed marks across Marshall’s forearm, the size and shape of her father’s hand.
“I wish you’d never stolen my shoes,” she said.
“I had a crush on you.”
The back of her throat tasted like salt water. “That wasn’t a crush.”
“It hurt, didn’t it?” Marshall lifted his crooked finger. “I know, because you gave me this.”
Loo’s face flushed, remembering the way his bone gave way beneath the skin. The pleasure she’d felt while it was breaking. She wanted to be a good person but she wasn’t sure she would ever be good. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Fine.” Marshall put on his shirt. He walked to the door. “For the record, I didn’t come here to break up with you.”
She turned away. She stared up at the monster hidden in the ceiling.
“Loo.”
He said her name like it was something he’d already left behind. She could feel her heart twisting inside the walls of her chest.
“Wait,” she said. “Just wait a minute.”
She pulled the sheet around her like a towel. She went into the living room and opened the trunk. She took out the Beretta with the slide lock, one of the handguns they’d used to practice in the woods. She dropped the magazine and filled it. She made sure the safety was on.
“Take this.”
“I don’t need a gun.”
“Just in case. It will keep those guys from screwing with you,” she said. Then she stepped away so he couldn’t give anything back. And when he continued to hesitate, staring down at the machine in his hands, she added, “Never try, never win.”
—
AFTER HE’D LEFT, Loo drew water, poured salts and took a bath, trying to wash Marshall off her skin. She ducked her head under the surface and ran her fingers through her hair. On the ledge around the lip of the tub were bottles of her mother’s shampoo and conditioner, the labels so curled and blurry that it was impossible to determine the brand.