He pretends shock. “In the middle of the night?”
I take a smack at him, but he evades it easily, like a dance we’ve performed before. And I know the next step is for me to swing up behind him onto the bike, the warmth of his back against my chest, the cold fingers of the wind in my hair as he heads for the old trestle bridge on the county line that trains stopped crossing twenty years ago. It’s a skeleton in the woods, one whose bones go deep into the ground, resolutely doing its job even though the heaviest weight it’s held in two decades is the aftermath of a kegger.
There’s no one there now though. We have the whole bridge to ourselves as Isaac eases the bike over the boards of the old footpath, their unevenness sending small shivers up our bodies, mine shaking more than his as my fear of heights settles in. We’re three hundred feet in the air, the river below and the only thing separating us from it is a safety barrier built as an excuse for jobs during the Depression.
Isaac swings off the bike as calmly as if we were in a parking lot, taking my hand to help me. He doesn’t let go, leading me to the edge where he sits, legs dangling into empty space and elbows resting on the bottom rung of the wooden fence that started deteriorating the second the tree was cut down almost a century ago. I sit down beside him because I know he thinks I won’t.
“Sasha Stone.” He shakes his head, as if my name is amusing to him somehow, while lighting a fresh cigarette.
My feet are dangling over rushing water, I’m sitting next to Isaac Harver above a three-hundred-foot drop and getting lung cancer from secondhand smoke. Not one of my better days. Yet, I feel awesome.
“Yeah, I hate it when he touches you,” Isaac repeats what he said in my driveway, as if our conversation wasn’t broken by a midnight ride to a broken bridge. And I remember why I’m here. And want to be here. At least, part of me does.
“So what’s up, lady?” he asks, smoke that smells just like my bedroom pillow exhaling with the words.
He might be able to say what he’s feeling as easily as he smokes, but it’s something I’ve got to warm up to. So I stall.
“If I’m Lady, what’s that make you? The Tramp?” I ask.
“Definitely.” He says it with total assurance, and any barriers I had inside of me come down with his conviction.
“You know what color my sheets are,” I say.
“Yep.”
“And I gave you my number.”
“Uh-huh.”
He offers his half-smoked cigarette to me, the tip bobbing in between us as I shove it back toward him.
“What? You don’t want to smoke with me?”
“No.” It’s an easy answer, one trained into me long ago.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s bad,” I say automatically, the abject truth so obvious I don’t understand why he starts laughing.
“It’s bad,” he repeats, taking a long draw, then flicking what’s left into the river.
“Littering is bad too,” I tell him, but there’s not a lot of bite in my words because his hands are on my face, framing my cheekbones and trailing a line down toward my lips.
“I must be a pretty bad guy then,” he says quietly. And for whatever reason I can’t agree with that. Maybe it’s because his hands are callused but his touch soft, or that his eyes are a cold shade of blue but somehow look more inviting than my own house.
“You’re not,” I say.
“And you don’t know what to make of that, do you?”
I don’t, but admitting that isn’t easy either. I pull back from his touch, suddenly wishing I had taken the offer of a cigarette just so I had something to do with my hands as I explain to him about the woman I’m supposed to become, an older version of Sasha Stone who has everything she deserves for doing all the good things and none of the bad. The girl who gets what she wants because she always does the right thing.
“And that stuff matters,” I say. “I’ve been following my class rank since seventh grade, it’s that important to me.”
“Oh yeah? And what are you?”
“I’m number one,” I tell him, my chin lifting up as I wait for him to tease me about it.
“Number one, huh?” He doesn’t disappoint, raising his middle finger. “So what?”
“Being valedictorian will help me get into a good school,” I say, and he rolls his eyes.
So I tell him about college and how those of us who go pick our universities, most of them yoked to our careers. We add them to the timeline as we fulfill our destinies within the machine of progress. Class rings become graduation caps, college degrees swapped out for doctor whites or, in my case, a sensible black pantsuit that will set off my clarinet nicely on the stage.
Except lately I’ve been thinking that pantsuits are a little too sensible, and maybe I want to wear a pencil skirt that makes Isaac Harver look at me.
“And that’s a problem,” I tell him. “Because it’s not me.”
Isaac makes a noise in his throat like maybe he understands, but then I realize he was just clearing it because the next thing he does is spit into the river.
“That’s disgusting,” I tell him.
“So all this time you been telling yourself you get a reward for being good. Know who else thinks like that?”
“Who?”
“A dog,” he says, looking at me hard. “A dog that’s been trained to act a certain way because someone told him so. Thing is, you can train a dog right, but you can also train it wrong, know what I’m saying?”
“You mean like dogs in a fighting ring?” I ask.
“What? No. I mean . . .” He trails off, eyes on the river and the rippling line of light the moon casts there. “More like, okay, so you teach a dog not to shit in the house by rewarding it when it goes outside, right? But you could switch it up, train a dog the wrong way by giving it a treat whenever it pisses in the kitchen.”
“Why would anyone ever do that?”
“I’m not saying they would, I’m saying they could,” Isaac goes on. “The dog knows the difference between good and bad only because of who trained it, and the trainer decided for the dog what was right and what was wrong.”
“So you think I’m just a trained dog?”
“I think you jump through the hoops real nice,” Isaac says, and it’s so close to how I feel about school that a shiver runs through me.
“And maybe I don’t like seeing a girl who’s smart enough to make up her own mind swallow what everyone tells her hook, line, and sinker.”
“You’re mixing the metaphor,” I tell him. “I went from being a dog to a fish.”
“Fuck metaphors,” he says, and lights another cigarette.
“And I don’t do what everyone tells me,” I argue. “Dad wanted me to be an accountant, and I’m going to major in music.” I don’t add so there, but it’s all over my voice.
“I didn’t say you do what everyone tells you,” he clarifies, and somehow I feel like my tone didn’t quite get through to him because he definitely thinks he won that one.