“But you let me, you wanted it.” He tries to sit up, but he can’t, he can’t, and Penny’s in my head, and she’s taking something from me, she’s always taking something from me. A girl at a diner, a girl sitting across from me in a booth. She opens her mouth and she says—“Like you let him. Worthless fucking slit.”
He looks so much like his brother these days. I want to bury him. The rain is on us both and I want to bury him. He flops uselessly against wet leaves and the mud, too drunk to stand and I walk over, the beat of my heart dulling until it stops and I plant my legs on either side of him. I grab him by the collar and pull him half up so I can push him in the dirt again because I want to be the worthless fucking slit that buries him. He desperately grabs at my arms until I’m on top of him, my knees in the ground on either side of him, he’s underneath me and I’m pressed against him. He calls me that word again and the rain is on us both. I want to bury him. I want to burn a moment of helplessness into him so he can know a fraction of what I felt, what I feel, what’s followed me every moment since, so I You cover cover his her mouth mouth.
i’ve been away but there’s nowhere I’ve been.
I stumble out of the trees, use the wrecked car to climb up the bank. Alek is still on the ground in the woods and I feel like I’m crawling through time, a time, and my head is thick with it, my legs and hands numb with it. Something wants out of me, someone, some girl. No. Not her. Not. Her. I slip, come down hard on one knee. I get up slowly.
When I show up at Leon’s, I’m not myself.
The rain follows me to Ibis, all the way to Heron Street, to his basement apartment. I walk until I see his Pontiac and then I round a little stone house until I find the door that must be his. I bring my fist to it. After a few minutes, Leon answers and when he sees it’s me, he closes the door in my face.
*
“i shouldn’t have done that,” he says, backing his Pontiac out of the driveway.
I sit in the passenger side, picking at the seat belt. I keep my eyes painfully open because if I blink, tears will spill over. He’s taking me home. I’m not sure I was even going to get that much out of him before he saw how drowned I was, before he took in the bandage on my forehead and my mud-streaked legs.
“You should have.”
“No,” he says firmly. “No, I shouldn’t have. I don’t treat people like that.”
“But I do.”
“Yeah, I guess you do.”
“You didn’t let me explain.”
He turns off his street. “You sent me one text message.”
“You didn’t answer it.”
“The more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want to.”
My chest aches. “Why?”
“You acted like you didn’t know me. You acted ashamed.”
“No—”
“Yeah, you did. And when I touched you, it was like—” He winces. “Like I was doing something wrong. You almost had me forcibly removed from a search party—”
“No,” I say again. “No, you weren’t—they wouldn’t have—”
“You don’t think that’s how that was going to end?” he demands. “Jesus, Romy, I was the only black guy there and the way that asshole was with me when he thought I was bothering you—I know the kind of look he was giving me.”
This—this, I am ashamed of. I can taste it, my shame, his hurt, and like that, the only thing I can say isn’t good enough. But then, it never was.
I just didn’t realize it until now.
“You’re right,” I say. “Leon, I am so sorry.”
“You say that a lot.” He comes to a stop sign and won’t look me in the eyes. “I can’t think of a reason you’d have for doing that to me that’s good enough.”
The reason is I need him. I need him to get this ghost off me because I still feel her. I still feel her and I want her to stay dead. The car starts moving again. I blink accidentally. Tears. I try to wipe them away before he sees, but I can tell he sees by the sigh he lets out, which makes me feel wrong, like it’s some kind of manipulation. If I know anything it’s that a girl never makes a case for herself by crying. It’s just one more side of herself she’s showed can’t be trusted. He drives on for a little while longer, rain spattering the windshield as he gets us out of Ibis.
After a stretch of highway, he pulls into an abandoned parking lot where Fontaine’s gas station used to be, before it burned down. He turns the car off.
“So tell me,” he says.
The space between us only feels big enough for the truth. I try to quell my rising panic, the kind that makes it hard to breathe. I can’t tell him the truth.
“Romy,” he says.
But it doesn’t have to be the truth, it just has to get close enough to sound like it.
That’s how every lie about me turned itself into something honest.
“Grebe isn’t a nice place,” I say.
“So?”
“They don’t think much of my family and I didn’t want you to have to deal with it.” The way he’s looking at me is suffocating. “That’s all it was at the search party.”
“You’re saying knowing you would be a problem for me in Grebe.”
“Yeah.”
“You know how that sounds, right?”
“Grebe Auto Supplies—” I stop. “You’ve heard of it.”
“Who hasn’t?”
“That’s Helen Turner’s business, the whole thing—she’s married to Sheriff Turner. Their youngest son is Penny Young’s boyfriend. I pointed him out to you on Monday. Alek Turner.”
“I remember.”
“The Turners hate my family and once you get on their bad side, you get on everyone else’s bad side too, so yes, it would’ve been a problem for you.”
“And what the hell did you do to get on everyone’s bad side?”
“My dad—”
“Your dad.”
“He called Helen Turner a cunt—he worked for her—he drank … he’s a drunk.” I close my eyes briefly. “She fired him. It was bad.”
He waits for me to say more and when I don’t, he reaches for the keys. “If that’s all you got for me, then I was right. It’s not a good enough reason.”
“Okay,” I say.