“Still weird?”
“So weird.”
She’s smiling when she pulls my head back down.
Caroline’s smiling, and we’re kissing, and everything is perfect, until light cuts across her face and she says, “Oh, shit.”
Headlights in the driveway.
“My dad.”
Her Romeo and Juliet balcony turns out to be the perfect height for dropping into the backyard.
My car turns out to be in just the right spot for getting out of Dodge without being spotted.
But the drive between Ankeny and Putnam is way too short for me to sort out what the fuck it is I thought I was doing and way too long to endure the memory of Caroline’s mouth against mine.
The apartment looks alien when I get back. Small and cold and ugly. Empty.
I go into my room and shut the door. I flop onto my back on the bed, feeling tired and used up.
My phone rings. I almost decide not to answer it, because I know it’s got to be Caroline.
I can’t talk to her. I have to get my head on straight first, figure out what that was. Figure out why, when I snuck down her driveway at a crawl with my headlights off, half of me was hoping I wouldn’t get caught and the other half was disappointed, ashamed, fucking furious with her for making me feel like her dirty little secret.
When I glance at the screen, it’s not her, though. It’s my mom.
“Hey, what’s up?” I ask.
Frankie’s voice. “Dad’s here.”
My heart jolts. I sit up so fast that my vision narrows. I have to put my palm to my forehead to steady myself. “Where are you?”
“At home. At Bo’s. He’s—he won’t go away, West. You have to make him go away.”
She sounds like she’s about to cry, her voice high and reedy, right on the verge of losing it.
Frankie never cries.
“Okay, take a deep breath, kiddo. You’re inside, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And he’s outside.”
“Uh-huh. And I locked the front door, but he’s pounding and pounding on it. I’m afraid it’ll break!”
Now that she says it, I can hear the pounding. I’m thousands of miles away, and the sound scares the fuck out of me. I still remember him outside the trailer, yelling at my mom in the middle of the night.
“Michelle! Let me in! Let me into my own goddamn house, you worthless slit!”
He was drunk, Mom told me. He was angry. He didn’t mean it. But I shouldn’t worry, because she would never, ever let him hurt me.
It wasn’t even forty-eight hours later that she let him into her bedroom.
He hurt me plenty.
“West?” Frankie’s voice is wobbly. “I’m scared, West.”
My hands are shaking from adrenaline. I push myself until my back is in contact with the wall. I need something hard to brace against. “I know, sweetheart, but that’s a solid door, and he’s not going to get through it. Where’s Mom and Bo?”
“They went out.”
Drinking, I guess she means. It’s only ten in Oregon. They won’t be back for hours.
“Did you lock the back?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“All right. Can you go do that now for me?”
“Yeah, but West—”
“Just lock the back door. One thing at a time, Franks.”
The pounding grows faint. She’s breathing heavy, fast. Scared to death. I try to focus on the sound of my own inhalations and exhalations.
When she was little and she had a bad dream, I’d take her into my bed and let her curl up beside me, matching our breathing until we both fell back asleep.
“I got it,” she says.
“Top and bottom?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, now the windows.”
“What about the windows?” Frankie asks.
“Check them, just to be sure.”
One thing about Bo—he’s a paranoid guy. Name a conspiracy theory and he’s a believer. Plus, he grows weed in a clearing in the woods behind the house and works as a guard at a prison that regularly releases men who hate his guts back into the stream of society. Bo’s house is a flimsy one-story POS ranch, but he’s got solid locks on the doors and bars on all the windows.
I murmur reassurances.
“It’ll be all right, baby.
“He’s not going to hurt you.
“He won’t get inside.”
But I don’t know. I’m not there. It’s taking everything I’ve got not to grill her for details.
“I checked them,” she says finally. “They’re locked.”
“Good girl. Now get as far from the door as you can so you don’t have to hear it.”
“He’s crying, West.”
“Just tune him out.”
“I feel bad for him.”
“Don’t. He made his bed. Go sit in the tub, okay?”
“Why?”
“You won’t be able to hear in there. It’ll be like you’re in a bubble.”
“That’s dumb.”
“Hey, who called who for help here?”
I imagine her smiling, even though I’m not. I’ve got nothing to smile about.
I hear the shower curtain rings sliding over the rod. Then her breathing is louder.
“You in there now, Franks?”
“Yeah.”
She’ll have one arm wrapped around her knees, just like Caroline up on the roof. I see her in her nightgown, her dark hair hanging over her arms, down her back. Her skinny legs, mosquito-bitten, covered in scratches and sores. Bare toes dirty.
Summer Frankie. But it’s November, and when I talked to Mom on Thanksgiving she said there was snow on the ground. I haven’t seen my sister in three months.
“Should I call the police?” she asks.
I think of Bo’s crop, the plants up to his chin. I know it’s not like that now. He’s harvested for the season. Last time I talked to him he told me he was letting the Indica buds mature, but pretty soon he’s going to be heading down to California to sell.
He doesn’t usually keep any of it in the house. He knows the law. He taught me it’s essential to know what you can go down for, if you’re gonna go down. Never carry enough to get charged with felony possession.
Still. What if he’s not following his own rules? I don’t want to be responsible for calling the cops out to Bo’s house and getting him in deep shit. If he loses his job, goes to jail, then Mom probably loses hers, too, and we’re all screwed.
Frankie’s just a little girl, defenseless, huddled in the tub.
“What happened?” I ask.
“I was watching TV. Mom said to go to bed by nine, but there was this movie on and I knew she wasn’t going to be back, so I watched it, and then I heard him knocking. It was so loud, West.”
“Did you open the door for him?”
“No. Mom said not to.”
“Mom knows he’s back?”
“We ran into him in town. He’s living at the trailer.”
“He’s not. Franks—tell me you’re joking.”
“Yeah, he is! He says it’s his, and we got no right to keep him out of it.”
“That fucker. What happened to Hailey?”
“She moved in with her boyfriend.”
I put my cousin Hailey in that trailer on purpose. I paid up the lot rent for the whole school year. I wanted Mom and Frankie to have a place to go if things went to shit with Bo, but I never thought of this. I never thought I’d be paying for that lowlife son of a bitch to have a home base to terrorize my little sister from.
I shove my heels into the blanket, pressing against the springs. I’ve got my head down, elbows between my knees, and I wish I was with Frankie. I wish I was there for her.
I wish I was where I belong.
“What’s he saying?”
“What do you mean—now?”
“No, I mean, what did he say when he got there? What’s he want?”
“He says, ‘Come out, baby girl. Your daddy wants to see you.’ And he called Mom a bitch, but then he said he didn’t mean it, that she broke his heart and that crap.”
“Don’t go out there, Frankie.”
She huffs. “I know, West. I’m not stupid.”
“Did he sound mad?”
“He sounds drunk.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s all, like, slobbery.”
“Jesus.”
She’s silent a moment. “I don’t hear him pounding anymore.”
She’s more herself now. I think she feels better in the shower with the doors all locked. Plus, she likes knowing something I don’t know. Being the one who tells me things for a change.
“I’m going to see if his truck is still there.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
I hear the shower curtain again, and then her breath is quieter, more even, as she moves through the house to the curtain. “He’s gone.”
“Good. But keep everything locked up.”
“I will.”
We’re quiet. Just breathing.
“Stay with me awhile,” she says.
“As long as you need me.”
It’s hours before she’s asleep. We watch a movie together, talk about nothing—her petty friendship dramas, the new hair bands she got, a singer she loves who’s going to be in a movie she wants to go see next time Mom is off work.
I hang up, finally, to the sound of Frankie breathing, heavy and slow.
She’s safe. She’s fine.
But I feel like I’m falling, and there’s nothing solid for me to grab hold of.
DECEMBER
Caroline
I wonder, sometimes, why I couldn’t see what was happening.
I mean, it was obvious to absolutely everyone. It should have been obvious to me. That night on the roof, how it ended, how my lips felt soft and changed for hours afterward, how I kept touching them, how I couldn’t think of anything else. Not for days.
That ridiculous deal we struck.
My impatience for Bridget to go to her Tuesday/Thursday morning class so I could sit on my bed and wait for his knock. Two taps, always two. And I would go to the door and pull it open, and there he’d be. Back again, when I’d been afraid that this was the day he wouldn’t show.
Back again to lie on my bed and put his mouth all over me, his hands all over me, to breathe hot and short against my neck while I pretended that my heart wasn’t dark and rich, full to bursting with the sound and smell and taste of him.
I don’t know why I didn’t understand. I guess I was afraid.
I never knew there could be so much ecstasy in fear.
He’s been avoiding me for a week. More than a week. Nine days.
At first I didn’t realize. I was too wrapped up in my brain fog of what-the-heck-happened, and then I went out to brunch with my dad, who wanted to talk about My Future. Only now the conversation was more awkward than ever, because part of me was happily nodding along, thinking, Yes! I’m going to get a great internship this summer, but I also had to contend with the chorus of Internet Asshats saying, Not with your cunt online!
And, meanwhile, the new, completely West-centric part of my brain was busy squeeing, I got stoned and made out with West on the roof—O-M-effing-G.
All of which means that I missed a lot of cues, said weird things, and got frowned at by my dad, who didn’t understand why I’d turned into such a freak.
I drove back to school on Sunday afternoon and sent West a text when I arrived. He wrote back, Cool.
Cool.
Who even says cool?
I don’t know, but I told myself maybe it was good that he didn’t seem too enthused to see me. We probably needed some time apart, a few days to sort through what that … that episode on the roof meant. And since I’d just had a serious talk with my dad, I’ll admit, I figured I could use a little space from West, to think about what I was doing.