“She’s so cold she runs an underground crime ring,” I chime in. Aunt Beth jumps on my joke lightning-fast.
“Two underground crime rings, thank you very much.”
I smirk back at her and give her a high-five. Mom shakes her head and makes a left turn out of the airport.
“You two are incorrigible.”
We stop to pick up a pizza and then head home. I fill in Aunt Beth about everything that’s happened at school. I show off my cranium scar, and she suggests I get it tattooed into a snake, or a dragon, or something serpentinely badass. Finally, after I’ve worn out the conversation, she hugs me hard and murmurs into my hair.
“Thank you for watching after your mom all this time. I know no one tells you this, but it’s very mature of you. And very thoughtful. You’re a wonderful person.”
“Aw, Aunt Beth, you gentle liar!” I squirm. “How mature can I be if I still laugh every time I rip a fart?”
“Let me tell you a Blake family secret.” She leans in. “You never grow out of laughing at your own farts.”
“Dammit! Why did you have to crush my dreams of becoming a graceful debutante?”
She laughs and hugs me harder. “I missed you. The house is so quiet without you.”
“I missed you, too,” I agree softly.
“I was worried when you left. You seemed so sad toward the end. But you’ve grown up so much here,” she says. “And you look a little happier.”
“I am,” I assert. “I know it doesn’t look it, but I’m rapturously joyful at all times.”
Aunt Beth gives me a flat you’re lying smile.
“Okay, okay.” I sigh. “You got me. I’ve carved out a life here, sure. And it’s good sometimes. But it’s hard, too. I know no one’s said this in the history of ever, but growing up is hard.”
She chuckles and squeezes my shoulder. “Growing up is really hard.”
That night, she and Mom talk in the living room around tea and cookies. I announce I’m going out to the store to grab something for a school project next week, and I slip out. I want to give them as much privacy as they need, Mom especially. Aunt Beth is here for her, to talk her through things only two adult women could talk about. Pain, I guess, and how to deal with pain. They both have scars upon scars upon scars, and sometimes, just showing each other’s scars can help ease the dull ache of years of heartbreak.
There are no cafés open at this time of night, so I decide to go to the children’s park in midtown and spend some quality time with myself and every rusty swing I can find. Thankfully, there’re a lot of them. I pump my legs and go as high as I can and then jump off only to repeat the process, the squeaking so loud the previously sleeping squirrels come out to chitter angrily at me.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “But I’m trying to get to the moon.”
The squirrels politely point out that NASA has sort of figured out a way to do it, and I counter with the fact that their method is much, much noisier and involves a lot more fire. Finally, I get bored of the swings and head to the slide, the squirrels thankfully retreating into their tree mansions. I sit at the top of the slide, watching the stars glimmer.
When was the last time I came to a playground? I remember—we loved them in middle school. We thought it was the coolest shit to stay out late at the playground, defying our curfews even though the parks were only ever a few blocks from our houses. By “we,” I mean Nameless’s friends and me. Nameless was there, too. We used to play midnight hide-and-seek, the spring-bound horse rides ogling us eerily with their huge plastic eyes as we shrieked and ran from each other. We were so young. Nameless was so polite, so kind. He’d always find me the best places to hide my bulk, and he’d hide somewhere obvious nearby so he’d get caught and could tell the finder he saw me in the opposite direction.
We drank energy drinks we weren’t supposed to, ate candy we weren’t supposed to. One of Nameless’s friends, Ashley, was even cool. She and I got along as only girls who read a lot can. We talked about Gone with the Wind, Harry Potter, any and every book we’d read lately. She was the closest thing to a friend I’d had since kindergarten. Being a dumpling gets you more jeers than conversations, even as a child. But Ashley didn’t once jab at my appearance. Even Nameless would join in if his friends started joking about my weight, but Ashley never did.
I spot a shooting star and marvel at how fast it moves—here one second, gone the next. I hope Ashley’s all right, wherever she is.
And I hope Nameless is suffering, wherever he is.
Movies and books tell me revenge is always the way to go. They tell me revenge is what a girl should go for after a guy wrongs her. But every time I see it happen in fiction, I can only shake my head. That’s not how it goes. You don’t want revenge, you just want to get away from that guy. You don’t ever want to see him again. You want him to never be happy again, but you certainly don’t want to beat him up or lash out. Shame and terror floods you after it happens, paralyzing you. You can’t move even an inch toward that person. You walk the other way to avoid him.
It would be a perfect world if every girl wronged could take revenge. Revenge never even crossed my mind—I was too busy convincing myself I was ruined forever, that I deserved it for being so stupid and naive. That it was my fault, not his.
I was too busy lying to myself to even think about revenge.
If I saw him now, would I want revenge? Revenge implies you do the same thing to them that they did to you, but I realize I could never do that to another person. I could never inflict what he did to me on someone else. So I’d have to hurt him differently, but just as much.
I’m not sure there’s anything on this planet I could do that would hurt him equally, hurt him so badly he hated every inch of his body, hurt him so badly he’d build a shield around himself so thick even a cannonball couldn’t pierce it.
I don’t want revenge. I want to go back in time and stop it from ever happening.
But I can’t. So I keep going as best I can, in the only way I know how—by joking around, sniping retorts, acting dumb to make people underestimate me.
Back at the house, the windows are dark. Aunt Beth sits on the porch, smoking. I walk up casually.
“Has anyone ever told you you’re a bad influence?” I ask. Aunt Beth’s eyes twinkle.
“My mother. But our mother was diagnosed as a pathological liar. So, only you, Isis.”
“The one and only.” I puff my chest and sit beside her on the porch. The smell of her cigarette is odd, and I squint. “You’re still on that weed jam?”
“Still on that weed jam.” She smirks around another drag. “You know me—it’s only occasional.”
It’s true. Back when I lived with her, she’d smoke the odd joint when her knee pain got too bad—she’d broken it when she was young and it never really healed right. She’d tried booze, but didn’t want to become an alcoholic, and then opiates—the prescription kind—but she’d gotten addicted. She quit, and found a happy medium. After trying weed with Nameless, I realized I never wanted to smoke it again, and told her so, and she never worried I’d steal it or something equally teenager-y.
“Patricia’s asleep,” Aunt Beth says after a beat of quiet. “But we talked. It was good. I think she’s ready for the trial, at least more ready than she was before I came.”
“Yeah?” I hug my knees. “That’s good.”
“How many joints have you smoked here in Ohio?”
“Seven hundred.”
She whistles in an impressed way. “Incredible.”
“I go to parties and drink a whole bottle of scotch every night.”
“Well, shit. I’d better tell your mom to put a down payment on a coffin real soon.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m donating my body. The demand for alcohol-ridden kidneys is huge. They eat them as a delicacy in France.”
“Bon appétit.” Aunt Beth chuckles. I wrinkle my nose.
“I gross myself out sometimes.”
“Take my a
dvice; if you don’t, something’s definitely wrong with you.”
“Phew. It’s so good knowing I’m wrong-free.”
We’re silent for a while, and then:
“How about you?” Aunt Beth asks. “How’re you feeling?”
“About the trial?”
“About anything.”
I recall Jack’s face. “Confused. A little sad. But I—I’m learning. I’m learning how to like myself again, slowly. And I never thought I would, you know?”
She nods, and I press on.
“But it’s not easy. There’s my dad, who doesn’t care about Mom or me anymore. There’s you, the only person who ever really got me, thousands of miles away. And then there’re my friends. We’ll all go to different colleges—oh God, college. I have to spend another four years cramming my brain full of minutiae while learning how to survive in a dorm with a roommate and shared showers and scholarships and essays and the massive ghost of a future unknown career pressuring me—what am I gonna do? How do you find an apartment or pay rent? How do I even make money?”
“Strip like I did when I was nineteen,” Aunt Beth offers.
“Obviously, stripping is the way to go,” I agree. “Don’t tell Mom.”
She mimes zipping her mouth shut with a wry smile, then immediately breaks it by talking. “Don’t strip.”
“Gotcha.”
The wind ruffles her skirt, and I offer her my jacket, but she refuses it.
“I’m going inside soon. Keep it for yourself.”
“What if I care about your well-being?”
“Don’t.” She turns her eyes to me, seriousness etched in her face. “Care about your own well-being.”
The way she says it is heavy.
She exhales softly. “I’m serious, Isis. You’ve got to start caring about yourself. Not me, not your mom, not your friends. Yourself. You are precious. There’s only one person like you in this whole world, and if you get run-down or hurt because you didn’t care about yourself enough, I’ll never forgive you.”
It’s not a threat—it can’t be when her eyes are shimmering with faint tears. I retract my hand holding my jacket to her and put it back on, the warmth welcome against the bitter air.
“I’m trying,” I say finally.
“No. You aren’t yet,” she corrects. “Not really. But if you are learning to like yourself again like you said, then it’ll come in time. And you have to let it happen when it does.”
Only half understanding, I nod.
“Okay.”
Aunt Beth’s stern face breaks into a smile, and she ruffles my hair.
“Thanks, kiddo.”
Aunt Beth leaves two days later, after forty-eight hours of Mom cooking delicious food for her and bingeing on a shitload of terrible Netflix movies we can all laugh at. It’s rejuvenating, having a third person in the house. Aunt Beth clears the air like an air purifier, a fan, something that keeps the energy moving. I can tell Mom loves having her around, and when she goes, we’re both pretty broken up about it. We don’t say that, of course, but on the way home from dropping Beth off at the airport, I squeeze Mom’s hand over the stick shift, and she smiles sadly.
“We’ll be okay,” I say.
“I hope so,” she returns.
Justice is basically a costumed farce. You learn that when you’re three and your parents tell you sharing is caring when quite clearly sharing is terrible and there is no caring at all involved, because no matter how loud you cry, no one seems to have sympathy for you and your doll that must not touch anybody else’s hands because everybody else is grimy and dumb.
A courthouse is essentially the same principle: a bunch of stuck-up, weary adults telling one another to share and care. With the added threat of jail time.
I sigh and re-button my hideous white blouse all the way up to my chin. At least Mom let me keep my jeans. I can’t morally support her when my butt is hanging out of tight black slacks for the world to see. I try to fix my hair—some big bun Mom made for me—but Kayla slaps my hands away.
“Stop it. You look good. For once.”
She sits beside me in the courtroom, a similar white blouse barely restraining her considerable chest. She wears a skirt and pearl earrings that are actual pearls and looks totally the part of first lady. If the first lady were seventeen and Latina.
The court isn’t exactly what I pictured; I was expecting CSI levels of crowded rooms and scowling judges and apprehensive jurors. But instead I get a room that looks straight out of the eighties—weird geometric-patterned carpets and a flickering fluorescent bulb in one corner and a judge who looks like a smiley grandma with purplish hair and bright red nails. The jury doesn’t even look serious. They talk and laugh among themselves. Mom sits two rows in front of us, her prosecutor at her table on the right. Leo, the scumbag, sits at the left table, his lawyer whispering to him. He’s got a cast on his arm and a bandaged nose.
“Ass,” I whisper to Kayla. “Leo’s nose is fine. He’s just wearing it for show.”
She sneers. “He’s so nasty. I hope he gets all that nasty delivered right back at him! Via FedEx! Express shipping!”
I keep my eyes on Mom as people filter in. I slept on the air mattress by her bed last night again because she couldn’t stop crying. After the Stanford hullabaloo deflated, all that was left was a sad remnant of reality, of the impending trial. Her shoulders are shaking under her two-piece suit and she’s wearing makeup to cover her dark circles, but she keeps her head high.
“Is Jack coming?” Kayla asks. I nod.
“Yeah. Why?”
She shrugs. “Just… It might be hard for you. You know.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Kayla’s quiet, before she says, “It was hard for him, too.”
“What? Who?”
“Jack. When you were gone, he was so different. I know I said that the day you came back, but—but he really, really changed. I’ve never seen him look that bored. It was almost like he was dead.”
“No one to call you names does that to people.”
She shakes her head and sighs. Leo’s eyes catch mine once, and I mime cutting my own throat to get the point across. He doesn’t look at me again.
“For once, your threats are deserved.”
The voice belongs to Jack, who slides into the seat next to me. He’s wearing a midnight suit—crisp, with a porcelain-blue tie that matches his eyes. His hair’s slicked back with gel, cheekbones defiant and profile haughty and regal as ever.
Kayla gives him a cursory glance. “Hey, Jack.”
“Kayla. Good to see you.” He nods at her. Their exchange two months ago would’ve been so different, but now it’s almost…mature? I shudder. Gross.
The image of his hand in the email picture won’t fade from my mind. He might’ve killed someone! Like, dead! Like, not-breathing or -eating! Not-eating sucks because A) food is fantastic and B) food is fantastic! And here I am talking normally to a guy who made people unable to eat. He could be a regular Ted Bundy for all I know, because I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him, except what my fragmented memories tell me. And it makes me feel like screaming. Or puking. Hopefully not simultaneously.
“Your mother looks better,” Jack leans in and murmurs. “She was wasting away while you were gone.”
“From the sound of things, so were you.”
He tenses minutely, his suit straining at his shoulders. Before he can open his mouth, the guard calls out, “All rise,” and everyone in the courtroom stands. The grandma-y judge settles in her chair and tells us to be seated.
“The honorable Judge Violet Diego will be presiding over case 109487, the State of Ohio versus Cassidy,” the guard reads from a clipboard. “Mr. John Pearson and Mrs. Hannah Roth will be representing their respective clients. Mr. William Fitzgerald is acting court stenographer. Your Honor.”
The guard nods to Judge Diego and then retreats to the corner. Diego clears her throat.
“It is my understandi
ng this trial is to address Mr. Leo Cassidy’s alleged breaking and entering and assault and battery of Mrs. Patricia Blake and her daughter, Isis Blake. Prosecutor, if you’d like to make your opening statement now.”
Mom’s prosecutor, a pretty blond lady, stands and takes the center of the room. She makes a speech about Leo’s ruthlessness, about Mom’s history with him, and how she left Florida to escape him. She presents the restraining order Mom got against him before she left, my cranial X-rays, and the photos the police took of the ransacked house. Our house. Shattered glass and a blood smear on the wall and—
I flinch. A metal baseball bat. Kayla grabs my hand and squeezes.
The defense attorney argues Leo was in a fugue state and suffering from the effects of PTSD from his time in Iraq as a medic.
I lean in to Jack. “You’re a nerd, right? You know big words.”
He snorts. “Verily, forsooth.”
“What’s a fugue state?”
“It’s similar to the dissociative amnesia you have for me,” he murmurs.
“Aw, stalking my medical records? You shouldn’t have.”
“I don’t stalk, I understand basic psychiatric indications. Regardless, the argument of a fugue state in his defense is idiotic. It’s a rare occurrence, and he showed no symptoms of another outward personality. If the judge buys it, I’ll be very surprised.”
“Aren’t you a witness?”
He nods. “They’ll call for me, if they think my testimony can help more than it hurts.”
The defense suddenly asks for Mom to take the stand. She looks back at me, once, and I smile as encouragingly as I can and give her a thumbs-up. She grins wanly and walks to the stand. The guard swears her in on the Bible, and the defense attorney starts to grill her—where she was that night, what she was wearing, where I was, what Leo looked like, what he sounded like. Mom’s resolve wavers, her hands shaking and her lip bitten, but she doesn’t break. She keeps talking even though she looks like glass is ripping up her stomach from the inside out. When the defense is done, her own lawyer comes up, and Mom gives a full account of the story with the lawyer’s urging. I gnaw my mouth to stay calm and think about unicorns, but even rainbow-pooping horned horses can’t distract me from the way Mom’s voice trembles as she describes the attack. I want to clap my hands over my ears, or leave, but she needs me. She’s looking at me the entire time she’s talking, so I keep eye contact with her. I’m her anchor.