“Kayla! When did you get so—so—”
“Awesome? All thanks to your influence.”
I’m silent and stare-y.
“And Wren’s,” she relents. “He’s very informative and methodical. One time I got to hear a history lesson of the condom while I was putting it on him.”
“Ugh,” I gag. “I don’t know what’s more miraculous—the fact that he only did that once, or that Wren of all people in the conceivable universe has turned you into a sexpert.”
“All I’m saying is,” Kayla huffs, “if you want Jack to date you—”
“I don’t!” I harp. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t. I’m not dating anyone ever again.”
“If you want Jack to sleep with you—” she corrects.
“I don’t. Why do people even say ‘sleeping with’? There is no sleeping involved! Sleeping is peaceful and nice and sex is like…the opposite of that.”
“You can’t say that,” Kayla fires back. “You’ve never had it.”
“I’ve had it once,” I defend, suddenly exhausted.
“That wasn’t sex and you and I both know it.”
“Look, it’s great that you’re all gung ho about sex and me and Jack all at the same time.” I sigh. “But you’re forgetting the part in which I’m never touching a dude again. And he’s never touching me. Besides, Jack wouldn’t even like touching me.”
“He would.”
“I’m fat.”
“You are surprisingly not-fat.”
“I’m not as pretty as like…any other girl he could get. You’ve seen his face. He got you. He could get freakin’ Scarlett Johansson if he really wanted to.”
“And I’m sure Ohio State is just teeming with Scarlett look-alikes.”
“In black bikinis.”
Kayla sighs. “It’s hard, I get it. After everything that’s happened… I don’t know what it’s like, but it’s gotta be hard. And I’m sorry. But he really likes you, Isis. And you really like him. And you guys are like, really interesting together and you light each other up in a weird, symbiotic way. And life is short. Sophia taught us that. And I think you deserve a shot at each other before you write each other off completely out of misguided martyrdom.”
“Wow. ‘Martyrdom.’ You might be the only one in the universe paying actual attention during college.”
“Shut up.” She flushes and leans in to close her computer. “And don’t call me back until you’ve at least kissed him.”
I slam my face on the keyboard of my laptop and roll it around, groaning. Yvette chooses that exact moment to burst through the door and collapse on her bed, likewise groaning.
“My life is over,” she says.
I get up and collapse next to her on the bed. “Finally. Time to die.”
There’s a long silence of us just breathing into pillows, experimenting with suffocating ourselves. Yvette breaks first, coming up for air, gasping.
“I’ve been sleeping with somebody,” she confesses.
“I know.” I look up. “I heard.”
Yvette goes red down to her skull earrings. “Sorry. I mean, shit, I’m not sorry. It was damn good.”
“Mind if I ask who?”
“Yes, actually. Very yes.”
I welcome the distraction. “It’s Steven. From socio.”
“Wow.” Yvette claps. “Ten points to you for saying the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard.”
“Brett with the weird T-shirts.”
“Yes, because I want to turn my vagina into a gonorrhea culture lab.”
“Give me a hint. Like, at least seven hundred whole hints. In essay form, with citations and footnotes.”
Yvette screws her face up like she’s in genuine pain, and it’s then I catch a whiff of something unmistakable. Something musky and sweet and floral. Roses.
“Dia—”
“I’m gay,” Yvette whisper-interrupts, as though terrified someone will hear in the security of our own room. We stare at each other in stunned silence, and then I smile and punch her shoulder.
“Diana, right? You lucky piece of shit!”
Yvette’s eyes widen, as if she was expecting something worse. Shouting, anger maybe. Her eyes well up with gratitude, and in typical Yvette fashion she shoves her face into the bed so I won’t see it.
I stand. “C’mon, let’s go get ice cream to celebrate.”
She doesn’t move. I tug on her boot. She groans.
“Get up,” I insist.
“I can’t get up!” Yvette’s voice is muffled by her pillows. “I’m gay!”
“You’re paying if you don’t get up in the next five seconds, Gay.”
Yvette peeks out of the pillow, looking like a scared child. “I haven’t told my parents.”
“You don’t gotta,” I offer. “Not right away. We’ve still got six months before we drop out. When they ask why you flushed their twenty thousand dollars down the toilet, tell them it’s because you’re gay. Trust me. They’ll be more mad about the money than your girlfriend.”
Yvette smirks, wiping her nose.
“Or. Or you could just drop the bomb now. Over the phone. Drop all the bombs. Blow up your own house.”
Yvette laughs and punches me weakly on the knee. And then we share a sundae, and for a while I’m not the only one with problems. Yvette’s bravery reminds me of that. I’m not the only one who thinks love and sex are all sorts of weird and hard and scary.
If Yvette could confess to me she’s gay, if she could overcome that turmoil and life-changing revelation all on her own, then I can overcome what happened to me.
I can’t be as strong as her, but I can try.
I owe it to myself, and everybody who loves me, to at least fucking try.
I visit Mom over the weekend. The drive is long, but the love is plenty—she comes out with a smile and wide arms that hug me close, and she’s cooked dinner for once. Pasta. The house is clean. The windows are open and the air inside every room is fresh instead of musty. Mom’s skin looks healthy; her eyes are bright. She can’t stop talking about work and a new group of lady friends she met at yoga, and I just sit in my chair and eat quietly and absorb it all—all her happiness, all her change.
“Are you okay, sweetie? I’m sorry I’ve been blabbering, it’s just—”
“No, I’m fine. Don’t be sorry. I was just really hungry.”
“Are you eating well at school?”
“Three square meals a day. Comprising doughnuts and regret.”
She laughs, and I smirk into a noodle.
“It’s been awfully quiet without you around,” Mom says. “So I’ve been trying to get out more. Do more things, meet more people.”
I flinch. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m not here more, and I’m sorry I didn’t come last weekend, I was—”
“It’s all right. I don’t want to hear excuses. But it was a promise, Isis. You promised me you’d come every other weekend. I know you’re busy, and it’s college, but I’m your mother. And I want to see you. I need to see you.”
“I’m sorry!” I clutch my fork. “I’m so sorry—”
Mom gets up, sweeping over to pet my head and hush me in soft whispers.
“No, honey. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for needing you so much. You should be free. I have to let you fly away from me sometime. Other kids your age, other parents my age have all learned how to leave and let go but…but it’s harder for me. And that makes it hard on you.”
I swallow. Mom looks into my eyes.
“Sometimes I think bad things—dark things. And I go to Dr. Torrand and try not to think them so much. But they keep me up at night. And I don’t sleep. And I start resenting everyone—your father, Leo, even you—and it’s horrible. I’m horrible.”
I hug her back, tight and unending.
“We’re not horrible,” I whisper. “We’re just people.”
I watch Charlie do his homework, hair greasy and his face eternally frowning. He’s not the most intelligent bod
yguard, and he doesn’t think before he speaks. Where my style is to write lightly with a ballpoint pen, his is to press hard with a soaked paintbrush. We both get the job done, just in different ways. It’s why Gregory assigned us to each other, probably—two radically differing methods double the chances of success. In theory.
In reality, we get along as well as two wet cats in a stewpot.
“What’re you staring at?” Charlie grunts, never taking his eyes off his paper.
“I wanted to thank you,” I say finally.
“Fuckin’ doubt that.”
“For sending Isis away at the barbecue. I was reluctant to do it myself.”
“You don’t say.” Charlie rolls his eyes. “You and her got history or somethin’?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, keep it out of this assignment. I don’t need your fuckbuddies screwing this up for me. A job like this means a damn promotion.”
I glance over at his desk. He doesn’t keep a lot of personal items, but he brought a framed picture of his grandmother, an old Japanese woman with a wrinkled, smiling face, hugging Charlie in front of a tiny noodle shop in what looks like foggy San Francisco. He sends the money he makes back to her—I did some digging into his file and his bank accounts. Orphaned at the age of three due to a racial hate crime, he was taken in by his grandmother, and she raised him. Now that she’s nearly eighty and unable to work the store, Charlie is the one who keeps it running with the money he makes. He used to be in a Chinatown gang until Gregory scouted him.
He’s weaker than me, even if he doesn’t act like it.
The people he loves are still alive, after all. And that is a weakness in and of itself. It’s why I will always be a better bodyguard than him. Or I thought I would be. Until Isis stepped back into the picture.
“She wasn’t a fuckbuddy,” I clarify, tempering the soft fire of anger that flares in my lungs. He didn’t mean it personally—his name-calling is a defense mechanism to keep from getting to know people and consequently, caring about them. It’s similar to Isis’s rampant jokes.
“Whatever she was to you, she was sure as hell jealous of Brittany that night. Kept giving her the stink-eye. Don’t let her get in the way of pumping Brittany for info, you got me?”
Jealous? Isis? That can’t be right. She’s smart enough to know when she’s chasing after a worthless cause. She would never pursue me. Not after what I’ve done to her.
Do you know how many times you’ve made me fucking cry?
I grab my coat and walk out.
The campus is quiet, night stars glimmering like discarded diamonds. My confused feet take me around the library, through the parking lot, and to a haughty granite fountain in the shape of a centaur shooting an arrow into the sky. I read the plaque—dedicated to someone’s dead something. I sit on the edge. I’m not the only one there, I notice.
I could walk away. I could leave her, on this starry night, and walk away. I could choose not to form this memory, not to engage. But I long for it. I miss the fights, the blows, the wit. I miss her, even when my every perfect, lifeless, and calculated plan demands that I never speak to her again, in the interest of not hurting her further. But I am human. I am selfish.
And I let myself be human and selfish, like she taught me.
“Boo,” I say.
Isis jumps, withdrawing her lazily circling hand from the water. “Fuckstick central! Are you trying to kill me before I attain my final form?”
“Do tell.” I settle beside her. She’s wearing a soft-looking sweater and jean shorts. “What’s your final form? No, wait, let me guess—insane witch.”
“Cyborg empress,” she corrects with a dignified sniff. “Of a small yet filthy-rich country.”
I laugh. “And what will you do when you’ve regained your kingdom, Your Majesty?”
“Oh, you know, improve schools, build better roads, form a harem of beautiful, delicate men, the usual.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Really? I thought your type was more beefy.”
“It was, until I learned it doesn’t actually matter what people look like on the outside, duh. Don’t you watch Dora the Explorer? Shit is straight informative. I’ve learned so much about treating people as equals. And like…backpacks.”
I smirk, and she hides her twisted smile in the crook of her arm.
“Alone in the middle of the night and hiding behind a studly centaur’s rump is no place for an empress,” I say.
“I wasn’t hiding.” She frowns. “Hiding is for babies. And ninjas.”
We graze our hands through the water, our ripples the only thing touching. Our fingers distort to albino snakes under the water, speckled by stars and moss.
“You wanna go somewhere with me?” she asks.
I look up. “Where?”
“Somewhere. Anywhere but here. Anywhere Sophia never got to go. Let’s go to the moon.”
I look up at the silver disc. “It’ll be cold.”
“We’ll bring jackets.”
There’s another quiet.
Isis huffs. “Where’d you get that thing on your eyebrow?”
“I ran into a doorframe,” I answer smoothly.
“Where, at Samwise Gamgee’s house?”
“Samwise lives in a gardener’s shack, not a house.”
“Oh my God, who cares?” She throws up her hands. “The point is that scratch looks nasty.”
“Yes. That’s what I’ve been doing all along. Nastying up my face so no woman will ever look twice at me again.”
“Impossible,” she scoffs. “All it’ll do is heal and make you look badass, and then you’ll have girls and their moms running after you. More than you do now. Distant aunts, maybe. God, life is so unfair.”
She pushes her chestnut hair off her shoulder. It’s gotten so long—past her shoulder blades—the faded purple streaks now lavender with a touch of white from the bleach. Her bangs are messy, in dire need of a trim, shading the warmest of brown eyes and gracing her flushed cheekbones. Her lips are still endearingly small and pouty. A year has changed her. She’s grown taller ever so slightly, a mature sort of beauty sending out its first roots into her face. Her lashes are as long and dark as ever, and only when she blinks four times do I realize I’m staring and look away quickly.
I owe her the truth. I owe her at least that much.
“I left Northplains because I couldn’t stay,” I say. “Because I didn’t know what to do with myself. Because I was hurting, and I was afraid I would hurt people with my own hurt. People like you.”
Isis is quiet, hand slowing in its caress of the water.
“I took the car and drove for days. I don’t even remember most of it. When I snapped out of it, I was in Vegas. I spent weeks there, in a motel room.”
“Doing what?” she asks softly.
“Fighting. Fighting and drinking. There was a club in the lower east end, and I’d go there every night, beating up tourists or seasoned veterans or whoever wanted a piece of me. I got beat up more than I did the beating, unfortunately. But I wanted to be hurt. I wanted to feel pain, to feel something, anything. Anything other than the horrible nothingness that closed in after the funeral.”
I see her swallow, her fists clenched in her lap.
“The guilt drove me like a demon. It still does, a little. But thanks to Gregory, it didn’t swallow me alive.”
“What do you mean?”
“The guy who chased you with Charlie in the forest—Gregory. He found me. God knows how. But he tracked me down, and just as I was running out of money, he offered me a job and training. Something to devote my energy to, to strive for, to pour myself into. I’d been so afraid of losing control for so long. But it’s been that way since my father died, I think. That’s when it started. I lost control in the forest and caused Joseph’s death. Terrified, I tried to control myself even harder, keeping people at arm’s length so they wouldn’t get hurt. But then you came along.”
She flinches, and I slide my
hand into hers under the water and hold it, lightly.
“That’s not a bad thing. Leo was, objectively, a bad thing. And I lost control then. But you—I lost control in a more pleasant way around you. In a way that was healthy and supportive. Losing control showed me the intricate web of emotions I’d been denying for so long. You teased them out, like the sun does to spring sprouts.”
The flush on her cheeks grows redder, and I smile. But then I realize I’m holding her hand and disengage quickly. Motions like that are not helping her move on to a better man. None of this is. And yet I’m too selfish to stop talking, to walk away. I want the sun. I want to be warmed again by her heat, if only for a fleeting moment.
“Gregory taught me to control myself in a deeper way than I was doing alone. He took me to the desert, a ranch house he owns in the middle of nowhere, and he made me work. I hauled water and firewood and struggled with the stallions. Horses hate me, by the way. And they hate snakes. But primarily me.”
“The difference between you is marginal,” she muses, grinning. I flash her a smirk.
“Gregory made me fight—him, mostly, and sometimes his ranch hand, a giant of a man. Gregory showed me that control isn’t suppression—it’s expression, expressed when and where you choose and with deliberate purpose. After three months, he said I was ready to join his team. And I did.”
“Spying,” she says.
“Bodyguarding,” I correct. “With a side of information collecting.”
“So you’re spying on Nameless.”
“He’s very secretive, and more clever than I gave him credit for. But with enough time, we’ll get solid evidence.”
“What’s he done? Other than ruin a girl’s life?” she asks.
“He’s helped some people involved with opium, meth, human trafficking. The list isn’t pretty. My employers aren’t after him, just the people he knows. He probably didn’t even know exactly what he was doing at the time, but he knew it was illegal.”
Isis is quiet. She puts her hands between her knees and rocks on the edge of the fountain, a nervous gesture.
“I’m scared. Every corner I turn—I’m convinced he’ll be on the other side, waiting for me.”