I crumple the poster because I’m not here for that. This is what I’m here for: to search the school. I look in the trophy cases, check every locker row, the girls’ room and the boys’, the gym and the cafeteria, the New Books! display in the library.
My underwear doesn’t turn up.
I head for homeroom and pick my usual desk at the back, next to the sinks and not the windows, because any view of the outside world—even one as lackluster as Grebe’s—makes the day drag on that much longer. After a while, Mr. McClelland comes in. He’s the youngest member of the faculty and he tries too hard. I don’t think I’ll be here the day that finally gets crushed out of him, but it’ll happen. It always does.
Students slowly trickle in, pieces of brightly colored paper clutched tightly in hands, even those who aren’t members of our senior class. Some are already on their phones, e-mailing Andy for details, no doubt. It’s a kind of digital vetting process, even though date and time is going to end up the worst-kept secret in this school. And you can always count on a few underclassmen sneaking past the frontlines to drink in some of the glory.
Penny Young and Alek Turner enter the room. It’s Penny first, and she’s still perfect. I can say it over and over because it will always be true. You can tell she’s perfect by the way everyone looks at her. They stare openly or glance furtively—the point is, they want to look because the looking is good. Alek’s entrance is altogether a different thing. He saunters in, a boy who claimed the world, but it’s not his fault; he only took what was offered. He wears a Grebe Auto Supplies shirt, just in case we forgot he’s marked for that empire.
He murmurs something in Penny’s ear and they move around each other with the ease of two people who grew up together but we all did. Someone flicked a switch on them in ninth grade and called it love.
“Announcements soon,” McClelland murmurs. “Everyone, be seated.”
They settle in a few rows ahead of me. Even from here, I can smell Alek’s cologne and it reminds me of last year, our heads bent together, scribbling about Romeo and Juliet for an English project and I thought it was a joke when Mrs. Carter paired us up; Paul Grey’s daughter, Helen Turner’s son. Two households both alike in dignity except there was no dignity on the Grey side, just Helen firing Paul the day he drunkenly called her a cunt in front of all the other boys in the auto shop because goddamn, it’s hard to work on something with an engine when you have a vagina for a boss.
Alek senses me watching. He turns in his seat and his eyes meet mine. I rest my middle finger across my lips; red on red, the most subtle way I can tell him to fuck himself because I’m not stupid enough to say it out loud in a world that’s his fan club. He turns back around, rests his arm over Penny’s shoulder and brings his mouth to her ear. She gives him a playful nudge.
Sometimes I imagine taking a walk with him. I imagine leading him behind the school and into the trees. I imagine stomping on his skull until all his fine, sharp features have turned to pulp. Until all the parts of him that are too familiar disappear.
He’s looking more and more like his brother these days.
“could you drive me to the Barn before I go to work?”
Mom pauses at the bottom of the stairs, Todd close behind. They’re both disheveled and flushed and I don’t want to think about what they were doing before I got home. I toss my book bag against the wall and decide I like the look of it there, that this is what I’ll do every time I make it back from school until it’s second nature. A house isn’t a home until it becomes a habit.
“What do you need?” she asks. Todd slips past her and steps into the kitchen. I hear the fridge door squeak open.
“I’m down to my last bra. I’d bike but I’d be late for my shift.”
“Sure. Just let me get my purse.”
She ducks into the kitchen, tells Todd what’s going on, and then the short, sweet sound of their mouths meeting. She reappears with the car keys clasped in her hand.
“Be nice to spend some time together, huh?”
“Yeah.”
The Barn is a discount store about twenty minutes outside of Grebe, on the way to Godwit. Get everything and get it cheap, which means I can shop for clothes while she picks up groceries. We get into the sweltering New Yorker and roll the windows all the way down. The car doesn’t start the first time or the second time, either. It doesn’t start until Todd comes out and tells us there’s a trick to it. He jiggles the keys in a way that looks less like trick and more like luck, but it works. The engine roars to life.
“You’ll have to fill her up before you leave town,” he tells us. He stands in the driveway and waves as we pull out. I can tell Mom likes that he does that, sees us off.
“I’ll pay for the gas,” I say. “It’s my trip.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
We have to get gas from Grebe Auto Supplies because it’s the only station in town. It’s right next to Gina’s Pizzeria and there’s something disturbingly appealing about the combined smell of grease and gas. Mom pulls up to the self-serve pump and hands me her credit card.
“You want to do this? I’ll get us something to drink at Deckard’s.”
She heads into the convenience store on the other side of and just a little behind the station. I pump gas, finishing before she does, and wait in the car. The minutes eke by. When I glance back at the convenience store, I can just make her out. She’s only halfway in, talking to Mr. Conway, so that should take forever. Great. Dan Conway. Biggest mouth in town. Bet he’s trying to feel out our new living arrangements and whether marriage is next on Mom’s list even though in his eyes, it probably should’ve come first.
I drum my fingers on my knees and then a Cadillac Escalade EXT pulls up to the self-serve pump next to mine, music blaring. My stomach sinks when I see Alek behind the wheel, Brock playing passenger.
It never feels fair, seeing them after school.
Brock gets out with a credit card—not his—in hand. Alek never pumps his own gas, if he can help it. Alek never does a thing he can get Brock to do for him. I watch him rest his head against the seat and stare at the world through a pair of Ray-Bans. After a second, he leans forward and presses his finger against the inside of the windshield. He pulls his hand away and studies it, frowning. He pokes his head out the window.
“Hey, clean the windshield while you’re at it,” he says. Brock gives him the finger. Alek scans the station before his eyes settle on Gina’s. “You hungry?”
Brock raises his middle finger higher, but when he’s hooked the nozzle back on the pump, he reaches for a filthy squeegee because of course he would. Brock lives one street away from me now I’ve moved, a street where the houses don’t so much resemble chipped and broken teeth, but if you look close enough, you see their foundations are rotting. Brock is the eldest of five in a family that’s no stranger to handouts. Alek got him on the sweet side of high school and that’s the kind of debt you spend your whole life trying to repay, which is exactly why Alek got Brock on the sweet side of high school.
When he finishes, Brock takes the card and heads to Gina’s. Stops when he realizes Alek isn’t coming with him. “You gonna wait there?”
“Fucking hot outside, man.”
Brock gives him a look, but he doesn’t push it. He heads inside without spotting me and I exhale. I might not get so lucky on his way back.
I glance at Deckard’s and Mom’s still cornered by Conway. I get out of the car quick and go in after her. Inside, the AC is cranked and the cold air makes me shiver. My arrival brings the sound of Conway’s gruff voice to an abrupt halt. Mom looks at me. She’s got two unpaid bottles of Coke in her hands.
“Have I been that long?” she asks.
“I’m not going to have time, if we don’t go soon.”
“You’re right.” There’s something grateful in her face that makes me think I should’ve broke this up sooner. Mom turns back to Conway, who is all steely-eyed now that I’m around. “Well, you take ca
re, Dan. It was nice talking to you.”
“You too, Alice.” He smiles at me. His yellow teeth stretch across his pudgy face. His bald spot is barely concealed by his blond comb over. “Hope you’re staying out of trouble, Romy.”
Conway says that to everyone but he doesn’t mean it because if they did, he wouldn’t have anything to talk about. Still, the way he says it to me is different than he’d say it to anyone else. Small town nuance. Something you don’t learn in the city. It’s knowing when hello means go away or when rough night means I know you got drunk again or when yeah, I’d love to see you, it’s just so busy lately means never, never, never. When Conway tells me he hopes I’m staying out of trouble what he means is I am the trouble.
I go back to the car while Mom pays and when I round my side, I notice a word cut through the dirt coating my door.
S L I T
Because “slut” was just too humanizing, I guess. A slit’s not even a person.
Just an opening.
The sun shines off the clean lettering. I slowly face the Escalade. Alek is looking elsewhere, but there’s a small smile on his lips.
I see Mom headed my way out the corner of my eye. I drag my nails through the word until it’s off the car, get inside, and rub my hand on my leg, streaking it with grime.
If Mom notices the Turner boy in his luxury truck, she doesn’t say so and it’s not until we’re on the road, heading out of Grebe that I feel like I can breathe. I watch the farmland roll past and wonder how anyone settles on this place when there’s Godwit only a few hours north and Ibis, which isn’t even a blink to the east, but far enough to feel like another planet.
Everything’s better somewhere else.
The Barn doesn’t even have the decency to look like what it’s named after, it’s just a boxy discount store—THE BARN, a sign in large, neon orange letters against an electric blue background over its entrance—with a parking lot that’s pretty full up because more people than don’t in this area get what they need to live here. We cross the parking lot and Mom puts in a quarter to unlock an orange shopping cart before we go inside.
Everything is here. Food and movies, clothes and cheap furniture that looks nice and falls apart fast. At the back of the store, there’s candy, toys, decorations for whatever upcoming holiday, then all your personal hygiene needs. The grocery department belongs to itself. In Grebe, there are two kinds of people: those who shop local and those who shop here.
Mom stays close while I pick through an eight-dollar bra bin at the back of the place. They’re so cheap, so unspectacular, they don’t even hang them up for display. Pieces of cloth with pads, that’s all. But it’s all I really need.
“Okay,” I say and toss them into the cart. There’s something about the way she looks at them that makes my face burn. It’s one thing when Tina calls my bras an embarrassment, but it’s another when my mother does, even if it’s not in so many words.
“Are those enough?” she asks.
“Mom.”
“I mean, are they going to give you enough support? They look sort of—”
“Yes. They will.”
She gives me a look. “You could have something nicer. I always think really nice underwear and pajamas are the best things you can get for yourself. I always feel so great when I have a good bra on or a—”
“Thanks for the nightmares, Mom.”
She laughs and wanders over to a rack of pink bras with fine, black lace edging. The tag attached to them has a picture of an amazing pair of breasts. It’s a push-up.
She holds it out to me. “Try it.”
“No. It’s okay.”
“What’s wrong with something like this?”
“I have what I need.”
I must have this look on my face because she drops it and I let her lead me through the rest of the store and stay quiet while she loads a week’s worth of groceries into the cart. At the checkout, it’s just boys at the registers and I can’t stand the idea of them knowing what I wear underneath my shirt. I tell Mom I have a headache, give her my wallet, and wait in the car while she pays for it all. I wish I didn’t have a body, sometimes.
i’m waiting for an old man to tell me what he wants to eat because he won’t let me leave his table before he decides because he knows he’ll decide as soon as I leave his table and then he’ll “spend the rest of the night trying to wave me down.” I can’t convince him otherwise, so I stand there while he adjusts his glasses and trails his finger over every menu item, waiting for something to call out to him, periodically asking my opinion on any potentials. It’s just fucking food, I want to tell him. It’s fuel. It doesn’t have to taste good to keep you alive.
After the first few minutes, he winks at me, like it can’t be helped. After the next five, I can’t help but sigh and he tells me kids my age don’t know shit about patience and then the air-conditioning flatlines and none of it matters anyway because he melts, he leaves without ordering. He’s not the only one. Tracey tells everyone drinks are on the house and by then it’s my break, thank Christ, because people are mouthing off like it’s something we’re doing to them on purpose.
Holly looks like she’s going to kill someone. She’s been in a pissy mood since she overheard Annie making plans to crash that college party this weekend, just like Holly thought she would. Now Annie’s grounded, Holly’s son is babysitting her on Friday and from the sound of it, no one in the house is speaking—but Annie’s slamming lots of doors.
“Thank God I don’t have to like her to love her,” Holly told me.
I find Leon in the kitchen and he asks if I want to spend the next twenty minutes with him in his car. I say yes and we sit in the back of his old Pontiac with the AC blasting and the radio playing low, awkwardly passing time with a deck of cards. It’s a vintage pack he found in the glove compartment when he bought the car and he decided it could stay because it features sexy pinups from the fifties. He’s embarrassed when he tells me this, watching as I sift through the cards, admiring the girls.
“Pretty,” I say.
“I’ve seen better,” he says. I flush.
He tries to show me how to do a shuffle called the Sybil cut but it’s too hard to follow, so I just watch the cards play against each other before turning back into a deck.
“Fun night, huh?” he asks.
“Real fun.”
Goose bumps prickle my arms and legs. I feel him beside me, so much. Too much. I stare out the window. I see the diner from here. I see patrons inside the diner from here. The bike rack. My bike. I watch a trucker and a woman cross the lot, their arms wrapped around each other. He nuzzles her neck and she tilts her head my way and I swear our eyes meet for half a second. I wonder what she sees when she looks at me.
I wonder what Leon sees when he looks at me.
How he decided on me.
The woman and the man climb into his semi.
“So how do you feel about good food and good people?” Leon asks. It’s so unexpected, I don’t know how to respond. He smiles. “That bad, huh?”
“Why?”
He tosses the pack of cards into the front seat. “I’m going to a party and I’m positive I’d have more fun with you there. It’s at my sister’s, this Friday. She’s in Ibis. How about it?”
“I have to work, Friday. You know that.”
“You could get Holly to cover for you. Or one of the other girls.”
“I have to, uh…” I forget what I have to do. He’s asking me out on a date and I feel about a thousand different things at once and not all of them are bad. I stare at my nails. But. All I manage to get out of my mouth is, “I don’t know.”
“But that’s not a no?”
“I’ll have to see if … I’ll have to see.”
Because there are things I need to know but I don’t know how to ask him, wouldn’t begin to know how to put them to words. I don’t think you can. I study Leon’s profile, my gaze traveling down the ridge of his nose to the soft outline of
his lips, to the sharp outline of his jaw. I wonder what it would be like to run the outside of my hand against it, to be close enough to do that. I am close enough to do that. I hate him a little, for the feeling between my legs.
“Do I have something on my face?” he asks.
“No,” I say. And then, “How would you describe yourself, Leon?”
“I’m awesome.”
“Seriously.”
“Ouch.” He clutches his chest. “What do you want me to say?”
“I can’t tell you or it won’t be true.”
“I think I’m great, for whatever that’s worth.”
It’s not worth anything. I look out the window again and I want to know what’s going on inside the semi. That girl looked like she knew what she was doing, like it was easy.
She didn’t look afraid.
“Look, when we go in, I’ll get my phone. We can swap numbers. Just let me know sometime tomorrow if you want to come and I’ll pick you up. Not a big deal if you can’t.”
He reaches over and squeezes my hand, startling me with his sweetness. But just because something starts out sweet doesn’t mean it won’t push itself so far past anything you could call sweet anymore. And if it all starts like this, how do you see what’s coming?
when i run, I don’t have to think about anything.
I don’t have to think about Leon, or my underwear, or mom, or Todd, or Penny, or Alek, or Brock. But then that last one—he comes up beside me and matches my pace. I take a quick look behind me. Everyone else specks the distance. I want to be them. They don’t have to worry about this. They can run without being chased because that’s what’s happening here. Brock is speaking to me with his body. It’s in the way he keeps it so close to mine. In the way he breathes, so heavy and loud, I can barely hear my heart. His arms lash at the air. He’s telling me the space between us is nothing, is something he’s letting me have, for now. I can barely keep myself ahead of him. I’m fast, but his legs are longer.