In that second of fraught silence, Candace, of all people, sinks into the chair beside me.
“Hey, y’all,” she says, and we all boggle at her.
She blushes and ducks her head, drawing her knees up and perching her heels on the chair’s edge, wrapping her skinny arms around herself. She holds her biscuit in both hands, like a little mousie with a nut.
It’s baffling. When I look back across the table, I am baffled further. Karice is backing up. She’s a little behind Shar, so Shar can’t see her going. Karice takes two steps away, then three, and then she turns and walks toward the line, as if she needs her peach half with its maraschino nipple, stat. Kim stares after her, then back at Candace. My odds just got crazy better.
Shar is glaring with such hate at Candace now that Candace’s spine becomes a curve, as if she’s going to fold herself in two. I think she’d keep on folding if she could, into quarters and then eighths, smaller and smaller, until she disappears.
But instead, she peeks up over her knees and says to Shar, “Did you just lick her breakfast?” She sounds genuinely curious.
The two Hispanic kids feel the winds shift as Karice goes past them to the line. The fight they smelled has been deferred, so they file to their end of the table with their trays.
“I think she licked her own breakfast,” I say. I push the tray across toward Shar.
Shar is about to speak, but Candace interjects. “In the supply closet?”
Kim’s been looking uncertainly from Shar to the hole that used to hold Karice, but now she turns to Candace. “Bitch, no one here cares you exist. Don’t make us care.”
Shar leans back, oddly silent. She glances behind her, to her right, where Karice should be, and does a double take. She looks around until she spots Karice in the line.
Candace spins her biscuit in her hands, takes a tiny nipping bite.
Now no one is looking at me. I’ve puffed into a fighting shape, only to find myself invisible. It’s disconcerting. I sink back down into my chair.
Candace says to Shar, “That was nice that Paula got you breakfast. Go on, now. Take it to the supply closet.” She turns to me and adds, “You know how Shar likes to eat stuff in there.”
Shar’s mouth closes all the way, and I can see all the spine draining out of her. I’m so interested in understanding the mechanics here. Back in Paulding County, I learned that I pick fight over flight. From Joya, I learned to find the weak spot, then hit it first and hardest, skipping the preliminaries. Now I’m watching Candace turn a fight with implication. It’s pretty damn effective; Kim is so unmoored she’s taken a literal step back.
“This is not your fight,” Shar tells her.
Candace spins the biscuit and nips at it again. This is her standard, enraging way of eating anything shaped like a circle. She takes little bites off the sides, turning it in her hands, making it smaller but retaining the round shape. “I know, right? It’s yours and Joya’s, but I guess Joya’s gone. Oh well.” She scootches her chair close to mine, so close we’re almost cuddling.
I’m interested enough to abandon my own plans and back her play. I snuggle even closer and tell Shar, “Maybe you should head off to the supply closet, get you a bite of whatever it is you like to eat in there.”
Shar’s cheeks puff out in a fast exhale, as if a blow has landed.
“What is this?” Kim asks Shar, confused, but Shar shakes her head.
“How do you know abou—” Shar says to Candace, and then stops talking.
It’s a shame, because I’m deeply curious about the end of her aborted question. Candace has some dirt on Shar. It’s not surprising, considering the way Candace weasels around, eavesdropping. I know this from highly personal experience. What is surprising is her long game—she’s held this secret to herself, but now she is deploying it on my behalf.
Candace spins her biscuit, nibble nibble nibble, and Shar shoves her abandoned chair out of her way and walks off. Kim hurries away in her wake, already asking questions.
“What happened in that closet?” I whisper to Candace.
“A lot. You know how Karice goes with that tall boy, Arly? Well, Shar got with him in there when they was broke up,” Candace whispers. Her biscuit is barely the size of a silver dollar now. “Karice is back with him and still don’t know.”
“And what do you have on Karice?” I ask. It has to be big, to make Karice abandon Shar mid-intimidation.
“Nuthin’,” she lies. Her eyes go wide and round, telegraphing innocence.
“Yes, you do,” I say. It’s something worse than boy thieving.
Candace changes the subject. “Did you see Shar’s face when I set down?” She snickers and peeps at me again, spinning her tiny biscuit coin. She pops it in her mouth and sucks on it, as if it were a particularly savory lozenge.
“Yeah,” I say, smiling. I’m feeling warmly toward her. It’s as if we came through an actual fight together, and we won. Not warm enough to see her all rosy. I know Candace doesn’t have friends. She has quid pro quos. I say, in my nicest tones, “Is there anyone you don’t have dirt on, Candace?”
“Kim, but only ’cause she’s boring,” Candace says. “People aren’t careful, and we all live real close up on one another.” She swallows and looks right at me. “People tell each other things, like you would not believe. They get distracted, like, they’ll get in a big fight. They won’t even think about who might have come on in the building. They’ll say all their darkest things out loud.”
I feel my stomach drop, dizzy sick. She’s looking almost through me with those eyes so light blue they are barely darker than the whites. Cold trickles up my spine.
Did she hear me telling Joya about that 911 call? I think of Candace creeping to kneel by my bed. She can move in such silence. Her big ears seem to pick up sounds from space. Is she bluffing me, the way I bluffed Shar by picking up on her reaction to the word closet? I can’t tell. She’s better at this kind of fight; I’m new to it.
“Want a piece of my bacon?” I ask, sweet as I can.
Candace smiles at me and takes it. She folds the whole thing into her mouth. She drops her gaze, her lashes in demure, pale fans across her cheeks. Every atom in me whirls and clenches. She knows. She knows. She owns me in this moment.
She picks the second piece of bacon off my tray and bites the end off without asking. A bold move, testing the pecking order.
I consider my options, but they are limited. Maybe I should concede? My time here is finite, after all. Kai’s release date is set, and if everything goes right, I could be home with her in a couple of months.
Watching Candace chew my bacon like a cud, I realize I will not make it.
“You know what I like about you, Candace?” I ask, reopening negotiations. “You didn’t rat out Karice to me just now. That’s pretty cool. Not many girls know how to keep their mouth shut, like me and Joya. It’s why me and Joya were so tight.”
She peeks at me, still in profile, but I can see her eyes gleaming. I have changed the stakes. I am offering my willing friendship for her silence, and my currency is valuable. She can make me be her bodyguard and hold my heartbeat in the bed beside her, but she can’t make me like her.
As she thinks, I jerk my bacon out of her hand. She spins toward me, indignant, only to find my face is very close to her face, and my eyes are hard. Friendship is on the table, sure. But I will not be her dog. If she doesn’t bend a little in her style of fighting, I will go back to mine and bend her all the way in half.
Her mouth twists. I can practically hear the crafty machinery of her mind spinning and whirring, reworking calculations. Her currency can be spent only once, but I can beat the living shit out of her endlessly. I tell her so with my eyes and the insolent, openmouthed chewing of my own damn meat.
She drops her gaze, demure again. When she speaks, her voice is tentative, almost a whisper. “You want to sit beside me on the bus?”
“Sure I do,” I say.
We might as well
have spit into our hands and clasped them. There will be border skirmishes and small negotiations, but we have the broad strokes of a deal. One I can live with, for the short time I have left.
Or so I thought then. It was months before I understood how thoroughly I had been played. Candace would have made a hellishly good lawyer. For example, when Candace met dead-eyed Jeremy in the rec hall stairwell, she wasn’t trading sex acts for Fun Dip or SweeTarts; she wanted both, the candy and the touch. She liked him, but she made him pay with sugar to kiss her, which she wanted, to touch her budding breasts, which she wanted, so they could put their hands down each other’s pants. All things that she wanted.
I learned the rudiments of dark negotiation from Candace. She got the candy and a boyfriend. Or her idea of one. Candace didn’t come from a world where a boy might like her, sweetly and simply. Love was something furtive to be paid for or extracted; her life had given her a dim view of that animal. But she wanted it. She was starving for it, though she wouldn’t have recognized it if it had run at her and slapped her—which, of course, it would. I’d see to that.
But was I any better, even now? Deep into my thirties and still one cracked heart away from walking to a pool hall in my fuck-me pumps, looking to pull a strange. And over Birdwine—a long-botched love that should already be scar tissue. Even so, last night, this morning, now, I was feeling it. It was an itch lodged deep inside my chest, too far below my skin to scratch or soothe. I had to shut it up. Shut it down.
Some kindly reminiscence with an old friend wouldn’t do it. Removing Birdwine required something ugly and immediate, spiced with the danger that came only with the unknown.
I was going to McGwiggen’s, an old-school midtown dive that had survived gentrification with its steeze intact. It was an easy walk, even in heels, especially if I didn’t mind a cut-through between buildings. I didn’t. I put my hand inside my bag, wrapped around my mace with a finger on the trigger, and took the turn. Walking down this dim road, narrow, lined with back doors and trash cans, was like walking back into my past.
My past had no Hana, her fate hovering out of view, secreted beyond a dark horizon. The only lost girl here was me, eager for something that felt more like a fight than straight-up sex. I walked into an old, familiar darkness, into a former Paula, one reincarnated by the staccato beat of my heels against hard concrete, the faint smell of decay. I remembered this hunger. It had lived in me before William, before Nick, and definitely long before damn Birdwine. I learned it at thirteen, in love with a dead-eyed mother who smelled like an ashtray and cried when she drank wine. It deepened as Kai and all her last names, all her incarnations, died. I was left with Karen Vauss, a parolee who kept her eyes focused faintly to the right of me. She pawned her mandolin, traded her bright silk skirts and bare feet for a waitress uniform and ugly orthopedic shoes. Karen Vauss did not tell stories often, and so she didn’t tell me who to be. She could barely stand to look at me.
But boys would look. I learned that, fast. Boys would follow me and beg and yearn, and I could push them down and own them, for an hour or two. I could invent a new self under each new gaze, could be unhungry, powerful, alone.
I wanted that again. Right now. I could feel the ghosts of all the girls I’d been behind me in the alleyway, creeping in my wake. I could almost hear my own past footsteps as an echo. For a moment it was so real that I spooked myself. I stopped and turned to look. There was only silence and darkness. I walked on.
I’d had boys in the back rooms at parties, in garden sheds, in gas station bathrooms, on rooftops with their parents sleeping soundly below. I’d had one up against a wall on a dark road much like this one, his back to the bricks, his knees bent so I could get my legs around him.
Now I needed a new male body with a different shape, a different smell, to push myself against. If I pushed hard enough, I could shove myself all the way past Birdwine. I wanted a new mouth to reinvent my tastes, to scrape fresh mint over bourbon off my tongue.
The front entrance to McGwiggen’s was around the corner, but there was a smoked glass door here in the alley. It let into the hallway by the restrooms. Wes, the bartender, must have seen me come in on the security camera, because he’d already pulled a tray of balls and was popping the cap off a Corona as I came into the center room. I claimed a table by the back wall, though I knew it had dead rails and a five-inch tear in the felt near the foot spot; it gave me a good view of the bar and the front door.
My only concession to the present was my cell phone. I dug it out and jammed it in my back pocket. If Julian buzzed me, I would feel it. Then I put all thoughts of siblings from my head. I scoped the local talent while I racked for nine ball. Slim pickings, but it was early yet.
The old white guy on the end had a healthy overinterest in my solo game, but he either was twice my age or had lived hard enough to look it. He was as welcome to the view as any tourist, but I wasn’t going to take him home. Four stools down was a real prospect, a black guy, maybe forty, broad through the shoulders with his head shaved down to dark stubble. He was looking, so I looked back. Then he smiled, showing me the gap between his two front teeth. That blew it for me.
I kept one eye on the front door as I played against myself. I was overstriking, but it felt good, especially when I sank my shots. I liked that rebounding clatter, the balls landing in the pocket with a gunfire smack of sound. A regular I knew came in; we nodded to each other, but I wasn’t interested. He was someone I would likely see again. A young man came in the back. Cute, but clearly a fetus. Wes took his fake ID and sent him home to mother.
I was racking for my second game when a man with some potential walked in the front door. He was a white guy, very fair-skinned, with dark blond hair. He was maybe five ten in his boots, built slim and elegant. My age or close to it. He paused to scan the bar, and when he got to me, he smiled. A good smile. Like I was exactly what he’d been looking for.
He had a pretty-boy face I didn’t mind at all: narrow jaw, sculpted nose, high cheekbones. Add the rangy build, the fair skin, and the light eyes, and he was the opposite of all things Birdwinian. That alone put him ahead on points. I smiled back.
I lost sight of him while I broke, but when I lined up for a bank shot on the one ball, there he was. He’d taken a stool directly opposite my table. His back was to the bar so he could face me. He was giving me the sex eye, and I gave it back as I walked around the table for my next shot.
He wore a generic navy blazer over a plaid shirt with that yoke-shaped piping at the top that made it read vaguely western. He had on western-style boots as well, but he didn’t read to me like an outdoorsy kind of fellow. His pale hair was short enough to be corporate, worn brushed back from his temples.
I blew the angle, and the two ball went wandering off to sit behind the nine. He lifted his beer to me in a rueful little toast. I toasted back, and he took it as permission to come over. I liked the way he did it, too, a slow, unhurried stroll, directly to me.
“Kin I buy you a drank,” he said, his drawl so exaggerated that I laughed.
“That’s the worst fake southern accent I’ve ever heard,” I told him.
He grinned, and his teeth were perfect. Straight and even.
“Well, when in Georgia,” he said with no accent at all. He could be from anyplace, and I liked that, too. “How about it?”
“I have a drink,” I said. I nodded toward my beer, half-full, sitting on the bar rail behind me. “Want to play?”
“Sure,” he said, and reached for my cue. His hands were so well kept they looked almost manicured, nothing like Birdwine’s callused bear paws. He didn’t bother to rerack or restart, just looked to make the shot I’d bungled. I took it as a tacit understanding that neither of us gave a crap about winning at nine ball tonight. “What’s your name?”
“Lady at the Bar, right now,” I said. “But it could be Fond Memory.”
“I like that second option,” he said, flashing those white teeth again. He walked away arou
nd the table, talking soft to make me follow. “Would it hurt my chances if I said my name was”—he paused, sizing me up—“Cowboy Passing Through?”
“Nope. I didn’t come to find myself a husband.” I liked the honesty inherent in his chosen pseudonym. It said plainly that he was looking for a ships-in-the-night scenario, which made up for the costume feel of that shirt, those boots; I’d never seen a more unlikely cowboy. Accountant passing through, maybe. His ring finger was bare, but I checked anyway, saying, “I’m not looking for someone else’s husband, either.”
“I’m not married,” he said, but then amended it. “Well. Not anymore.”
Good enough. He shot, and I picked my beer up and drank deep, swallowing, feeling the cold of it warming as it came to my center. I watched the lean and sway of his chosen angles. He sank two before he whiffed and passed the cue back. As I bent to shoot, his gaze slid frankly up and down my body, a balm against the burn inside my chest.
We had begun an old dance, and a familiar one. I’d learned it the way a future deb learns to two-step at cotillion. I didn’t ask any more questions; I didn’t care. He could be a banker or a busboy, from Austin or Albuquerque. His clothes were nondescript, excepting that slight faux-western flair, but he had fresh-cut hair, and some serious cash had gone into his teeth. I liked that he’d put more care into the body than the packaging. His forearms were corded with lean muscle, and I suspected I would find a gym body, complete with skinny-guy six-pack, when I peeled the blazer off and yanked open his shirt.
My little garnets, swinging from the chains, chimed in my ears as I bent and shifted, my body swaying toward him, then away around the table. We played the game, and sometimes I was chasing, sometimes letting him chase me. It was so familiar that the man himself began to seem like someone I remembered. In his movements, he became the avatar of every Kappa pledge that I’d seen once, then never seen again.