The rest of me was with Caroline.

I fall asleep after my last final and wake up to sharp knocking at the apartment door.

Caroline’s already left, on an airplane by now to the Caribbean with her family, so I know it’s bad news.

I’ve been expecting bad news ever since I knocked Nate down the stairs two nights ago.

There’s no way he’s not going to retaliate. I humiliated him. Twice.

She’s mine. That’s what I was thinking when I did it. I don’t care what happens to me—I’m not going to let anybody talk that kind of shit about Caroline in front of her, to my face, on my doorstep.

The worst part is, I knew she’d fuck with my priorities, mess with my head. I knew she would, and now that she has, I like it.

It’s perfect. I want her to move into my apartment, sleep in my bed, shower with my soap, wear my old shirts around. I want to eat her out before breakfast every morning, rub off on her ass, bury my face between her tits, and come on her hip.

I’m two inches from being so whipped I’ve turned into one of those guys who does whatever his woman tells him to do and grins all the time, like he’s high on the smell of pussy.

I’m a fucking goner for that girl. She owns me.

Which is why, when the knock comes at the door, I’m almost glad for it. I can’t stand myself. Can’t stand that she hit her head, bruising her temple. Can’t stand remembering the wretched, ugly sound she made throwing up in my bathroom.

After she was asleep, I texted Bo, telling him there was a good chance I’d end up behind bars before I made it home for Christmas.

Don’t let nobody in your place without a warrant, he wrote.

By the time I’ve got my boots on, the knocking has turned to pounding, but I take the time to pick up the book Caroline gave me off my pillow, dog-ear the page, and tuck it into my duffel bag.

It’s a good book, and I don’t want it trashed.

There are two of them at the door, a beefy guy with curly blond hair in a black Putnam PD uniform and a skinnier, shorter black guy wearing a red Putnam College Security polo. “Are you West Leavitt?” the blond one asks.

“Yes.”

“I’m Officer Jason Morrow with the Putnam Police, and this is Kevin Yates from campus security. We received an anonymous tip that you’ve been engaging in the illegal sale of marijuana. We need to come in and have a look around.”

I can tell by the way he says this that it usually works. They knock on college kids’ doors—twice a year, three times, whenever there’s a serious complaint. They act civil and ask nice, and these other kids roll right over.

I’ve got nothing in the apartment for them to find, because, despite what Nate seems to think, I’m not fucking stupid. The amount of weed I’m holding—that’s a serious misdemeanor for possession all by itself, a class D felony if they can prove I’m selling it. Which they can, of course, because nobody could smoke that much and function as a normal human being. I keep it in a locker at the rec center, and I go by there two or three times a week, run around the track, lift weights, shower, pocket a few eighths, a few quarters, whatever I know I’m going to be able to sell.

I haven’t grown a plant on campus since the beginning of last year, when I did it more as a stunt than anything. I wanted people to talk. He’s the guy who’s growing the good bud. He’s the one who can hook you up. Once that first crop was harvested, I shut the whole thing down. Too risky.

I know what I got myself into. I know my rights.

“No,” I say to the cop at the door.

No, he can’t come in.

No, I can’t get out.

I’m trapped in this mess I made, and I have a month away from here—from her —to figure out how I’m going to escape.

My mom throws her arm around my neck from behind me, leaning close to plant a kiss that glances off my ear and lands mostly on my baseball hat.

“Ugh. Mom. You smell like steamed meat.”

She’s just home from a shift at the prison. I’ve never seen the cafeteria where she works, but if the way she smells when she comes off work is any indication, I’m not missing much.

I don’t really mind the kiss, though. The cafeteria smell is in her clothes, but I can smell her skin, too, some flowery soap or lotion. Bo’s bathroom counter is cluttered with Mom’s beauty supplies.

I’ve been away so long that the strongest impressions when I walked in a couple days ago were all smells. Stale cigarette smoke, the plug-in air freshener, the waft of air that came off the couch when I sat down—dog hair and aging foam cushions layered over with Febreze.

The first time Mom hugged me, her scent made my throat catch, a physical reaction that wasn’t quite tears and wasn’t quite allergies, either. The boy in me saying Mom at the same time my hands itched to push her away, put a little distance between us.

“I just can’t get over how good it is to have you back.”

“Quit hanging on him,” Bo says from across the table. “He’s too old for that crap.”

Mom takes off my cap and musses up my flattened-down hair. “He’s my baby. You get something to eat yet, Westie? I can make you chipped beef if you want.”

She’s been plying me with my favorites. “Nah, I ate in town. Me and Frankie picked up Arby’s after I took her to Bandon.”

Bo looks up. “What’d you go to Bandon for?”

He was gone when we left, gone when we got home. I guess he didn’t know. “I took Franks to the clinic for her physical.”

His eyes narrow, and he turns to my mom. “You let him take her for that shot?”

My mom blinks a few times, too rapidly, and I realize she’s stuck me in the middle of something. She said Frankie needed a physical in order to be allowed to do some kind of after-school indoor-soccer thing come January. When we got to the clinic, the nurse told me Franks was overdue for a hepatitis booster and that she needed to get it or she wouldn’t be able to stay in school next year.

I figured it was a fluke. The state health plan covered it, so I told the nurse to go ahead, scrawling my signature across the form she handed me.

But now I remember, too late, that Bo doesn’t believe in vaccines. He’s got a book about it, a ready lecture about the fallacy of herd immunity and the toxicity of the stuff they put in those shots as preservatives. He’ll go on about blood aluminum levels for an hour if you get him going.

“Did Frankie get a shot?” Mom asks.

When Mom had walked in the door, Frankie showed her the Band-Aid, first thing.

I glare at her, and she gives me this weak smile. Her eyes are pleading with me. Come on, West. Take my side.

I don’t want there to be sides. Not between Mom and Bo.

“I went by what the doctor said.”

Bo picks up his Camels from off the table and peers in the open mouth of the pack. Frowns, slides out the last cigarette. He’s got a long fuse. If he and my mom are going to fight about this, it won’t be now.

But he’s not going to forget it happened.

“I’m going to grab a Coke,” Mom says. “West, you want anything?”

“I’ll take a beer.”

“Get me another pack from the freezer, would you?” Bo asks.

Mom heads toward the fridge. “Didn’t you just open those this morning?”

“So what if I did?”

“So you’re supposed to be cutting back. For Frankie.”

Frankie’s out in the living room, not visible from the kitchen, but Bo’s house is small, and she can hear. She calls, “You’re supposed to be quitting, Bo.”

“Maybe next week.”

Mom snags a beer for me. She doesn’t ask Bo if he wants one, and when she twists off the lid and says, “You want a glass, West?” he makes a disgusted noise and pushes up from the table.

“Where are you going?”

“Out to the greenhouse.”

He opens the freezer and takes a pack of cigarettes from the carton.

“You got some dinner?”

“Yeah, I’m good.”

The corners of her mouth turn down as she watches him push out the back door. It makes her look old. My mom’s only thirty-seven, but in her shapeless prison uniform she’s middle-aged, the lines in her face deep-set, the disappointment at the edges of her mouth never quite disappearing.

She hates that uniform. In a little while she’ll take a shower and do her hair, put on tight jeans and a nice shirt, chasing a youth that’s getting away from her.

She was always more like a friend with a driver’s license than a parent. A friend whose bad habits and flaws are obvious to everyone who knows her, but the kind of friend you forgive because she’s got a good heart, and she can’t seem to stop herself from getting it crushed.

I wish this were the first time since I got home that Bo’s gone out to the greenhouse in a huff, but it’s not. Something’s not right between them.

There’s a lot of things that don’t feel right. Things I didn’t expect. I want to glue down the flap of loose Formica at the corner of the kitchen counter, yellowed tape fluttering at its edges announcing three or four half-assed attempts to fix it, but it’s Bo’s kitchen, and when I search through the junk drawer for glue and find an envelope full of cash—one of Bo’s many stashes—I feel like a thief.

I want to tell Frankie not to read this book she’s got, this paperback that I remember girls reading when I was in high school, so I know it’s got incest and blow jobs and other shit that’s too old for her. But she’s Mom’s daughter, not mine.

Nothing here feels like it’s mine.

I tell myself it’s because I’ve never lived in this house. Back before I went to Putnam, when Mom decided to move in here with Bo, I stayed behind in the trailer. I’ve slept on Bo’s couch before, but I’ve never called Bo’s house my home.

The trailer is mine, and my dad is living in it.

“What’s up with you and Bo?”

She waves her hand in dismissal. Picks up a Zippo that’s lying on the table, flips it over a few times, tapping it lightly on the tabletop. “He’s fine. Probably not sleeping enough. He hates when he has to work nights. Makes him grouchy.”

“He’s back on days next week, though, right?”

“Right.” She drops into the chair Bo vacated, slides off the clogs she wears to work, and tosses them into the pile of shoes by the back door. Her socks have tiny little Totos on them, and she wiggles her toes at me. I gave her the socks for Christmas.

“Nice,” I say.

“I love them.”

She leans forward and picks up the lighter again, flicks it until she makes a flame. A sly brightness in her eyes tells me she’s got an agenda for this conversation. “So this is the first time I’ve really got you all to myself. Tell me everything about school.”

“Not much to tell.”

“Ask him about his girrrrlfriend,” Frankie trills from the living room.

My mom’s eyes brighten. “I knew you had a girl. No wonder you never call me back.”

“I always call you back.”

She rolls her eyes and flicks the lighter again. “Yeah, when you’re not working. ” She infuses the word with doubt, as though I’m working for the purpose of avoiding her.

Half the money I make, I end up sending her. I probably paid for the magazines on the coffee table, just like I paid for her socks.

“Let me see a picture,” she says.

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“He does!” Frankie’s at the threshold of the kitchen now, her smile delighted. “She sent him a bikini picture. ”

God damn it.

“She sent you a bikini picture,” I say, because this is the honest truth. I walked into the living room to find Frankie on my phone, texting Caroline, who’d just shared a vacation snapshot of her with her arm slung around a chunkier girl, her sister Janelle. Both of them in bikini tops with wet hair, smiling.

I need to stop texting her. Stop looking at that picture.

I need to draw better lines in my life, because this is what I’m supposed to be worrying about. The problems in this kitchen. How Frankie’s getting C’s in school and doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word privacy. How her boobs are growing and she’s wearing a bra and shirts that advertise that fact for the world to see. My head should be on whatever’s going on between Mom and Bo and whether Wyatt Leavitt has anything to do with it.

On how, when I asked Mom if she’d seen him, she said no, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes, and then she went all falsely cheerful like she gets when she’s lying to me.

I’m not supposed to be worrying whether Caroline’s having any fun in the Caribbean, thinking about when I’m going to be able to steal twenty minutes to call her, if there’s some way to get her alone behind a locked door when the house is empty so I can talk dirty to her, unzip my jeans, take myself in my hand.

“Let me see,” Mom says.

“No.”

But Frankie’s coming up behind me, her fingers dipping into my back pocket for my phone, and I’m not fast enough to stop her. I grab her, tickle her, reach for the phone while I pinch her ribs just hard enough to make her squirm away, saying, “Ow!” even as she’s laughing.

“Catch, Mom!”

She tosses the phone, and I get a glimpse of the screen with my text app open before the case hits the floor and skates across it. Then I’m down on my knees, scrambling with my mom, Frankie at the periphery, and it’s the weirdest thing, because they’re both laughing, but when Mom puts her hand out and pushes me away, she pushes hard. When she gets the phone and vaults to her feet—runs across the kitchen, saying, “Keep him off me, Frankie!”—it doesn’t feel like a game.

It’s not funny.

I dodge around Frankie effortlessly, grab my mom’s wrist, wrench the phone out of her hand. My chest is heaving. I’m hot, out of control, full of misdirected rage, thwarted fury.

“Christ, West, lighten up,” Mom says. But her eyes are glittering, offended and prideful, and when I look at Frankie she flinches.

I want to storm out of the house. Take a long walk out to the highway and along the road in the gathering dark. I want to fume, but I’ve got nothing to be pissed off about except my own failure to make the lines in my life black enough, dark enough to keep this kind of shit from happening.

I take a deep breath and let it out.

This is my family. My place.

These are my people, and this is where I belong.

If it doesn’t feel that way, I’m doing it wrong. Closing myself off. And I can’t do that, because if I lose this, who am I?

I thumb through a couple of screens on the phone and hand it back to my mom, whose expression softens at the peace offering. “The one on the right, or …?”

“The pretty one,” I hear myself say. “Her name’s Caroline.”

What r you doing?

She texts back right away. Nothing.

What kind of nothing?

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16