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?
Laying on couch watching a movie.
What movie?
Breakfast Club. I’ve seen 400 Molly Ringwald movies today.
Why?
They were my mom’s. I watch them sometimes.
A pause. My dad’s at work. I’m bored. Break sucks.
Yeah.
Another pause. I’m calling you.
I’m on the couch, alone in the house. New Year’s has come and gone, and Franks is back in school. Bo’s on days again. He and Mom are both working, and the house is quiet for the first time since I got here.
I’m hard before she even picks up.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
Then silence, and she laughs this breathy sort of laugh. “This is weird.”
“Which part?”
I can imagine her biting her lip. Looking away from me.
I can imagine her throat turning red and blotchy. The way her breasts are rising with each quick intake of breath.
“You know the part of the movie where Judd Nelson is in the closet, and Molly Ringwald locks herself in there with him?” she asks.
“Which one’s Judd Nelson?”
“The guy with the long hair and the flannel shirt.”
“The bad boy.”
“Yeah. And Molly Ringwald’s the one—”
“I know who she is.”
Caroline laughs. Kind of nervous. “That part’s on right now.”
“And?”
“And that’s the best part. Molly’s got her pink silk shirt on and her hair all perfect, because she’s such a good girl, only now they’re in the closet together …”
I start to laugh, realizing where this is going. “I thought you’d be into that other guy.”
“Who? Anthony Michael Hall?”
“The wrestler one.”
“Emilio Estevez? Ew.”
“He looks like Nate, but not as blond.”
Silence for a few beats. “God. He does. You’re right.”
She sounds so horrified, I start to laugh.
“But I always liked Judd best,” she says. “Even when he spits in the air and swallows it.”
“Got kind of a bad-boy thing, don’t you?”
“No.”
I can hear the smile in her voice, though. “It’s all right. Maybe I’m into poor little rich girls.”
“Maybe you are.”
“What are you wearing, rich girl?”
She exhales a laugh again. There’s this shift I can almost feel, a click on the line, digital signals rearranging themselves from one stream to another. What are you wearing? The phone-sex starter pistol firing, and I’m on the block, ready for it. Jeans unzipped. Hand outside my briefs, because I can’t go inside until I know she’s playing along. Not this time.
“I’ve got my pink silk shirt on.” I can hear the shift in her voice, too. Saying yes.
I slip my hand inside my shorts.
“And that long, tight brown skirt,” she adds. “Brown boots.”
“You have boots?”
“Sure. Every girl in America has boots.”
A tight grip. A slow stroke. “You’ll have to wear them for me sometime.”
“Why?”
“I like boots.”
The strain. There’s nothing like it—so bad and so good. It’s in every muscle in my body.
“Oh.” The sound is a sigh.
“Hey, rich girl?”
“Mmm-hmm?”
“Turn the volume off on the TV.”
I wait, working up a rhythm. The background noise fades to nothing. I can hear her breathing.
“What do you think they get up to in that closet?” I ask her. “You know, when the camera cuts away?”
There’s a pause. “I never really thought about it.”
“You wanna think about it now?”
“Maybe.”
“Where’s your hands?”
“Mmm. I’m not sure I’m saying.”
“Put one of them someplace interesting.”
She sniffs, a kind of laugh, and I wait a few seconds to make sure she’s doing it. Then I say, quiet and low, “I think they started off kissing.”
“Yeah.”
“And the kissing got hot, and he pushed her back down onto the bench.”
“I’m not sure there’s a bench.”
“There’s a bench. It’s long and flat, with no back on it, so he can lay her down and kneel next to her and push her skirt up past her knees.”
“It’s kind of long and tight, though. I don’t think he could push it up.”
“He’s good with skirts. He doesn’t have to take it off. He just pushes it up and leaves it up, so she feels the air on her thighs and starts to worry they’re gonna get caught. It’s exciting, thinking that. Maybe someone will walk in on them, the good girl with her legs spread, the bad boy kneeling there on the floor, kissing her. Touching her.”
“Where’s he touching her?”
“Everywhere except where she really wants it the most.”
She inhales deep and her breath catches. I’ve heard her do that before. Seen her do that. The sound draws up a surge of heat from my balls, and I slick it over the head, draw it down. Slow and tight.
“What are you doing, Caro?”
“What do you want me to be doing?”
“I want you on your back with your skirt up and your legs spread.”
That gets me a muffled mmph.