Like a Charm

by Karin Slaughter

  'I took a sociology and statistics class last semester and they say the average household sees its income drop after divorce. Guess your family bucked that trend.'

  'Thanks to my father, yes. If my mother hadn't met him, life would have been pretty hand-to-mouth for us.'

  'Your stepfather,' I said because precision in language is important to me.

  'Right,' Maya said.

  'I have both parents, and life is really hand-to-mouth for me.'

  I was trying to make a joke, or at least be a little self-deprecating, but Maya didn't laugh. She suddenly glanced at the big neon clock over the counter and said she had to go. She left in such a hurry that she didn't notice her charm bracelet was still on the table. Maybe that was because it had sort of scooted under a napkin, so she didn't see it as she gathered up her stuff. Or maybe she thought it was in her tote. At any rate, she left it behind and she was long gone before I realized it was there. So I did what anyone would do. I picked it up, planning to give it to her later.

  Of course I examined it first. It was surprisingly heavy and some of the charms were almost lethally sharp. A person would have lots of little nicks and cuts on her wrists, wearing a bracelet like that day-in and day-out. You couldn't dance in it, or work on a computer, or – if Maya had a life more like mine – wait tables with it on. You wouldn't want to wear it with a fine dress, because it would end up catching a thread here or there, creating runs. And you couldn't make love with it. You'd put someone's eye out, as my mom might say, although not about sex.

  I fingered the charms. There was a heart-shaped locket with a catch and I tried to prise it open, certain my father's photo was inside. I know, I know, Maya said it was her stepfather who had found it in the cab, but I didn't believe that. She was so keen to write our father out of her life that she had revised the story in her head.

  The charm I couldn't help noticing were the ballet slippers, two tiny gold cylinders with ribbons so fine you couldn't imagine one not getting broken over the years, with a jewel sparkling at one toe. It could have been cubic zirconium, but how would I be able to tell? The most precious stone I ever saw was the green glass in my high school ring. But I was sure it was a diamond glistening on those toe shoes.

  I had wanted to take dancing lessons, wanted it more than anything. I was graceful, I had the right build for it, long and lean. But even the half-assed amateurs who teach ballet and tap and jazz at ten bucks a pop still expect to be paid, up front and in full. Twice, I got into a class, only to have to drop out when my dad stopped paying. I can still see myself at eight, bare-legged because the leotard and the shoes were a big enough stretch – no money left over for the pink tights – being told that I can't come to class again until my mommy or daddy calls Madame Elena. After the second time I was barred from class – barred from the bar – I just didn't go back. I began running. To run, all you need is a pair of shoes and an open road.

  I tucked the bracelet in my jacket pocket, thinking I would give it to Maya the next time I saw her. It was the natural thing to do, right? She was gone, I couldn't run after her, and I didn't know exactly where she lived. I couldn't see giving it to the manager at Grounds for Life, he looked pretty skeevy. But what with one thing and another, I didn't see her for a while. Midterms came and then spring hit the area hard, with a wave of almost summer-like days. Even the mopey types at Not Quite U. knew what to do with good weather. The grassy hill in front of the Great Glass Library was filled with sunbathing girls and Frisbee-tossing boys. They told us not to tan, Not Quite put on a big information push about skin cancer, just like with STDs and eating disorders, but we know, OK? We knew and we made our choices.

  Anyway, I was sitting on the lawn with my sociology text when Clay approached me. He seemed kind of nervous, but guys often act weird after they've had sex with you. Why is that? I haven't been with that many guys, but I haven't found one yet who wasn't nervous after screwing you. Maybe it's because I don't get hooked on them, don't follow them around. The only thing guys dislike more than a clingy girl is a non-clingy girl.

  'Hey,' he said. 'Kate.' He looked around, as if he were proud of knowing my name and wanted to see if anyone appreciated the great effort he had made, dredging it up.

  'Hey,' I said, refusing to give him a name at all.

  'Um, you know Maya? My girlfriend?' So she was his girlfriend now, I hope she appreciated her promotion. 'She said you two had coffee a while back.'

  I figured he was feeling me out, trying to find out if I had told her anything.

  'Yeah, for all of ten minutes. We didn't really get into deep.' See, I was being nice, letting him off the hook. I didn't sleep with him to make trouble for anyone, especially myself.

  'Well, she thinks maybe she left her bracelet there, and she wonders if you took it.'

  Took it. Not picked it up, or remember if she was wearing it that night, or anything like that. He went straight to took it.

  'Bracelet? I don't know anything about a bracelet.'

  'Oh.' He was standing over me, his shadow blocking the sun, so I was beginning to catch a chill. It was that time of the year when there is a huge difference between sun and shadow, when you can lie in a bikini if you are out in the open, but would freeze in a lane of trees if you aren't carrying a sweater. 'She was pretty sure she wore it that night.'

  'I just don't remember it. I guess I didn't notice it.'

  'She said you talked about it, that you asked her about it.'

  Shit, I had. But so what? 'Maybe I did, I just don't remember.'

  'The thing is, she's always taking it on and off. It's like a nervous habit with her.'

  'Sorry.'

  It wasn't just that Maya had all but accused me of being a thief. It was the fact that she did it secondhand, sent her boyfriend to claim it for her, as if she were some lady fair and he was a knight trying to win her devotion.

  'Well, if you see it around—' Clay said, looking more nervous than ever. He was scared to go back to Maya empty-handed, he was that whipped.

  'What does it look like?' I asked. I wish I hadn't. The lie was too perfect in its nonchalance, and Clay caught it. He ambled away, with a careless backward glance at my body, as if congratulating himself for knowing what it looked like without a bathing suit.

  A week passed, then another, and no one came to talk to me about the bracelet again. I can't say I completely forgot about it – I kept the bracelet in my top drawer, next to my underwear, so I saw it every morning – but it wasn't uppermost in my mind. If I thought about the bracelet at all, it was to wonder how I could get it back to Maya anonymously. No plan seemed right.

  And then I came back to my room one night and found Maya standing there with the Resident Adviser, demanding to be let in. The R. A. thought it was bogus, I could tell he did. He took me aside and asked me to let her look through my room as a favour, so she would back off. Apparently her stepfather had been making calls to various people and he was a big giver and an alum, so they had to indulge him. Yet the R.A. was so sympathetic and kind that I began to think the bracelet wasn't in my room, that it was all a horrible misunderstanding. But once the door was unlocked, Maya went straight for it, as if the bracelet had a homing device.

  'How did that get there?' I asked. And the thing is, I meant it. I really couldn't remember.

  'Because you stole it. And you're just lucky that all I care about is getting it back, because my father said this bracelet is so valuable that I could bring felony theft charges against whoever had it.'

  My father. Two simple words, people say them all the time. But it was a lie, in Maya's mouth, and the lie made me furious.

  'Your stepfather. Because I know who your father was, and he happens to be my father too. And while you were living on Park Avenue and going to private school, he was either broke from paying your child support or moving us around so they couldn't find him to pay the child support. Five hundred dollars a month was nothing to you, but it was a lot to us, as much as we paid for rent in
some places.'

  'Don't be ridiculous,' Maya said. 'We're practically the same age and my father didn't leave until I was two. How could we have the same father?'

  'Pretty much in the same way we ended up having the same boyfriend.' I turned to the R.A., the lie now fully formed. 'She planted this here because she's jealous of me for having sex with her boyfriend, Clay. She's setting me up.'

  I looked to the R.A., then Maya. She was clearly shocked, and she sagged into him, whimpering a little. The R.A., so recently my ally, looked at me as if I were pure evil. So I did the only thing that made sense to me at that moment: I grabbed the bracelet back from Maya and began to run, just run, with no plan or thought. I was too busy doing the math in my head. The child support cheques my father made out every month had been for $500. But $500 a month was $6,000 a year and almost $100,000 over sixteen years. The money my father spent on Maya, who didn't need a dime, could have covered my tuition at Not Quite U. And she was going to begrudge me a bracelet, found by our father, in his cab? The way I see it, she had gotten to have the bracelet and now it was my turn. I ran, the bracelet in my hand, and remember I was fast, a miler.

  But Maya chased me and she had stamina from dancing, if not speed. She chased me down the steps of our dorm and on to the street. She chased me up the main drag, the one that separated the housing units from the campus, and into a neighbourhood of grand old houses. The fruit trees had lost their blooms and the tulips were beginning to lose their petals, but the azaleas were coming in and the trees were past the budding stage. Funny, the things you notice at such a moment, but I was breathing hard and those green spring smells went deep into my lungs. It occurred to me that Maya's family could afford a house as nice as the ones we ran past, possibly nicer, given how much more stuff cost in New York. I wondered if she had a car and a horse, if all the charms on the bracelet digging into my palm represented the abundance that Maya took for granted.

  She was not close to catching me and I knew the gap between us would only increase the longer we ran. But I also knew I'd have to go back eventually, face the R. A. and whatever consequences Not Quite U. had in store for me. They probably wouldn't let me have student housing next year, which was fine with me. I already planned to move off campus. But I didn't want to let go of the bracelet, not yet, so I ran and Maya continued to run after me. I wonder now why she didn't scream for someone to stop me, but I was still in my practice clothes and people were used to seeing young women jog down these streets around the university. I reached a busy intersection and crossed the street just as the light changed. I gather that Maya tried to put on a burst of speed, thought she could cross on the diagonal and pick up some ground. At any rate, I heard the screechy sound of failing brakes and then a scream, just one.

  Maya was hit by a car, an ordinary car. Campus rumour blew it into a bus, but it wasn't that dramatic. I'm tempted to say it was a cab because that would give the story a nice shape, and maybe over the years I'll allow myself that one little tweak. But it was just a car, and a fairly small one. Luckily for Maya, the woman saw her and braked, so she wasn't going that fast when she hit her. Unluckily for Maya, her left knee absorbed most of the impact.

  Plenty of people gathered round her, there was no reason for me to go back, nothing I could do. I slowed to a walk, turned the first corner I came to and sank on to a bench, as if waiting for a bus. The bench said 'The Greatest City in America', a claim so pathetically untrue that I wanted to laugh. This was the kind of place, the kind of people I came from, all brag, no do. I had tried everything I could to set myself apart. I wasn't going to be like my father, too busy dreaming to ever get it right. I certainly wasn't going to be like my mother, who had settled for being the dreamer's wife. But for all I had done, I would never be my sister, fate's favourite up until five minutes ago, one of life's natural-born winners. True, she's never going to dance again, but that will probably be for the best, too. She'll marry some rich guy, sit on the board of the New York City Ballet and spend the rest of her life alluding to the dance career she might have had if she hadn't been hit by a car.

  The bracelet had left dozens of tiny red marks, like a cat's tooth prints, inside my right palm. I let it dangle from my index finger, watching the play of light on the diamond on the ballet shoes. I wondered if Maya's stepfather had really found it in a cab, or if that was simply a story he had invented, a cover for something more disreputable – a card game, a pay-off for a bad debt. No, that's what my father would do. What was the logic of a world in which someone like Maya got a bracelet and a new father, while I had to make do with the cheap, pathetic bastard I'd known since birth? My dad was capable of a lot, but the bottom line was that he wasn't organized enough to run back and forth between two families, not even for a few months. Maya was not my sister, which meant that I couldn't show up at Park Avenue or wherever she lived, and demand that her stepfather save me as he had saved her. I couldn't even justify keeping the bracelet he had given her, but I didn't see why she should have it back. I tossed it under the bench in the greatest city in the world a few blocks from the greatest university where no one wanted to be and went back to the dorm.

  When I told them I had lost the bracelet, they asked me to leave school. My folks said a twenty-year-old who wasn't in school had to support herself, and I didn't bother to point out that I had been supporting myself even while in school. So here I am two years later in the airport bar, wearing a black polyester skirt that gives me a permanent visible panty line and dusting peanut skins from the seat. I am taking classes at the community college, but I still have a few years to go before my degree, and then I'm going to look at MBA programmes. What do you think, Wharton or Kellogg?

  I hope business picks up again soon. It's not just that fewer people are flying, but that people aren't as anxious to get blotto before a flight anymore. Everyone thinks they're going to be wrestling a terrorist to the ground somewhere over Pittsburgh. They almost seem to wish for it. But my mother said this is a good place to meet men and I guess she should know. She met my father this way, back in the day when they called this airport Friendship.

  So – are you married? Do you have a family? I don't mind. I know how to keep things casual.

  THE THINGS WE DID

  TO LAMAR

  Peter Moore Smith

  We gave him noogies, Indian burns, charlie horses, wet willies. We tickled him till he peed in his pants. We dangled him by his underwear from the dogwood tree in front of his house and left him hanging there. We held him down and let daddy-long-legs crawl all over his face. Once we gave him a potato chip and after he ate it we told him it had been dipped in formaldehyde; later, he hugged his stomach, rocked back and forth against the chain-link fence between our houses, and puked. The two of us, me and Benjamin, we'd trap Lamar in the concrete playground tube by the school, one of us on each side, and not let him out until he held his ears and squealed. Lamar had this sideways smile that flashed, all crooked and weird, even when we were beating the crap out of him. Christ. The things we did to that poor fucker. We shaved stripes into his head with Benjamin's dad's barbershop clippers. Sometimes we'd ask him if he wanted to go to the movies, and after he got the money from his mom we'd just take it to the 7-Eleven and buy Slim Jims.

  Lamar. Oh, Jesus.

  One afternoon we took his latch-key and threw it up on the roof. Next thing we knew old Lamar was up there, hanging by one hand from the rain gutter, smiling and giggling.

  'Jump!' we said. 'We'll catch you!'

  Yeah, right.

  Lamar's fat friend Anthony, who followed Lamar everywhere, had to call the fire department to get him down.

  We took his comic books; we took his baseball cards; we took his clothes and made him run home in his underpants; we took his money, his food, his toys. Anything he had, we took it. One time we noticed he was wearing a girl's bracelet. He said he found it under a park bench when he went to Baltimore to visit his grandma. Benjamin took it and threw it to me. I pretended to dro
p it down a sewer drain but really I stuck it in my pocket. We played keep-away with his hat, his books, his Scooby-Doo lunchbox; we took his homework so many days in a row that Lamar started making multiple copies, hiding little squares of folded paper all over his clothes.

  And fat Anthony, who was always just sort of standing around while we tortured poor Lamar, even he would laugh, his stomach jiggling like one of Mom's church picnic Jell-O moulds.

  This is a good one.

  One time we told Lamar that if he put on girls' underwear we'd let him come over to Benjamin's house and listen to Benjamin's dad's quadrophonic hi-fi system. Then, in the vacant lot behind the Safeway, after he'd slipped on my sister's training bra and underpants, we took a Polaroid and dropped it into the mail slot of Lamar's house.

  There was also the time Benjamin said Lamar was retarded but that no one was telling him.

  'I am not retarded,' Lamar said. 'I get straight As.'

  'Sure,' Benjamin said. 'In retard class. You're a straight-A retard.'

  'It's not a retard class.'

  'How do you know?'

  'Because it's the advanced class.'

  'How do you know they're not just saying that to make you feel smart, and that you're really all a bunch of retards?'

  Lamar's eyes grew wide.

  'Retard,' Benjamin said.

  Lamar put his hands over his ears.

  'Tard.'

  We'd punch Lamar in the same place on his arm until the bruise turned black, with concentric rings of purple and yellow. When we punched Lamar he would close his eyes but keep smiling. Then, after a few days of getting punched in the same spot, Lamar would do anything to guard it, offering up almost every other part of his body, giggling and at the same time twisting away in this grotesque, prissy dance.