Everything You Want Me to Be

by Mindy Mejia

  “Who would be out here?”

  “Anyone! God, Hattie. Don’t you think?”

  “I think you’re overreacting.” She was starting to get irritated. Good.

  “You could be raped or mugged.”

  “Morbid much?”

  “No one would hear you scream.” I stood on the edge of her ridiculous picnic setup, looming over her.

  “This isn’t Minneapolis, Peter. In case you hadn’t noticed. This is Pine Valley, where nothing bad ever happens except maybe drought. And see? I’ve got some water right here.”

  She was trying to lighten the mood again. Screw that.

  “Why are you dating him?”

  “Tommy?” She instantly brightened, like I’d asked the question she’d been hoping for. “What do you think? Is he a good choice?”

  “Tell me you like that moron. Tell me you’re not using him to get closer to me.”

  “I look at it as more of a public service. Everyone’s happy. You have no idea.” She looked infinitely pleased with herself and it sent me over the edge.

  “Why?” I grabbed her arms and shook her over the top of the lantern, throwing her shadow violently across the walls and ceiling. The force of it wiped the pleasure off her face. She understood I wasn’t playing her little game.

  I shook her again, pulling her up and bruising her arms. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because I love you.” Her eyes were wide and dark in the lantern shadows. Her voice broke a little and I realized how close we were: one furious, aching breath apart.

  Instantly I dropped her and turned away, fighting for control.

  “It’s a crush. An infatuation.” I wiped the cooled sweat from my forehead and tried to put some distance between us.

  “No one will suspect, Peter.” She was right behind me.

  “Stop this.”

  “No one will know I’m yours.”

  “You’re not mine.” I turned around and she paused, too. She wasn’t confident enough to bridge that last gap. Still a child. I took advantage of her hesitation, of that last flicker of innocence.

  “Can’t you see how wrong this is?”

  “I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know until it was too late. I’d already fallen.” Her voice was low, pleading now, and it started to break things inside me, things I’d spent weeks fortifying. “I just want you to look at me like you feel it, too. I know you do. I didn’t imagine it.”

  “What were you planning on doing, Hattie? Sleeping with us both?”

  “No.” She swallowed. “Just you.”

  My mouth went dry and my blood shifted from a pound to a dangerous pulse.

  “But you let him kiss you.”

  “Are you jealous?” A smiled flashed across her face and was gone. “It’s just acting, Peter. There’s not much to being Tommy’s girlfriend. I could have nailed it when I was twelve.”

  I took a step closer, compelled beyond reason toward this girl who kept shedding masks like a matryoshka doll, each one more audacious than the last, a psychological striptease that racked me with the need to tear her apart until I found out who or what was inside.

  “Is your entire life an act?”

  She dropped her head and something like shame finally crossed her face.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “And what role am I supposed to be playing?”

  “None!” Her head snapped back up.

  “You’ve planned this whole scene.”

  “No! It’s not like that.”

  “Who am I, Hattie? The big-city teacher who throws his whole life away for you? Who sweeps you off your lying feet? Like this?”

  In a heartbeat I closed the distance between us and hauled her up again. “Is this the part where I declare my love? Where I tell you I can’t get you out of my goddamn head?”

  “Yes,” she choked out.

  “How does the fantasy go, Hattie? What comes next?”

  Her eyes swarmed with fear, anger, and arousal, everything that had been torturing me since the Jane Eyre play, and then I knew what came next, what I couldn’t stop myself from doing any longer.

  We moved at the same time. I took her mouth in a race of lip, tongue, and teeth, and pulled her down to the floor with me, straight into the welcome blood rush of hell.

  HATTIE / January 2008

  I LOST my virginity when I was fifteen, although lost is a funny word for it. I didn’t misplace it like a homework assignment or a cell phone. It wasn’t like I could find it again and tuck it back in there. I gave it away in Mike Crestview’s basement on an old sofa with a cabbage-leaf print while we watched Lord of the Rings. I suppose it was a pretty typical first time, except I wasn’t all starry-eyed about Mike. I was curious more than anything. You can’t watch that many seasons of Sex and the City without getting a little curious. And Mike was a nice enough guy, a senior all excited to leave for college. I probably liked that excitement as much as anything else about him.

  We were watching the part where Gandalf fights the fire monster and falls into hell or wherever when I asked Mike if he wanted to have sex.

  He seemed pretty surprised. He was actually better friends with Greg than with me, but Greg was gone for the weekend, so I’d come over alone.

  “Do you have a condom?” I asked him. “If not, we can forget it.”

  It was kind of hilarious how fast he found a condom and made sure his parents were still at the grocery store.

  The sex itself was bumpy and weird and I didn’t help very much. Mike said he’d done it before, so I just lay back and let it happen, observing more than participating, I guess. The thing I remembered most, besides the scratchy fabric rubbing my butt, was the vein that popped out in Mike’s forehead, like a curvy blood river. After that I figured I understood what sex was all about, and didn’t have any urge to try it again.

  Last fall, as my junior year started and Mike was off enjoying life in Minneapolis, my grandpa passed away right in the middle of harvest and my parents had to go to Iowa to take care of the details.

  He’d been in a nursing home for years, ever since my grandma died and he had a stroke. Before the stroke he was just like my dad—a tough, matter-of-fact guy. Dad had a sense of humor, though, while Grandpa always seemed tense, like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but if it ever did he wouldn’t say a word about it. After the stroke, it was like he’d been turned inside out. He cried all the time. He cried when we came to visit him, when the nurse put him to bed at night, even about stuff that should have made him happy like when the Twins were winning. It was as if eighty years of buried emotion started leaking out his eyeballs.

  The nursing home was a sad-looking concrete building outside Des Moines where all the old ladies sat on the cracked patio and tried to wave us over to their wheelchairs. We ignored them and kept our eyes on the backs of Mom’s shoes as she walked inside. Grandpa always had stale Bit-O-Honeys that just about broke your jaw and we had to sit there chewing them while Mom chatted to the walls as she fussed around his room and he stared at us, silent tears running down his grizzled, old face.

  When he died I wondered if my dad was more upset about missing the harvest. Nobody talked about their feelings around here. They just absorbed the hurts and the losses and barely nodded if anyone said anything about it. It was okay to be funny or crack a joke like Dad, but any other emotion just got the American Gothic treatment. It was all hidden and sometimes I wondered if it was even there. I guess Dad really did love his father, though, because he left in the middle of the harvest and hired a migrant contractor to take over his fields while he was gone.

  I stayed behind to finish school that week and was supposed to come down for the funeral on Saturday. One afternoon I was reading on the log swing by the house, tracing the outside of one breast absently while I flipped pages, when I glanced over and saw Marco standing twenty feet away, staring at me. He was tall and thick, the kind of fat someone got when they did manual labor and probably ate a bunch
of fast food, layers of muscle over fat over muscle. Dad had said he was Guatemalan, with dark skin and hair, but his eyes were bright and fixed on the hand on my breast.

  I jumped up and muttered an apology, then ran back to the house. I even locked the front door, which I don’t think had ever been locked before, and watched his comings and goings through the curtains of my bedroom for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe it was the book, or the way his eyes seemed to be on fire, but that night was the first time I had an orgasm. I’d tried masturbating before, but apparently it was all about motivation.

  Since I’d fallen in love with Peter, motivation was never a problem.

  Still, nothing I’d imagined in my bed at night had prepared me for what happened in the Erickson barn. His anger scared me and I’d almost lost hope, until suddenly he grabbed me and dragged us to our knees. I remembered everything, how he ran his hands over every part of me he could reach, how I burned every place he kissed me. He was sweaty and hard and demanding and then it was over as quickly as it started.

  “We can’t do this,” he’d said, pushing me away.

  I dove back into him, kissing his neck, running my hands through his hair. He smelled so good. I wondered when boys stopped smelling like boys and started smelling like his tangle of musk and soap and heat. Or maybe Peter had always smelled that way. What would I have done if he’d walked by me in a mall when he was sixteen? Would my eight-year-old nose have smelled its match and followed him through the food court? I smiled into his collarbone and murmured, “I have condoms.”

  He groaned and nuzzled my temple, then framed my face in his hands. “You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?”

  “No, Peter.” I shook my head as much as his hold would allow. “I’m trying to help you live.”

  “Drop the act, Hattie. Tell me what you really want.”

  “I want you. I just want you.” I said it over and over again, closing my eyes and rubbing my cheek against his hand. His thumb ran over my mouth and I let it fall open, hoping he’d keep kissing me, but he didn’t.

  He stood up and dragged himself away.

  “You’re not eighteen.”

  My heart flip-flopped. “What’s a few weeks?”

  “Legally, it’s the difference between getting fired and getting fired, arrested, and thrown in jail.”

  I noticed he didn’t say anything about getting divorced, but I didn’t want to bring it up and spoil my chances. “So what are you going to give me for my birthday? A party? A present?”

  “A spanking,” he said, almost to himself, and then shook his head and started laughing. It wasn’t a happy-sounding laugh.

  “Hey, I’m going to be eighteen.” I stood up and crossed my arms. “You can’t talk to me like I’m a kid after that.”

  He just covered his face with his hand. I walked over and pulled it down so he had to look at me.

  “If anyone’s getting spanked, it’s you. You’re the naughty one here, having lusty feelings for your underage student.”

  I tsk-tsked him in my best sexy-teacher voice, but he wasn’t in the mood to play. His eyes raked over my face like he was desperate for something and not finding it. I didn’t know how to assure him when he didn’t believe anything I said. Finally he groaned again, a self-defeating groan, and wound me into a hug, resting his forehead on mine. It was the sweetest gesture he’d made toward me yet, and my heart slammed in my chest. The hope almost choked me.

  “There’s not enough punishment in the world for either one of us, but that’s not why we’re here, is it?”

  I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so I said nothing. I just closed my eyes and leaned into him.

  “When will you be eighteen?”

  “January fourth,” I whispered.

  He was quiet for a minute. And then he said the thing that threw my heart into a cardiac trauma level of happiness.

  “I’m taking you to Minneapolis.”

  We set the date for the weekend after my birthday. He told his wife he was visiting some old friends and I told my parents I was going to look at the U of M. Dad had insisted I apply there in case I decided to go to school closer to home next year and they were both thrilled—or as thrilled as they could get—when I told them I was going to take a campus tour. When Mom offered to drive up and back with me, I told her I’d arranged to stay with a girl I’d known freshman year whose family had moved up to the suburbs.

  “She wants to take me to the casino for my birthday,” I told them one night over beef stroganoff. Dad chuckled and Mom frowned and both of them told me I wasn’t allowed to lose more than twenty dollars, but that’s all it took for my story to become rock-solid. That was usually key with my parents. By admitting a slightly bad thing, I could blind them to any other possibilities of misbehavior. And even if they suspected anything else, it was probably along the same line of things I could do now that I was turning eighteen—getting a tattoo or buying cigarettes. Sleeping with my married English teacher was so far off the radar it was laughable.

  The rest of December moved like a freaking iceberg. Every day dragged out. My shifts at CVS were an endless line of customers. Tommy took me to the drive-in and tried to feel me up under my sweater. Portia got a cold and then gave it to me, with a sore throat and cough and everything. The only good part was Peter’s class, where I sat in front as always and pretended not to ogle his every movement. I chatted with Portia and Maggie and argued most of Peter’s lecture points, just like I always did. The only physical contact we had was when he collected homework assignments; he had everyone pass their papers to the front and then he walked along the front row picking up the stacks. I handed him my row’s papers and our fingers brushed. That was all.

  One day, though, the week before Christmas, I was just finishing a text on my phone when the bell rang, and Peter immediately said, “Hattie!”

  It was loud and everyone stopped talking to see what was going on.

  “Yeah?” I hit send before looking up.

  “Phone on my desk. Now. You can pick it up after school.”

  I trotted my phone up to his desk, ecstatic about violating the no-cell-phone-in-class policy. I thought it was genius, finding the excuse to see me alone, but after school that day a whole group of sophomores had invaded his room to study for the MCAs.

  He glanced up from the middle of the horde when I came in and said, “Oh, Hattie. Your phone’s over there. Leave it at home next time, okay?”

  I nodded and grabbed it, completely deflated after spending half the day dreaming about a brush of skin, a murmured promise, or even a stolen kiss behind the door.

  It wasn’t until I’d finished collecting books from my locker that I noticed the message. I had a new text, sent from myself, to myself, a half an hour ago.

  “From her hair the heads of five crucified also looked on, no more expressive than she.”

  Is this you? I keep looking, can’t help myself. Looking for you is my only sustenance.

  Check your right front tire.

  I practically ran out of the building, through the parking lot, and found a rectangular package on top of the tire, hidden from view in the wheel well and wrapped in gold.

  I got inside the truck and opened it, making sure no one was watching me. It was a book, a hardcover edition of V, by Thomas Pynchon—the book he’d wanted to get autographed the first time I stumbled on him in the chatroom. It felt like a lifetime ago. There was nothing written inside. He’d been careful not to create any link between us, but I couldn’t care less about that right now. He’d given me a Christmas present.

  I smelled the wrapping paper and whispered it—“sustenance”—feeling as giddy as I ever had in my life.

  I got another unexpected present, too. Gerald sent me a camcorder with a note in his swirly handwriting about hard work and dedication to perfection. Portia and I spent the last few nights before break performing our favorite movie scenes for the camera and it helped the time to pass.

  Christmas was so
strange this year. Although I didn’t miss Greg, exactly, it was weird not having him there, ripping open his presents and shouting his surprise or excitement. There was no one to dilute Mom and Dad’s attention. They sat on the couch blowing the steam off their coffee cups and watching me with that fake kind of happiness, the kind where you try to pretend things are normal, as I opened a big box that sat by itself under the tree.

  My present turned out to be a suitcase, a gorgeous suitcase. It was compact and simple, with smart pockets and dividers inside and wheels that looked like they were made of titanium. They made a sleek whirring sound on the laminate floor as I walked it around and around the kitchen table.

  “I love it,” I told them honestly and gave them each a big hug.

  “If you’re going to be seeing the world next year, you’ll need to look the part,” Dad said and ruffled my messy bed-head hair.

  Mom showed me how to wipe stains and dirt off it to keep the black material looking nice, and then she made me an enormous Denver omelet that I couldn’t half finish.

  I packed the suitcase up immediately and set it in the corner of my room. December turned into January, and then on the morning of Saturday, January 5th, I put it in the passenger seat of my truck—where it looked absurdly out of place—and drove to the Crowne Plaza in downtown Minneapolis.

  I was breathless as I knocked on the door to his room and when he opened it we both stared at each other.

  “Hi.”

  I just smiled instead of answering, not trusting my voice.

  “Come in.” He stepped aside and gestured awkwardly.

  There were lilies in a vase on the desk. I crossed over to them and touched one of the ragged-edged, white petals. “Nice hotel.”

  “No—I mean it is, it’s not bad, but I brought those. You said once they were your favorite.”

  Even though he seemed a little jumpy, he walked over to me. I let go of the suitcase handle and lifted one of the flowers out of the bouquet and smelled, closing my eyes.

  “Thank you.”

  “Happy birthday.”

  It made me warm to hear his voice, so low and close to my ear. I didn’t think I could be any happier than I was at that moment, standing quietly next to him, with the whole evening ahead of us and no one else in the world to intrude. I turned toward him and gave him a flirty grin.