Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  Was I?

  Of course, I know the answer to that question now.

  But on that day: “I’m sorry,” I said to Benny, stricken with guilt, unwilling to open up this whole can of worms lest I drive him away.

  “That’s OK, it’s no big deal.” He squeezed my arm, oblivious to my inner turmoil. “Look, we’re flying out tomorrow, but we’ll hang out as soon as I’m back from Paris, right?”

  “Bring back a baguette for me,” I said. My cheeks hurt from smiling.

  “You bet,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Benny was back on the bus on the first day of school after spring break, twitchy and wired, as if the spring weather had infected him with some sort of nervous giddiness. He jumped out of his seat when he saw me climb aboard and waved two baguettes over his head as if they were swords.

  “Baguettes for mademoiselle,” he said proudly.

  I took a baguette and tore off a piece. It was stale, but I ate it anyway, touched by the gesture and yet also acutely conscious of the fact that the millionaire’s son had brought me pennies’ worth of bread (again, in the back of my mind, a flash of green bundles in a dark, hidden safe). Of course, I reminded myself, the real value was that he’d listened, and thought of me, and brought me what I’d asked for. That was what was really important. That was the kind of person I was. Right?

  And yet.

  “Jesus, I’m glad to see you.” He flung an arm over my shoulder in a way that felt strangely definitive. I could tell that something was going on with him, something I couldn’t quite read. “Sanity at last.”

  “How was France?”

  He shrugged. “Spent most of my time sitting around eating pastries while I waited for my mom and my sister to finish shopping. And then my dad would lose it when we got back to the hotel and he saw how much they’d bought. Thrilling stuff.”

  “Pastries and shopping. Oh yeah, awful. I spent my holiday boning up on biological individuality in the town library. Bet you’re jealous.”

  “Actually, I am. I’d rather be anywhere with you than with my family in Paris.” He squeezed my shoulder.

  There it was again, that strange new flicker of resentment—Paris sounded awfully thrilling to me, he could at least have the good grace to appreciate his luck. But it sounded like he really believed that I was more interesting than a vacation in France, and who was I to dismiss that compliment?

  We ate the baguettes, a carpet of stale crumbs spreading out below us, until we got to the gates of Stonehaven. But once we were inside the property, Benny didn’t launch himself up the steps of the house. Instead, as we walked up the drive, he grabbed my sleeve and tugged me to the left, into a stand of pines on the side of the house.

  “What’s going on?”

  He put a finger to his lips and pointed at an upstairs window. Mom, he mouthed.

  I didn’t understand what he meant by that, but I followed him through the pines and down a dirt path that took us around the edge of the property before depositing us at the caretaker’s cottage. Once inside, he marched into the tiny kitchen where we kept our snacks and pulled a bottle out of a cabinet. He held it up for me to examine: vodka, expensive-looking stuff, from Finland. “My pot stash is gone,” he said. “But I stole this from my dad’s liquor cabinet.”

  “Gone? You smoked it all?”

  “Nah. My mom did a room raid before we went to France. She found it under my bed and flushed it down the toilet.” He looked abashed. “I’m in the doghouse. Actually, you’re not even supposed to be here. They forbade me from seeing you. That’s why we didn’t go inside the house.”

  I put two and two together: His curious bravado, the way he threw his arm around my shoulders on the bus like I belonged to him—it was all a middle finger to his parents. “What you’re saying is…they blame me. For the pot. They think I’m a bad influence because, what, my hair is pink? And I don’t ski?” A hot bubble of self-righteous anger rose inside me.

  He shook his head. “I told them it had nothing to do with you. Problem predates you. They know that. They’re just being…overprotective. Irrational. As usual. Fuck them.”

  The vodka bottle was still hanging between us, a totem of some symbolic transition, or of rebellion, or maybe apology. Finally, I reached out and grabbed it. “Is there juice? I’ll make screwdrivers.”

  “Shit, no. Just vodka.” He blushed when he met my eyes and I thought of a term that I had read before in a book—liquid courage. I unscrewed the cap of the bottle and lifted it to my lips and took a swig. I’d sipped at my mother’s martinis before, but this was a proper, showy gulp. It burned; I choked. Benny reached out and whacked my back as I spluttered.

  “I mean, I was going to offer you a glass but…” He took the bottle from my hand and lifted it to his own lips, convulsing when the liquor hit his esophagus. Vodka dribbled out of the side of his mouth and he wiped it away with the sleeve of his T-shirt. His eyes were watering and red, and as they met mine we both started laughing.

  The vodka lit up my stomach; it made me wired and punchy and hot. “Here,” he said, handing it back to me, and this time I swallowed down a good inch before coming up for air. Five minutes of this and we were drunk and giddy, and I was tripping on the chairs in the dining room and laughing from the lightness in my head. When Benny grabbed me to stop me from falling and spun me around, I finally screwed up my courage and kissed him.

  I’ve been kissed, all these years on, by so many men, almost all of them better kissers than Benny. But the first kiss is the one you always remember; and even now I can break that kiss down in detail. How chapped his lips were, but also how softly they gave way. The way he kept his eyes closed even when mine were open, and the way that made him look so serious and intense. The terrible sound of our teeth clicking against each other as we jockeyed for position; him stooping to pull me up to his face as I stood on my tiptoes, balancing myself against his chest. How when we stopped for a moment we both gasped for air as if we’d been underwater the whole time.

  I could hear his heart as I rested in his arms, galloping so hard that it sounded as if it might race straight out of his chest and through the door. It slowed as we stood there for a while, adjusting to this new reality. “You don’t have to do this out of pity or something,” he whispered into my hair.

  I pulled back, smacked him in the arm. “I kissed you, stupid.”

  His eyelashes fluttered, his eyes as soft and watching as a deer’s. I smelled the vodka on his breath, like sweet gasoline. “You’re beautiful and smart and tough and I don’t get it.”

  “There’s nothing to get,” I said. “Stop thinking so hard. Let me like you without second-guessing it.”

  But maybe he had a point. Nothing is ever as pure as it seems at first glance; there is always something more complicated to be found if you peel back the unmarred surface of pretty things. The black silt at the bottom of the pristine lake, the hard pit at the center of the avocado. I can’t help wondering now if I kissed him as a kind of statement of intent; a way of putting my mark on him. His parents were going to forbid me to see him, they thought I was a bad influence? Kissing him was my way of saying to his parents, Fuck you, he’s mine. You don’t get to win this one. You may have everything else in the world but I have your son.

  Maybe that’s why I felt so sure of myself as I took his hand and led him, stumbling, to that dormered bedroom with its creaking bed. Maybe that’s why I let the fire of the vodka light me up with a boldness I didn’t recognize in myself; why I abandoned myself so readily to the tugging and prodding, the clothes on the floor, the tongues against flesh. To the piercing, momentary pain; the gasp and thrust of it all. To the path forward into my future.

  * * *

  —

  And yet, however tainted our motivations might have been at the time, what happened to us that day—and
in the weeks that followed—felt pure. The cottage was ours, and the things that we did there, hidden inside its walls, seemed to belong to some kind of liminal space. At school, our relationship remained the same—racing past each other in the hallways on our way to class, occasionally eating pizza together at lunch, never really touching, although our feet sometimes found each other under the cafeteria table. Even on the bus to his house, as I felt the electric anticipation building, we still didn’t play out the typical boyfriend-girlfriend roles. There was no hand-holding, no doodling initials on each other’s forearms in blue ballpoint pen or sharing a single soda with two straws. Nothing was articulated out loud, nothing assumed. Only once we got to the cottage did everything shift, as if it had taken us that long—the better part of a day, plus a half-hour bus ride—to find the confidence to step into our insurgence.

  “So who’s the boy?” my mom asked one evening, as I stumbled through the door just before dinner, everything askew. I could still smell Benny on my skin and I wondered if she had smelled him, too, a pheromonal red flag signaling adolescent lust.

  “What makes you think there’s a boy?”

  She stood in the doorway to the bathroom, pulling curlers from her hair. “Baby, if I know anything about anything, it’s about love.” She considered this for a second. “Make that sex, actually. You’re using protection? I keep condoms in the upper drawer of my nightstand, you can take as many as you need.”

  “Jesus, Mom! Stop. Just say something like You’re too young and leave it at that.”

  “You’re too young, baby.” She raked her fingers through her curls to soften them, and then shellacked them back into place with hair spray. “Fuck, I was thirteen, so who am I to talk? Anyway, I’d like to meet him. Invite him for dinner sometime.”

  I thought about this—should I confess that it was the boy she met at the café? Or maybe she already suspected, and was waiting for me to tell her. But I felt strangely reluctant to bring Benny back with me across the Rubicon that divided our two worlds. It felt dangerous, as if something critical might be broken in the process. “Maybe.”

  She sat down on the toilet and tentatively massaged the toes on one foot. “OK. I think this is where I’m supposed to give you a lecture, so here goes. Sex—it can be about love, yes. And it’s wonderful when it’s that, and God, baby, I hope that’s what you’ve found. But it’s also a tool. Men use it to prove a point to themselves, about their power to take what they want. You’re just the first rung on the ladder of their world domination. And when that’s the kind of sex you’re having—which is most of the time—you got to make sure that you’re using it as a tool, too. Don’t let yourself be used up by them, all the time believing it’s some kind of equal relationship. Make sure you’re getting just as much out of it as they are.” She shoved the swollen foot into a shoe and stood, wobbling a little on her heels. “Pleasure, at the very least.”

  I hated how this made me feel. My relationship with Benny wasn’t transactional, I was sure of it. And yet my mother’s words lingered there in the air between us, injecting poison into my pretty picture. “Mom, that’s a really antiquated view of sex.”

  “Is it?” She studied herself in the mirror. “From what I see every night at my work, I would say it’s not.” She caught my eyes in the reflection. “Just, baby—be careful.”

  “Like you are?” The words came out sounding more spiteful than I meant them to.

  Her blue eyes blinked rapidly, as if trying to rid themselves of an irritant. A flake of mascara. A flotsam of regret. “I learned my lessons the hard way. I’m just trying to save you from having to do the same thing.”

  I softened; I couldn’t help myself. “You don’t have to worry about me, Mom.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know how not to.”

  * * *

  —

  The last day that I ever saw Benny was a Wednesday in mid-May. There were only three weeks left in the school year, and we were in the midst of finals; I hadn’t seen him in almost a week while I crammed for my tests in a last-ditch effort to bring a last few B pluses up to As. When he showed up on the bus and sat beside me that last day, he handed me a piece of paper. It was a portrait of me, carefully inked on thick linen. He’d imagined me as a manga character in a tight black costume, the pink fringe of my hair whipping out behind me, strong legs leaping through the air. I clutched a sword in one hand, dripping blood; and below my boots was a fire-breathing dragon, cowering in fear. My dark eyes gazed out from the page, shiny and huge, challenging whoever looked back to just try it, fucker.

  I studied the picture for a long time, seeing myself as Benny must have seen me: as a kind of superhero, stronger than I really was, capable of rescue.

  I folded it and put it in my backpack and then wordlessly took his hand. He smiled to himself as he wove his fingers between mine. The bus coughed its way along the lakeshore, warm spring air leaking through the cracked-open windows.

  “My mom’s in San Francisco for the week,” he said as we approached his neighborhood. “She had to go down to the city to get her meds adjusted. Guess she rearranged the furniture one time too many and my dad finally got a clue.” He tried to laugh but the noise that came out sounded like the pained squawk of a dying seagull.

  I squeezed his hand. “Is she going to be OK?”

  He shrugged. “It’s just the same thing over and over again. They’ll dope her up and she’ll be back and we’ll go through it all again next year.” But then he closed his eyes, his lashes vibrating against his pale skin, belying his blasé. And I thought of Benny’s own cocktail of meds, the way they kept his lips cracked and dry and his pulse thumping erratically, and I wondered if he ever worried about how much of his mother he had inside him.

  “Does that mean we have the house to ourselves?” I imagined finally going upstairs at Stonehaven and getting to see Benny’s bedroom, which remained as mysterious to me as it had on the day we met. I’d still only ever seen the parlor, the hallway, the kitchen, the dining room, the library—a handful of Stonehaven’s forty-two rooms, and (I could see now) a reminder of how much I wasn’t really welcome there.

  He shook his head. “Remember? I’m grounded. They don’t trust me with just Lourdes. So my dad’s up here while Mom’s down there. Convenient for them both, I guess.” He frowned. “If his car is in the driveway we’ll have to be extra sneaky, OK? He pays closer attention than my mom.”

  But his father’s Jaguar wasn’t in the driveway; only Lourdes’s mud-splattered Toyota, discreetly parked under the pines. And so we once more sauntered through the house as if we owned it, stopping in the kitchen to pick up a pair of Cokes and a bag of popcorn before going out to the caretaker’s cottage. There, we sat on the steps, our legs hooked over each other’s, watching a flock of geese that had landed on the lawn. Occasionally we’d toss a kernel of popcorn and a brave goose would creep toward us to gobble it down, eyeing us warily. They grazed and honked, pooping dark pellets all over the beautiful green grass.

  “So. Bad news.” Benny’s voice broke the silence. “My parents are sending me to Europe this summer.”

  “What?”

  “Some kind of reform camp in the Italian Alps where I can’t get in trouble. You know, fresh air and physical exertion and all that stuff that will magically turn me into the boy wonder they want me to be.” He flung another piece of popcorn at a goose and it flapped its wings in protest. “I guess they think European air is somehow more restorative than American air.” He looked over at me. “I’m flunking three subjects, you know. This is, I guess, their last attempt to fix me up before they give up on me forever.”

  “Maybe if you ace your tests they’ll let you stay?”

  “Unlikely. Both that I’ll ace the tests and that it will make a difference. I can’t cram and get As the way you do. I can barely even read for five minutes, for chrissake. Why do you think I like comic
books so much?”

  I thought of my own summer. I’d landed a minimum-wage job at a river-rafting company in Tahoe City, loading and unloading the rubber boats that clotted the Truckee River from Memorial Day to Labor Day. This prospect sounded even more unappealing now that he wouldn’t be there waiting for me after work. “Shit. What am I going to do without you?”

  “I’ll get you a cellphone of your own and then I’ll call you every day.”

  “Nice. But still not the same.”

  We sat in the sun in silence for a while, looking out at the lake. The boats weren’t out yet; the light that dappled the surface of the water was blinding against all that blue. Eventually Benny kissed me and his lips felt sadder than usual, like we were already saying goodbye for the summer. And when he pulled back for a moment he kept his eyes closed and said, almost as a murmur, “I love you.” And, heart racing, I echoed his words back. It felt like we had everything we needed, right there, forever; and that with these words we would somehow conquer all of the things in our way.

  It was the first and last time I ever felt pure, unadulterated joy.

  We moved into the cottage, and then to the bed. We shed our clothes en route, discarding T-shirts and socks like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. In the bedroom, the dim light glowed across his milky skin, and I traced the red freckles on his chest before climbing on top of him. At this point, after a dozen trysts, we’d figured out how we fit together; there was less of the awkward bumping of elbows and knees and more of the thrill of discovery. How it felt when you touched there, or were touched here; what this body part might do when in contact with that one. A children’s science experiment, but with so much more at stake.

  And that—the shocking heat of his mouth on my breast, the damp slide of his stomach against mine—was why we didn’t hear his father enter the cottage. We were so absorbed with each other that we didn’t have time to scramble for cover until he was already in the doorway, his bulk blocking out the light from the living room. And then Benny’s father’s hand was on my arm and he was yanking me off of his son, and I was shrieking and grabbing for a sheet to cover myself while Benny was exposed on the bed, blinking and stunned.