Stolen Things

by R. H. Herron

  There was Harper, sitting at a table laughing with a blond woman and a guy who’d turned out to be Kevin.

  Jojo’s breath caught in the back of her throat. Should she turn and leave? Sit at another table? Avoid eye contact even though it almost physically hurt to look away from her?

  But then Harper winked at her.

  Jojo, automatically, winked back.

  And they were friends again, just like that. The relief was visceral—as they left the café, Harper laughing with her as if no time had passed, Jojo’s bones felt like liquid gold. She’d floated all the way home. Harper had told her not to tell her parents. They think I’m bad for you now, and maybe I am. She’d dropped another wink that lit Jojo’s chest as if fireflies danced inside her.

  Friends again.

  More than friends.

  No, what did that even mean? Jojo’s stomach flipped, and she was glad she’d rejected Pamela’s offer to make her a quesadilla before she came to bed.

  She’d spent the night at Harper’s house just last week. Jojo’s parents thought she was at Emily’s house, and it was true, she had been supposed to stay there, but Emily had some reaction to cashews, and Jojo had said yes so fast it almost wasn’t even a word when Harper asked, “Want to stay at my house instead?”

  They’d slept in this bed.

  Together.

  The way they had a million, bajillion times before. Jojo knew that when Harper dreamed, she made blowing-bubbles sounds with her mouth that were so funny that sometimes she’d wake Harper up by laughing. She knew that Harper slung her body carelessly around the bed, draping her arm or leg over Jojo’s, and that had always been nice, growing up. Friendly. Sisterly.

  What she’d felt last week, though, hadn’t been sisterly.

  “Want some lip gloss?” Harper’d been sitting at her vanity—of course she had one—holding up the wand.

  Jojo didn’t want any. They’d already rebinged season one of The Office for the umpteenth time, and her body felt heavy and ready for sleep. “Nah.”

  “Come on. It’s sugary.”

  She sighed. “Fine. You have to bring it to me, though, I’m not getting up.”

  Harper smiled like a cat. She really did. Her green eyes straightened, and her lips curved, and she seemed to be almost purring. She sashayed away from the vanity toward Jojo, applying more lip gloss as she came. “You’ll like it.”

  Something about her voice made Jojo’s stomach lurch sideways. “Fine. Give it.”

  Harper turned and tossed the lip gloss onto her vanity, where it landed with a clatter. “I put on too much. Have some of mine.”

  Jojo blinked. That wasn’t . . . Surely she didn’t mean what it sounded like.

  Harper’s smile got even more catlike.

  Jojo knew this face. She’d seen it—studied it—a thousand times before, when Harper was going after some boy. Harper got all velvety-voiced and kept that mild look of amusement on her face as whatever boy it was in question spun, twisting, in her gaze.

  Jojo spun.

  Then she called Harper’s bluff. “Okay.”

  Harper wouldn’t do it—she’d break, she’d laugh. You should have seen your face, she’d hoot, and then Jojo would spend the next year living it down.

  But Harper didn’t laugh.

  She sat on the edge of the bed. “Have you ever kissed a girl before?”

  Dumbly, Jojo shook her head.

  “Do you want to kiss me?”

  It was a trick question. Maybe Harper was filming her to tease her later. They’d always teased each other. Harper loved practical jokes.

  So she answered, “Kind of.”

  Harper’s eyes lit. “I knew it.”

  “But it’s not kissing, not really. Not if you’re just sharing your lip gloss.”

  “True,” said Harper. “It’s really just environmentally responsible.”

  Jojo, her stomach tied into knots, nodded. “There’s petroleum jelly in there, right? That’s just straight-up refined oil. You can’t waste that.”

  Harper shook her head. “I can’t. That would be bad.”

  Oh, God, the way she said the word “bad,” like it was a mango or some other sticky, juicy fruit.

  “Bad,” breathed Jojo.

  Then Harper leaned forward and kissed her.

  They pretended for a second that it was about the lip gloss, moving their lips against each other’s demurely.

  Then—and Jojo wasn’t sure how it happened, but it did—their mouths were open and they were kissing harder. Their tongues touched.

  Holy shit.

  Was this the way a kiss always felt? No wonder the kids in the hall at school were constantly locked at the mouth. Harper’s tongue was soft and small. She tasted like the Junior Mints they’d just shared, and something else—something that was just her. Harper’s hand came up to Jojo’s breast, her fingers tentative over the cotton of the pajamas.

  “Oh!” Jojo pulled back.

  Harper blushed.

  She blushed! Jojo had never, ever seen Harper seem embarrassed about anything. It made her feel like she was flying.

  “Yeah,” said Harper, recovering. “It’s good gloss. I hate to waste anything, you know that.” It wasn’t true. Harper threw away clothes and shoes and boys like they didn’t matter.

  “Yeah.” Jojo froze in place.

  She hoped.

  She hoped so goddamn hard, and she didn’t even know for what.

  Then Harper slid the flat of her hand under Jojo’s pajama top, skimming it up her ribs and back down again. She came close to—but didn’t touch—Jojo’s nipple.

  Jojo’d had no idea a nipple could need to be touched so bad. She would die if Harper didn’t—and then she did.

  And then they did more.

  TWENTY-NINE

  JOJO WOKE ALONE in Harper’s bed, the previous two days coming to her in fast lightning bolts, like flashbulbs going off all around her. Kevin’s face. Steiner as he remembered Car 143. Sarah’s anger in the jail. Dad’s blue lips. And Harper.

  Harper might be dead.

  Jojo rolled to her side, facing Harper’s tidy desk. Light streamed through the sheer curtains. She should get up and go downstairs, ask Pamela to drive her to the hospital, but her legs felt too heavy to move.

  No. Harper wasn’t dead. They were connected—they always had been. Jojo would know if Harper was dead.

  Especially now. Sex was a powerful connection, right?

  Then again, she had no idea if what they’d done even counted as sex.

  How were you supposed to know, when it came to girls? Like, she literally didn’t know. She’d Googled, because she wasn’t a moron, but entering the words “Are you a virgin if you’re a girl who had sex with a girl?” she’d ended up in the ass end of the porn universe. She’d practically gotten an STD from the pop-up ads.

  She and Harper hadn’t really even talked about it. They’d gone to sleep after they’d done whatever-the-hell-it-had-been, and then they’d had cereal with Pamela, and then she’d dropped them at school. Harper had winked at her a few times and even kissed her hello on the quad, but Jojo knew that was more to freak out Jason and David than anything else. (And they had freaked out in the predictable way—they were probably beating their ugly meat to the memory right now.)

  Harper still had Ray. She was in love with him, she said.

  Whereas she and Jojo just plain loved each other.

  Jojo spun in bed, unable to settle her limbs. She reached for her phone and then put it back on the nightstand.

  It wasn’t like she was gay or anything. She didn’t lust after girls on TV (Ruby Rose didn’t count—everybody lusted after her). Chris Hemsworth was one fine-ass piece of man.

  It was just about Harper herself, about how damn beautiful she was, with the way her skin glowe
d, and that cluster of freckles on her nose, and those predatory eyes that seemed to rattle everyone in her path. It was about the way she moved like a dancer, the way she stretched unself-consciously, her shirt rising up to show her waist and belly button as she reached her arms overhead.

  She was objectively beautiful.

  Proof: Jojo got catcalled on the street the normal amount. Once or twice a day, maybe. Dudes were gross, and every dude wanted to pork a young girl. Disgusting.

  But Harper got it absolutely all the time. She walked into Starbucks and three different guys would try to buy her a frap and get her number. On the street guys walked with her until she broke and talked to them. They yelled out of cars. Sometimes they stopped their cars and got out, trying even harder.

  Guys couldn’t help it. They were wired that way when it came to drop-dead-gorgeous girls.

  I’m wired that way, too.

  Maybe. Maybe not. Was she bi? She didn’t actually have to decide, after all. Her friend Alyssa was pan. Maybe Jojo was, too.

  Maybe.

  Jojo didn’t want to open her cell phone—if she did, she’d be stuck. She’d have to check e-mail and Snapchat and every other list of things she did so habitually that it felt weird if she didn’t.

  So she reached for Harper’s cell—charging next to hers—instead.

  When Steiner gave the phone back to her, he’d asked her to give it to Harper’s parents in case somehow she was okay—in case she decided to call her own phone. It happens. No one knows anyone else’s number now, but you always know your own.

  Pamela had nodded in the car when Jojo’d mentioned it. “Yeah. I guess . . . I should go through it. I should be desperate to, right? But I’m scared.”

  Harper’s mother wasn’t ever scared of anything. Jojo had croaked, “You want me to do it for you?”

  “Yes. Is that bad?” Relief had been stark in Pamela’s voice. “Go through it. Tell me everything I need to know.”

  I slept with your daughter.

  The phone sprang to life under Jojo’s thumbprint. More texts scrolled from people who obviously didn’t know that Harper didn’t have her phone. Two from the guy who ran the CapB meetings, telling her when the next meeting was. Another from a girl at school who wanted to go to Six Flags next weekend.

  She swiped the texts away, heading straight for Instagram. Not for the photos she could have seen by looking at Harper’s account on her own phone, but for the photos saved as drafts, the selfies that Harper hadn’t gotten around to posting yet. Harper had a method to her social media—she used the weekends to get hella hot and posed in different locations looking amazing, and then she sprinkled those out through the next week. There were bound to be some Jojo hadn’t obsessed over yet.

  There were, and the funny thing was that Jojo had taken this photo series, so they weren’t even selfies, though Harper was alone in every shot. They’d been in Emeryville, on the shoreline just down from IKEA. Harper had been fending off advances from dudes getting their parasails ready to fly, and Jojo had been trailing her with the phone, snapping shots as she turned, the wind lifting her hair. Those drafted posts, the ones where Harper was grinning her real smile, those were meant for Jojo.

  Weren’t they?

  She longed to press SHARE on one, to make Harper be out there somewhere, if only popping up in other people’s feeds, but that would freak the shit out of everyone who knew she was missing, so she didn’t.

  Harper’s Instagram mailbox had messages in it.

  Jojo clicked over.

  And . . . holy crap.

  The first one she opened was from a man who said he’d had a crazy-hot time with her and could he see her again, this time with two of his friends? Same hotel, and I’ll have the champagne on ice. Strawberries, too.

  Jojo swiped to the next message. Another old man—at least forty by the looks of him—saying that he had what she wanted most. A picture of a freckled dick was attached. So gross.

  Then there was another dick pic from someone else. This one was curved at the end and lit terribly by a flash so it looked almost blue.

  Another dick pic. And another.

  Jojo felt sick.

  She knew that Harper got busy with a lot of people, but that was her thing. She always said, “I like everybody. I want to kiss everyone I meet. Who knows when the frog will turn into a prince?”

  But holy shit, the next guy named a price.

  A high price. A thousand bucks for an hour of letting him be her daddy.

  There were more.

  Frantically, Jojo leaned over and aimed for the wastebasket. But she only dry-heaved, miserably, for a moment or two. Her head pounded, and her eyes felt sticky.

  Sitting back up, she closed Instagram.

  She locked the phone and carefully placed it back next to her own.

  Wriggling lower, she pulled the blanket up to her neck. She’d call her mother in a second, but for right now she just needed to think.

  In the streaming morning light, she saw their faces. Their dicks.

  Their names.

  She knew so many of those names.

  THIRTY

  LAURIE ROUSED, UNCOMFORTABLE and stiff, in the hospital “lounge” chair. The room was still dark, the curtains closed, but sunlight filtered through the cracks. Her phone said it was almost ten in the morning. She’d missed two phone calls from Jojo—shit—but the only text said, On my way to see Dad, c u soon.

  In the hall multiple alarms beeped, but in their small room there was only the sound of Omid’s heartbeat, being tracked along the darkened screen.

  Omid’s eyes fluttered, the skin of his lids creased and thin. His face looked as if he’d aged ten years overnight, his crow’s-feet deeper, his lips flattened somehow.

  Still handsome, though. She could still see the man she’d fallen in love with. Maybe that was the best part of marriage—knowing what your partner had been like in his so-called prime and holding that as now, forever, automatically.

  “Hi,” she said as his brown eyes found hers.

  “Hey.” His voice was a hoarse croak, barely above a whisper.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Omid rocked his head from side to side, slowly. “I don’t know.”

  “That’s okay.” Laurie took his hand. “You’re okay.”

  It was true—the doctor said he came through with flying colors. The stent is in place, and he did great in surgery. Think of his body as a car. Sometimes you blow small things, like a tire, and other times you need a new catalytic converter. This was more like the latter, but you’ll get a lot more miles on this model with it in place.

  “Why . . .” His voice trailed off, and his eyes darted to peer behind her, next to her. He swiveled his head. “. . . am I here?”

  “You had another heart attack.” It sounded so simple said with so few words. It hadn’t been simple—she’d almost lost him, right there in front of her.

  “Another?”

  “You had a little one Friday night and another, bigger one yesterday. Do you remember?” Fear was a cold, sharp stick poking into her ribs.

  He shook his head.

  Oh, God. “What do you remember?”

  He shut his eyes. “I remember . . . going to work?”

  “Lucky guess. You go to work a lot.”

  He smiled, his eyes still closed. “Am I going to be okay?”

  “Yes,” she hoped out loud.

  “Are you and Jojo okay?”

  His voice was normal. Not that concerned. Like he was checking in on their general welfare, asking if they’d had a good day.

  He didn’t remember.

  Laurie didn’t know how to tell him.

  “Yes.” They were okay, after all. Technically they were both in one piece.

  “Where’s Joshi?”

  “S
he’s at . . .” She almost said at the Cunninghams’. “She’s at home.”

  He looked to the curtain. “It’s morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You stayed here all night?” He looked at the chair.

  “You were in ICU after the surgery, so I waited there, mostly.” She couldn’t stay next to his bed for more than a few moments there, but she’d gotten to hold his hand and listen to his raspy breath. Then she’d slept a little, propped up in the ICU family room, ignoring the blaring of Judge Judy. If pressed, she’d guess she’d gotten four hours of sleep in the last two days, and she was feeling it now, heavy and stupid to her very bones.

  “How long do I have to be here?”

  “Probably a week, maybe less if you’re lucky.” A whole week without him, in this week when they needed him most.

  “Work—”

  “Is taken care of.”

  “Who’s on rotation for me?”

  “Brent Stanley is acting chief.” He’d known that yesterday. “And he’s ecstatic, you know that.”

  “Oh, crap. He’d be happy if I died. He’s wanted my position for so long.”

  Yesterday you did die. She’d seen it. That machine had brought him back. A machine. If they lived fifty years ago, he’d be dead.

  “I have to tell you—”

  “Joshi!” His voice was as bright as his eyes.

  Laurie spun. There Jojo was, looking beautiful as always, dressed in a black T-shirt with something about water protectors on it, and a pair of blue jeans for which Laurie had exchanged four hours of being in her chair at dispatch.

  “Daddy!” Jojo hurried forward and kissed Omid’s cheek. She wiped her mouth. “Jeez, you need to shave. This”—she pointed at his fast-growing beard—“is a nightmare. Handle that.”

  Omid smiled. “How is my girl?”

  Jojo’s face fell. “Okay.”

  “What? What’s wrong?” Omid looked worried.

  Jojo looked at Laurie.