“So, you want to take in some criminal kid to come live in our house? This year, of all years?”
“Joanna Marie!”
“What? I read the paper! Foster kids are maladjusted all the time.”
I know I'm being completely uncharitable, but still—this is all a bit much. My parents have never liked babies. I'm pretty sure they hadn't even really planned to have me, and it had just been their good fortune that I'd come out docile and bookish.
As usual with good old Earl and Janice, they make a big show of asking my opinion at dinner, but it's pretty clear that the big decision has already been made. We go back to our meals in strained silence. Dad mentions that he has a contractor coming in the morning to talk about converting our garage into the third bedroom, for the new kid. And Mom's apparently using her connections at the school to prepare recommendations, so the city can make sure my parents aren't psychos.
“Now, it could be a boy,” Dad makes sure to tell me, as our oddest dinner to date reaches conclusion. “In this part of the world, it's the little girls who tend to find safe haven first. So you might be getting a brother. How does that sound?”
Just kill me, why don't you? A smelly boy, to clog up all the drains in the bathroom, and pull my hair, and stink up everywhere? Just what I always wanted, parents. Thanks.
But I don't say this. Instead I smile tightly, kiss them each on the cheek, and trundle up to my room to study.
Once the door is bolted behind me and the stereo is turned up loud, I dial the number of Eric's burner. I never call him at home, for obvious reasons.
“Hey there,” he says, picking up after just two rings. “Can't talk for long, sweetness. Miranda's just run out.”
“Can we meet tomorrow?” I say, a little breathlessly. I can hear the rents beginning to murmur downstairs, which means they're entering amateur psychoanalysis hour. Otherwise known as the period after dinner during which they discuss their daughter's moral failings.
“My parents just dropped this huge bomb on me, and I really need a friendly face. Please, Eric?” I hate the way my voice sounds when I plead.
“Oh, sweetheart. Sure. Of course. Two-thirty in the janitor's closet? Or, wait—the art room?”
“What's wrong with your office?”
“We've been playing a little loose and fast lately, is all. I think shaking things up could be...discreet.” He breathes noisily into the phone, awaiting my response. “That okay?”
“The art room. Sure,” I say, after a pause. We say goodnight. I fall asleep fast, though my dreams are full of nightmares.
Chapter Two
October 1st
On a bright, cold Saturday morning, Mom and Dad and I gather on the porch with balloons to welcome “Trace Harter,” into our house (name, c/o of his file). Mom and Dad kept Trace's info secret for a week before they showed it to me, so I'm not quite caught up with the details of my new brother's history—but in a nutshell, Trace grew up in one of the sketchier neighbors of inner-city Baltimore. He was raised by his grandmother, until she died of alcohol-related cirrhosis when Trace was nine. His story grows even patchier after that, but Trace's case-worker, Melanie, believes that Trace was caught up in the petty drug trade for several years as a minor, living mainly by his wits.
He was taken into a group home around age 10, where he lived until age 12. The years after that, he's spent bouncing between large family foster homes in the Baltimore City system. We were to understand that there was some vague violence in his past, but his teachers had always noted that Trace had a lot of potential. He'd even exceled in subjects like Creative Writing and English, back at his old high-school. It had been a battle to keep him attending class, but he was just barely up to the standard and would be able to enter twelfth grade on time this year. Maybe even graduate, Melanie half-joked, grimly—if we did our job right.
My mother has baked a zucchini loaf (a.k.a., the closest my family comes to sheet cake), to herald Trace's arrival. We hover on the porch, grinning like the Brady Bunch, even though it's already turning cold. Melanie said she'd come at nine, but it's nearing nine-thirty by the time her dull red Saab rounds the corner into our cul-de-sac. We've probably looked so stupid to the neighbors all this time—grinning like weirdoes on our porch for half the morning.
Melanie has big, frizzy brown hair and lots of lipstick on her teeth. She always seems tired, but is very kind. All last week she’d been coming to the house to check on Trace's future living arrangements, and ask us questions about our “home life.” IMHO, Mel has a bit of a soft spot for whatever fresh demon is coming into our lives today.
“Hey, Prines!” Melanie calls, her breath coming out as smoke. It really is freezing out. “Ready to meet your new family member?”
“Can I go back inside, please?” I murmur to my parents. My mother just pinches me, hard, on the elbow.
“Earl, Janice, Joanna—this is Trace Harter.” Melanie opens the back door of her car, like a valet. We all seem to hold our breath. In spite of myself, I guess I'm excited. I've cooled my bitchy attitude a bit, and finally come to appreciate what my parents are doing. It really is an important thing, taking in somebody who needs a home. It had been pretty shallow of me to just assume the guy would be a creep.
I knew from Trace's file that he was eighteen—just like me. He would age out of care by his graduation next year. “We're going with someone older first, because we want to make sure we'll be good at this,” my mother had said, while toiling over her zucchini loaf the evening prior. I'd been running calculus flash-cards at the kitchen table, and my father was fussing about with some of the décor in Trace's new garage bedroom.
We'd been told to expect sullenness, even unkind words from our new foster friend...for these kids had endured the worst kind of rejection for most of their lives. Your only job is to provide a loving home, to the best of your ability—Melanie was fond of saying. Just try to be there for him. Very few people have done that.
I see a long, smooth, nearly hairless calf materialize first. He's wearing basketball shoes—something with a Nike swish. Then, the rest of him arrives in space, until a grown-ass teenage boy is glowering at us from the driveway. I don't know what I expected him to look like, but this is not it.
For starters, Trace is super tall—like, easily six three. His shoulders are broad and sculpted, which I know immediately because he's wearing only a white white beater, despite the autumnal chill. Lines of ink stripe both of his upper arms—he has tattoos running from elbow to neck on each side. I can't decipher the symbols from my vantage point on the porch, but there's already something that strikes me as angry about all those harsh lines and angles. Below the signage, I can tell that Trace has smooth skin, the color of milky tea. He looks vaguely ethnic in some way I can't quite place.
He's chewing gum, and for a moment I watch the muscles in his jaw just bulge and relax, bulge and relax. He has a single gold stud in one ear. His ebony dark hair, very soft-looking, is cropped close to his head—but you can tell it would curl prettily if he let it grow. The suggestion of stubble glitters on his high cheekbones, and his brows are thick to the point of appearing stern. Mirrored aviator sunglasses flash from a perch on his nose, obscuring his eyes. So he's kind of a bad boy, I think to myself. Hmmm.
Apparently tired of being looked at, Trace slams the door of the Saab so hard I think the glass window might crumble. Melanie starts at the sound, but she bravely clings to her smile. We are in this together now, her wide eyes say. No backing out now, Prines!
“Trace, why don't we all go in from this cold and get acquainted?” she ventures. My mother steps forward, holding out her zucchini loaf like she's gifting gold to a king.
“Trace, it's so lovely to meet you!” she says. “You're a real looker! Isn't he, Jo?”
(When my mother gets nervous, she says super embarrassing things like this.)
“Hey, Trace!” I say, bypassing her comment. But for a weird flash, I do feel self-conscious. I reach up to smooth a
way any stray hairs that may have popped out of my ponytail. I glance down at my dumpy sweatshirt—a lost cause, in and of itself.
But Trace doesn't respond. Suddenly, I notice two gnawed-looking drumsticks, peeking out of the pocket of his basketball shorts. One of his hands is jiggling nervously over the sticks—like they're a pack of cigarettes, and he's trying and failing to quit.
“Come on, Trace,” Melanie says again, her tone motherly. “It's cold as hell out here. Let's all go in, huh?”
Still, my new foster brother just stands here. In fact, he appears to puff out his chest, as if to spite his case-worker's words as well as the weather. Squinting in the light, I begin to see more of the boy before me. His athletic build is almost alarming—he looks stronger than even the top players on my school's varsity basketball team. More a man than a boy, really. Was it possible that he'd lied about his age, on his file? Then again, his face—what I could see of it—the smoothness of his skin and the fullness of his hair suggest youth. While Eric, for instance (my personal emblem of “age”), is pale and crinkled at the edges, with his brown and grey flop already receding around a widow's peak.
Trace's round head swivels on his shoulders, and he peers over his sunglasses to stare at us. I watch him take in the meager little landscape of my childhood home. It must look so uncool to him, I can't help thinking. The Prines, we're very...basic.
Finally, my new brother makes some gesture, establishing that he can, in fact, hear. He jerks his chin upward, in the direction of my parents. Then, he pinches the aviators off the perch of his nose, and I get to see his eyes. Instantly, they remind me of Eric's—for though they aren't blue, they are just as piercing. Trace Harter's eyes are an emerald hue, light and opaque—like a black cat's eyes. In his gaze I read flintiness, yes, but also—intelligence. Humor. Wit. Sex.
You can tell a lot about a person by their eyes.
“Who's the chick?” Trace blurts suddenly, swiveling his sculpted head in my direction. His pink lips curl ever-so-slightly at the edges, and I feel once more that weird little thrill of self-consciousness. Trace cracks his knuckles—first his right hand, then his left. Like an intimidating gangster in a mafia movie.
“That 'chick' is your new foster sister,” Melanie says, her tone turning stern. “We talked about all this, remember?” She begins to rub her arms through her chintzy blazer.
“You in the system, too?” It takes another second for me to understand I'm being asked a question. Just long enough, in fact, for my father to intervene.
“No, Trace. This is our daughter, Jo. She's about your age, though!” Dad's arm falls across my shoulders, and I fight the urge to shake him away.
“Tight,” Trace says—and I swear, the look he gives me isn't unlike Eric's special come-on face, the face he makes when we're alone in his office (or the art room, or the janitor's closet...).
“Hey—nice sweatshirt, sis.”
I glance down at my choice of attire—a super winning and sexy homage to Disney World, featuring all of the original Disney princesses languishing under a tree. I feel my face burn, and my stomach plummet. It occurs to me to form some kind of snappy comeback, but when I open my mouth all that comes out is air.
But then, why do I care what my stupid foster brother thinks of my clothes? So what if I can see his nipples rising out of his shirt, in the cold? And so what if I can see the rectangular curves of his abs, or the elegant swells his calf muscles make? He has a good body. So-frigging-what.
“I'd hit that one in the middle,” Trace says to my sweatshirt, just loud enough that I can hear him, and his case-worker can ignore the remark. My parents just look confused, but I understand what he means immediately. I sneak a peek at the object of his gaze. He'd been referring to Princess Jasmine, curvy and small, her pillowy genie pants straddling the unimpressive space between my own breasts. I feel a funny pang. Jasmine, with her tanned skin and dark eyes, is kind of the opposite of pale, freckly me, with my short stature and mousy brown hair and narrow frame—“Botticelli face” or no.
Does his liking Jasmine mean he wouldn't hit ...me? Oh, Jesus Christ, Jo. Get it together.
“Trace,” Melanie says, her voice now utterly drained of patience. “Let's go inside. Come on, now. Be a gentleman.”
“I'm just playing,” the boy whines, his sweet alto sound just the slightest bit mocking. He reaches a hand up, and runs his fingers across the budding curls. Soft and dark hair—yet another thing he probably loves about Princess Jasmine.
Jesus. I cannot be jealous of a cartoon character.
“Point me to my room, and I'm okay,” my foster brother says—and it's suddenly like all the joking has gone out of him. He now seems impossibly bored, just to be standing out here on the sidewalk with us. “Y'all don't have to do nothing. I just want to be alone.”
Mom looks crestfallen, but dad puts a steadying hand on her shoulder. He's really on his shoulder-game today.
“Take all the time you need,” Dad says. “We'll be here. Just come inside when you get hungry.” Melanie, looking helplessly from us to Trace and back again, finally indicates the door to the garage room we've made up for my new “brother.” The four of us watch him lope towards his new world. The tattoos seem to ripple along his arms, as he saunters across the sidewalk. His ass—well, he's my foster brother, so I definitely don't think about his ass.
“That could have gone better,” mom says, as we make our way back inside.
“It also could have gone much worse. Right, Melanie?”
“Yes. He's a good kid, truly. He's just a little distrustful of authority. But I'm sure you can understand that.”
Mom divvies up the zucchini loaf, and the adults continue to chatter about Trace's well-being, but I'm still feeling restless. Electric. I need something.
So I sneak up to my room, and call Eric. My career counseling paramour confirms our date. Says he'll meet me in the art room, half an hour earlier than we'd originally planned.
* * *
It only takes a few minutes to run the five blocks to school from my house, so I grab my violin and get to the meet-up spot a bit early. It's a Saturday, and the campus buildings are deserted—but thanks to my friends in high places, I have a key to the front door so I can use the newspaper lab on the weekends. But the need coursing through me at this moment requires something more expressive, more insane than a sprint. I unpack my violin in the silent art lab, loving the illicit sense of being in a school room when no one else is around. I slide resin slowly up and down the bow, and I adjust the chin rest. I breathe noisily, enjoying the loud sounds I can make in a lonely space—all before diving straight into Ernst's Variations “The Last Rose of Summer.”
I don't know if I can even really describe how fantastic I feel, playing the violin. It's like I'm yelling into a canyon and bursting through the o-zone layer at the same time. I feel like I'm saying all the things I'm too shy or angry or busy to say in my daily life. And most of all, I feel like a helluva lot more than plain Joanna Prine: Dartmouth-bound math whiz, newspaper editor. Usual goodie-goodie, but occasional homewrecker.
Tripping through a few outro notes of my piece, I imagine I'm standing before a rapt crowd at Carnegie Hall, or the Palais Garnier. But just as I take an imaginary bow before my imaginary audience—
“Hey! You shouldn't play so loud in here. Someone could call the police, or something.” Startled, I feel the violin bow slide from my fingers. It clatters on the floor.
“Jesus, Eric! You scared me.”
“Oh, baby. I'm sorry. Let me make it up to you.” Stepping fully into the deserted classroom, I watch my paramour bend down, then resume standing with my bow clutched in his fist. For a second, while our fingers touch, Eric's face looks shockingly old to me—older than it was the day before. Not that he's ugly, but something about his features seems—carved. Distant. Like something in a museum, something fleshless.
I instantly feel bad about thinking this.
Eric's hair is growing long,
beginning to spiral around his ears. His locks are still thick and straight, thank goodness—brown, shot through with gray at the temples. He smiles at me, and I feel the familiar, thrilling power that I always enjoy at our sneaky meet-ups. Power because I'd made this man come meet me, here at this secret place. Power because I could make someone like him notice someone like me. This kind of skill, it isn't nothing.
Eric takes a step towards me.
“Is someone being a bratty little girl? Does someone need to be spanked?” My counselor reaches around and raps the side of my ass with his knuckles. Meanwhile, I am still in the unsexy weekend garb: Disney princess sweatshirt, jeans.
“I think it's the teacher that's been bad,” I murmur, setting my violin gently back into its case. “Maybe he's the one who needs to be taught a lesson.” I bite my lip. Eric's always told me that he loves it when I bite my lip.
As I begin to press my ass against the cup of his hand, I feel Eric shrink away just the smallest bit. We always dip toward kinky, in our foreplay—but when the moment comes to follow through, Eric will always back off. It makes me feel kind of shitty, actually. There's nothing like letting a guy know that you're willing to be spanked or teased or dominated and then have him ease you back into missionary, like you're the crazy, oversexed girl—the Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman to his genteel Richard Gere. I don't like feeling bad about my urges, but showing any sexual deviance can feel like a forfeit of that power I so love when I'm with Eric. Still: I need to feel good right now, so I don't call the counselor on his coy shit. I just can't get Trace's sexy smirk or his acid green eyes out of my head. I need to blow them up.
He gently pushes me backward, onto the art counter—so I'm lying there surrounded by crappy watercolor still lives and Mason jars full of caked paint-brushes. Then, he hovers over my face. His own body obscures most of the light striping the room, through the slats in the blinds. He reaches down to brush my hair away from my temples—then he leans down to kiss me. He pecks me lightly, a dozen or so times in a row. Eric doesn't really like to tongue kiss, but after a few moments, his mouth eases open, like a drawer. We press our faces together, and I feel him rub up against me, down there.
A Family Affair: My Bad Boy Foster Brother Page 2
