“And I just want you to live past your senior year,” Dad said, his jaw clenched. He let out a long breath. “People like you get killed by people like him.”
“Grant’s not like that,” I said, my voice sounding tinny and distant.
“He’s a teenage boy,” Dad said, raising his voice again. “They’re all like that! You don’t understand this at all, do you? God, I still remember that letter you sent when you started your hormone pills, where you told me you’d been a girl all along. I hadn’t understood it then but now I think I do, because you’re acting like a girl now. You’re acting like a little girl who’s so lovestruck she’s lost her mind.”
I closed my eyes and took deep, even breaths. “I’ll be more careful,” I said, my voice low.
“You’d better,” he said, glaring out the windshield. “One wrong move and I’m sending you back to your mother.”
He pulled into the Walmart parking lot and the car came to a stop. I slammed my door and didn’t look back as I strode across the asphalt. I wasn’t sure who I was angrier with—him for trying to control me, or myself for arguing, when a part of me still suspected he was right.
15
Friday night came as slow as torture, but it finally came. All week I had been thinking about what Dad had said in the car, that I shouldn’t be with Grant, that I was being foolish. But when Grant told me he wanted to take me somewhere on Friday night, I couldn’t help myself. I said yes.
I was waiting on the bottom step of the apartment’s breezeway when Grant arrived in a sedan older than me, its front left panel powder blue while the rest was varying degrees of rust red. The engine rattled like a maraca, and though the light was dim I could see the upholstery sagging inside. Grant stepped out, hands in his pockets and eyes cast to the ground. I walked over and smiled.
“How do you find yourself this evening, m’lord?” I said, trying to defuse the tension, but he didn’t smile. He bit his lip and shuffled for a quiet moment before giving me an anxious look. “We don’t have to go,” he said. “We could walk somewhere.”
“Why would we do that?” I said, circling slowly to his side of the car.
“Because my car’s a piece of junk,” he said. “It’s so embarrassing.”
“She’ll make point five past light speed,” I said, patting the hood of his car and doing my best Han Solo impression. “She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.” I leaned up, kissed him softly on the lips, and grinned, arching an eyebrow. “I’ve made some … special modifications myself.”
He smiled a little, but something was obviously still on his mind. I was starting to lose hope when he said, “Okay, well, get in the car you stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder.”
“Who’s scruffy-lookin’?” I asked in mock indignation as I hopped into the car. The seat screeched and tilted as I sat in it, and I realized when I reached that there was no seat belt. Grant sat down and started the poor, limping engine and we headed out.
“Hey, wait,” he said, frowning. “How come you’re Han and I’m Leia? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
“You were pouting,” I said, matter-of-factly. “Han Solo doesn’t pout. You can have your Han privileges back when you cheer up. Can I ask what’s on your mind?”
“You can,” Grant said, scratching his temple and frowning again. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“That’s a surprise. Hopefully a good one.”
I swallowed dryly and gripped the door handle, my own anxiety building the farther I got from home. The car rattled even worse once it hit speed on the highway, to the point that I was afraid it was going to come apart.
“Sorry again about the other night,” I said, twisting a strand of hair.
“You don’t need to apologize,” he said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t be so happy either if I had a daughter and found her in my house alone with a boy.”
“No,” I said, “I mean about pushing you too hard to talk about your family.”
“Oh,” Grant said. “That. I mean, I should be glad you want to know that kind of stuff. I should be really, really glad you’re interested in that. And I’m trying.”
He turned off the interstate onto a highway miles outside of town. The streetlights grew thinner and thinner until he eventually turned onto a dirt road and the only light remaining was his car’s one functioning headlight.
We pulled into a patch of gravel beside a brown double-wide trailer. A light came on above the trailer’s tiny latticed porch, revealing a pair of bony, tired-looking dogs chained near a garden where a dozen chickens hopped around angrily at the sudden disturbance before fleeing behind the trailer to escape the light.
Grant turned to me and grimaced a little. He let out a long, slow whistle. “This is my mom’s car. It was never in the shop. I just didn’t want you to see it, just like I didn’t want you to see where I live.” He took a deep breath and turned to me. “You sure you wanna come inside?”
I squeezed his hand and kissed his cheek. “I would love to meet your family.”
I followed him as he walked up to the porch, giving the chained-up dogs a wide berth. The screen door swung open and two girls hopped out, one with long black hair in overalls who couldn’t have been more than eight and a brown-haired girl in a tank top who looked a little older. They ran up to us, cackling happily.
“Is this her?” the older one asked.
“Yeah,” Grant said, kneeling to give both girls hugs.
“You’re really tall!” the younger one said, yanking on her hair and looking up at me with the same big, black eyes that stared out at me from Grant’s face. “How’d ya get so tall?”
“It kind of just happened,” I said with a shrug.
“Ignore her,” Grant said, smiling and tousling the girl’s hair. She screamed in delight and jumped away, grinning with a mouth missing a third of its teeth. “That’s my baby sister Avery.”
“Hi,” I said. She giggled again and ran inside. I saw the way Grant watched her, almost like a parent, and felt something soften in my chest.
“I’m Harper,” the older girl said. “Grant ain’t stopped talkin’ about ya for weeks.”
“I hope I don’t disappoint!” I said.
“Ya better not,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “Anybody messes my brother around’ll get a ass whuppin’.”
“Jesus, Harper, get inside!” Grant said, pointing at the door and giving her a stern expression. She stuck her tongue out and followed her sister.
“Sorry,” he said to me with a sigh as his shoulders sagged. “We don’t have company a lot.”
“It’s fine,” I said, hooking my arm around his and smiling. “They’re adorable. I’m ready to go in when you are.”
“Gotta get it over with, I guess,” Grant said, and we walked inside.
Grant’s trailer was the exact opposite of Dad’s apartment. Where Dad’s walls were white because he had trouble understanding the point of color, this living room’s walls practically glowed in lime green and purple. Where Dad’s furniture was brown because that seemed like the easiest way to keep it looking clean, none of this room’s furniture matched and the upholstery’s colors ranged across the whole spectrum. Where Dad’s walls and tables were bare of any decoration, this room’s walls were almost completely hidden behind dozens of family photos and strange, psychedelic portraits of a Jesus who looked nothing like the sterile thing worshiped at Anna’s church. A thin, gray-haired woman with a heavily lined face leaned out from the kitchen and waved.
“Hey, sugar!” she said in the gravelly voice of a heavy smoker. “Is this her? Oh my lord, Grant! She’s so pretty I could just die.” I covered my face. “I’m Grant’s mama, but you can call me Ruby. I’d come give y’all proper hugs but”—she gestured to her white, flour-caked hands and forearms—“I got some washin’ up to do before dinner. Grant, hon, can you make sure your sisters’re decent for
company?”
“They aren’t,” Grant said. “I’ll go get ’em ready. Amanda, you wanna come with? I can give you the tour.” He gestured to the rest of the trailer with a sweep of his arm, a sarcastic look on his face. I shook my head.
“Actually, mind pointing me to the ladies’?”
“Sure,” he said, then pointed at the closest door in the hallway leading to the bedrooms. “Bathroom’s over there.”
The bathroom was tiny and decorated in the same bizarre style as the living room. My eyes landed on a cluster of pill bottles on the sink: Seroquel, 800 mg, for Ruby Everett. When I was in the mental hospital after my suicide attempt, one of the other patients had been on that medication for delusions and hallucinations. I knew Grant’s home life was hard considering how much he had to work, but now I wondered how much worse it was than I had thought.
As I stepped out of the bathroom I peeked into the room beyond. It was small, with a well-made twin bed, a battered-looking acoustic guitar on a stand, a poster of Peyton Manning from back when he was in college, and a small television on a desk next to a stack of DVDs. A stack of glossy paperbacks stood on the floor. I picked one up and immediately recognized the Sandman series. A page was dog-eared near the beginning of volume two.
“Hey,” Grant said from behind me. I turned, afraid he was going to be angry at me for snooping, but he smiled. “Dinner’s ready.”
“Thank you,” I said, walking to him slowly, “for bringing me here.”
“No problem,” Grant said, shrugging. “Just … I’m sorry in advance if dinner’s weird.”
“I can handle weird,” I said as we walked out to the kitchen table. Grant gave me a worried look as we sat down at a table covered in a faded green-apple tablecloth, with green-apple wallpaper, red-apple place mats, and stickers of apples covering the refrigerator. Plates of collard greens, fried okra, cornbread, and fried catfish steamed as they waited for us to dig in. I grabbed my fork, but Grant touched my arm and slightly shook his head. I started to ask why when Ruby began to say grace.
“Give us, O God, the nourishing meal, well-being to the body, the frame of the soul,” she began, in the low voice of someone reciting poetry. I lowered my utensils and closed my eyes, feeling a tingle at the back of my neck. “Give us, O God, the honey-sweet milk, the sap and the savor of the fragrant farms.”
“That was beautiful,” I said, staring at Ruby. “Is that from the Bible?”
“Don’t know where it’s from. Mama used to say it, and her mama used to say it, so that’s what we say.”
“Well, I think it’s stupid,” Avery said. Grant opened his mouth angrily to chastise her, but Ruby beat him to the punch.
“Now, Avery,” Ruby said, “you know Jesus loves you like you love them dogs and all them chickens and all the birds in the woods. And you love them a lot, don’t you?” Avery nodded. “And lovin’ them like you do, wouldn’t it just hurt your heart to reach out to try and comfort one of those little babies and they scratched your finger?” Avery thought and then nodded more slowly. “Well, that’s what it’s like for Jesus when you say things like that.” Avery’s eyes widened. “You don’t wanna hurt Jesus, do you?”
“No…” Avery said, looking down at her plate. I stared and thought of Dad and all the times he had yelled at me as a kid. For a moment I wished someone had spoken to me like Ruby.
“This all looks so delicious,” I said, picking up my fork again.
“It ain’t nothin’,” Ruby said, waving a hand at me and smiling.
“No, really!” I said. “I haven’t had a meal like this since I moved here. Dad’s not much of a cook.”
“You ain’t from here?” Harper said with a mouth full of cornbread, spraying crumbs across the tablecloth.
“I’m from Tennessee originally,” I said between bites. “But out west near Memphis. Little town about an hour north called Jackson. Then my parents split up and me and Mom settled down just outside Atlanta and Dad moved here.”
“Well, then why’d you come to this shithole if you could’ve stayed someplace like that?” Harper asked.
“Don’t swear at the damn table!” Grant said, rubbing his temple.
“You just swore!” Harper said, banging the table for emphasis.
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” Avery said, giggling and bouncing. Ruby apologized to me, but I could tell she was fading quickly.
“My dad lives here, and I hadn’t seen him in a while,” I said. They talked over me. “Atlanta’s not all that great,” I added, hoping to cut through the conversation. Harper and Grant both gave me a confused look, while Avery’s attention drifted from swearing to poking her food into interesting shapes. “I don’t know. Maybe it is for some people. It wasn’t for me.” I glanced at Grant and squeezed his hand.
“It’s nice that you live with your daddy,” Avery said suddenly, looking at me wistfully. “I miss my daddy.”
Ruby, Harper, and Grant all froze, giving one another a strange look. Grant cleared his throat and silently began clearing plates.
“Avery, shug,” Ruby said, slurring just a little. “Why don’t you go play?”
“Okay, Mama,” Avery said, hopping down from her chair and flopping down near a pile of naked, half-bald Barbie dolls.
“You gonna help or just sit there?” Grant said, poking his head out of the kitchen to glare at Harper. She stuck her tongue out at him and stalked off toward her bedroom.
“Don’t mind her,” Ruby said softly. Her eyes were half-lidded and unfocused. “She always gets upset when people talk about her daddy.”
“Oh,” I said, as I stood and gathered the few remaining plates to help Grant. We hand-washed dishes in silence, him staring off into the distance and me afraid to ask what was going on.
“You ready to go?” he said as he placed the last of the plates in the drying rack.
“Yeah,” I said, and Grant gave me a quick grin.
He kissed his mom on the cheek and headed outside.
“Thanks for dinner,” I said as I picked up my purse. Her eyes fluttered like she was just waking up and she pulled me into a hug. I stiffened at first but quickly hugged her back. She smelled like cigarettes and mint and lemons.
“Thank you,” she said.
“What for?”
“For making my boy smile.”
16
I held Grant’s hand as we pulled out onto the main road. He squeezed mine in return, though his grip seemed weaker than usual. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t want to press him, but eventually the rattling of the engine started to get to me.
“Grant.” I put a hand over his and leaned over, lightly kissing his cheek. “We’re near the lake. Pull over.”
I used the light on my phone to find a small path and, taking his hand, led him into the woods toward the tree house where we had gone after that first party. I remembered every step of the path; I had thought of that night so many times that I could have made my way to the lake in my sleep. Grant was distracted, or nervous, or both, so he followed my lead. We reached the old tree house and climbed up wordlessly. The lake was as beautiful as last time, though a cold wind whipped across its surface, sending my hair swirling. Grant touched the back of my arm, and suddenly I felt very warm.
“You’re the first person I ever brought home,” he said, pulling me closer. I breathed in sharply and felt a pressure building near the bottom of my stomach. I realized I was shaking. “I’ve been too embarrassed to bring anybody over since we moved into the trailer.”
“Thank you for trusting me,” I said. The silence swelled between us. “When I was fifteen,” I began, feeling like I should tell him about my suicide attempt, like I should trade one of my secrets for his, but he kissed me before I could go any further. Our kiss started innocently enough, just lips pressed together like a dozen times in the past, but then his lips parted and mine parted, and our lips moved like we were whispering silent secrets into each other’s mouths. I felt the tip of his tongue brush my teeth, and t
hen our tongues were touching, and I heard myself whimper without meaning to do it. My knees failed and we lowered ourselves to a kneel, our fingers laced and our mouths never parting.
His fingers brushed the bottom of my stomach. I wanted them there, but years of terror made me brush his hand away. After a moment, I gently took his wrist and put his fingers back where they had been. His hand moved up farther, and then he had the hem of my shirt in both hands, and he was lifting it. I broke our kiss and scuttled backward, breathing heavily and trying to pick just one out of the swirl of feelings fighting to break the surface. I closed my eyes and tossed my shirt aside with trembling hands. We came together again and his hands were everywhere, on my back and sides and stomach and tracing my ribs. He reached behind me and, without breaking the kiss, started to unclasp my bra. Instinctively I backed away again, leaving my bra clasped.
“Can we slow down?” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.
“Of course,” Grant said, quickly handing me my shirt. I pulled it over my head and saw him smiling gently once I had it on. “Of course we can.”
“Can we … is it okay if we cuddle?” I said, brushing my hair back. “I didn’t get touched much before I met you.” I didn’t finish the rest of the thought: and I didn’t think I ever would. “I kind of need to—to ease into the idea of it.”
“I think we can manage that,” Grant said, wrapping his arm around me and pulling me in so I was lying on my side using his arm as a pillow. I kissed his cheek and we both turned to look at the stars. They were even more visible in the crisp fall air than they had been in the summer. I could even see the Milky Way, a band of white smeared across the night sky.
“I saw you’re reading Sandman,” I said. “I would have loaned you my copies.”
“I actually got it before we started dating,” he said. “I thought if I read the books you liked it might impress you.”
“That’s sweet,” I said, closing my eyes and nuzzling deeper into his arms. “You know I was already into you, right?”
If I Was Your Girl Page 10
