A Place For Us

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “No, leave it like that,” the voice said. A light flashed on. It took her a moment to adjust her eyes to the sudden brightness. There were three of them: a tall, skinny boy with a spotted face; a taller, broader boy with a stubble of beard; and a heavy-lidded, grinning Liam.

  “Hey,” she said, raising her arm in a salute, and then running her hand through her hair. She knew by the way the tall boy was gazing at her that she looked okay.

  “Brandon Cowley—Phoebe Lansing.” Liam’s voice seemed overly loud and emphatic. He didn’t bother introducing the other boy, who had wandered across the room, sat down at the piano, and begun picking out the opening chords to “The Long and Winding Road.”

  “Hey,” she said again, as Brandon collapsed on the other end of the couch. The pillows sighed under his weight. He was five or six inches taller than Liam, with the kind of solid build that made Phoebe think he lifted weights like her dad. He would have been very handsome if not for a slightly pug nose and a heavy jaw. But when he smiled at Phoebe, she knew he thought he was, as her dad would have put it, “really hot shit.”

  “So you’re the babysitter, huh?” he asked, turning toward her. She smelled the alcohol on him then. Alarmed, she glanced over at Liam, who’d slid into one of the red leather chairs facing the couch. His face was flushed, his hair falling in his eyes. He looked shamefaced, actually. Of course—he’d been drinking, too. After everything they’d talked about. After all those promises he’d made! She felt crushed in a way that was entirely alien to her. Her hopes for the night were ruined. Worse than that, though, she had to face the fact that she’d failed Liam somehow. And that he’d failed himself.

  “Yeah,” she said, standing up. “I better get home.”

  “Oh, no, you can’t go now,” Brandon told her. He leaned over and dug around in the backpack he’d left on the carpet when he first sat down, and pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red.

  “Heeeeeeeeere’s Johnnie!” he cried, waggling the bottle above his head.

  Liam snorted. The boy at the piano shook his head.

  “Thanks. But it’s getting really late,” Phoebe said, stepping around the table and the duffel Liam had dropped in front of him. As she moved past Liam, he reached out and grabbed her hand.

  “Don’t go, Phebe,” he said. She looked down at him and felt her heart contract. His pupils were enormous. He seemed to be having a hard time focusing on her.

  “Why?” she asked him, shaking her hand free. They’d gone over this again and again. How he’d dug himself into a hole but was going to pull himself out. Why he wasn’t going to find himself by drinking or doing drugs. That he was better than that. Smarter and stronger without any of that. Someone he could be proud of. And, probably more important, someone his dad could be proud of. He looked back up at her, smiling crookedly. She fought an urge to slap him.

  “The question is, Why not, Phebe?” Brandon said from the couch. She turned back toward him, ready to tell him not to call her that. It was Liam’s name for her. One of their precious secrets. Brandon had twisted the cap off the bottle of scotch and was holding it out to her. His gaze moved up and down her body, taking her in with obvious appreciation. Just as she had imagined Liam would be doing. She had put a whole scenario together in her head about how things would go between them. The way he would first touch her hair, fingering it as if it were something priceless. Then he’d cup the back of her head and gently pull her to him. He’d press his body up against hers and look down at her and say: You’re beautiful—do you know that? You’re so incredibly beautiful to me!

  All this time, she’d been so sure that she’d been helping him. Convinced that, by believing in him, she’d given him the strength he needed to take a stand against his problems. She’d felt so grown-up supporting him in this way. The love she’d always felt for him had only deepened with the conviction that he needed her. Because of her, he’d be able to make a fresh start. In spite of the distance and silence between them, she was sure he could somehow sense all the good, positive feelings she’d been sending his way these past few months.

  Oh, what a fool she’d been!

  She turned from Brandon back to Liam, hoping she would see something in his gaze. Something that would tell her she was wrong. But his eyes were closed. His mouth hung open. She felt her anger solidify into something she didn’t recognize. Something hard and hurtful. She sat back down on the couch and reached over to take the bottle that Brandon was holding out to her.

  • • •

  “Hmmm, you smell good,” Brandon said as he buried his face in her hair. She’d stopped keeping track of how much scotch she’d choked down. The stuff tasted awful. It burned in her throat. But she was intent on showing Liam that she didn’t give a damn. He was still slouched in the chair across from them, snoring lightly. She’d forgotten all about the other boy, until he suddenly materialized in front of the couch.

  “I’m going up, bro,” he said. “And I think you should, too.”

  “Thanks for the advice, bro,” Brandon said, looking up at the tall, skinny boy who Phoebe now realized was Brandon’s brother, Carey, Liam’s roommate at Moorehouse. Tilly had told her about them, that she’d liked one but not the other. “We’re doing just fine here.”

  “No, I mean it,” Carey said. “Leave her alone. I think Liam was like, you know, just talking.”

  “And I think you should like, you know, just mind your own business.”

  Carey continued to stand there, hands thrust deep into the back pockets of his jeans, looking down at them. Brandon turned back to Phoebe, his lips traveling along her neck as his right hand started to lightly massage her stomach beneath the sweater. Embarrassed by Carey’s disapproving gaze, she sat up, pushing Brandon’s hand away.

  “It’s Phoebe, right?” Carey asked. When she nodded, he went on: “Listen, I just think you should know that my brother here has a way of—”

  But before Carey could say another word, Brandon sprang up from the couch and pushed him in the chest.

  “Mind your own fucking business, asshole!” he said as Carey fell back a few steps.

  “Okay!” Carey said, regaining his balance. He put both hands up. “Okay. Whatever. Like I said. I’m going up to bed now.”

  • • •

  “You’re so beautiful,” he was telling her. His voice seemed far away. She could almost pretend that it was Liam’s. That he was Liam. And Liam was telling her exactly what she wanted to hear. She opened her mouth to say something, but suddenly his tongue was there, hot and probing. She felt nauseated. She tried to turn onto her side, but he held her in place with his left knee and then—in one swift powerful movement—pulled her down flat onto the couch and rolled on top of her.

  “What?” she cried. “No, wait!” She’d never felt a boy’s erection before. But what else could that thing be—digging between her thighs? And Brandon was so heavy! She could hardly breathe. It got even worse when he covered her mouth with his. She squirmed beneath him as he rocked into her. He was going to smother her, she thought. He was going to crush her to death! Panicking, she made a huge effort to push him off her, but she was barely able to move. His left hand dug into her throat, while his right tugged at her zipper. She felt the world darkening. Oh, God, why didn’t Liam wake up? How could he let this happen to her?

  “It’s okay,” Brandon was telling her, lifting off her for a moment. “You don’t have to worry. I always come prepared, so to speak.”

  She took this opportunity to knee him—hard—and then scramble off the couch as he doubled over in pain.

  “You fucking—,” he cried, grabbing for her, but all he managed to get was a handful of cashmere. He yanked it, ripping the sweater nearly in half before letting go. She fell down, then immediately tried to get up, but the room swayed around her. She was terrified she was going to pass out. She took a deep breath and lurched to her feet.

  “Hey, whoa?” Liam said, stirring in the chair. “What’s happening, man?”


  “You tell me!” Brandon said. “This stupid fat fucking cunt tried to castrate me.”

  “You—,” Phoebe whispered, fighting back another wave of nausea. Whatever happened, she was not going to allow herself to get sick in front of this person. “You—tried to rape me.”

  “Fuck that shit. You were all over me. And what’s the big deal anyway? Liam told me you’ve been putting out for him since seventh grade.”

  “Oh,” she said, taking a step backward. She knew she’d been hit. She could feel the impact. She couldn’t feel the pain yet, but she sensed it was coming. And she knew it was going to be terrible.

  “No,” Liam was saying, struggling to sit up. “Wait, no. I was just—Phebe, wait!”

  But she turned and stumbled out of the room, her whole world spinning.

  3

  On the drive up from Connecticut, Brandon, Carey, and Liam stopped at a diner just off Route 7 for something to eat. It was the first time Liam had been able to spend any real face time with Brandon Cowley, though his presence loomed large at Moorehouse. Varsity football, ice hockey, lacrosse, student council—Brandon’s achievements were many and varied, but it was more his personality that fascinated Liam. Brandon was a big, brash, in-your-face type of guy. He seemed utterly confident in any situation. Though often crude and cutting, Brandon possessed the kind of macho swagger and alpha male reputation that Liam longed to have himself. In every way, Liam’s standing at school was more on a par with Brandon’s younger, self-effacing, and socially invisible brother, Carey, who as Liam’s roommate was his nominal best friend at the boarding school.

  “So what’s the deal with you two?” Brandon asked as he sat across the table from Liam and Carey, waiting for their orders to arrive. “You jerk off together at night? I never see you down at Ralph’s or at any of the dances.” Ralph’s was the café and bakery in the small town of Moorehouse where students were encouraged to hang out and mingle with the locals.

  “We get out,” Carey told him. “We get around.”

  “Oh yeah?” Brandon laughed, looking from Carey to Liam. “Now, Liam here, I think, has a chance. But not you, pizza face. Jesus, your zits are just exploding all over the place right now.”

  “Thank you,” Carey replied, biting the paper tip off a straw as a waitress distributed their platters and drinks. “I actually have a pretty good idea what I look like. I ran out of my medication.”

  “No, that’s not the problem,” Brandon replied. Then, shaking his head, he turned to Liam and continued: “You see, Carey’s problem is that he likes to pick away at things. His pimples. Me. He really gets off on it. Pick, pick, pick! You should hear him complaining to our parents about me! Brandon owes me money he won’t pay back. Brandon’s mean to me in front of my friends. Jesus, what a whiner!”

  “You do owe me money.”

  “And, actually, now that I think about it—how can I be mean to you in front of your friends when you actually seem to have only one?”

  “Hey, c’mon,” Liam said. “Could the two of you maybe lay off each other—at least while we’re eating?”

  “No, really,” Brandon went on, looking at Liam over the top of the hamburger he was holding. “Carey was a total loner freshman year. I think you’ve got to be the only friend he has in the whole world. What’s the deal there, anyway? Are you taking him on as a charity case or something? Because you actually seem cool enough to hang out with a better class of people.”

  Liam had long been aware that the Cowley brothers were not exactly close. For starters, they couldn’t have been less alike. Carey was as awkward socially as Brandon was adept. A gifted pianist, Carey spent hours at a stretch holed up in Moorehouse’s practice rooms, lost in his own world. Brandon was happiest surrounded by his posse of friends, most himself when he had an appreciative audience. Liam wasn’t surprised to learn from Carey that, in fact, his roommate and Brandon weren’t biological brothers. Both had been adopted at birth, two years apart, by a wealthy, socially connected couple in Syracuse.

  “They’re great parents. They’re very loving and generous,” Carey had told Liam. “But Brandon’s really put one over on them. They’ve been led to believe that the sun shines directly out of my brother’s backside.” After months of being exposed to Carey’s carping, though, Liam began to realize that the younger brother’s feelings for the older were actually a very complicated mix of envy, disappointment, hero worship, and worry. Because, along with all his other leadership roles, Brandon was known to party harder than anyone else at Moorehouse, a prep school that prided itself on its zero tolerance policy.

  “He thinks he can get away with anything,” Carey explained to Liam. “Because my parents have always let him do whatever he wants. He’s still like a little kid in that way. He just doesn’t get the whole concept of consequences.”

  There was something about the wistful, concerned way Carey spoke about all this that made Liam finally break down and explain the facts behind his own recent run-in with consequences. One that had forced him to transfer from his local regional high school, where at least he was a well-known entity, to Moorehouse, where he’d spent the first half of his sophomore year in unhappy obscurity. It was not that he didn’t like Carey. Though uncomfortably shy with others, Carey had learned to relax with and open up to Liam. And Liam had come to appreciate his dry humor, his quick mind, and his remarkable musical abilities. What bothered him was Carey’s assumption that Liam enjoyed the role of outsider as much as he did.

  The bickering between the two brothers continued right through dinner and ratcheted up when the check came and Brandon had to admit that he didn’t have any cash on him.

  “I blew the rest of my allowance on our dessert,” he told Carey as his brother wearily reached for his wallet. “But wait till you see what I bought. I’ve got it in the car. And I have a feeling that Liam here is going to really eat it up.”

  In the parking lot, Brandon walked around the BMW and opened up the trunk. Liam, sitting in the back of the car, could hear him shifting things around before slamming the lid shut again. As he climbed behind the wheel, Brandon tossed a knapsack into Liam’s lap.

  “Go ahead and open it up, man,” Brandon told him, turning on the overhead interior light before starting the engine. Secretly pleased that he was being singled out for this task, Liam unzipped the bag, felt around, and pulled out an unopened fifth of Johnnie Walker. His heart skidded.

  “That’s just the chaser,” Brandon said. “There’s something else. The special of the evening, so to speak.” From the bottom of the sack, Liam fished out a small ziplock bag, containing an inch of white powder.

  “Oh, Christ!” Carey said. “What is that shit?”

  “OxyContin.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Carey said, turning around to face Liam. “You don’t want to be caught even looking at that stuff.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Brandon said, turning off the overhead light before reaching over and grabbing the bottle Liam had left on the seat beside him. “He’s a total pussy. We’re out here in the middle of fucking nowhere. Who’s going to find out what we’re doing? Unless this big crybaby goes and tells on us.”

  “Are you nuts?” Carey said. “You just got early acceptance to Brown. You can’t keep doing this kind of shit! Don’t you get it?”

  “Yes, I get it,” Brandon said, twisting the cap off the bottle. “I get that you only go around once in life, okay? Why not try enjoying yourself for a change, little brother? You’d be a lot more fun to have around.” Brandon tipped his head back, took a long swig, then waggled the bottle in front of his brother’s nose.

  “No way,” Carey said.

  Brandon just shook his head, turned around, and held the bottle out to Liam.

  “Okay, here you go, but take it easy. I don’t want anyone puking in the back of my Beemer.”

  Liam hesitated. He’d spent the past six months staying clean, keeping out of trouble, and trying to listen, as Phoebe had counseled him, to hi
s “own inner angels.” But he could feel something start to give way inside him now. His resolve—easy enough to keep when there was nothing to tempt him—began to crumble. The bracing smell of scotch filled the back of the car. He could already feel the alcohol burning in his throat. Easing the tension he’d been carrying around with him for too long. Lifting the loneliness.

  “Here you go, man,” Brandon said again. “I say we get an early start on the holidays!”

  It was Brandon’s welcoming tone more than anything else that decided things for him. For months now, Liam had been watching the entitled way Brandon and his friends moved around campus, roughhousing, high-fiving, name-calling—as if they owned the place. That’s what Liam wanted, to be part of a crowd. All Liam had ever really wanted—his whole life—was to fit in somewhere. To belong. Because the day his family moved from Manhattan back to his dad’s hometown, Liam had been lost between worlds. He was neither a local nor a weekender. In the public schools in Barnsbury he was considered “the rich kid.” Sure, he’d had a few friends. But he’d always been set apart. Up there on the mountain in that fancy new house. While the children of the wealthy second-home owners, who came up on weekends and holidays and went to private schools in the city, seemed to speak a whole different language than Liam did. They had their own, insular points of reference—and opinions. Whoever heard of living in the country and going to public school? He knew they thought something must be wrong with him.

  Liam’s mom had promised him that Moorehouse would be different. But, if anything, it had been worse. At least, until now. Until he reached over and took the bottle out of Brandon Cowley’s extended hand.

  • • •

  “A redhead, huh?” Brandon was saying. “I really get off on redheads. There’s something so sweet—and kind of malleable—about them, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah,” Liam said. Oh, man, was he flying! He felt weightless and wonderful. He couldn’t recall how they’d gotten onto the subject of girls exactly. Or Phoebe in particular. No, that’s right, Brandon had asked him if he was “getting any,” and Liam—trying not to tip his inexperienced hand—replied that the boys-only Moorehouse was not exactly “the best place in the world to get laid.”