“And I’ve also met parents of kids with learning disorders, like mine, and I’ve talked with them about the challenges they’re facing. While I want to be clear that I’m only speaking for myself here, I hope that our leaders will increase focus on education, specifically on using innovative ways to teach those who learn a little differently, like me. Our teachers and schools need our support so they can get the training and resources to do their jobs effectively. And teachers’ unions need to look at their practices and realize that protecting bad teachers hurts all kids, but especially those who need extra attention. While there are many extremely hard-working and talented teachers, like the ones I had, who can be lifesavers to kids with learning disorders, some union policies keep ineffective teachers in the classroom. We can better serve kids with special needs, and all of our kids, by making changes to those policies.”
I did it. I talked about teachers’ unions. I’ll get a lecture, or more, from Bain. But that’s okay. I can face him. I pause, realizing I’d been talking for way too long. But Marie let me. And it felt great.
“This issue must be very important to you,” Marie says.
“It is,” I say.
She smiles and looks to the audience. “Well, I don’t know how this election will turn out, but I have my money on any upcoming election where Peyton Arthur is on the ticket.”
I pull my hair back. “Thanks.”
She moves on to the succulent stuff. “So, we’ve all seen, I’m sure, the footage of you and this handsome man kissing in front of a gas station,” Marie says as she shifts the index cards in her hands. I imagine the card saying something like “Peyton. Kissing. Handsome.” Shorthand for one of the most sensual moments of my life.
It’s easy to produce a girlish blush because I don’t have to fake it. Marie points behind us, where a screen drops down from the ceiling. There are Dylan and me, next to the car. I’m explaining to him that too many people saw me in the store. But, of course, the audience can’t hear that. It just looks like we’re talking. I hadn’t watched it before. I thought I knew what it was about, and, according to Dylan and Lisa and my mom, watching too much coverage of yourself can be bad. But now I see how his hand reached snugly around my body, and how his other hand curved softly under my neck, and how his lips dived into mine, as though it was natural, as though it was pure.
I sigh.
Shit. Shit. Shit. I have a mic on. I look up, into Marie’s moony expression. My involuntary, not-on-purpose, not-at-all-devious sigh had been the exact right move. “It’s so magical to see two young people fall in love. Obviously, just seeing him up there, kissing you, has you remembering some wonderful things. Tell us about those things,” she says, closing her eyes, smiling, as though she’s about to get her first drink in a desert. “What’s he like? What first drew you to him?”
Lisa always knows what they’re going to ask.
I take a cue from my sigh and decide maybe I can be open, honest. Dylan said to say something about his dedication, his drive, but as much as I admire those qualities in him, that’s not what I really like about him. And I can feel of the audience, it’s like my finger is on the pulse of them—they don’t want to hear political spin.
I can give them something else. It reverberates in my heart.
“Well, this is going to sound horribly superficial,” I say, letting the pinkness tingle on my cheeks. Letting my embarrassment work for me. “But it was his eyes. I just...They’re beautiful. And I met him right before my mom was announced as the VP pick. I didn’t know anyone who was prepping me and I was so nervous about getting up on stage. And there he was, this cute intern, smiling at me and convincing me that everyone was going to love me. That everyone already did. Even if it isn’t true, the way he said it made me believe it.”
“He does have nice eyes.” Marie grins. “And when did you first know you wanted to be with him?”
“When he brought me gummy bears,” I say before thinking. Is that true? I’m not sure who I’m lying to.
Laughter ripples through the audience. I can practically hear Bain, if he’s watching this somewhere, say, “What the fuck is she talking about? Who told her to say that?”
Fuck him. He can live with a few innocuous, splashy surprises.
I proceed. “I was afraid I’d cry when I announced my mom at the convention. And once before when I cried, because, well, I’m a bit of a crier, I told him gummy bears helped. And he remembered.”
“Gummy bears?” Marie laughs and turns to the audience. “Flowers? Chocolates? Jewelry? No. Give women what they want, give them gummy bears.” The laughter rolls and I’m joining in. This is actually pretty fun.
“Yeah,” I say, pulling a strand of hair behind my ear. “It was just what I needed. He seems to always know just what I need.”
“And so, would you say you two are serious?” She leans forward and the audience hushes.
“I hope so.” My guard is down, the words spring out of my mouth. I smile at the ground.
Shit.
Marie opens her mouth to ask something else, but I need to bring this back to my plan. “We’re going to New Haven this weekend to meet some of his friends.”
She rests her head against her hand. “Well, that does sound serious.”
I cross my legs and wait. I’ve accomplished what I needed to do. I’m sure Bain’s vein is bulging as he shouts at the nearest cowering intern. “What the fuck are they going to do in New Haven? Did you know about this?”
But it’s done.
“So,” Marie says, turning to the audience with a knowing grin. “Dylan is actually backstage right now...”
Shit buckets.
“Yeah,” I say, slicing my hand in the air as casually as possible so no one knows my heart didn’t just speed the fuck up. “But he’s the kind of guy who’d rather be behind the camera than in front of it.”
Will this stop her? Will this cut her off?
She flips her hand at me. “Oh, I think he’ll play along.” She looks at the audience. “You want to meet him, right?”
My heart feels like it took a deep, long swim in an espresso. The applause and hoots and hollers storm in my ears.
Marie twists around. “Where is he? Can someone get him a mic?”
Dylan had been standing to the side. He wipes his face as he allows someone to set him up with a mic. The producer gives him a little push, and he walks on to the stage with an adorable wave at the audience. I move over on the too-small loveseat to make room. As he sits next to me, he puts his arm around me and looks at me a little longer than appropriate before turning to Marie.
“Thanks, Dylan, for being a good sport,” she says.
“Of course, Marie.”
“Now, let me ask you, when did you know you and Peyton had something together?”
I’m afraid. But I can’t look afraid. I should look playful. My boyfriend is about to talk about us. I should be happy, expectant. I try my very best to plaster my face with an expression that works and hide the anxiety drumming under my skin.
“It wasn’t any one moment. It was something that built and built, until I couldn’t deny it anymore,” he says.
The audience eats this up, of course, and I’m able to let my muscles untense. He’s playing it safe. Good.
“This is the thing,” he says, rubbing his knee and looking past Marie. “I’m a campaign and policy nerd.”
What is he doing? All he has to do is answer the questions. Why is he continuing on his own?
“Well, that makes sense,” Marie says.
“So, I like to talk about union activity in right-to-work states and why Franklin County in Ohio is so important to the election. Not a lot of girls want to get into that level of detail, and the ones who do are usually too much like me.”
“Oh?” Marie says, tilting her he
ad.
I tilt my head too. What is he getting at?
“So, and I admit I didn’t realize this till I met Peyton.” He chances a glance at me before turning back to Marie. “I need a girl who’s passionate about politics, so she doesn’t get bored with me.” Marie nods, waiting. I wait too. Dylan swallows. “But I also need someone who forces me to realize there are other important things. I need someone who makes me play games or talk about ‘90s rap or watch movies that are so bad they’re good. I need someone who forces me to enjoy life.”
He moves his arm from behind me and takes my hand, wrapping his long fingers under my palm. He stares at our hands together before looking up. His eyes are like black holes, sucking me in. “And Peyton is that someone.”
I’m sure the audience awws. I’m sure Marie says something else. There are more questions and more answers from Dylan and nods from me. I’m sure she thanks us for being on the show before telling her audience what’s up after the commercial break, but I don’t sense it. It’s all a blur.
All I feel is Dylan’s hand, still holding mine. At some point, I squeeze it. At some point, he squeezes back.
But as soon as the director calls cut, he releases me.
Stage hands swarm in to remove our mics and move us off stage as Marie looks over her next batch of index cards.
Did he mean all that? I walk toward the green room in a daze. Dylan follows. Once we get there, he closes the door behind him. Lisa looks up. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you two were in love.”
Dylan swallows and puts his hand on his stomach.
“But I do know better, because that would be unprofessional.” She chances a look to me, before drilling back to him. “As I said, this thing’s been a great side story to the campaign. People are thinking so much about this that the dad story is basically buried.”
She takes two steps to us, but her focus is always on Dylan. “But it is just a ploy, right, Torres?”
“Of course,” Dylan says with a gruff voice. “I made it look like we’re in love. Isn’t that the point?”
Something clunks in my stomach and I have to blink a few times and look away. I can’t cry at that. I pull out an old strategy my dad taught me. I think about puppies. While I’m half in a fluff-infused reverie, Lisa nods, satisfied, and takes two steps back, focusing on me. “So, a trip to New Haven?”
“Yeah,” I say, locking eyes with Dylan. “I thought that might be a nice touch. I hope you don’t mind.”
She taps her teeth. “It was a nice touch. It just gets complicated. Do you stay in a hotel room? Do you stay with his friends?”
“My friends and I have a house,” Dylan says. “I knew I’d be moving back to New Haven in November, so my room’s just waiting for me. She can sleep there, I’ll sleep on the couch.”
Lisa nods. “Okay, that could work.”
Her phone buzzes and she’s off, talking about the difference between green technology and renewable energy. Now’s my chance.
“That stuff you said, it was really sweet. I almost believed it,” I whisper.
Dylan rubs the back of his neck and looks at me with a hard face. “And I almost believed that you really wanted to meet my friends in New Haven, but I’m pretty sure something else is going on. What is it?”
I should be honest. But if he knew the real reason, he’d stop the trip.
“Don’t lie to me, Peyton. You promised me,” he says.
“I don’t want to lie to you,” I say. “But I can’t tell you why we’re going until we’re on our way there.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Don’t think about the future. That’s what they tell me. It will just make you ache.
But I can’t slip out of consciousness without imagining my daughter, far along, gray mixed with her red hair as she clutches my old, weathered, age-spotted hand. Maybe I will mumble. Maybe I can barely munch on broccoli. My teeth have rotted away. And while she still looks so young to me, I’ll know, in the corners of my rickety, aged mind, that she’s old too. Maybe even a grandmother who buys plastic, lime-green crap and too many scoops of ice cream for my great-grandkids.
She stares at me and knows her time on earth is closing in too. It hurts to have her confront mortality, but her wrinkled eyes remind me she’d confront it soon anyway. I’m not the one pushing it on her.
I close my eyes, letting dark seep in, as she pulls at my sheets and says something to the nurse about how she’s going to put on a horrendous political commentator. That guy who yells about the colors of birth control packets and, well, while he’s at it, the color of ketchup packets. She’s just saying that to get the nurse to leave. Triumphant, she grins as she clicks and clanks in her purse to get out the contraband candy bar. Gooey nougat.
Death is sad, but I’m old. She’s old. It’s time.
I try to pretend that. But then I notice that the purse my daughter shifts around in isn’t a purse. It’s a book bag. A sparkly, spastically purple book bag. When she snags my broccoli, crunching at it, she tells me she’s worried about a quiz in school and Tristan. “He’s so fucking annoying,” she says, looking to the hospital ceiling. Her face snaps back, looking at me. Her eyes are wide as she clasps her hand to her lips. “Sorry, Dad.”
“You can say fuck,” I tell her. “Sometimes you need to say fuck.”
She grins. It’s a whisper: “Fuck.”
“That’s my girl.”
I breathe in, but it’s heavy and heady. I once again try to see any strain of gray in her beautiful hair or a wisp of a wrinkle near her eyes. But there are none. She’s not too young to realize I’m having a desperate moment. She takes my hand. Squeezes it. I look at my fingers and her fingers, my palm and her palm. The worst part? The back of my hand. It’s not weathered, except for the scar I got when I stared at Jen for too long while dicing tomatoes. It was worth it. Jen had been wearing that cascading necklace that dripped down her back.
But, scar aside, my hands aren’t old. They’re just sick, veiny, with artificial tubes sprawling out.
And my daughter’s? Hers are far too soft and porcelain and fresh to have to hold her dying father’s hands.
I ask her to leave.
She wipes tears from her cheeks. Swallows. Floats out of the room.
“I love you, Peyton,” I say, even though she’s already gone.
Fuck.
* * *
We get on the train and find our seats. Dylan gestures for me to go ahead and sit next to the window. As he hoists my bag up above us, his happy trail peeks out from under his shirt. God, I want to run my fingers along those wonderful “V” dents that disappear under his boxers. My gaze meanders to places it shouldn’t.
“I’m up here, Peyton.”
My eyes shoot to his face, which has a delicious grin on it. I turn away, pressing my cool hands to my cheeks to stem the blushing.
He sits down next to me, his knee knocking against mine, and pulls something out of his pocket. It’s hidden within his fist. “I, um, I got you something.”
“What? You didn’t need to—”
“Yeah, I did. I shouldn’t have told Ruiz about the pin. I’m not sure how to make it up to you, but, I saw this and thought...”
He opens his palm. It’s a silver bracelet that culminates in a small circle.
“A bracelet?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Can I?” I give him my hand and he fastens it, his fingers brushing the sensitive part of my wrist and giving me pleasant jitters. “I thought, if you want to be able to see and feel the pin, you could put it in this loop.”
I stare at my wrist and barely notice that Dylan is rubbing his neck and murmuring. “It was just an idea. You don’t have—”
“I love it.” I can’t help smiling even more when I see his wide, full-toothed smile. I
undo the pin, which was inside my cardigan, and hook it into the bracelet. “Thank you.”
“I shouldn’t have been so eager to help the campaign that I hurt you. My priorities were out of place. I want you to trust me. I want us to trust each other. I know this set us back, and I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you.” I feel like feathers are resting on my shoulders, instead of the Acme-size weights there before.
“So, why are we really going to New Haven?”
“I want to go to a book signing.” I have to say it soft, so our foreheads are just an inch apart as we speak hushed truths on a train.
He leans even closer. “What book signing?”
I pull out my phone and find the entry on the Yale website about Representative Roberts’s visit. He reads the title of the event and sighs, flopping my phone on his knee and looking to the ceiling. “You should have told me this sooner.”
“I didn’t lie, I—”
“Come on, Peyton. This isn’t what I meant when I said we needed to trust each other.”
I sigh and take my phone back. He’s right. And I’ve kept far more things from him than he’s kept from me. “I can do this alone,” I say. “But I want your help.”
He leans into me again, hot whispers against the curve of my neck. “Okay, let’s game out what to do later, too many ears in this car. And we can’t afford to have this be the October surprise.”
The October surprise. Something that unsettles the election weeks, or days, before voting. No, I can’t be the October surprise. This close to voting day, the campaign wouldn’t have enough time to shovel over the issue—it would be fresh in voters’ minds on election day.
I pull back. Three people are at the front staring and pointing at us.
Dylan follows my gaze, before turning back to me. His arm pulls me to him, his nose nuzzles in my neck and makes my muscles burn. He reaches his other hand to my waist and kisses my neck softly. His whisper is sterner than his actions. “Loosen up, you’re too stiff. We’re supposed to be in love, remember?”
Supposed to be.
* * *
Red Blooded Page 20
