BONE DEEP

by Brooklyn Skye

  With just that name, The Rocks, a flood of memories hit me like a careening train: Cam. Dancing. Hands and stomach and legs and…much, much more.

  Jess’s house is dark and quiet. From the front it looks like no one’s home—her don’t-get-kicked-out-of-her-parents’-mansion tactic. If the house appears empty then it must be. Or so her mindless, rich-ass neighbors think. Candles lead us through the maze of halls, dining areas, and living rooms that are in no way lived in as the echo of music filters in from the backyard.

  “Tonight’s event is VIP only,” Ditty says, his case of beer and pair of trunks dangling from his grip. He’s got a funny smirk on his face which means there’s a double meaning to his words. I consider punching it out of him; instead I slide open the glass door and peer out onto the fairly empty patio. No bodies packed together or kegs glistening from inside a trashcan of ice. Nothing that resembles “old times” at all. In the Jacuzzi, two slender necks extend from the water. Jess and another with black hair tied into a knot on top of her head. It could be a number of girls—Melissa Rivel, Brooke Moverta, Maria Lozano—but then I see the dime-sized holes in her ears.

  I turn to Ditty and whisper, “Sam Weatherly?”

  “What? She’s hot.” The orangey glow of the porch lamp illuminates his face, and I swear his neck flushes bright red.

  “You could stick your finger through her ear.”

  “Leave it to you, Ledoux, to get all kinky like that. If that’s what gets you off.” He shakes his head and steps out, shoes thumping hollowly on the wooden deck.

  “You made it!” Jess sits up and whisper-shouts. Thin wisps of steam rises off her skin, vaporizing into the night as she steps out of the water and snatches a towel from the nearby railing. She catches me eyeing her leg, the scar on her thigh from where the doctors had to insert the pins, and apparently Ditty sees it, too.

  “You’re limping,” he says from behind me. “Why are you limping?”

  The towel sweeps over her, and she tucks her hair behind her ear with a shy smile. “Overworked it in physical therapy.” Jess shrugs against the biting breeze. “Or I don’t know. Maybe it’s the weather. It always seems to act up when it’s cold.” She meets my eyes and even though I know her comment’s not directed at me, that’s how I take it.

  Because it was me who didn’t see the stop sign. Or the two boys riding their bikes in the crosswalk. It was me who swerved and kissed my ’67 Camaro to a fucking street lamp. Rearranged the entire engine compartment like a set of K’NEX. Jess was in the car. Got the worst of it when the dash caved in and entombed her thigh. Firefighters cut her out, took her to the hospital where I stayed with her wearing out the words I’m sorry until her parents returned from their “business” trip to Cabo.

  I’d been distracted due to Dad’s arrest, that’s what she’d said. Due to relocating across town to a shithole apartment with a glazed-eye hippie for a roommate. Due to the fear of seeing my last name crawl across the screen every time I turned on the TV.

  But it was more than that.

  Battered and bloody faces—images from the incessant news coverage—haunted me. Found me at every corner. In the weeks following the accident, once surgery to repair Jess’s torn muscle was complete and she underwent intensive therapy, I stopped talking to her. Shut down. As if all the drugs the doctors had given her to numb the pain, deadened me instead. We tried to get back together a few months after, but my guilt and her constant mothering kept us from finding that place we’d been before.

  “We could play pool,” Jess says buoyantly, grabbing her beer from the bench. “Sammy, you know where the fridge is in the garage. Help yourself.”

  Sam looks to Ditty’s twelve pack. “I bet Ryan will share.”

  “Stay in as long as you want,” Jess says, taking my hand in hers. Hot skin surrounds my fingers. A year ago I would’ve been bustin’ a nut with a half-naked, steaming body in front of me. I would’ve scooped her up and carried her upstairs, rolled around under the covers while the rest of our friends drank themselves into a blurry coma. But I don’t feel like that same person anymore. My arms hang like lead weights at my side. Even the walk through her candle-lit house to the game room tires my legs.

  Jess flicks on a lamp. The game room hasn’t changed much since I was last in here: black-tiled bar with stools along the back counter, dart board’s bull’s-eye zeroing in on me from the wall, pool table the center focus of the room. Jess ties the towel around her in a quick motion and grabs two cues from the rack on the wall then looks at me, waiting.

  “What are we playing? Alabama Eight Ball or Misery?” She points to the plastic triangle in the corner of the table. I scoot it to the center and rack up the balls.

  I’m not really in a competitive mood, and even though Jess has taught me every variation of this game—soft eight, last pocket, Missouri—I’m suddenly having a difficult time even standing up straight. Maybe coming here was a mistake. “How about standard tonight?” I suggest.

  She gives me a look like I’ve just told her I ate worms for dinner. I start to tell her I’ll play whichever version she wants, but then her look softens and she says, “Okay, but you know standard is like playing Go-Fish instead of Poker.”

  The cue ball glides down the green-felt table and slams into the triangle of balls with a crack. Balls skitter. Two drop into the corner pockets. Both stripes.

  “You’re solids,” she announces with that stern voice she gets when she plays. I used to think it was cute. I used to not be able to keep my hands off her as she stretched over the side of the table to reach a shot. Now, I stand at the edge of the room with my back against the wall and watch as she sinks ball after ball into the pockets with the thought that if I want my life back, I should want her back, too. But I don’t.

  And then as two more balls disappear from the table I think that maybe it’s like that saying Alessi once told me: If you want to be something, start acting like it and you’ll become it. Back then, during my internship, he was talking about glassblowing professionally—pretending I was a pro, living, eating, breathing like one and poof! I’d magically become one. Right. Obviously glassblowing is out of my future, but being with Jess requires much less concentration. The movements, the routines…

  They might come back. If I lower the barrier and permit them.

  Leaving my cue along the wall, I come up behind Jess. My legs press against hers. She looks over her shoulder at me with a mock glare. “No distracting the players.”

  My fingers find the fold in her towel and slip it loose. It catches on the edge of the table and hangs. “It’s no fun playing with someone who wins on their first turn.” The words come out flat, like whatever emotion I’m supposed to be feeling was left outside in the cold.

  She leans. Aims.

  I slide my hand down her back, struggling to notice things about her. Skin, warm and still damp. Blond hair a little frizzed from the steam. The arch in her back as she concentrates harder on her shot: yellow straight into the corner pocket. My fingertips graze the waist of her black suit just as she shoots. The cue ball taps the eight ball, avoiding the yellow ball like it has rabies.

  “That’s not fair!” She turns into me, smiling, and whacks me softly across the chest. “I get a redo.”

  A redo. Erase what happened and start fresh. Retune my mind to its settings from a year ago, when I couldn’t keep my hands off her. I close my eyes, pull her close. Her body crushes against mine. She smells like chlorine. Her hand slips under my shirt, fingernails trace a line up my chest. Chills don’t scatter from her touch, not like they used to. Not like they did with Cam—

  Fuck. I’m thinking too much.

  I take her face in my hands, slide my tongue into her mouth, and kiss her deeper and deeper, but the feeling doesn’t come. Nothing comes. And I can’t keep dragging Jess into this shitfest that is my life.

  “I have to go,” I say. I’m out the front door before she can protest. She doesn’t follow. Eight months of chasing me aroun
d and maybe she’s finally learned to let me go.

  ~*~

  Sparks of moonlight shimmer off the silver metal, zipping lines of white up and over my trembling fingers. The glove compartment snaps shut and, careful not to knick myself with Ditty’s ridiculously sharp whittling knife, I tuck the blade beneath my belt at my back.

  Fuck the letters.

  And double fuck to the person sending them.

  I’m tired of this shit, and it’s time I put a stop to it.

  Black, lightless puddles conceal me as I jump out of Ditty’s truck, cold air beating against the beads of sweat on my forehead.

  Up the cracked driveway, Rachelle Lockwood’s house stares at me with its windows glowing from the second floor like wolf eyes. She’s the last one on The List—the only family left to be writing me the letters.

  You’re obsessed.

  Ditty hasn’t seen it—the messages, the words, the half-full wooden box. He might be standing next to me, spewing I’ve got your backs if he did.

  Tall and skinny, the house hovers over me. I hop up the steps and slam my fist on the door, hard and fast. I don’t know much about the Lockwood family. Rachelle Lockwood was an employee of Chanton Unified, a teacher most likely, though not at Templeton where I went. Jeremy, her husband, I’m guessing, is a mechanic downtown.

  The neighborhood is quiet. Silhouettes of a jungle gym and monstrous trees hang in the shadows from the park across the street. Houses, all similar to the one I stand before, line the street, fences touching like they’re reaching out to each other. Jess would call this place quaint; her way of saying things are small and cute without trying to sound conceited like her parents.

  I should call her, say sorry for dumping her with Ditty. Or running out—

  In front of me, the beige door creaks. I reach back, grip the knife’s handle. A little scare…that’s all. A flash of the knife, a sharp warning to leave me the fuck alone. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want all of this to stop. My legs tense, but I can’t run now. The door opens farther. My fingers tighten around the knife. Eyes peer out, big and brown and very, very familiar.

  “Krister?” A girl. The door gapes. Her voice is a low whisper. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Cam?” Her long hair is pulled out of her face. A gray sweatshirt hangs to her knees. Quickly, I release the knife. “You know the Lockw—”

  “How do you know where I live?” she says at the same time, her head cocked to the side.

  “Live? Wait.” I hold up my hand to stop her words. It suddenly feels like I’m in a speeding train, everything whizzing past me too fast to see what it is. “Your house?” I choke out. “I thought you lived in the dorms.”

  She nods. “This is my family’s house. I stay here…” One bare foot covers the other, legs crossing. “…um, sometimes when…” Her words trail off as she glances over her shoulder. When she looks back to me, her mouth is playing with a frown. “…just, whenever I can.”

  No.

  No, no, no.

  My knees start to wobble, and I rub my face. She can’t live here—this can’t be her house. Because if it is that means…

  Shaky words spill out of my mouth. “Your mom is—”

  “Cam?” a deep voice calls out from behind her. She flinches, but her eyes stay on mine. “Who is it?”

  “Just someone from…school, Jer,” Cam says, furrowing her brow. “He has a question about our sociology paper.” She steps out onto the porch, leaving the door propped open a few inches.

  “Seriously,” she crosses her arms and says to me. “How did you know where I lived?”

  The knife burns at my back. I close my eyes, willing the porch to open up and swallow me to distract me from telling her why I’m really here. If this is Rachelle Lockwood’s house. And hers. That means my father killed her mom.

  The thought sends my stomach to my toes, just like that.

  Unless…

  “Did you just move here or something? To this house?” What if she’s not a Lockwood? It’s possible after Rachelle’s death, the Lockwoods upped and moved. Lots of families do that. Especially after losing someone. There wasn’t any information about Rachelle Lockwood bearing any kids. Maybe—

  Cam shakes her head, popping the balloon of hope growing in my chest. “I’ve lived here since I was eight.” Her lips purse in question. “Why?”

  The sadness in her eyes. The tears. Her frequent visits to the train station and need for a distraction…or multiple distractions—

  It all makes sense now. Though at the moment, staring up at me with a half smile and searching eyes, she looks somewhat less sad. Maybe even happy to see me. And right then it hits me, fast and hard like the gust of wind from a rushing train: She needs someone to take her mind off the death of her mother—the mother my father stole from her.

  And based on the brightness in her eyes as she peers up at me, I’m going to have to be that someone. “I’m sorry,” I say, and as the words tumble out of my mouth one thing becomes crystal clear. Cam can’t know who I am. She can’t know who my father is or the real reason I’m standing in front of her quivering like a fucking Chihuahua. “For, you know, not staying longer the other night. That was a dickhead move—”

  “Stop.” She looks down at her bare feet, pink creeping into her cheeks. “It was…what I needed. Dumb, maybe, bringing a stranger into my room, but, yeah, let’s just say I had a momentary lapse of judgment.” Her hands twist together. “Just forget it ever happened, okay?”

  Walking away from her at this very moment would be easy: say okay, turn and leave, forget I ever met her. Probably for the better, too. She couldn’t have been the one to write the letters, though right now it wouldn’t matter if she did because I can’t get my feet to move. And I can’t force my eyes to look away from her tiny frame, braced by the edge of the door. The way her shoulders slump ever so slightly. I did this. Which means I need to make it better.

  “Come out with me,” I say quickly, and just as I take a step closer, the guy behind her calls her name from the couch, remote control in his grip. I can’t see his face, but his dark hair is shaved on the sides and long in a line down the middle of his head. By his wide frame, he looks a little older than me, which would make him—

  “Your boyfriend?” I whisper without moving my lips, and she shakes her head.

  “Older, very protective brother.”

  A movement stirs the air behind her and she glances back. Her brother’s gotten off the couch and is padding in his socks toward us. Shoulders flexed, arms stiff. “Cam,” the guy calls out again.

  Her face puckers. “I have to go.” She retreats back and the door inches shut. “Meet me at the station entrance tomorrow morning,” she whispers. “Ten o’clock.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Ryan called. Said he needs his truck back.”

  Wrenn slips her blue smock over her head, ties it around her waist, and settles in front of her throwing wheel. A clump of clay sits in the center of the circular platform. Lately, she’s been on a roll, producing more and more vases and bowls. I don’t know how much she makes for each one selling them in local pottery stores, but it must be a decent amount seeing there’s a steady selection of food in the pantry and no breaks in our electricity supply.

  Too bad she doesn’t know how to blow glass. She’d probably be pretty good.

  I nod, lifting the coffee mug to my lips to counteract the effects of my sleepless night. Thinking about how my fucked-up situation just became vastly more fucked up can do that. A girl who was just a girl I hooked up with is now a girl whose life my dad shattered. A life I now feel the need to repair.

  “If he calls again,” I swallow and say, “tell him I’ll drop it off later.”

  A different kind of crowd fills the station on Saturday mornings. No business suits or briefcases. Stiff frowns and scowls are replaced with easygoing slouches and talk of nice weather.

  The bench closest to the train deck is warm from the sun. I scrap
e my shoe against the cement to brush back the scattered peanut shells beneath. A raw ache sits in my chest, and I can’t figure out why. Because Cam lost her mom? Because I now feel obligated to do something about it? Because I want to make it up to her?

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to trick you into kissing me again.” I turn. Cam. And a smile creeps up my mouth.

  “I’ve got my kissing-strangers repellent on, so I think we’re both safe.”

  She rounds the bench with a grimace that matches the angry-striped pattern of her flannel shirt. “I really am sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I’ve never—”

  “Hey,” I say, noticing a bit of a shake to her words, “you don’t need to explain. You had a bad day, wanted to be distracted, and the fact that you chose me, well, we’ll just call that a momentary lapse in your judgment.”

  She buries her face into her hands and laughs. “I’m sure you’re a great guy.” Her shoulders shake with laughter, and because she’s not looking, I let my eyes linger a moment more over the messy knot of hair at the top of her head, and then down to her full lips that I suddenly want to taste again. She tugs at the side of her skirt. It’s dark purple and sort of ruffled, and looks a little emo the way she’s topped it with a silver tank top under the flannel. The thought that she’s really pretty runs through my head about three times before I cut it short. Liking this girl would be a death wish. Suicide, actually.

  “I hope I didn’t cause trouble last night. I didn’t realize your brother was…”

  “An ass?”

  “I was gonna say protective.”

  She sits down beside me, her leg just inches from mine. “He just doesn’t want a repeat of my senior year.” I give her a questioning look, and a halfhearted laugh bubbles off her lips. “It’s nothing. Just…” Her gaze ticks around my face: eyes, nose, chin, settles on my left ear with a strange expression washing over her face—an almost-scowl. Purple fabric crinkles in her clenched fists, and she adds flatly, “Ran away, got a tattoo…you know, the typical rebel when you’re seventeen behavior…” She pauses. Her mouth opens and closes and opens again, like she wants to add something, and I think she might by the way her eyes look determinedly into mine, but after a few seconds the moment is gone.