by CD Reiss
Bullshit. Everything was personal. Even this. Especially this.
“Whatever I do to you won’t be personal either.”
She smiled and put her cup down. “Want to tell me what you’re going to do to me? I’d like to be prepared.”
“Exactly what you did to me.”
She came to me and put her hands on my chest, drawing them flat down to my waist. “So you’re out to ruin me? I like the sound of that.”
She couldn’t mean what it sounded like. No sane human would go to such trouble to get laid, but her expression oozed desire. So she wasn’t sane, and neither was I. My mind was a seesaw with sex on one side and fear on the other. The fulcrum was curiosity. Once it was satisfied, I’d know whether to fuck or run.
I grabbed her wrists but didn’t move her hands. “Is that all you want?”
I tried to sound amenable, and maybe I fooled her into thinking I’d believe anything she said, but I listened and assumed she was lying.
“More or less. You were pretty prolific at MIT. All the girls talked about how good you were.”
“That’s flattering.”
She bit her lower lip and let it pop out slicked and wet. “I’m not as good.”
“Girls don’t have to work as hard.”
She tensed like a two-by-four holding up an archway. If I’d had a caliper to measure the rage in her face, it would have stretched open as far as Frieda Gallen’s legs.
She picked up her cup and straightened her spine. “We work twice as hard for half as much, and you know it.”
“Not to get laid.”
She spit out a laugh. Inside it was a long story she wasn’t going to tell me. “I worked pretty hard to get you here. I might as well get something out of it.”
“You can’t get some redneck to fuck you?”
She slammed her cup down, spraying sticky black coffee all over the place. If it burned her hand, she didn’t show it, and if the mess bothered her, she didn’t take a second to clean it up. Her face went from stone-solid rage to soft humor.
“I ain’t never fucked no city boy before.” Her accent was overdone to the point of comedy.
Catherine blew in like a ray of fucking sunshine. Harper took her hands off me and wiped the spill off the counter.
“Got it!” Catherine sang, handing Harper an envelope. “She’ll be at the coffee shop.”
“I can do it later.”
“Come on. I’ll buy you a hot chocolate.” I flicked her mug.
“I have to help Catherine.”
“No, you don’t,” her sister said. “Just go!”
Harper gave me a look of death before she acquiesced. “Let me brush my teeth, then we can go.”
XVI
The shitty Chevy went pretty fast for a car that looked as if it had been abandoned in a corn field. The seat rumbled and purred under me even though the plastic upholstery was cut into a foamy yellow wound. I cranked the window open and leaned my elbow out, angling my righthand fingers to rest on my forehead and chin.
The two-lane blacktop was pretty smooth, but the storefronts we passed were empty, boarded, broken, with sun-faded signs for a diner, a thrift store, fashion, sewing supplies, and pets. The necessities remained. Groceries. Pharmacy. A local bank with a name I’d never heard of. Liquor. A convenience store whose main convenience seemed to be lottery tickets.
“This the main strip?” I asked Harper.
A strand of her hair whipped out her open window. “Yeah. It’s shit. I know.”
“I didn’t say that.”
She stopped at a sign, though no one was coming in the other direction. The flapping strand dropped to her shoulder. “It’s hard for people to run a business when no one’s buying. Sew-Rite only stayed open until last year because Bonny lives in the back. Still does, but she’s got no money to put stuff on the shelves.” She pulled forward. In a block, we were at the edge of town, cutting a hard right onto a pocked light industrial area.
“Why’d you come back? From MIT?”
“I live here.”
“You didn’t graduate.” It was a question and a statement at the same time. If she’d graduated, she wouldn’t have come back to Shitsville.
“Neither did you.”
I was sure the situations were different. I’d had enough to live on from a trust Mom had set up in one of her moments of medicated lucidity. It was barely enough to live on, so I’d moved into a San Jose garage to reinvent circuits. Harper knew the story. Everyone did.
She wasn’t going to answer a direct question. She wasn’t going to be cornered by an inquisition. I was going to have to stir her until what I needed to know was kneaded into the conversation.
“You going to finish someday?” I asked.
“Are you?”
“I’m waiting for an honorary degree.” I joked—but not really. “They only give them to you when you don’t need them anymore.” I paused as she pulled in front of a corner diner. “Like everything, I guess.”
She glanced at me and slapped the car into park. “My father got sick.” She spit it out as if holding it back would be permanent. “He started coughing, and then it was blood. He could have afforded an army of people to take care of him, but he only wanted Catherine and me. He didn’t trust anyone in town. Genny Reardon’s a nurse, and Dr. Therro at least could have helped with the medicine, but he thought they’d let him die because he closed the factory.”
“Did they hate him?”
“They loved him.” She slammed the car into park like a statement. “They wouldn’t have let him die. Even though he did. Lasted three months after I got home.”
“And you didn’t go back? To MIT?”
“Couldn’t leave my sister.” She opened her door. “Let’s go. I’m hungry.”
* * *
She ate a half-pound cheeseburger (rare) and a plate of fries (overdone) like a hostage. I knew she had food. She wasn’t starving. She just had a healthy appetite.
“You have a hollow leg,” I said.
“Here you go, hon,” Trudy said, setting another pink milkshake in front of Harper while addressing me. “You having anything else, mister?”
“Taylor,” Harper said around the last mouthful of burger.
She’d introduced me to Trudy when we’d arrived but made no other conversation about the envelope or what the fuck I was doing there. Trudy seemed to be the same age as Harper, with a little more makeup and several dozen fewer IQ points.
“Taylor, then.” Trudy had a thick down-hominess that seemed forced and overdone, but I was starting to think it was genuine. “You staying around, Taylor?”
“No,” Harper snapped before I could answer.
“That’s too bad. Well, it’s nice to finally see our Harper with a member of”—she dropped her voice to a whisper—“the stronger sex, if you know what I mean.”
“I—”
“Trudy! Jesus!”
Trudy wagged her finger at her friend. “We don’t talk like that in my mother’s place. It’s just unexpected, and you’d be crazy to think we weren’t all wondering about him.”
“I am crazy.” Harper picked up her milkshake. “The check, please?”
“Nice to meet you.” Trudy smiled and went behind the counter.
“Wow,” I said once she was out of earshot.
“Forget everything she said.”
“I’m wowing at you. You were kind of a bitch.”
She slid the half-empty milkshake away. “If she was so happy I was walking around with a member of ‘the stronger sex,’ she wouldn’t have looked at you like you were a meal ticket.”
“And what am I to you?”
“Oh, fuck this.” She leapt out of her seat and snapped the check out of Trudy’s hand.
“Hey, I got it.”
Before I could get my hands on my wallet, Harper had put the envelope and a twenty under the check and smacked them both down on the counter. She walked out without looking back.
“Harper!” I cau
ght up with her and wedged myself between her and the driver’s side door. “You’re upset that I’m leaving?”
“No. I’m not.”
“You spent a ton of time and energy getting me here, and now I’m picking up my car. You’re upset. Don’t lie.”
“I’m upset because…” She took a deep breath. “I’m frustrated. Trudy went to school with me. She was knocked up in eleventh grade by Robbie Bonnacheck. She’s lived with her mother since then, working two jobs and barely pulling in shit, so what does she do? She gets bored when she’s twenty and lets Tim Breaker knock her up with a daughter who, by the way, is really, really cute, but my God… she can’t afford to feed these kids. So now? She’s twenty-four, and that money is for prenatal care because she’s too fucking stupid to take birth control.”
“Is that why you don’t have kids?”
“I’m different.”
“I’ll say.”
“And you know what really pisses me off? I love her, and I love her kids. I love the assholes who don’t even think of using a condom and fuck their own selves up in exchange for ten minutes of… I don’t even know.”
I was about to say something. Add a little filler that had all the markings of compassion and empathy. I had neither emotion for stupid people or bad decisions, but for Harper, I had it.
“You don’t even know?”
Her jaw clamped like a vise. “Just get in.”
I got in, and she took off.
“You don’t care, do you?” she asked.
“About?”
“Our troubles. You’re not telling anyone.”
“Can we stop this? Just for a minute?”
“Stop what?”
“The bullshit.”
She let that hang in the air as she drove. I tried not to look at her, but it was hard. Even in profile, her expression changed by the second.
Making another left, she drove past an open chain-link fence. The driveway led to a cinderblock garage wide enough for three cars. One of them was the Caddy. A big dog barked. Piles of red-brown car parts hung from a huge shed with a roof but no walls.
“I’m not lying.” She parked the Chevy between the shed and the garage.
“Tell me the truth, and I’ll make phone calls about Barrington. I’ll tweet it out. Everyone will know.”
I didn’t convince even the most gullible part of myself. She shook her head and laughed.
“Logic error,” she said, unlocking the doors. “In exchange for media attention, you want me to admit I’m lying, but if I’m lying, I don’t care about the attention.”
The fall hurts when a guy’s knocked down a few pegs.
She was still lying.
From the garage’s shadows, Orrin came out of an interior door with a guy in cheap chinos and a yellow polo. Percy padded behind, happy at his master’s heels. The rattle of a chain link snapped me to a much bigger dog making the racket. A ninety-five-pound bruiser was hurling itself at the fence it was trapped behind.
“You just want your shit back,” she muttered.
“Well, yeah. I know what I want, and I did what I had to do to get it. You’re a hacker. I can’t figure out why you didn’t just take the money you needed.”
“You mean steal?”
“Yeah. Take. Steal. It’s not any different.”
She spun in her seat as if she couldn’t hold back another second. “It is different. I don’t steal. I don’t cheat. I do things fair and square.”
“Are you fucking with me? What kind of moral gymnastics did you have to do to convince yourself hacking me was fair and square?”
“You’d never do something for someone besides yourself. But you needed to get hacked. You’re a little shit. You’re every problem with the world.”
“And now you’re no better. Do you miss the moral high ground? Because you left it as soon as you locked my system. Is the weather different down here? Or is it actually the damn fucking same?”
“I am not you. I care about people. All you care about is you. Not even you. All you care about is what people think of you.”
“You don’t know me.”
Of course she didn’t. She had no idea what I was thinking or feeling. She’d just made a bunch of assumptions. The fact that all of them were right notwithstanding, she’d built a composite picture out of thin air. I was allowed to get pissed about that.
“You targeted me because you don’t like me, but you didn’t make anything.” Percy’s barking got closer, but I had more to say. “You created nothing. You stole what someone else made, and you’re holding it for what? What do you want to give it back?”
“I’ll give it back.” She let that sink in. “When I have what I want.”
She crossed her arms, tapping her finger against her bicep. Her nails were naked, and she didn’t have a stitch of makeup over her freckled nose. The highlights in her hair had been kissed by the sun, not the salon. So easy to take for granted. So easy to underestimate.
“How much do you want?” I tried to sound nonchalant. People had fraught relationships with wealth, so I never said “dollars,” “cash,” or even “money” during a negotiation.
“If I was after money, you’d be broke already.”
She spoke truth. She could have done something much simpler and more profitable. But she hadn’t. I still wasn’t sure what she wanted. She kept me on shaky ground, and I was starting to think it was on purpose. She was hacking me, and I didn’t have any defenses against her attack.
XVII
At one point, my mother had decided to clean my room down to the plaster. When I got home from school, all my shit was in the driveway, and she was painting the walls.
Clearly, she was in a manic phase. Clearly, she couldn’t be reasoned with. I was supposed to let her do her thing and make sure she was safe.
But yellow?
I’d been powerless then too.
When she spoke about yellow paint day, even years later, my mother said the look I gave her broke through the mania long enough for her to stop painting and move to the next project. It was the only thing she’d ever remembered mid-episode.
“If I was after money, you’d be broke already.”
After Harper said that, I must have given her the same look, and it must have come from the same place of powerlessness. Because I didn’t accept that I was ever helpless, and the existence of a situation where I didn’t have choices or options tasted like a mouthful of dimes dipped in shit. I spit it out.
“When I’m through with you, you’re going to wish you’d killed me.”
I’d broken through her tough-chick performance. She opened her car door and slipped out as if stomping toward the garage was proof of anger, not proof of a defensive position. I got out after her with every intention of driving home some point or another. I’d forgotten what we were talking about, but I was going to hurt her until she cried, and I wasn’t going to give the smallest fuck about her feelings.
Which I did.
But I didn’t.
Maybe a little.
Two steps in front of me, she turned toward me with her finger out as if she had a point to make and I gave a fuck what it was.
Which I did.
But I didn’t.
Not even a little.
“Do it,” I growled. “Sell off my code, and I will come after you until this town is a wasteland. Do you understand me?”
“Fuck you.”
“Do you un—”
“Hey, Harper.” Orrin’s voice cut the wind just as Percy got his nose under my hand.
I petted him without thinking. Orrin pinched a lit cigarette between two grease-streaked fingers. Right behind him stood the guy in his fifties with the yellow polo, chinos, and clean hands. Despite the conservative costuming, he was tattooed with clock gears and pierced, his black hair whirling in the wind. His name, Johnny, and a corporate smile of a logo were embroidered over his left tit.
“Hey, Orrin.” Harper was all perk and smiles, as if
we hadn’t spent the last five minutes threatening everything we each held dear. “Hey, Johnny!”
Johnny kissed her cheek, which was more than Orrin had done.
“Mr. Harden,” Orrin said.
“Thanks for working on the car.” I pointed at the Caddy sitting in the garage. “The hood’s still up. Is it working?”
“Just fine.”
“They call you Hard-on in school?” Johnny asked, proving that inside, he was more tattoo than polo.
“Yes. Yes, they did.”
“You punch ‘em? Or did you cry?”
“I fucked their girlfriends.”
With every circuit in my brain, I mustered up the will to not look at Harper to gauge her reaction to what I’d said. I had little to gain from knowing it and everything to gain by acting as if I didn’t care.
Johnny, on the other hand, whooped a laugh of surprise and delight. He stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Same.” I shook his hand.
“Welcome to the Capitol of Crap.” He swung his arms wide. “Citizens too stupid to leave, and those that left are too damn cowardly to stay.”
Orrin shook his head. “Don’t mind him. He—”
“We’re the salt of the earth’s what they say. Them in power, with the money. They stroke us. Jerk us off with some bullshit about how hardworking we are. Tell us we’re the real America. Like we’re stupid. Them fucks set man against man so we can feel like winners, but let me ask you.” He held out his arms and stepped back. “Do I look like a winner to you?”
“Jeeze, Johnny,” Harper interrupted. “Can you—”
“If you want to win something,” I said, “we can get in a fistfight.”
Johnny whooped another laugh, falling into a deep, wet coughing fit. Even Orrin chuckled as we walked back to the garage.
“Well, not too many men alive can shut up old Johnny,” Orrin said. “This is a nice car.” He laid his hand on the chassis. “Regular battery doesn’t fit. I had to order one special, then I called the rental company because they’d shit themselves if they thought an unlicensed guy was touching the engine. Let them know what was happening.”
