by Sandra Block
When we opened the door, the room turned to look. A hundred eyes staring at me in absolute, deathly silence. Daisy cleared her throat as Quinn made her way down the aisle to find us seats. And all I could think, with my face burning hot with shame is:
They know.
They absolutely have to know. So now I don’t go to class. Sometimes I try to get up for lunch, but I can’t eat. The smell is nauseating. My clothes are hanging off me and people keep asking me if I’m sick.
The flu, I tell them. It’s easier than saying “Yes, I’m sick. I got drunk and high and people took me in a room and raped me and I don’t remember anything, but I can’t stand to be talking to you. You with your cheerful voice and sparkly headband and plate full of food that makes me want to retch.”
It’s hard to tell someone, yes, I’m sick. When I wake up in the morning, I don’t want to be awake. I can’t bear to think about all of the minutes looming ahead of me. The day is a gaping hole of hours. The day is quicksand, waiting to suck me under.
And I want out.
I don’t blame myself for what happened, but I do blame myself for what happened. My mom blames me for what happened. I’m afraid to sleep at night because I dream of hands holding me down, but I can’t stand to be awake. There is no place for me to be. It was not like this a month ago, but a month ago is a lifetime ago.
Daisy brings me hot chocolate, but it smells rank.
Quinn leaves me sticky notes with the social worker’s number in a heart that says “We love you,” but I can’t call the person. I don’t have the right to call her. People with real problems should call her. I just did something stupid that wasn’t my fault.
Pills. I’ve been reading up on the best ones. Tylenol will take out your liver, but it’s not fast. Aspirin might or might not do it. Motrin will just give you an ulcer. Antidepressants, ironically enough, might be my best bet. So, I’m thinking of going to the UHS and getting me some. But I won’t mention the S word. No one’s asked me anyway. Not sweet-talking Daisy or uncharacteristically careful Quinn. I suppose they’re afraid that they’ll give me the idea, which is hilarious. It’s the only idea that I have nowadays.
I can’t tell anyone the truth, because they wouldn’t understand. Suicide sounds so big, so dramatic and final. I guess that’s because it is.
But it’s also the only thing that gives me a shred of hope these days.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Dahlia
James unwraps his silver energy bar. “Five thousand dollars?”
“That’s what she said.”
The wrapper crinkles. “Sounds pretty steep to me.”
“Probably.” I flick a crumb off the table. “I suppose we could negotiate it. But I am the one asking for the coke.”
“True,” he acknowledges. “Do you have that much?”
“No,” I scoff, amused at the thought. “Do you?”
“No,” he admits. He unfolds another inch of the bar. “We could get a loan maybe.”
With a chuckle, I put on an official sounding voice. “Yes, we’d like to borrow five thousand dollars for a promising business venture. We’re investing in an extremely large amount of cocaine.”
James purses his lips. “And I suppose robbing a bank might go against our code.”
I stare at him, and he offers a little grin. “Attention,” I announce. “James Gardner is making a joke.”
He smiles again and pops the remainder of the bar in his mouth. Then he straightens himself in his chair, all business. “Okay, so let’s just say we get five thousand dollars and your friend actually gives us the cocaine.”
I nod. “Both huge ifs.”
“Correct,” he confirms. “Then what would we do?”
“Frame him,” I say.
“Right,” he answers. “I got that. But how do we do that exactly?” He drums his fingers on his thigh, something I’ve noticed he does when he’s thinking. “We need to make him a credible dealer.”
“Agreed.”
“So if we can get the cocaine, somehow we need to tie him to it.”
I take a sip of coffee. “We need to plant it in his house.”
“Which means we have to get into the house,” he says.
“Snyder got us the key code,” I remind him.
“Alarm?”
I pause, taking another sip from my mug. “Don’t know.” I put the coffee down on the table. “If so, we’re screwed.” We both pause, flummoxed by this roadblock. “All right. Let’s just say we get in there,” I proffer.
“Okay.” He opens another protein bar and offers it to me, but I shake my head.
“First off, we’ll need to be sure we don’t get our DNA all over.”
He shrugs. “Glove, booties, scrub hats. So, hospital supply store.”
“And I’m envisioning little baggies,” I say. “With bright-green BIG G labels on them.”
James lets out a hearty laugh, then assesses me when I don’t laugh back. “Wait, were you serious?”
“Of course.” I peer into my now-empty coffee mug. “Hand it to the police on a silver platter.”
He pauses. “‘Silver platter’ means ‘easy,’ right?”
“Right,” I say, wondering how he can hack into a computer and not know what a silver platter means. “Anyway,” I say. “Plant some bags in his place. Give some to Natasha to spread around.” I yawn into my hand. “That would be the basic gist.”
“If we can get a hold of five thousand dollars,” he adds.
“Yes. There’s always that.”
He crumples up his wrapper. “I don’t know. I could ask my parents but…”
“No. Don’t do that. Maybe we could—” But then I stop. Because he gave me an idea. Not an enticing, or even promising idea, perhaps. But an idea nonetheless.
“I think I know someone I can ask,” I say.
• • •
“Five thousand?” Shoshana asks with obvious surprise.
“Um, yeah. That’s, um…that’s right.” I want to bury my head under the desk. She should be spending the money on baby stuff anyway, not giving it to her ne’er-do-well sister. And if she asks what it’s for, I’m not sure how I’d answer. What’s it for? Oh, nothing. I just have to pay my homeless friend for a large stash of cocaine. I am holding my breath in the pause before her answer.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay?” I repeat with disbelief.
“Yeah,” she says. “Noah and I did really well this year. That should be no problem.”
Noah is her husband, whom she married right out of college. Noah is essentially perfect. Jewish, good-looking, kind. I even like him. And now they are making perfect progeny together.
“I just took on a new client too,” she continues, like she might be convincing herself. “Yeah, no problem. Five thousand should be completely doable.”
“Great!” I sit up in my chair as Sylvia rounds back to her seat, and at once, the telltale scent of Wite-Out fills the cubicle.
“You want me to wire it or something?” Shoshana asks.
“Oh, well, that would be perfect, if you could,” I say, scrounging around my drawer for my checkbook. I give her the routing number, etc. in a low voice, then stash my checkbook away again. “I’ll pay you back,” I say, hoping this is true, eventually.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“No, I will.”
“Should be there EOD,” she says, ignoring my protests.
“Great,” I answer, thinking how no one actually says EOD. Lawyers write it in emails all the time, but they don’t say it, because it’s just as fast to say end of day. But she is giving me five thousand dollars, so I shouldn’t be churlish.
“Who was that?” Sylvia asks.
“My sister, Shoshana.”
“Oh yeah?” She starts collating a
file into stacks. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Three years younger. A lawyer.”
“What firm?” Sylvia asks.
“Greenberg and Fein. Out in California.” I open up my email, then remember my manners. “You have a sister, right?” I vaguely remember hearing about her bitching about the bridesmaid dresses.
“Four of them.”
I turn from my computer screen. “Seriously?”
“And two brothers. Typical Catholics, you know.” She purses her lips to blow over some Wite-Out. “You’re Jewish, right?”
“Sort of.”
She lets out an abridged donkey laugh. “What’s that mean?”
It means I don’t believe in God anymore. “Lapsed, I guess.”
“Yeah, right. Beau’s the same. Catholic though.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Lots of Jewish people in the firm,” she comments. “Not that it’s bad or anything.”
“No, I didn’t think you meant that.”
Sylvia is right. There are lots of us in the firm. So much so that my last name gives them pause. Edelman… Wait, you’re one of us! This is followed by a puzzled look, then unasked questions: How come you didn’t go to law school? What are you doing slumming with the paralegals? How can you even live on what you’re making? You got into Harvard, for God’s sake. Why didn’t you graduate? Questions, if I’m honest, I sometimes ask myself.
They’re more used to a Shoshana, who will definitely be making partner in her firm. Like my dad did before her. Shoshana is the white sheep of the family, who did all the right things. Went to Yale. Graduated. Married a perfect Jewish man. Became a lawyer. No tattoos. Two right-size diamond earrings only. And of course—the kicker—she never went and got herself gang-raped. Which is the real reason she’s wiring me five thousand dollars, no questions asked.
Not that it’s her fault, it isn’t. But at the same time, it never happened to her. She wasn’t a member of the Unlucky Club. And when Mom said I shouldn’t have drunk so much, when Dad turned bright red and said he never wanted to hear another word about “the incident” again, Shoshana didn’t say a word. She just sat there and stared.
We had been close before “the incident.” We weren’t afterward.
I don’t know if she blamed me too, for getting raped, for fucking up the family. I don’t know because I couldn’t bear to ask her.
Just in case the answer was yes.
• • •
“Protestant,” James says in response to my question.
We are playing chess outside Au Bon Pain in the cooling, cloudy afternoon while waiting for Natasha. Well, he’s trying to teach me, and I’m trying to feign interest in the game. I keep glancing over at the brick wall at the corner, her usual spot. So far, nothing. I have five thousand dollars in cash, fresh from the bank across the street, flaming a hole in my purse.
“I’m Jewish.”
“Yeah, I know.” He moves his pawn.
“How do you know?” I ask, mirroring his move.
“It’s a Jewish name,” he says, shifting his pawn again. “You don’t want to do that.”
“I don’t?”
“No, use the other pawn, or go with the other side. You’re opening yourself up.”
“I thought the pawns were pretty much disposable.”
“Kinda,” he says unhelpfully.
Feeling a phantom vibration on my thigh, I check my text for the hundredth time in case she got back to me. “I really don’t get this game.”
“It takes practice.” He moves his pawn again, encroaching onto my board.
“Do you care that I’m Jewish?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Do you care that I’m Protestant?”
“No.” I move my pawn again.
He smiles. “Good move.” His queen clicks on the board. “Religion is basically just different programming languages, in my opinion.”
“How’s that?” I ask, as he consumes yet another one of my pawns.
“Everyone’s trying to figure out the universe, right?” He lines up my purloined chess pieces on his side. “So God is the array programmer, and people try to translate into assembly languages. Analytica, Octave, etc.”
“Hmph,” I say, surveying the board. “I don’t understand a thing you just said, but somehow I think you’re exactly right.” I make another move, and he smiles again.
“Oh,” he says. “I had an idea for your seizures.”
“My seizures?” I ask, rubbing my cold hands together. “Were we talking about my seizures?”
“No, sorry.” He glances up at me. “I do that sometimes. Go off on a tangent.”
“That’s okay.” I puzzle over my next move. “What about my seizures?”
“I had an idea how you could stop them. Since they’re not electrical and it’s more a mind-set thing.” Finally, he reaches over to make a move for me.
“Okay, what is it?” I lean back, more than happy to let him play against himself.
“My friend from D&D used to have this spell when she played. She stole it from the Wiccans, I think, but it was pretty cool. It’s to ward off evil.”
“Wiccans,” I say, definitely interested now. “How does it go?”
James stops, puts his palms up, and closes his eyes. In a deep voice, he says, “‘Go back from whence you came. Go back from whence you came. Go home.’” He pauses and opens his eyes. “And you keep repeating it.”
Someone races by me on a skateboard, clacking the cobblestone. “And that’s it?”
“That’s it,” he says.
I nod, leaning back in the stiff chair and putting my palms up as well. “Go back whence you came. Go back whence you came. Go home.” I feel silly. “Then you keep saying it?”
“Until the evil goes away.” He moves his king. “And you have to close your eyes.”
I move my queen. “And do you think this actually wards off evil?”
“No,” he says carefully, examining the board for his next move. “But if your mind holds on to that, then you might not have the seizure.”
I shrug. “Worth a try. Better than meds anyway.” I turn back to the board, but thankfully, my text buzzes for real this time.
I CAN GET IT.
“Natasha?” he asks.
“Yup.” My knee is jiggling in excitement.
Great! We’re at Au Bon Pain by Harvard.
Okay. Be there soon.
I groan, showing him the text. “‘Soon’ has many meanings to Natasha.”
He smiles at this while plowing farther into my board. “You give her that money, you think you’ll ever see her again?”
Glumly, I push my bishop the wrong way, and James corrects it. “Doubt it,” I answer.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dahlia
Soon is two hours later. It’s dark out, and we’ve played about ten games, all of which I lost, even though James somewhat patiently talked me through every move. I am rubbing my arms through my thin jacket when Natasha finally deigns to appear.
“Hey.” She adjusts her ragged backpack on her shoulder. “You guys playing chess? I love chess.” She sits down, cradling her backpack between her feet.
“No, we don’t have time,” I say before James can agree, which, by the way he glanced at the chess table again, I can tell he might have. “So what’s the word?”
“Hey,” she scolds me. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”
“Oh, sorry. Natasha, James. James, Natasha.”
She looks him up and down and smiles her toothy grin. “Tall, dark, and handsome, huh?” she states in approval, and James blushes. “Filipino?” she asks him.
“Japanese,” he answers. “Half.”
“I had a Filipino boyfriend once,” she says, nodding. “Crazy good sex.�
��
James blushes some more.
“Okay, Natasha. What’s happening?” I ask to rescue James from further lewd comments.
“Yeah, okay.” She peels her eyes away from him with reluctance. “I talked to a few different dealers. I can get you guys enough. But it’s going to take some time. I can’t look like I’m trying to deal myself or it’ll be a shit storm out there.”
“Okay, makes sense.” I shiver with cold. A couple college kids walk by us, smelling of alcohol.
“Do you have the money?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Two thousand now. And two thousand when you give it to us.”
Natasha shakes her head. “That’s not what we agreed to. Five K.”
“It’s what I have. Take it or leave it.”
She pauses. “Twenty-five hundred now.”
James and I look at each other, and he shrugs at me.
“Okay,” I say. “Deal.”
We shake on it, and she stands back up.
“Okay, so when do we do the pickup?” I ask.
Natasha glances at the cracked screen of her phone. “I’ll text you. Probably sometime next week.”
“Next week?”
“I told you. It’s going to take time.” She boosts her backpack higher on her back and gives me a vibrant grin. “Why? Don’t you trust me?”
I don’t bother to answer, but peel off twenty-five hundred dollars and hand it to her. She stuffs the money in one of the front pockets of her dirty jeans, then practically bounces away. As she turns the corner, we both stand up from the chairs. My butt is stiff and cold.
James stuffs his hands in his hoodie pockets. “You wanna ride home?”
• • •
As he slows down, we both search around the road in front of my apartment for a parking spot, not a given at this time of night. “Oh, there,” I call out, and he spots the space and executes a perfectly smooth parallel park. As the car idles, I pause a second, not looking forward to leaving the warmth of the car.
James turns off the car and unhooks his seat belt. “Here, I’ll walk you in.”
In silence, we walk through the chilly night to the vestibule. The heater hums in the silence, and then the door squeaks open, cold air shooting in again. Alethia, a woman from the apartment, gives me a wave and a shy smile.
