by Piper Lennox
Grades. Boyfriends. The color of my nails. I wanted his approval on it all, waited to see his eyes, silver and unwavering, crinkle at the corners when he smiled and rendered a verdict. As though a nod or hand on my arm, his blessing on the Way We Lived Our Life, could someday translate into a promise to stay.
So that New Year’s Eve when he ordered my mother to get her life together, for my sake, I crouched by the vent in the bathroom and held my breath. I hoped.
Get your life together. Find a job, keep a job. Whether any guy is here when you get home or not, remember that your daughter is.
I expected her to obey his order, because she always did. My father had rescued us from the mess of my mother’s life time and again; it was only natural, then, for him to expect her to save herself. Of course he was tired of coming back each time to find all his work unraveled: my grades back to D’s and F’s, the pantry empty, whatever small palace he’d scored us now replaced with an apartment where roaches weren’t even afraid of the light.
But Mom didn’t give her usual, quiet, “Yes.”
“Fuck you, Allie.”
My heel slipped out from under me in a puddle I’d left after my shower. I landed on my tailbone on the tile, sending a thump all the way through the wall, but they didn’t hear.
“I’m raising our daughter on my own. And you keep swooping in every few years so you can be the hero? It’s not happening anymore. It’s easy to get your life together when you can just put it on pause, isn’t it?”
Stop, I urged her. My mouth moved, but I couldn’t say it out loud. I just sent it to her as one powerful thought and prayed she’d listen, before she drove him away for good.
He left that night. Mom’s eye was swollen and purple at breakfast the next morning, a sickly yellow halo around it that made it impossible for me to finish my cereal. I ate it anyway, knowing there’d be a day, and soon, when even the grossest sight couldn’t get rid of my hunger.
“It’s a new year,” she smiled at me. The bruise creased and looked even worse. “Just you and me, baby girl, the way it should be. We don’t need anyone else.”
I nodded. But inside, I was already changing.
Alastair was a coward. Why he kept returning if he didn’t really care about us was beyond me, but I was done trying to make him stay. The silver smile of his eyes didn’t hold any charm for me, anymore.
As for Mom, I’d known all along she was a coward and a mess—but at least she knew it, too.
That afternoon, I went to a friend’s house and stole her dad’s whiskey from the antique cabinet in their dining room. Her brother was setting up Monopoly in the basement for all of us to play. When I showed them the bottle, my friend threatened to tell.
Her brother took the bottle from me and winked. I apologized to my friend; we played the game.
Later, after I said goodbye and slipped out the kitchen door, he met me at the basement one and let me back in. We drank past the label, alternating sips. I could hear his sister upstairs as she got ready for bed, while he undressed me on a sofa that smelled like warm root beer.
In a way, it was exactly the story you’d expect: girl grows up without her father, mother’s a terrible role model, girl turns to promiscuity to cope. But it was more than that.
“No boyfriend?” Alastair asked, when he returned for my sixteenth birthday. I’d filled him in on the years he’d missed with monotone answers, as brief as possible.
“No boyfriend,” I confirmed.
“She has plenty of dates, though,” Mom chimed. The sounds of their forks against the dinner plates made me cringe. “Nobody seems to hold her interest.”
“No point getting attached to someone.” I glanced at Alastair. It was funny: now that I didn’t care about making him smile, getting that approval I’d coveted when I was younger, he flashed it incessantly whenever we made eye contact. “Everyone bails on you, eventually.”
Mom’s laugh sounded like tin. “That’s awfully jaded. Even for a teenager.”
Now, I looked at her. “You can’t rely on anybody but yourself.”
The two of them shrank back against their seats, as though I’d erupted. In reality, I’d practically whispered these things to them, my voice was so even and soft. So sure.
“Tanya.” Alastair’s inflection on my name soured the icing on my teeth. I used to love his accent. I used to love everything about that man.
“Things are different.” Mom put her hand on his. They smiled at each other, and then at me.
“I promise, we’re going to do things right, this time,” he said.
I looked at the candles that had been on my cake. Two more years of doing things right wouldn’t make up for so many of doing them wrong. If they even changed at all. And I knew they wouldn’t.
That night, after they retreated to my mother’s bedroom and the whispers stopped, I dug out the suitcase I’d packed months ago. The money I’d saved from my fast food job. Just one photograph of my mom, because I knew, as hardened and angry as I felt right then, I would miss her.
I never found out if they looked for me or not. I liked believing they did: my preferred daydream when I was bored at my new job waiting tables, or while I studied to get my GED, was the two of them banding together in the tragedy that was my disappearance.
But that’s all it was: a dream. They couldn’t even get it together when I was right in front of them, a living collage of all their mistakes. The thought they could do it once I was gone was laughable.
I wanted independence, and I got it. By the time I got to college, I’d become the kind of person I wanted to be: fun, loud, and bold, all the things I couldn’t be in my old life, my focus too anchored on simple survival. I was the girl who could find a party in any situation, who rarely got knocked down and never, ever stayed down. The girl whose walk of shame held no shame whatsoever.
Only two people in the world knew why I didn’t want a relationship, preferring flings and hookups and easily cut ties. Mollie, my best friend, was the first.
The second was Luka.
Seven
Luka
“So…I heard your brother drowned.”
My leg flinched, accidentally kicking her. It was her second summer here, our third week-long hookup—and the first time one of us had dared to cross that line into anything quite so personal.
We were drunk on dirty martinis from the poolside bar, which helped. I was still caught off-guard, though, when her statement cracked the silence of the bedroom.
“Yeah,” I answered. “He did.”
She moved her head from my arm to my chest. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Noe, right? It’s been...almost three years?”
“God, girls really do tell each other everything,” I laughed, and she joined in. The tension eased.
“Before you get mad at Mollie for telling, she was technically just telling me things about Kai. But, you two being brothers and all....”
“It’s okay. I don’t talk about it much, but I guess I should. Let the wound breathe, or whatever.”
“Were you guys close?”
“Yeah. I mean, not as close as me and Kai, or Kai and him, just because Kai was in the middle, but...yeah.” Talking about Noe was still hard for me. I didn’t like trotting out old wounds like that; when something happened, it was done. No point talking it to death.
“Talking helps,” Kai was always telling me, ever since he started therapy out in California.
“Maybe for you. It just makes me dwell on that shit even more. What good is that?”
Tanya, without even trying, could make me talk. I’d already shared more with her than I’d planned, even if it was mild compared to this conversation: during this trip alone, I’d told her about my schooldays, how my parents and teachers basically wrote me off as a class clown. Which I was. But I was also bored out of my mind, simply because nothing we learned had practical use—at least not for the life I planned on having. Statistics class, or c
ooking? Aced them. Calculus? American Lit? Not so much.
I’d also told her about how hard I’d worked that past year, just to prove to my dad I was worth the gamble. That it wasn’t a gamble at all, letting me run the business, but a sure thing.
Most surprising of all, I divulged secrets I’d never told anyone—the time when I was seven and stole a box of snack cakes from a convenience store, or breaking my grandfather’s display case for his model planes when I kicked my soccer ball through his living room. I let him think it was Kai, who got whacked with a spoon across his legs until he cried.
She giggled at the funny stories, spread her hand across my chest during the tough ones, all while I lay there and wondered why I was telling this to someone I barely knew. Especially now, as she asked me more and more about Noe. Silly childhood secrets were one thing. This was brand-new territory.
It felt like I did know her, though. And when I gave it some thought, I realized why I told her so much: she didn’t tell me anything.
“What about you?” I asked, when the conversation finally lulled.
“Me? What, like, have I had people in my family die?”
“No,” I stammered, laughing under my breath. “I’m just wondering about any big stuff, from your past. You know? Everyone’s got at least one thing they can point to that—that just really changed them. I want to know yours.”
“Luka....”
“Hey, come on. I’ve told you some really personal stuff this week. But I feel like you’re a closed book when it comes to your life.”
Under my arm, I felt her tense. “Isn’t that the point of this?”
“The point of this,” I said, sweeping my hand through the air above us, “is to have amazing, mind-blowing sex. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn more about each other.”
She squirmed; I’d made her uncomfortable.
“Here, start with something easy: how was your childhood?”
Her laugh was different from her usual one. “That’s easy?”
“You didn’t have a good childhood?”
“I really don’t want to talk about this with you.” She picked at the edge of her nail. “You had a perfect childhood here, so...you wouldn’t get it.”
“That’s not fair.” I sat up. She shifted to the other side of the bed and pulled on her pool cover-up. “Nobody’s got a perfect childhood. I told you about how shitty school was for me. My dad basically wrote me off as a lost cause.”
Tanya braced her hands on the edge of the mattress and stared at my suit, folded across the bench at the foot of the bed. “Yeah, well—my dad actually wrote me off.”
The edge in her voice got my attention. Tanya didn’t like being sad or angry: she was like me, the kind of person who hated being alone with our own thoughts for very long. We liked having fun. And if something wasn’t fun or at least exciting, we avoided it like the plague.
But when I heard that, I knew I had to rush and put my foot in the door, before she closed herself off again. I wanted to know the rest.
“Your dad wasn’t around?” I asked softly, my hand drawing circles on her back, even though she barely relaxed.
“Sometimes, he was. That was the problem.”
In pieces, as the night stretched and we grew more and more tired, drunker, she told me everything.
And when it was over, when the ice of her voice reciting nothing but facts finally cracked, I pulled her against me and let her cry, while everything she’d hidden underneath—all the things those facts brought out in us that we hated feeling and showing—floated free.
“It wasn’t you,” I assure her now, as she cries into my shoulder again, just like that night she told me about her parents, her childhood. “First of all, your boss was clearly an asshole. And second, print media’s just struggling, right now.”
“It is not,” she barks, and would probably push off me if I didn’t have my arms locked around her so tightly. “No more now than it was when I started.” She turns her head, breathing hard and hiccuping. I smell her perfume. It’s new. My stomach burns again, that coal resting right above my belly button, at the thought of that guy buying it for her.
“You’ll find something else. Something way better than that job, too. I know it.”
“No, you don’t know that. And I don’t have time to wait for ‘something better.’ Two months and I’ll be broke.” She lifts her head as I loosen my hold, looking around the wine room. “It’s so easy for you. I know you work hard, I’m not saying that—but to know you’d always have the family business waiting for you, in some shape or form? God, I’d kill for that kind of safety net.”
“Not trying to change the focus here, but I don’t have any kind of ‘net.’ If this place fails, that’s on me.” The coal flares again. I push through. “You can find another job, Tan. You’ve got enough experience—”
“So did my mom.”
My arms drop from around her. “Is that why you’re marrying that guy?”
“What?”
“The fiancé—he’s loaded, I assume?”
She stands. I do, too. “You don’t know anything about Oscar.”
“I know he’s got the exact same Rolex I do,” I retort, holding up my wrist. “I know that rock on your hand is at least three carats.” When I step close to her, her back pressed against one of the racks, I search her eyes. The makeup around them is smudged from tears. The whites are reddened, irritated.
But that green—God, I’ve never thought about one color so much in my life.
“You’ve always told me you like your independence. That you don’t want to end up like your mom. Well, this is what your mom did. Got with guys she didn’t love, so they’d be her safety net.”
Her jaw sets. I see fresh tears but can tell, by the way she doesn’t wipe them away in embarrassment, they’re from anger.
I duck my head and kiss her chin, then her cheekbone. Pressing my lips against every drop I find.
She lets me hold her face in my hands, but as soon as my lips get too close to hers, she tears away.
“I can’t.” Her chest looks like it’s shaking, she’s breathing so hard.
I am, too, but can’t tell if it’s because of her, or because the pain in my stomach has now radiated to my back. Maybe she’s the cause of both.
“You’re engaged,” I whisper. We both nod, this quiet reminder putting us in our places. “I’ll respect that.”
Her arms cross over herself again. “Thank you.”
“But,” I add quickly, “I do want you to think about what I said. Not being unhappy, that’s not the same as being happy. Don’t marry someone you don’t love. If not for yourself, at least for him.”
“For you, you mean.”
“Goddamn it, Tan.” The concrete amplifies every step as I pace away. Forget pain: my stomach’s now a bonfire in an oil drum. “Why do you always do that?”
“Always do what?”
“Twist what I say so you can make me sound clingy or desperate, then I get defensive, and the subject changes.”
“Maybe if you’d stop saying clingy shit—”
“Look at yourself.” My hand projects like a rocket, first up to her stunned expression, then down to those heels, one foot set in front of her. Bracing herself for the fight. “You come down here looking, frankly, fucking incredible, and expect me not to try and kiss you? I mean, God, you couldn’t change into sweats after you went upstairs with him?”
“Why are you freaking out like this is a break-up or something?”
“Isn’t it? We can’t stay together if you’re engaged to another guy, can we?”
Her head tilts back, like she’s found a decoded message in my features.
“Except,” she says evenly, “we aren’t together.”
The fire climbs into my throat. It feels like battery acid.
“Right.” I stoop to pick up the inventory papers. It still needs to get done, but I need to get the hell out of here more.
While I’m gathering u
p the rest, she bends down, picks up a sheet, and holds it.
Her gaze finds the scar above my eyebrow where I landed on coral when I was sixteen, thrown from my board on a shallow reef break. She knows the story. She knows almost all my stories.
Tanya King can play like we don’t know shit about each other, that we aren’t losing anything tonight. But she’s got all my wins and losses, so many of my secrets, everything I love and hate most about myself, indexed in her head. And I know just as much about her.
At least, I thought I did.
“It had to end sometime,” she whispers. “If it hadn’t been me doing it, it would have been you. Please don’t make me feel like shit for it.”
“Maybe it’s not me making you feel that way.” I take the sheet fast enough to give her a paper cut.
It doesn’t. She knew exactly when to let go.
“What are you still doing up?”
My stomach can’t handle more coffee, but I gulp down the last in the mug as Dad steps up behind me. The kitchen table is a war zone: contracts, projections, and business textbooks, pilfered from the storage unit where Dad keeps all Noe’s old things.
“Trying to write an offer the Kalanis can’t refuse.”
He sits. While the lines around his mouth shift in thought, words he’s about to say, his eyes scan the blocks of text in the contract before him.
“Wendy and Gregory have some good reasons to be wary, son.”
The coffee bobs in my throat. I burp and swallow before croaking, “I’m not trying to screw them over. You know how important the affiliate program is to Port—we don’t want bad blood with the locals.”
Dad’s eyes narrow as he smirks, the face he gave us whenever we said something stupid but hilarious as kids. “You are a local.”
“You know what I mean.”
