by Julia Kent
Which meant it looked like I expected.
I dumped my shit by the door and stretched out on the bed. It smelled like cigarette ashes, Axe body spray and corn chips. My eyes began to count the tiny holes in the ceiling tiles above me. I was supposed to be thinking about Johnny. About Dad and prison. About getting on a plane in two days for the big show.
But all I could think about was a girl with purple and blue and red and orange and everything hair.
Liam had grabbed me the other day at the hospital as I left before I did something stupid. Pulled on my arm. He wasn’t pissed, but there had been something in his eyes.
All he’d said was, “Careful with Maggie. Google her. Last name’s Stevenson with a v. Google her name and don’t stop at the first five pages.”
And then he’d walked away.
Stupid me. I’d listened to him.
Maggie Stevenson. Margaret Stevenson. First few pages I found people who weren’t her. By page five I found nothing but her. Seven years ago.
Holy fucking shit. No kidding there was something deeper there. I had a smartphone with 4G, earbuds, and long rides with truckers. My travel reading hadn’t exactly been fun.
But it had been informative.
Turns out she lived in St. Louis, too. Only Maggie lived in one of those suburbs where people like me did manual labor. We were their gardeners and roofers and remodelers and junk haulers.
I remembered her case. Who wouldn’t? If you lived in St. Louis back then it was all over the news, the grainy security camera footage of her attack shown over and over. Then the trial a year and a half later.
She’d testified openly, and some newspaper had posted her real name and picture, a senior high school photo that showed a smiling, brown-haired girl with dark brown eyes that sparkled. Clear skin. No piercings. No psychedelic rainbow hair. No fake blue eyes. She looked like a boring sorority chick. Like the National Honor Society do-gooder.
She kind of looked like Amy. Nothing wrong with that, but what a difference now.
Why was she, of all people, hitting on me? How did someone who went through that—a gang rape, a trial, three college guys sentenced to prison until they’re in their fifties—end up propositioning me on a rooftop in Boston one spring night?
Why me?
Too much. Life was too much right now. Maggie. Dad’s return to prison. Johnny’s tweaking. My plane ride to L.A. tomorrow...it all swirled in me until sleep just claimed me, like wave after wave eating a sand castle on the beach until you never knew anything had been there.
I barely registered Johnny coming into the room, standing on tiptoes, and slowly unscrewing the lightbulb from the lamp. By the time he left I was sound asleep, anywhere but here.
Which was fine by me.
Maggie
The flight home was memorable only because half the passengers on the plane appeared to be watching the infamous chicken and gerbil video on their phones and laptops. That stupid video went viral like a nerdy Asian dance video of a Jedi panda on nitrous oxide, brilliantly playing the piano upside down.
The cab brought me home. As we pulled up and I paid the driver, I looked at the house. Really looked. Nothing had changed in the five months since I’d been home for the holidays. The bushes were still neat and trimmed like a mustache around the front door. The white siding had been power-washed and the black shutters were, well...black. Red impatiens peeked out from hanging baskets along the guttered front of the house, spaced about five feet apart. Mom had stone bunnies placed strategically throughout the mulch beds alongside the concrete sidewalk.
The house looked like the stage set for any standard family sitcom. My trusty old piano was a sentinel at the front door, in the tiny alcove off to the side. Daddy was gone, I knew. Mom said he had business in New York. He worked in corporate law, doing something so boring that I didn’t understand it even now, at twenty-nine and counting. His business trips took him to New York all the time, and he’d be home in three days. I’d see him then.
“Maggie!” Lena shouted, flinging open the door and rushing down the walkway to give me a huge hug. Younger than me by three years, yet playing the part of the older sister, Lena was as boring as I was colorful, as reserved as I was wild, and was the only person in the world who worried about me more than our mother.
She smelled like warm cinnamon and butter as she embraced me. Her hair was the color of a freshly-baked cookie. That was my normal color, too. Hadn’t seen that in seven years. We shared dark brown eyes, but that was where the similarities ended. Where she was a round, squat earth mother with a sweet, plump face I was tall, big-assed and filtered the word through color, holes in my skin, and constant surveillance.
“That’s it? Just the two bags?” she said, grabbing the heaviest.
“I’m only home for three weeks.”
“I thought school was over?”
We’d had this same conversation last year. “It is. Summer session and all the high school camps start soon.”
“They pay you extra for that, right?” Lena was a labor law lawyer.
“Of course.” And they did, but not much. I wouldn’t get into that with my bulldog sister, though.
“Dad’s gone on business and Mom’s having some weekend thing with her book group.”
“You mean her wine group.” For nearly two decades mom and five friends met once a month to discuss a book. “Book” meant to drink wine and gossip.
Lena waved her hand and smiled so tightly her dimples had dimples. “Whatever they do is their business. As long as Mom’s having fun.”
And that was the end of that conversation. We reached the house and a wall of freshly-baked cookie assaulted me. I began to drool.
“Some of them have pecans, some have crushed toffee. I’m experimenting,” Lena explained as she shimmied a spatula to unstick a cookie from parchment paper. She nodded her chin toward the cooling rack. “Enjoy.”
I patted my hip. “I hate you.”
She smiled, showing teeth, and patted her wider hip. “You’ve got a long way to go to match me.”
I laughed my way upstairs, mouth full of gooey goodness and mirth. My room was a sanctuary and a tomb. Frozen in time, nothing had changed since I graduated high school twelve years ago. The entire house had been brand new when Mom and Dad moved us in here when I was in fourth grade, and aside from the occasional replaced appliance, everything was the same for twenty years.
Except me.
I’d changed.
Let me backpedal a bit. After the rape, when the television news vans littered our street like piles of dog shit that appear after the winter snow melts, Dad installed motion detector lights and two security cameras. Real ones, he’d assured me, hooked up to monitors that recorded night and day.
Of all the modern updates they could have done to the house, that was the one I’d needed most back then.
I tossed my bags in the room and bounded back down stairs, deeply dehydrated and craving more cookies. Lena was rinsing mixing bowls and humming along to some pop radio station. I drank a glass of water and then I went over to the piano and began to play Chopin.
“Again? I think that’s burned into my brain,” she complained. “You wore the black off the keys from that one.”
I changed over to ragtime. She laughed. I played for a couple minutes, just flitting through a few songs, then gently caressed the keys.
For two years all I’d done was go to therapy and play piano. The instrument was like Lena. A best friend.
I walked over to my sister, snatched two more cookies, and plopped down on the sectional sofa in the family room, facing her.
“Dating anyone?” we asked each other.
Neither of us laughed, but I hesitated just enough to make her eyes narrow.
Having a lawyer for a sister sucks. She spots everything.
“You...who is he?”
“He? There is no he.”
“Her?”
I snorted. “No her.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” said my now-openly-lesbian sister.
“Right. I like cock.”
“Me, too,” she said, stuffing a cookie in her mouth, pressing her palm against her heart as if offended. “I just like mine at the end of a harness, worn by a woman.”
“Thanks for that image.”
“You can’t handle an open discussion about sexuality? You work in residence life!”
“I can’t handle talking about strap ons with my sister.”
She cocked one eyebrow. “But you will talk about him.”
“Him who?”
She gave me the Jedi stare.
Bzzz. Her phone vibrated on the dining table, next to an open laptop.
“Damn,” she muttered, turning off the oven. “I have to take that. We have a huge class-action lawsuit involving workers being forced to use their own time for—”
I stopped listening, my head filled with the sound of my teeth grinding against pralines crunched and baked into these snickerdoodles.
As Lena managed the crisis, I ate five cookies. Don’t judge.
She got off the phone fast, quickly packing her things and searching for her shoes. She looked at me, her sleek bob so pristine, those dark brown eyes like pieces of chocolate in the middle of bright white.
“Late night meeting. Document review. I’ll be at the firm forever.”
“We’ll catch up tomorrow,” I assured her.
She pointed at me as she walked out the front door. “I want to hear about him.”
“There is no hiiiiiim,” I called out as she sprinted for her car.
“Put the cookies away!” she called back as she yanked her car door open and shoved her briefcase in.
I patted my stomach and muttered as she backed out of the driveway. “I will.”
Him.
How was I supposed to come back home to my pristine little suburban life with my lawyer dad and my software-developer mom and my superstar sister and talk about Frown? They treated me like a porcelain vase. Like something that had been shattered and painstakingly glued back together, capable of looking pretty close to normal—but don’t pour water inside.
Something in Frown’s eyes told me he knew a little bit about being glued back together.
The piano called to me. I answered by sitting down and playing my own version of “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer”. The residence hall where I worked back in Massachusetts had a nasty, out-of-tune piano in the lounge. I played it for fun, but stuck to my keyboard in my apartment. When stress got bad enough, I plugged in headphones and played whatever I wanted for hours.
Over the past year I’d perfected the piano version of most of Random Acts of Crazy’s songs. Just for fun.
I played them, over and over until my fingers ached and my shoulders screamed out for a break. Even then, I didn’t stop, the burning muscles something to push past.
Mid-song, I stopped.
A wave of exhaustion hit me. The end of the semester meant move-outs and residence hall condition reports. Arguments with students who swore the shredded screen was “like that” when they moved in. That the hot-pink painted wall was “allowed” by some other resident director whose name they couldn’t remember. That the entire ceiling covered in naked pictures of David Gandy—all rubber-cemented into place—had “improved” the room.
And then there was that kiss with Tyler.
I flipped on the television and found something about pirates on a cable show. Lena had made about eight dozen cookies. I took my share. As I downed it all with an enormous glass of cold milk I faded out, dreaming of a tatted-up pirate with hands that played piano and made me feel safe.
Chapter Three
Tyler
I have woken up in a lot of messes in my life. Lived in my car for long stretches. Couch surfed. Slept on floors. In beds with women so drunk and passed out we didn’t have sex. Woke up once tucked between the cement foundation of the Boston Public Library and a thicket of bushes.
I’ve also been rolled a few times. Wallet, money, instruments stolen by street kids, by homeless dudes, by anyone who saw me as weaker and able to be rolled. Doesn’t happen often. Three times, now that I think about it.
Make that four.
The light streaming in through the broken blinds didn’t make sense. What time was it? I’d set my alarm to go off at eight, and the light felt...off. Too sunny to be that early. I fumbled for my phone in my back pocket.
No phone.
Huh. It must have fallen out. I looked around the room and nearly shit my pants.
It was empty, except for the nasty mattress I was currently standing on, my hands in my hair, pulling hard as the layers hit me.
Phone—gone.
Bass—gone.
Guitar—gone.
Backpack—gone.
Wallet—gone.
I leapt off the bed and bounded out of the room, heart slamming against my chest like Sam with a tambourine. The five-room apartment took thirty seconds to check.
Johnny—fucking gone.
“Fuck!” I screamed, as if it would help. Like words ever make a difference. A frantic search of the apartment showed that nothing but my shit was gone. Then again, nothing but my shit was worth anything on the streets.
Johnny’d said he’d manage somehow. Oh, yeah. He was right about that.
My fist punched the cheap, hollow door before I could even think to do it. Like it had a mind of its own. I pulled back after the second hit, a voice deep inside telling me to stop.
It sounded like my mom.
Red, burning pain lit up my knuckles. It distracted me. I ran back to my room, flipping the mattress. Carpet beetles ran amok, walking in drunken paths toward the edges of the room. I ripped at the cord for the blinds, pulling them up, looking out the filthy window. A line of mildew dotted the edge, like lace trim on a dress hem.
Johnny’s piece of shit car was gone.
My bleeding hand raked through my hair again. The rough sandpaper of my three-day beard scratched like it was judging me as I washed my face with my palm.
Think think think.
He’d fucking cleaned me out.
How hard had I slept? Stupid. Stupid fucking Tyler. How could I have slept like that? Trusted Johnny like that? Hold on. He’d never stolen from me before. Okay, he’d filched candy out of my Halloween bag when we were kids, but that didn’t count. The little fuckwad stole my bass. My guitar. My wallet, my phone my—oh, God.
I sprinted to the bathroom and flipped the toilet seat up so hard it cracked, slammed back down, and I puked all over the broken white porcelain. Over and over until there was nothing left.
Until I was hollow. Gutted. Empty.
Completely void.
I slammed my back against the stained wall by the sink and banged my head over and over against the wallboard, the dull thud of my brain smacking against my skull really soothing. Sometimes pain gets you through a situation you wouldn’t ever think you could survive.
The pain can be the only anchor to keep you in this world.
I don’t know how long I sat there, being empty. When you have nothing, when you are nothing, it’s not like you account for the time.
You just are.
And after a while, there isn’t even a you.
Slowly, my eyes took in my ink. The colors. The thick, black lines that separated one section from another. The contours, the shading, the careful attention to detail. My tats brought me back, deliberately, like they had a process. A plan.
A mission.
That voice? It suddenly said, You can do this.
I could? What the fuck could I do? What this could I do? No money. No ID. No bass. Not even a fucking beat-up guitar.
No Dad.
No brother.
No love.
I don’t cry. For the record—I don’t cry. Didn’t cry when Mom died when I was eleven. Didn’t cry when Dad came back and took over for us, his first question about how to find the local Soci
al Security office so he could apply for our survivors’ benefits. Didn’t cry when he started bringing weird guys home and one of them—
I don’t cry.
You can do this.
The voice sounded like Darla this time.
Elbows on my knees, I looked up. No light in the bathroom, so the only way I could see was from the shine of sunlight through the open door. The toilet paper roll was empty. The room reeked of my bile. My mind felt like cotton candy mixed with beer.
My mouth tasted like that, too.
A plan. I needed to take all the details in my head and turn them into puzzle pieces. Make the pieces fit.
No money. No phone. No ID. No instruments.
What do you do?
Think think think.
You start at the bank. I had four hundred bucks in a saving account you couldn’t access with my debit card. Even if Johnny blew through the checking account, he couldn’t get that.
Unless he beat me to the bank.
Five minutes later I reeked of puke and sweat, my body running on adrenaline to the local credit union where I’d just sprinted, three long city blocks past junkies and whores and perfectly fine moms pushing baby strollers and happy dads with kids in baseball caps.
I stopped in front of the bank’s door. If this was going to work, I could look like this. A few deep breaths, some stretches to look like I’d run on purpose. The grim reset button inside me being pushed. The steady decline from being wired to being calm.
Cool.
My goal is to look like a guy coming in to take money out of his account like it was no big deal. Like any other day.
Like a person you don’t need to ask for ID because he’s just so...okay.
That whole expectations thing is a game. Do what people expect of you and when you’re actually lying, you can get away with so much more.
“Hello?” the teller chirped. I remembered her. Sort of. Her face. She’d worked here for a while. “Is that Tyler? Haven’t seen you in months.”
I smiled. Her face brightened.
See? We’re on our way.
“Yeah, Linda.” Thank God for name tags. “How’s it going?”
