The Boy on the Bridge

by Sam Mariano

  “You’re the kind, considerate one,” he goes on. “I don’t mean to pigeonhole you, but without your calming influence in my life, God knows what I’ll get up to.”

  That feels like an oh-so-subtle threat. He’s putting a nice, coaxing face on it because he’d rather be playful than wrathful, but… well, he’s flexible.

  Still, I ignore him.

  “Wasn’t it your buddy Tolstoy that said ‘Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women’?”

  I finally look up at him, reluctantly impressed. “Your behavior is not my responsibility. And don’t think you can just buy me purses and quote Tolstoy at me and I’ll like you again.”

  “Didn’t you get the flowers? I sent flowers, too.”

  “Yes. I threw them away.”

  “How ’bout the teddy bear?”

  “Decapitated,” I lie.

  “Ouch.” Hunter shakes his head, but seems undeterred as he finally takes his seat.

  The teacher hasn’t said anything about his antics, but she has stood up and she’s looking in our direction. I guess he figures he’ll sit down before she has to.

  Once he’s in his seat, he says, “That’s fine. I’ll just send more. Do you not like roses?”

  “I don’t want flowers,” I tell him, flipping to the next page of my novel, intent on ignoring him.

  “Then what do you want?” he asks.

  “Peace and quiet so I can read until class starts.”

  He reaches over and lifts the front of the book so he can glimpse the cover. “Anna Karenina, huh? Does Suzanne Collins know you’re stepping out on her?”

  “My reading tastes have evolved,” I inform him, dragging my book closer to the right edge of my desk so he can’t reach it.

  I hate how tempted I am to talk to him. I never want to speak to him again after what he did, but then he shows up and makes it so hard to ignore him.

  “You like Tolstoy now?”

  “I do. You know what I don’t like?”

  His lips curve up wryly, anticipating my response before I can utter it. “Me?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t know,” he says, deliberately skeptical. “You seemed to like me just fine when I was balls deep inside of you at Valerie’s house.”

  The girl at the desk in front of him spins around to stare, eyes wide.

  He knows people are paying attention, the bastard.

  I want to kill him.

  “Your girlfriend’s house, you mean,” I reply bitingly, letting him see the anger bubbling just beneath the surface.

  “Come on, don’t tell me you didn’t like sticking it to her, at least a little bit. You hate Valerie.”

  “Not as much as I hate you,” I shoot back sweetly.

  “That’s not true.”

  He’s right, but I don’t bother letting him know it. Fixing my attention on the interaction taking place in black and white on the pages of my book, I tell him, “We’re done speaking. I’m busy. Go away.”

  “This is my assigned seat,” he reminds me. “I can’t go any farther than this.”

  It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him to go back to Italy, but it’s too mean.

  I’m mad at myself for considering it too mean, but I do.

  I don’t dwell on it. I’m still mad as hell and I don’t forgive him, I just refuse to stoop to his level. I refuse to be cruel just because he was.

  Even if he deserves it.

  “All right, everyone,” the teacher says, her gaze moving around the room. “It’s time to settle down. If you’ll close your mouths and open your minds, we’re going to start the week off right with an introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald...”

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Riley

  “Hey, look what I got!”

  I’m on the couch with a textbook open on my lap, a pen and notebook beside me in case I need to take notes.

  At the sound of my mom entering the living room—and apparently with something to show me—I turn around to see what it is. She’s holding up a gift card.

  “We’ve got $10 worth of free custard, baby.”

  “Nice,” I say, flashing her a smile. “Where’d you get that?”

  Her enthusiasm drops and her shoulders slouch. “Ugh, stupid, awful PTO meeting.”

  “Oh, was that tonight?” I ask sympathetically.

  She nods, kicking her heels off and dropping onto the couch beside me. “Those women are vipers.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Awful, awful, terrible, no-good…”

  I point to her gift card. “But we get free custard. That’s something, right?”

  “Free is an overstatement. Those custards cost six bucks each and we can’t leave Ray home. He hasn’t even had custard before; we have to help him fix his life.”

  “And the first step is custard?”

  “The second step is custard.” She smirks. “The first step was something you are far too young to know about.”

  “Gross,” I tell her. “Also, how old do you think I am?”

  “You’re seven and you want a pony for Christmas.”

  “This might explain why you insist I’m too young to look at boys,” I say.

  “Speaking of boys…”

  My eyes widen in alarm. “What? We were speaking of custard.” I redirect her attention to the mom perk she brought home from the PTO meeting. “So, the gift card will actually end up costing us $8.”

  She looks over at me, exaggerating her exhaustion. “Everything about the PTO is terrible.”

  “I’m sorry. You should quit.”

  “That’s the spirit,” she says, but quickly, so she can move on to the topic she was trying to segue to before. “You want to know what else I found out tonight?”

  A lone butterfly takes flight in my stomach. “Is it custard-related?”

  She shakes her head, her smile tightening into a sympathetic grimace. Her eyes, though. The eyes of a hawk.

  She knows.

  I accept it for a split second before she says, “Guess who decided to come home for senior year?”

  I break her gaze, sighing and looking straight ahead.

  “Maybe you don’t have to guess,” she murmurs.

  “I was going to tell you.”

  “Were you? School’s been back for over a week, hon. Seems like it should have come up by now.”

  “I know you don’t like him.”

  “Of course I don’t like him. He lied about my daughter sleeping with him before she could drive. What’s to like?”

  She’s not wrong, and I’m mad at Hunter for new reasons she doesn’t even know about, but old instincts somehow still come into play. The protectiveness I always used to feel that made me shy away from sharing Hunter with my mom… there must still be some essence of it, because the last thing I want to do is sit here and talk about him with her.

  I slide a piece of paper between the pages of my textbook and close it. “It doesn’t matter,” I tell her. “It’s not even worth discussing. Hunter and I aren’t friends anymore. He’s back—so what? It doesn’t matter.”

  Regarding me skeptically, she murmurs, “So you said.”

  “Well, it doesn’t.” I hear myself being defensive, but I struggle to rein it in.

  If she’s heard Hunter is back, I’m terrified she might have heard something else.

  “Have you talked to him?” she asks, her tone calm despite my rising hysteria.

  I know it’s not her fault, but her questions are making my skin crawl.

  It’s my fault. I feel guilty because I have been keeping this from her, and there’s more I’m keeping from her. Worse stuff that I really, really don’t want to talk about.

  I get off the couch and busy myself collecting my study materials so I have something to do other than look at her or noticeably avoid her gaze. “Yeah, I guess. Nothing significant, just…”

  That’s not a dodge, it’s a blatant lie.

  My stom
ach sinks.

  I hate lying to my mom.

  “It doesn’t matter that he’s back,” I say, looking up at her as I clutch my books against my chest.

  “Yeah, I heard.” Her tone is flat. “Hunter is back and it doesn’t matter—that’s my clear take away from this conversation.”

  “Good. It should be.” I drop her gaze, my heart feeling all funny.

  “What are you doing?” she asks, glancing at my books clutched to my chest.

  “I’ve got some homework to do,” I tell her. “I’m gonna go in my room.”

  Mom sighs. “You know what my least favorite thing about Hunter is?”

  This feels like a trap, but I answer anyway. “I’m assuming the ‘lied about me in middle school’ thing.”

  She shakes her head, pressing her lips together in a grim line. “You’d think so, but no, it’s not that. It’s the effect he has on you. In all our years, we’ve never encountered anything that made you keep secrets from me, not until him. Remember the year you accidentally found one of your Christmas gifts in the closet? I didn’t even catch you, still you came into my room near tears because you ruined the surprise. You told on yourself. And when Hunter first happened, I thought, hey, you know, she’s growing up. Maybe this is just how it has to be now. She’s becoming a teenager, maybe she needs to keep some secrets, have some areas of her life that are only hers.”

  I sigh, but I don’t bother interrupting.

  “But then he left.” Her eyebrows rise. “And with him went the secrets. You didn’t keep it from me when people started treating you like shit at school, you didn’t hide it when that awful, awful girl made up the lie about you and your history teacher… And then another boy came along. Finally. A nice one. And you didn’t keep things from me about Anderson. We talked about him, you let me in on things… and now, Hunter’s back,” she says, her voice dropping low with disappointment. “And with him, the secrets.”

  I feel somewhere around three inches tall.

  I stand there wordlessly, holding my books and refusing to meet her gaze, but in my mind I can see the three shopping bags I have hidden in my closet.

  The replacement purses.

  The party.

  Sex with Hunter.

  No condom.

  She’s right. The living room is standing room only if you account for all the things she doesn’t know.

  I swallow past a lump in my throat, but still I don’t look up.

  Mom sighs. I can tell I’ve disappointed her—she doesn’t even know how much—but she doesn’t push. “Well, maybe he’ll leave again,” she says.

  I keep my gaze down and don’t speak.

  “In the meantime, I hope you change your mind,” she adds. “I know he’s been a sore subject for us in the past, and I won’t pretend I like the kid—you wouldn’t believe me even if I did—but if you want to talk to me about him, you can. You can talk to me about anything. I promise to have an open mind. I don’t care about him, I care about you. That will always be the case, nothing could ever change that, and if you’re going through something, you don’t have to go through it alone.”

  Her words intensify my guilt, but they also send a fearful chill down my spine.

  This could be like that night she already knew I went to meet Hunter, but she was waiting for me to come clean to her about it.

  I want to believe the gossipy PTO moms have better things to do on a Tuesday night than discuss my sex life, but… well, historically speaking, that hasn’t always proven accurate.

  I can’t tell her, though.

  It’s not even that I don’t believe her when she says she can be open-minded about it, and I know she would be there for me no matter how badly I screwed up. She may have freaked out four years ago when she thought I might have slept with Hunter and she searched my bedroom for a condom wrapper, but she was caught off-guard then. If she’s asking about it now, she has prepared herself for it this time. Even if I told her I was stupid enough to have unprotected sex with a guy I’m not even dating… she wouldn’t flip out on me, no matter how strong the impulse was.

  But telling her makes everything more real.

  I’ve been avoiding it as much as possible because that’s what I need to do. It’s what I’m going to keep doing until I get my period.

  Then I’ll deal with everything else. Once I know I didn’t completely fuck my life up—only a little bit.

  I can handle making one stupid mistake.

  I can handle a bad senior year; I handled a bad junior year.

  I just can’t handle… that.

  If I tell my mom about that night, I’ll tell her everything. And if I tell her everything, then it’s real, and it’s all I’ll be able to think about.

  So, it’s not that I don’t want to tell her. I can’t.

  I also can’t explain that to her, so as much as I hate it, as horrible as the sinking feeling in my stomach is, knowing I’m continuing to disappoint her, I force a smile and dodge her gaze. “I know, Mom.”

  She watches me, her mom-gaze inciting a wrathful labor of moles in my gut. That’s how it feels, anyway.

  Resisting the pull despite that gnawing feeling, I turn around and flee to my bedroom.

  I sigh as I shut the door. I relax a little now that I’m in my bedroom away from her probing, but I still feel pretty awful.

  I drop my books on the bed and grab my cell phone off the charger. I had to plug it in when I got home from school earlier and I haven’t checked it since.

  It shouldn’t surprise me, then, that I have a bunch of missed notifications now. A couple texts from Anderson, but I don’t prioritize reading those. When I texted him yesterday about keeping things quiet for a couple of weeks, he never texted me back. I know he started typing something because I saw the bubbles, but when I checked my messages after class, nothing.

  He has texted me a few times since with small talk, but the fact that he avoided responding to the text I sent him hasn’t done anything to build my confidence in our second chance. And that was before Hunter’s performance in English class.

  I don’t know if Anderson has heard about that, we haven’t mentioned Hunter again, but I do know avoiding the subject will never foster closeness between us. If this is how he’s going to approach our second chance, it’ll likely end before anyone even finds out we tried again.

  I also have a message from a local number that isn’t saved in my phone. I scowl at the prospect of a stranger texting me and check that one first.

  “Are you home tonight?” the message reads.

  I scowl harder and type back, “Who is this?” Then I navigate back to my main message screen so I can read the ones I missed from Sara.

  The first couple of messages are commentary about our English assignment and the painful reading experience Mrs. Dowd is forcing on us. I’m ready to send back a sympathetic, “Ugh, I know,” but since I was away from my phone for so long, I missed my chance. Sara has already finished her homework and moved on to cyber stalking, apparently. She sends me another screenshot from social media. It’s a post by someone neither of us really knows, but she’s apparently in my English class with Hunter.

  My eyes widen when I see a picture of me with the Chanel bag on my desk and Hunter standing right beside it. The way the photo was timed, it looks like I’m reaching into the bag and drawing out the purse—I was actually putting the purse back into the bag—and Hunter is watching me open the present he bought me.

  Her caption reads:

  When the hottest guy in school buys you the classiest handbag

  #boyfriendgoals #notjealousatall #HunterMaxwellhasgreattaste #BetHeTastesGreatToo ;) #ImSingleIfShesNotInterested #jk #notreally #callme

  “Oh my God, what?” I mutter, swiping the picture off my screen and going back to Sara’s message.

  “Did I miss something?” Sara demands. “Are you and Hunter a thing now? And you told me he bought you a replacement purse, you didn’t tell me he bought you a $3,500 freaking Chanel
bag. Am I getting the abridged version of your life now? What is going on?”

  My eyes widen at the price. I’m not sure where she’s getting that number from. I certainly hope he didn’t spend $3,500 on a purse.

  I guess he can, but… I can’t fathom that. I could buy a car with that much money.

  “No, we’re not a thing,” I text back. “And I like how that girl is just blatantly offering herself up to Hunter in her hashtags. Classy.”

  Sara texts back instantaneously. “Jealous?” she teases with a winking emoji.

  “I’m not jealous,” I text back.

  “You sound jealous.”

  I narrow my eyes at the screen, but before I can type back a response, I get another text from the unknown number.

  “It’s Hunter. I bought a prepaid phone to text you from since you blocked my number. It’s slow as fuck. I have newfound respect for drug dealers. I don’t know how anyone could possibly use this as their primary phone.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “You bought a second phone just to get around being blocked? If I block this number, do you already have a third?”

  “Charged up and ready to go, but don’t be too impressed. These burner phones are straight trash, but they’re also incredibly cheap. I can keep buying new ones if you keep blocking me. And I will. You know I will.”

  “You’re exhausting,” I inform him.

  “There’s an easy solution,” he texts back. “You could just unblock my number.”

  Instead of doing that, I tap a few times and block that number, too.

  Sighing, I drop my phone on the mattress and walk over to my bedroom closet. I dig out the black Chanel shopping bag and carry it over to my bed.

  Even though I didn’t want to keep Hunter’s gifts, I brought the purses home with me. I didn’t know what else to do with them. I couldn’t leave them under my desk.

  I haven’t looked at them again, though. I stashed the shopping bags in my closet and hoped Mom didn’t do laundry when I wasn’t home.

  Now that I’m alone in the privacy of my room, I sit on my bed and draw out the pretty Chanel purse Hunter picked out for me. Without an audience, I don’t feel awkward opening the purse and checking out the inside.