“I was getting too old for the parties,” Edy blurted, unsure of she started talking. “I’ve been wanting to do something different.”
It was better that way. Better for them both if she swept the old ways out of sight. After all, there was no coming back from her mother’s pronouncements.
“Have you?” her father said, voice small.
“Of course. I’ll be sixteen. Old enough to date.”
She exchanged a tiny smile with Hassan.
“I see,” her father said and left the room.
~~~
Edy stood to the right of her mother and father and to the left of Kyle and his father Cam, her mother’s right hand man in politics. They crowded together on a roped-off section of State Street, with their backs to the historic Old State House. Rain swelled the sleek sheet of November sky as twitches of lightening illuminated it. A distant storm made a fast approach. Not that it mattered. With the cameras on her mother, there could be no moving, no delaying, no deviation from the plan. Even the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would have to hold on Line Three once Edy’s mother got wind of an opportunity to give one of her “Mean Nothing” speeches. Pressed to the gills with platitudes and pregnant pauses for applause lines, her speeches had ways of being both ambitious and empty, promising nothing, all the while implying everything. Somehow, it seemed appropriate for her.
Under the glare of flashing bulbs and the frigid slice of winter wind, Edy allowed her thoughts to drift to dance. Ballet had been neither here nor there for her lately—neither the passion nor the disappointment that came with strong emotion. Instead, she found herself memorizing style and substance, as committed as ever to the punishing exactness of the classical variation, even as she warped it in her mind, molding it to the pops and snaps and gyrations of the street stuff she’d never dare do in public.
She thought about New York, often. About Bean and his father and rejection and the anger of krump dancing in the pit. She contrasted it with the grace and sculpting and exactness of classical ballet, fusing them in her mind like a Franken-scientist gone mad.
They were clapping. People on stage, in the audience, everyone around applauded with a vigor that told her she’d missed something important. Her mind fumbled with the faux pas before setting her on track again. Edy brought her hands together just as the noise of the crowd petered away. It occurred to her that her display might have been captured; daydreaming might have been captured, not just by local papers, but by national media as well. How long did she have before her blank stare became fodder for The Daily Show or Late Night?
But she was a kid. No one cared what kids did.
Following the close of a fire-filled speech crammed to the throat with buzzwords, Edy’s mother fielded a dozen or so questions before exiting in the same way she’d ended their family meeting. After a moment of confused loitering, Edy followed her parents and the others, head lowered, determined to blend in as well as a teenager could amongst the most powerful adults in the state. It was her birthday, of course, and part of her wondered if she could at least be afforded the option skipping some of the grind. Maybe she could catch a movie with Hassan or go bowling with the twins. Anything had to be better than impersonating a mannequin for her mother.
They paused at the entrance of the limo, where a rapid back-and-forth took place; first, between Cam and a staffer, then Cam and Edy’s mother. Afterward, they piled into the limo and pulled away from the curb.
“There’ll be consequences for the next person that stands behind me looking less than enthusiastic,” her mother announced.
The eyes and ears of Rebecca Phelps were as plentiful as the grains of dirt on the ground. Favors were the currency of politics, and even small ones had their value. Telling on Edy brought a reward.
There would be no movies with Hassan, of course. No bowling with the twins either. For Edy’s birthday, she had the distinction of being ushered around alongside her mother all day, smiling like the world’s most well-behaved child, all the while imagining herself collapsing on her back like an upended turtle and burrowing into her shell.
Hassan texted her during the fundraising dinner at the governor’s private mansion. He wanted to know how she was and when she expected to leave. She didn’t know how to tell him that whatever hopes he harbored for an evening together were a waste. A seven-course menu and politicians who salivated at the sound of their own voice promised that.
When Edy made it back to her room, it was a quarter to eleven. Her feet throbbed around the permanent cramp of pumps while the clock on her nightstand ticked out the final minutes of her birthday.
“Happy birthday,” she whispered.
No dress hung on the door. No three-tiered cake waited at the Dyson house. Instead, she was just Edy, as she’d always wanted it.
So, why did her heart feel so heavy?
Edy pulled out her cell phone and reread the happy birthday message from Hassan. Three words were the closest she’d come to hearing his voice that day.
“Happy birthday, Cake.”
She looked up to find Hassan’s head jutting through the window.
“Hey!” she cried and tossed her phone aside, the ache of her feet forgotten as she threw her arms around him.
He laughed, latching onto her with an arm as he tilted precariously. “Let me in, okay? I promise to hold onto you all night.”
She stepped back, smile broad with the deliciousness of the thought.
Hassan swung a leg in and unfolded to full height, into hard-bodied broadness that pressed at the seams of his fabric.
His hand found hers to pull her in close, communicating with eyes that never hid his secrets. The smile from him was brief, sweet, tiny with the humor of their new world. Them. Together. That was what his face said before he kissed her, wiping away the possibility of thought. When Hassan drew away, it was with a sigh from both. “I have company,” he admitted.
Edy stole a look at the window just as another leg slipped in. One after another, her room filled under the silence of stealth as Matt, Mason, and Lawrence piled in.
“Did we really have to do this here?” Lawrence said.
Mason peeled off a backpack; Matt pulled off another. As Hassan locked Edy’s door, all three Dyson boys went to work emptying bags.
Refreshments emerged from one of the Jansports. Twinkies. Guacamole. Salsa. Tortilla chips and a bag full of Lil’ Smokies. Another of Rice Krispies treats. Trail mix and Gatorade. So distracted was she by the hodgepodge assortment from the first backpack that she missed what emerged from the second. Hassan and Lawrence tacked up yellow and baby blue streamers to the walls. Matt blew up balloons.
“Alyssa made these pinwheels,” Mason explained as he pulled out the last of these treats. “They’re better than they look.”
To argue as much, he held up a mashed and half empty bag.
Alyssa. His on again off again “it” girl that she hated without knowing why. Alyssa, the girl that kept trying nonetheless, as if being Edy’s friend somehow meant something.
“I’ve been stupid,” she admitted.
“I know,” Mason said. He gave her a long and skeptical once over before opening his arms. She went into them. When Matt stopped to look at them, she pulled him over, too.
“I promise not to be a jerk anymore,” she said. “If that’s who you lo—”
“Forget about it, okay?” Mason said. Abruptly, he vacated the embrace. Matt followed suit.
“How about you put it in a Hallmark, Edy?” Lawrence knotted purple balloons to a string.
Matt pulled out an iPod and speaker dock, the last of the goodies in his bag.
“You probably shouldn’t—”
She glanced at the door. But Matt pressed a finger to his lips.
“We’ll keep it low,” he said. “Quiet storm stuff.”
The twins were known for a lot of things, but silence wasn’t one of them. Nonetheless, the first song was sultry and acoustic. A brush of violin. A hint of piano. Rumbl
ing waterfalls and crashing waves.
Hassan held out his hand.
“First dance?”
Always, she thought. Forever and then one more time after that.
Edy placed her hand in his and allowed herself to be drawn into his arms. He smelled of winter leaves and apple cider, love and nothing else. She pulled him closer, willed him closer, and found that close enough wasn’t even possible.
Lips brushed her forehead and dipped lower, grazing the button of her nose before settling on her mouth. Arms she’d always known encircled her, fierce in their entrapment, as his lips tasted, drank, swallowed every breath she had.
Somewhere, a throat cleared. Hassan stepped back, dropped his hands, and sighed.
“I’m pretty sure I had at least half a minute,” he said.
“You did. But my stomach didn’t,” Matt said.
Hassan dropped onto the bed with a snort. Edy joined him. The music shifted brazenly, from gentle innuendo to braggadocios hip hop warped on acid. Despite its low timbre, the rowdiness barred none.
“I wanted you for myself,” Hassan said. “But they insisted on coming. ‘A party’s not a party with only two people,’ Matt said. But something tells me we could have had a party all our own.”
His fingertips traced trails on her skin, his mouth kissed shivers through her body. She wanted the party he promised; she craved that party.
Matt snatched Edy up. She clamped down on a yelp before crashing head to chest into him. He dove into spasmodic, lurching hip thrusts that only mocked the beat, face contorting to suggest more rigorous work than that what was actually being done. Mason came behind her for a violent sort of sandwich, both twitching and bumping, closing in on her space. Laughter ruptured from Edy despite pains to stifle it, and she dissolved into a mess of giggles.
When she refused to dance like them, the twins declared Edy worthless and tossed her toward the bed. Hassan caught her with a smile.
“I don’t think they actually needed you for your birthday,” he admitted, adjusting her so that she shifted from the rumpled lump in his lap to sitting up in the bed.
His gaze fell to her lips, petering her goofy smile to nothingness. Only he could erase her thoughts that way; only he could render her senseless. An upturn of full lips and glimmer of gold-flecked eyes turned her bones to pudding in her body.
Hassan cleared his throat.
“I owe you an apology,” he said. “We uh, started making you this dress, you know, as in keeping with the birthday tradition. But the ostrich feathers, duct tape, and pink shag carpet felt understated when compared to your usual look.”
She shoved him, knowing it to be the equivalent of taking a running start into a brick wall. He fed her a grin as broad as the sky above and took the same hand she’d used to assault him to trace circles in her palm.
“I want to kiss you,” he said.
“Do it.”
He looked up, grin broad and emboldened by her frankness. “I used my one freebie,” he told her. “I don’t think they can stand us making out.”
Edy waited. Eventually, his gaze dropped to her lips, up again, then down before his Adam’s apple bobbed.
He moved in, mouth drawn to hers, and Edy pressed to meet him—hand to chest, drinking in contours and hardness with her fingers.
She could taste his scent, smell his touch; her mind garbled from the feel of him. This. She thought. It was the only word she could manage.
A blast of pillow to the head sent both of them reeling. “I’d tell you to get a room,” Matt said, pillow still in hand. “But if you did, we’d beat you to dust, Sawn.”
Hassan’s face split into a massive smile before he leapt, tangling with the twins. Lawrence scrambled to his defense, like always.
Too much noise.
Four oversized football players, trying and failing not to topple furniture, crash into walls, and bring down the curtains would be more than her sleeping parents could stand. She could think of but one way to stop them.
Edy helicoptered in. Diving from the edge of her bed, she landed partway on Matt and partway on Lawrence like a pan full of hot grease, scalding them so they jerked away. No one would dare throw a punch. No one would risk harming sweet, sweet Edy.
In the end, she rolled onto her back, guffawing at having done something no one man could accomplish: breaking up a room full of football players in a tussle.
“You’d better run,” she said. “’Cause I was that close to cracking skulls.”
Edy tucked her hands behind her head and closed her eyes, marveling at how plush the mauve carpeting was, even after so many years. Somewhere near the closet was a splash of carnation pink, where Chloe had spilled nail polish remover half a decade ago.
The first pillow blasted her square in the face. As Edy’s eyes flew open, a torrent of blows followed. Pillows—her pillows—assaulted her from every direction.
Her feet fumbled an attempt at uprightness, only to get snatched out from under her altogether. Then the fingers started. Hundreds of them, thousands of them, tickling, as she arched her back and kicked her feet in vain, making her whoop like a hyena.
The hand that covered her mouth was Hassan’s, seconds before his face hovered over hers.
“Next time you dive into a fight,” he said. “Pick a side. You know, so you don’t get jumped, skull-cracker.”
She caught a glimmer of teasing in smiling green eyes and couldn’t help but return it. Hassan leaned in and licked his lips.
“I need to take a leak,” Lawrence announced.
“You can’t,” Hassan said. “You know you can’t.”
He rolled onto his back with a groan.
“I go in here or elsewhere,” Lawrence said. “Either way, I go.”
“Call his bluff,” Matt said. “Make him piss his pants.”
“No!” Edy leapt to her feet, images of her attempting to explain a urine-soaked carpet—minus a pet to her parents. Her mother would claim it to be but the latest evidence of her overwhelming incompetence. See? She hasn’t brains enough to find a toilet, let alone think for herself. How can we get her into Harvard now? Her father, on the other hand, would leave no academic journal unmolested in his search for a reasonable explanation. She’s experienced a regression to the anal stage of Freudian psychosexual development. It’s all right here.
“This way,” Edy said, eager to take the risk over the alternative. Still, she slipped into the hall, lungs shrunken to stones in her chest. She didn’t dare breathe; no way she’d risk the slightest sound. She jerked a finger in the general direction of the upstairs bathroom. Lights out, door slightly ajar. Across the hall from it, her parents’ bedroom looked similarly safe.
It had been a long day, she told herself, and they were middle-aged. They had to be resting.
Lawrence disappeared. It literally happened that fast. Soundless, he whisked away, leaving her mouth agape with a promised warning of caution, undelivered. The bathroom door closed behind him.
And she waited.
Never had the hall looked so long.
Never had her parents’ room seemed so close.
And never had her heart galloped like a herd between her ears.
One. One one hundred. Two.
“Jesus, take me,” Edy whispered.
When they were kids, Steve Dyson had had an English cocker spaniel named Hugo, a proud and glorious hound that had walked the streets as if the very trees should bend to his will. And why not? He’d enjoyed weekly spa visits, deep tissue massages, pawdicures, and all-natural treats regularly. He’d spent his days lazing about and his evenings dining on beef ribs, succulent T-bone, and specially made sausages from a local deli, all of it supplemented by organic fruits and vegetables.
One day, Hassan and all three Dyson brothers had decided to give Hugo a makeover. They’d shaved him down to the pink, leaving only a thick strip of fur running from crown to tail. They’d adorned him in clip-on bangles, thick rouge, and a crudely painted replica of the New
England Patriots’ cheerleading uniform. Edy, who had served as lookout outside of Matt’s room, had managed a thick sheen of sweat on her arms. Their signal for the arrival of a parent had been so cumbersome and confusing that she’d shrieked at the sight of their father, bolting down the hall and shouting like Paul Revere with the British on his heels. They’d been caught. And while they would have been found out whether Edy had taken to hysteria or not, her reaction had all but confirmed Steve’s suspicion that the boys had been up to something.
This felt like that moment.
Lawrence emerged. His steps were swift and weightless, as if time and gravity were mere figments of her imagination and he could float away on dust. But as Lawrence arrived, Edy realized they had a problem.
She could hear the boys in the hall.
“If that’s a six pack, then you need remedial math,” Hassan said.
“You don’t have muscles on your back!” Matt said.
“I do six-thousand sit-ups a night,” Mason bragged.
“When? Where?” Matt said.
“Maybe on your girl’s face,” Mason spat.
She wanted to run, down the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door. But it would do no good. There was nowhere to run.
“Look at this,” Hassan said. “And this. And this. I’ve got muscles flexing muscles. You dream about this.”
Lawrence and Edy exchanged a wide-eyed stare, faces mirrored in horror. Edy shoved open the door and the both of them entered. But she stopped. Lord, did she stop. And think about backing out her room again.
They were naked. Almost naked, with boxers as the only barrier between skin and sight.
No shirts. No pants. Too loud.
“All I know is that I look better than both of you,” Matt said.
“We’re identical, you moron!”
Hassan stepped back. “Let Edy vote. She’ll make the right choice.” He winked at her, as if she might need encouragement to make the “right choice.”
Love Edy Page 23
