by Molly Hoffer
“How?”
“He’ll scare her straight. You know there is that documentary, where they take kids that do drugs or crimes or something that scare them straight by putting them in prisons or something?”
“I don’t think that’s how that went, but yea…”
“Well, being around Nick might help Vanessa to grow up, to see what life’s like on the poor side of town. She has all these privileges and sometimes I just don’t think she appreciates them.”
“Three kids are now all grown and out of the house, one’s hardly home between college and tourism, so we’ve got one kid to raise, and she’s the one that pa left the biggest trust for, so if we gotta scare her straight, I guess that’s what it will take.”
I had enough. It was fine and well for me to manipulate my way into things, but this was far too conniving for my parents. Who does that?!
I sneaked out of the library and back to my room, without being seen. I was steaming by the time I crawled onto my tall curtained bed. Scare me straight!? I’ll show them who’ll be scared straight!
At dinner in a couple of hours, I tried to smile politely and to say as little as possible, while I studied every word Nick uttered, looking for a weakness. He didn’t say much, so there wasn’t enough to go on for a conclusion.
Towards the end of dinner, mom said to Nick, “Fedor found some notebooks, other school things, and our older son’s old uniform you can use. You’ll find them in your room.”
“Uniform? The Trinity uniform? Why?” I asked, startled at the thought that my campaign against Nick would now also be staged on the turf that was my primary social battleground.
“Yes, Nick will be joining you at Trinity.”
“How did they let him in?! The waiting list is years long!”
“Your dad called Principal Washington, and got a special permission for Nick to sit in on classes.”
This was shocking. Dad didn’t like pulling strings unless he had to because any favor he asked for usually meant millions in donations in return.
Nick rode in the limo with me next morning, and happened to be in half of my classes. Dad probably asked Principal Washington to mirror my schedule, I thought.
I was wearing the short greenish-black skirt that was our traditional uniform, left over from the ancient days when Trinity was a religious school. I noticed Nick scanning my legs a few times across the day. I was thankful that the teachers didn’t introduce Nick as my “foster brother” or something, or I might have died of embarrassment. Some of the kids did notice that we arrived in the same limo, so during our community lunch hour, I was surrounded by a committee of girls that interrogated me on the newcomer.
We had lunch in a giant hall that at one point was a chapel, and now had dozens of round mahogany tables evenly spaced across it. The roof was newly renovated and was made out of light wooden arches below a glass ceiling. Servers brought out plates for each of us, and we could choose from a few different options for what we would be served, vegetarian, diet, or extra meaty and fatty, were the usual three or four options on the menu.
“So, spill, who is he?” Meg asked, as she supported her refreshed face on her knuckles.
“He’s nobody, just a guy, Nick.”
“How did he get in senior year, like nobody starts senior year. The waiting list…” a girl with black-rimmed glasses, who was the valedictorian of our class asked, with some concern.
“Yea, I know, that’s what I said, but I guess he did.”
“Look at how he’s eating,” Stacey, who led Trinity’s dance team, whispered, pointing with her pinky to Nick, who took a seat at a table in a corner, away from other students.
Nick had actually picked up a chicken thigh with his hand and was eating it like a burrito. My face reddened, as I hoped the girls wouldn’t return to the initial question of our relation.
“It’s like he’s a bushman,” I said, diverting the conversation. The girls giggled, and scanned his ill-fitting uniform, which consisted of a jacket, a white shirt and pants for boys.
A bit later, Nick stood up and proceeded towards a trashcan to dump the remains of his lunch. On his way there, one of the jocks, Pete, who had a defensive position on our nationally competitive football team, stuck out his foot, trying to make Nick trip. The jocks noticed that all the hot girls at my table were staring at Nick instead of at their table for once, and regardless of why he had their attention, they felt obligated to get back at him.
Nick was looking down and noticed the foot. Instead of stepping over it, he smashed it violently with his borrowed polished shoes.
“Aaa! Hey! What da fuck!” Pete said, jumping up with fury, while his eyes teared up from pain.
Nick kept walking, as if he didn’t notice what happened. If Pete thought to create an “accident,” he thought he’d also let the “accidental” nature of the stomping linger.
“Hey you! Punk! You stumped on my foot!” Pete insisted.
Nick tried to keep walking, but Pete was hollering so loudly that now most of the cafeteria was staring at the two of them, so Nick had to turn around to face Pete.
“Er?”
“Yea, I’m talking to you,” Pete shook his head, when Nick looked uncertain if Pete was speaking to him, while hiding a grin that was sneaking into a small curve of his lips.
“Stumped on your foot?! When?”
“Look, smartass, I know you did it on purpose.”
“On purpose? Why would I just run up to your foot and stump on it? How would I even reach it under your table?” Nick questioned him.
Pete decided that if Nick were going to act tough, he’d check just how tough he was. He came up to him and when Nick maintained eye contact, he shoved his shoulders.
Nick Stepped backwards with the shove, as he anticipated long before Pete stretched out his hands. His face was now blank and pale. One of his eyebrows was raised, and he looked stern, but calm, as if calculating if he could really shove Pete without breaking a law. He clearly decided that it was unlikely that he’d avoid detention, so he shook his head and said, “I really think that you’re the one that just shoved me. Are you done with that? Or do you wanna try and shove me again?”
Pete was speechless by Nick’s cool response, and decided that he really didn’t know Nick well enough to attempt a second shove. So, seeing that his opponent was silenced, Nick finished tossing the remains of his lunch out, and left the lunchroom.
Everybody saw this scene, and everybody was talking about for weeks afterwards, so I finally did confess that he was staying with me, as my temporary foster brother. I made sure to stress that I hated him, and that I thought he was a dirtball, so the association didn’t diminish my status.
The scene in the cafeteria stirred some strange emotions in me. On the one hand, it proved that Nick was pretty psychotic, and not to be trusted. On the other, it was kind of sexy that he stood up for himself, without getting into a juvenile fight, or rolling around on the floor, or getting kicked out. I’m not saying that I knew that I was attracted to him, but if I had examined my bodily response to the scene at the time, I would’ve realized that I was pretty wet down under and pretty hot in the groin and boob areas. I dated Pete before, and he humped like a guerilla. I mean, I asked him to suck me off and he just said, “Nah, I don’t think so.” I was as dry as the desert when we did it, and the experience left some hidden resentment in me. So seeing Pete humiliated was really rather satisfying.
On the ride back home after the incident, he sat on a seat across from me, and when the limo hit a bump, his legs bumped against mine. I suddenly realized that we were in a limo alone, with the blinds to the driver’s seat darkened, and the windows to the street dimmed. We weren’t talking because I had made it a policy to avoid talking with the enemy. But, the silence only added a shade of sexual tension. If we were chatting about the weather, or about our classes, we probably would’ve sobered into a friendly familiarity, a relationship that would’ve made the possibility of intercourse or sex
ual closeness impossible.
Clearly, also overcome with a hidden desire, Nick took out a textbook and started glaring at its pages, without really seeing any of the words, just to avoid looking up at me. Both of us were turning red, and were relieved when the limo stopped at the main entrance to our building.
That same awkward sexually tense silence repeated itself twice-a-day for weeks until it burst into a stronger hatred in me. I hated how he made me feel. I hated that I had to share my limo with him. I hated his stupid long blond hair, and his stupid light blue eyes. And I hated when I spotted him in nothing but a towel in the hallway, on his way back to his rooms from the sauna. I had never been that close to a guy that wasn’t related to me before for that long. Weeks turned into months, and he just wasn’t leaving.
And, each day that he remained, my parents were lavishing more and more attention on him. They bought him a gaming system. They bought him a new computer. They bought him new uniforms… The list went on and on. And as his list expanded, mine was shrinking, and my vague desire to be rid of him turned into an urgent need to be away from him as soon as possible. I was feeling as if him staying much longer was going to make me go nuts, so that I’d end up strangling him on one of those drives in the limo.
CHAPTER THREE
It was during the winter break when I decided I had to take actions that are more drastic. I had between December 20 and January 11 free, and I couldn’t stand that my parents were buying Dominic an outfit for our New Year’s ball, and were clearly vetting him for gift ideas. I was the youngest kid in the next, my brother having semi-departed at the end of the previous school year. But, now for the first time, I was no longer the little princess. At school, most of the kids hated Nick and made attempts to harass him, but he stared at their grinning faces as if they were monkeys in a zoo. For the sake of avoiding a conversation about it on the limo ride, I didn’t participate much in the teasing. I knew that if I struck a heavy blow, the climbers at Trinity would love me for it, but if I fumbled around and failed, my parents were equally likely to count it as a strike against my inheritance.
I had to find out who Nick really was before he joined our family. I had to find some dark secret he was hiding that led to him still being a foster kid at seventeen. I thought foster care was like prison, that staying in that system long enough meant that kids that went through it build up a record of violence and misbehavior.
My parents took Dominic shopping on the 21st and I took it as an opportunity to investigate what he was hiding in his laptop. He didn’t have a password on it, so I just logged in and pulled up his main files folder. Aside from his school files, I noticed a few file names like, “10 Poems on the Forest” and “A River of Love” and opened a few of them. To my surprise, Nick was spending most of his free time writing sappy love and nature poetry.
It can’t be true, I thought. He probably took a disk with his real files with him. What kind of a guy writes poetry and doesn’t even show it to people?
I remembered that sometimes Nick went out for pretty long periods of time. Those gaps were the reason I assumed he had something to hide, that he was going out to meet with some shady people from his past.
So, I kept my door open to keep a better eye on Nick’s door in the next couple of days. Sure enough, on the 23rd, he put on a thick coat, gloves and goofy hat and ventured out. I tossed on a coat with a covering furry hood, a scarf over my face and the stylish gloves I had, securing them in place in the elevator ride down. I was in the building’s lobby a few moments after Nick’s elevator arrived, and I didn’t see him, but a quick, “Where did Nick go?” to the front desk security guard, got him to point to a retreating figure outside the building.
I rushed outside and hurried down the street after Dominic. I was around a block away from him, so I didn’t have to worry about him not spotting me. Thankfully, he didn’t take too many turns and went straight down the street. I rushed through a couple of red lights as I followed him, and there were a few narrow escapes with oncoming vehicles.
The speed of the chase kept me warm, but there were a few segments of sidewalks and streets that were coated with a thick ice, covered with a foot of snow, or seeped in a brown slush that’s left of snow when salt is tossed on a lot of ice and snow. The few black, naked trees that stood in boxed enclosures along Manhattan’s streets were covered with snow, and chunks of snow or icicles occasionally broke up and crashed down, covering the pedestrians.
All of a sudden, I noticed the dark line of Central Park ahead of us.
Nick was walking pretty rapidly, staring at the pavement in front of him in reverie. When the line appeared ahead, he started glancing up at it.
I watched that line too, thinking that he was nearing the spot where he was meeting somebody.
Instead, Nick just kept walking until he was inside of Central Park, and once there he took one of the more isolated paths. I sped up and reached the path just in time to see where he was headed and to follow him there. After walking along a path that was covered in a thin sheet of snow that hadn’t been cleared off yet, Nick stopped and sat down at a simple bench, brushing away the snow that piled on top of it with his sleeve. I was around a corner from him, just at the edge of sight. There was a bench there, but I decided to stand instead of sitting on that snowy bench to keep my coat from soaking in the melting snow. I turned red, just imagining if Nick spotted me just standing there, but my curiosity was peaked, and I couldn’t leave now. I was sure some gang of maniacs was about to walk up and join Nick, and they were all going to go off to sell drugs, or guns, or something equally scandalous.
A couple of minutes went by, I was working on keeping myself hidden behind a tree that stood between Nick and I, while also scanning him occasionally for any changes. Nick was staring oddly ahead of him, and then up and down the path, and it seemed as if he was scanning the people that passed him, so my theory was still holding. Then, he took out a small palm-sized notebook and an ink pen and started scribbling something down, then looking around, noticing something in the nature or people around him, and the writing something down again.
I looked at the people and objects he was studying, and didn’t see anything extraordinary about them. Just people. Just trees. Who comes out to Central Park and sits on an icy bench just to stare at stuff and scribble about it?!
I waited for another five minutes until my fingers and forehead started tingling and I decided that I had to go back home to avoid freezing. Maybe Nick didn’t feel the cold as much because he was sitting down and because his mind was off in his fictional world. I walked as quickly as I could to get out of Central Park, flexing my muscles to keep the blood flowing. When I stepped out of the trees onto the first main street, I fetched a cab and took it back to our building.
An hour later, Nick finally came back, and went straight to his room. I could hear that he ran the bath and got in through the wall separating our rooms. I didn’t even think of taking a bath, as I was wrecking my head thinking if maybe Nick was writing a note to drop off to his drug connection because he spotted me and didn’t want to let on that he saw me. A few other possible spy-novel plots came to mind, in that long hour.
As Nick relaxed and stretched out in his tub, splashing water as he’d sit up and then lead back down, I couldn’t help but imagine him naked in that tub. I pictured his hair, falling back against the inflatable pillow at the back of the circular tub. Strands of hair were probably sticking to his cheeks, to the pillow, and one might have fallen over his eyes as he sat up.
There he was in my mind’s eye, stroking his penis casually, as one rubs an earlobe when daydreaming. Did he pour the bubbles mix in? Did he put in some salt crystals or moisturizer beads? Bubbles? Beads? What guy would do that?! I was thinking.
Without realizing it, I reached down and started massaging my clitoris, pulling my hand down into my pants and panties. I tickled and played with it, pushing it from side to side, imaging what Nick’s body looked like naked there, in his tub. Wit
h a start, I realized what I was doing, and felt a wave of shame over feeling pleasure at the thought of my supposed enemy número uno.
But, my clitoris had been stimulated past the point of dismissing the arousal. I felt as if the walls were paper-thin, and I was afraid that Nick would hear my moans or the sound of flesh rubbing against flesh, so I also ran a bath. I left a small stream flowing into the full tub to deafen the noise, and then leaned back against the pillow, and started aggressively massaging my clitoris. I separated the lips of my vagina, and inserted a finger into the opening between them. I imagined that Nick heard me and walked into my bathroom to join me, and this image expedited my arousal. I felt bursts of hot blood pumping into my clitoris and against the falls of my vagina. I slowed down for a moment, but the tingling was so intense that I had to arrive at the finish as quickly as possible. All this time, I kept from moaning by keeping my lips shut, but as I burst in an orgasm, I let out a single “Aahu, whuuu.” And then fell back onto the pillow. I felt as if I was about to pass out from the hot water in the tub, the frosty coldness I had just endured outside, and a stronger than usual orgasm that seemed to have spent all of my energy reserves.
As my pulse came down, and I stopped seeing stars in my eyes, I realized that Nick stopped splashing and moving around in his tub. Did he hear me!? I thought in a panic.
Just then, Nick sat up and loudly stood up, wiped his body with a towel and got out of his tub. Clearly, he heard something or he wouldn’t have gotten out just at that moment. My face went red, and I dived my head under the water as if to deafen my embarrassment. I stayed down there for a few moments, listening to the loud thumps of my heart.
Finally, I slowly emerged out of the water. What gives him the right to be spying on me!? I thought, once again furious at him. I’ll catch him yet! I just have to dig deeper!
I found a new chance to sneak into Nick’s room on Christmas Eve, when the family was in the dining room, and Nick was forced by propriety to stay at the table and in the conversation. I had excused myself, and snuck into Nick’s room. This was a riskier venture than my earlier attempts because if Nick suddenly had to use the restroom, or grab something from his room I’d be caught. Knowing that I had only a few minutes, I went straight for his drawers to find the notebook he was writing in at Central Park. It wasn’t difficult to find it, as he left it in the top unlocked drawer of his desk. I opened it to the last page and read:
