by M. O’Keefe
No touching. I couldn’t do this and not pretend. I couldn’t do this, not pretend and touch her.
“Go to sleep. I’ll be back.”
She smiled as her eyes fluttered shut. “So bossy. All the time.”
Everything I wanted not to feel, it was here. In the air around us, and she sighed. We were connected. We always had been. Pretending didn’t change anything.
“I’m leaving Pest here,” I told her. “Don’t open that door for anyone. I’m serious. I’ll be back in an hour.” I dragged a garbage can nestled in the corner by the dresser, over to her bed in case she was sick. Which was inevitable. “Get some sleep if you can.”
“Thank you, Tommy.”
“It’s okay…Beth.”
And that was the end of pretending.
* * *
Town was a long fifteen minutes away and I picked up some necessities at the tiny mom-and-pop grocery store. Gatorade and bottled water. Applesauce and chocolate pudding that didn’t need to be refrigerated. Some loaves of bread and peanut butter and jelly. A bunch of oranges. Kibble for Pest.
I looked at it all on the conveyor belt as I waited to pay and realized it was exactly what Simon and I lived on those first few months in that apartment. It was the diet he’d prescribed because it had protein and vitamin C. We’d been broke and scared, and I was growing so big so fast that at night my bones hurt. And there had never been enough food. Not ever.
But there’d been more with Simon than at St. Joke’s. He made sure of it.
And now… I was back at the same survival menu.
My life was traveling in large loops. Constant circles. With minor variations.
Not Simon this time but Beth. Not Beth…Jada.
Fuck. I was tired.
The magazines on the rack beside the checkout were full of Jada. Pictures of her in the mermaid costume, with the long curly wig and the mask, seemed to be the favorite.
And I understood why; it was sexy. That outfit. The whole look was sexy and not just because she showed a lot of skin above the iridescent tail she wore. The body paint made the most of her thin stomach and the bikini top pushed her breasts together.
It was sexy because it was so outrageous. So bold. Confident.
Fucking ballsy. So ballsy I had to smile. I wanted to laugh.
Because she didn’t care what other people thought of her. She’d committed to this idea that no one would know who she was. That’s what the costumes were. The masks and the wigs. It was her protecting herself, and I understood that in my gut.
Difficult pop star passes out onstage, said one of the headlines.
On another there was a grainy picture taken from a cell phone of Beth wearing a long blonde wig and a unicorn horn, passed out on the stage, her band rushing to her side.
Exhaustion? said the headline. Or a difficult artist’s drug-fueled lifestyle?
Man, they loved calling women difficult.
I couldn’t even imagine what her life had been like the last seven months. How do you cope with that kind change? That kind of sudden pressure?
I turned the magazine around and put it back on the plastic shelf, the pictures of Jada hidden.
There was no leaving her. Even if she’d given me ten names of people who could drive out here and bring her shoes and her phone and money. The fact that she had no one made me so lonely for her I couldn’t stand it.
Maybe because I got it.
I had Simon and that was it. And he really was only in my life because he was gone half the time. Most of the time.
My only friend was never in the country and rarely had cell service.
It’s why we stayed friends.
I’d kept all the spaces around me clear. All the spots that would have been occupied by girlfriends or friends or even lovers, I kept them blank.
Because it felt better that way. Safer.
None of that did me any good here.
None of that distance kept me safe because now I was locked up in a cottage with the girl I’d failed and the girl I’d loved and the girl I’d never forgotten.
On the outskirts of Prescott there was a used car dealership, dusty and sun-blasted, it’s red and white flags hanging limp in the windless day. I took a sharp right into the lot that had plenty of old SUVs and pickup trucks.
The salesman came out to greet me, buttoning his sports coat over his stomach. “Hey there,” he said, all smiles. “What can I do you for?”
“Straight-up trade,” I said.
“Your BMW?” the man asked, looking dubious. “For what?”
I pointed to a truck exactly like the truck I had at home. “For that.”
The salesman wanted to check the blue book and he would have to call the owner to see if he could give me that kind of trade, but I waved him off and a half hour later I was driving back to the Yucca Family Lodge in a stripped-down 2007 gray Ford pickup.
The salesman could figure out how much money I should have gotten for the BMW, while he also figured out how much it was worth to him to take my advice and park the BMW in the back for a few weeks just to be on the safe side.
“Safe from what?” he’d asked.
“All sorts,” I’d said and gotten out of there.
I opened the cottage and found it just as I left it, Jada…Beth in bed, the covers pulled up to her ears and Pest beside the bed.
Pest lifted her head as I came in, and I put our stuff on the dresser and poured Pest a bunch of kibble. I collapsed in the chair that sat next to the fire, and Pest, when she was done with her meal, came to sit beside me.
I reached down and pulled her up into my lap. I’d spent years trying to train the lap squirrel not to be a lap squirrel. But I figured we could both use a little contact.
I stared at the bed and tracked the slow rise and fall of Beth’s breathing.
My breathing began to match hers, and I thought, sleep creeping over me: This is how long it takes. Half a day, a few minutes of quiet and my body lines itself up along hers again.
I couldn’t stop it. Didn’t even know how.
“Pest?” I said, and my old friend licked my thumb in response. “What the hell are we going to do now?”
14
Beth
I cried my first night at St. Joke’s. I didn’t, like, sob. Or howl. I just leaked. Tears streaming out of my eyes. I couldn’t talk. Or eat. I didn’t want to. I just wanted my mom. As crazy as that seemed, as much as she had put me through, I just wanted her to walk in that door and pull me up from that kitchen table and get me out of there.
But it didn’t happen.
Instead the Pastor’s wife got pissed and took my dinner away, and the Pastor said anyone giving me food would get punished.
Around that table were four kids who didn’t even look at me when he said this. They stared at their plates and nodded. I didn’t expect any of them to help me. I’d watched those movies and read the books—I knew what foster homes were like.
When the lights went out, they’d probably take turns beating me up.
“Girls,” the Pastor said, leaning back from the table. Tommy, the big blond kid, started shoveling in the rest of the meager amount of food he’d been given. “Clear the table.”
Carissa and Rosa jumped to their feet, and I lurched to mine. I had no plates of my own to pick up, so I picked up Simon’s. Carissa picked up Tommy’s, and he handed her his spoon and looked at me. I was startled by the brush of his blue eyes. By the way his gaze seemed to pierce me. I leaked more tears and all but ran into the kitchen.
It was drab and gray.
All the cupboards had locks on them. So did the refrigerator.
I stared at those locks and felt real terror.
That night as we were all getting ready for bed, the girls in the downstairs bathroom, the boys in the upstairs bathroom, Carissa shouldered into the bathroom next to me and whispered, “Tommy has something for you.”
“What?” I asked.
She shrugged.
�
�How…how do you know?”
“He gave me his spoon at dinner and looked at you.”
It didn’t make any sense.
I expected something awful. Something dirty. These kids were so rough—nothing like the kids I went to school with or the kids I had carefully monitored study sessions with. I expected, even while crying, to be hurt.
When I passed Tommy in the hallway, he tried to hand something to me and I flinched away and a sleeve of crackers in brown waxy paper fell on the floor.
Simon picked them up.
“Are you trying to get in trouble?” Simon asked Tommy in the thinnest, quietest whisper imaginable.
“I’m trying to get her something to eat,” Tommy whispered back. Both of them were watching the staircase like a monster was going to come up. Tommy grabbed the crackers from Simon and shoved them at me.
“Take them,” he said. He had the bluest eyes. And the whitest hair. “You didn’t have dinner.”
I stood there, silent and leaking.
“Hey,” he said in a softer voice. “It’s okay. You’re hungry, aren’t you?”
I nodded, because I was. I was hungry and scared, and this boy’s voice and this package of crackers was a kindness when I hadn’t felt any in a long time.
“Thank you,” I whispered, and I took them.
“You’re welcome,” he said and I caught him smiling at me, so I smiled back. And for just a second, a split second, things felt…better. Brighter.
Simon tapped Tommy on the shoulder and jerked his thumb toward the room they shared.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Tommy said, and he and Simon left. I stood there for a second, the crackers in my hands. My eyes dry for the first time in days.
Tommy, I thought.
And then I went into the room I shared with Rosa, the pregnant girl. I didn’t like this room. It was ugly and cold and the window didn’t open and the sheets were scratchy and smelled like bleach. I missed my double bed and all my pillows. I missed my sheets that smelled like lavender because Mom believed lavender would calm me down before bed. And I missed my books and my guitar and even though she was a monster, I missed my mother so much it hurt.
It hurt to breathe.
“You have to stop crying at some point,” Rosa said. She wasn’t even looking at me and she knew I was crying.
“I’m trying,” I whispered and hiccuped.
“Well, you gotta try harder.”
“Do you want a cracker?” I asked her, tearing them open on our desk. According to my old biology textbook, pregnant women had to eat more calories.
“What the hell are you doing?” Rosa asked, grabbing the crackers and handing them to me and then sweeping the crumbs off the desk. She licked the crumbs off her hand.
“You’re hungry—”
“Tommy give you those?” she asked, and before I could answer, she shook her head. “Fucking Tommy. You get caught with those, you’re in trouble, you get that?”
I didn’t. I didn’t get anything. The tears started again, and Rosa rolled her eyes. She grabbed the crackers and put them under my pillow. “You get caught with them, you say Tommy gave them to you.”
“Will he get in trouble?” I asked. There’d been a whole bunch of rules when I got moved here. All kinds of binders and pamphlets, and I didn’t pay attention to any of them. I was numb.
“Better him than you.”
“I’m not going to tell on him.” I didn’t know a lot, but I knew telling on someone wasn’t going to win me any friends.
“You do what you want,” she said like she was washing her hands of the whole thing.
We got into our pajamas with our backs turned to each other. Shrugging out of our shirts and our bras and throwing our clothes over our bodies like someone might catch us naked. I was curious about her stomach, I’d never seen a pregnant teenager, but I didn’t look.
“Good night,” I said when we were both in bed, and I reached over to turn off the light on the table between us.
“You have to leave it on until he comes up and turns it off.”
“The Pastor?”
She nodded, and something cold slid over me. I didn’t like the Pastor, and I rolled over onto my side and pulled a cracker out of the sleeve from under my pillow. I nibbled an edge and thought about Tommy.
Those eyes couldn’t be real. No one had eyes that blue.
“Girls?” The Pastor’s voice made me jerk, and I shoved the cracker under my pillow before rolling over to face him.
“What’s under your pillow?” the Pastor asked, his runny eyes focused on me like lasers, and I said nothing. I froze. I couldn’t even swallow the cracker that was in my mouth.
He walked across the room to my bed, his belly shaking with every step. Small tremors and earthquakes. As he got closer, I could smell him, wine and something else. Something I didn’t like.
“I asked you a question, Beth.”
“Nothing,” I said, lying badly because I never lied very well.
Rosa didn’t say anything; she was looking at her hands folded over her stomach. The Pastor reached under my pillow, his other hand grazing my hip, and I flinched away from him. His touch felt poisonous. Like his breath. His smell. Everything about him gave me the creeps.
“Where did you get these?” he asked, holding up the crackers.
I was silent. Terrified. Tears pouring down my cheeks.
“Rosa?” he asked, and she looked up so fast I saw her fear before she put it away.
“I don’t know where she got them,” she said.
He sat on the edge of my bed, his weight making a dip so I rolled toward him. My whole body pressed against his leg, and my stomach curled. “Beth,” he said, putting his hand on my knee. I couldn’t breathe with him so close. “You’re not in trouble. But stealing food is against the rules.”
His hand squeezed my knee and Rosa made a low, scared sound in her throat and I nearly threw up.
“Tommy,” I said. So much for trying to make friends. So much for not tattling. So much for me being brave. “Tommy gave them to me.”
The Pastor stood, his expression so pleased. So satisfied. Like he’d known all along and being proven right was just the best thing.
I knew that expression because I saw it on my mother’s face all the time.
She loved that I disappointed her.
“Thank you, Beth,” he said. “Honesty is always rewarded.”
And then he turned off the light and shut the door and I heard the loud click of a lock.
“He’s locking us in?” I asked Rosa, my voice shaking.
“He always does.”
“What…what is going to happen to Tommy?” I asked.
“Nothing he didn’t deserve. The boy knows the rules.”
That didn’t comfort me.
I wasn’t crying anymore. Fear and adrenaline and guilt kept my eyes dry and awake.
Awake long enough that hours later I heard the footsteps coming up the stairs. A door was unlocked. Not ours.
I sat up.
There was a rumble of voices. Tommy said something. I couldn’t make it out.
And then there were two sets of footsteps walking down the hall toward the room at the end of the hallway. The office, someone called it.
“Go to sleep,” Rosa said. “There’s nothing you can do.”
But I was sick with the truth.
There was nothing I could do because I’d already done it.
* * *
I woke up out of my dream, sweaty and foul, my stomach and my head in a war. My body ached so much it felt like I had the flu. I thrashed in sheets that smelled like St. Joke’s.
Sour sweat and bitter fear.
“Hey,” a soft voice said. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
I turned toward the comfort of that voice because I had no defenses. My eyes blinked open against their will, but the cabin we were sharing was dark. Only a fire in the fireplace. I sighed because the darkness was appreciated. I was sure I looke
d like shit. And I didn’t want to face the bright light of anything. Not yet.
“You want something to drink?” Tommy asked and I nodded. He’d been taking care of me for I wasn’t even sure how long. Hours. Days. Weeks. Most of my life.
“Thank you,” I said, gratitude getting brittle on my tongue.
He helped me with a bottle of water, and I fell back against the bed after a sip like I’d run a marathon.
“I feel terrible,” I said. “Like the flu and hangover all in one.”
“I have some painkillers. Over-the-counter stuff.” I heard the rattle of a bottle, and then he pressed two pills into my hand, his fingers cool against my skin.
I swallowed the pills with more water and fell back against the bed.
“Want some orange?” he asked.
“Orange what?”
“Orange…orange,” he said, and I smiled because I could hear in his voice that he was smiling too.
“I was hoping for Skittles.”
“I’m sure you were. But orange orange is what’ I’m offering.”
“Orange sounds… amazing.”
His low, rumbly laugh filled the room. And then there was a peeled orange segment in my hand, the velvety skin just barely containing the juice and pulp. I put it in my mouth and burst it with my teeth.
I groaned in ecstasy.
“Let’s not get carried away,” he said, teasing me.
“I remember the way you used to eat peanut butter sandwiches, so don’t give me any grief. Oh my God and bologna. You loved bologna.”
It was silent for a moment, like I’d crossed some line, and I turned my head to find him in the shadows.
You said, I wanted to say, you said I didn’t have to pretend.
For a second it almost seemed like he was scared, but the expression was gone so fast I could have only imagined it. Seeing things in the shadows.
“I felt that way about everything I got to eat.”
“He starved you.”
“I think actually…she did. But yes, I was hungry. A lot.”
“Someone fed you,” I said, lifting my hand to wave at his body.
“Simon mostly,” he said. “Once we got out, he made sure I got enough to eat.”
