Age of Consent

by Marti Leimbach

  Meanwhile, another annoyance. A teenage kid leaning against the entrance of the bus stop with his school knapsack was watching her. Without turning her head, she could see the black teeth of a hair comb lodged in his back pocket and a silver sleeve of Pop-Tarts in his hand. She felt her stomach rumble as he tore through the packaging with his teeth, then slid out one of the strawberry Pop-Tarts. Its colorful sugar crystals were embedded in pink icing, and she wanted to reach across the air and grab it.

  She looked away quickly but he’d noticed her already and now he smiled, then took another bite of the Pop-Tart and cleared his throat all at once, preparing some kind of greeting. She steeled herself and waited. He said, “Didn’t you come through McDonald’s last night?” Another bite, then, “It’s kind of weird, me seeing you again.”

  He had a soft, polite voice and as soon as he spoke she knew exactly who he was: Dan from the drive-through booth, Dan the McDonald’s boy. She looked at the place where he’d worn the name tag last night, though of course it was gone now, and his eyeglasses were newly clean, washed of burger grease. She recognized his curlicue hair, his freckled nose, the long arms and long legs, the angular chin that made a shadow on his neck. She remembered how his skin had gleamed under the close, fluorescent tube at the drive-through, and how he’d been scared when Craig started on him, and how she’d been scared, too.

  She shrugged like she did not recall any of this while a full-alarm, run-for-cover siren screeched inside her head, all the facts ringing out: being seen with Craig the very hour of the crash, the money in full sight right there in the ashtray, the smell of pot in the reeking car. Dan would be able to recount all of this to the police. There had been a witness. The word echoed in her head: witness.

  She thought of all the dreadful effort—fighting her way out of the car, forcing herself forward on sore feet, sleeping on the ground—all of it had been a waste. Once Craig’s body was found, the police would call for information and Dan would come forward. Of course he would. He was a pleasant citizen, a member of the public, a kid whose schoolbooks filled to bursting every corner of his knapsack and who worked a part-time job while at high school. He’d come forward responsibly, he might even feel very important, saying he had seen the car that night, seen her in it. He would explain how she’d later appeared mysteriously at the bus stop outside the mall and then the woman at Kmart would testify that she’d bought a change of clothes. They would assume the worst of her: that she’d murdered Craig.

  Dan said, “Last night, you came by the drive-through with that, uh, guy, right? Wasn’t that you?”

  She felt sick inside, but she opened her mouth in a little smile, then shook her head like she thought it was funny that he could imagine such a thing.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, making a face.

  He dropped onto the bench, allowing the knapsack to slide off his shoulder onto the cement floor. “It sure looked like you.”

  “Not me,” she said.

  He indicated a bruise or mark or scratch; she wasn’t sure. “What happened there?” he said, and touched the air in front of his face.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” She scowled as though she thought it ridiculous for him to make such a remark, that she thought it very uncool. “Is there something wrong with my face? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No, no. I didn’t mean that. Just that it looks almost like you broke your nose.”

  “Oh,” she said, flustered. She wondered if her nose really were broken. She felt a swelling there and a band of numbness across the tip. “I did that a while ago. Fell off my bike.”

  She thought that might be the end of it. She kept him in the corner of her vision, noticing his white skin, his shining hair, the long smooth fingers of his hands. He seemed startlingly clean by comparison to her. The pads of her soles felt worn through as though she’d been walking on bone all night. She couldn’t let him see her limp. She couldn’t let him see her bleed, either, and hoped the toe cut didn’t seep blood through her new shoes.

  Meanwhile, the Pop-Tart was torture. She wished she could take it from him, lick the strawberry glaze, bite deep into the pastry. The thought of food set her stomach in motion, and she felt another low grumble of hunger even before she heard it. Pressing her belly with her palm made no difference and now the noise of her stomach drifted into the still air between her and the boy, who looked as though he was still puzzling over something.

  “You want one?” he said, holding out the foil pack.

  Though she was becoming shaky with hunger, she said, “I just ate. I ate at home.”

  He took another hefty bite and her stomach pinged and gurgled while he chewed. “Are you sure?” he said.

  “Positive.” She looked away. “I had toast—two pieces—and cereal.” The glass bus stop was like a greenhouse and she wished she had her own Pop-Tarts and that she had water. Her body was acting strange. Her hands shook; her armpits pricked with sweat; she shivered, then felt okay, then dizzy. One thing for sure: She could not think. Closing her eyes, she listened to the crinkly sound of the Pop-Tart packet, imagining Dan biting into the second one. She wished a bus would come—any bus, it didn’t matter—and that this kid lived somewhere other than right here, where she’d happened to turn up. In the distance was a hill of little yellow houses with green, hedged lawns, part of a new development, and she imagined he lived in one of those. She leaned her head against the glass wall. And then some vibration in the air made her realize a bus was arriving. She jumped up, scrambling to the edge of the sidewalk and through the accordion doors into the bus’s pale interior, asking for a transfer ticket she had no idea how to use.

  The bus was largely empty and she went to its center, dropping into a window seat behind the second set of doors. She heard Dan behind her, getting change from the driver. She tried not to take too much notice of him as he passed. The bus heaved forward and they traveled for a few miles. She heard nothing from Dan during this time and she thought maybe he was done with her. A few miles more and she saw a high school—not her school, not even one she knew—and she heard Dan’s footsteps again, and those of some other passengers. She stared at her knees, waiting for him to get off the bus. He walked to where she sat and she heard the crinkling sound of the foil pack—the lone Pop-Tart, the one he’d been willing to give to her. She glanced up, and he handed her the Pop-Tart, smiling as he did so. She knew he meant her no harm, but in her head he was already identifying her in a lineup.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “I told you I already had breakfast.”

  “Take it anyway.”

  She took the foil pack from him, then watched as he walked through the doors, drawing a little wave in the air as he entered the street. Despite how young he was, how thin and full of angles, he had a confidence she admired. This feeling deepened when she removed the Pop-Tart from the sleeve and saw, folded into quarters within, a 3 x 5 file card on which Dan had written the words, Stay away from that guy. He had signed it with his name and a smiley face. She looked out the window and saw Dan there, saw his handsome young face, then she looked at the note again.

  Suddenly, she was out of her seat. The doors had already closed, the bus readying to set out, but she launched herself down the steps, slapping at the doors with her open palms until at last the driver told her to quit and that he’d open them again if she’d just step back. She pushed herself away and waited as the doors sprang on their hinges, then spilled out onto the sidewalk toward Dan, who had watched the commotion at the door and looked stricken by the sight of her, with her bruises and messy straw-colored hair and the way she hurled herself at him, grabbing his arm and pulling him to the side, away from the few other students who were also arriving late to school that day.

  “I don’t know where I am,” she said urgently.

  He looked confused. “You don’t go to school here?”

  She shook her head. She wa
s suddenly appalled at herself. She stood back, her hands in the air as though she’d touched wet paint. “I’m sorry!” she said. “Forget it! Forget what I said!”

  He began to speak but she heard nothing he was saying until, at last, he stepped toward her and she felt his cool hand against the skin on her forehead. With that, it was as though the sound had been turned back on, and she understood the last snatches of a sentence including very pale and drink some water.

  He shepherded her toward the school’s entrance, its wide doors ajar to catch any breeze that might come up. She felt the cooler temperatures inside where fans whirred. He led her to a drinking fountain humming beside a trophy case, then pressed his thumb against a button until an arc of water leaped up in front of her.

  “Drink,” he instructed. She was scared to be seen here, scared to be found out. Being in a school that wasn’t your own was somehow fraudulent—she could get in trouble just for that, she thought. But she was thirsty and Dan stood over her as she drank from the fountain. Between long, solid swallows she whispered, “I have to go!,” and he nodded and told her they would go, but please calm down. “You have to get to class,” she added.

  “I haven’t signed in yet. Nobody knows I’m here,” he said. “You should call your folks.”

  “No!” She felt the adrenaline rising inside her. The thought of Dan somehow persuading her to call her mother alarmed her freshly and without any thought she shot out of the school, down the sidewalk, across the hot grass, and through the fierce, whitening sun, thinking now what a mistake it had been to talk to Dan, what a disaster she’d set herself up for. When she got to the bus stop, she wheeled around and saw him there, trailing behind her.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  She told him that under no circumstances—none—would she call her mother. “That’s rule number one,” she said.

  “But you have to get home,” he said gently.

  “Yeah, and I don’t know where I am, not even which county, or the day or time, or how to get home. It’s like I’m on Mars—”

  He let out a sigh. “Montgomery County,” he said quietly. “Friday.” She sensed Dan’s steady, willing nature, exactly the same as the night before when he had encouraged crazy Craig to look for the money he owed in the wad of cash in the ashtray. “It’s just after ten in the morning. Does that help? And I’ll help get you home,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  —

  THEY RODE TOGETHER, changed buses twice, then stopped at a deli and ordered pastrami sandwiches that came in wax paper and made a mess of mustard and sauerkraut in their laps no matter how carefully they ate them. She drank two ginger ales in a row and still wanted more, so he pulled another from the deli’s cooler and gave the cashier money he fished from his jeans pocket, even though she kept saying, “No, really, I can pay.”

  She didn’t tell him about the fifties. If she thought too much about having nearly a thousand dollars in her pocket it made her paranoid, as though she were holding drug money, which she may well be, she concluded.

  Outside, the buses were slow, the schedules shot. Waiting for the third bus, their backs pushed up against an oak tree, their bellies now full, she fell asleep. Falling asleep had not been a gradual thing, not a drifting off but a plowing under. She felt something pulling her, almost like she was drowning, and then lights out; she was gone.

  Waking up was just as abrupt. She was wrenched out of sleep and into the solid heat of midday by the hum of cars passing and the stiff tufts of gnarled grass not yet killed by the sun digging into her skin. Lying on her side, her arm over her eyes, her head on Dan’s knee, she felt like she’d been tossed here, thrown from the sky. When she spoke it sounded strange inside her head, as though her skull were a vacuum and the words trapped inside.

  “My head hurts.” Her stomach contracted and she wished she could spit somewhere. “How long was I asleep?”

  “Maybe fifteen minutes.”

  How could sleep be a poison like that? She stretched the muscles in her calves, feeling the heat like a warm cocoon around her, the bones of Dan’s knee beneath her cheek, and then, inevitably, the tender, pained muscles of her body—every single one of them—groaning into action. She wrenched herself up in jerky movements. The evil nap had made her more tired. She wondered if this was the way it would be now: sleep, an exhausting, terrible mission from which she returned feeling buggy and depleted. She wondered if she had a concussion—what were the symptoms for that?

  “You talked in your sleep,” Dan said.

  “What did I say?”

  “Not actual words, but it all sounds bad. And you twitched; I think you were dreaming. I thought maybe you were crying, so that’s why I woke you up.”

  “You woke me?” She’d had no idea.

  “Yes, you were somewhere very bad in your head and I didn’t think it was a good idea to leave you there.”

  She smiled. “Thank you.”

  “I want to say something. Are you okay for me to say something about last night?”

  No, she wasn’t. Not now, with the pastrami sandwich doing wheelies in her stomach, but also not ever. “Does it have to be this minute?”

  Apparently, it didn’t. Whatever Dan was about to say, he swallowed it back. His face was still bright, with a soft energy and eagerness that drew her. When he smiled instead of speaking she was so relieved, she said, “Go ahead then.”

  “It’s nothing, really,” he began. “Only that last night I was worried that guy was going to do something. That he might hurt you. I thought about it afterward. I hadn’t gotten the plate number and I thought how stupid I’d been not to call the police. Now here you are asleep on my leg. This can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “It’s a coincidence. That’s exactly what it is.”

  “I feel like it was fate. Do you believe in God?”

  “Less and less.”

  Dan was waiting for her to say something more, but she didn’t. What she was thinking was that it would have been better for Dan if he hadn’t met her. And if there were a God, he should protect people like Dan from meeting people like her.

  “Are you a friend of that guy?” he asked. “I wondered if you were being kidnapped.”

  “Craig,” she said, then realized how much she hated saying his name out loud. “Not really friends, no.” She realized she was talking about Craig as though he were still alive and that it felt like he was alive, too. She remembered his face, both before and after the accident, and she smelled all over again the burning tires, the blown engine, the blood.

  “I feel like he did something to you last night. But you don’t have to tell me.”

  He meant like rape her. She could see it on his face. “Not what you think,” she said. He looked away, embarrassed as she continued. “He didn’t do anything. It was me. What I did.”

  All the while they’d been talking, she’d been trying to force her legs to bend against the sore muscles and scraped skin. She’d gotten one of her ankles to twist a little so she could sit cross-legged, but the other was too grieved to bend, so she gave up, and stuck her legs out straight, leaning onto the bromegrass with her open palms, which were also sore, she now realized.

  “You have a lot of marks on you, is all,” Dan said.

  “You’re imagining stuff,” she said. There was an awkward silence, both of them embarrassed. “When is this bus coming?”

  “It was supposed to be here already.”

  She asked him how he was going to get back, and he said it was easy and he’d been hopping on and off buses all his life. The rural routes were unreliable, the timetables a joke, but the buses did run and were cheap. He had a lot of older siblings who’d taught him how to get around and he’d been riding buses in and out of the capital since he was twelve.

  “When we moved into that house there wasn’t even a supermarket within ten miles,” he said. “But I’m saving for a car. I already have a license. If I go to a college that allows c
ars, I’ll buy one. Otherwise, I’ll buy one when I graduate.”

  She didn’t want to think about cars or driver’s licenses anymore. There was a time when she couldn’t wait to get her license but all that was ruined for her now. The police would find her. Of course they would. She put her head in her hands. She wanted to wipe away the whole mess but couldn’t.

  She said, “You think you want an exciting life and then you find out that you don’t.”

  “I want an exciting life,” Dan said. “Everywhere I’m applying to college is way out of state.”

  She looked up at Dan and tried to think of something normal to say to him, something that would make her seem like any other teenager. “Like where?” she said finally. “Where are you applying?”

  “New York, Boston, California,” he said. “I don’t want to stay here. My parents are making me apply to Hopkins—and I know it’s good. But I don’t want to be in Maryland.”

  “I wish…” she said, then wasn’t even sure what she wished for. She wished she, too, could go away, go somewhere else, to a new place and a new life, somewhere she could begin afresh. “If I tell you what happened last night it will be bad,” she said. “Bad for you, I mean.”

  “How can it be bad for me?”

  There was a puzzle. She wasn’t sure how to explain it. “I can’t say why, but it will be.”

  He shook his head. He looked so confident, unmarked, and fine. He looked almost regal, as though he could go anywhere in the world and set up his life as a prince. If he had any sense he’d get up and leave her there on the grass, never speak to her again. The thought came to her once more: Last night she’d killed a man. It was too great, the weight of it. “I’m going to be in so much trouble,” she said.