by Anne Hansen
“Ma! I’m here!” she calls, looking at the lasagna while she pinches her lips together. “Lasagna? I thought you were making salmon salad?”
My mother bustles back out, setting extra plates, forks, knives, and finally scooping me a serving. “I planned to, but the salmon wasn’t fresh. If Troy thinks he’s gonna take over his father’s business, he better stop trying to sell that week-old fish.” She taps the side of her nose. “This nose knows, and that pup isn’t tricking me into buying overpriced fish that’s this side of too stinky even for bait.”
Nicki plops into her chair and eyes Keira, who’s sitting straight and stiff like she’s seen a whole family of ghosts.
Or a whole family of lunatics. That makes way more sense considering my family has been coming and going in front of her.
“Hello,” Nicki says with a smile that’s a little too Cheshire cat for my liking. “And who might you be?” Her attention leaves Keira when our mother tries to shovel a heaping serving of lasagna on her plate. “Ma, are you kidding? Pop couldn’t eat all that! You know I shouldn’t even been eating carbs. Performance is a few weeks away.”
“Eat,” my mother says, ignoring her.
Nicki chops the serving in half, then in half again, and scoops three-quarters onto our brother Dom’s plate. “I’m sorry,” she says, rolling her eyes for Keira’s benefit. “I’m Nicki. And you are…”
“Keira.” She gives a little wave across the table. “I’m just here for dinner.”
Nicki takes such a small bite, I’m not sure she’ll even be able to taste it. She looks at me with a wicked gleam in her eyes.
“Oh, it’s not ‘just dinner,’ hon,” she says, her smile sickeningly sweet. “Vin never brings girls over to dinner. I mean, he dates girls. If you can call it ‘dating.’ I think he’s dated just about every girl in his grade and the two below, right Vin?” She bats her lashes innocently, and I glare across the table.
My sister has always been good for stirring the pot.
“I think you’re confusing how many girls I dated with how many guys you scr—”
“Vin!” My mother sticks her head in from the kitchen and levels an evil gaze my way. Same shit since we were tiny kids. Nicki could get away with anything, and I always got caught red-handed.
“Vin and I are just friends,” Keira says in what she thinks is a smooth voice. “I’m his tutor.”
Just as the words are leaving her mouth, my idiot brother walks in, smiling at her like he’s got a shot to win her over. Fat chance. He may be my flesh and blood, but I’ll beat the piss out of him if he so much as looks at Keira crooked. If I’m not good enough to date her, my brother’s not even good enough to share a table with her.
But he’s about to, digging into the serving Nicki pushed on his plate just as my parents sit. “So, you’re tutoring Vin? In what? Everything?”
I notice she waits until my mother begins eating before she takes her first bite, unlike my mannerless siblings. Because she’s a class act.
“This is amazing, Mrs. Moretti,” she says, pointing to her lasagna with her fork. My mother smiles wide and proud. Keira turns to Dom with a stern look that’s a serious turn on. I love how she doesn’t take shit from anyone. “I’m tutoring him in English. Vin’s doing amazing, but Mrs. Delani just wanted me to give him some help on essays.”
It’s weird. The way she’s sticking up for me in front of them. She doesn’t have to.
I mean, I appreciate that she’s doing it, but she could just sit back and let my crazy family be crazy if she wanted.
“Delani.” Dom gives a shudder. “That gorgon’s had it out for us Morettis since she taught, like, Great Grandpop, right Dad?”
Our father looks up, his face lined and tired. He gives Dom a weak smile. “She’s a tough nut, that Delani woman. Didn’t you have a rough time with her last year, Vin? I thought they tried to switch it up if there was any kind of issue like that.”
I feel Keira looking around the table, taking in my family, and I wish I could know what she’s thinking, how they come across to her. Because they seem like a pack of loonies to me, and I grew up with them.
“They do usually try to switch teachers if you had a problem, but Delani was the only one available to teach senior English, so I’m stuck.” Usually this would lead in to me bitching about how that sucks and my old man and brother agreeing, but I don’t feel like going that road tonight. “She must be losing her edge in her old age. She’s been alright.”
“Right. Or maybe you’ll overlook anything the old bag does as long as being in her class means you get tutored by a good-looking girl,” Dom says, raising his eyebrows and giving Keira a goofy grin.
Dad reaches a hand up and smacks him on the back of his head. Dom yelps and rubs the spot.
“Have some manners,” Dad growls. He looks at Keira. “Excuse my son. He forgets himself sometimes. We’re very glad you’re giving Vin a hand. His mother and I know he has it in him to go far if he’d put his mind to his schoolwork.”
Dom snorts, then winces like he’s waiting for another smack to the back of the head. Nicki nods. “There’s a big world out there, Vin. Way bigger than Eastside. I know you’re making money with Uncle Gio, but there’s so much more than—” She stops short of talking family business in front of Keira. “The garage. More than the garage. Salad! Thank God,” she sighs as Mom comes in with a big salad.
My family’s never looked so damn happy to see some lettuce in a bowl. Or maybe it’s just that they realized how close Nicki came to mentioning private, illegal Moretti family stuff to a virtual stranger.
Keira finishes the meal quietly, and when I ask to be excused, Mom and Dad both wave us on with that kind of embarrassing wink-nudge thing that means they’re happy with her.
Of course they’re happy with her. She’s incredible.
I walk her out to my car, offering her my jacket again when I notice the way she shivers in the cool evening night. “I should have grabbed my jacket before we left,” she says before getting into the car. She bites her lip. “And my pre-calc book. Damn! I’m right on the edge of dropping my B to a C, and we have a quiz tomorrow.”
“Get in,” I say.
She does what I tell her to with wide eyes, and I can’t help laughing at how this night is going. I tried not to get my expectations too high. Just being around her—getting to inhale the sweet smell of her perfumed skin, getting to feel her hand brush mine every now and then during dinner, having stains on my shirt because I had the privilege of being the person she turned to when she needed to cry—should have been enough for me.
But I’m a greedy asshole. I imagined this whole hang-out session leading to things I have no business imagining. It’s the problem with being a blue-collar guy from the wrong side of the tracks with too many expectations. Instead of accepting the realities of my life, I’m somehow always looking at ways to escape my fate, dream bigger.
Which is dumb because I know better than anyone that the road to hell truly is paved with good intentions.
But—worse than dumb—it’s dangerous. Because when I try to forget who I am and what I do, I wind up pulling good people, people like Keira, into places she doesn’t need to be.
I drive up to the last place I ever want to be at.
“I don’t think anyone’s here,” Keira says, eyeing our dark school warily. “There aren’t any cars around. I guess the custodians have all gone home. It’s fine. I’ll swing by early.”
I get out in the middle of her ramble and walk over to her side of the door, open it, and hold my hand out to her. I fully expect her to get out on her own and brush me off, but she takes my hand and follows me without making another sound.
When I notice she’s tiptoeing, I raise my eyebrow. “We’re not committing a felony here, Keira.”
“Is it...legal to break in?” she whispers.
I imagine her wishing she was dressed in all black with a ski mask. Damn, this girl is so adorably innocent.
“That depends on what you mean by ‘breaking in,’” I say, leading her along a back alley where the trucks unload food for the cafeteria. I take her down a set of side stairs, through an outside entryway, and to a small, unmarked door that’s almost invisible from the lot. I push it open, and it swings easily on its hinges. “Tada. Eastside’s janitorial smoking corner.”
“You can’t smoke on school grounds.” Keira ducks in under my arm, then waves a hand in front of her face. “Whoa. It smells like an ashtray in here.”
“What’d I tell ya?” I guide her through the dreary little hall that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. It actually opens to the back of a storage room where they keep old equipment and other junk, and then, through the storage room, you can access the main building. “Just one of many secrets you learn when you get so many work-duty detentions, you make friends with the head custodian.”
“So there was some upside to all that trouble?” Keira tosses a grin over her shoulder like this is all fun and games, and my guts lurch like someone grabbed a fistful and squeezed.
I decide not to point out that all the stupid crap I got myself into doesn’t add up to a bunch of funny stories—it ended up with my ass too close to jail, and that’s not something Keira needs anywhere near her life.
“If being able to sneak into this shithole is an upside, I guess.” I shrug and throw my arm around her shoulders. It’s an innocent enough gesture, but even the smallest gesture is huge with Keira. I should know better, but that’s exactly the problem.
I’m too stupid to avoid what I know is a bad idea around her.
We walk through the halls, up the stairs, and wind up at a locker in the middle of nowhere.
“Give me one second,” Keira says, spinning the lock.
“This is your locker?” I ask, looking around at the dusty little corner of Eastside I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen.
“Mine all mine,” she murmurs, tugging books and notebooks out. When she gets her backpack zippered, she lets my jacket slide off her arms and hands it over.
“It’s cold,” I object.
Her laugh tears at me. “Right. But I have mine. I don’t need yours.”
I take it and she pulls her jacket out of the locker and slides it on over the green sweater that hugged her body all day.
I never thought I’d be pathetic enough to be jealous of a damn sweater.
“You got what you need?” I lean against the locker and watch her skin go pink as she presses her lips together.
She slams the locker door shut, making herself jump as the noise echoes in the empty halls. “I’m good. I guess.” She moves closer to me, lifts her eyes to my face, and I’m drowning in all that blue. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.” It’s a risky answer, but, in the quiet of the deserted hall, I want the words to be true.
I’ll have to do my best to make sure they are.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone about David?” she asks, putting her hand on my chest. “What you did for him?”
I feel the way her hand’s pressed at the spot right over where my heart used to be, before I shut that shit down so I wouldn’t go out of my mind. “David who?” I ask.
“David Lombardi,” she says, her face falling. “You know him. He’s in our English class.”
“Right,” I say, remembering her weird friend. “The kid who’s always wearing hats and suspenders. What about him?”
“You…” She shakes her head and gives me a confused look. “You saved him. His life.”
“What?”
I know the kid’s in the drama club. Did I pull some asshole off him in gym class or get him out of some locker-room situation about to go all wrong? I might be a jerk now and then, but I’m not down with guys playing tough by picking on easy marks, and I don’t turn away when I see that shit going on.
“He said it was you. He said you might not have recognized him. He was in costume that night. He’d been at a masquerade. And he was hurt. All the blood—”
“What?” I snap, but it’s like my brain can’t really process what she’s saying, because it’s replacing her words with images I’ll never forget, images even someone like me—someone with a pretty strong stomach and fairly low expectations for the human race in general—still feels sick over.
Suddenly the halls of Eastside recede, and I’m back in a Saab so fresh off the dealership lot, all I can smell is the perfect chemical bite of new car in the back of my throat. The moon is high and full, and there’s a nasty nip to the air. No one should be out on a night like tonight, but there’s movement out the passenger side of the window. I should be racing back to Gio’s, my mission done, my night complete.
But something makes me hit the brakes.
My brain fast forwards: I remember how light his body was when I finally lifted him up. Covered in blood and sequins. He was dressed up like it was Halloween. I’m not sure why, since it was the dead of winter. I remember having this crazy thought; I remember thinking it was like I was lifting the lifeless body of some kind of rare bird.
“Vin?” Keira asks, her words murky. I look at her face, her eyes searching mine for answers to a question I never expected anyone to ask, let alone the last girl who could possibly know. “Are you saying it wasn’t you? You didn’t help David?” Her blue eyes continue to comb my face for clues, trying to read what I’m not saying based on my expression.
So I force it to go blank, making sure my mouth is tight and my eyes are flat. “I don’t know David,” I say, watching her cast her eyes down like she’s disappointed.
My heart is going wild, beating like I just ran a marathon.
I have no clue what made me stop that night, what made me interrupt a risky run to go see what the hell was going on in Grantham Park—nothing good was ever going on in that place, but that night something drew my attention to a situation that looked worse than usual. I jogged over, yelling at the thugs standing over that small, limp body with their fists bunched. He was curled in a ball while the two huge guys with steel-toe boots used him for target practice.
“But he saw you,” she says, her voice quiet and insistent. She’s not going to let it go.
“If he got beat up, he was probably out of his head. Especially that guy. He’s got to weigh—what?—ninety pounds, soaking wet?” I make sure I sneer the words.
Her mouth twists. Shame presses hard on me.
Beating the shit out of the two of them wasn’t even something I had to weigh out, morally. I harnessed every pissed-off, fed-up emotion I’d been dealing with for weeks and let my fists fly, over and over until their cowardly pleas stopped.
I couldn’t make a fist again for three weeks after, and my knuckles still ache when the weather gets too cold.
I left the two shitheads moaning in the park, scooped up the kid and laid him out on the back seat of the Saab I was supposed to rush back to Gio. Cream leather interior. I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that it would look like there’d been a murder victim in the backseat.
I was just hoping there wouldn’t actually be a murder victim back there.
“I guess…he said you were driving a Saab? Did you ever have a Saab?” she asks, like this detail, about a car I might have been driving, would stand out clearer in my memory than stumbling across a guy who’d been beaten to the brink of death for no reason.
Funny how you can lie through your damn teeth while every word out of your mouth is the truth. “I never had a Saab. I hate ‘em.” My hands shake.
I drove fast. Fast enough I could have taken any pink slip from any joker if I’d been street racing. Fast enough that I should have been pulled over more than once by more than one cop I knew was out patrolling that beat, but luck must have been on my side, because I made it to the hospital faster than any ambulance could have and no one so much as flashed their lights my way.
I picked him up, covered in blood and so limp I knew he must be dead already, raced in and handed him off to my mother’s nurse friend, Teresa,
who never asks stupid questions when you show up at the ER with suspicious injuries.
She whisked the kid away and came back fifteen minutes later to tell me he was stable and ask if I had any idea who he was.
My body shook with relief, and I told her I’d never seen him before I stopped the assholes who were using him as punching bag.
She said I was an angel, kissed my cheek, and told me to send my Uncle Gio her love.
Which is when I remembered the stolen car I left running in front of the hospital, original plates still on, blood streaked on the back seats.
“So you weren’t at the park when he got beaten up? You didn’t bring him to safety?” Keira finally asks directly, like she’s daring me to lie to her face.
I look right at her, right into those sweet blue eyes that want to believe I’m better than I am so badly it kills me. “Sweetheart, there’s not much I do if it doesn’t pay off for me in the end.”
Her lips part and she licks them. I guess it’s a nervous tic, but it’s sexy as hell. “You...you didn’t answer the question,” she says, her voice almost a whisper.
I come close to her and she backs up until she’s pressed hard against the doors of the lockers. She looks up at me from under her lashes, her lips trembling. I flatten my hands on the cold metal behind Keira to keep myself from touching her uninvited. I lean in close, so close I can see the spikes of deep gray in her eyes, open wide like she’s waiting.
For what?
I glance down at her lips, which she’s pulling into a pucker like she’s frustrated. Or like she wants to be kissed. I screw my eyes shut, because there’s no way I can stare this kind of temptation in the face and not give in.
“Some questions are better left unanswered, babe. Time to go.”
I turn and walk away from her, memories of what happened after I left the hospital fogging my brain.
