Nibbling his Pop-Tart under Charlotte’s solemn gaze, he felt a jerk of impatience. She was weak, a joke—his sister—without even knowing it! Why don’t you do something? he wanted to shout, then wondered why he hadn’t done something himself—or said something. Said anything. Opened his fucking mouth even once. He believed Charlotte had the power to determine the outcome of certain things. Did she sense his treachery (she could read his mind, he was sure), or was she sad for some other reason?
“I rented Murder on the Nile,” she said.
“Subtle,” he said. “Let’s.”
“Here, I’ll make your pizza.” She’d saved half her own to eat with him. Her thin brown hair fell around her face as she took a pizza from the freezer and carried it to the microwave. And in that moment, Ricky, like the pizza, seemed to travel some distance in his sister’s hands, to arrive fully and decisively home, in this kitchen.
“I smoked pot,” he said.
He spoke with a mix of conspiracy and challenge, longing for Charlotte’s approval yet daring her to withhold it. She rarely did; Charlotte liked being Ricky’s confessor, privy to all his evil deeds.
“Ding ding,” she said.
She carried his pizza upstairs, trying to master the anxiety it gave her to picture her brother consorting with boys who despised her. It seemed possible they might turn Ricky against her, and this conjured an isolation more brutal than any Charlotte had imagined.
“I watched a little, but we can start over,” she said as they collapsed onto the couch in the TV room.
“That’s okay,” Ricky said, penitent. He relied on his sister to be cheerful; her somberness tonight unnerved him. “I can watch tomorrow.”
But Charlotte rewound the tape, as he’d known she would. They flopped together, chewing pizza, and as the movie began, Ricky felt comfort fold itself around him like a pair of wings. The skating, Paul Lofgren, it all just blew away. It was maybe even good, he considered, that the other kids didn’t like Charlotte—it meant that whenever he came home, she was likely to be here.
“You’re waiting for something to happen?” Moose asked. “Is that what you said?”
“Does it sound weird?”
He smiled. “There are those who would tell you I’m not the best judge of that.”
Charlotte laughed. The air was full of leaves. Ten fat jack-o’-lantern bags squatted on the bright lawn around Versailles. “Do you think something will happen?” she asked, hesitant.
“Yes,” Moose said. He was thoughtful now. Charlotte followed his gaze, but saw just the lawn, the jack-o’-lantern bags. What was he always looking at, this handsome, uneasy man her mother loved so much?
“Yes, I do,” he said.
And then it did. Something happened. Something strange—stranger than finding the wounded lady thief inside their house. It happened several days after her last visit to Moose, when Charlotte borrowed her mother’s Lexus and drove to Baxter to pick up her friends. She waited for them outside the school, a woodsy assemblage of A-frames built in the sixties. She waved to Mr. Childs, her old biology teacher.
“How goes it, Chas?” he asked. Mr. Childs was famous for conferring monikers upon his favorites; a nickname meant a B+ at least. “How’s East?”
“Good so far,” she said. “You dissecting yet?” Charlotte had loved dissection, especially larger animals like the baby shark and fetal pig.
“Worms, and you should hear the bellyaching. You’re in chemistry now?”
“Chem II. But the labs aren’t as nice.”
A teacher Charlotte didn’t know was crossing the lot in the canted sunlight. He looked familiar: dark eyes, an angular, expressive face that seemed just slightly to glower. “See you tomorrow,” this stranger told Mr. Childs. His eyes skimmed Charlotte, braking on her just long enough for Charlotte to recognize him: the man she had met by the river last August.
“Have a good one, Mike,” Mr. Childs said. And to Charlotte, who was staring after the stranger, “That’s Michael West, teaches math. Tracy Lapoint’s husband got a last-minute transfer to Omaha, and Mike turned up out of the blue. All the right credentials.”
“Where did he come from?”
“California, but I guess he’s lived in Europe a good while. I’ve got to run get my kids out of day care. Nice to see you, Chas.”
He crossed the parking lot to his car. Meanwhile, the man Charlotte had met by the river was backing out of a space. She bolted toward him without thought, shoes hammering the pavement. The man stopped his car and rolled down his window, squinting at her in the angled light.
“I met you last summer,” Charlotte said, breathless. “Remember?”
“I do not.”
“By the river. You said you were new in town. Remember?” But already she saw differences: this man had neatly trimmed hair, a smooth, tanned face, while the other had been scruffier. And injured, too—his arm? Charlotte stared at the man in front of her, red Lacoste shirt, tanned fingers tapping at the wheel. Both arms looked fine.
“I believe you are mistaken,” he said, with a slight accent. Had the man by the river had one?
“No,” she insisted. She wanted it to be true—to have this coincidence. “It was you.”
He laughed, his teeth a white slash against his face. “We have hit an impasse,” he said. “And I’m hurrying to go.” He waited, looking up at her, and only then did Charlotte realize that her hands were on his car, he couldn’t move. She lifted them.
“Good-bye,” the teacher said. He raised one hand to his face in a farewell gesture, and Charlotte felt a deep, prickling shock. It was the same thing he’d done before, by the river: part salute, part wave. It was the same man. The strangeness and certainty of it fell against her.
“It was you!” she called after him as the car pulled away. “Why are you saying it wasn’t?”
She stood in the lot, gazing after the car as kids shambled past her in groups. She felt stunned by the encounter, as if she’d brushed against a tiny corner of something vast and mysterious. But why? she asked herself. So he didn’t remember. Or he did, but didn’t feel like saying so.
“Chari,” her friends called, cascading toward her through the parking lot. “Sorry, babe. My lock was like totally stuck,” Roselyn said, enfolding Charlotte in her peppery embrace.
They piled into the Lexus. Charlotte had just gotten her license, and the others hadn’t seen her drive. “Look how calm she is,” said Sheila, in front. She could make the nicest thing sound mildly sarcastic.
“Chari, your brother is so egregiously cute,” came Roselyn’s gritty voice from the backseat. She had something known as “screamers” on her vocal chords, a diagnosis that had occasioned no end of hilarity among them, since Roselyn had a tendency to shout. Charlotte smelled her strawberry lip gloss.
“He’s thirteen,” she pointed out.
“Roz is stalking little boys,” Sheila said, fiddling with the radio dial. “It’s her new project.”
“Yum yum,” Roselyn said.
“What’re the guys like at East?” Laurel asked. “Like, how evolved?”
“Meaning are they into ballet,” Sheila said.
“Ha ha,” Laurel said. Freshman year, she had joined the Rockford Dance Company, and now performed in one large ballet each season. Since then she’d taken to extending her legs at odd moments, casually gripping a thigh and easing it toward her head in a disorienting spectacle of limberness. To Sheila, who slouched and was bulimic, the sight of another human so giddy in her flesh was beyond endurance.
There was a pause, and Charlotte realized they were waiting for her to speak. “I guess they’re mostly jocks,” she said, forcing herself to concentrate. Her mind swerved to the math teacher, then to the man by the river. “Some are cute,” she said. “But the girls are, too.” She had an anxious sense of covering something up—as if she weren’t actually a student at East, as if this were merely a pretext. “You should come visit.”
“Let’s,” Laurel said. “Sis
terhood.”
“Rah rah,” Sheila said acidly.
“You’re not invited,” Charlotte told her, which made Sheila grin. She liked being put in her place.
“Change it! Change it!” Roz shrieked from the backseat. She meant the song—Sarah McLachlan, whom she hated. “Change it before I scream.”
“You are screaming,” Charlotte said. “Right in my ear while I’m driving.”
“No wonder,” Sheila muttered.
“That’s not why I have screamers,” Roz said hotly. “The doctor says there’s point zero zero connection.”
No one answered. It was a fruitless argument.
“I saw that new math guy,” Charlotte said casually. “Mr. West.”
“Oh. My. God,” Roselyn said, breathing hot strawberry fumes close to Charlotte’s ear. “Is he not the most dire thing you ever saw?”
“I’m in his class,” Laurel said, and Charlotte winced at the thought of the math teacher watching her point her feet into perfect commas.
“Is he nice?” she asked.
“Freaky,” Laurel said. “Half the time when someone makes a joke, he doesn’t even get it. He’s like, formal?”
“Mucho curioso,” Roz said, squeezing Charlotte’s shoulder.
“I thought I saw him before,” she said, then let it go. But her heart and stomach were alive with secret intelligence. She knew the math teacher in a different way; she’d spoken to him alone, by the river, when he was not a math teacher but someone else. That was how it felt—as if they had met first in a dream and now were meeting again in waking life.
At Cherryvale, the girls bought peanut butter logs and lemonheads at Mr. Bulky’s and ate them furtively from small white bags while they clawed through the racks at Juxtapose, whose walls were emblazoned with posters proclaiming, “Back to cool,” and “Enter the next level.”
At Waldenbooks, they swarmed the magazine counter, sticky fingers snapping glossy pages as they riffled through them greedily, breathing each other’s gum and candy and lip gloss as they spied on the slender girls moving about in their parallel universe. Girls squinting in deserts. Girls leaping in snowbanks. Girls fishing in waders past their thighs. Charlotte tried not to see them. There was no place for her in this parallel world; according to its dictates, she was worthless. Her friends didn’t look like models either, but in some ineffable way they came closer, Sheila especially. And Laurel had her dancer’s body and Roz, with her sultry voice and tangled hair, had been nicknamed “Luscious” since ninth grade. Charlotte observed these facts without resentment; for her, there would have to be another way. She believed this.
At six-thirty, she drove everyone home, Roselyn last because she lived nearest. “I miss you, Chari,” she said. “You’re real.”
“You, too,” Charlotte said.
“I get sick of all the plastic people.”
“It’s an infestation.”
“So you’ll come, right?” Roselyn and her older sister were having a party that weekend. “Bring people from East.”
“I’m not sure they’re worthy.”
“Then bring your brother,” Roselyn said.
Charlotte was supposed to see her uncle the next afternoon, but she canceled the appointment, cut her last class, borrowed her mother’s Lexus once again and drove to Baxter just before classes ended. She killed the engine and sat in the parking lot fiddling with the radio dial. When the first kids began coming out, she hunched down in her seat. They left the campus in waves.
Finally Mr. West appeared, walking with Abby Reece, Charlotte’s eighth-grade English teacher. Ms. Reece was very pretty, and Charlotte felt a little queasy watching the two of them talk. Her heartbeat swished in her ears.
Finally he got in his rust-colored Oldsmobile Cutlass. It was three-fifty. Charlotte pulled out of the lot behind him and followed him south all the way to State Street, where he turned east and drove past the State Street Station, past Aunt Mary’s and Alpine Road and Winnebago College and then Versailles, where Moose lived, then finally made a left into the parking lot at the Logli supermarket. The lot was vast and busy, and the math teacher grabbed a lone spot close to the entrance. “Shit!” Charlotte yelled, trying to memorize the place as she drove on. She saw him walking into the Logli and decided to idle near the exit doors. Nine Inch Nails was on the radio, a group she loathed, but she was too anxious about keeping her quarry in sight to bother switching stations. Every muscle in her body felt alert, primed for action. After thirty minutes, the math teacher emerged with a sack of groceries in each arm, and Charlotte floored the gas so her tires yelped and a pregnant lady glanced at her in fear. She sped to the exit nearest his parking space and waited there—not her most delicate bit of spying, it was true—but when he pulled out, she was right behind him. He drove west on State and took a left, then a right, then another left onto a street farther south, close to East High School and lined with smallish houses, some with weedy, overgrown lawns. He pulled into the driveway of one of the weedy ones.
Charlotte parked on the next block and sat there, Janet Jackson serenading her alongside the heckling voice in her own brain informing her that she could not do this thing—it would be a breach of normal conduct too egregious to recover from. Yet she felt she had no choice. She left the car and made her way on watery legs to the man’s modest two-story house. White peeling paint, green window trim. She rang the bell and waited, and then the door opened and there he was, holding a can of Blue Ribbon. He regarded her coldly.
“It’s me,” Charlotte said. She clenched her jaws to keep her teeth from chattering.
“So I can see,” he said.
“I met you yesterday. And before, by the river.”
He didn’t reply, and Charlotte glanced behind him into the house. It looked empty. “Did you just move in?” she asked, a bit desperately.
“Tell me what you want.”
It felt impossible to explain. “Remember how you said Rockford was ugly and I said don’t call it ugly? By the river, remember?” She watched him beseechingly, waiting for him to feel the link of fate connecting them.
Michael West cocked his head. Then, abruptly, he opened the door and stood aside to let her through. “Come here in the kitchen,” he said, leading the way. It was small, a pale green linoleum floor. Two windows faced the driveway. The grocery bags sat on the counter, half unpacked. He gestured at one of the chairs.
“Beer?” he asked. “But then again, you’re driving.”
“How did you know?”
“I confess I am pessimistic about your career as a detective,” he said, and laughed a little harshly.
“I don’t want to be a detective,” Charlotte countered. “I want to be a tropical fish dealer.”
Michael West poured her a glass of orange juice, flipped a chair backwards and sat facing her across the table. “How old are you?”
You asked me that already, she almost said, by the river, but refrained. Allusions to the river did not seem to go over well. “Sixteen.”
“The other sixteens are smoking pot and listening to Anthrax,” he said. “Not following people in cars.”
“I’m not like them.”
“In what respect?”
She hesitated. The difference felt complex, difficult to name. “I don’t have breasts,” she finally said.
This made him laugh, more in surprise than anything. “Patience,” he told her.
“No, they’re done. But I don’t have any.”
“The name is ‘small-breasted,’” he said. “Some men prefer it.”
“Do you?”
“This is irrelevant.”
“But do you?”
He rose to fetch a second beer and remained standing, looking out his windows. He opened the can and took a long swallow. “Do you often discuss your breasts with strangers?”
“No.”
“Then why are you trusting me?”
“I don’t,” she told him, “trust you.”
He laughed, perplexe
d, then resumed his seat and leaned toward her so that Charlotte smelled him: warm, bitter, tinged with something like cinnamon. His scowling look had finally disappeared. “You want something from me,” he said. “What is it?”
“I want you to seduce me,” she said, then waited in dread for him to laugh. He did not. He looked quite serious. “I think you’re the right person,” she said. It had come to her only seconds ago, when she’d smelled him.
“Are you a virgin?”
She considered. “Half and half.”
Michael West looked bemused. After a moment he pushed back his chair and stood up.
“You said I had pretty eyes. By the river,” she reminded him.
“Our mysterious chat by the river.”
“You did.”
“Well, they are,” he said, not looking at her. “They’re very dark.”
Charlotte was aware of a tightening in the room, some emotion from him that she couldn’t identify. Encouraged, she went on, “It would be easy! You know I would let you.”
At last he looked at her. “You cannot talk a man into seducing you,” he said. “He should feel a … a longing for you.”
Charlotte shook her head. “No one does,” she said, and to her own astonishment, tears filled her eyes. It had been years since she’d cried in front of anyone. She covered her face. “No one ever will.”
She heard him moving behind her. He put his hand on her shoulder, a man’s hand. Warm. But he didn’t want her.
“You’re learning something important,” he said, rubbing her shoulder a little. She lifted her head. “The world is made of shit,” he said, and Charlotte was startled by his look: empty, hopeless.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
For just a moment, he seemed on the verge of some disclosure. Then he smiled, his face resuming its harsh posture. “Nothing you could understand.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know one thing about me.”
Look at Me Page 12
