The Girls I've Been

by Tess Sharpe

  I stare hard out at the pool. Wes has gotten hold of the unicorn floatie raft that Lee brought home one day in a rare fit of whimsy. He’s sprawled across it, his eyes half closed.

  “He’s my family,” I say finally. “I’m not going to say that he’s like my brother, because that’s gross. But until him, I had one person to trust. And being in love, that was just one small part of it. When that part ended—and that part has way, way ended—the other parts didn’t.”

  “The Franken-friends,” she says.

  “He told you about that?”

  “He tells me about a lot of things. Or, I guess, I thought he did.” She almost smiles as she watches him hugging the unicorn floatie’s neck, humming to himself, but then it flickers out. It’ll come in waves, the realization of all the secrets he and I keep; she doesn’t even know the half of it. I’m not sure she ever will. “God,” Iris says, almost to herself. “Is everyone’s dad just evil?”

  That gets my attention. “What do you mean?” Had I let something slip? I’m tracing our conversations in flashes, trying to think.

  “Nothing,” she says. And then she follows it up with a shake of her head and another “nothing.” She probably would’ve caught herself if she wasn’t so rattled, but I can’t help but notice.

  I haven’t let something slip. She has.

  “I’m not sure I’ve heard you mention your dad,” I say carefully, even though I am sure. I have a catalogue of knowledge about her in the back of my head, like a little Library of Iris I keep adding shelves to.

  “There’s nothing to say,” she says, in such a clipped way that I know there’s actually a wealth of shit to say, but she’s not going to. “My parents are getting a divorce,” she continues. “I don’t see him. How long has this been going on?”

  She gestures to the pool.

  “It’s not my story,” I say. “He’s gonna be embarrassed when the cookies fade and he realizes you saw.”

  She nods. “Right. I’ll figure that out. Is he still getting hurt?”

  The questions keep coming out of her like a compulsion.

  “Staying out of the house works most of the time,” I say carefully. “It’s been a while since . . .” I pause, lick my lips. “It’s been a few years.”

  “So he stopped,” Iris says.

  “Men like that don’t stop,” I say, and she stares me down, all questions she’s not going to ask and silent answers that I don’t know well enough to hear yet.

  “No, they don’t,” she agrees quietly.

  Is everyone’s dad just evil? Her question circles in my head, because evil is a good word for the mayor, but it makes me wonder what her dad did to earn that moniker. She makes me wonder if I need to do something about it, like I did with the mayor. It clamors inside me, that wild horse of an urge that gallops out when I remember Wes’s shoulders before they scarred and after; that day out in the woods, where I forced a dangerous change that could break at any moment, just to ruin us for good.

  “So you and Lee and Terry know,” she says.

  “And you.”

  “And me,” she agrees.

  “We try to keep him safe.” Does she understand what I’m saying? What I’m asking?

  “I understand,” she says, turning back to watch him lolling about in the pool, kicking his feet like a little kid.

  “You do?”

  She nods, still keeping her eyes on him. “You and I . . . we’re more alike than you know,” she says, and then she doesn’t say any more. Her pinky brushes up against mine on the yellow cushions and hooks around it. Not a promise, but an entwining of her and me and this knowledge between us. A twisting of something much deeper than a vow, something that has rooted in me, poised to bloom.

  I know it’s love, but in that moment before the careful unfurling, it’s simpler to pretend I don’t.

  But I’ve never been good at conning myself. Even when I want to.

  — 31 —

  11:21 a.m. (129 minutes captive)

  1 lighter, 3 bottles of vodka, 1 pair of scissors, 2 safe-deposit keys

  Plan #1: Scrapped

  Plan #2: In progress

  I pull Iris’s hair out of her face and the line of fire as she throws up, one hand pressed low on her belly as tears leak out of the corners of her eyes. When she straightens, her lower lip trembles and she wipes at her eyes with her knuckles. Her eye makeup hardly smears through those sad historical dramas with the corsets and the cliffs and the pacing along the cliffs she likes to watch, and it doesn’t now. I’d be impressed if I wasn’t so worried.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “It just hurts.” But then she leans against the desk, her entire body curling into itself. “I wish I had some water,” she adds in a smaller voice. And then she straightens, like her bones were broken glass for just a moment and now they’re steel again. “Vodka isn’t ideal for rinsing out your mouth.”

  “Not unless you’re getting ready for a bender,” Wes agrees, and she smiles shakily at him.

  She sets the trash can in the corner, then goes over to sit next to Wes on the floor across the room. I stay near the desk, because I’m not sure I’m welcome. I am sure this isn’t done. Her questions. My revelations.

  But if the two robbers are distracted by the welding machine and getting into the safe-deposit vault, we’ve probably bought ourselves enough time for SWAT to show up and actually do something.

  The problem with probably is that it’s probably. I can’t gamble our lives on the Feds down in Sacramento being fast enough to get here in time. Middle-of-nowhere towns like Clear Creek aren’t anyone’s priority.

  The only sure thing I have here is me. So I can either trust the Feds, which goes against everything I’ve been taught . . . or I can trust myself. And what can I say? I’ve never really respected authority. I’m more likely to come to Jesus than trust the FBI, and neither seems likely, all things considered. I’ll never buckle under the authority of a deity or a parent or a government agency again.

  “Is this why you two broke up?” Iris asks suddenly.

  I know I have a totally spooked look on my face, because Wes’s expression is a mirror of mine right now.

  “You told me you were the one that fucked it up,” she says to me. “I thought you meant you cheated or something.”

  “I kind of implied that so you wouldn’t figure out the truth,” I say, because honesty. It’s the policy here.

  “So me wondering if you’re a cheater is better than me knowing the truth.”

  “It’s called a secret identity for a reason,” I say. “No one’s supposed to know.”

  “Wes knows.”

  “She didn’t tell me,” Wes says. “I figured it out.”

  “Well, now I feel silly that I didn’t,” Iris says.

  “Don’t. It took me three years, a forest fire, and her pulling one fucking insane blackmail scheme for me to find out,” Wes says.

  “It was not insane. And if you keep talking about it, we’re going to have to talk about it,” I warn him.

  But to my surprise, he shrugs. “Who cares? Look where we are. You think I don’t remember? I wasn’t that high. I know she’s seen my shoulders.”

  “Oh, Wes,” Iris says, but he shrugs again. Red stains his cheeks.

  “We don’t have to—” I start to say, because I want to protect him. I want to protect her. I don’t know if I can do both. I know I can’t protect myself. Can I protect them from me? What does that mean? What would it look like?

  Me, gone, far away from them.

  “What else are we going to do?” Wes asks. “You’re putting it all out there. I might as well, too. What do you say, Iris? We may be dead any minute. Truth for Truth?”

  Iris smooths out the skirt of her dress. “Truth for Truth,” she agrees.

  They look at me, expectant.

 
; “Fine,” I say. “Truth for Truth.”

  — 32 —

  Truth for Truth

  One of the first things I discover about Iris is that if you dare her to do something, she’ll do it—unless it harms a person or animal. But she does not count herself in the person or animal categories. She is heedless and gleeful and has the self-preservation instincts of a moth drawn to dares and flames.

  Which is how, after one escalating game of Truth or Dare that ends with Iris spraining her wrist because she almost falls off the roof of Terry’s house when he dares her to climb the widow’s walk, Wes comes up with the game Truth for Truth instead.

  It’s exactly what it says on the box: If you give someone a truth, they have to give you one in return. Usually it involves drinking, which makes things easier. But now it involves just us and danger and this locked room, and sure, Iris has that vodka in her pocket, but it’s not time for drinking.

  It’s just time for the truth. For all of us.

  — 33 —

  The Mayor

  Almost Three Years Ago

  For three whole years, I do what Lee asks of me. I act normal. Like a kid, not a con artist. I still look for exits and people to talk into walking me through them. I still wake up three nights out of four fighting people who aren’t there. But I go to therapy and I don’t skip school. Wes and I are friends, and months, then years tick by, and we’re fourteen and we’re something more . . . and then we’re fifteen and we’re us.

  I didn’t realize what being part of an us was like. I didn’t know what that kind of love would nurture and bloom in me. A thorny kind of plant, more thistle than flower, one that protected and pierced, that would turn to poison if threatened.

  By the time we’re an us, we’ve already got a routine. We’re good at juggling it, his time in and out of that house. I don’t think of it as his house. It’s not—it’s the mayor’s. It’s his little fiefdom. An ostentatious log-cabin-style lodge sitting on ten acres that he rules like a medieval lord. But we’ve made it so Wes is always out the door as the mayor’s coming in. It’s not an exact science, and it’s not perfect. I can’t keep him from getting hit. But I can reduce the time he’s there, so his father has fewer opportunities.

  There are good excuses and flimsy ones, study sessions and late nights we just hold our breath, and there are times I think about creating an entire club that meets every day after school for hours if I have to, just to keep him out of there, to keep him away.

  Lee watches. More often than not, she doesn’t say anything about the boy in the guest room. She won’t, unless I step over the line. Unless I really risk us.

  And then, I do.

  Because one day, Wes doesn’t come over when he’s supposed to.

  One day, I have to go over there, looking for him.

  I know what I’m going to find before I even slip through the back door without knocking, because three years and his love is not enough to strip me of instincts that took twelve years and six girls to warp into me.

  He’s shirtless on the floor of his bathroom upstairs, and there’s so much blood on the bath towels, my stomach and my head swoop all at once. I have to grab the edge of the counter. The tile is cool against my fingers, grounding me enough to let me suck in a breath. His eyes are swollen; there are tear tracks down his face as he turns away from me.

  I’m on my knees on the towel-heaped tile next to him, and for a terrible, too-long moment, my hands just hover. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what to do. His shoulders . . .

  I’m frozen; the girl who always knows what to do. I want to ask what happened. I don’t know how to say it in a way that doesn’t make it sound like I’m blaming him for something, because the mayor, shit, the mayor is usually smarter than this. I hate that thought more than anything, but it’s the truth. He hardly ever leaves marks that won’t go away.

  And these won’t go away.

  “What do you need?” I blurt it out, because it’s the thing that my therapist asks me sometimes. Need is more than want. Need is . . . I can do need. I can help him.

  I have to help him. I have to stop this.

  (You could stop the mayor, something whispers inside me, and it sounds so much like me, and not like my mother or any of the girls, that I don’t know what to do but reject it.)

  “You gotta go,” he says. He whispers it, like he’s still afraid, and that’s when I realize he is, and that I’ve never seen him afraid before. He is strong and he is quiet until you draw him out, and then he runs his mouth in the best way, but he carries himself like he’s accepted the pain of the world, not like he fears it. “He’ll be back soon. If he finds you here . . .”

  “I’m not leaving you,” I say. “You need a hospital. Stitches.”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t.”

  Of course. Why did I even say that? Why am I not thinking right?

  I’m thinking like Nora. Like I’m normal. Time to stop doing that.

  “Where’s the first aid kit?”

  “Downstairs. In the kitchen.”

  “I’ll be right back. Keep the pressure on it.” I press the towel against his shoulder, and his hand comes up to hold it, his fingers brushing against mine. “I love you,” I tell him, and it’s so little, it’s nothing, but he looks at me through red-rimmed eyes like it’s everything.

  It takes me forever to find the first aid kit. I’m still rooting around in the bottom cupboards when I hear it: the sound of tires on gravel. Someone’s coming.

  I jerk up, snapping the cupboard door shut, the kit forgotten. The hairs on my arms rise as the sound grows louder, and I glance over my shoulder. The back door is right there. I could . . .

  But if the mayor touches Wes again . . .

  My mind’s full of half-formed thoughts; I’m so rusty. It feels like the part of me that’s supposed to react fast and smart is atrophied, struggling to come alive in time. But my body takes over like it knows what to do. I’ve set a pan on the stove before I’m even thinking of the plan. I move over to the fridge, pulling out the vegetables from the crisper and whatever was wrapped in butcher paper on the bottom shelf. Don’t rush, I remind myself. I’ll get red if I hurry, and he’ll be looking at me close.

  I grab the biggest butcher knife. Wes’s mom likes to cook, and her knives are beautiful. Handcrafted in Japan and sharpened lovingly and expertly. It would be so easy to . . .

  I could . . .

  No. I couldn’t.

  I hear the honking sound of the mayor locking his car. He’ll be inside the house any minute now. I drizzle olive oil into the pan on the stove and then turn back to the cutting board. By the time his footsteps hit the hallway, I’ve chopped an entire onion and dumped it into the heating pan. It sizzles. I pray that Wes stays upstairs. If he keeps out of sight, I can pull this off.

  “Wes, are you cooking some—” He stops short in the kitchen when he catches sight of me.

  I look up from the carrot I’m chopping and give him a casual smile. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I want to scream at him. I want to stab him. I want so many things, and most of them are violent and all of them are terrifying, because I’m not supposed to be like that anymore.

  I’m supposed to be Nora.

  But I’m not right now. I fall right back into my old ways now that I’m awake—alive—again, now that I’ve got a plan.

  “Nora, what are you doing here?”

  “I’m sorry, did I startle you?” I ask. “Wes wasn’t feeling good, and there’s that flu going around. I came by to check on him. He was already asleep, so I thought I’d make him some soup for when he wakes up. Mrs. Prentiss said it was okay to use the ingredients. I called her.”

  I go back to chopping the vegetables as the onions sweat on the stove. I keep an eye on him out of the corner of mine. He’s trying to decide what’s going on.


  I sweep the carrots off the cutting board and into the pan with the flat of the knife and then go back to the counter to take care of the celery. “I’m going to make homemade noodles,” I continue, filling the eerie silence that’s taken over Mrs. Prentiss’s cavernous kitchen. The mayor’s just standing there, staring at me, wondering if I know. If I don’t. What to do in both scenarios.

  “I didn’t realize you could cook, Nora,” he finally says. He moves farther into the kitchen as he talks, closer to me. My fingers curl tighter around the handle of the knife. How many steps would it take to get to the back door? Ten? Fifteen? I should know this. I should’ve counted.

  “I can knit, too. My mother taught me both before she passed away.”

  “Cooking’s a good skill to have.”

  “Especially when you have a sister who works as much as mine. She’s so busy catching criminals and helping keep us all safe. The least I can do is make dinner a few times a week.”

  He slows down at the mention of Lee. At the reminder: I have someone waiting for me at home. She’ll hunt him down and gut him with a paper clip if he hurts me.

  The celery gets added to the pan, and I stir the softening vegetables around. The mayor settles down on a stool set on the opposite side of the kitchen island, and I grit my teeth. At least if he’s here with me, it means he can’t be upstairs with Wes.

  I unwrap the chicken from the butcher paper and set it on the cutting board. He’s watching me so closely; I know if I take a deep, steeling breath like I want, he’ll notice. So I take the knife and begin to break down the chicken like Raymond taught me to do. I’m good with knives and I’ve never been squicked by raw meat, so teaching me the basics had been his way of bonding that first year, when he was still in hard-woo mode with Mom and me.

  I slice the chicken apart, separating the flesh and bone and skin with the deftness of a surgeon, and when I glance up at the mayor, he’s staring down at my hands with surprising intent.