“Yes, but I’m not keeping it.”
He stared at me over the rim of his glass as he drank. I could tell he was curious about me. Someone my age who was so sure, so savvy. So practical.
“Your choice,” he said. “But if you worked for me over the summer, you could go to Hollywood with a nice nest egg.”
I knew I could. The temptation was real, and torturous. Every night I weighed it in my mind. Siphon what I could from Hiyam and Gary and their ilk, and go to California with full pockets, without the pressure of fighting other starry-eyed fledglings tooth-and-nail for shitty jobs and shittier apartments? How could Evan say no if I told him he had a year to find a job he truly loved, a year while we lived freely in the sun? But I couldn’t. It was a trap, not a shortcut. The more money you made, the deeper in you got with these scumbags. They’d collect dirt on you. Then it became an endless game of bluffing, everyone constantly poised to destroy each other Game of Thrones-style, and your only choice was to keep working your way up, waiting to be dethroned. That’s what Mom never understood. It was a zero sum game. Your gain came at the expense of someone else, and eventually someone else would gain at your expense. The best you could hope for was to live and keep playing a little longer.
Or you could walk away before they had you that deep.
“I know what I’m doing,” I said.
Gary gave me that sharky smile. “You know, sweetheart, sometimes I think you do.”
Hiyam wore a dress conservative by her standards, a heart-shaped neck framing a pillow of satiny bronze cl**vage, her hoop earrings flashing. On the cab ride to the restaurant I thought about hooking her up with Park, and began to laugh. Totally his type: the uber-hot alpha girl with a planet-sized ego to match. He’d be trying to ditch her within two minutes flat.
“What’s so funny, O’Malley?”
“Nothing.”
“Then maybe you should shut the f**k up, or I’ll start having second thoughts.”
I wiped the smile off my face. “Hiyam.”
“What?”
I looked her straight in the eye. “I’m going to see Evan tomorrow. And I’m going to f**k the shit out of him, just like I did last weekend.” I raised my eyebrows innocently. “Do you want me to say hi?”
She frowned. This must be confusing for her, the slave showing backbone, willingly divulging information. She didn’t understand I had nothing to fear from her anymore.
“You still see him?”
“Yes.”
“So you really do have a thing. It wasn’t just, ‘Fuck me, Mr. Wilke?’”
“Oh,” I said lazily, “I still say that.”
And I burst out laughing at the look on her face.
“You crazy bitch,” Hiyam said, part misgiving, part awe.
In the restaurant Quinn gave us both pat-downs before we sat, which Hiyam seemed to find equally offensive and erotic. I traded glances with the tall, dark-haired boy in a borrowed waiter’s uniform. Hiyam, being Hiyam, never noticed him. He was just the help.
“Mr. Rivero,” I said, “I’d like you to meet my friend, Hiyam Farhoudi.”
—11—
St. Louis was still sleepy with winter, the grass like frosted straw, the sky an anemic blue and the Mississippi muddy green, sluggish but unstoppable. Skyscrapers glinted harshly, mirroring the cold white sun.
Park took us to a club that let under-21s in and his bartender friend looked the other way when I drank from Evan’s glass. We watched Park flirt with a gorgeous mixed-race girl, cinnamon skin and laughing eyes, but he left her with a frown and came back to us, saying she wanted Evan’s number. I nearly choked. When I kissed Evan I tasted the whiskey and cola we were sharing. He took me out on the floor and Park joined us. They both danced with me, Evan’s eyes hypnotic and his smile slow and our bodies edging closer and closer until Park wrapped a ridiculously muscular arm around my waist and picked me up, spinning me away. Evan laughed and let me go, and I danced with strangers for a while until he slipped behind me, his mouth at my ear, his erection pressed against my ass, saying, “Everyone’s in love with you.” Guys were staring at me, and so was a cute pixie-haired girl, and I smiled. Cones of hot colored light flashed in my face, scarlet, violet, indigo. I was drunk as much on whiskey as on the liquor of sweat and cologne. We caught our own cab to the loft. Evan pressed me into the soft leather seat and put his hand between my legs until I gasped and the cabbie threatened to kick us out. I tipped him double and we rushed upstairs. The elevator made me shriek with surprise, forgetting the haunting, and Evan laughed and kissed me and once we got inside he picked me up, turning with me in his arms. “What are you doing?” I said, and he said, “Being in love,” and I started kissing him again and he let me down to focus on the kiss. We broke apart and moved around the loft aimlessly, picking things up, flipping switches with a restless, agitated happiness. It’s all still here, I thought. All the things we touched and all the things we felt. It was too intense, being near each other, and we orbited from across the room, keeping large objects between us.
“What if this is it?” he said in front of the windows. Beyond him the night sky was an oil painting of deep, swirling blues, starless, the bright streets sketching a map of light across the city.
I sat on the arm of the sofa, ankles crossed.
“What if this is all we have?” he said, coming closer. “What if you go to California, and I never see you again?”
“Then I’ll make movies about it for the rest of my life. About a girl who falls in love with her teacher, and loses him tragically, and never loves again.”
He looked at my hand on the couch: the Claddagh ring on my finger again, its heart turned toward me.
“Why won’t you come to LA?” I said in a hushed voice.
He took a deep breath. He kept looking at the ring. “Your life is just beginning, Maise. You have so much ahead of you, so many new things. And you’re already way too damn cynical. Don’t argue, it’s true.”
I closed my mouth. Then I said, “I wasn’t.”
He smiled. “I don’t want to take that from you. The thrill of discovering things for yourself. Of feeling like the world is new and made just for you.”
“That’s the exact opposite of how it is.” I was shivering suddenly, shaking. I felt an understanding building in me after a long, arduous unveiling. Revelation. “You’re right, I was cynical. I thought I knew everything, I thought the world was vulgar and crude, all cheap thrills. You couldn’t make me any more jaded than I was when we met.” I let my arms fall, let my spine hold me, a slender fin of bone. How had it borne the weight of so much cynicism all these years? “You changed that. You’re the one who made it new for me. If I hadn’t met you, I would’ve gone off to college thinking everything was the same. I would’ve become hardened and walled up and—” Just like my mother. “—empty. A perfect shell, protecting nothing.”
“Maise,” Evan said.
“Don’t you see how different I am now? Didn’t you see it in my film, and every day we spent together, and apart? The world is new when I’m with you.” I took his hands in mine. “And I’ve seen you, I’ve seen how you light up when you’re with me. It’s the same for you. We’re both kids with each other, and this world is made just for us. So that can’t be your reason for saying no.”
“Am I saying no?”
“You’re not saying yes.” I pulled him toward me. “Do you really want to teach high school in Southern f**king Illinois the rest of your life?”
He gave me that patented furrowed brow.
“And,” I said, pulling him closer, my voice lowering, “do you really not want to f**k me, every day, in our house full of sunlight and Santa Ana winds, in Southern f**king California?”
He put his mouth on my neck, his stubble raking my throat. “I want to f**k you now.”
Do it, I told him with my eyes. Please, please do it.
He took my clothes off, and his own, and laid me on the bed on the icy silk sheets, and the gravity that had threatened to throw us into collision finally did. I held him close as he moved inside me, hard and deep and with an urgency that felt somehow final, and we gave ourselves to it, fully, without reservation. No future and no past, only an endless now. Afterward, as we lay with our limbs tangled and stared at the pipes on the ceiling, his words ran through me. What if this is all we have? This closeness, this space between breaths, holding each other like air in our lungs, the oxygen metabolizing into our blood in a thrilling, ephemeral rush?
How could it ever, ever be enough?
“How was your spring break?” Hiyam said, dropping her Cheshire grin on me.
“Best I’ve ever had,” I said, smiling back. “You?”
She rolled her eyes, tossed her hair, bared her smooth coppery neck to me. She laughed at the ceiling. Kids sitting nearby stared.
“In-f**king-describable,” she said.
Translation: coked out of her mind.
I kept smiling, but she didn’t see the way it deepened in my eyes, the dark flash.
“Hey,” I said. “What do you have next period?”
“American History.”
“Ditch and meet me in 209.”
She lowered her face, curious. “Why?”
“I’ve got something for you,” I said, and patted my pocket.
Hiyam laughed her rich, sultry laugh. “You freak.”
Green light, I texted Wesley after class.
Hiyam caught up with me on the stairs to the second floor, where I’d unknowingly made my way to the class that would change my life. Part of me still expected to open his door and catch him glancing up from his desk, smiling. I’d kissed him in here like I meant to devour him, let him push me against the whiteboard and f**k me with his fingers. God, I thought. Was that really my life? It seemed like a dream now. A movie.
There was no Evan inside the dark class. There was, however, a Wesley, sitting with his laptop on the dais at the back. The projector was on, its lamp burning hot as a quasar.
Hiyam’s eyes drifted from him to me. Intrigue, suspicion, but no fear.
Not yet.
“I didn’t know you nerds were into this,” she said.
“Into what?” I said, waiting for her to walk in so I could stealthily lock the door.
“Getting high.”
“We’re not,” Wesley said, moving the mouse cursor over a video.
“We’re into revenge,” I said. “Have a seat.”
Hiyam was so f**king confident, so used to getting away with everything, that she laughed and sat at her old desk, crossing her legs as if we were back in Film Studies, vying for Mr. Wilke’s attention. Now she knew it had always been mine. I took the teacher’s chair, propping my feet on the desk.
“And now for our final victim,” I said, echoing Evan, “Hiyam Farhoudi.”
Wesley clicked play.
I’d seen this a dozen times, so I mostly watched Hiyam’s face. She shook her head knowingly, a smirk curling in the corners of her mouth, when the first frame came up: