How to Disappear (19 page)

I say, “Do you ever think about going ‘screw it’ and getting away?”

She says, “Like a week at Disney World or life in Argentina?”

“Argentina.”

Her hand covers my hand. “Was this the plan? Pass out for ten hours, then strike with your lame romantic fantasy?”

“Ten hours?”

“That might be an exaggeration,” she says. “Just slightly.” Then she starts unbuttoning her shirt.

Once it’s off and she’s still kissing me, I reach around her and unhook her bra.

She says, “Nuh-uh,” batting my hands away.

I say, “I’ll do it.” But I’ve never hooked a bra back up, and they’re not as stretchy as you’d think. I’m trying to get her bra closed again without breaking the mood, hoping she’ll say it’s okay to leave it open. She doesn’t, and I feel like a clown. Finally, she does it herself, behind her back, not even seeing where the miniscule hooks are.

Then she touches my hand, still behind her, pulling it onto her skin.

I say, “That was close. Thanks for preserving my virtue.”

“Sarcasm,” she says. “So unromantic.”

Then she takes the hem of my T-shirt and she starts to lift it up over my torso. Reflexively, I pull it back down.

She says, “What? You want to stash me in Paraguay, but you won’t let me kiss your naked shoulders?”

“Gotta keep you in line.”

“Take off your shirt.”

It’s not like everyone who’s ever been to a pool party with me, and dozens of crew teams, haven’t seen me without a shirt. I know the drill. I’ve got my story down if anybody asks. That doesn’t mean I want to be here now, showing her.

“What?” she says, touching my hair. “Do you have a tattoo that says,
I love my wife
or
I love Mommy
or
I love boys
? Do you have a giant birthmark in the shape of a weasel? Do you have a terrifying scar?”

She stops right there.

She says, “I’m sorry.” She sits there, waiting for me to say something. “I swear, I thought it was like you thought I’d hate chest hair or something. I was joking about the scar.”

How transparent am I? One day I’m calculating in minute detail the staging of a murder in the mountains, and now I’ve lowered my guard like a drawbridge for her to cross.

She says, “I really was joking. Sorry, okay? Don’t be mad.”

There’s more silence from me. It’s not that I’m fuming; it’s that I don’t know what to say.

“It’s just kind of weird getting this naked with someone who’s not equally naked,” she says. “That’s all. I keep the bra, you keep the shirt, okay?”

I raise my arms.

She says, “You don’t have to do this.” Then she eases my T-shirt up past my pits and over my head.

I wish I could see her face, but she’s behind me now on the bed, her legs pressing against me on either side. I think,
Perfect, this is the A-number-one position to get garroted, one thin stretch of wire to my neck, quick, followed by instant death.

I’m in the A-number-one position for a stupid guy who trusts a girl, shirtless, without anything between me and the truth, between me and her. I’m acting exactly like a person who trusts people, specifically her, the girl I just invited to a South American country, whom anyone in his right mind would know not to trust.

I feel her eyes on my back, fixed on the expanse of skin where my biography is etched.

I feel her finger tracing the scar that runs across my back, first the faint lines and then the one where it’s hard for me to feel anything but a vague pressure, where I can’t feel the location of her finger on my body unless she pushes down hard, because the sensation is gone: the ugly one. The scar twists across my back in uneven knots of hard white skin, like a deformed centipede.

She says, “Who did this to you?”

The story is that Don did it. It goes, we were playing with fencing swords, one of them with the dull tip broken off, leaving a jagged metal point. The story is that we were too young to understand the danger, that we both thought we were Zorro until I started to bleed through my cut-to-ribbons Sunday School shirt.

I don’t know why I put the Sunday School shirt in there, nice detail though.

The story is a lie.

“ ‘
Two paths diverge in a yellow wood
,’ ” she misquotes. “Are you going to tell me or not?”

The idea that a month ago I was sitting in AP English and cared what Robert Frost had to say is remarkable. It’s amazing how false it feels for that to be my memory, as if high school and AP English and raising my hand and being called on could never happen to the thug I am now.

But the AP English in me speaks. “Roads. It was roads that diverged.”

“Show-off. Are you going to take the path where you tell me what happened to you?”

I try to get myself to feel better about this so I can keep some semblance of control here. I say to myself,
I might as well tell her, she already suspects
. She’d probably admire someone who could cut up a kid, her being such a master of cutting up humans.

But it feels as if the girl who’s a slasher and the girl on the bed this close to me are two different people. I don’t want to hurt either one of them.

I want her to know, God knows why.

I try to convince myself that coming out with it would have a strategic advantage. If I go with the truth about this thing, it will make me look honest as hell. I could be the trustworthy guy who gets to unhook the bra.

Okay, there’s that. I’m trying to have sex with her, which, under the circumstances, makes me a monster—a respectful monster, but a monster.

I say, “I tell people my brother and I were playing with a broken saber.”

“But that’s not true?” I’m not sure if this is a question or a statement.

Suddenly, I’m not turned on. She’s put my T-shirt on herself, snuggling now at my side. The shirt hangs like a charcoal gray tepee, which on her could still be arousing. It’s not arousing now.

“My dad had an anger-management problem.” The words come out slowly. They feel stuck in my mouth.

“That’s one way of putting it,” she says, her fingers still wandering the surface of my back, between the shoulder blades and down my spine as she curls around me. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

She can say that, but she’s waiting for something.

“My dad beat on me.” It doesn’t even sound like my voice. “Not often. Jesus.” She’s moved to where she’s next to me, holding me, touching my face. My face is in her now-black hair where it gets fluffy around the neck, soft as a cat.

Her arms wrap around me. She says, “I’d never have kids if I thought I’d do that
once
.”

“You don’t think anyone can lose it if they’re angry enough? If everything lines up, perfect storm?”

She’s hanging on to me from the side, straddling me, clinging the way those stuffed animal toys with hinged arms and legs cling
to the ends of pencils. “You seriously think
anyone
could beat on a kid with a meat cleaver?”

I have to stop myself from saying
You should know
or
Got hypocrisy?
or
What the fuck were you doing with a knife and Connie Marino’s jugular vein?

But I don’t say any of it. I say, “Belt buckle.”

I’ve told the other story so often that the truth feels like a lie. Having Don shred my back sounds a lot more plausible than my dad losing it. Of course, my dad losing it isn’t what happened either. My dad always did what he intended to do. He didn’t lose it.

It’s hard to breathe because my throat is closing. I force words out across my tongue and through my lips, which are freaking quivering—
quivering
! I don’t get like this. I will not.

I say, “It wasn’t his anger-management problem. He didn’t realize how much it would show. It was a big PR disaster.”

Maybe I can’t breathe because she’s holding me so tight. She’s pressed against me so hard everywhere, I couldn’t get any closer unless I were literally inside her. But I’m the opposite of turned on.

Her hands are kneading my shoulders. She has a lot of hand strength for a small girl: surprise, surprise. I lean forward, away from her. The places we were skin to skin peel apart with a little stripping sound.

I’m making satisfied noises against my will.

She says, “Do you want to keep having this conversation?”

“No! I don’t ever want to discuss this again.”

“Don’t yell at me.”

“Sorry.”

“When I was joking about wounded, sensitive guys? The part where I said they can’t stand me and they make me sick. I’m sorry.”

“I’m
not
wounded. And I’m
not
sensitive. Give me back my shirt.”

She pulls it right off, slides it fast over my head and down my shoulders. Once my eyes are uncovered, there’s the pink polka-dotted bra. It’s a don’t-touch-me, purest-girl-on-the-cheerleading-squad, don’t-think-about-going-all-the-way bra.

I wish beyond wishing that the truth wasn’t true. I wish Connie Marino were alive and well and acing nursing school in Michigan. I wish this girl with the unfettered evil streak didn’t make me feel this way—this crazy protective want-to-be-with-her-all-the-time way.

Pull on the snag, and the sweater unravels.

Everyone knows that.

I know that.

I didn’t mean to unravel him. I would knit him back up if I could. But all I get to do is hold him, sensitive and wounded, leaning back against me on the bed.

I want to say,
Be all right. Don’t let me mess you up. I can knit. Let me fix this
.

I know there’s no way to fix this.

If I could face down the man who did this to him, the so-called father with the belt, I would—with my own hands, with the rush mothers get that lets them lift boulders off their half-crushed babies—give him what he deserves.

I hum and stroke J’s head, the babysitting move that puts the kid to sleep.

He relaxes into me.

I want to be a real girl holding a real boy. Not a fake person from a fake trailer full of fake religious zealots pretending to care about someone she’s going to ditch ASAP because her whole life is all me me me, staying alive.

The plan is to slide from place to place. Score a birth certificate. Get a real job. Save up. Go to college online. Get plastic surgery. Do everything intentionally missing people on TV shows do, and come out as a living person who’s not me.

The problem is, I hate this plan.

Tell me how it’s being alive if you can’t stop for one freaking second and care about someone? And not just because he’s distracting you with charm and hotness. When he’s not one-upping you with his macho boy thing. When you just accidently pushed him into his own personal dark cellar full of spooks and things that snag and snag and snag.

Please, please get out of the cellar.

Said the fake girl to the real boy crashing into her. Through his T-shirt, I feel the raggedy line of the strand I yanked on. I feel it in the scar across his back and in the tension in his shoulder blades.

I say, “Please. I’m so sorry I did that about your shirt. I’m an idiot.”

He says, “No harm done.” Touches his neck. He’s so lying.

Harm done.

“Tell me how to make you feel better. Anything.” Then I wish I could take back the
anything
because it sounds like I’m offering up sex like it was Krazy Glue to stick broken guys back together.

“Anything?”
I can tell it’s a tease.

“Not
that
anything. Some other anything. Where I’m not an idiot and I bake you a pie.”

“I’m not getting psychoanalyzed for a metaphorical pie.”

“Actual pie. I don’t do metaphorical anything, duh. I’m not literary, I’m practical. Do you want it or not?”

He swings his legs over the side of the bed. His face looks semi-normal.

I say, “Don’t even answer. All straight guys want pie and bra removal. It’s a fact of life.”

He shakes his head. “Is this chiseled on stone tablets? Because I wouldn’t want to mess with the eleventh commandment.”

“On bedrock. Do you mind store-bought crust?”

You can tell he’s so glad he’s not fending off a conversation about his back, his father, or anything that makes him seem, look, or feel weak, he’d eat crust made of crushed gravel. This guy likes weakness even less than all other guys like weakness.

It seems like I actually see him, weirdly so, since we’re busy burying his actual feelings in pastry. Even from this place of total fakeness, I get him. I do. Not Cat.
Me.

“Store-bought?” He shakes his head. “I might have to dump you.”

“Ha! I’d have to be your girlfriend for you to dump me, and I’m so not.”

Only maybe I am.

Or maybe Cat is, and how’s that supposed to work?

I run across the backyard to Mrs. Podolski’s kitchen. I grab a crust. I bake him a blueberry pie in the garage’s miniature oven.

We make out while waiting for it to cool.

Do I know how idiotic this is?

Do I know we should be dealing with what happens now? (About blowing town. About the guy he pounded and I punctured. About disappearing.)

Do I know I have to go, and going with him would be mind-blowingly stupid?

Yes to all of the above.

Walking back to my apartment from her place, I’m whistling. Then I’m not whistling so much.

I know to check if things are as I left them. I’ve known that since I was five, and not just because Don took my stuff and put it back broken.

Trip wires, threads, twigs, tiny wads of lint—you wouldn’t think a person so conversant with the fine art of self-preservation would be facing down two guys in his living room.

Correction: I’m facing one guy. I walked in, and there he was, sitting in the dark. The second guy was pressed against the bookcase, a yard from the door. But I missed him, and now he has a hard metallic thing just behind my head. I force air up and down my nostrils, smell the dust in the apartment, and the humans.

Nobody says anything.

Every breath seems to take thirty seconds: time to plan. First you assess your target, then you plan. You hit them hard enough to get away, and then you get away.