The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (26 page)

“Gotta go,” I said.

I walked away, already thumbing at the call button under Birdwine’s name.

“Are you kidding me?” he called after me, back to pissy. “Hey! Are you fucking kidding me?”

I kept walking, disappearing into the hallway that led to the bathrooms and the back way out. It was quiet enough here for me to hear the phone, ringing and ringing. Damn Birdwine, he let me go to voicemail. I waited for the beep.

“So I’m at McGwiggen’s,” I said, with no preamble. “I met this guy. Could’ve left with him, but no. I blew him off. I wasn’t even nice about it, and you have no idea how bad I want to lie to you.” I was talking loud, making myself be heard over the music. I slipped out the back door into the quiet alley. “I want to say, ‘Hey Birdwine, I’m calling from the top of reverse cowgirl.’ Then I’d get to hurt you without the risk of bad sex or chlamydia.” Ye gods, but it felt good to yell at him, though. Crazy good. If I had only thought to call Kai like this, back in the day, I could have saved so much money on birth control, maybe skipped a solid third of all that therapy. There was no one to hear me except the row of old-school silver trash cans where McGwiggen’s unfinished wing platters came to die. It smelled sour, like hot sauce and bones, with the nasty tang of ranch dip going wrong. “I ditched him like I owed it to you. Why is that? Why do I still feel like I owe it to you, when you are so patently an asshole? When you are—”

Light spilled into the alleyway around me, and I whirled to see that Cowboy had followed me. I stepped back as the door swung shut behind him.

“Are you running off on me,” he said, but it didn’t lilt up on the end into a question. It was a statement, both proprietary and weirdly emphatic.

I hit the button to close my call and slipped my phone back in my bag, instantly wary enough that I wanted both hands free. I wished I’d thought to palm my mace when I stepped out, but I couldn’t very well go digging for it now. I straightened up, tall enough in my high shoes to have an inch or two on him.

I made my voice cold as I could, which was pretty close to arctic. “I told you, it’s not on. Go back inside.”

“You don’t want to piss me off,” he said, as if something was at stake here.

Very intense, considering we weren’t even the cost of a drink to each other. Adrenaline began leaking into my bloodstream. I could feel myself swelling with it. The air around us had charged, and it was charging still.

He took one step toward me, not quite into my space, but closer. He was between me and the door, and I’d be giving him an opening if I tried to duck around him. If he knew how to fight, if he leveraged his much greater upper-body strength, I didn’t stand much chance. But a guy like this—gym-made muscles, capped teeth, and a fresh, expensive haircut—he might start soft, a testing slap or grab. I could go after his soft bits, immediate and hard. Disable him long enough to get inside.

He took another step into me. I held my ground, because prey retreats, and hunger follows anything that runs. The lights above the door made his hair a yellow nimbus. A shadow fell across his eyes, so I could see them only as a gleaming. The light bounced off his sculpted nose, his narrow jawline. Elegant. Familiar.

I recognized him then.

He wasn’t pinging in my memory against every one-off frat boy I’d ever taken off behind some trees. He’d seemed familiar because he was familiar. I’d seen him before. Just once, in a picture. I hadn’t recognized him without the demon horns, the red eyes, and the Hitler mustache.

My pickup wannabe was Oakleigh’s husband.

“Clark?” I said, so shocked that I stepped back, banging into the row of silver trash cans. I reached behind me, put one hand on the edge to steady myself. “Clark Winkley?”

“Shit,” he said, angry to be recognized, but he did not back off.

He took another step in, shifting how the light fell, and I could see his eyes again, shining with something purely ugly. I thought he’d make his move, and my body coiled in on itself. I couldn’t allow him to get a solid grip on me. I had to hurt him bad enough to get away.

But he stayed where he was. Instead of reaching for me, he slipped his hand into the pocket of his jacket, where he balled it in a fist, grabbing something. Then I realized why he hadn’t done the cliché move tried by every man on earth who’d ever shot pool with a woman: the lean-over from behind to help line up a shot that didn’t need relining. It wasn’t because he hadn’t been happy to see me. He hadn’t wanted me to feel the gun.

“Clark, this is not about me,” I said, as cool as I could with my mouth gone suddenly so dry.

“You should have gone to bed with me. But no, you had to be a bitch about it,” Clark said. His pretty-boy face was twisted, sculptured nostrils flared. Oakleigh had picked out that nose at the plastic surgeon’s, I remembered. The sides of his mouth were wet, spit leaking out, and he didn’t even notice. “Jesus, everyone who’s ever met you says that you’re a whore. You should have gone ahead and been a whore.”

So I had his lawyer, Macon, to thank for this. That sackless piece of crap must have talked about our past. Ye gods, how small men hated to be beaten by a woman. Especially a woman they were sleeping with. So his lawyer had called me a slut, and Clark had come up with a plan to get the easy lawyer into bed. And if I had brought him home with me?

Of course. I’d show up for the meet on Monday to find last week’s nameless cowboy was the opposition. I’d have to recuse myself.

“Clark,” I said. “Nothing has happened. Not yet. Right now there’s no big story here. We played some pool. I realized you were my client’s husband, you realized I was Oakleigh’s lawyer. We walked away.”

It was an error, saying Oakleigh’s name.

“No. No, no, dammit,” he said, and that spittle leaking out around his lips hit my face in pinprick sprinkles. “You’re bitches, and neither of you gets to walk away.”

Why had I plugged his rat hole? He’d been perfectly happy to stalk Oakleigh, to risk death climbing trees, creeping along her roofline, peeing in her makeup case. I’d claimed his attention for myself when I’d locked him out. All of his attention. He’d come into McGwiggen’s not half an hour after I did. He’d known right where I was, the same way he’d known whenever Oakleigh left the house. He’d been following me.

For days now, I’d felt watched and followed. Even Julian had felt it, back at Birdwine’s place. Tonight had been the first real opening he’d had, and he had taken it. I put one hand up, propitiating, my other hand still braced on the trash can’s greasy edge, holding me steady and upright.

“Clark, let’s take a breath, okay?” I said, almost lilting, the way I’d talk to a dangerous dog who had backed me in a corner. “I know you’re really angry.”

“Bitch, you don’t know a damn thing, yet.”

He took his hand out of his pocket.

Then all I could see was the snub-nose pistol.

It didn’t look real. I felt an absurd bubble of laughter rising up. He was holding a lady gun, bright silver with mother-of-pearl glinting at the handle. It was a silly little thing, too slight a weight to make his jacket hang wrong, crafted to rest between a compact and a purse dog. It was exactly the sort of gun a girl like Oakleigh would find darling. And yet this shiny bit of nonsense was pointed at my middle. It could put a hole in me. It could kill me.

“Wait,” I said, though other words were crowding in my throat. Useless ones. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t die right now, not with so many things unfinished.

Hana unfound. Kai’s fate unknown. My best friend’s new baby, named Paul after me, would never know my face. My new brother would be hit with yet another loss. The last words I’d ever say to Birdwine would be the ones I’d just recorded, angry, unforgiving, calling him an asshole.

Clark laughed then, a hoarse and breaking sound. He swept the gun up until it was pointing directly in my face. It gleamed like a bright toy in his elegant hand.

The small, dark hole at the end of it looked into my left eye, promising oblivion. I looked back, and time slowed. Stopped. I saw my end inside that pinprick darkness, saw it as if it had already happened. As if it had happened a long time ago, and was still happening now.

CHAPTER 11

T
his is the dangerous time.

Outside, the sun is shining, and yellow light streams in the window. Outside, Kai is on her way to me. This morning we have our first visit in the flesh since her release, and I feel like I am filled with butter-colored sunshine, too. Inside my body, I am bright with it, barely able to stay inside my skin. Even so, I keep my face blank and lie still. I am beside a bomb.

My mattress is shaped like a long, narrow valley. Candace lies in the center trench, staring up at the ceiling. The depression in the middle is the weight of history, shaped over time by every kid who ever slept here. Candace’s slight weight has not changed it in any way that I can feel on those rare moments when I have my bed to myself. She doesn’t seem like a bomb right now. She seems like a girl who is about to fall back asleep in the choicest spot.

I lie along the raised edge on my side, my back to the wall. Even now, I can feel the two depressions in the ridge that Joya and I made, back when we used to sit here every day. It is a solid proof that we were here, as personal as a graffiti sign or a fingerprint. The last time Joya fit herself into her space here, she was readying to leave me, and we burned each other to the ground.

“What’s she look like? Your mama?” Candace asks.

Candace has gone spelunking in my private lockbox often enough to see my mother in pictures from every angle. I answer anyway, to placate her.

“She’s tall and pale,” I say, offhand. I don’t say how beautiful she is. I don’t say,
I used to put my bare feet on top of her bare feet, and she would spin while I yelled, “Dance me, dance me.”
“She has long hair. Or used to have.”

It’s Saturday morning, and Mrs. Mack has sent the other girls to watch the TV in the center building’s rec hall, so Kai and I can have the common room. Candace wanted to wait with me, and I didn’t fight her. I will not fight Candace on anything. Not now.

My mother and I have made plans during our court-mandated phone calls. I know she is already job hunting, apartment hunting, working to meet every requirement to regain me. Soon, I will be going home with her. Every step I take between now and my departure, I am walking on a knife edge with this crazy girl who knows enough to ruin me.

“I think it’s weird your mama is a white lady,” Candace says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I can’t imagine what all your daddy was, huh?” Candace tells the ceiling.

I feel a lightning flash of temper, but I let it pass and fade.

“I don’t know.”

That puts us on more common ground. Candace only ever had a stepdad, and he was bad news. He’s one reason that her mama has lost parental rights forever and Candace is available to be adopted. She’s white, but she’s also an adolescent who’s been broken in ways that make people uncomfortable. Outlook not good on adoption.

“Here’s a weird thing about cats,” Candace says, abruptly. She shifts in the bed, rolling on her side to face me and scootching back. Now she teeters on the opposite edge of the mattress. The trench is between us, tipping us in toward each other. We both have to brace. “A mama cat is whatever kind of cat she is. Maybe she’s a calico. But she can have a litter with three kittens and one will be black, and one yellow, and one stripy, because they all have a different daddy.”

“Yeah. So?” I say, not following.

“Maybe you’re like that,” Candace says. “Maybe you’re all three kittens.”

I can feel my face flush. I’m pretty sure that in her crazy way, she’s called Kai a whore and me some kind of mutant. But all I say is, “That could be kinda cool, if I got three child supports. I’d be so rich. I could go to Disney World and stay all summer.”

Candace was hoping for a rise, and my attempt at humor agitates her. She blinks rapidly, then slithers in closer. Her breath is sweet, milky and butterscotchy, as if she’s been eating pudding.

“I had a secret dream,” she whispers. “In the nighttime. I was dreaming that your mama took us both. We both went home to live with her, and you let me pick out the color to paint your room. Isn’t that weird?”

Trick question. I deflect. “Depends. What color did you pick?”

Her brows knit. “I think green?”

“Then that’s not weird,” I say.

“Well, but, I had to sleep inside a drawer under your bed.”

That makes me smile. Sometimes Candace can be funny. “Okay, that is weird.”

“I wish, though, I wish it could be true,” she whispers, even lower, and her eyes on me are so intense. We are not talking about her dream now. “Do you think your mama would ever be a foster?”

“I don’t think they let people who went to jail be fosters, is the only thing,” I say.

It is far from the only thing. But it is the only thing that it feels safe to say.

“But they’ll let her have you back, so she can’t be dangerous to kids,” Candace argues.

But I am Kai’s, by right,
I want to say.
I was born to her, and we share blood and history. We got a judge who made exceptions and bent rules based purely on the force of the bond he saw between us. And who the hell are you?

It’s true, but it’s a truth that would burn and blister if I let it touch Candace. I don’t want to remind her of all the ways that we are different. Chief among them, I belong to somebody. I say nothing, until Candace answers herself.

“Anyways, I was mostly wondering if she would like it, not if they would let her. Like if she was that kind of person who would want more kids.”

This subject is too dangerous. I change the conversation. “You know we’ll still see each other, you and me.” I am feeding Candace the same spoonful of crap Joya tried to serve up sweet to me. Still, I have to try. Candace owns a weapon that can only be used once, but if she’s losing everything anyway, what’s to stop her?

Kai must never know I am the one who made the 911 call, that I cost her her freedom. And Dwayne, too, whatever that was worth. He mattered enough for her to ask me if I had gotten any letters from old friends, three calls in a row after I sent the poem. He never wrote me back at all. The fourth call, she didn’t bring it up, so I asked,
What happened, with, you know, that poem about Rama and Sita?
There was a long silence, and then she said,
Rama who?
I don’t remember any Rama in our story.
She never mentioned Dwayne again.

“But what if you live far though?” Candace asks, plaintive.

“Kai will get a car, or a boyfriend who has one. She always did before.”

Candace leans in even closer and talks fast, low, her words a nervous tumble.

“I was thinking, though, what if I ran away. There’d be a fuss right at first, but no one would stay bothered about it. They’d be looking for me at my mama’s anyhow, and after a while, they wouldn’t look at all.”

I see where this is going, and I talk fast to nip it down before it sprouts. “You’re a kid, Candace. People freak out about missing kids.”

Candace and I both know this isn’t wholly true. Kids like Candace don’t get the kind of press the missing children of middle-class or rich folks get. On the other hand, Candace is blond and big-eyed and thin—all the things TV likes. There could well be a little stir.

She says, “I won’t cut out right away. I’d make Shar and Karice be my friends, until everyone forgets about you and me being tight. Then I’ll run away and hide until they quit looking. Then I’ll come to where you are.”

I have to work so hard to make my face stay bland and kind. Inside, I recoil from the intensity of pleading in those lamp-like golem eyes. I want to pinch some sense into her skin. Her plan is impossible, a fantasy, but Candace is not very connected to how the world works when it doesn’t line up with her wishes.

“We’ll have to think about that, Candace. Kai’s parole officer will be coming by our place. Parole officers can show up anytime, and you have to let them in. If they see you, they’ll send her back to prison, and then you’re back here, anyway.”

Candace pulls her bottom lip in and munches at it. After a little thought, she says, “Yeah. But so are you. Maybe forever. She wouldn’t want you back, after that. If they took her to jail again, and it was your fault, I bet she wouldn’t even come back for you. She’d be so mad.”

Oh damn, she is crafty. She is pressing on the blackest bruise I have inside me. I make myself smile. “I’m not saying no. I’m saying we need to think it through. Be slow. And anyway, I bet we can work it out for you to visit, for sure.”

“How long of visits?” Candace asks. “How soon?”

Just then, from downstairs, I hear the sounds of Kai’s arrival. The knock. The clap of Mrs. Mack’s old-lady shoes on the linoleum as she goes to answer the door.

I should stay here, at least another minute. I should reassure Candace, soothe her. But I hear Kai’s voice, her present voice, not crackling through a bad connection while I press the old phone against my ear. I hear her living voice lighting up the room below me. I can’t help it. I scramble over Candace, my knee jamming into her stomach so that all her air puffs out. I launch off her as if she is an object. I run. I don’t even look back, bounding down the stairs to see my mother.

She stands at the bottom, a brightness in the common room. She makes the gray slab walls, the deflating beanbags, and the sagging navy couches fade away. There is only my mother wearing sunshine-colored paisley: orange, yellow, gold. Her hair has grown out longer, falling way past her collarbones and over her small breasts. Her face is tipped up to mine and smiling.

I leap at her from the last two stairs, right into her arms.

She says, “Oof,” and she is laughing.

She spins me and her dark hair swings around us, her skirt wraps my legs.

It doesn’t matter that her body feels different, softer and spongier around her middle. It doesn’t matter that she smells different, too, the acrid stench of cigarettes over cheap shampoo. Her arms are still her arms. Her crying eyes on me are still her eyes, even spilling tears.

“You’re so pretty! You’re so pretty!” she keeps saying. “You’re so tall!”

There is nothing that can touch me in this moment. Nothing. Mrs. Mack leaves without me noticing, like she’s been teleported from the room.

Kai’s brought a Tupperware with her, and it’s banging me in the back as we hug and clasp and almost dance together. It’s the pancakes, the ones with orange rind in the batter. They are cold, and the syrup has soaked through and made them soggy. The butter has congealed. We sit side by side on the navy loveseat and eat them with our fingers anyway. Kai can’t stop touching me. Can’t keep her syrup-sticky fingers off my face, my hair. She’s quiet, but I whisper and plan for both of us, talking with my mouth full. Not about the past, or even much the now. Today I only talk about our brightest nexts, and she leans in, rapt. I am the storyteller now, telling her a future that is half pretend, half hope, certain and glorious. Kai can’t stop crying and smiling. Tears leak the whole time, but it is sweet, for all that. The sweetest hours that I have known in literally years.

Time has never moved so fast. I want to slow it, make it stop, stay here in the common room with some old cartoon running silent on the shared TV and Kai’s long leg pressed against my own.

“I’ll be back for dinner Monday night, remember,” Kai says, feeling it, too. “And then again on Wednesday, and again, and again, until one day very soon, I’ll take you home.”

I beam at her, and past her, I spot Candace. She has crept out to crouch at the top of the stairs with her shoulders in a hunch. Her chin rests on her knees, and she peers down at us. Her eyes shine as pale and blue as any bitter winter. In that glance, I feel joy teeter on the cusp of ruin. I see the end of everything.

It was perhaps three seconds of my life, that look. Then Candace crab-walked backward, out of sight, and I turned back to Kai. But that moment when our eyes met, it stayed with me.

I learned in that span how certain time is. It marched forward always, with me in it. Sometimes it dragged, sometimes it flew far too fast, but it was always moving. It would always move, inexorable, until it brought me to the word, the bullet, the breath that ended it.

It brought me to this alleyway. To Oakleigh’s husband.

I stared into that small black hole, and Clark’s pupils behind it were two more small black holes, exactly the same. All three held the promise of a crazy blankness. His hand shook and tightened, time so slow that I could see the flex of every tiny muscle in his fingers. The light glinted off the blond hairs on his hand. They were like live filaments, electric, and so beautiful.

All I could say was “Wait, wait,” in that futile way that people do. Wanting one more second.

He waited.

Clark was a gym body, with civilized white teeth. He’d been pushed beyond his edge, but he was new to violence. He hesitated, and I had time for one more thing.

In this brief stay, I could say
Wait
again, or
Please,
or
No,
but it wouldn’t stop him. I could see this wasn’t personal. He didn’t care that I would not find Hana. That I would not be there to watch over Julian. That I’d never tell Birdwine that here, inside the gun’s dark eye, I saw his flaws and all his failures clearly, and knew they did not change how dear he was to me, how necessary, good, and worthy.

Clark had fallen over some edge or another. He was tumbling, and I could not call him back with the concerns of my inconsequential life, or make him see the fine web of connections he was cutting. I wasn’t real to him. Another debt I owed to Candace, this clarity: his acts against me had nothing to do with me, and any sentence of my story was only that—a story. So in the small space of his hesitation, I forgot myself, and told a piece of his: “Oakleigh’s got something on you.”

His chin dipped down, and I had bought another breath, though the tension in his finger on the trigger did not abate. The gun’s black eye looked into my left eye, exactly. I tried to see past it, see him, but it was so hard. So hard to look at anything but that silly, silvery gun.

“What?” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me right.