The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (3 page)

I had no doubt that Daphne had driven past plenty of girls like this magenta-haired creature. They were common enough in Atlanta. This kid was one of a thousand strung-out runaways all over the city, unwilling or unready to be salvaged, getting by in whatever way she could.

I felt certain Daphne had never once thought to buy a girl like this a sandwich or offer a ride to a shelter. But I also knew my client had never taken a kid like this into the bushes, used her like a Kleenex, and then handed her a wad of greasy money. I felt myself shifting from professional advocate to my own self, playing for my own stakes. If I had my way entirely, Skopes would go to prison and learn firsthand how hard life could be on the knees.

It wasn’t feasible, and not only because it was against my client’s interests. This girl he’d used was smoke, already gone. Maybe Birdwine could find her, given time and money, but she wasn’t going to testify or press charges. I knew her kind.

So what I had left was hitting Bryan Skopes hard in the money sack, in his misapplied belief in his own good personhood, and most of all, in his gloating love of power over women. I could make him bend over for Daphne and for me. The very idea made my spine feel longer. I could feel myself growing taller. I ran my tongue over my teeth, hungry for next week’s scheduled depo. How much had Skopes given to that girl? I wished I could see the money clearly. A couple of twenties? A fifty? I didn’t know the going rate, but this I did know: Skopes was going to pay more than he’d ever thought for that one-off in the bushes.

I closed the PowerPoint and forwarded a copy to my partner Nick with a note:
Can we get Daphne in here this week? I need to prep her.

I went to PayPal to send Birdwine the full amount of the bill from my own account, instantly, plus a sizable bonus. It would be a paperwork ass-pain to get reimbursed, but I wanted the speed to resonate with him. Usually his invoices had to go through Verona.

In the message box I typed,
Thanks for the dirty pictures
—
better than a box of chocolates,
but then I erased it. I barely had him back working for me. It was too soon to try for our old combative-flirty banter. I tried,
See why I can’t do without you, Birdwine?
but that read too personal. After a moment’s thought, I changed it to
See why I can’t do without you, Zachary?

Still too personal; he’d been very clear, in the car. I sent it blank, then started a fresh email with a different case file attached. I typed in,
This guy’s discovery is BS. He’s hiding money. My bet? In something artsy-fartsy like sculpture or wine. Find it? Regular rates.
I hit send and waited.

Two minutes later, the reply came back:
On it.

That was that. Birdwine and I were back in business. Still mostly on his terms, sure, but I was shifting him. We were heading in the right direction.

Even better, in a week—about the same time it would take for Kai’s check to clear—I would meet with Bryan Skopes. He thought that he’d get everything he asked for. Well, maybe so. My mother had named me for Kali, after all. He would get what he was asking for, all right. It would be my pleasure to give it to him.

V
ictory called up a secret face that lived under my copper skin, my pale and tilted eyes, my fat-lipped mouth. Right now, that face wanted all its teeth to show. I felt flat and sharp-eyed, with a tongue that longed to loll out and taste the metal in the air. This face was ready to eat everything. It didn’t belong at Cartwright, Doyle & Vauss.

My partners, Nick Cartwright and Catherine Willoughby Doyle, were old Atlanta aristocracy, genteel rainmakers, plugged into the social scene. They were cousins who looked more like siblings: lanky, blond, elegant. Wealthy couples with complex estates came to our firm when it was time for a quiet, civilized divorce. The kind of marriages we dissolved were thick with trust funds, fraught with prenups and questions about who should get which houses. We were expensive, but we earned it, slicing up complicated financial pies, and people who couldn’t afford our skill sets didn’t need them. When these polite uncouplings soured, as they often did, well, that was why my name was on the letterhead. I was the blunt instrument at the back of the closet.

I met Nick in law school. We found we worked together well, in bed and out of it. I was bold and aggressive, he was meticulous and a born negotiator. In mock trials, he played carrot, I played stick. He brought me into his father’s well-established firm, and when his dad retired, Catherine and I became full partners. My skill set complemented theirs, and as a former foster kid of murky racial origin who did criminal pro bono cases twice a year, I singlehandedly made the firm look progressive and all kinds of multicultural. They liked me especially on days like this; I had decimated Skopes.

After the depo, they were in a postwin pleasure haze. Catherine sighed contented sighs and Nick looked at me fondly, as if I were his own zoo tiger. They invited me to celebrate, but I declined. I couldn’t keep my savage face screwed down while they decorously popped a bottle of expensive bubbly. Nick had crystal glasses to chime and ting together during wordy toasts, and right now, my flexing hands might shatter them.

I said I was going to cut out early, and Catherine beamed approval, telling me to toddle off and have a lovely evening, I had earned it.

At home, I paused in the entry, trying to kick my heels off with Henry yelling his weird, overloud meow and scraping his side-fang along my ankle to claim me. If I was home, Henry felt certain it was suppertime, no matter what the clock said.

“Damn straight, buddy,” I told him. “I’m going to open you a can of tuna. Real deal. Solid albacore.”

Henry ran ahead of me, across the wide room toward the kitchen. The maid had come that day, so my whole loft smelled like orange oil and vinegar, and my feet slid smoothly across the glossy hardwoods. I dropped my iPhone into the bay and saw she’d left my mail in a stack on the kitchen counter. I ignored it and hit my victory playlist. The Kongos came on, and I cranked it, grinning. The volume didn’t bother Henry. Like many white cats, he was wholly deaf.

Victory made my blood run fast, vibrating in my body as I danced barefoot to the pantry. Ye gods and little fishes, how I loved this high. I’d held it in back at the office, but now I wanted to pick up Henry, leap around with him until he was thoroughly alarmed. The musician I was seeing on and off had an out-of-town gig, but this British guy I used to date had texted me. I would text him back, tell him to swing by and help me make a dent in my best bourbon. We’d put this day to bed, hard and proper. I deserved to climb onto this joy, ride its bucking rhythms until I was wrung out and pleased and creamy through and through.

“Asshole never saw it coming, Henry,” I told my cat, pausing my dance just long enough to scoop the tuna onto a plate.

When Skopes first came in today, I’d smiled for him. I’d crossed my legs and swung my foot, calling his attention to a skirt that was cut too high to ever see a courtroom. I had on sleek black stilettos, their blood-red soles promising all kinds of carnage. His gaze bypassed their warning to crawl predictably over the bare skin of my legs.

The conference room table was clotted with bodies: Nick and Daphne, Skopes’s lawyer, a court reporter. To me, they had all been gray shapes at the table, irrelevant and insubstantial. The only true color was the opposing red of Skopes’s power tie, the only light the faint glow of my laptop. It was booted up and open at the table’s foot, facing in to show Skopes and his lawyer my soothing screen saver—tropical fish drifting in and out of a reef.

I spoke first, chanting the case number to begin the ritual that kicked off every depo. The court reporter swore Skopes in, and I asked him to state his name, his address, his birthdate for the record, giving him bored eyes. Letting his lawyer, Jeremy Anderson, give me bored eyes back.

As we completed the formalities, I moved the cordless mouse I’d placed beside my stacked papers. On my laptop, the lazy fish screen saver vanished, revealing an image from Birdwine’s slideshow. Skopes stood in the bower of azaleas with his head tipped back and his eyes closed, his mouth yawped open and slack. It was color replacing color, light replacing light. Skopes didn’t notice.

“Are you much of a gardener, Mr. Skopes?” I asked.

“A gardener?” he said, and made a scoffing noise. “I
have
a gardener.”

“Interesting. Does he tend azaleas?” I asked.

At the head of the table, the court reporter’s hands paused for a hairline fracture of a second. He’d noticed the slides. Then he gave a shrug so infinitesimal it was practically internal. His hands resumed their rhythmic bobbing on the steno with the world-weariness common to his breed. Daphne Skopes and Nick stared blandly at him, as if shorthand typing was a fascinating sight, just as I had prepped them to do.

“I don’t know the names of flowers,” Skopes said. These were not the kinds of questions he expected. He had good instincts, and they were telling him that something was amiss.

“Please get to the point, or move off gardening questions,” his lawyer said.

“Sure,” I said to Anderson. Then, purely to keep a rhythm, I asked Skopes, “Where did you go to college?”

“Vanderbilt,” Skopes said.

“And did you join a fraternity at Vanderbilt?”

The slideshow finally caught Anderson’s attention. He made a faint, choked noise.

“Do you not want me to answer that?” Skopes asked, turning to his lawyer. He saw Anderson’s face. Followed his line of vision.

The room got very quiet.

The slide changed.

“Did you join a fraternity at Vanderbilt?” I repeated, as if nothing were happening. As if Skopes’s ugliest self weren’t on display here, in front of the wife he had bought for similar purposes, but with more socially acceptable currency.

“You absolute bitch,” said Bryan Skopes in a flat voice.

I wasn’t sure if he meant me, or Daphne, or the girl his eyes were on. The very young one, with magenta hair and baby cheeks. The one on her knees.

The picture changed again. He was staring at it, at himself, trying to see a way around all that this was going to cost him.

“You absolute bitch,” Skopes repeated, his voice still toneless, but now his face was washed with red.

I kept my own face blank, perused the papers in front of me. “I’m not familiar with a fraternity called You Absolute Bitch. Would that be Psi Alpha Beta?”

Skopes stood up. His forehead was beginning to look sweaty. I could see him measuring how these photos might play to a much larger audience. To his Rotary Club. His church. His father. The neglected daughters he believed he loved, just as he believed that he was a good person. These pictures told a truer story, and for this moment, he was the one tasting helplessness. He was flayed open, all his inner ugliness exposed to the air.

“Give her what she wants,” he said. Anderson tried to speak, but Skopes cut him off. “Just give her what she wants.”

My favorite words.

Skopes thought he was saying them to his lawyer, or perhaps even to Daphne. He was wrong. Those words belonged to me.

After today, it would devolve into paperwork. Nick and I would do a long billable dance with Jeremy Anderson, slicing up the fat financial pie. That was nice and all, but my meat was in this moment. This perfect, unrepeated moment when Skopes was exposed. When all the stories that he told himself were washed away, and he saw himself, true.

Now I paused to set the dish of tuna on the floor. Henry wolfed at it. I grabbed the phone to text the Brit, and there, sticking out of the stack of mail, was the corner of a thick cream-colored envelope. I pulled it out, and saw my name and my return address engraved in burnt brown. Kai’s PO box in Texas was written in my spider-scrawl. It was the very one I’d tossed into my outbox in the last hour of Valentine’s Day. Now it had three red words in my mother’s handwriting, slanting across the front.

Return to Sender.

All thought stopped. All breath. My victory went bang out of my head. All my plans for the night went, too. My cat and my own hungers—gone. I couldn’t even hear the music.

Some time passed. Maybe half a minute, maybe a few seconds. I couldn’t tell.

This close, I could hear Henry making a low, overloud grumble in his chest that he felt as only a vibration. I heard him smacking up tuna. I turned the envelope over and saw the flap was sealed with Scotch tape. I hadn’t sent it that way.

My hands felt swollen and clumsy. They trembled so violently that I could barely get it open.

Inside, I found my check. She’d written
VOID
in the same red pen across the front.

Finally, a different answer. But why now? I’d sent a check every month for almost sixteen years, repeating its endless question. I’d sent tiny checks while I worked my way through junior college up in Indiana. One week, I sent five dollars, and it wiped out my account. They got a little bigger when I got a full ride to Notre Dame and then Emory Law, larger still after I graduated and established my career. One hundred and eighty-some-odd checks had made their way from me to Kai over the years, one by one, each asking,
Are we even?

Her answer was to cash them. Without fail, even though my mother moved often and on the fly. Once or twice a year I’d get a change of address card, impersonal and cheery, shifting her mail from one PO box to a new one in another city. She always made sure to collect my check and cash it, though.

The voided check trembled in my fingers. I turned it in my hands, and saw more words on the back in my mother’s left-leaning hand:

No, thank you. I have enough money to last me the rest of my life.

That was a joke. The cancer got everywhere before I noticed, so “the rest” will be quite short. Weeks, if I am lucky. I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning; death is not the end. You will be the end. We will meet again, and there will be new stories. You know how Karma works.