Fall from Grace (4 page)

IT TOOK HIM
longer to find the apartment than he thought it would. He knew the road it was on, a divided highway on the west side, but it was tucked around behind a strip mall, and the entrance, unmarked, was squeezed between a Burger King and an auto-parts store that had gone out of business before Sawyer started high school. He was driving past it for the fifth time when he spotted the green mailbox she had told him to look for.

Six cars in the parking lot—two minivans, two pickups, a junker on cinder blocks, and a Corvette. It was the middle of the afternoon, so either the residents were all at work or there weren't that many residents to begin with.
There were eight buildings in the complex, each with four apartments—two up, two down—and a laundry room on the lower level. The buildings were identical once but different now, some missing their fake shutters, some with the plastic brick façade peeling away from the plywood. It wasn't ghetto, wasn't even trailer park, but it was heading that way.

The door to the building was propped open with a hunk of concrete that had once been part of the walkway. He went up to the landing and knocked. He could hear her inside, and for a second, maybe longer, he imagined her opening the door wearing just a towel, a small one, barefoot, her hair still wet from the shower. But as the security chain came off and the bolt clicked and the door opened, he knew it wouldn't be like that.

“I was hoping it was you,” Grace said, stepping back to give him room to come in. “For some reason they put the peephole six feet up. I didn't want to have to drag a chair all the way from the kitchen to look out.”

“You should've checked. I could have been a bad guy.”

She grinned and brought a foot-long kitchen knife from behind her back.

“Whoa. Good thing you recognized me.”

“Yeah,” she said, moving over to a desk, dropping the knife into an open drawer, then bumping the drawer closed with her hip. “Wouldn't want to make that mistake again.”

He had assumed the inside of the apartment would match the building, but he was wrong. It was straight off one of those home-makeover shows Zoë watched, with light gray walls, bright white trim, spotless white leather furniture, matching bookcases lined with picture frames and thick glass bowls filled with clear glass marbles, a weird painting hanging by the balcony. Down the hallway was the kitchen and across from that, the bathroom, then a closed door that was probably a bedroom. Everything in the apartment was modern and expensive. At least, it looked expensive. But what was the deal with the TV?

“My aunt's even shorter than me,” Grace said, holding her hand out shoulder high as they both looked over at the thirty-odd-inch flat-screen, mounted on the wall about a foot off the new gray carpet, the top of the monitor not quite at Sawyer's waist. “All day long she has to look up at people. When she comes home, she likes to look down on them. And it doesn't hurt your
neck, especially when you sit on the floor.”

He took it as a cue and sat down, leaning against the bottom of the couch, eye-level with the screen. “What do you want to drink?” Grace said as she walked to the kitchen.

He heard the fridge open. “Any beer?”

“Of course. But we're not having any.”

“You don't like beer?”

“I love beer. But we're not having any here.”

“Would your aunt know?”

“Probably not, but I would. That's why she lets me hang out here when she's at work. I gave her my word I'd be good.”

“And no drinking was one of her rules?”

“There weren't any rules, she just told me to be good.”

“And you gave your word.”

“My word's all I got. And some diet cream soda.”

He listened as she dropped ice cubes into tall glasses. “I didn't think you'd call,” she said.

He wasn't going to. When she gave him her phone number at the library, he didn't bother to write it down. If Zoë saw a strange number on a page in his notebook or on his phone, she'd have questions and he'd have lies, but
she'd call the number anyway—
Who's this? Why you giving my boyfriend your skank number?
—playing the role because that's what you did when you found a strange number where there shouldn't be a strange number. It'd be a lot of hassle for nothing. So he didn't even try to remember it. But two days later, for no reason he could figure, the number was still there, right in the front of his mind. And that was the reason he dialed the number from the phone in the back room of Mike's Ice Cream.

“When I saw your girlfriend come in, I said to myself, There's no way he's calling you.”

“Yeah, she's really hot,” he said, knowing it sounded wrong as the words were coming out, but if it bothered her, she didn't let it show.

“That's not why.” She sat down next to him, not close but close enough to hand him his drink. “I could tell by looking at her, she's got you by the short hairs. You ain't going nowhere.”

“It's
not
like that.”

It
was
like that and he knew it, but he hadn't heard it since Dillon had left for college, and he didn't expect it from her.

“I'm not saying she's not nice, I'm just saying she's
the type who likes to be in charge. Nothing wrong with that.” She messed with the remote. “I mean, if that's what you're into.”

“I'm here, ain't I?”

“Calm down, tiger. I'm just yanking your chain. I'm glad you called.” She looked over at him and smiled. It was a real smile, nothing hidden behind it.

“So what's this movie that I
ab
-solutely,
pos
-itively must,
must
,
MUST
have to see?”

“It's
The Sting
, from 1973, directed by George Roy Hill, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, a hundred and twenty-nine minutes, four and a half stars, and if you make fun of me one more time, you're out. Now, you ready for this?”

The movie didn't suck as bad as he thought it would, a couple of con men back in the 1930s ripping off a rich gangster with an elaborate plan that would have probably made sense if she weren't talking through the whole thing. She loved the two main actors, hated the music, thought the hats were great, liked the old guy, didn't trust the waitress, swore that she saw the one gangster in another movie, and jumped when the gun went off, even though she'd seen the movie a dozen times
before. She paused it at the end, freezing a shot of the Johnny Hooker character tapping the side of his nose.

“That's a classic signal right there,” she said, acting it out in case he had missed it. “You see that, you know the fix is in.”

“So is that how you're going to become a celebrity? Pull an elaborate con game on a mob boss?”

She glared at him, then laughed. “It's not nice to make fun of a girl and her dreams.”

“You're only kidding about that, right? You don't really want to be a celebrity, do you?”

“Why not?”

“It's not realistic, that's why.”

“Oh, and being an actuary for an insurance company
is
realistic?”

“You can go to school to be an insurance actuary—”

“No,
you
can go to school for it.”

“—but you can't just decide to become a celebrity. That's not how it works. You have to be famous for something.”

“Give me time.”

“And you just can't start at the top.”

“Watch me,” Grace said. “It's go big or go home.”

“Besides, what's so great about being a celebrity?”

Bang. She sat up at that. “Oh my god,
everything
! Check it out. You get into all the clubs, people give you hot clothes and jewelry for no reason, you've got photographers everywhere you go, you're on TV
all
the time,
millions
of people follow you online, and if you're
really
famous, if you're a
true
celebrity, then you get your own reality show.”

He looked at her, the way she was beaming, her eyes all lit up, her smile somehow brighter. He shrugged. “You didn't seem like the reality-TV type.”

“Yeah, well you don't seem like the insurance type either.”

“Those shows are so stupid—”

“Don't be judging just because people like stuff you don't like. I think they're fun.”

“And you want to be on one.”

“Yup.”

He thought of something and grinned. “Well, there
are
ways to get on those shows, you know. Like that one girl, the fake Italian…”

“The one that screws everybody in sight?” She waved him off. “No way.”

“It worked for her.”

“Yeah, well if that's all it took, three-quarters of the
girls at my school would be megastars. No, I'm going to be a celebrity, and I'm going to have my own show, and I'm going to do it my way. You'll see.”

She hit the Play button, and the credits rolled while he thought about the girls at West High.

THIS IS THE
joke Sawyer's precalculus teacher told the first day of school: A teacher's standing in front of the class, explaining a precalc equation, and there's this big football player, we'll call him Billy, sitting in the last row, and he's completely lost. The teacher's talking and Billy keeps sighing and yawning, not really disrupting the class, but making his presence known. Finally Billy raises his hand. Hey teach, I got a question. Yes, Billy? Why do we need to take this class? The teacher looks straight at him and says, Because calculus saves lives. Billy scratches his head and thinks about if for a second, then says, Hey teach, how does calculus save lives? And the teacher says, It keeps guys like you out of medical school.

Not funny, but Sawyer got it.

It was one of the last things he got in that class.

Not that he hadn't been trying. He assumed he had to have a good grade in the class since that's what his guidance counselor kept telling him, but then his father didn't seem all that worried that he was failing, hinting that there were “things in the works” and “irons in the fire,” whatever that meant. His mother offered to help. She'd aced precalc in high school. Hadn't used it since, not even in college, but hey, it was like falling off a bike, right?

Right. That feeling of being out of control, of falling—no, of crashing, not able to do anything about it, that panic just before hitting the pavement, skin scraping off, bones buckling under the pressure, feeling it all before it happened, the scars that took forever to heal, and that sour feeling in the pit of your stomach the next time you tried it? Yeah, that was precalc.

But that wasn't the worst feeling. He'd get through the class—eventually—not with the best grade but with a passing one, and he'd get his diploma and he'd go off to college. Precalculus would go away. But there was another feeling, one he couldn't nail down, one that
came late at night or when he went for a run or when it was slow at Mike's Ice Cream or like now, in precalc, Mr. Young up there speaking in tongues,
that
feeling—he wondered if it would be with him for the rest of his life.

It wasn't lost.

Lost was what you felt when you didn't know where to go or how to get there. All you needed were directions and you wouldn't be lost. He knew where he had to go and what he had to do to get there, the directions clearer than the ones that came with his phone. Get good grades, get into college, get more good grades, get a career, get money, get married, get kids, get old, get on with it. So it wasn't lost.

Was it drifting, was that the feeling? That sense that he was simply floating along without a plan, wondering where he'd land when he washed up on shore? No, that wasn't it, he had had a perfect plan handed to him, and the plan told him exactly where he'd land. It couldn't have been drifting. Drifting actually sounded pretty good.

Besides, he was going too fast to be drifting.

Here's what he knew—he had a direction and he had a plan. They weren't his, but they seemed to be working.
And he had a hot girlfriend and a car of his own and an okay job and a future as an insurance actuary. What was he complaining about? He had it good. He knew all that.

But it didn't make that feeling go away.

Grace was the one with no plan. Celebrity? Come on, what was she thinking? That's the kind of dream you have when you're ten, like him thinking he'd grow up to be Batman. It was stupid to hold on to dreams like that. Maybe that's why he liked hanging around her. Next to her, he looked smart. At least career-wise.

But there was something about her, something different. She was cute, yeah, and she'd pop into his head now and then, but so did any halfway-decent-looking girl, not much control there. It wasn't like he was going to hit on her. She didn't seem like the type anyway, probably a virgin but you never know, and besides, he had Zoë. The movie was okay, sorta, but watching it with her was fun. There's a lot more movies you
have
to see, she had said, and he groaned when she pulled a list out of her pocket, but really it was good because he'd get to watch them with her, and then he was back to wondering what it was about her he liked in the first place.

Then the bell rang and Mr. Young said what he always said at the end of every class: “I hope you learned something today.”

Sawyer had learned something that day.

He learned he'd never get into medical school.

“ONE GUY, EIGHT
hot girls. It's like the plot of
every
porno out there.”

That was Zoë's girlfriend Renée and that's how Renée liked to talk, the clique's self-appointed expert on all things X-rated.

She was right about the numbers. There were seven girls in the oversized rec room at Zoë's house, and there was one guy, Sawyer, and the girls were hot, no doubt about it, in their tight jeans and short shorts, even the two in baggy sweat pants—waistbands below their hips, baby-doll T-shirts under their unzipped hoodies—even they were hot. But she was wrong about it being like every porno out there.

First off, it wasn't always one guy and seven girls.
Sawyer had seen enough pornos online—bits of them, anyway—to know Renée didn't know what she was talking about.

As usual.

Second, one guy and seven girls wasn't a plot, it was a cast. It might make the plot more interesting, but it wasn't a plot. Anyway, from what he'd seen, pornos didn't need plots.

Third—and this was the one that bugged him the most—girls in pornos didn't spend the whole night wolfing down bags of sour cream and onion potato chips and stacks of chocolate-covered Double Stuf Oreos, chugging Diet Cokes to win burping contests while they texted their boyfriends, texted girls who weren't there, and texted the boyfriends of the girls they were sitting right next to. Add in the direct-to-video chick flicks on the HDTV, the just-shoot-me dance music on the stereo, and a parent peeking in the door every five minutes to make sure there wasn't any alcohol, and you had a typical Friday night at Zoë's. So even if it were the plot of
every
porno out there, it wasn't going anywhere.

Sawyer racked up the balls for another game of pool. He played by himself, eight ball, switching from stripes to solids and back again with every missed shot. He
switched a lot. Tatiana was good at pool, and if she were there he'd challenge her to a game. She'd beat him, sure, she beat him every time they played, but that was okay. She'd been playing her whole life and nobody beat her. Tatiana had a boyfriend now, one who didn't like spending his Friday nights at Zoë's house, so Sawyer played alone. He could have asked Taylor or Meagan or Sandra or Lori or any of the others, but they were worse than he was and lost interest after their first missed shot, which was early in the game. Besides, they didn't have time for games, not with all that serious texting to be done.

He lined up the cue ball, drew back, and broke. The balls scattered but nothing dropped.

On the couch, Meagan was digging the last of the caramel corn out of the bag, asking anyone who was listening if they had heard back from any colleges yet. Jessica laughed.

“It's not even Thanksgiving. I'm still working on the applications.”

“Just wondering. I sent mine out last week and I was hoping that—”

“What? You think you're going to hear back
already
? Don't be stupid.”

“Ms. Brody says you won't hear until February, after
they've checked your financial-aid forms.”

“Yeah, right. Like I'm gonna get financial aid.”

“I got accepted already,” Zoë said without looking up from her phone, owning the moment.

Sawyer stopped mid-backstroke, listening in to the news.

“You
did
? Where?”

“Wembly.”

There was a pause. “Oh.”

“What do you mean, ‘
Oh
'?”

Meagan shrugged. “I thought you were going away to school.”

“Changed my mind. I met some of the girls from Kappa Kappa Gamma. They told me I'd have no problem getting in.”

“To
Wembly
?”

“Duh. To KKG. I got in to Wembly no problem.”

Sandra said, “I heard that they don't even look at you if you don't get a two thousand on your SATs.”

“That's a lie,” Renée said, and immediately they all assumed it was true. But then if Zoë
did
get in…

“KKG is great,” Lori said, “but isn't Wembly a bit, I don't know,
conservative
for you?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“No coed dorms, visiting hours, guests gotta sign in at the desk or get buzzed in, guys can't sleep over. And they've got all those rules about smoking and drinking…”

“So? What's your point?”

“It sounds kinda like what you have now.”

“You make it sound like a prison. Besides, that's only when you're a freshman and you have to live in the dorms. Sophomore year I'll move into KKG. That'll be insane.”

From the beanbag chair, Taylor said, “My parents want me to go to a state school.”

“Go. It'd be better than staying here.”

“Nothing wrong with staying here,” Zoë said.

“Not if you're
Kappa Kappa Gamma
.”

Sawyer blinked, then shifted his weight before realigning his shot, still thinking about what Zoë said. And how every school he was applying to was at least two hours away.

“What are you smiling about,” Lori said, giving Sawyer a little hip-check as she walked past on her way to the bathroom. He laughed, then shot without looking, nailing the seven ball into the far corner pocket.

Andrea said, “I know this guy, Tyree, he goes to West. He just found out he got a full-ride scholarship to State.”

“What do you expect?” Meagan said. “West's got the best basketball team in the county.”

“Not because of Tyree. He's pure geek. They say he's a genius.”

“And he goes to
West
? Don't believe it.”

“I have a few friends at West,” Sandra said, ripping open a fresh bag of Cheez Doodles. “I think they're pretty smart.”

“Said the girl who's not taking any AP classes.”

“That's because of band. You know my schedule's all screwed up. Don't be such a little bitch.”

“Well, I wouldn't have to be if you weren't—”

“This girl came into Mike's the other day, looking for a job,” Sawyer said, talking loud enough to drown out Zoë, making it up as he went. “She goes to West. Her application said she was on the high honor roll.”

“At West that's a C-minus,” Renée said.

“She had a weird name. Grace something. Know her?”

“Nope. But I'll ask my friend Lindsey,” Sandra said, her thumbs jumping around the keypad. “She knows everyone there.”

Zoë laughed. “There's something to be proud of.”

It took two more games of solo pool and another
twenty minutes of painful movie before Sandra got her answer.

“That girl? Grace? She's a nobody. Lindsey says she a loser.”

Sawyer stepped away from his shot and chalked up the cue. “Could be more than one Grace at West.”

“No, Lindsey says she's the only one,” Sandra said, texting as she read the screen. “Was she short?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“Wore a stupid hat?”

“Maybe. I don't remember,” he said, remembering the hat she wore to the library, the one that didn't look stupid at all, the one that looked a lot cooler than Andrea's ridiculous pink hair or Jessica's eyebrow ring.

“She's a loser. She's got abso-zero friends. Even the foreign-exchange students avoid her.”

He squinted down the cue. “She didn't seem that weird.”

“Trust me, she is. Lindsey knows everybody at West and if she says somebody's a loser, they're a loser. Don't let her get hired, you might have to work with her.”

Bang. The four ball rattled in the pocket. “That doesn't seem fair.”

Sandra laughed. “So? What do
you
care?”

“Yeah,” Zoë said, looking over from her seat on the couch, head down just a bit so her eyes were glaring out from under her arched brows. “What do
you
care?”

“I don't,” Sawyer said, hitting the cue ball low and hard, launching it off the table and across the hardwood floor.