This Secret Thing, стр. 63
“Hey, hey,” he said. Casey suspected he’d already forgotten her name. “Where ya running off to?” He grabbed her shoulder to stop her from leaving.
“I have to go,” she said. She tried to shake his hand from her shoulder, but his grip tightened. She felt the fear come roaring back, once dormant, now wide awake. She felt the panic in her throat, the urgency to flee. She looked at him, into his dancing eyes. He was enjoying this, seemingly oblivious to her fear.
“Don’t go just yet,” he said, and gave her a lazy smile, one she suspected worked on girls like her. She was one of many. She’d held no illusions about that. She thought, painfully, of Eli, of how he’d feel if he knew about this.
“I need to get home. My mom’s expecting me.”
He laughed, and she could smell his sleep breath, dark and musty. His eyes went from warm and amused to hard and cold. She’d seen that happen before with Russell, but at the time she hadn’t known then what could happen next. Now she did.
“Your mommy’s expecting you?” He said it with a sneer in his voice. Rejection brought out the anger in him. She was finding that to be true of most men.
She took a step back, right into the door. It banged against the wall, the noise loud in the tiny apartment. She straightened her back, willing courage to replace the fear. She didn’t have to be afraid, she reassured herself. He was mad, but he wouldn’t hurt her. If he did and she reported it, he’d lose his job. She just needed to appeal to his rational side.
“Could you let me go, please?” she asked. She wished he’d put on some clothes. The room smelled of sex and sleep and adrenaline. The smell made her nauseous. She feared she would vomit right in his doorway, right on his bare feet. “Maybe we could see each other later?” She threw the hope out to distract him. “But right now I just need to get home.”
He stepped back. She stifled a relieved exhalation. He turned his back to her and walked over to the bed. She looked away when he bent over to retrieve his boxers from the floor. He talked as he put them on, but she kept her eyes averted. “I should’ve known better,” he said, “than to mess around with you.”
She heard the mattress springs squeak and looked up to see him half-clothed, sitting on his bed. Their eyes met, and his gaze narrowed like he was trying to figure something out. “You’re just a little girl,” he said. “A little girl playing grown-up games.”
She shifted under his gaze, considered just turning and running, but something made her stand her ground.
“The problem with little girls who play grown-up games is that they end up getting hurt,” he continued. He lifted his eyebrows. “You should be more careful. So you don’t end up hurt.”
A wave of anger surged through her, hot and red. It burned through every vein and muscle and organ, searing all the fear away. The burning felt like its own kind of power. She wanted to jump on him, pound her fists into his chest, and scream in his face: What do you know about little girls who get hurt?
Instead she just said, “Too late.” Then she turned and walked calmly out of his apartment, leaving his front door wide open behind her.
Bess
October 12
Bess dialed Polly’s number and listened to it ring, thinking as she did that this was Norah’s mother she was calling. Sometimes the way life worked out didn’t seem possible. For a long time she’d assumed Norah’s mother was dead, because Norah had never mentioned her—even around the holidays or Mother’s Day. She never took an obligatory trip out of town to visit her or made a last-minute scramble for a gift with a coordinating lament about how hard mothers were to buy for. (Bess’s own mother was quite easy to buy for. She just sent her the most expensive bottle of gin for her martinis. As her mother said, “Well, I can always use it!” And use it, she did.)
But none of that from Norah. Bess had assumed she’d lost her mother tragically, and it was just too painful to talk about. Until one of their wine-soaked nights out when, out of the blue, Norah had spilled it about her mother, Polly, who was lost to her, but not due to death. Just to a roaring argument and a lifetime of resentment over her mother’s poor choices with men. The bottom line: Norah’s mother had never been without a man, whether that was best for Norah or not.
Her dependence on them was, according to Norah, clinical. Polly had moved Norah in the middle of the school year for one husband, dragged her to church and made her get baptized for another. She’d changed careers, hair colors, and political parties in the name of whatever man she’d hitched herself to at the time. It made sense that Norah had grown up to see men as commodities to be traded, pawns to be moved around on her board, a means to an end. They were always, in her world, interchangeable. Accessories more than humans.
Polly’s voicemail came on, and Bess left a message, making her voice sound cheerful and upbeat. Bess didn’t hold the woman’s prior sins against her. Polly wasn’t her mother. And she was doing the right thing by offering to help in this hard time. It was the least she could do. “Hey, Polly,” she said. “I’ve made too much dinner and thought maybe I’d bring some over to you and Violet. Thought maybe that would be one less thing to worry about. Let me know if that sounds good!”
She put the phone down and peered out at the shed, willing Jason to step out of it now while