August gets more and more brutal. Every day is over a hundred degrees, sometimes hitting one hundred and nine, the heat wrapping me like a fiery blanket. It’s insufferable in my room at night and so I’ve been staying with Riley as much as I can, hoping every night that he’ll be home, because he has a swamp cooler. On the nights he isn’t there, I drift in and out of a hot sleep, the floor fan pressed right up against my futon.
Riley and I have come to work early this morning. We’re sharing quesadillas with over-easy eggs and red chile when the phone rings.
Riley comes back around the corner and pulls me down the dark, greasy-floored hallway to Julie’s office. “Linus is sick; she’s not coming in,” he says, shutting the door behind him. He kisses me deeply, running his hands under my shirt.
“Riley…” I feel uncomfortable.
“Shhh. Tanner won’t be here until seven-thirty and Julie’s in Scottsdale at a retreat. She won’t be back until this afternoon.” He settles on the couch and reaches up for my overall straps. Our lips sting from chile.
I don’t want to do this here, it feels wrong to do this in Julie’s office, but he’s insistent, and it’s over quickly. I rub the cushion of the couch with my hand before we leave the office, to smooth out any wrinkles.
As Riley opens the door, tucking his T-shirt back into his brown pants with his other hand, he stops short; my face mashes into his back.
Tanner is standing awkwardly in the hallway. He has a very weird look on his face, like he doesn’t know what to think, and in that moment, I know he heard us, and my face blazes up with embarrassment.
Tanner squints as though he’s been doused in water. He whispers, “I’m so sorry for what’s about to happen.” He steps to the side.
Behind him, standing by the dishwasher, is Julie.
“The last session of my retreat was canceled. I got home last night.” Her voice is cold.
The air around us is heavy and tense. “Sorry, Jules,” Riley says calmly, sidling by her as if nothing is wrong. I walk slowly to the dish station, squeezing past her, so scared and embarrassed that I feel sick. I can barely hear myself think, my heart is pounding so much.
Julie looks at Riley, now safely behind the cutting island. She looks at the plate of half-eaten red chile quesadillas, the two forks. She looks over at me and down the hallway to the open office.
“Wash your hands, the both of you, this instant. I can’t deal with this right now. Our fucking breakfast rush, if we have one, is about to happen. Where’s Linus!” she yells.
“Sick,” Tanner says..
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Julie stomps to the front counter without saying anything else.
Riley soaps his hands next to me at the sink. He arches his head to check the front of the coffeehouse before kissing me quickly on the cheek. He shrugs, which makes me think everything might be okay.
There is a breakfast rush and a lunch rush. After, when the café clears out, I help Tanner bus the tables while Julie counts the register. She worked counter all morning while Tanner waited tables, walking back stiffly with her orders and slamming them down for Riley without a word. She wouldn’t look at me, which made my heart sink.
When Tanner and I come back into the kitchen with our full bus tubs, Julie’s shouting from behind the closed door of the office.
“Oh, shit, this is going to be good.” Tanner cracks the refrigerator and takes a can of Riley’s PBR. “I mean, not for you.”
“Shut up,” I hiss at him, my face draining as Julie’s voice gets louder and louder. “It’s not funny.”
At intervals, we hear: “Why do you always make the worst decisions?” “How the fuck long has this been going on?” “Did you not even think about what she said in this office? Is she even eighteen, Riley? Do you have any idea what that means? It means statutory rape.”
The ugliness of that slaps itself over my skin. I start pinching my thighs through my pockets.
Tanner looks over at me. “Are you eighteen?” He has an amused grin.
“Yes,” I hiss. “Soon. Eleven days.” I’m so embarrassed, I think I’m going to throw up. My stomach is roiling.
“Do you think you can just fuck in my office?” Julie screams, “And you left a fucking condom in my fucking wastebasket!”
My face drains. Oh my God. I don’t know why I didn’t wonder what he did with it at the time. Tanner laughs out loud, a barky sound that pierces my heart, which is the last straw for me.
I pull off my apron and shove it onto the dish tray, turning on the machine. The sudden sound of water drowns out the fuzz in my ears. I grab my backpack and leave.
—
I walk bleary-eyed through the Goodwill, looking for nothing but not wanting to be outside or at home just yet. I finger odd stacks of electronics that I know nothing about: bold blue plastic boxes of wires and cords and sprockets and springs. I paw through the endless racks of scarred and chewed LPs. I try to keep my eyes open and my breath even. I pinch my forearms. Even if I leave bruises, Riley won’t say anything about them, I’m sure of that. Finally, I go back to my room to wait for him.
—
I forgot to lock the door. When he knocks, I don’t answer, and he pushes in anyway, crossing the room to the refrigerator. He opens it, though I don’t think he’s really looking for anything to eat.
He closes the door and leans against it, looking down at me on the floor. “You really only ever eat at Grit, don’t you?”
He’s clutching a paper bag and he holds it up to his lips, drinks from it. I watch him and remember the alley behind the Food Conspiracy Co-op those few months ago. He stood the same way, shoulders slumped, paper bag in hand.
I’m between the tub and the wall, where I’ve been burrowed for the past several hours, waiting. It’s true; I only buy food if I have to. Every morning, I’m hopeful that sometime during the day, Riley will make the wrong order and offer it to me: a bagel with hummus instead of cream cheese, an omelet with black olives instead of green peppers. Or I take what he gives me after a run. We never go out to eat. Sometimes I wait until he’s asleep and select things carefully from his haphazardly stocked kitchen: an orange, a tortilla slathered in butter, a glass of dubious-smelling milk.
When he’s not too far gone, we do incredible things in the dark, on his rumpled bed, but I am afraid to ask him for food and except for the one time on his porch, I’ve never really talked about living outside and what it means. And he’s never asked, which now makes me even sadder than I was before. I’m always asking him things about himself, as much as he’ll allow, but he never asks me about me.
I will my voice not to break. “Are we fired now?”
Riley caps his bottle. “Me? She’ll never fire me. Though I was a little scared there, after she yelled about the condom. I think she’s mad about a lot of things, not just us screwing in her office.”
Groaning, he settles on the floor next to me, stretching his legs out on the scarred linoleum. “She’s royally pissed, Charlie. What you didn’t hear, because you took off, is that she knew about us awhile ago. Being the tender lovebirds we are, we walk to and from work together, which she can see from her window above the restaurant, but she decided not to say anything right away. Her apartment is up there. I don’t know if you knew that or not. She ignored it. But our relations today, in her office, kind of threw her for a loop.”
“And?”
“And…she’s switching you to nights. Actually, what she said was ‘I won’t hand her to you on a platter.’ ” He looks amused. “She said, ‘She’s not a cookie, or a book, or a record on a shelf. You can’t just play with her and then put her back.’ ”
You can’t just play with her and put her back. “That was really embarrassing,” I say sharply. “Having her find us like that. I didn’t even want to do it. You made me.”
He gives me a sharp look. His voice gets tight. “I didn’t make you do anything, girl. I think you got something out of it.”
No, I want to tell him, I didn’t. But I don’t, because wasn’t it partly my fault it happened anyway? I didn’t want to do it, but I let him anyway.
He lolls his head to the side. Something catches his eye and he leans forward. “Why do you have a suitcase wedged under the tub, Strange Girl?”
Before I can stop him, he slides over and pulls it out. He fixes his glisteny eyes on me, the side of his mouth rising in a smile.
He lowers his voice in a spooky way. “Is this it? Does the magic suitcase hold the secret to my little stranger?”
He flips the clasps and paws through the shirts until he finds the metal kit. Only, he thinks it’s just something neat, because he says, “Cool.” But then he unlatches it. His eyes dart over the objects inside, the creams, the tape, the bandages, everything I bought that first day I got here, at the convenience store. My heart’s in my throat, watching him.
It’s a little mean, a little payback for today, for never asking me about myself. Because it’s going to make him scared, and a little sick, being faced with the puzzle pieces of me for a change.
Riley picks up the roll of linen hesitantly and lets it unfurl; pieces of broken glass tumble onto the floor, making their familiar chimelike sound.
He huffs twice, queer sounds, like someone’s knocked him in the chest. “What the fuck is this?”
Before I can stop myself, I blurt, “It’s me. It’s what I do. What I did, I mean. I’m trying not to do that anymore.” I hold my breath, waiting.
It’s like he didn’t hear me. Angry, he holds out the box, his voice rising. “What is this shit?”
He holds up the pieces of glass one by one, the small plastic container of hydrogen peroxide, the tube of ointment, the roll of gauze.
“It’s what I use. To cut myself. Those are my things.”
Riley drops them all back in the box as though they’ve burned his fingers. He kicks the kit violently across the floor and stands up, yanking the hood of his jacket over his head tightly. I close my eyes. The front door slams.
I crawl across the floor and take my kit in my hands, holding it close to my body. I carefully reassemble everything, slotting everything in its place, because it’s all precious to me. In my fingers, the glass tinkles, pricks, tiny promises that I have to steel myself to ignore. The linen rests against my palm. I put the kit in the suitcase, push the suitcase under the tub.
The door to my apartment bangs open and shut. He walks straight to the sink, cracking the window above it, and lights a cigarette. “Tell me,” he demands. “Like, what is that all about? Why do you have that box? What does it mean?”
“Where the fuck did you think my scars came from?” My voice breaks. “Do you think they just…appeared by themselves?”
He mumbles. “I don’t know…I just…I kind of kept it abstract.” He exhales smoke out the window. “I figured you were all done with that. It didn’t occur to me you kept, like, a fucking box of shit to cut yourself if you fucking felt like it.”
“You have a box of shit.” It tumbles out of me like water. Riley’s mouth drops open. He didn’t know I knew. He didn’t think I would look, I bet, or even guess.
“Are you the only one in the world who gets to be a fuckup? Am I spoiled for you now that you’ve seen my stuff ? Did it make me real? Not a cookie or a cake or a record anymore?” My body is revving up in a dangerous way, my breath coming in gasps.
“Don’t.” His voice is a warning. “Don’t even go there. That’s not…valid.”
“I’m the only one here who’s trying not to do the bad thing, who’s trying to get better, and you’re treating me like shit for it.” My palms are flat on the cold, sticky linoleum. I can smell the unwashed floor, the dirt in the cracks by the wall, the whole shitty mess of the building, and Riley, Riley, too: his burnished alcohol stink, the cloud of old cigarette smoke that sticks to his clothes.
I ferried his drugs. I fucked him in his sister’s office. I let him see all of me, every bit, and now I’m sitting here on the grungy floor, a dog at his feet. Like a dog I wait for him at night. Like a dog, now, stupidly, I only want him to pet me, love me, not leave, and that makes me suddenly, blazingly angry and sad all at once, which feels like fire inside me.
I pound and claw at his legs. He jumps in surprise, his bottle falling, smashing inside the sink. He catches my arms, swearing when I struggle, and for a minute, a flicker of something dark crosses his face, his lip curls; the tension increases in his wrists. His fingers tighten like metal on my skin. He’s shouting now, like my mother, What is wrong with you? And then one of his hands is in the air, fingers together, palm flat.
My mother and her raised fist flashes in front of my eyes. I shrink away from Riley, shutting myself off, bracing myself.
There is the person people see on the outside and then there is the person on the inside and then, even farther down, is that other, buried person, a naked and silent creature, not used to light. I have it and now, here, I see it: Riley’s hidden person.
There’s a crackling in my head. My wrists ache.
“Stop making that noise,” he says roughly.
I look up; he’s dunking a cigarette under the tap. The hot paper sizzles and then silences.
“You were going to hit me.” My voice sounds flat, far away.
“Jesus, this is fucked. You’re still such a fucking kid. I’m fucking twenty-seven years old. What am I doing? I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.” His face is papery with exhaustion as he walks to the door.
When the door closes, I turn off all the lights and curl up in the bathtub in a very tight ball. I imagine myself inside an egg, a metal egg, impenetrable, locked on the outside, anything to keep myself from crawling to my kit, from crawling outside to my bicycle, to wait at the stop sign down his street, to say I’m sorry, but for what, for what, for what.
