-SCARLET-
I GOT through the first week without any grave disasters. I memorized the dining hall hours, and I figured out which library was which.
I learned that the other nine students in my introductory Italian class were nice, but that the teacher was a dick. It was an immersion-style class, so no English was allowed inside its walls. And any accidental non-Italian words emerging from a student’s mouth were met with a snarl from the ornery grad student who taught it.
“The… oops!” a petite girl with boxy glasses clapped a hand over her mouth across the conference table from me.
“EN ITALIANO!” Eduardo barked.
I gave the frightened girl a friendly wink, which brought one of Eduardo’s glares in my direction.
Whatever, dude. My entire town snarled at me for all of last year. You go ahead and do your worst.
There was one more college rule I learned the hard way, on Thursday night. I’d gone to the library for an hour to go over my statistics notes. And when I returned to our suite, I pushed open our bedroom door without a second thought. And it took my brain a long moment to process what I saw inside. On Katie’s bed was a body on all fours. But the broad, naked ass I saw there did not compute. Was I in the wrong room? No. But those buns couldn’t belong to the very svelte Blond Katie. And wait… that was a hairy ass?
Not one but two heads whipped around to catch me staring. And that’s when my feet got the hint. Quick as you please, I spun around and closed the door. Not sure what to do next, I went over to our window seat and dropped my book bag. As I stared out the window, I heard two noises start up. One noise was the smack of fat raindrops against our antique windows. Even as I watched, the sky darkened and the rain came down in sheets.
But over that sound was the muted, rhythmic grunting of a guy who was just about to…
Ack!
Quickly, I cracked the window open an inch, which let both the sound and the fresh smell of the rain into our room.
Even though it wasn’t me in that bedroom, I felt an inexplicable slap of shame come over me. I wasn’t a baby, and the idea of my peers having sex shouldn’t disgust me. Even so, I felt shaken, like a little kid who had just walked in on her parents.
Come to think of it, I’d never happened upon that.
I needed to think about something else, and soon. It was really pouring outside now, so leaving wasn’t a great option. I jammed my ear buds into my ears and cranked up a playlist of guitar solos I’d been hoping to learn. And tried really hard not to think about Blond Katie and Hairy Ass getting it on in the other room.
In some ways, I was a more jaded First Year than anyone else around me. I’d read about more criminally lewd acts in the past year than anyone ever should. But the normal nineteen year-old variety of sex was a mystery to me. At my house, we’d never talked about sex. We were New Englanders. We talked about sports and the weather.
I’d learned the basics of human reproduction, of course. From health class and from copies of Cosmo I read in the salon, I knew the mechanics. But I had no context. And what’s more, I was ashamed of my own curiosity. But when you spent your senior year completely ostracized by your peers, there wasn’t any time for learning the ropes. While other girls my age were experiencing their first loves, and hook-ups, I was alone in my room playing Jordan.
It’s no accident that I’d named my guitar after a boy. He was as close to a boyfriend as I was likely to get.
I wished I had Jordan right now. But he wasn’t available to me, since I kept him under my bed, which was just a few feet away from…
Gah.
An hour later, I pretended to be absorbed in my music when that bedroom door opened up again. Blond Katie showed her guest out into the hallway before coming back into the common room. She planted herself in front of the window seat and gave me a glare. “Didn’t you see my flag?”
Pulling out my ear buds, I turned my eyes toward our bedroom door. Sure enough, a red bandanna was hanging on our doorknob. So that’s why that was there. I thought she’d just left it there by chance.
“Sorry. It didn’t sink in.”
She chuckled. “Oh, it sank in all right.” At that, she retreated to our room, while I sat there, my face burning.
Later that night, the Katies were discussing a frat house formal they planned to attend. But there was a crisis — they needed new stockings, and didn’t have any way to get to the mall.
Right across the street, my car sat waiting in its $300 per month parking spot. But I didn’t feel like offering to take them.
When Saturday came, I did a chore that I’d been avoiding. I got in the new car that my parents had bought and drove to an address in the neighboring town of Orange, one that I’d looked up in the white pages.
Pulling up to the house, I saw a car in the garage and another in the driveway. So at least there was a good shot she was home.
As soon as I rang the bell, Coach Samantha Smith came to the door. “Why, Shannon!” she exclaimed, her smile wide. “What brings you out here?” She came out onto the wide porch. “Have a seat. It’s so nice out, I should be outside anyway.”
I sat joylessly in a wicker chair. The truth was that I’d driven out to Coach’s home because I couldn’t stand the thought of walking into the rink to find her. It would probably make me cry. “Well,” I cleared my throat. “I’m not going to play. And I wanted you to know right away.”
Her face broke open with surprise, and not in a good way. “But…” she sputtered. “We admitted you anyway!” And then she bit down, realizing that she shouldn’t have said what she did. “Anyway” meant “in spite of your father’s arrest and indictment.”
“And I’m really grateful for that,” I said quickly. “A lot of schools dropped me like a hot turd.”
Her eyes were wide and liquid, waiting for me to finish.
“But I can’t play. I love hockey, but…” There was an enormous lump in my throat. “I changed my name,” I blurted out.
She sucked in a breath. “Okay…” she shook her head. “I’m trying to understand. But Shannon…” she cocked her head.
“Scarlet Crowley,” I supplied.
“Scarlet Crowley, we are going to kick ass this year. And we really need some help in front of the net. You’re good enough to start games.”
“I know,” I said in a small voice. “I just can’t… I can’t be her anymore. I… apologize.”
Coach put her chin on her hands. “I’m really sorry you feel that way. But wouldn’t playing in spite of them just prove to everyone who you really are?”
That sounded good on paper. But Coach hadn’t lived the year I’d just lived. She really had no idea how bad it could be. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I wanted to play for you. I really did.”
Her frown turned into resignation. “I wouldn’t say this to a lot of players, Scarlet. But if you stay in shape, you could come back in a year or two. My gut says there will always be room for you.”
I let out a long breath. “Thank you, Coach. Thank you.”
There weren’t any more words to say. So I got up and drove home.
Without hockey practice to keep me busy, I was at a loss for what to do with myself. Even though I’d vowed that this year would be different from last year, I found myself practicing guitar on my bed in the evenings. I could almost play the opening riff to Eric Clapton’s Layla, which had bedeviled me for months.
And hey — there weren’t any news trucks sitting outside. So that was progress.
Also, I had Tuesdays and Thursdays to look forward to. They quickly became the best days of the week, because Bridger and I were becoming friends. The moment I walked into statistics class, I always checked to make sure he was there.
He always was.
In stats, I’d learned to sit in the row in front of him. Otherwise, the temptation was just too great to watch Bridger instead of the professor. My grade in that course could not withstand my wandering eyes. And I planned to do very, very well at Harkness. College was my lifeline, and I wasn’t about to risk it with a poor performance.
After stats, the day got even better. With some careful timing (a goalie was good at this sort of maneuvering) I always managed to fall in with Bridger on the way to music theory.
“Stalker! What music do you think we’ll hear in class today?” he would ask.
Except for the dreadful nickname he’d given to me, everything about Bridger was fun. I’d make a few guesses about what we’d get during music theory, all the while trying not to fall headlong into his green-eyed gaze.
After class, we usually ate lunch together in the student center. We’d hang around for a little while afterward, too, helping each other with the work from the courses we shared.
I learned plenty from Bridger. I learned that statistics wasn’t as scary as I’d thought, once you got past all the new terminology. And the homework was more interesting than anything I’d ever done for a calculus class, because all the examples were practical, concrete things. In stats class, the world was not biased and abstract. Every mystery could be ordered, graphed and explained.
In addition to math, I learned that Bridger had pale freckles on the back of his hands, and that his smile was slightly lopsided. And that when he leaned back in his chair, his t-shirt stretched across every glorious muscle on his chest.
Each time we hung out, his watch alarm went off at exactly ten minutes past two o’clock. “Time to go to work,” he’d say, shoving his books into his backpack.
“Where do you work?” I’d asked.
“Where don’t I work?” was his retort.
Once, his alarm beeped when Bridger was right in the middle of helping me understand the Z-distribution. “Crap,” I said. “Is there any way we can take this up later?” It was a purely selfish question, of course. I was nursing a big crush on Bridger, even though I was sure he was out of my league.
“If you need help, call me,” he said. “Give me your pen.” He scribbled his phone number on my notes. “But this is the only time I can study with you.” He shrugged on a jacket. “I make expensive coffee some afternoons, I drive a forklift at night, and on the weekends I have a babysitting gig.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “You work three jobs, and you’re getting a master’s degree alongside your bachelor’s?”
“There’s no rest for the wicked,” he said. Then he gave me a cheeky wink and strode out of the library.
Only once did I see Bridger outside of our Tuesday / Thursday time slot. One warm Saturday, just as September segued into October, I went jogging. After four miles, I decided to stop torturing myself and buy something to drink. Panting in the back of a little Organic market on Chapel street, I was eyeing the choices in the cooler when I heard a familiar voice.
“I don’t think so, Lucy,” Bridger said in his warm baritone. “The bunny crackers cost twice as much as the ones we usually buy. Maybe another time.” I turned my head just in time to see him pass by the end of my aisle and out of sight.
Now, it shouldn’t have surprised me to see that Bridger was there with a girl. But this particular girl was about four feet tall, and wearing a pink bicycle helmet. And even though she passed by in a blink, there was no mistaking the chestnut colored ponytail flopping along behind her.
Bridger had mentioned a babysitting job. But that little girl had to be a relative.
It would have been easy to catch up with him and say hello. And I wanted to. But I was sweaty from my run. And even more importantly, I didn’t want him to imagine I’d followed him here. So I let my gaze linger on the beverages. When I finally chose one, paid, and emerged from the store, they were nowhere in sight.
-BRIDGER-
I survived September without any disasters, but that was no cause for celebration. My life was a house of cards. I woke up every morning wondering whether this would be the day that the slightest breeze blew everything down.
Classes. Lucy. Work. Repeat. That was my life. (Oh, and worry. There was always time for that.) It only took a couple of weeks before my friends stopped texting me. Since I never replied to their updates and invitations, it wasn’t that surprising that they stopped trying.
Except for one. Hartley texted me every day, making me feel like a real jerkface for never replying. The first Wednesday in October, he came into the coffee shop during my shift.
“Dude!” he said, leaning on the counter. “Where the fuck have you been? And why don’t you answer your phone?”
“Working,” I said immediately.
He was quiet for a second, studying me. I hadn’t seen him since move-in day, for Christ’s sake. “How bad is it, Bridge?”
Shit, he cut right to the chase. I rifled through my short stack of excuses and came up dry.
“Why are you working so many hours that you don’t even come into the dining hall at dinner time?” Hartley pressed.
I probably winced. Hartley and I had been friends for a long time. We’d played hockey together for years. Even last year, when Hartley was off the team for an injury, we’d somehow stayed tight. There really wasn’t an excuse in the world good enough to convince him that my life wasn’t circling the drain. I was pretty famous for working hard and partying hard. And my new living arrangement meant that I hadn’t been able to show my face at a party since July.
“Hi, Hartley!”
My friend turned his head to see my sister waving at him from the cafe table where I’d parked her with two cookies and a Nancy Drew paperback. “Lucy! What up, girl?” He wandered over to get a high five.
Saved by the eight year old. Hartley couldn’t grill me about my so-called life so long as Lulu was part of the conversation. As long as she didn’t spill the beans, I should be okay.
I didn’t even want to think about all the secrets I’d asked Lucy to keep this year. It can’t be all that good for the third grade psyche to live a double life. But there really was no choice.
I had to make three froufrou espresso drinks for some sorority girls before Hartley and I had another chance to talk. “Do you want coffee, or did you just come in to see my pretty face?” I asked him.
He grinned. “Can I have a small French roast?” Even though Hartley had more cash in his pockets than he used to, he hadn’t given up his cheapskate habits. He and I had grown up with an instinct for the cheapest thing on any menu. The soup at a diner. The dollar menu at a fast food joint.
The small French roast.
“How’s Theresa?” I asked as I poured for him. “Is she still freaking out about having to do homework?”
Hartley grinned. “Yeah, it’s pretty funny hearing her complain about a pop quiz.” Hartley’s mother had just started nursing school. After twenty years of just scraping by as a single mom, she was finally getting her turn.
I loved Theresa, and I’d crashed at their house more times than I cared to count. I’d thought about calling Hartley’s mom to ask her to take Lucy in. Hell, I thought about it every damned day. And I knew she’d do it. But I also knew she’d quit school to bail us out. I could not let that happen.
“How’s your mom?” Hartley asked, taking his first sip of coffee.
I was ready for the question. “The same,” I said. Although it was a lie twice over. Because things had gone very far South over the summer. Her drug addiction and her creepy friends had pushed me into taking Lucy off her hands. These days, I didn’t even know how she was faring. I hadn’t seen her in a few weeks.
And neither had Lucy.
Hartley studied me. “Do you have Lucy a lot?” he asked.
“Not usually,” I lied. “She’s in an after school program on Wednesdays, and it was canceled today for some reason. I told Mom she could hang with me at the coffee shop. So how’s the lineup this year, anyway?” That’s how desperate I was to get off the subject of Lucy — I was even willing to bring up hockey. This was precisely why I’d been avoiding my friends for a month. With me, there were only painful topics.
It was Hartley’s turn to flinch. “The team looks damned good, honestly. Wish you were there. The frosh don’t get my jokes. And half of them don’t speak English.”
“Ouch.”
“I know. Coach wooed a handful of Canadians who were tired of riding the bench in the semipros. Twenty-one year-old French speakers. I don’t know how they’ll pass their classes until the tutoring kicks in. But they sure can skate.”
I put my elbows on the counter. “So that’s it for us Connecticut kids, isn’t it? If the Ivy League can pull in the ringers like that.”
Hartley shrugged, putting two dollars down on the counter. “Maybe you and I already got the best of it.”
“Maybe. But your final season could be pretty exciting.” Hartley was a year ahead of me.
“We’ll see.”
“How’s Callahan?” Hartley’s girlfriend was another good friend of mine. Christ, I really missed hanging out with the two of them.
“She’s good. Did I tell you that she’s a student manager for the women’s team this year?”
“No shit? That’s bad-ass.” Callahan used to play hockey, too. Until an injury put her on crutches for life.
Hartley shrugged. “She seems happy. The women’s team looks really good this year, too. Except they lost a goalie recruit over the summer.”
“Bummer. That’s not an easy position to fill.”
“I know. The girl was J.P. Ellison’s daughter. You know, that coach who was arrested for…?” Hartley zipped his lip just in time, with a guilty glance over his shoulder toward Lucy. But Lucy was reading her book, oblivious.
“Yeah. Nasty story. I didn’t know he had a daughter.”
“She was supposed to mind the net this year. But she didn’t turn up. Speaking of which…” Hartley checked his watch. It was time for him to go to practice. Shit, I wished I was going with him. He reached across the counter and punched me in the arm. “Call me, would you? Or I’m going to hunt you down, and drag you to a party.”
Good luck with that. “I will.”
Another lie.
Friday morning I blew off my neuro bio lecture to do an errand I’d been avoiding. I biked off campus, past Lucy’s elementary school. She was in there somewhere, learning fractions and spelling rules. (Since I was the one who checked her homework these days, I was quite the third grade curriculum expert.) The further I traveled from campus, the smaller the houses became. On my childhood street, I coasted to a stop before I reached our ranch house. An unfamiliar car sat in the driveway. And the front door was standing open.
I pulled my bike under the bus shelter with me and watched the house.
A few minutes later, a scrawny man emerged, a box in his arms. He wore a loose-fitting denim jacket, and his hair had not been washed any time recently. He put the box in the back seat of the car. Then he walked back up on our small stoop and spoke to someone inside.
My mother shuffled into view, and the sight made my chest tight.
He led her by the arm. But even so, her gait was shaky. She wore rumpled, baggy clothes, lank hair and a completely blank expression.
Shit.
My mother was tucked by the greasy asshole into the passenger seat of the car. And then they drove away together. When the car passed me, I made myself look away, studying the bus schedule as if the secrets of the universe were written there.
They weren’t.
Even after the car had gone, I didn’t move for a couple of minutes. I watched our house, wondering who else might be inside. But I only had an hour, and things looked quiet over there. So I walked my bike up the drive, leaning it against the side of the house where it couldn’t be seen from the street. I dug my keys out of my pocket, only to spot a new lock glinting on the back door. What the fuck? I tried the knob. Locked.
A cold dread expanded in my gut as I forced open the kitchen window. This had been my means of entry many times during high school, if I’d left my keys at home by mistake. The sill was chest height, since it was over the sink. But I still had it, ladies and gentlemen. I could still boost my ass up there without too much trouble.
It was the smell that hit me first.
God, the kitchen reeked. There was garbage on the counter tops, and abandoned dishes in the sink. I put my foot down on the counter and leapt to the floor. The sight of something moving just about stopped my heart.
A rat. Only a rat.
I stood there for a moment, heart pounding. It wasn’t long ago that this kitchen was spotless. I used to sneak through here after curfew on Saturday nights. The worst smell back then was maybe a little cigarette smoke — a habit my father never managed to break. But the surfaces used to shine in the moonlight as I tiptoed towards my room. I would hear my dad sawing logs from his side of the bed. Sometimes my mother fell asleep in the living room, the TV watching her instead of the other way around. I’d put my hand on her shoulder until she woke up — Mom wasn’t much of a stickler about curfew. At my urging, she’d rouse herself enough to go to bed.
Lucy was little then, still sleeping in a crib when I was fifteen, her red hair looking like a lion’s mane when she woke up in the morning. My father was still alive, his van parked in the driveway. McCaulley Plumbing and Heating was painted on the side.
The ghosts of happier times were all around me. I took a deep breath to try to force them back. But all that did was to pull more of the stench into my lungs.
Fuck.
I moved from the kitchen into the dining room. The smell was less here, but that didn’t make it better. Because the dining room table was covered with strange accoutrements. There was a stash of glass jars lined up in a row, and two small propane tanks. On the floor was a stack of crushed boxes that had once contained blister packs of an over-the-counter allergy medicine.
Somebody had been busy here, making something both illegal and dangerous. My first impulse was to pull out my phone and take a photo. But then I thought better of the idea. I wanted no part in this.
Leaving that shit behind, I walked toward the bedrooms. I already knew that there was nothing of value left in mine. There were some sentimental things, though. In fact, when I got there I saw that my treasure box — a big shoebox I’d begun keeping in my closet when I was nine — had been raided by some opportunistic shithead. But I found a handful of photographs scattered inside. I shoved these into the front pocket of my hockey hoodie and left the room.
Lucy’s room hadn’t fared much better. It smelled as if someone had been sleeping in there. There were still a lot of books and toys on the shelves. But I couldn’t carry much back to campus. I tucked the box set of Harry Potter books under my arm. Then I went into her closet and grabbed a stack of sweaters off the shelf. I’d brought a plastic shopping bag, which I pulled from my jeans pocket. I crammed five sweaters into it, until it was so full that the loops would barely fit over my hand.
For winter, she’d need a coat and boots. What else? Long pants. Warm socks. We would just have to buy those things. Last year’s probably wouldn’t fit anyway.
Fuck it. I had to get out of here.
Thirty seconds later, I walked out the back door, leaving it unlocked. Then I was back on my bike, pedaling down the street with a box of books under one arm and a bag around my wrist. I made it almost all the way back home before it really hit me. And then the wave of sadness was so strong that I stopped in front of the hospital, dismounted and put my hands on my knees.
I knew it would be bad. Six weeks ago, I wheeled Lucy’s bike out of the garage and told her to just come home with me. We’d put some of her things into her backpack and mine. And we pedaled away from there together. By taking Lucy, I’d basically given my mother permission to fall all the way apart. And she’d taken me up on it.
Six weeks. Not one phone call from her to ask if Lucy was okay. What kind of mother does that? So I’d already known that shit was hopeless. But… Christ. That house. That smell.
My brain began to spool through the usual What Ifs. What if I’d staged some kind of intervention? What if I just called the police right now? I’d thought through it all before, so this time it didn’t take very long to arrive at the only answer.
No way.
Because anything I did to save my mom would put Lucy into the system. Even if I spent another night Googling “addiction treatment Connecticut,” we didn’t have any other family. If my mom was in rehab — or jail — Lucy would go to foster care. And I wasn’t going to let that happen.
You can’t save everybody, I reminded myself. The trouble was that I wasn’t sure I could save anyone at all. Not even myself.
I straightened up, forcing a few deep breaths into my lungs. It was Friday. I had a bio lab in forty minutes. I had a shift at the coffee shop. And I had to pick Lucy up from her after school program by five. Her schedule was different every day of the week, and so was mine. I’d written a spreadsheet to track everything. I could do this.
So long as nothing ever went wrong.
Shoving off again, I pedaled toward campus. This weekend I’d take Lucy to her soccer game in the park, and then we’d go out for pizza together. We’d both do homework. And then the week would start again, with its schedules and deadlines.
And on Tuesday I could see Scarlet. She was my happy thought — with those perfect cheekbones and thoughtful, hazel eyes. I blew out another big breath and tried to pump the stress out of my lungs. It almost worked.
