-SCARLET-
WHEN I CHECKED my phone after Italian class the following week, a new voicemail waited, from an unfamiliar New Hampshire number.
That couldn’t be good.
I tapped the screen and held it to my ear, expecting to hear Azzan or a lawyer chewing me out for my lack of cooperation.
A woman’s voice got right to the point. “I am trying to reach Shannon Ellison, also known as Scarlet Crowley.” Ouch. She made it sound as though I had a criminal alias. “This is Madeline Teeter, assistant district attorney for the district of New Hampshire. Would you please give me a call at your earliest convenience? There are a few questions I’d like to ask you…”
My heart skittered even as she rattled off the number. Because I’d expected to get called by lawyers. But not the prosecution.
When I tapped my phone to delete the message, my fingers were shaking.
If my parents — and their lawyers — were unhappy with me now, they would be ten times angrier if I ever spoke to the district attorney’s office.
I shoved the phone deep into my pocket.
Even before my world blew up, I’d sometimes spent time trying to figure out what my parents wanted from me. In many ways, my father was easier than Mom. Win a hockey game, and you were his favorite person. Lose, and you were invisible. A straight A report card and a spot on the girls’ all-state hockey team was all he wanted from me. Luckily I was able to deliver most of the time. Because the man could be terrifying if you disappointed him in public. He was “that” dad, the one who screamed from the sidelines, letting you know exactly how badly you’d screwed up.
So I tried never to screw up.
My mother was far more complicated. She wanted a tricky mixture of gratitude and reverence and success. She cared about appearances, too, in ways that I never quite understood. It was okay with her that I was an athlete — she didn’t try to dress me in skirts and heels. But in her mind, even sporty girls should be fashionable. She bought me Lululemon workout gear, and pink sports bras. She got huffy if I wore my most comfortable pair of gray track pants out of the house.
To Mom, it wasn’t worth doing unless you did it in style. And when the TV trucks began to pull up in front of the house, she didn’t fall apart. No — if anything, she upped her trips to the salon, determined to look stylish and confident every time they filmed her coming out of the house.
If I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, I might reason that hers was the pathetic response of a person with no other way to contribute to her husband’s cause. But it was hard to be generous to a woman who had refused to acknowledge that my father’s legal troubles weren’t just a minor inconvenience.
Every day I thanked the gods of the Harkness Admissions Department that they’d sent me a fat envelope. Before the scandal, several schools had begun recruiting me for hockey. But nearly all of them dropped me when the story broke. Only two schools admitted me — Harkness, who was probably just too confident in its 300-year-old history to care about scandal. And Sterling — the college where my father coached. They probably admitted me out of obligation.
Thank God I wasn’t sitting in New Hampshire with nowhere to go. I planned to stay as far from my father’s trial as I could possibly get.
Normal people lived for the weekends. But I was not a normal person. Friday night loomed, and with it the usual poor set of options for entertaining myself. At times, I’d tagged along with The Katies to parties, but they always left me cold. I hated small talk and warm beer. Apart from deafening music, parties seemed to offer little else.
This Friday, I thought I’d stay in and watch some reruns on my laptop. But after dinner, as Blond Katie made plans on the phone, she kept eying me. “I’ll ask,” she said before hanging up.
Then she turned to me, and I readied my excuses on my tongue.
“Before you say no,” Katie began, “it isn’t a party.”
She was so on to me. “What, then?”
“The freshmen football players we’ve been dating have a friend in town,” she said.
“And you want me to be your third? For what?”
“A game!” she said. “Harkness versus Brown. Please? It starts in an hour.”
I looked out of our rapidly darkening window and wondered what Bridger was up to. Working, of course. I hated to admit it, but his unavailability was starting to get to me. There was no chance in hell that the Katies’ football friends would be as interesting as Bridger. They’d probably be several notches down the evolutionary chain. But I was sick of staying home on Friday nights, practicing the guitar and texting Bridger at work.
“Okay,” I sighed. “But if the guy tries to grab my butt, I’m leaving.”
The Katies’ boyfriends’ visitor had a neck the size of a ham, and introduced himself as Spunky. Surely his parents had given him another name, but whatever it was, I never found out. I caught myself wondering who would give himself a weird new name on purpose.
And then I realized that’s exactly what I’d done, too.
We trudged along in the cold and I tried to stay on top of the conversation. But there wasn’t much of one. Anything the girls said caused the football players to grin, and then one of them would declare it “dubious.”
For example:
A Katie: “And then the bartender swore that he knew how to make a Flaming Salamander. Even though I’d invented the name of the drink just to stump him!”
A Football Player: “That is dubious.”
And so it went, until the moment I realized where we were headed. “Hang on,” I protested, stopping on the street corner. “I thought we were going to a football game?”
Ponytail Katie spun around and pinned me with her gaze. “They wouldn’t be joining us then, would they? Duh! Tonight is a hockey game. The preseason scrimmage against Brown.”
Oh, crap. “But… I don’t go to hockey games,” I whined.
“Scarlet,” she protested, hoping I was not about to bail. “We’re here already.”
And so we were. Defeated, I followed them into the arena where I’d always expected to compete.
It made for a much more depressing evening than I’d bargained for, to say the least. And that’s the only reason I drank from Spunky’s flask whenever it was passed my way. It was filled with some kind of fruity schnapps, a flavor so sweet that it made my teeth itch. I thought it was weird that football players would want to get drunk on a sissy thing like schnapps. At least, it seemed weird until I got toasted on it. And then I figured out that’s probably why they’d brought it.
Tonight I was really not on my game.
The Katies bought popcorn, and I ate a bunch of it to try to cushion the schnapps. The Harkness men’s team was skating really well, and it made for a very exciting game. Tied at 1-1 for most of the first two periods, Harkness came out swinging in the third. The team captain sent a Howitzer right over the goalie’s glove and into the net, and I was on my feet with the rest of the cheering crowd.
This had once been my whole life — watching the puck whip across the ice, critiquing the plays, and scanning for a breakaway. I missed it. Terribly.
Given the chance, I would have distracted myself with a little conversation. But in spite of his name, Spunky wasn’t a talker. And I couldn’t even fidget with my generation’s favorite escape — my phone — because I’d left it behind in my dorm room by accident.
With four minutes left, Harkness drew a penalty, and the entire stadium leaned forward to see whether Brown would be able to make anything happen during the two minute period when one of our defensemen sat in the sin bin. Both teams amped it up, skating fast, checking hard.
We survived it, the Harkness players ragging the puck until their man was freed. And when the buzzer rang, Harkness had won, 2-1.
By the time we stood to leave, I was drunk on schnapps and the achingly familiar sound of the puck smacking the boards. Tipsily, I followed The Katies and their thick-necked men toward Hannigan’s Bar, where the doorway was jammed with hockey fans. I waited with my roommates, wondering how they planned to get past the bouncer. None of us was twenty-one. Maybe that didn’t matter?
But when the crowd before us cleared, Blond Katie stepped up to the bouncer. As I watched, she and all the others pulled IDs from their pockets.
Fake IDs.
Crap! This was going to be embarrassing. I didn’t have a fake ID, nor did I have a clue where to get one. On the other hand, I now had the perfect excuse to leave without them. I leaned over to Ponytail Katie. “Sorry, I can’t get into this place. I’m outie.”
Then, just as I turned to go, my eyes swept the bar. As the crowd moved, I caught a pair of familiar eyes looking back at me.
Bridger was there, sitting on a barstool.
My mouth fell open. I wanted a closer look, but shifting bodies blocked my view of his end of the bar. Feeling awfully drunk, I wondered for a half a second if I had imagined it.
“Let me see some ID, miss,” the bouncer demanded of me then.
“I…” Shaking my head, I turned for the door. What had just happened? Bridger, who was too busy to ever see me on the weekend, was chilling at the bar. I felt as if I’d been slapped.
The wintry air outside was bracing. I stopped just beyond the bar, trying to get a grip on myself. I felt my pocket for my phone, once again remembering that I’d left it behind. If I texted him right now (“Hi Bridge, how’s work?”) I wondered what he would reply.
Betrayal made my throat feel hot.
“Where are you going, pretty girl?”
I looked up to find Spunky the football player. “G… gotta go,” I choked out.
“You could stay here with me,” he said, taking a big step forward. In response, I took a staggered step backward, my bottom colliding with the brick building. The guy put his big hands on my shoulders, pinning me there. “It’s early,” he whispered. “Don’t run off.”
Now I was actually trapped, and feeling afraid. The rush of hockey goers had filtered into the bar, or down the streets. There was nobody but me and the big galumph holding me to the wall.
Great.
I squirmed to the side, but he stopped me. He put his feet between mine. There was no way to finesse this, other than the obvious. So I put both my hands on his chest and gave a mighty shove. “Back off,” I said.
“Be nice,” was his response. He leaned in to kiss me. I gave another great shove and craned my neck away from his alcohol soaked breath. He only grabbed my arms and pinned my wrists against the building.
That’s when I really began to panic. “OFF ME!” I screamed.
And then he was gone. I felt the cool air of freedom, and registered the sound of a heavy body falling to the sidewalk. “Aaaarrgh, fuck!” the guy hollered. When I looked down, he was curled up in a ball, holding his nuts.
And Bridger was standing over him. “What part of off me did you not hear?” he growled. He wound up for another kick, but the guy rolled away, flopping over onto his other side, still protecting the family jewels.
“Bridge,” I gasped, tasting bile in my throat. I was still stunned to see him. If only the world would slow down for a few minutes so I could catch up with everything that had just happened.
The sound of my voice seemed to change his focus. He wheeled away from Spunky and stood before me. Bridger took my hands in his, inspecting my wrists. He pulled me into a hug. “Did he hurt you? Jesus, I’ll kill him.”
That’s when the tears began running down my face, and Bridger wiped them away with his thumbs. But I wasn’t really afraid, just overwrought. About everything. And Bridger had no idea. Angry, I pushed him away. “No. Don’t touch me.”
He stepped back, shock on his face. “Christ, Scarlet. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“You,” I squealed. “Why are you here? Why were you there, in that bar? With who? I’m just your Tuesday and Thursday girl…”
I broke off, gasping now. Even as my sobs gathered steam, I knew I was making an ass of myself. But I was too drunk to reign it in. I stood there, right on Elm Street, having an ugly cry.
“Where is it, Scarlet?”
Bridger was trying to ask me a question, but I was too busy sobbing to hear him. I wiped my nose on my sleeve.
He wrapped an arm around my back, and I let him. I allowed it, because crying while very drunk wasn’t as easy as you’d think. The ground beneath my feet had begun to sway in unpredictable ways. But Bridger held me tight, and it felt so freaking good. And that only made me cry harder. Damn. It. All.
“Your phone, Scarlet. Did you lose it?”
“At home,” I gulped. “Why?”
“Because I’ve been calling you for hours,” he sighed. “I got an unexpected free pass tonight. So I started calling you before seven, right up until the minute I saw you in that bar. Go look at your phone. You’ll see.”
“Ohhhh,” I moaned, the word long and shuddery.
Bridger pulled me to his side and started to lead me down the sidewalk. “How did you get into such a state? Do you always get wasted on Friday nights?”
I shook my head violently. “Never. Which is why I feel so… urgh.”
“Let’s get you home, then,” he said, steering me across the street. “You have your key card?”
I nodded with my whole drunken body. The way a horse nods.
“Okay,” he chuckled. “Come on.”
We’d almost made it home when a war broke out in my stomach. As we walked across Freshman Court, the schnapps began fighting the popcorn, and I couldn’t tell who was winning. But I, for one, was losing. “Bridger, I think… ugh.” I swerved away from him, took two staggered steps, and managed to aim my vomit into the shrubbery. “Oh,” I wailed, as much from the humiliation as from the discomfort.
Bridger gathered my hair together and held it for me. “You’ll be okay,” he said, with actual humor in his voice. “We’ve all been there.”
“Not me,” I said. “I don’t do this.”
Behind me, he let out another enormous sight. “Okay, you know what? We’re going to write off this entire night.”
“Are we?” I stood up again, fishing through my pockets for a tissue. No such luck. The best I could come up with was a receipt for a cup of coffee I’d bought. So that’s what I used to wipe my mouth.
Sexy.
“Henceforth,” he said, “we shall refer to this as The Most Pointless Night Ever. It’s just one more example of my good luck. Getting this one night’s reprieve…”
“And me not answering the phone,” I mumbled. “It’s all my fault.”
“Not at all,” he sighed. “I should have known about tonight before, but I didn’t read the… never mind. Let’s get you upstairs before that happens again.”
“Again?” I whimpered.
“Probably.”
Since the Katies were still at the bar, my room was dark and quiet. Bridger walked me into my bedroom. “Where are your PJs?” he asked.
Not willing to act helpless, I grabbed my sweats from a drawer. Bridger turned around to give me privacy, and I couldn’t decide whether or not I appreciated the gesture. In my recent fantasies, he was less of a gentleman. Maybe I was such a repulsive drunk that he didn’t want to look.
Getting out of my jeans was proving very difficult for some reason.
“Scarlet,” Bridger said as I flailed in the dark, “you should probably take off your shoes first.”
Right. That would help, wouldn’t it?
“Okay, all set,” I was finally able to say. “Now I want to brush my teeth.”
“I’ll bet you do.” He picked up my bathroom caddy and pointed at the door.
The fluorescent lights of the bathroom were an assault on my eyes. “Ouch.”
“Ouch,” Bridger agreed, handing me my toothbrush. There was toothpaste on it already.
“Thank you,” I sighed.
“Now, hop in there,” he said a few minutes later, pointing at my bed. Bridger had filled a cup of water, which he set on my nightstand.
“Only if you’ll stay for a minute,” I whined. Even as I said it, an ache began to creep across my temples.
He tossed his coat onto Katie’s bed and kicked off his shoes. Then he actually dropped himself over my prone body and into the space between me and the wall. He put his nose in my hair and his arm around my waist.
“Nice,” I said.
He kissed the back of my head in reply.
It was dark, and Bridger was in my bed. In spite of my foul stomach and the beginnings of a nasty headache, I craved his touch. Wiggling in the tight space, I flopped onto my back and then turned to face him. His chest was warm and firm under my hands. I stroked the scruff of his whiskers, then pulled his head towards mine.
He gave me the gentlest of kisses, and then pulled back.
Unsatisfied, I hoisted my floppy body onto an elbow, leaned forward and planted one on him, square on the lips. If only to defend himself from my assault, his big hand landed on my ribcage, his thumb grazing my breast. This time, Bridger gave in and kissed me back.
The dark, his warm body, and a drunken lack of inhibition all crested at once. When our tongues met, a jolt of desire shot through me. The moan I let out was probably not very ladylike, but it had the intended effect. Bridger deepened our kiss.
Suddenly, it was no longer okay with me that I was trapped under the comforter and he was not. I slid out of the bed and then dropped back on top of it again, climbing onto Bridger as he rolled onto his back. Kissing him, I settled onto his hips. His big hands cupped my bottom, pulling me in tight. Spread out over his warm body, each point of contact made me tingle. I could feel him under my breasts, my knees, my thighs. My… everywhere.
And he felt it too. Never mind that he was still kissing me in a way that was more polite than I wished. His body gave him away. As unfamiliar as I was with male desire, there was no mistaking the solid form of him, pressing against the fly of his jeans, lying just between my legs. My hips, acting without my conscious consent, rolled closer to him. My body wanted contact, right now.
Bridger groaned deep in his throat. Then he rolled me off of him, putting some space between us. Panting, he said, “let’s stop.”
“Don’t want to,” I said. The room was spinning. But I managed to find the fly of his jeans with two hands.
“Oh no you don’t,” he sighed, catching my hands in his own. “Not tonight, Scarlet. Not when we’re both drunk.”
“You’re drunk? I can’t tell.”
He laughed. “I’m better at it than you. But seriously, we can’t.”
“Why?” I’m pretty sure it came out as a whine.
He pushed my hair away from my face, and the gesture was so sweet that I felt my eyes tear up. “Because,” he whispered. “When we do, if we ever get to, I want you to remember it the next day.”
“Don’t say if,” I cried, the tears falling.
“Sorry, Scarlet. But in my life there’s a big fat gap between what I want and what I can actually have. And I don’t see how that’s going to change any time soon.”
“It just sucks,” I shuddered.
“It does,” he agreed. “It absolutely and totally sucks.”
Bridger left soon after that. And, coming down off my adrenaline rush, I felt ill again and ran to the toilet. Eventually, I took the two Advil he’d left out for me, and slept about ten hours, only to wake to the most crushing headache I’d ever experienced.
When I finally turned on my phone, around noon, it was to find that Bridger had peppered me with texts and calls for three hours. Just like he’d said he had done.
Disgusted with myself, I tossed the phone aside. Then buried my aching head in my hands.
-BRIDGER-
Sunday morning I woke up halfway when Lucy began to wiggle on her mattress, which lay on the floor beside my bed. Keeping my eyes slammed shut, I rolled into my pillow. We’d been sharing a room for more than three months now, so the week had a rhythm to it. On the weekends, my sister woke up at seven, which was just the same time she woke up on school days. So while I ignored her, she would get up to putter around, sneaking extra time for cartoons on my computer while I pretended not to notice.
I was just dozing off again when her little voice quavered up to me. “Bridge…?”
“Hrrmff,” I said.
“I don’t feel so good.”
My consciousness buzzed to life in a hurry then. Because Lucy was not a complainer. I opened my eyes, startled to realize that it was still dark in our little room. It wasn’t even morning.
“Bridge…”
And then I heard a telltale gurgle, and was on my feet even before my brain caught up. In the dark, I jumped over the corner of Lucy’s mattress to grab the wastebasket from under my desk. But Lulu had also taken action, lurching toward the door. She made it as far as the door handle before bending over to hurl on the floorboards.
Diving forward, I caught the second heave in the trashcan. Lucy began to cry before she even stopped puking.
“Aw, buddy,” I sighed, pulling her hair out of her face. “You’re okay. It sucks, but it’ll stop.” This was the second time in forty-eight hours that I’d comforted a puking female. Go figure.
“I… threw… up… on your shoe,” she sobbed.
Christ, she did. Fuck my life.
“It’s okay.” I kicked the offending shoe aside and opened the door. “Quiet, all right?” I whispered. Not that anyone else was going to be awake at five o-fucking-clock on a Sunday to hear us. I steered her into the bathroom. “Rinse out your mouth, but spit, okay? Don’t drink the water, even if you’re thirsty.”
“Why?”
“Because your tummy is pissed off right now. Trust me.”
“You said a swear.” Her voice was small.
I turned on the tap for her. “You can say one, too. Anyone who’s throwing up gets a free swear.”
“Shit,” Lucy said.
“Good one.” I cleaned out the trashcan, which took a few minutes. But now I had to see to the floor inside my room. “Lucy, stay here for a minute, would you? Just in case it happens again.”
Obediently, she slid down the tile wall until her little butt hit the floor.
“Be right back.” I reeled several long sheets of the coarse brown paper towel out of the dispenser on the wall and went to take care of some business. To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t that bad. When you’d drunk as much as I had the past two years, a little puke wasn’t that big of a deal.
When I came back into the bathroom, Lucy was leaning over the bowl, hands on the toilet seat, her little body heaving. There were tear tracks down her face. But her crying was silent.
Even puking her guts out in the predawn hours, Lucy knew the rules. She was supposed to stay quiet. Because children weren’t allowed to live here.
“Rinse one more time,” I said when it finally stopped. “And let’s wash your hands.” Seeing her hands on a toilet seat shared by four guys gave me the willies.
Afterwards, I steered her back into the room. Fishing one of my clean t-shirts out of my dresser drawer, I said, “strip.” She yanked her P.J. top off, and I dropped the men’s size large over her little shoulders. The shirt hung past her knees.
“Lulu, the trash can is going to be right here, okay?” I set it beside her mattress. “Let’s try to get a little more sleep. Your stomach might leave you alone now.” Weary, I stretched out onto my bed.
Lucy sunk down onto her mattress and wrestled her covers. “Bridge?” Her voice was shaky.
I sat up quickly. “Do you need the bucket?”
In the dark, she swung her head from side to side. And then her small shoulders hunched over and I could hear her crying again.
“Come here.”
About one point five seconds later, she was in my bed, her skinny arms latched around my neck. I tucked her head under my chin, and began to think uncharitable thoughts. Namely: For the love of God, don’t let me catch this flu. Because we will be so very screwed.
As if we weren’t already.
“Shh,” I said. Because that’s what you say to a crying child when there’s no other comfort you can give. Her tears were beginning to soak through my t-shirt.
And then she opened her mouth and cut me in half. “I want Mama.”
Lucy hadn’t mentioned Mom for weeks. She was a smart little girl, who had followed me out of the only home she’d ever lived in without a backward glance. And I’d thought she was okay with it. But didn’t that just prove that I was an insensitive ass? She was eight. She wanted Mommy to hold her when she was ill. “Of course you do,” I whispered against the tightening of my throat.
Because you can’t help what your heart wants.
“We should tell her I’m sick,” Lucy muttered into my chest.
I waited for the familiar surge of anger I always felt when I thought about Mom. But instead of an anger tsunami, all I got was a sad little ripple. “It’s the middle of the night,” I explained, congratulating myself for providing a semi-logical excuse. Because I couldn’t tell Lucy the truth. That her mother was a drugged up bitch who didn’t give two shits about us.
The panicky, ill Lucy wanted to believe that Mom would somehow wake from her self-induced nightmare and pull herself together on account of a virus. But I knew she wouldn’t. And in the morning, Lucy would probably know it, too.
My sister fell asleep without saying anything more. But I just lay there, watching as the gray light crept in through the leaded windows. This year was just so fucking hard. And it wasn’t going to get any easier.
Being with Lucy wasn’t the hard part. I was thirteen years old when she was born — a surprise to my parents. But things were going well for my father’s plumbing business, and so we moved out of our apartment and into the little house on the outskirts of Harkness.
Because of Lucy, I’ve always been good with kids. I was the fifteen year old holding the toddler in the grocery store while my mother shopped. Lucy let my father teach her to tie her shoes, but she wanted me when it was time to take the training wheels off her bike. Her preschool graduation was on the same day as my high school graduation. There’s a picture somewhere of the two of us, both wearing caps and gowns.
She was easy company. Even at her worst — sick in the night — she wasn’t any trouble. But money was tight. Time was tight. And hiding her from everyone else was fucking killing me.
The stress monkeys began climbing around inside my head, swinging from problem to problem. Luckily, Lucy slept.
