You Will Know Me(87)

Eric’s head to her belly, he told her he heard something. A grunt. A snarl.

And that’s when she felt a sharp tugging, like teeth. A tail flapping.

Looking down, between her legs, she saw it.

Tawny fur, black stripe. A tiger’s paw, claws unsheathed.



Katie’s own voice woke her, a strangled cry. Her head jerking up, her body lifting, running from itself.

There’s something in the bed.

There’s something in me.

Turning, she saw Devon standing in the doorway.

“Mom.” Stepping inside the bedroom.

Katie turned away. In the dark, her daughter’s face was like a black hood.

Behind her, she heard the footfalls on the carpet, a shush of bedcovers lifting, Devon sliding in bed beside her, next to her, breathing quickly, her body shuddering as if with heat and horrors.

“Have you ever done something so awful?” Devon asked.

“Devon.”

A moment passed, Katie listening to her breath, waiting.

Finally: “I have to tell you, Mom.”

“Tell me,” Katie said. “Just tell me.”



She did love him, maybe. But she wasn’t sure what that meant, and did anyone ever know?

She’d never had a boy even talk to her before.

It was after a bad practice. Coach had yelled at her, everyone saw. She couldn’t make her body do the things it was supposed to do. Everything felt like it was falling apart. Ryan saw her hiding under the bleachers. He said, If you ever need someone to talk to. And explained he’d been a basketball player in high school, a good one. Everyone told him he’d get a scholarship. He didn’t. He liked pot, liked to party. He went to juvie instead. It’s hard, he told her, when everyone wants it so much but you’re the one who has to do it.

The first time it happened—the back of the restaurant, on the slumped sofa in the manager’s office. The huff of the oven, blazing from twelve hours of use, the spray and gush of the dishwasher, the hot-red blink of a voice mail on the manager’s phone.

(“Mom,” she said now, “everyone tells you how much it’ll hurt. But it didn’t hurt at all.”) She was so focused on her own body, on what she was doing, on what was happening to every muscle, every nerve, that she nearly missed the look on his face, the flush that came over him, his shoulders shaking.

(“Mom, it was so exciting,” Devon said now, clutching her mom’s arm. “All of it.”

“I know,” Katie said.)

After, he covered his face in his hands. She thought he might be crying. He said he wasn’t, and turned away.

She’d seen many men cry—Coach T. after a very good meet or a very bad one; a dozen dads, including Jim Chu, who’d cried when Cheyenne landed on her head during a tumbling run—even Bobby V., when he’d moved the uneven bars an inch without telling anyone and two girls fell.

(And your dad, Katie thought. On the freshly sheared grass of the yard. But Devon couldn’t possibly remember.) It’s not because I’m sorry, Ryan said. It’s because I’m not.

The next time Devon saw a man cry was six weeks later when her dad told her he’d found out. He wouldn’t say how he knew, but he said it was his job to warn her that she was throwing everything away.

That Teddy would never forgive her, that everything would change.

That the biggest mistake you can make in life is giving into sex.

All the things you do when you’re young seem temporary, but they’re all forever, he told her. And there’s a hundred ways sex can ruin you.

That became the thought she couldn’t get out of her head.

(“I felt sick all the time,” Devon said to Katie. “He made it seem different, feel different. Like I’d maybe ruined everything already. And qualifiers were coming.”) She had nightmares he was chasing her through thick woods. She could hear him breathing behind her, panting after her. He had long teeth like a vampire and wanted to drain her of all her blood She dreamed he was choking her. She woke up panting for air.

But she couldn’t figure out how to tell Ryan.

(“I thought maybe I’d be in love like Hailey,” she said. “Like the girls at school. But it wasn’t ever like that. It was just a thing I was trying.”) The call came while she was at Lacey’s party, pedicures under way, rows of girls with their toes turned in, red and crackled and deformed.

Skip the party, he said. Can you sneak the car out again?

She’d said she couldn’t. She didn’t want to do that anymore. My dad knows, she kept telling him. I have to stop.

It’s important, he said, and Devon snuck into one of the Weaver bedrooms, Lacey’s party-favor wrappers strewn across the floor. It was hard to hear him because he was outside, he was walking on the road. I won’t have my car. I need to see you.

And he told her he’d just ended things with Hailey. It wasn’t fair to her, what they were doing.

It’s someone else, Hailey had said, and she was very angry and very loud.

He’d told her no, but he didn’t think she believed him. He’d driven her home in her car, and now he was walking and he wondered if it was time to tell her the truth, tell everyone.

That he and Devon were in love, and it was real, and they weren’t ashamed. (But I don’t love you, she thought, and it’s not real, and I am ashamed.) And that neither of them cared about the consequences.