A Spark of Light(72)

“Just a boyfriend?” he teased.

“Maybe a fiancé …”

“Maybe like you can’t remember?” Dr. Ward chuckled. “Or maybe like you haven’t decided yet?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Girl, I got nothing but time.” Dr. Ward grinned.

“It’s not that easy. We come from really different places,” Izzy explained.

“Palestine and Israel?”

“What? No …”

“Mars and Venus?” Dr. Ward asked. “Union and Confederacy?”

“Parker grew up eating caviar. I grew up eating when we had enough money for food.” Immediately, Izzy flushed beet red. She didn’t talk about her upbringing. She tried, on a daily basis, to forget it.

She and Parker had been together for three years. They hardly ever fought, and when they did, it always came down to the difference in their backgrounds.

There was the time they had only been dating a few weeks when she had come across him scrolling through social media on his phone. He’d murmured, Valencia looks nice.

Let me guess. She’s someone you went to school with. Jealousy had bristled through Izzy. Women with names like that had trust funds and ski instructors.

Parker had held out his phone to show her that it was the name of the new Instagram filter.

Someone’s jealous, he had teased.

I told you I’m not perfect.

Nope, Parker had said. But you’re perfect for me.

Another time, they had just moved in together and he’d put his glass on the coffee table they had just bought at a yard sale. How could you not use a coaster? she’d snapped.

It’s a twenty-dollar table, he had said, incredulous.

Izzy could not imagine spending that much on an item and not treating it like it was precious. Exactly, she’d said.

All the fight had gone out of him.

I’m an asshole, he had told her, and she never caught him without a coaster again.

She knew damn well why she had fallen for Parker. She just couldn’t, for the life of her, understand why he had fallen for her. One day, Parker would be embarrassed by her in the company of his friends, when she did something that revealed her upbringing. Or he would leave her and she’d be broken. Better to be the one to do the breaking.

Dr. Ward reached for her steady hand. “Well, look at that,” he said. “Someone’s forgotten to be scared.”

During this whispered conversation, which they might have been having anywhere and anytime, rather than in the middle of a hostage crisis, Izzy had stopped shaking. “What do you think he’s going to do to us?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” the doctor replied. “But I do know you’re going to survive it.” He winked at her. “You can’t leave that poor boy of yours hanging.”

You don’t know the half of it, Izzy thought.

—


TRUTH BE TOLD, JANINE HAD been waiting for this day. She knew God would punish her; she just hadn’t thought it would be with quite this much irony.

She kept her hands pressed to the chest of the woman who had been shot. If she pushed hard enough, there wasn’t any blood. If she pushed hard enough, maybe she could shove back the secret that had been buried so far it felt like a false memory.

Janine had not had many friends. Having a brother with Down syndrome was time-consuming. It meant she had to be home after school when her parents were working, to be a babysitter. It meant explaining to everyone why Ben had to tag along, and sometimes she just didn’t have the energy or inclination. And it also meant defending him against stupid comments people made—calling him the R word, or saying But he looks pretty normal, or asking why her mother hadn’t had prenatal testing. It was easier to just not have anyone over to the house, to remain a loner in school.

Which was why, when she was sixteen and somehow got paired in biology with the queen bee of the sophomore class, she expected the worst. Instead, Monica took her under her wing, as if she were a clueless little sister, dragging her into the girls’ room to teach her how to do a cat’s eye with liquid liner; sharing YouTube videos that were supposed to make her laugh. It was the first time she was in on the joke instead of the butt of it, which was why when Monica invited her out on a Friday night, she went. She told her mother that she was studying for her bio midterm with her lab partner, which was only partly a lie. She met Monica, who gave her a fake ID to use that had belonged to her cousin, who looked like Janine with longer hair if you squinted hard. They were going to sneak into a frat party at the college.

Janine had only drunk wine at communion, and tonight’s fare was grain alcohol punch. It tasted like Kool-Aid and there was always a boy pressing another drink into her hand. The night became a collage of images and moments: a red Solo cup, a heartbeat made of music, boys who danced so close that the hair on the back of her neck stood up the way it did before a thunderstorm. Their hands on her shoulders, a massage. Teeth scraping her neck. The realization that most people, including Monica, had gone home. The green nap of a pool table on her bare thighs. Someone holding her down while another moved between her legs, splitting her in two. Don’t tell me you don’t want this, he said, and while she was trying to figure out whether the answer that would get him off her was a yes or a no, a dick was shoved into her mouth.