Never Have I Ever(79)
“I’m not gay! We have children!”
“Mm-hmm. I forgot that God strikes gay people barren. Or maybe it’s that they spontaneously combust in hellfire if they try to breed. Whatever your church says.”
It was true that Francis and Panda went to a very conservative church; they had both been raised in it. Now, in a minute’s worth of eavesdropping, Panda and her way-too-lovely husband made an awful kind of sense. I felt so sad for both of them, and even angrier with Roux. Just one pair of shoes in the other closet was worth more than the rent on this place, but she was tearing Panda up over it. If the stakes in my own game had not been so very, very high, I don’t know what I might have done in that moment.
“My only sin right now is how deep and wide I hate you,” Panda said. “You do not understand anything about me or my marriage.”
“Okay, well, then go pay my rent for no reason,” Roux said. She’d set the phone down on the dresser, and she was stepping, topless, into yoga pants. “I’m going to check the website in two minutes, and if I see I’m paid up, you can go in peace to enjoy thinking about Tate while you make sweet, sweet love to your not-gay husband’s toothbrush. If not . . .”
I could feel my entire body shaking, I was so angry with Roux. I saw Panda’s whole life as a picture, captured in this single moment. She hadn’t befriended Tate to propitiate her like a sex-volcano god. Panda was in love with her.
What an awful thing, to be so love-starved and to settle for so little. She and Francis were caught up together in a lifelong lie, and Roux had threatened to tell her very straitlaced family, maybe her church. Or maybe Roux had only threatened to tell Tate. That would do it, because now that I knew, it was obvious that Panda had hung her heart on the meager peg of Tate Bonasco’s shallow friendship.
“I’m paying it now,” Panda said. “Although how I’m going to buy groceries this month, I have no idea.”
I wondered then if Panda didn’t like me because she saw herself in me. I was excessively close with Char for my own reasons, but maybe, to Panda, my fierce protection of Charlotte acted as a mirror, and Panda didn’t want to look too deeply at herself. That I understood.
“Here, I’ll make it up to you,” Roux said. She was holding a sports bra, but she traded it for the phone. She pointed it at herself, but too low for a selfie, throwing her shoulders back and tightening the muscles in her toned abdomen. I heard the whir of the phone’s camera, and then she tapped at the screen. “Check your texts.” She waited a few seconds, until we both heard Panda’s shocked gasp. Then she said, “Hey, straight girl, are mine as nice as Tate’s?”
More silence. Panda had closed the connection. Roux chuckled, shaking her head, then tucked her phone into her purse. I watched, seething, as she put on the bra top. She did bend down and dig out a pair of the shoes that had been right by my face not five minutes ago. She carried them away, moving out of the room and down the hall at a fast clip.
The breath all came out of me, and I felt like half my bones had turned to air and leaked out with it. I was shaking with exhaustion, but I couldn’t relax. Not yet. She’d said that she was going to check the website. I eased down the hallway, quiet as I could, my back plastered against the wall. She was in the den. I could hear her clacking at the keys.
I checked my watch. I had half an hour, tops, before the DVD was over and the kids started wondering where I was. So far the only secrets I had learned were Panda’s.
Panda must have done as she was told, though, because Roux didn’t call her back. She made a soft, satisfied sound and stood up. A minute later she walked right past me, unseeing, and went out the door.
I ran to the computer even as she was locking up on the porch. I had to, before it could go dark again. I hoped to God that Roux hadn’t forgotten her gym pass or a bottled water. If she came back now, I would have no time to hide.
On the monitor I saw mostly games, but there was also MS Paint, a calculator, Office. I navigated through the doc files and found that there was literally one saved docx on the whole computer, labeled “Civics Paper.” Either the computer was as brand-spanking-new as it looked or Roux was letting Luca slack on homeschooling.
I opened it and scanned a few paragraphs. It was about the judicial branch, and it read like it had been stolen directly off Wikipedia. The mom in me reacted, wondering if Roux knew how to check with those antiplagiarism sites, and then I blinked and shook my head, almost laughing at myself. This was Roux, amoral as a feral cat; she’d just as likely be teaching her kid how to cheat better so he could beat those programs when he went to college. This really did seem to be Luca’s computer, though I knew from my eavesdropping that Roux at least used it to surf the Internet.
Time was leaking away, but I took another precious minute to check the browser history. Like every parent with a teenager, I knew how. I found Airbnb, of course; she’d just checked the Sprite House listing. Before that, Roux had been Googling tropical places, reading up on countries with good coastlines, low cost of living, and no extradition treaties. She’d bookmarked seven sites with information about the Maldives.
My heart jumped. I was right. She was running from the law—she must be. Some client or another had been braver than I was and pressed charges. There was a warrant somewhere, probably with serious time attached. I needed her real name, and I would have her.