No One Knows Us Here(26)

I couldn’t do it, in the end. Too many variables. What if he drank half of it and didn’t die? What if he called 911 and the police came and they tested the coffee and realized I’d poisoned him?

I couldn’t kill him, but I could end it, all those silent little visits to my room in the middle of the night.

My mom asked me to bring him his dinner. It was steak. When I brought the tray in, he was lying in bed in a grubby old T-shirt and nylon athletic shorts. The whole room had that stale locker room smell. Old socks and sweat and bologna sandwiches. He didn’t even look up when I set the tray down. Didn’t bother to say so much as thank you. But he noticed when I took the steak knife to his throat. He noticed when I pressed the tip against his skin.

I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I was just trying to scare him. And Jason did look scared, at least in that first moment. His eyes bulged out in surprise, and I saw the flash of fear. He might not have feared the steak knife so much as the idea that the jig was up, that I was going to go to my mom or maybe even the police. It only lasted a second, that frightened rabbit look. Then he scoffed. Do it, he told me. When I didn’t do it, didn’t plunge that knife straight through his neck, he laughed. He told me to quit messing around with the silverware and let him eat his dinner in peace.

I gripped the knife tighter, so tight I could see the whites of my knuckles. I told him he was never going to come into my room again. I told him if he did, I’d kill him. I dropped the knife so it clattered on the tray, and I walked out. He never touched me again.

A lone blueberry languished on my plate, drowning in its own blood. I popped it in my mouth and it burst, sweet and mealy. “You know what I can’t stop thinking about?” I said to Sam.

Sam shook his head. His eyes had grown a bit wider now. I was scaring him off. Good. Maybe that was for the best.

“I keep thinking that if I’d had the guts back then to do it—to finish him off—everything would be different now. All those years, I thought if I just left, everything would be okay. Maybe I wouldn’t be okay, but they would be okay. I really believed that. But now—” For the first time since I started telling my tragic little tale, my voice faltered. “Now my mom is dead and my little sister—” I could only shake my head, unable to complete the sentence.

“Hey,” Sam said, and he reached for my hands. We sat, facing each other, so close our foreheads almost touched. Our four hands clasped together. “Hey,” he said again, softly. “You’re doing a good thing here, taking care of your sister.”

“But it’s too late! If I’d taken care of things sooner—”

“We wouldn’t be here right now,” he said. “We never would have met.”

“That would probably be better,” I said. “For you, I mean.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t believe that.”

I almost leaned in and kissed him. Almost. I shut my eyes tightly and thought of my sister. The apartment. My new job. Leo. I stood up, too quickly, overturning my wineglass on the tablecloth. I felt the blood rush to my head. My vision went dark for a second. I had to close my eyes and take in a gulp of air. Maybe I had had more to drink than I’d realized. “You should probably go.”

I put my hand to my forehead, trying to gain my composure.

“You okay?” He placed his hands on both sides of my arms, as if to steady me. Then, with one finger, he brushed a strand of my hair from my forehead, tucked it behind my ear.

We looked straight into each other’s eyes. Not many people had such perfectly gray eyes. Usually it was just a trick of the light, and when you inspected them up close, you realized they were really an ambiguous shade of blue or green. Sam’s were gray. Purely gray. There was no other color to describe them.

I thought he might kiss me. I thought of what it would be like to go to bed with him. His face listed toward mine and I angled my body closer to his, so the edges of our clothes were touching, and it seemed like in a moment we’d be wrapping ourselves up in each other, but then something shifted. I felt him inching back.

He squeezed my arms gently. “It’s getting late.”

I lifted my hand to his cheek. There was something sort of romantic and tragic about it, like a tearful goodbye at the train depot, when the soldier goes off to war and the wife has to wave to him from the platform, a brave smile on her face that crumples the minute the train rumbles out of the station.

“Thanks for the waffles,” he said. And then he left.





CHAPTER 10


I couldn’t get to sleep after Sam went home. I was drunk, maybe, but also strangely energized from telling him everything, the whole story leading up to this current predicament I found myself in. It was like shedding an extra skin. I kept jumping out of bed and pacing back and forth across the floor. It took all my willpower to stop myself from going over there and throwing myself on him, one last wild act before buckling down and becoming Leo Glass’s paid girlfriend and the perfect older sister/mother figure to Wendy.

That thought sobered me, a little. Mother figure. I was too young for all this, I kept thinking. But when my mom was twenty-three, I was in kindergarten and she was already married to Jason. She did it. I could do it. I would do it.

I buried myself under my covers with my laptop and passed out sometime around three o’clock watching videos on YouTube.