The People We Keep(41)

Carly takes one of the dish towels and snaps it at his ass. “Could you be any more blond?” she says as he walks through the door to the kitchen.

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful!” Bodie screeches, the door swinging shut behind him.





— Chapter 19 —


We don’t have sex, Adam and me. There could be a big difference in the way you have sex with a teenage boy in the back of his mom’s station wagon and the way you have sex with a man who you live with. Maybe I’m supposed to seduce him. Maybe I’m supposed to drive to the mall when my shift is over and buy lacy things to wear to meet him at the door when he comes home. But I don’t go to the mall after my shift. I go back to Adam’s place, and I wear Margo’s old leopard leggings and one of Adam’s sweatshirts, and drink a Coke and watch Ren & Stimpy until he gets home. And then we order pizza and play Rook until we can’t stop yawning.

Adam never asked me to move in exactly. He just kept offering me spaces for my things. My clothes are hanging in his closet, which was half-empty anyway, like the girl before me left that space and Adam never even thought of spreading his clothes out to the other side. My toothbrush lives in the cup on the edge of the bathroom sink with his. A few of the mugs from Margo’s Diner are in the cabinet with his nice mugs and he uses them like he doesn’t even mind the chipped rims. I wish I had someone to ask if this is how it happens. It’s the kind of thing I’d ask Margo if I could.

I didn’t even know my dad knew Irene before he stopped coming home. So I certainly don’t know if she asked him to stay or he just stopped leaving. Matty and I were going to get married before we got a place together, and even though, deep down, I didn’t want to marry Matty, at least there was some kind of order to that plan. With Adam, I feel like there’s something I’m missing and I don’t even know where to find it.

Sometimes, when Adam has a couple beers, we fool around on the futon in the living room that’s always folded up like a couch now. I sleep with him in his bed. But we don’t have sex ever, and we don’t do much more in bed than kiss good night.

Once Matty and I started messing around, all he ever wanted to do was have sex. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if he heard a word I said, but it’s like he was addicted to me and that mattered more than the kids who teased him about his weirdo girlfriend or his mom picking at him to find someone better. It mattered more than when I bruised his ego with a joke or turned him down when I didn’t want his grabby hands on my body. I knew I had this power over him, and I liked it.

Adam hears every word I say, but he has to be drunk to want me and even then, he can always stop. The fooling around part with Adam is better than sex was with Matty, but I worry it means that this isn’t going to last, and I want it to. More than just because I want a place to stay, but because I like being with Adam. I like talking to him. I like the way we have patterns, that things are the same most of the time.

At night, when Adam turns the light off, we confess things to each other. Stupid stuff, mostly. Adam says he’s afraid of clowns. I tell him about the way starlings flocked in bare tree branches in the winter in Little River, so many that they looked like leaves, and when they up and flew away all at once, it would make me scared for reasons I don’t know how to say. I tell him like it was years ago. Not weeks.

We lie there, staring at the ceiling, looking for shapes in cracks we can just barely see in the street light that leaks through the blinds. Sides touching, holding hands, like Matty and I used to when we watched clouds as kids.

Adam tells me that he slept with a blankie until he was twelve. I say that I used to sing Whitney Houston into a pencil at the top of my lungs. He cops to liking Air Supply. I tell him about the pink puke sneakers I had from the time I threw up in Margo’s car. I don’t tell him why I puked, just that my dad didn’t see the need to buy me new shoes. But even that feels like I’m saying a little too much, because I have to be so careful about the whens.

There’s a part of me that wants Adam to know everything, like if I told him, my life could start from that moment and nothing before would count. It wouldn’t even leave a stain. But if he knew everything, he wouldn’t like me anymore. He couldn’t. The catch in all of it is that if he knew and didn’t care, he couldn’t be the Adam I want him to be. Either way I’d lose him.

Eventually his grip on my hand gets softer. “What are you thinking about?” he asks in his slow, sleepy voice. He likes to talk until the very last moment before he falls asleep.

“A tree frog,” I say. “What are you thinking about?”

“Donuts,” he says, and then he’s done for the day, breathing softly through his mouth.

In the dim light, I watch Adam drift away, the vee between his eyebrows softening until it disappears, and I wonder what it must be like to be one of those people who sleep soundly and wake up rested.

They say you spend like half your life asleep, but I think I’ve been awake for most of it. I wonder if I’ll ever stop waking up at the slightest little noise, thinking it could be my mom sneaking back home to take me with her. I wonder if sleeping is something I could ever learn to do.





— Chapter 20 —


I call Margo on Sundays at two o’clock from the pay phone outside of Woolworth’s. It’s my deal with her. She says someone needs to keep track of me. She says I can call collect, but I don’t. I take a roll of dimes with me. Last time I called, we used up the whole roll and I couldn’t stop shivering for hours afterward.