All We Can Do Is Wait(25)
Danny made Skyler feel special and free and all those things it was hard to feel in her buttoned-up house. Maybe this was the feeling her mother had been chasing all these years, a sense of looseness and sexiness and excitement.
Skyler was fifteen when she and Danny started dating, and by the time she was sixteen, Skyler was in full, consuming love, most waking moments of the day taken up by Danny or thoughts of Danny. She loved the wiriness of his red hair, his skinny but muscled frame, the dumb shamrock tattoo he’d gotten on a trip to Montreal, the gold cross he wore around his neck, a gift for his confirmation.
She loved the way he always had her pulled close to him, whether they were wandering through the Prudential Center or at parties in the Arboretum, everyone drunk on Bud Light cans, all the other girls named Meghan or Ashley, the boys Tommy and Timmy and Mike. Danny always had an arm firmly around her waist, his hand often traveling down to give her butt a squeeze. She liked being Danny’s girl, liked playing up whatever hint of a Boston accent she had.
And she liked, even though she knew it was wrong, that Danny was often jealous, that he had once knocked a tooth out of a Latin Academy kid’s head for talking to her at a party. She liked his roughness, the way he almost devoured her during sex, pinning her arms above her head, that gold cross dangling above her. It all felt very grown-up, somehow, that Danny had such an obvious passion for her, that she felt so protected by him, provided for. Danny worked as a caddie at The Country Club in Brookline in the summers, and he must have gotten good tips, because he always had money, was always insisting that he pay when they went to see a movie, or got ice cream at J.P. Licks, or, on special occasions, dinner at Bertucci’s.
Still, there was a small, nagging voice deep inside Skyler, which sounded a lot like her sister, telling her that this was all going to turn bad someday, that the dangerous flicker she saw in Danny’s eyes sometimes—rarely at first, but then more and more as they became more intertwined, when he was drunk or was swerving between cars on Arborway—was eventually going to turn its dark, frightening glare onto her. She never told Kate about these worries, as Kate had mostly opted to let Skyler make her own mistakes, greeting Danny coolly whenever he came over and raising her eyebrows in skepticism whenever Skyler told her sister about a nice thing Danny had done. So Skyler let this fear, a little gray bead lodged somewhere in her, stay quiet, mostly unaddressed and ignored.
There was a sick kind of relief, then—the strange satisfaction of having a persistent fear finally manifest itself—when, on the night of Danny’s senior prom, Skyler learned what it felt like to have Danny’s anger pointed directly at her.
Skyler spent all afternoon getting ready, Kate helping her with her hair and makeup, wanting to make her sister look nice for the dance, if not for Danny.
“You know, you could always skip,” she said to Skyler, the two of them in Kate’s room, Skyler with her hair up as Kate did her makeup. “We could go get a fancy dinner somewhere instead.”
Skyler sighed. “Come on, Kate. I’m going to the dance.”
“I know. I know.”
“He’s really not like what people think he’s like. He’s sweet.”
“Yeah, but aren’t they always sweet in the beginning? Isn’t that how they get you?”
Skyler laughed. Kate was being so dramatic. “What would you know about how ‘they’ always are, Kate? When’s the last time you even dated someone?”
Unfazed by Skyler’s teasing, Kate took a step back to examine her progress with Skyler’s makeup. “You know fully well that I went on a date with Chris Chen last month.”
“Chris Chen?” Skyler laughed again. “Chris Chen is gay.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t know that yet. So it counts as a date.”
“That is so sad.”
Kate shrugged and gave her sister a goofy smile. “I think you’re ready,” she said, getting out of the way so her sister could see herself in the mirror. Skyler liked the job Kate had done—it was a subtle amount of makeup, but it still made her cheeks glow, her eyes sultry and inviting, her lips pouty and sophisticated.
“He’s gonna love it . . .” she murmured appreciatively.
“The important thing is that you love it,” Kate said, a pointedness in her voice.
“I do, I do. Thank you. What time is it? I should get dressed.”
The dress Skyler had saved up for was a pale blue two-piece, satin and hugging with a thin layer of chiffon over the skirt. It was lovely and ethereal. When Skyler first tried it on she felt like some sort of ancient goddess, powerful and graceful. There was only the slightest hint of midriff showing. It was strapless, but nothing plunging or otherwise risqué. It was the kind of dress that Skyler wasn’t afraid to wear in front of her grandmother, so she certainly didn’t anticipate Danny taking any issue with it. She hoped he’d think she looked good, that he’d be proud to have her as his date. It was a good dress, and had cost her all the money she had saved from work, plus a little from her grandmother, who said, “For your party” when she gave Skyler the check.
Skyler unzipped the dress bag, laid out carefully on Kate’s bed, and looked at the gown with admiration for a moment before slipping it on, Kate helping her with the zipper in back, then letting her sister’s hair down—a kind of casual beach wave look that had taken hours to get right—and saying, “O.K. Take a look.”