I'd Give Anything(18)

From far away downstairs, I heard the office door open, my mother’s footsteps, regular as a metronome.

And I left. Just walked out of his room, down the hall into my own, and I shut the door and put on music and lay in the dark with my churning stomach and leaking eyes and cracked heart and tried not to throw up.

The police put the signs back in time. No one died. No one died. No one died.

It was my version of praying.

I fell asleep. I must have because Trevor was shaking me awake.

“Let’s go,” he whispered.

The first time Trevor and I sneaked out, he was twelve, I was eleven, and our parents were having the fight that would finally set the busted pieces of their marriage on fire and obliterate it forever. In the seven years since then, when Trevor’s asked me to go, I’ve never said no.

“No,” I said.

He took his hand off my shoulder. I could feel him standing there in the dark like a statue.

Then, he whispered, “They were all four-way stops.”

“What?”

“The one at Baxter and Simon’s Bridge. The one down there by that old mill they turned into a restaurant. And this other one a few miles over the PA line, near a Christmas tree farm. I mean, I know people could still have gotten hurt, but right then, when I did it? I was thinking that it would be okay because all the other cars would stop. And I told the cop all the places, so he could put them back. I swear. When Eddie and I were in the car, before he stopped at Ed’s house, he called the locations in on his radio.”

“Oh!” I blurted out, and I sat up in bed and started sucking in air like a person who’d been drowning and finally breaks the surface of the water.

“Hey, hey,” said Trevor. He rested his hand on the top of my head, just for a couple of seconds.

Later, at the burial ground, I said, “I should have known, Trev,” and I counted on him to understand what I meant.

“No, you’re fine,” he said.

And then, he said, “All those years ago, she should’ve let me go with Dad.”

He’s said it before. Every time, it hurts the exact same amount as it did the first time, when I was eleven. Every time, I wonder how he could imagine living away from me, leaving me alone.

That’s when he said he hated her.

I believe in intensity. I believe in diving into the quarry, in standing right under the waterfall. You know what I mean, right? But Trevor’s fury at my mother, that constant, seething volcanic rage. I can’t think it’s right. She is harsh and hard and frozen as a glacier. But I look at her sometimes, when she’s reading or listening to opera or arranging flowers in a vase, and I see that she is human.

Also, she is our mother.

“I think she’s turning me into a monster, like her,” said Trevor.

“That will never happen, ever,” I told him.

“Maybe it already has.”

“They were all four-way stops,” I reminded him. “That’s who you really are. The guy who wants to drive Mom crazy but doesn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Like you know,” he said, but I could tell from his voice that he was smiling.

“I do,” I said.

I flung my arms open on the grass.

“I know everything.”





Chapter Six





Ginny


I had underestimated my friend Kirsten. “Finally!” was not the first thing she said. In fact, I don’t think she uttered the word even once. When she called, and, after a couple seconds of hesitation, I steeled myself and answered, the first words out of her mouth were: “How’s our girl doing with this?”

Kirsten had a longtime boyfriend named Tex and no children, but she’d called sharesies on Avery while she was still in utero, and, because we were short on blood relations (especially nonpotentially sociopathic ones) and I was long on love for Kirsten, I’d happily agreed.

“You heard.”

“Not from you, which we will address at a later time, but yes.”

“Well. It’s been, what? Four days. So far, at school, she’s overheard—and possibly was meant to overhear—three conversations. Two of them involved calling the girl in question a ‘slut.’ One involved her friend Alice telling their mutual friend Paigie that, just to be safe, her mom isn’t allowing her to come to our house for a while because Harris is possibly a child molester.”

“For a while? Because child molesters just need a little time to get all that pesky molesting out of their system?”

“Obviously, Alice’s mom doesn’t watch enough Law and Order.”

“Still, two out of three, right?” said Kirsten. “The others sound like they were blaming the girl. Slut is no joke. In our day, kids threw that word around like it was, I don’t know, bitch. But nowadays, calling someone a slut will get you suspended just like that, especially at Lucretia Mott. So they are pulling out the big shame guns on this girl.”

“Great. Let’s pop the champagne.”

“Have they talked, Avery and Harris?”

“No. I talked to her, and then I talked to him about talking to her, and he decided to let her be the one to bring it up to him. And oddly enough, I don’t think she’s quite figured out how to do that.”