In Her Skin(23)

“I don’t know.” My voice hitches in surprise. You know I’m going to the police station? “Does it matter what I wear?”

“It always matters.” You nod at my chest. “Wear that sweater. Preppy and innocent. And Henry and Clarissa’s plan is a good one: say you don’t remember a thing. No one presses the shell-shocked or the traumatized. Take it from me.” I’m mouthing “Henry and Clarissa?” at your back when you turn suddenly at the door. “Another thing.” You rush to hug me, press of hot sternum. “I’m glad you’re back. It makes everything better.”

I watch the door. Maybe you’ll return, but you don’t. I hear your music crank and disappear (you popped on headphones; I know your ways), and it’s just me and the flat girls, and I know how they feel. Plucking them off the bed, I drape their arms and legs on hangers inside my empty closet. From the middle of my bed with my legs crossed, I admire my open closet and the clothes inside that are mine. Eventually, I flick off the light and climb into my bed, which I’m starting to look forward to, and I drift fast. This house seems to want me to sleep in it, and though it’s hours earlier than I’ve ever slept, I oblige, and the fall is delicious.

A metallic rattle jolts me awake.

My window faces a back alley. While the first-floor windows are barred, the third floor is considered too high for breaking and entering, but I wouldn’t mind some bars. Far as I’m concerned, a ladder leading to your window might as well be a stamped invitation. I feel under my pillow for the steak knife I stole from the kitchen—weak blade, but it’ll do—and crawl off the bed, ninja-style, sliding against the wall. The fire-escape creep won’t expect a girl who knows the best place for stabbing is the neck or groin. Jangle, shake-shake, jangle. Louder now. I tested that fire escape when I moved in, one leg out the window. It held good. A shade darker on the floor in front of the window: the city light gives his shadow away. My back prickles.

He stands on the landing looking directly into my room.

I have two choices: scream or fight. Vivi would scream. Jo would fight.

I leap off the wall, knife blazing.

Wolf throws up his hands and lurches backward, veering wildly toward the rail.

I drop the knife and reach fast for a handful of his shirt, yanking him inside. He falls into me, and we stagger for a minute like we’re dancing drunk until I shove him off.

The bedroom is dark but I can see the cut on his lower lip. He has a need in his eyes for something barbed or burning, a need he can fight when he has me.

“You look like someone else,” he says.

“You look the same,” I whisper. Over my shoulder, I check through the crack in my door to see if your light has flipped on. Still dark. When I turn, Wolf is circling the room. Even in the purple half-light, I can see that he is stunned by the grand curtains and poster bed and polished plank floors. I smell cold air and other men’s skin, and I shouldn’t care.

He could blow everything just by being here.

If we get caught I will accuse him of scaling the fire escape to rape me. He won’t argue, because although he hates me right now, he also loves me.

Wolf makes a low whistle. “This is some place.”

“You can’t stay,” I whisper, less sure than I ought to be.

“Don’t plan to,” he says, lifting a bell-shaped glass cover off a gold tree sitting on the dresser. “Unless they lost a boy here, too. Maybe I could play pretend-rich-kid alongside you.”

“Wolf…”

“What is this thing, anyway?” he says, holding the glass cover in the air.

“It’s a cloche. It holds jewelry. I mean, you hang jewelry on the tree and the glass covers it.”

He widens his eyes, nodding. “Fancy. Cloche.” He sets the glass bell down carefully.

“Why are you here?” I say, weighting my words.

He turns and looks me full in the face. “I could ask you the same question.”

I move closer and force myself to breathe him in. The smell of the men on Wolf is enough to keep me away. I worked hard to keep Momma’s men off me; it’s a contamination and I am clean here in my new home and backward is not in my vocabulary. I do not want you, Wolf. I do not want you, Wolf. I do not want.

“I’m safe here. They believe I’m Vivienne Weir.”

Something shifts inside him; he was waiting for this. “Safe from what?”

“The last one, for starters. What if he comes after me?”

“Your momma’s been dead a year. No one’s coming after you.” He leans in and takes my chin. “That isn’t why you left.”

I step backward. “Maybe life in Tent City isn’t for me.”

“Because your life in Florida was so fine?” He waves his hands in the air. “Because this is what you’re used to?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Because I never had a mother? You aren’t the only one who had a different life before Tent City.”

“Fine. I couldn’t take the life anymore.”

“With me. You couldn’t take the life with me anymore. Is that what you’re saying, Jolene?”

I grab his wrists. The insides are marked by yellowed thumbprints. Wolf cannot protect himself from the things he lets happen to him because he thinks he isn’t worth not letting things happen to him. I am scared for Wolf. I am scared for me. Mostly, though, I know life in Tent City isn’t the life I’m supposed to have. Life in Immokalee with Momma wasn’t, either. I’ve been inside other people’s lives, and I found out what I was missing, and it looked a lot more like this.