The Comeback(40)

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just not how it works, Esme. Nobody will even bother printing a tiny retraction, let alone a whole new post to say I was behaving perfectly normally on a Wednesday afternoon in Best Buy. That’s not a story. Have you ever read that about anyone?”

“That’s bullshit,” Esme says sulkily, and I feel like I’ve just told her that puppies don’t exist, or that Tom Hanks is a raving misogynist.

“People are saying you have a problem. Like drugs or drinking or something,” Esme says, and I resist the urge to tell her that it’s probably the first time in five years that I don’t have either of those particular problems. She doesn’t need to think any less of me than she already does.

“Maybe even psychosis,” she adds.

“Esme, I appreciate the effort you went to, but I’m pretty sure that however you got that photo is the last thing I need to be involved in right now. Thank you for what you were trying to do, but can we please just forget about the kid with the boner?”

“But why should he get away with it, just because he’s a guy?” Esme says, sounding as if she’s about to burst into tears. “Didn’t anyone teach you that you have to stand up to bullies?”

I try to remember a time when I believed in rules like this, too, when I last felt owed anything by life. I feel a tug of envy at her na?veté.

“Sometimes real life doesn’t work out like that,” I say quietly. “Look, you may not know this yet, but there are some bad people in the world, and while some of them get exactly what they deserve, others just don’t. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. This guy might feasibly keep winning, over and over, to the point where you can’t even begin to understand how unfair life can be. So the sooner you just accept that, the easier it will all be.”

Esme is silent on the other end of the phone, and I shift in my chair to stop my leg from cramping up.

“The Best Buy geek is going to win?” she asks eventually. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know,” I reply, exhausted suddenly, and grateful that my parents aren’t home to witness the demotivational speech I’ve just given my sister. “No, probably not.”

“So who’s going to win?” Esme asks softly.

“Can we talk about something else?” I say, and for some reason I feel lonelier than I have in a long time.

“Why are you just giving up? It’s so sad to watch,” Esme says, sounding just like our mother.

“I have to go,” I say, hanging up the phone.

I lean back in my chair and stare up at the collection of four houses on the bluff over Coyote Sumac. The view of Able’s house is even better from here, and when I squint, I can just about make out a figure on the roof, staring out toward the ocean. I know instantly that it’s Able. He’s at home, standing on his roof deck and waiting for the sun to slip behind the ocean. My heart hammers with fury that he could be doing something so ordinary, something so quietly gratifying as watching the sunset on a Monday afternoon, just like the rest of us. I think of what I told Esme, and how I wish I had been lying. I wish that the bad guys were just the bad guys, that they didn’t know exactly how to claw you down with them until your own shame becomes indistinguishable from theirs. As I watch him stare out at the ocean, I understand that I can hide myself away for as long as I want, but it will still only ever be because he made me.

When Able moves inside, a simmering anger bubbles underneath my skin for the first time in a while. The sky casts a deep red light onto the white roof of his house, and the whole ugly thing glows from the inside like it’s on fire.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR





Everything with Able changed a couple of months before my nineteenth birthday. I had just finished shooting the last movie where I would play a child, in a World War II film set in a concentration camp, and Able was hosting a party to celebrate at his house, the peach house up on the hill. He had ignored me throughout the entire shoot, breaking the usual pattern, and I had assumed that this time my performance really wasn’t good enough, that I hadn’t lost enough weight, or that he’d made a mistake by casting me in such an intense role. Or maybe he’d found out about the drugs I was relying on more and more to get through the weeks. The project was the first time we’d worked together since I turned eighteen, and a tiny part of me wondered if he wasn’t interested in me now that I was older, but the thought came from the deepest, most unruly part of my mind, the part I had to suffocate in order to do what I had to do, and be who I had to be every single day.

I was surprised when Able excused us from the rest of the party under the guise of showing me our next script, and he led me into his office at the back of the house. Other guests smiled indulgently at us as we passed them, both of us America’s adopted sweethearts. I remember that Emilia even waved as we went, before turning back to break up another squabble between the twins.

I floated after him, so relieved that he wanted to talk to me again. A sense of calmness descended over me that made what came next even worse. In the office, Able leaned against his desk and told me that he was finally giving in to me, that he would give me what I had wanted all this time. He unzipped his jeans as he spoke, and somehow, through my fear, I found the words to say that I didn’t think it was a good idea. He told me to stop being disingenuous. That everyone knew I’d been chasing him for years. I said I needed to go to the bathroom, but he just looked at me with blank eyes as he forced me down onto the floor and put his penis in my mouth. I started to choke. Thick saliva dripped down my chin and my eyes burned with hot, shameful tears. I was staring at a photograph of Able, Emilia and the twins on the desk behind him the whole time. He didn’t even turn it around.