Seven Days in June(53)

She remembered her mom calling on and off for a good two days. She never answered, but she kept the bulky Nokia phone on the charger, just in case (in case of what, she wasn’t sure). On the third day, she moved it into the kitchen downstairs so she wouldn’t hear the buzzing.



She remembered her first non-self-administered orgasm. They were lying out in the grass by the pool in their underwear, roasting in the swampy DC heat. Shane was listening to her ramble about how Carrie and The Exorcist represented the male fear of female puberty.

“I secretly wanna get a period. Just once,” he said as he popped a WHORE pill on his tongue and tenderly kissed it into her mouth. “What’s up with you and horror?”

“It’s an escape.”

He trailed kisses along her jawline, down her neck. Pausing at her jugular, he murmured against her skin, “Keep talking.”

“It’s a safe way to…to feel…”

“Feel what?”

“Intensity,” she breathed. “A thrill, without being in actual danger.”

He sucked the skin above her collarbone into his mouth. Then he bit her. Hot, wet, hard. Electricity bolted through her, and she let out a quivery cry. Shane’s eyes flickered. Lightly, he cupped her throat with his hand. Ghosting his lips over hers, he said, “There is no safe thrill.”

He squeezed her throat, and she went boneless. Christ. She didn’t know this was something to need. His mouth traveled, restless, over her skin, down to where she was drenched. Then he sucked her till she shattered, tearing fistfuls of grass from the earth.



She remembered walking in Adams Morgan at sunset. When it started to rain, Shane broke into a parked Chevy Nova (using that mysterious ATM card) to wait it out. He was behind the wheel, Genevieve was shotgun, and they snorted lines of PARTY powder off Shane’s paperback copy of Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle.

Something had been weighing on her mind, and she didn’t know how to bring it up. She’d tried and failed several times. But now, feeling electric with coke confidence, she dove right in.

“Gotta ask you something,” she started.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“You a virgin?”

“Virginity is a social construct,” he said proudly.

“Seriously,” she said, rubbing her burning nose. “Are you?”

“Um…no.” He looked vaguely uncomfortable. “Are you?”

“No,” she said.

What she had meant was No, Shane, I’m not a virgin, because I was closing my register at Marshalls last summer and the tall, dead-eyed stock guy who never acknowledged me in public asked me to chill, so we smoked a bowl in his mom’s basement and I asked him not to put it in, but he did, and afterward he high-fived me for not crying. No, Shane, I’m not a virgin. I’m the kind of girl who went back for more, ’cause I told myself he thought I was special. I’m not a virgin. I’m the queen of delusion, and boys lie but I believe, so please, oh please, be careful with me…

“…ask?” Shane was saying something.

“Sorry, what?”

“I said, why do you ask?”

Instead of answering, she bit her lip, shrugging coquettishly. And then she grabbed his face, kissing him until it escalated into a desperate make-out session. A Tipper Gore look-alike pounded on the window, shouting, “Go home!” Genevieve peered at her over Shane’s shoulder, clicked open the blade of her pocketknife, and grinned. Bra strap in his teeth, Shane gave Tipper the finger. The woman clutched her purse and hurried away.

They hated everyone who wasn’t them.



She remembered that sometimes, Shane would wake up fighting. He’d punch at the air, sweating, tangled up in the sheets. Instinctively, she’d run the tips of her fingers over his chest, arms, back, any skin she could reach—tracing the infinity sign over and over, little figure eights, till he slept.

It was the only thing that calmed him.

This memory was the faintest. It wasn’t until years later, when Shane published Eight, that it came rushing back.



She remembered lying in the fetal position on the bed, her brain shrieking, waiting for her cocktail of narcotics to kick in. Sunset bathed the room in a warm strawberry-amber glow. Shane was lying facedown in a dusty corner, playing Scrabble with himself. Brow furrowed, lips pouting, he mumbled, “Fuck. I’m just so hard to beat.”

She stared until he glanced up, face aglow with violet bruises.

“You’re beautiful,” she purred.

With a drowsy smirk, he began to croon the Christina Aguilera power ballad. She gasped and then burst into delighted laughter because, goddammit, he did sound like Ginuwine!

Groaning, Shane folded in on himself with boyish self-consciousness, tucking his face into his tee. Like it was a new thing, letting his guard down. Like his goofy side (and absurd vocal range) was for her only.

She drifted off, helplessly endeared, forgetting that she was a stolen girl stealing moments in a stolen house—and sooner or later, she’d have to pay.



She remembered going on a 7-Eleven run around 2:00 a.m. and sneaking off with a zillion Hostess treats. Together, they took the bus to the Barry Farm area of Southeast DC, the site of Shane’s court-ordered home. The Wilson Children’s Shelter was a county-owned, one-story building on a broken-down block. She couldn’t believe people lived there. It looked like an abandoned Staples.