How to Disappear(49)

I say, “Do you ever think about going ‘screw it’ and getting away?”

She says, “Like a week at Disney World or life in Argentina?”

“Argentina.”

Her hand covers my hand. “Was this the plan? Pass out for ten hours, then strike with your lame romantic fantasy?”

“Ten hours?”

“That might be an exaggeration,” she says. “Just slightly.” Then she starts unbuttoning her shirt.

Once it’s off and she’s still kissing me, I reach around her and unhook her bra.

She says, “Nuh-uh,” batting my hands away.

I say, “I’ll do it.” But I’ve never hooked a bra back up, and they’re not as stretchy as you’d think. I’m trying to get her bra closed again without breaking the mood, hoping she’ll say it’s okay to leave it open. She doesn’t, and I feel like a clown. Finally, she does it herself, behind her back, not even seeing where the miniscule hooks are.

Then she touches my hand, still behind her, pulling it onto her skin.

I say, “That was close. Thanks for preserving my virtue.”

“Sarcasm,” she says. “So unromantic.”

Then she takes the hem of my T-shirt and she starts to lift it up over my torso. Reflexively, I pull it back down.

She says, “What? You want to stash me in Paraguay, but you won’t let me kiss your naked shoulders?”

“Gotta keep you in line.”

“Take off your shirt.”

It’s not like everyone who’s ever been to a pool party with me, and dozens of crew teams, haven’t seen me without a shirt. I know the drill. I’ve got my story down if anybody asks. That doesn’t mean I want to be here now, showing her.

“What?” she says, touching my hair. “Do you have a tattoo that says, I love my wife or I love Mommy or I love boys? Do you have a giant birthmark in the shape of a weasel? Do you have a terrifying scar?”

She stops right there.

She says, “I’m sorry.” She sits there, waiting for me to say something. “I swear, I thought it was like you thought I’d hate chest hair or something. I was joking about the scar.”

How transparent am I? One day I’m calculating in minute detail the staging of a murder in the mountains, and now I’ve lowered my guard like a drawbridge for her to cross.

She says, “I really was joking. Sorry, okay? Don’t be mad.”

There’s more silence from me. It’s not that I’m fuming; it’s that I don’t know what to say.

“It’s just kind of weird getting this naked with someone who’s not equally naked,” she says. “That’s all. I keep the bra, you keep the shirt, okay?”

I raise my arms.

She says, “You don’t have to do this.” Then she eases my T-shirt up past my pits and over my head.

I wish I could see her face, but she’s behind me now on the bed, her legs pressing against me on either side. I think, Perfect, this is the A-number-one position to get garroted, one thin stretch of wire to my neck, quick, followed by instant death.

I’m in the A-number-one position for a stupid guy who trusts a girl, shirtless, without anything between me and the truth, between me and her. I’m acting exactly like a person who trusts people, specifically her, the girl I just invited to a South American country, whom anyone in his right mind would know not to trust.

I feel her eyes on my back, fixed on the expanse of skin where my biography is etched.

I feel her finger tracing the scar that runs across my back, first the faint lines and then the one where it’s hard for me to feel anything but a vague pressure, where I can’t feel the location of her finger on my body unless she pushes down hard, because the sensation is gone: the ugly one. The scar twists across my back in uneven knots of hard white skin, like a deformed centipede.

She says, “Who did this to you?”

The story is that Don did it. It goes, we were playing with fencing swords, one of them with the dull tip broken off, leaving a jagged metal point. The story is that we were too young to understand the danger, that we both thought we were Zorro until I started to bleed through my cut-to-ribbons Sunday School shirt.

I don’t know why I put the Sunday School shirt in there, nice detail though.

The story is a lie.

“?‘Two paths diverge in a yellow wood,’?” she misquotes. “Are you going to tell me or not?”

The idea that a month ago I was sitting in AP English and cared what Robert Frost had to say is remarkable. It’s amazing how false it feels for that to be my memory, as if high school and AP English and raising my hand and being called on could never happen to the thug I am now.

But the AP English in me speaks. “Roads. It was roads that diverged.”

“Show-off. Are you going to take the path where you tell me what happened to you?”

I try to get myself to feel better about this so I can keep some semblance of control here. I say to myself, I might as well tell her, she already suspects. She’d probably admire someone who could cut up a kid, her being such a master of cutting up humans.

But it feels as if the girl who’s a slasher and the girl on the bed this close to me are two different people. I don’t want to hurt either one of them.

I want her to know, God knows why.