How to Disappear(51)

Tell me how it’s being alive if you can’t stop for one freaking second and care about someone? And not just because he’s distracting you with charm and hotness. When he’s not one-upping you with his macho boy thing. When you just accidently pushed him into his own personal dark cellar full of spooks and things that snag and snag and snag.

Please, please get out of the cellar.

Said the fake girl to the real boy crashing into her. Through his T-shirt, I feel the raggedy line of the strand I yanked on. I feel it in the scar across his back and in the tension in his shoulder blades.

I say, “Please. I’m so sorry I did that about your shirt. I’m an idiot.”

He says, “No harm done.” Touches his neck. He’s so lying.

Harm done.

“Tell me how to make you feel better. Anything.” Then I wish I could take back the anything because it sounds like I’m offering up sex like it was Krazy Glue to stick broken guys back together.

“Anything?” I can tell it’s a tease.

“Not that anything. Some other anything. Where I’m not an idiot and I bake you a pie.”

“I’m not getting psychoanalyzed for a metaphorical pie.”

“Actual pie. I don’t do metaphorical anything, duh. I’m not literary, I’m practical. Do you want it or not?”

He swings his legs over the side of the bed. His face looks semi-normal.

I say, “Don’t even answer. All straight guys want pie and bra removal. It’s a fact of life.”

He shakes his head. “Is this chiseled on stone tablets? Because I wouldn’t want to mess with the eleventh commandment.”

“On bedrock. Do you mind store-bought crust?”

You can tell he’s so glad he’s not fending off a conversation about his back, his father, or anything that makes him seem, look, or feel weak, he’d eat crust made of crushed gravel. This guy likes weakness even less than all other guys like weakness.

It seems like I actually see him, weirdly so, since we’re busy burying his actual feelings in pastry. Even from this place of total fakeness, I get him. I do. Not Cat. Me.

“Store-bought?” He shakes his head. “I might have to dump you.”

“Ha! I’d have to be your girlfriend for you to dump me, and I’m so not.”

Only maybe I am.

Or maybe Cat is, and how’s that supposed to work?

I run across the backyard to Mrs. Podolski’s kitchen. I grab a crust. I bake him a blueberry pie in the garage’s miniature oven.

We make out while waiting for it to cool.

Do I know how idiotic this is?

Do I know we should be dealing with what happens now? (About blowing town. About the guy he pounded and I punctured. About disappearing.) Do I know I have to go, and going with him would be mind-blowingly stupid?

Yes to all of the above.





52


Jack


Walking back to my apartment from her place, I’m whistling. Then I’m not whistling so much.

I know to check if things are as I left them. I’ve known that since I was five, and not just because Don took my stuff and put it back broken.

Trip wires, threads, twigs, tiny wads of lint—you wouldn’t think a person so conversant with the fine art of self-preservation would be facing down two guys in his living room.

Correction: I’m facing one guy. I walked in, and there he was, sitting in the dark. The second guy was pressed against the bookcase, a yard from the door. But I missed him, and now he has a hard metallic thing just behind my head. I force air up and down my nostrils, smell the dust in the apartment, and the humans.

Nobody says anything.

Every breath seems to take thirty seconds: time to plan. First you assess your target, then you plan. You hit them hard enough to get away, and then you get away.

If they falter, I’ll duck, jab backward, kick, and try to take out a knee in a bastardized Krav Maga move. I wish I were wearing hiking boots and not sneakers. I’m so pumped with adrenaline, I could probably bench press a Hummer. Dislocating a kneecap with a Converse sneaker should be nothing compared to that.

I wonder if they’ve found Don’s gun in its hiding place. If they’re that good, I’m f*cked whether they’ve found it or not.

The guy in front of me is built like a bouncer. He’s bulging out of his suit, his pants riding up over the top of zip-up ankle boots. His weapon isn’t pointed at me. It isn’t even out. Why should it be, given what’s behind my head?

He settles in the green easy chair, his bulk spilling over the armrests. I make myself stop thinking about Nicolette in my lap in that chair, the rough mohair on skin, her skin against my skin.

I can’t let myself get distracted. These guys figuring out who was in that chair would make things worse—much worse. Because they’re not here for me, they’re here for her.

The guy behind me doesn’t move. I don’t think he’s big, and either he doesn’t use deodorant or he’s scared shitless. The worst kind of guy to have pointing something at the back of your head would be a scared little guy.

It runs through my head that the wedge sitting in my chair will collapse it, the guy behind me will freak, and I’ll only make it if the thing in his hand is a knife.

“You should get a better lock,” the big guy says. “Word to the wise.” He sounds as if he’s auditioning for a part in an episode of the kind of old black-and-white crime show my dad liked—or maybe a parody of that kind of show.