Fingerprints of You (3 page)

“You girls old enough to smoke?” He inhaled deep.

“What do you think?” Molly-Warner said, and rolled her eyes.

Molly-Warner and I met in chemistry class the year before. She was still a virgin, but there were rumors at school that she gave good blow jobs, which made me feel a little better when I first told her about sleeping with the pothead. He wasn’t the most admirable character, a lanky kid who’d probably never make it to graduation, but she believed me when I said he’d been nice about the whole thing and that he had a quirky sense of humor.

“I’m a sucker for anyone who can make me laugh,” I told
her, which was true even though it didn’t have much to do with me sleeping with the stoner. We’d never talked all that much, when it really came down to it.

Molly-Warner was my most confident friend even though she was a little bit fat, and she had short, spiky hair that made her look tough and unpredictable. She wasn’t weirded out when I told her about all the different places my mom and I had lived, and she’d been nice to me from the start even back when I was the new kid in school, the daughter of a single mom who lived in the junky apartment complex near the mall. She never was one to judge. Both her parents worked at the furniture factory in town, and they bought her a used Toyota when she turned sixteen so they wouldn’t have to worry about driving her to school. She was my only friend with a car, and I was her only friend who didn’t mind talking about what it felt like to have sex.

“Did it make you feel important?” she asked one afternoon as she wove her way through town with one hand on the steering wheel and the other hanging out the window.

I had my nose buried in a not-very-good collection of Jim Morrison poems, and I shook my head and kept my face turned down toward the book. “Not really.”

“But it was exciting, right? To be with him like that?”

She hit the brakes, and I looked up, eyeing the red light that put the car on pause. She was staring at me like I was supposed to say something significant as she raised her dark eyebrows high, punctuating her face with them like two big quote marks. I didn’t want to disappoint her, but I also didn’t like to lie.

“I guess it . . .” I tried to find an easy way to describe the weight in my stomach the first time we did it, the distinct and
lonely feeling that comes when you realize something important has happened and that, if you had blinked just a second longer, you almost would have missed it. “I guess it felt good to do something memorable,” I said.

She returned her eyes to the road with a “humph,” trying to translate my statement into something satisfying, a recommendation maybe, or a promise.

We lied and told Johnny Drinko we were nineteen, and when he said he was twenty-seven, I decided he was too young for my mom anyway, that he probably didn’t know she’d be thirty-six in November. She had a convenient habit of letting the fact slip through the cracks.

“You girls like living here?” he asked as a woman and her son nudged past us and headed into the sub shop.

I looked at him and tried to decide if
he
liked living there, but it was too hard to tell, since he was wearing sunglasses and watching Church Street in front of us as the cars moved down the road.

“It’s okay, I guess.” I shrugged.

“It’s a shit hole is what it is,” Molly-Warner said, and I wished I could sound as assertive as she did when I talked. It was something she was always telling me I needed to work on.

“Oh, yeah?” Johnny eyed her up and down, and I tried to telepathically tell her to suck in her gut. I wanted him to think I was the kind of girl who had interesting thin friends with strong opinions.

“There’s nothing to do here—it’s the same shit all the time.” She flicked her cigarette onto the pavement.

“That’s kind of what I like about this town,” Johnny said. “It’s mellow, no surprises. I dig that.”

I wanted to tell him that’s exactly how I felt, that that was
what made the town my favorite place Stella and I had lived, but I kept my mouth shut and finished my smoke instead.

We were pretty drunk by the time my mom got home, so my voice was slow and slurred when I tried to explain why Molly-Warner and I were sitting around in our underwear taking tequila shots and playing strip poker with Johnny Drinko. She said something about us acting like prostitutes, and then she told me to get some clothes on and go to my room. Now. Johnny was on his feet pretty fast considering how many cocktails he’d had, grabbing his T-shirt off the floor and pulling his tennis shoes on as he headed toward the door.

“It’s cool, Stella,” he said as he dug in his pocket for his keys. “We’re just hanging out.”

Molly-Warner and I stood in the doorway that connected the kitchen to the living room, and we held hands and smiled as we watched my mom throw her cell phone at Johnny’s head.

“Are you insane?” she yelled right before the phone hit the wall.

We stopped smiling then, and I started to feel a little queasy when Molly-Warner began to cry, the tequila sneaking up on me and uncoiling in my stomach, stretching out. But I squeezed my friend’s hand and whispered, “Shh, it’s gonna be fine,” and then Johnny called my mom a crazy bitch, and he opened the door and headed down the hallway.

She followed him out and stood at the top of the stairs, yelling, “They’re only seventeen, you sick shithead” until he was gone. I hoped the neighbors weren’t home from work yet.

My mom kicked Molly-Warner out, and I sat on the couch as I watched her slam the door and call my friend a dumb slut. Then she turned her eyes to me.

“Are you crazy? Have you lost your mind?” she asked.

Which made me think of her at the Motel 6 the week after we left Denny, of the way I dragged her out of bed on the sixth day and dumped her in the shower. It was fast and furious, the misery and depression clinging to her like Velcro she couldn’t get unstuck. I was only fourteen at the time, but I watched as my mother lost herself over Denny, a drunk who treated us like crap, a loser who took all her money.

“Jesus, Lemon. He’s twice your age,” she said, which wasn’t even close to being true, but I let it slide.

I looked at her in the tight black miniskirt and the chunky wedge heels she’d worn to work. I looked at our tiny apartment, the stacks of dirty dishes taking over the coffee table and the trash spilling out of the bin in the kitchen. And for the first time I realized how embarrassing it was to have a mother who acted like a child, to live in an apartment where two people in the building couldn’t take a hot shower at the same time. I decided I’d outgrown Stella’s choices: I wanted a permanent address, a home with enough space for us to unpack all the boxes, a family that made more sense than we did.

“Look at you,” she said. “He works at a tattoo parlor, for Christ’s sake.”

“You’re the one who gave him the key,” I said, even though I knew it had nothing to do with me and Molly-Warner getting drunk with the man I figured my mother wanted as her boyfriend.

“What does
that
mean?” She came toward me. She ran her eyes over the empty shot glasses that had left sticky rings along the edge of our coffee table, at the tequila that had spilled and ruined her stack of
Vogue
magazines piled on the floor. At my jeans on the carpet next to the couch.

“It just means he was here when I got home. He was here because of you.” I stared at her. “They always are.”

Her face changed right before she slapped me—it was hot and tight and far away, her face like sculpted metal and her eyes like broken glass.

I brought my hand to my cheek, my skin throbbing and my eyes watering over. And when she turned away, headed to her bedroom, and slammed the door behind her, I knew we’d be moving within the month.

The last time I saw Johnny Drinko was that weekend, back at the tattoo shop. He was ringing up a man with a buzz cut and a square of Saran Wrap taped to his forearm, and I stood outside the window, looking in as Johnny handed the guy a credit-card receipt. The customer left, and then Johnny came out, lit a cigarette, and squatted down next to me. I didn’t say anything for a long time, but then he reached over and hooked his finger under the edge of my silver anklet.

“I hope I didn’t get you and your friend in too much trouble,” he said.

I remembered the way his skin looked when he took off his shirt at our apartment, the way the black tattoo on his back reminded me of the Egyptian hieroglyphics I’d learned about in social studies the year before.

“Nah, it’s no big deal.”

He dropped the silver chain but kept his grip on my foot as he rubbed his thumb along the curve of my heel, making me hot and anxious in a way none of the boys from school ever had.

“You seem like a good kid. It’s too bad.” He stopped.

I fidgeted with the button on my corduroy miniskirt and
imagined how his breath might taste. Like sweat and cigarettes, tequila and ink, maybe. “It’s too bad what?” I asked.

I thought of the pothead and the way I kept my shirt on the first time we did it in his car down at the cul-de-sac. We were rushed and awkward, childish, and it embarrassed me as I stood outside the shop with Johnny Drinko. I imagined it would be better with Johnny, that he would be smarter and less clumsy. He would make me feel grown up, and I would finally understand why Stella wanted to be with men like him.

He ran his hand up my calf and squeezed my leg. “It’s too bad about you being so young.” He rubbed his thumb along the slope behind my knee. “And me being so old, I guess.”

When I followed Johnny Drinko into the shop and behind the white curtain, I was thinking of my mom across town behind the jewelry counter at J.C. Penney, how she was probably planning the move, deciding what we would need to leave behind this time and what we would have space to take with us.

And then Johnny sat down in the same chair my mother had sat in a week earlier and pulled me toward him. Behind him I saw myself in the glass mirror above his work counter, me looking down at him as he tugged me to his lap. He tasted different than I expected. I’d been right about the cigarettes, but there was also something cinnamon and hot, like the thick red After Shock liquor Molly-Warner and I drank sometimes at her house. At first his tongue was slower than the pothead’s, but it sped up as he shoved his hands under my shirt, his fingers darting back and forth across my skin, pinching.

“Should we lock the door or something?” I asked when I pulled my face away from his and tried to catch my breath.

“I already did,” he said.

My mom and I bailed on the month-to-month rental by the sub shop and moved to Morgantown, West Virginia, the following week.

“I’m doing this for you,” Stella said after we loaded up the car and turned in the key to the landlord. But I just rolled my eyes and looked out the window as she pulled out onto the road.

I didn’t get a chance to see Johnny Drinko again, but I copied down the address of the tattoo shop from the phone book and promised myself eventually I would find words good enough to write down and send to him from the road. I lost the address on I-77 somewhere between Beckley and Bridgeport.

The day we left, I ran into the pothead when we stopped at the gas station near the mall. At first he pretended he didn’t know me, but when Stella went inside to pay, he came over to the car and leaned down at my window.

“I heard about what you did, Lemon,” he said. He reached inside to graze his fingers across my cheek, but I shook his hand away. “You screwed that guy down at Atlas Tattoo.”