Hooked (7 page)

“Nice intro to your bad boy,” I said. Usually he played around with me down there before the main attraction. “Don’t mind me, I’ll just lie here.”

“Sorry, I’m feeling very … focused,” he said, thrusting.

“You like fucking me in your new room?” I whispered.

“God, yes,” he said. There was the sound of footsteps running down the hall and I felt that letting-go, almost sick feeling, our backs growing sweaty on his bare, unmade mattress.

We lingered in what felt like timelessness afterward as the room got darker, listening to the constant stream of noise out in the hall. The bad thoughts started crowding back in.
Be positive
. Schmee schmositive.

“Have I mentioned that your mother hates me?” I asked.

“She doesn’t hate you,” Will said, running his fingers along my boobs. “She’s just an odd bird. They’re in their own little rabbit world.” When the room was pitch-black, I got up and felt around for my sneakers.

“Do you really have to go?” he asked, pulling my hand.

I nodded and kissed him, turning on a light. I wanted to stay, but my heart was already aching at the thought of leaving and I wanted to get it over with.

“Good night, G-Rock, Rocker-G, Special Sauce.” He stood up, naked, his distracted, disgruntled expression reminding me of Dad’s whenever I left at the end of a weekend. Like he didn’t want me to go, but at the same time his head was already somewhere else.

part two

As a special parting gift from Stuyvesant—a final act of cruelty—I was awarded zero-period gym my senior year, which meant I had to be in the girls’ locker room by quarter of eight each ever-darkening morning. After school Vanessa and I had SAT prep on Twenty-Third Street, and then we’d go for coffee and anxiously bark vocabulary words at each other while doing our other homework.

I got home late one night in October and heard Mom’s TV. I was in a phase where I’d decided to stop worrying about her. She’d passed the real estate test and she had two new listings, so she had stuff to keep her busy. I was glad she was awake, in bed with a hunk of white, runny cheese, her latest obsession.

“How was the class?” She held a cracker out at me, still looking at the TV.

“I’m totally fried,” I said. “It’s too much. I can’t wait till it’s over.”

Mom said nothing and went back to her cheese. Her bed was overgrown with mail and dry cleaning hangers. I made my way to it, using the flashing TV light to navigate.

She was watching a movie where two kids were getting married, and they didn’t want a big wedding but their parents did. It was a movie from the fifties. I could tell because the girl character started every sentence with “Why,” as in “Why, I wouldn’t dream of going to the picnic without you.”

The guy on TV was yelling. “Maybe we should forget the whole darn thing!” he said. I turned and leaned my head against her leg. Her duvet smelled like nail polish remover.

“Why can’t you be more like them?” Mom asked, her head gesturing up at the screen.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“They’re just so polite and … obedient. They respect their parents.”

“I respect my parents,” I said, although I could hear my own mocking tone of voice.

“Right,” she said. She’d cast the cheese onto the pillow next to her and was patting Pond’s onto her face. My mother had a penchant for cheap drugstore beauty products. “That rental car company is still breathing down my back. Honestly, Thea, I got another bill from them today. It’s been months since that little episode.”

“Really?” I asked sheepishly.

“Yes, still,” she said. “We gave you our hard-earned money to go and be on your own and study in another country, and what did you do?” she asked. “You took that money and paraded around the continent doing God knows what.” She set the Pond’s jar down on her chest and yanked the tie on her robe.

“God, we’ve been through that so many times already,” I said. “Can’t we laugh about it yet? Can’t it be a story that we have now that we like to pull out of our hats from time to time at parties?”

“Don’t be flip, Thea,” Mom snapped. “There is absolutely nothing amusing about that episode and there never will be, to me or to Daddy. You could have been in a much more serious accident, or gotten raped or murdered, and we might never have found you.”

They’d given me three thousand dollars for a work-study program in London, where I was supposed to take some “new math” course at UCL (Dad’s thing) and a design class at Central St. Martins (my thing). I stayed at Mom’s older sister’s in
Fulham and got a job at a café. But by the beginning of August I was getting really bored. Vanessa was doing an exchange student thing, living with a family outside of Venice, so two weeks before the classes ended, I quit my job, told my aunt, who was clueless, that I was going to visit a friend, and I met up with Vanessa in Italy. I had a thousand euros from the café job and from what Dad had given me, and Vanessa had more, so we took off. I’m not sure why, but I felt like I deserved to do what I wanted, and what I wanted was to go with Vanessa to Portofino and then up to the top of the Matterhorn in Switzerland, to watch the sun rise, and then to Ireland or Scotland, if we had money left, to check out all the beautiful yarn. I love yarn, especially raw, prickly yarn straight off a lamb, in rich, dark colors. It was the best two weeks. We were the dirty Americans. We got drunk and found cute guys everywhere, made out with them in cafés, behind crowded market stalls, in smelly bathrooms. We slept in hostels or in two-star hotels, or sometimes in the train station, on our bags. We’d wake up sweaty and hungover and change our minds about where to go next and find some cheese and bread and stay another day. I’d called Mom and lied, lied, lied, saying I was still in London. I knew she’d never check in with her sister because they didn’t get along—Dad had actually been the one to call her and arrange my visit. We would have gotten away with it if I hadn’t sideswiped someone in our rented car in Galway, on our way back to Dublin, right at the end. It was the first time I’d used a credit card the whole trip, and I thought I’d be home in time to intercept the bill. But when I returned the car, the rental company called my mother, the primary cardholder, to get her insurance information. After that it was a shit show.

“Such callous disregard, Thea,” Dad had said, the pain of
deception knitted into his thin, gray brows. “I’m deeply, deeply, disappointed.” Well, so am I, I remember thinking. I’m disappointed that you couldn’t figure out a way to stick it out together so I wouldn’t have to pack my stupid rolling Swiss Army suitcase every weekend like a traveling monkey and waste my allowance on cab fare to your stupid house by the river—far, far away from any subway, when I’d rather just stay put at Mom’s.

“I would think twice before you ever pull a stunt like that again,” Mom said, slapping the lid on the Pond’s jar.

“Actually, there’s this arts program at Edinburgh next summer that I wanted to talk to you about,” I said.

She muted the TV and glared at me.

“I’m kidding,” I said. The phone rang in my room and I rolled off her bed.

“Don’t stay on long,” she called. “I can hear you, you know.”

“College is so boring,” Will said when I answered. “They’re all next door. I can hear them.”

“Are they eating pineapple pizza?”

“Yeah, that’s right, and friggin’ taco sandwiches. Hell, I just want to go to sleep. With you. I wish we could be together all the time. I wish you could live in my drawer. I wish I could uncork you from a bottle whenever I wanted. God, I just miss you, Thee.”

I breathed in his voice, little pinpricks moving across my chest, as though my heart were waking up from falling asleep.

“Imagine we’re really old and you die and everyone sees me trudging up and down First Avenue with my boots undone,” he said. “They’d say, ‘Poor Vic.’ ”

“You changed your name?”

“Yeah, I changed my name to Vic, thinking it would make me feel better.”

“But it doesn’t,” I said.

“No, it does not,” he said indignantly. “But they all say, ‘Poor old Vic, lost the love of his life,’ and the other widowers bring me Ovaltine and doughnuts, which I can’t eat because I’m so bereft. And they ask me out.”

“The widowers? You’ve gone gay?” I watched puffs of cottony smoke billow from a tower outside my window, thinking, White looks so strange in the dark.

“No, I mean widows,” Will said. “The ladies. I take one out a few times, but soon enough, wouldn’t you know it, she starts to bug the shit out of me.”

“Let me guess, she gets on you about exercising.”

“Right. ‘Fitness first,’ she cackles over and over, like a parrot, so I break up with her because she just reminds me that I don’t care about fitness anymore because you’re not there. At night I’d lie in my little single bed, remembering G-Rock, my flower girl. Your green eyes that catch fire when you’re in the sun and the way your face automatically points to the sky when you laugh. I’d look out my window, at the little sliver of moon and I’d say, ‘Damn you, moon, give me back my girl.’ I’d curse, then I’d beg, then I’d curse, then I’d beg, all night, every night, till I finally died too.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Sad, right?”

“So sad.”

“Well, maybe it’ll end happier than that,” he said. “Maybe you won’t die and I won’t die and we’ll live happily ever after forever. We’d be the first people to live forever.”

“That’d be nice,” I said. I stretched my legs to a cool part
of the mattress and pictured us living in a tiny, gold-wallpapered apartment in Paris on the Seine, next to that famous bookstore. How great and weird would it be if we stayed together forever, I thought. High school sweethearts. How great and weird.

“I can’t take it,” my friend Jill said as she squeezed a slimy lemon onto a wedge of washed-out-looking honeydew. We were cutting fourth period at a coffee shop near school on a brisk morning just before Thanksgiving break. Jill’s mother raised Pomeranians and sold them at cut rates. I used to see the handwritten ad at a deli near my house. A sketch of a pug-nosed dog inside a lopsided heart. There were something like twelve Pomeranians living in Jill’s apartment, and Jill’s mother made her walk the bigger ones every night before she went to bed.

“She makes me carry these tiny wads of tinfoil, which aren’t big enough to pick up the poo,” she continued. “Then, when they get their periods, they walk around in public in little doggie diapers. People stare at me on the street. I hate her.” As I pictured twelve diapered Pomeranians dancing at Jill’s feet, a cold, sinking feeling rushed through me. Where was
my
period? I quickly calculated the dates in my head and realized I was a few days—maybe even a week—late. How could it be? I was a sophisticated, sexually active teenager on the pill. But then I remembered the Friday night a few weeks earlier, when
I’d told Mom I was staying at Vanessa’s and instead I’d stayed at Will’s. I hadn’t brought my stuff with me. I’d told myself not to worry and to just forget it and had done a good job of it, until then.

I obsessed over whether or not to test when I got to Dad’s apartment that afternoon. Mom was away at a spa in France, and I didn’t think I could handle all those days in a row with Dad if the results were positive, so I decided to wait, wishing the weekend were already over. Will was leaving with his family to spend Thanksgiving at his aunt’s in New Jersey, and Vanessa was going upstate somewhere. Dad and I were having Thanksgiving dinner at home. A trader who worked for him was coming with his wife.

I went into my bedroom, found my crochet hook and yarn and curled up on Dad’s stiff canvas couch, grateful for a tactile distraction. I’d kept the project by my bed at home and I picked it up sometimes when I was on the phone late at night with Will, but after a while it hurt to crochet and hold the phone in my neck, and the phone always won, which meant I never got very far. But I liked having it by my bed, marking time, waiting to be finished.

Dad’s apartment was silent except for the noise from my grandmother’s antique clock on his desk. I looked up at the slats of dark wood, the old warehouse ceiling that was Dad’s favorite thing about the apartment. Sitting there reminded me of all the nights I used to stay up late, reading his old photography books, waiting for him to come home so I could say goodnight and go to bed. He’d been in that apartment on West Twelfth Street a while, two years maybe, and it was so much better than the dump on Twenty-Third Street he went to right after he moved out. Nothing was more depressing than that.
The elevator buttons were the really old kind that lit up when you touched them, but they were so dirty and disgusting I’d only touch them with my elbow, which was hard when I had a coat on. A never-ending hallway with grassy, dentist-office wallpaper led to his scuffed-up metal door. He’d open it on Friday nights, his living room a murky brown hole behind him, and hug me and my knapsack with some strange kind of desperation, like he was drowning.

He came home that night at around seven, his phone jammed to his ear. “A Maserati’s a fine car, as long as you drive it in a straight line.” He chuckled. “That’s right. Well, enjoy. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” He took off his coat and smiled at me, slipping his shoes under the chair in the foyer. “How was school? Any homework?” He kissed me on the forehead and headed toward his bedroom. He did that all the time—asked a question and walked away or asked a question and looked down and read something. It drove Mom crazy. I try to look at it as some form of adult attention disorder. It could hurt your feelings if you let it.