How to Misbehave (Short Story) (3 page)

She smiled. He sounded better again. Relaxed. He was funny, which was a surprise.

She liked him.

Of course, she’d already liked him, but in a faraway, movie-star-idolizing sort of way. When she’d imagined talking to him in her head, he hadn’t ever been funny.

Actually, did he even talk, in her head? Or did he just sort of … attractively smolder while chopping wood, or smashing things with a sledgehammer, shirtless?

Her imagination—so rich in some ways, so impoverished in others.

“Do you deserve to be defended?” she asked. “I thought you were trouble.”

“Who said I was trouble?”

The teasing had drained from his tone.
Oops
. “The same person who told me your name was Patrick.”

“You were asking about me.”

“It’s possible.”

“Well, if you did ask about me, and you found somebody who knew my family well enough to tell me and Patrick apart, they’d probably tell you I was all right. Not bad news like Patrick, but not as smart as Joe or as ambitious as Peter. They’d probably also tell you none of us boys has a lick of sense compared to Andrea and Cathy.”

“That’s a lot of nots. You’re not the bad one, the smart one, the ambitious one, or one of the girls. Which one does that make you?”

“The one who’s never going to amount to anything.”

He was trying to sound light and breezy again, but it wasn’t quite working. She heard the
discomfort behind his words, and it surprised her.

Tony ran a big construction company, or at least part of it. Directed trucks. Told workers what to do. He walked around pointing at girders and directing electricians as though he had an encyclopedia of construction inside his head. Surely he’d already amounted to something?

“Why would anybody say that about you?”

A few seconds’ pause. “Actually, I take it back. It’s been awhile since anybody said that. I’m trying to be the responsible one these days.”

“Trying?”

Three or four mornings out of five, his blue truck was waiting in the parking lot when she drove up, and he kept her late after work. He seemed about as responsible as they came.

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t come real natural. My brother, Patrick? He and I …” Tony paused, then exhaled explosively. “Let’s just say he did something he couldn’t undo, and I had a part in it. It changed the way I think about … pretty much everything. And then my dad died a few years ago, and my mom took over the company, but she doesn’t know jack shit about building things. I’ve been helping her keep it afloat.”

“You don’t sound like trouble at all.”

“I used to be.”

An uncomfortable pause. They’d strayed too far from where they started. In an attempt to steer them back, she said, “That’s a relief. If you were a saint, who would teach me how to misbehave?”

Silence.

She’d walked off a conversational cliff.

In the dark, silence had a completely different quality. She felt exposed, her heart beating over a loudspeaker, her words echoing in the space between them.

She smelled concrete and pool chlorine and damp. She shifted away from the hard plastic of the chair digging into her upper back, and she heard it all coming. Everything he was about to say.

“Amber, look.”

She crossed her arms.

“You’re a nice girl.”

That. Exactly that. Now he would tell her he hadn’t meant what he’d said earlier.

“I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression. The thing is …”

“I get it,” she said. Anything to stop him before he could tell her she was too
nice
for him, or too young, or too something else that she didn’t know the words for.

“I’m pushing thirty,” he said. “And you’re, what, twenty-one? Twenty-two?”

“Twenty-four.”

Metal scraped over concrete as he shifted in his chair. “You’re a pretty girl.”

He said it like an apology.

“Thank you.”

Silence again. Pitch-black silence, into which no machines rumbled and no lights intruded, no shapes emerged to make the darkness feel familiar. She could hear the rain, a faraway white noise that only seemed to deepen the quiet of the basement.

She could hear her watch, too, ticking off the seconds. She’d had no idea it was making so much noise down there on her wrist.

And beneath that, inaudible but present, she could hear the anger and frustration she’d been finding increasingly difficult to ignore over the past few years.

This was what came of trying so hard for so long to be good. Twenty-four years old, and her inexperience was written all over her face, so obvious that it meant a man like Tony didn’t even find her attractive.

When she was little, she’d believed that God was watching her, and she’d wanted to please Him, just as she’d wanted to please her mother. In those first years after they moved to Ohio from Michigan, away from her aunts and uncles and her grandparents, her mother had become so bitter and unhappy she was almost unrecognizable.

Amber did what she could to make it better. She played with her younger brother, Caleb, and helped take care of baby Katie. She never made a peep at school, helped clean the house, brought home exemplary report cards.

After a while, Mom got used to Camelot, Ohio, and Amber got used to being good. For years and years, she was as good as she could possibly be, thinking it was going to get her somewhere. Win her a blue ribbon, or true love, or fulfillment.

It didn’t.

Even before college, her faith in God and goodness had started to fray, and the summer break she spent in the slums outside Cape Town doing charity work with a group of Nazarene students left it in tatters.

God wasn’t watching. There might
be
a God, or there might not—she hadn’t made up her mind about that. But she’d seen enough dire poverty and need in South Africa to shake her out of her complacence.

Life could be short, and it could be brutal. She was lucky enough to have been born in a good place to good people in the midst of plenty. Yes, she needed to use the advantages she had to try to make the world better, but she also had to
live
.

It wasn’t that she wanted to misbehave. She just wanted to locate some other set of standards, some way to
be
and
feel
without worrying so much about doing the right thing all the time. She wanted to follow the occasional crazy impulse without getting smacked down for it.

She’d just begun to think that maybe she could, with Tony. That she could flirt. Be a bit reckless.

Then,
smack
.

“Say something.”

Tony’s voice, strung tight again.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Anything. I get … I get antsy, being in my head this much.”

She didn’t know what to tell him. She couldn’t go back to what they’d been doing before—teasing conversation that had misled her.

Irritation nudged at her.
Be who you are. Say what you mean. What difference does it make, anyway? Who’s really paying attention?

He might end up thinking she was a fool, but he was just a stranger. A guy who worked construction at her job. When the new wing of the community center was finished, she’d stop seeing him three or four days a week and start seeing him every three or four years. Or never.

Why should she care what Tony Mazzara thought of her? He certainly didn’t care what she thought of
him
.

For once in her life, she was going to say whatever she wanted, and damn the consequences.

“I’ll talk to you,” Amber said, “but only if you promise not to feed me any bull.”

Tony sounded cautious when he replied. “I’m not feeding you bull.”

“Just … just be honest, okay? You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, and the same goes for me, but don’t say what you think I want to hear. And don’t tell me how nice I am. You don’t know me.”

“All right.”

A few more seconds ticked by. She hadn’t expected his easy acquiescence. This was uncharted territory, and stepping into it unsettled her as much as it exhilarated her.

“So you gonna talk to me or not?” he asked.

“I’m thinking.”

“Anybody ever tell you that you think too much?”

“Yes.”

She couldn’t see him, but she thought he might have smiled.

“Okay, here’s what I want to know,” she said. “Do you feel like the inside of your head matches the outside of you? I mean, do you think people see who you are when they look at you, or somebody entirely different?”

It was something she wondered about a lot.

“Deep thoughts, bunny.”

“Don’t call me ‘bunny.’ I’m not an infant.”

Amber did a mental stutter step. She
never
would have said that to him in the light. She never would have said it to
anyone
.

But Tony didn’t seem to recognize the audacity of her remark. He just said, “Sorry.” Then he exhaled, considering her question. “No. Not really.”

“So who are you, really?”

“Who do you think I am?”

She felt her face heating, but she ignored it. “You’re strong. I mean, your body, of course, but that’s not the main thing. You walk around like you know where you’re going, and like that’s all you’re thinking about. You don’t care who sees you or what they think about you. You’re … centered in yourself, I guess. And everyone else is irrelevant.”

“You’re seeing the job.”

“No, it’s you. I mean, it’s what you look like. To me.”

“And you have a thing for that guy.”

He didn’t say it like a question. It was just that obvious. She didn’t
try
to perk up whenever he was around, but she felt it happening—the way her spine straightened and her chin lifted and her eyes went all wide and excited.

He must have seen her staring at him. Must have read her mind when she followed him out to the parking lot each night, hoping that tonight would be the night she’d get something other than
Have a good one
as a goodbye.

Amber closed her eyes against the sick discomfort of her embarrassment, but eyes open or closed, it was the same. The blackness didn’t change. She could shrink away from it or expand into it.

She decided she would rather expand.

There was nothing wrong with having a thing for him. It wasn’t illegal. It wasn’t even pathetic, though it felt that way. It was human. She was human.

And she was tired of shrinking.

She looked straight at the spot where she knew he was and said, “Yes. I do have a thing for that guy.”

“He’s not me. I’m a lot more fucked-up than he is.”

“I think everybody is. I mean, everybody is more complicated than they look, when you actually get to know them.”

“Yeah, maybe so. You want me to tell you what you look like? From the outside, I mean?”

“I think you already did,” she said.

“You tell me, then.”

Amber considered how to put it. “Sweet. Nice. Ordinary nice, and ordinary pretty, all the way through. Like a Girl Scout, or Maria in
The Sound of Music
.”

A huff of laughter. “There’s some of that, I’ll be honest. But you got the whistle, too.”

“What about the whistle?”

“You round up those kids with the whistle. When you’ve got your clipboard and you’re barking orders at them out on the soccer field you look tough as nails.”

Tough as nails
. She liked that.

“You look sexy.”

Something dark and dangerous in his voice made her nipples prickle.

“Don’t.”

“No, it’s true. You look like you know what you want. Like the way you seem to think I am.” A pause. “This chair is wicked uncomfortable.”

Metal scraped against the floor, and he rustled around for a moment. She felt him move
closer, then farther away.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to sit by the wall. Want to join me?”

“Sure.” The chair
was
getting kind of painful. She stood and pushed it aside. “I don’t want to trip over you.”

“I’ve got my hand out.”

She waved her arm around until she connected with skin. Soft hair and hard muscle. His forearm. She followed it down to his wrist, then his hand.

His fingers wrapped around hers, damp but strong, and he used his grip to guide her to the right spot. “Sit right there.”

She sank to the ground. Her thigh brushed his, and she moved over a few inches to lean against the cold cement wall.

“Better?”

“Better.”

She took a few moments to get used to the new position. It felt cooler, the chill of the concrete moving through the backs of her thighs. Closer to him, too. More intimate.

“How are you doing now?” she asked. “With the dark, I mean.”

“I’m hanging in. Keep talking to me.”

“Why do you hate it so much?”

She felt his shrug as a disturbance against her shoulder. “There weren’t a lot of dark places at my house growing up, or a lot of alone time. I’m not real fond of either.”

It didn’t feel like a complete answer. She waited, hoping she’d get more from him.

He sighed. “It’s easier to ignore all the bad shit in the light. Distract yourself with work and TV and other people. The dark is just … bad memories. Bad dreams. I don’t like to be left alone with all that.”

Trouble
, Rosalie had said. Amber remembered her mother’s question, cut off before she could complete it.
Is he the one who …?

Whatever had happened to Tony—whatever he did or didn’t do—it had left its mark on him.

“I hate spiders,” she volunteered.

“All girls hate spiders.”

“I don’t mind the little ones. Just the big, hairy ones.”

“I hate them, too. But don’t tell anybody.”

“It’ll be our little secret.”

“You any good at keeping secrets?”

“Should’ve asked me before you told me your secrets.”

“Yeah.”

She pulled up her knees and leaned her head back against the wall. “What are you most afraid of?”

“I’ve already told you two things that scare me. If you think I’m going to make you a list, you don’t know men.”

“We already established that.”

He chuckled.

“I have a brother, you know. And a dad. I’m not a complete innocent.”