The Dismantling (24 page)

She stared at him. “Thomas, I'm not going to steal from your parents. They've taken me in, and—”

“Gimme a break. They're not fucking saints, trust me. And this money's not going to make any difference to them.”

“I don't know.”

“Oh, so now you're above stealing anything, and I'm the asshole? Who was ripping off the newsstand in the first place?”

She looked down into the cash box. “But even if I take this . . . I'm too young. He won't sell to me.”

Thomas grinned. “This is the good part.” He told her that he'd cut a deal with Chet: if Maria paid him back double for the two packs she'd already stolen—
four
, she said silently,
but okay
—he'd sell cigarettes to her for now on, with an extra fee of two bucks per pack tacked on, no ID required. And, unbelievably, it worked: Chet accepted her mumbled apology, took her money, and gave her the American Spirits she asked for. What she hadn't told Thomas was that the cigarettes weren't really for her. She didn't care about smoking one way or another, but the school's punks, in their Rancid and Bad Religion T-shirts, did, clustering in a corner of the school lot to suck a few butts during lunch. She'd figured this was her way of getting in with them: not by smoking herself, but by being the provider of what was—for a bunch of kids—a precious commodity, almost a currency, she thought, like in prison. Basically, she was a newbie freak with dead parents who needed some friends, and the cigarettes were how she was going to get them. Thomas had been right about his parents too: they didn't notice the missing cash, or at least they didn't say anything about it to her. And after a few weeks of stealing from the box, she forgot to feel guilty about it anymore. But what about Thomas? What was in it for him? At the time, Maria left the question unexamined, but even then she understood, uneasily, that he'd both made her into his accomplice and placed her in his debt.

The change in Thomas's behavior toward her was at first subtle. The way his eyes lingered on her ass for a breath too long, the way he seemed—deliberately, she wasn't sure—to get in her way in the kitchen, contriving superfluous little jolts of physical contact. He was suddenly obsessed with whether she'd found a boyfriend, what she thought about the pickings at San Gabriel High. He himself, he took pains to inform her, had a girlfriend at the beginning of the school year but had dumped her—it was now April—for being “too clingy.” As a senior, he believed it was his right to “sample the wares.” She'd wrinkled her nose at the phrase, and he'd assured her, with an unnecessary squeeze of her shoulder, that he was just joking around and that she should try to loosen up.

In the beginning of May, he tried to kiss her. He'd lured her out to the garage with an unlikely story about finding a stray kitten curled up in the wheel well of his mother's Accord. She followed him out there, already pretty sure he was full of shit. His dirt bike was propped up on a lift, its engine in a dozen pieces. He led her over to the Accord and squatted down by one of the back wheels. “Come on,” he said, “help me look.” Maria kneeled down next to him and peered halfheartedly under the car. “It was here,” he said, “just a few minutes ago.” He took a small flashlight out of his pocket and made a show of pointing the light around the car's undercarriage. “Ah well.” He snapped the light off. “Guess it got spooked.”

He turned to her then, their faces only a few inches apart, the two of them crouched behind the Accord and hidden from the doorway that led into the house. He smelled like cinnamon gum and motor oil.
Oh shit
, she thought, and then it happened before she could stop it: Thomas pressing his face against hers—because that's what it felt like, him pressing his whole greasy, pimply, hormonal face into hers, the lips basically incidental—and his hand latching on to the side of her neck like it was a pole in a subway car. She pulled back and slapped his hand away. “Thomas, what the
fuck
?”

He gave her a slack-jawed look that suggested he was genuinely surprised by this reaction. “Hey, M.,” he said, “chill out. We're just having fun.”

“Speak for yourself,” she said, and moved to get up off the floor.

He grabbed her wrist and yanked her back down. “M., listen—”

“Get the fuck off me.” She tried to free her wrist, but he held tight.

“Hey, think about it.” His eyes were bright, evangelizing. “We mess around a little, whenever we feel like it. Nobody has to know. It's perfect.”

“Thomas, let go of my wrist.”

“Maria—”

“Let go, or I'll tell your parents about this.”

His eyes went dead. His face turned hard and mean, and Maria thought she was looking through a window into the man he would become ten or twenty years from then—pissed off and aggrieved after he'd been told, yet again, that he couldn't have every last thing he believed himself entitled to. He let go of her wrist. “You say a word to my parents, and I'll tell them about the money. Think they want some klepto gutter-punk bitch sleeping in their house?”

Maria's face went red with anger. “You wouldn't.”

“What're you, sixteen? Nobody wants teenagers anyway, and definitely not a klepto. Too much trouble. Everybody'd rather adopt some cute little kid. How'd you like the shelter? Wanna go back?” Maria said nothing, just stared at him in fury. “Didn't think so,” he said dismissively. He got up, walked over to his dirt bike, and started wiping down a piston, turning his back to her as though she weren't even there.

She said nothing about this episode to the Dreesons, nor to the distracted child-services rep on his pro forma visits to their household. Maria figured she only had to endure Thomas for another few months—he'd graduate in June, leave for college in August—and then she could finish high school here in San Gabriel. She would turn eighteen a week after she graduated the following spring, and after that she'd be free to—well, she didn't know what she was going to do. Get a job, she supposed. Whatever she did, though, it would be
hers
. She'd be free of the system. Nobody could tell her what to do.

After Thomas left for UC Santa Cruz, she didn't see him again until Christmas break. His few months away had emboldened and hardened him somehow. What had been run-of-the-mill teenage disrespect—for his parents, for Maria, for sluts and jocks and fags and whoever else was pissing him off at any given moment—had refined itself into a purer form of contempt. Maria sensed it as soon as he walked through the door, eyes shaded by his flat-brim Monster cap: directionless hostility. He was itching for a fight.

She did her best to avoid him. The first week, when she was still busy at school, was easy enough. Christmas fell on Wednesday of the following week. Both of his parents went to work on Monday, leaving Maria and Thomas alone in the house together. Maria left in the morning, but without a car she could only go so far, riding her bicycle around the Valley, hemmed in by freeways and mountains. She returned home in the late afternoon, exhausted. She wheeled her bicycle into the garage, her stomach sinking when she saw Thomas's dirt bike. She could hear them through the garage door: three or four of them, yelling and cursing over the PlayStation's machine-gun chatter. She hesitated at the door. She had a strong impulse to turn around and get back on her bike and ride away—it didn't matter where. But this was her home. Screw him and his dumb friends: this was where she
lived
. She opened the door and stepped inside the house.

She moved through the living room as quickly as she could, her eyes fixed on the carpet. She smelled the funk of beer and liquor and In-N-Out burgers. Ten steps to the stairs. Nine, eight—“Yo, sis!” Thomas's voice, booming, slurred. She didn't stop. Her foot on the first step, she risked a glance out of the corner of her eye: three of them on the couch, Thomas in the middle. On the coffee table, a half-empty handle of Jack Daniel's presiding over a congregation of Tecate cans. “Come hang with us for a while, little sis,” Thomas said, smirking. Maria shook her head and kept walking—
slowly
, she told herself,
don't rush
—up the stairs. “What the fuck's her problem,” said one of the friends, laughing, and then she was inside her bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

She lay down on her bed and put on her headphones. She turned up the volume and closed her eyes, and then she was floating inside the music, free of Thomas, free of the Dreesons, free of San Gabriel. Some time passed—four songs, maybe five—then, in the silence between tracks, she heard the knocking. She took off her headphones. “What?”

“Yoo-hoo.” Thomas. “Can we come in?”

“Fuck off.”

Laughter from outside the door. “Yeah,” Thomas said, “not gonna do that.”

The knob rattled—there was no lock; why was there no lock?—and then they were inside her room, Thomas and his two idiot friends, all stinking drunk. Thomas swayed slightly as he pointed at her. “You,” he said, pausing as though about to deliver the capstone to a historic speech, “are a girl who needs to learn how to have fun.”

“Get out of my room,” Maria said.

“But it's not your room,” Thomas said. “Remember? None of this”—he swept his arm in a wide arc—“is yours. You're a freeloader, Maria. A leech.”

His two friends laughed. They were a blur to Maria, pasty-white faces floating above baggy athletic clothes. They crowded her room, shrinking the space around her.

“Yo, Tom,” one of the faces said, “what's a leech do?”

“I don't know,” Thomas said. “Why don't we ask Maria?”

Maria got up from the bed. “I'm leaving.” They blocked her way to the door. She shoved one of the friends, and Thomas grabbed her arm and threw her back onto the bed. “Show some respect,” he said.

She sat on the bed and stared at him. A dangerous charge pulsed through the room. In retrospect, she recognized this moment as the junction between Thomas choosing to be one kind of person or another—and between him choosing one kind of life or another
for her
.

“I think,” he said slowly, “Maria needs to learn how to show a little gratitude
.
”

The two friends moved to either side of the bed. Thomas stood at the foot, staring down on her with a blank, glassy look. For a second, nobody moved, and then Maria sprung up and at Thomas, catching him in the side of the head with her open palm. With a surprised grunt, he flung her back down onto the bed. She twisted as she fell, smashing her mouth into the headboard. She felt one of her teeth flare with pain—this was the origin of her gray and crooked incisor—and tasted the blood filling her mouth. “Hold her,” Thomas said, and the two friends obeyed, pinning her shoulders to the mattress. Thomas pulled away her jeans and underwear, and then he stopped, his hands gripping her thighs. “Ah, shit,” he said, and for a moment she thought he might have realized what he was doing, might have realized the damage he was about to cause. Then he told his friends to leave the room. They let go of her shoulders, but still she couldn't move, paralyzed by both fear and the staggering incomprehensibility of the scene, and then the door closed and Thomas's hand gripped her neck while the other yanked at his belt, and suddenly he was on top of her, pushing himself inside, and she went dead, limp as though her bones had dissolved into her blood. She stared into his face as he strained above her; she wanted him to acknowledge her. He didn't look her in the eyes once, not until after he was finished. When he finally did, he appeared startled, as though he'd woken in an unfamiliar place and didn't know how he'd gotten there. He buttoned up his jeans. “At least I wasn't your first,” he said. “I would've felt pretty bad about that.”

 • • • 

M
aria stopped here, abruptly, as though she'd reached the last page of an incomplete script, its final scenes gone missing.

“Maria,” Simon said. She ran the tip of her tongue back and forth against her damaged tooth. He tried to hold her gaze. He wanted her to know that he was trying to understand how shattering it must have been for her, to communicate how desperately he wished it had never happened, and he knew he'd fail with words alone. She turned away and stared stubbornly down the river. “Jesus. I'm so, so sorry.”

She snorted, as though trying to undercut the horror of what she'd told him. “Don't say that until I tell you what happened to
him
.”

“You didn't say anything to his parents?”

“I didn't think they'd believe me. He's their son. They'd known me for, what, a year? And I tell them some crazy fucking story about a
rape
? No.”

“But . . .” Simon remained stubbornly fixated on the aftermath's details and logistics, as though he knew there was nothing he could say or ask that could touch the burning-hot, terrible core of the story, of the act itself. “What about the social worker? Or the police?”

“You're looking at things from the outside, logically, like it was a problem I could solve if I just did things the right way. It didn't feel like that from the inside. I couldn't think like that, not then.” She pulled up her hood again, retreating. “I remember the main thing was this absolute terror that I would get pregnant. When that didn't happen, I felt better. At least temporarily.”

“You never told anybody?”

“Not for years and years. I was so angry sometimes, I could barely see. But I was too young and fucked up then, and I turned a lot of that rage onto myself. And shame too. I couldn't believe I'd let this happen to me—that was how I thought about the thing. I didn't
let
anything happen, obviously. But it took some time before I could see that.” She stood up abruptly. “So
that
, Simon, was my lowest moment. Now you know.” She turned away from the river. “I'm cold. Let's get back.”