Weird Girl (23 page)

30

One night, Cleo stopped suddenly. Her echo took an extra
step, but then froze. On a whim, Cleo crept up the steps of a pink Victorian
house, pulled out her lock picks, and let herself in. She had never broken into
a house at night while people were sleeping. It was impulsive, and exciting,
and she wanted her echo to see her in action. She crept through the shadowed
parlor, and into a kitchen that smelled faintly of rye bread. Upstairs, snores
floated underneath two closed doors. A third was partially cracked, and a wedge
of moonlight beckoned her to the doorway. A girl was sleeping on a frilly pink
bed, a teddy bear wedged under her chin like an extra pillow. Cleo tiptoed back
downstairs and sat on the worn sofa, leaning back against a crocheted afghan
and trying to make out the shapes and shadows of tchotchkes and family photos.
After an hour, she relocked the front door behind her and skipped down the
steps, immediately resuming her original path. The echo started behind her, and
she smiled the whole way back to her apartment.

Cleo and her shadow played their nighttime game well into
the summer, until she became more focused on the footsteps behind her than the footsteps
in front of her. Gleefully pulling out her lock picks, she crouched on one knee
and slid a thin piece of metal into the lock on a grand Nob Hill house. The
door popped open and she stood up, stepping over the threshold…and bouncing off
a man standing just inside the darkened foyer, a suitcase in one hand and a
briefcase in the other. They stared at one another in absolute surprise, and
then he reached out and pushed a red button on the alarm panel by the door,
lunging for her just as she turned to run. He wrestled her to the floor and
kept her pinned there until the police arrived.

If she hadn’t been distracted by her game with the echo, she
would have realized that a Nob Hill house would have a security system. It
wouldn’t have mattered if the man had been leaving for the airport at 4am, or
if the house had been empty. She would have set off the alarm just the same. It
was stupid, and careless, and she was furious with herself.

Still, she hadn’t stolen anything. In fact, there was
speculation that she even successfully picked the lock at all, since the man
remembered turning the doorknob just as the door opened. Attempted breaking and
entering is small potatoes compared to the murders and armed robberies working
their way through the justice system, and her attorney insisted that she had
just been there on a dare. Why else would an eighteen-year-old rich girl, who
owned her own penthouse, be breaking into a house at four in the morning?
Still, the judge saw something strange in Cleo. Frankly, he was weirded out by
the way she scribbled in her notebook the entire time she was in court. So, she
didn’t go to jail. She paid a $500 fine, and was told to visit a court-ordered
psychiatrist, with the mandate that she attend therapy sessions until the doctor
would attest that she was not a threat to the city, or to herself. Which would
have been great, except that she ended up almost killing him.

***

She started seeing her therapist in September, two weeks
after her nineteenth birthday. Dr. Davis was around forty-five years old, with
salt and pepper hair and black rimmed glasses. He wore a Rolex and liked to tap
his pen on the desk while she talked, and she suspected that he rarely
listened. As an experiment, she once spent fifteen minutes talking about penguins,
and all he did was nod and smile. Cleo found it somewhat relaxing at first, to
slip off her shoes, tuck her feet underneath her legs in the plush leather
chair, and ramble about nothing for fifty minutes. Four weeks in, the
experience had lost its shine. One day, after a particularly long monologue
about her time with the Peace Corps (entirely fictional), he told her that she
might consider joining an organization that would allow her to devote her
excess time to building schools or cleaning up after natural disasters, to
which she replied, “No shit, Sherlock” and rolled her eyes. At this point, Cleo
had begun to lose interest in therapy. She began to wonder why one little
non-robbery should warrant this many weekly sessions with a man who never even
asked about her childhood.

In fact, he would have signed off on her court sheet after
three or four sessions, if not for the day that she showed up for therapy
wearing a red jersey dress that hugged her curves, her chestnut hair hanging in
waves down to her shoulder blades. The view that was offered when she leaned
forward to put her shoes back on was nothing short of miraculous, and Dr. Davis
now had new motivation to keep her around. So, she kept going to therapy, and
Dr. Davis kept cashing her checks. Except, instead of ignoring her, he now
spent fifty minutes a week trying to seduce her.

She caught on to what he was doing after a couple of weeks,
but figured it could only help her get out of therapy faster, so she batted her
eyelashes, and smiled like she had a secret, and laughed whenever he was clever
(and often when he wasn’t). He moved her appointment to the last evening slot,
and served her champagne to help her relax, and asked her to tell him about her
dreams. Unsurprisingly, he interpreted every single one as an example of her
sexual repression, and he would massage her shoulders and tell her to imagine
herself in a bed with white linens and candles all around it.

***

One evening in December, while he was massaging and she was
pretending to imagine the stupid bed, his fingers started dipping lower and
lower, to her collarbones, and then barely inside the neckline of her dress.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Cleo asked conversationally. The fingers froze.
Several seconds of silence passed, until Cleo sighed and said, “Look, what will
it take to get that paper signed so I’m done with mandatory therapy shit?”

“Have sex with me,” said Dr. Davis. He gulped and waited for
her to scream, but instead she just shrugged and said, “Alright.”

Cleo stood up and turned to face him, laughing at the
uncertainty on his face. “Are we doing this, or not?” she said. Reaching for
his tie, she tugged him closer and kissed him on the mouth. That one moment of
contact ignited a fire within him, and in half a second, he had pushed her on
her back across his desk and was hurriedly unbuckling his belt while kissing
her jawline.

She recovered from her initial surprise and wrapped her legs
around his waist to ease the strain on her torso. “So, one time and I get my
papers, right?” she said.

He ignored her, nibbling her collarbone and unbuttoning his
shirt. So, she slapped him on the ear and repeated: “One time and I get my
papers, right?” she yelled. He nodded and took off his pants, tripping over the
shoes that were still on his feet and nearly falling over in the process. Cleo
sighed and waited for him to get back to business.

“God, you’re beautiful,” he growled as he began kissing her
earlobe, down her neck, and across her left clavicle. Suddenly, he buried his
face in her cleavage and laughed.

“What?” she asked, gasping a little as his hands ran up her
thighs.

“I signed your papers two months ago, but I couldn’t send
them in” he said, his voice muffled by her breasts. Then he giggled. “I just
had to have you,” he gasped. Then, he jerked her neckline and bra cup aside and
groaned before grabbing and squeezing her with one hand, while the other
reached under her dress in search of her underwear.

It took her four or five seconds to process what he meant.
“You mean, I could have quit coming a long time ago?” she asked, her voice
holding the first hint of anger.

He giggled again, his fingernails scratching her hip as he
tried to hook the waistline of her panties. Cleo thought about it for a few
more seconds. “So, what you’re telling me is that you’ve made me come here, for
months, holding me hostage, just because you wanted to get laid?”

“Oh, God, Cleo” he groaned as he directed his attention to
freeing her other breast. They were the last words he uttered before she
reached for the bronze bust of Oedipus behind her head and brained him with it.

His face froze in a moment of utter shock. Then, as the
blood trickled down, his eyes rolled back in his head, and his body went limp
on top of her.

She took a deep breath and shoved with both hands, not
caring when his head bounced off the corner of the desk as his body crashed to
the floor. “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!” she screamed, kicking him hard in the balls.

He lay there, not moving, one eye partially open. She
couldn’t tell if he was alive or not, and the adrenaline surge that had fueled
her anger moments before was now causing her to hyperventilate. The blood was
rushing in her ears, and all she could do was look from the wound on his head,
now almost black as the blood congealed, to the bronze Oedipus, bloody streaks
trailing down from his hollow eye sockets. The phone on his desk began to ring,
but it sounded very far away.

It rang until the answering machine picked up, and then the
person hung up. And called back. And hung up. And called back. It was a
struggle for Cleo to pay attention to the ringing because of the pounding in her
head. Finally, the answering machine picked up and a man said, “Miss St. James,
there is a car waiting for you downstairs. Gather your things, and leave now.”

Cleo stared at the phone like it had spontaneously started
dancing and singing showtunes. The phone rang again, and this time the man
said, “Miss St. James, this will all be taken care of. Please get your things
and go to the car.”

She looked once more at Dr. Davis, his shirt unbuttoned, his
plaid boxers bunched and twisted, his pale, hairy legs leading to dark socks
and dress shoes. When the phone rang again, she jumped into action, adjusting
her clothing and smoothing her hair. She slipped her feet into her black
leather heels and dropped the Oedipus into her purse before stepping over the
body and letting herself out. Outside, a black car was idling at the curb. As
she stepped out of the doctor’s office, a man got out of the car and held open
the rear door for her. She got in without hesitation, and they pulled into
evening traffic.

The driver parallel parked in front of her building and sat,
polite in his silence, until Cleo came out of her daze and realized that she
was home. Without even thinking to ask his name, or why he had come to get her,
or how he knew where she lived, she pulled a hundred dollars out of her purse,
dropped it over the front seat, and got out of the car on shaky legs.

***

She barely managed to steady her keys enough to unlock the
door to her apartment. Dropping keys and purse on the floor, she kicked off her
shoes and stood in the dark, forcing herself to breathe deeply as her heart
rate slowed down. Suddenly, a man’s arm reached over her shoulder, clamping a
hand across her mouth and yanking her back toward a solid chest in a single,
elegant movement.

SWIK
. As the switchblade sprang open, Cleo belatedly
registered the scent of peppermint. She immediately relaxed as her captor
laughed and removed his hand. “Always good to see you, Jackson,” said Cleo,
turning her head slightly to speak at the shadow behind her.

“How’s it hangin’, Cleopatra?” he said, laughter still in
his voice.

Cleo turned, allowed her eyes to adjust to the darkness, and
slapped him. Hard.

“Jesus, Cleo! What the hell was that for?” he asked, taking
two quick strides to the light switch by the front door. When the lights came
on, he stood, rubbing an angry, red welt on his jawline and scowling at her.

“You left me, you asshole!” she said, closing the gap
between them. He held up his hands defensively.

“Ummm…stab anybody lately?” he asked, nervously nodding
toward the switchblade that she still held in her left hand.

“Only the ones who deserved it,” she replied, subtly
shifting back and trying her hardest not to smile. She let him gently lift her
wrist, his fingers lightly stroking the palm of her hand as he removed the
knife from her grip and closed the blade. She opened her mouth to say something
else, but he stopped her.

“Plenty of time to talk later. Right now, you need a shower
and a change of clothes,” he said. When she narrowed her eyes, he added,
“You’re covered in blood,” pointing at the long streak on her dress that marked
the trail of Dr. Davis’s head as he was sliding off of her. She tried to speak
yet again, and he interrupted once more. “Don’t worry about him. It’s being
taken care of. Just get changed, and then we’ll talk,” he said, putting a hand
in the small of her back and nudging her toward the bedroom.

She was curious to see whether or not he would escort her
all the way to the shower, but the hand dropped away just as she reached her
bedroom door and he took a step back, hands in his pockets. “Take your time.
I’m not going anywhere,” he said, before turning in the direction of the
kitchen.

“I’ll believe that when I see it!” she called after him. But
there was no venom in her voice now, and she could feel his smile even though
his back was turned. She went into her bedroom alone, trying not to think about
how much she had enjoyed the warmth of his hand at the base of her spine.

She stripped on her way to the bathroom, leaving a trail of
blood-crusted clothing. By the time the hot water was running, she was in the
middle of a personal crisis, torn between taking a ridiculously long shower
just to make Jackson wait, and hurrying so that he wouldn’t have a chance to
sneak out (again). In the end, she opted to be quick, although it took longer
than she thought it would to scrub away the blood that had dried under her
fingernails. Then, she once again struggled—how much effort should she put into
getting dressed for her conversation with Jackson? Fancy outfit? Jeans?
Pajamas? Full makeup? No makeup? Hair up? Hair down? It was disconcerting. Cleo
had never been so unsure of herself before, and she wanted to kick herself for
this sudden onset of girlishness. After all, it was only Jackson, the jackass
who had walked out on her eight years ago and never looked back.