Circle Nine (20 page)

I was on the swing set in the park when I met him. It’s where I like to go to think. I was twirling on the swing, doing my thinking, even talking to myself a little when he spoke.

“I talk to myself, too,” he said. “I always thought I was crazy till now.” I jumped, because I hadn’t heard him come up at all, let alone settle onto the swing exactly next to me. I was so embarrassed. The boy was dark and strikingly handsome, Latino-looking. I was pierced, gone from the start.

“I wasn’t talking to myself,” I muttered, looking at the ground.

“OK,” he said. “Then I guess you were talking to me.” I looked up then, meeting his eyes and nodding slowly. He looked long and hard at my notepad, open on my lap. It was just a little piece of nothing, a drawing of me, how I see myself. But his eyes went wider when he saw it, and he nodded as if he saw exactly what it was I was doing. As if he saw the thoughts behind the girl in the picture.

“Do one of me?” he asked. So I did, forgetting the way I usually try to normalize things, forgetting to try to flirt the way Katie does, forgetting to focus on anything but the way I saw him in that moment. When I was done, he looked at it for a long time.

“I think I understand,” he finally told me after I’d sat there biting my lip for a couple of minutes. His voice was quiet and serious, and I worried at first that I’d offended him. Maybe he hated what I saw. Because what I’d seen was a mishmash of contradictions — some lovely, some harsh — and what I’d drawn was a caricature of that. My interpretation. He wore a shirt with rolled cuffs, once white and probably crisp but now irreversibly soiled, as if he’d been living in it for weeks. It had some embroidery, Rockville Prep, on its breast pocket. I knew Rockville Prep. It was a boarding school an hour away, the kind of place even the rich can barely afford. He wore chinos that were ragged and thin, leather dress shoes with holes in them. His face was hard-edged and handsome, but his eyes were sunken deep. He oozed of ruined wealth. He looked like he’d fallen from grace, so that’s what I’d drawn: a fallen angel.

I held my breath, waiting for him to turn angry eyes my way. I shouldn’t have done it; I shouldn’t have drawn the truth. But then he tore the picture out and put it in his pocket.

“Hope you don’t mind,” he said.

“I do mind,” I told him. “It’s mine. Maybe once I get to know you better, you can have it.” I was shocked by my boldness, but he didn’t seem bothered.

“Fair enough,” he said, handing it back. Then, after another minute, “Icarus. Icarus might have been better. For the drawing, I mean. Better than a fallen angel.”

“Daddy always told me any man who describes himself as Icarus has a terrible ego,” I said to him. There was another pause, then he surprised me by laughing long and hard.

“Your dad’s probably right,” he told me.

After that, we talked. We talked for hours and hours, all through the morning and into the afternoon. He told me he wanted to go to Thailand to live in a hut on the beach and read books all day in a hammock and live on nothing but fish he caught himself. I said that sounded nice, that I would come too and peddle my art to tourists on the side of the road. That I’d roast bananas for dessert. That I’d weave mosquito netting for the windows. That I’d let the salt coat my hair until I looked wild and fierce.

He laughed and said, “We’re a little different but exactly the same, you know.” And then he told me in words heated and passionate about the books he loved the most, and as he talked, I illustrated what I saw in his words, the emotions of it and feelings of it, until my notepad was nearly full. Then I looked at my watch and it was almost time for dinner, and I was sure even my oblivious parents would know I wasn’t sick, after all, that I’d just skipped out. I was shocked that six-and-a-half hours had gone by. I’d never talked that much to any single person in my life, even Katie.

He was intoxicating, he was brilliant, he opened my mind and heart. He was a dreamer, like me.

“I’ve got to go,” I told him.

“OK,” he said. “But I’ll miss you.” He smiled, wide and crooked, and my heart stopped. I’d barely walked four steps, four heavy steps, when he spoke up again.

“Hey, I hate to ask you this, but . . .” At that point I would have done anything in the world he’d asked for. He looked down, as if he was embarrassed. “I’m just short a few bucks,” he said. “Do you have anything? A loan, I mean.” My heart plummeted. Money was the one thing I couldn’t give him. But then I’d remembered the small safe in Mama and Daddy’s room. The way they opened it only on our birthdays or other special occasions. Family money. The money they’d saved up. I nodded slowly. I told him what to do, when to meet me.

So here I am, eleven p.m., staring at Mama and Daddy’s sleeping bodies. They look so peaceful next to each other, as if they were born curled up like this. I imagine Sam and me doing the same thing, and I shudder. This afternoon was too wonderful for me to bear. I turn from them and tiptoe back to my room, careful to leave their door open a crack for easier access later. I think how jealous Katie will be when she meets Sam. Or maybe she’ll be happy for me, proud of me for finding him and attracting him all on my own. I suddenly can’t wait to tell her all about him; I imagine us whispering and giggling like old times.

I stand there daydreaming for another few minutes before I hear it: the slight pinging on my windowpane. I laugh; the pebbles had been his idea. “I’ve always wanted to,” he’d said. I wave to him before running as quietly as I can down the stairs. My heart is thudding. I am betraying Mama and Daddy. But it’s just a loan; he said he’d replace it by next week. They only go in that safe every few months, anyway. They’ll never even know it was gone. And I trust him, I do.

I let Sam in the front door, and we tiptoe upstairs together. What we’re about to do is wrong and I know it, but I am high, so very high on adrenaline and giddiness and the inexplicable, incomparable attraction I feel for him. He clutches my hand and places one finger to his lips, and then I’m fighting giggles; it’s one big adventure. This whole day has been. The fun of it makes what we’re actually doing easier to ignore.

When we reach my parents’ door, I push it open ever so carefully. It emits a small creak, but it’s not loud enough to wake them. Just to make sure, I hold my breath and wait another thirty seconds, counting it out —“one, one thousand,” like that — in my head. Then we creep in soundlessly. The room smells like cookies baking, and my eyes are immediately drawn to the flickering candles on their windowsill. Mama’s doing. She’s forgotten, as usual, to put them out, but now their light leads us, an accomplice to our crime. The smell is suffocating as I inch my way toward the small safe Daddy had installed into the wall right next to their bed. The room itself is dingy and gray and littered with scraps of paper and candy wrappers, Mama’s hair spray and bottles of nail polish in every color. In the corner is Daddy’s model-plane set, bits of balsa wood littering the floor below a cheap folding table. Neither of my parents is tidy. There’s a thin sheet covering the only window in lieu of a curtain, blocking out prying eyes. I don’t know the code to the safe, but Sam told me he knows how to use a bobby pin, and the code itself is way too loud to use even if I did know it.

I’m waiting behind Sam and he’s fumbling with the pin and my armpits are feeling damp and Mama seems more restless than usual, grunting a little and drooling, although maybe this is what she always does. I’ve never seen it up close. They’ve been out for nearly two hours, plenty long enough, I estimate, for them to be in
REM.
But who knows whether they are or not? Long enough is no guarantee, and two of them means double the chance we’ll be caught. The desperation of my plan washes over me in full, but Sam’s in it both hands now, jiggling that bobby pin for all it’s worth, and the way he seems so assured of everything calms me down a little.

Then there’s a click. Silence.

The door swings wide and, thank God, they haven’t spent all of it or even close to it, and I help Sam grab it, jamming bill after bill into my pockets and down my shirt into my bra. I’m so excited, I don’t feel Sam’s hand on my wrist, pulling me away, pointing at my mama, who’s rolling over, as if she’s about to wake up. But something about the situation has taken hold of me, and it’s as if my hands won’t stop reaching into that safe.

I pull away and feel my skin begin to slide through his wrist, and then I am free, except momentum makes my arm jerk back and it collides with something, and that same something falls from the sill, hitting my arm and leaking searing, hot wetness over me. I smell cookies baking on my wrist.

There is a wave of intense heat. It pushes me backward into Sam. Something’s gone wrong.

Now the place is on fire. Everything is ablaze. I stare at it, wondering how it could have happened so quickly. Then Mama is awake, rubbing her eyes in confusion, mumbling incoherently. I look at Sam and wonder why he is still standing there, why he isn’t running away, and then I realize that he’s stamping at the flames frantically, but then they’re spreading and his stamping’s doing no good, and the smoke is so thick I can barely see, and we’re both hacking madly, and he’s pleading with me to come with him. The flames have spread between me and Mama and Daddy.

I am suddenly more afraid than I have ever been in my life. I fight Sam and turn to go back, but his grip is iron. He is strong, much stronger than I am. Now we’re at the door, and I give in, allowing him to pull me closer to it, farther from my parents. I find the doorknob first with my hands, but when I try to turn it, it melts my fingers and wrist on impact, and I scream. I watch as Sam pulls his shirt off and uses it as a glove, and then the door is wide open and we are gloriously free, since the smoke isn’t as bad in this part of the hall.

But Mama and Daddy are not behind us. I turn back for them one more time, but I can’t see them. I can’t even tell anymore which direction I am pointed, because I am so disoriented by the flames. All this time, Sam’s hand never leaves my wrist. The flames are miles high already and block the stairs to the attic, but the stairs to the main level are still intact and that’s where he pulls me. I mutter prayers under my breath that Mama and Daddy will be OK. Maybe they have already jumped from their second-story window.

Sam pushes me to the ground and we start down on all fours, me in front and him behind. And when I wake up, there is an angel above me, stroking my cheek, and I can’t remember a thing.

I don’t want the memories. I struggle to my feet; I run from him and I run from them. I run from Abby, too, that person I was and wasn’t, the person Sam wanted me to be. I run fast at first and then never fast enough, tree branches whipping my face and midnight sounds hissing just behind my heels. I move like this, on and on and on — a crazed automaton — until I am reduced to nothing but blood and sweat and tears. Will I die like this out here? I run for what must be hours. I’ve run the wrong way; I’ve known it all along, but I also don’t know which is the right way. I expected to see the big rock, the faded trampled-out path, fresh from our feet. Then the pond, lovely and shining under the moon, and the cave not far behind it.

But all I’ve seen for miles are trees, thick trees with rocks and brambles scattered in between. My pants are torn. There is mud everywhere; it saturates me until I feel I am made of clay. I have no direction, only forward. There’s only one thing I feel profoundly: exhaustion. I want to sleep; I must sleep or I will die. I must keep moving or I will die. I take one more step and hope that with it will come something new: a road, or water — because I am horribly, painfully thirsty, so thirsty I am dizzy — or maybe some sign of human life. But there’s nothing; and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, I think at last, to sleep, just for a little while.

I open my eyes as I do every other day, but today there’s the brightness of sun in my face. It’s unusual; there’s usually no sunlight in the cave. We have to go outside for our sun. “Sam?” I ask. “Sammy?” He doesn’t answer me. I roll over, and there’s something sharp and prickly in my face. My face. My face is on fire. I reach up and scratch it and claw at it because it feels like I’ve got some horrible itching disease, and I call for Sammy but he doesn’t come, and I open my eyes and —