His To Shatter (3 page)

“We need to go,” Ashlee chirped, bouncing on
her heels.

“OK, babe,” Kyle crooned, adopting the
sappiest frat bro-esque voice he could muster. Ashlee and I
responded with hearty barfing noises.

“Just stick to the script I gave you,” Ashlee
said.

“There’s a script?” I asked.

“Of course,” Ashlee said, pulling Kyle back
toward the front door, “I’m a professional.”

“See you later, Maddie,” Kyle called, “Good
luck!”

“Break a leg!” Ashlee added.

“Thanks!” I called as the door slammed
shut.

I hurried to apply my makeup and arrange my
hair into some approximation of an up-do. Corelli was an
established firm that managed to stay ahead of the times. My look
had to be a perfect cross of classic and contemporary, the past and
the future. For someone whose shoe collection consisted of one pair
of stilettos from Payless, this was not exactly an easy note to
strike. I had labored over my interview ensemble for weeks,
ultimately choosing a dress that would have made Brigitte Bardot
proud. The internship I was interviewing for was in France, after
all—Paris. I thought I could afford to be a little fancy about my
outfit. I wasn’t going to walk in there with a cigarette and white
gloves, of course, but a little allusion to Paris couldn’t
hurt.

Dara and Bryan/Ryan were taking their good
sweet time in her bedroom. Their good, sweet, and loud time. As I
put the finishing touches on my outfit, Dara’s moaning became
something akin to a keen. They must have thought I’d left with
Ashlee and Kyle. For all her promiscuity, Dara was still a
conscientious roommate when it came to having sex in the apartment.
She was never loud or obtrusive when we were around or awake,
though there was one time when our kitchen cabinet door got ripped
clean off its hinges after one of her beaus had stopped by. We had
since instituted the No Sex in the Kitchen rule, just for the sake
of cleanliness.

I crept toward the door as love sounds filled
the apartment. For all my reluctance to jump in the sack with any
old guy, I couldn’t deny that I was intrigued about the whole
thing. The one guy I’d slept with was my college boyfriend, Marc.
He lived on the floor above me, and after we made eyes a couple of
times in the dining hall, he asked me out. I never had a boyfriend
before Marc, so when we made it exclusive, I was pretty unprepared
for the whole thing. I hadn’t expected to jump right to sleeping
together, though looking back, it seemed a bit naive not to. I
really enjoyed Marc’s company, and had been perfectly content to
lose my virginity to him. That was, of course, before I learned
that he was sleeping with some senior from the poetry department
who “elevated his thinking”. I was a marketing major. Apparently
the only thing I could elevate was sales.

Even once we started sleeping together, I
hadn’t been very inspired by Marc as a lover. He’d been attentive
at first, knowing that I was new, but I was so skittish and guarded
during all of it that I hadn’t even gotten off. Not once. We tended
to see to Marc’s orgasms over mine, as a rule. And while I’d never
been pressured into doing anything I was opposed to, sex with Marc
just hadn’t been that interesting. How could sex that bland exist
in a world where Dara seemed to get her mind (and other parts)blown
every other night? It was a mystery to me.

I slipped soundlessly out of the apartment
and hurried down the stairs. My talking points raced through my
head on an endless loop. I prayed to every god I could think of
that my interview would go well. I’d been dreaming about this
internship for what felt like eons; the chance to spend a summer in
Paris would be singularly incredible. I’d never even been away from
the East Coast in my life—a European adventure was almost beyond
the reach of my imagination. But more than just the cafe’s and
gardens, I was also eager to get my foot in the door of the
international marketing world. I knew that I was the right girl for
the job, if they’d have me.
Please
, I prayed,
please let
them have me
.

My heels clicked against the sidewalk as I
made my way to the subway. The whistles and stares I attracted
caught me off guard, and I tried to take them in stride. For the
first time, I didn’t feel like a little girl playing dress-up. I
felt like a woman with direction, and drive, and places to be. As
the subway rolled up to the station, I finally felt like I could
truly nail my interview. Nothing could disturb my focus.

* * * * *

Chapter Two

* * * * *

The subway doors slid open and I stepped into
the nearest car. The day was still so young that rush hour hadn’t
yet taken hold of the city’s public transportation. I lived within
walking distance of NYU’s campus, and didn’t have to take the
subway on a daily basis. Being whisked up to my interview, even by
something so unglamorous as the F train, was exciting, in its way.
I was still getting used to life in New York, even a year later.
West Chester was about as close to Podunk as you could get on the
East Coast, so transitioning to big city life had been something of
a challenge.

Thankfully, I hadn’t made the leap alone.
Dara, Ashlee and I had been scheming about moving to New York since
the day we started undergrad. The move was a no-brainer for Ashlee,
who needed to be in the city for her career. And it was a given
that Dara would lead a cosmopolitan lifestyle after graduation,
whether it was on her dime or her parents’. I was the wildcard in
our New York scenario. I didn’t have the connections or financial
means to stroll into any lease I wanted. My first four years of
college had been supported by my bulletproof GPA and scores of
extracurriculars, but after graduation I had no safety net. The
three of us had nearly wet ourselves with excitement the week that
Ashlee and I received our acceptance letters from NYU. Both of our
programs, acting and international marketing, were among the best
in the country. But more important than prestige was the fact that
we’d all get to stick together through the next chapter of our
lives.

Kyle had followed us into the city almost on
a whim. He had never been fond of being traditional, and that held
for his career as well. The idea of an office job or internship was
anathema to Kyle, so from the very beginning of undergrad he’d been
building up his status as a freelancer. By the time we graduated,
he was already landing great freelance graphic design jobs from
small start-ups and companies in the city. He could work remotely
from anywhere, but he chose to put himself in the middle of the
action with us. We all teased him for tagging along, but
professionally, he was ahead of us by leaps and bounds. Kyle was
constantly encouraging me to shrug off my marketing focus and
embrace the freelance lifestyle.

“You’re feeding into the same system that
keeps your family down,” he had once said. “These big marketing
firms only serve to make the rich richer.”

“Capitalism didn’t keep my family down,” I’d
snapped at him, “Alcohol and my father’s penchant for jail bait
did.”

That shut him up, but I could tell that he
still disapproved of my career path. To Kyle, and many of our young
friends who found themselves incensed about the wealth inequality
in the country, my field was disgusting. They couldn’t see past the
fact that marketing deals with sales, economy, trends. They
couldn’t understand why I wanted international marketing to be my
life. From the first few classes I’d taken on the subject, I had
been fascinated by the way marketing moved ideas between companies,
communities, and countries. That was what I wanted to be a part of
for the rest of my life; that perpetual exchange of inspiration,
experience, and innovation. I couldn’t care less about making “the
big bucks” or fancy titles. I just wanted to be a part of it
all.

The F train lumbered to a stop, and most of
the passengers rose to leave. As the wave of exiting people flowed
out of the train doors, I heard a raised voice among the crowd.
Loud, persistent noises were rather commonplace in the city, and
I’d learned to ignore them for the most part. As I was digging my
interview notes out of my purse, the yelling voice continued to
blather on, coming closer and closer to my car. I peered up from my
notes and felt my stomach tighten just a hair.

There was a man making his way through the
subway station, staggering through the thick crowd with no qualms
about running into other passengers. He was nearing middle age,
with a mop of greasy brown tangles atop his head and a broad barrel
chest. His clothing was threadbare and stained, his face was
flushed, and his eyes were glazed over. I could tell by the way he
stumbled that he had been drinking, though it was still well before
noon. As ashamed as I was to admit it, I couldn’t help but be
scornful toward drunks. Obviously, this man’s situation was nothing
like what my father’s had been, but the relation was too strong.
For the rest of my life, I’d associate drunkenness with weakness of
character, with unchecked and dangerous disregard for anyone else.
I didn’t know who the subway drunk was, to be sure, but his drunken
behavior was enough for me to be wary of him.

To my horror, the man swung into my subway
car just as the doors were closing. I dropped my gaze instantly,
lest he notice some disdain in my eyes. Grumbling loudly to
himself, the drunk fell into a plastic seat opposite me. An
unmistakable odor assaulted my nostrils when he sat down—I could
smell the booze on him. I would know that smell anywhere. It was
the same stink that had clung to my father’s breath most nights,
and I couldn’t help but gag on it there in the subway. The drunk
across from me reached into the front of his jacket, and for one
crazed moment I thought that he was going to pull a gun out. But
instead, he extracted a half-empty bottle of vodka and took a
mighty pull, smacking his lips against the glass.

I stared down at my notes, though there was
no hope in concentrating any longer. The man was mumbling things to
himself, occasionally raising his voice to a shout. The handful of
other passengers on the train paid the man no mind, though I did
see one mother with a young son move incrementally further away
from him. It always amazed me how New Yorkers could just turn a
blind eye. Once, I’d been in the subway when a young woman had
gotten mugged right in front of the entire train. She struggled to
hold onto her purse for a good minute before the mugger wrenched it
away, and in that time not a single person stepped forward to help
her. Not
one
. On the streets above, the homeless set up
their makeshift homes on every other street corner. One morning, I
had left my apartment and found a man sleeping over a subway grate
in the dead of winter, to soak up the heat from the tunnel. There
were many things to love about living in New York, but I hadn’t
been there long enough to be able to look away when someone was in
trouble.

A mighty belch escaped the drunk’s mouth
across the way, and I swallowed a grimace before it could stretch
across my face. I tried to remind myself that this was a man who
had fallen on hard times, that he deserved my sympathy. But his
blatant drunkenness was dulling my sense of empathy. He was looking
around the train, his eyes rolling wildly in his head. Scanning the
assembled passengers, he rose unsteadily to his feet and lay his
hand over his heart.

“Hello, ‘scuse the interruption,” he began,
slurring incoherently, “My name is Pete, and I was proud to have
served in Nam back in the day.”

I raised my eyebrow at the man. He was
definitely not old enough to have served in Vietnam. He probably
hadn’t even been born when the conflict was still going on. But my
skepticism certainly didn’t deter him.

“I used to be a Wall Street banker,” he
continued, “But last year, I was diagnosed with cancer, and the big
man threw me out on my ass. Then I caught HIV, and I didn’t get no
help from nobody...”

He was raving now, clinging onto the rails of
the subway with shaking hands. I felt a stab of pity for the man,
reduced as he was to lying about his past. The air in the subway
car iced over as he raked his eyes over his fellow passengers.

“If you could spare a little change, or some
food, I could ‘ppreciate it,” he said. “I used to be a doctor,
before they threw me out. Nowhere to go, no help...”

The man lumbered around the rocking subway
car, hand outstretched. Nobody offered him what he’d asked for, and
the color began to rise in his cheeks. The young boy down the car
cowered against his mother as the man came close. Having been
denied his offering, the man fell back into his seat, glaring
wildly around the subway car. Nobody looked up to meet his gaze,
whether from fear, or apathy, or revulsion. He sank back into the
plastic bench and stared straight ahead, fuming. His eyes fell
heavily upon me and lingered there. In a moment, I could feel his
gaze boring through me, resting on my expensive-looking ensemble,
and my expertly-painted face. I was suddenly furious with myself
for dressing up in so flashy an outfit. Obviously, I should be able
to wear whatever I wanted, but looking halfway decent in this city
meant a lot of unwarranted attention, especially if you happened to
be a woman.

“Hey baby,” the man growled. There was no
ambiguity about who he was speaking to. I pretended to study my
notes, ignoring him roundly. “I said
hello
,” he insisted,
refusing to be unheard. “Don’t you have any manners?”

I looked up sharply and made the bitchiest
face I could muster. The man’s face cracked into a gruesome grin,
and a wet laugh escaped his throat. “Are you try’na scare me?” he
said, incredulously. “Well, good. I like my bitches nasty.”

Sighing pointedly, I brought my notes up in
front of my face, hoping to block out the unsightly image of the
man’s yellow-toothed grin. But my attempts at ignoring him only
encouraged his outrageous behavior. Struggling, he pulled himself
back to standing and started down at me. He was not a small man, by
anyone’s estimation. He was much taller than me, and twice my size.
My eyes darted around the subway car, silently pleading with my
fellow passengers for a spot of help. Not one person returned my
desperate gaze. Not one. I should have known better than to expect
assistance, but I was disappointed in my new city.