Random Acts of Hope (9 page)

When you’re
sixteen
.

For two different specialists.

The test results weren’t a surprise, but they were a source of rage. Shame.
Something
. My teeth ground against each other and my hands itched to do…something. Hi
t
something. Play something.

Anything but this conversation.

Amy closed her eyes and nodded. “I get it. You knew you couldn’t father children. Charlotte got pregnant. You assumed she cheated on you. End of story.”

“Right.”

“Is that why you dumped her like that? So coldly on the phone?” Amy asked.

I whipped around, surprised. “You knew that?”

“Only later. Maybe…two years ago? Rumors. People got together and you talk and…” Her voice trailed off. “I defended you. I said you’d never, ever be that cold to someone. That you were too kind to do such a thing.”

Sam froze. My past with Amy wasn’t a secret, but he clearly didn’t like it being aired like this. After he’d disappeared on her, and after Charlotte fucked me over, we’d turned to each other and, in a moment of we
a
kness, slept with each other.

Not a mistake, but not something I wanted tossed out there in front of Sam right now.

“You never told me,” Amy said softly. Her big, brown eyes locked on mine with an enormous accusation.

“I nev
e
r told anyone, except him.” I pointed to Trevor, who crossed his arms over his chest and glowered.

“And I kept my mouth shut because you don’t talk about this kin
d
of hit.”

“Hit?”
Amy asked, frowning.
 

He pretended to be gut punched. “Yeah.
Hit.
Can you imagine what he went through? I’d have thro
w
n the phone through a window and gone all Hulk-crazy if that happened to me. Trying to pass off the baby as Liam’s?”

Thanks, bro.

“Trevor!” Darla’s voice carried out into the living room. “It’s a full moon and we need your hairy ass in here.
Joe’s got the hairy feet covered.
”

“
My feet aren’t hairy!” Joe’s cries of protest mingled with the sound of Darla giggling.
 

Trevor grinned. “I gotta go.”

“
Y
eah,” I muttered, watching Sam and Amy murmur a bunch of sickly sweet crap to each other and kiss.

“Everyone’s got a date tonight except me,” I mumbled. The beer in me was only rented and it was time to vacate, so I went to the bathroom, opened the door and—

My
blow-up doll
date was in the shower with a sign taped to her:

“
I’m your number one fan
.”

Charlotte

“There’s a boa constrictor loose in Boothman.” The call from security at 3:22 a.m. w
oke
me out of a hot dream involving Liam and
a
blowup
sex
doll. It was like
9 1/2
Weeks
meets
Naked Lunch
.

I was wet and throbbing and panting slightly. “A
what
?” I barked into the phone.

“A boa constrictor.”

“As in
a
snake
? A giant snake is loose in one of the buildings?”

“Yep.” The voice on the other end of the line
wa
s new to me. The start of every semester meant we had a new crop of student workers. This
wa
sn’t Dale Evanston, the ass
i
stant chief of police calling me.
That
voice I knew.
A little too well.
Or the
d
irector of
c
ampus
s
ecurity, Sharon Dunston.

This was Anonymous Minimum Wage Student Worker #17.

“What am I supposed to do about it?” I asked.

“I…uh…” He
went
from being casual to worried. “I don’t know. I just know protocol says I inform the resident director on duty.”

“Did you call animal control, too?”

“The students said they did.”

“Were they drunk?”

“Um…they said they weren’t, but the
y
also said the reason the snake got loose was because the ping-pong ball from beer pong popped into the cage and they opened it to get it and—”

I threw off the covers and started fishing around in my drawers for clean sweats. And fresh underwear, because mine were soaked.

God damn Liam and my dreams.

“
The first rule of working in student services is never automatically believe what the students tell you. What’s your name?”
 

“Dan.” His voice cracked.

“
Dan, y
ou call animal control
right now
,” I said with a long sigh. “What room was this in?”

“412.
They really did swear they weren’t drunk,
”
he added in a pleading voice.
I pattern matched in my mind to the best of my middle-of-the-night abilities. Freshman quad. Four drunk eighteen year olds with a six-foot snake.

An
escaped
six-foot snake.

Awesome.

“Thanks.”

“So…you need me for anything?”

Eye roll. “Just call animal control and document it in the log.”

“Should I review the security tapes?” His voice was a little too eager, just like my RA Jordan’s had been the other day. The student workers loved to watch security video. I think they’re all destined to become NSA agents.

“No. If we need to do that,
the
R
D
s
like me
will handle it.”

Disappointment filled his voice. “Okay. Thanks.”
Click
.

“Go into residence life, they said. It will be fun, they said,” I muttered as I threw on new pants and a crappy old hoodie from high school with some band slogan on it. Saturday nights in the dorms were always a bit crazy, but so far this night I’d handled two lockouts because the RAs were busy doing other things, one case of a female fresh
ma
n coming back to her room and walking in on her roommate having hot monkey sex with her boyfriend, two overstudied premed students who fell asleep in the elevator, and one male student who systematically lit cigarettes and flicked them out of a twel
f
th-story window, sing
e
ing one woman’s butt-length hair.

I looked outside. Full moon? It brought out the nutcases. Maybe even the werewolves at this rate. And, apparently, a six-foot snake.

I grabbed my keys, ID, and phone and began the quiet march over to Boothman. That dorm was all men, all freshmen and sophomores, and tended to house the science majors. Pets other than fish were absolutely banned from campus halls, and every fall I’d always add a line in orientation sessions:

“And just because it fits
in
an aquarium doesn’t mean it’s allowed.”

Once word got out that a six-foot snake was loose in a dorm, my phone and all the RD phones in this cluster would be screaming.
And then in the morning the parents could be screaming, too.
Tomorrow would be one hell of a day.

But tonight? This was just the cherry on top. What else could the night throw at me th
a
t would be harder to deal with than a six-foot snake?

Liam

I needed to take a bath in a giant bucket of varnish remover. So many hands on me, so many backsides rubbed up against my frontside. T
o
o many fingers copping an extra feel around my g-string. Long, fake fingernails trailing lines down my biceps, my thigh, my chest and abs…leaving trails of spine-tingling shudders.

Most nights I was fine
with being the flesh fun
. I got into it, really. I’m young, hot, and this is what I do. I entertain. On a stage I do it with a guitar in hand, and here I do it with a g-string. The difference between the two is slim. When—not if—the band breaks out, I can jus
t
make women think I w
a
nt to fuck them by using my hands on a guitar and my voice at a mic.

Here
I
use costumes and g-string. They eat it up, and knowing they want me makes it all the more fun.

It had been a long night. Three bachelorette parties in a row. What was it about early September in New England and weddings? By the third party I felt like someone had drugged me. How much lipstick could my chin handle?

My wallet was nice and fat, so I shouldn’t complain. But I would. You think stripping is easy cash, and who gives a shit about showing off your body for other people’s pleasure. It’s my body and I can do what I want with it. Dad cut me off and Mom can’t help, so I just did what seemed natural when a friend of a friend of a friend told me about the job.

The owner of the company where we stripped,
Louise, told me I was a natural, and bam—instant $300 a night most nights. Tonight I was packing $500. All three parties had been in Weston, at places with gates and butlers. You get an address in
neighborhoods and towns like
Weston or Wellesley or Beacon Hill and suddenly the ones become fives and tens.

The demands go up, too. Tentative hands turn into entitled gropes. Wo
m
en with tight faces, elevated breasts,
and shoes that cost more than my first car
go indignant when you tell them you won’t do
that
for an extra $200. No, not for $500, either.

Tempting as it might be.

The rage comes out, then. But they have to keep it in check, because life among the
suburban
blue bloods is all about a careful balance between what you know is true on the inside, what you have to fake on the outside, and the screaming tension of the unpredictable.

A bachelorette party with some beefcake (that’s me) is unpredictable enough to let these women feel like they’re being wild, but some of them think that because they’re letting loose and because they have husbands who own entire towns that means they can own me, too, for a half-hour or so.

“Name your price,” they’ve told me, and while I don’t have one,
my fellow stripper
Jack does. He quotes now with a sly half-smile and gives me a wink as the well-coiffed women slip past all their friends who try to act like they don’t notice
that the cougars are about to roar
.

And Jack has the fattest wallet of all.

It’s when the women won’t take no for an answer that the job gets tough. Too tough. And tonight was one of those nights.

Obsessing about Charlotte didn’t help, either.

Nights like this are why I pay $50 a month to belong to a twenty-four-hour gym. By the time I get there, it’s 3:44 a.m. and the place is close to dead. Only the hardcore free-weight junkies are lifting, spotting each other and do
i
ng cage squats that make you think their assholes are about to explode from lifting six hundred pounds out of a below-parallel squat.

Somehow they get up there, high enough to count it as a rep. Maybe that’s the key to success: work so hard you nearly blow an organ. And then do it again.

I showed up in sweats and g
o
t down to it, a set of lunges, then toe lunges, then diagonal toe lunges burning up my quads. The racks were full, and that’s how I liked it: my gym, my way, on my timeline.

“Hey,” a voice said, interrupting my thoughts. I was bench pressing forties to get re
a
dy to move up, push myself to hundreds. You can’t start too high or you’ll shred yourself. Right now, being shredded to pulp and
becoming
stringy meat sounded good. Maybe then I’d stop thinking about Charlotte.

The voice was attached to Tyler, our replacement bass player,
a.k.a. Frown.
 

“Hey,” I muttered back.

“You do forties?” He w
a
sn’t impressed.
Sweat poured off his face, his hair shorter than the last time I saw him, his tats on display as he wore a nasty old wife-beater that used to have a logo on it. Like, ten years ago. That shirt was so tattered it could be one of those strings of prayer flags the Free Tibet people used to fly on their balconies in college.
 

“To start.” I pushed up, elbows angled just right, and let the weights come down slowly, helping to build more muscle fiber. “Working up to hundreds.” Why I said that was a mystery. I d
id
n’t need to impress him.

“Need a spotter?”

Why was he here? Fuck this. “Not yet.” Gym manners said I should offer back. It wasn’t his fault I felt like taking out a small village righ
t
now.

But I didn’t offer.

“When you do, let me know.” And with that he walked off
slowly, like nothing bothered him
.
A flare of jealously filled my skin. Must be nice to be that chill.
 

I worked my way up to eighties and felt my arms weaken. Nineties made my triceps scream, but I wasn’t giving up. Every rep gave me more power, even as it ripped through me, and drove thoughts of Charlotte out of my mind.

All those women stroking and teasing me. A few
licked
me. And all I could think about was Charlotte and why she fucked me over five years ago.

I got up to get a drink of water and heard someone laugh. Tuning people out at the gym was easy, because I didn’t know anyone. I kept it that way. I had enough friends.

I went back to my bench and halted, the laughter growing.

The blowup doll was on my bench, one arm clutching a
five
-pound weight. She wore a big
P
ost-it note that said: “Can someone spot me?”

Fucking Tyler. I looked everywhere for him. Gone.

Three guys came out of nowhere and pointed. “She your trainer?” More laughter.

I snatched her up and stormed off to the shower.
Ten minutes under the hot spray and as much soap as I could manage washed away the ick of work. What did Charlotte call her? Esme? She sat quietly on a bench, unchanging, unmoved. Maybe a blowup girlfriend was the way to go. That Ryan Gosling movie might have been a non-fiction guide to a non-friction relationship.