Where I End and You Begin (11 page)

Wiping my palms on my jeans, I clean one stool off and sit down. Pushing my foot against the counter, I give a little spin. Whee.

“What was it like working as a hostess?” Daniel asks. He’s inspecting the stool one down from mine, as though he’s trying to find one that isn’t quite as disgusting as the others. I look at his pressed pants, sigh, and get up.

“Here, let me help you,” I say. I go over to the stool, hop up, and rub my butt over it, wiping it down with my jeans. “There.”

I hop back up and slap the dust off my jeans with my hands, but when I look up Daniel is staring at me as if I’ve just stuffed a banana in my ear. “What?” I say.

“That was just... an unconventional way of dusting.”

“Well, excuse me,” I say. “You weren’t going to do it. It’s all going to end up on my jeans anyway, might as well skip the part where it gets all over my hands and under my fingernails. This place is probably full of lead paint and asbestos. We’re courting death just breathing in here.”

He smiles and sits down. “I suppose,” he concedes. “Anyway. You worked as a hostess at a restaurant in high school?”

Oh, the dreaded childhood probing. Well, it was fine. I didn’t have anything to hide. “Yeah,” I say. “It was easy to do so I could still concentrate on my schoolwork, and we needed the money.” I shrug. “It was no big deal. But every time I go into a restaurant I’m still extra nice to the hostesses. And waiters. And waitresses. And the busboys, too. You wouldn’t believe how shitty those jobs are. Unless you’ve done them. Have you done them?”

Daniel shakes his head. “I’ve never worked in a restaurant,” he says. “Actually, I haven’t really ever worked for pay at all. I didn’t have a high school job.”

My mouth drops open. “What?” I say. “How could you not?” The concept is completely foreign to me. Well, to be fair, a lot of people couldn’t get jobs because the economy was so shitty, but that didn’t mean they didn’t try. Everyone always needed extra money. Money to pay for their cars, for their college, for drugs or booze or whatever.

He shakes his head. “My mom didn’t want me to. She told me to focus on school.” He smiles. “Also we went to church probably every night, so I didn’t really have time to work.”

Oh, God. I can’t think of a worse fate. “No offense, but I’d rather get paid to lick turds off of people’s shoes than go to church every night.”

He frowns. “Why?”

I laugh. “I hated church. My mom made me go to church, too. She got really holy roller after... after I got into high school. She decided to go to this really nutty church where people talked in tongues and shit. It was so bizarre. I hated going.”

Daniel looks intrigued. “I’ve never been to a church where they speak in tongues,” he says. Heedless of the dust, he props his elbow up on the counter and leans towards me. “What was it like?”

I think about it. “Nuts,” I say. “It was utterly bugfuck crazy. Like, the preacher would point someone out of the crowd and start berating them for being ungodly, telling them that there was a great sin weighing on their soul, and that they had to repent or feel the fires of hell.”

Just thinking about it sends a little shudder up my spine, and suddenly I’m glad I’m here in this broken down old diner. The air is cold and the building is falling apart, and it’s the complete opposite of the church my mother made me go to.

There it was always hot and crowded. Stifling. You needed water and air, no matter what time of year it was. There was no air conditioning, and in the Oklahoma summer it would get so sweltering in the little building that I sometimes thought I was going to start having visions. Pastor Mike’s face floats up in my brain, red and round, spittle flying from his mouth.

“Repent!” He was always screaming, over the moaning of the organ and the shrieking of the demon-possessed. “Repent!”

The memory of sweaty bodies and music so loud it grated on my brain presses down on me, and I have to dig my fingernails into the flesh of my palms to chase them away. I take a deep breath and steal a glance at Daniel.

He’s watching me closely, as though I’m an interesting specimen, or some rare species that he’s never encountered before. I clear my throat.

“Uh, anyway. The tongues wasn’t anything real, you know. It was just babbling that people would do. I could never tell if they really believed they were speaking in another language or if they were just blithering so the preacher wouldn’t bother them any more.”

Daniel’s brows are drawn down into a frown. “That sounds a little...” He searches for the right word. “Intense.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But I guess it wasn’t boring. The church we went to before that one was just boring, and the one after was boring too. I’ve never been to Mass. Are they boring?”

Daniel looks away. “I don’t know,” he says. “I was really into it when I was a kid. The ceremony, the ritual... it was like an anchor for the soul, you know? Kept me grounded. My mom also made me participate in the youth group stuff, too, so some of it was fun.” A little rueful smile creases his face. “And there was always drama.”

“Ugh,” I say. “I hate drama.”

He grins at that. “Oh, come on, Bianca, you don’t want to know who snubbed who and who’s cheating on who with who’s girlfriend?”

I put my hands over my ears. “I lost brain cells just listening to that,” I complain. “I like my drama on the television, not in my life.”

He quirks an eyebrow. “You don’t like drama in your life?

I know what he’s thinking and I lower my hands, feeling foolish. “No,” I say. “I mean...” I search for the right words. “I fuck up pretty bad all the fucking time. But I don’t bother anyone with it, you know? They’re my problems. No one else should have to deal with them.”

To my surprise, Daniel suddenly looks worried. “Really?” he says. “You don’t share with anyone? Don’t you have a best friend you can share that sort of thing with?”

I think of Tanya and Alice. I think of Jibril, and Lana, and really, most of the people in Marchand. To be fair, there’s a lot of drama in the house as well, but it’s different. It’s stuff that comes and goes. Nothing really changes when it happens.

That’s probably why I don’t want to bother anyone with it, I realize. “I guess I like my dorm too much,” I say. “I want it to be safe. I don’t want to drag all my problems home with me, you know?”

He tilts his head. “But when you leave, aren’t they still there, waiting for you outside the door?”

Yes. Of course they are. But they’ll always be there. I crack a smile. “Oh come on,” I say. “Problems go away if you ignore them, right?”

“I don’t think it works like that.”

I snort. “On a long enough timeline, all problems are eventually moot.”

He raises a brow at this.

“Because you die, you see,” I explain.

He purses his lips and takes his hipster glasses off, setting them on the dusty bar, then props an elbow on it, jams his fist into his cheek, and looks at me. “What if you come back as a ghost?” he asks.

I inhale sharply. “What about it?” I snap. “So what if I did?”

Daniel frowns and sits back up. “I... I’m sorry, what? I didn’t mean to offend you...”

I’m not offended. I don’t know what I am.

Abruptly I slide off the stool and stand up. “I like talking here,” I tell him. “But I need to walk.”

He opens his mouth to say something, but then seems to think better of it. He puts his glasses back on and stands up with me. “Walk where?” he asks.

I look around and spy the hallway that leads back to the bathrooms and the kitchen. I point. “Over there?”

He follows my finger and nods. “Okay.”

Together we wander back to the little dark hallway. There are no windows here, and at the end of the hall is one of the steel doors set into the back of the building. I wonder if we can unlock it from the inside and file the thought away.

I turn and push into the kitchen, and Daniel follows me.

There’s not much back here. The really expensive equipment must have been taken and sold, but there are still a few brushed metal racks on wheels floating around. It’s dark in here with no windows, and only the light, meager already from so few windows in the dining room, is downright paltry as it filters through the half-closed order window.

I like the dark. It heightens my other senses.

Behind me, Daniel moves. I can hear the sound of his clothes moving together, the shifting of his feet on the gritty floor. If I am very quiet, I can hear him breathing. I wonder if he’s listening to me breathe, too. The thought leaves a funny feeling in the pit of my belly.

“You’re naïve,” I say. “I could be a serial killer. Luring you into the dark.” I keep walking, away from the order window, looking for the darkest place, a place to hide, a place where all that stands between the darkness outside and the darkness inside is the thickness of my skin.

“How do you know I’m not going to kill you?” Daniel says.

I turn to see him, but it’s so dark, and there are just enough leftover trays and rolling shelves that I no longer know where he is.

“I don’t,” I say. “You never know what someone could be.”

He shifts. My hearing, heightened and sensitive, picks up the sound as though it were broadcast through a loudspeaker.

“That’s cynical,” he says.

I think I see him, in the darkness. The slightest curve of light falls on his cheek, gleams off his glasses.

“Is it?” I ask. I shuffle across the floor, my hands out, until I find the wall. “Want to hear a story?”

“Yes,” he says.

“My mother thought I was possessed by demons.”

Daniel doesn’t say anything to that. I trace the tiles on the wall, the bumps and ridges.

“In the church she picked, demons were anything you didn’t like. Like demons of irritable bowel syndrome, or demons of alcohol, or demons of porn. If you got caught doing something bad, it was a demon. And you had to be exorcised.” I feel myself smile. “I was possessed by the demons of talking back. My mother hated whenever I ‘talked back.’ Except it was whenever I talked. Anything I said was talking back, or I guess anything that made her uncomfortable was talking back. She used to get so mad at me... Disobedience. That was another one. If I forgot to load the dishwasher, it was the demon of disobedience. And then she’d take me to church that Sunday and I’d have to sit up at the front and all these people would gather around me and put their hands on me and howl in tongues and it was so
fucking stupid.
”

If I think too hard about it, I can still feel those hands on me. On my shoulders, on my head, my back, my arms.

“Those people actually thought they were casting demons out of me. It was the same no matter what. If I was sad, or angry, or anything at all... demons. Like anything that wasn’t happy-happy joy-joy was the opposite of the will of God or whatever.”

My jaw is clenching now, my arms and back tight. “But there’s all sorts of horrible, shitty things in this world. My mom wanted me to believe in God, like Jesus was some sort of Prozac that would make me happy. ‘Be healed in Christ,’ she’d say. So I stopped talking to her about anything.” I let out a laugh. “But wouldn’t you know, there’s a demon of sullenness, too? I’m just demons all the way down.”

Daniel says nothing, but I can hear him breathing.

I rake my fingernails through my hair. “Anyway. You think that might have something to do with why I don’t talk?”

His soles scrape over the gritty floor. “It’s not always like that,” he says. “Churches, I mean.”

“I know,” I tell him. “She only went there for a few years, then we started going to a nice little church that didn’t believe everything bad in the world was caused by demons.”

“That’s good,” he says.

“Is it?” I ask him. “Because
those
guys thought everything bad in the world happened for a
reason
. We couldn’t know the reason, but there was a reason for it. So which is better? Pretending to know the reason, or thinking it’s okay to be kept in the dark?”

There is silence for a long moment. “Why did your mother turn to a church like that?” he asks finally. His voice is so low, I have to strain to hear it.

“Problems,” I say. My voice is low, too, as though talking about these things is taboo, only to be done in hushed whispers. “She was just trying to figure out how to survive. People do crazy things to survive.”

He’s quiet. Then: “You are very understanding, Bianca. It takes a lot of people years and years to forgive something like that.”

You really don’t know anything at all about anything, do you?
I think. He’s so sweet, so
nice.
I almost want to protect him.

“Oh,” I say. “I didn’t forgive her. I hate her guts. When I’m done with college, I don’t think I’ll ever speak with her again.”

He inhales sharply. “Even though you know why she did it?”

My teeth clench. It all happened years ago, but talking about it has brought back the white-hot rage, the smoldering fury. “Especially because I know why. She projected all her pain onto me, like I didn’t have enough of it on my own. People who make their problems into other people’s problems are worse than shit.” I laugh again, but it’s an angry thing, as though I’m spitting venom. “And here I am, being your problem. I just can’t stop being a
problem.”

Footsteps. He’s walking toward me. They echo in the small kitchen with its concrete floor and tiled walls. I feel the air shift as he draws near, and then the warmth of his body.

I put my hand out to let him know that I’m right there, that he needn’t come any closer. My palm lands on his stomach, and I feel the hard flex of muscle beneath his sweater. “Stop,” I say, pulling my hand back.

“Bianca,” he says.

I hold my breath, not knowing what to do or say.

I hear him move, and when his hands alight on my upper arms, I jump, but don’t pull away.

Slowly, gently, he draws me in, until I have to take a step forward, and then another, until his arms wrap around me and I am fully pressed against him.

My heart is racing, my body alive at the contact, but nothing more happens. He just holds me, and I hide my face in his chest, feeling the beat of his heart thrumming against my brow.