Robin York - Deeper

The conversation dies.

“Hey, guys,” I say cheerfully. I’m not sure how else to play this. Someone has to smooth over this awkwardness, and I guess it’s got to be me. “Getting something to tide you over the break?”

“They’re not getting anything.” West’s tone is caustic. He looks at Josh. “What part of ‘Text me first’ and ‘Don’t come around where I live’ was so hard for you to understand?”

Josh’s chin comes up, defiant. “We just thought of it when we drove by. I figured you might be here, with finals going.”

West shakes his head. “I told you how it works.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I set the terms,” he says curtly. “Not you.”

“We’ll buy a whole ounce,” Nate says. He’s lounging against the railing, faking relaxation. His expression is all holier-than-thou, and I recognize it as the face he made when he wanted me to do something for him that I didn’t want to.

West has never looked at me like that.

“I had some of what you sold Marshall,” Nate says. “It’s good shit. He says it’s one fifty for the half ounce.”

“I’m not selling to you.”

“I’ll pay you four hundred.” There’s something smarmy in the way Nate says this—like he’s trying to figure out West’s price so he can pay it and then look down on him for being hard up enough to let himself be debased.

I’m kind of amazed. I mean, I saw him on the floor after West punched him. I can’t believe he has the guts to be here, much less to be acting so superior.

“Maybe I’m not being clear.” West is getting angry. “I wouldn’t sell to you no matter what you paid me.” He gestures at Josh. “I’m done with you, too. Get the fuck out of here.”

Nate’s jawline hardens. “You’re an asshole.”

“You’re a cocksucker.”

“Isn’t that more Caroline’s department?”

I have time to register what the words do to West—this weird ripple of tension through him as every part of his body goes hard and furious, all at once.

I have time to think, Oh, crap.

Then everything happens fast. West lunges forward and pushes me back into the apartment at the same time. I’m catching at his waist, trying to keep him from hitting anyone or getting hit, not on my account, not tonight. “Keep out of this,” he says, and he’s straight-arming me toward the door, but the fire escape is slippery and I lose my footing and bang my temple against something hard that makes me see stars, which I always thought was a figure of speech. Nate’s against the railing, West is on him, Josh is shoving West, West’s fist comes up—

I don’t think it’s West’s fault, I really don’t.

But when it’s all over, West is the one who’s standing on the fire escape in wet socks, absently rubbing his knuckles, and Nate is the one on his knees at the base of the stairs, cradling his ribs and spitting blood.

I think you need an ambulance.

I can walk.

Keep the fuck away from her.

She doesn’t belong to you.

Doesn’t belong to you, either, asshole.

Had your chance. Fucked it up.

Wish I’d had her longer. Miss that sweet ass. Or haven’t you fucked her there yet?

Get him out of here. I won’t be responsible.

Let’s go. Nate. Let’s go.

You’ll be sorry.

I slide down the doorjamb, shake my head, blinking. It’s cold.

I wish I hadn’t come to the door.

West is there, his face right in front of mine, his intensity almost more than I can take. “Shit, Caro, are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

He pulls me to my feet, puts his arm around me, shuts the door on Nate and Josh. They’re out there in the snow, Nate hobbling when he tries to walk, maybe hurt.

It’s so ugly. All of it, this ugliness, because of me.

I hate it.

I think I’m supposed to like it. I think of all the movies I’ve seen where the guy takes a swing for his woman. The girl never gets hit in those movies. Nobody ever runs to the bathroom, hunched over, and throws up half-digested chicken soup in the toilet.

Clearly, I’m doing this wrong. I’m doing everything wrong.

I hear West come into the room, but I don’t know what he wants from me. When I went to the door, before I even looked out on the fire escape, I put my arm around him and he shrank away from me.

It hurt when he did that. Everything that came after just made it hurt worse.

I think, inanely, of the present I gave him. The glittery bow. Two hundred dollars in an envelope.

What did he think I was paying him for?

The ugliness—it’s not just in me. It’s in him, too, and he doesn’t want me to know about it, but that doesn’t make it any less there.

I’m falling in love with a boy who sells drugs, who punches when he’s angry, who knows my body better than I do.

I’m already in love with him. With West, who likes to set the rules, and who doesn’t want me to hand him money in an envelope after I’ve taken his dick in my hand and made him come.

I don’t know who he is, what his past looks like. I can’t know, because he won’t tell me. But his present is ugly enough to make me starkly, painfully aware of my own naïveté.

I’m shaking, clutching cold porcelain, crying.

West crouches down beside me. “Let me look at your head.”

I let him. Even though I’m sick, sobbing more for him than for me. Even though I hate myself.

I curl up in West’s lap on his bathroom floor and let him look at my head, test me for a concussion, wrap his arms around me, and lean against the wall, holding me. Holding me.

Something is wrong with both of us, but I don’t ever want him to let go.

My mom has a thing for The Wizard of Oz. When I was a kid, she found these blue-and-white-checked curtains at Fred Meyer and hung them up in the trailer, where they made everything look shabby. It was only a few months after Dad’s most recent vanishing act, and she was still wearing these cheap sparkly red shoes he’d given her. You know the kind of shoes with a wide toe strap and a stacked heel like a wedge of cheese?

She loved them. Wore them everywhere, even though she was constantly turning her ankles. One night she put them on to go out drinking with Dad, and she came back three days later wearing new clothes, with a tattoo of Toto on her ankle and a shot glass that said Reno. She gave it to me as a souvenir.

After Dad left and Mom lost her job because he took the car and she couldn’t find a reliable ride to town, she had this running joke where she’d click the heels of those shoes together and say, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”

Then she’d look around the trailer and frown like she was disappointed.

“Still a dump,” she’d say.

But she would lean into me if I was nearby, her shoulder against mine, our hair touching. “At least we’ve got each other, Westie.”

All her jokes were like that—the humor at our expense, the silver lining in the fact that we were a team. A family.

There’s no place like home.

But you can’t go home again—I learned that from being at Putnam. Home changes while you’re away, and you change, too, without noticing. You get in your car, watch the shapes of your mom and your kid sister get smaller in the rearview, and you think it’ll all still be there the next time, as though you went out for groceries or worked two eighteens at the golf course, back to back, then pulled right into your spot in Bo’s driveway like you’d never left.

It doesn’t work that way. You come home on a plane. You land in Portland, hitchhike to Coos Bay, walk to the school to surprise your sister when she gets out for the day—and then when the group of kids with her in it goes by, you don’t even recognize her.

You’ve never seen her clothes before. Her ears are pierced. Her face is different.

And the worst part is, she doesn’t recognize you, either. She walks right past. You have to catch her sleeve, say her name.

I’ve never felt more like two different people than I did that Christmas.

One of me lived in Oregon, with Frankie, Mom, and Bo. Uprooted, worried, frustrated, cautious—but there, where I belonged.

The rest of me was with Caroline.

I fall asleep after my last final and wake up to sharp knocking at the apartment door.

Caroline’s already left, on an airplane by now to the Caribbean with her family, so I know it’s bad news.

I’ve been expecting bad news ever since I knocked Nate down the stairs two nights ago.

There’s no way he’s not going to retaliate. I humiliated him. Twice.

She’s mine. That’s what I was thinking when I did it. I don’t care what happens to me—I’m not going to let anybody talk that kind of shit about Caroline in front of her, to my face, on my doorstep.

The worst part is, I knew she’d fuck with my priorities, mess with my head. I knew she would, and now that she has, I like it.

It’s perfect. I want her to move into my apartment, sleep in my bed, shower with my soap, wear my old shirts around. I want to eat her out before breakfast every morning, rub off on her ass, bury my face between her tits, and come on her hip.

I’m two inches from being so whipped I’ve turned into one of those guys who does whatever his woman tells him to do and grins all the time, like he’s high on the smell of pussy.

I’m a fucking goner for that girl. She owns me.

Which is why, when the knock comes at the door, I’m almost glad for it. I can’t stand myself. Can’t stand that she hit her head, bruising her temple. Can’t stand remembering the wretched, ugly sound she made throwing up in my bathroom.

After she was asleep, I texted Bo, telling him there was a good chance I’d end up behind bars before I made it home for Christmas.

Don’t let nobody in your place without a warrant, he wrote.

By the time I’ve got my boots on, the knocking has turned to pounding, but I take the time to pick up the book Caroline gave me off my pillow, dog-ear the page, and tuck it into my duffel bag.

It’s a good book, and I don’t want it trashed.

There are two of them at the door, a beefy guy with curly blond hair in a black Putnam PD uniform and a skinnier, shorter black guy wearing a red Putnam College Security polo. “Are you West Leavitt?” the blond one asks.

“Yes.”

“I’m Officer Jason Morrow with the Putnam Police, and this is Kevin Yates from campus security. We received an anonymous tip that you’ve been engaging in the illegal sale of marijuana. We need to come in and have a look around.”

I can tell by the way he says this that it usually works. They knock on college kids’ doors—twice a year, three times, whenever there’s a serious complaint. They act civil and ask nice, and these other kids roll right over.

I’ve got nothing in the apartment for them to find, because, despite what Nate seems to think, I’m not fucking stupid. The amount of weed I’m holding—that’s a serious misdemeanor for possession all by itself, a class D felony if they can prove I’m selling it. Which they can, of course, because nobody could smoke that much and function as a normal human being. I keep it in a locker at the rec center, and I go by there two or three times a week, run around the track, lift weights, shower, pocket a few eighths, a few quarters, whatever I know I’m going to be able to sell.

I haven’t grown a plant on campus since the beginning of last year, when I did it more as a stunt than anything. I wanted people to talk. He’s the guy who’s growing the good bud. He’s the one who can hook you up. Once that first crop was harvested, I shut the whole thing down. Too risky.

I know what I got myself into. I know my rights.

“No,” I say to the cop at the door.

No, he can’t come in.

No, I can’t get out.

I’m trapped in this mess I made, and I have a month away from here—from her—to figure out how I’m going to escape.

My mom throws her arm around my neck from behind me, leaning close to plant a kiss that glances off my ear and lands mostly on my baseball hat.