Deeper

“Sure thing.”

Nate pulled me inside, closed the door, kissed my neck. His hands roamed under my shirt, over my bra, and then I stopped him because Bridget was in the hallway and I had a paper to write.

And also because I felt deflated, as though some rich possibility had been taken from me. Something more than a juvenile game of hallway bowling.

The alchemy of a boy who could turn two-liter soda bottles into chicken rockets.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the pull I felt toward West is the reason why I broke up with Nate. Whether it gathered power until it got so strong, it cast a shadow over all my other feelings, and I didn’t even realize it.

When I think about Nate, about West, it’s hard for me to tell what’s my fault and what isn’t.

When I sleep, there’s no peace in it. I dream of being chased, attacked, hurt. In my dreams, I’m a victim, and the dreams start to feel more real than the daytime does.

Semitrucks idle behind the Walmart and the grocery store. The guy at the gas station has gotten to know who I am, and he asks how things are going when I pay for gas and orange juice. He’s in his forties, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a gut. He seems like a nice man, but how nice can he be, really, working the night shift at the Kum and Go?

Even the name of the gas station is too gross. Before, I thought it was funny. Now it gives me flashbacks, and I’ve started driving twenty miles to the next town to buy gas there, because I can no longer talk to the Kum and Go guy without wondering if he’s seen me with my clothes off.

I drive by knots of drunk students walking back to the college from the bar or the pub, gripping one another’s elbows, laughing and shoving. One time I saw a girl fall down. She was alone with a guy, and I thought he was going to rape her, but he helped her up. I pulled the car over and took deep breaths, close to hyperventilating. Because, seriously, what on earth is wrong with me that I thought that?

I never would have, before. Never.

I don’t want to be like this for the rest of my life. If I had an undo button, I’d hit it so hard. But if there’s some way to go back to how I was before, I haven’t found it.

Most nights, I end up at the bakery.

I tell myself I won’t, but I do.

I’m under strict personal orders to stop driving here, stop parking out front, stop looking through the window for a glimpse of West.

Yet here I am.

Light spills from the kitchen in the back of the shop, through the plate glass and over the sidewalk. I set the emergency brake but leave the engine idling. With the car stopped, my music sounds too loud, so I lean forward to turn it down.

I imagine it’s warm in the kitchen and it smells good. The mental taste of it is sweet, an antidote to all the hours I spend on my laptop, sifting through the worst that humanity has to offer.

West’s figure crosses the doorway. By the time I’m standing up, one hand holding the door open and the other tucking my keys into my hoodie, he’s already disappeared. A gust of cold wind blows across my exposed feet and over the back of my neck. I hunch down, pushing my fists deeper into the kangaroo pocket of my hooded sweatshirt.

The men in my head want to know what I’m staring at and why I’m such a dumb cunt.

I don’t know. I don’t know why.

I’m about to get back in the car when the wind shoves at me again, a cold, hard push right in my face, and I squint my eyes and raise a hand to shield my eyes.

I’m annoyed.

I’m angry.

I’m pissed.

I’m standing in front of a bakery at four in the morning, furious, staring at an empty window.

I squeeze my keys so hard, they bite marks into my palm. West walks by the open kitchen door again.

Go in there and tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you like him. Tell him something.

But I don’t. I can’t. West isn’t what I need. He’s only what I want.

I want him because he punches when he’s mad.

I want him because he drove a wheezing car two thousand miles by himself, eating stew out of cans as if that’s something you can just do.

Because he looks at a soda bottle and sees a chicken rocket.

Because I feel like, if I was with him, he might fix me. He might save me.

He might ask me, Want to play? and this time I might say yes.

But I know that’s not what would happen. He wouldn’t save me. He’d ruin me.

I’m already ruined enough.

I turn around, get back in the car, and drive away.

OCTOBER

West

It took me ten years to learn how to hate my dad.

He blew through town just often enough to fuck with Mom’s head until she lost her job, gave him all her money, turned her heart over to him one more time, and then watched him drive away.

That year—that summer when I turned ten—Mom cried for a week. I visited the neighbors in our trailer park, telling them what had happened in a way that made it all sound funny, hoping they’d give me something to eat.

In the busted-ass, nothing place in Oregon where I’m from, there used to be jobs in lumber, but now there’s nothing but part-time work, hourly pay, wages you can’t raise a family on.

Where I’m from, women work, and men are only good for two things: fighting and fucking.

I got good at fighting early. When I was twelve, my cousin’s friend Kaylee took me into the unlocked storage room beside the laundry and showed me how to fuck.

I got good at that, too, with some practice.

Maybe it should have been enough for me. Seemed like it was enough for everybody else.

But there’s something in me that’s like a weed, always pushing up through cracks, looking for light. Looking for a deeper grip in inadequate soil.

I’m curious. I want to know how things work, fix them if they’re broken, make them better. It’s just the way I am, as far back as I can remember. When three out of the five dryers are sitting broken in the trailer-park laundry, I’ve got to know why. If I can’t get a good answer, I’ll take those fuckers apart and try to figure it out.

When there’s something I can do, I need to do it.

I think that’s what makes a real man. Not whose ass you can kick or how good you can fuck, but what you do. How hard you work for the people who depend on you. What you can give them.

That time my dad came around when I was ten—the time I stood up to him and he beat me hard enough that I finally learned how to hate him—he got Mom pregnant before he left.

My sister, Frankie, came into the world with two strikes already against her. Mom hadn’t planned on another kid and wasn’t real thrilled. Frankie showed up early, way too puny. She slept a ton.

Because I’m curious—because I can’t help myself—I read this pamphlet that had come home from the hospital in a bag of free formula. It said babies were supposed to wake up every three or four hours to eat, but Frankie wasn’t doing that. Not even close.

“What a good baby,” everybody said.

Nobody wanted to hear she was starving.

I didn’t want to love Frankie. I just wanted to fix her. But the thing about babies is, you mix up formula for them in the middle of the night—unwrap their blankets, change their diapers, run your fingernail across the bottom of their tiny bare feet until they’re awake enough to eat—and the next thing you know they’ve got their little fingers wrapped around your soul, and they don’t ever let go.

I had to do things for Frankie. Whatever needed to be done. I just had to.

So I learned what hours DHS is open. What paperwork you have to take to the office, who to call if you swipe your Oregon Trail card at the grocery store and it turns out there’s no money on it because your mom missed the appointment and didn’t tell you. I learned where to go to get secondhand onesies. Who gives out free formula on what days. How to turn in cans for quarters to pay for laundry, where to find work when people say there isn’t any.

I learned. I’ve got a knack for it.

By the time I turned fourteen, I was making more money than my mom was, and I guess I started to think I was the man of the house. The rock the surf broke over. Invincible.

Then my dad showed up.

If I was the rock, he was the tide. Nothing I could do to keep him from dragging my mom back out to sea. All I could manage was to keep Frankie sheltered, give her somewhere to hide and huddle so he couldn’t drag her under, too.

After that, I started thinking about what else I could do.

Just working and keeping shit together the way I was already—it wasn’t ever going to be good enough. I had to give Frankie a life somewhere else, somewhere better, or she was going to end up like all the other girls, screwing twelve-year-old boys in supply closets, getting screwed over again and again by some worthless bastard she’s decided she’s in love with.

I couldn’t stand the thought of it.

When I was old enough to drive, I got a job at this ritzy golf course twenty-five miles away. I got that job on purpose, because I knew if there was anywhere I could meet the right people, study them, figure out how to become one of them, it was there.

I worked my way up to caddying, which is how I met Dr. Tomlinson. I caddied for him once when his usual guy was sick, and then he requested me and I got to be his usual guy.

This golf course I’m talking about—when I say it’s ritzy, I mean it’s so ritzy that people fly there from all over the world just to play golf, and once they pick their caddy they keep the same caddy for as long as they want. It’s swank.

So, anyway, Dr. T is rich—an anesthesiologist—and his wife comes from money. I’ve been in their house, high up on a bluff with a view over the golf course. It’s huge, clean, everything immaculate, nothing broken or out of place.

That house looked like everything I wanted for Frankie. A fortress that would protect her from my dad, from pain, from making stupid, fucked-up decisions and wasting her life.

I saw that house, and I wanted it. I wanted what he had.

I guess Dr. T saw something in me, too. The weediness in me. My willingness to work, to grow toward any kind of light I can find. He said I reminded him of himself back when he was a dirt-poor farm kid in Iowa, desperate to do something with his life.

I make him feel big, is what he means. Show him who he was and how far he’s gotten.

Dr. T made me his project. He taught me how to talk so I don’t sound ignorant. He told me when I was acting like trash, how to fit in among people like him. He and his wife don’t have kids, and he kind of adopted me.

His wife—she didn’t want a kid. She took me out in the woods and told me to lift up her skirt. Took me in the pool. Took me into her bedroom when Dr. T wasn’t around.

She wasn’t the only woman to use me, or even the first. She wanted into my pants. I wanted her money. A fair exchange, I figured.

Dr. T told me they would send me to the college where he’d gone, the best college, according to him. If I could get the grades and get in, they would ship me off to Putnam, Iowa, with full tuition. Room and board would be up to me.

The Tomlinsons would do that for me. They liked me that much.

I worked my ass off to get in to Putnam. I did things I’m proud of, and I did things Dr. T would kill me for if he found out. I did them so I could get here, and I’m here so I can get a good degree and meet the right people to give me a leg up in life.

I did them for Frankie and my mom.

I’m not ashamed. The world isn’t some flawless place where everything works. It’s a fucking mess, and if I have to cut corners or break the law to get where I need to be, fine. If I have to trade sex for money, for opportunity, I’m still better off using my dick than wasting my life, losing my heart.

Love is what fucks people up. Love is the undertow.

My mom taught me that.

At Putnam, I wasn’t not the same person I am back home. I was a student, a worker, an actor mouthing lines. I was an impostor, but a good one. I knew exactly how I was supposed to behave, what I could get away with saying and doing, when I needed to shut the fuck up and keep my head down, no matter how much I didn’t want to.