I knew the rules. I knew where they bent, and I was good at bending them, because for a guy like me, bending them was the only way.
But bending is bending and breaking is breaking. Except for that one fuckup with Caroline, I didn’t break the rules. I broke the law but not the rules.
I guess when I fuck up, I tend to go epic.
“Get your fingers out of there.”
Krishna is bent over the mixing bowl, poking at the nine-grain-bread dough. I take the towel out of my waistband and snap him across the back of the neck.
“Ow!”
“I said get your fingers out.”
He straightens and wipes his hand on his jeans. Flour released from the towel drifts in a cloud around him. “I just want to see if it feels like an ass.”
“That is some perverted shit.”
“You’re the one who told me.”
“No way did I say that. Wash your hands if you’re going to touch it. That’s all I ask.”
“I did before I came over here.”
“You did not.”
“I did too. I always wash my hands after.”
After, in this case, means, after I roll out of her bed. Half the time Krishna crashes my night shift, he’s wasted. The other half the time, he’s just gotten laid.
Tonight, I’m pretty sure it’s both.
“Maybe you should wash your hands before, quit spreading scabies all over campus.”
“Scabies? Dude, that’s sick. My body is a fucking temple.”
“And I’m sure your women appreciate it, but I don’t know where those fingers have been, so you’re going to wash them again before you touch that dough or I’ll smack the shit out of you.”
He lifts both hands in surrender. “All right, Captain, all right. What crawled up your ass tonight?”
“Nothing.”
Krishna scrubs his hands. I clean the bowl of the mixer with a scraper and soapy water, then dry it and polish it until it shines.
I like working alone. There’s no one around to make a big fucking deal of what mood I’m in.
There’s no one to make me notice I’ve been in a bad mood for weeks, because every time I see Nate Hetherington, I want to punch him again.
I must not have hit him hard enough last time. He’s still smiling that smarmy fucking smile.
Krishna puts both hands in my nine-grain dough and starts massaging it with his eyes closed, his expression all blissed out. He acts like such a dipshit, you’d never know he was some kind of math prodigy.
“I’m not going to let you fuck it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Shh,” he says. “I’m comparing.”
“To who?”
“That girl I was with tonight. Penelope.”
“With the dark hair?” I ask. “Kind of big?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus.”
“Why, you like her? You know if you’d told me, I wouldn’t—”
“Nah, it’s fine. She’s my lab partner.”
“She’s got an ass on her,” he says.
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
It’s not that I care about Penelope one way or the other. I just don’t want to go to lab and have to think about Krishna bending her over a railing or whatever.
He’d tell me all the details if I didn’t forbid him to. Krishna will tell anybody any goddamn thing. Back home, a guy who bragged as much as he does would get his ass beat on a regular basis. When I met him last year, I thought I’d probably kill him inside of a week, and there goes my big chance.
He has a way of making you like him, though. Fuck me if I could tell you what it is.
He smacks the dough lightly. “This doesn’t compare. It’s all lumpy.”
“It’s the nine-grain. It’s supposed to be lumpy.”
When he thinks I’m not looking, he pinches off some dough and puts it in his mouth. Then he licks his finger.
“That’s it. If you touch one more thing, you’re leaving.”
“You’d get lonely without me here to keep you company.”
“Yeah, I’ll cry all over the baguettes and tell Bob to charge the suckers extra for artisanal salt.”
Bob owns the bakery. He hired me as extra labor for the Thanksgiving rush last November, but I made myself so indispensable that he kept me on, eventually giving me a few overnights a week. He’s close to retirement, and he doesn’t really give a fuck anymore as long as the place opens and closes and there’s something to sell. He’s been letting me experiment with the bread, make new kinds to see if the customers go for it. It’s a kick.
Plus, the bakery is a great place to move weed. There was already a tradition of Bob selling warm muffins and cookies to college students in the wee hours—stoners with the munchies, students pushing the edge of an all-nighter. I keep up the tradition, but the ones who text or call me first and slip a wad of cash into my hand get more than a muffin in their paper bakery bag.
Krishna’s running the finger he licked around the lip of the giant mixing bowl. I go for the towel again, but he sees it coming and grabs it out of my hand. I let him. I’m not fighting over a hand towel.
“I’ve got work to do, you know.”
“What have you got to do? Watch dough rise. This is the most boring job in the world.”
Since he got here, I’ve been washing dishes in water hot enough to scald his never-worked-a-day-in-his-life skin.
I don’t know why I keep him around. He skips class, doesn’t have a job, drinks too much, sticks his dick in anything that moves. I shouldn’t like him.
He just kind of attached himself to me.
I’d planned to live by myself this year. I found a basement apartment for cheap and got permission from the college to live off campus, which saves a fortune on room and board.
Krishna saw the lease on my desk and begged me to take him with me.
He ended up finding a bigger place, above a shop, and promised to pay the rent if I’d lease it and let him take a room. I agreed, because he’s good for it. Krishna’s parents are loaded.
He dusts off the countertop with the towel, hops up on it, and draws a grid in the flour on the cool metal surface. “Will it cheer you up if I tell you your girl’s sitting out front in her car again?”
I look up, which is just stupid. First off, I can’t see her from back here. I can only see her if I walk to the other side of the room and look out the front window—and then she can see me, which I don’t want her to.
Second, she’s not my girl.
Third—
“Ha!” Krishna says. “You’re so easy.”
Yeah. That’s the third thing. He picked up on my Caroline fixation real quick last year, and he taunts me with it.
Ever since I hit Nate last month, she’s been parking at the bakery a couple of nights a week. She doesn’t come in. She just sits out there when she’s supposed to be sleeping.
I saw her at the library today, bent over her notebook, writing something. The sun was streaming in over her table, making her hair and her skin glow gold. She looked fragile. Tired.
I can’t stand her being out there. I want her to go away.
I want to not have to think about her.
Of course, maybe she’s not even out there. Krishna could be yanking my chain. He’s hoping I’ll ask, and I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“You know anybody Vietnamese?” he says.
“What? No.”
“I need to find somebody Vietnamese to teach me how they play tic-tac-toe. I’m working on this combinatorics thing—”
“Is she out there or not?”
He grins. His teeth are blinding. The grin is at least 50 percent of the reason he gets so much tail. “Yeah, she’s out there.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“You told me to leave her alone.”
“Good.”
I put the yeast away in the fridge and look at the list of stuff I need to get finished before my shift’s over.
I glance at the clock.
Krishna’s still talking about tic-tac-toe.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out, see my mom’s number, but the text sounds like Frankie.
What r u doing?
I text back. Working. Why are you awake?
Cant sleep, she writes. Sing 2 me
It’s after ten back home. She should have been asleep hours ago. She’s only nine.
Why not Mom?
Shes out.
That’s what I was afraid of.
What song do you want?
Star one
So I type out the first verse of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” line by line. She sends me a smiley face.
Go to sleep, Frank.
Im trying
Be good.
Always
Love you.
Night west
Night peanut.
When I put my phone back in my pocket, it feels heavier.
I don’t like Frankie texting me after ten o’clock.
I don’t like that my mom’s not home or that she emailed me asking for five hundred dollars this morning but didn’t say what it was for. I tried to call Bo, mom’s boyfriend, who they live with, but he didn’t pick up and he hasn’t called back.
A couple thousand miles away from them, I can only know what they tell me, and Mom only tells me what she thinks I’ll want to hear. I’m supposed to have faith they’ll all be fine without me.
When you’ve had my life, faith is in short supply.
And God damn it, I don’t like knowing Caroline is out there in the dark, alone, awake when she needs some rest.
I’m sick of fucking worrying about her all the time.
That’s the worst thing about Caroline—the endless nagging worry of her. It was bad enough last year, when I met her and fell for her and swore to myself I’d never touch her again, all in the same day.
It was bad enough when I started dreaming about her, waking up with my cock hard and jerking off in the sheets, thinking about her mouth on me, her legs wrapped around my waist, what her face might look like when she comes.
Bad enough, but fine. Whatever. I can ignore that kind of shit forever. I could jerk off a million times thinking about Caroline and still not need to talk to her.
The problem with Caroline isn’t that I want her. The problem is that I want to help her, want to learn her, want to fix her, and I can’t do that. I can’t get caught up with her, or she’ll distract me and I’ll wreck everything.
I’ve got too much at stake to let myself get stuck on some impossible girl.
I’m not going out there.
I look at the clock again.
Krishna sticks his head in the big industrial fridge. “You have any cookie dough in here?”
“No. It’s time for you to take off. I’ve got to start baking soon.”
He cocks his head and gives me an assessing look. He has a streak of wet gunk on one cheek and a drift of flour in his hair.
“You’re trying to make me leave because you’re gonna go talk to her, aren’t you?”
Fuck it, I am.
I am, because I can’t not do it anymore. I’ve been not going out to talk to her for weeks.
“I’ll bring you some breakfast later,” I tell him. “What do you want, a lemon poppy-seed muffin?”
“Bring me one of those ones with chocolate chips.”
“You can have all the fucking chocolate chips. Just get out of here.” I push him toward the back door, into the alley.
“Far be it from me to get between you and your lady friend.”
“You know it’s because you say things like ‘lady friend’ that I’m making you go, right?”
“Nah, it’s because you’ve got serious privacy issues. You could be a serial killer, and nobody would know. Or, like, a secret stripper.”