Her shuffling pauses. And I think I can detect a smile, even though I can’t see her face. It’s the way her shoulders move, ever so slightly. It’s presumptuous, but I’m right. Because she turns again and she is smiling.
“If we’re better together, why do we spend so much time apart?”
I let out a long breath. “Well. Maybe it’s time to fix that?”
This time her smile is different. So different it catches me off guard. I’m very astute at reading people, but so is she. So the two of us together are a lesson in self-control and checked emotions. But she gives it all away when she blushes and I’m immediately reminded that she is only eighteen years old.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I say quickly.
Her response comes out as a laugh. “Do you?”
I nod. “Yep. You’re thinking… what now? Who are we? Where will this go?”
Maybe she wasn’t thinking that, but she is now. And it hits because she’s back in control of her expressions, any trace of that blush totally gone now.
“And that’s OK, ya know? We can do that.”
“Do what?”
“Wonder about things. Intentions and shit like that. Or we can just be who we are.”
“Haven’t we always been who we are?”
I nod. Slowly. “That’s why I like you. I have always been me with you.”
“Hmm. I’m trying to think if I can say the same.”
“And?”
She shrugs. “I dunno. I didn’t see you as a man before last Christmas. I saw you as a…”
Her pause kills me. I die waiting. “Don’t say ‘brother.’”
She laughs. “No.” And then she puts up a hand. “You’re not gonna like this though, because when I was a kid, and I was with you and Lauren, I felt like we were a family.”
“We were.”
“I know. But I mean…”
“Father?” I say. “You saw me as a father?”
“No. You were too young for that.”
“So it is brother.”
“No. Because if you were a big brother, you would not have expectations of me. You would’ve been all protective the way you were with Lauren. But you always treated us different. You always had expectations of me.”
Now it’s my turn to pause. “Did I? What kind of expectations?”
“You know. I had your back.”
“Oh.” I smile. “Yeah. One hundred percent. If shit went down, I always knew you had my back. So that makes us… friends. Just like I said.”
“You gotta start somewhere, I guess.”
I agree by nodding my head. “Yeah. So. You wanna get some dinner?”
“Like a date?”
I don’t want to pause here, but I do. Because this thing between Wendy and me, it’s precarious and I don’t want to fuck it up. But it is a date. It’s meant to be a date. This entire visit is a date. We are something else now and I’m trying to figure out a way to ease us into this new whatever it is we are, without pissing her off too much or forcing the inevitable hate speech as she walks out on me. I can’t deny it’s a date, or that sends all the wrong signals, so I go with truth. “Yeah,” I say. “Like a date.”
“Do I need to change?”
She’s wearing jeans, a black tank top that has a white skull on it, and her boots. Which can’t be the same brown boots she’s been wearing since she was ten, but they look exactly like the same brown boots she’s been wearing since she was ten. Her blonde hair is long and straight, one side tucked behind her ear. She is wearing no makeup.
“No,” I say. “Please don’t change.”
She walks over to me, leans up on her tiptoes, but this time she does not kiss me on the cheek.
Her lips are soft when they touch mine. She doesn’t open her mouth and neither do I.
It’s not a make-out kiss. It’s not an I-love-you kiss, either. It’s not even a promise-of-something-later kiss.
It’s just… hello.
CHAPTER SEVEN - WENDY
THE DAY I MET NICK
The boat is big and it’s in the ocean.
The ocean is close to a cliff.
Atop the cliff is a mansion.
And in the mansion is a massacre.
We are on the boat.
Yesterday I was in a place called Mexico and today I am off the coast of a place called California. This is all I know because I am small and no one wants to show me a map.
I’m not sure what to do with these facts, so I do nothing. I sit. I’m quiet. I listen.
The man with me is Chek. He’s got a mean face and bald head. But he’s not mean. Not to me. Not so far.
Chek is talking to other, meaner-looking people. They yell, they scowl, they pay no attention to me at all. I think it’s because I’m wearing a dress. Chek came to my orphanage in Mexico a few days ago. He wasn’t there for me—something else was happening. But he noticed me. Everyone notices me, that’s nothing new. My pale skin, blonde hair, and ice-blue eyes make them all take notice.
But not the same way that Chek did.
He came over to me, bent down, and asked me, in English, “What is your name?”
So I told him.
Then he just stood up, went over to the priest who runs the place, and started asking questions. They were all about me. He wasn’t very careful about this because he was facing me as he talked and I can read lips. So at first I thought, Well, he’s just another customer putting in his order. I’m never sent to the customers, so this had nothing to do with me, and I was about to turn away and go back to my coloring when he said, “She’s one of us and she’s coming with me.”
I remember thinking, Oh, shit, here we go. I guess I’m not so special anymore, am I?
Chek hit the priest in the face, knocking him down, and said, “Keeping secrets from me is a very bad idea.” And then he walked back over to me, held out his hand, and said, “Let’s go.”
That’s how I got on the boat.
But we stopped along the way and took the tender boat into a little coastal village, and he bought me some colorful dresses. I liked them. One was dark red and it was made of a soft gauzy material. Another one was bright yellow, like a canary. The third one was white. I was wearing the white one as the men on the boat argued about whatever was happening on the coast of California.
I think this is why they ignored me. A little girl in a white dress. What could be more innocent?
But Chek knew better. He knows I’m not really a little girl.
No one told me this, not until he came along, but I have always known that I was different. The other kids in the orphanage, they were so clueless. They never questioned anything. When the stupid sisters gave us food, it never even occurred to them that it might be drugged.
But I knew better.
And I didn’t eat it unless they made me. Mostly, I only ate what was on the sisters’ plates after they were finished. That’s why I liked working in the kitchen. It was the only way I didn’t starve.
Of course, that didn’t work all the time. The sisters were all bigger than me, so I spent plenty of nights in my own drugged-out stupor. But at least I was aware that I was being drugged and did my best to minimize it.