Believe

Chapter Six Robin

I wasn’t playing it cool with Phoenix. I knew that. I just didn’t care. What did playing head games with guys get me ever? A boyfriend who cheated and a lot of casual dates. There was no flirt left in me. She seemed to have disappeared with the vodka. So I was just being honest with Phoenix and he seemed okay with it. Maybe in another three days he would get bored with me, but then whatever. It was better than pretending that I was too busy or too in demand to spend time with him.

But I did feel a twinge of embarrassment that maybe I had overreached with the cat picture. His response came right away, though, and had been to ask me if he could see me later, so I felt reassured. More than that. I felt pleased. Excited.

The way he had kissed me . . . like I was precious, fragile. Like he wanted to meld us together into one person. Like he genuinely liked me, like he looked at me and saw me and wanted me. It wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t what I had ever experienced.

Then Kylie and Nathan had shown up and I had immediately felt guilty. Not only did I feel guilty about Kylie, but I felt guilty that Tyler knew and that Phoenix didn’t. Plus I felt a little sick to my stomach at seeing Nathan, who had acted weird about Phoenix being there. I hadn’t seen Nathan since that morning in his room, and I hadn’t been with a guy since then, but here he had to go and see me in bed with someone? I knew he was thinking I was a slut and I didn’t really blame him. There was no point in telling him the truth. I didn’t want to talk to him and it didn’t really matter what Nathan thought of me.

It couldn’t be good. Not in the ways that mattered.

Having dinner with my parents tonight, I texted. Classes start 2morrow but maybe we could do something 2morrow nite?

I start work. 3 to 11. Lunch?

That was disappointing. I had wanted to see him tomorrow night and have him spend the night again. I liked having him there with me, especially with my roommates around. I was becoming resigned to the fact that I couldn’t move out without causing huge drama. I was stuck. But it would be easier to see Nathan around the apartment with Phoenix there.

Which sounded so pathetic. And unfair. I hated myself for even thinking about it in those terms.

Maybe I didn’t deserve to see him. Yet that didn’t stop me from texting back.

I only have an hour free. 12:45 to 1:45.

I’ll be there. Where should I meet you?

On campus. University center. Text me when you get there.

I wanted to add something. Like an x or an o, or a heart or a smiley. All of which seemed too much.

K. See ya then.

K.

He didn’t respond, because uh, why would he? And then I felt like a jerk.

Damn it. I decided right then and there that I was going to continue to do and say whatever I wanted with Phoenix. That this was my chance to have a totally pure experience with a guy, in the sense that I wasn’t going to censor what I said or did. I was going to treat him exactly the way I would one of my girlfriends.

So I went for the smiley.

And he sent me back, get this, a rose. Swoon. Seriously, of all the guys I had ever dated, no one, not a single sucky one, had ever done that. It was simple. It was nothing much. Just a tiny graphic that required nothing more than him tapping it on the screen and hitting Send.

Yet it meant everything to me that the guy who was supposed to be such bad news was actually kind of charming. He reminded me of the Beast in the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. Rough around the edges, a little bit grumpy, but well meaning. Sweet.

When I went off to my parents’ house for dinner, I smiled as I sang along in the car to some Taylor Swift. The lyrics didn’t suit my mood, but the upbeat tempo did.

The smile lasted even through my grandmother starting in on me about eating more.

“Skin and bones, it’s disgusting. Men don’t like a woman who looks like a chicken,” she said to me, scooping more rice onto my plate.

“No thanks, I’m full,” I told her, knowing I was offending her and, in her mind, offending my mother as well by refusing her cooking. But I was going to burst if I ate anything else.

She clucked. Her hair had gone gray before I was born and she refused to dye it. She also refused to say how old she was, but by my father’s best geusstimation, she was eighty-nine, having had him at twenty-seven or thereabouts, because she had left Puerto Rico to come here for college and had married immediately. But whenever you asked her about any of it she gave vague responses and said things like, “Age is a state of mind. And muscle tone.”

“I’m going to die before any of you are married,” she said, looking tiny and forlorn in her chair at the foot of my parent’s enormous and very traditional dining room table.

“Probably,” my brother Eric said, which earned him a slap on the back of the head from my dad.

Dinner at my parents every Sunday was a thing. You went unless you were vomiting from the flu or were recovering from major surgery. My aunt and uncle and cousins were there every week too, and my brother Marco had brought his girlfriend, Rebecca, for the first time, which was basically a sign of commitment. You didn’t bring just anyone to Sunday dinner, but they both looked uncomfortable with the reference to marriage and who could blame them? They’d only been dating a few months, but my grandmother had been sighing and giving them meaningful looks all afternoon.

For some reason, I’d been seated to the right of her at the table since I was about six, and it was a dubious honor. She was always overfeeding me and always criticizing me. My eyebrows were too thick, then too thin once I waxed them. I was too fat, too thin. Too outspoken, too quiet. I was silly to focus on my art, then silly to want to work in an office. She hated my clothes, no matter what they were. Yet I knew she would murder a man with nothing but her attitude and her handbag if he ever tried to hurt me.

“Robin Bernadette,” she said, using my middle name like she always did, because it was a saint’s name, whereas Robin was too English and pagan in her opinion. “You look like a girl who has had her heart broken. Tell your abuela who this rotten boy is.”

Unfortunately, while Nathan might have proven himself rotten, it wasn’t his fault. Not really.

“Mama, I think that’s old news,” my dad said. “Haven’t you noticed she keeps sneaking looks at her cell phone under the table? And she’s smiling today. There’s a new boy.” He tapped his temple, looking smug. “Trust me.”

Well, since they had me all figured out, there wasn’t much for me to say.

I wondered then about how we are raised, how it shapes us. Tyler and Phoenix had grown up with addicts, Rory without a mother, Jessica with a father who ran a huge church, while Kylie and I grew up in the so-called ordinary nuclear family. How had that made me who I was? Was it so very ordinary that I was ordinary?

I do know that when I applied to college I stressed over that damn entrance essay because what did I have to say? I couldn’t outline how I invented an app for family members of cancer patients or did missionary work in Africa or was the daughter of a senator or had to navigate gang warfare to get to the community center where there was one teacher who believed in me. I lived in a middle income multicultural suburb of white, black, and Hispanic families where both parents worked as teachers, bank tellers, warehouse managers. Nothing other than ordinary people doing ordinary things.

My mother wanted me to milk my Latina heritage in my essay, but it felt like bullshit to me, so I didn’t. I wrote about expressing myself through art. My twelfth-grade English teacher gave me a C and suggested a rewrite. I didn’t. But I got in to the design school and that was all I ever really wanted, so I figured it didn’t matter.

Yet then I guess I fell off the rails, even though it didn’t feel like that at the time. It just felt like a party. But now, it didn’t feel like me.

Was it because I didn’t have a strong identity or a real sense of myself? Was that what my high school boyfriend had meant? That I had a quasi sense of self?

I didn’t know.

But I did know that today my father was right. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling just a little. Despite my grandmother’s comments about my disappearing breasts and my chicken wrists. Despite knowing that it was going to be hard to have Kylie and Nathan around the apartment.

“Leave her alone,” my aunt Marguerite told my grandmother. “She looks beautiful, as usual.”

“Actually, she looks hungover,” Eric said.

That had me sitting up straighter. “I’m not hungover. I don’t drink.” That was one thing I did know. I wasn’t going to be accused of doing something I was determined to stay away from.

The look he gave me was so skeptical that I made a face back at him.

My phone buzzed in my lap. When I glanced down I saw that Phoenix had sent me a text. Glancing down and up in the ridiculous hope that no one would guess what I was doing, I read the text.

Ink I want. What do u think?

It was his sketch of the snake from the park. I couldn’t imagine where that was going to fit on his body, but I guess there were parts I hadn’t seen yet. Yet? I felt my cheeks grown warm and when I raised my eyes I felt the beady-eyed stare of my grandmother. She said something in Spanish and I had no clue what it was.

But I didn’t really want to know.

When I got back to the house around seven, Rory and Kylie were watching TV and they waved to me. “Sit.” Kylie patted the couch next to her. “We totally need to catch up.”

I should. I knew I had to. But I panicked. I couldn’t sit there and pretend nothing had happened. I wasn’t ready, or strong enough, and the scene from that morning was still fresh in my mind. The embarrassment I had felt when I had seen Nathan.

“I actually feel sick,” I said. “I have super bad cramps. I need to lay down.”

“Oh, bummer,” Kylie said. “Take some Midol.” She didn’t look the least bit suspicious because Kylie never believed anyone had ill intention. It was a gift she had, of pure happiness, all the time. Happiness I would destroy if she found out the truth.

Rory was eyeing me like she knew there was more to it than that, but she would never ask. She would think about it, analyze, study me. The one person I really had to avoid, truthfully, was Jessica. And, of course, Tyler. He knew almost all there was to know, but even he didn’t know it went way beyond just making out in a car. Obviously Nathan wasn’t going to tell, though I didn’t want to see him either.

“Thanks. Glad you’re both back,” I said, forcing a smile.

Then I went down the hall and shut the door firmly to my little room. Sighing, I fell onto my bed and answered Phoenix.

We texted back and forth for three hours, about everything, about nothing, until the TV in the living room went off and the line of light under my door disappeared. I felt safe in my room and relieved when Rory and Kylie went to bed. Classes started the next day, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for the pressure of schoolwork, but at midnight, in the dark, with Phoenix distracting me, I thought I could deal.

He was funny, in a sly, side door kind of way.

He was also clearly interested in keeping the conversation going, and maybe it was me, maybe it would have been anyone who would talk to him, but I was grateful.

And even as I worried that developing feelings for a guy I felt grateful to was seriously pathetic, I couldn’t stop myself.

Nite, I finally texted him when my eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore.

See you tomorrow.

I closed my eyes, but I wished he was lying next to me, his quiet, steady breathing soothing me the way it had the past two nights.

It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all.

I knew I should cancel lunch with him. I knew I should pull away. That I couldn’t let myself get pulled into a friendship I wasn’t ready for, because I was still too raw, still holding on to my secret.

But I couldn’t pull away.

Just the opposite.

When I saw Phoenix walking across the food court in the university center the next day, I bit my lip to keep from smiling too broadly. I was sitting at a table with plastic chairs around it, my backpack on the floor next to me. I had decided to wear another sundress again because they were so comfortable. My leg stubble was starting to grow back in, which meant I was on the edge of being a hippie, but the skirt was long enough that I had decided I didn’t care. Phoenix was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, nothing weird, but without a backpack, he did look a little unusual. But what mostly struck me was the way he moved through the crowd, looking neither right or left, with a confidence and an aggressive walk that made people shift out of his way, probably without even realizing they did it.

He was swinging car keys around his finger, which meant he was ignoring his lack of a license again. I wondered why he didn’t worry that if he got pulled over, he would wind up back in jail. When he got closer to me, the corner of his mouth turned up, and he was doing what I was doing—trying not to smile too much. We were both like a couple of middle schoolers making eye contact at a dance.

Flipping his hair out of his eye, he dropped into the chair next to me, his legs sprawling out. “Hey.”

“Hey. You found me okay.”

He smiled. “I have good tracking skills. You know, and the texts with the specific instructions like ‘Next to KFC in the food court’ helped, too.”

“Good.”

“Though I don’t think you needed to point out what you’re wearing. I’m pretty sure I’d recognize you whether your dress was floral or solid.”

I wasn’t sure why I had done that. He was right. We didn’t recognize people based on their clothes, so why would I think he needed a description of my sundress to find me? “I overexplain. Sorry. What do you want to eat? I have a ton of points on my meal plan and I never use them all, so lunch is on me.”

“I can pay for myself,” he said, even though we both knew he couldn’t.

“But why should you when I have all this credit? Last year there was, like, two hundred bucks unused at the end of the year, and it doesn’t get credited back to you.” I didn’t have a meal plan anymore since I wasn’t living in the dorm, but he didn’t know that. I had a swipe card that billed everything to a central account where my tuition and books showed up, too. I figured I would go in and pay the food expenses myself before my parents saw it and it would allow me to trick Phoenix into letting me pay for lunch.

“Okay,” he said, but he looked reluctant. He did insist on carrying my tray back to the table after we ordered. I got a bowl of soup and he got a burrito the size of my head.

When we sat back down, the group of girls at the table next to us stared boldly. I knew one of them from my literature class, and the others I had seen at parties, but I didn’t know their names. I smiled tightly at them when we made eye contact, but they didn’t look away. I could hear them whispering.

“OMG, who is that chick Robin with? Is he like her bodyguard or something?”

I knew that Phoenix heard them, too, because his shoulders were rigid, but otherwise he showed no change in emotion. He was better, a thousand times better, at hiding his emotion than I was. I knew I probably looked uncomfortable. But I just sat there and spread out my napkin in my lap.

“Bodyguard? She doesn’t need a bodyguard, she needs a stylist. She looks like hell this year. WTF happened to her?”

I paused with my spoon halfway to my mouth.

“I heard she has cancer, that’s why. I mean, look at her. I’m surprised she’s even here for classes.”

“I heard she spent the summer at rehab. Drugs.”

“No, it was for sex addiction.”

Phoenix made a sound of disgust and he leaned over and touched one of the girls’ arms. She jumped and looked at him like he was a zombie out for her flesh.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your gossip session,” he said. “But we can hear every word you’re saying and it’s rude. In case you didn’t realize that.”

Their mouths all dropped open. Two had the decency to look shamefaced, but the third just sneered. “Sorry,” she said, and it was about as insincere as you can get. “But now you can clear up the mystery for us. Who are you? I’m Frannie.”

“Go fuck yourself, Frannie,” he said in a very polite voice, a tight smile on his face. Then he picked up my tray and his and moved us three tables over.

They had no response, clearly as shocked as I was.

I followed him, their gasps of indignation washing over me, not sure how I felt. I was embarrassed that people were talking about me, that my appearance was so noticeably different it was grounds for gossip. But at the same time, I didn’t really give a shit what they thought of me. They weren’t my friends and never would be. They were bored girls with no real worries in their lives. I had been one of them. But now I knew I had no business judging anyone else.

I also wasn’t sure how I felt about Phoenix feeling like he had to defend me.

“You shouldn’t have to listen to that shit,” Phoenix said, his jaw tense, his nostrils flaring. He moved back and forth in front of the table for a second before he yanked the chair out and sat down. I could see him pulling himself in, controlling his emotions and his body.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter, and they are right, you know. I do look like hell. But I’m okay with it.” I was. If it truly bothered me, I would put on makeup. But I couldn’t work up the energy to worry about it. It was nice not to have to reapply lipstick every hour.

“You do not.” Phoenix glanced away for a second, and when he looked back at me, my breath caught in my throat. He looked at me like I was important, special. “You’re beautiful, you know.”

To him, I was. I could see that and it had more impact than any bitchy comments from girls I didn’t know. “Thank you,” I whispered.

“Are they right, in any way?” he asked, and I realized his face was pale. “Do you have cancer?”

Oh, God. I shook my head rapidly, feeling guilty all over again. “No! No, of course not. I’m not sick at all. And no, I didn’t go to rehab either, though I did stop drinking because I had one of those nights where I blacked out and it scared the shit out of me.” That was as close to the truth as I could get, but I wanted him to understand that he shouldn’t feel sorry for me. I didn’t deserve his pity or sympathy.

He gave a sigh, one that seemed like relief to me, and he nodded. “I’m glad to hear it. For a second I thought, what if they’re right?” He looked like he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. He just shook his head. “Anyway. Eat your soup.”

I took a spoonful, but my appetite was gone. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t either super charged or totally generic chitchat, which seemed almost insulting. Conversation for strangers, and whatever Phoenix was, he wasn’t a stranger. So finally I asked what I wanted to know. “Can I ask you something?”

He nodded, chewing his burrito. “Sure. But make sure you’re prepared for the answer.”

That was a good point. But I still asked it anyway. I needed to know before I let myself fall any further. “Did you love Angel? Do you still love her?”

His eyebrows rose. It obviously was not a question he was anticipating. But then he smiled and shook his head. “No. I never loved her. She was interested in me. I figured why not? And I did care about her. But then for someone who claimed to want me so much, she couldn’t be bothered to visit me when I was in.”

“So you’re more angry than hurt?”

“Yeah, I guess. But I suppose I’m not even all that angry, because anger on me is a lot louder and messier than what you saw.”

It seemed like a warning. Or maybe I just took it that way. I didn’t have a lot of experience with anger. Passive-aggressive behavior? Sure. But not pure anger. “Well, I’m still sorry that she wasn’t an honest girlfriend to you.”

“It’s okay.” Phoenix leaned forward, closer to me. “Can I ask you a question now?”

“Sure. Just be prepared for the answer,” I parroted back to him, hoping he wouldn’t ask me anything I felt like I couldn’t answer.

“What’s his name?”

“Who?”

“The guy everyone thinks did this to you.”

“Did what?” I asked, heart starting to race. “No one did anything to me.”

“What those girls noticed.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and starting swiping at it. “I am being honest, you look beautiful to me, but you do look different. What happened at that party where you blacked out?” he asked.

Then he showed me a picture of myself from early in the summer. I was drunk, yelling, plastic cup in the air. I was in full makeup, cleavage out, hair hot-rolled into waves. My lip curled before I could stop myself.

“No one did anything to me. That is the truth. And even if they did, why would you want his name?”

“So I can beat the shit out of him.”

I tore my eyes off his phone screen to stare at him. He sounded serious. He looked serious. Tightly wound, the caged tiger, ready to attack the minute the gate was raised. “I don’t need you to do that, but even if I did, aren’t you on probation or something? And why were you in prison anyway?”

“For beating the shit out of someone.”

My jaw dropped. It made sense. I mean, if it wasn’t drugs or driving under the influence, what would it be? I didn’t think he was the kind for stealing. It just didn’t match the behavior I had seen. But fighting? It wasn’t that hard to picture. A five-month sentence seemed harsh for assault, though it wasn’t like I really had any clue about sentencing and the justice system. Maybe I had been avoiding asking because while I wanted to respect his privacy I also just didn’t want to have to face the fact that Phoenix had done something wrong. I wanted to hold onto the belief that like Tyler, he had been wrongfully imprisoned in some way, despite what Tyler himself had hinted at.

My pause where I processed that information grew too long, and he gave a sound of exasperation.

“Don’t worry, I only beat the shit out of people who deserve it.”

“Who deserved it?” I asked in a quiet voice, wondering if anyone ever truly deserved it.

“My mom’s piece-of-shit boyfriend, who just happens to be a drug dealer. Some of his inventory went missing and he decided my mother took it. I caught him with a knife, carving up her stomach while he . . .”

I was horrified, and my face must have reflected that.

Phoenix cut his words off, shaking his head. His lips were pursed. “Never mind. But he deserved it for that and for all the times he hit her before that. And I’m not even sorry for it. I’d do it again if the circumstances were the same.”

I saw that he meant it. All for a woman who hadn’t bothered to tell him where she was moving while he was in prison for defending her. So I just nodded, because I had no idea what to say. I didn’t understand that world and I didn’t know what it would feel like to watch your mother being abused or how instinctive it would be to use violence to stop violence. I did think that it was the right thing to do to stop someone hurting another person, that in a situation where nothing was right, it was more wrong to walk away and pretend it wasn’t happening.

A knife carving up her stomach. Good God.

Phoenix pushed his tray away. “I should probably just go.”

“Why?” That upset me. I didn’t want him to walk away with anything awkward between us. I wasn’t even sure how I felt, but I knew I didn’t have any right to judge something I didn’t know anything about.

“Because . . .” He looked away and shook his head.

“Why?” I repeated, both of our lunches totally abandoned.

“Because I like you.” Phoenix turned back and met my gaze. “And I won’t be good for you.”

My throat tightened. “I think maybe you think I’m a better person than I am.”

But Phoenix shifted his chair closer to me so we were sitting next to each other, and he took my hand. “Robin.”

“Yes?”

“I’m no good for you. And you’re probably no good for me. But we’re going to do this anyway, aren’t we?”

I nodded, because looking into his dark eyes there wasn’t any other answer. I couldn’t walk away from him, and I couldn’t let him walk away from me. “Yes. We are.”

“I thought so,” he murmured, and he kissed me in the food court, a quick brush of his lips over mine.

My skin tingled, and I sighed.

Oh yeah, we were definitely going to do this.

It was the only thing I’d been sure of all summer.

When the truth was that an ordinary life with an ordinary family hadn’t just made me ordinary, it had made me naive. Because in that moment, I genuinely thought that Phoenix’s background, his anger, my secret, didn’t matter at all.

It did.