Deeper

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.

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.”

“As if I have time for another job.”

“That’s true. You’d have to stop sleeping. But it might be worth it to have chicks shoving cash in your jock.”

“They do that, anyway, whenever I go out dancing.”

“Oh, yeah?” Krishna’s face lights up. “You got moves?”

I don’t dance. If I need to get drunk, I do it at the bar in town that doesn’t card.

If I need to get laid, I find somebody who doesn’t go to the college, take her home, make her happy, and clear out. Townie women don’t expect anything from me.

“No,” I say. “I don’t need moves. I’ve got tight pants and an elephant dick.”

Krishna laughs.

“You’re not driving, are you?”

“I walked. I can knock on her window if you want. Send her your way.”

“Thanks, but no.” I turn him in the other direction, pointing him toward the apartment. It’s only two blocks, and I’ve never heard of anybody getting mugged in Putnam.

“Don’t forget my muffin,” he calls as he turns the corner.

After Krishna’s gone, the kitchen is so silent it seems to echo. This is my favorite part of the night, what comes next—the part when I dump out the proofed dough, weigh it into loaves, shape it, fill the pans, and fire up the ovens. It’s an act of creation, and I’m the god of the bread.

I look at the clock and measure out the minutes. Ten.

Ten, at a minimum, before I go look out the window. Maybe she’ll be gone, and I won’t have to do this. I can rule over this tiny world, messing with temperatures and proofing times, how much flour and how much liquid, how many minutes in the oven. It’s like pulling levers. Up or down. More or less. Simple.

I wish Caroline would let me do it—let me be the god of the bread and leave me alone. But she’s out there, messing up my kingdom, and I’m afraid of how much I want to go talk to her.

I think of Frankie on the phone. Of the money I sent my mom this afternoon.

I promise myself I won’t go to the door for fifteen minutes.

Fuck it, twenty. I won’t go for twenty.

I can’t give in to this, because the worst thing about Caroline is that I’ve never promised her anything, but she’s here, anyway. It’s as if she knows.

She doesn’t know. She can’t.

She can’t know that when I make a promise, I keep it.

Or that I’m afraid if I start promising her things, I won’t ever be able to quit.

“You want to come inside?”

That’s all it takes. When she says, “Yeah, sure,” I turn and go back in, and she closes her car up and follows me.

I put my iPod on shuffle and start it playing. I like having music for this part of the night—put it on any earlier, and the mixers are too loud to hear it. While I wash my hands, Caroline wanders around, doing a slow circuit of the room. Unlike Krishna, she doesn’t touch anything.

I tie my apron on over my jeans and go back to what I was doing.

“Bob makes the sweets,” I tell her. “I just stick them in the oven at the end of my shift. Not sure if you want to wait that long.”

As though she’s here for a cookie, and not because … fuck if I know. I clocked her ex, she showed up at the library, I mauled her, and she told me she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Then she started stalking me at work.

What am I supposed to think?

She shrugs.

I fling a chunk of bread off the scale onto the floured surface of the table. “So how’s it going?”

Caroline leans a hip against the table’s edge, all the way down at the far end. “Fine.”

Fine.

Everybody says they’re fine. It’s bullshit.

It’s not as though every conversation I have back home is deep and meaningful, but I never wasted so much time being polite as I do in Iowa.

Caroline’s wearing sweatpants and flip-flops and a hoodie you could fit seven of her in. Her toenail polish is chipped, and her hair’s in one of those lazy half ponytails, like she started to put it up but her arms got tired and she had to abandon the job before she finished.

There are chicks who dress the way Caroline is dressed all the time, but she’s not one of them. On the first day of history class, she wore jeans and a bright-blue sweater even though it was still ninety degrees outside. She lined her pen and her highlighter up perpendicular to her binder, the textbook and the syllabus all out in front of her.

There’s something about her that’s totally pulled together, even when she’s just wearing jeans and a shirt. Not the way she looks, I mean. Something inside her. Like she’s got it all figured out, knows what she wants, knows she deserves to get it.

I can still see how her face looked when she was sticking her nose inside my car, checking out all my stuff, asking me, “Don’t you worry about botulism?”

Tonight—lately—she’s all wrong. She isn’t fine. Not anymore.

And I can’t let it be.

“How come everybody lies when you ask them that?”

“What, how they are?”

“Yeah. You say, Hey, how’s it going? and everybody says, Oh, fine. Their hair could be on fire, and they’d still say, Fine, fine. Nobody ever says, You look like shit, or I don’t have enough money to make rent, or I just picked up a prescription for a really bad case of hemorrhoids.”

“People don’t like talking about hemorrhoids. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“But who decided it was the end of the fucking world to be uncomfortable? That’s what I want to know.”

She shrugs again. “I think it’s supposed to be like lubrication for society.”

“Lubrication?”

“Grease.”

I frown at her and toss a loaf down the counter. It’s filling up. I have to throw them down to her end. This one lands with a little pouf of flour that gets her black sweats messy, but she doesn’t brush the flour off.

I know what lubrication is. I just don’t get why we need it.

We didn’t need it at the library, when I was so fucked in the head from hitting Nate that I forgot I was supposed to even try to be polite.

It felt good punching that jackass.

It felt fucking great backing her up against the stacks, smelling her, getting my nose full of Caroline and my leg right up between hers, getting the taste of her on my tongue.

“It’s something my dad says,” she tells me. “Being polite is a form of social lubrication.”

“I thought that was booze.”

“What was?”

“I thought booze was for social lubrication.”

She smiles a little. “That, too.”

“I’m not sure you and me need lubricating.”

That earns me Caroline’s I’m-so-offended look. Those big ol’ brown eyes narrowed to slits.

I’d like to see her make that face at me when I have my tongue between her legs.

And that is not even a little bit what I’m supposed to be thinking about.

It’s impossible, though, to stop thinking about friction and lubrication, tongues and fingers and mouths, when she goes all red like that. When I know I’m getting her good and rattled. She pinked up that way once when I walked back to my room from the shower in a towel. Stared and stared at me with her neck flushing and her eyes huge.

I had a hard-on for a week.

“Why’d you come tonight?”

“You asked me to.”

“Before that. Why do you keep driving here, parking out front? What do you want?”

I throw the last piece of dough down the table, and it skids across the floured surface, stopping right in front of her.

“I don’t want anything.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She stares at me, nostrils flared, chin up. Starting to get pissed that I’m pressing.

Good. Let her be pissed. When she’s pissed, she talks.

“How’s it going, Caroline?”

This time, I lean into the words the way I might lean into the bread dough, pressing down hard with the heel of my hand. I want a real answer, because it’s the middle of the night and we can lie to each other in the daytime, on campus, in the library.

We do it already. Every time I pass her in the hallway and don’t grab her and push her up against a wall, kiss her stupid—every time it’s a lie.

I’m sick of it. I took this job expecting to be left alone, working when nobody was awake, not having to be polite or to say words I don’t mean, to act like I’m somebody I not. I need the job to give me that because I don’t get it otherwise, and it fucks it up when Krishna shows up and we have to pussyfoot around the fact that he drinks too much and hates himself. It fucks it up to have Caroline sitting outside in her car, not coming in. And now that she’s in, it’s fucking it up that she’s telling me she’s fine.

“It’s going,” she says.

“Yeah? Enjoying the fall weather? Classes treating you well?”

She pinches the bridge of her nose instead, high up, and closes her eyes. “You were right. Is that what you want me to say?”

“I want you to say whatever the truth is.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think you ever tell anybody the truth. You’re awake at two in the morning. You look like shit. You’re exhausted. When I invite you in here, when I ask you how it’s going, you think I’m going to fucking buy it that you’re fine? You think that’s what I want you to say?”

“That’s what everybody says.”

“Yeah. It is. And if you’re going to get out of bed and come here and talk to me, the bare minimum you can do is assume I’m not everybody. When I ask you, I actually want to know how you are.”

“What if I don’t feel like telling you?”

“Then say that. How’s it going, Caroline? None of your fucking business, West. See how that works? It’s easy.”

For a minute she’s quiet, and I have a chance to appreciate what an asshole I am. I’ve got no right to be this way with her. I don’t know why I always want to be—to push at her, peel her apart, find out what’s underneath—but I do.

That’s the thing about Caroline. I want to strip her naked, and then I want to keep going. I want to learn what makes her tick. Not even want—I need to.

I need something from her, and that’s what I have to guard against. The most dangerous thing about her. Because if I need her, she’ll hurt me, distract me, maybe even break me into pieces and grind them under her heel. I’ve seen it happen with my mom.

And it’s not like I’m so dumb that I think love does that to everyone. Bo, Mom’s boyfriend now, he loves her, but he doesn’t love her that way—like a typhoon, a fucking tsunami knocking his feet out from under him. I know there’s love in the world that’s take-it-or-leave it, easygoing, slow and steady.

But that’s not what I feel around Caroline.

She could knock me on my ass so hard.

It’s not what I’m in Iowa for.

She exhales, a long whoosh of air. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” And then, after another pause, “Ask me again.”

“How’s it going?”

“Terrible.” She looks at the floor. “Every day,” she whispers. “Every single day is the worst day of my life.”

I flour the table in front of me, preparing to shape the loaves.

Bread practically makes itself, if you do it right. You just have to quit fighting it.

Caroline watches my hands. The way my fingers shape and pinch, set the bread on a tray to rise—I have a way of making not fighting it look like fighting it. I guess I’ve been digging my heels in so long, it’s hard to remember there’s another way to do things.

I don’t think I was ever like Caroline, though. Never privileged like her, confident of my place in the world, thinking the future was some gilded egg I could pluck out of the nest and take home. I’ve always known the world isn’t fine, that it’s broken, that it fails you when you least expect it to.

When you know that, it’s easier to take the blows. Automatic to fight back.

“I can’t make it go away,” she says softly. “Not by myself. Not without …”

“Not without what?”

Her nose wrinkles. “Telling my dad.”

“What can he do that you can’t?”

“Lots of things, potentially. But mainly there’s this company you can hire to scrub your name online. Push the bad results down in the search engines. But it’s expensive.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“That sucks.”

“It does.”

“So what else is new?”

She blinks at me, obviously not expecting the change of subject. “Not much,” she says.

“Huh.” I push some dough in her direction. “You want to try this?”

“No, thanks.”

“C’mon, I’ll show you how.”

“Thank you, but no. I think my talents lie elsewhere.”

She sounds so much like the old Caroline that I almost smile. “No problem.”

She starts to wander around the room again.

“Have you thought about anything at all besides naked pictures since they first popped up … when, early last month?”

“August twenty-fourth.” She tilts her head, considering. “Yes.”

“What else have you been thinking about?”

Caroline peers into the clean mixer. When she puts her finger inside the bowl and traces the curve of it—the curve I polished until it was shiny enough to attract her attention—I don’t tell her to stop, even though I’ll have to clean it again after she goes.

She can touch whatever she wants.

“My constitutional law class. Latin homework. My sister’s wedding coming up. Whether my dad is eating okay now that I’m not at home to nag him. How to cover up the circles under my eyes. Rape. Evil. Whether law school admissions committees routinely Google applicants or just in special circumstances.”

She glances at me. “If I should get the space between my teeth fixed. The usual.”

“Sure you don’t want to pile on a few more things? Global warming, maybe? Declining newspaper circulations?”

She almost smiles. “What do you think about?”

I guess I’m supposed to make a list, too, but fuck that.

I’ve got three years of undergrad before I can start med school, followed by four years to become a doctor, another four or five to become an anesthesiologist, and then years of hard work to build a practice. I’ve got three jobs, Frankie to think about, Mom to take care of.

Maybe what I can have of Caroline is this little slice of space and light in the darkest hours of the night. I can give her permission to not be fine. Let her talk about what’s bugging her. Distract her from her problems.

If she wants to come here, I’ll do all that, but I won’t make her problems into mine, and I’m not going to bare my fucking soul to her.

“My ears, mostly,” I say. “You really think they’re too small?”

I touch them with my flour-covered hands, trying to look self-conscious. It works—she smiles.

That gap between her teeth kills me. I need to measure it with my tongue.

“Are you sure they’re full-grown?” she asks. “Because my dentist told me that it might be a few years before my wisdom teeth finish coming in. Maybe it’s the same with your ears.”

“You’re saying I might hit a growth spurt. Grow some manlier ears.”

“It’s possible.”

“You know what they say, though. Small ears, big equipment.”

“That is so not what they say.”

“No? Maybe it’s only in Oregon they say that.”

She laughs, a husky sound. I don’t like how it slips over me. I don’t like how I can just about feel myself filing it away in the stroke book for later—Caroline laughing as I unhook her bra. Still smiling when I take off those shapeless sweatpants and see what she’s got on underneath. What she looks like naked.

You already know what she looks like naked.

Everybody does.

I shake off the whole train of thought. Doesn’t matter, and it’s not happening between her and me, anyway.

“Here’s my point, though,” I say. “There’s all this other shit you could be worrying about, and you’re wasting too much worry on something you can’t fix.”

“Like what? Worrying over the size of your ears isn’t going to fill much of my time. I’ll still have, like, twenty-three and a half hours a day to worry in.”

“What are you saying, you only care about my ears half an hour’s worth?”

“Maybe not even that. I have to be honest with you.”

“Please. Be honest.”

“Okay. The thing is, if I never have to see another guy’s ears so long as I live? I’ll be a happy girl.”

“Now you’re starting to sound bitter.”

“Maybe I am bitter. Maybe I’ve just seen waaaay too many close-ups of ears lately.”

“Red, swollen ears?”

She leans in, like she’s telling me a big secret. “Veiny, horrible, giant, disgusting, dripping ears.”

That cracks me up.

“What is it with you guys taking pictures of your ears?” She’s all indignant now. “It’s like you’re so proud of them.”

“If you could make stuff shoot out of your ears, you’d be proud, too.”

She’s biting her lip, looking away toward the mixer like it’s going to rescue her from the fact that we just had a conversation about dicks, and she wants to laugh but she won’t let herself. “I think we need a new topic.”

“Something more polite?”

“Yes.” Then she glances up at me from under her eyelashes, and, for one hot second, she’s wicked. “Something a little less lubricated.”

I have to look away from her. Take a breath.

I point at a lump of dough. “Wash your hands, and I’ll let you knead that.”

“Will you, now?”

“I will. I’m going to teach you to make the best sourdough loaf in Putnam County.”

“Is anybody else in Putnam County making sourdough loaves?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

She makes a face at the bread, but she’s pulling her sweatshirt over her head. “All right. I’m game.”

The shirt she’s got on underneath—it’s got to be her pajama shirt. She’s not wearing a bra.

I get four more loaves ready while she’s washing her hands at the sink. It takes two before I’ve managed to push the surprise away.

I do another one with my eyes closed, willing the soft bounce of her breasts from my head.

When she comes back from the sink, her face is serious. “Listen. I’m … I’m just going to say this. I meant what I told you at the library.”

“Which thing you told me?”

She’s picking at her thumb with her fingernail. “I can’t be your friend. Or—or anything else.”

I get it.

Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, a little, to hear it again, but I really do get it.

For all that I had my reasons for not talking to her last year, she’s got her own reasons, too. There was Nate. There was her dad, who hated my guts even before I set about deliberately lighting his fuse. But underneath all that, there was this other thing.

Caroline’s not the kind of girl who gets mixed up with a guy who’s dealing. She’s the type who plays it safe, does what she’s supposed to, follows all the rules.

Maybe if I were who I’m pretending to be when I’m at Putnam, me and Caroline would be possible, but I’m not. We don’t make sense together.

It’s fine.

“Tell you what,” I say. “Tonight I’m going to show you how to make a decent loaf and bake it. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll teach you something else. We don’t need to be friends. We can just do this … you know, this nighttime thing. If you want to.”

“Can we?”

“When Bob’s not here, it’s my bakery. I can do whatever I want as long as I get the bread made.”

“And you won’t …”

When she looks right at me, my hands twitch.

You won’t, West.

You fucking won’t.

“We’ll make bread and be not-friends. You don’t have to come within ten feet of my ears. I don’t want that from you, anyway.”

What’s one more lie on top of all the others?

She pokes experimentally at the dough in front of her. “All right. Show me how you do this thing, then.”

I show her, and then I show her the rest of it. She stays until her loaf comes out of the oven. By then she’s yawning.

I send her home to bed with warm bread tucked under her arm. I make her text me when she’s back at the dorm, safe behind a locked door.

The next night, she comes back.

She keeps coming back, and I keep letting her.

That’s how I get to be not-friends with Caroline Piasecki.