Deeper

WINTER BREAK West

My mom has a thing for The Wizard of Oz. When I was a kid, she found these blue-and-white-checked curtains at Fred Meyer and hung them up in the trailer, where they made everything look shabby. It was only a few months after Dad’s most recent vanishing act, and she was still wearing these cheap sparkly red shoes he’d given her. You know the kind of shoes with a wide toe strap and a stacked heel like a wedge of cheese?

She loved them. Wore them everywhere, even though she was constantly turning her ankles. One night she put them on to go out drinking with Dad, and she came back three days later wearing new clothes, with a tattoo of Toto on her ankle and a shot glass that said Reno. She gave it to me as a souvenir.

After Dad left and Mom lost her job because he took the car and she couldn’t find a reliable ride to town, she had this running joke where she’d click the heels of those shoes together and say, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”

Then she’d look around the trailer and frown like she was disappointed.

“Still a dump,” she’d say.

But she would lean into me if I was nearby, her shoulder against mine, our hair touching. “At least we’ve got each other, Westie.”

All her jokes were like that—the humor at our expense, the silver lining in the fact that we were a team. A family.

There’s no place like home.

But you can’t go home again—I learned that from being at Putnam. Home changes while you’re away, and you change, too, without noticing. You get in your car, watch the shapes of your mom and your kid sister get smaller in the rearview, and you think it’ll all still be there the next time, as though you went out for groceries or worked two eighteens at the golf course, back to back, then pulled right into your spot in Bo’s driveway like you’d never left.

It doesn’t work that way. You come home on a plane. You land in Portland, hitchhike to Coos Bay, walk to the school to surprise your sister when she gets out for the day—and then when the group of kids with her in it goes by, you don’t even recognize her.

You’ve never seen her clothes before. Her ears are pierced. Her face is different.

And the worst part is, she doesn’t recognize you, either. She walks right past. You have to catch her sleeve, say her name.

I’ve never felt more like two different people than I did that Christmas.

One of me lived in Oregon, with Frankie, Mom, and Bo. Uprooted, worried, frustrated, cautious—but there, where I belonged.

The rest of me was with Caroline.

I fall asleep after my last final and wake up to sharp knocking at the apartment door.

Caroline’s already left, on an airplane by now to the Caribbean with her family, so I know it’s bad news.

I’ve been expecting bad news ever since I knocked Nate down the stairs two nights ago.

There’s no way he’s not going to retaliate. I humiliated him. Twice.

She’s mine. That’s what I was thinking when I did it. I don’t care what happens to me—I’m not going to let anybody talk that kind of shit about Caroline in front of her, to my face, on my doorstep.

The worst part is, I knew she’d fuck with my priorities, mess with my head. I knew she would, and now that she has, I like it.

It’s perfect. I want her to move into my apartment, sleep in my bed, shower with my soap, wear my old shirts around. I want to eat her out before breakfast every morning, rub off on her ass, bury my face between her tits, and come on her hip.

I’m two inches from being so whipped I’ve turned into one of those guys who does whatever his woman tells him to do and grins all the time, like he’s high on the smell of pussy.

I’m a fucking goner for that girl. She owns me.

Which is why, when the knock comes at the door, I’m almost glad for it. I can’t stand myself. Can’t stand that she hit her head, bruising her temple. Can’t stand remembering the wretched, ugly sound she made throwing up in my bathroom.

After she was asleep, I texted Bo, telling him there was a good chance I’d end up behind bars before I made it home for Christmas.

Don’t let nobody in your place without a warrant, he wrote.

By the time I’ve got my boots on, the knocking has turned to pounding, but I take the time to pick up the book Caroline gave me off my pillow, dog-ear the page, and tuck it into my duffel bag.

It’s a good book, and I don’t want it trashed.

There are two of them at the door, a beefy guy with curly blond hair in a black Putnam PD uniform and a skinnier, shorter black guy wearing a red Putnam College Security polo. “Are you West Leavitt?” the blond one asks.

“Yes.”

“I’m Officer Jason Morrow with the Putnam Police, and this is Kevin Yates from campus security. We received an anonymous tip that you’ve been engaging in the illegal sale of marijuana. We need to come in and have a look around.”

I can tell by the way he says this that it usually works. They knock on college kids’ doors—twice a year, three times, whenever there’s a serious complaint. They act civil and ask nice, and these other kids roll right over.

I’ve got nothing in the apartment for them to find, because, despite what Nate seems to think, I’m not fucking stupid. The amount of weed I’m holding—that’s a serious misdemeanor for possession all by itself, a class D felony if they can prove I’m selling it. Which they can, of course, because nobody could smoke that much and function as a normal human being. I keep it in a locker at the rec center, and I go by there two or three times a week, run around the track, lift weights, shower, pocket a few eighths, a few quarters, whatever I know I’m going to be able to sell.

I haven’t grown a plant on campus since the beginning of last year, when I did it more as a stunt than anything. I wanted people to talk. He’s the guy who’s growing the good bud. He’s the one who can hook you up. Once that first crop was harvested, I shut the whole thing down. Too risky.

I know what I got myself into. I know my rights.

“No,” I say to the cop at the door.

No, he can’t come in.

No, I can’t get out.

I’m trapped in this mess I made, and I have a month away from here—from her—to figure out how I’m going to escape.

My mom throws her arm around my neck from behind me, leaning close to plant a kiss that glances off my ear and lands mostly on my baseball hat.

“Ugh. Mom. You smell like steamed meat.”

She’s just home from a shift at the prison. I’ve never seen the cafeteria where she works, but if the way she smells when she comes off work is any indication, I’m not missing much.

I don’t really mind the kiss, though. The cafeteria smell is in her clothes, but I can smell her skin, too, some flowery soap or lotion. Bo’s bathroom counter is cluttered with Mom’s beauty supplies.

I’ve been away so long that the strongest impressions when I walked in a couple days ago were all smells. Stale cigarette smoke, the plug-in air freshener, the waft of air that came off the couch when I sat down—dog hair and aging foam cushions layered over with Febreze.

The first time Mom hugged me, her scent made my throat catch, a physical reaction that wasn’t quite tears and wasn’t quite allergies, either. The boy in me saying Mom at the same time my hands itched to push her away, put a little distance between us.

“I just can’t get over how good it is to have you back.”

“Quit hanging on him,” Bo says from across the table. “He’s too old for that crap.”

Mom takes off my cap and musses up my flattened-down hair. “He’s my baby. You get something to eat yet, Westie? I can make you chipped beef if you want.”

She’s been plying me with my favorites. “Nah, I ate in town. Me and Frankie picked up Arby’s after I took her to Bandon.”

Bo looks up. “What’d you go to Bandon for?”

He was gone when we left, gone when we got home. I guess he didn’t know. “I took Franks to the clinic for her physical.”

His eyes narrow, and he turns to my mom. “You let him take her for that shot?”

My mom blinks a few times, too rapidly, and I realize she’s stuck me in the middle of something. She said Frankie needed a physical in order to be allowed to do some kind of after-school indoor-soccer thing come January. When we got to the clinic, the nurse told me Franks was overdue for a hepatitis booster and that she needed to get it or she wouldn’t be able to stay in school next year.

I figured it was a fluke. The state health plan covered it, so I told the nurse to go ahead, scrawling my signature across the form she handed me.

But now I remember, too late, that Bo doesn’t believe in vaccines. He’s got a book about it, a ready lecture about the fallacy of herd immunity and the toxicity of the stuff they put in those shots as preservatives. He’ll go on about blood aluminum levels for an hour if you get him going.

“Did Frankie get a shot?” Mom asks.

When Mom had walked in the door, Frankie showed her the Band-Aid, first thing.

I glare at her, and she gives me this weak smile. Her eyes are pleading with me. Come on, West. Take my side.

I don’t want there to be sides. Not between Mom and Bo.

“I went by what the doctor said.”

Bo picks up his Camels from off the table and peers in the open mouth of the pack. Frowns, slides out the last cigarette. He’s got a long fuse. If he and my mom are going to fight about this, it won’t be now.

But he’s not going to forget it happened.

“I’m going to grab a Coke,” Mom says. “West, you want anything?”

“I’ll take a beer.”

“Get me another pack from the freezer, would you?” Bo asks.

Mom heads toward the fridge. “Didn’t you just open those this morning?”

“So what if I did?”

“So you’re supposed to be cutting back. For Frankie.”

Frankie’s out in the living room, not visible from the kitchen, but Bo’s house is small, and she can hear. She calls, “You’re supposed to be quitting, Bo.”

“Maybe next week.”

Mom snags a beer for me. She doesn’t ask Bo if he wants one, and when she twists off the lid and says, “You want a glass, West?” he makes a disgusted noise and pushes up from the table.

“Where are you going?”

“Out to the greenhouse.”

He opens the freezer and takes a pack of cigarettes from the carton.

“You got some dinner?”

“Yeah, I’m good.”

The corners of her mouth turn down as she watches him push out the back door. It makes her look old. My mom’s only thirty-seven, but in her shapeless prison uniform she’s middle-aged, the lines in her face deep-set, the disappointment at the edges of her mouth never quite disappearing.

She hates that uniform. In a little while she’ll take a shower and do her hair, put on tight jeans and a nice shirt, chasing a youth that’s getting away from her.

She was always more like a friend with a driver’s license than a parent. A friend whose bad habits and flaws are obvious to everyone who knows her, but the kind of friend you forgive because she’s got a good heart, and she can’t seem to stop herself from getting it crushed.

I wish this were the first time since I got home that Bo’s gone out to the greenhouse in a huff, but it’s not. Something’s not right between them.

There’s a lot of things that don’t feel right. Things I didn’t expect. I want to glue down the flap of loose Formica at the corner of the kitchen counter, yellowed tape fluttering at its edges announcing three or four half-assed attempts to fix it, but it’s Bo’s kitchen, and when I search through the junk drawer for glue and find an envelope full of cash—one of Bo’s many stashes—I feel like a thief.

I want to tell Frankie not to read this book she’s got, this paperback that I remember girls reading when I was in high school, so I know it’s got incest and blow jobs and other shit that’s too old for her. But she’s Mom’s daughter, not mine.

Nothing here feels like it’s mine.

I tell myself it’s because I’ve never lived in this house. Back before I went to Putnam, when Mom decided to move in here with Bo, I stayed behind in the trailer. I’ve slept on Bo’s couch before, but I’ve never called Bo’s house my home.

The trailer is mine, and my dad is living in it.

“What’s up with you and Bo?”

She waves her hand in dismissal. Picks up a Zippo that’s lying on the table, flips it over a few times, tapping it lightly on the tabletop. “He’s fine. Probably not sleeping enough. He hates when he has to work nights. Makes him grouchy.”

“He’s back on days next week, though, right?”

“Right.” She drops into the chair Bo vacated, slides off the clogs she wears to work, and tosses them into the pile of shoes by the back door. Her socks have tiny little Totos on them, and she wiggles her toes at me. I gave her the socks for Christmas.

“Nice,” I say.

“I love them.”

She leans forward and picks up the lighter again, flicks it until she makes a flame. A sly brightness in her eyes tells me she’s got an agenda for this conversation. “So this is the first time I’ve really got you all to myself. Tell me everything about school.”

“Not much to tell.”

“Ask him about his girrrrlfriend,” Frankie trills from the living room.

My mom’s eyes brighten. “I knew you had a girl. No wonder you never call me back.”

“I always call you back.”

She rolls her eyes and flicks the lighter again. “Yeah, when you’re not working.” She infuses the word with doubt, as though I’m working for the purpose of avoiding her.

Half the money I make, I end up sending her. I probably paid for the magazines on the coffee table, just like I paid for her socks.

“Let me see a picture,” she says.

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“He does!” Frankie’s at the threshold of the kitchen now, her smile delighted. “She sent him a bikini picture.”

God damn it.

“She sent you a bikini picture,” I say, because this is the honest truth. I walked into the living room to find Frankie on my phone, texting Caroline, who’d just shared a vacation snapshot of her with her arm slung around a chunkier girl, her sister Janelle. Both of them in bikini tops with wet hair, smiling.

I need to stop texting her. Stop looking at that picture.

I need to draw better lines in my life, because this is what I’m supposed to be worrying about. The problems in this kitchen. How Frankie’s getting C’s in school and doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word privacy. How her boobs are growing and she’s wearing a bra and shirts that advertise that fact for the world to see. My head should be on whatever’s going on between Mom and Bo and whether Wyatt Leavitt has anything to do with it.

On how, when I asked Mom if she’d seen him, she said no, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes, and then she went all falsely cheerful like she gets when she’s lying to me.

I’m not supposed to be worrying whether Caroline’s having any fun in the Caribbean, thinking about when I’m going to be able to steal twenty minutes to call her, if there’s some way to get her alone behind a locked door when the house is empty so I can talk dirty to her, unzip my jeans, take myself in my hand.

“Let me see,” Mom says.

“No.”

But Frankie’s coming up behind me, her fingers dipping into my back pocket for my phone, and I’m not fast enough to stop her. I grab her, tickle her, reach for the phone while I pinch her ribs just hard enough to make her squirm away, saying, “Ow!” even as she’s laughing.

“Catch, Mom!”

She tosses the phone, and I get a glimpse of the screen with my text app open before the case hits the floor and skates across it. Then I’m down on my knees, scrambling with my mom, Frankie at the periphery, and it’s the weirdest thing, because they’re both laughing, but when Mom puts her hand out and pushes me away, she pushes hard. When she gets the phone and vaults to her feet—runs across the kitchen, saying, “Keep him off me, Frankie!”—it doesn’t feel like a game.

It’s not funny.

I dodge around Frankie effortlessly, grab my mom’s wrist, wrench the phone out of her hand. My chest is heaving. I’m hot, out of control, full of misdirected rage, thwarted fury.

“Christ, West, lighten up,” Mom says. But her eyes are glittering, offended and prideful, and when I look at Frankie she flinches.

I want to storm out of the house. Take a long walk out to the highway and along the road in the gathering dark. I want to fume, but I’ve got nothing to be pissed off about except my own failure to make the lines in my life black enough, dark enough to keep this kind of shit from happening.

I take a deep breath and let it out.

This is my family. My place.

These are my people, and this is where I belong.

If it doesn’t feel that way, I’m doing it wrong. Closing myself off. And I can’t do that, because if I lose this, who am I?

I thumb through a couple of screens on the phone and hand it back to my mom, whose expression softens at the peace offering. “The one on the right, or … ?”

“The pretty one,” I hear myself say. “Her name’s Caroline.”

What r you doing?

She texts back right away. Nothing.

What kind of nothing?

Laying on couch watching a movie.

What movie?

Breakfast Club. I’ve seen 400 Molly Ringwald movies today.

Why?

They were my mom’s. I watch them sometimes.

A pause. My dad’s at work. I’m bored. Break sucks.

Yeah.

Another pause. I’m calling you.

I’m on the couch, alone in the house. New Year’s has come and gone, and Franks is back in school. Bo’s on days again. He and Mom are both working, and the house is quiet for the first time since I got here.

I’m hard before she even picks up.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

Then silence, and she laughs this breathy sort of laugh. “This is weird.”

“Which part?”

I can imagine her biting her lip. Looking away from me.

I can imagine her throat turning red and blotchy. The way her breasts are rising with each quick intake of breath.

“You know the part of the movie where Judd Nelson is in the closet, and Molly Ringwald locks herself in there with him?” she asks.

“Which one’s Judd Nelson?”

“The guy with the long hair and the flannel shirt.”

“The bad boy.”

“Yeah. And Molly Ringwald’s the one—”

“I know who she is.”

Caroline laughs. Kind of nervous. “That part’s on right now.”

“And?”

“And that’s the best part. Molly’s got her pink silk shirt on and her hair all perfect, because she’s such a good girl, only now they’re in the closet together …”

I start to laugh, realizing where this is going. “I thought you’d be into that other guy.”

“Who? Anthony Michael Hall?”

“The wrestler one.”

“Emilio Estevez? Ew.”

“He looks like Nate, but not as blond.”

Silence for a few beats. “God. He does. You’re right.”

She sounds so horrified, I start to laugh.

“But I always liked Judd best,” she says. “Even when he spits in the air and swallows it.”

“Got kind of a bad-boy thing, don’t you?”

“No.”

I can hear the smile in her voice, though. “It’s all right. Maybe I’m into poor little rich girls.”

“Maybe you are.”

“What are you wearing, rich girl?”

She exhales a laugh again. There’s this shift I can almost feel, a click on the line, digital signals rearranging themselves from one stream to another. What are you wearing? The phone-sex starter pistol firing, and I’m on the block, ready for it. Jeans unzipped. Hand outside my briefs, because I can’t go inside until I know she’s playing along. Not this time.

“I’ve got my pink silk shirt on.” I can hear the shift in her voice, too. Saying yes.

I slip my hand inside my shorts.

“And that long, tight brown skirt,” she adds. “Brown boots.”

“You have boots?”

“Sure. Every girl in America has boots.”

A tight grip. A slow stroke. “You’ll have to wear them for me sometime.”

“Why?”

“I like boots.”

The strain. There’s nothing like it—so bad and so good. It’s in every muscle in my body.

“Oh.” The sound is a sigh.

“Hey, rich girl?”

“Mmm-hmm?”

“Turn the volume off on the TV.”

I wait, working up a rhythm. The background noise fades to nothing. I can hear her breathing.

“What do you think they get up to in that closet?” I ask her. “You know, when the camera cuts away?”

There’s a pause. “I never really thought about it.”

“You wanna think about it now?”

“Maybe.”

“Where’s your hands?”

“Mmm. I’m not sure I’m saying.”

“Put one of them someplace interesting.”

She sniffs, a kind of laugh, and I wait a few seconds to make sure she’s doing it. Then I say, quiet and low, “I think they started off kissing.”

“Yeah.”

“And the kissing got hot, and he pushed her back down onto the bench.”

“I’m not sure there’s a bench.”

“There’s a bench. It’s long and flat, with no back on it, so he can lay her down and kneel next to her and push her skirt up past her knees.”

“It’s kind of long and tight, though. I don’t think he could push it up.”

“He’s good with skirts. He doesn’t have to take it off. He just pushes it up and leaves it up, so she feels the air on her thighs and starts to worry they’re gonna get caught. It’s exciting, thinking that. Maybe someone will walk in on them, the good girl with her legs spread, the bad boy kneeling there on the floor, kissing her. Touching her.”

“Where’s he touching her?”

“Everywhere except where she really wants it the most.”

She inhales deep and her breath catches. I’ve heard her do that before. Seen her do that. The sound draws up a surge of heat from my balls, and I slick it over the head, draw it down. Slow and tight.

“What are you doing, Caro?”

“What do you want me to be doing?”

“I want you on your back with your skirt up and your legs spread.”

That gets me a muffled mmph.

“You’re there already, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s my girl.”

“What are you doing?”

“Honey, you know what I’m doing.”

“Like last time?” she asks. “Thanksgiving?”

“Yeah.”

She’s just breathing.

“He’s got her shirt pushed up now,” I tell her. “His mouth on her stomach. Moving down.”

“She’s nervous.”

“How come?”

“She’s never done this before. It’s exciting.”

“He likes the way she smells. How smooth her legs are, how pale she is. Like a secret. She’s wearing yellow panties under there, just plain ones. Are they wet, Caroline?”

She kind of squeaks, and my grip tightens. God, I love that squeak.

“Tell me.”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, I thought so. Wet through her panties, and he’s going to go ahead and straddle that bench and get his nose right down there, pushing into the wet spot.”

“That’s crude.”

“He’s crude. That’s why she likes him.”

“That’s not the only reason.”

“It’s one, though. She thinks he’s exciting. She loves knowing he thinks about her when she’s not around. That she makes him hard. Makes him come in his bed, in his shower, but he’s never touched her.”

“God. That’s hot.”

I smile.

“Why’s he like her?” she asks.

I have to think about it—not the easiest thing to do with your hand on your dick, but I manage. “He likes that she doesn’t know all the things he knows. That she hasn’t seen the worst of life.”

“She’s seen more than he thinks.”

“Maybe, but she’s still got this air around her, like the bad things can never really touch her.”

“She’d hate that,” Caroline says. “If he told her that was why—she’d be disappointed.”

“But that’s not the only reason. It’s not even the main one.”

“What’s the main one?”

I try to focus on the movie. Not Caroline on her couch, spread open, touching herself. “That she’s there in the closet. She’s brave, once she’s made up her mind what she wants. Fierce.”

“He likes her when she’s fierce?”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

Who are we talking about? I’m not sure. I’m starting to feel kind of drugged, dumb, like I might be saying more than I mean to, but I don’t really care.

“West?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s he do next?”

“He puts his tongue on her, right through her panties. Gets his hands underneath the elastic, holds her there on the bench and licks and licks her until her panties are soaked through and she’s just about dead from it.”

“Does he like that?”

“He fucking loves it. Making her feel good, making her give up control, shut her head off and just feel—it’s a trip. And he likes those panties, too. Those yellow panties. But he needs more, so instead of taking them off, he just eases them over a few inches. Enough to get his tongue in her slit, where she’s soft and swollen and so wet. He can’t get enough of her. He just buries his face in her, gets himself wet all over his chin and his mouth.”

“West.”

“She tastes incredible.”

“God, West, I can’t—”

I can’t, either. I’m thinking about her pussy, the way she felt under my fingers, under my tongue. Her thighs pressing against my head, her hands in my hair, on my dick—it’s too much. “I want you,” I say. “Fuck, I want you.”

“You’ve got me.”

“Right here, on this couch, here. I want you here, Caro. I want to taste you. Get my fingers inside you, tongue your clit. I want you naked.”

She’s panting.

“Use your hand,” I tell her. “Pretend it’s me. Come for me. I want to hear.”

“West.”

“Yeah.”

“You, too.”

“I’m close.”

And then it’s just breath. Noise. It’s just moaning, grunting.

It’s knowing what she’s doing, picturing her doing it, her tits, her pussy, her eyes closed and her mouth open and the way her face looks when I make her come.

It’s my hand working hard and fast, her fingers flying, this thread of connection between us, nothing real about it, nothing true, nothing right, but here it is, anyway. Nothing I can do about it. Nothing I want to do but this, but Caroline. Nothing.

She sucks in a breath, says, “Now,” and I go with her with a grunt and a hot splash on my hand and a little bit on the couch, which, fuck, I’m going to have to clean that up, but I can’t even care. She’s trying hard not to make noise, and even so I can hear her, I can hear the not-noise she’s making, and it’s fucking glorious.

I come apart, a little bit. Lean back, close my eyes, listen to her. I go loose, unhinged, and break into pieces.

But I feel, afterward, like maybe some part of me got put back together.

It’s late. I walk out to the greenhouse, dodging dog shit in the backyard and wishing I’d turned on the back porch light.

I step in something too soft. “Fuck.”

I try scraping off my boot in the grass, but it’s no use. The smell is in my nose now, my lip curling. I have to find a stick, try picking brown crap out of the treads, but that doesn’t work, either, and I end up turning on the garden hose, covering the cold copper fitting with my thumb, blasting the sole of my boot and sending flecks of shit shooting all over the place.

By the time I’ve got the boot cleaned off, my pants are sticking to my shins. I’m cold and pissed, disgusted with everything.

I’m going back to school in a week, and my whole life has turned into a minefield of crap.

When I get to the greenhouse and open the door, I don’t see Bo right away. I take a breath, trying to find a calm spot to do this from. It’s not his fault I stepped in dog shit. Not his fault I’ve been waiting to talk to him for days and there’s never a right time.

He’s working. Mom’s around. Frankie needs help with her homework.

Bo has been pushing away from the kitchen table and disappearing for hours at a time, and I’ve always thought of the greenhouse as his domain, where he goes to be alone, not to be pestered by his girlfriend’s kid, who’s sleeping on his couch, eating his food, getting in the way.

But I have to talk to him, because I’m leaving soon. Nobody else will tell me.

There’s music playing in the back. I follow it, follow the light, and find Bo just leaning there, blowing cigarette smoke out a broken pane of glass into the night.

I recognize the song. Metallica. He’s into all those old metal bands, but Mom can’t stand the stuff.

The greenhouse is a rusted-out dump, a lot of the glass broken. Bo loves it. He likes growing things—not just weed, which he only plants back in the woods, but vegetables, herbs, all kinds of shit. He talks about finding a freeze-drier, storing up food against the collapse of civilization, but he mostly ends up putting bushel baskets of tomatoes and corn and peppers out by the road with a sign that says: Help yourself.

Bo is short, barrel-chested, with a shaved head and grizzled chest hair you can usually see because he goes around shirtless or half unbuttoned. In his prison uniform—belt weighed down with his radio, his phone, a nightstick, his Beretta—he looks like a badass.

He is a badass. He’s got the scars to prove it. I saw him get into a fight once at a bar. He destroyed the dude who picked the fight. Just destroyed him.

It’s partly because of Bo that I’m at Putnam instead of the community college. Because I trust him to keep his job, take care of Mom, watch out for Frankie, and not morph into a pervert or an asshole when I stop paying attention.

He loves them. Both of them.

I’ve never been completely sure Mom loves him back. He had to ask her out a bunch of times before she said yes. Had to court her for a few months before she started sleeping over at his place. She likes being with him, likes his house, but I don’t think she likes the idea of being Bo’s old lady for the rest of her life.

I think she’s addicted to the way my dad makes her feel. That exciting, edgy, fucked-up rush she can only get from him.

“I fell in love with him the second I met him,” she told me once. “I was fifteen, and he drove into town on that motorcycle, and the world stopped spinning.”

Bo can’t compare with that. Nothing can.

I know, because I felt that way the first time I saw Caroline, and I still do. If there’s some way to turn it off, I haven’t found it yet.

Bo taps ash on a jagged glass edge, dropping it into the weeds on the other side of the window.

“What happened with the cops?” he asks.

He doesn’t mean did they search the place or leave—I already told him that. He means what did I do to get their attention.

“This girl I’m seeing—she’s got an ex who doesn’t like me much.”

“You give him a reason? Other than stealing his girl.”

“I didn’t steal her. They were already broken up.”

But I did steal her, a little bit. Freshman year, when she was across the hall, I watched her. Tried to get her flustered. I did things to catch her eye, and Nate knew it. He hated me even then.

He has every right to hate me.

“I got into it with him. For talking shit about her.”

Bo takes a deep drag, eyes narrowed, watching me. Waiting for the rest.

“Twice. Second time was a little worse than the first.”

I think of Caroline throwing up in my bathroom. The roaring pain in my hand when I connected with his face. His rib cage.

I gesture at the pack of cigarettes in Bo’s shirt pocket. “Can I have one of those?”

He lifts an eyebrow. I don’t smoke, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how. I need the rush right now—the way the nicotine will sharpen up the edges of everything, make me wary, make me smart.

I need to get smart.

He hands me a cigarette, and when I put it in my mouth and cup my hands around the tip, he gives me a light off his Zippo.

“What’s he got over you?” Bo asks.

“I knocked him down a fire escape. Might’ve cracked his ribs. Assault, I guess. Especially if he went to the hospital afterward.”

“Was there a witness?”

“His friend. And Caroline.”

He nods.

“I’ve sold to the friend,” I add.

“More than once?”

“Yeah.”

“So he tipped off the cops.”

“Probably. I mean, anybody could have, but probably. You think they’ll be back?”

“Yeah.”

I purse my lips and inhale, grateful for the small, rustling sound of the paper igniting. Grateful to have this tiny curling spark to look at, this tight fullness in my chest as I hold the smoke in my lungs.

It’s good to have somebody to talk to.

“You think I should just stop selling? Lay low for a semester?”

“If you can get by without the money.”

I hesitate. Take another drag. Grow some balls and admit, “I end up sending most of it to Mom.”

He makes this sound—I’m not sure what it means. Kind of a laugh, except with pain in it. He’s not surprised, though. There’s resignation in that laugh.

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Smokes his cigarette down to the filter, drops it onto the dirt floor, grinds it out.

“She don’t need it,” he says.

“What’s she doing with it, then?”

He shrugs.

“You don’t have any idea?”

“Presents I don’t need. Clothes and shit for her and Frankie. I think she gave money to one of your cousins to get rid of a baby, but she won’t talk about it.”

I let that sink in.

“She’s going out to see your grandma once a week.”

He doesn’t mean Mom’s mom, who used to live in California but is dead now. He means Dad’s mom.

He means a decade-old rift between my mom and my dad’s family has been quietly repaired, and she didn’t tell me. That my money’s paying for stuff Dad’s people need—or stuff they want—because that’s the way Mom is with money. If she’s got it, she’ll give it to anybody, for anything.

If I’ve got it, she figures that’s the same as if it’s hers.

“Has he been back here?”

I don’t have to tell Bo I mean my dad. We both know what this conversation is about, and it’s a relief to talk around the undercurrents beneath the words, dig up the buried wires without having to name them.

The longer I stay here, the more obvious it becomes that, underneath, things are deeply fucked up.

Five miles away, living in a piece-of-shit trailer in the kind of trailer park nobody lives in if they have a better option, there’s a man with my eyes. My mouth. Fucking things up just by drawing breath.

“Once,” Bo says. “I drove him off with a shotgun.”

“What’s he want?”

Bo gives me a pitying look, and I take another drag on the cigarette and stare at my feet.

Stupid question. He wants what he always wants. Whatever my mom’s got. Her heart. Her cunt. Her money. Her pride.

He wants Frankie’s loyalty.

He wants to win everybody over, bring them around to his side, get them feeling sorry for him, looking at the world through his eyes, thinking, Man, he’s had some tough breaks, but he’s a good guy. I’m glad it’s all working for him this time. I’m glad he’s pulled it together.

He wants to make my mom fall in love with him, and then when she’s so far gone she can’t even remember what happened before, he wants to punch her in the gut.

The last time I saw my father, he kicked me like a dog. Spat on me. Left me there, my lip split, curled around the pain.

I don’t know why my mom can’t understand. That’s what he wants.

“Has she seen him?”

Bo doesn’t answer for so long, I think he’s not going to. He moves down the bench, swipes at an untidy spill of potting soil, rubs the dried brown leaves of a plant between his thumb and forefinger. “While I was down in California selling the crop.”

“She tell you?”

His expression darkens. “You think I’d fucking let her live here if she told me? I heard it off a guy I know. She says it’s bullshit.”

“You don’t believe her.”

“I haven’t made my mind up yet. But you know what happens if I find out she’s seeing him behind my back.”

Fuck. Yes. I know what happens.

He’ll toss her out on her ass, and she’ll deserve it.

Frankie, too. Bo’s not going to be raising a nine-year-old kid who doesn’t belong to him. Not without my mom in his bed.

He turns toward me. Walks close, clamps his hand over my shoulder. “I wish it wasn’t like this,” he says.

I can’t look at him. I look out at the stars and finish the cigarette.

It’s the weight of the past, suspended over our heads by a frayed rope.

It’s a woman holding a knife in her hand, one cut that could ruin everything for me. Ruin Frankie. Ruin Bo. Ruin her.

It’s like this, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Frankie flings herself over the back of the couch, her forearm pressing against my windpipe. “Do you really have to go?”

I tilt my head back and grab her by the waist to flip her over onto my lap.

In the air, she feels so insubstantial, her bones hollow like a bird’s. I tickle her until she’s shrieking.

“Quit it, West! Swear to God, quit, stop, please! West!”

I let up, and she scrambles away from me, skinny legs in skinny jeans, thick socks, a shirt with short little zippers at the shoulders that isn’t warm enough for winter or young enough for her.

Mom and Bo are both at work. This morning it’s just Franks and me and a bus I’ve got to catch if I’m going to make my flight back to school.

I’m leaving, but I don’t think I’ll be away for long.

Since that night out in the greenhouse with Bo, I can hear the clock ticking. The hands are flying around the dial like in some movie, blurring, blending, until time is tissue-paper thin.

My mother’s eyes never light on anything for long. Her hands are nervous, her replies evasive.

Weeks from now, months if I’m lucky, I’m going to get a call that makes me drop everything and fly home. And the truth is, I don’t have to go to Putnam at all.

I never had to.

I told myself when I left for school that I was doing it for Frankie and Mom, but I could have taken better care of them if I’d stayed here. Enrolled at the community college. Kept an eye on Frankie, kept my dad out of that trailer.

I went to Putnam because I wanted to.

I wanted to know who I could be if I wasn’t tethered to this place. What I could accomplish on my own.

Anything, Caroline would tell me. You can do anything.

She believes it, too.

Caroline could never understand how selfish a thought like that can be. How selfish I am for having left and for being about to leave again when I know how things are here.

Frankie’s smiling at me, breathing hard, her collarbones peeking out of the neckline of her shirt, her bottom lip chapped, her teeth a little too big for her face.

She’s got black crap all around her eyes, long earrings dangling almost to her shoulders.

She’s nine years old.

She needs somebody who will set limits, send her to bed, tell her to get off the phone and wash her face.

She needs me to make her do her homework and to manage Mom, who can only pass as a decent parent if there’s somebody around to make her work at it.

She needs me.

Resentment spikes in me, dark and poisonous.

I wish I knew some way to give her back. If I knew how to stop caring—to become as faithless as my father—then I could go to Putnam and stay there. Send Frankie a card on her birthday.

I could make myself over into Caroline’s West, with wide horizons and endless options.

“I’ll miss you,” my sister says.

Fists clenched, I have to close my eyes.

I would leave you behind if I could.

I wish I could. I want to.

But I open my eyes, open my mouth, and tell her, “I’ll miss you, too. I’ll be home in a few months. Then I’ll take you somewhere cool. Portland, maybe.”

“Really? What about San Francisco? Keisha says they have sea lions there, and there’s this store that’s all kinds of chocolate. That’s where we should go.”

“Yeah, I guess we could go to San Francisco. Maybe go camping on the way. See the redwoods.”

“Camping? No way. Camping sucks.”

“When have you ever been camping?”

“I know about it! You sleep in a tent and don’t shower, and spiders fall on your head. No thanks.”

I’ve never been camping, either. But who’s going to take her if not me?

“We could have a fire. Make s’mores. We’ll find a place to stay with a shower.”

“A fire would be good,” she says. “As long as there’s a shower. And you would have to kill all the spiders.”

“I can handle that.”

Whatever has to be handled—spiders, nightmares, homework, fathers—I can handle it.

What choice have I got?

I stand. “Hug me goodbye.”

She gets up and wraps her arms around me.

I kiss the top of her head. Her hair is soft. It smells like pink chemicals, and all the resentment in me is gone, washed away as if it had never been.

We walk down the driveway together. She chatters about San Francisco.

She watches me from the road. Waves whenever I turn around.

She belongs to me. I can’t do anything about it.

It’s five miles into town, but I get lucky and hitch a ride with one of Bo’s neighbors.

I look out the passenger window at the landscape, white and wheat, beige and brown, the sky wide open and relentlessly blue.

It doesn’t look like Iowa. It looks like me. Those colors the colors I’m made of, the dirt of this place in my bones, silted up around my heart.

I can’t keep being two people. The clock’s running down, my time almost up, and I won’t let myself string Caroline along, let her think I’m some other guy, some Iowa version of myself, when I’m not. I don’t get to be.

I’m Frankie’s.

I can’t be Frankie’s and keep Caroline. I wish I could, but there’s no point in wishing.

Every time I kissed Caroline, I pulled her deeper in. Deep and then deeper, until I couldn’t come home again without bringing her along.

“Here’s my girl,” I told my mother. “The pretty one.”

I sat on Bo’s couch in the dark and told Caroline, “I want inside you. I want you here.”

But I was pretending. There’s no world that has Frankie and my mom and Caroline in it, all of them belonging to me.

I’ve made a mess of things. That’s what it all boils down to. A heinous fucking mess.

Caroline is in me, and now I’ve got to cut her out.