Harder (3 page)

West leans forward and flips on the radio. The music is loud, hammering hair-band rock.

I turn it off. “When’s the funeral?”

“Whenever they get the body back from the coroner.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not going.”

“Okay.”

More silence. Dark green forest closes in on both sides of the road. We’re climbing now, heading into the foothills.

“How long are you staying?” West asks.

“As long as you need me to.”

He stares at me so long, I start to get nervous we’re going to drive off the road. “What?”

“When’s school start?”

“The twenty-eighth.”

“Two weeks.”

“Two and a half.”

“You’re not gonna be here two and a half weeks.”

“Whatever you need.”

West looks out the driver’s-side window. “You shouldn’t have come.”

I’ve already thought the same thing, but it hurts to hear him say it. “It’s nice to see you, too, baby.”

“I didn’t invite you.”

“How sweet of you to notice, I
have
lost a little weight.”

His eyes narrow. “You look scrawny.”

Stung, I drop the act. “I’ll be sure to put on a few pounds for your visual enjoyment.”

“If you want to say
Fuck you, West
, go ahead and say it.”

“Fuck you, West.”

His jawline tightens. When he reaches for the radio, I knock his hand away.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with you,” he says.

“You’re supposed to let me help.”

“I don’t want you anywhere near this shit.”

“That’s sweet, but too bad.”

That earns me a criminal’s glare. “You don’t belong in Silt.”

“I guess I’m about to find that out for myself.”

“I guess you are.”

He reaches for the stereo again. This time, I let him turn it on.

I think about how we’re driving toward the Pacific Ocean, which I’ve never seen.

I think about West and what I want from him. Why I’m here.

I don’t have any answers. I’m not kidding myself, though. Inside a makeup pouch at the bottom of my suitcase, there’s a leather bracelet with his name on it.

I shouldn’t be here, but I am.

I’m not leaving until I know there’s no chance I’ll ever wear that bracelet again.

The road drops away from the pavement on West’s side of the truck.

The guardrail doesn’t look like it would be much help if he yanked the wheel to the left and sent us sailing out over the edge.

Not that he’d do that.

I don’t think.

We climb up and up through a corridor of trees, winding around broad curves to the sound of rushing water. The light fades.

I can’t get over the green. It’s green in Iowa in August, too, but there the color hugs the ground in long rows and flat lawns. Here, it’s all trees. More trees than I’ve ever seen in one place, crowding the road and pulling my gaze up to the sky.

After a while, we descend, sweeping in slow, easy curves downhill as though we’re skiing on an extravagant scale. This heaved-up world is our field of moguls, the tires rocking us back and forth like freshly waxed skis on perfect powder.

I’ve been to the mountains, skiing in Telluride and Aspen with my family, but Oregon is different. The road’s so narrow, the forest so dense. It feels primeval, unfinished.

We swoop and curve. The silence stretches out and grows stale.

This drive is interminable.

West reaches past my knees to open the glove box. Careful not to touch me, he extracts a pack of cigarettes.

“You’re smoking now?”

“Hand me the lighter, would you?”

I can see it—cheap bright pink plastic—but it’s too deep for him to reach. I leave it where it is.

“Smoking is disgusting.”

We hit a straight section. He leans over me as far as he has to in order to retrieve the lighter, which is far enough to press his shoulder into my knee.

The lighter snicks and sparks when he sits up, the smell of the catching tobacco acrid, then sugary. The ripples from our brief moment of contact move through my body, lapping against my skin for a long time.

West blows smoke in a stream out the window to dissipate in the dark.

I feel like smoke, my edges dissolving with every mile that passes, every flick of his hand over the wand that makes the high beams come on, a flood of light, then another flick, dimming to yellow. The darkness concentrates his potency, makes him more solid and me less substantial, immaterial, unreal.

When he leans forward to turn down the radio—an obvious prelude to conversation—I have to pull myself back from somewhere far away.

“What’s going on with Nate?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“He stopped posting the pictures?”

“As far as I can tell. They pop up sometimes, but that’s going to happen. I don’t think it’s him doing it anymore.”

Nate spent most of last school year posting and reposting our sex pictures online while I wasted dozens of hours contacting site owners to get them removed. It was the world’s least fun game of whack-a-mole.

He finally stopped after I took the problem to the dean’s office. When the college began to investigate, I hoped he would end up expelled for violating the campus technology policy, but it didn’t happen. He’d been too sneaky, and he’s a convincing liar. How else would he have convinced me he was a nice person for all the time we were going out?

The college let him off the hook with a suspension of his Internet privileges—a slap on the wrist—but the disciplinary
investigation must have shaken him up, because he’s backed off the attack.

“You get a trial date yet?” West asks.

“No, we’re not done working on the complaint.”

“What about the Jane Doe thing?”

Filing as Jane Doe rather than Caroline Piasecki means my highly recognizable name won’t come out in connection with the case, and the public records of the suit won’t identify me.

Which means, in turn, there’s a chance that my entire economic and political future won’t be tainted by what Nate did and what I’m doing to get back at him.

“My dad knows someone who knows someone who says with the judge I’m going to be assigned, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“So when do they set your trial date?”

“After we file the complaint, which is any day now,” I say. “Dad says it will probably be at least twelve months until the trial.”

“It’ll be nice to see that fucker raked over the coals for what he did.”

“I guess so.”

“You
guess
so?”

“It’s going to cost a fortune.”

“How much?”

“Maybe a hundred thousand dollars, according to the lawyer. Could be more.”

West whistles.

“And he says it could get ugly, like a rape case. They’ll attack my credibility. So I’m trying to get ready for all that.”

“Doesn’t sound easy to get ready for. Douchebag lawyers grilling you about your sex life.”

“Don’t forget my mental stability.”

“Your mental stability’s just fine.”

“I meant that they’ll grill me about my mental stability.”

There’s a smile flirting with the corners of his mouth. “Fucking great. Have ’em call me, I’ll tell ’em what a basket case you were at the bakery last year.”

“That’d be great, thanks.”

“My pleasure.”

I press my hands against my thighs so I won’t press them into the ache in my chest.

It’s too easy. Talking to him. Remembering.

If I close my eyes and pretend, it’s almost possible to forget all the bad stuff between us and drop into my memories of those nights at the bakery when I was falling in love with West.

Maybe he feels it, too, because he leans forward to turn up the music.

I look out at the dark green shapes of the trees, the blurred branches. The trial drops away as I let myself think about why I’m here. What I want. My purpose.

West.

But after a while, even West slips away, and then it’s just dark.

Cold air coming in from the driver’s side of the truck snaps me awake.

We’re parked on the street in a neighborhood of nearly identical houses—all of them small, crowded on tiny lots.

West stands outside the open driver’s-side door. His face through the window is stark, shadowed.

“Is this where Frankie is?” I ask.

“Yeah, my grandma’s.”

He shifts so he’s holding the top of the car door with both hands, leaning into it, studying me through the glass. It’s as though he’s using the door as a shield so he can look at me,
really
look at me, the way he hasn’t yet.

He rakes his eyes upward from my shoes. Right turn at my knees. Left turn at my thighs. Lingering over the parts that used to be his favorites.

It’s like in my dreams—my mind too fuzzy and slow to defend me against the heat of West’s lava-dipped icicle gaze. I just want to crawl across the front seat of the truck on all fours until I crash into his body and he’s on me, over me, hot hands and wet mouths and every single thing I’ve missed that I need.

A few hours in the truck, and my lofty thoughts of friendship and loyalty are nothing but a sticky layer on top of weeks’ worth of longing.

West’s expression has gone dark. “You’re staying here tonight,” he says.

“What, to sleep?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you staying?”

“Out at Bo’s.”

“How far is that?”

“Twenty miles.”

“I want to stay wherever you are.”

He comes from behind the door and jacks his seat forward, pushing himself all the way through the space behind it so he can get hold of my bag.

When he starts rolling it up the walk to the front door, I get the idea that this decision he’s made isn’t negotiable.

I hurry after him. “Who’s inside?”

“Based on the cars, I’m guessing Grandma, Mom, Frankie, a couple of my aunts.”

I wasn’t aware he had aunts. Or, until he mentioned her earlier, a living grandmother. “Anything I should know about them?”

“Except for my mom and Frankie, I haven’t seen them in six years.”

“Seriously?”

He frowns. “You think I’m fucking around?”

I don’t. My stomach hurts. “Sorry. How should—who should I say I am?”

“Tell them whatever you want.” He rings the doorbell.

I have time to take a breath and think,
This is going to be weird
, before the door is pulled open directly into the kitchen.

The first thing I notice is that there’s a woman sobbing at the table.

Like, sobbing
.

Two other women and three kids are crowded into the room with her, but I don’t pay much attention to them, because the second thing I notice is that the woman who opened the door has West’s eyes
exactly
.

Nobody has eyes like West’s. Even West doesn’t, since his eyes look one way one day and another way the next, depending on the light and his mood and all kinds of factors I can’t pin down. I’ve wondered what it says on his driver’s license, because there is no word for the color his eyes are.

It’s trippy, seeing West’s eyes in the wrinkled face of a woman.

Other than the eyes, the resemblance is scanty. She has to tip her head way back to talk to him, because this woman is
short
. She’s round in every direction—boobs, hips, butt—with salt-and-pepper hair cut close to her head. She’s takes a drag off a cigarette held in her left hand, and I notice when she puts it to her lips that her fingers seem to take off in a new direction at each swollen knuckle joint.

“Will wonders never cease?” she says.

Far from a welcome. I kind of expect her to exhale right in West’s face and then slam the door, but she turns her head to the side instead and says, “Michelle, look who’s here.”

I know that Michelle is West’s mom. She looks up.

Her eyes are like dark holes punched into dough.

“Who’s that?” Her voice is hoarse, terrible to hear. I want to cover my face with my hands.

“This is Caroline,” West says.

She blinks. Rubs at her eyes. Blinks again. “Caroline who?”

Behind a closed door between the kitchen and the other room, a toilet flushes. West asks his grandma, “What’s she on?”

“She’s been like this all day.”

“Fuck.” He inhales deeply. “Can we come in?”

“Introduce us,” his grandmother says.

“Caroline, this is my grandma, Joan. Grandma, Caroline.” He points across the kitchen. “Aunt Stephanie, Aunt Heather, and my cousins Tyler, Taylor, and … I don’t know that one.”

“Hailey,” the woman named Heather says.

“Hailey,” West repeats. “Good to meet you, Hailey. I’m West.”

I shake West’s grandmother’s hand and offer a weak, “Hi.”

“I brought her to stay with Frankie,” West says.

“I’m with Frankie,” Joan replies.

“You’ve got other stuff on your plate.”

“I can take care of one kid.”

The bathroom door opens, and I recognize West’s sister at the same time her face lights up to see him. “West!”

Relief washes through me—more than I’m prepared for.

I’ve never met Frankie in person, but when West and I were together, she and I started texting. I don’t know if he’s aware that we never stopped.

Not that we swap the secrets of our hearts. Frankie’s ten. She sends me pictures of cute boys and really bad jokes. I send her links to stories I think she’d like, or I just ask her how she’s doing.

How’s school? How’s life?

I never ask her,
How’s West?

I guess I figured that was over the line, but standing here now, it’s utterly hilarious that I thought I had lines. I mean, I’m in Silt, Oregon.
Obviously
I have no lines.

West’s got his arms around Frankie, his face in her hair, his eyes closed, and I can’t look away.

He wants me to stay here, so I’ll stay here.

He wants me to watch over his sister, so I’ll watch over her.

There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for West Leavitt.

Frankie and I bunk down that night in the attic. It’s one big low-ceilinged room full of boxes and swollen garbage bags, a broken chair, the ironing board and mop bucket. Clashing squares carpet the floor—deep brown shag next to a red Turkish print next to a pink nubbly one.