The Burning Girl (9 page)

“I eat here on my break,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” she said. She deflated a little, drew in a deep breath. “Oh. Okay.”

Woop, woop
, said the police car on Madison, trying to push its way through traffic.
Woop
.

Was she going to apologize? I wondered. If I were writing her, what would I have her do? I’d like to get that little wiggle in her eyebrows, that tightness of uncertainty around her eyes, the just-barely-there embarrassed smile. It’s all those little muscles under the skin; they dance in response to limbic impulses we can’t control. It’s their subtle shifting and moving that make expression.

“It’s just something you have to look out for, you know?” she said. She looked back at the playground and gave a little wave. The tension dissipated, the line blurring, the nannies began talking among themselves. “When you watch kids at the playground. Especially here in the city.”

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “I get it. No worries.”

“Okay.”

Nope. She wasn’t going to say she was sorry. Because she didn’t believe me. She knew I wasn’t there on my break. But she also knew I wasn’t stalking the kids. She started moving back toward the playground. I saw Toby looking at her through the fence.

“Meggie,” he called. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m okay, Toby,” she said. “Go play. I’m watching you.”

She started moving away, going back to him. I didn’t want her to.

“I saw you a couple of days ago,” I admitted. It just kind of came out.

She turned back, and I came a step closer. She didn’t back up. I looked up at the sky again, the bare branches, the little brown birds watching us. “I think you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. I’ve been looking for a chance to talk to you.”

I’ve never been much good at anything but total honesty. Sometimes it works for you. Then I saw it: a brief, reluctant smile. And I knew I wasn’t sunk—yet. I tried to remember that I wasn’t the loser kid on the school playground. I wasn’t Fatboy anymore. I was okay to look at; I had money. She could like me. Why not?

“Really,” she said flatly. She looked down at her outfit, another winner—faded jeans, a stained white button-down, a puffy parka with a fur-lined hood, scuffed Ugg boots. She gave me a half-amused, half-flattered look.

“Really,” I said.

I could see her scanning through a list of replies. Finally: “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

I was sure that wasn’t true. She looked like the kind of girl to whom people said nice things all the time.

“There’s more where that came from,” I said. I went for a kind of faux-smarmy thing. And this time she smiled for real.

“Meeegaaaan,” called Toby, whiny, annoyed.

She backed away again toward the playground, blushing in a really sweet way.

“Want to get a coffee?” I asked.

“Uh,” she said. “I don’t know. This is weird.”

I waited, still thinking to myself: I’m okay. Chicks dig me. I get laid with some frequency. I don’t always pay for it. I’m not a stalker.

“When?” she asked, still moving backward.

“Tonight,” I said. “What time do you get off?”

I couldn’t let her go without making her agree to see me again. I knew what would happen if she had too much time to think about it. Because I could already tell what kind of girl she was.

She came from money; she had nice, concerned parents probably living somewhere close by. How did I know this? There’s a way a woman carries herself, a shine, an inner cleanliness, when she comes from love and privilege. It takes a certain amount of confidence to walk around Manhattan looking like a bit of a mess. She was pretty, probably smoking hot underneath those baggy clothes. She could have shown it off like every other beautiful girl in the city. But she didn’t need to; she didn’t care who was looking. You have to feel really good about yourself to look like shit when you don’t have to. And you don’t feel that way, not ever, unless your parents told you and showed you how special you are. That’s how I knew.

If she had too much time to think about me, about our encounter, if she told her best friend, her employer, or God forbid her mom, they’d talk her out of seeing me again. Maybe tomorrow she’d decide it was better to go to another park for a while.

“Seven,” she said. “I get off at seven.”

“Meet me here at seven, then. Seven fifteen.”

“Maybe,” she said. She moved an errant strand of hair away from her eyes. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll wait.”

“I don’t know,” she said again. And that time it sounded more like a no.

She was gone then, disappeared behind the playground gate. And I turned around, leaving quickly. I knew as I walked downtown that if she didn’t come back at seven that night, I might not see her again.

• • •

“Why did you come back?” I would ask her much later.

“Because I felt sorry for you,” she said. She gave me a kind of sympathetic smile, a light touch to the face. “You looked like a person who needed something.”

“I was
needy
?
That’s
why you came back—not because I was hot or charming or magnetic? Not because you wanted me?”

“No. Sorry.” Then that laugh, a little-girl giggle that always made me laugh, too.

“I
did
need something,” I said. I ran my hand along the swell of her naked hip. “I needed you. I needed this life.”

“Aw,” she said. “And I came back because you were sweet. I could see that you were really, really sweet.”

But
I
didn’t make it back to the park that night at seven. Guess why.

Priss.

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