“Like I said, it’s complicated.” She picks up the paperback then. “You’ll see what I mean when you read it. I don’t want to spoil the rest of the story or the ending for you.”
“You know the ending?” I ask in confusion. She appears to only be two thirds of the way through.
“I haven’t read it all yet,” she says. “But I’ve read the ending.”
I stare at her. As a writer, I wouldn’t be able to fathom someone going straight to the end of my stories. “Doesn’t that take away the suspense?”
“I don’t like suspense,” she replies, her voice tight. “I want to know what happens.”
I digest that as Dee resumes her reading, and I look around her room. The previous times I’ve been in here to ask for homework help or for some other excuse I invented, my attention was always on her, not the surroundings. But I notice them now.
Dee’s room is clean but not orderly. A white shelf overflows with books, and the excess are stacked on the floor. I imagine her reading all those endings first. Missing out on the anticipation. The suspense. Thenot knowing.
Could that be the point? She has had little certainty in her life.
My eyes continue to travel, picking up the details. The decor is sparse. There are no knickknacks or girly things on her dresser. There’s not much of anything, other than a ghetto blaster and a lamp on the side table. But her walls are covered with Maria’s and Gabi’s drawings and photos of the Torreses and me. Candid shots of us and Dee’s not in any of them. It’s as if she’s on the outside looking in.
The other thing that strikes me is that there are no photographs of her life before. She doesn’t talk about her childhood. In fact, she’s closed about most things. All I really know is that, like my parents, hers had a shotgun wedding. Then her father took off when she was three or four, after which she spent years being bounced between her unstable mother and foster care, until her mom got sick and died. That was when she came to live with the Torreses, and I met the girl with the big, sad eyes.
I sense Dee has many secrets. And I often wonder what else she hides besides her body. But I haven’t pried. I have my secrets, too.
“Thanks for patching me up,” I say, breaking the silence.
She stays quiet for a moment and then angles her profile toward me. Our eyes meet. “It was just a bandage. That’s nothing compared with what you did for me.”
I know Dee’s referring to the incident with J. T. Morrison, one of the dickheads who gets off on harassing her when Victor and I aren’t around. A few weeks ago, I heard from a couple of my teammates that Dee had come into the cafeteria—something she rarely did—and J. T. called out, “Look who’s here! It’s the fat girl. Guard your food!” Then he howled with his cronies while Dee apparently stood there. Probably humiliated.
It wasn’t even a thought. Mad as hell, I went in search of J. T. and found him behind the school in his usual spot, smoking. The instant I reached him, no questions asked, I shoved my fist so hard into his stomach that the weak-ass dropped to his knees and threw up his lunch. Then I started to go for J. T.’s three idiot sidekicks. The principal arrived after I got in a few solid punches. Because I’m a basketball star and because I’m Malcolm Peters’ son, I didn’t get suspended. Both the coach and my father would have raised hell if I had been forced to miss practice.
The principal excused my behavior, saying that I was defending my best friend’s sister. But the incident was hard on Dee, and I haven’t seen her in the cafeteria since.
Now, I point out to her, “J. T. and his friends are assholes. They say that kind of shit to make themselves feel better because they know how weak and pathetic they really are.”
Dee turns away from me and frowns up at the ceiling. “I never think of them as weak. When it happens, they seem to hold the power. I wish I didn’t care…sticks and stones and all that jazz…but it still gets to me. And then it gets to me more because I don’t fight back. That’s the worst of it—the not fighting back.”
“Yeah, I know.” The confession slips past my guard.
“Youdo?” she asks. Setting the book aside and turning, she props herself up on one elbow to search my face. “You always come across as so strong and confident. I’ve never seen you back down from anyone.”
I’m not sure I can bluff my way out of this or that I even want to. If anyone can understand my suck-ass childhood, she can. But my answer is lodged somewhere between my heart and my throat.
“What did you mean when you said, ‘I know’ Mick?” she persists.
When I still don’t answer, Dee pokes me in the ribs with a finger, and I draw my breath in sharply.
She pulls her hand back and her eyes round. “What did I do?”
“Nothing. My side is just a little tender.”
“From the fall?”
I shrug because I don’t want to lie to her now.
“Could your ribs be broken?”
“No.”
Ignoring my protest, she lifts my shirt, and her eyes move with shock and concern across my torso.
