Calmly, he places one hot hand on her shoulder, fingers brushing unpleasantly against the back of her neck. Softly, uncertainly, he mumbles:
“You know you’re prettier than your mom?”
It’s a sudden kiss, and hot in the sense of temperature. He runs his hand down her back, and up, under her flannel and then his animal weight is pulling toward her and she jerks away sharply, allergic to his meaty hands, his drunk breath. Her throat constricts, every muscle electric and vile, retching feeling, seizing her—
“Fuck you.”
She is pushing out back into the light and people are gasping and laughing, and she is thudding up the stairs, crying or not crying, blasting through the stale archaeological site of the kitchen (fossilizing half-finished beer cans) and the music is getting farther and farther away, and no one is coming after her.
“Sebastian!”
And there he is, his bare, dripping back, his hands and face and some other girl, water falling against itself, creating an oblivion around them.
Don’t abandon me, she had said. Was it so hard for him to put her first? Or is it nothing for him to exchange one woman for another, to flatten her desires and fears into some inconsequential noise.Fuck you too, she thinks.
When he submerges, Lisa shouts, echoing into the dark. And Viola runs.
Sopping, Sebastian scrambles out of the pool, in search of a toilet or a towel or Lola. Ideally all three. He drags his shoulder along the steady exterior wall. He needs his sister to drive him home.
He isn’t sure where Lisa is. She had jumped in, having taken off her sweatshirt to reveal a bright red bra, and the two of them kissed fumblingly in the water until she said she was cold. He remained for a moment, and he could see bodies passing through the kitchen, new lights turned on inside the house. The movements had a strange undertone, which he realizes is the absence of music.
He grabs his clothes, pulls on his jeans. The door is ajar, and Toby’s mother is standing hands on hips, monitoring as people call their parents.
Dark, slippery pine-needle paths, the wide shoulder, the light of her phone dancing ahead of her. Viola knows every road in this town. Her shape becomes nothing, a rhythm, the slap of shoes on pavement and the steady heave of breath. Only once, she falls, destabilized by the new swing of her brain, shaving the skin of her knee. Her mind militarizes, commanded to action by beer and betrayal.
How did they get here?
The box. The scripts. The names in the margins, his psychoactive imagination. Dumbass Pandora. The problem is their mother, making her brother think that women are all vacant bodies, purpose-built for whatever men want to do with them. Sure, why not put it all out there, Seb? Doesn’t the world need more doubt and conspiracy and empty sex? If everyone saw your sister like that?
No, it has to be undone, and like always, it is up to her. She must release him from his own twisted mythology.
After twenty minutes, the house emerges from the woodland. Tillie’s car is still in the drive, Al’s is still out.
Good, she thinks. Because the last thing her father needs is another reminder of how much love can hurt.
Adrenaline pumps her up the stairs. Sebastian’s door is open, the locker room smell of him wafting into her face. Stumble over hisdetritus, thrust up a window. What we need is clean. Sanity. There. A messy, pored-over stack on the desk. Her knee stings distantly. She carries her mother’s scripts to the living room.
The matches are on the mantelpiece. Strike one. Strike two.
She does not read the names written in the margins, she does not need to read them. The important thing is that her father never will, that their ambiguity will not cast new confusion onto the marriage he is only now, a decade later, recovering from. And maybe with time her brother will forget what or who he was looking for in here, stop wondering whether there was anything to be found. The flames kiss the pages as she drops them onto the plinth of the fireplace.
This is an act of kindness.
“I gotta go,” Sebastian says to no one. Lisa is somewhere else, maybe with some other guy. It’s not important. He finds his way to the gate (the gate!) the slanty, sideways, upside-down gate, incidental bodies opening like a sea in front of him as he crashes out into the night.
The keys are in his pocket.
He is newly aware, sitting in the driver’s seat, of how wet his jeans are, and somehow in all of this, he has lost his shirt. He does not care.
As he drives home, he considers what he will say to his father.I think you were fucking afraid of her.Something like that.Because unlike you, she really knew how to live. Unlike you, she was somebody.He will show him all the names in her scripts. And even if it’s all bullshit, his own hopes getting away from him, at least maybe Al will admit it. That there are better ways to live.
Her brother, reeking of poor behavior, finds her in her room, pretending to read. She registers the simmer of his anger.He doesn’t know what’s good for him, she thinks. Gently, she places the book aside.
“Where did you put them?”
“Where did I put what?”
“You know what.”
