Age of Consent (2 page)

She almost called out to Craig. Her mouth dropped open, and she began to say his name but stopped herself. He was already at the car. He would not hear her.

It was difficult to say how much was there, but she knew a feeling she'd never held so much money in her hands before. It had a particular texture, a weight to it that was different from plain paper. There was dust on the side that had faced up, and a dryness to the outside fifty that told her the roll of bills had been there a long time. The rubber band had lost its spring and when she slid it off, it left gummy marks. She was alone now, the door still open so she could see the cement path outside and the glow of the big sign against the pavement. Anyone might see her but nobody was watching, and so she counted out the money.

A thousand dollars. She had never seen so much money. Wherever it came from originally, there was something wrong that it was here in the room now, and she did not think it belonged in her hand.

She decided she'd better leave it. She thought it was probably drug money and that the owners would come back at any second. She imagined the drug dealers there in the room with a gun trained on her temple. They'd say, “Lay it down,” then shoot her. As quickly as that, she saw the image in her mind—the blood oozing from her temple, her body crumpled and pale, suddenly naked again on the patterned orange carpet under the dense yellow light.

And she thought, too, that money like this was always tainted, and if she were to take it, she would be tracked down, and that wherever she ran, she would be unearthed. She had learned—no, she'd not learned this but felt it inside her—that objects held power, if not in themselves then from the people who understood their meaning. This money was bad, and by taking it she was moving toward something mildly criminal. Craig gave her the same feeling. With the secrets and the drugs and the sex.

The bills had a crisper side where the light had heated one side of the roll; she could smell the special ink used at mints, a smell like nothing else. She thought money was a unique element that should be on the periodic table. N for nitrogen, M for money. She would put the money back, she decided, put it all back. But she didn't. She sat on the floor and looked up at the nightstand on which the bills now lay. Nobody had seen her enter, and if she were careful nobody would see her leave. The money was hers without consequence. It only required her to fold it into her pocket, just as she would a pack of chewing gum.

She heard the blare of the car horn now, her name being called. He would not call her Bobbie because it was a boy's name, but always Barbara, which she hated. She pressed the bills out one at a time, flattening each upon the table. Then she rolled them into two small logs. She put one log of five hundred dollars in her right front pocket, the other in her left. She checked the night table for more money, opening the drawer and searching the corners, but there was none. Strangely, she felt relieved there was no more money, no further bills she would have to hide on her person and guard. There was, however, a Gideon Bible, and a notepad and pencil, and the way they were arranged felt to her like a sign, a suggestion from outside herself. There was something more she had to do.

She took the Bible out of the drawer, noticing its gold writing and hard cover and all the crowded words inside. Then she removed one of the rolls of bills from her pocket, placing it on top of the Bible's cover. She peeled a leaf from the writing pad. She did not know to whom she was writing, some future girl in the same position in which she found herself, perhaps. She wrote, “If you need this, please take it.” She put the Bible back in the drawer beside five hundred dollars of the money, a solid half of what she'd found. When she left, shutting the door quietly behind her and following the path out to the parking lot, she felt differently about the money, as though giving half of it back had removed from the remainder whatever bad spell it had once possessed.

She walked to where the beams of Craig's headlights glared into the night. She tried to look natural, like nothing unusual was happening, but it felt as though anyone could see the money straight through her thin jeans. Nobody was watching, but she imagined being seen walking out with the money. She imagined being looked at from some high, lit window. Even the night, with its warm breeze and the heat from the day still rising from the parking lot around her, felt newly alive with the threat of being discovered. She was sensitive to sounds, the buzz of the giant sign with its cold light, the whoosh of car tires overhead. On a raised section of highway above, the traffic shook the air.

“What took you so long?” Craig said. He was sitting behind the wheel, the door open, window down. The inside light shined darkly onto his face. She could see his annoyance at her, at having to wait. Gnats pulled closer to the bulb and he waved them away like smoke.

“Sorry,” she said.

“You leave the key someplace?”

“On the table in front of the mirror.”

“You make it all tidy and clean like you're the maid?”

She told him she was just being polite.

“That's not polite, that's stupid,” he said. He was a ram, angling his horns toward her. She knew to retreat, but a contrariness planted itself inside her.

“Why are you so nasty to me?” she said.

Sometimes, just lately, she could challenge him. Talk back. But he didn't like it. He gave her a warning look. Then he said, “Stating facts isn't nasty.”

“We just had sex—can't you be nice?”

“Don't call it sex. That's trashy. We made love.”

HE HAD HIS
own logic about when she was old enough, and she remembered how he used to stretch the elastic from her panties, peering beneath, assessing how much pubic hair she had, before declaring whether it was all right yet. The month she turned fourteen he said, yes, he believed she was old enough now. Had she not been “developed” enough they would have waited longer. And though he'd become impatient, he told her it proved he cared. She was educated into his code of ethics, shaped by his thoughts and by his steady assessment. She'd let him look.

He would pick her up from school, parking a few blocks away from the snarl of buses and the crowd of newly teenaged kids moving along the sidewalks with their notebooks and pencil cases and long swinging hair, slouching beneath the hot Maryland sun. He'd watch the procession of girls in their tank tops, their denim cutoffs. The car, an old Buick with a long bench seat in front, was hot. No air-conditioning. He'd leave the windows down and stretch out, his back against one door, his legs sprawled across the seat, and push open the passenger door with his foot when he saw her.

A year later, nothing had changed. He was still there. Not every day. Maybe once or twice a week. She'd look up through blurry sheets of hot air rising from the ground and see the Buick. She'd see him lazing in his car, the radio on, and she would stop suddenly as though she'd run out of sidewalk.

One afternoon, she saw him before he saw her. He had his head tilted at an angle and was facing away. She hoped if she kept walking, it would be possible to fade into the crowd, to hide and stay hidden. She had a load of books, her gym bag on a string, her new handbag with a separate compartment for her makeup, her pencil case, her little tube of strawberry-scented lip gloss. She scurried forward, trying to stay with the largest group. The sun was hot and she could feel her scalp going red with the beginnings of a sunburn. She allowed herself a glance back and saw him again, baking in his car like a toad in a can, unavoidable. A big wall that separated her from everything around her in one awful instant.

He wore teardrop shades, a T-shirt with the logo of the radio station where he worked across the front, baggy jeans over his heavy gut. He looked old, surrounded as he was now by the junior-high crowd. People would think he was her older brother. People would think she was related to him. People wouldn't think he was her boyfriend, never that. In the surround of junior high, in the drench of afternoon sun, it was unconscionable.

The new handbag as well as the blouse she wore were presents from her mother. She didn't want him messing them up. She had a lot of homework and he didn't understand about homework. He didn't understand about school at all. There was a lab write-up due for science and she would get detention if it was late and it
would
be late if she got in his car.

She told herself he wasn't her boyfriend. He wasn't anyone she loved. She didn't have to do what he said; she could keep on walking.

She moved along with a group of girls. Swept up in the gentle arc of students, she glided away from the car. She thought maybe he hadn't seen her, not yet. It was a risk. He mustn't know she was running from him. She hoped the group she hid within did not thin, or turn toward the car, or somehow evaporate all at once so that she was left exposed. She kept a steady gait, gradually distancing herself from where Craig waited. She ducked her head low into her books, shoulder to shoulder with the others. Part of the group splintered, lining up next to a big yellow bus. His car was behind her now, and she was blocked by the crowd. He might be distracted by the heat, by the blinding sun. He'd not seen her in the first place—surely he would not spot her now. In a swift few steps she was suddenly through the bus's closing accordion doors, and the driver prepared to pull out from the curb.

She didn't know where the bus was heading—it wasn't the bus that she normally took—but there would be no hope of getting that one. He'd be watching that one. She took a seat in back, staring down, away from the windows. If he hadn't seen her yet, she was safe. She counted backward from twenty, waiting for the bus to move onto the road, and when it did she let her breath go, then began counting again.

The bus heaved to the stop sign, took a left, everything happening slowly and with a lot of engine noise and a lot of noise from all the kids in the seats in front of her. They headed down a narrow lane that wound through a housing development, little terraced houses all crushed together behind identical rectangles of grass. She listened to the rumble of the bus, felt it glide and roll. It had come along at just the right moment; it was a magic carpet, carrying her away. She gazed out the window at the tidy circles of houses, some with bikes in the yards, some with clay pots of flowers, and thought about him, back at the school, growing more agitated in his car.

By now, the crowds of kids would have thinned to nearly nothing. He'd be sitting up, straining his neck to find her in the rearview mirror, coming up the sidewalk late. She was often late and he'd be annoyed, thinking how she was haphazard and disorganized. Eventually, he would conclude she hadn't been in school that day and he'd stew about how he was always telling her that if she wasn't going to be in school on a particular day, she should let him know and save him the drive over and sitting in the hot sun.

Once he figured out she wasn't coming, he'd begin driving to the house where he knew he was sure to find her. He'd prepare a lecture about how she should be more considerate, maybe get so pissed off with it all that he had to pull over to the side of the road and stick his bong between his knees. He'd light whatever seeds were still in there, or push the flame of his Bic down on some little leftover hash pebble, take a hit to calm down. It's what she drove him to.

Out where she lived were tall, unkempt trees, the dead ones leaning on the ones still growing, and he'd stop there, searching for her mom's car or any sign of life from inside the house. If he saw the car, he'd leave, his tires crunching slowly over the gravel until he got to the main road. She'd hear from him that night or the next day by phone, worried about her. Worried angry.

It was bad enough that way, but worse if her mom's car
wasn't
there and he came looking for her, banging on the doors and windows of their split-level. He'd search for her in her bedroom closet, or the green bath of their olive-colored suite, or even under the laundry. She had hidden in all those places before, but when he found her, she would pretend she hadn't been hiding. It was the only way to keep things steady. She couldn't bear for him to be angry with her, to be disappointed. Now she was on a bus and didn't even know where it was going, or how she was going to get home, or if.

She thought maybe she could call him that night when he was on the air, when she knew he couldn't come find her right away, and say, “You can't get me at school anymore. My mom knows.” She could say that her mother threatened to call the police, that she was forbidden to see him, that she was grounded. She was sorry, she'd explain, but it wasn't her fault. She was too young, nothing she could do.

The thought of her mother really finding out was too much for her. It scared her more than anything. He knew that. And because he always seemed to know when she was lying, there was little point in trying to convince him that she'd told her mother. He'd only call the house and speak to June, gauging her response. Of course, her mother would be as warm as ever to him, and then he'd know Bobbie was lying. The big problem—one of the big problems—was how much her mother liked Craig. June thought he was a kind of older brother for Bobbie, the sibling she'd never had. For this reason, and perhaps others Bobbie could not yet imagine, June would get into a conversation with him. She'd tell him exactly where Bobbie was, then hang up and feed the plants none the wiser while Craig set out on his hunt.

On the bus, she worried about what he would do if he found out she'd avoided him. It was already hot, another scorcher marking the unusual weather they would endure all summer, but it wasn't the heat that caused her to writhe and sweat and crane her neck to get more air. It was what would happen if he found out she'd run away from him. The thought was too awful, and just as she was feeling at her worst about it, even a little sick, she looked out the window and saw—she couldn't believe it—his dark gold Buick. He was following the bus, drawing up alongside it, then tucking in behind, trying to get her attention. If he was here now, he'd been here all along. He looked up through the top of his window and caught her staring down at him. He saw her, saw her right now. She could make out his words as he yelled through the windshield. She imagined how loud he was, his voice bellowing so that anyone hearing the car pass would think he was on his way to kill someone. On his way.