Charmed (3 page)

Chapter Nine

After we have sex for the first time, Cody Dillon tells me it’s okay to just call him Dillon.

“That’s what my friends call me.” He passes me the joint.

I’m really hurting, and there’s blood, but he pretends not to notice, which is sweet of him. I lied and told him it wasn’t my first time, so he wouldn’t think I was a prude, but oh my God did it ever hurt! I smile at him and sit up. Tuck is lying in the doorway. I wonder if he watched the whole time. That makes my stomach flip. Gross.

“Go away, Tuck!” He slinks off, tail between his legs.

“That was your first time, wasn’t it?” Cody Dillon, just Dillon, I guess, puts a hand on my naked knee. I would like him to remove it.

I nod.

He squeezes my knee.

“I thought so. It gets better, trust me.” He kisses my knee. “You need to shave your legs, babe.”

I pull the sleeping bag over my legs. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay.” He takes the joint. “I’ll buy you what you need. Let’s go shopping.”

We drive into the city, to the big mall downtown. Dillon buys me a whole set of new clothes, expensive, tight-fitting, cool stuff that supermodels wear.

“You’re built like a model,” he says. “Only, you’re a little short. Still, you’re hot.”

“My tits are too small,” I say. “I’m too skinny.” (HE SAYS I’M HOT!).

He pinches my scrawny butt. “Skinny’s good. You can always buy bigger tits.”

Not including all the clothes, he buys me the following:

1. Four new bras, all the padded push-up kind, all black and slinky.

2. Sexy black knee-high boots that zip up the sides.

3. Brand new makeup, the complete works, all good quality and EXPENSIVE!

4. A cell phone (MY VERY OWN CELL PHONE!).

We sit in the food court and eat Chinese food and he shows me how to use the cell phone. There are all kinds of rings to choose from. I pick “Someday My Prince Will Come,” but he says, “I’m right here, babe,” and he’s right, so I change it. Now it meows when I get a call.

This skank comes up to our table. She’s a little older than me, but not much, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She’s all dolled up, but she’s got scabs on her face, so it makes the dolled-up stuff look really nasty.

“Dillon?”

Dillon ignores her.

“You got five bucks or something?”

“I’m busy, go away.” Dillon winks at me.

“C’mon, Dillon. Just five bucks. I can’t wait until next week.”

Dillon takes a five off the wad of cash he was spending on me and gives it to her. “Scram, Erin.”

She scrams, right away, without even saying thanks.

“Dumb crackhead,” Dillon says.

“How do you know her?”

Dillon shrugs. “My buddy’s girlfriend.”

“Oh.” I don’t want my chow mein anymore. Something about the girl turned me off. Her smell maybe, cheap perfume and seriously bad body funk. “She stinks.”

“Forget about her.” Dillon takes my hands in his. “Today is all about you.”

When we get back to Dillon’s place, I phone Margaret to tell her about all my new stuff. She’s not home. Her fat-cow mother says she’s with “her nice new friend,” but she won’t tell me where they are. I bet they’re at Teen Night at the rec center. This new friend, Amanda, is her science lab partner. She doesn’t smoke pot or cigarettes, doesn’t drink, not even a little, and has never stolen anything in her life, not even a jawbreaker from the corner store. Margaret’s mother loves Amanda. Amanda loves Teen Night. Her older sister first organized it, and now Amanda is sort of half in charge. Margaret says she only goes for the free chips and pop, but I know better. She likes the “in-charge” part and she likes the geeky movies they watch and she likes that her mother thinks Amanda is a “nice new friend,” rather than a “saucy little tart,” which is what she’s thought of me since I was eight.

Dillon goes out later, and after about five minutes I get bored. His apartment only has one room besides the kitchen and the bathroom. There’s not even a TV. I try to read his 4×4 magazines, but they’re so boring they make me sleepy. I smoke a joint because there’s nothing else to do. I decide right now is a good time to try Margaret again. She answers on the first ring.

“It’s after midnight, Izzy!”

“Is Amanda there?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie. She is too, isn’t she?”

“Okay, so she is. So what?”

I shrug, even though she can’t see. “I was just going to tell you something.” I look over at my new stuff. I should put it away, but I like the way the boxes and bags look all together, like a hotel porter brought them in.

“So tell me.”

“I changed my mind. I don’t want to tell you anymore.”

There’s a pause. I bet that priss Amanda is mouthing something at her.

“Are you mad at me, Izzy?”

I’m not mad. I’m high. I never get mad when I’m high. But I’m done. I’m done with Margaret.

“Ding.”

Margaret says, “What?”

“Ding! You’re done, Margaret.”

“Are you high?”

“Ding!” I say. “Whoops, better take you out of the oven!” I hang up.

I paint my fingernails ten different colors. I paint my toenails ten different colors. I clean it all off and paint them all black. I try on all my new clothes and try out all the new makeup. I’m buzzing. I wonder if there’s something extra in the pot. I turn the lights out and try to relax. At first I can’t sleep, and then all of a sudden I’m out.

Dillon wakes me up. I fell asleep in the sexy boots and leather mini-skirt and nothing else. He’s brought a friend home. The friend is grinning down at me. I yank the sleeping bag over me. His name is Barrel, and he’s big and round like one.

“She’ll do,” he says. Then he leaves.

“Do what?” My head is pounding.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” Dillon heads for the shower. “Go back to sleep.”

So I do.

Chapter Ten

My mom calls my cell the day she’s heading back to camp.

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Margaret’s mom taking good care of you?”

“Sure.”

“Well…” I hear a zipper. Is she getting dressed? Doing up a bag? “Well, I’ve been thinking, Izzy. Just until my contract’s done—”

“I can’t come home?” I don’t even want to go home, but I want to cry anyway. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, baby. Not at all. I just wondered if you’d rather stay at Margaret’s than come back here and bicker with Rob all the time I’m gone, you know?”

I nod. Rob the Slob. I can’t believe she picked him over her Best Thing.

“Izzy? Baby?”

“Yeah, Mom.”

“So how about I give Margaret’s mom some money and you stay put until I get back?”

“Mrs. Pritchard already told me she’d never take money from us. She knows we don’t have any, and besides, she says parenting isn’t a paying job.” This hurts, I can tell by Mom’s sudden intake of breath and the silence that follows. Good. It was meant to. “She says I can stay for as long as I want. She said that. As long as I want. Like, till I graduated if I wanted.”

“Oh.” I hear a tap running. Is she in the kitchen? “Hey, Izzy, about the money you stole from Rob…”

I wait. “Yeah?”

“He won’t let me pay him back for it. He says you stole it, so you pay it back from your own money. He totaled it up. He says you owe him two hundred dollars.”

“It wasn’t that much!”

“But you did steal it, right?”

“Not that much!”

“I’m not going to argue about the amount. Maybe this’ll teach you a lesson.”

I hang up on her. She calls back. The phone meows. I don’t answer. I answer later, though, because I’m waiting for Dillon to come home and I think it’s him. It’s Mom.

“Don’t you hang up on me! I’m just about to get on the plane. I wanted to tell you Rob says you can come home when you’ve got the two hundred dollars.”

“What if you send me the money and I’ll say it’s mine?”

“Can’t, baby. This is your mess. You got to clean it up this time.”

I hear an airplane taking off. A baby crying. A boarding announcement for a flight to Calgary. I wish I was getting on the plane with her, like when I was little and I got to go to camp with her. I used to play in the cupboards under the counter. I’d make one a fort, with blankets and pillows, a stash of cookies, books to read and a flashlight. The cupboards were metal, and my voice echoed. I used to lie in the dark and sing to myself, just to hear the echo. I liked being a little kid, but that was a long time ago.

Chapter Eleven

Barrel brings over a Chinese girl named Kitty. She’s even skinnier than me, but has bigger tits. She and I sit on the mattress in the other room and paint each other’s nails while Dillon and Barrel take the only chairs into the kitchen, shut the door and talk in low voices. I tell Kitty about my mom’s kitten shirt.

“I’d give it to you.” I’m having a hard time getting the polish on neat. I’ve had too much coffee and too much pot and too much beer and there’s no food around to take the edge off. “I will give it to you, when I can go home and get it.”

“Thanks, but it’s okay.” She has an accent, even though she was born in Richmond. I want to ask her to say something in Chinese, but I’m worried that’d be racist. “I got a couple of shirts like that. And some underwear.”

“Here, look.” I make my cell phone meow. She loves it, so we set hers to do the same.

“Is Barrel your boyfriend?”

Kitty laughs, dripping a splotch of polish on my foot. She wipes it off. “Barrel?” She lowers her voice. “Gross. He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Then how do you know him?”

Dillon and Barrel come into the room. Dillon leans against the wall, arms crossed. Barrel snatches Kitty’s arm and yanks her up.

“Let’s go.”

“Hey!” I grab her other arm. “Don’t grab her like that!”

Kitty winks at me. “It’s okay, Izzy.”

I let go of her. “It doesn’t look okay to me.”

“That’s what I mean,” Barrel says to Dillon. “You keep an eye on that.”

Barrel frowns at me. His clothes might be expensive and nice, but they’re all a little small on him and have the sheen of not being washed in a very long time. He looks swollen, like he might burst out of them. He probably thinks he looks muscular, but he just looks bloated. I bite back a smirk.

“What?” He shoves Kitty toward the door and hauls me up by my arm. “Wipe that look off your face, slut!”

That’s funny. Yeah, that’s me, Little Miss Sleep Around. I know I shouldn’t, but I really want to laugh right in his chubby face. My smirk grows. He smacks me. I fall back onto the mattress, not because of the force — it wasn’t that hard, really — but I was so surprised. Good old Tuck, he doesn’t even wake up, let alone race to my rescue.

“Hey! Dillon?” Dillon stays where he is and shakes his head. “Do something, Dillon!” I scream. “He hit me!”

Barrel glares down at me, his sweaty cheeks flushed. Behind him, Dillon puts a shut-up finger to his lips. Kitty shakes her head and mouths “don’t.” She presses something on her phone and it meows.

The sound surprises Barrel. He whips around and then realizes it’s just a phone. Stupid me wants to laugh again, at the thought that a cat could startle Big Bad Barrel. Don’t laugh, Izzy. Bad idea.

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” Kitty talks into the phone. “Okay. Ten minutes. No problem.” She hangs up. Barrel gets his keys out of his pocket.

“Where?”

“Franklin and Gower.”

Kitty winks at me as Barrel gives me one last glare. He pushes her out ahead of him and slams the door. When they’ve gone, Dillon tells me Kitty is Barrel’s drug mule. He’s the dealer, but he gets Kitty to carry the drugs because he has a criminal record and she doesn’t and she’s underage and he’s not. If she gets caught, she probably won’t get charged at all, or if she did, her record would get wiped when she turns nineteen. It actually kind of makes sense.

Dillon is still leaning against the wall. His eyes are closed now.

“Do you love me, Isabelle?”

Tuck wakes up; it’s that shocking a question. Of course I do!

“Of course, Dillon!”

His eyes are still closed. “You’d do anything for me?”

My skin goes a little cold, or hot, I can’t tell. It’s his tone. So sad. So tired.

I nod, but his eyes are closed, so he can’t see me. It takes a while to find my voice.

“Yeah.” I wait for him to ask me to mule for him, or Barrel, but he doesn’t.

When Dillon opens his eyes, he looks out the grimy window and not at me. I said I’d wash them, and I still haven’t. I get a bottle of vinegar and an old newspaper and start cleaning the windows. Dillon stares past me. It’s raining outside. The cars whoosh by on the wet road. I wipe the glass hard, squeaky clean. The streetlights come on. It gets dark so early now.

“What’s wrong, Dillon?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

He lights a cigarette and lies down on the mattress. What if a fire starts like that? What if Dillon dies? I’m gripped by panic, grief, terror at the thought of losing him. I must love him. That’s what love is, isn’t it? I can’t believe my mom feels this way about Rob the Slob. She can’t really be in love with him, not like I am with Dillon.

“Dillon?”

He’s fallen asleep. I take the cigarette from his fingers and cover him with the sleeping bag. I go into the kitchen and wash the window in there and then the counters and the fridge and the floor. I’m on the floor in the bathroom, scrubbing, when Dillon comes in to pee.

“Maybe you could get a job,” he says.

“Is it money?” I sit on the edge of the bathtub. It needs cleaning too. And the toilet. “Is that what’s wrong?”

“Well, you’re living here for free, right?” He leans in the doorway.

I nod.

“Someone would pay you to do this work, you know.”

I go back to scrubbing the floor. Yes, I am living here for free, but here I am on my hands and knees, trying to make up for it! I’m mad, but then I think, I’m not mad—I’m in love, and sometimes things are rough in love. But it’s worth it.

“Nah,” Dillon says. “You’d get crap money.”

I don’t answer. I’m afraid if I do I’ll sound lippy, and he’s so stressed out, I don’t want to set him off. He’s trying. I know that. He really is.

“Look, Isabelle.” My heart warms a little when he says my name. “I’ll think of something. Don’t you worry about it, okay?”

I dry my hands and put my arms around him. “Will you tell me if I can do anything?”

He nods, kisses the top of my head. I would do anything to be with him, anything to not have to go home to Rob the Slob.