Fat Girl (8 page)

Dee rolls her eyes. “Well, tough guy, let’s see that macho act now.”

She drenches a cotton ball with peroxide and swabs the cut. Screw macho. I curse a blue streak. But rather than rib me, Dee leans in, puckers her full lips, and softly blows away the sting.

I want nothing more than to bury my hands in those falling curls and press my mouth to hers. She’d taste sweet with a spicy kick. I’d bet money on it.

Dee tears off a square piece of gauze and a strip of tape. “Hold still.” She reaches for my cheek and secures the bandage in place. “Done,” she says stepping back to survey her handiwork. Giving me a modicum of space to get my thoughts in check.

“So,” I ask, “do I look tough?”

“No, you look like a guy who needs to lie down with an ice pack.”

“Way to squash my ego.”

“That would probably take a steamroller.”

I laugh and get a glimmer of another crooked smile in return. “Seriously, you should rest,” she says.

“I’ll stretch out on Victor’s bed for a while.”

“Or you could hang out in…ah…my room.”

Her suggestion floors me. On the surface, we’re like family, considering how close I am to the Torreses and how much time I spend here. But I’ve never felt brotherly toward Dee. Not that I would ever dare reveal what I do feel. She’s the daughter of the man who has given me so much. I’d never do anything to betray his trust. He’s protective of his girls, and that makes Dee off limits. I’m not the nice boy she deserves.

Noticing my hesitation, Dee suddenly tugs at the front of her top in a way I’ve come to learn she does whenever she’s feeling self-conscious. “It’s okay. I just thought…you know…if you wanted company. Don’t worry about it, you don’t have to—”

“I want to,” I hear myself say. “If you’re sure I won’t be in your way.”

She looks up shyly. “You won’t be. I was just reading.”

“Okay, if you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

Dee gets me a clean T-shirt of Victor’s. I change into it after she leaves. I’m not modest about my body, but I can’t let her see the marks on my chest.

I ball up my soiled shirt and place it inside the garbage bin, burying it beneath trash. Winded from the exertion, I lean against the sink, allowing the throbbing of my ribs to subside before I wash the dried blood off my neck and hands. When I’m done, I go to Dee’s room.

She’s lying on her back, knees bent, head raised on a couple of pillows, reading
Jane Eyre
, our required assignment for English Lit. I look at the twin bed. I look at her. She glances up and dangles a blue gel ice pack. I get a sense of what Adam must have experienced in the Garden of Eden. I know this is wrong, but the temptation to be near her is bigger than my will to resist.

I slide in beside Dee and take the ice pack from her hand. Our fingers brush in the exchange. We both pull back quickly, and I gingerly press the bag to my cheek.

“Wanna give me the Cliff’s Notes version?” I ask to distract myself from the fact that I’m lying in bed inches from a girl I can’t stop thinking about naked and under me.

“That would be cheating,” she says.

“C’mon. I’ll still have to read it to write the essay. Just the highlights.”

Dee mulls that over, rolling that juicy bottom lip, and I’d like nothing more than to bite it. Being this close to her is sweet torture.

“Okay.” She puts the book, page down, on her stomach and turns her head to face me. “The main character is Jane…well, obviously,” she says with a nervous laugh. “The story’s told from her viewpoint. It starts with her being orphaned at ten and going to live with relatives.”

Does Dee relate to this Jane character? I don’t ask. I don’t want to make her sad. Instead, I close my eyes, listening to the soothing cadence of Dee’s voice. I catch glimpses of Jane’s hard life and her tragedies. But she also has a strength that I can hear Dee admires.

At the part where Jane becomes a governess, Dee stops, probably assuming I’ve fallen asleep. I can feel her eyes on me and confirm it through a covert peek. Thinking she’s going unnoticed, she slowly skims her gaze from my face to my chest and then inches past my stomach to the fly of my jeans. I have to force my dick to heel. A reminder that she’s Papa T’s daughter does the trick.

“Go on,” I say.

“Oh,” she says, flustered, “I thought you were sleeping.”

“Nah. I was just enjoying the sound of your voice.”

I open my eyes to find her blushing. Damn, she’s sweet. Sweet and innocent. And I’m neither of those things. I’m known as a fuck ’em and chuck ’em kind of guy. Not that I pretend to be anything else. I use girls for sex, and they use me for whatever thrill they get from screwing a popular jock. But Dee’s different. She doesn’t care about my local fame or NBA potential. She likes me. And I like her too. Hell, if I’m honest with myself, I’m in love with her. I have been for a really long time. All those other girls have just been poor substitutes. But nothing can happen between us, which is why I’m going to keep my feelings and my hands to myself.

“Where was I?” she asks, breaking into my thoughts.

“Jane went to work as a governess.”

“Oh, right.” She shakes her head, as if forcing her mind to focus. “So Jane takes a job as a governess, but the employer, whom she’s never met, is out of town. Then one night while she’s out walking, she witnesses a man being thrown from his horse. She helps him up and there’s an…um…immediate attraction.”

“Oh yeah? And is he attracted to her?”

“Y-yes.” She blushes again. “But as it turns out, he is her employer, and so being together is complicated.”

Tell me about it.
“So do they ever get together?” I need to know.

“Yes,” she says, barely above a whisper. “They fall in love.”

“And what happens?”

“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. The
not 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.

“You
do
?” 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.

“Oh my God,” she whispers, her breath fanning the road map of bruises, old and new. “How did you get these? And tell me the truth this time.”

The truth.
I sober at the thought. I haven’t told this to anyone. My mother took the secret to her grave. And I promised myself I’d bury my shame the same way. But it was Dee who pulled me out of the darkness after my father’s beating. And I think that maybe if I tell her it will unlock the shackles around my soul and free me in a way I’ve never imagined possible.

I move the ice pack out of the way and look into her eyes. They well with tears. She already knows the ending. She’s just waiting for the story. But tears freak me out. They remind me of my mother’s and make me feel helpless. “I can’t talk about this if you cry.”

“Okay.” She sniffles and knuckles the wetness away. “I can handle it.”

I don’t know if
I
can, but I’m going to try. “Today he came home at lunchtime drunk,” I say because I haven’t hidden my old man’s drinking from her or the Torreses. “I was writing my submission for NYU and he caught me. You know how he feels about my writing.”

“I’m so sorry,” she consoles me, her voice a soft caress. “How long has it been going on?”

I close my eyes for a moment, as the answer threatens to suffocate me. “For as long as I can remember. He hated that I was born. My mom was just another pretty girl he was set to toss away, but she was in love with him. Why, I could never understand, but she was. After she died, I read her journals. When she told him about her pregnancy, he told her to get rid of it…of me. He had North Carolina State and wasn’t going to be saddled with a wife and kid. My mom refused to have an abortion. She thought once I was born he would come to love us. That night she told him, he got stinking drunk and drove his motorcycle too fast around a bend. It jackknifed. He broke a few bones, but the worst of it was a busted tibia. Finding out he’d never play competitive basketball again because he’d fucked up his shinbone was like a death sentence to him.”

“And now he thinks you owe him NC State and the NBA?” she concludes.

“Something like that. But he knows basketball doesn’t drive me. My writing does, the way it drove my mother, and that pisses him off. Seeing the NYU application made him go apeshit. But this is the first time he’s ever hit me in the face or this hard.”

“Who knows?”

“No one. Well…now you.”

“What about Victor?”

I shake my head.

“Why not?”

“Because he’d tell Mama and Papa T.”

“They should know, Mick.”

“No!” I say loudly, hoping I haven’t made the biggest mistake of my life. “They can’t ever know.”

“You have to let them help you,” she argues, sitting up, her eyes filling with tears again. “He can’t get away with this anymore.” There’s anger in her voice now.

“Yes he can. He’s the fucking sheriff. I’ll get into NYU, I know I will.” That’s not conceit. I got my talent for writing from my mother, and she could have gone far if it weren’t for my old man. I’m not going to let that happen to me. “The summer session starts in July. I can survive another six months.”

“What if you can’t?” she protests. “You said that it’s never been this bad.”

“I’ll act like I’m taking the scholarship to North Carolina.” I don’t care if it’s cowardly. I’d do anything to wipe the fear off her face.

“He hit you before he knew you were applying to NYU. Your father can find any excuse or none at all. We are going to tell Mama and Papa T as soon as they get home, and they will help you report this to someone over his head.”