Split (11 page)

chapter 17

a
nother soccer game lost
. Our record: 0–5. We so need a new goalie. After said ass-whipping, I’m munching my corn-chip dinner and trying to gussy up my
Hamlet
paper in the twenty-minute window I have post-shower and pre-bookstore. I’m typing in “The undiscovere’d country … [that] puzzles the will/And makes us rather bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of?” when the e-mail account dings at me. New mail! I open it, assuming it’s my mom’s check-in, only to find that Lauren has replied. Which means that right now, she is at her computer, too.
Kismet
, says a sly part of my brain.
An opportunity
, adds Señor Sly.
Apologize, help her forgive you, tell her about your new life. It’s not like you could hurt her again. Thirteen HUNDRED miles of distance. She’s sitting in
her rose-colored room on her perpetually unmade bed, cross-legged with her laptop on her knees, waiting to hear from you
. I call up the memory of her body hitting the sidewalk, which shuts up Señor Sly. I click on the RE: Warrant for your arrest? line.

Above my
Do it
, she has written:

Done.

It took her days to write this one word, days in which her complaint was processed and served, days in which my mom copied it and sent it to me. Did she know that tipping me off was a surefire way to help me duck a summons?

I click on the dictionary icon to find the textbook definition for
ambivalence:
having mixed or contradictory feelings about something. Am-biv-a-lent
adj
. Am-biv-a-lent-ly
adv
. Example: Jace feels ambivalently about the warrant for his arrest. Jace knows that this warrant is proof positive that Lauren will return to her normal self, that he hasn’t broken her. Therefore, Jace can uncoil the knot in his back. However, Jace is also happy that he is in New Mexico, where he won’t be found, much less arrested. Finally, Jace suspects it’s a bad sign that he is referring to himself in the third person.

The door clicks, and I shut down the e-mail before I turn around. Caitlyn is making her way over to me.

I glance at the clock. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” she says.

She tells me everyone (a.k.a. her pride plus the soccer guys) is going out for pizza, and do I want to come? And oh, Eric’s not going to be there.

“Would you have tracked me down if he was?”

“Of course,” she says, but I’m not as certain as she is until she says, “He might ask me out if he sees me with you.”

“Caitlyn,” I say, “you could just ask him out, instead of acting all weird about it. You asked me out.”

“But
you
hadn’t broken up with me already.”

“Oh.”

I had assumed she was the puppet-master, but she’s just trying to refertilize her burned-up ego.

“So, you see?” she says, and takes a chip and then starts to laugh. “You look so surprised.”

“Well, yeah. You’ve got him on a string.”

“He bailed when I said those three little words. If he wants me back, he’s gotta answer ’em.” She pauses and looks at my computer screen. “Anyway, come out with us.”

I would like to blow this off and hang out with her and her friends. I’ve been eating lunch with them, and Heather even burned me a few CDs to save me from a twenty-two-year-old brother’s music collection.

I shrug and remember how often I would hang with Edward and our soccer team. Now this team is going to eat and joke around and talk about nothing. I could do with a little nothing.

“I can’t.”

“The paper isn’t due for—”

“No, I have to work.”

“That’s what sick days are for,” she says. “Don’t you feel sick?”

Dakota isn’t scheduled to work, and I can finish the paper when I get back to the apartment.

I smile up at her, and we head out the door. I use her cell phone to call work and tell Robyn I’m not feeling well, and for one night, I actually get to feel like life is a little normal again, like there’s a place where I fit.

When Eric comes in, Caitlyn’s mouth drops before she can cover. He made it, after all.
Great
. Caitlyn scootches toward me to make room. But when Eric goes to sit next to her, she goes, “Oh, could you get me a coke.” When he comes back with it, she has her elbow on the table and is turned toward me, using universal body language to block him out. I go ahead and flirt back while Eric is slumped on her other side, eating cold pizza. I’m being a bastard again, but this time, it’s community service.

A few days later, I’m sitting on a stool in the middle of Dakota’s kitchen with my shirt off. My shoulders and neck are wrapped in airless, moist, blue plastic wrap, and newspapers lie on the floor under me.

“You’re sure you want to dye your hair?” Dakota asks for the third time.

“You’re sure you can do it?”

“I did Douglas’s.”

“Really? You’re good.”

She sketches a bow.

“Do you think it’ll look good?” I ask.

She shrugs. “I like how it looks now.”

I think of my dad’s blond hair and my own. “Go to it, Van Gogh.”

She asks me where the box of hair dye is, and when I tell her, she gets it out of my bag.

Dakota and I have started hanging together outside of work. After the Saturday shift, we head out to someplace desert-beautiful. (She seems to know them all.) Turns out she loves to draw; she drew the pix of Lady Godiva on her jeans. So she brings her art stuff, and I bring my camera. She hangs and draws. I wander and shoot. Though she has dropped me off and come up to the apartment once or twice, this is the first time I’ve been to her house. It is a sprawling one-story and has the no-molding-around-the-windows-and-doors, remember-the-Spanish look.

She brings in the box and a print of mine that was in my backpack.

“I like this one,” she says. “I liked it more when it wasn’t Photoshopped.”

I sigh. We’ve been disagreeing on that since day one. She says nature photography shouldn’t be Photoshopped because it misrepresents our world. I argue that as soon as I choose what to take a picture of, I’m already making decisions about what to represent and what to leave out; every photo, nature or not, is manufactured.

There’s nothing quite like Photoshop. Once I took a silver-processing film class. Hated it. On the computer, I can change whatever I see after the fact. Taking the images isn’t the fun part; it’s fixing them. I composite images, erase imperfections, arrange colors. It’s a little like playing God.

She goes on, “But I guess you like it more Photo-shopped. Satisfies the control freak within.”

“I am not a control freak. I just want it to be right.”

“Yeah, but right according to you. Control freak.”

I can’t think of a comeback, so I lean backward as if I’m in a salon, my neck craning over the metal and my head hanging in the sink. She sits me back up, picks up the bottle of dye, and starts dragging the nozzle along my scalp—a light scratching as she changes my look. It smells sharp, like hydrochloric acid. I don’t want to distract her, so I keep quiet, but when I feel the bottle moving more swiftly, with more confidence, I say, “Hey, Douglas said that that old woman came back, the one with the attitude and earrings?”

Some woman with a deep, loud voice and a Slavic accent came into the store the other day and put up a big fuss when Dakota couldn’t find a book on the shelves that was in the system. She started telling Dakota something about finding a boyfriend—a young, pretty girl like yourself doesn’t have a head for this kind of thing—and Dakota just stood there, taking it. When I stepped in, the woman went all soft and sweet with me.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Did she give you a hard time?”

“She’s just a crackpot with retro views on the world.”

“You shouldn’t let her kick you around. Just tell her to shut up,” I say.

“I didn’t
let
her, and I want to keep my job—you know, the job my father got me.”

“Oh, Robyn doesn’t care about that.”

She shakes her head. “Yes, she does. She told me when I started working.”

“Well, she doesn’t anymore. She called you the ‘model bookstore service representative’ when I interviewed with her. Besides, if Robyn tries to give you a hard time, I’ll back you up.”

She puts the bottle down. I glance at her from the corner of my eye, careful not to move my head.

“That’s gracious of you, but I can fight my own battles,” she says.

“Well, obviously not.”

“Hey. I appreciate it that you stepped up for me the other day, but don’t tell me how to live my life.”

I suddenly wonder what would happen if I pissed her off and she left my hair half my dad, half my brother. I’m not going for the yin-yang look. “Okay. Sorry. Just trying to help.”

She picks up the dye and continues. “Didn’t you … Did you … Hasn’t anyone ever kicked you around?”

“Not really.”

Lies come so easily that I answer without thinking. Then I wonder who I am protecting. Who was I ever protecting? I used to lie because that’s how it was done.
Because that’s how it’s done
isn’t so persuasive anymore. Hell, I used to stand up and take my mother’s beating for her because that’s how it was done.

“No … Yeah.” My hands start to shake. “My dad.”

“That’s different,” she says. “Parents are never happy. If it’s not the way you dress, it’s your grades. If it’s not your grades, it’s your friends. Are you cold?”

“Shirtless.” I wonder if I will ever stop lying.

“Wait a minute. Where
is
your dad? I haven’t seen either of your parents in that little apartment of yours.”

“He’s in Chicago.”

When she asks, I tell her no, he’s not traveling on business; he lives there still.

The bottle slows again. “So, are your parents getting a divorce? Is that why you moved out here?”

“No, they’re still together.”

“She moved here from Chicago, but she doesn’t want a divorce?”

I sense that the lies are about to unravel. I want them unraveled. Why not pull the string? I think of the tightlipped victim Christian was talking about the other night. I think of how I accuse Christian of not talking, but no one in my new life has even heard about Lauren. If I want to change, is this the way?

“It’s just my brother and me here. My mom is supposed to come out in”—I realize how neurotic I’ll sound if I say
thirty-four days
—“at Thanksgiving. She hasn’t left him. Yet.”

“She sent you out here to live with your brother?” she asks.

I’m silent. And so is she. It’s like the world is on pause for a second. I want to turn and look at her, but I don’t want to move my head, either.

“Jace,” she says finally. “Remember the day we met?”

“Yeah.”

“You said you got in a car accident.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“But was that … Just now, did you mean literally? That your father
literally
kicked you around?”

I tell myself that I’ll be able to handle whatever reaction she throws at me. She might put the bottle down, fold her arms, and ask me the questions I’ve been asking myself.

“How could you leave your mother behind to take it without you? Why aren’t you banging down the door, calling the police, testifying against him?” she’d ask
.

I’d say, “Do you understand the court system? No prosecutor would bring a he-said, she-said case against a judge in Chicago. And even if we pretend that there is a gutsy TV-hero attorney, no judge would ever let another judge get convicted.”

She’ll try to tell me about the effectiveness of the justice system and how I should trust the courts, but I’ve seen the system fail too many times, been weaned on my dad’s stories about its limited protection, been told about how the law can be twisted, evidence ruled
inadmissible. Too many ways to go wrong. Too many ways my father could walk free
.

“When he gets out, she’s dead,” I’ll say. “An order of protection is just a piece of paper.”

Whatever she throws at me, I’ll be able to handle.

I watch my hands shake. I tell myself that this will be the hardest time to say it, that it will get easier, that my face won’t burn and my throat won’t close, that lies are verbose, and the truth takes one word.

“No.” I laugh a little to cover. “No, of course not. My dad isn’t a monster, or anything.”

I suddenly get who I’m protecting. As soon as I call my father out, Dakota won’t understand anything else about him. And I know the same thing is true for me—if I tell anyone about Lauren, they’re never going to see anything but my fists.

“Really?” she says.

I cover: my father has high standards, he won’t accept anything less than perfect; that one time when I missed a score in a soccer game, he kept after me for three weeks; that’s what I meant when I said he kicks me around. That my mom hasn’t filed for divorce
yet
, but she’s leaving him. Once Dakota looks like she believes me, I say, “Come on, let’s see your work.”

“Not yet,” she says. “It needs to sit for a little while.”

She puts a plastic bag on my hair, and I take off the sweaty Saran Wrap. I put on my shirt and button it up before we go into the den, where her parents and her little sister, Missy, are watching some Saturday movie. When they laugh, they all sound the same. Dakota in surround sound. I rest my back against the cushions, and Missy ends up with her head on my lap while she watches. When Dakota notices, she doesn’t apologize for this sudden familiarity, and I don’t want her to.

It’s loud here, sure, but there’s a stillness underneath, a promise that tomorrow will look the same as today.

After half an hour or so, Dakota tells me we need to rinse my hair, and when we’re done, she leads me to a bathroom to inspect the look in a mirror. She did a great job. It’s dark and contrasts with my blue eyes. No doubt about it: I look more like Christian than ever, but in truth, still not much.

Dakota is looking down and pulling at her cuticles.