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Authors: Paul Griffin

BOOK: Stay with Me
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“You did real good,” he says, taking away his hand.
I won’t let him go. I squeeze his hand. Why won’t he look at me? I can see it in his neck, his pulse, as fast as mine. I want to bite the beautiful vampire’s neck.
He slips his hand from mine. “We better get her down to the street,” he says. “She’s been holding it in all night.”
 
They walk me home, Mack and Boo. When he hands me the leash, the dog pulls ahead of me. “Pull back hard on the lead,” Mack says.
“She’ll bite me.”
He takes the leash and swings the dog behind me. She stays there all the way to my house.
“You want her?” he says.
“Uh,
no
.”
“She likes you a ton. She’ll cuddle you all night.”
“I can’t.”
“Your moms?”
“My mother loves dogs.”
“I figured.”
“Why?”
“She’s the type.”
“And what type am I?”
He looks away. “I’ll be holding her for you. Give her to you trained perfect too.”
I scan Palazzo Vaccuccia. The windows are dark. I step so I’m facing him and a half step closer. “We could crank the air conditioner, and you, me, and Miss Boo can watch
Polar Express
with the director’s commentary. My mother made peppermint cornbread. It tastes gross, but on the upside it’s filling and not completely stale, baked fresh four days ago.”
“In all that heat?”
“I know.”
He scratches the back of his head as he checks the sky.
“Satellites?” I say.
“None up there tonight. None I can see.”
“Come on in with me. Just for a little bit. For like a Pepsi or something.”
“I’m a Sprite man.” He strands me there, not even a walk the girl to her door.
It’s definite now: I am the fattest, ugliest girl in the city.
He gets a few steps away when he stops. “I wanted to give you something.” He digs his hand into his pocket, and for a second I’m seeing him pull that knife, the one he used to cut the kid who rolled him down the stairs. He takes his hand out of his pocket, and it’s empty. “Wanted to, to give you a little bit of advice.”
“Ad
vice
. Okay?”
“When you walk a dog, if you choke up on the leash a little, you have more control over her.”
“I see.”
“You did real great though, Céce. With Boo, I mean. You don’t know it, but you’re a dog person.” He goes with his dog. She watches and studies and worships him.
 
Four o’clock in the morning. I’m doing a droolly face plant in my notebook when a crash downstairs wakes me up. My stupid practice essay is sticking to my face, some crap I wrote about wanting to be in politics, because I thought it would make me seem community-minded.
Anthony is down there before I am. Ma slumps against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. The leave-your-crap-here table is on its side. Grumpy’s dusty glass figurines are all over the floor.
“Ma, did you fall coming up or going down?” Ant says.
“Uhhh. Pp.”
Plas
tered. Her nose is bleeding, a splinter of glass in the bridge.
Ant pulls it out. “Cheech, you gotta watch her while I’m gone.”
I want to rip off my skin and crawl through salt. I’m screaming, “Why, Ant? Why’re you going over there?” Then I start in on my mother when Ant calms me down with a gentle hand to my shoulder.
“Hey, kid?” he says, his voice soft, easy. “Breathe. It’s gonna be okay. Cheech, look here. I swear. Let’s get her upstairs.”
We get her into bed. The overhead fluorescent is on its way out. “Are the lights flickering, or am I losing it?” she says.
“Both,” I say.
“Where’s Anthony?”
“Getting towels and ice.”
“
Towels
and
ice
?”
“For your nose, Ma. You’re bleeding all over yourself.”
“I can’t even feel it.”
“Fantastic.”
“Céce Vaccuccia?”
“What?”
“I love you like a crazy person.”
“You
are
a crazy person, Carmella.”
Anthony comes back with the ice. Ma won’t let go of his hand. “Anthony, don’t go, honey. Please, babe. Stay.”
THE TENTH DAY . . .
 
(Sunday, June 21, morning)
 
MACK:
 
Sun comes up hazy between the condo towers they’re building past the reservoir there. I guess I slept some last night. I’m studying the
G
-turned-
C
stickpin. Boo whines to pee. I take her down to the street, and we walk the reservoir and then pick up the rest of the dogs. The whole morning I can’t think of anything except that I’m the biggest idiot in the city for not holding on to that girl’s hand.
When we get back, I set down a pot of cool water. While Boo’s drinking I go to the other side of the roof. “Boo, come.”
She looks up, gets back to her water.
“Boo, come.” This time I show her inside my hand, peanut butter wiped on it.
She bolts across the roof to lick my palm clean. I try it again and again, then without peanut butter, and still she comes to me every time, even if it’s just for a scratch under her jaw. Now is the hard one: “Wait.”
Nope, dog won’t stop following me, her peanut butter man.
“Wait.” I say it strict and deep as I walk away from her, but she keeps following me. She’s too tired for training after all our walking. I pen her and rest with her. By mid-afternoon I can’t stand it anymore, dreaming of Céce but not seeing her.
 
I’m not on the schedule tonight, but I show up at Vic’s Too just at the time Céce is getting off brunch shift. I wait out front, by the mailbox.
Her mom comes out first. Her hair is dyed bright pink. She has a Band-Aid on her nose, but she’s smiling her pretty gold teeth. Her eyes are pink too, means she danced hard with the bottle last night. I want to help her, but my experience is adults get mad when kids try to help them. She musses my hair. “Couldn’t stay away even a day.”
I can’t tell if she’s talking about Vic’s Too or Céce, and either way I’m too sick with the crush to pretend I’m not interested in her daughter. She knows. She winked at me when she caught me staring at Céce last night.
Céce comes out kind of mopey.
“I gotta go buy limes,” her mom says.
“For your cornbread, ma’am?”
“For tonight’s bar fruit. Lime cornbread, though. You’re a genius.” Mrs. V. pinches my cheek and heads off for the market.
“Hey,” I say.
“You’re not on the schedule tonight,” Céce says.
“Happened to your mom’s nose?”
“Ask me about her hair instead.”
“Okay?”
“When she gets depressed, say like when her only son is leaving in a week to go get himself killed, she dyes it a bright color. Last time it was orange.”
“What triggered that?”
“When my grandfather died. She went to the funeral with her hair blow-dried to look like a flame. She wanted me to do it too.”
“You got the prettiest hair, though.”
She rolls her eyes, hand on a cocked hip. “What do you want from me?”
“I just want to be with you. You want to go for a walk? Hit the park maybe. There’s a couple of sweet hiking trails. I was gonna bring Boo, but it’s too hot. You like the country?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“You have me up on that roof last night, and it’s like, I don’t know.”
“I know.”
“You know what I mean?” she says.
“I know. I don’t know. I’m an idiot.”
“I mean, it’s like if you want to be friends, that’s okay, but I just have to know which way you want to go.”
“No, I definitely don’t want to be friends. I mean I do too. Hell, look, I got something for you.”
“More dog-training advice for the dog I don’t have. Can’t wait. Lay it on me.”
I pull the stickpin from my pocket. It’s kind of crusty with sweated-up dog biscuit crumbs. There’s this dot of chipped glue where one of the diamonds fell off. Damn.
She takes it gentle from my hand and stares at it. Now that she’s holding it, I see it’s way not good enough for her. For the prettiest girl you ever seen, you need to do better than a junky piece of plastic that like a kid in fourth grade would give to a crush. And on top of that you can tell it isn’t a real
C
to begin with. She shakes her head.
Knew
I should’ve gave her the phone case instead. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m just the lamest.”
“It’s so, so beautiful.” She pins it to her shirt, and she’s misty in those dark brown eyes. She grips my hand. I let her keep it. We thread fingers tight all the way to the park. “I’m afraid to ask you,” she says. “That guy in the alley.”
“Which guy?”
“The one you’re flipping tens to.”
“He told you?”
“I saw you from the window.”
“Spy, huh?”
“Mad?”
“Never be mad at you.”
“Just so you know,” she says. “I trend toward intensely emotional.”
“I like that about you. That emotional stuff.”
“I should be on meds,” she says.
“You are a med.”
“I’m a
med
?” she says.
“You’re like a happy drug to me. You’re kind of like perfect.”
“What?”
“I went on a ride once at one of those fun parks. It’s sort of a coaster. I forget the name of it, but it kind of makes you want to puke. It’s real cool. The freefall thing. That’s what it’s like with you.”
“The puke-inducing freefall?”
“I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”
“Okay, so I’m looking at you right now, right?”
My eyes flick to hers, then away. “Looks that way.”
“I feel myself leaning in,” she says.
“You are. You have a cherry gum smell on you. That’s like my second-favorite flavor.”
“How I’m holding off from ramming my tongue down your throat, I have no idea,” she says.
I have no answer to that. I’m pretty sure I’m about to drop backwards and smack my head on the trail rock, and then she’s going to be ankle deep in dumb brains.
“But first I have to know about this guy you meet behind Vic’s every day, in the alley. What’s his name, your friend? You don’t know, do you? Yet you give him money.”
“He needs it.”
“But you need it too.”
“I got, I have enough to spare somebody a little.”
“But why you?” she says.
“Somebody has to lend him a hand, I guess.”
“You’re not lying to me, right? I can’t tell because you won’t look me in the eye.”
Still can’t look her in the eye. Wouldn’t be able to say the stuff I’m saying. “Never lie to you. Promise and swear.”
“I’m praying you’re for real.” She says it more to herself than to me. She grips my jaw and turns my head so I have to look at her. “Mack Morse?”
“How’d you find out my last name? Tony told you, right?”
“I saw it on your time card,” she says.
“You really are spying on me.”
“You’re a curiosity.” She kisses me and leans back to look at me. I try to work up the courage to kiss her back, because who knows if this will happen again, her getting all mental like this. A breeze starts up the trail and dips and comes back stronger and stays. I’m trembly, and I look her in the eye as I lean in to kiss her, till my eyes cross. We smack mouths a little too hard. “Damn, sorry. Did I chip your tooth? No, you’re good.”
“You too.” She sucks my bottom lip. I feel her breathing on me, from her nose, on my mouth. Sounds gross but it isn’t. It’s warm. She breathes fast and light like when a pigeon lands on the bench top real close to you and they look at you with a cocked head like you’re a freak and you can see a purple rainbow on their wings.
We’re standing there, hugging, our hearts punching each other. “You want to go sit under that tree, in the shade?” she says.
This is so perfect right now. Right here. I can’t move. I can’t open my eyes. Ninety-odd degrees and my teeth are chattering. “Let’s just stay like this,” I say, and she’s my world, and I’m her satellite coasting through the stars.
THE SIXTEENTH DAY . . .

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