She was.
Hiyam and I ended up in Art Appreciation together. When she asked if I wanted to hang out after school, I laughed in her face, loud and cold, and for a moment she actually looked hurt. Then she smiled and said, “You bitch,” in a way that was both scoffing and admiring.
Every now and then I’d pass Wesley in the halls. He kept his head down, but he was too tall to hide. I looked at him and felt nothing. No hate, no regret. Just dull gray deadness.
Hiyam kept pushing me for larger amounts of coke. I told her no. Gary had prepped me for this: if I ever got caught, I wanted to be charged with possession, not intent to deliver. Both were felonies, but possession for a first-time offender would likely result in probation. Anything more than an 8-ball would look like intent to deliver. Plus he didn’t trust me with that much powdered cash.
“You’re a smart girl, sweetheart,” he said when I met him in a restaurant, “and that’s why I don’t trust you. You’d rip me off and disappear, and you’re clever enough to get away with it.”
He asked what I thought of his product, and I told him I had no idea. I didn’t use. This made his eyebrows go up.
“Very smart girl,” he said.
Now that my two-faced teacher was gone, I could’ve stopped dealing. Hiyam was no threat. But part of me thought: f**k it. I’d never gotten a call back from all those job apps. Wesley, whose family had money, who had the luxury of stalking me with his expensive camera, was the one who got a job. I got fuck-all and a mom who stole my college fund. The universe seemed intent on presenting me with narrow, unsavory options. Maybe it was time I accepted it.
For a horrifying moment, I could understand how my mother made certain choices. Sometimes life just shoveled endless shit in your face until you threw down your spade and said, Fuck it, I’ll find another way.
I sat in my classes, staring at the bleak brown landscape pulverized by snow, decaying from the inside. With Him, winter had been glitter and auroras and feathery snowflakes falling out of the sky. Now it was smashed up and filthy, banal. Rust and rot and endless gray.
Things I didn’t expect to do my senior year:
Become a drug dealer.
Become my mother.
Find and lose the love of my life.
One Saturday I went downstairs and Wesley was sitting in my living room.
“The f**k is this?” I said.
“Babe,” Mom said, “he says he wants to apologize.”
“Maise,” Wesley called.
I was halfway back up to my room. “What,” I said. Not a question. The banister creaked under my hand.
“You have every right to hate me. What I did was wrong, okay? Really, really wrong. I’m sorry. Can I talk to you, please?”
Mom stood watching us both with interest.
“This isn’t a soap opera,” I snapped at her. “Go amuse yourself elsewhere.”
Her eyes narrowed dangerously, but Wesley’s pleading look assuaged her. She wandered into the kitchen.
“So talk,” I said.
“Here?”
“Do you want to come up to my room? Do you want to pet my hair and put your arm around me and tell me it’s all right? Just say whatever the f**k you have to say.”
Wesley grimaced, shrugging uncomfortably in his duffel coat. “Look, I know there’s no excuse, okay? But I want you to know I’m sorry, and I feel like shit.” He lowered his voice. “I thought he was using you. Hurting you. I guess I wanted to see it that way, and I tried to make you see that, too. It was wrong and I’m sorry, Maise.”
I stared at the wallpaper running along the stairwell. In normal families, there’d be pictures here. Mom and Dad. Nan and Pop. Beloved daughter. Our wallpaper just had a yellowish film of cigarette smoke.
“Why were you at the carnival that night?”
“Summer job. I ran the darts booth.”
I laughed. I’d probably looked right at him and not given him a second thought.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, glancing at him. “You always knew it was Evan.”
I still thought of him as Evan. It was his middle name, according to Google.
“I don’t know.” Wesley sighed, cheeks puffing out, hair flopping over his eyes. “Because it was your secret. I wanted you to tell me yourself. I wanted you to trust me with it.”
“You didn’t deserve my trust,” I said.
He looked at the stairs.
“This is all moot anyway. I’ve got to study.”
Wesley wiped a hand across his face.
Oh my god. Was he actually crying?
“You were right,” he said, still facing the stairs, his voice deep and shaky. “You were right when you said you’re my only friend. You’re the only person I care about who’s not family. I don’t expect you to ever trust me again, but I’m sorry. I miss you. Mom misses you. She was so pissed—don’t worry, I didn’t mention Mr. Wilke, but she’s told me how stupid I am a million times.” He sniffled. “I wish I could undo it. I put your private life on display for everyone. I thought I was saving you but I was just being a f**king creep. It’s messed up. I know that. I’m sorry.”
He finally raised his head, but only managed to face the banister, not me. His eyes were glassy, a sheen of wetness on his cheeks.
“It’s not an excuse, but you’re right. I’m younger than you, Maise. Way younger. You’re years and years ahead. And I didn’t mean to hurt you or f**k things up with him. I’m just a f**king idiot kid.”
He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
I swallowed, too. My throat and the back of my eyes felt tight, pinched. “Siobhan didn’t call you stupid,” I said. “I know her. She probably called your actions stupid.”
“Isn’t that what I said, Captain Obvious?” he muttered miserably.
I stared at him. “No,” I said, and started to laugh. “You didn’t, you sorry a**hole.” My laughter died as quickly as it had come. “You didn’t screw it up with me and Evan. You were right about him.”
Wesley finally looked at me.
“He isn’t who I thought he was. And I guess I’m not who I thought I was, either.” I shook my head. “You know who I am?”
“Who?”
“Same as you. A f**king idiot kid.”
Slowly, over weeks, Wesley and I started talking again. Eating lunch together, sometimes walking for miles when the roads were plowed, the fields flat and quilted with snow, our breath trailing mist as we talked about post-graduation plans. Siobhan invited me over for Valentine’s Day dinner and I melted into her arms, struggling not to cry. She didn’t say a word about Evan but I knew she understood everything, and just seeing her, this amazing person I looked up to who’d survived her own affair with a teacher, was enough.
“To the only love that lasts,” she said when we raised our champagne glasses. “The love of family and friends.”
I clinked my glass with theirs, but it rang hollowly.
Hiyam’s audacity knew no limits.
“I’ve got big plans for spring break, O’Malley,” she said as we sat in the back of Art Appreciation, waiting for the bell. “I need you to come through for me.”
She hooked her elbows over the back of my chair, leaning close to my ear.
“Get me a key.”
I burst out laughing. “You’re hilarious.”
“I’m totally f**king serious,” she hissed, scraping a fingernail against my jaw. “You know what kind of cut you’ll get? You and your creepy boyfriend could move to Hollywood.”
She had taken to calling Wesley my creepy boyfriend.
I turned around. “There is no reality, parallel or otherwise, in which I would do this. You’re delusional.”
“I’m disappointed, O’Malley. I thought the chance to blow this shithole would appeal to you.”
“It does. But I don’t believe even you have that kind of money.”
Her face turned sly and vulpine. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
“Right. Your dad’ll just let you take twenty grand out of your trust fund.”
“I’ve been withdrawing small amounts for years. I’ve got thirty K he doesn’t even know about.”
I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. I’m not risking my life for your Scarface fantasies.”
“You should reconsider,” she said, leaning forward, “or I’ll have to reconsider whether this arrangement is working out.”
I stared her dead in the eyes. “He’s gone. I haven’t seen him in months. That threat means nothing to me.”
“I didn’t mean him going to jail,” Hiyam said, smiling. “I meant you.”
“Hiyam’s blackmailing me again,” I said to Wesley as we sat on milk crates up in the water tower. “She’s threatening to narc.”
I’d told him everything that had happened with Evan, including the blackmail and dealing. He listened without judgment. He said it would make an incredible movie. I couldn’t disagree. We spent hours thinking up titles. White Town. Snowglobe City. The Lights Every Night. In a way, this was his penance for stalking me: acknowledging the secret I’d bottled inside for so long. Listening to me crying, laughing, raging, sighing over it. I could finally talk openly with someone who knew me, who knew how much of my life it had consumed. Now that I hadn’t seen Evan in months and had started to forget the feel of his body, the chemical trance it put me in, the thing I missed most was simply hanging out with him. Watching movies together. Walking through St. Louis, pretending to be characters from films. Staying up all night talking in bed. The way we’d be sitting silently in the car or a theater and see something ridiculous and look over at each other, smiling. The way we’d look at each other in class, through the absurdity of the lives we had to live, and sigh, knowing we’d be in each other’s arms that night.
I missed the mundane things most. The precious minutiae I’d taken for granted.
Wesley had asked why I still wore the Claddagh ring if it was over, and I stared at it, not even realizing. I’d taken it off but kept it in my pocket, touching it sometimes, like a talisman.
“How can she narc on you when she’s the buyer?” he said now, shooting a stream of clove smoke at my face.
I chipped at the ice on the driftwood with my shoe. It was so cold my eyelashes felt like a brittle fringe of frost that could crumble away in the wind. “I don’t know, but I need to get out of this. It’s like I’m in the middle of Goodfellas. This is way too serious to be my life, Wesley.”
From up here the world was white on white: white ground, white sky, the clouds shining mutedly and rippling with silver like mother-of-pearl. There was a crystalline tension in the ground waiting to be shattered, all the buried living things raring to burst free and breathe again. That same feeling was in me. I was tired of this chrysalis of ice and frozen tears. I wanted out. I wanted to feel the sun again.
Wesley had taken Computer Animation as his art elective. He didn’t have a camera glued to his eye anymore—now he was always lugging his laptop around, doing kinetic typography: text unfolding and cascading and flipping, word into word, a visual poem. I was pretty sure he’d shifted focus because of me and the stalking. I knew he missed looking at the world through a lens.