FALL 2010

NOVEL EXCERPTS

Chapter Four: The Body Electric by Corie Rosen

Bianca’s party, all brightly colored dresses and enormous arching doorways, swirled through the halls of a dusty old mansion in the Hancock Park section of the city. Guests in their party clothes churned like watercolor paint through the ground floor of the house, which I learned, was one of the most valuable homes in the city and belonged not to Bianca, but to her friend Lexi’s mother, a former actress who, more than forty years ago, had changed her name from Sarah Gruel to Olivia Bryne-Fisher and gone on to star in mostly B-type movies. She had married two or three formidable directors before her last husband finally left her (in a moment of awful truth and terrible cliché) for a much younger woman. Now, in her late sixties, she had changed her name back to Gruel and moved to the Turks and Caicos Islands where she lived with a scuba diving instructor, the heir to a tomato farming fortune, more than twenty years her junior.

Neil told me all this as we shuffled through the crowded hallways, lifting flutes of champagne from the trays that appeared, as if by magic, carried by men in tuxedo-style uniforms. Outside, people floated around the concrete edges of an infinity pool, their smooth, estival bodies radiating summer in the form of evenly browned tans and the immaculate candent of their bleached, bone-white teeth. The edge of the pool vanished at the end of the yard, dematerializing somewhere between the spot where I stood and the cold sweep of the dark valley below. Beyond the valley, the undulating city, rows and rows of lights on lights, sparkled in the darkness. Somewhere, past the horizon, I knew that the little glittering spots yielded to the coast, to the far line of ocean and deep black water beyond.

Flanked on either side by Brett and Neil, I had a momentary sensation of safety, a feeling that they stood as gates to my body, protectors of my very soul.

Brett spoke in metered lilt and his slow gait pulled us through the yard. We passed groups of women who smiled in recognition and Brett bowed his head a little, like Japanese businessmen did on TV. I had only imagined scenes like this, had only seen people who looked like these people in magazine and in movies and my head swam with the immediacy of it all, the well-dressed guests in their beautiful clothes, the unimaginable expanse of yard with its manicured topiary and its gleaming, electric blue pool. In spite of the parti-colored crowd, Brett maintained a quietude and tranquility that I found calming; he seemed unaffected by the noise and crowding, the bold rush of energy that filled a space occupied by so many people. I found myself calmed by Brett’s easiness and fascinated by the fluorescence of the scene around me so that, before I realized it, I had momentarily forgotten what we were doing there, in the yard with its soft dark expanse of furry grass and subtle shadowed spaces, its jasmine laced corners in which men and women hung near each other, smoking cigarettes and laughing at private jokes.

“Come on,” Brett said. He smiled and, I am sure, saw the fascination written across my face, the way my head bent slightly downward in marveling obeisance. “You are so quiet.” Then, to Neil, he said, “Did you know Taylor was a very quiet person?”

Neil shook his head. “It’s not such a bad thing to be quiet.”

“I can get pretty loud. Just wait.” I was aware that this claim of obstreperousness was itself a kind of outsize lie, though not as large or unsympathetic as the one in which Brett has caught me earlier.

“Really?”said Neil.

“Sure.” I shrugged. “Let’s do something clamorous.”

“Alright,” Brett said. “Alright. Let’s go and find your mentor, the fantastic Bianca.”

We plunged back into the variegated brightness of the party. Prior to that night, I had entertained (the entirely reasonable) belief that one can usually expect to find people for whom she is looking in living rooms, in seats behind game tables, in bedroom chairs and dining rooms. I learned right away that this was not the case with Bianca. Finding her required the kind of thorough search that one would use to locate a lost dog or badly treed cat. She could, Neil said, have gone off to just about anywhere.

“Have you seen Bianca?” Neil asked the groups of people who lingered in the hallway as we wandered by. Many of them greeted Neil, but none knew Bianca’s whereabouts.

“Try outside,” a woman in a short red dress suggested. Then she leaned into me and drunkenly whispered, “I’m wearing Gautier.” The dress fit her well enough, but looked me like an ordinary red dress with a layer of plastic taped over it. “What do you think?” she said. Neil thanked her and waved goodbye, saving me from having to opine on her outfit, and as we walked through the hallway toward the house’s grand foyer, it occurred to me that I recognized the woman from a program on television, though through my mild champagne fog, I had a hard time specifying on which show I had seen her.

We spilled out of the front door and into the inky lightlessness of the night street. When we came to the end of the dark block I saw a petite figure, illuminated by the halo of gold cast off by a black lamppost, body silhouetted in the curling yellow light. The figure’s head, arched to the sky, was turned away from us and I could see a mess of marvelous blonde hair, like gold, that framed a face angled away from us, toward the stars. For a moment, I thought she was alone, staring up at the night sky, then I noticed four other people, further up the street, feet shed of shoes, dashing around the block.

“We’re having a footrace,” the tiny blonde woman cried out as we approached. “Stand back,” she said. “It’s almost my turn.”

A tall man in a pair of slim fitting slacks and a turban rounded the bend in the smooth paved road and handed off a small stuffed bear with tufted gray fur and ominous, beady eyes. This, apparently, was what they were using in place of a relay baton. The little blonde took and sped off into the darkened distance, her laughter sounding with each quick and silent footfall.

“Abinash,” Neil said and embraced the man, whose handsome features showed a light sweat and a clear skinned, ruddy health. Neil hugged him in a way that made me wonder whether the two had been lovers and I reminded myself that it didn’t matter, that Neil, whatever his intentions toward me, was a person I hardly knew.

“Brett and Neil.” Abinash said, “Hello, hello. As you see, we are having a little race.”

Neil nodded in my direction and introduced me as a new student and Abinash held my hand and squeezed it momentarily before turning back toward the race.

“I’m relaying back from the other side,” he said by way of explanation before he jaunted off into the undefined darkness.

Bianca returned, out of breath, holding hands with a much taller dark haired girl, laughing as the two tripped up onto the curb together. Bianca hung her little bug-like body down, resting her hands on her knees and grinning up at us. Evidence of her exertion rose red in her cheeks and I noticed that she wore, not a dress as I had thought when I had seen her before, but a one piece outfit consisting of a pair of shorts and an attached top, the kind of thing typically worn by a child. She stood with a self-conscious shudder and held out her hand, full of confidence and apology. She wore patterned tights under her deep blue shorts and a mischievous half-smile that turned up her mouth and settled playfully into the edges of her eyes. I knew instantly that she was the sort of person who always got exactly what she wanted.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have introduced myself before, but the race, you know. We wanted to win.”

I nodded my concurrence, signaling that I understood the importance of winning the race, though I had not run and would, I knew, have performed badly if I had.

“This is Emily, my friend” she said, gesturing to the tall girl next to her.

I introduced myself and Bianca apologized again, explaining that she loved to race, loved anything that required her to compete, and that Abinash had suggested a relay, so they had ventured away from the party in the name of sport.

“Not a very good showing of manners, for a mentor,” Brett said, teasingly.

“Give her a break,” the girl called Emily said. “She’s had a difficult day.” She turned to me. “You’re her mentee?” she said. “What’s that?”

“It’s just a program,” I said. “For transfer students.” I said this last part wishing that Brett hadn’t told her, wishing that I could have simply stood quietly through that party, not having needed to say anything at all.

“Oh,” Bianca said. She smiled. “I had no idea. I’m sorry about all the relay business. Neil must have told you about what happened.” She frowned and bit her lip. In the golden cast of the overhead light I could see that her previous laughter had been a mask, a kind of cover, for some deep and immediate pain that she felt. She sighed. “I’m trying to keep my spirits high.”

“You are?” I said, dumbly, not sure where she was leading me. I looked to Neil whose face, shrouded in darkness, gave nothing away.

“Yes,” Bianca said. “Didn’t you know? Neil and I broke up today.”

“Yes,” Neil said quickly. “But it’s really for the best.”

Bianca nodded. “We are going to stay friends. So nobody has anything to worry about. And anyway, you must think we’re out of our minds with silliness over our relay race.” She tugged down the bottom of her shorts and in the next moment, linked her arm in mine. I tried to turn my head so that I could see Neil’s face over my shoulder and gauge his reaction. Bianca, when she had spoken about him, had seemed languid but resigned, and I sensed a hint of something deeper, some underlying rational cause for dissolution, as is often true of the ends of long relationships. Her reassurance that everything would be okay, that she and Neil would remain friends, had seemed to calm the others and I wondered if the group was a little bit dependent on them, if theirs was the kind of relationship that can anchor an entire world, causing friends and lovers to revolve around them like the planets and the stars. Standing so close to Bianca, I found that she gave off an unusual vanilla scent, a mixture of sweat and perfume and hair supplies and I found that familiar desire rising in my chest; the desire not to both be close to and to inhabit another person, to shed the worst qualities of myself until I was obscured by the other person’s gilded presence.

“You will get back together,” Emily said and turned to me. “You know,” she nodded, as if reminding me of a secret that I already knew, “they always get back together.”

 “Come on,” Bianca said, as though sensing my desire to escape the awkward Emily and her public personal confidences, “let’s go up to the house and talk. Why didn’t you say you were my mentee before?” She practically skipped in her bare feet as she maneuvered us toward the capacious double doors that I knew let on to the party. “I have,” she said, “been so looking forward to meeting you.”

Just before we reentered the party’s garish stratosphere, Bianca asked Neil how we had gotten there, and whether we had room in our car for one more person if she needed a way to get home at the end of the night. Neil, referencing his burnished sports car, promised Bianca that we could accommodate her, if she wanted us to.

“Bianca loves roadsters,” Neil explained. The way he said her name, the sounds emerged smooth and even, like polished stones. I wondered whether he would ever say my name like that and whether the hard sounds of my masculine sobriquet could ever be as musical as the soft notes of Bianca’s. I thought their exchange strange, unforced and facile, not the difficult and labored interaction I would have expected between two recently parted lovers. Bianca pulled me away from Neil and Brett and together we shimmied through a crowded hallway, past the kitchen, crowded with faces belonging to beautiful people of varied heritage, none of whose names I knew.  Someone thrust a full drink into my hand and, for lack of any alternative I took it, holding it carefully while the ice cubes clinked against the glass.

“Follow me,” Bianca said, taking my hand. “I’m going to show you the absolute best thing.”
Balancing the cocktail in my hand, whose bouquet recommended it as one part juice and many parts liquor, I walked alongside Bianca until we reached an empty, darkened staircase at the back of the house. It was a secondary staircase, the kind which, many years ago, might have been used for servants, allowing them to move, unheard and unseen, through the mansion’s halls, in and out of bedrooms where a carefully made bed or a glowing fireplace would be the only mark of their service.

The staircase creaked under our footsteps, protesting our footfalls, and when we got upstairs, I saw that the great house was cold and dank, full of dust and unused rooms. Despite the bright lights and loud laughter of the party below, the upper floor seemed haunted, clouded over with time and the fading fingers of heavy light.  Bianca let us into a square study whose ornate wall frames cradled bucolic country scenes, their painted figures smiling in miniature from the tops of their sheep-dotted hills. Over the windows, plush curtains fell in great avalanches of velvet and on the bookshelves, souvenirs gleamed alongside a collection of idiosyncratic odds and ends, wigs and plaster noses and little figurines, here a photograph, there a baseball cap, here a framed printed t-shirt. It was, I gathered, Lexi’s mother’s study — the items in the cabinet residue of a life spent in the movies.
Bianca said nothing, and produced a little golden key from her shorts pocket. She knelt down and stuck it into a similarly golden lock on the face of one of the lower cabinet doors.

“This key sticks,” she said, kneeing down and biting her lip before moving into a cross-legged position. “There.”

I heard a light click and the cabinet door gave, falling open into Bianca’s bird-like hand. From the interior shelf, she withdrew a small golden statue, its little arched body firm atop a round marble base. I gasped.

“Is that?”

“It really is,” she said. Her eyes, wet and shining, wore the same expression of pure delight that molded the rest of her face. “Isn’t it amazing?” I nodded.

“You can hold it if you want.”

I scrooched down onto the floor next to her and leaned back against the wooden cabinet. She held the Oscar out to me and I took it, admiring its tawny curves, feeling its weight press into my palm, heavier than I had imagined.

“They say every Oscar has a ghost.” Bianca’s face, round and full, shone like that of a happy child. She had a wiry, manic frame, an ebullient sort of unstoppable energy, and, I gathered, an enthusiasm for everything she encountered that was both genuine and facile in its expression. That cozy, straightforward attitude seemed to define Bianca and that quality, so opposite my own somber, withdrawn nature, drew me in to her.

“Ghosts,” I said, “Like in the theater.” I knew it was well established that every theater had at least one ghost. My mother had acted in local productions before I was born and when I started up in theater, she had told me a warning story, of an old boyfriend. He had had been cast in a local production of Our Town, playing one of the leads, the role of the narrator. A handsome, arrogant man, he had never believed in ghosts, and so he had flaunted the name of the Scottish play whenever he could, including the word “Macbeth” in casual conversation. He had even said the word on opening night. The other actors in the cast begged him to do an anti-curse ritual. In his conceit, he had refused. Later that night, there was a lighting gaffe and a beam strung with heavy lights fell down and hit the actor, injuring him and bringing him close to death. The whole audience had to be evacuated and the paramedics called. My mother, who was waiting in the wings at the time, was the only cast member brave enough to try to revive him. Ghosts, she had told me, whether you believed that they existed or not, were nothing to be trifled with. I imagined that, if Oscar ghosts were anything like theater ghosts, we would have to be careful not to anger this one, not to show it haughtiness or gall, anything that might encourage it to bring its ire down on us.

Bianca leaned in and touched the statue as I held its firm body in my hand. “I told you,” she said. “I told you it was the absolute best thing in the house.”

“How did you get the key?” I said, remembering the gold flecked piece of metal that Bianca had taken out of her shorts pocket. We sat across from each other, cross legged, on the study floor, and I set the weight of the Oscar down so that the statue stood between us, a dwarfish beacon of golden accomplishment, standing directly between us.

“I have a whole set,” Bianca said. “From Lexi’s mother. She lives in the tropics, you know.”

“You’ll like Lexi,” Bianca went on, “when you meet her. We’ll take you to meet her.” She bit her lip in that same nervous gesture I had noticed outside. “She isn’t here tonight.”

It struck me as odd that Bianca would throw a party in Lexi’s mother’s house and that Lexi wouldn’t be there, but then, many things about the intangibles of their little group settled into my brain in way that felt odd, like a half-burnt light bulb sputtering and buzzing in a darkened room. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it. There was something strange about them, about the way spoke about one another, the intimacy they seemed to share, the way that they seemed to function as a kind of closed universe, a place unto themselves.

Bianca sat back and ran her little index finger over the base of the Oscar. She was beautiful in way that reminded me of the forties, with that wonderful hair and wide set eyes that made me think of Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. She also had an almost imperceptible, aching air of sadness, like Marilyn in the early, bit-part days. Like a memory of melancholy it hung around her in an invisible fog and, every now and then, when her ebullience waned, I thought I sensed that she recognized it. That delicate, terrible sadness — that is what I remember most about her. I’m not sure if I saw it in her that night, or if, in the clarity that memory sometimes imparts, I can only see it now, looking back.

“Bianca, Taylor?” Neil’s voice, already familiar, floated around the corner and into the room.
“In here,” Bianca said. Her bell of a voice tinkled as she moved to her feet, brushing away the dust and detritus that lay like an invisible foam on top of the carpeted floor and threatened to cling the cuffs of her shorts. Neil’s head appeared around the doorframe as though disembodied for a moment, then his slim shoulders and fine hips, swaying gently like a girl’s, followed, causing his entire form to manifest in the doorway.

“Can I talk to you?” he said. I knew without pause that he meant Bianca, and I gathered myself and stood as quickly as I could. I detected a hint of invective in his voice and, not sure whether it was real or imagined, decided that it didn’t matter, and that his appearance was my cue to leave. I excused myself with characteristic polite awkwardness and scooted out the door, practically passing under Neil’s armpit as I did, taking in a full breath of his smell, exertion and coffee and now liquor too.

In the backyard, the pool, which had started the evening as an ocean of gentle blue, stood half filled with swimmers, eight or so of them, some of whom had shed their clothes and, not having swimsuits, had leapt in wearing only their underwear. One man had removed even his shorts and swam naked, chasing a girl in a see-through brazier whose pink nipples bounced as she shrieked in childish delight. I walked to the far of edge of the pool, the infinity edge, and examined the way the water created the illusion that the pool ran right off of the hillside and that a person swimming carelessly could tumble over the hill, into the slit of the valley below. When I turned back toward the party, Brett was standing nearby and I noticed he had pressed one of his long, translucent fingers to the side of his face, as if to stop a nosebleed.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He nodded. “Cocaine?” he said.

“You are offering?”

“Yes.” He laughed. “Do you want any?”

I shook my head.

“Have you never seen anyone do that before?”

“No,” I said. “Never.”

Brett looped his long arm around my shoulder. “Come on then, you should try it. Life is meant to be tasted.”

His arm was lean and pale, and beneath his flop of hair his green eyes seemed to almost glow in the thinning dark. He pulled me toward the house and I stepped back, pulling him with me, hesitating.

In part to assuage my nervousness, and in part to make sure my mouth and hands were unquestionably occupied, I pulled my soft pack of Pall Malls from my purse, took a cigarette out and lit it.

“Ah,” Brett said. “An act of resistance.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t have to try it if you don’t want to,” he said. You shouldn’t do anything that makes you uncomfortable.”

“Well,” I said, trying to buy myself some time. “How do you know what makes me uncomfortable?”

“The pull of your shoulders, the way you hang back. You’re scared.”

I puffed on my cigarette. “Maybe a little.”

“That’s okay.” He leaned his face in close to mine and I could see his alabaster skin, the way it arced and curved over the sculpture of his bones. He felt fragile there, touching me, and I looked at the small bones in his hands, realized that this lanky man, this odd, strange force, was nothing more than a set of linked little bones, ready to crumble and break under the right kind of force.

I shook my head. “I’ve never taken drugs before.” This, unlike my claim about having to meet Bianca earlier, was entirely true. Like most college students, I’d had a string of opportunities to smoke pot, and I had marveled at the sickly sweet smell and relaxed mood the green herb was able to produce for its users. Still. My mother’s illness and her self-described fondness for drugs in her younger days had warned me away from taking anything that didn’t come with the reassuring safety of a doctor’s label, and even when doctors were prescribing, I was wary.

“No thanks,” I said. I looked back toward the pool and noticed that the naked man and the girl were no longer among the swimmers.

“I don’t take drugs. Not if I can help it, anyway.”

“Well.” Brett shook his head. “Do whatever makes you feel comfortable.”

I started to open my mouth to explain. Before I could say anything, Emily, the tall girl I had seen racing with Bianca appeared and slung a well-tanned arm around Brett’s pallid shoulders.

“This is Taylor,” Brett said, by way of introduction. “She was just telling me that she doesn’t want any cocaine.”

Emily laughed. “I’ll let you two discuss that,” she said, and wandered back in the direction of the house.

“Is it really so dire”? I asked when Emily had fallen out of earshot. I thought about the people I had known in the drama department at home, a few regular marijuana smokers, a handful of LSD devotees who swore by their acid revelations, a long-haired meth head.

“I’ve never taken drugs before,” I said. “I don’t see why I should want to start now.”
Brett smiled, a half-arrect smile that suggested he had something he wanted to say but that he had decided not to say it.

He gave me a gentle punch, the kind of tap that big brothers are always giving their siblings in tender scenes on television. When his hand connected with my flesh, I felt a little tingle of electricity. His green eyes, staring at me as though they could penetrate me just by looking, spoke of a certain desire and, for just a moment, I thought that he might try to lean in and kiss me. As if in slow motion, I watched him withdraw his hand from the place where he had touched my arm. With a weak smile he turned and walked back toward the house and I moved off in the opposite direction, sliding off my shoes and letting my bare feet sink down into the soft mat of grass.
Next to me, the pool quaked and roiled with the waves from three nude swimmers playing Marco Polo. For a moment, I wanted to strip off my clothes, fling myself headfirst into the chill blue water, and join them. But then I thought better of it and turned out toward the end of the yard and the city below, its lights like a fabric of jewels, thousands of lighted spots glittering against the petal soft sky.

“Let’s go, buddy,” Neil said, coming out from the house. “Party’s winding down.”

“Where are we going now?”

“Home, Jonesey’s, wherever.” He shrugged.

Out on the street the night was slowly lifting and I could feel the darkness lightening, the promise of only a few more hours of lingering black before the gold brilliance of sunrise.

“Hey,” Neil said, a hint of alarm in his voice. “Hey, hey. Where is the car?”

Just up the block, in the place where Neil had parked, an empty space now stood, filled with nothing but the cool glow of evening lamp light.

“It’s gone,” I said.

“Yeah.” Neil nodded. “Apparently so.”

*

Asking about the car was nearly impossible since, in the time we had spent looking for Brett, more people had arrived. The party was not, as Neil had suggested, winding down. When we returned, the downstairs rooms were crowded with the heat of lean bodies forced too close to one another by the narrow hallways and antique clutter.

“Have you seen Neil’s car?” I shouted to a brunette in the dining room.

“Who’s Neil?” she shouted back.

I shrugged, shook my head, and moved off slowly, leaving a string of “excuse me’s” in my polite wake.

Brett suggested we seek out Bianca and ask her whether she knew anything about the car. I shimmied my way through a crowded hallway and into the kitchen, past a row of faces belonging to people I didn’t know. The kitchen was as congested and loud as the rest of the party and to calm my fraying nerves, I fixed myself a drink with a bottle of chilled vodka and some ice that I found in the freezer. Holding my cocktail carefully, I slid back into the tightly packed hallway, inched my way through the downstairs rooms, and, realizing that I didn’t know whom to ask or where to look for either Bianca or the missing car, I made my way out to the entry walk where, I hoped, I would find some quiet, some space to breathe.

The front yard stood deserted with the exception of two couples who sat on the groomed lawn, smoking cigarettes and laughing. Three of the four people sat cross legged. The fourth, a girl in a short dress, kneeled in the grass, her legs folded tightly beneath her. They looked up when I shut the front door behind me, and the kneeling girl smiled.

If this Bianca could linger alone out under streetlamps, I thought, then so could I. I welcomed the promise of quiet and smiled back at the kneeling girl, moved past the little group and down the flagstone walk, down the gray stone steps, listening to the ice clank in my drink as I moved.
Out in front of the house, I stood in the street and looked up at the halo band of city light that blocked the stars that I knew hung, sparkling, in the muted distance, far overhead. High above, an airplane passed, its red light like a slow-moving star, its phenomenal speed reduced from a distance. My drink felt cold in my hand and I followed the red spark of the plane’s light with my eye, watching it inch, inch, inch across the inky night sky. I had been standing like that only a few moments when I heard the sound of an engine, loud and growling. A small silver car curled around the corner and thrummed into the street, then paused next to me as the driver’s side window slid down. In the silver belly of the car, Bianca was like a skein of golden thread, tightly wound and glistening.

“Want to get in?” she said.

“Isn’t that Neil’s car?”

“That, it turns out, is not the answer to my question.” A smile spread across her face.

“Shouldn’t we tell him that we found it?”

“Just get in already.”

“Come on,” she said. “Don’t you want to have some fun?”

I looked up and noticed that my airplane star had drifted out of sight. I walked to the passenger door, opened it, and slid inside. The leather seat was slick to the touch and it radiated the warmth of my legs back to me, giving off a soft heat.

“Where to, then?” I said. Bianca looked at me and a smile spread again across her face, brightening her delicate features.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

In spite of her offer to let me determine our destination, Bianca already had an idea of where she wanted to go. She sped us forward, toward this predetermined spot. By the time I had admitted that I lacked almost all knowledge of the city, we were already turning out of Hancock Park, onto Beverly Boulevard. Even at that hour, the street was an ocean of slow moving cars. We slid into the traffic with ease, the cars around us gliding forward with smooth assurance. I rolled down my window to let in the late summer night, the air of the gilded city.

“What about Neil? Won’t he be worried about the car? Does he know you have it?”

Bianca laughed. “Neil will be fine, I promise.”

We were out in the night now, the storefront lights of closed up restaurants glowing neon, the colors reflecting off of the hoods of passing cars, images like tessellations, bouncing off the shiny windshields and wax-sealed doors.

“Don’t you think we should call him?” I said, practically screaming over the noise of the air that whipped in through the open windows and howled as it passed over the top of the car. We rounded a corner and entered the faster flow of cars on Olympic Boulevard, a wide southern thoroughfare that, I knew, could carry us across the city, through Santa Monica, to the sand edge of the beach.

“Calm down.” Bianca said.

“You did sort of steal his car.”

“I didn’t steal it,” she paused. “Neil knows me. A lot better than he knows you. I don’t think he’s going to be worried.”

I ignored the silent sting of this comment and wondered if she had meant as the accusation that I felt it was. Her cell phone sat in the center console cup holder and I took it out, scrolling through her missed calls. The phone was a light weight in my hand, neat and square and glowing green with a weird, impersonal light. Missed Call, Neil; Missed Call Neil; Missed Call Neil. The phone glared back up at me, its digital display practically shouting. I ran my finger down the neon screen and wondered if Neil knew that I was sitting in the warm front seat of his car, its wheels spinning fast, its body racing down Olympic, carrying us toward some destination I couldn’t name.