Like A Charm

'I still think you and Maya look alike,' he said. 'If I didn't know better, I'd say you were long-lost sisters.'

'Maybe we are,' I said, trying to keep my tone light. 'Was her father the mailman?'

'See, that's the funny thing. Maya doesn't know her real dad. I think it was some scandal. Luckily, her mom met this great guy and remarried while Maya was still really young. But no one ever talks about it. I've known her since junior high.'

'Are you her boyfriend?'

'More of a friend,' he said swiftly, as if sensing an opportunity. But I'm not sure the opportunity was there, not when I asked. Two hours later, I was letting him screw me in his dorm room. His roommate came in not long after we finished, while I was putting on my socks, and said, 'Hey, Maya.'

'Hey,' I said, my voice sweet and tinkly, not at all my own, and Clay didn't bother to correct his roommate's notion of what happened. And if I had been trying to make trouble, wouldn't I have made sure the roommate, ugly boy, knew I wasn't Maya?

It wasn't a big deal, by the way. My generation, whatever our problems, we're level-headed about sex. It feels good, and dorm life provides a lot of opportunities. I've been with guys and I've been with girls, and it's more about warmth than anything else, like puppies in a pet shop window, piled together in a heap. Plus, N.Q.U. is in this boring Rust Belt city where there isn't a lot to do. (Are you getting it yet? First choice of pre-meds, the Great Glass Library, big on lacrosse, Rust Belt city, a college with a two-word name? Look, I'd name it outright, but they have some scary lawyers, men who are very keen that the school's name not be connected with me in any form.) Anyway, it wasn't a big deal, sleeping with Maya's maybe, maybe-not boyfriend. It wasn't some Bette Davis movie where she plays twins, or even that stupid flick where the girl puts the spike heel through the guy's eye after a little mistaken identity action. Sex at N.Q.U. was about as meaningful as going out for a latte with somebody, only it didn't cost $3. Condoms were free, thanks to the student health clinic.

But sex with Clay was one degree of separation from Maya, and it made me feel as if I had, I don't know, permission to remove that one degree, to talk to Maya one-on-one, figure out if I was right about what I suspected. We didn't have any classes together, her being a year ahead and a dilettante art history major, but it was a small enough campus to cross someone's path, if you really put your mind to it.

I put my mind to it.

'Hey,' I said, coming across her as she left a rehearsal one night. It was early spring now, just a month after we first met, warmer but by no means balmy. Still, all Maya wore was a pair of sweats over her skimpy leotard. I've got a nice body, too, a body very much like Maya's - long legged, small-boned - but I don't walk around in my track shorts, showing everyone my ass.

'Yeah?' she asked, not looking up. She was bent over her wrist, fastening the charm bracelet. I guess she couldn't wear it when she danced, loud as it was.

'We met at Long John's that one time? Remember? Those crazy guys thought we looked alike.'

'Oh, sure.' Sizing me up now, still trying to decide if the comparison was an insult.

'I like your bracelet,' I said, then hated myself for sounding as if I were sucking up. 'I mean, they're very fashionable right now, aren't they? Charm bracelets.'

'Are they? This was a gift from my father, so I wear it all the time. It's an odd story – he found it in a cab.'

'Was he the driver?'

'No.' She laughed as if the idea of a cab-driving father were something quaint. But my dad had driven a cab once upon a time, although I had never heard of him doing it in New York. Then again, my dad's life had a lot of gaps, even the parts I knew about were filled with gaps. 'He just found it in the back seat. Normally, he would have handed it over to the driver, but the guy looked kind of shady. So my dad called the cab company and told them what he had found, and they said they would turn it over to him if no one claimed it. No one ever did, so he kept it, and gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday.'

It sounded like the sort of story my dad would tell, except it had a happy ending. I put a deposit down on the most beautiful bike, baby, but the guy sold it from under my nose. I went to the toy store, baby, but they didn't have the doll you wanted. I meant to have something for your birthday, honey, but I got held up at work and all the stores were closed. Until I was ten, I believed it all. That was when I found out about the two things that kept us so broke - Daddy's poker habit and Daddy's other family.

'I'm going for coffee. You want to come?' Again, I could have kicked myself for sounding so needy. But Maya said yes. I don't know why. Maybe she wanted a cup of coffee. Maybe she liked me, in spite of herself. Maybe she wanted to know more about this strange girl with her face. We went to a place just off campus, Grounds for Life. That was the year when all the coffee places around Not Quite U. had grounds in the name. Grounds for Life, Urban Grounds, Common Grounds. Only the last one made sense to me.

'Hey, maybe some day someone will open up a Grounds Zero,' I said as we fixed our coffees, just to be saying something. I noticed we took our coffees the same, with skim and two Equals.

Maya wrinkled her nose. All my life, I had been seeing that phrase in books, but I didn't really get it until that moment. She looked like a cat, a cat that had smelled something bad. I wondered if I would look like that if I made the same face.

'I'm sorry, my dad is a stockbroker, we knew like a dozen people who were killed that day.'

'Your stepdad, right?'

She didn't like that word. She played with the clasp on her bracelet, easing it on and off her wrist, just as she had that first night in Long John's. 'Who told you that?'

I shrugged, determined not to mention Clay. See, I didn't have any intention of hurting her. If I wanted to blow up her life, I could have done it right there, introduced Clay into the mix and let her draw her own conclusions. 'I don't know. I probably just confused you with someone else. You know how it is on this campus, you hear bits and pieces of people's lives, all out of context. It gets jumbled up.'

'Well, he is my stepdad, technically. But I think of him as my father. I never knew my biological father.' She hit that word hard, as if it were something distasteful. 'He ran out on the family when I was less than a year old.'

'You never knew him?'

'I don't want to know him. Creep.'

'Still, he paid child support, right?'

'I'm sure I don't know. It couldn't have been much, he was a real loser. It was my mother's lucky day when he left. She met my dad, Frank, six months later and they were married before I was three years old. I grew up on Park Avenue.'

The last detail bugged me. Why would she tell me that she grew up on Park Avenue if she didn't know it would get under my skin. We had moved nine or ten times, but not one of our former addresses was Park Avenue. I had lived on streets with names like Meushaw and Hinton, places as ugly as they sounded, in stripped-down apartments that were still more than we could afford. We usually left owing a month or two of rent, although once my dad played the hand out too far and they put our stuff on the street. Whatever happened, the excuse for everything we didn't have was that my father had another family before he met my mom and his ex-wife took him for every penny he had, even though she didn't need it. My mom tried to make it sound more proper than it was, but I did the math and I figured out that the last child of his first marriage and the first child of his second marriage – me, me, me - had been born within a few months of each other. Four to be exact. My birthday was October, which meant I was always the youngest in my class.