“Who knows,” Lisa said, shrugging at the wall of family portraits. Bill was sorry he’d asked, as he could sense the embarrassment wafting off her. “Ole Bethany’s told me the story about five different ways. She buzzes me off when I ask too much. It’s why I refused to change my last name to Kline when she remarried. So she can’t pretend I’m her nice white girl. Like she never had a premarital yellow cock in her.”
He laughed at this haunted humor and looked back to the smiling pictures of Lisa perched before her stiff white-bread stepfather and chubby, dim-looking stepbrother. Then they went upstairs, and beneath her posters of Trent Reznor, Kurt Cobain, and a shirtless Nelly, simultaneously cast off their virginities.
All this was preamble to the protracted war between him, Lisa, and Bethany. From word one, Mrs. Kline did not like Bill. He enabled Lisa’s rebellion, had her coming home late, had her getting caught with small bits of pot or condoms or bottles of liquor. Lisa informed him of Bethany’s retrograde attempts to enact punishment, to “ground” her so to speak, but Lisa was too smart, too defiant, too fiery to treat like a child. He recalled picking her up, Bethany standing in the foyer with her hands on her hips, a cheek-chewing expression of fury rippling through her facial folds.
“Your mom totally despises me,” he said as she climbed into the car. “We’re never going to change her mind.”
“Nah, Ashcraft, just get your tongue up her vagina. That’s what turned me around on you.” He threw the car into gear, laughing madly.
Weirdly, once Bethany learned that Bill’s mother worked for the local newspaper, she took up writing letters to the editor as her principal hobby, gaining a more or less permanent position on the New Canaan News editorial page, where she expounded on such topics as the immorality of not allowing a moment for prayer in schools, the teaching of intelligent design, the dangerous possibility that teachers were not being screened for past sex offenses, and just generally that there was a holocaust going on in abortion clinics.
His dad would fume every time a letter appeared and wonder why the paper had to keep giving this woman space. Bill always figured his mom lived her entire life in a sub-audible state of misery over having left her native Queens to follow her husband to his dicktoon hometown. She’d interned at the New York Post, and Bill had the feeling that giving up her dream of someday writing at a major paper had been a bitter, softball-sized pill to swallow just so her husband could carry on the dentistry practice started by his own father. Bethany’s letters became a constant source of tension in their marriage. He could tell his dad didn’t like Lisa, didn’t trust her even though she shared none of Bethany’s odious views. On the Ferris wheel at the county fair that summer, Lisa was the one who climbed onto him and nearly sucked his lips off, grinding into his lap while the games dinged and the stadium lights spilled across the country band wailing away onstage. She was the one who’d gone down on him when they climbed up on the roof of the library, and she was the one who suggested they pee on each other, just to give it a shot. Yet she still called herself a Christian, still kept a pointless Bible quote etched into a wooden plaque in her room. William Sr. deeply distrusted this pretense of religiosity, and like Bethany, he seemed certain Bill would end up getting Lisa pregnant.
His mom, the quintessential purveyor of mom-reasonability, chided them both. At the paper, she was always ending up in the middle of these stupid small-town controversies, and she had the disease of seeing a false equivalence in everything, of lending credence to idiots and charlatans. She said of Bethany, “It’s all she’s ever known. People like her grow up in a small town and get the same kind of cruel ideas fed to them their entire lives, and they wrap it up in their worldviews because that’s the context they understand. Her husband left her at a young age, and she had to raise a daughter alone for a long time. That’s a hard thing.”
Bill could never tell which of his parents he was in more of an argument with. How much of his nature could be attributed to spending his formative years arguing with his mother’s on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand Obamaian pragmatic streak? It would strain their relationship enough that they stopped speaking for several years. Similar pointless, circular arguments ensued with his father, but that resulted from Bill’s total disinterest in law school or med school or, God forbid, dental school. All that formal education just made people higher-paid fools or more articulate fools, but fools they remained.
Lisa was no fool. Never had been, never would be. They broke up the week before he left for college. Out at the Brew, parked in the shade of a tree where the moonlight couldn’t reach, they sucked on each other, turned the interior of his Accord into a sauna, and that’s how you broke up in high school. You fucked like a corporeal toast to the heartache of new beginnings.
“I can’t wait to see where we’ll end up,” she said, playing with the hairs on his chest, letting free a few uncharacteristic tears. “If I had to bet, you’ll be the only person in this town to do crazier shit than me.”
“You think?”
“Of course. It’s why I decided to let you love me for a minute.”
A year later, when he heard what Lisa had done, he wrote to her to make sure she was okay. He’d heard rumors—gossip as currency, people all but bartering with it—about a pregnancy, about an abortion, about a blowout fight with Bethany.
In an e-mail, Lisa assured Bill that, no, she wasn’t pregnant. She’d packed a bag, grabbed her passport, emptied her savings account, and bought a one-way ticket overseas. Told her mom not to bother looking for her. At first, Bill loved hearing all this. It impressed him, inspired him. Whenever he found himself lost or in danger abroad, he’d think of how Lisa had been doing scarier shit when she was just an eighteen-year-old kid. Six years after she left, when he found himself working in Southeast Asia, he went in search of her.
I’m in your neck of the woods, he wrote to her via Facebook.
Lisa Han
5/23 3:03 p.m.
No shit!? Where? Why?
Bill Assata Shakur Ashcraft
5/23 5:24 p.m.
Where to begin? Um, I’ve been in Cambodia buying up child prostitutes.
Lisa Han
5/24 9:07 a.m.
Can’t say I’m surprised, but uh, yeah, please tell me that’s a joke?
Bill Assata Shakur Ashcraft
5/24 11:11 a.m.
Ha no joke. But I mean like buying them out. So I was over here working for this NGO that frees girls from the sex trade, gets them back to their families, and sets them up with shit to do so they don’t have to go back to prostituting (and so their families don’t sell them back 
). Get me? We like set them up with seed money and training to start their own markets, selling sandals or beads or fruit or whatnot.
Lisa Han
5/24 2:54 p.m.
Ah goddamnit I always knew you had some deep decency in you, BA. Don’t tell me you’ve turned into an actual catch since high school? 
Bill Assata Shakur Ashcraft