“I think we can have a little sleepover,” Pop said, his tone as lecherous as it had been a few weeks before, when he'd been sizing up Zora in the shower. As if this night couldn't be any more nausea-inducing, now I had to imagine my derelict father getting his D wet for the first time in thirty years, or whatever it was.
Meanwhile, Anya was nodding her head like the matter was decided. She stood and stretched elaborately, before holding out a hand to the Pastor, who took it. She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, engulfing me for an instant in a hot cloud of patchouli. I watched Ash bending down to gather the dinner dishes, over her mother's shoulder.
“Happy birthday again, sweetheart!” Anya murmured at her daughter—but she spoke into my ear. It somehow sounded seductive. I was aware of the moisture popping off her lips as she spoke. “We love you! Take good care of your step-brother-to-be.” Ash didn't so much as shrug, she just continued stacking plates. I realized there had been no presents, no cards, no heralding of this eighteenth birthday at all. I wondered then if she really had turned eighteen that night. I wondered if she really had asked her mother not to celebrate it, or if that was just bunk for our benefit.
Anya repeated herself, as she pulled away from me. “Take good care of him, baby.” And I thought I spied a wink.
Chapter Nine
Ash
The walls were too thin. The walls were disastrously thin, in fact. It took about ten seconds (and some of my newly minted woman's intuition) for me to jam my headphones into my ears and blast The Clash, so as to overwhelm any sounds of Anya and the Pastor...going at it. This wasn't exactly a new tactic—Lord knew I'd overheard my mother doing just about everything a person could do, despite even the biggest speakers—but The Clash was working better than most bands. Mr. Dempsey had suggested them to me. He'd brought me a mix CD on the last day of school.
I watched the light flickering under my closed door, indicating that he-who-must-not-be-named was watching TV in the living room. In spite of myself, I wondered what he could be watching. Probably sports. Meathead guys don't throw a lot of cultural curveballs.
Though it had been a relatively short evening, I was shocked by how quickly my tune had changed about Landon. For the past few weeks, I'd been bobbing around on a mysterious Cloud Nine. I'd been kinder to my mother than usual. I'd suffered my bullies with patience. I'd gotten a little distracted in my AP comp class at the community college, but had gleefully taken on extra work to ensure I'd graduate with an A. The day before, I'd received my early enrollment materials from UT, as well as a personal note of congratulations from my advisor. In the note, a one Mrs. Kepling had called my application materials “stunningly precocious” and “self-possessed.” I was looking forward to college, all while living out a daydream fantasy in my head. But in one pizza party, everything now seemed ruined.
I stared up at the Day-Glo stars smattered across my ceiling (left by a previous tenant) and tried to prioritize the problems at hand. So, okay—I'd very nearly got it on with my step-brother. That was maybe a 7 on the 1-10 disaster scale. More pressing was the fact that my crazy ma seems to have fallen head-over-heels for an old, crusty charlatan. As much as I wanted Anya to be happy and cared for after I flew the coop for school, wasn't leaving her in the clutches of Pastor Sterling a poor move on a daughter's part? The guy could barely walk, and the first words out of his mouth to me had been disciplinary. I didn't trust him. Their whole, whirlwind romance seemed...off.
And then there was the fact of the step-brother himself. It had been one thing to see him standing there, looking especially smug and tan in the kitchen doorway, and have to contend with the possibility that he was more of a jock dirt bag than I'd let myself believe on the roof. But the way he'd acted outside the bathroom? Trying to come onto me, and shit? I couldn't believe how quickly it was possible to go from lust to repulsion. I also couldn't believe how warped my own judgment of people could be, especially given all the lunatic step-fathers and druggies my mother had introduced me to. The whole thing was nauseating. As if to augment my fury, Joe Strummer now screeched into my ears about being lost in a supermarket.
The instant I threw my headphones aside in frustration, the overhead lights in my room snapped on. Blinking, I sat up to see jock boy—looking confused (and extremely naked, from the waist up). For a split-second, we just regarded one another.
Another source of extreme fury was the fact that—yeah, okay, sure, whatever, he was kind of good looking. I saw in the full light that his football camp tan ended at t-shirt level, while his pecs and chest remained a lighter color. There was something cute about the farmer look. There was something cuter about the coils of dark hair on his chest. The hair was darker than I would have imagined, and it grew thick at a spot just below his navel. When he inhaled, his core expanded in a way that suggested every fiber of his body was made of muscle. His form was tapered like a swimmer's. Either I'd forgotten the whole Adonis body thing while in the dark of his Saab, or he'd really outdone himself on the free weights in Galveston.
But it wasn't like any of this mattered, or made him less of a creep. It was like Carson said: “You can admire the house without signing the deed.”
“I got turned around. Thought this was the bathroom,” Landon grumbled, scratching at the side of his face. Even in the hours since dinner, it seemed as if stubble had begun to erupt on his jawline. Or maybe this was a trick of the light. Unbidden, I recalled his proclamation on the rooftop: I'm a man. I will fuck you senseless.
“It's not, genius,” I managed to huff, hopefully concealing some of my gawkery. But Landon didn't turn around right away. Instead, I got the sense that he was staring me down. Seconds too late, I remembered the loose-fitting nightshirt I'd elected to wear—the one I treated like a second skin. It was a gauzy, practically see-through t-shirt that just barely covered my ass—one of mom's old faves from the seventies. A lot of faux-Spanish embroidery framed the plummeting V-neck. I never had to think about how suggestive my sleeping clothes were when I lived in a house with no men. Blinking with fury, I shifted a pillow in front of my chest.
“Is that all?”
Landon nodded, but I watched his eyes pull themselves from my body and lurch around my room. I'd inherited a decorating gene from Carson. No matter how often Anya and I skipped town, making a space my own was always a first instinct. As his eyes peered around my room, I tried to see my little cubby space from Landon's POV. The long, glittery tapestries procured from Austin street fairs. An original sketch of Tex's, affixed to the far wall with multi-colored pushpins. A gumbo of band posters for Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, The Strokes and Metric. A tall vintage lamp, draped with scarves. Did all of my objects immediately betray the fact that I was a kid, and still “kind of an idiot”? In one way, this was my greatest fear. That people—even stupid jerk people, like my future step-brother—wouldn't take me seriously, for whatever reason.
Landon looked like he was about to say something, but at that moment some ambiguous groan moved through the wall. I watched him hear it, and frown. If things had been different, we might have made eye contact and grimaced together. That was the kind of thing siblings did, wasn't it? Laugh at the dumb (and disgusting) shit their parents did?