My own nerves were raw as rope, almost rubbed through. I couldn’t have him breaking down, too. “Fine, no more story time. Just … why do you think my mom named me after that story specifically?”
“Maybe she didn’t. Maybe whoever left the page is trying to mess with you. She could’ve named you after, I don’t know, Alice in Wonderland. Or nobody at all.”
He took a swig of his coffee, rolled his neck. Calm, laid-back Finch was returning, sliding into place over his skin. It bothered me that he got to see me broken and all I got was the same candy shell he showed everyone else.
“Still, maybe she did,” I said, letting the story’s strange rhythms play over in my mind. It was different from what I thought it would be. It rattled around in my skull, unfinished. I’d assumed Althea’s work would have a strong feminist message, allegorical undertones, a clear arc of story. I’d expected Angela Carter at best, Animal Farm with princesses at worst. But this story had no allegiance to anything. It was winding and creepy and not even that bloody. There were no heroes, no wedding. No message.
“You know who my dad is, right?” Finch crushed oyster crackers into his soup.
“Um. Sort of.” Of course I knew who his dad was.
“So my name, my full name, is Ellery Oliver Djan-Nelson-Abrams-Finch.”
“Does that fit on a Scantron?”
“A what?”
“Never mind.” Of course the touchy-feely grade schools Finch must’ve attended didn’t use Scantrons. His middle school had probably graded with hearts and flowers.
“Ellery was my dad’s grandfather’s name, but guess where they got the Oliver.”
“Oliver Twist?”
“Nope.”
“Oliver Wendell Holmes?”
“I wish. But no.”
“Oliver … Hardy?”
“My parents aren’t that cool.”
“Fine. I give up.”
“My mom’s brother. He lived in the States for a few years before I was born, when my mom was still modeling. Then he moved back to Ghana when I was a baby. My stepmother has never once called me Ellery. She only calls me Oliver. She likes to pretend I’m not related to my dad at all—because I don’t look like him, I look like my mom. Like my uncle. She’s trying, through, like, power of sicko suggestion, to imply I’m not my dad’s. That I’m, like, my uncle’s.”
My stomach kicked like a rabbit. “Are you sure she means it that way? That’d be a pretty sick accusation.”
“She’s a pretty sick woman. She’s trying to get pregnant right now, and she’s at least forty-five. It’s straight out of a fucking fairy tale—like someday she’ll convince my dad I’m not even his, and her baby will inherit it all. Like I even want it. Like I’d ever want to be a man like my dad.”
Finch’s smiling, vaguely cloudy aspect had burned away. His face was a fierce beam of bitterness. The way he was gripping his coffee cup, I thought it might crack. I reached out to lay my hand over his before I could think.
He sat up straighter, his eyes refocusing on mine. The serene smile inched back onto his face, but now that I’d seen beneath it, I could tell it wasn’t a perfect fit.
“My mom used to let me swim in fountains,” I said, leaning slowly back and pulling my hand away. The memory came from nowhere; I hadn’t thought about it in years. “I always wanted to jump face-first into any body of water bigger than a puddle, and most moms would never let it happen, right? Because of security guards and waterborne diseases or whatever. But what Ella would do was put on her sunglasses and sit a little ways away, while I jumped into the fountain and shrieked and partied till someone noticed. Then she’d have to pretend to be mad, but she never made me get out till the last possible second. This happened in malls, courtyards, parks. It was awesome.”
“My mom punched my stepmom in the stomach once.”
I choked on my water. “What? Was it at the wedding?”
“God, that would’ve been even better. I’m telling it that way next time. But no, it was right after she found out about her and my dad. Total cliché, my stepmom was my dad’s personal assistant. So my mom cabs over to his office, and my stepmom’s all, ‘Good day, Mrs. Djan-Nelson-Abrams-Finch,’ because of course she’s really proper about those things, the bullshit things, and my mom hauls off and socks her in the stomach.”
“Wow. Did she sue for assault?”
“Nope. According to my dad’s business partner, she pretended like it didn’t even happen. Once she could breathe normally again, I mean. She’s a Vaseline-on-the-teeth type.”
“Damn. Your mom sounds ballsy.”
I stuttered to silence, remembering I had the tense wrong. Wondering if he knew I knew she was dead. But before I could feel worse, I saw something over Finch’s shoulder that made my vision tunnel.
It was the boy in the cab, the one who’d offered me a lift after school. In the weirdness of everything that had happened since, I’d forgotten about him. He was slouching in a vinyl seat at the back of the restaurant, holding a coffee mug in one hand and wearing his ratty flat cap. Everything in his posture said he didn’t see me, and for a second I mistrusted my racing heart.
Then he shifted slightly and winked at me, before turning his head toward the waitress.
“Finch,” I said quietly, “we’re going. Now.” He looked at my face and nodded, dug out a few bills to throw on the table. The boy in the cap was getting his coffee refilled when we slid from the booth and back out onto Seventy-Ninth Street.
“I think there’s a guy in there who’s following me,” I said, giving up on the idea of not sounding insane. We’d turned a sharp corner and were careening down the street, dodging clumps of tourists. For once I was glad they were there, to offer cover.
“What’s he look like?”
“College age, but kinda old-timey. Like a … I don’t know. A good-looking cabbie during Prohibition.”
“Good-looking?”
His stupid question hung in the air. I was looking back over my shoulder so often, it took me a minute to realize we were weaving toward his place. Where I would, what? Spend the night? I felt a pang of self-loathing. Freeloading again, off a boy I barely knew. A boy whose eyes were the alert, shiny color of sunlight through Coke, with a kinetic energy that made him seem like he never slept.
By the time we reached his block I was seriously considering heading to Lana’s. Or Salty Dog—I had a key. I could lie across two tables to sleep, sneak out before it opened the next morning.
“Look, Finch. You don’t have to take me back to your—”
“Stop.” His voice was so harsh that I did. But he wasn’t looking at me. He grabbed the back of my jacket in his fist and pulled me toward the low wall surrounding Central Park, across and a couple of doors down from his place.
“Get down,” he hissed. He was staring hard at a figure standing just beyond the spill of light beneath his awning.
At first I just saw a girl in black—black dress, black boots, a brief stretch of pale leg between them. My eyes adjusted, and I started picking out details. Her hair was a sweep of piled-up dark, with a white comic-book stripe blazing down the center. Her eyes were so light I could actually see them from where we crouched—they cast a glow. They ticked back and forth, watching the sidewalk. My skin crawled when I considered the possibility of them landing on me. When she shifted a bit in the shadows, I saw the messy scar that ran down her right temple and cupped her chin like a palm.