He didn’t mean did I want him. Did I want to learn how to cut loose. Did I wish I could be different.
But, even so, my heart beat like a bass drum in a halftime show, and I couldn’t quite catch my breath to answer, No, thanks.
This isn’t for me.
You’re not for me.
The denial was too thick in my throat. If I tried to say it out loud, I would choke on no, because I wanted to say yes.
In the end, I didn’t say anything. Nate came up behind me and wrapped his arm around my waist, resting his chin on my shoulder. “What’s with all the noise?”
A door shut behind West’s eyes. His face closed off, and the tipping point where I was standing flattened out beneath my feet into the familiar, unexceptional terrain of my hallway, my state, my whole boring life.
“Just blowing off some steam,” West said.
“Could you keep it down, maybe?” Nate asked. “We’re trying to study.”
“Sure thing.”
Nate pulled me inside, closed the door, kissed my neck. His hands roamed under my shirt, over my bra, and then I stopped him because Bridget was in the hallway and I had a paper to write.
And also because I felt deflated, as though some rich possibility had been taken from me. Something more than a juvenile game of hallway bowling.
The alchemy of a boy who could turn two-liter soda bottles into chicken rockets.
I wonder, sometimes, whether the pull I felt toward West is the reason why I broke up with Nate. Whether it gathered power until it got so strong, it cast a shadow over all my other feelings, and I didn’t even realize it.
When I think about Nate, about West, it’s hard for me to tell what’s my fault and what isn’t.
When I sleep, there’s no peace in it. I dream of being chased, attacked, hurt. In my dreams, I’m a victim, and the dreams start to feel more real than the daytime does.
Semitrucks idle behind the Walmart and the grocery store. The guy at the gas station has gotten to know who I am, and he asks how things are going when I pay for gas and orange juice. He’s in his forties, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a gut. He seems like a nice man, but how nice can he be, really, working the night shift at the Kum and Go?
Even the name of the gas station is too gross. Before, I thought it was funny. Now it gives me flashbacks, and I’ve started driving twenty miles to the next town to buy gas there, because I can no longer talk to the Kum and Go guy without wondering if he’s seen me with my clothes off.
I drive by knots of drunk students walking back to the college from the bar or the pub, gripping one another’s elbows, laughing and shoving. One time I saw a girl fall down. She was alone with a guy, and I thought he was going to rape her, but he helped her up. I pulled the car over and took deep breaths, close to hyperventilating. Because, seriously, what on earth is wrong with me that I thought that?
I never would have, before. Never.
I don’t want to be like this for the rest of my life. If I had an undo button, I’d hit it so hard. But if there’s some way to go back to how I was before, I haven’t found it.
Most nights, I end up at the bakery.
I tell myself I won’t, but I do.
I’m under strict personal orders to stop driving here, stop parking out front, stop looking through the window for a glimpse of West.
Yet here I am.
Light spills from the kitchen in the back of the shop, through the plate glass and over the sidewalk. I set the emergency brake but leave the engine idling. With the car stopped, my music sounds too loud, so I lean forward to turn it down.
I imagine it’s warm in the kitchen and it smells good. The mental taste of it is sweet, an antidote to all the hours I spend on my laptop, sifting through the worst that humanity has to offer.
West’s figure crosses the doorway. By the time I’m standing up, one hand holding the door open and the other tucking my keys into my hoodie, he’s already disappeared. A gust of cold wind blows across my exposed feet and over the back of my neck. I hunch down, pushing my fists deeper into the kangaroo pocket of my hooded sweatshirt.
The men in my head want to know what I’m staring at and why I’m such a dumb cunt.
I don’t know. I don’t know why.
I’m about to get back in the car when the wind shoves at me again, a cold, hard push right in my face, and I squint my eyes and raise a hand to shield my eyes.
I’m annoyed.
I’m angry.
I’m pissed.
I’m standing in front of a bakery at four in the morning, furious, staring at an empty window.
I squeeze my keys so hard, they bite marks into my palm. West walks by the open kitchen door again.
Go in there and tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you like him. Tell him something.
But I don’t. I can’t. West isn’t what I need. He’s only what I want.
I want him because he punches when he’s mad.
I want him because he drove a wheezing car two thousand miles by himself, eating stew out of cans as if that’s something you can just do.
Because he looks at a soda bottle and sees a chicken rocket.
Because I feel like, if I was with him, he might fix me. He might save me.
He might ask me, Want to play? and this time I might say yes.
But I know that’s not what would happen. He wouldn’t save me. He’d ruin me.
I’m already ruined enough.
I turn around, get back in the car, and drive away.
OCTOBER
West
It took me ten years to learn how to hate my dad.
He blew through town just often enough to fuck with Mom’s head until she lost her job, gave him all her money, turned her heart over to him one more time, and then watched him drive away.
That year—that summer when I turned ten—Mom cried for a week. I visited the neighbors in our trailer park, telling them what had happened in a way that made it all sound funny, hoping they’d give me something to eat.
In the busted-ass, nothing place in Oregon where I’m from, there used to be jobs in lumber, but now there’s nothing but part-time work, hourly pay, wages you can’t raise a family on.
Where I’m from, women work, and men are only good for two things: fighting and fucking.
I got good at fighting early. When I was twelve, my cousin’s friend Kaylee took me into the unlocked storage room beside the laundry and showed me how to fuck.
I got good at that, too, with some practice.
Maybe it should have been enough for me. Seemed like it was enough for everybody else.
But there’s something in me that’s like a weed, always pushing up through cracks, looking for light. Looking for a deeper grip in inadequate soil.
I’m curious. I want to know how things work, fix them if they’re broken, make them better. It’s just the way I am, as far back as I can remember. When three out of the five dryers are sitting broken in the trailer-park laundry, I’ve got to know why. If I can’t get a good answer, I’ll take those fuckers apart and try to figure it out.
When there’s something I can do, I need to do it.
I think that’s what makes a real man. Not whose ass you can kick or how good you can fuck, but what you do. How hard you work for the people who depend on you. What you can give them.
That time my dad came around when I was ten—the time I stood up to him and he beat me hard enough that I finally learned how to hate him—he got Mom pregnant before he left.