Page 35 of Bent Heavens

Aggie chewed a cookie and nodded.

“That’s a good attitude. Few more months, all this”—she waved the cookie at the disheveled kitchen, but also at Bloughton—“will be in the rearview mirror.”

Liv knew it was college that Aggie spoke of, and she tried to visualize it, the independent future that, only a few weeks ago, had tantalized her. Now all she could picture were the shiny college brochures that kept coming in the mail, plastered with multicultural mixes of young people with smiles that were easygoing, inspirational, and determined. Such glossy dreams now felt out of reach. Her story was doomed to dead-end with her in handcuffs, juvie, prison.

“Is that your dad’s compass you’re wearing?” Aggie asked. “Where’d you find it?”

Liv shrugged. So many lies would suffice. “The garage.”

“Huh. That’s nice. He’d be glad to see that.”

Would he? Everything Liv was doing out in that shed was for her dad, though increasingly, it had begun to feel like it was just as much for Doug, and for her. Liv glanced at her mother. The loss was all right there, in the lines of her face, the unchanging apologetic slant of her eyes. Liv could tell her. Right now. How the thing that took her husband was a few hundred feet away. Only Doug’s warning about adults halted her: They did things in ways that might account for laws, but rarely justice.

“Yeah” was what Liv said instead. “Still works.”

Aggie wiped chocolate from her chin.

“So,” she said. “You and Doug are spending a lot of time together.”

Liv set down the cookie and took hold of her glass of milk. Chocolate smeared across it like blood on pale flesh.

“Not really.”

“Not really? I hear you guys tromping around; I see his car.”

Now it made sense. The soothing setting. The comforting cookies. She thought Liv and Doug were fooling around, possibly out back in the shed. It was so unimaginatively romantic: childhood friends finding love right under their noses. Liv’s stomach hurt as it had while Doug clobbered the skinner’s hip. Her mom, after all, was right. She and Doug were experimenting, just not how she thought.

“It’s just—you know. We’re just friends.”

“Well, either way. I want you to know that I’m not a shrew. I’m a modern woman and all that. If you need advice about anything or whatever, I’m here. I’m right here.”

Her mother wanted so badly to give that advice—Liv could tell. It would be proof that Aggie’s existence had meant something, that all her upheavals and losses weren’t in vain. Liv thought of her mother’s photo albums, now missing pictures of her husband Liv had used to taunt the skinner. Aggie had been in plenty of those old pictures, wild haired and red lipped and short skirted, ravenous in a way Liv thought she herself had never had the chance to be.

The problem with her mother’s advice was that it came too late. If it were indeed sex, and not violence, that she and Doug were sharing, they’d be far beyond the sort of innocent bumbling Aggie was imagining. They’d be engaged in the filthiest of perversions, past rescue of any mother-talk chat.

“Got it,” Liv said. “Thanks.”

“You tell Doug he doesn’t have to speed off like he’s not welcome. He’s welcome. He’ll always be welcome here.”

Liv wasn’t hungry—she felt, in fact, like she might be sick—but she picked up another cookie and pushed it into her mouth in self-punishment. What if it was inevitable? What if the secrets Liv and Doug shared, deepening by the day, locked the two of them together forever? Maybe this was it. Maybe he was it. Maybe, once you crossed certain thresholds, there were no more options left. No cars, no bows, only a hole.

THIRD STANZA:

PHILOSOPHIES OF SUFFERING

17.

Liv could not get the water of her daily showers hot enough to cleanse her, and once in class, she so closely studied her fingernails for skinner flesh that she missed being called upon. She continued to move alongside Monica, Krista, and the gang in the halls, and sat with them at lunch, but interactions felt blurry and muffled, as if performed through a fiberglass pane. If only they spoke fewer words, like those three she couldn’t get out of her head, the three the skinner continued to croak every time she saw it: Car. Bow. Hole.

Her interactions with teachers followed the same model, and when Coach Carney called Liv into the crowded office she shared with other coaches, Liv expected role-model boilerplate: Is there something troubling you? There are counselors trained to help you. Liv declined the seat Carney offered and adopted a pose she’d be able to hold long enough to cycle through a short series of lies. Instead, Carney ambushed her.

“You’re off the team, Liv. I’m sorry.”

Runners were dutiful by nature, and Carney wasn’t practiced at tasks like this. She crept a hand over her mouth as if prepared to cry if Liv cried; the coach was a noted weeper, liable to shatter into sobs when a runner scored a personal best. Liv, though, felt no mirrored emotion. The fiberglass was still there, slotted between her and a world that seemed increasingly unintelligible. At least Carney’s pointed words cracked the pane. Liv narrowed her eyes and tried to peer through it.

“It’s just too many missed practices,” Carney said. “It’s not fair to the other girls.”

“The other girls.” Liv echoed it only to get her mouth moving, but once uttered, the words hung there like soot. “What did they say?”