Page 39 of Bent Heavens

She didn’t move for a moment too long.

“What’s wrong?” Bruno asked.

“Nothing. Thanks for the ride.”

She bucked from the seat back, but there was a hand on her upper arm. Her instinct was to recoil, rip it away, and swing at it with Doug’s table-leg baton. Instead she looked at its owner. Bruno’s bright white teeth were hidden. The honest brown eyes, though, did not change.

“I just want you to know that everyone knows how you feel,” he said. “I mean, as much as we can. We’ve talked about it. Everyone’s sympathetic. If there’s anything we can do to make you feel better, just tell me. We’re not bad people. We’re theater geeks.”

Anger had so overwhelmed Liv lately that a trickle of gratefulness was enough to drown her. She gripped the door handle in hopes of keeping her head above it.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you guys. Everything is confusing right now.” Liv gestured at the clinic. “My mom’s got two jobs and can’t pay the bills, and I’m not helping at all. At all. I don’t know what I’m doing. You don’t understand.”

“Yes, I do. My mom’s got two jobs, too. Plus four kids, and my dad’s doing shit work in Mexico, and we move like every couple years, and what am I doing to help? I’m in a stupid musical.”

“Why do you move every couple years?”

“Why do you think? My parents worked for nine years at a factory in Monroeville squashing pumpkin into little cans for people to make their stupid Thanksgiving pumpkin pies until one day there was this sweep and my dad ends up in Mexico and mom ends up basically on the run through a series of shithole towns where it gets harder and harder to get hired because her résumé is full of jobs she quit without notice. So, yeah, I think I understand.”

The only pumpkin Liv had ever given thought to was the Floating Pumpkin. Bruno’s vehemence made her feel like the insensitive dunce she was, and she had to suppress the urge to tell him that she wasn’t just another privileged white girl, that she knew what it was like to remake yourself into a different person. However garish her hardships, Bruno Mayorga had her beat. And yet what he’d offered her was something she suspected he’d never told anyone. The final thing Liv wanted to say, but didn’t, after nodding and apologizing and getting out of the car, was that he shouldn’t worry—she, more than anyone, knew how to keep a secret.

18.

That birthdays still happened on the dark side of the earth surprised Liv. Doug was a Virgo, and she remembered a birthday seven or eight years back, as he read out of a kids’ guide to the signs, announcing with pride that he was loyal, analytical, kind, and hardworking. Virgos were “all work and no play”—that fun fact she remembered. Sitting there on the cool, patchy grass beside the Armory, gazing up at the stars, she wondered if there were, in fact, rules and orders even in these bent heavens.

Liv could see Doug’s car asleep and peaceful on the road, as well as the front bumper of the station wagon, fortified by a new battery Aggie purchased but couldn’t afford. The heat, so high yesterday, had bottomed out to an early-autumn chill, but Doug wore his usual shorts, which meant there was enough pale flesh exposed to see him coming from the house. He sat next to her, handed her a glass, kept another for himself, and planted a wine bottle between them. Liv stared at it.

“You think my mom won’t notice that’s gone?”

“One bottle? On a Saturday night? Aggie won’t mind.”

Doug had no idea what to do with a corkscrew, though, and handed it to Liv. She made a mess of it, but a little cork down their throats wouldn’t kill them. She poured the red wine, and they clinked their glasses together.

“Happy birthday, I guess,” she said.

“When you put it like that.”

They drank. He winced, not seasoned to the taste, and she winced, worried that she, like her mother, would like it too much. And she did like it. She gulped until she had to come up for air, and discovered all around her a night of unnatural stillness. The treetops looked like photographs. The clouds in front of the moon stayed in place like a shroud. Even without wind, her flesh tingled. She wished the wine were any other kind of drink. Wine felt celebratory, and celebration felt wrong.

“You get anything from your dad?” She was careful not to slur.

“A call. Caught me before I came here. He’s in Colorado. He said he’s got something for me, but won’t be by for a few weeks. He doesn’t have shit for me. Not that I care. Which reminds me: We’ll have to figure out how to handle it when he’s here. If I’m gone every night, he’ll think it’s weird. You know how he gets. He tries to make up for being gone; he gets all dadlike.” He paused. “It would actually help if…”

When he stopped talking, he seemed to vanish into dark waters. Liv held the wine in her cheeks so she could listen for any sign of a drowner’s struggle. She could feel the effect of the alcohol. Her emotions were truncated, and she was so glad. Finally she swallowed.

“What would help?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Just ask. It’s your birthday. I’ll probably do it.”

He sighed. “If I told him I had a girlfriend, he’d be cooler about it.”

Either the wine was acidic or her gut had other reasons to revolt.

“It’d just be pretend,” Doug rushed to say. “You wouldn’t have to do anything, like, at school. He’s got so many girlfriends, what could he say about me going out every night? It was just an idea. It’d get him off my back is all.”

Stars did not reflect in the wine; the liquid was as black as ink. She swirled it and felt as if the glass was stationary and it was she who spun, round and round through the ink, until she was heavy with it and she could see nothing at all, not even Bruno Mayorga. Maybe if she said yes to Doug, as a favor, he’d owe her a favor back and might reconsider allowing others to see the skinner as a way to save Lee’s reputation—and, somehow, save both of them as well.