Page 12 of The Triangle

“Now what?” she says.

I shrug. “We wait for Alec, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Because… I guess… he’s the one who knows things.”

“Should we care what he knows?”

I press my lips together and reluctantly nod my head. “We should.”

There’s ten minutes of silence after that. I feel very exposed for some reason. And I don’t know why. Is it because she’s back and she brought him with her? Is it because I still want her and can’t have her? Is it because there’s an opportunity here? One that ends the way I always thought it would?

I think back on the day I first met her. We were in a foster home. She’d been there a while, but it was my first day. I’d gotten busted for stealing food from a local grocery store and just finished a few months of juvie time. Most kids like me have no hope of getting placed with a family, but it was my lucky day. The family had a baby on the way and needed some quick cash. So they took as many kids as the system would let them and packed us all into this big, old house down on Second.

Christine was ten years old. I was fourteen and those four years seemed like an eternity between us. She was sitting on the grass in the ratty backyard poking a beetle with a stick. I remember this because the beetle was blue, and it shouldn’t have been.

“It’s a mutant,” she said, still poking at it. “That’s why it’s blue.”

I remember thinking she was a mind reader when she said that.

But she turned those hazy green eyes up at me and said, “Do you ever feel like crushing pretty things?”

And it stopped my heart, I swear to God.

I said, “No,” because I thought she was pretty and if I told the truth and said yes, then that would mean I’d want to crush her.

“I do,” she said. She poked the bug again. Not hard or anything. And it scrambled up a tall, weedy stalk of grass to get away. “But only because I want to see what’s inside. I need to know what makes it so pretty.”

I remember thinking, Damn, this little girl is fucked up.

But I didn’t say that. I just took that stick and tossed it over a fence. Then I reached for her hand, pulled her to her feet, and said, “I got a couple bucks. Wanna blow this place and get some ice cream?”

Because it wasn’t fair. She wasn’t a kid anymore. She was old and someone did that to her. Someone stole her childhood. Maybe she’d never been a kid and it just wasn’t fair.

“Do you have a bathtub?” Christine says in the here and now.

We were a team after that.

I look at her without turning my head. “Yeah.”

“Can I take a bath? I’m so fucking sore. I just want to soak.”

I swallow down the opportunity. Tell myself I don’t want to kiss her right now. Tell myself I don’t love her that way. Tell myself—

“Please?”

“Sure,” I say. And then I push her legs off my lap, stand up, walk over to the little dining table, put on my leather jacket, and say, “I’ll be back in a couple hours. There are towels in the hall closet.”

Brasil is my Alec these days. He’s a tall guy with reddish hair and beard—both going gray at vastly different rates—who lives on the west side of the city near the waterfront on the top floor of one of those newly renovated old buildings that spent its youth as a rubber factory or some shit.

He’s only like twelve years older than me but the guy has been around the fuckin’ block and he’s got the scars and lines to prove it.

We chop cars.

High-end motherfuckin’ cars.

We don’t do it here. This city is way too industrial for the legitimate über-rich. Not enough sun, not enough sand, not enough glam.