When she doesn’t ask me what kind, I know for sure she’s heard.
“Well, I think it’s fun to have you back,” she says. Her tone is warm, but I can’t help but feel a current of anxiety. Misha’s fun was always the kind that drew blood. “Your dad must be glad to have you home after all this time. He worked on our fence for us just last summer, after that big tornado came through. Did a great job, too.”
I don’t want to talk about my dad. I definitely don’t want to talk about my dad with Misha. I clear my throat. “So you married Jonah Jennings?” I ask, with a kind of politeness I hope she’ll interpret, correctly, as fake.
Misha only laughs. “His brother, Peter.”
The new Misha is unpredictable. It’s as if the rules to the past have been rewritten, and I’m still learning the game. All I know of Peter Jennings is something I saw in the Tribune, a year or two into college—that he’d been arrested for dealing heroin.
Misha fiddles with the magazine rack. “Held out for as long as I could, but he was persistent.” She hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “We have a baby, too. Kayla’s out in the car. We’ll say hi on the way out.”
Even inside, with the air-conditioning going, it feels like standing inside a closed mouth. “It’s so hot,” I say. Misha’s not my business. Misha’s baby’s not my business. But still, I can’t help it. “You sure she’ll be okay?”
“Oh, she’s just napping. She’ll scream like anything if I try to wake her. God. Listen to me. Can you believe it? I swear, you blink and ten years go by and it looks nothing like you thought it would.” She eyes me as if we’re sharing a secret. “You know I work over at Barrens High School now? I’ve been vice principal for a few years now.”
This shocks me. Misha hated school almost as much as I did, though for different reasons. She found class to be an inconvenience, and the mandatory homework a distraction from getting felt up by random guys on the football team.
“I had no idea,” I say, although what I really want to ask is: How? Then again, Barrens High, a tiny school with a graduating class of about sixty, probably isn’t attracting the best and the brightest in the education system. “Congratulations.”
She waves a hand, but she looks pleased—pleased, and proud. “We make plans and God laughs. Isn’t that what they say?”
I can’t tell if she’s kidding. “I didn’t think you believed in all that religious stuff. In high school, you hated the Jesus freaks.”
But of course she didn’t: she only hated me.
Misha’s smile drops. “I was young then. We all were.” She lowers her chin and looks up at me through lashes thick with mascara. “It’s all water under the bridge now. Besides, you’re our big star around here. The girl who got out.”
Of course it’s bullshit. It has to be. She tortured me, tortured my family, got pleasure out of making me cry. I didn’t make that up. I can’t have made it up. She left a razorblade taped to my homeroom desk with a note saying, “Just do it.” That’s not water under any bridge I know. She spread rumors, humiliated me, and why? I had no friends anyway. I wasn’t a threat. Back then I was barely even a person.
Still, when she takes my arm, I don’t pull away. “I could use an iced coffee. How about you?”
“Nah,” I say. I swing open the cooler door and stare at the rows of bottled water, gripping the handle to steady myself. Six bottles, side by side. Three in each row, except the last, which has only one. That’s the one I grab. “Just this.”
Even though I really want to say, Stop touching me. I’ve always hated you. But maybe this is Misha’s ultimate power, like the witch in The Little Mermaid: she steals your voice.
I watch her fill up an iced coffee. I’m trying to figure out how to excuse myself, how to say, Good-bye, have a very mediocre life, hope I never see you again as long as I live, when she suddenly blurts, “You know, Brent still asks about you sometimes.”
I freeze. “Brent O’Connell?”
“Who else? He’s a big shot at Optimal now. Regional sales manager. Followed in his father’s footsteps and worked his way up.”
Brent was from one of the richest families in town, which for Barrens means a basketball hoop, aboveground pool, and separate bedrooms for Brent, his older sister, and their parents. Brent’s father wore a tie to work, and his mother was like Carol Brady: big smile, blond hair, very clean-looking. Brent was hired at Optimal straight out of high school. Whereas the other guys had after-school jobs pumping gas or stocking shelves at the grocery store or even sweeping stables at one of the local farms, Brent had an internship at Optimal.
“He’s still single. A shame, isn’t it?” She stirs her coffee slowly, like it’s a chemistry experiment and the wrong blend of sugar and cream will make the whole place blow up. One sugar. Stir. Two sugars. Stir. Three. Then, suddenly: “He always had a crush on you, you know.”
“Brent’s with Kaycee,” I say quickly. I have no idea where the present tense came from: five minutes back in town and the past is invading me. “I mean, he was.”
“He was with Kaycee, but he liked you. Everybody knew that.”
Brent O’Connell was one of the most popular guys in Barrens. What she’s saying makes no sense.
Except…
Except for the kiss, the one kiss, the night of graduation. A first kiss almost exactly like I’d always dreamed it: an unseasonably warm June day, swimming weather, almost; the smell of smoke turning the air sharp; Brent coming through the trees, lifting a hand to his eyes against the dazzle of my flashlight. How many nights had I walked the woods behind my house to the edge of the reservoir, hoping to run into him just that way, hoping he would notice me?
It was so perfect I could never be sure I hadn’t made it up, like I did Sonya, a dark-skinned colt-legged girl who lived in the attic of our old house when I was a kid and used to play games with me in exchange for leaves, twigs, and branches I brought her from outside; she had once been a fairy, I explained, when my mother found the attic nesting with rotten leaves and beetles. Like the games I made up after my mom died, to bring her back. Skipping over the sidewalk cracks, of course, but other ones, too. If I could hold my breath until five cars had passed…if I could swim down to the bottom of the reservoir and plunge a finger in the silt…if there were an even number of crows on the telephone pole, any number but ten.
Misha carefully seals a top on her iced coffee, pressing with a thumb around the edges. “Why?” she asks—so casually, so sweetly, I nearly miss it.
“Excuse me?” For a second, I really don’t understand.
Finally, she looks up. Her eyes are the clear blue of the summer sky. “Why do you think Brent liked you so much?”
I clutch my water bottle so hard the plastic takes on the imprint of my fingers. “I—I don’t know,” I stutter. Then: “He didn’t.”
She just keeps smiling. “All that long hair, maybe.”
And then, unexpectedly, she reaches out to tug my ponytail lightly. When I jerk away, Misha laughs as if embarrassed.
“Maybe that’s where all that BS came from, Kaycee wanting us to hurt your feelings,” Misha goes on. “She was cuckoo, that one.”