Being at school with kids whose biggest problems were sorting through crushes and achieving arbitrary academic objectives was difficult to comprehend. When Liv got to school Friday morning, she got out of her car and stared at her warped reflection in the door for twenty minutes to avoid going inside. But when the day’s final bell rang, she found herself equally reluctant to go home and confront Doug. She tried wandering the halls, but they were a minefield: Monica over here, Coach Carney over there.
Liv made her way to a lower floor. The auditorium, to her surprise, seemed the safest place—there she could sink into the black sea of seats. All she had to do was control her temper about the play being rehearsed. She settled in, halfway back, hoping no one saw her. A few did, of course, and word was passed actor to actor, creating a heightened electricity. Liv recalled from opening nights past her dad saying that a few nerves weren’t a bad thing for acting.
It seemed true. As if trying to prove something to Liv, the cast appeared to shift to a higher energy level. The first couple of scenes were hard for Liv. The actors danced through choreography ignorant of the blood they tracked around the stage. They belted songs without recognition of the people haunted by those melodies. It had to be comforting, Liv thought, to know the precise parameters of your three-walled world, to know exactly what words to say, when to enter, when to exit, when to laugh, when to die.
It amazed her how quickly her trauma receded. Perhaps she needed a diversion, and, given one, she attached herself to it with claws and teeth. Bruno had insisted that the drama geeks were “not bad people,” and no matter how hard she looked, she saw no indication that he was wrong. The girl who played Oliver was decent, despite the dull, angelic role. The kid playing Fagin, however, was amazing, bounding over props, flipping his cane like a twirler’s baton, and behaving as if herding pickpockets was the funnest thing ever. Liv recognized this kid from classes—a quiet notebook scribbler—and never would have thought he had it in him.
Bruno Mayorga was the best of them all. His lanky frame was extended by a stupendous top hat, which he rolled up his arm with a magician’s dexterity until the hat broke in half. He spoke dialogue as if it were a rope holding him back. Words were irrelevant; everything was conveyed through his agile tone and body language, the manipulation of his big eyes and expressive mouth. Liv could read them from a mile away.
Baldwin’s gaze was warier, and Liv understood. These were her kids, and she had to protect them. When rehearsal was through, the cast and crew filtered into the auditorium, lingering to gab. Bruno, as usual, made no effort to conceal his interest in Liv. He took the stage steps by twos and ambled up to her. He was in casual clothes, as they all were, but still carried his collapsed top hat.
“I think Baldwin’s braced for a bomb. Where’d you put it?”
“You were good.” It came out before she could stop it. “I mean, everything was good.”
Bruno looked touched. “Aw. I didn’t expect you to say that.”
Since becoming A’s nurse, she’d developed some expertise at evaluating bodies, and what joyful respite there was in observing one that worked as perfectly as Bruno’s. His body needed nothing from her—no antiseptic, no medical tape, no painkillers. She longed to place both hands on his chest, feel how his heart beat evenly, how his lungs breathed steadily, how his ribs rose and fell beneath the skin, where ribs ought to be. She pictured herself doing it and leaned forward.
With that small arch of her back, everything became as simple as if they’d rehearsed this scene a thousand times. The subsequent exchange didn’t feel canned, but rather exciting, each word of dialogue in its proper place.
“What are you doing now?” she asked.
He held up his busted top hat.
“The costume room,” he said. “Need a new chapeau.”
“You want me to come?”
“Yes, I do.”
The costumes were kept in a low-ceilinged, concrete-walled dungeon beneath the auditorium, a labyrinth of overstuffed clothing racks arranged at odd angles. It was lit by overhead bulbs, just like the Armory, and when Liv clopped down the steps into the stuffy, mothball air, she was struck by a worrisome displacement, as if all paths led to the backyard shed. She hurried, sending puffs of dust upward and rains of sequins downward.
She found Bruno standing before a large bookshelf arranged with fedoras, bowlers, newsboys, berets, beanies, sombreros, pillboxes, visors, cloches, and crowns. He was staring up at the top hats, but even faced away from her, Liv could tell he wasn’t seeing them. He turned at her approach and looked at her with a sense of disbelief.
“Did we come down here to make out?” he asked.
The lean into him she’d started up above continued here down below, her hips and breasts pressing against his opposites. She placed her hands on either side of his torso. His T-shirt was pitifully thin. She could feel ribs, individual moles. She tilted her face up to his, making it simple—all he had to do was lean down a couple of inches—but his hands settled on the sides of her shoulders, and there was nothing sexy about that.
“You’re gay,” she guessed.
His lips were so close that his laugh fluttered her eyelashes.
“Mono’s going around. I have to sing with this voice.”
Mono was farcical to Liv. A’s blood, tumors, teeth, tongue, spittle—all of it had landed on her, hot and frantic, festering with extraterrestrial microbes worse than any kissing bug. She exhaled in frustration, dug her fingers into his back, and mashed her lips against his. This time, there was interest. She felt it in the grope of his lips and a slight tilt of his hips. His hands slid from the safe zone of her shoulders and pushed into the sides of her breasts. She found the hem of his shirt and raced her hands up his bare back. This is what she wanted: to feel, against her own skin, a skin that wasn’t sticky or gelatinous, and to hear hoarse pants of excitement, not foreign chirps of pain.
Bruno moved fast once he’d begun. He yanked down the nearest three costumes for cushioning and lay back on them, folding Liv down atop him. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, and felt Bruno’s tongue—still there, not severed—slide across her teeth—every tooth still rooted in place, not cast across the floor. Revolting, invading images; she pushed them away and buried herself in Bruno’s scents and textures.
Their clothes shaved off in alternation, just like skinners were supposed to shed skin. His warm thumbs ran under the elastic of her underwear, unsealing it, inch by inch, from her sweaty skin, and that did it—her mind blacked out in spots like when she took a hard body-check in soccer. She manipulated his penis from his boxers and stroked it. She’d done this only twice before, but was eager. He had a hand down the front of her pants when he climaxed all over some peasant tunic that hadn’t seen action in decades.
For a while they lay with legs interlocked, listening to the distant thuds of faculty leaving the building late. Liv pictured a janitor pushing his mop bucket toward the costume room, and she tried to care that she was half-naked. She couldn’t. Maybe it was Fleming genetics: She thought of her father, naked in the town square, and an oily puddle of bad mood bubbled inside her. She’d have to leave soon, tunnel through the darkness of Custer Road, and brave the shed. She swiveled her face away from Bruno.
“We don’t have to make this a thing,” she said. “My life is weird right now.”
“Are you kidding me? I wish this was a thing, like, three times a day.”
He was looking at her, she could feel it; she could also feel herself draw away. He had no idea who she really was.
“You need a ride?” he asked.
“So gallant,” she joked.
He shrugged, jostling her sweaty shoulder. “My car is cleaner than your car.”
“Car,” she sighed, and the rest came unbidden: “Bow. Hole.”
Bruno humphed. “Who’s that?”
Liv felt herself blush and wondered how far down her bare chest the pink went.
“It’s nothing.”
Bruno turned to face her, grinning. “Ooh, another Latin lover on the side. I’m jealous.”
She stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a name, right? Carbajal?”
He said it phonetically: Car-bah-hall. Liv felt her throat swelling shut. Could it be that, all this time, Car-Bow-Hole had been a person’s name? Had A had been trying to give them somebody’s name? It made no sense, was bizarre beyond anything she’d ever considered.
She pulled her phone out of jeans still warm from friction.
“Well, this isn’t very flattering,” Bruno said.
“Shh,” Liv replied. Two years of high-school Spanish gave her the foundation to guess the spelling of the name, but to type it she had to take a slow breath and peck each letter with an index finger. Results sprang up, the usual screed of heartless hits and cold-blooded URLs. A municipality in Spain, a California congressman, a street photographer. None of them felt right. Liv used her index finger again, added Iowa. A basketball coach, an obituary.
“Did you forget Señor Carbajal’s full name?” Bruno teased.
Liv closed the browser. She stared into the dark ceiling, feeling disjointed and cold, while her heartbeat thumped hard, like a table-leg baton against helpless flesh. Carbajal, Carbajal, Carbajal, Carbajal—A had repeated it endlessly until Doug had performed the oral surgery to make it stop.
“It’s a word I heard in a dream,” she said. “Doesn’t mean anything.”
Bruno reached for her phone and gently took it, and for some reason, she allowed it. Carbajal was a Spanish name; maybe he knew a variant way of spelling it. Instead, she realized he was only inputting his number. It felt as personal as the physical acts they’d just shared, and Liv looked away. The low, cobwebby ceiling, the janitorial thumps above—these mundanities shielded her from the expansive awfulness beyond.
She shivered and wanted her shirt back. Bruno’s long arm reached behind them and came up with what she’d wanted, plus bra. She sat up and began the upper-body gymnastics of getting into the garments, a routine she’d done thousands of times but that was made newly complicated by watching eyes.
“I know you’ve got problems,” Bruno said.
Liv paused in the adjusting of her bra, but knew it was better not to. She picked up her shirt, grabbed it through the neck hole, and pulled it right side in. He might be correct, but that didn’t mean he had any clue what the word Carbajal had just done to her world.
“You don’t quit your team and start hanging with drama dorks because everything’s going hunky-dory,” he continued. “You’re running from something. And that’s fine. I’m not one of those people who say you shouldn’t. My family sure has. Sometimes running’s the only thing you can do.”
Liv lost sight for a scramble of seconds as she pulled the shirt over her head. Bruno’s role of the Artful Dodger, she thought, was fitting: He’d dodged from town to town with his mom and sisters. More miraculously, he’d dodged the gloom and pessimism he’d earned twice over. And like the Artful Dodger with Oliver Twist, Bruno, if given the chance, might lead Liv somewhere better, if only she could scrounge courage, or desperation, enough to follow. She already had the wrist compass.
She was fully dressed and looked down at herself in disappointment. There had been excitement and possibility to her body when naked. The way it had stretched and flexed, anything had been possible; she could have been any Liv Fleming she’d wanted. Dressed, she was the same hopeless girl she’d been at the start of the day, except for that one unpleasant new thought: Carbajal.
“What happens to Dodger at the end?” she whispered.
“Let’s see. In the movie, he gets back with Fagin, and I guess they keep on stealing. In the book, he gets sent to prison in Australia. In the play, though, they don’t say.”
“What do you think?”
“He’s pretty nice in the play. I think he stays friends with Oliver. Reforms himself. Becomes a proper gent.”
“That seems good. Maybe Nancy doesn’t die, either.”
“And the workhouse hands out better gruel.”
“And Oliver finds his dad. His dad’s not dead after all.”
“Yeah. That’d be nice. Maybe we can convince Baldwin to rewrite it.”
He sighed, zipped his pants, and sat up, reaching for his own shirt. Liv felt a yawning chasm of longing as he leaned away. He was beginning to stand now, angling toward the hat shelves to resume his original task. She wanted to crook her arm across his chest, quick while she could, and pin him back down on a cold floor they could turn warm. She wanted to pull her face into his beautiful neck and inhale the smells of fusty top-hat hair and over-laundered shirt, and then, nursemaid now by trade, kiss around until she could find his pulse in every spot where it beat.