It is hard to sleep. There’s the air conditioner for starters—first too cold and then not cold enough and then noisy and blasting. There’s the ice machine, clattering outside in the hall. There’s a group of kids still swimming in the pool when it’s supposed to be closed by ten p.m. There is Luke Messenger, taking her fingers at Magic Waters water park.
There is The Taker—
Stop!
Stop it, really. Will he ruin every moment of her life forevermore? Maybe not forevermore, but for a long time to come, yes, he will still be there shoving forward, reminding her not to forget him or anyone else.
Now, The Taker grabs her fingers under the library table after their night at Neumos. She doesn’t exactly mind. She sort of likes the secret of it, the slow quiet of what is hidden. But he doesn’t want slow, and he doesn’t want hidden.
He wants to walk around the halls holding hands. He wants to kiss her in the stairwell. He grabs her hand, he pulls her to him; she pulls away. He presses.
“God. It’s like, you’re the banana and he’s the peel,” Kat says.
He begins to text and call all the time.
“Who’s calling you so late?” Gina says. “I don’t like it.”
Annabelle doesn’t like it, either. It’s too much too fast. She feels forced. He comes by Essential Baking Company when she’s working and orders coffee. It flusters her. Once, afterward, she warmed up a raspberry muffin for two minutes and turned it hard as a baseball. Her boss, Claire, always kind and perceptive, asked if she needed to talk.
And that lie, the one about his friends the night of Neumos, it nags at her.
“What’s Adrian’s band called again?” she asks The Taker one night when he phones.
“Um, Loose Change.”
“Do they play around here? We should go see them.”
“They don’t play much. And Jules is thinking about breaking things off. She says it’s like she and Adrian are married. They never do anything.”
“We could do something with them.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“I can’t believe you lied about them coming to Neumos.”
He laughs. “I have my trickster ways.”
“It’s not funny! I don’t like trickster ways. I like the truth.”
He’s silent.
“I should tell you the truth, then.”
“Okay.” She is sitting on the floor in her room, her back against the bed. Her stomach hurts suddenly. She picks at the threads of her carpet. She feels like something bad is coming. Something bad is coming. Something worse than she could ever imagine.
“Remember when I told you that we moved in part because my mom thought I got in with a bad crowd? That this kid I know robbed an old guy?”
Oh God. Oh no. “Yeah.”
“I was the kid.”
She is silent. She doesn’t tap her thumb to her fingers. Instead, with her free hand, she makes a fist and squeezes hard until she can feel her nails jab her skin.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. I mean, I didn’t, like, rob-rob him. Not like, stick-’em-up rob him. My parents had this friend, Jim Hastings? He was a rich guy, lived alone. He used to teach at the university, too, but then his family sold some patent or something, for some kind of waterproof material, and he got rich and quit. He had this house on the water. And he kept inviting me over. Like, for jobs. To clean his pool, and paint his bathroom, and my parents thought it was great, but the dude gave me the willies. Like, he was always trying to be alone with me, and standing too close, and doing weird shit, like keeping me late to show me his rare-coin collection, and . . . ugh.”
“Yeah, so I finally was like, ‘Fuck this. I’m not going over there. I don’t care if he pays me thirty bucks an hour.’ On the last day, I was finishing up this job. Spreading this big shitload of bark in his yard, and I put the tools away in the garage, and then I went in to use the bathroom and wash the splinters out of my skin, and after I dried my hands, I don’t know, I just went in his bedroom and opened up his dresser drawer where the coins were, and I took all these plastic bags. They were rare coins and he just had them in Ziplocs, and I shoved a bunch of them in my pockets, and I got out of there and never went back.”
“Oh, wow.” She doesn’t know what to say. “He had to know it was you.”
“Of course he knew it was me, and my parents kept asking me, ‘Why did you do this? Why?’ And I didn’t have an answer. I was just, I don’t know. I felt like the dude violated me, and I wanted to do it back. I was drying my hands on that towel in his bathroom, and it was a white towel, and then it was smeared with dirt, and I thought, ‘Good.’ I was furious all of a sudden. I hated him.”
“I can understand that.” In a way she can.
“Yeah? You don’t want me out of your life? At home, people avoided me after they heard. Not that most of those asshats were my best friends or anything before that, but still. My real friends ditched me. It sucked. Bad. It’s not like I was a felon. No one pressed charges. He got the coins back. The whole thing was dropped. My parents thought it was because I was hanging out with these two guys, Kevin and Raine, and Kevin smoked pot and Raine was always depressed, but it was because I hated that dude Jim Hastings. Hated him and his creepy lips and fat fingers. He deserved it. He deserved worse, if you ask me.”
Annabelle is disturbed. The man, Jim Hastings, and his fancy house, and the jobs, and The Taker and the coins and the hate disturb her. She doesn’t know how to understand this story. In a way, she feels sorry for The Taker. But the story is distressing. And it is far from her own life. There is so much about the story and about The Taker that is just not her and hers. Will cheated on a test in the seventh grade and still felt bad about it. Kat’s older sister, Becka, who didn’t live with them anymore, got pregnant and had an abortion. That Bastard Father Anthony left them and became a priest, and Gina is so worried about stuff going wrong that she drives everyone crazy, but somehow this stuff is all above the surface, not below. She can see it and know what it is. She understands that Gina also has anxiety and that Father Anthony is emotionally removed.
She doesn’t know what The Taker’s story is. And she realizes that she really doesn’t know him. The deep-down-inside him. The pieces that make him who he is. The pieces she sees—they are like foreign objects. His intensity and loneliness are, and so are the gun magazines that she sometimes sees him thumbing through during boring lectures, and the way he doesn’t even seem to feel guilty for what he did. It reminds her of how she went to Kiley Tasmin’s house for a sleepover in middle school, and saw a bong under her bed. Kat had to tell Annabelle what it was. She knew it was wrong, she knew it shouldn’t be there, she knew it felt bad, but she didn’t have a name for it.
“I’m glad you’re not going to leave me,” he says before they hang up.
She couldn’t have known what was going to happen, Annabelle tells herself, when she thinks about his hand holding hers under the library table. There are all kinds of hands—careful ones, cruel ones, ones you can trust and ones you can’t. You don’t always know the difference until too late, but it’s true, too, that ones as disturbed as The Taker’s are rare. They are rare, she reminds herself.
Most hands are good.
Will’s were.
This is a sucker punch. Her stomach reels. Her heart clutches.
Which are worse? The bad memories or the good ones?
Because now she feels Will’s hands in mittens holding her hands in mittens. His fingers on her body. His fingers lift her hand to kiss it; his hands are on a steering wheel, and they cut a sandwich in half, and they hug his mom, and carry his lacrosse bag.
There is his finger, ringing her doorbell. It is shortly after The Taker tells her about stealing the coins. It is early May, and it is starting to stay light later, and she is home after work, an extra-busy shift since Claire had to stay home with her sick kid, Harrison. She and Mom and Malc had pancakes for dinner, so when she answers the door, the smell drifts out, and he says, Mmm. Pancakes.
She is surprised to see him. She lets him in. She can’t believe he’s there. She is so, so happy he’s suddenly appeared like this, but nervous, too. She looks awful. Here, she thought it was a neighbor collecting signatures for some cause, but it’s Will.
“Oh, God, I look—”
“Beautiful. My eyes are really happy right now.”
He is in her house. He’s so familiar, so terrifically familiar, it’s almost like they should just go plop down in front of the TV and watch a show.
“Hi, Will,” Malcolm says. He’s running his finger in a syrup trail on the table, licks it.
“Gross, Malcolm.”
“How’ve you been, Will?” Gina says. She beams at him. Annabelle can feel the wink of support she would love to give. The mood in the room lifts. They all feel happy. Or maybe Annabelle is just buoyant enough for everyone.
“We’re going to—”
“Go talk. We’ll be here if you need us!” Gina says cheerfully.
“Yep, we’ll be here if you need us,” Malcolm says. Now, he’s the one who does it. He winks.
She and Will go upstairs. He pinches her butt playfully on the way up and she swats him, just like the old days. Wow, she has missed those brown eyes that look sweet as a deer’s. She’s missed his soft hair, and the smell of his shampoo. She’s missed that easy familiarity.
In her room, he kisses her. Now that’s the kiss she loves. Here’s the boy she loves. They look at each other and smile and talk. And talk, and talk.
They make a decision that changes everything.
They make a decision that changes everything forever.
• • •
Luke’s fingers, The Taker’s, Will’s. It is too much. Annabelle gets out of bed. She is holding her pillow. She clutches it hard. She walks in a circle around the beds and back. She walks in a circle. She walks in a circle. She walks in a circle.