“You know you wouldn’t miss me,” Carla says. She’s on the floor, and the dresser, the clothes off their hangers, the comb are things I look at, have to look at. She keeps going.
“You wouldn’t,” she says.
From some other planet, I look at her. “Carla, what are you talking about?”
“You know, like if I were out of here.” She waves her arm like an umpire calling someone out who slid into home base.
“Stop talking like that.” I say the words. That’s all.
Carla starts to laugh, a laugh that is old like a hollow tree. “I’m right. No one would notice. How funny is that.” She presses her palms on her legs and stretches. “But you know who really wouldn’t miss me even if he were alive?”
I shake my head.
“My dad.” Her eyes wince in the corners. “My dad wouldn’t miss me.” The idea hurts her, but she throws it at me anyway.
“How do you mean?”
“Ever since I was old enough for school, he sent me away, to places far enough that he couldn’t see me during the week, or he sent me to boarding schools. It’s like I wouldn’t see him for days since he spent so much time with his artists, and then, on weekends, just the two of us, we’d walk down the rows of peach trees. He’d tell me how much he loved me. But I’d end up alone by the end.”
“What about your brother?”
“Sure, there’s Doug. Druggie, jail, the whole thing. He’s gone. We don’t talk about him.”
“I’m so sorry. Why did your dad send you away?”
“He loved me, too much, more than my brother,” she says. There is no curl in her words.
“Like how?” I say. How I say things sometimes is how she says things, young.
“Don’t know.”
“Giving you things?”
“No.”
“Holding on to you?”
“Kind of,” she says.
Whenever I try to get her to talk about her family, she changes the subject. This time, with Kyle and the sunrise in my apartment, she answers.
“What’s your dad like?” she says. Here’s the subject change, the switch of tracks. She’s back to the curl in her words.
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. It comes out more curtly than I meant.
My bedroom is the breeze outside, the growing morning, the fridge in the kitchen turning on.
“Nobody’d miss me,” she says.
My lips go tight. Her type of smart is the chessboard kind, each move carefully tabulated, angled. I don’t want to be a sacrificed piece. But she looks left and right as if she’s looking for a way through the floor. I don’t know how to move the pieces so we’re king to king.
“Sure they would,” I say, but the words sound like a brochure by Mr. White’s phone.
“No,” she says. “The only person who’d miss me is Kyle.” She’s shaking and her jaw gets tight.
That one hits me. My eyes squint. My lips stay tight and thin. There’s nothing but us in this room, nobody else in this world that’s tipping one way and then the other.
“I’d miss you,” I say.
She looks up. “Really?”
Her excitement came too quickly. I’m being played, and the game is more than a match in this room. There’s her life. There’s my job. There’s a goose crying out in the night sky.
“You’re just saying that because you think I’ll kill myself.”
Right now I’ll say anything to keep another person living.
“Carla, I care about you,” I say. And I do. Maybe too much.
“You do not. If you cared about me, you’d keep away from me.”
“Meaning?”
“People hurt what they love.”
“Wrong,” I say, “people protect what they love.” My feet over the edge of the bed, I lean forward, looking down at her on the floor.
“Like you loved Kyle,” she says. “Nice job.”
My head turns toward my shoulder, away from her. That was low.
“Nice, Carla” is all I say.
And we sit in my room for awhile, the sun coming up outside. Breakfast will be ready soon, and we’ll have classes, and everyone will be normal and “Fine, thank you” and worried about college. And we’ll forget tonight, and Kyle, and Donny Zurkus will get his name cleared, and St. Tim’s will make the top ten boarding schools.
“This isn’t worth it,” she says. With her elbows at angles, she gets up from the floor. Her head gets taller than my head in the room since I’m sitting on the bed, leaning my back against the wall, my legs flat in front of me.
“Where you going?”
“What do you care?” The curl to her words is sharp.
“Promise me you’re not going to do anything stupid.” I’m standing up, too, taller than her tall. One of my hands reaches toward her, but she steps away.
“I’m going to breakfast. Later, Ms. Alta.”
And she gives me a little salute with two fingers touching an imaginary cap.
“Come back after breakfast, okay?” I say.
Out of my bedroom, she’s already reaching for the outside door.