16

Beneath the afternoon sun, steam rises in slow waves from the water, like gauzy sheets of silk. On the porch, Sofìa is sprawled in a lounge chair, a book splayed in one hand. She looks up when I settle into the lounge chair opposite her, as though it takes her a moment to remember where she is. She’s reading something she brought with her, Wuthering Heights—which isn’t unusual for her. She was always the smart one. That’s how I remember her, in school, back home, just about wherever I saw her, with her nose buried in a book, and almost always an old one I wouldn’t have ever thought to pick up myself.

Sofìa lets the book drop to her lap. “How are you doing?” she asks me, giving me a critical once-over. “It’s hard to get used to this”—she gestures to my hair—“whole thing.” Then, with a gasp: “You look like your mom.”

I make a face at her.

She slaps a hand over her mouth, histrionically. “Same expression, too,” she tells me. She cranes her neck around, and says, to the house and its many cameras, “Sorry, Anthony.” She gives me a guilty grin, like we’re back in school and the teacher just caught her passing notes. I wonder if the cameras can pick up what we’re saying. If Anthony’s hidden microphones are actually that powerful. “Maybe we’re not supposed to be childhood friends anymore. Has he said anything to you?”

“No,” I say. “You’re probably right, though. I don’t think it’s a good idea.” And it really isn’t. Not just because it will make it harder for her to think of me as Lola and not Betty, but also because the fact that she grew up three streets away from me is another tether tying me down to Betty. I don’t want to think about home. The whole point of changing my hair, my wardrobe, my story, is so I can forget about these things. About Betty. And that’s already hard enough to do with Sofìa just being here. To her, that’s who I am. Who I’ll always be. Betty Roux, the gangly girl who was her best friend for sophomore and junior year of high school. I dye my hair and nothing changes, except now to her I look more like my mom. There’s no space to breathe, to exist as Lola, with her around.

She loses interest in me, quick. She still asks me what I’m going to do today, but her voice is distant, and her eyes are back on her book.

I’m rescued from having to lie about what I was going to do next—pretending like I had actually thought about it when I hadn’t—by Anthony. He slips out the front door, catches my attention, and beckons me over to him.

When I reach him, he pulls me inside to give us some privacy, but still pitches his voice low. “Sammy’s chopping our firewood,” he tells me, and it strikes me as he speaks that I’ve been hearing the steady beat of the ax for some time now, without identifying it. The metallic thud reverberates over the water with a hollow echo before the thick overgrowth of trees surrounding us swallows it. “I’d like you to talk to him. Alone. Are you up for that?”

I take a deep breath, trying not to let my anxiety show. You ain’t going to be his bitch. I haven’t been able to get Sammy’s warning out of my mind. It wasn’t so much what he’d said that bothered me. It was how he’d said it. The simmering resentment he couldn’t conceal, for the domination Anthony exerted over him. I can’t escape the feeling that there’s something specific that happened between them that has kept them separate for however many years. I’m walking blind into a hornet’s nest. That’s what Anthony’s asking me to do. “What excuse do I give,” I ask him, my unease threading itself through my voice, “for joining him?”

Anthony holds up a chilled bottle of water, which I take from him. “Not,” he adds, “that you need a pretext. He’ll just be happy to see you.”

He leads me through the house, into the kitchen, to the back door. The chopping gets louder, and I expect to find Sammy just outside, but when the door swings open, there’s nothing but the grass swaying gently in the breeze. Anthony doesn’t cross the threshold with me.

“Follow the noise,” he instructs me. Then, when I stop, too: “Don’t worry. I’ll be watching the whole time.” He points down the hall, toward his office.

Despite his good intentions, this isn’t exactly comforting. All it means is Anthony will be eavesdropping, judging me. I will be hyperaware of his gaze on me, on us. And it’s not like I’m in any danger here, right? After all, I’m just saying hi. I’m getting to know the man. What is it Anthony thinks he has to protect me from?

I step into a wave of heat. The buzz of flies competes with the loud, echoing chops of Sammy’s ax, which I’m supposed to follow. Into the woods, it seems. Into that forbidding jungle.

“Break a leg,” Anthony says.

“Thanks,” I mutter. And then I step into the glare and trail the vicious, determined clank of the ax like I’ve been told to, searching for Sammy.

It turns out, I don’t have to walk far to find him. The path to my cottage has a fork in it that I hadn’t noticed before, and I follow the muddy line along the edge of a thicket to a small mossy clearing. There are an old bench and worktable, some rusted tools whose purpose I could never even begin to fathom, and in the center of this open space—that still manages to feel claustrophobic, like the trees are slowly but surely closing in on us—is Sammy, wielding an ax with a big rusted blade. It sounds like he’s taking huge savage swings. In fact, though, his stroke is truncated. Economical. He’s not making a show of this. He has a job to do, and he knows how to get it done. His violence is controlled.

He’s winding up for another blow, when he stops, frozen. I don’t think I’ve made too much noise, but he seems to have felt my presence, nevertheless. He lets the ax drop into one hand as he pivots around, finding my eyes as if he knew somehow exactly where to place me. For a moment, he looks confused. Dazed, almost. Like he’s walked down the staircase in the dark and he’s forgotten a step. And then he finds himself. “Lola,” he says. I wait for him to say more, but that’s it. Just Lola.

“Hi,” I say, shooing a mosquito away from my face. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”

He looks at me, puzzled.

I hold up the water bottle. The condensation drips through my fingers. “It’s hot out here.” As if to emphasize the point, my cheeks burn. You ain’t going to be his bitch. I feel foolish. It would have been enough just to follow the sound here. I’m the one who should determine who Lola is, not Anthony. I shouldn’t feel compelled to do everything he tells me to. Sammy is just another person. Another man. All I have to do is get to know him.

Sammy says, “Thank you,” but he doesn’t move. He isn’t going to be the one to close the distance between us. I’m going to have to put the bottle in his hand. I know I’m overanalyzing this. But it feels as if he’s testing me. He wants me to prove my interest in him, and he’s ready to use it to subdue me and establish his dominance. You ain’t going to be his bitch. You’re gonna be mine.

I try to shake off my nerves. I can do this. I force my feet to walk, and I place the slippery plastic bottle into his waiting hand. His palms, I notice, are blazing red, from the friction of the handle. He isn’t wearing gloves. But the skin is callused, and it isn’t torn. He’s used to this. Up close, I can smell his sweat. More than that, I’m suffocating in it. The hot stink of sulfur practically chokes me. He isn’t wearing a shirt, and the skin on his shoulders and arms and torso is thick, too, like his hands, tanned into a strange combination of gold and pink. He accepts the water, drops the ax to the side, and drinks it down in practically one large gulp.

I take a discreet step back, to escape the smell. But no more than that. His gaze fixes me in place. The doleful expression is gone. These eyes are sharper. Curious. Awake.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, though I don’t know what I’m apologizing for.

He raises his eyebrows.

“For interrupting you,” I finish, limply.

“It’s my pleasure,” he tells me. And I can feel how much he means it, just like I can feel the heat emanating from his body. The air seems to vibrate with his energy.

I resist the urge to search the trees surrounding us. Has Anthony really had time to install cameras out here? Where are they? Can he actually hear us? Does it even matter? I have to resist the urge, too, to offer Sammy another apology—Sorry I’m being so awkward, I just don’t know what we’re supposed to talk about—and then I hear myself say, “That’s a nasty scar.” I’m pointing to his temple. A broken, disjointed line cuts from the top of his cheekbone over his ear, stretching toward the back of his head. The hair, shorn so close to his skull, is divided in two along this mark. The sweat rolling down his forehead to his cheeks and clinging to his chin sickens me somehow. I don’t know why. Or maybe I do. Maybe it’s because there’s something intimate about it. And maybe I’m not sickened by it so much as my own reaction to it. Because I’m not only repulsed. I almost want to touch it. Wipe the pendulous droplets off his jaw.

He runs a hand over his scalp, compulsively. “You can thank Archie Miller for that,” he tells me. “I don’t think of it as nasty, though.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“Have you ever been bullied?” he asks me, in answer.

“Not really,” I say, though I’m not sure if I’m telling him the truth. It feels like a lie. I didn’t escape being tormented in school. It’s just that nobody thought of me long enough to consider bullying me. That truth, though, belongs to Betty. Not to Lola.

“Things are different now,” he continues. “There’s online bullying, all that invisible stuff. That didn’t exist back when I was a kid. Back then it was physical. Personal. Archie Miller hated me. You know what I mean? He had it out for me. Decided to make my life hell. This”—he runs his hand over his scalp again—“happened when I finally fought back. This was after years of him waiting for me, teasing me, hounding me, grabbing me. Hitting me. Bullying me. Archie Miller and his friends. Buddy Rhodes. Jason Smith. The whole gang of them. Then one day I didn’t want to be hit no more. Simple as that.”

“Oh, my God” is all I can say. I have a hard time picturing this hulking man as a small child. He’s got too much presence, too much confidence, for me to imagine him as a helpless, desperate kid.

“I tried to kill him,” Sammy says. “He tried to kill me.”

“I’m so sorry,” I tell him, and it finally sounds sincere.

His hand rests on his head, forgotten. “That was the end of it,” he says. He smiles at me. Satisfied. Even after all these years, whatever he did to Archie Miller, it still nourishes him.

The scars on my fingers, on Tucker’s face, suddenly seem inadequate—pathetic, compared to the wound on Sammy’s skull. Yet I can still remember the look on Tucker’s face, when I threw that lamp, when I reached for him. And I feel a sudden connection—a real connection—to this man, because I still experience some sort of animal pleasure at the memory, regardless of my shame.

“You know,” Sammy says, crumpling the empty plastic bottle and tossing it onto the workbench, “you look really familiar, Lola.”

Underneath that watchful gaze, I become aware that I’ve wrapped my arms around myself, like I’m cold, rather than boiling under the sun, and I force my hands to relax their grip and shake myself loose. “Oh?” I ask.

“Like Darla,” he tells me, simply, like I should know who Darla is. I can’t remember the last time he’s blinked.

“Darla?” I ask, when it’s clear he’s not going to say more unless I prod him.

“Darla,” he repeats, again like it should be enough. And then, finally: “My first girlfriend.” He makes an odd swirling gesture over his head. “She had hair like that. She cut it herself. Dyed it.” For a minute, he looks confused, genuinely, and I find myself wondering if there might not be something wrong with him. Something slightly off. Maybe when he got that scar, he got more than just a cut. “Do you know Darla?” he asks me.

“No.” My tone is patronizing, like I’m speaking to a child. “I don’t.”

“Really?” And there’s something about the question that touches me, even as I’m realizing that this is no accident, that this is why Anthony has dyed my hair, to set me up, like a piece of bait. The man in front of me is floundering. The question he really wants to ask isn’t if I know this Darla. It’s if I am her. His eyes search my face, but it seems to take him a long time to find me. When he does, it reminds me of a boxer after a particularly brutal fight, in the moment when he embraces his opponent. Now that the bout is over, they recognize each other, not in spite of their stupor but because of it. There’s a bond between them, and a distance that separates them from the rest of the world.

“That’s too bad,” Sammy says. “She was sweet,” he tells me. “Sweet like you.”