On the same night he’d been admitted, Erik checked himself out of the hospital while Dee was out getting something to eat. When she got back, she dropped the bag of takeout she’d bought for the two of them, and the tomato soup spilled across the hospital floor. The nurses did not have a forwarding address, and they admitted that they’d recommended he stay another night, but he’d requested the wheelchair, and they’d brought it and rolled him outside. He’d limped away. Dee left a voicemail about it all on my work phone, and I listened to it while sorting books. My boss eyed me warily from the door of his office. I hadn’t picked up because I’d known it would be about Erik, and I’d missed so much work that summer, and done such a terrible job when I had been there, that I sensed I was dangerously close to losing the job. I assumed I’d been hired in part because my boss thought I was cute, in part because I played the poet-needing-work card well, but I’d missed several days in a row during the past week and I knew I wasn’t that cute. I wasn’t Dee-level cute, anyway. It was a good job, an easy job, and I needed it. I listened to the voicemail and acted bored, like it was a message from my mother or the landlord. I could still feel my boss’s eyes on me while I deleted the message and quietly put the phone back on the receiver. I picked up my sorting pace and kept my head down.
When the clock struck four-thirty, I rushed to Dee’s dorm. I had to walk and then take the bus, so it was almost an hour before I was knocking on her door. I was sweating from the walk, and I felt empty and hungry, like I could drink all of Lake Michigan or eat six meals at once. Dee didn’t answer, so I gently opened the door and found her painting. She looked so beautiful, I had the urge to run to her and wrap her up. Dee had this effect on me sometimes; I needed to be near her body. She was sweating too, but just lightly, and it gave her whole body a glistening pulse. She ignored me, and I allowed her that. I sat down on the floor and watched her paint, and I could feel time passing by the way light pooled and evaporated and pooled again in the corners of the tiny room and on her bed and in her hair. She was painting more onions. It was getting dark when she finally turned to me and said, “What?”
I felt like I was waking from meditation. “You called me,” I said.
“You didn’t answer.” She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand unselfconsciously and smeared a streak of purple paint on her nose.
“Babe,” I started. “I was at work.”
She rolled her eyes, and then they got large and dark and began to well. I stayed on the floor. I lost the urge to touch her when the tears started to flow.
“He’s gone,” she said. Her voice broke. I wanted to turn a light on in the room because the space seemed suddenly, dangerously dark, even though summer light still lingered in the sky. Leif’s words echoed in my head: You can only make it worse. I was making it worse.
“He’s a smart kid. He’ll be okay,” I tried.
Dee threw down the paintbrush she’d been holding. Paint splattered on the carpet. “You’re dumber than I thought,” she said. I cringed. “Okay?” she repeated.
I didn’t really think he was going to be okay, but I needed to say something. I was bad at saying the right thing, even when it came to Dee, whom I knew so well. Whom I thought I knew so well.
“We need to find him,” she said. She pointed at me. “You need to find him.” I nodded and nodded, but I had no real hope we would. The nodding seemed to calm Dee, though, so I put some heart into it. She sat down next to me on the carpet. I wished she would turn the light on. Her bare shoulder touched mine, and I felt our skin stick together for a second while she leaned in to me. “You saw those pictures at the bar. What if Erik . . . What if he goes missing too.” I was ashamed I hadn’t thought of this possibility. Or that Leif hadn’t.
“Right,” I conceded, because I was tired of fighting. This was the way I lost all arguments—appeasement. “You hungry?” I pinched her arm, and she shoved me.
“Whatever,” she said.
“Let’s go to Walker’s Point,” I said. “We can ask around.”
Dee eyed me. Her face was hard to see in the dark room. I put my forehead against hers, but she still wasn’t having it. She pushed me back. “Fine,” she said.
I scrubbed Dee’s nose harshly with a washcloth to get the paint off, and then we took the bus down to Walker’s Point. I was starving and wanted to kill two birds with one stone, so I decided we’d check out the bar right next door to the one where the devil blew smoke out onto the dance floor. This bar was famous for serving cheeseburgers that would change your life. I’d heard this from Erik, and he hadn’t cared to elaborate. I told Dee on the bus, and she rolled her eyes.
“I’m a vegetarian now,” she said smartly. Milwaukee washed by behind her done-up eyes, and I had a hard time focusing on either view: her purpled eye shadow and the sidewalks, her rose-petal cheekbones and the bus shelters, her oily mascara and the cream-brick buildings.
“Jesus, really?” I murmured. “You can get plain cheese. Just like we used to make at home, then.” She huffed and put her headphones on. I thought Frank had given her the Walkman, though she’d never confirmed that. I didn’t think she could have afforded it on her wage at the salon. Frank was big into gifts like that. I was suspicious of them, and I wondered if they were meant as distractions, though from what I didn’t know. But I also couldn’t remember the last time Leif had bought me something besides drugs or takeout, so maybe I was just jealous.
The bus started to empty out near the downtown, and it didn’t pick up any new passengers. By the time we got to Walker’s Point, Dee and I were the only people on the bus. It was late, and Dee had slipped into a half sleep, resting her head slightly on my shoulder. At our stop, I nudged her, and she sprang up and grabbed my hand so tightly it hurt.
“Relax,” I said. “We’re here.” She got embarrassed and busied herself with tucking away the Walkman. I wished she hadn’t brought it. It was a thief magnet.
The bar was much shabbier than the one we’d been to with Erik. Its most redeeming qualities were the permanent multicolored Christmas lights strung up behind the bar and the overwhelming smells of hot butter and meat. Dee wrinkled her nose up, but I knew she thought it smelled good. We sat at the bar, which was fairly empty, and I ordered us two beers and two cheeseburgers, one without meat. The bartender, a young woman in a crop top and a choker, stared at me. “No meat?” she yelled over the music.
“No meat,” I yelled back. She laughed, and I nodded, and I saw her run to tell the other bartender, who was running the grill (a generous noun for the contraption he was cooking on), and he threw his hands up, and she gestured toward us, and they laughed conspiratorially.
“Happy?” I asked Dee.
She licked foam from the head of her beer. “Hell no,” she said. “Great plan. Brilliant.”
“Just drink your damn beer.”
The burgers arrived in waxed paper and dripping in grease, which spread in large wet spots on the paper and covered our hands when we opened them. The most satisfying part was the waxed paper. The burger did not change my life, unless clogged arteries counts. Dee hated hers; it was clearly an unevenly sliced piece of Velveeta cut from those processed cheese-like blocks they sell in aluminum foil.
“Gross, Dee,” I said. “Stop eating that.”
“Well, give me a bite of yours, then,” she said. She reached over to grab my burger and I slapped her hand away.
“I thought you were a vegetarian,” I said. “Now.” I stuck my tongue out at her.
Dee shrugged. “I changed my mind again.”
I nodded and slid my half-eaten burger toward her. She kissed my cheek. I leaned in to the kiss.
When the bartender came to refresh our drinks, I leaned across the bar; I motioned for her to lean in too, and she was annoyed. Sweat collected on her choker and I watched it run down her neck. “Can I ask you a couple of questions?”
“That depends,” she said.
“Do you know Erik Gunnarson?”
“Honey, lots of men come into this bar. I don’t develop a relationship with every single one of them.”
“Young, skinny, tall, reddish-blond hair, huge green eyes . . .”
“Yeah, I’ve seen him.”
“You see him recently?”
“You a cop or something?”
“No, just his . . . friend.” I choked on that word.
“Well, I haven’t seen him in a month or maybe more, but I can’t be sure. We’ve been having some real weird shit happen around here.” She motioned to the back of the bar door, which, like the other bar I’d visited, had a corkboard filled with pictures and descriptions of men gone missing. “People just disappearing left and right, and the cops don’t seem to give a damn about it.” There was a guy waving her down at the other end of the bar, and she tossed her head in his direction.
“Thanks,” I shouted after her.
“Look at you,” Dee said. “Playing detective.”
“You’ve got a bit of cheese just there.” I tried to touch the corner of her mouth, but she batted me away.
“No, I don’t.” She laughed.
“I’m not kidding, it’s right there, here, just let me.” She pushed my arm away, and I shrugged.
She wiped her face, but there wasn’t any cheese there. She pinched my arm. “Funny,” she said. “What now?”
I got out my notebook and wrote down Erik’s description. I didn’t have a picture, but I told Dee we’d come back with one, and then I posted the write-up to the back of the door. It was a sad door, and I couldn’t stand to look at it for very long.
“We can wait around and ask some other people too.” I ordered us another round. Dee shrugged.
The bar stayed relatively empty, and we never did ask anyone else about Erik. Instead, the music got louder and louder, and Dee and I got drunk. My memories from this night are both rose-tinted and PBR-tinted. Our conversation meandered. We talked about Dee’s plans for her next set of paintings, and my plans to save enough money for a plane ticket to Europe next summer. We worried aloud about Ma’s loneliness and wondered when Suze would quit waitressing and “do something with her life,” and we gossiped about whom Peter was dating. I loved spending long hours like this with Dee. There was no one else I felt as comfortable with. We shared the kinds of things that other people might scoff off—aspirations, fears, hopes—the kind of Hallmark shit you’re not supposed to talk about out loud. But that night, even as we got drunk, and the music got louder, and the night got later, I could tell something was broken between us. We were skirting Frank, but he ghosted our conversation the whole night. I waited until I was very drunk, and Dee was mid-sip, and then I asked her.
“Have you heard from him?” I knew I was a coward for not saying his name. Her face went blank, like she was suddenly leaning very hard into the beer-induced numbness. I thought maybe she wouldn’t respond, because she began picking at her cocktail napkin. I took two big swallows.
“No,” she said.
I knew immediately she was lying. “I’m sorry.” I didn’t risk pressing her, but I wanted so badly to ask if she blamed me.
“I just miss the sex,” she said. Her cocktail napkin was shredded now. This was a clever move, aimed to distract me.
I took the bait. “He didn’t even make you come.”
“It’s not all about that.”
“Did you fake it with him?”
“Do you fake it with Leif?”
I paused to consider the question. Leif had a real fear that I lied about my orgasms. I thought I did a good job of keeping it honest. I never faked it, but I left the situation open to interpretation sometimes. And if he asked, I always told him the truth.
“Nope,” I said, but the pause had undermined the confidence of the response, and Dee rolled her eyes.
“Sure,” she said.
I felt the conversation getting away from me. “I’m sorry.” I suspected neither of us knew exactly what I was apologizing for; I hoped it would cover something I’d done or said that had hurt her over the past couple of weeks, months, years. Dee leaned in to me, and her face seemed much older suddenly. I noticed faint lines between her eyebrows and tracing her eye sockets. Ma had the same ones. Did I? She whispered in my ear. I shivered.
“You’re so full of shit. You think you know everything about what you like, and why you like it, but the only difference between us is I’m honest with myself.” She burped, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I patted her on the back, and she drained the last of her beer and went to find the bathroom.
While Dee was in the bathroom, I used the pay phone outside to call Leif. He’d skipped work on account of a bad hangover, and I knew he was home because he always ordered shitty Chinese food and watched pay-per-view porn when he was in bad shape. He was surprised to hear my voice. “Everything good?”
“I just . . . We . . . need a ride, okay?”
I wondered if the TV screen was frozen on something nasty, some improbably large-chested woman getting slapped around by the pizza guy or whatever.
“Of course. Where are you?”
I hesitated because I knew Leif wouldn’t like the answer, but I was too drunk to lie. “Walker’s Point,” I said.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fine.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were packed into the Spitfire, and Dee’s head was lolling around on account of Leif’s vigorous driving. Every little bump threw her head back into the headrest.
“Easy,” I said. He eyed me and shook his head. I put my hand on his thigh, which he allowed. “Please.”
Leif carried Dee into the house and put her, not entirely gently, on our couch. I had an image of Erik’s gangly body stretched out there earlier in the summer, and felt my knees go a little weak. I stumbled and Leif reached for me.
“You too?” He scooped me up like a baby and used his mouth to brush the hair away from my ear. “What were you two doing?” At this point, I did play. I pretended to get very sleepy, and I blinked several times slowly. I nuzzled his neck and took a bit of the soft skin there between my lips. I felt his body come awake.
Leif said, “Let’s go to bed, okay?”
He carried me into the bedroom and shut the door with his foot. Then he laid me down on the bed. It was an awkward pose, with my legs bent at an uncomfortable angle and my hands curled up near my face. I could feel my clothes were askew. I felt the night breeze from the open window on my bare stomach. I let my breath get deeper, and I kept my eyes closed. I could hear Leif shuffling around, and then I heard the click and swish of his camera’s shutter. I stayed so still. I felt him move toward me, and he started taking off my clothes. He did everything for me. He unbuttoned my jeans and slipped my shirt over my head. He tugged my pants from my hips and gently undid the clasp of my bra. He ran his hands over everything, and I stayed limp, like a rag doll. I wanted to know what he would do when he thought I was not awake. He pulled my panties down, and opened my legs for me, and stopped. I lay as still as I could. Did he think I was asleep? Or passed out? He moved my legs, and I liked the way he put me in the position I knew he liked. He kissed me between the legs, and then, before I was ready, he was inside me. He was so hard, and I was so dry, I thought I would scream, but I kept my eyes shut, and eventually, he rolled me over and starting fucking me from behind with his hand on the back of my neck and my arms lying limp over the side of the bed. When he was done and I could feel the cum dripping out of me, he rearranged me. He rolled me over and threw our sheet on top of me, and then he straddled me, I could feel his knees pressing my hips. He kissed me on the lips, and I tasted his sweat and his breath, which smelled slightly of five spice. And then I fell asleep for real.
Leif woke me when he came to bed. He flopped down heavily beside me and tried to pull me in to him. My mouth was dry, and my body was plastered to the sheets with sweat. I tossed Leif’s arms off me and padded into the kitchen. After I’d drunk three glasses of water and taken three ibuprofen, I went into the living room, where Dee was sleeping awkwardly on the couch. Through the doorway, I could see Leif’s large body splayed out on our bed. I pulled the cushions off the back of the couch and took a blanket from the bedroom. Then I pulled Dee down off the couch and curled up next to her on the floor. She reached out to me and offered her hand, which I held, even though I could tell it was sweating out the alcohol in her body.
When I woke up, I couldn’t feel my right shoulder anymore. I sat up and reached for Dee, but she was gone. She’d left a messy note on our coffee table. Have to work at 10:00. We need to find Erik. I love you. I eased myself onto the couch and held my head in my hands. I felt the blood rushing back into my shoulder, and it burned. Leif stumbled into our living room completely naked, and he wiped crusty sleep gunk from his beautiful eyes. He hopped into his sweats and flopped down next to me on the sofa. I reached for the note, because I didn’t want to talk about it, but Leif had shed his sleepiness quickly and grabbed it before I did, then tossed it back on the coffee table. There was weed all over the table, empty Coke cans, a Kenneth Koch anthology opened to some poem Leif was memorizing. Leif shook tiny buds of weed from the note. “You two should give this up,” he said.
“Dee’s worried about him. Why aren’t you?”
Leif ignored this.
“You should be,” I said.
“Did you sleep out here?” he asked.
“No,” I lied. “I’ve been up for a while now.”
“I carried you to bed,” Leif said. “I remember.”
I shrugged. “I was drunk,” I said. I closed my eyes and saw myself splayed out on our bed. I watched Leif rearrange my legs. I was a puppet. I had an urge to hurt him, and I forced myself to stare at my hands.
“I know,” he said gently. He brushed some sticky hair from the nape of my neck and leaned in to smell me there. He kissed each vertebra in my neck softly. “God, you looked sexy.”
I wanted to tell him I’d been awake. I wanted to tell him he’d hurt me. He reached under my shirt and teased my nipples taut. He slipped his hand in my underwear, where, this time, I was wet. He moaned when he felt the slipperiness between his fingers. I lifted my hips up and he pulled my underwear down over my hips. He knelt next to the couch and nuzzled the inside of my thighs with his lips. He kissed me. I let him. I always let him.
I was fifteen when I discovered I could make myself come by holding my hips just right and my legs open underneath the heavy stream of the bathtub faucet. I was thrilled to find I wasn’t defective after all, but I was disappointed and shocked by the feeling itself. It was like someone had taken control of me from the outside and contracted my body so tightly that it only felt good because the moment of orgasm was a release from that contraction.
I felt I had to tell Dee, though as soon as I’d told her, a deep shame coursed through me, because she retreated from me slightly. Her cheeks went pink. Her eyes drilled into the center of my forehead.
“Oh my God, Pegasus,” she said. She had a mindless habit of brushing her lips and tracing their outline with the ends of her hair. “That is . . . really weird.” That was about all she said on the subject. I wanted to ask her how it was different than her friend Nicole on her bike. But I just shrugged and acted like no big deal, even though I was stung.
A couple of weeks later, I asked if she’d tried it yet, and she seemed annoyed. She was doing her homework on the couch in the living room. She shook her head and buried herself in her notebook, but her cheeks blazed. I knew she was lying.
“What?” I prodded her. “Are you too scared?”
“No, I’m just not a weirdo.” There was a certain grit, a seriousness, in her voice that hurt me and made me want to hurt her back.
“You are,” I told her. She glared at me. In a dramatic flourish, she threw her notebook on the ground at my feet. It was a cheap bright yellow composition book. It fell open on the carpet so I could see class notes written in her messy, looping handwriting, and doodles in the margins, which had become more intricate and sophisticated in the last year—profiles of classmates, landscape sketches, petals of complicated flowers. I stared at them while Dee ran up to our bedroom and slammed the door. Ma came out of the kitchen and stood in the doorway watching me stare at Dee’s drawings. She picked up the notebook and gently closed it. I opened my mouth to defend myself, and Ma put her hand up as if to say, I don’t want to hear it.