Dirty Read online

  Then he turned around and stalked away.

  I let him go. I watched him go. I stood in stunned silence at the sight of his back his words echoing in my ears.

  “You weren’t supposed to,” I managed to find the breath to say.

  He stopped at the front door and turned to look back at me. I have never seen a look so desperate. I have never seen eyes so bleak.

  “But I do,” he said. “What are you, Elle? Are you a ghost? Are you an angel or a demon? Because you can’t be real.”

  He’d said those words to me the first time his touch had made me shudder with fulfillment. When he said them now, I had to sit. My knees bent, and I went to the floor like a puppet whose strings have been cut. A rag doll. Broken.

  “I’m real,” I whispered.

  “Not for me,” he said. “You won’t let yourself be real for me.”

  I looked down at my white shirt. Red flowers had bloomed on it. My blood, from the wound on my finger.

  Blood, like crimson roses, blooming on my white shirt.

  I began to shake. My hair fell down around my shoulders and over my face. He couldn’t see me. I didn’t want him to see me, could not bear it, couldn’t stand to have him see my tears.

  “Did you go to bed with him tonight?”

  The words, spoken no more as a challenge but bleakly, made me shake my head.

  “No, Dan. I didn’t.”

  He was suddenly beside me. “Look at me.”

  I did.

  “I love you, Elle.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t.”

  “I do. I love you.”

  I shook my head. Tears scalded my skin, slipping in hot trails down my chin and down my throat, puddling in the hollow there. He took my hands in his, ignoring the blood.

  “Why won’t you let me inside?” he asked.

  There are always choices in this life. Move forward. Retreat. Leap. Fly. Fall. Succeed…fail.

  Trust.

  “I want to,” I told him. I shook harder, though I wasn’t cold.

  “Then do it. It will be all right. I promise you.” He put my fingertips to his mouth and kissed them. Licked the trace of blood away. Made them clean.

  Then I knew the truth I had been denying. He made me clean. Dan made me clean and shining and bright. He made me beautiful, and I did not want to lose him.

  “I promise,” he told me, and I believed him.

  This is what I told him.Andrew was always my mother’s favorite. I think he was meant to be her only, as well, because there were six years between his birth and mine, and she’d never made any secret of calling me her “little surprise.” I’d been spared, at least, of being referred to as the “mistake,” which was what I’d heard her call Chad once to her gaggle of girlfriends when she’d had them over for cigarettes and cards.

  Andrew was her favorite and deserving of it. Smart. Popular. Teachers and priests adored him. Schoolmates admired him. By the time he was in high school, the girls giggled and chased after him.

  We loved him too, Chad and I, and he was the perfect older brother. He never minded if we tagged along. He took us everywhere he went. He played games with us long after he’d outgrown them. Clue, Trouble, Uno, Hide and Seek, Ghost in the Graveyard. He made time for us in his life when he didn’t have to, and we idolized him. He defused our mother, who swung between suffocating us with love and whirlwind rages. He ignored our father, whose drinking increased steadily, year after year.

  I didn’t connect my mother’s fits of temper with my father’s consumption of alcohol until I was older, but by then it didn’t matter. We’d all lived so long with the white elephant by then that it was easier to keep pretending we didn’t see it.

  Something changed when Andrew turned twenty-one. His friends took him out. Got him drunk. Sent him home singing and banging doors at 3:00 a.m. I don’t know if he’d ever had alcohol before that, though he’d have had ample opportunity to try it at our house. I think, though, that he hadn’t. Drinking was one of those things we never discussed but the results of which we could only pretend to ignore.

  He started doing poorly in school, where he’d almost completed a degree in Criminology. In fact, he flunked out of college with only one more semester to go, and he came home to live with us again.

  He’d changed. He drank. He did drugs. He stole money to pay for it. He let his hair grow long and he didn’t shave. He pierced his ears. He no longer tried to make our mother laugh.

  The games he played were different now, too.

  He ignored Chad except to call him a sissy and a faggot. Chad, who was having trouble with bullies in school, retreated behind his black clothes and eyeliner, and his Goth punk music. It didn’t help anything. He was thirteen.

  I was fifteen. Awkward. My body had changed and grown, the braces had come off, I’d sprouted up taller than a number of boys in my class. Andrew told me I was beautiful. That he loved me. And that if I loved him, I would be nice.

  I did love my brother. I wanted to please him. I wanted things to go back the way they were, before, when he’d camp out with us in a tent in the backyard and keep us up all night telling us stories about monsters.

  Now Andrew had become the monster. Once, he’d vowed to protect me, but he didn’t protect me from himself.

  I did what he asked for three years. I thought it would make him better. It didn’t. He still drank. Still lost job after job. Still got surly and angry at the world for reasons I couldn’t understand. He’d leave home for a few months and return, hollow-eyed and sneering, and our mother turned the house upside down to accommodate him.

  Chad got bigger, the makeup heavier, the clothes blacker, the music louder. I stopped smiling. Counting helped, and counting food helped more. Bites of cake. Pieces of popcorn. I shielded myself in layers of fat and clothing, hiding the beauty my brother had seen and couldn’t seem to forget.

  Nobody asked me what was wrong.

  Chad knew, the same way I knew the magazines he hid beneath his mattress had pictures of naked boys, not girls, in them. We didn’t talk about it. Chad and I barely talked at all. We passed in the hall and sat across the breakfast table with each other, and for three years our eyes shared secrets neither of us dared to speak aloud.

  I didn’t really want to die, but cutting my wrist seemed like a good idea at the time. It bled a lot, and it hurt worse than I expected. I only did the one because the sight of the blood made me feel faint, and I had to sit down, and because Chad opened the door to my bedroom to tell me it was time for dinner.

  I hadn’t planned it very well, you see, my suicide attempt. My mother ranted at me the entire time she yanked me down the stairs to the kitchen, where she stanched my wrist with a tea towel. The carpet on the stairs was ruined, and she threw away the rug from my room. She kept me home from school for the rest of the week, but we never told anyone else what had happened.

  She didn’t tell me not to, I just…didn’t.

  The only person who asked me why I had done it was Andrew, who let himself into my bedroom and into my bed and kissed the white bandage right over the small red spot that had bloomed on it.

  “Why, Ella? Why would you do this? Is it because of me?”

  When I answered yes, he started to cry. And I pitied him, my beloved brother, because he sounded so forlorn, and I envied him because I had been unable to weep for years. He buried his face against me and his sobs rocked us, rocked the bed as he’d rocked it before for different reasons, and I stroked his hair over and over with my good hand until he tried to kiss me.

  And then I told him no.

  “No?” He asked in a voice like broken glass. “You don’t love me?”

  “No, Andrew. I don’t love you.”

  I thought he might hurt me, then. He’d done it before, even when I didn’t resist. He liked to pull my hair or pin my wrists. He liked to pinch.

  I didn’t flinch. I waited.

  He asked me again. “No?”

  “No.”