Page 106 of On His Mind

Trust me.

Two words, and something goes through the middle of me like a skate blade through fresh ice, silent, all the way to the bottom. Because I do trust her. I don't know when that happened. I don't know the day. There wasn't a moment. There was that first Hawthorne House party my freshman year and then a hundred small nothings after it, and at some point, that trust grew. It happened without my permission, and now I'm here.

I get up. The four feet take about a second, and it costs me more than anything I've done all week. The mattress gives when I sit. My weight tips the bed toward me, and she has to put a hand down to stay where she is, and then she shifts back on the mattress, and turns, and puts her spine against mine. I’m confused, but I don’t move. We’re shoulder blade to shoulder blade. I feel the small hard line of her vertebrae fitting into the channel of my spine. Her weight settles until we're holding each other up and neither of us can see each other.

"There," she whispers to the wall in front of her. "Now you're not looking at me. You're just talking."

I don't know what to do. I sit there in the dark with Penelope’s back against mine, and I can't get a full breath in, and the reason I can't is that she's warm. Every time she breathes, I feel her back move against mine, and I forget everything else. I try to slow my heart down, try to stop the thoughts racing through my head –– the ones that are getting too excited, too nervous, too scared.My feet are flat on the ground like I’m ready to run at any given moment.

In for four. Hold. Out for six. It doesn't work. My heart’s going like something's chasing it, high and fast up under my collarbones and into my throat, and there's no way out. I put both hands on my knees and press down. Reste tranquille.

"I'll go first," she says. I feel the shape of the words in her ribs a half second before I hear them, and I'll never be able to explain what that does to me.

“I spent all summer being what my mother wanted. I was in Chicago, then two weeks in Portugal. Every dinner, every room, every moment was fake.”

I don't say anything. I've got nothing that would help.

"She called yesterday to tell me she's ashamed of me."

Her back goes stiff against mine, the kind you'd never see if you were looking at her from the front, and I get all of it because there's nowhere for it to hide.

"Not in those words. She'd never use those words." Her hands do something in her lap — I feel the shift of it through her shoulders. "That's why I'm not going home for Christmas."

She stops.

And I sit there with her spine against mine and there’s an enormous, useless need to turn around and look at her. But I don’t. I've been trying to work out what's happening in my chest since she sat down behind me, and that's it. It's so simple it's stupid: I want to turn around. I want to see her face while she says it. I want to know whether her eyes are wet or whether she's doing the thing where she squares her shoulders and makes it small so nobody has to carry it with her. But she's sitting behind me on purpose. She's done me a kindness, and the entire time I'm sitting inside her kindness wanting to tear it down. I stay where I am and don't turn around.

I don’t mean to let the silence go on for this long, but I’m trying to think of what she wants to know. She spoke about her mom, so I guess I can tell her about mine. It takes me a moment, but I finally say it when I feel her stop breathing.

"My mom left when I was young," I say. My voice comes out wrong. Lower than usual and flattened, like something's sitting on my chest. "I don't remember her."

Behind me, nothing. No sound, no shift.

"My dad." My thumb finds the inside seam on my jeans and starts working it, back and forth, over a thread that's already come loose from doing this. "He used." The word comes out sanded down. I've said it before, in offices, to people with clipboards, and it always comes out like that — one syllable, no emotion, the fact of it.

"It got bad."

Bad. Another one. Another word doing the work of the year.

I could give her the real thing. It's all there. The apartment on Rue Sainte-Julie with the radiator that banged all night. The sound of the front door at four in the morning and how you could tell everything you needed to know from the way it closed. Learning at six years old to make a bowl of cereal without opening a cabinet. How many minutes it takes a man to come up two flights of stairs and how many friends are right behind him.

"Really bad," I say.

She moves against me — a small adjustment, settling her weight back a little further into me, finally breathing again.

"The state took me at seven."

I say it to the locked bedroom door on the other side of the room.

"That one was when he broke my arm."

Her breathing stops. It's not a gasp. She doesn't make a sound. Her ribs simply stop moving against my back, and they staystopped, and the absence of it is louder than anything she could have said.

Three seconds. Four.

Then she breathes again, careful, like she's doing it quietly, so I won't hear that she had to start again.

She doesn't turn around. She doesn't say my name in the soft voice. She doesn't reach back for my hand, and if she had, I'd have gone out the door and down the stairs.