by T. M. De Vos
I remember it as a sad year. I was a freshman at Wayne, commuting like everyone else. I never met girls, and I couldn’t even imagine hooking up with the ones in my class. People checked each other out, but mostly you felt too awkward to approach anyone. We were all 18, 19, sober and thinking of the kids who got to live in real dorm rooms. We were a weird mix of kids who hadn’t done well enough and who’d done everything right but couldn’t afford to go away.
Detroit wasn’t much of a college town. Buildings were still boarded up from the riots in the ‘60s, old flaking murals on their sides—fur storage, haberdasheries. It was hard to imagine the extinct race of people who had needed these places. The ones I saw stood at bus stops and seemed to live on party-store cheeseburgers.
People were throwing parties in the taller buildings, not just raves but some good techno shows with wine and real models. I took some friends to one once, and we went up on an elevator that hadn’t been used for a good 30 years. We had to pull the cage down over ourselves to fit inside. It creaked at every floor and shaved crumbs off the walls. I took the stairs back down. I wasn’t dumb.
Not like my sister. I don’t know what it is with girls; they see exactly what a guy’s about, and they just keep going back for more. We used to roast her about the losers she picked up, Vic and Ryan and me. That and being darker than the three of us. Rochelle was Iranian, eye-raynian, as we said then, before we heard the PC version: ear-ahnian. We’d always tease her when she came out with a bath-towel turban on her head—towel-head, Ay-rab, our camel jockey sister. She’d laugh and snap it at us hard. “Sand nigger,” we’d say, falling over in hysterics, as she pounded the shit out of us with couch pillows. But we stopped saying that once Dean came around.
She’d been talking about some kid she was trying to save. She and her friends pulled up, all giddy from being packed into a car, a couple of them rummaging in the fridge and the rest horsing around on the lawn. Dean was perched on the railing when I came out to check on them.
“Rob!” Rochelle shouted. She rushed up behind Dean, wrapping her arms around him and resting her chin on his shoulder. “Dean got an 86 on his science quiz today. He studied!” She looked at me expectantly and squeezed him.
I saw the look on his face. He was recording that, right then. She hung all over everyone—me and Vic and Ryan, and Mom too, but I knew what it meant to Dean.
“Good job, man.” I held out my hand. He was testing me, and I was ready for him: clasp, knock, frisk.
Later he wandered back out to the porch where I was sitting with my calc homework, scratching down solutions and erasing them.
“Listen, man,” he began, taking the seat next to mine. His baggy pants drooped perfectly, the way Rochelle called “sexy.” “I know you seen me looking at your sister, and I just want to tell you I got a lot of respect for her.” He said, “respeck,” dropping the T.
It was probably too late. If Roe was trying to reform him, she already liked him. “That’s great,” I answered, trying to pull myself together. “I worry about my sister. Gotta keep her safe, you know?”
“I feel you, man.” He touched his fist to his heart. His face was perfectly serious. “Your sister is an amazing person, to touch people like she does. We’re both colored people. She knows how hard—”
I slammed my book shut. “My sister isn’t colored.”
“Okay, man. I see how it is for you. That’s fucked up.” His accent was becoming stronger, something the white man wasn’t supposed to get. The look on his face was triumphant: gotcha, racist.
“No, man,” I replied, quickly. “You’re not colored, my sister’s not colored. Shouldn’t anybody be using those words, this day and age.”
He relaxed. “That’s cool. My bad, man. Sometimes you get used to people saying shit, that’s all.”
“Course. I just need to know that anyone who comes around my sister has good intentions.”
“I feel you,” he said again. “I know how to treat a woman.” A woman. Men fucked women.
“Look, I think you’re a good guy,” I offered. If I fought him, it would only make him more attractive to Roe. “If she likes you, more power to you.”
“Thanks, man.”
“But I find out she gets hurt—anything happens at all—I will hurt you.” I laughed at the end, but it came out drier than I meant it to.
“Like you should.” And we shook, slower this time.
“So what do you think?” Rochelle asked, as they pulled away, before she even got the door closed. “He’s cute, right?”
“Oh right, Roe, like I really check guys out.”
“I do!” Vic called from the kitchen, in a high falsetto. “Do you think he’ll take me to prom?”
“Shut up, Vicsucker!” she yelled.
“I dunno, there’s something shifty about him,” I said, “To be honest with you, I think he’s kind of a thug.”
Her face fell. “But he’s changing! He’s doing all these good things now, and he says it’s because I inspired him.”
“Yeah. I don’t buy it. Once you’re selling drugs, messing with gangs, you’re in with some hard people, and they’re not gonna leave you alone just because you got an 82 on some test.”
“86.”
“86. Whatever. These people are not just going to go away, is my point. You can’t just say, ‘Hey guys, I’m whipped by this girl, so I can’t do gang stuff anymore. No.’”
Roe looked at me defiantly. “Okay, well, you’re entitled to your own opinion.” She examined her nails. “When’s Mom coming home?”
“Late. She’s at the call center tonight.”
“Oh, right.” She squinted at her thumb, still trying to blow off what I’d said. “I wanted to talk to her. She’ll be happy I met someone.”
“Too happy,” I muttered.
I knew when they’d had sex, because Roe started walking around self-importantly, like she was needed somewhere. She’d already gotten in the habit of talking about Dean the way the neighbor ladies referred to their husbands at barbecues. “We already saw that movie,” she’d say placidly, or “We had chicken yesterday.” I guess at that age sounding like a boring old couple was sexy.
As for Dean, there was a shady one-up attitude he had when he was over. He’d guide Roe into her room, then shut the door slowly, snapping the lock in place. Her music would start playing loud, and whatever was happening in there got scrambled. I tried to be in my room when they emerged, but once I ran into Dean on his way out.
“Go ahead, man,” he said, giving me the right of way in our dark hall. He looked like a guy who’d just won something on TV. Anyone’s brother would have wanted to smash his face. And right then, I thought a wrong thing, something I never felt before: This is why they lynched you guys.
Rochelle always ran for the shower after he left—she either wanted to wash him off or prolong her post-Dean high for a while. Her showers took a good forty minutes. She started waking up early, too, even on weekends. I groggily registered her door opening, and a few minutes later, the front door smacking shut.
“Roe, where do you go in the mornings?”
“Running,” she answered smoothly, squeezing past me with a glass of juice.
“Yeah? Nice. You want some toast?”
“No, I don’t need the calories.”
I looked at the wrapper. “70 calories a slice. Doesn’t Dean like girls with a little meat on their bones?” She was a good-looking girl, not skinny, but with that sort of fleshy body that any reasonable guy prefers over skinny. I saw a belly dancer on TV once, and I remember thinking that was what Roe would look like when she was older.
She shot me a look, that teenage-girl hatred look.
“He’s not telling you to lose weight, is he?”
“Oh, god. Of course you look for a way to blame him.”
When he came over later, I thought he seemed more hostile than usual, but I couldn’t be sure. Whatever, I thought, and retreated to my room with Roe’s barely-touched glass of juice.
I was scribbling away on the first draft of my anthro paper when I heard them leave. The engine of his crap car gunned and then faded. I stood up and strode into her room, not sure what I was looking for. Not her diary. Something more personal, though I wasn’t sure what. The bed was made, but the room smelled weird.
My hands were in her trash, rooting up lipstick kisses and crumpled looseleaf.
“Fuck,” I muttered, storming over to the bathroom. The basket there was empty. He could have flushed it, I reasoned. But where was the wrapper? He was not the kind of guy to discreetly pocket it so that no one at our house would have to find it. If he used one, he would probably have strung it up on the kitchen faucet for everyone to see. Or slapped it across my pillow.
“How do you know he’s not using one?” Ryan demanded, from his exalted seat in his East Lansing dorm room.
“Uh, some things Roe’s been saying. She doesn’t seem to know much.”
“Look, dude.” He sighed heavily. “If she wants to be like Mom, you’re not gonna be the one to save her. Protect her as much as you can, or I’ll kick your ass, but—”
I laughed thinly. Easy for him to say. He got away. “It’s rough, man.”
“I know, Mr. Maturzak. You’re doing alright.” It was a sort of brotherly salute. Half-brotherly, really, since none of us had the same name.
“Take care of yourself up there, Mr. Stark. Study hard.”
“I’m always hard,” he came back.
“Asshole.” And we clicked off.
“I broke up with Dean,” Roe announced one morning, nonchalantly, as we pulled into the high school’s parking lot. Spring term had ended, and I was waiting for my summer classes to start.
“Yeah?” I looked up, cautiously.
“Yeah. I don’t know, it wasn’t working.”
“How’s he taking it?” I thought of his smirk, the whites of his eyes floating in the dim of our house.
“Bad,” she snickered. “Arrogant prick.”
“You know what I thought of him,” I said. She swung her backpack over her shoulder and got out of the car.
But he was always around. She’d go to the mall with her friends, and he’d shadow them from the opposite level, staring up their shorts from below, or leaning over the second-floor railings as if he was about to spit.
“Tell the security guards,” I suggested, “They’ll throw him out.”
She shrugged. “Whatever. He wouldn’t do anything, he just wants to make me feel bad.”
There’s a moment—I forget the word for it, but we learned about it in anthro—when someone returns to the group after a transforming experience. That was what it was like to have Roe back. While Mom was out, and Vic was at his girlfriend’s, Roe would make popcorn, and we’d fold ourselves up on the couch and watch movies. Or even dumb TV. Sometimes she’d sigh, like she was worried about something, and rest her head on my shoulder. We’d just sit like that for a while, me holding her like she was my kid or something. Normally, I wouldn’t have let her, but I got the feeling that she’d been through more than she owned up to.
“What’s it like for a guy?” she asked me one night. A piece of her hair streamed over my shoulder like ribbon.
“Uh, I dunno. You know.” I kept my eyes on the TV.
She laughed. “No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking. So why is it so important to guys?”
“Because it feels good. Jesus, Roe, why do you think?”
“So? Taking a bath feels good, but I don’t spend all my time figuring out ways to get in the bathtub.”
I snorted. This was weird. “Uh, humping for guys is like—”
“Humping?”
“Okay, sexual intercourse for guys is sort of like sticking your thumb in peanut butter.” I paused. “Unless the girl is a virgin, and then it’s like trying to get a scoop into hard ice cream. Only way more important. I dunno.” I ducked my head and crammed a fistful of popcorn in my mouth.
She smacked me on the back of the head. “Okay, weirdo. So Dean liked ice cream.”
It was shaping up to be a nice summer. I had two classes and an almost-full-time job with a professor who ran a genetics lab—just assistant work like preparing solutions and washing dishes, as they called the glassware. And taking care of the mice. That was more work than I thought it would be, since they had five generations at any one time, and they all needed to be weaned and tagged and kept in the right cages. The mouse room was in the basement of the science building and had the mineral-and-protein smell of a vitamin store. I had to walk by the other lab’s rats to get to our mice. The rats followed you with their eyes, while the mice were so small and hyper they didn’t seem to notice you until you were already lifting them up and tossing them in another cage. Then they forgot you again.
But the rats, I was pretty sure they remembered you.
The other doors were always closed and had paper blocking their windows to keep out the light. One had a drawing of two cartoon fish facing each other, with a heart floating over them: “Quiet! Fish are mating!” It looked like it had been there awhile.
Roe had gotten herself a job at Burger King—near Wayne so she could ride to work with me every morning. What we didn’t mention was the fact that it was also out of Dean’s usual radius.
We were always pretty quiet in the car, letting the radio wake us up. “Almost there,” Roe would comment, as we reached the last intersection.
“Aaaaaand…here we are,” I’d drawl, stretching out the announcement so it would last until I pulled into the driveway of the Burger King. Then I’d turn around, cut off one of the breakfast crowd on my way out, and continue on, drumming on the steering wheel and singing. I don’t remember what I thought about all summer, but whatever it was felt like wanting something you weren’t that far away from. There’s something about summer that makes you feel less poor.
I was running a few minutes late, already imagining the mice, frantic for their chow. As I hurried up the sidewalk, I could see a kid sitting outside the door of the science building. He stood up when he saw me. I brushed my wallet with my fingers and moved to pass him. Dean.
“Hey, man.” It was not a greeting.
“What,” I returned.
“Your sister did wrong. Least you could do—”
“Hardly responsible for my sister, am I?”
“You take care of her. So you try to keep her from doin’ wrong.”
I shrugged. “And this is going where?”
“She did wrong to me,” he repeated. His eyes looked yellow. “There was shit between us you don’t understand. She’s not gonna be able to do this without me. I’ma give her one chance to do right.”
I snorted. “She’s doing fine without you.” I checked his left shoulder with my right as I brushed by.
“One chance,” he called after me. “Tell her that.”
“What the fuck,” she said, at dinner. “If I wanted to be talking to him, I would be.” She rolled her eyes and looked back at her book.
I was still bothered. “Roe, I think he’s a little messed up. Maybe—”
“Like I don’t know that,” she muttered, turning the page.
For a couple of weeks, he was dormant. There were a few hang-up calls in the evenings, which Vic handled by way of a godawful whistle he’d taken to keeping by the phone.
I didn’t mind the calls. There was something more natural about them, the kind of thing high-schoolers pull after a breakup. Less creepy than tailing your ex-girlfriend’s brother to work. That worried me. If he knew where I worked, chances were good he knew where Roe worked, too. But if he knows and he hasn’t shown up, I argued to myself, chances are he won’t.
I was wrong. And even at the time, I knew I was wrong. He started going in as soon as Roe showed up in the mornings and sat there all day, staring at her. “He only leaves to go to the bathroom,” she complained. “Then he’s right back in the same spot. Every hour they tell him he has to order food if he wants to sit there, so he gets another pop or fries or something. He walks out after me when you drive up and watches us till we go.”
This was true. I’d seen him and pretended I didn’t. What was I supposed to do? Beat his ass? I probably could have. We were about the same height, but he was scrawny. I was pretty built that year, with all the reps I did in my room and the push-up battles Vic and I were always challenging each other to. We’d drop and start pumping away till one of us collapsed. But Dean, while he seemed to operate alone, had some pretty shady friends. I couldn’t hold out against a gang.
I ruffled Roe’s hair over her face, but she looked so sad that I finger-combed it back, as if that would help. “Can the manager do anything?”
“In a while,” she answered. “If it gets worse.”
“Well…good.”
I had to take her everywhere she went, and I had to pick her up too. If Dean showed up during the day, she was supposed to call me. It was just me. Vic had gone up to East Lansing to stay with Ryan and work security at the dorms while all the orientation kids were there. Mom checked in with Roe about Dean, but she worked forty-five minutes away.
The lab phone rang. Two shorts and a long: Roe’s code for me.
“Roe, the mice are getting skinny. This is the third time today.” There was a sound on the other end like an accordion unfolding.
“Oh, Jesus, what? What? Roe, I’m sorry. I’m coming.” I slammed the food into a cupboard and pounded up the stairs.
“So Mom says we’re gonna move me out of here.” Roe was sober, her hair pinned up behind like an old aunt’s. The tires on Mom’s car had been slashed, leaving me with another person to drive tomorrow morning.
“You know Thomas in Woodhill? With the big house?”
“Yeah.” I was exhausted already. “What’s Mom gonna do about work? That’s twice as far away for her.”
“She’s gonna temp. It’ll be okay.”
“Oh yeah, Roe, that pays real good. Good thinking.”
“Rob, what am I supposed to do?” Tears again. I did wish her gone, right then.
“Choose your boyfriends more carefully would be a start.” I slammed my fist against the fridge. “Goddamn. I’m going to bed, so I can drive Mom tomorrow before you even wake up.” And I stalked off to my bedroom for my five hours.
It was kind of peaceful after she left. Two whole weeks before fall term, and I was alone in the house, sleeping in every day and staying late at work, filling the gaps in my lab notebook. The rats stood up in their cages like people knocking on a window, watching me. Dean was watching me, too, from somewhere, seeing me drive past the Burger King straight on to Wayne, and back at night. Vic came back, full of stories about the freshman girls. We sat on the porch like two old men, him spinning his yarns and me picking apart the details till he started cracking up.
“Had you going, man,” he said, bent over on himself, laughing.
I slugged him. “Yeah, and if you did, you’da been happy to keep it that way.”
“No harm—” he stopped. Someone had slipped past my car and was running down the street.
I stood up. “Think we should do something about that?”
“Naw, man,” Vic said, firmly. “Nothing for him to find.”
Roe was bored in Woodhill. She’d been avoiding me, but Mom called every other night. She missed her friends and was gaining weight.
“Not surprising, Mom. We spent the summer on the couch with popcorn and Guernsey’s butter pecan. Got a gut myself.”
“Oh, Rob,” Mom laughed. She sounded distracted. “It’s harder for girls.”
She might have been right. Next on Roe’s list of problems was the fact that she was four and a half months pregnant.
“Well done, Roe,” I seethed. She didn’t want to talk to me, but I’d threatened Mom with selling off her car for parts if she didn’t put Roe on the phone.
“Rob, stop it,” she sobbed, “I’m upset enough.”
“Where are you going to get the money for the abortion?” I demanded. Silence.
“Rob, I sort of want—”
“That’s fucking ridiculous,” I yelled. Vic strolled by, raising his eyebrows.
“Tell our sister I said hello,” he whispered loudly.
I don’t know what she said—some shit about being lonely, or having enough time to take care of it and go to school both, or something about the baby being the phoenix rising from the ashes of her and Dean. All I knew was that it was a bunch of shit.
“Listen, Roe,” I hissed, my jaw tight. “In that evolution class I took, we learned that getting pregnant was a liability. If you were pregnant, you couldn’t run away from your enemies. And what you need to do right now is run.”
“I was dumb,” she admitted. We were on the phone again. Her hormones must have straightened out, because she was making more sense. “I thought if I exercised a lot and tried not to eat, I would just miscarry and it would take care of itself.”
I groaned. “Name one problem that takes care of itself.”
“I know, okay? I took care of it.”
“Where’d you get the money?”
“Thomas gave it to me. And Angela, she lent me some.”
“Angela?”
“I talk to a few girls here. Rachel—she’s cool, but kinda weird. One of the art people. Angela is more like me. I think she’s depressed. Her parents are really strict, and she really wants a guy. To rescue her, I guess.” She giggled. “She thinks I’m lucky.”
“Oh god, she really is dense.”
“Sheltered. She’s nice, though. Really smart.”
“Good. Listen, you feeling alright? After…everything?”
“Yeah. Thanks. I have to take a lot of aspirin though. And I’m leaking.”
“Maaaan. Roe—why’d you have to tell your poor brother?” I shuddered. “Top or bottom?”
She laughed. “Both. My shirt was wet today. Angela let me wear her jacket home.”
“Roe, I am so grossed out.”
“Love you too, bro.” We hung up.
We were all back at the house the weekend before Christmas. No one had any temp jobs for Mom this close to the holiday, so she carted Roe in. Ryan had snagged a ride home with some friends passing through Detroit on their way to the suburbs. He’d crashed in his old lair in the basement with Vic late last night, and his junk was strewn all over the house.
They were already back in their old routine, one setting someone up, and the other finishing them off. They kept busting on Mom, which usually pissed her off in a hurry, but today she seemed tickled by it.
“Keep making fun of your poor mother,” she kept saying indulgently. She was helping Roe sort out Christmas lights and ornaments. Roe loved Christmas, even though we weren’t religious. In fact, we were a big bunch of atheists, which would not have gone over big if we made a big show of it. Lucky for us, Roe put on a pretty good display every year.
“You know, if there was someone up there, and I’m not saying there is,” Mom announced, “maybe they’ll see what a nice family we are and send us some better times next year. For Rochelley. And the rest of us, too.”
Roe grimaced.
“Call her Rochelley again and you’re gonna need Jesus. Right, Rochelley?”
“Vic, you’re an ass,” Roe returned, “Sure, Mom, you never know.” She patted Mom’s hand.
“Hey, Jesus!” Ryan called, tilting his head back. “Let’s make it a good year, yeah?” He grinned and aimed a big thumbs-up at the light fixture.
“He says he wants a popcorn string this time, Roe. He about starved last year,” Vic added.
“Hey, Mom, remember when you let balloons go after Aunt Barb’s funeral? Sending them to her soul or something.” Ryan was cracking himself up already.
“You really shouldn’t do that. They end up landing on a farm somewhere and the animals eat them and choke. I read that somewhere.” Roe pulled at a string of lights.
“Nice job, Mom. Aunt Barb dies and you sacrifice a cow.”
“Or a goat.” Vic elbowed Ryan in the gut.
“So your mother has stupid ideas sometimes.” Mom’s eyes looked watery. “Give her a break.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I broke in. “Probably didn’t make it past the smokestacks by Outer Drive.”
“You think, Rob? Well, you’d know.” She looked pleased. I was the science consultant lately. She wouldn’t even take cough syrup without calling me about the dosage. I kept telling her I was a bio major, not a pharmacist.
“So, Doctor, tell me, do the mice ever start looking good to you?”
I was ready for him. “Too small for me, Ry. About your size though, from what your girlfriend told me.”
“Girlfriend?” Vic picked up Ryan’s wrist. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”
“Ohhhh! Ryan, ouch!” Roe shouted.
“Guys, please,” Mom said, trying not to laugh. “Mixed company.”
“This mixed company needs to get to bed.” Roe stood up. “Can’t look at another light bulb.” She hopped over the boxes. “Night, Mom. And cavemen.”
“Ooog!” Ryan grunted, scratching his armpit.
Roe was up early the next morning. When I walked into the kitchen, she was whipping eggs in a bowl at a speed that rivaled the lab centrifuge. There were some whole ones boiling in a pot.
“Gotta use these up,” she greeted me. “Gonna go bad.”
“I can help with that, Sister Dear.” I sat down at the table.
“What a surprise. So what’s up with you today?”
“Going Christmas shopping, I think. Maybe a haircut.” I pulled the ends of my hair in front of my eyes. “Yeah, haircut.”
“Can I go with?” She smiled devilishly. It was our joke, every year: me trying to ditch her so I could buy her present.
I ate fast, while Roe chopped a stalk of celery that had seen better days. She was mixing up an egg salad. I remember this because it was the last thing I saw her do. She had a tiny cut on her arm, and I remember this, too, and it occurred to me later that it had meant to heal. That sounds weird, but it just seemed too easy—me gone, Vic and Ryan and Mom all sleeping in—like in a movie, when things line up too perfectly and you can see the ending coming.
I don’t know, because I headed off to the mall, got a decent parking spot, and hung out there till lunchtime. I was in a good mood. I had to keep reminding myself not to check out my reflection after my haircut. Whatever the guy did this time, it looked pretty good. I even caught a few girls looking at me. I sat in the Olga’s and ate my gyro and fries, watching them walk by. There seemed to be more of them. Of course, it was Christmas; lots of people were out. But they seemed closer somehow, more colorful. At Wayne, the girls seemed like a big grey mass of assembly-line workers shuffling off to the plant with us. I saw them sitting behind desks or working in stores, but I’d lost my imagination about them.
When I pulled up, switched-on Christmas lights covered half the shrubs. There was another big ratty coil on the ground. That was funny. Roe usually got them up in no time.
I was barely out of the car when Vic ran out in his socks. “Dude,” he said.
“What?” His face twisted. “Rochelle—” He fell on me, threw his arms over my shoulders.
She’d already stopped being Roe. We didn’t call her that again. And Vic didn’t make any sense that day. I had to drag him to the couch and leave him there with a big roll of toilet paper and a glass of water. He just fell back onto it when I pushed him.
I got most of the story from Mom when she got home. I could figure out the rest. These stories are always the same, the girls who get killed. The guy hunts her down, she hides, and he finally gets her alone and kills her, right when you would least expect it. The big things in life, the ones you think are unique, are the most commonplace. Love, sex, death, all that—that’s the bread and butter. You think no one but you can understand, but it’s the common denominator. It’s the things you do in private, to pass the time, that are really weird. Like eating noodles and throwing them up—“If you do it right away, it doesn’t burn coming up,” Roe’s diary said. And the other stuff that was in there—hand-washing her underwear in the sink when she had her period, or having a weird crush on a guy freshman year who reminded her of me.
It took me a long time to learn this. We were all so caught up in details, had to be, really, because we got asked over and over again. The cop kept coming back to me. He brought me an ultrasound picture they’d found on Dean, of Roe in her third month. “Why did you leave her alone this morning?” he asked, gently.
“I don’t know,” I said, “Obviously we wouldn’t have if we knew what was coming. Hell, Mom wouldn’t even have brought her home this weekend. I think we were all just sick of the subject and glad to have her home, and we thought he was done with her.” I thought of Mom and her flaky ideas about the holidays being magic. Maybe we weren’t so different.
He let it stand. “Why do you think she went with him?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated. “My sister liked to feel important. That’s one thing he was good at.”
I saw where she got it from at the funeral home. It was in Woodhill. We weren’t even trying to have anything in Detroit anymore. Her old friends had driven out in three separate cars. You could tell them apart from the Woodhill kids because they seemed thirty and working-class, even though their faces were young. They cut through the crowd purposefully and made a horseshoe around the head of the casket. The girls all had boyfriends and clung to them. You could tell they were old couples, the kind who met when they were thirteen and didn’t let go. They studied Roe for a long time. I couldn’t even go up and greet them. Vic and Ryan and I had been up there once, before everyone arrived, and we couldn’t do it. So we stayed slumped against each other on a couch near the door.
I saw Wendy, the one Roe knew from first grade, take out her lipstick. She unscrewed it and brought it down inside the casket, making little dabbing motions.
The church was easier. You could get over the casket a little more when it was closed. When the speeches were over—we let Mom do one for all of us—I caught sight of Angela. She seemed to be alone. I don’t know why I thought that was my problem just then, but I went up to her.
“Hey,” I offered, taking her arm. “Rob. Rochelle’s brother. I think we’ve met.”
“When?” she asked. Her eyes looked unfocused.
Teenage girls always want to know when you noticed them and what you thought. It’s like they’re trying to figure themselves out by what you want with them.
“At the library. When I was picking Rochelle up.” I stopped. “You don’t remember.”
She didn’t reply. It’s weird to say, but her staring felt good, like the tingle you get before a doctor touches you with a cold stethoscope. I kept my eyes down.
“Thank you,” I said. “For coming.” She nodded, and the crowd moved her into the hall.
I did a bad thing. I took the guest register off Mom’s desk and found Angela’s name and address in tall scratchy print. She had pressed hard.
I had all day, and I’d seen what direction her father’s car had turned after the service. I followed the subdivision signs, all brass and oak, and cruised around inside each of them till I was sure it was the right one. I took the slippers Roe had bought for her. They were huge and shaped like puppies. Roe hadn’t gotten a chance to wrap them. On the way out of the house, I tossed them into a green gift bag.
“Hey,” she said hollowly, when I made it to her door. Her face had broken out. You could tell she had squeezed—the spots were an angry red, blistered over. “My parents are gone. I can’t have people over.”
“Just come for a walk,” I said.
“Like this?” she demanded. She was wearing fraying jean shorts and a Cure shirt. Her arms were folded right under the lead singer’s creepy face. His eyes looked bruised. “Yeah, like that,” I said, “But put on a coat or something.” She backed away from the door, and I stepped in. Her house wasn’t cozy. There were bare bulbs instead of fixtures, and a piano and a Christmas tree were the only furniture in the living room.
“So,” she said, clopping over in big silver moon boots and a long velvet coat.
“Great boots.”
“Thanks.” She ducked here head and pulled a piece of hair over the largest red spot.
We walked out. Her teeth were chattering. “Look, I feel bad. You’re freezing. Let’s just sit out in my car, okay? It’s still warm. We can talk there.”
“Nice try,” she said. She stopped walking and watched me, interested.
“Look, if I was gonna try something, would I drive forty miles to try it with my dead sister’s friend?”
“I’m sorry. I was being a bitch.” She goose-stepped along some old footprints to the curb. “This your car?”
It was easier to talk with the blast of the heater. Sometimes it helps to have something to talk over.
“So,” she began again, cracking her knuckles in her hand. “Are you okay?”
I didn’t say anything, thinking it over.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “Of course you’re not. After everything.”
“No, it’s nice that you asked.” I pulled my head up and smiled at her, like an actor coming out of character. “So how about you?”
“It’s hard, you know? People are so dumb. No one bothers to get to know new people, and now they’re acting like it’s their tragedy. Like Monday, the principal talked about it on the announcements, and he was like, ‘I know Rochelle loved Woodhill.’ Well, guess what, she didn’t. We used to talk about how fake the people are.”
I laughed. “Yeah, if I remember right, she wasn’t too crazy about it.”
“Yeah—I think that’s one of the worst things you can do, put words in a dead person’s mouth. Well, kill someone, actually.”
I thought of what Roe had said, about Angela being jealous, thinking Dean’s craziness was romantic. “I met that fucker,” I offered.
“I hate him,” she said. Her fist was clenched in her palm. “I want to get a gun and go to Detroit and find him and throw him next to the tracks. When a train is coming. I don’t care if I go to jail.”
That killed me, coming from this tiny girl who wasn’t even allowed out of her house for a walk. “I’ll see you in jail then.”
She smiled briefly, her eyes still fierce. The red splotches on her face were bright, like war paint. “I have no right, really. I mean, we never even hung out outside of school. My parents, they don’t let me—they thought—” She turned away again. I could hear the air leaving her. “They thought Rochelle was nice but trouble,” she finished, in one breath.
“They wouldn’t let me come to the funeral home and see her, just the church. I hate them for it.”
“They were kinda right,” I said.
“What?”
“Dean was a bad guy, don’t get me wrong. But Rochelle did some stupid things. Can I just tell you how mad I am at her for going for that ride with him?”
“Really? I mean, I kinda wondered why—but I just figured she trusted him.”
“She did. And it was stupid.”
“I hope she wasn’t scared. I hope he shot her while she was walking away or something and she never knew.”
I thought of the coroner, sitting there with Mom, talking about how Roe’s face was bruised from where Dean had shoved the gun in her mouth. The undertaker had had to use heavy foundation, the kind that hides scars. I swallowed hard. “Me too,” I agreed.
Her head was down, but I felt her attention—that cold stethoscope. I read a story once in Penthouse about a blind woman who was so sensitive she could have an orgasm from someone brushing against her stomach. She could tell if a guy was hard from across the room. Angela reminded me of her, missing something important but leaning on some other sense.
She jerked her head over her shoulder at the street behind us. “Crap.” Her hand was on the door. “My parents are coming.” She looked as if someone had emptied a bucket on her face. “Can you do me a favor? Knock on the door after they get in, and let them invite you in. Do you mind?”
“See you on the inside,” I answered. And she was out, kicking up high fans of snow in her crazy boots. I picked up the gift bag from behind my seat and crunched it between my knees. After a few seconds, the upstairs lights went on and the pink blinds wavered. I could feel her behind them, checking on me, waiting.
Editor’s Note: Be sure to check out Noted in Spain, Charlie Geer’s commentary on an American writer’s experiences abroad.
