Page 19 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER NINE
The city
Back then
By the time I was fifteen I’d learned how to be lots of different people. With my dad I was demanding and high-strung, a showoff. With the kids at school I was quiet. With Fee I never had to think about it, so who knows. On the train, in the world, I was a girl as hard as safety glass.
But Marion was one person. She wouldn’t, shecouldn’t,shape-shift. Some days I was impressed by it, and on others her refusal to fake it pissed me off. Fee and I knew when to make ourselves small and when to pretend we felt big, but Marion refused to be anything other than who she was. She was too intense, she came on too strong, she could never take a joke unless she’d made it. She told off customers out loud instead of under her breath, and snapped like a twig at catcallers.
Her refusal to compromise made us braver. She coaxed us out of our neighborhood, down the long spine of the city. Together we slid through the crowds at all-ages shows, hands linked, pretending someone was waiting for us at the front. We walked under the viaduct at two in the morning, past sleepingbags and shopping carts. For the price of coffee and pie we rented out tables in all-night diners populated by men in work boots and gutter punks ashing into their eggs.
Marion started working at the fish shop in midwinter, when the city was half dead under a rock-salt overcoat. It was a night in late March, at the start of the thaw, that we sat on the beach at Farwell, fish grease breathing off our clothes, passing around a bottle of Malört.
This late the beach was a cruising ground. Nobody paid us any mind. It was warm for the season, Marion’s boombox playing Yo La Tengo on low. She was relaxed for once, elbows in the sand. Fee’s head was in my lap and I was furrowing her black hair into loose braids and out again, rhythmic as a rosary. Down by the water two men shuffled by. I saw one of them notice us, grabbing his friend’s arm to reroute him.
I jostled my knee until Fee sat up.
The men, two white dudes, walked up the beach, their pinstriped shirts untucked from their Casual Friday khakis. The one who’d seen us first was ferret-skinny, his hair in bleached spikes. His friend was shorter, a young man with an old man’s paunch. He’d managed to get himself a sunburn somewhere. They stopped a few yards away, cocking up our view of the lake.
“Evening, ladies,” slurred the Ferret. He was so drunk he looked like he had pinkeye.
“Gentlemen,” I said. “Nice night at the Admiral?”
The sunburnt one blinked. “We weren’t at the Admiral.”
“She’s mocking us,” said the Ferret, grinning. He had that slippery veneer of high good humor that generally conceals a black hole. He ticked a finger at each of us in turn—Marion,Fee, me. “Lemme guess. You’re the slutty one, you’re the spicy one, and you’re the sad emo chick.”
“I like emo music,” Sunburn said, beaming in from a different conversation. “I used to be in a band. In high school.”
Ferret slung an arm around his friend. “Hear that? Which one of you wants to blow a rock star?”
“Huh?” Sunburn focused on us with difficulty. “Dude. They’re kids.”
“Not interested,” Fee said, her voice ironed flat. “Keep walking.”
Ferret plonked his ass down in the sand. “Keep walking! What are you, fuckin’… fuckin’ Johnny Corleone?Keep walking.”
“Vito Corleone,” said Sunburn. “Come on, Matt. Let’s go.”
I knew how to coat my disdain with enough sugar to get guys like this to back off.Sorry, I have a boyfriend,that kind of thing. But my mouth was wicked with wormwood and I was pissed at Marion’s silence.
“Listen to your friend, Matt,” I told him. “You’re gross. Nobody here wants you.”
Ferret’s mask slipped. I think he wanted to haul back and hit me, but he was trapped in the grip of the nice-guy dilemma: if you’re too good a dude to ever hit a girl, what do you do when some bitch disrespects you?
He settled on leaning over almost lazily and rapping his knuckles twice on my skull, hard. “Talk nicer to me, sweetheart.”
Before I could react Fee was between us, shoving him away. “No way, motherfucker,” she spat. “You don’ttouchher.”
Then Marion surged to her feet. Shaking, fisted hands held out. Her lips were moving and her face looked possessed, one eye wandering off center.
“You sh-shit,” she panted.
Ferret laughed, but it sounded nervous. I think all of us were spooked.
“What did you think would happen here?” Her voice still trembled. “What ugly things do you think about when you mess with girls who don’t want you?”
His lip curled back. “You wanna talk about ugly, babe? I’d be doing you a favor.”
