Dark Rooms. Lili Anolik

driver. Her name is—” He turns to me. “What’s your name?”

      Damon takes a casual step back. “Hi, Grace.”

      “Hi,” I say, surprised he knows my name, though classes are small enough at Chandler that it’s hard not to know everybody’s.

      Max’s eyebrows climb his forehead. “She a friend of yours?”

      “Chandler,” Damon says.

      “Then I can save my breath, skip the introductions.” Max holds out a stack of slips. “I just approved these bonds.”

      “Max, I told you, I don’t need a driver. Frankie doesn’t start at U Bridgeport until the second week in September. He said he’d take me around.”

      “The second week of September is in a few days. Forget Frankie.”

      “Then I’ll find somebody else.”

      “You ready to go out again?”

      “But I—”

      “Or do you want to ice the knee first?”

      I glance down at Damon’s knees, see a brace on the left one, black so that it blends in with the dark blue of his jeans, my brain going click, click, click: he wasn’t lurching around Glen Flynn’s office this morning because he was drunk, he was lurching around because he was hurt.

      Damon shakes his head, an angry muscle twitching in his cheek, and snatches the slips from Max’s hand. Without a word, he turns, exits the office. For a couple beats I just stare at the coffee cup he left on Max’s desk. Then I snap to, grab my bag from the back of the chair. I have to run to catch up. For a guy in a brace, he moves fast.

       Chapter Eight

      That puke smell sure isn’t fading in a hurry. For the rest of the afternoon I sit in my car, windows down, breathing through my mouth while Damon goes in and out of the courthouse, consults with his uncle via cell. He barely looks in my direction, doesn’t say a word to me other than left, right, stop, and wait. We finish at six. He tells me to take him to the YMCA downtown.

      “Okay,” I say, “sure. But the equipment in Houghton’s nicer.”

      He glares at me. “You think I don’t know that?”

      “So why don’t you go there?”

      He’s silent for so long I assume he’s ignoring me. But then he says, “Because the fob in my Chandler ID expired today.”

      “Oh yeah, I forgot. First day of the new school year. Maybe, though, an exception can be made. I mean, it’s to do your rehab exercises and you were, like, the best guy on the baseball team, right?”

      Another lengthy silence. And then he says, “I met with some asshole administrator who’s supposed to be in charge of maintaining Chandler’s buildings or operating them—some fucking thing.”

      Glen Flynn, Director of Facilities. So that’s what Damon was doing in the Business Development Office this morning. “What did this asshole say?”

      “Current students only. I told him Coach Morrissey would vouch for me, to talk to him.”

      “So did he?”

      Damon snorts. “Said he did, left the room for twenty minutes, but I doubt it. Probably hid out in the faculty lounge.”

      “I can let you in with my ID. Employees are allowed to use the gym too.”

      “Forget it. They don’t want me, they don’t have to have me.”

      I shrug, start the car.

      After dropping off Damon at the Y, I drop off myself at home. I close the door behind me, toss my keys in the bowl on the end table.

      The house is quiet, the only sound the laundry tumbling around in the dryer in the basement, a button or a zipper pinging the sides of the machine every few seconds. I feel a thump of tiredness, sit down on the bottom step of the staircase. Then I feel a thump of hunger, start foraging around in my bag. Find the package of Wheat Thins and two of the Hershey’s Miniatures. I begin to eat. The rhythmic motion of my jaw soothes me, puts me in a trance, and I stare straight ahead, eyes unfocused, munching, munching.

      Dad’s voice comes down from upstairs. “Hello?”

      “It’s me, Dad.”

      “Gracie?”

      “Uh-huh.” I alternate bites of chocolate with bites of cracker: sweet, salty, sweet, salty.

      “Good timing, sweetheart. Dinner’s just about ready.”

      “Do you need me to set the table?”

      “Already done. Just go wash your hands. I’ll be right down.”

      I put the last bite in my mouth but my appetite’s vanished as suddenly as it appeared, and it seems like too much energy to chew or swallow. So I wait for enough spit to build, then let the lump slide down my throat. Slowly I get to my feet, walk to the kitchen.

      I must have seen it a hundred times, so you’d think by now it would have lost its power, fail to affect me. But it always does. Nica’s Dream, the black-and-white photograph of my sister hanging above the table, taking up almost the entire wall length-wise and half of it height-wise. In it, Nica, eleven, is lying in the grass in the backyard of our house, head turned away from the camera. The cutoffs she’s wearing have ridden up so high you can see the pale linty lining of her pockets, the dim hollow of her groin. Her halter top’s twisted around her torso, revealing her stomach, smooth and concave, stretched between the twin knobs of her hip-bones. A Band-Aid hangs off her right heel and the paint on the nail of her big toe is chipped. In spite of the fact that she’s slender to the point of scrawny, totally undeveloped, her body gives off a glow, a heat that’s as undeniable as it is unsettling. Maybe it’s the way her mouth, greedy and carnal, is nuzzling her bare shoulder. Or the way one of her hands is tucked between her thighs, like she’s in the throws of a sex dream, dreaming but somehow also dead, climaxed in death, eyes closed, neck limp, skin waxy. Her other hand loosely clutches a peach, round and dimpled and fuzzed, glossed to sinister perfection. The poisoned fruit from a fairy tale.