Page 55 of Your Echo
Now I’m the one trying to sound brazen.
“Of course,” I tell her, “now that you’ve seen my apartment, I’m going to have to kill you.”
She twists a lock of hair around her finger. “Just as long as my murder involves kinky sex.”
I reach over to pinch her nipple and she gasps.
“Who knew you were such a bad girl?” I tease.
I instantly regret saying it as I watch her face fall. She shrugs my hand off her and pulls the blanket up so it’s covering her chest.
“Hey,” I say quickly. “It was a joke. I was just bugging you. I didn’t mean it as an insult. You have no idea how fucking hot tonight was, and I loved every second of it.”
She sits up. I don’t have a headboard, so she leans her naked back against the wall, still clutching the blanket around herself and bringing her knees up to her chest.
“I’m sorry. It’s not you. It’s...I get weird about the whole ‘bad girl’ thing.”
I sit up too. “Any reason?”
She glances at me and then stares down at the two bumps her knees make under the blanket. She’s silent for so long I’m about to change the subject, but then she starts to speak.
“This is kind of hard to talk about, but I went through a...Well, I guess you could call it a rebellious phase. Is something a phase if it lasts for five years? I don’t know. I started going off the deep end when I was fifteen, and I only began crawling out of it when I was twenty.”
“Going off the deep end?” I repeat.
She takes a deep breath in. “At first it was just small stuff. In high school, me and some other girls used to dare each other to do all these stupid things. We shoplifted. We stole our parents’ booze. We tried weed. I think I was just trying to shout this huge ‘Fuck you!’ to the universe, but the only person I ended up hurting was myself. And my mom.”
She hides her face behind her hair.
“My mom has...health problems, and she had to work a lot too. I realize now I was probably just acting out of frustration over that. I wanted parents who could come after me when I snuck out of the house. I wanted parents who weren’t so busy working they noticed when I missed curfew. It’s not that my mom didn’t care; she caredsomuch, but she was stuck. We both were. She was just another French Canadian girl who got pregnant way too young. That’s all the world saw her as, and she accepted it. I wanted so much more for her. I wanted more forus. We used to have these terrible fights. I said some pretty horrible things to her.”
I run my fingers down the skin of her forearm, and when she doesn’t pull away, I take hold of her hand.
“When I got older and bars and clubs and sex came into the picture, things got worse. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a party girl, but I was doing it for all the wrong reasons. I just...It’s hard to explain.”
“You don’t have to,” I tell her. “Trust me; I’m the last person you need to explain that feeling to.”
She doesn’t look at me, but her hand tightens around mine.
“It started to rip my life apart,” she continues. “I was failing courses at CÉGEP. The dance studio I used to go to had offered me a place as an assistant teacher, and they were threatening to fire me. When I was a kid, sometimes on weekends I’d dance for eight hours a day. When I was nineteen, I usually spent my weekends so hungover I couldn’t get out of bed. The worst part was that it gave me this fucked up sense of satisfaction.”
Save for the pressure of her fingers, it’s like she doesn’t even remember that I’m here. She’s somewhere else right now, and I know better than to interrupt her.
“It was a matter of control. Because of my mom and our financial situation, I never got to go as far as I could have with my dancing. I was so tired of being forced to give things up. When I was wrecking my life with partying, then at least I was the one responsible. At least it felt like a choice.”
She stares down at the blanket for another few minutes before she shakes her hair out of her face and turns to me, forcing a smile that barely lifts the corners of her mouth up.
“Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking, dumping all that on you. I’ve just never admitted everything to one person all at once before, and I guess after what we just did, it—”
“Don’t apologize,” I urge. “I already told you, whatever is going on here isn’t casual. I...want to know you, Stéphanie. I want to know everything.”
I drape my arm around her shoulders and she leans into my chest.
“I want to know you, too.”
For a second, it all threatens to spill out: my parents, the accident, boarding school, all those nights on Boulevard St. Laurent...
We could have bumped into each other. We could have grinded up against each other on a dance floor and neither of us would even remember it. The same sounds that echo through my dreams could be the same ones that haunt her in hers.
I’m not ready to drag her into my nightmares, though. For now, I just want to hold her and make connect-the-dot pictures with the freckles on her back. I want to feel her hands trace the ink on my arms and hope it tells the story I can’t bring myself to share.
