Page 48 of The Deals We Make
I take Calista’s hand in mine. Her fingers are slender. I always noticed how dainty her hands were when we used to game together. Long and thin fingers with stubby nails that she occasionally bit.
Now they are a glossy beige.
“Now that you know what happened to me, it’s your turn to fill in the gaps,” I say.
“You came over. I heard you asking Mom where I was, but I’d told her we’d had a big fight. Couldn’t think of how else to explain it to her. She promised to stall. To keep you away. So, she lied and watched you turn for home. Once she was confident you were gone, she made me a large mug of hot chocolate and asked me what you’d fixed.”
Tears brim in Calista’s eyes, but she brushes them away.
“It’s okay. I’m here.”
She takes a sip of the whiskey. “No, it’s just, I’m remembering how Mom did that one nice thing. She thoughtI’d just had a big fight with my best friend and wanted to do something to make me feel better. I think it was the last kind thing she ever did for me.”
I can only imagine how that contrasts with how her mom is now. Unspoken hurt radiates from her, and despite everything that has happened between us, I want to take it from her and carry it. “Calista.”
She swipes her hand through the air as if wiping everything she just said away. “Anyway, I refused to tell her, obviously. Then, about ten minutes later, the rear door from the yard to the kitchen was kicked open. And in poured the bikers. Cue Ball said he knew what I’d been up to. He said I had some fucking balls for thinking I could get away with it. He told me I had four hours to get out of New Jersey, and if he ever saw me here again, he’d kill me. And Wrinkle told me that if I told you, if you did anything reckless, like try to defend me, you’d die too. They had a knife to Mom’s neck, and she put two and two together that it was something to do with what you had said about making something right. It cut her skin, not badly, but enough to start this slow and steady trickle of blood down her neck. She asked me what I’d done. She assumed I was guilty without asking.”
Calista slams what’s in her glass, then puts it down on the table.
I place my hand on her back. Her sweater is soft beneath my palm. I feel the bumps of her spine and have a momentary thought of how soft her skin likely is too.
“What did they do to you, Calista?”
“Can we just leave it?”
“If you need a break, sure. But I need to know it all.”
She turns to glare at me, the look on her face wretched. “He humiliated me, okay? Cupped me in front of his friends. I was in my tank top and shorts. You want the full details? He gripped mynipples and pulled on them until I screamed. He licked the side of my face. And he choked me until I almost passed out.”
Something inside me breaks at the thought of Cue Ball hurting her that way. I’d seen him in action with club girls. He was all about his own pleasure. A selfish lover. He was into pain to the point where most of the club girls avoided him.
“Why didn’t you lie to him? Tell him you had no idea what he was talking about.”
I hate myself that my actions, however well-intentioned and principled they were, led her to danger anyway.
Exasperation furrows her brow. “Because Mom’s face told everyone she believed I’d done something wrong. And he knew so much about what was going on, I assumed you’d told him. He told me you’d fixed my mess, and now they were there to fix me.”
That stings. “Why the fuck would you think I told him? You were my best friend.”
“Because you came to my house first. I often wondered if you came with them but ducked out before they hurt me. Like, why did you come to my door that morning?”
“Because I wanted to tell you I’d beefed up their systems and you wouldn’t be able to get in. Why didn’t you tell me about it when I came back a second time?”
“Because I honestly didn’t think my best friend would fuck off to a motorcycle club and stop me from doing what I was going to do. They smashed all my computer equipment that I’d worked and saved for. All except that old backup laptop that Malik donated.”
Malik graduated college and just bought himself a new laptop with his small sign-on bonus. He passed the laptop to me, but I passed it on to Calista.
“I figured that you’d come back to gloat. That you’d come to reinforce what they’d already told me. And I hated you. I felt so utterly betrayed by you. I felt like the person I loved most in theworld had thrown me to the lions. I was still reeling from what had happened that morning. From the…”
The unspoken wordassaulthangs between us.
I think about everything she’s told me. “I’m sorry, Calista. In hindsight, it was a stupid move. I shouldn’t have done it. What I should have done was find a way to convince you it was a really bad idea. What I should have done was persist on seeing you that morning. Fuck, I should have tried harder.”
She huffs. “I should probably go. This is more honesty than I was prepared for today.”
“Let’s finish this,” I say. Anger swirls inside me. Anger that can’t be directed at Calista because it isn’t her fault. Cue Ball is dead. Wrinkle is dead. And Camelot is dead so I can’t ask him if he betrayed me. I guess I’ll never know what happened that night because they all pretended we were friends every day since. But at least one of them is the reason Calista ran. Did Camelot give the order, or did Cue Ball come up with the idea by himself?
Knowing what I know now, Cue Ball was always jealous of Camelot. He felt that it was his family’s turn to be president instead of vice president to Camelot’s family. Perhaps that dislike and distrust ran deeper than any of us knew.
