Page 65 of Seven Days in June

“Seriously,” she said, rubbing her burning nose. “Are you?”

“Um…no.” He looked vaguely uncomfortable. “Are you?”

“No,” she said.

What she had meant wasNo, Shane, I’m not a virgin, because I was closing my register at Marshalls last summer and the tall, dead-eyed stock guy who never acknowledged me in public asked me to chill, so we smoked a bowl in his mom’s basement and I asked him not to put it in, but he did, and afterward he high-fived me for not crying. No, Shane, I’m not a virgin. I’m the kind of girl who went back for more, ’cause I told myself he thought I was special. I’m not a virgin. I’m the queen of delusion, and boys lie but I believe, so please, oh please, be careful with me…

“…ask?” Shane was saying something.

“Sorry, what?”

“I said, why do you ask?”

Instead of answering, she bit her lip, shrugging coquettishly. And then she grabbed his face, kissing him until it escalated into a desperate make-out session. A Tipper Gore look-alike pounded on the window, shouting, “Go home!” Genevieve peered at her over Shane’s shoulder, clicked open the blade of her pocketknife, and grinned. Bra strap in his teeth, Shane gave Tipper the finger. The woman clutched her purse and hurried away.

They hated everyone who wasn’t them.

She remembered that sometimes, Shane would wake up fighting. He’d punch at the air, sweating, tangled up in the sheets. Instinctively, she’d run the tips of her fingers over his chest, arms, back, any skin she could reach—tracing the infinity sign over and over, little figure eights, till he slept.

It was the only thing that calmed him.

This memory was the faintest. It wasn’t until years later, when Shane publishedEight, that it came rushing back.

She remembered lying in the fetal position on the bed, her brain shrieking, waiting for her cocktail of narcotics to kick in. Sunset bathed the room in a warm strawberry-amber glow. Shane was lying facedown in a dusty corner, playing Scrabble with himself. Brow furrowed, lips pouting, he mumbled, “Fuck.I’m just so hard to beat.”

She stared until he glanced up, face aglow with violet bruises.

“You’re beautiful,” she purred.

With a drowsy smirk, he began to croon the Christina Aguilera power ballad. She gasped and then burst into delighted laughter because, goddammit, hedidsound like Ginuwine!

Groaning, Shane folded in on himself with boyish self-consciousness, tucking his face into his tee. Like it was a new thing, letting his guard down. Like his goofy side (and absurd vocal range) was for her only.

She drifted off, helplessly endeared, forgetting that she was a stolen girl stealing moments in a stolen house—and sooner or later, she’d have to pay.

She remembered going on a 7-Eleven run around 2:00 a.m. and sneaking off with a zillion Hostess treats. Together, they took the bus to the Barry Farm area of Southeast DC, the site of Shane’s court-ordered home. The Wilson Children’s Shelter was a county-owned, one-story building on a broken-down block. She couldn’t believe people lived there. It looked like an abandoned Staples.

Under the gauze of night, they snuck in through a janitor’s entrance. While Eva waited in a hallway that smelled of bleach and piss, Shane slipped into the crowded bedrooms, leaving a Twinkie under each kid’s pillow. Then they slipped out.

Afterward, they sat on a bus-stop bench a couple of blocks away. One cracked streetlamp lit the block. A siren went off endlessly.

“I wish I could protect them. They’re innocent, you know? Actually, Mike and Junior are fucking menaces. But in a pure way.”

“You’re pure.”

Chewing the inside of his cheek, he looked at her. “If you knew about me, you wouldn’t like me anymore.”

Resting her chin on his shoulder, she slipped her arms around him. “How do you know I like you?”

His smile flickered, then faded. “I had parents once,” he continued quietly. “Foster parents, from when I was a baby to about seven. I really loved them. They loved me back, too. One day, I was doing dumb shit, wearing my Superman cape and jumping off the counter. I broke my arm. My foster mom drove me to the ER. She was scared, ’cause you could see the bone and I was losing a lot of blood. She ran a red light and crashed into an intersection. She died. I didn’t.

“After that, my foster dad acted like I didn’t exist. Then he sent me away. Who wants to live with the kid who killed their wife?”

Genevieve, too struck to answer, gently curled her arm through his and held his hand. She squeezed, offering absolution the only way she could.

“Anyway. The kids in there? I don’t want them to get locked up, like me. The more times you go, the harder it is to tell yourself you don’t belong there. Prison is the school of the unlearned lesson.” He paused. “I’ll probably go back a third time.”

“I won’t let it happen,” she promised. “What do you like to do? Besides fight?”

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