“I’ve been good,” he complained.
“Get in!” she shouted, and somehow that, of all things, seemed to work. With a sigh, he walked around the front of the car. She got in on the other side and passed him the keys, holding the metal bar up with her other hand to show she’d use it if she had to. It was solid and smelled faintly of oil and hung comfortingly heavy in her grip.
Aidan took a quick look at her face and turned the key in the ignition.
“Go,” she said, under her breath, like a prayer. “Go, go, go, go.”
He pulled across the lawn toward the road. In the rearview mirror, the house looked like an ordinary clapboard farmhouse, except for the broken window and the bit of curtain fluttering through it, a lone and lonely ghost.
CHAPTER 6
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.
—Woody Allen
Aidan had been the worst boyfriend in the world.
They’d met in art class, which Tana had taken only because her friend Pauline had promised her it’d be easy and full of other slackers. Pauline was more or less right. Their teacher spent the time painting trompe l’oeils of arched windows leading into darkness-soaked rooms or somewhat grisly still lifes of rotting fruit, flies, and spilled honey. He sold the paintings in a gallery three towns over and told the class at length about how he needed the money since teachers’ salaries sucked, especially in these dark times.
Basically, so long as everyone worked on some kind of project more or less quietly, he didn’t bother any of them.
Pauline decided that she was going to cut up yearbooks and glue tiny pieces to stiffened linen so that she could make a bra out of the heads of the boys in class. She planned to frame it in a shadowbox and sneak it into the award cabinet once it was done.
Tana was mostly doing nothing, drawing idly with charcoal, and talking to Aidan.
He was just a cute boy in class back then, one with floppy brown hair that fell in front of his eyes when he talked, who wore clean band shirts with hoodies zipped over them, bright red Chucks, and a black-and-white checkered belt. He smiled a lot and laughed at his own jokes and told Tana lots of stories about the unfathomable girls he seemed to find himself dating. He seemed hapless and good-natured. He was always in love. He smelled like Ivory soap.
Pauline teased Tana about him, and Tana just laughed. She got why girls fell for him. He was charming, but he was so upfront about trying to charm her, so obvious, that she was sure she was immune.
Aidan’s project was a life-size papier-maché version of himself, posed as if he were asleep in class. He badgered Tana into measuring him for it, and she rolled her eyes as she wound the tape around his upper arms and across the width of his chest.
When he grinned down at her, raising his eyebrows as though they were sharing a joke, she realized she wasn’t immune after all.
He asked her out soon after, not on a real date or anything, just to hang out with some friends. And she went and had a few beers. When he kissed her, she let him.
“You’re not like other girls,” Aidan said, pressing her back against the cushions of the couch. “You’re cool.”
Tana tried to be cool, tried to act as if it didn’t bother her when he flirted with anything that moved—and, that one time, when he was really drunk, with a coatrack. She’d heard all his stories about the possessive girl who texted him over and over again when he was just out with his cousin or the dramatic girl who sent him ten-page letters, the writing smudged with her tears. She didn’t want to be the star of another “crazy girl” story.
And it didn’t bother her, not really, not in the way Aidan seemed to expect. Sometimes it hurt to watch him with someone else, sure, but what she really minded was that he always seemed to be monitoring her for signs that she was going to scold him. She minded going to parties, where she made awkward conversation, drank a lot, and pretended that everyone wasn’t waiting for her to pick some kind of giant fight with Aidan. And she minded not knowing the rules, because any time she asked him about them, he just stammered elaborate conversation-ending apologies.
When she suggested he go to parties alone, he would make an exaggeratedly sad face. “No, Tana,” he’d say. “You have to be there. I hate going to things by myself.”
“You could go with friends,” she’d suggest, laughing at him. Because it wasn’t as if he was ever alone. He knew everyone. He had lots of friends.