Fang had already been at the shelter for too long, and he was ugly, and now he was a biter. He was a goner. In the chaos, no one really paid me any attention, they just left me with Fang who was now weirdly calm and was looking at me like, “What next?”—like he knew I would understand why he did it. And I did. So while the parents were fussing over the kid somewhere and the shelter manager ran to get the paperwork to document the whole mess, I put Fang into my backpack instead of taking him back to Isolation like I was supposed to.
Of course I got caught. They made me hand over the backpack, dog and all, to another volunteer who took him where I was supposed to take him. I got off with a warning and was told that if I ever tried that again, I’d be banned from volunteering.
The next week, when I went back, Fang was gone.
Not good gone. Not adopted gone.
Dead gone.
???
Seth and I met in fifth grade, but he didn’t love me until last summer. Even now, I am aware that his love for me is conditional.
Condition 1: Sex. It sounds cliché, and maybe it is, but I am aware of how important sex is in our relationship. It’s okay with me; I love it. I love to be with Seth. It didn’t hurt, much, the first time, and it’s gotten better since then.
Some of my friends have a miserable time trying to find a place and a time when they can be alone together, when they can do the things that I do with Seth, but it’s not a problem for us. My dad is practically never home, and my mom sticks to a regular schedule. She plays tennis three afternoons a week with some of her girlfriends, and she never leaves the club until after dark.
Seth’s house is more fun than mine, the way it’s always crowded with his brothers and all their friends. Seth is the second of four boys. His older brother Wade graduated two years ago, but still lives at home. He spends most of his time in the garage working on his dirt bike. Seth’s two younger brothers are like wild animals; they’re always together, wrestling and punching each other and calling each other “asshole.” They’re ten months apart, Seth told me, so they’re what people call Irish twins. They’re even in the same grade—seventh—because the older one, Anthony, is dyslexic or something and had to repeat kindergarten. He and the youngest, Jude, are exactly the same height. They have a band of miscreant friends that follows after them like apostles, laughing at their jokes and spilling cheese puffs and potato chips on the carpet.
The place is a mess because their mom works and they don’t have a housekeeper. Our Shady Canyon development is one of the most expensive in Irvine; Seth’s family lives in the Woodbridge development. Older houses, smaller yards. Seth says it’s a relief to come over to my place, where everything is quiet and spread out and we can do whatever we want, but I don’t know. His place is smaller and messier, and way more crowded, but those all feel like good things to me.
Condition 2: I don’t call him. Now, this might sound sort of crazy—not to be able to call your boyfriend—but it’s not like that. I mean, it’s not like he’s ever said not to call him. I used to call him, at first, but it didn’t take too many times before I figured out that the Seth who called me was way more fun than the Seth I called.
It’s something about the chase, I guess. He likes it even better when I don’t answer the first few times he calls, when I make him wait and guess and worry. Then, when I finally do answer, he feels like he’s won or something. It’s like, I’m not supposed to show how crazy I am about him. Like my real feelings would be too big, or too gross. Instead, I stand just over here, an arm’s reach away, and I tilt my face just up like that, so I’m looking off in a different direction. And I’m so distracted by whatever that I can’t even be bothered to notice when my phone is ringing or when it buzzes with a text, until finally, at last, I respond. That’s when he wants me the most. That’s how he likes me. Removed.
Condition 3: We never talk about Apollonia Corado.
Apollonia was new last year, and she’s from Portugal, so she’s exciting and other and beautiful in a non-Irvine way. Irvine is full of white girls and Asian girls and some Persian girls and not much else. Apollonia drips honeyed foreign appeal.
But we never talk about Apollonia and what happened last winter.
???
It was in August, two weeks before the beginning of junior year, when Seth called me. It had been a long summer, hotter than usual, and lonely. Louise had been around until the beginning of August, but since then she’d been away with her family in the mountains somewhere, so except for my shifts at the shelter, I was alone. I was lying out by the pool in the backyard, glasses off, trying to keep my body parts from touching each other so that I could tan more evenly. I didn’t look at the name before I answered.
“Nina,” he said, and I knew instantly who he was, even though he had never called me before. And I knew too why he was calling. I don’t know how I knew. Maybe it was the way he said my name, like he was smiling.
He came over that afternoon, and we sat in the hot tub and drank sodas and he did tricks off the diving board to make me laugh. Without my glasses, everything was blurry and perfect, like a fantasy dream. We floated in the deep end of the pool and he kissed me. Our first kiss—with chlorine on our lips and barely any clothes between us. Part of me could barely move my lips to kiss him back, so desperately did I want to freeze that moment. Another part wanted to take his lower lip between my teeth and bite until he bled, just to see if he would stay.
We had those two weeks of summer together, Seth and I. He came to my house and sometimes I went to his and we went to the beach and the movies.
The last night of summer vacation, we did it for the first time. We had almost done it the day before, in my bedroom. I laid a towel on my sheet in case I bled, and then I watched Seth roll the condom over his penis, and I rested my head on my pillow and watched his hands push into the flesh of my thighs, spreading them apart, and I watched him maneuver his latex-wrapped erection, as he pushed and tried to get inside.
I tried to relax, I tried to let him in, I wanted to let him in, but I just couldn’t. And Seth was sweet and said it was okay, we’d try again, and then I went down on him instead.
But the next night, the last night of summer, we had dinner at his place with his whole family. There was a big bowl of spaghetti in the center of the table and everyone took turns shaking out Parmesan cheese from the green canister. It was loud and crowded and steamy from the pasta. Anthony and Jude had a friend over, a kid they called Elbows, and even Wade had come out of the garage to eat with us. Their mom looked tired but happy, and it was really nice.
After dinner, his mom—who told me to call her Carol, not Mrs. Barton—offered to take us all out for ice cream to celebrate back to school.