16. El NiÑo,Boys Will Be Boys #3
When I eventually got home, JR was already in the courtyard of our apartment building, cleaning Alistair’s feathers. I wandered over to him as the sun burned off the morning tide of gray.
“You look different,” he said, his eyes flicking from the pigeon to me. I focused instead on Alistair.
“Do you think I’m devoid of anything?” I asked.
“Um,” said JR diplomatically. “Like, thought?”
“No. Emotion, I guess.”
“Ohhhh. No.” He seemed pleased with himself. “Alistair likes you.”
“Alistair doesn’t like anything.”
“Alistair likes lots of things.”
“Lady pigeons.”
“Yeah.” JR looked dreamy for a second.
“How’s it going with Tavis, by the way?”
“Well, we’re kind of the top two right now, so. There’s a lot of potential for discord. I’m thinking I might try to sort out a friendly.”
“They have friendlies in pigeon-fucking?”
“Doo-flying,” he corrected me. “And I mean, I think the intention behind any given strategy is definitely a factor.”
“Do you think it’s possible to love someone evil?” I asked.
“Ummmmm, probably,” was JR’s sage response. “Are you talking about that guy from high school?”
It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. “You mean Teddy?”
“Yeah, he came by last night. Your mom seemed happy to see him.”
“Of course she was,” I muttered, before realizing aloud, “Wait, why was he here?”
“He brought you flowers,” JR said.
“What?”
“I didn’t talk to him. I was waiting for Alistair.”
“Right, but—”
“He said he wanted to surprise you but then your mom said you weren’t home.”
I had a sudden, stabbing pain of dread that read like indigestion. The feeling that this was going to become a problem for me, my crime against a man’s pride, the audacity to not be at his beck and call. “Well, I didn’t have plans with him or anything.”
“Right, it was a surprise. But you don’t like surprises.” JR looked at me sideways.
“What?” I asked him.
He shrugged, beginning to dab lightly at Alistair’s iridescent plumage with surgical precision, his instrument withdrawn from a massive bag of dollar store cotton swabs.
“Are you trying to say you disapprove, JR?” I was amused by this.
I always thought of JR as being less worldly than me, or more naive, despite being older.
“I highly doubt Teddy is any sort of danger to me.” I thought of William de Witt calling Teddy a little bitch and realized I could never fuck him again, under any circumstances.
Not even if his mother offered me a part.
Okay, maybe if his mother offered me a part. I realized I didn’t even dislike William for what he’d said about me. My brain had already begun to fixate on the most actionable part of that sentence: She’ll make the perfect Emmanuelle.
“I just think you can find someone who’s nice to you,” JR said.
“Maybe I don’t want nice.” I thought again of the thrill, the monster I seemed so unwisely desperate to follow.
“Maybe what I want is someone to treat me the way I deserve.” I laughed, because it was a joke, the idea that I was not a good person and this was why I found myself attracted to someone who could have been a murderer.
Like maybe if I chose evil on purpose, then everything else about me would finally make sense.
I could just be the person everyone wanted to believe I was, the archetype of a woman that Hollywood had already made for me. The kind who got what she deserved.
“You should be careful.” The look on JR’s face was too transparent for me to look at directly.
“Should I?”
“People keep going missing.” His voice was steady and quiet.
I forced myself to shrug it off, thinking of the Amber Alerts, the stories on the news, the way they’d always been there and would continue, even after one monster was caught.
The constancy I’d always known of people who disappeared, swallowed by the night like they were nothing, met with the freshly chilled sensation that there was nothing to distinguish any of them from me.
“Come on, JR. It’s almost never a stranger.”
He was stroking Alistair’s feathers. “I know,” he said, and that was that.
I no longer knew what he was trying to imply, or maybe I just didn’t want to hear it. So I rose to my feet and said with as much lightness as I could conjure, “Good luck with Tavis and the pigeon council!”
“Okay,” mumbled JR, having returned his attention to Alistair’s grooming. I vaulted myself away, catching a glimpse of Tita Linda watching me from her kitchen window.
“Don’t hover like that,” I called to her as I crossed the courtyard to my unit. “It’s creepy!”
“The day I don’t hover over you is the day I’m dead,” she called back over the sound of longanisa frying. “I’m not like your grandma. I’m not going to care about you anymore when I’m gone. I’m going to say Anya who? and go flirt with the angels.”
I unlocked the door to my apartment with a roll of my eyes, spotting the lilies Teddy had brought me in a vase on the kitchen counter. They had a smell like the greenhouse, that strange fleshy sweetness, and again, I felt Jude’s fingers on my throat.
I inhaled sharply. Then, on impulse, I threw the flowers in the trash and went back to bed.