Love Edy (3 page)

She surprised him by extending a hand,
ultra-formal for a bunch of teens. He took it, and she didn’t let
go.

“Will you come with me?” she said.
“Upstairs?”

His Adam’s apple bobbed, thick in his
throat. She didn’t mean anything by the offer. After all, lots of
things were upstairs. He just couldn’t think of any.

“Alright,” Hassan managed. He cleared his
throat and set the beer on a table.

Aimee led him by the hand through the crowd.
Upstairs and a single left later, they arrived at a bathroom, large
and luminous. Hassan blinked. Aimee pulled him in and shut the door
behind them.

“Number twenty-seven” she crooned, just a
hint of slur in her voice. She stepped forward, copper curls
spilling into damp, hooded, and shadowed green eyes. “Ninety yards
against Madison. Two touchdowns against Southie. Three against
Charlestown,” she announced. The girl leaned forward, lips parted,
and ran a red-tipped finger from Hassan’s nose downward, eyes never
leaving his mouth.

“Kiss me,” she said.

He froze. Had the girl never heard of small
talk? Already, he’d forgotten her name. Even if she wanted to . . .
do things
, it seemed to him that she should wait for his
advances. Maybe he was old fashioned. How many guys did it take for
a girl to do away with the formalities?

She turned her back on him to flip out the
light switch, bathing them in darkness. Hassan opened his mouth,
only to find that words wouldn’t come. Soft lips and the nip of
teeth grazed his ear. Her mouth dragged lower, paused, and
devoured.

She kissed hard, punching her tongue between
his lips, blazing the cinders of cigarettes there. He’d kissed
before, easy, meaningless flirting that was never so demanding, and
never with a girl that made him feel smothered, or made him feel
like he needed to reach out and grab a buoy. Before he could get
the hang of it though, she’d backed away. Now she had fingers at
his zipper. Fumbling.

The beer muddled what was already a jumble
of confusing, contrary thoughts: that he should
say
something, that he didn’t really
know
her, that he was sorry
if he was supposed to, that he couldn’t even recall ever having
seen her. And what the
hell
was her name?

He shoved her back, then snatched for her
when she pitched, only to ease her clumsy head crash to the door.
He’d never put his hands on a girl and hadn’t meant to that time.
If he’d hurt her, he didn’t think he could deal with that.

The redhead clutched the back of her head
and let loose a stream of gutter rude insults, before finding her
footing enough to slap him and barge out the door.

What the hell just happened?

He splashed water on his face and pushed the
image from his mind, before forcing himself out of the bathroom.
Once at the top of the stairs, his gaze swept the crowd and met
that of a slender Asian girl who blushed in response. Her smile
made him think of Edy.

“I see you met Hungry Hungry Hippo,” Matt
said, appearing at his side.

Hassan started. “What?”

“Hungry Hungry Hippo. Come on. You must have
seen that mouth work.”

When shrugging into his shirt didn’t work,
Hassan buried his embarrassment in an attentive sweep of the crowd.
Obviously, Matt had expected something to happen upstairs with the
redhead. He wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of confirming or
denying it.

“Where’s Edy?” he said instead.

A casual question, yeah, but even as he
asked it, he realized that he hadn’t seen her for awhile.

“Seriously, I don’t see her.” His gaze began
to comb the crowd methodically.

He ventured downstairs. Two, three dozen
kids grinding on the dance floor, but he knew better than to look
among them. Along the walls, she wasn’t there. In the kitchen, not
there either. So, he backtracked, winding through the dancers on
second thought.

“Sawn?” Lawrence asked, appearing with Chloe
by his side.

“Edy,” Hassan answered and kept moving.

He thought about the girl and the bathroom
and how easily that had happened. He thought about the teammates
all around, guys who poured beer down the throats of girls and
shrugged at the outcome.
Edy had better not be drinking
, he
thought, knowing it to be hypocritical and not caring.

He weaved his way back to Lawrence just as
Matt showed up, then Mason. All three wore the same worried
expression. They split up, with Mason heading out front to search
the yard and Matt upstairs. Hassan and Lawrence searched the bottom
floor in vain.

The twins returned empty-handed, leaving the
boys to ponder what would happen should they go home without Edy.
Once, they’d lost her in the old Jordan Marsh downtown at Christmas
time. All four boys had abandoned her for a WWF Wrestling display
with authentic replica belts. They were halfway through an
improvised bout when they upturned a row of mannequins and realized
she was no longer at their side.

It hadn’t mattered that they’d been found,
safe and playing in a clearance rack of plus size blouses. It
hadn’t mattered either, that she had had no interest in wrestling.
They were like a family, each responsible for the other. Edy’s
father had seen fit to remind them. No faux gold, glitter, or cheap
enticement should ever make them forget it again, he’d said.

The sight of Lorenzo Carpenter descending
the stairs jarred Hassan from the memory. Lorenzo was the team
linebacker, party host, and guy most likely to slink away to dip
Liquid X in some girl’s drink. Dudes like him had a way of sensing
diminished capacity in a six-mile radius, or helping it along, at
any rate. If he knew what was best for him, he’d turn up Edy
unscathed and on demand.

The Dysons beat Hassan to Lorenzo, minds
with him, on one accord. Together, the twins seized him by the
collar and slammed him into the wall. They were backed up by Hassan
on the right and Lawrence on the left. So much as a flinch from the
linebacker would bring down a fury of fists.

“Edy,” Matt demanded. “
Now.
”

What the hell were they thinking, bringing
her to this guy’s house and letting their guard down? They had
pakhana
for brains. Shit, to be exact.

Lorenzo stared back at them with eyes too
far apart.

“Edy
Phelps
?” he said and choked on a
laugh.

Matt cocked back his fist.

“Wait! Hold on,” Lorenzo hollered. He
struggled against the hold on him, face twisted in irritation,
limbs grappling, flailing, before coming to a final, frustrated
rest. A look left and right confirmed that no teammates would come
to his aid. Instead, they watched, as if the party finally kicked
up a notch.

“I saw her,” Lorenzo said. “Earlier.”

“Where?” Hassan said.

Mason slammed the boy into the wall.

“Stop screwing around and tell us where she
is,” Mason said. “Drunk? Upstairs? You know better than to touch
her, don’t you? If you so much as—”

“Yeah!” Lorenzo said. “I mean, no. I didn’t
touch her! Like somebody would even bother.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hassan
said.

Lorenzo turned to him, wincing.

“Come on, Sawn. We all know—”

Matt shoved him again.

“Face
forward.
Talk to
me
.”

“Fine!” Lorenzo grinned. “What’s the
problem, anyway? If Edy wants to give a little something something
to somebody—”

He choked on the rest. Mason caught him by
the throat, squeezing, then releasing, just enough to warn. Just
enough to slide the smile off his face.

“Where is she?” Matt said, calm despite the
elevating assault.

By Monday, they’d all have to find some
semblance of normalcy on the practice field. They’d deal with
Monday when it came.

“Gone, you idiots!” Lorenzo yelled. “And
she’s been gone! She walked right out the front door. Now get off
me.”

Lorenzo’s arms battered the wall of bodies
around him. But Matt and Mason released him on hearing what sounded
like the truth. The group exchanged an uneasy look.

Gone.

And they hadn’t even noticed.

~~~

Mason muscled the Land Rover over a bed of
shrubs and into the street, knocking his passengers left then right
with the hustle. Just as Matt yelled for him to head in the
opposite direction, Lawrence demanded to know if he could possibly
hurry up. Hassan’s eyes kept to the street, desperate for a glimpse
of a just-departed Edy.

He supposed to an outsider their panic
looked silly. But none of them cared. Edy was one of
them
,
and they didn’t need her father to remind them.

“Why would she leave like that?” Mason said,
halting at a red light and chewing on the side of his thumb.

“Maybe someone tried something,” Lawrence
said.

“Tried something?” Matt echoed.

Silence filled the cabin.

Hassan’s face tightened, teeth sealing with
the weight of wet cement. That image didn’t work for him. It didn’t
work for him one friggin’ bit.

“If someone had tried something, Edy
would’ve come to one of us,” Mason said.

Chloe, who sat wedged between Hassan and
Lawrence in the center backseat, cleared her throat. “Maybe she
didn’t want to,” she offered.

That had everyone’s attention.

“And why wouldn’t she want to?” Matt
snapped.

“I don’t know,” Chloe said. “Maybe . . . if
she liked it.” She looked from one face to the next, each cold,
hard, unappreciative.

“Maybe you oughta be quiet,” Lawrence
muttered and turned to face the window.

Hassan rode with the company of his
thoughts, now violently intruded on by Chloe’s assertion.
Meanwhile, he kept dialing Edy’s cell and it went to voicemail each
time. Tension hung like a threat in the air.

“Who saw her last?” Mason demanded.

“Oh, don’t start that again,” Lawrence said.
He turned to Hassan, eyed the cell in his hand. “Keep trying. Keep
calling.”

Hassan sighed. He pushed away a thousand
crazy thoughts: that Lorenzo Carpenter had been lying to them, that
Chloe had been telling the truth, that Chloe had been talking about
Lorenzo when she told them the truth.

“We have to check her house,” Mason said.
“It’s the only place left.”

“Right,” Matt sneered. “We just walk into
her living room and ask Nathan if he’s seen the daughter he left
with us.”

“Not us.” Mason said. “Sawn.”

“How?” Hassan said. He looked up from the
phone.

“You’ve got a key,” Matt pointed out. “Use
it and walk up to her room.”

“Like Nathan isn’t up? Waiting?” Hassan
said.

“Window,” Lawrence said. “Climb up. Look in.
See if she’s there.”

Her window. Their secret rendezvous place
since Hassan had learned to climb trees at six. It was a decent
idea. He could only hope that her father wasn’t sitting on the bed,
waiting for his now-late daughter.

They parked on the tail end of Hassan’s
street, Dunberry, behind a cluster of oaks and a stop sign. All
four boys climbed out, hunched low, and scurried covertly to 2260,
Edy’s address, while Chloe waited behind in the car. On arrival,
the Dyson brothers clustered around a sweeping, aged, and
red-tipped chestnut, squinting upward as Hassan scaled it. They
watched with a nervous eye for Edy’s parents, or his, next
door.

Hassan made it to the thick “V” of limbs
that split half toward Edy’s house, half toward his. He hoisted
himself up, grabbed a gnarled branch for balance, and found a knot
of familiar footing to stand on. A square of darkness stared back
at him. He reached forward and yanked up Edy’s window.

“Edy!” Hassan hissed. “You in there?”

Silence.

“Ed—”

She emerged from the shadows, hair in an
oversized ponytail, pajamas ultra-pink and wrinkled, the epitome of
a been-sleeping girl. Only, he knew better. She stared back at him,
evenly, eyes wider in the night.

“What are you doing here?” he said. “Why
aren’t you answering your phone? We’ve been looking for you. We
didn’t know what to think.”

“I’m here because I live here. You can go
back to your party now.”

“What? I can go back—” Hassan flared. “Why
didn’t you say you wanted to leave? Mason would’ve taken you. Or
Matt. I would have walked you, if nothing else.”

“I don’t
need
anyone to take me. Now
if you’ll excuse me, I’m tired.”

But he couldn’t excuse her. Not like that.
Her anger, whenever he earned it, sat with him, needling like a
shoe that didn’t quite fit.

“Cake?” he said uncertainly.

His name for her. It had always been his
name for her. But she jerked as if the word itself burned.

He needed to
do
something. To fix
whatever was happening. Only . . . he hadn’t the faintest idea what
was happening.

“Edy, please. If I did something, just tell
me. ”

She ran fingers along the sill. They were
long, slender, curving beauties that had climbed trees with him,
and been laced with his a thousand times.

He had an urge to make it a thousand and
one.

“Good night, Hassan,” Edy said.

She looked up at him with puffy eyes and
closed the window between them.

“Night, Cake.” He whispered it to
darkness.

Three

The next morning, a Saturday, Edy watched
her father’s pearl-black BMW ease out the driveway, windows down to
conserve energy. With no traffic in either direction, his speed
matched that of an old lady’s scooter. Once out and facing Mass
Avenue, he offered her a curt wave. Edy waved back, keeping up the
motion as her father rolled away, apparently without the use of
gas. Hassan’s dad always did say that his best friend drove as if
headed to select his own grave.

Hassan.

Edy had earned the indulgence of last
night’s tears, but she would permit no more. Instead, she told
herself that the party had been an awakening of sorts, about
Hassan, about herself, about the parameters of their relationship.
After all, she had been the one bleeding through the line that
divided friend and more. Last night, he had only made clear what he
expected “more” to look like, and it was not much.