The Taming (8 page)

“Get real, Lisa, he doesn’t even—”

“See you? Yeah, he does.” She was getting scary-good at getting inside my head. She nodded, more to herself than anything. “I see who sees what. Always have.” Lisa crossed her legs, right over left, and then uncrossed them. “Look, I was born, uh,
complex.
Thank God my units have the resources to deal with that. At least it makes them feel better.” She crossed her legs again. This time left over right. “But you, I knew right off that you run deeper.”

I stopped breathing.

“Keep breathing, Katie. Like I said, I see things. It helps me run circles around my shrinks.”

“Shrinks, Lisa? Like, with an ‘s,’ plural?”

She shrugged, but didn’t say anything else.

And that was it. Note the date and time. That was the closest Lisa and I ever came to a normal girlfriend-to-girlfriend-type conversation. I was so stunned I would have let the first bus go by and at the very least talked about Evan some more, but Lisa was the one who reminded me.

“Hey, aren’t you kind of late? I thought you said your old lady would massacre you if you let the play get in the way of your dinner-making and housekeeping duties.”

Ooops, she was right. I was in trouble, big trouble. Mom was on day shift at The Flow, where she was a hostess. It’s where and when she’d met her last three boyfriends. Mom hated days. The action was slow, so the tips were nonexistent, and she had to fill in the time by taking in stock and organizing supplies. It screwed up her manicures and her mood.

I flew out of the bus and out of the elevator, desperate to make it home before she did. It took a minute to register that there was noise in the kitchen. My stomach clenched.

“Mom?”

Pots and pans rattled. My mother barely knew where we stored them.

“Mom?” I called again.

“Naw, it’s just me, kid.”

Joey. He walked out with his tie flung over his shoulder and a tea towel tucked into his belt.

“Mr. Campana.”

“I keep telling ya, call me Joey.” He winked and I nodded. We both knew I wouldn’t.

Joey Campana liked to think of himself as the silver fox. He had a monster head of shiny grey hair, I’d give him that—that and a year-round tan that would make our school’s orange crowd sick with envy. He topped this off with an endless wardrobe of sharkskin suits. Joey did not believe in “dress casual.” Joey was a real estate agent, a big one. Mom had hit pay dirt this time. The man had his face plastered on signs, bus shelters and concrete benches all over the city.

“I’m making my world-famous spaghetti carbonara.”

“Right.” I inhaled and smiled. “I smell that killer onion-bacon combo.”

That was a mistake. Joey stopped in his tracks, smiled back and slid his eyes over me at the same time. Time froze, but I still had enough juice left to will myself invisible. He whipped out the towel and wiped his dry hands. Was he looking at me
that way
, the way Mr. Kormos had? For the millionth time in the past few weeks, I whipped back into a different time with a different one of my mother’s men. That was happening a lot lately. Why? Was it the play? Punishment for being visible? It was messing me up something fierce. Memories, like rogue movie trailers, just kept shoving themselves up and into my face.

Nick Kormos was boyfriend number two. Mom said she loved him the best of all of them, including my dad. I was almost twelve then and pretty stupid, stupider than now. I wasn’t even scared of “Call me Nick, kid.” We lived with him in a massive three-bedroom condominium. I didn’t have the safety antennae that girls are supposed to have. I actually
liked
Nick. Even when he pinned me against the dining room table, I was more confused than scared. Even with what had happened the times before, all those little creepy things … I was shocked, immobile.

Like I said, stupid.

It was a miracle that Mom came home in time that day. She wasn’t supposed to get in until closing, four hours later.

I hated moving almost as much as she did. It was ugly.

She blamed me, but she didn’t have to. I knew it was my fault. I was visible
and
stupid—a deadly combination.

Joey wasn’t like that, though. I was pretty sure. And even if he was, I knew now how not to be there, how to stop it before it happened.

“Remember to keep at your mom that she needs a better stock of fresh ingredients, okay, kid?” He didn’t pause for an answer. Instead, Joey returned to his bacon and onions. “So dinner’s on me, eh? You can go relax and tweet your peeps.”

Joey considered himself the master of all social media, and he probably was. Mom and I got non-stop lectures on how important Facebook, blogs and Twitter were to managing your standard successful real-estate empire.

I, on the other hand, considered myself the master of flying below the radar. I had and did none of those things. I was probably the only kid in the city without a cellphone.

Joey was crooning a Dean Martin song in the kitchen. He’d bought us an iPod and dock last Christmas and uploaded every Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin song ever recorded. Those two Italian dead guys seemed to have a million tunes. Anyway, Joey was safely singing “Volare” and muttering about the pathetic quality of our utensils. The point was that even when he was looking at me, he didn’t see me.

I slipped into my room, shut the door and leaned against it.
Breathe in for three and out for four
 … 
breathe in for three
 … Crisis averted. It was okay. I had done it. Apparently, I could turn it on and off. Good to know.

Chapter Thirteen

I
heard the front door open and turned the TV up dramatically. I wasn’t going to run out to greet her, but I wanted her to know where I was so she’d come to me.

She walked into the room in all her glory. It was the first sighting I’d had of her since last Sunday. She was wearing last season’s Chanel and this season’s Prada shoes, tasteful gold jewellery, and carrying her prized Hermes Birkin bag. The fact that I knew all that designer detail made me sad. Maybe Travis wasn’t the only one with a hint of a sexual-identity crisis.

“That is incredibly loud!” my mother called out.

“What?”

“That is incredibly—”

I hit the mute button mid-sentence as she started to yell but stopped herself.

“I should really have your hearing checked,” she said. “Too many years of wearing your iPod turned up too loud.”

Too many years of needing to block out things I didn’t want to hear.

“You would not believe what a week I had!” she said. “Every single charity seems to be running short this year. I’m on far too many boards.”

I nodded my head. I wasn’t going to argue about that. Didn’t she know that charity began at home? “Would you like to know about my week?”

“Your week?”

“As in my first week at the new school … remember the new school?”

“Oh … I’m so sorry … you must think I’m a terrible mother!”

I didn’t say anything. I just smirked.

“So, please, tell me, what was it like? I really want to know.”

“I was expelled.”

“You were expelled?”

I smirked again. “Just joking.”

“That wasn’t very funny. You shouldn’t joke—”

“Actually, I got suspended.”

“No! What did you do to get suspended?”

“Joking again. I wasn’t suspended … but you have to admit that would have been better than being expelled.”

She dropped her purse and slumped into a chair across from me. She looked tiny and bird-like. Rich covered up a lot of sins, but even expensive makeup, hair styled and coloured by “the best” and an occasional shot of Botox couldn’t hide everything. My father and I had agreed to not mention her getting older. But we did notice, and not talking about it didn’t change it.

“That was rather unkind of you, to kid me about being expelled,” she said.

“Almost as unkind as you not remembering that I was forced to go to a new school in the first place.”

“It’s not as though we really had a choice.”

“There are always choices. You decided
not
to pursue any choice that would have kept me in my school.”

“Your father—”

“And we all know you wouldn’t want to disagree with anything he said or did,” I pointed out.

“Don’t blame your father, Evan. It wasn’t something that
he
did that started all of this.”

I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach, and, judging by her expression, I could tell she knew and was feeling guilty. It was good she felt guilty for something, but really, how could I expect her to stand up to him on my account when she couldn’t even do it for herself?

“I’m surprised you’re home on a Friday night,” she said, changing the subject.

“New school … remember … so no friends.”

This she did deserve to feel guilty about, so I wasn’t going to let her off the hook and tell her that I’d already made some friends.

“But I didn’t see your car.”

That she’d noticed. I couldn’t very well tell her that I’d lent it to one of the new friends I didn’t have.

“I brought it in for service. It was time for an oil change. You wanted me to be more responsible, right?”

“That
was
more responsible.”

I actually impressed myself with how quickly I’d come up with a credible lie that not only covered up the situation but made me look good in the process. I guess there was more of my father in me than I liked to believe.

“It’ll be back by tomorrow. They’ll send the bill to you,” I said.

“Not to me,” she said, holding up her hands. “You know they should send it to our business manager.”

“Okay, sure, I’ll have them do that.”

I bent down and pulled my calculus test out of my backpack and offered it to her. “Thought you might want to see this.”

“What is it?” she asked as she took the paper from me. She looked concerned. Did she think it really was a suspension notice? She looked and—“This is a 98! That’s a wonderful mark!”

“Not bad. Only two marks away from the mark that Dad would think is wonderful … or would he even be happy with that?”

“Don’t be so hard on your father.”

“Somebody should be hard on him.” I got up from the seat and started to walk away before she grabbed my arm to stop me.

“He just wants what’s best for you—for both of us. He’s only hard on you to make you reach your potential.”

“My potential would have been reached if you had fought to keep me in my last school rather than letting him sell me down the river. He could have worked things out and I could have stayed.”

“Your father thought it was best, and obviously, judging by your calculus mark, his decision wasn’t completely without merit.”

I laughed. “Now if I do badly I’m wrong, and if I do well I’m wrong. There’s no way to win with him … as usual.”

“Don’t say that.”

“How the hell can you defend him after all that he’s put
you
through?”

A shudder went through her whole body, as if I’d pierced her heart with an arrow.
I
hadn’t.
He
had. But she still defended him. And, even after everything, she still stood by her man like some stupid country song. I didn’t figure he’d stop test driving, I just wondered how long it would be before he got himself a new model.

“I just wish you didn’t know,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

“If you could wish for anything, maybe it would be better to wish that it didn’t happen at all.”

“Not everything in life turns out the way you want. You learn to forgive and forget and move on, Evan.”

“Maybe I’m not ready to forgive. And, believe me, I’m
never
going to forget,” I told her. “But I am going to move on … as soon as I can.”

Chapter Fourteen