especially. He locked me in a linen closet once. He slipped a dead snake into my backpack. He messed with the brakes on my bike. In a lot of ways, I was an easy target. Ted had taught me to wear my fear like perfume, and Cooper was an animal who could pick up a scent.
One time, when Cooper was eighteen, Kyla and I ten, he was supposed to be watching us at the Kelleys’ house while their parents were out. Instead, he drove us to a tattoo parlor, had us sit beside him and watch as a needle pricked him over and over. When it was done, he presented his forearm to us as if it were a masterpiece in a museum.
A section of honeycomb, looking like holes in his skin.
Bees crawling around, seeming almost 3-D.
And then the stingers: exaggerated, talon-sharp, big as syringes.
Cooper smelled my reaction right away. It didn’t matter that I covered my arms, concealing the goose bumps that swelled there in an instant. He knew. And for years after that, he used his tattoo as a weapon. How many times did he wrestle me to the ground, pressing the bees, the honeycomb, the stingers against my screaming mouth? I lost count after the seventh attack. Every time he held me down, the bees on his skin squirming as he flexed with anticipation, his arm shoving my lips so far apart my jaw ached, he laughed hysterically. Kyla would always try to yank him off, and his parents, whose house he still lived in well into his twenties, would threaten to take his car keys. But it didn’t matter. Even as a teenager, I could never enter my best friend’s house without my eyes peeled for her brother, my heart knocking against my ribs.
“I saw Ted,” he says now.
I wrench my eyes away from his tattoo, and he smiles. He knows I was looking.
“Yeah, I’m waiting for him,” I say, careful to keep my voice steady. “He’s been inside for a while.” I click my phone, look at the time. “A long while,” I mumble.
Cooper taps his cigarette, ashes on the sidewalk next to my feet. I look at my shoes—flip-flops. Such a vulnerable choice.
“No,” he says, “I mean I saw him leaving when I got here.”
“Just now?”
Cooper nods. “A few minutes ago. I tried to say hi, but he had that look in his eye. You know the one I’m talking about. Then he peeled on out of here.”
I look at the space where Ted had parked. It holds a tan Prius—not a green Subaru. My heart clenches with a familiar pain. He left me at the store again. When I was a kid, he sometimes abandoned me in unfamiliar places as Experiments. Worse, there were other times when he flat-out forgot about me. For a moment, I wonder which it is now. Then I remember his voice full of fervor, his live-wire mind, his need for the typewriter ribbon the second I arrived, and I know it’s the latter. He was in and out at Rusty’s while I was still grabbing boxes or staring at Astrid’s face. And now he’s back in his office, without a single thought of me, type-type-typing away.
Through a new surge of nausea, I call the house phone. I wait twelve rings before I finally hang up. I can feel Cooper’s eyes on me the entire time.
“You want a ride home?” he asks. He stamps out his cigarette with a paint-streaked boot.
“No. Thanks.”
“You sure? It’s pretty brutal out here. And last I checked, your house was a couple miles away.”
I look down at my phone, the black screen a void where Ted’s name won’t appear. Cooper’s right, and I hate that. The heat feels like a sweaty sleeping bag. My flip-flops have a tiny hole in the sole, and the road back home is full of gravel.
“Fine,” I say.
When he leads me to his red pickup and opens the passenger door for me, I try to forget the weight of his body, the taste of his arm as it pushed against my tongue.
* * *
Cooper flips houses now. This is all he talks about as he drives me to Ted’s. He points out past projects as we pass them—the red colonial on Walnut, the blue ranch on Pine—and I try to act impressed. He tells me how he practically lives at Rusty’s for all the materials he has him stock for him there, and he waxes poetic about how renovating