thing about Steven: you couldn’t always tell what was him and what was his idea of how he ought to be. He was a high school graduate framing in walls and laying shingles, but he had plans, big plans, not school plans or job plans but money plans, success plans.
I don’t know how I managed to keep up with my schoolwork. Maybe it was because Steven acted as though it was a part of me he thought was important. We would be at the dumpy apartment where one of his friends lived, up a rickety set of wooden stairs to the second floor of what you could tell was meant to be a one-family house instead of a collection of weird apartments with half kitchens and sketchy bathrooms, drinking beer, or gin and orange juice for the girls, someone in the bedroom passing around a joint, and Steven would announce, “This woman? Top of her class. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she’s more than a pretty face. She’s a brain. Calculus, man.”
“Precalculus,” I might say under my breath, but no one listened to me much, in those apartments or in the bars. Steve Sawicki’s girlfriend. Tommy Miller’s sister. That was all I was, no matter how often Steven told people otherwise. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he’d say, putting out his hand, “Mimi Miller.” It was embarrassing, but there was a part of me that liked it, too. He made it feel like life was a party, and he was hosting it. Sometimes when I wasn’t with him and I thought about him he seemed unreal to me. But then he’d be sitting next to me and I’d look down at those little dark hairs on his arms and they were the realest things in the world. I know some people wondered why I was with him, and part of it was because he made it seem like he was training for the Olympics and I was the gold medal. No one had ever acted like I was the gold medal before, or not so I’d noticed.
But I know now that some of it was simpler than that. It was the sex, although I spent a lot of time pretending we weren’t having it. I wouldn’t go into one of the bedrooms at those crappy apartments the way those other girls did, so you could hear them through the thin hollow-core doors. Some of them sounded like they were pretending to me. I wasn’t pretending, not one bit.
None of the people Steven hung out with were the kind of people who cared if you took calculus, or precalculus. Some of the girls seemed just shy of low-dull normal, although maybe that was what they thought their boyfriends liked. One or two were nice to me. Brenda, who was a beautician, was always telling me how good my hair would look if I let her put streaks in it. She said she could do it right in the kitchen, but I thought my mother would go nuts. She was already suspicious of Steven. Maybe she could smell the sex on me. Maybe that’s why I was keeping up with my schoolwork, too, because my mother kept watch, was always going in my bag and looking at the grades on my quizzes. They didn’t give her any ammunition: A A A A. Even the English essays.
Once Steven insisted on driving me to the state capital when I was planning to do research. I tried to get out of that by saying that I had to take Richard, too, but he insisted on giving Richard a lift. The three of us were sandwiched in the cab of his truck, Richard and me with our notebooks on our laps, Steven with his hand on my knee.
“He seems like an okay guy,” Richard said when we got inside. “He has a lot of plans,” I’d replied, but that sounded lame even to me. Although it was true. Steven could talk about his plans for hours at a time, until Tommy, who liked him less now that I was with him, would tell him to shut up. His plan—his business plan, he always called it—was to buy a run-down house cheap, fix it up, then resell it at a profit and buy another one. He would take long drives to look for the right areas, “up-and-comers,” he’d call them. I’d go with him, if I wasn’t working at the diner or doing extra credit