think I have a bit of a right to know if Francisca actually went for her. I need to know everything that’s going on with Francisca and I have the distinct feeling that Penny’s hiding something from me.
I smoke like a demon and then ask if she’s hungry. We eat, we drink, we don’t talk much. And then the car decides to die and everything goes to shit.
We’re forced to sleep in the car. The darkness is so thick you could cut it. I can tell she’s terrified, because her breathing is heavy like the first time I met her on the stairs. I don’t know why I still feel responsible for her. I try to comfort her in my own way. If you look at the stars, I say, you can’t be afraid.
The worst is when we lie in the back. Maybe we should have stayed in our separate seats, but it’s way too cold for that. The problem is that when she’s close to me, she smells so good and my body declares war on what my brain says, so to cover it up I come out with the heavy, mocking words of a complete asshole.
The truth is I’d like to comfort her in a whole other way. As soon as I get back I need to find a woman to fuck; I can’t behave myself when I’m exploding like this. I’m sure if I just get this out of my system the madness will pass, but meanwhile I need to get through the night. I have to order my body not to do what it wants. I have to order my mind to stop imagining Penny, sweet and wild, utterly naked except for her high-heeled boots, those magnificent thighs spread and waiting for me, lying back on this very seat.
I can’t wait for dawn so we can try to get this shit car working and get home. Then I can write to Francisca, wait for her reply, and go back to life as I know it.
I leave Penny on the stairs without even thanking her. After all, she offered to do this thing – I didn’t ask. At home I take off my clothes and take a shower. Despite the cold water and my good intentions, I am desperately excited. With one arm resting on the tiled wall, I jerk off under the stream of water. It’s the last time I’ll ever do such a thing, the last time I’ll think of that little girl in that way, imagining her under this same water, her lips parted in a low moan. Starting tomorrow – no, tonight – I’m gonna start fucking whoever I find. If this thing with Penny is the result of moderation, I prefer to go overboard. I’m sure Francisca would prefer that.
11
Ever since the day Grant showed up at the library, Penny had been wary. If she had to go put a book back on a shelf in some distant corner, she did it with her heart in her throat, for fear that her worst nightmare would suddenly come true. One afternoon, when she had just climbed to the top step of the ladder, she heard a voice calling from below and nearly fell.
She descended slowly, carrying a heavy volume and ready to hurl it in his face if necessary, but then realised it wasn’t Grant, or even some other man. A girl was smiling up at her, and Penny tried hard to remember where she had seen her before. She was tall and very slim, with an edgy haircut and veneers on her teeth. They were too white and perfect to be real.
‘Penny Miller, don’t you remember me?’ the girl asked, shaking her hand.
Penny’s brain flashed through moments from her past: sweet sixteen, high school days, her fury at her grandmother for insisting on moving her to a school way out of their neighbourhood – an expensive school that had drained Barbie’s savings, terrific in educational terms but full of racist assholes.
Then, ‘Rebecca Day?’ she exclaimed, very nearly tempted to ask her where she had left the other half of herself, since she barely weighed a hundred pounds. Penny was no giant, but her former schoolmate looked like she hadn’t eaten in months. Penny’s first thought was that she was sick, but that smile, those clothes that must have cost at least six times her own salary, and her air of triumph told her that Rebecca was yet another of those underfed aspiring-model