Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

How old is Nicholas?” (Eighteen! They had that big party with the tent, you were there). Questions with easy answers, the sort Coach Bell would ask when you banged heads with another girl while playing field hockey in PE class.

At home Mari’s mother guided her in through the front door, made a pot of tea, and then parted and brushed her hair. Once she finished both braids, she said quietly, “You have to tell Imogen, and I have to tell her parents.” She was standing behind Mari, who was seated in a kitchen chair. Mari didn’t see why Imogen’s parents needed to know anything, and said so, but her mother then began to undo and rebraid her hair as she explained the meanings of several legal terms: “age of consent”; “statutory rape”; “liability.” When she stepped from behind Mari’s chair to turn on the faucet, Mari saw the look on her face. She feared for an awful moment that her mother was about to cry. But she didn’t; she rinsed out the teacups and scrubbed the pans left soaking in the sink and paused only to look up briefly and say in midthought, to either Mari or her own reflection in the window, “They opened their home to her.”

Imogen looked so plainly delighted when asked to return to the tree house that Mari felt like a monster. “We haven’t been up here in ages,” Imogen said, and stretched her arms up, oblivious to the accumulation of cobwebs. “Look! I’m hitting the ceiling now.”

But as Mari talked, Imogen’s arms sank back down to her sides. She bent over so she could rest her elbows on the filthy edge of the window, and she allowed her sheet of hair to fall forward and hide her face. Mari knew that she was crying, but she also knew not to put her arm around her smotheringly. When Imogen finally spoke, she didn’t turn to look at her. “This whole time I thought Alex was the one she liked.”

Her voice had a hitch in it, and that made Mari start to cry.

“I thought so too. I mean, that’s what she told us. But maybe she was just using him as a cover? I don’t know if there was anything really there.”

Imogen was silent for a moment.

“Maybe she wanted to talk about what she was feeling without having to say who the person was.”

Mari nodded tearfully. “Right. Like a decoy.”

Imogen continued to stare out the window.

Another possible explanation suddenly reared up in Mari’s mind, and she felt her stomach lurch. Maybe Alex had been not decoy but practice. Like a warm-up. Low stakes, no pressure. Vaguely brown, formerly chubby Alex. Like shooting baskets in the backyard before the game. She shuddered. She could never say that aloud.

“You know what,” Imogen said, “I really wish they hadn’t taken down the zip line.”

Mari joined her in gazing at the yard. Below them spread a low layer of broad, glossy foliage. It looked like a shimmering green carpet that floated just a few inches above the ground, lush but uncomfortable to lie down in. In, not on, because of course the carpet wasn’t solid but made out of large, stiff-leaved plants that would crowd in on you or get crushed under you if you were to try to have sex in their midst. This was part of the strangeness of Mari’s fantasy—there really was no welcoming spot in this woodland garden for two people looking to have sex. Or at least sex according to how she imagined it. To her mind it required a reasonably comfortable surface, one that was by necessity horizontal. Never in a million years would she consider the following possible: on the hood of a Volvo; folded over a table; standing on one foot, pushed up soundlessly against a bathroom door.

How did they begin the conversation with Bree?

We need to talk to you. About something serious.

Or: Melanie told us.

Or: Will you close the door?

Or: I don’t even know what to say right now.

All plausible, but none certain. None sounding even faintly familiar. However hard she tried, Mari couldn’t remember. Not what was said, or where. The total blankness made her wonder if a conversation had ever happened. Did Imogen speak alone with Bree? Was Mari not a party to it? Did parents step in and make arrangements among themselves, with the thought of sparing them the pain of talking? Or was Mari’s mere presence during this conversation ignoble enough that her memory now refused to summon it? All plausible, too.

What Mari did know was that whatever happened in such a conversation, however the information was conveyed, Bree would remember. She would be able to recall every detail of it clearly.

Just as Mari could recall where she and Melanie had been standing in the record store that August afternoon; what Melanie was wearing (a saggy blue cardigan over her Buzzcocks shirt); what they had just eaten (roll-up sandwiches with tahini dressing); what was playing on the store’s speakers (Nick Cave doing a cover of “Hey Joe”).

Another detail, impossible to forget: the phrase that Nicholas had pressed into her, hotly and permanently, a phrase describing her mother. During one of the phone calls between her mother and Imogen’s, Nicholas had picked up the receiver in another part of the house—an interruption that wouldn’t even be possible now—and spoken at her mother furiously, in the relentless, punishing style of a seasoned debater. Afterward she’d walked into Mari’s room looking dazed. “He called me, among many other unpleasant things,” her mother had said, sinking onto the bed, “a busybody. A pathetic busybody who wants to make everyone else as miserable as I am.”

A cooling of relations ensued, but despite what Bree later claimed, it couldn’t be rightly called a banishment. The interlude resembled more of a breather, a period of recovery, than an actual estrangement. After their talk in the tree house, Mari had pictured Imogen and herself moving side by side down the school