Karin Slaughter - Like A Charm

But sex with Clay was one degree of separation from Maya, and it made me feel as if I had, I don't know, permission to remove that one degree, to talk to Maya one-on-one, figure out if I was right about what I suspected. We didn't have any classes together, her being a year ahead and a dilettante art history major, but it was a small enough campus to cross someone's path, if you really put your mind to it.

I put my mind to it.

'Hey,' I said, coming across her as she left a rehearsal one night. It was early spring now, just a month after we first met, warmer but by no means balmy. Still, all Maya wore was a pair of sweats over her skimpy leotard. I've got a nice body, too, a body very much like Maya's - long legged, small-boned - but I don't walk around in my track shorts, showing everyone my ass.

'Yeah?' she asked, not looking up. She was bent over her wrist, fastening the charm bracelet. I guess she couldn't wear it when she danced, loud as it was.

'We met at Long John's that one time? Remember? Those crazy guys thought we looked alike.'

'Oh, sure.' Sizing me up now, still trying to decide if the comparison was an insult.

'I like your bracelet,' I said, then hated myself for sounding as if I were sucking up. 'I mean, they're very fashionable right now, aren't they? Charm bracelets.'

'Are they? This was a gift from my father, so I wear it all the time. It's an odd story – he found it in a cab.'

'Was he the driver?'

'No.' She laughed as if the idea of a cab-driving father were something quaint. But my dad had driven a cab once upon a time, although I had never heard of him doing it in New York. Then again, my dad's life had a lot of gaps, even the parts I knew about were filled with gaps. 'He just found it in the back seat. Normally, he would have handed it over to the driver, but the guy looked kind of shady. So my dad called the cab company and told them what he had found, and they said they would turn it over to him if no one claimed it. No one ever did, so he kept it, and gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday.'

It sounded like the sort of story my dad would tell, except it had a happy ending. I put a deposit down on the most beautiful bike, baby, but the guy sold it from under my nose. I went to the toy store, baby, but they didn't have the doll you wanted. I meant to have something for your birthday, honey, but I got held up at work and all the stores were closed. Until I was ten, I believed it all. That was when I found out about the two things that kept us so broke - Daddy's poker habit and Daddy's other family.

'I'm going for coffee. You want to come?' Again, I could have kicked myself for sounding so needy. But Maya said yes. I don't know why. Maybe she wanted a cup of coffee. Maybe she liked me, in spite of herself. Maybe she wanted to know more about this strange girl with her face. We went to a place just off campus, Grounds for Life. That was the year when all the coffee places around Not Quite U. had grounds in the name. Grounds for Life, Urban Grounds, Common Grounds. Only the last one made sense to me.

'Hey, maybe some day someone will open up a Grounds Zero,' I said as we fixed our coffees, just to be saying something. I noticed we took our coffees the same, with skim and two Equals.

Maya wrinkled her nose. All my life, I had been seeing that phrase in books, but I didn't really get it until that moment. She looked like a cat, a cat that had smelled something bad. I wondered if I would look like that if I made the same face.

'I'm sorry, my dad is a stockbroker, we knew like a dozen people who were killed that day.'

'Your stepdad, right?'

She didn't like that word. She played with the clasp on her bracelet, easing it on and off her wrist, just as she had that first night in Long John's. 'Who told you that?'

I shrugged, determined not to mention Clay. See, I didn't have any intention of hurting her. If I wanted to blow up her life, I could have done it right there, introduced Clay into the mix and let her draw her own conclusions. 'I don't know. I probably just confused you with someone else. You know how it is on this campus, you hear bits and pieces of people's lives, all out of context. It gets jumbled up.'

'Well, he is my stepdad, technically. But I think of him as my father. I never knew my biological father.' She hit that word hard, as if it were something distasteful. 'He ran out on the family when I was less than a year old.'

'You never knew him?'

'I don't want to know him. Creep.'

'Still, he paid child support, right?'

'I'm sure I don't know. It couldn't have been much, he was a real loser. It was my mother's lucky day when he left. She met my dad, Frank, six months later and they were married before I was three years old. I grew up on Park Avenue.'

The last detail bugged me. Why would she tell me that she grew up on Park Avenue if she didn't know it would get under my skin. We had moved nine or ten times, but not one of our former addresses was Park Avenue. I had lived on streets with names like Meushaw and Hinton, places as ugly as they sounded, in stripped-down apartments that were still more than we could afford. We usually left owing a month or two of rent, although once my dad played the hand out too far and they put our stuff on the street. Whatever happened, the excuse for everything we didn't have was that my father had another family before he met my mom and his ex-wife took him for every penny he had, even though she didn't need it. My mom tried to make it sound more proper than it was, but I did the math and I figured out that the last child of his first marriage and the first child of his second marriage – me, me, me - had been born within a few months of each other. Four to be exact. My birthday was October, which meant I was always the youngest in my class.

'I took a sociology and statistics class last semester and they say the average household sees its income drop after divorce. Guess your family bucked that trend.'

'Thanks to my father, yes. If my mother hadn't met him, life would have been pretty hand-to-mouth for us.'

'Your stepfather,' I said because precision in language is important to me.

'Right,' Maya said.

'I have both parents, and life is really hand-to-mouth for me.'

I was trying to make a joke, or at least be a little self-deprecating, but Maya didn't laugh. She suddenly glanced at the big neon clock over the counter and said she had to go. She left in such a hurry that she didn't notice her charm bracelet was still on the table. Maybe that was because it had sort of scooted under a napkin, so she didn't see it as she gathered up her stuff. Or maybe she thought it was in her tote. At any rate, she left it behind and she was long gone before I realized it was there. So I did what anyone would do. I picked it up, planning to give it to her later.

Of course I examined it first. It was surprisingly heavy and some of the charms were almost lethally sharp. A person would have lots of little nicks and cuts on her wrists, wearing a bracelet like that day-in and day-out. You couldn't dance in it, or work on a computer, or - if Maya had a life more like mine - wait tables with it on. You wouldn't want to wear it with a fine dress, because it would end up catching a thread here or there, creating runs. And you couldn't make love with it. You'd put someone's eye out, as my mom might say, although not about sex.

I fingered the charms. There was a heart-shaped locket with a catch and I tried to prise it open, certain my father's photo was inside. I know, I know, Maya said it was her stepfather who had found it in the cab, but I didn't believe that. She was so keen to write our father out of her life that she had revised the story in her head.

The charm I couldn't help noticing were the ballet slippers, two tiny gold cylinders with ribbons so fine you couldn't imagine one not getting broken over the years, with a jewel sparkling at one toe. It could have been cubic zirconium, but how would I be able to tell? The most precious stone I ever saw was the green glass in my high school ring. But I was sure it was a diamond glistening on those toe shoes.