Karin Slaughter - Like A Charm

I had wanted to take dancing lessons, wanted it more than anything. I was graceful, I had the right build for it, long and lean. But even the half-assed amateurs who teach ballet and tap and jazz at ten bucks a pop still expect to be paid, up front and in full. Twice, I got into a class, only to have to drop out when my dad stopped paying. I can still see myself at eight, bare-legged because the leotard and the shoes were a big enough stretch - no money left over for the pink tights - being told that I can't come to class again until my mommy or daddy calls Madame Elena. After the second time I was barred from class - barred from the bar - I just didn't go back. I began running. To run, all you need is a pair of shoes and an open road.

I tucked the bracelet in my jacket pocket, thinking I would give it to Maya the next time I saw her. It was the natural thing to do, right? She was gone, I couldn't run after her, and I didn't know exactly where she lived. I couldn't see giving it to the manager at Grounds for Life, he looked pretty skeevy. But what with one thing and another, I didn't see her for a while. Midterms came and then spring hit the area hard, with a wave of almost summer-like days. Even the mopey types at Not Quite U. knew what to do with good weather. The grassy hill in front of the Great Glass Library was filled with sunbathing girls and Frisbee-tossing boys. They told us not to tan, Not Quite put on a big information push about skin cancer, just like with STDs and eating disorders, but we know, OK? We knew and we made our choices.

Anyway, I was sitting on the lawn with my sociology text when Clay approached me. He seemed kind of nervous, but guys often act weird after they've had sex with you. Why is that? I haven't been with that many guys, but I haven't found one yet who wasn't nervous after screwing you. Maybe it's because I don't get hooked on them, don't follow them around. The only thing guys dislike more than a clingy girl is a non-clingy girl.

'Hey,' he said. 'Kate.' He looked around, as if he were proud of knowing my name and wanted to see if anyone appreciated the great effort he had made, dredging it up.

'Hey,' I said, refusing to give him a name at all.

'Um, you know Maya? My girlfriend?' So she was his girlfriend now, I hope she appreciated her promotion. 'She said you two had coffee a while back.'

I figured he was feeling me out, trying to find out if I had told her anything.

'Yeah, for all of ten minutes. We didn't really get into deep.' See, I was being nice, letting him off the hook. I didn't sleep with him to make trouble for anyone, especially myself.

'Well, she thinks maybe she left her bracelet there, and she wonders if you took it.'

Took it. Not picked it up, or remember if she was wearing it that night, or anything like that. He went straight to took it.

'Bracelet? I don't know anything about a bracelet.'

'Oh.' He was standing over me, his shadow blocking the sun, so I was beginning to catch a chill. It was that time of the year when there is a huge difference between sun and shadow, when you can lie in a bikini if you are out in the open, but would freeze in a lane of trees if you aren't carrying a sweater. 'She was pretty sure she wore it that night.'

'I just don't remember it. I guess I didn't notice it.'

'She said you talked about it, that you asked her about it.'

Shit, I had. But so what? 'Maybe I did, I just don't remember.'

'The thing is, she's always taking it on and off. It's like a nervous habit with her.'

'Sorry.'

It wasn't just that Maya had all but accused me of being a thief. It was the fact that she did it secondhand, sent her boyfriend to claim it for her, as if she were some lady fair and he was a knight trying to win her devotion.

'Well, if you see it around-' Clay said, looking more nervous than ever. He was scared to go back to Maya empty-handed, he was that whipped.

'What does it look like?' I asked. I wish I hadn't. The lie was too perfect in its nonchalance, and Clay caught it. He ambled away, with a careless backward glance at my body, as if congratulating himself for knowing what it looked like without a bathing suit.

A week passed, then another, and no one came to talk to me about the bracelet again. I can't say I completely forgot about it - I kept the bracelet in my top drawer, next to my underwear, so I saw it every morning - but it wasn't uppermost in my mind. If I thought about the bracelet at all, it was to wonder how I could get it back to Maya anonymously. No plan seemed right.

And then I came back to my room one night and found Maya standing there with the Resident Adviser, demanding to be let in. The R. A. thought it was bogus, I could tell he did. He took me aside and asked me to let her look through my room as a favour, so she would back off. Apparently her stepfather had been making calls to various people and he was a big giver and an alum, so they had to indulge him. Yet the R.A. was so sympathetic and kind that I began to think the bracelet wasn't in my room, that it was all a horrible misunderstanding. But once the door was unlocked, Maya went straight for it, as if the bracelet had a homing device.

'How did that get there?' I asked. And the thing is, I meant it. I really couldn't remember.

'Because you stole it. And you're just lucky that all I care about is getting it back, because my father said this bracelet is so valuable that I could bring felony theft charges against whoever had it.'

My father. Two simple words, people say them all the time. But it was a lie, in Maya's mouth, and the lie made me furious.

'Your stepfather. Because I know who your father was, and he happens to be my father too. And while you were living on Park Avenue and going to private school, he was either broke from paying your child support or moving us around so they couldn't find him to pay the child support. Five hundred dollars a month was nothing to you, but it was a lot to us, as much as we paid for rent in some places.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Maya said. 'We're practically the same age and my father didn't leave until I was two. How could we have the same father?'

'Pretty much in the same way we ended up having the same boyfriend.' I turned to the R.A., the lie now fully formed. 'She planted this here because she's jealous of me for having sex with her boyfriend, Clay. She's setting me up.'

I looked to the R.A., then Maya. She was clearly shocked, and she sagged into him, whimpering a little. The R.A., so recently my ally, looked at me as if I were pure evil. So I did the only thing that made sense to me at that moment: I grabbed the bracelet back from Maya and began to run, just run, with no plan or thought. I was too busy doing the math in my head. The child support cheques my father made out every month had been for $500. But $500 a month was $6,000 a year and almost $100,000 over sixteen years. The money my father spent on Maya, who didn't need a dime, could have covered my tuition at Not Quite U. And she was going to begrudge me a bracelet, found by our father, in his cab? The way I see it, she had gotten to have the bracelet and now it was my turn. I ran, the bracelet in my hand, and remember I was fast, a miler.

But Maya chased me and she had stamina from dancing, if not speed. She chased me down the steps of our dorm and on to the street. She chased me up the main drag, the one that separated the housing units from the campus, and into a neighbourhood of grand old houses. The fruit trees had lost their blooms and the tulips were beginning to lose their petals, but the azaleas were coming in and the trees were past the budding stage. Funny, the things you notice at such a moment, but I was breathing hard and those green spring smells went deep into my lungs. It occurred to me that Maya's family could afford a house as nice as the ones we ran past, possibly nicer, given how much more stuff cost in New York. I wondered if she had a car and a horse, if all the charms on the bracelet digging into my palm represented the abundance that Maya took for granted.