Robin York - Deeper

I stop packing my bag and just stand there, looking at it.

He made forty bucks.

“How much did you charge?”

“Sixty-five.”

“For how much?”

“An eighth of an ounce.”

I turn around. “Is that a lot?”

“A lot of money, or a lot of weed?”

“Um, either.”

He smiles for real now and shakes his head. “It’s a little more than anybody else is charging, but the weed is better. It’s the smallest amount I’ll bother to sell. Why are we talking about this?”

And that’s when I lose my nerve. I shrug. I look past his left ear.

I don’t want to ask him.

Before this year, I never gave money a lot of thought. My dad is pretty well off. I grew up in a nice house in a safe neighborhood in Ankeny, outside Des Moines, and even though Putnam isn’t cheap, I didn’t have to worry about tuition. I always knew my dad would pay it, whatever it was.

But that was before the pictures, and it was before I figured out that, no matter what I do, I can’t make them go away. Not by myself.

I need fifteen hundred dollars—maybe more—to hire the company that will push my name down in the search rankings and scrub my reputation online. The guy I talked to when I called said that cases like mine can be more involved, which means a higher fee.

I don’t have a job. I had one in high school, but Dad says I’m better off concentrating on my schoolwork now. I have a hundred thousand dollars in a savings account—my share of the life-insurance settlement when my mom died from cancer when I was a baby—but until I’m twenty-one, I can’t touch it.

With no income and no credit history, I can’t get fifteen hundred dollars on a credit card without my dad cosigning on the application. I tried.

“Caroline?” West asks.

“What?”

He steps closer. “What’s this really about?”

And I blurt out the stupidest thing. “You don’t have to protect me.”

Because I’m sick of it. Of being protected. Of needing to be.

“I’m not.”

His eyes, though. When I meet his eyes, they’re blazing with the truth.

He is. He wants to.

“You know what the worst thing is?” I ask. “It’s knowing I was always stupid and sheltered and just … just useless . Everyone telling me I’m smart, like that’s so great and important. Going to a good college— oh, Caroline, how fantastic . But one bad thing happens to me, and I can’t even …”

I trail off, because I think I’m going to cry, and I’m too angry to give in to it.

West takes another step closer, and then he’s rubbing my arm. The flat of his palm lands against the back of my neck, over my hair, and he’s tipping me forward until my forehead rests against his chest.

“You’re not useless.”

“No, seriously, I can’t—I need you to hear this, okay? Because the thing is—”

“Caroline, shut up.”

The way he says it, though—it’s definitely the nicest anyone’s ever shut me up. And his rubbing hand comes around my back and presses me into him, and that’s nice, too. I can feel him breathing. I can smell his skin, feel my hair catching on the stubble underneath his chin.

It’s better here. I like it.

I like it too much. So much that I spend the longest possible span of time I can get away with savoring the heat of him, the weight of his hand on the back of my neck, the way his boot looks stuck between my flats. But then I have to ask. I have to.

“West?”

He makes a noise like hunh .

“Do you have a lot of money?”

I lift my forehead to ask him, which puts me in startlingly close range of his face. I’m close enough to see the frown begin at the downturned tips of his eyebrows and spread across his forehead.

Close enough to see his eyes go baffled. Then angry. Then blank.

His hand drops away from my neck. “Why are you asking me that?”

It’s too late not to say, but the butterflies in my stomach have turned to lead ingots, and I know this is all wrong. I know it is. But I don’t know why or how to get out of it. “I, uh … I need a loan.”

He steps back. “What for?”

“Remember when I told you about that company that can clean up my reputation online?”

“You said it was expensive, so you’d have to tell your dad.”

“Yeah.”

I wait a beat.

“You didn’t tell your dad.”

“I can’t, West. I thought about it, but I … What if he sees?”

It could happen any time. My dad could be sitting at his desk and type my name into a search engine, just because. Or somebody he works with could point him in that direction. A friend. One of my sisters. Anybody .

I close my eyes, because the humiliation of it, the shame of asking West to help me fix this thing—I can’t.

I can’t look at him at all.

“How much do you need?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars. I heard you … I heard sometimes you do that.”

He sighs. “You have any income at all?”

“I get an allowance.”

I open my eyes, but I can’t lift them above my shoes. My black flats are dusted with flour. It’s worked its way down into the buckle, and I doubt I would be able to clean it out, even if I wanted to.

“How long would it take you to pay me back?”

“I could pay you a hundred fifty a month.” If I never buy anything or eat outside the dining hall.

West kicks my toe with his boot. Waits for me to look up. His eyes are still dead.

“I’m charging you interest.”

“I would expect you to.”

“I’ll have it on Tuesday.”

And then there’s nothing left to say. He’s gone, empty, and I’m too full—like there aren’t any edges to me. It’s just pain and disappointment, all the way through.

“Thanks,” I say. “I’m … I’m going to head out. I have to write that paper.”

He just grunts at me and weighs out dough. A thousand miles away.

I don’t see West on Friday, because he’s working at the restaurant, and we’re not friends.

I don’t go to the soccer party. Bridget just about breaks something trying to sell me on the idea, but I can’t. I tell her I have to study, and then I hide in the library and replay my conversation with West over and over again. I should never have asked him for the money. I don’t know who I should have asked, but not him. The look on his face … I can’t stop thinking about it.

I don’t see West on Saturday, because he’s working at the restaurant, and we’re not friends.

The next week is more of the same thing. On Tuesday he gives me the money, and he teaches me how to make lemon glaze for the muffins. Everything’s like normal, but there’s this thin coating of awkwardness ladled over our conversations, and when I’m not around him, it hardens and turns opaque.

I convert West’s cash into a money order and send it off to the Internet-reputation people, but I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d never opened my mouth.

The next weekend I eat dinner with Bridget, and we walk to the Dairy Queen in town afterward, leaves crunching under our feet. I eat a hot-fudge brownie sundae so big that I have to lie down on the red lacquered bench afterward and unbutton the top of my jeans. Upside down, I look out the front window and down the street. I can just make out the chalkboard easel outside the Gilded Pear.

Nate took me to dinner there last year before the spring formal. West was our waiter. Every time he came to the table, it was more awkward than the last. By the time he brought the check, his conversation with Nate was so thickly laced with irony that I felt like they were performing a scene in a play.

The kind of play with sword fighting.

I didn’t break up with Nate because of West. Honestly.