Adam Levin - Hot Pink

Afterward, I had the sense the sex implicated me in something. I assumed rightly that it was love and asked her to marry me.

I drove Tell to the hospital to get her truck. On the way, I kept thinking I saw my thermostat needle creeping to the right, but then we’d get to a stop, and I’d look a little closer and see it was smack in the middle — it was fine. Tell’s truck, on the other hand, refused to start, so I drove us to her mother’s.

My jaw was swollen by the time we arrived. Tell’s mother, giving it a squint and a head-tilt, said, “What a pleasure to meet you, Ben, now please leave my home,” and Tell ripped the fresh scab off the gash on her chin and bled on the rug.

She said, “I’m moving in with him, and then we’re getting married.”

“Like hell you are,” her mom said.

The stepdad, watching Leno and eating baby carrots from a cereal bowl, spoke the word guffaw and slapped his knee. “Guffaw,” he said. “Guffaw, guffaw.”

Tell handed me her scab. “Smoke a cigarette with my mother while I pack up my stuff.”

I held out my pack and her mom took two. She tossed one to the stepdad.

Tipping his head back, he leaned forward and caught it, filter-first, in his mouth. Then he clapped.

“She’s done this before,” Tell’s mother said. I lit her cigarette. “You’re just the newest nice guy.”

“Amen,” said the stepdad. “Hey. How about a light, Peggy?”

“How about give me half a second, Steve.”

“Your name’s Steve?” I said.

“Stephen, actually. With a p h ,” he said. “Steve means something else.”

I took a look around the living room, a normal-looking living room: leather couch, reclining chair, steel-and-glass coffee table. A knickknack tray on an oldish-looking bureau. Framed photos in a line on a squat redwood bench. I found a clay ashtray on a speaker behind me, next to the television. Everything looked normal. I don’t know what I was expecting.

“Look at me,” Tell’s mom said. “See the resemblance?” I looked. She was normal-looking, too. I didn’t see much of a resemblance, though. Maybe something around the eyes.

She grabbed the meat of her gut and shook it. She tucked her head and pointed at the second chin. “This is what happens if you get her pregnant, boy-o. And you will. And then you get another one just like her, no matter how sure she is it’ll be a son. Shit. And then she leaves you because you’re not who you say you are and she goes and gets another one like him.” She thumbed the air in the stepdad’s direction. “And then that’s it. Two, three more lives wasted and another stupid kid walking around, spreading her legs for any guy who’ll listen to her sad stories and say it’s not her fault. It’s wretched. It’s wretched and it’s inevitable.”

“That sounds rehearsed,” I said.

She said, “I told you. You’re not the first one.”

Tell returned with a duffel, a telescopic easel, and an expandable plastic box containing paints and brushes. She set the easel and the box at my feet. “I should grab a pillow,” she said. “I like a lot of pillows.”

“You don’t own a pillow,” said the stepdad. “I own the pillows.”

“I’ve got pillows,” I said.

“I hope that’s everything,” said Peggy. “Because we’re changing the locks tomorrow.”

Tell said, “I still have some stuff in my room I want to get. My truck’s broken down, though.” She opened my fist and took the scab back. She held it out to her mom. “You can keep this until I can get back here for my stereo and clothes,” she said. “And then you can change the locks.”

“Why are you so disturbed?” her mom said.

“Just please, Mom?” Tell dangled the scab for a second, then reached around her mother to set it on the edge of the coffee table.

“Please!” her mom said. “We eat here.” She seized the scab between her pink fingernails and dropped it in the ashtray.

Tell drew a set of scissors from a drawer in the bureau.

“Those are mine,” said the Steve.

The truck driver was a fluke. According to Tell, the beating he’d dealt her was cosmic evidence that everything was right between us.

“I’ve never gotten Ricked in the suburbs,” she said. “Not in public, anyway.”

I was sitting on the edge of my bathtub, my feet in the basin, my face between my knees. Tell stood behind me, working the clippers in single strokes from the back of my neck to the front of my head. She wasn’t using a guard, and the metal kept warming. Blood was throbbing inside of my ears. The hair she’d used the scissors on lay in a pile in the tub beneath my eyes and I watched it get sprinkled with dead flakes of scalp and thousands of shorter hairs, hard, like wire.

I said, “Can I sit up for a minute? I’m about to pass out.”

She turned off the clippers.

There was a burning cigarette on the edge of the sink. I nodded at it and she handed it over.

I told her, “I don’t think I want that to happen again. I don’t like it. The idea of it… I think it’s bad for you.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “And you do like it. You just don’t know it yet. It takes some time.”

I said, “I don’t think you’d be into it if your mom wasn’t so… I mean, if you hadn’t, when you were a kid or something, suffered some kind of fucked-up—”

She held the little cutting machine in her fist and struck the front of her head with it.

“Hey!” I said.

She did it again. I took it away from her. “Don’t start playing with my mind,” she said. “I enjoy getting Ricked because it feels good. Don’t be jealous.”

“It’s not jealousy, Tell. It’s guilt.”

“That’s worse than jealousy.”

“It makes me fucken scared,” I said.

“It, it, it,” she said. “Fuck fuck fuck. Enough with all the curses and pronouns,” she said.

“You fucken know what I mean by fucken context,” I said.

She gave me a laugh and kissed me on the cheek. She said, “Don’t be scared.”

“What if you get killed?”

“That’s sweet,” she said. “There’s no need to worry, though. They don’t want to kill me. They just want to Rick me.”

She flipped the clippers back on and I lowered my head.

A couple days later, Tell answered my phone. “Hello?” she said. “Jane Tell,” she said. “Well, it’s nice to hear your voice, too. One second.” She handed me the receiver. “Your father,” she said.

He said, “Jane Tell, eh? This explains a lot. We’ve missed you, been worried, haven’t seen you since the trial. We were starting to think you were avoiding us. We are no longer worried about that, or you. At least I’m no longer worried, and your mom won’t be either, once I tell her we’ve spoken. We wrote down a list of things to say to you, though. We worked on it for two afternoons. Ready? Okay.

“One: don’t be ashamed about the drugs. Two: we love you. Three: you’re either our first- or second-favorite person in the world, depending on the day, because sometimes we like Leah better. Four: we’re glad you’re not in prison, glad that you’re safe, and we trust you not to put us through anything like you’ve put us through ever again. Five: things like that happen once, and it’s excusable, colon: you’re young and this is the first time. A mistake was made. You made it. But everyone makes mistakes.”

I said, “You’re giddy. What’s up?”

“What’s up? What’s up is I just sold a ten-million-dollar term-life policy to an eighty-year-old woman. Biggest single premium I’ve seen in two years. It fell into my lap, and the world seems like a lucky place today, boychic.”

“Congratulations.”