Селеста Инг - Little Fires Everywhere

It soon became clear, however, that Mr. Richardson was not the only conflicted party. The judge seemed to be waffling as well. A week passed after the hearing, then two, with no decision made. In mid-April, Lexie was due for a follow-up appointment at the clinic, and to both Pearl’s and Mia’s surprise, she asked Mia to accompany her.

“You don’t have to do anything,” she promised Mia. “I’d just feel better if you were there.” The earnestness in her voice was persuasive, and on the afternoon of the appointment, after tenth period, Lexie parked her Explorer outside the house on Winslow. Mia started up the Rabbit and Lexie climbed into the passenger seat and they drove away together, as if she really were Pearl, as if Mia really were her mother taking her on this most intimate errand.

In fact, since the visit to the clinic, Pearl had felt a strange sense of reversal: as if, while she and Lexie slept under the same roof, Lexie had somehow taken her place and she’d taken Lexie’s and they had not quite disentangled. Lexie had gone home in a borrowed T-shirt, and Pearl, watching her walk out the door in her own clothing, had had the eerie feeling of watching herself walk away. The next morning, she’d found Lexie’s own shirt on her bed: laundered and carefully folded by Mia, presumably left there to be returned at school. Instead of tucking it into her bag, Pearl had put it on, and in this borrowed skin she’d felt prettier, wittier, had even been a bit sassy in English class, to the amusement of her classmates and her teacher alike. When the bell rang, a few kids had glanced back at her, impressed, as if they were noticing her for the first time. So this is what it’s like to be Lexie, she’d thought. Lexie herself was back at school, wan and somewhat subdued and with dark rings under her eyes, but upright. “You stole my shirt, bitch,” she said to Pearl, but affectionately, and then, “Looks good on you.”

Days later, shirt returned and her own retrieved, Pearl still felt Lexie’s confidence fizzing in her veins. So now, when presented with a rare empty house, Pearl decided to take full advantage. She left a note in Trip’s locker; she told Moody that she’d promised to help her mother at home all afternoon. Mia, meanwhile, had told Izzy she had a shift at the restaurant—“Go do something fun,” she’d said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”—so no one was home when Trip and Pearl arrived at the house on Winslow after school and went upstairs to Pearl’s bedroom. It was the first time Trip had been to her house, and to her it seemed momentous to be able to lie down with him in a place of her own choosing, instead of on the old worn-out couch in Tim Michaels’s basement, surrounded by the PlayStation and the air hockey table and Tim’s old soccer trophies, all the paraphernalia of someone else’s life. This would be in her own space, in her own bed, and that morning, as she’d made it carefully, she’d felt a warm glow at the base of her throat, thinking of Trip’s head lying on her pillow.

Moody, left to his own devices, had just shut his locker and was headed home when he heard someone calling his name. It was Tim Michaels, gym bag slung over his shoulder. Tim was tall and tough and had never been very kind to Moody: years ago, when Tim and Trip had been closer and he’d come over to the Richardsons’ now and then to play video games, he’d nicknamed Moody Jake— “Jake, get me another Coke,” “Jake, move your big head, you’re blocking my view.” Moody had dared to think it was affectionate, but then he’d heard the word at school and understood what it meant in Shaker slang . Dave Matthews Band was dope; Bryan Adams was jake. Getting to third base was dope; being grounded was jake. After that, he’d stayed upstairs when Tim came over, and was meanly glad when he and Trip began to drift apart. Now here was Tim calling Moody’s name—his real name—and jogging down the theatre wing toward him.

“Dude,” Tim said when he’d caught up to Moody. “You know anything about this mystery girl of your brother’s?”

It took Moody a moment to parse this question. “Mystery girl?”

“He’s been bringing some girl over to my place in the afternoons while I’m at practice. Won’t tell me who she is.” Tim shifted his gym bag to the other shoulder. “Trip’s not really a man of mystery, you know what I mean? I figure either it’s someone totally sketch or he’s really into her.”

Moody paused. Tim was an idiot, but he wasn’t imaginative. He wasn’t the kind to make things up. A suspicion was beginning to form in his mind.

“You don’t know anything about her?” he said.

“Nothing. It’s been, like, two months now. I’m almost tempted to go over there one afternoon and catch them in the act. He hasn’t said anything to you?”

“He never tells me anything,” Moody said, and pushed the door open and went out onto the front lawn.

He was still fretting when he got home and found Izzy reading on the couch.

“What are you doing home so early?” he said.

“Mia had her other job this afternoon,” Izzy said. She turned a page. “Where is everyone? Is Pearl not with you?”

Moody didn’t answer. The suspicion was taking on an uncomfortable solid shape. “Some new project my mom’s working on,” Pearl had told him. “She just needs an extra set of hands.” Yet there was Izzy—a perfectly good set of extra hands—at home, telling him Mia was out. Without answering Izzy, he dropped his bookbag on the coffee table and headed to the garage for his bike.

All the way to the duplex on Winslow, he told himself he was imagining things. That there was nothing going on here, that this was all a coincidence. But there, just as he’d expected, was Trip’s car, parked across the street from the house. He stayed there, staring at Pearl’s window, for what felt like hours, trying not to think about what was happening inside, but unable to look away. It looked so innocent, that modest little brick house, with its clean white door, the peach tree in the front yard ruffled with soft pink blossoms.

When Trip and Pearl emerged, they were holding hands, but that wasn’t what shook him. There was an ease between them that, Moody was sure, could only come from being intimately comfortable with another person’s body. The way their shoulders jostled as they came down the walkway. The way Pearl leaned over to close the zip on Trip’s backpack, the way he leaned down to smooth a stray curl out of her face. Then both of them looked up and saw Moody, astride his bicycle on the sidewalk, and froze. Before either of them could respond, he jammed his foot onto the pedal and sped away.

It never occurred to Moody to confront his brother; this was only what he expected from Trip. All of his fury was saved for Pearl, and later that afternoon, when she tiptoed upstairs and rapped on his door, he was not in the mood to listen to her excuses.

“It just happened,” she said, once she’d shut the door. Moody knew from her voice that she was telling the truth, but it brought him little comfort. He rolled his eyes at how much she sounded like a character on a bad teen drama and went back to tuning his guitar.

“Whatever,” he said. “I mean, if you want to screw my loser brother—” Pearl flinched, and in spite of himself, he stopped. “You know he’s just using you, right?” he said after a moment. “That’s what he does. He’s never serious about anyone. He gets bored and he moves on.”

Pearl maintained a defiant silence. This time, she was sure, was different. They were both right: Trip got bored easily, and seldom thought about girls once they were out of his sight. But he had never encountered a girl like Pearl before, who wasn’t embarrassed to be smart, who didn’t quite fit into the orderly world of Shaker Heights, whether she knew it or not. Over the past two months she had wormed into his mind at all hours of the day: in chemistry lab, during practice, at night when he normally would have fallen asleep quickly and dreamed banal dreams. The girls he’d grown up with in Shaker—and the boys, too, for that matter—seemed so purposeful: they were so ambitious; they were so confident; they were so certain about everything. They were, he thought, a little like his sisters, and his mother: so convinced there was a right and a wrong to everything, so positive that they knew one from the other. Pearl was smarter than any of them and yet she seemed comfortable with everything she didn’t know: she lingered comfortably in the gray spaces. She thought about big things, he discovered, and in those afternoons after they’d been together, big things were what they ended up talking about: How bad he felt that he and Moody didn’t get along (“We’re brothers,” he said, “aren’t we supposed to be friends?”). How he wasn’t sure, at seventeen, what he wanted to do with his life: everyone was asking; he was supposed to be thinking about college, he was supposed to know by now, and he didn’t, not at all. There’s time, Pearl had reassured him, there’s always more time. Being with Pearl made the world feel bigger, even as being with him made Pearl feel more grounded, less abstract, more real.