MrD: I love it.
BadApple: then watch this
I yank the computer cord out of the wall without waiting to log out. Then I stand, check the time on my third-hand phone, and head out, glad to leave the eerie sensation behind. I can’t believe I let that creeper get to me. But as unsettling as that was, and as alluring as the daydream of more money than we’ve ever had in my whole life is, that’s not real.
Mr. Behr is real.
For a girl like me, this is the only way out. The price you pay for a dream. You blow your teachers to get good grades, and maybe get a scholarship to a state college, where you probably have to blow your professors. Eventually, you get off the casting couch and walk on your own two feet.
At first, I left Mom notes when I went to meet Mr. Behr, always halfway terrified and halfway hoping she’d ask me where I went. But Mom stopped seeing me as her daughter and started seeing me as competition around my twelfth year, when boyfriend number ninety turned out to be a dick like the first eighty-nine she dragged through the house in my lifetime. Except this one proved to be a dick of the sort who wanted in her daughter’s pants instead of hers. From then on, she was glad to have me out of the house. After a few months of blowing Mr. Behr, I walked out while she was right there in front of the TV. She didn’t even look my way.
The younger the better, if it’s up to them. That’s why you’d better cover yourself up when this one’s coming over, Harper. I’m not about to lose a man to some kid who doesn’t know her ass from her elbow.
When I step from the dim interior into the blinding late afternoon sun, I have to stop and let my eyes adjust. Between our decrepit brick house and the next, Blue’s crouched over a kiddie pool half filled with sand, picking through it with an old plastic ladle. Beside her, Olive sits in a folding beach chair made of cracked plastic with aluminum legs that’s probably been around since her mom was a teenager. She runs a toy car up and down the metal bars of the chair, waiting for her big sister to clean her sandbox.
Normally, I’d say hi. We’re not exactly friends, but proximity and age make Blue about as close as I come to friends. Between the two of us, we have too many walls. One of us would have to want to break them down to become friends, and we’re both too guarded. She has her sister, and I have my fists, and we’re both respectful of the fact that those things matter most to the other.
“Fucking cats,” Blue swears, hurling a scoop of shit out of her yard and into the road. “Does this look like a litter box?”
“Probably to them,” Olive says. “It’s not their fault. Everybody shits somewhere.”
Blue sighs and tosses a cigarette butt out of the sand before standing.
“Okay, you can play,” she says, and the sisters change places. She waves when she sees me, blowing her lank blue hair out of her eyes and pulling out a pack of cigarettes. She holds it out to me as I step over the sunken spot in our broken walkway, rubbing my arms to get rid of the chill I got from the conversation with Mr. D.
“Thanks,” I say, stepping across the dirt patch between our walkways to grab a smoke. “I’ll get you back.”
“Cool,” Blue says, lighting up and handing me the lighter. I’m just stalling, putting off the inevitable, but it doesn’t stop me. Mr. Behr can wait—and he will. In truth, he’s not the only one who gets something out of it, though. I like watching people, studying them, seeing what makes them tick and what they’ll do. I know the lure of my teenage flesh is too strong for weak Mr. Behr to resist. He won’t even dare scold me for being late. I’m taking pity on a lonely old fat guy who can’t get it any other way, and we both know it, just as well as we know he’ll fail me in math if I don’t show up at all.
“You going out?” Blue asks, watching Olive drive her little car through the sand and leap it over a cigarette butt she’s unearthed.
“Yeah.”
We aren’t close enough for her to ask where I’m going, or for me to tell her. Olive, like most six-year-olds, has no such reservations.
“You going to work?” she asks, squinting up at me from the sand.
“Just an errand,” I say, crouching so she doesn’t have to stare into the brutal sun.
“What’s an erin?”
“An errand is like a chore,” I explain.
“Oh,” she says, digging a finger into the sand and pulling up another toy car. She holds it out to me. “Wanna play?”
“She doesn’t want to play with you, Olive,” Blue says, dragging on her cigarette.
“I would, but I better go,” I say.
“Okay,” Olive says, sounding wholly unconcerned as she goes back to making a road in the sand.
I stand and wave goodbye, stepping into the pothole ridden road.
“I’ll play,” I hear Blue say as I walk away. I glance over my shoulder to see her perched on the edge of the plastic tub, toy car in hand. I turn away and face forward, trying to get in the right headspace for doing what the next hour requires.
Today’s the first time I’ll meet Mr. Behr since the end of last school year, but my feet follow the familiar path. At first, it was electrifying, if a little terrifying. Mom always talks about this kind of thing as if it’s inevitable, and maybe it is. At least it was for me. Maybe I was always expecting it. Knowing I could intoxicate a grown man made me feel powerful.
But it didn’t take me long to figure out that I only had power because Mr. Behr let me. It was all an act—how he couldn’t live without me, couldn’t think, couldn’t teach. That’s how bad he needed to have his dick in my mouth.