Eddie said, “You’re clear on what’s happening here, right, Nadia? Nobody but us can know. Otherwise, it’ll be back to Russia for the five of you.”

“Kyrgyzstan,” Nadia said.

“Exactly,” Eddie said.

Nadia patted Eddie’s cheek. “Do not worry, Eddie. We understand. It just business.”


Eddie walked back toward his car with the shopping bag, smarting about his lost hat. He told himself that he had two others just like it at home. He told himself to focus on the bigger picture.

After all, Barbie had been right. Things had gone just fine.

HOPE

Allegra texted Hope at ten thirty on Saturday night. Please come pick me up.

Hope was thrown by the word please. Allegra never, ever used please, thank you, or excuse me when communicating with Hope.

Where are you? Hope texted back. She had dropped Allegra in front of the Dreamland Theatre, but she knew Allegra had had no intention of seeing a movie. Now, she worried something was wrong.

At Calgary’s house, Allegra texted. Please come get me.

NFW, Hope texted. Find another ride.

Pls! Allegra texted.

Three uses of the word please. Something definitely wrong. Hope waited.

PLS HOPE!

Hope waited.

PLS PLS PLS PLS!!!! I’ll owe you.

You already owe me already! For covering for you! Hope texted, but she put on her sandals. She had practiced the flute for two hours, until her tongue and lips hurt, then she had looked at her chemistry homework. She was pretty sure Allegra was out with Ian Coburn, which meant Brick might be home and willing to text with her about acids and bases. But if she texted Hot glass looks like cool glass and Brick was out having fun the way teenagers were supposed to on Saturday nights, then Hope would feel like the biggest loser on earth.

When she set her chemistry book down, she was officially out of options for her Saturday night.

She did NOT want to go to Calgary’s house, the same house where she had allowed him to get to third base while lying on his bed last December.

Calgary had asked Hope to the Christmas formal the week before Thanksgiving, and she had said yes, even though she realized she was a date of convenience-Calgary was Brick’s best friend, and Brick was taking Allegra. Right after Hope said yes, Calgary started paying all kinds of boyfriend-like attention to her. He invited her to his basketball games, where a seat was reserved for her in the family section. Hope sat and made awkward conversation with Rachel McMann and Dr. Andy (who had been Hope’s dentist until Rachel got her real-estate license and joined a rival agency, when Eddie moved the whole family to Dr. Torre).

Calgary started walking Hope to class and walking her to the bus. He asked her to the movies one night, and after the movies there was some mad kissing on the front step of Jack Wills, which was shuttered and closed for the season. Then Christmas Stroll weekend arrived, and Calgary and Hope walked around holding hands. They waited for Santa to arrive in his fire engine, they listened to the Victorian carolers, they got chowder and cocoa from the food tent. At one point, Calgary stepped into Stephanie’s, the gift shop, alone, because he said he wanted to get a present for Hope. Hope sat on a bench with her eyes closed until he emerged with a small bag that contained a tiny box. Jewelry. Something special, something binding. This was turning into a relationship.

Hope couldn’t believe it. Calgary was popular and good looking; he was a three-sport athlete and president of the Japanese club, which might have been really dorky except that Calgary was so cool, he made the Japanese club cool, and lots of people joined, most of whom couldn’t speak a word of Japanese. Calgary could speak Japanese fluently; his parents, in a burst of foresight, had hired a Japanese au pair when he was small, and when her visa expired, they paid one of the sushi chefs at Lola to be his tutor. Calgary wanted to go to the University of Pennsylvania, major in Japanese and business, and proceed to become more successful than any man they knew.

The Saturday night of Stroll, Hope let Calgary feel her breasts and put his mouth on them. He called them exquisite, and Hope ran her hands through Calgary’s hair, because this was something she had seen actresses do in the movies. Calgary had nice brown curls that smelled like pinecones. Touching his hair while he kissed her breasts made her fall in love a little, which she suspected was a bad development.

The weekend after Christmas Stroll, Calgary’s parents went off island to a Marriage Encounter weekend in Fall River, and Calgary invited Hope over to hang out. This was a setup, she thought, for them to both lose their virginity, and she deliberated for several hours before accepting. She wasn’t sure she wanted to lose her virginity to Calgary McMann-because, although he was good looking and spoke fluent Japanese and sank 88 percent of his free throws, and although she’d felt something when she touched his hair and he explored her breasts with his mouth, it wasn’t the big, all-consuming fireball of TRUE LOVE she’d been expecting. But, she realized, she might not meet that person for another twenty years, and did she really want to be a virgin when she was thirty-six? Wasn’t it a rite of passage to get it out of the way? Calgary wasn’t a bad choice.

Hope agreed to go.

They went up to Calgary’s bedroom. He had lit candles and had music playing-John Mayer. Hope wondered if Calgary had consulted Brick about these details. Allegra loved John Mayer and had intimated that she and Brick had sex while listening to “Your Body is a Wonderland” all the time. Hope decided that the candles and music were nice, the empty house was nice, and Calgary had made his bed and plumped the pillows.

All systems go, then-kissing, Hope’s shirt off, Calgary’s shirt off, Hope’s bra unhooked, Calgary’s mouth on her breasts, Hope’s hands in his hair. Eventually Calgary began fiddling with the button of her jeans. She helped him unbutton and unzip, then sucked in her breath to create room for him to slip his hands down inside her underwear (lacy thong, borrowed from Allegra, for the occasion).

This was where, somehow, things went wrong. Hope didn’t even have the vocabulary to describe it. Calgary was rough. He poked where he should have rubbed, he stabbed where he should have gently explored. Hope cried out, wriggled in pain, tried to pull her jeans off even farther so he could see what he was doing. He said, “Oh yeah, you like that, you like that, baby,” in some desperate and nearly violent tone she didn’t recognize. She did not like it, not at all, but she was afraid to say so. She was aware that most teenage boys found the female anatomy perplexing, but Calgary was treating her delicate parts like something he needed to tame.

“Stop,” Hope finally said, when his fingernail scraped inside of her. “Be gentle.”

“Gentle?” Calgary said, as if this were the last word that might apply to the sex act. He pulled his finger out and delivered it straight to his mouth, where he sucked it clean. “You taste…,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Hope lay on his bed with her jeans and the lace thong binding her midthigh. “You don’t know what?”

He said something in Japanese; it sounded like he was ordering sushi.

Hope stared at the ceiling. “You don’t know what, Calgary?”

“I think you should leave,” Calgary said.


Embarrassment, humiliation, shame, anger, a sense of gullible stupidity all collided. Hope’s feelings for Calgary had immediately changed from the blandly positive to the blackest negative.

He’d driven Hope home in silence. She tried to turn the radio on, but he snapped it off. As she got out of the car in her driveway, she said, “Is it over, then?”

“Oh yes,” Calgary said. “I’m asking someone else to the Christmas formal.”

“Wow,” Hope said. “Okay.”

“You can think I’m a jerk,” he said. “I don’t care.”

“I don’t think that,” Hope said. She absolutely did think that, but the bigger question was: what had gone wrong back at Calgary’s house? She hadn’t liked the way he was touching her, and maybe he didn’t like what he was touching-or tasting. The mortification was enough to make her want to vaporize.

“Whatever, Hope,” he said. “See you around.”

She was being dismissed. Okay, fine. It happened between teenagers, she supposed, all the time, every day.


Now here she was, retracing her steps of that awful night, to pick up her sister. And why? Allegra was capable of finding a ride home, but she had asked and then begged Hope, and, as perverse as it was, Hope enjoyed being called upon to save the day. Hope herself had very lame social credentials; her only entrée to the cool people was through her sister.

She pulled up in front of the McMann house and honked. There was no way she was going inside.

She waited in the dark car, playing Cage the Elephant at ten thousand decibels. She wanted to seem like she’d arrived here from a different party, a party with college kids, where the music was better and the conversation was elevated.

Nobody appeared.

Hope texted Allegra. I’m out front. Hurry.

Still nothing. Hope laid on the horn.

Finally, the front door opened, and out came-Brick. Hope swallowed. He stumbled down the front steps and over to her car. He opened the passenger door and climbed in.

Hope said, “Where’s Allegra?”

“She’s not coming.”

“She’s not?”

“No,” he said. His head fell forward on his neck like a wilting flower. “I was the one who texted you. I stole her phone.”