As her thoughts spiraled away, her gaze fell on the aluminum siding of the house. She watched as her shadow-self arched her back and rose up off the stairs at an impossible angle. Without Vince’s shadow, it was like being in the grips of a demon lover. Possessed. Reaching for someone who wasn’t there.
12
THE PAST
Hall Pass, they called her in junior high, as in “Did you get your Hall Pass?” Asked to the boys by one another, snickered about by the girls. There was some glory in it, to be thought of as the girl with all the experience, especially when in fact Charlie had absolutely none. But it was mostly humiliating, her body drawing boys to her and repulsing them at once. It made group assignments fraught. Push your desks together and Matt Panchak spent most of his time sliding one sneakered foot up your leg, taking your lack of complaint for desire.
Never mind that you’d gone to kindergarten with him.
Never mind that once, during PE, he’d gotten a soccer ball kicked into his stomach so hard that he threw up, and you were the one who walked him to the nurse’s office.
No, now you were a pair of legs with boobs on top, with the ability to banish all his insecurities. Venus on the half shell.
In gym class, while she was changing, Doreen Kowalski asked Charlie all kinds of questions about when she’d gotten her period and whether she shaved her underarms and what size bra she wore. At first, she wondered if Doreen wanted to be friends, but once Charlie answered, Doreen rushed back to her knot of buddies, giggling.
They didn’t understand how her bra straps cut into her shoulders and underwires cut into her ribs, and that the bras that fit looked like ones a matronly nurse would wear in an old war movie. There was no way to make them understand.
Charlie put on darker eyeliner and wore baggier clothes and stompier boots.
Rand didn’t seem to know what to do with her either. When he’d recruited her at twelve, she’d already looked older than her age. By the time she was starting high school, her body let her pass for a grown woman.
It didn’t help that Charlie got a little too good at all the wrong things. She had a nose for where an unlocked window or door might be when she approached houses. Her pickpocketing was deft enough that Rand didn’t let her get close to him. And when she played a role, she disappeared into it.
He liked the idea of passing on his knowledge to a kid with some natural talent, but he didn’t want her to be better than him. And he definitely didn’t want her as competition.
“You and me, we’re the same,” he’d remind her again and again, in case she forgot. “We pretend, so that other people will like us. But they wouldn’t like us if they knew us, would they? That’s why we’ve got to stick together.”
Sometimes after she’d done particularly well on a job, he’d be in a spiteful mood. He’d condescendingly call her “Little Miss Charlatan,” go over every mistake she made, and give her less of the take than she deserved.
But if Charlie’s growing skill frustrated him, he also clearly enjoyed having someone to whom he could complain, or brag, or rant. The natural consequence of criminality was that he had to be discreet about it, and Rand wasn’t a discreet person by nature.
Sometimes he could be fun. He took her with him to the Moose Lodge in Chicopee, where a bunch of old racketeers drank, and let her sit around drinking burnt coffee with lots of cream while they regaled her with stories. She rubbed elbows with fences and forgers. Learned how to count cards from Willie Lead, who told her about Leticia, his late wife and, according to him, the greatest stickup artist ever to knock over a liquor store.
“It was the throat cancer that got her in the end,” he said mournfully. “The cops never even came close.”
The Moose Lodge was where Charlie got her start as a bartender, at fourteen, pouring shots when no one else wanted to do it, making cocktails according to highly idiosyncratic instructions.
“Just wave the vermouth bottle over the gin,” Benny would say. “That’s how to make a martini right.” His game was angling after rich widows, and he always looked sharp doing it, even if his breath was often perfumed with booze.
Willie would disagree vehemently, shouting that vermouth ought to be a full fourth of the drink, and that Benny was a drunk who’d burned away his good taste, if he’d ever had any in the first place.
“So I’m a drunk!” Benny would shout back. “If you can’t trust a drunk about liquor, who can you trust?”
Charlie liked them. She told them about her grandmother and the shotgun, and the detail that her grandfather was sitting in his BarcaLounger when he got executed made them howl with laughter. Willie promised they’d take Charlie up to the North Central Correctional Institute in Gardner to visit the grand dame one day, although they never did.