The Big Hit Page 5

  “Well, the person with the penis,” she said reasonably. “Not me, for the most part.”

  “What?”

  But that got Tatum going, and she gave me quite a bit of useful information as we walked, which I stored up. For just in case.

  “How did you learn to braid like this?” she asked me later, after she got out of the shower. I ran the brush through her hair. She looked like she was feeling a lot better.

  “I used to do my mom’s hair. I spent a lot of time watching tutorials, too.” I didn’t used to have much else to do during the winter except my painting and crafty kind of stuff.

  “Your mom liked fancy braids?” Tatum turned back and forth, admiring her head. “No bumps at all.”

  “I guess she did. She didn’t mind me messing with her hair. It was a way for us to be together.”

  She looked at me in the bathroom mirror. “I thought you lived together. You said that was why you didn’t go to college.”

  “We did live together but we weren’t very close. We didn’t talk very much. It’s kind of complicated.” I twisted the band around the tail of her hair. “You’re done and I think I just heard a car pull up.” The guests were arriving.

  The party got crowded, loud, and out of control, very fast. I enjoyed it a little, but as an outsider, rather than a participant. Like I was doing field research on college students: “Watch the male approach the two females in the west quadrant of the family room. You’ll note that he inflates his chest and drinks from his red cup. The females signal their acceptance of his interest with high-pitched giggles and by mirroring his drinking with sips from their own cups.” I didn’t talk to anyone; I didn’t drink; I didn’t know what I was doing there. After not too long, the noise and the crowd were way too much for me and I started to feel anxious and panicked. I needed to get away, and I went up to Tatum’s lilac room.

  Someone was already there: a bare-breasted woman sat on the bed with the ruffled pillows. “This room is taken,” she announced to me, and an equally naked man came out of the bathroom. I averted my eyes before I got more than a glimpse and went down the hall to Tatum’s dad’s bedroom. If Tatum came up later to use it, I could leave and go home, but for now I just wanted a moment of quiet. I sat on the big bed she had pointed out to me, then thought about what had gone on there, and got up and sat on the desk chair instead.

  “There you are! Did you see the couple in my room? They’re both really flexible,” Tatum said, coming in and throwing herself on the bed. “They left the door open, too.”

  “Are you needing this room?” I stood.

  Tatum curled into a ball, cuddling a pillow. “No. I feel like I’ve already been with those guys downstairs.”

  I tried not to show my shock. “All of them?”

  “No, but the same type.”

  I got what she meant. Almost all the men at the party were variations on the same basic theme: wealthy, white, fraternity bro, drunk, lame. I thought of Knox, then, and how he was a whole other theme.

  “Remember you were asking me about the Woodsmen?” Tatum asked, peering into my thoughts. She pointed at a framed picture on her dad’s desk, of a short, older man who looked a lot like Tatum, standing with Davis Blake, the Woodsmen quarterback whom I recognized, and another player who also looked familiar. “That’s Nico Williams with him, the wide receiver. Isn’t he hot?” She hopped out of bed and ran her finger over the picture. “I’ve always liked him but he’s never given me the time of day at any of the crappy Woodsmen events I’ve been to with my dad.”

  Davis Blake wasn’t bad either, I considered. Not bad at all.

  “Here.” She flipped open the laptop on the desk. “I know my dad’s password.”

  “Tatum, what are you…”

  “These are the files with information about all the players. I’m pretty sure my dad isn’t supposed to have access to all this, either. I read some of them yesterday, and a lot of those guys have done some pretty dumb shit. This lineman has a DUI,” she told me, pointing to a name. “Even the man in the mascot suit, the Hank the Hunter? He’s been in jail. It’s interesting reading.”

  “We shouldn’t look at this,” I said. But then I saw the file labeled “Knox Lynch.” My finger went involuntarily to touch it on the screen.

  “Knox is the one you like? That dumb guy? I didn’t read his.” She clicked on his name, interested.

  “He isn’t dumb!” I said immediately, instead of saying, “No, of course I’m not interested in one of the Woodsmen.” I tried again. “I don’t think he’s dumb. I watched the interview with him and Marcus Tagarela a few times, so I was curious about him.” The file had opened to his picture, a close-up that looked like it had to have been from a few years ago. When I saw him in the basement, his face had looked older. Older, and harder.

  “Look.” Tatum pointed at the scar on his neck. “I wonder how he got that. Gnarly. If I ran into him in a dark alley, I’d scream.”

  Oh, I had.

  “Then I’d ask him to pull down his pants. What could be under there?” she mused.

  “Tatum! Do you ever look at a man and not immediately go to sex?”

  She stared at me blankly. “What else would you do with them?”

  There was a huge crashing sound downstairs, followed by screaming, and both of us stood up. I quickly clicked closed the Woodsmen file. “I think I’m going to head home. Do you want my help in getting all these people out?”

  “Why would I want them out?” Tatum asked. She lay back down on the bed. “Bye, Daisy.”

  I hesitated as I looked at her. She looked very young, and very forlorn. “Do you want to come with me to my house? I don’t know if you should leave everyone here without your supervision, but—”

  Tatum jumped up. “Sure!” She ran into the hall, and pushed past the crowd at her door watching the two naked people writhing on her canopy bed. I looked the other way while I waited for her to pack a bag, although the scene on the bed could have been quite educational.

  My jaw dropped when I saw what was happening downstairs. It was a zoo—literally, there was a woman hanging like a monkey from the chippy white chandelier. “Tatum, I think you have to get these people out of here. They’re wrecking your house!”

  “It’s no problem. I’ll call the police and say they’re trespassers once we leave.”

  And she did, when we were on the road in my car. “Won’t the police call your father to tell him?” I asked nervously.

  She waved off my concern. “Daisy, did you ever get into trouble before?”

  “No,” I answered honestly. “I was really shy and scared in high school. I never did anything wrong.”

  “What about after?”

  “No,” I said again. “My mom had issues, and I did, too. I never wanted to do anything to make our situation worse. My brother was always trying so hard to fix everything for us…I couldn’t do that to him.”

  “That’s very mature,” Tatum said, sounding more than a little surprised. Like acting grown-up was a new idea.

  “You could try it,” I suggested gently. Because from what I’d seen so far, she wasn’t much about that.

  Tatum fell asleep almost the minute we got to my house, curled up on the bed in the room where Julia and my brother stayed when they came home to visit. I did my normal routine of coaxing the cat, and I got him to come within 15 feet of me. Progress. Then I went to bed, too, but I couldn’t sleep because of all the things I had to think about. I started to worry in a way that I knew wasn’t productive, especially late at night. I got out my tablet to read and to let my mind shut off everything but the world built by the words, the story of true love and happily ever afters. And men who shape-shifted into bears.

  ∞

  Benedict Arnold: You guys, you can’t still be pissed that I went out with the girls from the barre class!

  No one answered her directly but the group text kept buzzing.

  Caffeine [she seemed to have a lot of energy]: I’m going for a
run, only 10 mi. Who wants to come? Then I’m at the studio until 8. And check out who’s back in town…

  I tilted my head to look at the picture she posted of the half-naked man posing in a bed, flexing his arms and smirking at the lens. His muscles weren’t that impressive compared to some others, but the group text was still fascinating to me, and it was helping me get through class today. I yawned a little behind my hand and switched my focus to my Topics in Modern Art teacher at the front of the auditorium. I was a little tired. I had stepped up my time with Professor Amico because he was flipping out about finding the lost Renaissance painting supposedly in our collection. But he was a little frail to do the lifting, opening, and unwrapping of the artworks by himself, so I was trying to be there as much as I could to help him out. It made my days pretty long.

  “I need to go down to the basement,” I told Solomon when I got to the library after the Modern Art class.

  “Again?” He made a face. “You’ve went down there yesterday, too.”

  “Right, to find the fax machine I forgot to bring up last week. And today I need to…” Skulk around and look for Knox Lynch, but I didn’t want to say that to Solomon.

  Luckily, he didn’t care about my reasons as long as it meant that he didn’t have to go to the basement himself. “I’m helping Kathleen in the back, so the floor is empty as long as you’re gone,” he mentioned, and walked toward our boss’s office behind the circulation desk.

  I hurried down the steps. I would be quick, I thought, just a peek, and then I’d go back upstairs. “Hello?” I called immediately as I opened the door, but all the lights were off, and no one answered me. Just like yesterday, when I’d spent a ridiculous amount of time “looking for the fax machine” that I’d actually found in about a minute. It was presently buzzing up in Professor Amico’s office, spilling out curly, shiny paper from a roll that I now needed to replace because it was already running out. Perfect! I would look for more fax paper rolls in the basement today, an ideal reason to come down. Even if I had only thought of the reason once I was already there, it didn’t matter.

  I started to poke around in the dented, dusty cabinets that held ancient office supplies. They were a great source for carbon paper, bulbs for overhead projectors, rolodex cards, and a lot of other things I had never seen or had any use for before I started working for Domenico.

  There, at the back. Either it was the snow of Narnia, or it was a roll of that weird fax paper. I stretched my arm and leaned—

  I felt the cabinet start to tip. “Oh, crap!” I yelped, and tried to grab the sides and throw my weight to pull it back up. Instead of stopping the fall, I went over right along with it.

  BOOM. We hit the floor with an ungodly noise, and paper and dust and eons worth of stuff crashed around me. My body connected hard with the shelves. “Oof,” I grunted, and then there was another boom, then another, like the world’s largest kettle drums, and I had a terrible suspicion that my cabinet had knocked down the rest like dominos.

  “Ow,” I said aloud, and tried not to freak out, even though I was shaken by the noise and fall and scared that I had done some real property damage. I carefully pulled myself up out of the wreckage. The storage cabinets were horizontal instead of vertical, and there was stuff flung everywhere, a giant mess of ancient office supplies, old magazines and catalogs, and dirt. Decades of dirt. I coughed in the dust cloud I’d created and tried to rub it out of my eyes with my arm.

  “I don’t want to scare you—”

  I wheeled around and screamed. Again.

  Knox Lynch winced. “I didn’t think you had noticed me coming. I heard the crash when I came in.”

  I pointed at the debris field around me with the roll of fax paper that I had managed to grab, that I still clutched in my hand. “I had an accident,” I shakily explained.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, and he looked me over and nodded. Then he picked up the cabinets, one after the other, and righted them. Like I would have picked up a pencil off the floor, that was how he lifted the six-foot steel boxes still full of stuff. I stared at his arms, the muscles that jumped and flexed. He wiped his hands together when he was done and I stared at those, at his fingers that might have been thick and clumsy due to his size, but were instead long and elegant. He was big for sure, but nothing about him was clumsy.

  And he was watching me too, watching me peruse his body. “Oh!” I blushed. “Thank you,” I said belatedly.

  He nodded, his hair falling forward over his cheekbones. My own fingers itched to tuck it back behind his ears so that I could see his whole face. Actually, I was pretty itchy all over, most likely because I had just taken a dirt bath.

  “I thought you only came down on Fridays.”

  “Oh,” I said again, now more embarrassed. I held out the roll of fax paper. “I needed this. I wasn’t waiting here, looking for you.” Because usually, when people weren’t doing something, they announced it: “I’m not shoplifting, I’m just walking around with these scarves stuffed up my shirt” or “Pay no attention to the muddy tracks leading to my garage, I didn’t do donuts in your yard!”

  “Are you here late?” Knox asked.

  “In the basement? No, I’m leaving now. After you,” I suggested.

  “I meant, you work here, don’t you? How late do you work?”

  “Oh. Just until six today.”

  “Would you be able to help me with something?” I could hear a little twang of Oklahoma in his voice.

  And he was waiting for my answer. “Yes, I can. At six. Here?”

  “What about in the study carrels over by the colored glass windows? No one goes there.”

  “Not many people go to the library at all. It’s one of the most underutilized resources on campus, according to a recent student survey.” He was waiting again. “I mean, yes! I’ll meet you there when I’m done with this.” I gestured with the roll of paper again.

  “Thank you.” He nodded at me, just once, and walked away toward the stairs.

  I brushed some hair out of my eyes, noticing the dirt on my hands and clothes from my tumble into the cabinet. I counted to 50 to give Knox a head start, then I ran up the stairs, too, and straight into Solomon.

  His eyes got huge. “Daisy? What happened to you? You look like you were making mud pies.”

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass door of our boss Kathleen’s office, and I did look pretty dirty. But I was also smiling.

  Chapter 4

  By six o’clock, the sun had stopped pouring through the stained-glass windows high in the wall of the West Stacks, so there were no more red and gold patterns on the scuffed wood floor. I had straightened up the basement as best I could then cleaned up myself, wiping all the dirt and dust off my face, shaking it out of my hair, and getting most of it off my clothes. Then I had spent the rest of my hours “working” at the library just wandering around, lost in thought.

  Now I sat in the back of the study carrels with a sharpened pencil in my hand, because I couldn’t think of what else I would need to bring. I couldn’t think of why Knox Lynch wanted to meet with me, unless it was to help him look for books or materials for the paper he had said he was working on. I was, after all, a library aide.

  “Daisy.”

  I managed not to scream, but I did levitate off the chair at least a few inches. I had been looking the other way, but how did someone so big move without making any noise? “Hello,” I said, fairly calmly. “You walk really, really quietly.”

  Knox nodded and picked up a chair to put next to mine. “Thank you for coming. I’m having some trouble with this.” He set a file folder on the tabletop.

  “What is it?” I opened the folder and looked at the papers inside: copies of articles and chapters from books, lists of notes, and a few typed pages.

  “It’s my essay,” he said, pointing at a page. “I don’t know how to do it. I never had to do one before.”

  I squinted at the words. “Um,
let’s see. This is about…early Hollywood movies?”

  “I’m an American Studies major.” He assembled some pages out of the file and handed them to me. “Here it is.”

  I read through what he had written, a long series of ideas that just stopped suddenly, midway through the third page of single-spaced lines (without paragraphs). “What’s your thesis? The main idea you’re trying to prove? I don’t see…”

  “I don’t know how to do it,” Knox said again, and I looked up at his face. His mouth was drawn into a tight line.

  “Ok. It’s ok, we can figure it out.” I smiled to reassure him. I wondered why, and how, he had gotten to this point in his life without ever having to write an essay like this. “You have lots of research here and you have lots of good concepts, too. I wonder if I’m, um, I’m not exactly a writer, though. The college has these tutoring services—”

  “No.” He bit out the word very sharply and his face was expressionless and frozen, which made me very uneasy. I must have shown it, because he held up his hands like he had in the basement and his features relaxed. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather work with you. I’ll pay you whatever tutors get paid.”

  “You don’t need to pay me,” I said quickly. “I can help you with this, like between friends. And I won’t mention it to anyone,” I added nonchalantly, in case he was worried about that. “Ok, tell me what you were trying to say with this paper. What were you trying to prove?” He scooted his chair closer, so that we could both look at what he had written. Our shoulders almost touched—they did, if I leaned over just a little. I sat up straight so I wouldn’t rub against him.

  We worked for a long time, figuring out a thesis statement, outlining his ideas, and writing the topic sentences so he could break his paper into paragraphs. I hadn’t ever been the best student in high school because of my mom’s problems and the beginnings of mine, but I harkened back to what my English teachers had tried to drum into me and I felt like I was able to help him. By the end of more than an hour, I thought he had a good start and I told him so. “I’m not a professor here, but if you keep going like this, then I think you’ll get a decent grade.” My stomach growled horribly and I pushed my arm into it. “Sorry. It’s been a long time since my PB and J on the way over here after class.”