Out of Plaster

Angelina noticed Janet’s hands before she’d even seen her face. Her fingers, one-by-one, tapped against Angelina’s bruised wrist with a chivalrous restraint. Angelina first thought her touch was actually drops from a spilled drink, and looked up, scowling at some asshole for being a klutz. Instead, she looked into Janet’s face; the bow lips and turned-up nose implied a girlish haughtiness. Janet didn’t quite smile, she half-grinned.

“What happened?”

So Angelina told Janet how she’d been T-boned at an intersection. The other driver, a Georgetown waif who’d gotten lost out in Rock Creek Park and had been mapquesting on her iPhone, sped through a stop sign to collide with Angelina’s 2000 Civic. Angelina even told Janet about how, before the pain of her shattered hand could register, she’d leaned out her opened window to yell: “you stupid cunt, can’t you read a fucking sign?”

Her wrist and two of her fingers shattered against the wheel. She’d been strangled in that cast for nearly two months, would wake from nightmare sensations of a strange animal coiling its muscular body around her hand. Now, over a month out of plaster, her hand was still swollen and purple, like that animal’s venom roiled in her veins.

The last girl she’d told the story to, an overripe peach of Georgia blonde, hadn’t seen the humor. “Cunt in such an ugly word,” the girl said. “It turns us into our genitals.” Angelina rued crushing on a woman’s studies major. Janet danced her figures through her blonde pixie-cut hair—Angelina preferred natural blondes, but a friendly girl was a friendly girl. Janet tilted her body toward Angelina’s. Her pert little breasts exuded rich, glandular warmth. Angelina felt thick and oafish beside her. Janet had that kind of angular leanness that was almost elegant yet slightly awkward.

They met at the karaoke bar in Wheaton. Angelina hated karaoke, but she loved gin, and her friend Valerie, who’d booked their room, assured her this place had great cocktails. Janet was a friend of one of Valerie’s roommates, and she told Angelina she was “so grateful just to be out, you know, after me and Eli broke up.” Eli was Janet’s French-Iranian ex-boyfriend, who was now in upstate New York teaching art history.

Janet rambled tipsily through the history of their parting. Usually, people who shared their troubles before they’d shared their last names unnerved Angelina. But something about the pride in Janet’s description of Eli’s “brilliant” PhD defense touched her. “He got full funding to his program. His parents are rich as hell. They’re like, Iranian aristocracy or something. They would have paid for him to get an MBA. But he didn’t want their money.” The pride reminded Angelina of one of her students, Ray Roach, who braved a myriad of colds just so he could win best attendance at awards assembly.

“It’s the best award because it’ll be mine!” Ray cheerily informed her as they’d stacked the plaster-of-paris kits. But he got the flu a month before the awards assembly and missed two weeks of school. He lost the award to the fifth-grade girl who had also won best science student.

“So, um, this is a cash only bar, and I just spent my last twenty,” Janet began.

Earlier, Angelina had stopped at the ATM near the pet supply store. She didn’t have a dog yet, just a stray that kept close to her basement apartment—especially since she’d started leaving mixing bowls filled with dog food near her door. She thought—she didn’t know what she thought—that if the dog had a nicer bowl, something sturdy yet attractive, then he might stay a while.

Stupid, she knew. The dog would do what he always did, sniff the bowl as he eyed her, and, upon deciding that she was still as safe as she’d been yesterday, chow down. Upon finishing, he stared up at her, vigorously smacking his mouth. When she first mentioned the dog to Ray Roach, he insisted she call him Joker. “Because of how dogs’ faces look like the Joker’s smiling”. As a girl, Angelina also thought of dogs’ panting as smiles, that every dog on the block was just so happy to see her. She told her father this, and he laughed, but not in his mean way: “Animals know good people. They’ve got senses.”

Angelina would learn that Janet didn’t ask for favors, she stated a truth that was disadvantageous to her, allowing you to suggest the favor. Then she’d thank you before you quite understood that you’d agreed to anything. Angelina fished a crumpled ten out of her jacket pocket. Janet leaned in closer, her hot breath rolling off Angelina’s cheeks. Angelina couldn’t help but admire the faux machismo with which Janet downed her whiskey sours; this reedy girl with the badly bleached hair and wan pink bangs slamming down “a fuckin’ cowboy drink…like a shot!”

Ray Roach’s pale green eyes flashed through Angelina’s mind—dishwater pale, dirty water that stubbornly pools in the drain. It’s the best award because it’ll be mine!

“We should go home,” Janet said. “Which is wherever your place is. I am too lovely and too drunk to be on the metro alone.”

Constantly talks about her ex, and thinks everyone wants her and yet Angelina found herself escorting Janet to her rental car. Janet sat Indian-style in the passenger seat. Her thighs slid gracefully across each other. Angelina’s hips and thighs spread against her seat like blood under a door in some C-grade horror flick.

Angelina piloted the rented Saturn with her right hand clamped around the wheel; her left hand held on gingerly, but when the pain came, she let go. Her knuckles stiffened, the bones in her wrist swelled, throbbed like they’d burst through her skin. The doctor’s flat, mildly soothing voice filled her head: “Just push yourself a little every day. Practice making fists.”

She always laughed at that. If there is one thing we Moltisantis are good at, its making fists. But then her father’s voice barged in, that guest, already drunk, who shows up to a dinner party an hour late. “If you don’t try to make your hand like it was, then it’s like that yuppie bitch stole a part of you.” Sicilian melodrama, she thought, every offense, every potential offense, punishable in the swiftest, most severe way.

Spilled milk caught a backhand. When she accidentally overfilled the bathtub, she caught the belt. Her mother attempted a feeble protest: “But she’s only eight!” But eight was no excuse, and he railed about the crack in the ceiling for weeks afterward.

The Saturn coasted leftward. Angelina shook out her hand, and made a fist around the wheel.

Janet tripped up Angelina’s small porch, knocking the dog’s bowl over. Only a few pieces of kibble were left.

“You know, you’re just going to attract, like, rats and rabbits and stuff with that”, Janet said, toeing the bowl.

“Good protein for him,” Angelina replied.

“You’ve got a mean streak,” Janet laughed. “Clearly, I like that.”

The door yawned open to a cluttered apartment. Strips of canvas were tacked to the wall. Each strip bore the charcoaled outline of a woman’s back, with enough shading to detail shoulder blades, back fat, ribs. The backs varied. Some were soft yet sexless, girls’ backs. In other images, their chub became the gentle heft of adult womanhood. Angelina had taken X-acto knives to the backs, had glued down long scars of twine. Painted them that pinched white color of deep scar.

“Damn, woman, you are haunted.”

Janet fanned her fingers in front of them all. Her high heel snapped, and she buckled into Angelina’s couch. Angelina heard her mumble: “goddamn it, you really do pay less.” Janet wobbled through the narrow kitchen toward the bedroom; Angelina stood in the hallway, her fingers curling around Janet’s red stiletto. Bedsprings squeaked.

“I’m not sleeping on my own couch tonight, Janet,” Angelina said, trying for her “teacher tone”, half old maid, half Terminator.

Janet lay with her legs slung along the wall, her knobby toes flexing against cracked plaster. She held Angelina’s cast. The cast was on Angelina’s dresser, on top of her grandmother’s porcelain serving tray. Something about defiling that precious tea-rose painting that typified “old-school Italian” (along with baby blue wallpaper and floral-patterned furniture) with her cast, soiled gray and stinking faintly of dried sweat, appealed to her. She’d think of her grandmother, with anxious smiles, serving shortbread cookies to her husband’s sisters, who only ignored her.

“All these little kid names,” Janet said.

“I’m a teacher’s aide at Ridgewood Elementary School. Third grade. ” Angelina said.

Janet’s laugh was more bemused than mocking, but Angelina felt a full-body flush. She knew she wasn’t a teacher. The students knew she wasn’t a teacher. The first time she stood pigeon-toed in front of that classroom, she sensed the mild distain radiating from the fourteen glassy-eyed, scab-kneed little bodies at their plastic desks. Then one boy pointed at her black Chuck Taylors (sadly, her dressiest shoes) and excitedly yelled out his love for sneakers. Angelina’s “master teacher”, a prim man named Rueben, pursed his mouth to suppress a sigh. She would later call this his “sweet Christ shut up Ray” look.

“You don’t seem the teacher type,” Janet said. “Or is it just some day job you got pushed into because your parents are scared you can’t make it with your art.”

Angelina exhaled slowly. Her face tingled with the aftershock of a slap.

“Damn, you’re sharp,” she said.

Her father would say this whenever Angelina repeated something she’d learned, whether from school or off the TV. When she was a child, dinnertime was her theatre—she’d rattle off the state capitals alphabetically or give an animated recounting of the hunting habits of Serengeti lions. Her mother was alarmed that she knew the latter: “Jack, should she really be exposed to that kinda stuff? Animals ripping each other apart and eating each other?”

But her father sighed his “sweet Christ shut up Marie” sigh. Her mother’s brown eyes narrowed, then fell soft; her oh, okay look.

“That’s just nature, animals eat each other. Why shouldn’t she know about that?”

But her father’s favorite dinner theatre was when Angelina would recite, word-for-word, that “offer you can’t refuse” monologue from The Godfather. He’d slap the table laughing at how she’d puff out her cheeks to master Brando’s pseudo-slur. Even her mother—who wasn’t thrilled that her father had let her stay up one Friday to watch the entire trilogy—laughed when Angelina stroked her invisible cat.

Janet turned to lie on her side; she smoothed her big toe over a razor nick below her knee. Pink-polished, her toenails were immaculate little opals.

“I understand. I’m a writer, so everyone says you have to go into publishing. My mother insists I have ‘something to fall back on’. Whenever I hear that phrase, though, I just think of freefalling backwards from a skyscraper. Like, you think there’s going to be some giant air-mattress under you, but it’s really just a cab.”

“I can see that.”

Angelina always said this when she couldn’t think of anything else to say. Her cell rang; the name flashed with a hostile insistence.

“Somebody really wants you,” Janet yawned. She arched her hands over her head, fingers locked in a steeple. “Maybe you’ve also got some crazy ex. Boyfriend? Girlfriend?”

“My father.” Angelina gave the word a sour twist.

Janet suppressed a slight yawn. Angelina didn’t use words like miffed, but she was. And shouldn’t Janet be miffed by the sudden interruption? Instead, she said:

“I love that his ringtone is the theme from Jaws.”

The comparison seemed natural to Angelina from the moment he’d allowed her to watch that Friday night late movie. She wound her doll’s hair around her fingers whenever the shark rose from water; though her father was in the recliner behind her, he would not have tolerated any scampering for his lap. If you’re old enough to watch the movie, then you’re old enough to deal with the material. The hair cut off circulation in her thumbs before she even turned to look at him. That widow’s peak on his high forehead recalled the shark’s fin. Even his eyes, large and dark and constantly searching, were the shark’s eyes. His body was broad, but also angular; his stomach had eased into a mild paunch but his shoulders and arms were still rigid, muscular. Like the shark’s white underside, the bare thighs under his boxers were paler than his olive-dark calves. Black hair swirled up from his ankles.

“I’ll let it go to voicemail,” Angelina muttered. “He can leave a goddamn message like everyone else.”

“Oh my,” Janet chuckled. “What about your mom, what is her ringtone?”

“Nothing special.”

“Ouch.”

But Angelina hadn’t assigned a ringtone because she couldn’t think of a song that truly described her mother’s mildness without seeming silly or cruel. Some insipid pop song perhaps, because beneath the froth there was always the bitterness of thwarted hope. In unguarded moments, mother’s face assumed that pinched look like after a long, hard cry; an ugly cry, as mother would say, wincing and rubbing her jaw. Even in her day-to-day, mother’s face showed the strain of feigning pleasantries. But her eyes, wetly expectant, waited for the next perceived slight to “fix him in a mood”.

“Eli used to say his mother was like an in-house prostitute,” Janet said. “His father philandered, and Eli even saw him slap her once. He used to say that her pride had the same cost as a diamond tennis bracelet. A boy who can’t respect this mother, damn, I should have known.”

Janet patted the space beside her. Invites me into my own bed and yet Angelina sat down. As she unlaced her Chuck Taylors, she thought of the one time she’d met Ray’s mother. Mrs. Roach’s frosted blonde hair was crimped into waves at her temples. Clearly, she’d been trying for symmetry, but the left side was longer, looser, like she’d expended all her energy on the right side. Angelina imagined her shaking out her hands, cursing herself for being so sloppy, so ugly.

Mrs. Roach had given Ray his large, thinly lashed eyes and his small mouth. Her chin descended into her thick neck, but Ray’s face was sharp, elfin. Yet Angelina couldn’t image Mr. Roach having refined features. In Ray’s “family portrait”, he was a series of wide circles; his huge head had a Frankenstein flattop. Once, Mrs. Roach might’ve been blandly pretty; now, her delicate nose emerged from her swollen cheeks like a swimmer bobbing through a heavy tide.

“Dumpy woman in an ugly floral T-shirt from WalMart who couldn’t find a pair of clean jeans that matched it. No wonder her son is so damn dirty.”

This was Rueben’s verdict, but he was the sort of nattily dressed metrosexual who pronounced ugly ugh-lee. Sadly, he wasn’t wrong, Ray was damn dirty. His ears were ringed with crud, and there were often soda stains around his mouth. Even Angelina, who was used to oil paint drying along her forearms, was disgusted by the dirt caked under his fingernails. Black half-moons. The other students noticed. “How could they not?” Rueben sniffed.

Still, Angelina swelled with something like maternal beneficence whenever GAP-clad Tiffani (there were no names ending in “y” anymore) or kickball star Hunter called Ray “pee boy”. A few times, Ray swung a punch back. If Rueben weren’t around, Angelina wouldn’t write Ray up. But her vindication became an agitated confusion that her father’s voice was narrating her thoughts: that’s right, you teach those preppy little brats.

School policy mandated that Angelina could not touch Ray, but she could guide him over to the sink, she could show him how to work the soap between his hands. Until, of course, she had her cast. Ray, so used to mimicking her, held his left hand above the faucet as she did. When she reminded him that he should use both hands, the tender depth in her tone surprised her. Such kindness could slip through lips that, every two days, sucked a pack of Camels to their filters.

“I have to be the left hand for both of us,” Ray said, without any of his customary over-exuberance. He spoke with the calmness of fact.

Rueben reminded her “it’s just not a good idea to get attached to these kids. Especially the ones you always have to discipline.” Sometimes, when talking to Rueben, Angelina imagined what her father might say: That asshole spends seventy-five dollars on a pair of flip-flops and you’re supposed to learn from him?

“So violence isn’t just natural to us blue collar types, huh?”

“Oh?” Janet’s mouth formed the letter.

“One time, my mom took fifty dollars out of their joint checking and my dad smacked her so hard his handprint stayed on her cheek for like, an hour. For fifty fucking dollars. That’s like, two hours’ wage for me. ” Angelina said, stretching out straight.

Janet slid her hand under the band of Angelina’s skirt. Angelina felt a sudden, desperate urge to go home, and yet she was home.

“Actually, I got hit too.”

“You say that in passive voice,” Janet said. “Like it’s just an action somebody did to you. There’s no subject performing the action.”

“Fucking writers,” Angelina sighed.

“Make it a proper sentence, subject performing action.”

Janet’s fingers halted just below Angelina’s navel. Her forefinger tapped like the foot of an impatient schoolmistress: I’m waiting.

“Okay. When I was thirteen, I dyed my hair green. My dad got so mad, he was all like, no daughter of mine is gonna look so trashy, all this stereotypical Italian dad stuff from, like, The Girls Just Wanna Have Fun video. I tell him he can go to hell if he thinks I’m going to wash it. So he grabs me, holds my head under running water in the kitchen sink. And here you go, here’s your proper sentence: he took my head and slammed it into the sink.”

Angelina’s blood prickled with this rapid warmth, like drunkenness, but she wasn’t drunk. Janet sighed; Angelina felt her suppress a shiver, her forced stillness reminded Angelina of how she’d braced her own body against the kitchen counter, like a rabbit who’s wandered into a freshly mowed backyard, into the view of the family dog. Her chest tightening into a hard little pit that the rest of her would shrink into; her poor heart railing up against nothing.

Her father, yelling, calling her names—but when she could make out his words, at least her head was above water, away from the basin. The impact was an iron gong struck between her temples. She went limp. She slipped to the floor. Her father just grunted, but if he’d spoken, his words would have been: Whatever happens here is because I allow it.

She hadn’t told many people this story, at least in recent years. Marie tried to mollify her with three days home from school. But those days were spent in bed, her ear still hot and stinging; the sound of running water still whooshing thickly through her head. Pain radiated down her jaw, subtle as a heartbeat, but no less present.

“He says he’s sorry,” she huffed at her friends. When she did feel well enough to go out, she met them behind the strip-mall. Near the dumpsters for Dress Barn, they passed around a bottle of sour-apple Schnapps in a brown paper bag. Her friends could only shake their heads, mumble: “that’s fucked.” The slight emphasis on fucked was enough to embolden Angelina. “I swear to God, he comes near me again, I’ll stab him in the throat.” Her friends fell silent.

Angelina remembered her meeting with the school principal after she’d done her “mandated reporting” on Ray. The principal had a high, insurmountably round bosom like warheads jutting from a battleship. There was a general weariness in her voice that endeared her to Angelina. But this weariness was guarded; it came from disappointments the principal assumed Angelina too young to have experienced. She took pains to explain that all these twice-initiated documents would do no good:

“I’ve seen my share of these cases, Miss Moltisanti. The sad thing is that eventually you get used to it. If you can’t, you ought to get out of teaching. Because, our best intentions aside, these kids stay angry.”

Angelina nodded. Let the principal think she was some naive college junior who brought canvas bags to the grocery store, marched on Washington, and went door to door for the Green Party candidate. Let the principal think Ray Roach’s father hitting him with a belt could possibly break her heart.

“My hearing is still kind of fucked up in my right ear,” Angelina said.

“Your poor ear.”

Janet leaned up as though about to touch Angelina’s right ear, but Angelina lowered Janet’s hand back on her stomach. Janet’s fingers accepted their rebuke, tapping a path under Angelina’s skirt. They brushed against Angelina’s pubic bone before trailing up again, circling her navel. Angelina liked a long set of nails on a woman, extra friction. Janet’s nails were slightly gnawed, and their torn edges tickled. This was the worst part of anyone new: how to laugh without offending.

“You’ve got a great ass,” Janet murmured. “It’s like two cantaloupes in a wet paper sack.”

Angelina didn’t laugh so much as snort with shock. She would’ve thought she’d been insulted—and perhaps she had been—but Janet worked her hand below Angelina’s underwear (Angelina wasn’t one of those cute dykes who wore panties). Angelina bucked into Janet’s hand, but not in the good way. The touch was too sudden, and she was still dry.

“Is that some line from one of your stories? You auditioning it?”

Angelina maneuvered Janet’s hand further up. Janet paused, seemed to consider the question. Angelina’s relief at the sudden stillness depressed her. She eased her hand back inside the cast. Like a hermit crab slipping into its shell again. All the contours felt like home.

“But this, now, this, is just adorable.”

Janet pointed to Ray Roach’s stick figure dog. When she returned to class two days after the accident, most of her students were nonplussed. They’d seen casts before. They scribbled their names, never pondering the hand inside. Ray, however, looked at her with the startled tenderness of a battlefield medic on his very first call.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, starting to draw the dog’s triangle head.

“Kind of. Not that bad anymore.”

“Did it hurt before?”

He placed his left hand along her forearm to steady his right drawing hand. Just like she’d taught him: Make sure you have a good hold on the surface, that’ll keep your lines straight and clean. His touch was light, hesitant before he started the dog’s tiny triangle ears; more secure, his fingers pressed harder, but not hard; their presence was a gentle warmth along her skin.

“Yes, it did hurt before.”

Ray stopped coloring the dog’s ears to look her in the face.

“I’m sorry you had to hurt.”

Janet read aloud what was in the speech bubble coming from the dog’s mouth: “Miss Angie, you are the best teecher ever.”

“Your student has a premature sense of irony,” she added wryly.

Angelina felt the hot shock of indignation on Ray’s behalf. She should have been paying better attention when he was writing, but once he was done, she just didn’t have the heart to correct him. To be one more person to tell him he’d done something wrong.

“Leave him alone. That kid has it rough.”

“Oh?”

“His father beats him. Hits him with a belt.”

Those words weren’t as hard for her anymore. Beats, hits just two ordinary words, words that had nothing to do with her, at least in this context. Rueben gave Ray detention for smearing paste all over Tiffani Russo’s desk. Detention ended at four-thirty, Ray should have been used to this, but he squirmed in his seat. Angelina thought of a sausage in the pan, sizzling out of its skin. He gnawed off his fingernails, one-by-one, swallowed them when he thought she wasn’t looking. His eyes were glossy. Angelina remembered walking around with that sheen of tears, her mind throbbing with a single thought: don’t blink, don’t blink, please don’t blink.

“Miss Angie, you have to let me go early today, please,” Ray said. He mumbled her name but jumped to a yell on the please. Angelina asked him why though she already knew. She wanted to hear someone else say it for once.

“My dad hates waiting. Then he gets all mad, and when he gets all mad, he sometimes, he spanks me, but he uses his belt and I don’t like it.”

She tilted forward like she might hug him. However, school policy mandated that she couldn’t touch Ray.

Angelina pressed her mouth to Janet’s; she kissed back with startling force. Janet’s lips thrummed, they were vibrantly alive, like stalks of a young plant pushing through hard soil.

Now we’re cooking with gas. Another of her father’s inane expressions, but she didn’t fight it. The back of her head buzzed. Then Janet asked her what she liked, and her stomach clenched with trepidation. Angelina never really watched herself fucking, she just felt things: a bright heat spreading through her hips. Everything inside her soft and loose until the heat seeped back into a single spot, a spot that ticked and throbbed until it burst apart.

“Have you been with women before?” Angelina asked.

“A few times, you know, in college. But it’s like riding a bike, you never really forget how.”

A fucking bicycle? But she stopped herself; her father’s voice wouldn’t ruin this for her. Discreetly, she tried to wriggle out of her underwear, before Janet could make some writerly comment about Wal-Mart chic. Angelina hated that awkward chill of sudden exposure. She closed her eyes; preparing herself for sex was like walking through a many-chambered hall, unlocking each set of iron doors, one-by-one.

Her cell phone vibrated. Of course, her father couldn’t just leave messages. He didn’t trust her to call back.

“Maybe you should take that,” Janet said.

“No, goddamn it. He doesn’t get to ruin everything.”

“So I’m a thing?”

There was no anger in Janet’s voice. Instead, this playfulness like she might enjoy being a thing. Or like she knew she did enjoy being a thing.

Angelina’s phone quaked along the bedside table. She watched her hand move toward Janet’s head, then chuckled, realizing she’d left the cast on.

“Something funny?”

Janet’s flicker of annoyance gave Angelina a vicious little thrill. The thrill, however, became the unbearable itching of her left hand; the padding inside the cast began to feel uncomfortably damp. She remembered sticking butter knives down the opening of her cast, and that rich, sated feeling after she’d scratched. The brittle dryness of the cast against Janet’s moist skin made a delicious friction. Plaster burned red bumps along Janet’s shoulder; Angelina pressed down harder, as though plaster could burn down to the bone.

“I can’t.”

Janet’s head sagged against Angelina’s stomach; she sniffled thickly. Angelina sighed. Her body cramped for a moment—the tightness of iron doors swinging shut.

“I’m sorry, I’m a bad person. I just, I haven’t—not since Eli. And fuck, you’ve been so nice. You brought me home.”

Hey, honey, it’s okay, you didn’t even get me started. Instead, all Angelina said was: “It’s okay.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Janet said. “I’ll buy you a coffee or something tomorrow.” Then she stared down at Angelina’s left hand. “Wait, have you been wearing that the whole time?”

She’ll just tell herself you’re some goddamn weirdo and it’s probably a good thing she couldn’t fuck you. Angelina wished she could tell Janet to just call a cab. She imagined herself seated at her kitchen table, dunking a teabag into lukewarm water, waiting for the slow ebb back into her body. But she hadn’t even left. A rude little shiver made her acutely aware that she was still exposed. She thought of what Ray Roach said after he told her about his father: “But I love him, Miss Angie. I love him.” The fear in his voice was not fear of his father, but fear of his love.

Sometimes, when the Friday night movies were really scary, her father let her sit on his lap. His wide palm cupped the back of her neck. She could feel how tight, how strong his hands were, but he softened them, just for her.

“You don’t have to scared. It’s just a shark on the TV, it can’t hurt you.”

“But what if we were at the ocean?”

“Well, I’d just punch that shark in the nose.”

He guided her head to his chest. As she curled against him, their breath slowed to the same pace.

Her phone rang again. Angelina checked the time: five after midnight. She wondered if her father called from the bedroom; but that didn’t matter, since he’d wake her mother even if he called from the kitchen downstairs. His voice carried.

But her mother had become so attuned to his movements she probably heard him dialing. Angelina imagined her mother sitting up in bed, defeatedly reaching for the bedside lamp. Her mother would rub her swollen eyes with the heels of her hands and sigh.

Angelina sat on the couch, beneath her drawings. The clipped little trill of the call going to voicemail startled her. Her heart ticked dryly as she checked the message.

“Angie, it’s Dad. Look, I know I’m a pain in the ass and you’re probably out having fun somewhere, but when you get the chance give me a call and remind me which hospital you were in, what the doctor’s name is. The insurance company says we’ve got to have duplicates of the ER records. I just want you to get this money.”

Now that her father had said his piece, he might let her mother get some sleep. Might. Her mother kept a pile of Oprah magazines on the bedside table for those nights when her father just couldn’t go back to bed, because if her father couldn’t sleep, nobody else could either.

So she could call back now, could tell Janet she’d been up late talking to her father and was too tired for coffee. Then she’d just drop Janet off at the metro, spare herself the effort of feigning attentiveness while Janet prattled on about Eli as though Angelina was just another girl friend.

Angelina eased her feet up on the couch. With her head propped on the armrest, she looked at her scarred backs. Children’s Services would investigate Ray’s family now; they would write reports, would assign shrinks. Ray would come to class smelling fresh as Irish Spring; he’d be made pliant with Ritalin. But these kids, they stay angry.

She started to take the cast off, but stopped herself. Remembered how, once that trapped, panicky feeling passed, her hand would relax. In the darkness beneath her skin, her bones found each other again. As she slept, the plaster’s solemn protectiveness felt like love.

***

Laura Bogart

Laura Bogart is a recently minted MFA. She earned those three little letters from American University. Her fiction has appeared in Ne’er Do Well and 34th Parallel. Her nonfiction has appeared in Wazee Journal.