Page 120 of The Black Table
Equipment manager? Sure. Why not. “Only if your mom bought it.”
She sucks her teeth. “Hard to say. I…promised her photo proof.”
“Eh, that can be arranged.” I wait a moment. “She’s a hard ass, huh?”
It strikes me that I don’t know much about Gwenna beyond the…obvious traumatic backstory that’s made its way across campus.
Gwenna purses her lips. “She’d probably describe herself as type A, but she’s…Yeah, that’s basically it. She and my dad had an ugly divorce, and that…” Her voice fades. “That kinda set everything in motion.”
“I see,” I say.
So she jumped straight from mommy issues to setting a church on fire?I don’t quite connect the dots, especially knowing that someone wanted to hurt her bad enough to leave a vicious cut on her body. There’s something missing.
But, then again, it’s not for me to say whether that’s logical. My own life narrative doesn’t make much more sense. Go from a hardscrabble kid on the South Side to a collegiate fencing starwith a multi-millionaire foster father? I sound like Oliver fucking Twist.
“They call it…spiritual psychosis,” Gwenna says. Her eyes are resolute and forward, fixed on the far shore of the lake, but her tone is even and steady, like she’s deliberately doling out this information. “What happened…I just…” She shakes her head, sighing, just a little shakily.
I listen intently without changing my posture, riveted to her every word, even as my alcohol-infused blood is making everything just a little bit wavy.
“I think it was the divorce, I don’t know. I got so obsessed with what I had done wrong, all this stuff about sinning and losing favor, and I was studying a lot—Catholic school, you know—and I started thinking…I started to think I could change things, that I was hearing things, seeing things. Only in church, though, which is the craziest fucking part. We didn’t even go that much when I was growing up. And then I started going all the time once I went to Catholic school. Somehow I got this idea that, like, I was on this kind of divine quest. That I was gonna unlock the secrets of the universe by reading everything I could. All the geeky medieval shit that I came here to study.”
She laughs, but there’s no humor in it.
And my blood, alcohol or no, has gone cold.
“Like, what…kind of stuff?” I ask. Trying not to sound too curious. Too suspicious.
“Oh, you know. The secret to eternal life. A cure for all wounds.” She makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be a sob. “I…I thought I was this sort of vessel for, I don’t know, the redemption of the earth. Basically one step down from thinking I’m Jesus Christ reincarnated.”
I sneak a glance at her, and there’s a tear glimmering in the corner of her eye. It physically hurts to restrain myself from wiping it away.
“Fuck me,” I whisper.
“You got that right,” she says, laughing. And this time there’s a little color to it, some humor, which makes me feel like I’ve won the lottery and punched Satan himself in the face. Then she looks at me, and the feeling quadruples. “God, what right do you have to be so nice and understanding, Kai?”
“Excuse me,” I say, in mock offense. “I am the very model of a sensitive, empathetic, modern gentleman.”
She blinks. “You’ve got three piercings, God knows how many tattoos, and mezcal on your breath,” she says.
More than three,I think,but I guess you only know about the visible ones.I catch my lip ring in my teeth for effect and grin at her. “Don’t you know it’s what’s on the inside that counts?”
She laughs. “Tell that to someone like my mother.” She sighs, but it ends on another little laugh.
“What?” I prompt.
“Nothing. It’s just…remember that night at Porter’s? When you tried to jump into my selfie?”
I squint, feigning recollection.Of course I remember. How could I fucking forget?
“I seem to recall,” I say.
“Imagine I took that picture.” She lifts an imaginary phone, tips her head, and grins. “Look, Mom, this is my new boyfriend. He’s tattooed, pierced, and smells like an ashtray. Don’t you love it?”
I laugh. Laugh because it’s funny. And laugh because…yeah, I don’t know. I’d love to be the bad boyfriend that makes her mom angry. Show up for dinner, scare the living daylight out of her old lady, and then drive home and fuck her till she can’t walk straight.
I chew my tongue to quell the need for another cigarette.
“It’d be a veritable laugh riot,” I murmur.
