Page 8 of Wounded Dance
“You can’t do that,” I told him. “Dad will kill you.”
Denham shrugged and blew smoke my direction. “He ain’t exactly here. You gonna narc on me?”
He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, right down to the charcoal shirt. I’d never met anybody like him.
“How did you end up here?” I asked. “Who are you really?”
“Nobody important,” he said. “And I’ll probably just run off.”
My eyes got wide at that. “Where would you go?”
“I got friends on the East Side,” he said. He looked up at the canopy of trees that shaded our backyard and kicked at an old plastic teeter-totter. “Somebody will hook me up with a place to crash.”
“Dad won’t like that,” I said.
He took a step closer to me then, and when his sky blue eyes penetrated mine, I felt a little quivery inside. “You sure worry a lot about what your father thinks.”
“Don’t you have a dad somewhere? Don’t you care what he thinks?”
Denham drew in a long pull on the cigarette, his blue eyes fixed on me. “Been me and my mom all my life,” he said. “She died two months ago.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged, shoving a hand in his jeans pocket. “She wasn’t around all that much. I don’t really need nobody.”
He blew smoke in the air, and I knew I’d rather not be around when he got caught. But I decided something that day. Denham was going to be part of a family once and for all. And I was going to make it happen.
At the hotel, I turn off the shower, instantly shivering even though the bathroom is warm with steam. How could he be back now? When I’d impulsively gone onstage for the finale ofDance Blitz, it hadn’t even occurred to me that he would see me. Mom and Dad, maybe, if Mindy saw it and her parents caught her and they called mine. I was fine with that. They can’t do anything to me. I’m nineteen.
But Denham? He hadn’t even crossed my mind.
I wrap myself in a towel and sit on the cushioned stool in front of the long marble counter. The top of the mirror is fogged, but the bottom is clear. I look at myself, remembering the younger version of me. I had confidence then. But the years in between were laden with self-doubt and shame.
Shame I hadn’t needed to feel.
He wasn’t my brother at all.
Denham had kept the ruse, calling Dad “Mr. Mason” although Mom had him call her Dot, a shortened form of Dorothy that felt more like a nickname for him to use.
Mom liked Denham, quietly bringing him into the family, keeping the smoking away from her home and encouraging him to come along on outings to movies and dinners, even though he tried to stay behind.
That summer had a record-breaking heat wave, and Mom set up a sprinkler in the backyard for Andy.
One day, my friend Paula and I went to the backyard to get some sun and watch Andy for Mom, who had gone to the store.
I wasn’t allowed bikinis, even back then, but I wore a tankini where the top was long enough to meet the bottom. Paula’s mom was less strict, so she had a ruffled bikini, but it was still pretty tame.
After fifteen minutes of Andy splashing around, and Paula and me chatting about high school starting in a few weeks, Denham came out on the back porch.
He had wisely shucked the leather jacket, since it was pushing one hundred degrees, and had on a tight white T-shirt and jeans. His eyes roamed over me and Paula as he lit a cigarette.
Paula nudged me and asked, “Who is THAT?”
I wasn’t sure what to call him. He wasn’t related, not a cousin or anything. “That’s Denham,” I said. “He’s living with us.” I leaned in to whisper. “His mom died.”
“Oh,” Paula said. She flicked her long blond hair behind her shoulder and squeezed her arms together to make it look like she had more cleavage than she did.
Denham noticed, his eyebrow quirking as he blew smoke out over the yard. Then his gaze rested on me lightly, like a caress.
