Chapter 5 — Don’t Turn Around

Jessica did not know if Tyler knew what the park was for.

That was the sentence she carried through the gate, held against her ribs like a second bag. If he knew, the coffee had been a road with a destination. If he did not know, she was the one with the dirty map, walking a kind boy into a lesson Jennie had already taught her for free.

She decided to go in.

Deciding felt like action. It was only feet. The packed dirt took them the way it had taken her two evenings ago, patient, unimpressed. Afternoon light came down through the leaves in coins. Somewhere a bird made an ordinary sound, which felt like an insult. Tyler walked with his hands in his pockets and his handsome face turned toward the trees as if trees were the point.

“See?” he said. “Air. I told you.”

At the start, everything was normal.

A woman jogging. A man eating from a paper bag. Two girls on a far bench with textbooks they were not reading. The park wore its daylight name. Sundown. Pretty. A postcard if you cropped the edges. Jessica let her shoulders drop half an inch and hated that the drop felt like hope.

They took a bench that faced another bench across a short spit of path. Tyler sat first and left her space that was not a trap. Jessica sat with her bag in her lap, a wall she could pretend was only a bag. The slats were warm. She did not look at the wood too long. Wood remembered.

“So,” Tyler said. “Countryside. What does a Sunday look like there?”

She told him a Sunday that could be put on a table. Mother at the stove if the stove was behaving. Brother doing homework with his mouth open. A bus that did not come when it said it would. She did not tell him about medicine lined up like a small army. She did not tell him about a clean room and a hand. Tyler listened like listening was a sport he was good at. He asked about the scholarship without making it a charity. He said his own first year had been a performance of knowing things he did not know. Jessica almost liked him. That was the danger. Liking was how the city got in without breaking a window.

Then the other bench filled.

A couple. Her age, or a year past it. The girl in a short dress the color of something sweet. The boy with a grin that had already decided the afternoon. They sat closer than talking required. Jessica’s stomach did the small drop of a person who has seen this film.

Tyler was still on Sundays.

The couple kissed.

Not a postcard kiss. A mouth-open, hand-in-hair kiss that made the path into furniture. Jessica’s fingers tightened on the strap of her bag. She knew the next scene. She had sat in the stalls for it already, with Jennie’s voice doing commentary. Knowing did not help. Knowing only meant she could not use surprise as a shield.

She glanced at Tyler.

He was looking at her.

Not at the other bench. At her mouth, her eyes, the place in her cheek that went hot when she was thinking too loudly. His focus was a lamp. It stayed on her face as if the park had only one occupant worth lighting.

Jessica believed it then, almost: he did not know. A boy who knew would have looked. A boy who knew would have timed the bench. Tyler’s gaze did not wander. He was doing the handsome, kind work of being interested in her answers, and behind him — in front of her — the other girl’s top was already being persuaded out of its job.

“You went somewhere,” Tyler said, soft. “Just now. Behind your eyes.”

“I’m here.”

“You’re here and also not. It’s all right. First days do that.”

On the other bench the boy’s hand went under the dress. The girl laughed into his mouth and shifted into his lap with the same terrible ease Jessica had already watched once, as if laps were chairs and chairs were beds and beds were public property after a certain hour. Jessica’s pulse climbed into her throat. She kept her face pointed at Tyler because if she turned fully she would be a person watching, and if she was a person watching she would have to admit she had come back.

They started fucking.

There was no polite word that survived the sound. A zip. A breath punched out of the girl. The wet, rhythmic fact of it arriving across six feet of path while a jogger somewhere else kept jogging. Jessica’s whole body went tight. Uncomfortable was the clean word, the one she could have used in a letter. Under it, traitor, the other thing: a low uninvited slick, last night and the last park visit braided together, her body voting in a room she had not called to order.

She was getting wet on a bench beside the most handsome boy in the class while strangers used each other in front of her.

Tyler still had not turned.

His knee angled toward hers. His smile waited for her to finish a sentence she had not started. Behind his shoulder the girl’s head dropped back. Jessica looked. She told herself she was only checking. Checking was not watching. The distinction lasted less than a second.

She needed him not to turn.

If he turned, two things could happen and she wanted neither. He would be shocked, and she would have to be the girl who had led a kind boy into a sex park and called it trees. Or he would not be shocked, and the coffee would change color, and she would know the lamp of his attention had always had a dimmer switch shaped like this place.

So she kept him.

She did it badly and on purpose. She asked about the module. She asked about his roommate and the protein powder. She laughed too quickly at a joke he had already finished. She leaned an inch toward him so his eyes would have to follow her face, not the path. Her voice came out brighter than she felt, a false coin.

“You really repeated a year?” she said.

“I really did. Tragic. Tell me something worse about you so I feel less like a cautionary tale.”

“I packed one suitcase.”

“That’s not worse. That’s holy.”

On the other bench the boy’s rhythm lost its manners. The girl made a noise she tried to keep small and failed. Jessica’s laugh at Tyler’s holy sat on top of that noise like a lid that did not fit. She shifted on the slats and the seam of her underwear dragged through wetness she was no longer able to call a rumor. Shame and heat. The same braid as Jennie’s room. The city was not even inventing new tricks.

“Jessica.” Tyler’s voice dipped. “You’re shaking.”

“I’m cold.”

“It’s warm.”

“Then I’m—” She had no ending. She put her hand on the bench between them, close to his, a small foolish anchor. “Tell me about the coffee shop you didn’t take me to. The worse one. I want to be warned.”

He smiled, delighted to be used as conversation. He started describing a machine that burned milk for sport. Jessica nodded as if burned milk were the emergency. Over his shoulder the girl’s legs tightened. Jessica looked again because her eyes were traitors with seniority. She saw too much and not enough. Skin. Motion. The unbelievable plainness of people who had decided the world was not invited and also did not matter.

Tyler’s gaze stayed on her mouth.

She almost loved him for that. She almost hated the park for testing it.

Keep him busy. Keep him here, in her face, in the syllabus of her invented questions. Do not let the lamp swing.

“Do you go home often?” she asked.

“Not if I can help it. Do you?”

“Sunday. I call.” The truth slipped out because she was spending all her lies on the bench. “My mother. My brother.”

“That’s good,” Tyler said, and sounded like he meant it. “That’s the part they don’t put in the brochure either.”

For a few seconds it worked. Two people on a bench. Trees. A conversation that could have happened in the café. Jessica’s body went on being a problem she could not take to office hours. She pressed her knees together. That, again, made it worse. She thought of Jennie saying *you’re looking*, and of her own lie in the café — *I haven’t visited anywhere* — and of how the lie was now a physical place with slats and a soundtrack.

Then the girl moaned.

Not the small kind. The kind that tore. A high, helpless sound that did not belong to daylight or to textbooks or to a boy describing bad coffee. It went up through the leaves like a bird that had been shot.

Tyler’s head turned.

The lamp left Jessica’s face.

She saw, in profile, the exact instant handsome kindness hit the other bench and had to become a different expression. She did not yet know which expression. The moan was still in the air. The couple did not stop. The park, having waited, collected its second audience.

Jessica sat very still with her bag in her lap and her thighs slick and her lie sitting between them like a third person, and watched Tyler look.

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