Sheltered(9)

“You won’t break it. Just click on this—see your name? Click again, press play. Done.”

“Are you serious?”

“It’s not as though you’re gonna run away with it. Are you?”

She tried not to laugh. Her insides felt too giddy to let something like that out.

“Doubtful.”

“And I know you’ll be real careful with it.”

“I will. Thank you. That’s really…”

She struggled to come up with the right word? Sweet? Sweet just put her right back into Hello Kitty territory again. But the fact remained—that was how he seemed. Like the sweetest person ever, in a coarse punk package.

“It’s really kind of you,” she settled on, finally.

But in response he just shrugged. No big deal. The nicest thing anyone had ever done for her was really no big deal at all.





The music started out slow. Just a thumping, distorted beat, of the kind her father would tut and try to correct the levels on his stereo over. It seemed to shiver out of the little metal rectangle in her hands, up the wires and through the earphones and into her body, where it sounded like the loudest thing in the world.

Did he always have it this loud? She couldn’t imagine how anyone could listen to a beat like that, at a volume like the one he had it at. It was too much. It drowned out her heartbeat.

And then a woman’s voice thrummed over the top, like nothing she’d ever heard before. It sounded like an echo of the beat, haunting and low and able to reach some part inside her that hadn’t previously existed.

She couldn’t breathe for a second. The screen said that the song was being sung by something called Massive Attack, but that didn’t tell her anything about who this woman was or how she could make her voice sound the way it did.

And it didn’t tell her about the words either. The ones that struck like a gong in her chest and made her want to get up and pace the room. Maybe find Van’s phone number, even though she didn’t have a phone and couldn’t have called him even if she had.

This girl I knew needs some shelter. But she don’t believe anyone can help her.

She thought of Van’s eyes, so dark and wounded. Like this woman’s voice, pouring out of a stupid bit of metal at her.

I’ll stand in front of you, the woman sang. I’ll take the force of the blow.

Of course it could have meant any number of things. That the woman was willing to take some sort of punishment. That the woman lived in an abusive relationship, and wanted it to continue.

But none of those were the way her mind wanted her to hear it. Someone’s willing to stand in front of this person, and take the blow for them. Someone’s willing to be their champion, to help them even though it hurts to.

Of course, she immediately thought of her father saying…that thing he’d said. The one about what would happen if she, Evie, decided to run away one day. For example, all sorts of accidents could befall people, without another person to keep watch. Her mother was known for being clumsy, so really…it wouldn’t be such a surprise, to find her at the bottom of the stairs.

Though weirdly this wasn’t what she found herself thinking of, as the music wound on. It should have been, but it wasn’t. She thought about Van instead, turning to some faceless friend of his to say, This girl I knew…

And then she had to put the thing down, turn it off, not listen. There were too many other songs on the playlist he’d made so quickly, with all sorts of telling titles. And though they tempted her, she couldn’t quite bring herself to play another.

Instead, she clicked off her lamp and buried the iPod back beneath her mattress, hand over it at all times in case something should happen in the night. Maybe it would slip out, and when her father came to wake her in the morning it would be there, on the floor. Black against beige, all full of accusation.

But there was no accusation in her head. Just those words, over and over. This girl I knew…

She could feel sleep coming, but the song remained. It thumped through her head, without the need for things like batteries and power and earphones. It thumped through her body too, until dreams started fingering the edges of her mind.

Weird, twisting dreams about his charcoal drawings and his charcoal gaze and his mouth, like the split center of some exotic fruit.

The naked limbs she hadn’t seen moved off the page and coiled on a bed somewhere. Thighs curved and breasts rounded, everything tangling with something she couldn’t make out so distinctly.

A man, she thought. A man.

But even her free-flying dream-self didn’t know what a naked man looked like. Or at least, her dream-self didn’t know entirely. It just guessed some of it and filled the rest in with Calvin Klein ads she’d seen on billboards, shoulders broad and torso covered in delicious bumps, everything gray and black, gray and black.