Dodging Trains

  I was twelve when a stranger at a train station taught me the meaning of ugly. He forced himself on me and threatened to kill my family if I told. I stayed silent, and the ugliness grew.

  Now, that word rolls in film clips through my mind. All I’ve done since my best friend, Keyon Arias, left town is cement how ugly I am. Ugly on the inside—deep down to my core. On the outside… I am a Vixen. I flash men a smile and make them moan out pleasure I control.

  Not them. Never them.

  After five years of being away, my beautiful boy has come back to town for his father’s masquerade ball. He’s different. Hard muscle supersedes the skin and bone of his once boyish frame. One thing hasn’t changed though: the murderous look in his eyes when he slaughters his opponents. In the ring, I see the bullied boy, all grown up, dominating in ways he couldn’t in high school.

  He’s the mayor’s son. The rising MMA fighter. The beautiful one.

  I’m not the Paislee Cain of before, not the sweet girl he once knew, the one who chased away his bullies. I’m the town slut. The dirty girl whose shame will never fade no matter how many men I use. He’d disown what I’ve become.

  Because beautiful can never love ugly.

  Synopsis

  1. Clips

  2. Train Stations

  3. Trip

  4. Lollipops

  5. Abandon

  6. Vanilla

  7. The Search

  8. Home Life

  9. Happy Trails

  10. Different

  11. Secrets Shared

  12. Possession

  13. Beauty

  14. Tampa

  15. Opportunities

  16. Florida

  17. Bad Ideas

  18. Mirror Rooms

  19. Beach & Gym

  20. Weekend

  21. Clip Heaven

  22. Routines

  23. Preparations

  24. Tumults

  25. Fight Day

  26. Terrors

  27. Cool Climates

  28. Coping

  29. Repair

  30. Insomnia

  31. Exorcism

  32. Last Hours

  33. Futures

  34. Hall Of Mirrors

  35. Party

  Walking Heartbreak

  Adrenaline Chrush

  Leon’s Way

  Acknowledgments

  About Sunniva Dee

  Future Projects

  Newsletter

  Contact Info

  Other Books By Sunniva Dee

  Copyright

  PAISLEE

  The most vibrant moments of my life flicker through my brain like film clips. If I concentrate long enough, they suck in sound until they become so real they mix in scents from my memories too. Already, I realize today will morph into a clip that’ll join the rest of them—the short version of today, what I’m watching right now.

  In this moment, he doesn’t star in a snippet at the back of my brain. He’s almost tangible, himself in ways I haven’t seen him in years.

  Heat glistened off him when he strutted into the cage, arms high in preempted victory and with a cocky smile on his mouth. But now, minutes into the match, he’s not smiling anymore, no, because Keyon is fighting hard.

  He always did that. Fought hard, I mean. And I wasn’t afraid for him back when I knew him either. Who can be afraid for someone who looks murderous?

  I don’t mind his back toward the camera while he delivers the last decisive blow to his opponent; I enjoy the sight of skin and muscles under glaring spotlights and sweat that flies off hair and lashes when he turns.

  The local TV station replays Keyon’s knockout in slow motion, while I consider what’s most real; replays like these on a TV screen versus what’s in my brain—those special clips from years ago. I let the thought go and ponder instead how Keyon and what’s-his-name survive the punishment they give each other.

  I’ve kept close track of Keyon in the news. This is the first televised event he’s been a part of, so until now I’ve found him on the Internet and in our flimsy newspaper, the Rigita Gazette.

  From the first glimpse of his face on TV, I saw the same impatience as before. Wildfire still burns in his eyes, and dedication radiates off him like red-hot quicksilver. In my imagination, Keyon is rattling the starting gates, dying to be freed into a world where he can rule, destroy, feast on his power without inhibitions.

  I’ve read about his sport. Fighters can go pro at eighteen, and with Keyon’s talent and his twenty-one years, it must only be a matter of time.

  It’s been five years since our high school principal threatened to expel him. I recognize his feral expression, the one he wore so consistently during the last months before his family packed up and moved.

  I wish we’d stayed in touch after he left. His film clips remain with me though, and since I found a small photo of him in the Gazette a year ago, I’ve become a veritable stalker. I really, truly have, and I admit that it’s freaky.

  But here he is now, on TV, all grown up. He looks so intense. So unafraid. I recall the fear infesting his eyes before everything changed, right when I was learning to tame my own fear. Would things have been different if he were fearless from the start?

  They say he took a beating in his last fight. Nothing broken, just some bruised ribs. I scan his back for signs, but the camera focus zooms to his shoulders and head.

  The referee screams something, and as Keyon twists to the camera, realization slams into me; I’ve known he was out there, but now my body internalizes it all at once. It is him, without a shred of doubt—I’m face to face with Keyon Arias on the screen, and his chest heaves, not with exertion like in so many of my film clips, but with undefeated energy.

  I’m mesmerized by his eyes as he stills. They’re honeyed, not olive-colored. Just like years ago, they fluctuate depending on his mood. I always had a hard time deciding which shade spoke of calm waters.

  Those cat eyes stare at the camera, unseeing and full of purpose, and his jaw tics when he clenches his teeth.

  Oh I know that expression. I recall him ready to grab classmates by the neck and bash them into the asphalt on the way home from school.

  If I interpret him correctly, he’s fighting the urge to deck his contender as the man staggers to his feet. This is new to me. Once Keyon Arias claimed the throne as the terror of our school, he made no attempt to stop until his victim was too exhausted to move.

  I used to throw myself over Keyon’s back. He couldn’t beat people with the tentacles of a girl he’d never hurt around his neck.

  “Paislee?” Old-Man lifts bushy brows from the doorway to the break room. “You’re watching TV?” He can’t believe what he sees in the middle of my shift. The mirrors are waiting, and if they’re to become gritty artisan-perfect, meeting our trademark standard, every step needs to be carefully monitored and completed within two hours. You don’t take breaks in those two hours.

  The mirror waiting for me out there, the one that’s been waiting for ten minutes, might already be yellowing into that sickening color that can’t be considered art.

  “Sorry, Old-Man. I’m… I don’t know what happened. I’ll go there now.”

  “I put Mack on it,” he rumbles, voice deep for such a skinny man. I always felt deep voices should live in chunkier men.

  I wonder how Keyon’s voice sounds now. At the time he moved, it had just changed from his young-boy pitch.

  Old-Man’s eyebrows are more expressive than his eyes. Now they sink so far down, his irises morph into muddy half-moons beneath them.

  “Can’t lose a mirror, ya know.” He nods, sniffing. Old-Man would never rebuke me. He angles a glance at the referee who’s grabbing Keyon’s arm to prevent him from lunging at his compe
titor.

  “Boxing?” he asks finally.

  “MMA—Mixed Martial Arts,” I say. The rickety table next to the couch is too weak to hold the old-fashioned monster of a TV for much longer. “I’ll buy us a better TV stand.”

  Old-Man bobs his head. Sniffs again out of habit. He’s been around the mirror fumes for decades, and even when his nose is dry, he’ll sniff. I feel my smile draw up on one side at how much I love this man.

  “He’s a hectic one, huh?” he says about Keyon. The words he uses are few and genuine. Only when he’s drunk does he chatter.

  “He is.”

  “Likes to fight.” Old-Man sucks air in through his teeth. Eases his hands into his overall pockets and rocks on the heels of his feet. “You know him?”

  It’s my turn to nod. “That’s Keyon Arias. He used to live here. Keyon was our high school bully,” I reply, and despite myself, my smile blows into a grin.

  PAISLEE

  You know what sucks?

  Train stations.

  Train stations have the power to distort lives. When I was twelve, my brother and I started getting on trains to our grandparents’, pushed out of the way while Mom and Dad exchanged blame, fought over why they’d gotten married, and who loved each other the least.

  Years later, they concluded the family thing didn’t work. Dad and Cugs should move out, they decided. Cugs was too much like Dad, the only thing they agreed on.

  Dad and Cugs have the same thick, floppy hair. Same droopy eyes and nose slightly bent to the left and uneven nostrils shaped like giant teardrops. Cugs’ laughter rolled out easier than Dad’s though, while Dad’s voice boomed louder than Cugs’ when he yelled. I miss my brother’s laughter.

  In a world where cars rule, train stations can still keep kids trapped until it’s time to ship them off to wherever they don’t want to be. Train stations are like World War II. They sent kids to the countryside back then, to be safe from the bombings in London. I told my brother once, but he was too little to understand. He laughed, saying we live in the US, not in England, and that World War II was over a thousand years ago.

  But what if its effects still linger? Those pictures of parents waving from platforms and already missing their babies. Of heartbroken children crying through open train windows. I’m sure those trains in London formed the children’s lives, maybe their children’s lives.

  Trains aren’t as bad as train stations though. Except the trains in Germany during World War II. The Nazis ushered Jews onto them and shipped them off to concentration camps. Those kids, adults—mothers, fathers, grandparents—they didn’t know their destinies. All they knew was that they were sent off to work somewhere. Later, in the camps, the Nazis starved them to death or killed them in gas chambers, and though these are not my memories, homemade film clips of them often surge in my head.

  But trains aren’t to blame for who I’ve become. Train stations are.

  Somehow I’ve turned twenty-one already. Twenty-one-year-old Paislee Marie Cain, who finished high school with a scream of mercy, who’ll never move out of gossip-town Rigita so high up in America that the tendrils of our snow graze glaciers on the wrong day.

  I’m that girl, the one who’ll never see her brother again, or India, the original Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, her father, or the glassblower museum at Murano. I’m the town slut who works at the only place in this sleepy white dot on the map where no one judges her: Win’s Hall of Mirrors, hidden in the nook beyond a hole-in-the-wall falafel storefront on Broad Street.

  The Al Admony restaurant is tiny compared to Old-Man’s mirror factory beyond. We used to show our products there, attracting customers, but Old-Man doesn’t need a display; his obsessed customers mail-order, web-order, even drive into town to see him hand-make his angel-gilded, one-of-a-kind pieces of art.

  Old-Man can take you to Heaven with the beauty of his craft, and our customers leave knowing they’ll cause bliss-filled havoc wherever they hang their acquisitions. Yes, Old-Man’s mirrors, once you’ve stared into one, become an obsession.

  I could never afford his mirrors—they’re too expensive to make for him to sell cheap—but for my twenty-first birthday, Old-Man gifted me a piece I didn’t see him make. He surprised me by hanging it in my loft studio above the factory and didn’t know what to do when I cried. See, people don’t do things like that for me without asking for favors.

  Old-Man names all of his pieces. I don’t recall the name he’d given mine, because to me it came without thinking; my Murano lights the sun in my space.

  I work hard here, in Win’s Hall of Mirrors, from within my fume hood and my protective suit. This place is my sanctuary. Whenever I shed my gear, I’m on the phone and the computer, doing Old-Man’s marketing and keeping up with his website.

  I’m appreciated in the three-man business he runs, and every day I thank the gods for giving me this job. I’m good at it. One could say I excel at it, and on the phone, on the Internet, no one knows who I am.

  But where Win’s Hall of Mirrors is light and hope, train stations are violence and darkness. They’re the crushing of futures and dreams and self-respect. I know this because Cugs and I frequented the Sherrelwood Railway Station for years on our way to and from our grandparents’.

  Only once did I go alone. Only once did the bathroom stall door get pushed open by an unknown man craving twelve-year-old virginities. And only once did an unknown man tell me he’d kill my family if I squealed.

  But that was a long time ago. Nine years to be exact. By now, the shivering, sleepless nights have become rare, and I’ve stopped believing that all men are monsters. It took effort, but I accomplished that on my own, and I am proud.

  You have to take the bull by the horns. If you stare death down without flinching, you end up learning things, like that you’re gorgeous. That you’re sexy. That you’re irresistible. That you can bat eyelashes, pucker stained-red lips, and draw a corner of your mouth up in ways that rule a man’s world.

  To me, men aren’t dangerous unless they’re in railway stations with twelve-year-old girls they’ve frightened stiff.

  I seek them now. Instead of stealing my power, they squash what once happened. Over and over they squash it, and I welcome their caresses, their heated looks, and the gleam in their smiles when they ask me if it’s good for me too.

  “Let’s get Eden into her frame and we’re done for the day,” Old-Man shouts over the high-pressure setting of the water. It rushes over the mirror like liquid silk, erasing the last chemical stains he wants gone. When he lifts the mirror, the sun takes over the room, and Mack straightens next to me too, hands on his hips, and the two of us exchange contented looks.

  “She’s a beauty,” Mack confirms what the three of us know. “One of your best, Old-Man.”

  Old-Man just grunts, but his upper lip disappears beneath his salt-and-pepper whiskers, and I know he’s hiding a smirk.

  The frame depicts Eden, hence the name of the mirror itself. It’s lavish and decadent, bursting with gold fruits and songbirds. When I first started working here at the age of seventeen, I thought, Who the heck would buy something so over the top? At each pompous new piece Old-Man created, I thought this.

  I don’t anymore.

  Most of Old-Man’s creations are customized pre-orders, but when we have time, he’ll indulge in ripping a beauty straight from his fantasy world. Since he’s not actively trying to sell these, they always, always go for more than the custom orders.

  “Want to grab dinner?” Mack asks me as we’re tidying up for the night. He’s not blunt with Old-Man around. Mack and I have a tacit understanding, because my after-hours life saddens Old-Man.

  “Okay, sure,” I say, and his eyes ignite and skim my body before he grabs his jacket.

  “I’m actually hungry,” he tells me on the way up my stairs.

  “Do you have any food?” he asks while he lowers my pants and puts his hand between my thighs. I’m twisting the key in the door lock. The power I have o
ver Mack right now makes my heart bounce.

  “No, not really. Just pickles and applesauce. I need to get to the store.”

  “Ah never mind.” He works quietly on my shirt once we’re inside. Hits the light switch so he can see me. “I’ll just pick up a falafel on the way home.”

  I don’t answer. I just close my eyes and enjoy his eager hands. I know the feel of them well. They’re the same every time, gentle and to the point, finding what he wants and making sure he doesn’t hurt me when he joins us somewhere in my apartment. It’s easy and fast. We’re friends. Sometimes I come too. It makes him happy when I do.

  “Thanks, Paislee, you’re a lifesaver,” he says as he pulls his jeans back up and brings me my robe from the bathroom door hanger. He starts to put it on me, which makes me smile. Mack is nice.

  “I can dress myself,” I say.

  “Right, okay,” Mack chuckles, embarrassed. “See ya tomorrow.” His hand goes up in greeting on the way out the door, and I wave back, all fingers on one hand fluttering.

  “Sure, tomorrow.”

  “Geez, look at that!” Rob, one of Mom’s regulars, hollers and points at the TV monitor. “First the guy deserts town and now, all of a sudden, he wants to be our mayor? The nerve of some people!” He rocks on his barstool, butt cheeks spilling over the sides. My mom twists for a glance, used to Rob’s tactless exclamations. She dries a wine glass and hooks it above the counter with the others.

  “It’s his duty to become our mayor, Rob. And that’s the inauguration they’re talking about. Plus he does live in town again,” Mom says, and Rob hisses quietly through his teeth.

  “Bah, you know Mayor Thompson won again, not that guy, Margaret. He should just take his foreign wife and go somewhere else where they want him.”

  “Should I remind you again what happened?” Mom asks, voice patient like she is with Rob. “Old Cyril Thompson passed away.”

  “So?” Rob huffs, not finding a better comeback.