Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

‘What?’

Tammy is up on her elbow now, facing me.

‘Huh?’

‘You mumbled something, Alice. What did you say?’

I had not meant to ask that essential, unanswerable question out loud. This would break all the rules. There are some things you only speak of when you’ve had enough cheap booze to pretend you don’t know what you’re saying. When you’ve drunk so much alcohol you can no longer hide the fact you’re split down the middle with grief, still fresh with it. As if it all happened yesterday, not years ago, when you were only fourteen years old. In these moments, while your best friend holds your hair back, and you throw up weed and last night’s tin-can spirits, everything comes tumbling out. Words as violent as the bile burning your throat. How you wanted to die, too, on that kitchen floor, how you wanted to climb right into the fire as they closed those dark, heavy curtains around her coffin.

I was fourteen years old when my mother shot herself in the head. She pulled the trigger a half hour before I arrived home from school. Ensuring she would be well dead by the time I got home. How do you ever find the right words to question that?

If the pain slips out when you are drunk, you never reference it the next morning, never talk about it when you’re sober. Just the same way you never ask Tammy what she meant when she said she had uncles not monsters under her bed when she was growing up, and you know to pull her away when she attempts to stumble off with a pair of college footballers at those Friday night parties you gatecrash together. You take care of each other at night. And then you wave off that care in the morning. These are the rules you’ve got going, and this is how you both survive.

‘Okay, weirdo. Whatever.’

Tammy shrugs away my long silence, then waves the strip of paper in my face again.

‘Call him, Alice. Call Mr Jaaaaaaackson. You’re not a student anymore. He’s not your teacher, and besides’—she reaches over and moves a wayward strand of hair away from my eyes, her own eyes glinting—‘he’s hot. So, so hot! And let’s be honest. It’ll be the easiest money you’re ever going to make around here. Hell, I’d do it, too, if I were half as pretty as you. But ain’t nobody needs to see me like that.’

Tammy folds the piece of paper into my hand, closes my fingers around it with her own.

‘Call him. Do it. What have you got to lose?’

She doesn’t wait for me to respond.

‘The way I see it, Alice Lee. The answer to that would be nothing the fuck at all.’

‘You comfortable, Alice?’

‘Uh-huh.’

I’m lying. My legs already ache, and a muscle in my left arm won’t stop twitching. When he first moved my arms, when he asked me to hold still in this position, I wondered how hard it could be to stay like this. Reclined on a small couch in the pose he’d asked for, comfortable in my jean shorts and white singlet, it really did feel like the easiest money I’d ever make. Two hundred dollars to stay still and let a man draw me. Easy. It only took a minute for everything to start aching.

‘This is just the practice round, Alice,’ he’d said as he lifted my arms over my head. ‘Just so I can get a feel for how to capture you best. Every single body is different, and I need to learn about yours. Okay?’

When he leaned in so close, I could smell weed and scotch, and see how his fingers were stained black at the tips. I stared at his short, dirty fingernails, as he bent one knee and gently pushed my legs a little further apart. It made my stomach flip, the nearness of those fingers, and my nerves threatened to reveal themselves in a stupid, girlish giggle. I didn’t want to do anything wrong. And not just because of the stack of twenty-dollar bills he’d put down on the table next to me. I wanted to please him.

Mr Jackson.

We all wanted to please Mr Jackson.

Once, in junior year, he’d come over to my desk, and I could smell that heady combination of weed and scotch, even then. I was holding my breath as he stared at my sketch of a ballerina at the barre, the tension I had tried to capture in her muscles, when, without saying a word, he ran his fingers lightly between my dancer’s charcoal legs. Just for a second, a gesture so quick no one else in class would have noticed. But I felt it. I felt it as if he had run those fingers between my own thighs. As he walked away, I had no idea whether the butterflies swarming in my stomach signalled pleasure—or a desire to run from the room.

In my final semester, he talked to the class about life drawing, how you couldn’t really paint people unless you understood what was happening to their bodies, to skin and bone and curves. He said the best portrait artists always began with the naked form. He wanted to bring in a life model for us to draw but the school board wouldn’t allow it, so we’d just have to take his word for it—or see for ourselves once we graduated.

‘Maybe even try it from the other side,’ Mr Jackson had teased the class, staring straight at me.

‘It’s Jamie, not Mr Jackson,’ he’d chided when he helped me take off my coat this afternoon. ‘I’m not your teacher anymore, hey.’ And I’d automatically said, ‘Sorry, Mr Jackson.’ Which made him laugh, and lightly touch my cheek. He said he was glad I had called.

‘It isn’t easy in this town’—he’d waved his hand about, as if there was no need to finish the sentence.

He understood. I didn’t need him to tell me that it’s never easy around here.

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