Rainey Royal by Dylan Landis Read Free Book Online Page A

of secret time in her father’s room. She’s excavated the postcards her mother sends from the ashram. She’s stolen family photos from Howard’s albums, one at a time. She’s found boxes of Ramses and a pair of leopard-print underwear for men andthe dispensers of birth-control pills from which Howard administers one pill to her every morning.
I know what girls your age are doing
. The talks have escalated, and she hates them, Howard loosely strung across a brocade parlor chair while she’s curled into her carapace to hide her breasts.
    “I believe you,” says Rainey. “I do.”
    In addition to the gun, Rainey stole her birth certificate from a file marked “Legal.”
Rainey Ann Royal
. Who the fuck picked Ann, anyway? A girl named Ann would dance badly and her hip-huggers wouldn’t hug. If anyone kissed her, she’d wonder where the noses go. In dodgeball, if you were feeling mean, Ann would be the girl whose anxious face you’d aim for.
    Maybe Ann is the reason her mother left.
    No one knows Rainey’s middle name, not even Tina, and she knows every single other thing about Rainey. Tina knows it is a lie when Rainey says she plays jazz flute. She knows it is true that Rainey technically may almost have lost it to her father’s best friend. She knows it is a lie that Rainey will move to the ashram to be with her mother when she is sixteen. She knows all this, and she says nothing.
    Ahead, near the corner of Washington, the couple sits on a townhouse stoop. They kiss and lean into each other.
    “She’s blind,” says Tina. It takes Rainey a second to realize they are still talking about the grandmother. “I
told
you.” They are standing less than half a block from the couple, watching obliquely. The man lights two cigarettes and passes one to the woman. Maybe they are just playing, too, playing at beingrobbed. The man glances up the sidewalk and watches Rainey and Tina, still in conference.
    “I get it,” says Rainey. “I believe you. I get it, Teen.”
    They resume a slow walk toward the townhouse stoop. Rainey could swear she hears Tina thinking hard in her direction. She could swear she hears something like,
I’m lying, she’s not blind. The twenty dollars, that’s bullshit, too
, and Rainey thinks back,
It’s okay, Teen, I love you anyway, and we’re going to just walk by these people, right?
and she hears Tina think,
Of course we are, we’re just playing
, when Tina drops her hand into the bag and says, “You don’t get anything.”
    They are about a quarter block away. Less.
    Alarmed, Rainey looks straight at the beautiful leonine man. “Don’t do it,” she says in a low voice. And then, because she knows it is too late, because it is not in her control, and because she wants to do it, too, she says quietly, “Don’t hurt anyone.”
    Now the woman looks up. In about fifteen steps, if they keep walking, Rainey and Tina will reach the man and the woman on the stoop.
    They keep walking, slowly.
    Tina says, “There’s a safety, right? That’s what it’s for, right?” Her elbow is cocked; it’s obvious she’s about to draw something out of the bag, and now they are right there, steps from the man and the woman sitting and smoking on the stoop, and Rainey has no idea if there’s a safety or what a gun was doing in Howard’s filing cabinet. She wants the man to look at her and lose all awareness of everything that is notRainey, and he is, now, looking at her, but with the wrong expression. Quizzical. He looks quizzical, and the woman is checking his face to see what’s changed. Tina stops. Rainey stops behind her. She imagines Tina stepping closer to the stoop and the man twisting her wrist so that the gun falls to the sidewalk and explodes, shooting someone in the ankle. But she wants that softly gliding cape, which she will wear to school, inciting fabulous waves of jealousy.
    She could go somewhere around the treetops and look down from there. It’s a gift she has, one she likes to