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  “Since April twelfth,” I say.

  “Well, April,” he says, “I’m Kennedy. Actual first name.” He looks apologetic. “Kennedy Clifford.”

  “Oh,” I say, “a backward guy.”

  The next week at the store is slow, and I get so bored I want to lie down behind the counter and close my eyes. Mary Ann says almost nothing about what went on with Tall, and she doesn’t invite me to go back with her to the Athena the following week, when she goes down again with her sister.

  I texted her from the train saying I was on my way home, though she’d never bothered to tell me she was alive after she’d left with Tall. I didn’t tell her what happened in the cab with Kennedy on the way to the station. I didn’t mention how I’d been talking easily, no longer shy, once Kennedy knew what I was. I told him about going to Seattle, how far away from home I wanted to get, how I liked the mountain views because all around you was land, but most of it hostile, pure, existing for no human purpose.

  There had been a pause in the conversation, and he pulled me close in his suit-jacketed arms. I liked the way he held me, how he let his hand glide over my hips, as though he had all the time in the world to see or do what he wanted. I wondered then if what Mike said that time might be true, that I could make a man happy. A man, and not a boy.

  In early August, Kennedy is brown from the sun. We are in Greenwich, in a house with a pool, visiting another associate at the law firm where Kennedy works. It’s a nice house, but not as nice as my family’s. The pool is smaller, with a rough concrete edge that Kennedy’s friend Brian Sharp wants to replace for next summer. Brian Sharp’s wife has straight brown hair, parted in the middle, and she went to law school, too, but is now home with the baby. I am on a lounge chair, putting sunscreen on my legs and not talking unless someone insists. When the others aren’t looking, Kennedy grabs me by the waist and kisses me in his soft, semi-serious way. Kennedy tells them I am in retail, which is “factual,” as he says. I stay at his house some nights, when my parents are away visiting friends. It’s really just a cottage, but it’s fun because it’s the two of us, and it’s a real house, with men’s suits and lace-up leather shoes in the closet, and law books and papers strewn across the massive desk in the corner of the living room. Kennedy says he moved to Greenwich for the peace at night, because he likes to jog on the beach, that going out in the city is easy enough, and he enjoys the time on the train.

  When Brian Sharp is grilling steak and hamburgers, I ask if he has any hot dogs, not because I don’t like the other things, but because Kennedy will laugh at me, and maybe corner me in an upstairs room, because he says what is best about me is all the nonsense. “Women my age,” he tells me all the time, “have an agenda.”

  I tell him sometimes I do too, that I want him for myself, but he laughs and says what I need is simple.

  At the end of the day at Brian Sharp’s pool, we are the last couple to leave, and Brian Sharp’s wife, Sara, asks me to hold the baby a moment. Kennedy is having a beer, his only of the day, while Brian Sharp must be on his fifth, and I think I see Sara’s mouth tense when she looks at him. Brian is patting Kennedy on the back, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. Kennedy keeps his arms crossed, and I can tell how he is feeling even though it has been only three weeks and five days since the night at the Athena. He is ducking his head the way he does when he wants to lie down, not to fool around, but only to touch my hair and pull me close.

  I am holding the baby, and she feels heavy and strange in my arms and squirms far more than I expected. Sara Sharp is walking away from me and the baby and the pool to say something to the men, maybe that it’s time to go, and for a moment all three of them stop and turn to look at me. I am barefoot in a long white skirt and my black-and-white bathing suit top, holding the tiny squirming baby in a yellow blanket that’s getting wet from the damp of my suit. Brian Sharp has his head cocked, and Sara looks right at me, and Kennedy is frowning in the mocking way he does when he watches me eating ice cream, which he says I do “rather piggishly.” It’s the way he looks at me when I am reading my book, with my feet on the arm of his couch, and he calls me April, as though we’d never cleared that business up, and he strokes the bottoms of my feet to make me laugh and kick him. For a moment I wonder if Sara is asking something about me, like do I like kids, and maybe could I sit for her? Or maybe they’re just chatting about people I don’t know, or things at the law firm, or other people’s babies, or marriages, or cars, or houses, and I am a nothing they are looking past.

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  About the Author

  Photo by Lanny Schwartz

  CLAIRE NEEDELL is a middle school teacher at a public school in New York City. She is the author of Nothing Real Volumes 1 through 3, three short story collections published digitally under the HarperTeen Impulse imprint. Claire also writes for The New York Times.

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  Copyright

  NOTHING REAL VOLUME 3: A COLLECTION OF STORIES. Copyright © 2014 by Claire Needell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © July 2014 ISBN 9780062338259

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