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“Sure,” I shrugged.
He stubbed out his cigarette, then he looked me up and down. Not leering but appraising. “You’re going to have to change.”
I put my hand on my hip, cocking my head. “You don’t like what I’m wearing?”
My skirt was definitely too short for dress code, though the teachers had given up on enforcing it with me. My leather boots had a heel that caused my feet absolute agony. I liked it. Made me feel grown up. It was a goal to train myself to either withstand the pain or to not feel it at all for when I wore $600 shoes in New York one day.
Plans... I had a lot of them for my life, down to the wardrobe, the area code. And it was nowhere near here, where you were expected to go to the local college, or better yet, learn a trade, marry your high school sweetheart, pop out a couple of babies.
That future repulsed me.
Mine contained noise, glamour, excitement, danger, achievement, riches. Power.
“I like what you’re wearing,” Though Jasper’s tone was flat, a prickle of desire shocked my skin at the statement. “Which I imagine is the point.” My excitement was swallowed by his indifference, as if I was transparent. Predictable.
My hackles instantly went up. “I don’t dress for the male gaze,” I snapped, reproducing what I’d yelled at my father the many times we’d gone toe to toe about my wardrobe and my abhorrence for any man’s opinion on it. Even if that man was my father.Especiallyif that man was my father.
My father had a lot of ideas about what his little girl would be. My ideas differed.
“Yeah, I’m sure your bookshelves are full of Laura Mulvey, Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler,” Jasper drawled, listing off the names of the authors who were in fact on my cluttered bookshelves. “But you do dress for the male gaze. Because it gives you power.” His eyes refused to lower from mine. A taunt.
I was struck speechless. Not just by his knowledge of feminist theorists the other boys in our school would’ve been ignorant of but by his perception.
My smart retort was lost somewhere in shock. I was equipped to go head-on with those boys, with my father, precisely because they didn’t know who Laura Mulvey was. It irked me that I wasn’t equipped to handle someone less predictable than the other boys or my blue collar, protective father.
“If you want to come with me, you’ll have to get changed into something more comfortable. Or don’t.” Jasper hiked up a shoulder like he really didn’t care either way.
I considered his offer with a watchful gaze. What was the cooler option? Changing in order to be ‘comfortable’ for whatever he had in mind or maintaining my autonomy and not letting him tell me what to do? Though the latter could shoot me in the foot.
“We’ll stop at my place on the way to wherever we’re going,” I decided, unsure if I’d made the right choice, if I even had the power in this exchange.
Jasper nodded, no kind of victory or smugness on his face. It seemed he truly didn’t care. His indifference was intoxicating.
He walked toward the parking lot he wasn’t bothered whether if I followed him or not. Which meant I went running after him.
Because I wasn’t the girl who ran from the wolf in the fairy tale, I followed him.
“You haven’t taken me all the way out here to murder me, have you?” I joked. “Because you could’ve done that at my place. Still no witnesses.”
Jasper had waited downstairs while I changed, my mother out somewhere. I didn’t trouble myself with her comings and goings, and she’d long given up on asking me whether I should be in class or not. I got straight As, attendance be damned.
Again, my father was another story.
When I came back downstairs in sweats, he’d been looking at the photos cluttering our mantel like some kind of anthropologist looking at foreign artifacts.
I remembered his history. Foster care. Yeah, the McPherson’s were nice, but I suspected the damage of not having a family during his formative years had been done.
As much as mine irritated the ever-loving shit out of me, I was lucky. That I knew. Well, in theory I knew that. But I couldn’t rid myself of the belief that I was the black sheep of my nuclear family, put in it by accident.
I’d mulled that over during the drive, considering I’d made the decision from a naïve point of view, not truly knowing how fucked-up this boy was.
Jasper didn’t answer me as he parked the car in the lot of a popular walking trail about thirty minutes out of town. The lot wasn’t very populated, surely because it was a Tuesday afternoon, all avid hikers working. Or doing whatever the heck avid hikers did when they weren’t hiking. Shopping at Patagonia, freeze-drying meat.
I followed him when he got out of the car, rounding to the trunk where he grabbed something, hopefully not a gun or a bat to bludgeon me with.
Despite the levity in my question, I was nervous. This was the troubled new kid, and I’d just gone off with him, no one knew where I was, who I was with. Perfect set of circumstances to be murdered.
Yet the danger didn’t unsettle me; I liked the way my heart pounded. I felt excited by it.