The Last Dead Girl Read Free

because sometimes the ball took a bad hop.
    The restaurant manager listened with a grave expression. Doubtful.
    â€œIs that the way you want to leave it?” she asked when Jana finished.
    â€œI’m not sure what you mean.”
    The manager looked sad. “I mean you can trust me, hon. You can say what really happened. You don’t have to tell me stories.”
    And Jana nearly wavered, because of the kindness in the woman’s voice. But in the end she said, “It’s not a story, it’s what happened.” She smiled. “I don’t have any stories.”
    The manager sighed and suggested that Jana take some time off, that she come back later in the week, after the swelling went down all the way. Then she could cover the mark with makeup, for the sake of the customers. Bruises are bad for business. It shouldn’t be hard to cover up; the manager could show Jana how; she knew some tricks.
    And now, in the moonlight, Jana remembered their conversation. She hadn’t gone back to the restaurant since, and she wasn’t sure if she would. But she didn’t regret the lies she’d told. Not the one about the bad hop, or the one about not having any stories.
    Because that was a lie too. She had stories.
    There was David, for instance. She had met him three nights ago. In the rain, as it happened. She had brought him home to her apartment, half a duplex on a dead-end street. And she had slept with him that first night, something she never did, but he was tall and she liked the shape of his jaw and he had a voice that was just a bit husky, as if he were getting over a cold.
    He had strong hands too, but he was smart enough to let her take control. He let her undress him the first time and laid back, his heels hanging off the foot of her bed. His body was lean; she explored it with her hands and her mouth. He got hard, fast, and stayed hard, but he didn’t rush her. Finally she kissed his chest and wrapped a hand around him, straddled him, took him inside her, just the tip. Still he waited, let her lead, and she sank herself onto him, all the way, and then she felt those strong hands on her hips, helping her move. And then the bedsprings and his voice saying her name, and she came so hard she moaned, which never happened either.
    David. She didn’t know much about him, except that he was a year older—twenty-six—and he’d grown up here, in Rome, New York. He’d gone to college somewhere else and had a degree in engineering. She thought he came from money, but she wasn’t sure. There was something in the way he spoke, the way he carried himself, a confidence. When he took her out, he paid, no hesitation. On the other hand, his job was inspecting houses for people who wanted to buy them. Not what you’d call a high-powered occupation. He drove a pickup truck—and not a new one, but one that was well broken in. So, mixed signals. She had never seen where he lived.
    She didn’t know what he thought of her, living in her cheap apartment. Maybe that she came from money too, and was slumming, trying to prove that she could make it on her own.
    And he liked her body, her skin; that was part of it, she thought. His own skin was pale; he would get off on the novelty of sleeping with a black girl. Which was funny, because she never thought of herself as a black girl. She had a black father she had never met, and a white mother who had raised her in Geneva, New York, a little town on the shore of Seneca Lake.
    David. He was a good story. Jana didn’t know how long he would stay around, but he’d been back each night since they met. And if they kept at it, she would have to do something about the bedsprings, because her landlady lived in the other half of the duplex—a respectable elderly woman—and whenever Jana saw her now she got a disapproving look.
    She wasn’t going to worry about her landlady.
    Jana stepped off the bricks of the patio