Like A Charm

Took it. Not picked it up, or remember if she was wearing it that night, or anything like that. He went straight to took it.

'Bracelet? I don't know anything about a bracelet.'

'Oh.' He was standing over me, his shadow blocking the sun, so I was begi

'I just don't remember it. I guess I didn't notice it.'

'She said you talked about it, that you asked her about it.'

Shit, I had. But so what? 'Maybe I did, I just don't remember.'

'The thing is, she's always taking it on and off. It's like a nervous habit with her.'

'Sorry.'

It wasn't just that Maya had all but accused me of being a thief. It was the fact that she did it secondhand, sent her boyfriend to claim it for her, as if she were some lady fair and he was a knight trying to win her devotion.

'Well, if you see it around-' Clay said, looking more nervous than ever. He was scared to go back to Maya empty-handed, he was that whipped.

'What does it look like?' I asked. I wish I hadn't. The lie was too perfect in its nonchalance, and Clay caught it. He ambled away, with a careless backward glance at my body, as if congratulating himself for knowing what it looked like without a bathing suit.

A week passed, then another, and no one came to talk to me about the bracelet again. I can't say I completely forgot about it - I kept the bracelet in my top drawer, next to my underwear, so I saw it every morning - but it wasn't uppermost in my mind. If I thought about the bracelet at all, it was to wonder how I could get it back to Maya anonymously. No plan seemed right.

And then I came back to my room one night and found Maya standing there with the Resident Adviser, demanding to be let in. The R. A. thought it was bogus, I could tell he did. He took me aside and asked me to let her look through my room as a favour, so she would back off. Apparently her stepfather had been making calls to various people and he was a big giver and an alum, so they had to indulge him. Yet the R.A. was so sympathetic and kind that I began to think the bracelet wasn't in my room, that it was all a horrible misunderstanding. But once the door was unlocked, Maya went straight for it, as if the bracelet had a homing device.

'How did that get there?' I asked. And the thing is, I meant it. I really couldn't remember.

'Because you stole it. And you're just lucky that all I care about is getting it back, because my father said this bracelet is so valuable that I could bring felony theft charges against whoever had it.'

My father. Two simple words, people say them all the time. But it was a lie, in Maya's mouth, and the lie made me furious.

'Your stepfather. Because I know who your father was, and he happens to be my father too. And while you were living on Park Avenue and going to private school, he was either broke from paying your child support or moving us around so they couldn't find him to pay the child support. Five hundred dollars a month was nothing to you, but it was a lot to us, as much as we paid for rent in some places.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Maya said. 'We're practically the same age and my father didn't leave until I was two. How could we have the same father?'

'Pretty much in the same way we ended up having the same boyfriend.' I turned to the R.A., the lie now fully formed. 'She planted this here because she's jealous of me for having sex with her boyfriend, Clay. She's setting me up.'

I looked to the R.A., then Maya. She was clearly shocked, and she sagged into him, whimpering a little. The R.A., so recently my ally, looked at me as if I were pure evil. So I did the only thing that made sense to me at that moment: I grabbed the bracelet back from Maya and began to run, just run, with no plan or thought. I was too busy doing the math in my head. The child support cheques my father made out every month had been for $500. But $500 a month was $6,000 a year and almost $100,000 over sixteen years. The money my father spent on Maya, who didn't need a dime, could have covered my tuition at Not Quite U. And she was going to begrudge me a bracelet, found by our father, in his cab? The way I see it, she had gotten to have the bracelet and now it was my turn. I ran, the bracelet in my hand, and remember I was fast, a miler.

But Maya chased me and she had stamina from dancing, if not speed. She chased me down the steps of our dorm and on to the street. She chased me up the main drag, the one that separated the housing units from the campus, and into a neighbourhood of grand old houses. The fruit trees had lost their blooms and the tulips were begi

She was not close to catching me and I knew the gap between us would only increase the longer we ran. But I also knew I'd have to go back eventually, face the R. A. and whatever consequences Not Quite U. had in store for me. They probably wouldn't let me have student housing next year, which was fine with me. I already pla

Maya was hit by a car, an ordinary car. Campus rumour blew it into a bus, but it wasn't that dramatic. I'm tempted to say it was a cab because that would give the story a nice shape, and maybe over the years I'll allow myself that one little tweak. But it was just a car, and a fairly small one. Luckily for Maya, the woman saw her and braked, so she wasn't going that fast when she hit her. Unluckily for Maya, her left knee absorbed most of the impact.

Plenty of people gathered round her, there was no reason for me to go back, nothing I could do. I slowed to a walk, turned the first corner I came to and sank on to a bench, as if waiting for a bus. The bench said 'The Greatest City in America ', a claim so pathetically untrue that I wanted to laugh. This was the kind of place, the kind of people I came from, all brag, no do. I had tried everything I could to set myself apart. I wasn't going to be like my father, too busy dreaming to ever get it right. I certainly wasn't going to be like my mother, who had settled for being the dreamer's wife. But for all I had done, I would never be my sister, fate's favourite up until five minutes ago, one of life's natural-born wi

The bracelet had left dozens of tiny red marks, like a cat's tooth prints, inside my right palm. I let it dangle from my index finger, watching the play of light on the diamond on the ballet shoes. I wondered if Maya's stepfather had really found it in a cab, or if that was simply a story he had invented, a cover for something more disreputable - a card game, a pay-off for a bad debt. No, that's what my father would do. What was the logic of a world in which someone like Maya got a bracelet and a new father, while I had to make do with the cheap, pathetic bastard I'd known since birth? My dad was capable of a lot, but the bottom line was that he wasn't organized enough to run back and forth between two families, not even for a few months. Maya was not my sister, which meant that I couldn't show up at Park Avenue or wherever she lived, and demand that her stepfather save me as he had saved her. I couldn't even justify keeping the bracelet he had given her, but I didn't see why she should have it back. I tossed it under the bench in the greatest city in the world a few blocks from the greatest university where no one wanted to be and went back to the dorm.