The Burning Girl by Lisa Unger Page B

you.”
    I’ve never been much good at anything but total honesty. Sometimes it works for you. Then I saw it: a brief, reluctant smile. And I knew I wasn’t sunk—yet. I tried to remember that I wasn’t the loser kid on the school playground. I wasn’t Fatboy anymore. I was okay to look at; I had money. She could like me. Why not?
    “Really,” she said flatly. She looked down at her outfit, another winner—faded jeans, a stained white button-down, a puffy parka with a fur-lined hood, scuffed Ugg boots. She gave me a half-amused, half-flattered look.
    “Really,” I said.
    I could see her scanning through a list of replies. Finally: “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
    I was sure that wasn’t true. She looked like the kind of girl to whom people said nice things all the time.
    “There’s more where that came from,” I said. I went for a kind of faux-smarmy thing. And this time she smiled for real.
    “Meeegaaaan,” called Toby, whiny, annoyed.
    She backed away again toward the playground, blushing in a really sweet way.
    “Want to get a coffee?” I asked.
    “Uh,” she said. “I don’t know. This is weird.”
    I waited, still thinking to myself: I’m okay. Chicks dig me. I get laid with some frequency. I don’t always pay for it. I’m not a stalker.
    “When?” she asked, still moving backward.
    “Tonight,” I said. “What time do you get off?”
    I couldn’t let her go without making her agree to see me again. I knew what would happen if she had too much time to think about it. Because I could already tell what kind of girl she was.
    She came from money; she had nice, concerned parents probably living somewhere close by. How did I know this? There’s a way a woman carries herself, a shine, an inner cleanliness, when she comes from love and privilege. It takes a certain amount of confidence to walk around Manhattan looking like a bit of a mess. She was pretty, probably smoking hot underneath those baggy clothes. She could have shown it off like every other beautiful girl in the city. But she didn’t need to; she didn’t care who was looking. You have to feel really good about yourself to look like shit when you don’t have to. And you don’t feel that way, not ever, unless your parents told you and showed you how special you are. That’s how I knew.
    If she had too much time to think about me, about our encounter, if she told her best friend, her employer, or God forbid her mom, they’d talk her out of seeing me again. Maybe tomorrow she’d decide it was better to go to another park for a while.
    “Seven,” she said. “I get off at seven.”
    “Meet me here at seven, then. Seven fifteen.”
    “Maybe,” she said. She moved an errant strand of hair away from her eyes. “I don’t know.”
    “I’ll wait.”
    “I don’t know,” she said again. And that time it sounded more like a no.
    She was gone then, disappeared behind the playground gate. And I turned around, leaving quickly. I knew as I walked downtown that if she didn’t come back at seven that night, I might not see her again.
    • • •
    “Why did you come back?” I would ask her much later.
    “Because I felt sorry for you,” she said. She gave me a kind of sympathetic smile, a light touch to the face. “You looked like a person who needed something.”
    “I was needy ? That’s why you came back—not because I was hot or charming or magnetic? Not because you wanted me?”
    “No. Sorry.” Then that laugh, a little-girl giggle that always made me laugh, too.
    “I did need something,” I said. I ran my hand along the swell of her naked hip. “I needed you. I needed this life.”
    “Aw,” she said. “And I came back because you were sweet. I could see that you were really, really sweet.”
    But I didn’t make it back to the park that night at seven. Guess why.
    Priss.

ALSO BY LISA UNGER
    In the Blood
    Heartbroken
    Darkness, My Old Friend
    Fragile
    Die for You
    Black Out
    Sliver of