The Mentor by Sebastian Stuart

smeared. She was staring into space—her skinny gaudy glamorous mother, her going-mad mother, sitting there splayleggedon some crazy mixture of Seconol and Vivarin and Valium, some crazy chemical cocktail concocted to dull her dreams. Emma knew immediately that he was gone, her sad-eyed father with his longing for golden California. Strangely enough, she was relieved. At least it was over. The screaming, the hitting, that awful dead feeling that permeated an apartment shared by two people who blamed each other for everything, whose every waking moment was an unspoken shout of “If only I hadn’t met you.”
    Emma said nothing to her mother, but walked slowly into her bedroom and crawled under her bed. She pulled a towel over her and imagined her father making his way west, her pot-smoking, underground-comics-reading, incense-burning, bitterly unhappy father who loved Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and the Grateful Dead, off to seek his long-haired dream far from the dreary dying towns of western Pennsylvania. She imagined him in motels and rented rooms as he made his way across the country, she imagined him forgetting about his mistake, about his wife, his life, about Emma. She understood. And yet secretly, every time the phone rang, every time the mail came, she felt it—that strange sad tingle of hope.
    Emma curls up into the fetal position on her bed. Fuck her father. He better not come around after she’s famous, like one of those movie-star stories you read in the tabloids. His sorry ass won’t get a dime out of her. Emma blows off that loser’s memory and turns her thoughts to Charles Davis and his piney smell. She’s seen men looking at her on the subway; she knows she’s no dog. Her breasts are as pretty as Winona Ryder’s. She lets her hands go up and explore them, running her fingertips in gentle circles. She a goddamn survivor.

15
    Charles is ravenous and he can feel the beginnings of a headache taunting him from behind his eyes. It isn’t going well, the new book. Through the closed door, he hears Emma enter the outer office. With lunch, he hopes. She’s a strange girl; he can’t quite get a bead on her. Definitely not at home in her own body—today is the first day she’s worn a skirt above her knees. Her figure is decent, small but well proportioned.
    “Charles?” she says softly, tentatively, from behind the door.
    “Come in.”
    Emma pokes her head into the office. “I’ve got your veggie burger and carrot juice.”
    Charles gets up and joins her in the outer office. The crisp autumn air has brought up a touch of color on her pale skin and her eyes look especially bright. She smells faintly of peppermint soap. She hands him a tray loaded down with two hot dogs and a huge serving of french fries slathered with mayonnaise.
    “I hope this is organic mayonnaise,” he says, accepting the tray. “How’s it going out here?”
    “Steadily. How’s it going in there?” Something in the way she asks, her serious curiosity, pleases him. He glances at the small V of flesh her open shirt affords.
    “I’m trying to have faith in the process,” he says. She nods that grave, simpatico nod of hers that he finds so touching somehow. She has such lively brown hair. Why the hell does she keep it pulled back like that, and with a tacky red elastic band? She really is determined to downplay her charms. He wonders suddenly, Is she a virgin?
    “Join me?” he asks.
    “I won’t interrupt your world”
    “I wouldn’t have asked.”
    Emma picks up her salad and follows Charles into his office. He pulls up a chair for her. She bites her lower lip in exaggerated concentration as she squeezes orange dressing out of a small plastic packet. There’s something so submissive about her, so yielding.
    “That looks disgusting,” he says about the Day-Glo dressing.
    Emma looks over at his tray, brimming with grease and fat and hot dogs made of who-knows-what, and smiles slyly. When she smiles like that she becomes