Selling Out by Amber Lin

about finding the positive, picking the wildflower
from a field of brittle grass. At least she didn’t know that pain, and if I
could keep her safe, she never would.
    Resolved, I turned back to her story. “Are you sure the guys
were bringing you out to him? Maybe they were looking for somewhere private,
and you guys saw him doing some deal.”
    “No, I remember one of the guys saying how the rich guy
needs to pay up.”
    Shadows flitted across her face, pain and horror and grief
for a man she didn’t even know, a man who’d hurt her. This was more than
innocence, her instinctive caring for her enemy—it was goodness. No wonder we
fought all the time. We were oil and water, destined never to mix.
    “He was the one I saw on the ground as the door closed.”
    I thought back to what Jade had said. “And Henri wasn’t doing
any shady business when you got there? Drugs, women, something?”
    “No. He was just standing outside, waiting.”
    “Did he give you anything?”
    She pursed her lips in frustration. “Like what? No, nothing.
See, this is pointless.”
    “The point is saving your ungrateful behind,” I said mildly.
    From her position where she reclined on the bed, she
suddenly turned onto her belly and rested her forehead on my jeans-clad knee.
Her words were muffled when she spoke.
    “I don’t know what he wanted with me. I didn’t do anything
to him. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
    She was bowed down to me, her words like a prayer. I felt
uncomfortable in my own skin, a fake object of worship, a fraud. My skin
itched, too tight, all wrong. She probably needed comfort, but I couldn’t give
her that. I’d known all along I wasn’t cut out for this. I’d said all along
that this wasn’t my thing. I would protect her, not baby her.
    I slipped out from her grasp and out of the room, leaving
her arms outstretched to nothing, ignoring the darkened stains of her tears on
the bed. I really didn’t care at all.
    Locking myself in my room, I dialed Luke’s number. I wasn’t
ready to deal with his desperate search for some other girl, but this situation
needed him. Ella needed him.
    “He is only one cares
enough,” Jade had said.
    I called his apartment first, disconnected. Then his cell
phone; it rang and rang. If he cared so much, then where was he? Not just now,
but every time I had ever been hurt, ever been humiliated, why hadn’t he been
there to protect me? It was irrational to think he could have saved me before
we’d even met, but my love for him was irrational. It was obsession and
affection, all blackened with the taint of resentment that I wasn’t pure
enough. It was lust and it was familial, but then those two things had always
been twist-dyed for me.
    I kept thinking if I only had a name for what I felt for
him, the solution would reveal itself to me. But there were no words for it,
only sensations. Only the hollow sound of my voice calling out in a well where no
one could hear me. There was only this churning, choking feeling in my gut, the
remembered bite of a whip I had sworn never to feel again. Now I felt it
always—phantom pain.
    How much would I pay to keep my friends safe? It began as a
mantra, a way to help someone who needed it at the time, a way to prove I
wasn’t the shallow rich girl everyone thought I was. How much of myself could I
give away and still be me? I feared we had already passed the mark, the
sacrifice like a cancer that ate away at me inside, always hungry, never full.
    A knock at the door startled me. I flung it open, expecting
to see Ella: penitent, indignant, forgiving. Instead Philip glowered there.
    “Where the fuck did you go?”
    “Don’t start with me.” The look I gave him was pure venom,
my whole body a poison. “I’m not in the mood.”
    He brushed past me. “You and your moods. Everyone living at
your whim. You’re like the goddamned queen sometimes, Shelly.”
    “I’m a queen?” It was so ludicrous, a laugh puffed out of
me. Resigned, I