Ask for Pain
On the eve of a wedding, her choice was revenge or redemption

By Julie Orringer
Sunday, February 10, 2008

The hotel was in the wine country, in St. Helena. We were there that first Friday of June because my mother was marrying Della's father. The next morning, three weeks before my 16th birthday, Della and I would become stepsisters. We would be family, though I could hardly bear to be in the same room with her for 10 minutes. Maybe that was why I'd chosen that day to tell her about what existed between me and Javi Penaflorida. Maybe I wanted to drive a permanent wedge between us, a reminder that whatever our parents had decided, whatever vows they made, we would never be sisters.

We'd come straight to St. Helena from our last day of school, both of us still wearing our uniforms. I watched her as I lay on the bed in our shared room, watched her standing at the window in her blue skirt and knee socks, staring down into the garden, where jumpsuited men were erecting the tent in which our parents would be married. Della had inserted herself between the sheer curtain liner and the glass, had draped the liner over her shoulders as though she were a bride herself. In the angle of her hips, in the vulnerable stitch at the backs of her knees, I could read her thoughts; she was imagining a different wedding altogether. She'd been in love with Javi Penaflorida for the past four months. But in another minute I would tell her the truth about Javi and me; I would tell her as soon as she turned from that window.

IT WAS DELLA'S FAULT OUR PARENTS WERE GETTING MARRIED. Two years earlier she'd signed up for a cooking class at Lucca, the San Francisco restaurant where my mother worked as a pastry chef. Five Cakes and a Tart: That was the title of the class. Della noticed my mother didn't wear a ring, and one day when her father picked her up she introduced them. By the end of the summer they were engaged.

Della's father hadn't dated since he and Della's mother had gotten divorced. At first, he'd been too heartbroken, then too busy with his law practice. In the three years since my father, a writer, had died of a ruptured aneurysm, my mother had gone on a few disappointing dates and then had sworn off the whole thing. But Solomon changed that. My mother got her hair cut in a loose sexy style, went around the house singing the old show tunes she used to sing when I was little, and hired an apprentice to work Sundays so she'd have more free time. She stopped brooding for hours in my father's study, stopped hugging herself in his cane rocking chair, the one where he used to sit and rock me when I was little, both of us looking out over the cypresses of Golden Gate Park. I wanted to be happy for her, and I told myself I was. She was living her life again. I knew it was what my father would have wanted. But when I saw her with Solomon -- watched them kneading bread in the kitchen with Della, or heading off for a hike in Marin or sitting on the sofa with the crossword -- all I could think of was that her happiness meant that my father was dead, really dead, and he wasn't coming back. And I suspected my mother was starting to love Della, too -- Della, who liked to cook and was good at it, and who, let's face it, was often in a better mood than I was.

The next summer my mother moved us out of our sunny flat in the Haight and into Solomon's enormous hillside house in San Anselmo, half an hour from the city. Since I'd have to change schools anyway, my mother said, I might consider going to boarding school with Della in Menlo Park. She acted like I had a choice in the matter, but I didn't. What was I going to do, live in San Anselmo with my mother and Solomon, just the three of us? At school, at least, I could avoid Della, make friends with people who had nothing to do with her.

And it worked out that way. We scarcely saw each other. But one afternoon in February I found myself in Della's dorm room. Our parents had sent us a Valentine's package -- chocolate tarts and pink-frosted cookies and boxer shorts with conversation hearts on them, TOO HOT and KISS ME and I'M SURE -- and we'd gotten together after our last class to divide the stuff. We were sitting on her bed with the box between us when Javi and his father came in to replace the screens in Della's room.

Javi had come to live with his father at the beginning of the term. We heard he'd been kicked out of his public high school in Santa Rosa. Speculation favored arson or an affair with a teacher. He was 17 and had dark eyes, copper-colored skin, black hair that hung to his shoulders. He wore a leather jacket with the words ASK FOR PAIN written across the back in safety pins. That afternoon, Mr. Penaflorida came in carrying the new screens under his arms, and Javi followed with the toolbox. As if under a spell, we sat on Della's bed and watched Javi and his father take the windows apart and put in the screens. Every now and then, Javi would look up at us; once, when he met my eyes, we stared at each other for an uncomfortably long time. I blushed, remembering something I'd read in a book: If someone looked into your eyes for more than five seconds, it meant they were either going to sleep with you or kill you. Javi flashed a smile and glanced away. When the screens were installed, Mr. Penaflorida gave us his usual nod and spoke a few words to Javi in Tagalog. Javi frowned, picked up the toolbox and left. Della followed him with her eyes. That was the beginning of it. She didn't have to say anything; I knew.

ONE NIGHT A FEW WEEKS LATER, I was crossing the field to return a bag of soccer balls to the equipment shed when I saw Javi standing beside the door of the riding-mower garage. I'd thought about him a few times since that day in Della's room, but I wasn't thinking of him then; instead, I was thinking about the game, about the goal I'd scored just before time ran out, my first of the season. I was smelling the cool eucalyptus scent of South Bay dusk, feeling the hard sweet afterburn of soccer in my back and thighs. Suddenly, there was Javi beside the garage, taking the net bag of soccer balls from me, his eyes meeting mine. He stared at me, and I stared back, and then he put a hand on my wrist, carefully, as if he were asking a question. I stepped closer to him, and he bent to me and kissed me, and then I was following him into the shed.

AT 16, DELLA WAS 5-FOOT-10, tongue-tied, owlish behind her glasses. She hung out with a group of girls who read sci-fi novels and published a weekly literary rag called the Orb. At dances I'd overheard guys making fun of Della and her friends: Ask one of those space aliens to dance. No, man, you do it, I'll give you $20. It might have made me feel bad for her if the situation between us were different. I told myself she must have known she didn't have a chance with Javi. But if she knew, it didn't stop her from thinking about him. Every poem she published in the Orb that spring was addressed to him: You hover/just outside the borders of my life/asking for pain/never sensing mine.

Meanwhile, Javi and I were meeting in the riding-mower garage two or three times a week. It wasn't just physical; we would talk for hours, sometimes all night if I could get past my dorm monitors. I told him things I'd never told anyone: that I'd lost my virginity at 14 to one of the servers at Lucca; that I'd walked to the Golden Gate Bridge one night not long after my dad died, and stood there imagining what it might be like to jump, until I realized that if my dad could see me, he'd think I was being ridiculous -- he'd tell me I was just feeling sorry for myself, and that the last thing my mother needed at that moment was a dead kid. In return, Javi told me about his own mother, who'd divorced his father and worked as an aide in a nursing home; he told me about his grandfather back in the Philippines. When I finally worked up the nerve to ask why he'd been kicked out of school, he laughed and looked almost flattered. He hadn't been kicked out, he said; he'd graduated early. He'd come to work with his father to make money for college. He'd already been admitted to Berkeley.

I smiled. "Everyone thinks you're a degenerate."

"It's the jacket," he said. "Appearances deceive."

"Yeah. Everyone thinks I'm a rich kid from Marin."

"Aren't you, mahal?" he said. Mahal: It was Tagalog for expensive, or dear, like cher in French.

"No," I said. "I'm a baker's daughter. A writer's daughter." But I'd told him about Solomon and his law practice, his house in San Anselmo; as far as Javi was concerned, I was a rich kid from Marin. Della had done this to me, too.

"I wish my mom would marry someone with money," he said. "She could quit her job, kick back a little."

"You don't really wish that," I said. "Trust me."

"What do you know about it?" he said, and for a moment his eyes went hard on mine. But then he was laughing and shaking his head. "We'll both go to Berkeley," he said. "We'll raise hell, okay?"

DELLA PINED LIKE A CHARACTER IN A VICTORIAN NOVEL. She lost weight, wandered in the morning fog like a ghost, carried on whispered conversations with her friends from the Orb, spent hours sitting under a tree and writing in a red leather notebook. Whenever she and Javi came within 50 yards of each other, she went white and looked like she was going to faint. She never mentioned him to me, though, and of course I never told her that he and I had been meeting; I never told her anything that was important to me.

Then one day, when she and I had to drive down to Palo Alto for a bridesmaid-gown fitting, she gave a sigh and confessed it all -- that she was in love with Javi, and had been since that day in her room with the screens.

"I'm going to tell him," she said, gripping the steering wheel, her eyes fixed on the curving plane of Highway 280. "What do I have to lose? At worst he'll think I'm an idiot. And if he does, so what?"

I imagined what he'd say to her when she told him; I saw her turning away, her ears burning with shame. I wanted to see the aftermath of it, see her crying on her friends' shoulders. "You should tell him," I said, and then, in a half-whisper, "I've seen him looking at you."

"You have?"

"Yeah," I said. "More than once."

THE NEXT TIME JAVI AND I WERE TOGETHER, I told him what was coming. I expected him to laugh, but he didn't; he frowned and hooked his arms around his knees.

"She seems like a nice girl," he said. "Awkward stage, though, right?"

"I don't know about stage," I said. "She's been that way since I met her."

"You hate her guts, don't you."

"What makes you say that?"

"When you talk about her, you look like you want to kill someone."

I shrugged.

"You shouldn't hate her. She's going to be your sister."

"Step," I said. "Stepsister."

He shook his head slowly, that dark hair brushing his shoulders, and said, "You've got some anger in you, mahal."

WE WERE TOGETHER AGAIN A FEW NIGHTS LATER when we heard footsteps coming across the grass. We'd become adept at listening; everything depended on it. The footsteps stilled, and we heard Della asking for Javi at Mr. Penaflorida's cottage. Mr. Penaflorida told her she could leave a note. Then Javi said, "Wait here," and left me sitting in the dark.

He went to meet her at the door of the garage. I crouched behind a mower and watched. She wasn't wearing her uniform; from where I knelt I could see she'd put on a knee-length yellow dress, the one she was supposed to wear to the rehearsal dinner. She spoke in low anxious tones, rushing through what she had to say. In her hands was a cake on a plate. I recognized it as one of the five cakes my mother had taught her to bake. It was chocolate, dusted with powdered sugar; I knew it was flavored with cardamom and a hint of cayenne pepper. I waited for Javi to speak, to say the words that would make Della turn away in pain and shame. Instead he bent toward her and spoke in a low intimate tone. He touched her hair, smoothed it behind her ear. Then, as she stood there holding that cake, he leaned in and kissed her quickly on the mouth. He took the plate from her and told her he hoped he'd see her around. A moment later she was gone, her feet swift and light over the grass.

When he came back inside, he sat down in front of me and put the plate on the floor, cut a slice of cake with his pocketknife and ate it. I watched the pleasure of it come over him, the unexpected heat of the pepper. He raised his eyes to mine and I read the challenge there. I knew he'd meant to shock me awake, to show me that what I felt for Della was small and tight and wrong. I knew that as well as he did, but I wasn't ready to hear it. I got up and left him sitting there on the floor of the garage with that fragrant cake in front of him, Della's cayenne and cardamom on his tongue.

FIVE DAYS LATER, Della and I found ourselves in that flowery room in St. Helena, on the eve of our parents' wedding. Nothing could change the fact that for the past three months I'd been spending every free moment of my life with Javi Penaflorida. Nothing could take the power of it away from me; the fact that he'd kissed her would only make it worse for her. She moved away from the window, and I took a breath. I was going to tell her. But when she looked at me she seemed lit from inside, as if the brilliance of the afternoon had filled her and was coming through her skin. She saw me staring at her, tilted her head and said, "What?"

And as she spoke, the light beneath her skin dimmed by a milliwatt, by a fraction of a shade. It was enough to let me know what would happen if I told her. I thought of Javi and I turned away from her. I couldn't speak. I didn't tell her. Not that day, not ever.

JAVI AND I NEVER SAW EACH OTHER AFTER THAT SCHOOL YEAR, though he called and called all summer. I didn't return his calls; I didn't respond to his e-mails. I resented him until it exhausted me. Even after I'd stopped hating my stepsister, even after I started thinking of her more as sister then as step, I still couldn't forgive him. The thought kept coming to me that my father would have approved of what he'd done, would have wanted me to see how small and empty I'd become, even if it hurt. The idea only made me angrier.

He called and called, and after a while he stopped.

I hope you read this, mahal. I know now what I lost, and what you gave me.

Julie Orringer is the author of the short story collection How to Breathe Underwater. She can be reached at 20071@washpost.com.