Trevor’s warm hand sat on my thigh now, resting there as if it had every right to the skin. That was a feeling I could get used to right easy – having him claim me, acting as if I were his and he could just touch me and tell the world I was taken. Taken. How full that felt, so complete and rich and real. Men in my world didn’t elicit these emotions in me, rendering instead a sense of tolerance, a mild appreciation to be taken out for a cheap Friday prime rib special, to be escorted to the latest action movie at the cineplex, and to be ridden in the backseat of a car or in their shared apartment because, well – because.

What else do you do with a life you didn’t choose and can’t get out of? You adapt and take whatever crumbs you can find so you don’t let your soul or body starve.

Trevor burst out laughing suddenly, the rich baritone exuding a combo of sleep deprivation, mystification, incredulity and a touch of madness. The sound made me smile and it was contagious, too – we devolved into a cluster of giggles until he gasped and said:

“I am so glad that you, of all people, picked me up on the road.”

“Well, Jeffrey Dahmer was busy.” Damn, there I went. Deflecting and making silly jokes when he paid me a compliment. I looked down and wondered what on earth he saw in me, dirty jeans and fat thighs pouring out over the sides of the bucket seat. Stop that, Darla, my wiser mind shouted. He likes you because he just does. Enjoy it. Let the man make his own choices.

He’s choosing you.

“He’s dead,” Trevor said, nodding.

“He’s from Ohio,” I prattled on. What a fucking turn-on, talking about a serial killer cannibal. Maybe my dating problems weren’t about the gene pool after all.

“What’s your house like?” he asked, changing the subject and turning what had been an awkward joke into an even worse mess. My house? What house? We lived in a double-wide trailer that was older than me, with mice living under it and plumbing that was about as reliable as Lindsay Lohan on a movie set.

“You’re about to find out,” I stammered, turning onto the road that led to my trailer park. Broken down cars and spare lumber littered the lawns of an increasing number of houses as we drew closer to my home, as if the trailer park were a magnet for trash and debris.

“Whoa. Tornado?” Trevor asked as he gaped, watching the scene fly by, pointing to the piles of random crap in people’s lawns. “Lawn” was giving them too much credit, the tufts of grass poking up here and there like remnants of hair on the scalp of a long-time chemo patient. A chicken coop in one yard leaned so far to the right it looked like it was doing pilates, suspended in midair by a series of vines I would wager were poison ivy.

“Um, sorta,” I answered, my voice sing-songy and my gut tight with a groaning fear and wretched sense that This Would Not Go Well. The man I sat next to about to get one hell of an education you don’t find at an upper-crust Boston college. If he thought my flip phone was out of date, what was he going to say when I parked in front of the faded, aluminum-sided old trailer with the crooked porch, torn screen and clutter that made the television show Hoarders look like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?

Real Life, meet Fantasy Life. Bringing home Trevor Connor from Random Acts of Crazy hadn’t even been anywhere near my actual Bucket List of life goals. I had wanted to meet him, of course, since the first time I heard his smoky voice as he seemed to sing his way into my clitoris and my heart, but inviting him to a house with yellow walls –not from paint, or some Martha Stewart magazine photo, but from decades of Mama’s chain smoking, and linoleum held together with asbestos and apple juice spills – ground in just how bad my life must look to someone from the outside.

What was Massachusetts like? I drove right past the park’s entrance and asked him that very question. Spending a little more time roaming dark country roads meant delaying the inevitable panic that was about to infuse my cells when Trevor met Mama. I could drive without thinking, the roads were imprinted in my mind, the map so embedded in me I could leave for fifty years and come back and still get around in the dark, blindfolded. Buying myself some time, I figured it couldn’t hurt to feel him out and get a sense of what his life was like, so I could compare.

And cringe. Knowledge is power, though – right? If I knew what he lived in, how he functioned, what income level is family was at, then maybe I didn’t need to worry so much. There must be poor people in Sudborough. Maybe he was one of them.

“I don’t know. It’s like lots of places, you know? We’re not rich.” He craned his neck around and spotted two guys sitting on the hood of a rusted out Cutlass, sucking off the teat of some 40s in paper bags. “Uh, not poor. Just, you know. Middle class. Everything is all New Englandy and the people are fake. Half the children are geniuses and we have to be diagnosed with ADHD and medicated to get extra time on the SATs so we can prove how perfect we are. You know.”

Heh. Around here, half the children are diagnosed with ADHD and medicated so they qualify for SSI for their family income to go up by $700 a month, thereby doubling it. Maybe we weren’t so different after all.

“Your fake sounds better than my real life,” I muttered as I recognized Old Mike, one of my mom’s exes, on that hood, standing and unbuckling his belt to take a piss. I hit the accelerator and whizzed by before he could whizz on my car.

“What do you mean?” Those eyes searched my face and I inhaled slowly, turning the car onto a small road that I knew would circle us back eventually. The early May air made the trees sway a bit, their branches dotted with the tiny, unfurling green buds that would soon become lush leaves, making this bleak road a fertile, pleasant drive and, thankfully, hiding some of the junk that dotted the front yards along the path. Trevor seemed genuinely perplexed, as if he didn’t notice how fucked up my life really was, from my junky car to my stupid ex finding us having sex at a rest area to the rotted out shells of cars along the way to my house, all clues that pointed to a grinding sort of working-class life that made me nothing like him.

“I mean that you are someone who is clearly accustomed to way more than I have,” I answered quietly, cracking my window and taking a deep breath, then tentatively, hopefully, reaching out and patting his hand. He grabbed mine and clenched it with a beseeching pressure that made my heart grow.

“What?” he asked, more naive than I’d take him for.

“Trevor, you go to Boston University, don’t you?” I remembered that from reading his bio over and over and over on his band’s website.

He nodded, his face relaxed and neutral. “Sure. Where do you go to school?”

“Uh, Convenience Store University. I’m majoring in selling gas and cigarettes.” It took so much effort to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “U.S. News and World Report ranks it, well…it’s pretty rank.”

His jaw clenched. “I’m not a snob,” he said, squeezing my hand and then patting it. “I don’t care if you didn’t go to college.”

“I did, actually,” I piped up, my voice so chipper it squeaked and offended me. Stupid people pleaser in me – I couldn’t bury it as much as I wanted. “A few classes. Local branch campus.”

He brightened. “What did you major in?”

Oh, boy. Here we go. “Anthropology was my goal.” Half the people around here had no idea what anthropology was, and the other half told me I was an idiot to major in something so useless, and why not get my CNA so I could make $10.50 an hour at the local nursing home and “do something” with my college edumacation?

“I know some anthro majors. It’s good for grad school and museum work, mostly.” He peered at me as the car hit the end of the big loop and we headed back toward my trailer. If I weren’t so afraid of the events that were about to unfold I would have hugged him in appreciation for not laughing at me, for so casually accepting my education choice as if it were normal and fine and perfectly reasonable. What a world he must live in if people knew what anthro was and respected it as a life choice. My heart ached to go there.

No more stalling; the clock read 12:13 a.m. And I was getting tired. We needed to crash somewhere, and we might as well do it where there was a bed and a roof.

He was pointedly looking at me. Oh. Yeah. An answer. “I just took the classes because they taught me a lot about why humans are as fucked up as we are.”

“I majored in political science for the same reason,” he answered. I snorted. “No – really!” he protested. “That and because my parents pressured me into it to go to law school,” he admitted.

“Are you going?”

His turn to snort. “That’s what everyone says. I got into plenty of good schools, and I’ll join the six-figure debt club soon. But…” His voice trailed off.

“But you’d rather go on tour,” I finished for him. Something in the way his eyes went wistful, how his hand curled into a fist, the way his eyes went hooded when he talked about his parents – it made me wonder how good he really had it. Whatever Sudborough was like, it clearly wasn’t what Trevor wanted. Music was it – so why didn’t he just do that?

I was about to ask when I slowed the car down, snaking my way past trailer after trailer to reach mine. Trevor frowned. “What is this place?” His face was a mask of revulsion and bemusement, a look most people couldn’t pull off. Each trailer was different from the other, but none of them was the Taj Mahal, you know? Ours was smack on the low end of the spectrum of living here, but at least we had fully functioning utilities.

Well, this month, at least. Any month that came within two months of tax refund season was good for running water and heat.

The rest was a crap shoot, a game of Musical Utility Bills. Would the water be on today, or the lights – or both? You just never knew. From the way Trevor had eyed my flip phone with a look like I was pressing a fresh log of dog crap to his ear, I had a feeling that his “fake” life involved far more financial stability and luxuries compared to mine.

And I’ll bet he never, ever ate meat from a can.

I had spent so much time and energy in these short hours worrying here and there – when I wasn’t damn close to being pleasured under a pine tree in a rest area on the interstate – worrying about what Trevor would think about my house, my Mama, my life when it hit me that I had no choice but to bring him home. Scant attention, though, had I paid to what Mama might think of my bringing home a buck naked young man covered only in a Mylar blanket and a cowboy hat.

If Davey had beaten me home – and I suspected he had, the man had a cell phone for God’s sake and even if it was only a flip phone it meant that he could make a goddamn phone call – then Mama was about to encounter one of the strangest things her child had ever brought home.

Now, mind you, I’d brought plenty of crazy shit home, including twin brothers I’d won in a wet t-shirt contest. Don’t ask – it’s a long story and right now you want to read about the rest of this one. That one, I can get to it later, but I doubt it. Let’s just say law enforcement officers from three different counties were involved and when someone tells you they’re eighteen, don’t believe me. Er…them.