Free The Secret Life of Prince Charming by Deb Caletti Page B

thatSteven Devlin would live in a cabin somewhere was ludicrous, naturally. A jail cell, perhaps. This was before Barry. Right before Barry. I met Steven Devlin in an anthropology class, where the professor had moons of dirt under his fingernails, as if he’d just returned from an excavation in the desert. Steven Devlin had raven-black hair. He was the kind of quiet that’s sultry and that simmers. Remember Richard Gere in the old days? Officer and a Gentleman days? The kind of quiet that you can think he’s thinking of all these deep things, the universe’s secrets, his private torment, when he’s likely only thinking about carburetors or lunch or breaking a lock. Listen to me—we have to be careful not to create a person in our imagination.
    Steven Devlin was the sort who was always in trouble at school, barely graduated, conflicts with teachers, picked up by police for drinking and drugging. I don’t know how he got into college, other than his parents probably paid his way in. I used to watch him turn in his tests, sauntering down the aisle, the low-slung walk of a coyote, and I’d picture us rolling passionately around on my dorm-room bed. He just looked so turbulent and dangerous and this appealed to me the way standing on a bluff in roaring wind does. Because you feel something, then, something real and large. He was a storm approaching. A walking, talking thundercloud.
    He didn’t disappoint me in the passion department. He was passionate all right, God, a great kisser, and once he ran right out in the middle of a busy street in the pouring rain to help a dog that had been hit. But he’d also disappear and get into deep depressions, and I’d cry and try to help him and itwas all very dramatic. He didn’t feel loved by his father, and I thought I’d show him what love was. If only he knew what love was…He had trouble with authority—he’d tell off his bosses and a teacher who failed him. He’d get upset, then disappear in the middle of the night. He had a terrible temper—his face would turn into someone else’s when he got mad. That little muscle, you know, right here in your cheek? His would pulse with the force of his teeth clenching. He dislocated his arm once, throwing a book across the room.
    A list of beautiful attributes, yes? Moody, depressive, deviant, terrible family relationships, drug use, and numerous previous sex partners? I felt something real and large, yes, that’s true, but that something was pain. It ended when I found out that one of the places he was disappearing to was the bed of a thirty-five-year-old woman whom he babysat for. He was nineteen. I never told Frances Lee that part of the story.
    I read somewhere later, years, that the boys who are delinquent in high school, the kind who are always in trouble, drugs, barely graduating, all of it, it’s a huge indicator of a future sociopath. That’s right. You are tempted to think, Teenager, troubled. Part of the landscape. But it’s not part of the landscape. Not part of any normal landscape. This is who he is, who he will always be, and no amount of your love is going to change that.
    In comparison, Barry’s dramatics seemed mild. He just had a lot of girls around him all the time. Just. You see—I only turned the drama volume down , when I should have turned it off.
    I lay awake in the dark, in our room at Dad’s house. When we first came back into Dad’s life, the room had been used for Brie to work out in. There had been an exercise bike and weights and squishy green mats; a television with an assortment of videos beside it, with covers of women flexing muscles and running on the beach. But Brie had moved over for us, moved her stuff to the attic and gotten a membership in some gym downtown. Now the room had two beds and a dresser Brie had found in an antique store, with a big mirror in the shape of a shell. Brie had brought in a painter, who made a mural of two mermaids at sea. She kissed our foreheads when we went