Love Bites

Part One

"An angel's smile is what you sell
You promise me heaven, then put me through Hell
Chains of love got a hold on me
When passions a prison, you can't break free"

"You Give Love a Bad Name," by Bon Jovi

Fourteen-year-old Louise tosses her phone on the bed, sighs, and resumes lightly banging her head on her desk. It shouldn't help, but somehow it gives her a focus, the slight discomfort on her forehead distracting her from the messy, convoluted feelings in her heart. She checks her alarm clock: half an hour to go before Tina is off work and joins her on Skype. Crap.

She pockets her phone, creeps out of her room, and tiptoes down the stairs, expertly lifting herself on the banisters to lightly vault over the creaky fourth and fifth steps. Her parents are snoring like dueling banjos, a call and response punctuated by occasional farts, but Louise knows from long experience that her mother practically has radar in her sleep. Gene is at some party, the lucky bastard, probably getting wasted, maybe getting laid. Damn it! Why does everything have to come back to stupid sex?

Louise makes it down to the basement undetected. She turns on the lights and grabs bottled water from the mini-fridge she bought with her tip money, the final thing she needed to make her personal gym complete. Of course it's not as nice as the one at the YMCA, but the Louise Lair, as her mother calls it, is always open. Louise gives the speed-bag her father hung for her years ago a light tap, then another. The chain rattles, and she grabs the bag to still it. The last thing she needs is for her father to wake up. ("The Louise Lair is open 24/7, but the boxing corner closes at bedtime," Bob has sleepily growled at her more than once from the top of the stairs.) Her mother has an ear for her kids sneaking around at night, but her father has an almost preternatural ability to hear the clink and thud of Louise working the speed or body bags, even in the basement.

Louise all but lives for the fight, but she's too heartsore right now to manage an argument with her father on top of everything else, and besides, she might miss her window to talk to Tina, who seems almost busier during the summer in Chicago than she is during the school year.

Nope. She rolls out her yoga mat and sets to work on her abs. Not ABS, the terrible Frond-fronted conflict resolution program, but her abdominals, her core. It's as good of a place to start as any; she's going to need a strong stomach for this conversation.

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At exactly 12:30 she opens Skype and types "You there?"

After what feels like forty hours, Tina types back, "Putting on my headphones."

Louise, one earbud already firmly in place, the other draped over her back so she can keep her ear open for movement upstairs, hits the video button, and Tina's face pops into view. Her makeup looks cakey from her long shift at...wherever. Tina keeps changing jobs, so Louise isn't sure where she works now, and there are dark rings under her eyes that concealer and glasses just can't hide. But Tina smiles at the sight of her sister, and Louise starts to feel better already.

"Okay, so what's the top-secret thing you couldn't just text me? Dish, girl."

From anyone else with such a flat monotone it would sound impatient or condescending, but Louise knows how to read her sister, to hear the micro-inflections, to spot the tiniest flicker of her carefully drawn-on brows.

"Oh God, T, I really fucked up this time."

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