by Adam Nemett
What that meant was “We’re going to war.”
— Ø —
They lay there on the garage floor like cousins at a sleepover, shoes in a box. David vs. Mathias.
Here’s how it goes. A second of savasana: corpse pose. Then a whistle: tweet.
David pops up to find his paintball pistol. He spots Mathias. There’s an inflatable Intex raft in the corner of the garage and David grabs it, too, uses it as a shield. They fire. They duck.
The gun safe in Lee’s chem lab held no real firearms, Mathias said. But David brought to The Egg his two paintball pistols and the remainder of his bag of yellow ammo, like jumbo M&M’s. Mathias offered to stash it all in the gun safe, that he had the code, and said doing some opposing forces exercises in the garage might be good practice. But Mathias was against guns, even in the event of total societal breakdown. “Once one side has guns, the other side needs to have guns,” he’d say. “And if both sides have guns, the tendency is to use them.”
Lee gets bored and scuttles across the battlefield like a Wimbledon ball boy. He heads for a giant pump-action Super Soaker water cannon, the kind with a huge tank you wear like a backpack. It’s understood this means open season on Lee. A brief moment to exact revenge for all his assholery. David feels some invisible energy lock himself and Mathias as teammates as they form an unspoken treaty to pelt Lee instead of each other. But he’s wrong about this.
Mathias likes to win.
— Ø —
The last step is boiling. First, you have to filter it.
They had a cone-bottom tank in the garage already set up: a layer of gravel, a layer of sand, a layer of charcoal—briquettes or pulled straight from the woodstove. Then another layer of each—gravel, sand, charcoal—like a parfait. It came out the bottom spigot reasonably safe. But boiling is what made it pure.
They gathered round the woodstove, the pipe rising up through the home like a central artery, vital and life-giving.
David knew about superimposition: how when you’re not on Zeronal, memories pile up on each other and get more visual. He stared at his hands. He’d just used some of the unpurified tank water in the garage to shampoo for the first time in a week. Now, standing over the runoff bucket, he couldn’t help but notice that his fingers were loaded with hair. His own.
“Hey, Lee!” he yelled into The Egg. “Is hair loss another side effect of Zeronal?”
“Why?” Lee screamed at the garage. “Are you losing your hair?”
“No,” David said. “Just asking.” Blink.
ii.
Before Zeronal there were other substances and side effects, and they all orbited around Haley Roth. Maddy was a year older, and by the time she was about to leave for the University of Maryland, they’d graduated from weed to pills and powders, mostly painkillers purchased from the Racketeer.
“You’re in luck,” Haley once told them. “I got a bunch of acid I’m trying to unload.”
“David doesn’t do hallucinogens,” said Madeline with a dose of condescension.
“Mkay, then I’ve got Lortab, which is kinda orthodontist-y. I have Valium and Xanax and also a little E, but that’s thirty bucks per.”
“Ecstasy could be fun,” David suggested under his breath. He then excused himself, realizing he’d left his wallet in the car. He wanted to pay for their drugs, like this was a date.
“Chivalry is not dead after all!” Haley yelled after David as he bounded down the stairs.
Left alone with Haley, who’d begun sorting pills, Madeline strolled the bedroom perimeter. From Haley’s nightstand, she lifted a picture frame exhibiting Haley with her arms around three olive-skinned, dark-haired boys, all of them incredibly cute, mugging for the camera. One wore a yarmulke. Madeline realized the photo was from a recent teen tour or birthright trip to Israel, a kind of taxidermy mount showing off some of Haley’s exotic kills.
“It was a truly spiritual experience,” Haley said, deadpan.
Madeline responded by swiping a finger across the glass of the frame, collecting the residue of white powder she’d noticed there. She conspicuously rubbed this stuff into her gums.
Haley told Madeline she liked her, which wasn’t totally a lie, but what she meant was that she liked David and, for the moment, approved of Madeline for him.
She made a recommendation: Ecstasy.
“It’s great for couples,” Haley said. “Tell you what: you’re both so cute how you always come here together, like you’re picking out furniture. I’ll give you two for fifty bucks, how ’bout that?”
She opened a wooden box and began sifting through different Ziploc bags. Bending over her wares, her pink tank top revealed a tunnel of cleavage. Madeline shook off a pang of jealousy.
“Look at me,” Haley said, “just slashing prices!”
“Thanks, but honestly, I don’t know how long we’ll be a couple, what with me going away to school in the fall,” Madeline confided for some reason. “You get it.”
Haley stopped what she was doing and looked up.
“As your dealer,” she said, “I’ll stick with my recommendation. You need truth serum.”
“How’d you get into dealing?” asked Madeline, trying to change the subject.
“Is this Career Day?” said Haley.
“You just don’t strike me as the kind of girl who needs to do this,” Madeline said.
“I enjoy it, providing a service for the community.” Haley shrugged. Then she stared hard at Madeline. “And I enjoy doing something that people like you think I shouldn’t be doing.”
It had hurt David when Maddy left for college, and he soon figured out she was cheating on him. He could’ve turned to painkillers, but instead, he drowned himself in work. Even after getting into Princeton, when senioritis was supposed to set in, David frequented Haley Roth’s house, but now to score study drugs. He’d never really needed them before, but withdrawal from caffeine pills made him mopey and unfocused.
“Study drugs?” Haley said, taken aback. “Cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater.”
“Adderall. Caffeine. What’s the difference?”
“Amphetamines is the difference,” she said. “You don’t have ADD, right? ’Cause if you do these’ll even you out. But if not, Adderall’s like speed with tunnel vision. A performance enhancer.”
“Will it make me a superhero?” David asked, eyebrow cocked.
“Put it this way: random fuckups could probably run all of New Zealand when they’re on the stuff. You’re a smarty-pants, so you could probably take over the world.”
“Isn’t that more like being a supervillain?” he said.
“Depends on your vision for the world.” She laughed this totally sexy laugh. She threw her head back, lips parted, perfect rows of teeth on show, eyes droopy.
David bought ten Adderall pills and ate one immediately. When she slipped him a baggie, David felt her fingers and found himself telling her, “Maddy’s enjoying college too much.”
“Speaking of which,” she said, nodding across the room, “look who’s also a smarty-pants.”
Taped to Haley’s vanity mirror was a college acceptance letter. From Princeton.
David looked stunned, and Haley quietly reveled in his shock. Granted, she went to private school and he’d never shared a class with her and had no frame of reference, but she realized that in his arrogance he never thought they might be applying to the same schools. They talked about how they found out, their hopes for the fall, their visions for the world.
Something welled up inside him, the pill beginning to work, maybe. He saw her room anew and became aware of a ballpoint pen drawing on her vanity. She said it was only a doodle. But in fact she’d crafted an army of characters—cartoonish, lifelike, lanky, fat—swimming through some calligraphic text. The page had the air of a religious fresco, a mad Hindu gathering. Bustled Victorian beauties floated next to tattooed cyberpunks. David was impressed and shook her hand.
“So are we going to be friends at school?
” he asked.
Haley shrugged. Then she took David’s hand and pulled it to her chest, smirking, feeling powerful. David didn’t resist. Her nipple was hard, poking against her bra.
“Cheater, cheater,” she mumbled, bowing her head against his arm. Her own pill was kicking in, too, her bones going melty.
David stared down at Haley’s neck. It was even hairier than his. Not something he usually found compelling, but something about that hair. The V of blond fluff cradled her neck, and David knew it was the type of downiness that continued along her spine like the wake of some powerboat, down to the parts where the hair grows darker, denser. Her skin was smooth and tan, the color of stained hickory. Wedging his hand down her shirt, he grazed her satiny pink bra.
“You can be rougher with those,” she’d said, and smiled. “I’m on Xanax so I can barely feel that.”
She lazily took off her jeans and underwear, and David noticed she had much more hair than Madeline, who’d gotten into creative shaving. Haley was more natural. She lay back and opened a drawer in her nightstand. David recognized this to be some universal modern-animal signal that meant there were condoms in there, that he should grab one, that she wanted him to fuck her or that she’d let him, that the concept of fucking her was on the table. And it was around now that David realized he wasn’t actually hard.
This, for all intents and purposes, was the moment he’d been waiting for. He’d have preferred to lose his virginity to Maddy, but here was this girl, and she was hot, she was smart, apparently, and talented, and a shrewd businesswoman, and all the things his brain said were good, and she was naked from the waist down, waiting. He was waiting, too, for his body to respond, for the blood to rush to his proverbial underground lair. But some circuit was disconnected—the tributary that normally bore his teenage hunger diverted or dammed. What was happening? Was it the Adderall? To stall, David decided to go down on her. For a while. With each moan he felt the false drug-baron swagger leave her body, float out her window, and soon it was like she wasn’t there anymore, only watching from outside. She made little sighs. But David was accustomed to a growing intensity of sound, and she seemed to be trailing off.
“Is this okay?” he mumbled into her lap. She said nothing. He peeked up at her face.
Her eyes were closed. She was still. Passed out. Paralyzed.
Meanwhile, back at the Batcave, cruel fate had finally blessed him with a belated boner. David realized that he could still have Haley. She’d never said no—had kinda said yes—and they were naked, and he was sad and ready now and full of vengeance for she who’d left him behind.
Then David shuddered and thought, I’m a bad person.
When he looked at Haley again, she was no longer a sexual being. More a deadweight toddler, ready to be carried to bed. He gathered Haley’s clothes and tried his best to put them back on her limp limbs. Her bra was unwieldy and her jeans were nearly impossible, but he yanked and maneuvered them back on to her legs and over her butt and even got the fly back up. He covered her with her peppermint bedspread and turned off her light. As he slowly shut her bedroom door, he waited for Haley’s voice to tell him the thing he most wanted to hear:
Wow. Thanks, David, she might say. You’re a really good guy.
He waited by the closing door for this queen to anoint him. He waited. Any minute now.
iii.
Bob had been careful not to leave many marks. The day after Halloween, when David had woken from Poe Field, he had no shiner, no broken nose. Only a sore jaw and some breathing trouble, possibly a broken rib or two. And a trashed costume.
He took to bed, too raw and horrified to see anyone. David knew he’d failed but told himself he’d wait till he was feeling better physically before punishing himself psychologically.
He slept or pretended to sleep through most of the next two days. Thankfully, Owen wasn’t around much, and when he did pop in David hid in the bathroom. By mid-week, David was still nursing his wounds, still reading the same damn Hume sentence for the fourteenth time, when down the hall he heard Owen screaming. At first David thought he was kidding around, but as the sound got closer, he realized Owen was actually crying.
David went to the door and poked his head out. A few other heads were out their doors, hanging in the air like wall sconces. Owen strode down the hall, arms swinging, ripping down flyers taped to the walls. He looked drunk and violent; and it was a Wednesday evening, which wasn’t a typical time for such things. Following behind him at a good distance, Esteban supervised.
David ventured up the hall to Whitney Garfunkle’s room. She was a rower on the lightweight crew team, tall, fair-skinned, with hair always ponytailed. David didn’t know her too well. But she stood in her doorway, arms crossed, and looked like she knew something.
“What’s happening?” David asked.
“You haven’t heard?”
“I guess not.”
“Soccer Bob got arrested for sexually assaulting someone at your fucking soiree.”
“Soccer Bob?” David was doing his best to sound surprised, but the news had strangely shocked him. For David, it was as if the events of Halloween happened in a parallel dimension, never to incur any real retribution in this realm.
“Who did he assault?” asked David, hating himself harder and harder.
Whitney sighed long, lips pursed, and then said, “Maya Angelou. Does it matter? The victim’s identity is nobody’s business.”
Whitney speedily lectured David on how it’s hard enough for a woman to come forward and deal with people questioning her character, wondering if she’s telling the truth, calling her a cocktease, and how the best she can hope for is to remain anonymous, so even if Whitney knew, she wouldn’t tell him, but she didn’t know anyways so fuck off.
“What’s going to happen to Bob?” he asked.
“I’m going to sodomize him with a fucking skateboard,” she answered. “I don’t know, David, your special buddy will probably have to leave school. Jail, maybe?”
“But that’s crazy. Bob wouldn’t do that.” Where were these lies coming from? David could only guess that maybe he was scared Bob might find him and hit him again.
This was David at his most pathetic, begging for retroactive mercy.
“And why wouldn’t he do that?” she asked. “Because, oh, ‘he has sex with girls all the time’? How about this, how about I twist your nuts off and we call it a hand job, okay? How ’bout I smack you in the face with a frying pan and call it cooking? You’re a typical—”
“HE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!” This was Owen’s voice. He rounded the corner and came back into view. David could see his face, red and swollen like a catcher’s mitt. Without breaking stride, Owen grabbed a plastic recycling bin and slammed it against a wall, exploding empty Gatorades and Red Bulls in all directions. The sound cleared the hallway, heads darting back into their rooms to avoid his wrath.
David knew he should get out of the way, but he inched toward the center of the hallway, trying to cut off his roommate’s path. The boy’s speed continued. He passed a hanging Exit sign and volleyball spiked it with an open palm, taking it clean off the wall. Sparks shot from the red lightbulb popping inside it.
The sign hung from its now frayed wire like an eyeball dangling from its socket.
Owen continued back and forth down the hall, trapped, angry at a nameless girl for coming forward, angry at Bob for being guilty, angry at himself for choosing the wrong new best friend, and angry at a red Exit sign for being so easily shattered.
But the victim didn’t stay nameless for long. The rumor mill churned, and students discussed who was who and how they’d put what into where. Two days after the hallway meltdown, Esteban was hiding in David and Owen’s room while Bob Badalamenti’s relatives were clearing out his room, carrying his monstrous speakers down the Forbes stairs. David kept hearing the dull thud of them dropping, but no one wanted to help carry anything of Soccer Bob’s. The prevailing rumor was that Bob was taking some ti
me off, and he’d probably be back next semester or next year, maybe, once they sorted this mess out. But when the Daily Princetonian got delivered to each door that morning, there it was. Front page above the fold: “Freshman Arrested on Sexual Assault Charges.”
It didn’t offer a ton of detail, but the basics were: during an unsanctioned campus paintball event, a student-athlete plied the victim—dressed as Cap’n Crunch—with the date-rape drug GHB, attempted to lure her to his dorm, and, when she resisted and ultimately lost consciousness, forced her into an undisclosed outdoor space and committed aggravated sexual assault, a charge usually filed when penetration is alleged to have occurred.
It named names. First Bob’s, and then, much worse, the victim’s.
David couldn’t believe the newspaper had printed Haley’s name. Was that even legal? He wondered if she wanted it to use her name, to make a statement of some kind. He wondered if she had to leave school now, too. He wondered if she had the kind of friends who would help carry her speakers.
Actually, Haley did tell the Princetonian to print her name and mention her costume, betting on the universally acknowledged asexuality of Cap’n Crunch. She wanted people to see she’d chosen a reasonably prude outfit, knowing full well this would be part of the public’s judgment, the decision-making on whether she’d been asking for it. Still, she imagined the speculation: What choice of accessories had visited this trouble upon Haley Roth, they’d wonder, and how could she have been so stupid, so naive, to wear those boots, that neckerchief? Didn’t she know? For men, neckerchiefs are like sex-catnip in a bucket of get-out-of-jail-free cards! She should’ve dressed as an exploding garbage bag, a Hefty Cinch Sak maybe, but not the sexy kind!
She told the newspaper to print her name because she wasn’t at fault. And because she mistakenly believed everyone would understand and agree on that.
Owen sat on his lower bunk looking fat and bloated. “They’re making an example of him,” he said. “Fuffman knew her in high school. You said she was a slut then, too!”