by Amy Reed
“Shit, man,” someone says, and I look up. Everyone’s eyes are pointed toward me, and I look down to check if my skirt is up around my waist. I make sure there is no snot running down my face. I look around the room and realize that they’re all looking at Anton. They are looking at the gun in Anton’s lap.
I start laughing. This is not my life. It is a movie. I am high on cocaine and sitting next to a six-foot-tall black man who just got out of prison and has a gun in his lap. I hear my dad’s voice narrating: Those people, those people, he keeps saying. All they do is prove the stereotypes true.
But no one else is laughing. I look around the room again, and things are not like I first saw them. Anton is turning the gun around in his hands with a broken look on his face, like he’s only holding it because he has to. The guys are solemn, nodding their heads. The girls look worried, like little mothers. I am not laughing anymore. This is not a movie. This is a guy I just danced with who is willing to do something terrible because he thinks he has no choice.
All of a sudden, I’m sober. The light feeling in my chest has turned into concrete. The music sounds hostile. All the chemicals inside me are swirling around my empty stomach, making me dizzy. I get off the bed and crawl over to Alex.
“I don’t feel good,” I tell her.
“Lightweight,” she says.
“I want to go home.”
“Then go,” she says.
“Will you come with me?” I ask her. There’s no way I can find my way home alone.
“Hell no,” she says. “The party’s just getting good.”
Everyone else is talking among themselves in low, serious tones. All I want is to be home in bed. I want everything to not be swirling and turning grotesque, everyone’s face becoming sludge, melting. If I don’t get up, I will pass out here on the floor and everyone will see. If I get up, I can hide. I can die in private.
I use Alex’s shoulder to pull myself off the floor. “Get off,” she says, pushing me away. I get up and stumble into the party, shove my way through the sweaty, smoking crowd. I get outside and it is freezing, but the cold makes the melting stop. It makes my body solid. It makes me see straight.
I start walking in the direction we came from and nothing looks familiar. All I see is concrete and abandoned parking lots. There is no life anywhere, not a bird or cat or even a tree. I keep walking and walking until I don’t even know how to get back to the party. The spinning comes back and I puke behind a dumpster. I stay there for a while. I think about not leaving. I think about freezing to death behind this dumpster in a miniskirt and high heels. I wonder who would find me. I wonder if I would be dead or just barely alive, if I would end up in a hospital bed or a cemetery. I imagine my parents frantic, mourning me, my mother weeping, my father swearing silently to himself. I imagine them blaming themselves, and this thought makes me warmer.
But I am not dead. I am not even dying. I am cold and lost and miles away from home, but I can’t be forgiven because I am not close enough to death. There is no excuse for me unless I’m dead.
There is a 7-Eleven across the street with a pay phone. The pay phone will call my house. My mom will answer the phone. She will pick me up. She will hate me, but only temporarily, and she will pick me up.
I make it across the street. I put a quarter in the hole. I call my phone number. I don’t know what time it is, but I know it is late. I know everyone in the world is sleeping except people who are getting into trouble. I try not to notice the guy in the red truck sucking his teeth at me. The phone rings. Once. Twice. Three times. Someone answers.
“Hello?” It is my father.
“Dad?” I say, and I start crying. I don’t want it to be him. I don’t want him to be the one I have to explain to how stupid I am. I can deal with my mother because she has nothing to do but love me, but my father doesn’t want me even when I’m good. He is going to be mad at me. He is going to yell. He is going to leave me here, stranded and freezing, with no one around but the man in the truck.
“Dad,” I say again. I am not loud when I cry. He did not hear me cry. “Can you come pick me up?” I sound normal. I sound like nothing’s wrong.
“Where are you?” he says.
“I don’t know.” My voice breaks. I sound like I am crying.
“Are you okay?” He does not sound mad. He does not sound like I’ve ever heard him.
“Yeah.”
“Are you hurt?”
I am calming down. He is not going to leave me here. “No. I just need a ride.”
“Where are you?”
“7-Eleven.”
“By the arcade?”
“No. In Juanita.”
“What’s the address?”
“I don’t know.” The tears are coming back. What if he can’t find me?
“Look at the building. Look for numbers on the building.”
I look. They are there. A whole address is there, white paint on glass. “7644 Juanita Boulevard.”
“Okay, I’m on my way,” he says, and hangs up the phone.
I stand there for about fifteen minutes. The guy in the truck gets tired of me and drives away. Some guys I recognize from the party drive up and I hide behind the phone booth. I stay there until my dad comes, watching people drive up, walk in, walk out, drive away. I am invisible behind the phone booth. No one knows I’m here.
Dad drives up in his crappy old car and I don’t move for a second. I think about hiding forever. But I am cold and it looks warm inside the car, so I leave the shadows behind the phone booth and walk toward the streetlamps and his headlights. I am looking at the oil stains and gum littering the parking lot. I am counting the white lines that designate parking spaces. One. Two. Three. Four. The walk is a mile long. It is slow motion. I can feel him watching me, like the windshield is a movie screen, like this is a movie about the dumbest girl in the world.
I get in and sit down and his big winter coat is on the seat.
“I thought you’d be cold,” he says.
I don’t say anything as I wrap the coat around me. It smells strongly of something I don’t recognize, and I realize that I don’t really know what my father smells like, that I’ve never been this close to something that has been so close to him.
“Are you okay?” he says softly.
I nod my head. I still can’t speak. He pulls the car out of the parking lot and we drive home on what might be the same route that Alex and I took to walk here. But everything looks different from the inside of a warm car. Everything looks different wrapped up in my father’s coat, sitting in silence when he should be yelling at me.
“Do you want a milk shake?” he says, and I nod my head again. Even though I haven’t had anything since a bowl of cereal this morning, eating is the last thing I want to do. But I could get a milk shake down. I could drink something cold and sweet.
We pull up to the late-night McDonald’s drive-through. The lady shouts through the speaker to take our order and it makes me jump.
“What flavor do you want?” he says.
“Strawberry,” I say. My voice sounds strange, smaller and higher than usual.
He orders the milk shake. I take it and turn toward the window as far as I can go so he cannot see me, so he cannot see the tears running down my face and into my mouth as I drink.
“Cassie,” he says.
I don’t move.
“Look at me,” he says.
I turn my head so I am facing him. My eyes can’t find a place to settle. I see his nose, his chin, his shoulder. Finally, I meet his eyes, but I look away before they see too much.
“Are you really okay?” he says.
I can see his eyes in the sound of his voice, and there are explosions inside me, giant gusts of warm, red wind rattling everything solid. I nod because it is the only thing I can do to keep from crying, to keep from telling him everything.
“Okay,” he says, and I hold my breath until we get home.
Before he opens the door to our apartme
nt, he says, “I’m not going to tell your mother about this.”
All I can do is nod. I hand him his coat and suddenly feel cold. I go to my room and close the door, take off my shoes, and crawl into bed without changing my clothes. Even though I am covered with blankets, even though I am hugging my knees as hard as I can, I am shivering. I wonder what my father is thinking as he gets into bed with my mother, who will never know any of this. I wonder what it will be like in the morning, when we act like everything’s normal, when we don’t talk, like always.
(TWELVE)
It is the last day of school before winter break and I am behind the gym, sitting on concrete. Justin is sitting next to me and I am waiting for him to give me what I’m here for. I am letting his leg touch mine, letting his mildew-smelling coat touch my shoulder, my arm, my hand. I let him talk about Bill Gates and computers and microchips and macroeconomics and anything else that’s in his ugly little brain. I imagine it is gray and slimy like the rest of him, smelling of mildew and old greasy food.
I have a theory that the closer I let him sit, the shorter this will take. But it has been four weeks now, four Tuesdays, and it always takes all lunch.
All I had to do was ask him if I could copy his homework, even though I didn’t need to, even though I’m probably smarter than he is. But he doesn’t know that. As long as I’m doing this, he’ll never suspect that I’m smart at all.
He calls this “our dates.” He said it too loud in class, “Do you remember our date at lunch?” and everyone looked at me like they were going to throw up, even Mr. Cobb. And all I could do was smile and say, “Yes,” and remind him quietly that it’s our secret and try not to burst into tears and run out of the room and out of the school and down to the lake and drown myself in the freezing, polluted water.
This is where Justin gives me his medicine and asks for nothing in return. Just time. Just ears. Just the blank look on my face that I have mastered. Ritalin makes him normal and it makes me invincible. I took four every day, then six, then eight, now I can’t keep track and nobody has any idea. Alex and Sarah think he only gives me half his normal prescription, that we’re all getting the same tiny amount to save up for the weekends. They don’t know they’re getting nothing compared to me. They don’t know he gets his prescription filled four times more than he’s supposed to and his mom doesn’t notice and the pharmacist doesn’t notice and his doctor doesn’t notice and nobody notices because Justin is invisible.
Nobody notices that I don’t sleep, that I sit up awake in my chair by the window and look out into shadows that are sometimes still, sometimes shifting, sometimes flat, sometimes textured and breathing. They don’t know about the hole I drill into my arm with burning needles I keep in a little fake gold box Mom bought me for my thirteenth birthday. Even when I’m naked, Ethan doesn’t notice the dime-size scar on my arm that never heals, the hole I keep opening and cutting and burning and scarring because it is the only thing to do at four in the morning when everything is quiet and dark and my heart is thumping fast and heavy in my chest.
This is too easy. It should not be this easy. I should not be able to slip a box of sleeping pills in my back pocket at the grocery store whenever I need to recharge. I should not be able to wake up and feel fine and do it all over again. I should be dying. My stomach should be falling out. My parents should be grounding me. I should be getting arrested. Someone should be trying to stop me.
I should not look forward to these meetings behind the gym, Justin’s incessant chatter about things that don’t matter, his awful, wet chewing on the lunch I can’t eat. This should not be the calmest I feel all week, sitting on concrete behind the gym, watching the rain pounding on dumpsters, feeling so grateful that I’m not inside. There is no Alex, no Ethan, no James, no Wes, no gangster girls, no potheads, no tweekers, no skaters, no sluts. There is no giant glass wall dividing us from the normal kids who sit at their tables and eat their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and plan slumber parties and play video games and fantasize about first kisses. It is just me and Justin and the rain and his sandwich and his pills and the weird things he says, things like “Your friends aren’t nice to you,” things like “You’re not like them.”
He is talking about microchips and he is excited and little bubbles of drool emerge from the sides of his mouth and hold on to his gray skin with surface tension or some other scientific principle he could explain to me. I am tempted to say, “Explain the scientific principle that makes your drool bubbles hold on to your skin,” but I don’t. But not because of the usual reasons I don’t speak, not because I am concrete and my mouth is stuffed with glass. I don’t speak because I enjoy my silence here. I enjoy listening to his endless ramblings, his words that do not matter. I enjoy that he wants nothing from me, just me sitting here, just my ears, just my silence. He asks for nothing because he is the boy who gets shoved into lockers. He is the boy who even the smart kids don’t want.
I don’t ask him about his drool bubbles. I don’t ask him why his coat smells like mildew or why his glasses are held together with tape or why he sits alone at lunch every day except Tuesdays. Instead, I ask, “Is there anything else you want from me?” I do not think these words. They just come out, like a reflex, like I need to make up for the twisted gratitude that I feel when I’m with him. I don’t realize what I’ve said until I notice that he’s stopped talking about microchips, that he’s looking at me in a funny way. He blushes, which makes his pimples seem extra greasy and extra erupting, and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and the drool bubbles are gone. He looks at me with his squinty eyes and leans over and whispers even though there’s nobody around to hear, just me and him and the memory of drool bubbles, and pills in my pocket and erection in his.
“What do you mean?” he says, and his breath smells like beef jerky.
I say, “Anything.” I am leaning closer, pressing my breasts against his shoulder. “Anything you want.”
He thinks for a moment. His mouth opens slightly, then closes. Finally, he looks at me. Finally, he leans over and whispers, “I want to touch you.” He sniffles. “I want to touch you down there.”
“Okay,” I say. This is easy. This is nothing.
He is shaking and he flinches at the sound of the zipper. He flinches when I grab his wrist and lead his hand down into the sexy underwear I only wear when I know I have a date with Ethan. He lets his hand lie there a while, not moving at all, and his eyes are closed and his nostrils flare with heavy, wheezy, snotty breaths, like this is the most important thing that’s ever happened to him. His hand is lying there so gentle and scared and I want to slap him. Just do it, I want to say. I want to slap him.
“You are so pretty,” he says.
“Fuck pretty,” I say.
“Why are you so angry?” he says.
“Fuck you,” I say.
His fingers move a little. He stops breathing. His face is red and still and he smells like mildew, like eggs and toast, like computers, and the bell rings, and I want to slap him even more, not just slap but punch and kick and bite until he bleeds and jump on his ribs until they are all broken. His eyes shoot open like he’s heard the thoughts inside my head, and he takes back his hand and runs off without his backpack, holding his hand to his chest as if it is broken, running like a boy with asthma runs, trailing dirty boy smells behind him, smells of mildew, smells of something musty from myself.
I zip up my pants and smoke a cigarette even though I am already late for class. I sit on the concrete and watch the rain fall in sheets, pounding on the dumpster and turning the field into mud. Across the field, one of the gangster girls is beating up a tiny goth girl while others cheer her on. They are all ant-size, nothing. The goth girl’s pain is nothing. The gangster girl’s cruelty is nothing. They do not see me. I am ant-size, invisible.
I pick up Justin’s backpack and walk to class. The halls are empty and silent and smell like sneakers. This is a foreign place, a place I pass through but do not
belong. Someday it will be gone and I will be somewhere else, ant-size, invisible, passing through. It will smell like something else. It will be made out of something different than linoleum and brick and metal lockers. It will be different, but I will be the same.
When I enter the classroom, eyes roll as usual and Mr. Cobb tells me I have detention, my third tardy in two weeks. He hands me the pink slip. “Whatever,” I say, and sit in my seat next to Justin. I drop his backpack on the floor. He pulls it toward him without looking at me.
Mr. Cobb says, “Did you do your math homework?” wanting me to say no, wanting me to admit I don’t belong here. But I pull it out of my bag and hand it to him. I want to tell him it took me five minutes. I want to tell him I’m smarter than everyone in here. But that is not what I do. I let people think what they want.
(THIRTEEN)
A giant sign at the entrance to Ethan’s neighborhood reads oak heights. I don’t see any trees, but all the streets are named something like Spruce, Madrone, Alder, Redwood. We drive by row after row of small, two-story boxes in varying shades of pastel. He seems to know where he’s going, even though there are no landmarks of any kind. The yards are all identical, with the same manicured hedges and plots of hibernating flowers, the same toys and bicycles tidily arranged on the same small front lawns. The only thing that distinguishes some houses from the others is an American flag hanging to the left of the front door and a few tasteful strings of white Christmas lights. Ethan informs me that these are the only decorations that are allowed. Each house has a limit of two pumpkins at Halloween.
“One family tried to paint their house purple and they got kicked out,” he tells me. “It was on the news.”
“Why?” I ask him.
“You sign a contract when you move here. There’s only four colors you can choose from.”