by Tess Oliver
I pushed the last piece of donut into my mouth.
“I’m sure all of you are as pleased as I am that Mr. Jameson decided to sit in on group today.”
A small, derisive snort floated over from Pete. I’d hardly had any contact with the man, but he seemed to have taken a strong dislike to me. Kirkendall caught the sound.
“Yes, Pete, is there something you’d like to comment on?”
I folded my arms across my chest and stared over at him.
He fidgeted on his folding chair for a second, then spoke. “It’s just, I don’t know if I’m comfortable with his attitude. I doubt I’ll be able to share freely in group today with his arrogant smirk glaring my direction.”
I kept staring at him.
“Tommy,” Kirkendall said, “do you have a response to that?”
“Yes.” The worm flinched as if I was going to hit him or something. I pointed to my face. “This isn’t arrogance, it’s non-committal boredom. I don’t care enough about anything you have to say to give you attitude . . . or the fucking time of day for that matter.”
Sugar laughed but cut it short.
“Mr. Jameson, out of respect for others in the group, I’m going to ask you to tone down your language.”
“So much for speaking without being judged,” I said.
Pete’s mouth had pulled into a bow, and he looked like a landed fish trying to suck in air. “It most certainly is arrogance, the kind of arrogance that comes from being born into money rather than having to work hard to earn it. Like me.”
I looked at the doctor, who seemed temporarily flustered by the rough start. I’d always known the guy didn’t like me. He always got up and huffed out of the television room whenever I sat down to watch something. Guess he really hated me. And here I’d hardly noticed him. Maybe that was why he hated me.
The hamburger heiress cleared her throat.
“Yes, Jayleen?” Kirkendall asked.
“I take exception with Pete lumping all of us who have been born into money into the same category. And, I don’t believe it’s Mr. Jameson’s arrogance that is so off-putting. I think it’s the menacing, angry aura that always seems to be swirling around him.”
Sugar giggled again. At least she was having a good time. “Y’all have it wrong,” Sugar said. “Tommy’s not arrogant or menacing.” She flashed me one more of those for my eyes only smiles. “He’s both.”
I raised a brow at her before turning back to Kirkendall. “Jeez, Doc, thanks for inviting me along today.”
“Dr. Kirkendall, please,” she corrected. She put up her hands. “All right, everyone. I’m going to ask that we get off this path of character attacks. Now, who’d like to start with something else?”
Sugar lifted her hand. “I would just like to say that the watermelon they served at lunch was exceptional.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. She had just as much disdain for these group sessions as me. She just showed it in a much more charming, less obvious way.
“I would like to add to that,” I said. “I didn’t actually taste the watermelon, but after watching Miss Scarborough, here, lick, suck and slurp on ten slices of watermelon for twenty minutes today, I agree.” I looked over Jayleen’s head at Sugar. “The watermelon was exceptional.”
“Well, I was completely unhappy with today’s lunch menu,” Mandy spoke up. “I don’t understand, with the money this place costs, why the food can’t be better. The last movie set I was on, the caterer brought out a delicious assortment of choices every day.” While Mandy went on with her list of complaints and pathetic attempt to remind us all that she was a movie star, I noticed Sugar writing something on her notepad.
As Dr. Kirkendall pried deeper into Mandy’s concerns about the food served here, Sugar’s note came to me by way of an annoyed Jayleen. I unfolded it.
“Are you mad at me?”
I grabbed Jayleen’s pencil off her lap. I guess my menacing aura kept her from yanking it back. “No, you were right. I am both arrogant and menacing,” I wrote down.
I handed it back across. Sugar read it and scrawled a response. “That I know. I meant because of the whole thing with Lawson.”
An entire food discussion was well underway while Sugar and I had our own meeting. Kirkendall was well aware of the silent sidebar conversation taking place on the other side of the group, but she hadn’t said anything yet. It seemed she might have been tiptoeing some after the ugly start for my first real time at her group.
We were running out of room on the paper and our middle man messenger was getting miffed, but that didn’t stop us. “Like you said, it was none of my business,” I wrote, but I hadn’t gotten the incident with Lawson out of my craw. I was still angry about it. The smart thing would have been to send back the note with the one line, but turned out I could be as stupid with a pencil and paper as with my mouth. “But next time you decide to wrap your fingers around some guy’s cock, don’t invite me to come watch.”
I regretted the note the second I saw Sugar’s face reading it. Her bottom lipped trembled. She crumpled it up and held it in her fist. I reached over and ripped a piece of paper off Jayleen’s notepad. This time she grunted in protest.
“Tommy, would you like a notepad?” Kirkendall asked, interrupting the riveting food discussion that was now focused on the evils of gluten.
“Nope, I’m good.” I waited for Kirkendall to focus back on Harold’s food allergy linked with strange behavior theory. Then I scrawled another note. “I can’t be mad at you, Sugar. There is no space in my head or heart to be mad at you . . . ever.” I handed it to Jayleen. Instead of handing it to Sugar, she stood and walked the paper to Dr. Kirkendall. Then she walked back, picked up her chair and placed it down hard next to Mandy. There was just air space between Sugar and me, but she refused to look my way.
“I personally think you should read the note aloud,” Jayleen said sharply.
“Come on, what is this— sixth grade?” I asked.
For some reason, this comment caught the good doctor’s attention. She faced me. “Why do you say that, Thomas?”
“Tommy,” I corrected her this time.
“Tommy, of course. Why do you bring up sixth grade?” She was digging, and I figured, what the hell.
“That was a rule my bitchy sixth grade teacher had for note passing. If you got caught, she’d read it to the whole class.” Sixth grade, when they’d started pumping drugs into me to help me pay attention. It wasn’t my attention that was the problem. I was just bored as hell.
Kirkendall positioned her clipboard as if some good stuff was coming instead of a stupid, meaningless story about me at twelve. “Humiliation? Possibly not the best mode of punishment, but effective, I imagine. So, you had a note of yours read in class, and it embarrassed you?”
She was really digging. It was sort of comical. “Nope, I wasn’t embarrassed, but I did get a three day suspension.” Now, it seemed, everyone, even old, fidgety Pete leaned closer. Dirty laundry from Tommy Jameson. Sugar was still stiff and angry next to me, and I wished to hell I hadn’t sent that damn note.
“Do you mind telling us about it? Sometimes incidents in our childhood leave the deepest footprints.” Kirkendall sat back and waited.
I glanced around at the curious stares, but I couldn’t look at Sugar. She was pissed at me, and I hated that. “I was tossing a note to a girl named Becky, and this little weasel, Bob or Bill, can’t remember his name, intercepted it and carried it up to the teacher.” I looked pointedly at Jayleen. She lifted her chin, obviously standing behind her decision to be a snitch.
“And the teacher read it aloud?” Harold asked.
“Yep. She regretted it more than me. Think she started reading it without realizing what it said, and by the full red blush on her face, it seemed she wanted to pull the wor
ds back in.”
“Don’t suppose you remember what—” Kirkendall began.
“Hey, Becky, after school, let me stick my tongue down your throat.” I laughed. “See, Doc—, Dr. Kirkendall, that’s the exact same face my teacher had after she blurted my note out loud to the class.”
Kirkendall took a deep breath and smiled. “What happened next?” Everyone seemed to be enjoying my story except Mandy, who still seemed irritated about the poor lunch choices. And that’s when it occurred to me that her sharp, bony shoulders and pencil thin legs were probably due to some kind of eating disorder rather than society’s pressure for models and actresses to be skinny. What do you know? Group sessions did reveal shit after all.
“What was your reaction after the teacher read the note?” Kirkendall asked.
I shrugged. “I guess I felt bad for Becky. She looked kind of teary eyed and embarrassed. The teacher sent me to the principal, who called my dad and suspended me for three days.”
“How did your father react?”
My dad was the subject. We were getting into deep shit now, tar-filled territory, quicksand, the crap in my life that had pulled me down. “My dad was more embarrassed than pissed. He’d been in a meeting, and his assistant wrote down the message that Tommy was being suspended for sexual harassment and that someone had to pick him up before the end of the school day. He always cares more about what other people think.”
“Feel free to answer or not,” Kirkendall said. “Did your dad ever punish you physically?”
“What, you mean spanking or a belt? Nah, if he had, he would have hired someone to do it. We just didn’t have that much personal interaction. He was good at playing the mind fuck—” I bowed my head in apology, “messing with my mind though. That night he walked into my room and didn’t say anything, just tossed a bunch of pamphlets for military schools on my bed. Then he walked out.”
“So, he sent you to military school after that?” she asked.
“Not that year. Would have looked pretty weak for a man like Thomas Jameson to not be able to control his preteen son. He waited until I was older and completely out of control to ship me off. Although, it really wasn’t military school. More like boot camp for bad kids.” This shit should have bothered me, but it was ‘water under the bridge’ as they say. I’d already fisted a few walls on this subject. I was over it. And military school had only made me tougher, so I didn’t mind it too much. I had still come out of it with an anger problem, but I was a lot more effective when I threw a punch after my two years in the academy. Even my stuttering was better those years. The last thing you wanted to do was stutter in front of one of those teachers.
“My final question and then I promise we’ll let someone else have the floor.” Dr. Kirkendall stared down at her flowery clipboard as if she was trying to decide whether or not to ask the final question. “Do you think it was sexual harassment?” She stared at me with her dark brown eyes, blinking innocently behind the round lenses of her glasses. I wasn’t completely sure what she was getting at.
“I was twelve. I didn’t think much about anything at that time except figuring out how to get between a girl and her training bra.” Harold got a kick out of that comment. Sugar was still angry and hurt and it was coming off of her in waves. “When I got back to school after the suspension, Becky yanked me into the girls’ bathroom. She let me feel her up while she stuck her tongue in my mouth. So, no, it wasn’t harassment. It was flirting because I knew Becky and I knew what she was like.” This evoked a grunt of disapproval from Jayleen. I continued. “Becky had three older sisters, and they all had a reputation for spreading their legs. Their father was an abusive prick, and I think they were just trying to get attention.”
“So, you took advantage of a girl because her father was abusive?” Kirkendall said.
I stared hard at the doctor. Just like my teacher, she seemed to be wishing she could pull the words back. “For a non-judgmental group session, I seem to be getting a lot of fucking judgment. And deal with the language. I was in speech therapy for stuttering for years, and I can tell you the word fuck is the one word that never gets stuck on my tongue.”
Kirkendall didn’t know shit about me. She thought this digging was opening me, splaying my insides out for all to see, but it had been a kiss for a twelve year old. My first tongue kiss. Nothing more.
Sugar sat stock-still next to me, and I wished to hell I hadn’t come to group. I wished I hadn’t pissed her off with my stupid fucking note. I wished she wasn’t sitting there next to me listening to me tell this stupid damn story.
“I’ve upset you. I apologize.” The tiny gold hoops vibrated as she jotted down a few words under her big silver clip. “Let’s move on to someone else and another topic.” She smiled at Harold. “Harold, how was the visit with your family?” And that was that. She’d stuck me center stage, turned on the spotlight and tossed a few rotten tomatoes at me with her final question. Then she yanked me off stage.
Chapter 5
Not wanting to add fuel to the rumor that I was an arrogant asshole, I stuck it out for the rest of group. Three times, I glanced over at Sugar, and all three times, she ignored me. I got up and left the second Kirkendall excused us. I headed to the kitchen for a drink of water. I needed something for my dry mouth.
It seemed my luck wasn’t changing anytime soon. Dr. Kirkendall and her brightly colored clipboard met on my way out of the kitchen.
“Told you those group sessions were worthless for me.” I tried to slip past her.
“On the contrary, Tommy. That session far surpassed all of my expectations today.”
I looked at her, trying to read more from her expression, but she had on her doctor face. “I’m sorry that Pete started the whole thing on such a negative note. And I’m afraid I ended it on a negative one too. But I do think these sessions will be good for you.”
I nodded, but it was more to end the conversation than to agree with her. “Don’t know if it’ll be good for Pete and Jayleen. I’m not sure how to look less menacing.”
She placed her hand on my arm and leaned closer. “You could try unfurling your fists every once in a while.” Her little gold hoops twinkled at me. “By the way, I gave your note to Sugar.” She walked away.
This place could close in on me fast. I headed outside and across the yard to the bars. It was mid-June, and the summer heat was still wavering between bearable and sticky. The laughable gym in the facility had only a few exercise bikes and four treadmills. Nothing like riding and walking for hours and going nowhere. Weights were not allowed. I could have used some.
I reached the black rubber mats. The afternoon sun was bouncing off of them, making the area beneath the bars and swings hotter than the surrounding air. I yanked off my shirt, against regulations, of course, but then no one liked to come out this far. I reached up and took hold of the bar for pull-ups. I hauled myself up to that bar again and again until my biceps were shaking, my palms burned and sweat rolled down between my shoulder blades. My mind was blank through it all, just me focusing on the pull-ups. Quiet reflection, that was how we were supposed to spend our days at this place, but I hated spending that much quiet time with my thoughts. Reflection and bringing up old shit seemed counterproductive to me.
I hadn’t heard her footsteps behind me. Her voice drifted over my shoulder as I hung there trying to see if I had it in me to pull myself up once more.
“A scorpion tattoo,” she said. “I guess I’ve never seen you shirtless. Nice.”
I dropped down, picked up my shirt and wiped my face with it. Sugar walked over to the swings and stretched out her long legs. She was wearing shorts and yellow high-top tennis shoes. Satiny, tanned skin stretched between the hems of her roughly cut-off shorts and the tops of the shoes.
I pulled on my shirt. It stuck to the sweat on my back and shoulders. I sat on the s
wing next to her and pulled the cigarettes out of my back pocket.
Sugar’s lip tilted at the corner. “Smoking sort of negates the exercise session, don’t you think?” She was still not herself, like she wasn’t convinced she should have come out to talk to me.
I lit my cigarette and peered around the yard. Either it was too hot, or too cold, or too humid, most people found every excuse not to step outside the building. As far as I was concerned, if they’d allow it, I would’ve dragged my pillow outside to sleep. It was far better than inside. I offered her a hit on my cigarette. She shook her head.
“So, you don’t hate me?” she asked. The girl was beautiful and funny and smart and athletic and people gravitated toward her just to be standing closer and yet, somehow, she managed to be insecure.
I looked over at her. She stared down at her yellow shoes. “Not possible, Sugar. No way I could ever hate you.”
She pushed off and swung gently back and forth. “Dr. Kirkendall likes to pry stuff out of everyone, doesn’t she?”
“I was definitely her target today, but I guess that’s my fault for skipping group so much.”
“She tells me the reason I was always sleeping with all my mom’s boyfriends was to get her attention, something I wanted badly. But I think it was more that she was my model for behavior, and so, like mother, like daughter . . .” She put her feet down and twisted the swing chains around twice before letting go. Her incredible legs swung around and she dropped her head back as she spun. I pinched the cigarette between my thumb and forefinger and took a drag on it as I watched her, her hair swirling around in chocolate waves and her smooth white throat exposed to the sunlight.
Sugar stopped the spin with her feet. She pushed the hair from her face. “I don’t get it. Why dredge up all these childhood memories, stuff that I would prefer to keep under the layers of silt? I mean, yeah, so my mom did a crappy job raising me, but it’s done. You can’t erase it, you know?”