Know Not Why: A Novel

by Hannah Johnson

  “Right after you totally punched him in the face? Sure.”

  “It’s pretty complicated,” Cliff mumbles, sheepish.

  “Why the hell do you have pepperspray?” I can’t help asking. This is not exactly crime central.

  “I don’t,” Heather replies. “It’s a sampler bottle of hairspray.”

  “You mean you were gonna attack us with hairspray?” Cliff asks, starting to laugh. “Like, what, make our hair look really good?”

  “Uh, did I give you chortle permission, doof?” Heather demands.

  He stops laughing and stares sadly at the ground.

  She tosses her hair over her shoulder.

  I … don’t really know what to do.

  Arthur’s car pulls into the lot. It’s still running when Kristy jumps out of the passenger’s seat and scurries over to the scene of the crime. “Reddy? What’s going on??”

  “Morning, Kristybee,” Cliff says, massaging his neck awkwardly. “Um. First remember that I love you. This, total act of love. And, uh, I did something kind of stupid.”

  While Cliff gets cracking on that explanation, Heather reaches down and helps me back on my feet. Considering the last time we engaged in physical contact it was while she was puking on me, it makes things kind of weird.

  “Uh,” I say, “thanks, I guess. For … saving me.”

  She shrugs. “I owed you one.”

  “Yeah,” I say, because I can’t quite dispute that. “You did.”

  For a second, I wonder if she’s going to apologize. It’s gone quiet, the kind of quiet that usually preludes some grand proclamation. The sky is just starting to brighten from black to dusky blue. It’d be downright symbolic.

  “See you around,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I agree, “See ya.”

  I watch her walk away, disoriented. Who knew the day would come when her working next door would bring me anything besides anxiety and pain?

  Arthur comes over. “Look at you.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “There’s blood,” he reports.

  “Score,” I say.

  He rummages in his pocket for a few seconds and retrieves—

  “Oh, Artie. You’re handkerchiefing me?”

  “It’s a Kleenex,” he protests.

  “Still.” I grin at him. “You classy gent.”

  He laughs softly as he lifts it to my nose. There’s a flash of pain at the contact, and I wince.

  “Sorry,” he murmurs.

  “S’okay.”

  “And I thought telling your mother about me was going to be the dramatic highlight of your week.”

  “Please, boytoy mine. I live large. And fast. Always.”

  “How ever will I keep up with you?” he deadpans.

  “Ehhh.” I feign contemplation. “For you, I’ll slow down.”

  He smiles, one of those slight quiet smiles that look really good on his mouth. “Much appreciated.”

  “I just got saved from Reddy,” I recount, still feeling pretty dazed, “by Heather Grimsby, Ruiner of my Teenage Existence.”

  “I think she owed you.”

  “That’s what she said,” I reply. As soon as the words come out of my mouth, the world around us turns sparkly and bright. “Hey! Look at that. An accidental ‘that’s what she said.’”

  “I don’t think it counts,” Arthur says, “since the preceding statement wasn’t exactly ridden with innuendo—”

  “Shhhh,” I interrupt, catching his wrist and temporarily ceasing his mission to mop up my blood. (That’s real affection.) “Don’t destroy the pristine, ephemeral beauty of this perfect moment.”

  He shuts up obediently. And rolls his eyes, but it’s in a way where I can tell he finds my shenanigans endearing.

  I am so damn lucky. Standing in a parking lot with my second bloody nose ever seems nothing short of great, as long as he’s right there with his goddamn Kleenex.

  “Hey, Howie?”

  I turn around. Cliff is standing there, looking contrite.

  “You can have the rest of my hot chocolate, if you want.” He holds it out to me.

  Wouldn’t you know, this zany debacle’s been good for something after all.

  “Thanks, buddy,” I say, and get to work gulping it down.

  +

  As far as bloody noses go, mine is pretty unimpressive. It’s not even bleeding anymore, just red and grumpy-looking. I inspect my reflection in the bathroom mirror. What is it about me, unwanted red noses, and this mirror?

  “I got you ice.” I turn to see Kristy standing in the doorway, clutching a ziplock bag of ice cubes.

  “You didn’t have to get me ice.”

  “I wanted to,” she says, handing it to me. “I’m sorry he did that.”

  “I’m not. I earned it. I more than earned it. He probably should have hit me with a moving van.”

  “Nah,” she replies, with a pale imitation of her usual Kristy beam. After a few seconds, she slyly adds, “He’s a nervous driver. I don’t think he’d want to operate a moving van.”

  “Burnnnn.”

  I press the ice pack gingerly against my nose, wincing a little at the sudden sting of the cold.

  This is not lost on Kristy. “Isn’t it a shame sometimes that ice has to be so cold? I sort of wish they could invent hot ice. But that makes no sense, does it? Like, you could probably just use a heating pad or something. Still. You know what else I think would be neat? A reverse microwave, you know, in case you have something that’s too hot and you want it to cool down faster. Because the fridge just doesn’t work very fast! Even the freezer doesn’t. I tried to tell Arthur about this one time, but he said it was scientifically impossible, which I thought was sort of unfair, because—” She stops and bites her lip. “Sorry. I’m rambling.”

  “I like it when you ramble,” I tell her. “Your rambling, milady, has been dearly missed by me.”

  “It’s only been a few days,” she points out.

  “Don’t care. Mine has been an empty life, KQ.”

  She laughs a little, halfheartedly, and doesn’t say anything.

  “I hate me for all the stuff Amber told you,” I say, because I can’t really handle not saying it. “You get that, right?”

  A little hesitantly, she answers, “Reddy did say that you were going to let him hit you.”

  “Yeah,” I say, and feel a flash of gratitude toward ol’ Reddy for not including the part where I also ran away.

  “I know that a lot of the time boys pretend to like girls and care about what they say just so they can sleep with them,” she says, not looking at me. “I do. But it made me really sad to think that you were one of them.”

  “Hey, don’t. That was all – I dunno, denial, and me not being happy about a lot of stuff, and you just seemed like this really great cure.”

  She gives me a sad smile. “I’m not a cure.”

  “Yeah. But you’re nice, and you’re smart, and you’re fun, and you’re sweet. And if I was going to find any girl who would, I dunno, be the right one for me, the one who was going to stop me from feeling like shit all the time or whatever, you would have been just like … it. You know?”

  She doesn’t say anything, but she’s staring really intently at me. Make it count, Jenkins.

  “And so, yeah, I got this job to get laid. Because I’m a guy, and I guess that’s how we stupid bastards think stuff’s gonna get fixed. But my problem wasn’t really just like … oh, I’m horny, better find me a hot mama. Or, well, it was. Kinda. But it’s not like it was just about sex. It was like – an all-consuming horniness. A horniness of the soul.”

  That part gets a laugh out of her. “That’s gross.”

  “It is somewhat gross,” I acknowledge. “It was supposed to be poetic. In a modern, hard-edged kinda way.”

  She eyes me thoughtfully. “Are you still soul-horny?”

  “No,” I report. “My soul’s getting some on a pretty regular basis.”

  She giggles. A Kristy giggle
! All in the world is right.

  “But, you know,” I continue, heartened, “that’s not just Arthur. I mean, obviously there are – er – certain aspects of said horniness that he gets to take care of. But it’s you, too. And Cora. Knowing you guys, all three of you, it’s made my life a lot better. It’s made me a hell of a lot better. And – and if you can’t tell right now, which, I really can’t blame you, well … you’ll be able to soon. I’m getting better. Just in a general, human beingly way.”

  She’s starting to smile.

  “Oh, Howie,” she says. I feel so very, very much like I am on my way to better.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “I think,” Amber says, “I’m gonna go on a date.”

  “Whoa huh what now?”

  We’re sitting on the bleachers at the ice rink, because while exercise is well and good, bleacher-sitting has always been Amber’s and my area of expertise. Meanwhile, Dennis, Emily, and Mitch are out skating it up, along with a handful of small children. While our zany companions are out physically exerting themselves, we split a bag of barbeque potato chips and a thermos of apple cider.

  And Amber drops unexpected bombshells.

  “With Kristy’s boyfriend’s friend,” Amber elaborates. “That John guy.”

  “Uh, okay. Why?”

  “I don’t know.” She grabs the thermos from me and takes a sip. She seems a little embarrassed. “For one thing, I was terrible to Kristy and I feel really bad about it. Maybe this would help to make it up to her, or something.”

  “I can see that,” I admit. “But isn’t it a little … I dunno …”

  Amber watches me expectantly.

  “… loose?”

  “Wow. Thank you.”

  “Not by normal human standards!” I throw in quickly. “Just by you standards. The Amber May—”

  “Ugh, no middle name.”

  “—Clark Standards of Being Hella Proper, they don’t exactly involve going on dates with random scalawags, now do they?”

  “Maybe he’s not a scalawag. Points for word choice, by the way.”

  “Why, thank you. And oh, you know he’s a scalawag. He hangs out with Cliff. That guy did not hesitate to go all fisticuffs on my ass.”

  “Scalawag, fisticuffs – you are on today.”

  “It’s the apple cider. It makes me articulater.”

  “Way more articulater. Also – he did hesitate, right? Wasn’t that the whole thing?”

  “Well, okay, yeah. Maybe he hesitated. But then he full-on beat me up.”

  “Please. You can’t even tell anybody hit you. And he gave you hot chocolate afterwards!”

  “Still,” I mumble.

  “Quit pouting,” she orders, and waves the bag of chips at me. I grab a few. “And – I don’t know, I just think maybe it would be good for me to try something new. This is my year off before I throw myself back into the sweet mad academic hell that is grad school. And I’ve never really done the living thing. I should do that, right?”

  “Um,” I say. I know I should be supportive now that she’s suddenly empowered, but I can’t help it. It’s weird. If Amber starts going on dates, who knows where that will end up? One night stands! Jello shots! Prostitution!

  “I don’t mean like go all crazy.” She gives me this knowing, you-are-ridiculous look. “I mean … Do you know how many books I read in college?”

  “Uh. No?”

  “Five hundred and twenty-four. You know how I know? Because I kept a list.” She sighs. “But it’s not like I was totally Miss Weirdo Pariah Girl.”

  “Pariah Carrey.”

  “Thank you, Oscar Wilde.” I tip my imaginary hat at her. “I did make friends and everything. I went out sometimes. But – I dunno, I never met anybody that I liked as much as you.” In spite of myself, I like the sound of that. It was hard to get left by Amber, to imagine that she was off having this great new life while I was stuck here. It’s nice to know I left a hole.

  “And,” she continues, looking out at the ice, “I never met anybody that I even thought about liking as much as Dennis.”

  The Dennis in question is, at the moment, adjusting Emily’s amorphous lump of a hat for her. They’re both smiling.

  “There was this one guy who was in a bunch of my classes, and he asked me out to coffee a few times,” Amber says. “And I would never go. It seemed pointless. And sort of offensive.”

  “That bastard.”

  “That bastard,” she echoes wanly. Dennis and Emily get back to skating, hand-in-hand. “There’s this story by Edith Wharton.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t make me hit you.”

  “Oh, right, Edith Wharton. Or as I like to call her – EdieWhoa. Yeah. We’re tight.”

  Amber rolls her eyes. “Anyway. It’s about this woman who’s in love with this man her whole life, but it doesn’t really matter, because he never looks at her like that. And after he’s dead, this other man falls in love with her. Of course, it doesn’t go so well. And in the end, she writes the new guy this letter. To explain why they can’t be together, and all that. And there’s this line – ‘It is because Vincent Rendle didn't love me that there is no hope for you. I never had what I wanted, and never, never, never will I stoop to wanting anything else.’ I love that. I am so profoundly that. Never, never, never will I stoop.”

  She’s looking at Dennis and Emily. It feels like she’s not even talking to me.

  “But maybe I should, like – I don’t know. Stoop. Being like this; it’s like I can actually feel it making me into a sucky human being. I was evil to Kristy, who’s never been anything besides nice to me. I’ve been like this bitchy hell-hag of doom to you. I totally wrote Emily off right from the get-go even though, the more I hear, the more she seems like exactly my type of person. I’m twenty-two. I’m not Miss Havisham. I should stoop.”

  “You should try,” I correct. “I’m not saying ho it up all over the place. I’m not even saying let the scalawag come within a foot of you. But maybe you should, like, try just enough to see if it’s worth it.”

  “Yeah.” She smiles. “Check you out. You’re so wise.”

  “I am that.”

  “Making out with boys agrees with you.”

  “Hey,” I say, because Mitch is making his way over to us. “Shhh, shhh, shhh.”

  “Why don’t you tell him?”

  “Because. It’s one thing if I’m telling ladies, but he is a fellow male. It’ll be freaky and awkward.”

  “Oh, it’s Mitch. He won’t care. He cried at I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.”

  “There’s a distinct difference between bromance and romance, lady friend.”

  “He won’t ca-are—”

  “Shut u-up—”

  “I can’t believe you guys aren’t skating!” Mitch exclaims, coming to a stop in front of us. “This is awesome.”

  “We’re kind of having a conversation here, Mitchell,” Amber informs him.

  Apparently he takes this as an invitation, because he hoists himself up onto the bleachers. “Oh yeah? What’re we talkin’ about?”

  “Amber’s date.”

  His eyes get really big. He looks at Amber. “You’re going on a date?”

  “Maybe,” she replies. “Don’t start.”

  “Who with?” he continues, sounding more interested than your average bear.

  “A friend of Kristy’s boyfriend. I haven’t actually met him. I guess it would be like a blind date type of deal.”

  “Oh,” Mitch says. “Cool.”

  She laughs shortly. “We’ll see.”

  It gets quiet. Mitch keeps on staring at Amber.

  “What?” she asks at last. “Do I have something on my face?”

  “Uhhhh,” he says. “Yeah! Some of that orange barbeque chip stuff.” As she starts to lift her hand to her face, he lunges forward. “Oh, hey, no, don’t worry about it, I got it.” He pulls off his mitten, not seeming to care so much as it falls under the bleachers, and brushes his
thumb over the left corner of her mouth.

  I try to ignore the part where I’m like 99% sure she didn’t have anything on her face. It makes things weird. I am retiring from weird.

  Mitch, meanwhile, is being really thorough about the whole touching-the-side-of-her-mouth thing.

  “Okay, man,” I can’t help but say. “I think you got it.”

  “You dropped your mitten,” Amber tells him.

  “Oh.” He actually, honest-to-God shakes his head, like he’s shaking his brain right out of the moment. “No big! I will just – go grab that—”

  This involves having to take his skates off so he can go glove-hunting under the bleachers. Hopefully this will teach him a lesson or two about random compulsions to touch Amber. He stands up, sock-clad, and prepares to set off.

  “It’s freezing, Mitch, don’t wander around without any shoes on,” Amber says.

  “No! I got this. It’s gonna be fine. It’ll be great. It’ll take like two seconds.”

  “Fine,” Amber sighs.

  “Unless,” he adds, “you want me to wear shoes. Then I will. If you want me to.”

  “Um, okay,” she says. “Yes. Wear shoes.”

  “’kay!” He puts on his shoes, gives us one last jaunty grin, salutes, and then embarks on his mission.

  “He’s been acting sort of weird lately, don’t you think?” Amber says.

  I, in the interest of abstaining from weirdness, say nothing.

  +

  “This,” Arthur observes, “is a Halloween gingerbread house kit.”

  It is here, exactly here, that I feel like maybe I shouldn’t have gone along with our newest dissatisfied customer’s “Let me talk to your manager” request.

  “Yeah,” grunts said customer: a middle-aged, somewhat portly gentleman.

  “It’s the end of December.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you only realized that you were dissatisfied with this product now?”

  “So?”

  “You appear to have used it,” Arthur continues, inspecting the empty box.

  “Yeah, it’s at home,” the customer says. “In the trash. But this is the box.”