by Paula McLain
I wasn’t jealous of Tom, exactly. Or maybe I was. Maybe I was jealous of them both. Although Fawn was obviously happier than she had been before Tom arrived on the scene, I missed the time before, when it was just us; when we would spend our evenings walking the neighborhood barefoot, singing. Now, as soon as dusk fell, the fireflies waking up to begin their hula dance of love, Fawn began her own dance, stepping into clean “date” panties, brushing her hair a billion times, stalking the mirror on pimple patrol, and splashing Love’s Baby Soft behind her knees. I was on my own, trying to get even a few seconds of mirror time so I could tame my duckling hair with water and hair spray and a little luck from the hair gods.
I wanted Fawn to like Tom a little less, but I also understood why that couldn’t happen. For all of Tom’s aloofness, his bad skin, his skinny-as-a-rail boy hips, he had something my ’Teen magazines described without daring to define it: charisma. I found myself drawn to watch him no matter what he was doing, no matter what demeaning thing he was saying to Collin, even against my own good sense. He was clearly earmarked for Fawn and mostly acted as if he didn’t know I existed. But when he did look at me, his eyes, which were a pale yellow-green, a rare and disturbing color, seemed to issue a dare.
I was the one who suggested, finally, that we drive out to Interstate 80 and check out the rest stop Raymond and his crew had been demolishing for months. We’d driven by it once—Raymond, myself, and Fawn, on the way to Davenport on an errand—and it had looked cool, the earth-moving equipment glowing yellow-orange in the rubble, dwarfed by I-beams, steel girders, and mountains of dirt. Fawn seconded the motion and go we did, though later I felt a little guilty and disloyal. Raymond would have had kittens if he’d known we were there, tossing empty beer cans into the shovel of the backhoe he drove every day, clambering up onto the head of the steamroller and daring each other to jump. But it was an amazing place, a postapocalyptic moonscape. Chewed concrete lay in mountainous piles. Unearthed water pipes loomed, backlit, like remnants of an abandoned colony.
I was having such a good time, and had become so pleasantly hazed over by the beer, “warm as pisswater” though it was, that I barely noticed when the pairing off happened. Tom and Fawn tottered off to “explore.” Her idea. Shipman and Claudia went to the van for more beer, but then didn’t come back. Collin and I sat alone for five minutes or more before either of us spoke.
“How’d that rug ever turn out?” he asked finally.
“What?” I shook my head a little, trying to clear the beer fuzz from my brain.
“The rug you were working on in Home Ec. It was a horned owl, with big yellow eyes.”
“I never finished it,” I said. I peered at him through the dark, trying to place him at one of the low tables in Mrs. Forge’s classroom, making a macramé plant hanger, or behind one of the Singer sewing machines. “Were you in that class?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I sat right behind you, but we never talked or anything. I don’t think you talked to anyone, come to think of it. You were pretty shy.”
“I guess I was. I was new, you know.”
“Yeah, that’s always hard. You came when we were still in the cooking section of the class, when we were making haystack cookies. Remember those cookies?”
I did. They were awful—little mounds of coconut covered with condensed milk and melted chocolate bar, all of it congealing on waxed paper. “Refrigerator cookies” Mrs. Forge had called them, “for those days when it’s just too hot to cook.”
“How do you remember this stuff?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “I just do.”
I looked over at Collin, his face a pleasant blob ten feet from me, where he sat up against a tower of orange pylons. He didn’t look away.
“You wore a windbreaker to school,” he said. “It was January. You must have been freezing.”
“I thought I was going to die, it was so cold. I had just moved here from California, and my uncle didn’t take me shopping for a while.”
“Yeah, California. That’s what I heard.”
“Heard where? From who?”
“I don’t know. Around.”
And that’s when something clicked, one abacus bead in my brain coming down against another solidly to deliver this simple math: Collin remembered me, noticed me. He was noticing me now and it felt good, felt like a kind of power. I gazed steadily at Collin in the dark and tried to see him too, to remember and then revise what I had seen before and criticized. He was tragically buttoned-up and sort of helpless, true, but for all that wasn’t bad to look at. When Tom wasn’t around for comparison, Collin didn’t look pudgy in the least. The hair was good: dark brown, soft-looking, curly. His eyes were a warm toffee color, and he had clear skin that flushed easily. All in all, he wasn’t bad, and could even be said to have a Bobby Fisher quality—a little too smart and a little too quiet, maybe, but cute enough.
At that moment, I heard and then saw Fawn and Tom coming toward us in the gloaming. The four of us made our way to the van where Claudia and Shipman lay passed out on the floor in back, Claudia’s shirt twisted in a suspicious way, her skirt bunched up around her panties. Claudia and Shipman? I thought. Really? But then the obvious and immediate answer came to me in Fawn’s voice, in my head: Everything has sex, retard.
On the way home, Collin reached for my hand; his fingertips were dry and warm and steady. Squeezing once, he let his hand relax around mine, and we just sat that way, not looking at each other, not talking. The touch buzzed lightly between us, like a string telephone line running between two windows.
Half an hour later, Tom killed the lights a few hundred yards from Raymond’s mailbox. “Last stop,” he said, then leaned over to kiss Fawn good night. The back of the van was a cavern. I peered into the pale smudge of Collin’s face, which bobbed slightly when I blinked. The closest thing to a boyfriend I’d ever had was Patrick Fettle, and that had begun and ended in an unspectacular way. But somehow I knew that if I wanted Collin as a boyfriend, I could have him. Maybe Fawn’s confidence with boys was starting to rub off on me or maybe, now that I was no longer a hermit, I could read boys’ signals more clearly. I knew that Collin thought I was pretty. I knew that he wanted to kiss me.
“Bye,” I said. “I had fun.”
“Me too.”
I closed my eyes, but nothing happened.
If the world had been a different kind of place and the rules less rigid, less clear, I might have kissed him, might have touched him, even, the way I wanted to be touched. As it was, I had no choice but to head for the door, crawling indelicately on my hands and knees around the still-collapsed Claudia. That’s when Collin reached out for me, his fingers pressing closed around my ankle, circling the skin above my sandal.
“Good night,” he said, and it was sort of sweet that he was scared. He liked me, I could tell, but I wasn’t sure that would be enough. Up front, Fawn and Tom were panting and moaning. How was I supposed to be satisfied with scared and sweet?
“Night,” I said.
I closed the door and stood next to the van, waiting for Tom and Fawn to stop their wrestling. When Fawn finally did get out, her hair was tousled and her face was damp. We stood together, silently watching Tom’s taillights fade up Twenty-sixth Street until they were the size of gumdrops. Fawn exhaled tiredly, pleasantly. It was three a.m.
It wasn’t until we got right in front of Raymond’s house that we noticed a strange car in the driveway. It was a green sedan with some sort of glitter in the paint so that it sparkled a little, even under the low streetlight. We peered into the driver’s side window. It was clean as a whistle with no identifying trash on the floorboards, but there was a single tube of lipstick, like a coppery bullet, lying in the passenger seat.
A woman’s car.
Fawn and I shared a meaningful look and then, without speaking, without so much as a nod to each other, walked with unified purpose around the side of the house, past our own window on the screened porch, and toward Raymond’
s room. When we rounded the corner at the back, bending to a slinking pose, my heart began to thud, a hockey puck knocking around. What would we see? What, God forbid, would happen if Raymond caught us spying on him? What could we possibly say in our defense?
When we got to his window, there was the slimmest crack where the blinds had not been fully drawn. Fawn stood on tiptoe and strained, her belly touching the siding, to peer in. “You’ve got to see this,” she whispered. “He’s doing her in the butt. And he’s huge, like a horse. I’ve never seen such a big dick. Come here,” she urged in a menacing whisper. “Come look.”
I felt a sick thrill. I didn’t want to see Raymond having sex, and I kind of did too.
Nodding, I belly-crawled along the side of the house as Fawn had done. When I was near enough, Fawn slid over to give me the entire peephole. I almost couldn’t open my eyes, but when I did, my breath held, my chest on the verge of collapse, there was Raymond’s bed, neatly made. A lamp was on, but the room was empty.
When my eyes snapped back, Fawn was grinning widely: Gotcha. I had a millisecond to choose whether to get angry at Fawn, and surely be made fun of, or make fun of myself by laughing along with the joke, rolling my eyes at my own gullibility.
There was no choice: I laughed.
KILLING ME SOFTLY
At the corner of Nineteenth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, a parked ice cream truck tinkled random notes, not a song so much as a jumble of snatches from childhood tunes that all sounded alike—“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Hickory Dickory Dock,” “Three Blind Mice”—the same five notes scaling the humid afternoon air, mesmerizing a line of sweaty kids waiting for Fudgsicles and missiles and push-up bars. It was the end of July and hot as hell.
“What’s going on with you and Tom?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Fawn’s face was blank, indecipherable, though I was sure Fawn knew exactly what I meant. For the past week, instead of going to the park at night, we had walked to the nearest package store and waited outside until Fawn spotted someone who looked pliable enough, and then approached him about buying us two bottles of strawberry-flavored Boone’s Farm wine. Armed with the pink bottles, we walked back to Queen of Peace, to the greenhouse, and then, when we were sufficiently drunk, cruised the neighborhood looking for houses with banked lights and no car in the drive, and broke into their garages. So far we had taken nothing much. What was there to take in most garages anyway? A hammer? A socket wrench? But I had to admit I liked the charged feeling I got from knowing we could get caught any minute. It was a heady sensation that, coupled with the Boone’s Farm, made me feel slightly invincible. I was having a good time with Fawn, and didn’t miss the competition for Fawn’s attention that Tom presented, but something had clearly happened to cool their relationship down, and whatever that something was, Fawn wasn’t telling.
“I just meant, you know, that we haven’t seen him for a few days.”
“What’s it to you?”
I shook my head, no reason, dug in my pocket for change. Fifty yards down the street, two boys took turns kicking a volleyball against a parked VW bus. “I hope that’s their car,” I said.
“Pretty stupid to bang up your own car, don’t you think?” Fawn smirked.
The line inched forward.
“So. Tom?” I pressed.
“You’re awfully interested in my social life all of a sudden. Why don’t you worry about your own? How’s little candy-pants Collin? Is he your husband now?” She made a loud smooching noise and hip-bumped me farther up the line.
“Shut up. Collin and I are just friends.”
“All right then, Tom’s just a friend too.”
Later that day, we decided to head over to see Claudia. Actually, it was Fawn’s idea, which made me think that either Claudia was beginning to grow on Fawn, or Fawn was using her as a way to spend even more time with Tom, no matter what she’d just said about their being “friends.” The sky lowered as we walked, growing yellower and more ominous-looking. With a sharp report, it cracked open and we found ourselves in the middle of a downpour. Fawn suggested we make a run for it, and by the time we stood on the rubber mat in front of the Fletchers’ door, we were completely drenched. Fawn rang the bell with the hand not holding her dripping flip-flops. Her hair was plastered in strands to her neck and the back of her shirt; her eyelashes were wet. She looked amazing. I pulled at the legs of my soaked shorts, hoping I looked half as good.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” said Claudia when she opened the door. “My mom would freak if you dripped on the carpet. Wait here and I’ll get you some towels.” She trotted off down a long hallway, where we could hear her calling out for Tom.
“Oh brother,” Fawn said with an exaggerated sigh.
“He does live here, you know. If you didn’t want to see him, why did we come?”
“It’s fine. What do I care?” she said. It was becoming obvious she did care, a lot, but for some reason she couldn’t simply tell me that.
Claudia came back with towels and led us into the kitchen, which was papered with a vivid yellow daisy pattern. In fact, just about everything in the room was yellow, the range and refrigerator and countertop, the tasseled tablecloth and vinyl chairs, even the cabinetry, each piece of which was adorned with lemon-yellow pull knobs.
“How cheery,” Fawn said wryly.
“I know,” Claudia said. “My mother’s insane. She read something in a magazine. Yellow’s supposed to keep you happy all the time. Blue’s supposed to make you calm or sleepy or something. All of our bedrooms are blue. I hate blue.”
“Really?” I asked. “Who hates blue?”
Claudia shrugged. “Call me crazy.”
“Crazy,” said Tom, who was just coming in the door. Collin trailed slightly behind him. When he saw me, Collin smiled, and then hopped casually up on the countertop by the sink, his sneakers bumping lightly against the base cabinet.
The rest of the afternoon went this way: Tom gave Fawn a tour of the house, although as far as I could tell, they never made it past his bedroom. Claudia, Collin, and I headed downstairs to the basement, which had dark wood paneling on all the walls, a TV, stereo, pool table, and an old upright piano. Several pieces of low furniture were covered with an orange plaid. Tangerine curtains hung from the garden-level windows and there were two end tables upon which orange ceramic lamps squatted, fat as pumpkins.
“What’s orange supposed to do?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” said Claudia. “Make you hungry, I think.”
“It’s working then,” said Collin. “I’m starving.”
Claudia went upstairs to get us chips and sodas, and we played cutthroat pool until she had to leave for her piano lesson. “I’m having a birthday party on Saturday night,” she said as she headed out. “A sleepover. You and Fawn should come. It’ll be fun.”
“Great,” I said. “We’ll have to check with my uncle, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.” I tried to keep my voice level as I answered her, but in fact I was thrilled that she’d thought to include us.
“Good. Eight o’clock, then,” Claudia said, and bounded up the stairs.
As soon as we couldn’t hear her anymore, Collin said, “I’ve been looking for you at the park. I thought maybe you were moving back to California or something.”
“No, nothing like that. We’ve just been busy.”
“Yeah, I know how that goes,” he said, though I could tell he didn’t know at all.
“Do you play?” Collin asked. He walked over to the upright piano and straddled the bench familiarly.
“Hmm mm,” I shook my head.
“Lucky,” he said. “I’ve had lessons since I was five, still do. Every Thursday. Same teacher Claudia goes to, Mrs. Ritchie the tyrant.”
“Can you play well?”
“I play all right,” he said, and then proceeded to knock my socks off. He played “Time in a Bottle,” and “American Pie,” and “Morning Has Broken,” all from memory. He p
layed “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and switched the rhythm halfway through, so that it was super-syncopated, and then moved right from there into a meltingly slow version of “Baby I’m-a Want You.”
“You’re really good,” I said when he stopped. “How many songs do you know by heart?”
“I don’t know. Tons of popular stuff, I guess. I have a really good memory for music. I usually only have to listen to something a couple of times before I can play it.”
“Really? That’s amazing. I’d love to do that.”
“You probably already can. Think about it. When you really like a song and play it over and over on the stereo, how many times does it take before you can sing it alone? Just a few, right? Same thing with the piano. If I know the notes, it’s easy to make chords from there. Not so special, really.”
“Teach me something,” I said. “Something easy.”
I sat next to Collin on the bench and let him position my fingers on the keys. He then placed his lightly on top of mine and showed me several chords. On the bench, our knees kissed and stayed that way, the fine hair on his leg tickling me pleasantly. The sensation began to preoccupy me. I wanted it to continue, to change, even, becoming something else, a firmer touching, a wet kiss, but Collin seemed entirely content with where we were. Within ten minutes, I could plink out the first two bars of “Rocket Man,” but he hadn’t so much as held my hand. Meanwhile, Fawn and Tom, just friends, were upstairs in Tom’s room, only a few dozen vertical feet away. So close, in fact, that the Styrofoam-looking ceiling panels over my head vibrated lightly from Tom’s stereo, Seals and Crofts crooning, Hummingbird don’t fly away fly away.
“So why do you hang out with Tom anyway?” I asked, suddenly angry. “I mean, why do you let him kick you around?”