“I think Daisy took control of the situation. I think that’s what the parents can’t stand. So she was sexy on-screen . . .”
“Sexy? You call that sexy?” Jonas said. “I lost my boner watching that thing.”
“You lost it fifty times?” James said.
Jonas smacked him upside the head, but gently.
“You know what I mean,” Davis said, looking from one boy to the other. “She did what people used to do in private in a way that got really fucking public.”
“With a baseball bat?” said Bledsoe. “People do that?”
“You know what I mean,” said Davis. “And what’s the shame in that? I mean if everyone suddenly goes public . . .”
“My mom said something like that in the cab on the way back from my lawyer’s,” Jake said.
“You got a lawyer?” said Jonas. He nodded his head in approval. “That’s cool, dude.”
Davis said, “That’s the future.”
“Kids having lawyers?” said Jonas.
“No, being public. Being out in the open. The whole world knowing. So if everyone does it, will anyone care? I mean, a couple of weeks later, do we even care?”
“My mom cares,” said Henry. “Colleges care.”
“I care,” said Jake.
“My dad says Daisy will never get a job now,” Jonas said. “And my mom says she’ll never get married.”
“Look at Monica Lewinsky,” said Jonas.
“Look at what?” said James.
“She never got married and it wasn’t even this bad,” Jonas said. “That’s what my mom says. Plus, she got really fat.”
No one said anything.
“You know what I mean,” said Davis, although they didn’t really. They didn’t seem to, that is. Jake knew he didn’t totally get it himself.
“I mean, if you take away the disgrace factor,” said Davis, clearly getting exasperated, “won’t all the girls be Daisies?”
“Let’s hope so,” Jonas said.
Everybody laughed. Jake did, too.
On Friday, Rachel Potter asked Jake out. Rachel Potter was one of the hottest girls in his grade and one of the most popular. She had all this great curly blond hair. She came up behind Jake as he was crossing campus on his way to the gym.
“Hey, Jake,” said Rachel, her hair singing in a cloud above her shoulders, like each spiral was a voice in a chorus. She had angel hair, Rachel, and she was wearing a little flouncy blue miniskirt, a filmy white blouse, boots on bare legs. She couldn’t have been hipper.
He was surprised she knew his name. Except now everyone did. So he wasn’t. He was formerly surprised in the moment, not now.
“Hey, Rachel,” said Jake.
She walked alongside him.
“It really sucked what Daisy did to you,” she said. She smiled at him as they walked down the brick path across the grass.
“Yeah, well,” said Jake. He wasn’t sure if Daisy actually did it to him or he to her or Daisy to herself, but he liked Rachel’s spin.
“I mean, you didn’t ask for it, did you?” Rachel said. She kind of leaned into him when she asked the question, and he noticed that her eyes were very, very blue. Almost as if there were holes in her head and he was seeing the sky behind her. Or mirrors, mirrors at two intersecting forty-five-degree angles reflecting the blue above. Like her eyes were a light box.
“Ask her for what?” said Jake. “The email?”
“To dance for you like that,” said Rachel.
“No,” said Jake. “I didn’t ask for it.”
“But did you like it?” said Rachel.
Did he like it? This was never a question anyone had asked him before. He’d been surprised by it, he’d been shocked by it, he’d been excited by it, when he’d first seen it; it felt like icy water, really icy water, with actual shards of ice in it, had been coursing through his veins, so cold and spiky. He’d gotten hard. He’d gotten proud. He’d been appalled, scared; he’d wanted to show off.
“I don’t know,” said Jake.
“I like to dance,” said Rachel. She looked him in the eyes when she said that.
Jake’s cheeks flushed hot.
“You’re so cute, Jake,” said Rachel. “You’re blushing.”
“I am not,” said Jake, but he was. He could feel the rising heat.
“Okay,” said Rachel, “you’re not,” but she was smiling then. Smiling in a teasing way, gentle, not mean, inviting.
“Text me if you want to hang out sometime,” she said.
“Okay,” said Jake.
And then she said, “I have to go to Latin,” and she veered off down another path.
The weekend he spent at home doing homework. Catching up on studying for his exams. His parents wouldn’t let him out of the house. There was only one more week before finals. Jake was glad for the work. It kept his mind off everything except the sheer panic of trying to master all the stuff he’d missed, plus whatever he hadn’t understood from before. His mom had made his first shrink appointment. It was for Wednesday after school, and his mom, looking up from her computer, had said that maybe he might enjoy it. She’d said she herself had liked going to a shrink, which she did back in the day, before she’d married his father. She said Jake’s going might inspire her to go again, too. She said all of this to be encouraging, obviously.
“I don’t want him to think of it as punitive,” Jake heard her whisper to his father, who didn’t seem to care if Jake saw it as punitive or not. His dad was too preoccupied with work. With getting back in. He spent most of the weekend on the phone. On email. He was making his case through back roads or something. Something smart and canny and strategic. Something dadlike.
They parked Coco in front of the TV all weekend. They anesthetized her. His mom even let Coco play video games for hours on her laptop; that is, when his mom wasn’t on it herself. No one even made a motion to take Coco to the park. Jake wouldn’t have been surprised if they dosed her juice with Benadryl. They let her skip African dance and ballet; they seemed to forget about it. It wasn’t even clear if anyone ever made her take a bath. It’s almost like it’s just us again, Jake thought, and Coco is a boarder.
On Monday he saw Audrey down the hall, the back of her, that tiny butt, those tight black jeans, those magical gold slippers. He started to walk faster to catch up with her, when he saw Luke turn the corner. Audrey took one look at Luke and turned the other way. “C’mon, Aud,” said Luke. He started going after her. Jake hadn’t seen Luke yet; he was afraid to see Luke, and he didn’t want Luke to see him. “Audrey!” he heard Luke call after her. So Jake hung back in the hallway, taking a step or two in reverse when Rachel Potter caught his elbow with her hand.
“You’re going the wrong way, Jake,” she said. She slid her hand down his arm and crooked her elbow in the hook of his elbow. “You’ve got math now, right?”
“How do you know?” said Jake.
“C’mon, I’ll escort you,” she said. She started walking him forward. “I looked up your schedule online.”
“Why did you do that?” he said.
“Because I like you,” she said. Those clear blue eyes again. Depthless. That blond curly hair, tied back in a knot at the base of her neck. She liked him?
As they walked down the hall, Jake saw McHenry coming toward them.
“Fuck you,” McHenry said to Jake. It was the first time the two boys had seen each other. “You are a total fucking asshole.”
Jake stopped in his tracks for a second. He hated McHenry.
McHenry took a step in closer to Jake. His breath smelled bad. Like tobacco and coffee. He got up in his face. “You should drop out of school, Jacoby, I’m telling you. We could have gone to jail because of you. You should fucking drop out.”
Jake could feel Rachel’s fingers tighten around his arm.
“I should fuck you up,” said McHenry.
A crowd was beginning to gather. Jake didn’t know whether to flee or fight. He just stood there dumbly, breathing heavily. He
wondered if he was having a heart attack or a stroke. A seizure.
“Do you assholes want to get expelled?” whispered James. He sailed right past them. “You’ll get everyone in trouble.”
“C’mon, Jake,” said Rachel. She tugged Jake away, McHenry hissing after him. “You can run but you can’t hide,” McHenry said.
All through math class Jake could not listen to a word the teacher said; his cheeks burned and he could hear his own blood flowing so loudly through his ears there wasn’t room for words or numbers or sounds. When class let out, he decided he’d go off campus for lunch. He decided he’d go to the nurse and call in sick. Anything to get out of there. He let the rest of the class stream out so he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone as he made his getaway. But Rachel was standing in the hall, waiting for him.
“C’mon,” she said.
They went outside and into the woods.
Wednesday he had his first shrink session. The guy didn’t have a beard, which was a surprise. He was younger than Jake’s parents, Greekish—that is, from here but with a Greek last name. He had an open collar and a sport coat. His skin was darker than Jake’s but still white. He was a good-looking guy, with a strong nose. Silvery sideburns. Although Jake arrived by himself; his mom was waiting for him in the waiting room to pick him up when the forty-five-minute hour was over, like he was a tiny kid or terminally ill or just a prisoner. Like he was a little pet goat.
Friday, after school, Jake finally saw Audrey. That is, he spoke to her.
He’d stayed late in the library so he could avoid people. He was supposedly studying, but his attention consistently wandered off. He kept thinking about dinosaurs. His mind was filled with dinosaurs. Just like when he was little. For some reason he kept thinking about the stegosaurus with a brain the size of a meatball. How could something with so large a body have such a tiny head? How could its plates not have been attached to its bones? In what direction had they truly pointed?
It was impossible to empty his mind enough to study. When Jake tried, it quickly filled with other, more awful stuff. How he felt. What it was like at home. The way his parents now seemed to him like strangers. Dishonor! Ignominy! Lonesomeness! The overriding desire to blame everyone else for his own conduct. The weird thrill he got at odd moments when he felt he was actually getting over. Celebrity! Notoriety! Infamy! Did he even want to go on this way? Being this kind of guy, the kind of guy that did the things he’d done?
He’d rather be a boy. A boy who thought about dinosaurs. It was about six when he looked up at the clock and realized that he’d gotten nothing accomplished. Exam week started Monday. Oh well. Maybe he’d just flunk out.
He decided to grab his books and make his way home. Maybe he’d get off the subway a couple of stops later and get a bagel on Broadway. H&H had the best bagels and they were open twenty-four hours, and often when you bought one, it was still warm. Jake could buy a cinnamon-raisin bagel and a salt. If they were warm, he wouldn’t even need cream cheese, and he could take a bite first out of one flavor and then alternate it with the other, which is what he liked, the saltiness interchanged with the sweet. He walked out of the library and into the bright, cool evening. The sun probably wouldn’t set until somewhere around eight o’clock. He could eat bagels and then go to Riverside Park, jump in the Hudson and drown.
She was sitting outside the library. Audrey. The building was surrounded by mown grass, thick and verdant, like a deep shag pile. All over campus were the flowery accents of scattered pink marble benches. Audrey sat alone on one, her back to him. He had the instinct to run back into the building and so he turned on his heels, but when he faced that freestanding glass library, glowing as if it were set ablaze with books, all that intellectual heat seemed to catapult him back in her direction. In front of Audrey, in the distance, was the cavernous shellacked airplane hangar they called a gym. He would pretend he was walking to basketball practice, if she asked him.
Audrey was smoking a cigarette, even though she was on school property, and she was sitting by herself. On a marble bench donated by some Class-of-Something, or the parents of a kid who died in a traffic accident or in a war. The bench was so pretty, and so was Audrey; she looked like a Chinese character from the back, perched upon it that way, the slim lines of her sleek black hair, her all-black outfit, the black jeans and the tight black T-shirt, all precise little brush strokes. And then there were those gold slippers, the smoky gray veil of her cigarette smoke. The red ember. Like watercolor.
“Hey, Audrey,” Jake said.
She turned her head up and to the right to see him.
“S’up, Jake,” she said, squinting into the light.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” he said.
“A free country,” she said. She turned back to look in the same direction she’d been looking in before he came and disturbed her.
Jake sat down next to her. He dropped his backpack down next to his feet. He stared at the tops of his sneakers. He looked over at her knees, her thighs: even as narrow as they were, they fanned out a little pressed against the marble. Jake wanted more than anything to bury his face in her lap.
Instead he raised his gaze. She was so gorgeous, in a boylike way, her eyes, her nose, her beautiful mouth so totally, elegantly balanced. Her jawline exhibited as a precise right angle, and that inky black hair curved under it. Strong, muscular, graceful, lithe. He realized then, for the first time, that the haircut was asymmetrical. Was that new? Or had it always been that way? It curved longer on the right side. On purpose. Audrey was asymmetrical on purpose. She was perfect but tweaked, which made her even more perfect, Jake thought.
She inhaled again, then tipped her neck back, exposing her long, golden throat, and exhaled up into the sky. So the smoke would not get into his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” said Jake.
“Why are you apologizing to me?” she said. “That’s kind of funny.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Well, it’s Daisy’s life you destroyed, not mine,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I didn’t ask her to do it or to send it to me.”
“Who cares?” she said. “We don’t ask for a lot of things . . .”
There was silence for a while. His mind reeled; he didn’t know how to express himself or how to reach her. He searched for any tool he could use.
“I didn’t deal with it very well,” said Jake, slowly, he hoped plainly. “I know that it was . . . it was . . . it was unchivalrous of me.”
“Unchivalrous?” said Audrey. It was almost as if she hooted a little at the word—her word, he thought—except she didn’t. “Unchivalrous? An understatement,” she said. She took a last drag and dropped the cigarette into the thick, green grass and ground it out with her foot. Then she picked up the butt and put it into the pocket of her black sweatshirt. She was shivering, but it wasn’t cold and she didn’t put the sweatshirt on. Instead, she crossed her legs in a half-lotus up on the bench.
She looked Jake in the eye. Hers were inky black and she’d lined them with black liner. Lashes, eyeliner, iris—all the same color. The skin on her cheeks shimmered gold, like she’d used that body glitter some girls use, although clearly she hadn’t, and her lips were pale and she’d chewed her lipstick off; they were chapped even in May. Her teeth seemed to chatter a little behind them.
“You’re cold,” said Jake. He picked up her sweatshirt off the ground and offered it to her. It was seventy degrees out.
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a girl?” said Audrey, legs crossed, teeth chattering. Ignoring his outstretched hand.
“Yeah,” said Jake. “I know. The double standard, you mean?” He brought her sweatshirt into his lap. It was soft. He petted it like a small animal.
Audrey reached down into her bag. It was black suede and had long black fringes with black beads threaded on them. It looked vintage—whatever that meant. Like she’d either spent a lot of money on it or found it in a shop
in Brooklyn. She snaked her golden arm into the bag and brought out a pack of Marlboros. She opened it and shook out a cigarette and a lighter. She pressed down on the little pedal of the lighter and lit up. She inhaled deeply, and it was as if her body were a balloon and the smoke lifted her. Like helium, it raised her to her feet. With her standing, her T-shirt rose, and he saw the gold ring piercing her navel. It winked at him for a second, before she exhaled and the T-shirt came back down. Audrey stared off at a stand of trees.
“You are just an idiot boy,” she said. “You are all just idiot boys. Someday I’ll be old and ugly and nobody will want to fuck me and I won’t have to deal with you any longer. I am really looking forward to that,” she said.
Then she took back her sweatshirt and tied it around her tiny waist, like the sleeves were a black velvet ribbon and Audrey herself was a package, a precious little gift. She slung that cool bag over her shoulder and she started walking. She started walking away from Jake and all the idiot boys, walking away from the prison of her youth and beauty and into the hard-fought-for loneliness of her future. Audrey walked away from Jake, down the path toward the stone gates of the school, and there was nothing he could do to stop her. Or if there was, he was clueless.
Jake didn’t talk about any of that with the shrink on Wednesday. He’d spent the morning taking his Chem final, and he pretty much talked about how hard it was and how scared he’d been but at the end of the day he was feeling pretty confident, “bizarrely confident” were the words he used with the shrink. He felt like maybe he’d aced it. His dad had been a whiz at chemistry; his dad had almost majored in chemistry, and maybe that is why Jake was so good at it himself. He was like his dad that way; maybe it was in his genes.
“Do you think you are like your father?” said the shrink. He was wearing a blue tie that day and no sport coat. The tie was really blue and shiny and it kind of reminded Jake of Rachel’s eyes, but he didn’t talk about that, either.
“No, not much,” said Jake.
“Not much how?” said the shrink.
“Well, I’m not much of a runner, and my dad is a great runner, a long-distance runner. He’s also kind of like this genius. He’s got a million degrees and his dad was a post office worker and my dad was the first in his family to graduate from high school, much less college . . .” Here Jake’s voice ran out.
This Beautiful Life Page 14