“I just don’t want to see you put what other people think above what you feel about someone,” Fiona’s mother said. “Just because he isn’t part of your school crowd”—Fiona’s mother raised her well-formed eyebrows—“doesn’t mean he’s disposable.”
“Are you hearing the girlfriend part, Mom?” Fiona asked. “Are you hearing the part about how he can’t remember shit anyway?”
“I hear that’s going away,” her mother said. “The memory thing is better.”
“Since when are you the authority on all things James Kennedy?”
“I just think you’d feel better if you saw him,” her mother said.
“But I don’t feel bad,” Fiona said. “It’s not like I’m losing any sleep.” It was true, she slept fine, but when she did, she almost always dreamed about James. Sometimes in the dreams he was flipping burgers, with his hair tied back, but then, when he’d turn around, Fiona would see that something awful had happened to his face. Sometimes in the dreams she was angry at him for showing her his terrible face.
A few days later, she heard James was going to be in the hospital for at least a month, due to the extent of his injuries, but that the memory issue had been mostly resolved. Fiona went home early from school, skipping her last two periods, and baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies.
James was alone in the room when she walked in. James looked like James, but lopsided. She felt an odd stirring inside her, as if she were seeing him for the first time since summer.
He had a thick bandage around his head, with some tufts of hair sticking out the top, though it seemed he had been shaved mostly bald. His right arm was in a full cast, and his left hand was bandaged.
“A hundred and twenty stitches,” James said. “Mostly here,” he said, pointing to his head. “But I even have some on my ass.” He smiled, and his lips, she noticed, were purplish, bruised.
Fiona sat down on the bed and opened her tin of cookies. “Want one?” she asked.
“You have to hold it for me.”
As she sat there, feeding him cookies, she noticed a coat on the back of the door, a woman’s coat. He followed her gaze. “My mom went down the hall,” he said. She was relieved it was not Andrea. She imagined the girl had returned to school, at least for the week.
“You don’t look so comfortable,” James said between mouthfuls. “Like you’d rather be somewhere else.”
“Would you rather I were somewhere else?”
He eyed the empty space of the bed next to where he was lying. She smiled and shook her head.
“You’re crazy.”
“Think how much good it would do me.”
“What about your mom?”
“It’s all right,” James said. “Lock it. They’ll blame me. They know these drugs make me horny as hell.”
Fiona lay down. She’d never heard of painkillers making you horny, but maybe James was just being James. “Don’t let me mess up your pillow there,” she said. She could feel him inching toward her, pressing himself against her.
“You want to know something no one knows?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, and her voice felt thick in her throat.
“I was going to your house when I crashed. Nothing crazy or stalkerish or anything. I just wanted to sit with you. Maybe watch some TV. Then I crashed. Now I know we weren’t meant to be. God, Andrea would kill me if she knew.”
Fiona stared at James in disbelief. “You lie,” she whispered in his ear.
His eyelids fluttered. His jawline was the one part of his face that seemed completely without injury, and she kissed him there. “No fucking way you were coming to my house.”
“I swear,” he said. “On my father’s grave. I thought maybe you missed me a little. We’d smoke a bowl. Sweet and simple.”
“So your sweet, simple desire to see me almost killed you?” she said.
“Yep. I think you’re the only girl I’d kill myself for unintentionally.”
“I’m so flattered,” she said.
When she told her mother she’d been to visit James, her mother gave Fiona one of those pert smiles that made Fiona wonder why she hadn’t pursued a career as a TV actress. Half the time she seemed to be playing one of those single TV moms with just the right combination of coolness and the right amount of mom-ness. She had the bit down so perfect, Fiona almost wanted to puncture the whole thing, prick the latex of her mother’s composure and let the air out.
The next time Fiona went to visit James, Davie Peacock was there. If someone had told Fiona that Davie Peacock had been dead for the last four years and had just been resurrected, the story would have been more plausible to her than the truth, which was that, according to Davie, she had been in two classes with him the year before—gym and Spanish conversation.
“I’d swear I hadn’t seen you since middle school,” Fiona said.
“I guess I don’t have a sterling attendance record,” Davie said. He narrowed his eyes at Fiona, and leaned back in the hospital room’s one chair. James eyed Fiona and then Davie, waiting for Davie to leave, Fiona thought, but Davie stubbornly refused to take the hint. “I guess I’m not bound for Harvard like you, Fiona.”
It was the cliché version of who Fiona was, who she hung with, and she refused to take the bait. “I’m just glad I don’t have Mr. Adorno this year for Spanish,” she said. “How do they hire someone with that kind of a hygiene issue?”
“Must’ve cleaned up for the interview,” Davie said. “Must’ve sprayed some stain remover shit on those pit sewers.”
Fiona stood there for fifteen minutes before Davie finally ambled out, after taking what seemed to Fiona like a deliberately noisy piss in the bathroom. “Guess he didn’t want to leave me alone with you,” Fiona said.
James shifted in the bed. “Andrea’ll be pissed. When I told her you came that last time, she freaked.”
“Why would you even tell her?” It seemed like James was deliberately creating drama, making sure people knew there was something between them. Fiona hadn’t breathed a word of their whatever-it-was to anyone.
“Come sit,” James said, nodding at the corner of the bed, his same routine. “Look,” he said, “I can move my lips.” He puckered at her, and she had to laugh, for all his bandages, his greasy hair, the blackish, greenish bruise that covered a good deal of the right side of his face, he still had a fragile handsomeness that verged on girlishness. She lay on the sliver of the bed and kissed him. “Good decision,” James said.
“Let me know if anything hurts.”
It was a few days later, after track practice, when Fiona was walking to her car, that Sam Greenfield caught up with her.
“Hey, Fi,” he said, and she turned. The whole thing she’d had with Sam sophomore year was over after a couple of months. Sam was athletic and smart, in a book-smart kind of way, but he’d quickly gotten on Fiona’s nerves. She didn’t like the way he seemed to pity her for the smallness of the red carriage house, the smallness of her family unit. Why hadn’t her mother remarried, he wanted to know, as if her single status were an affront, an impediment to his complete acceptance of Fiona as his girlfriend.
“She says she’s going at her own pace. She says she was married for ten years, and she needs at least that much time off for good behavior,” Fiona had explained.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam had asked.
It was hard to say, but Fiona thought she knew. She wasn’t sure if someone like Sam would get it, though, someone who seemed so certain of his own life’s inevitable path. Each year of high school got better, brought more freedom, college would be better still, and then . . . they were assured a sort of success, a certain level of satisfaction. Fiona was sure that her father, when he was young, had been someone like Sam Greenfield, someone strong and sure of himself, because she couldn’t imagine her mother settling for anything else. But then he had died young of stomach cancer, and her mother had learned what being a wife “really meant.” Her mother told her there wer
e “unimaginable responsibilities,” in these situations. It was not that she hadn’t loved Fiona’s father, just that she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to go through that again.
After Sam, Fiona found herself drawn to boys who, she assumed, were her father’s opposite. Flawed boys she couldn’t bring herself to admit to liking. James was the most recent and most extreme example, a guy who was gentle but hopeless, a pothead, who was maybe a little dumb, and who, in any case, had a dirtbag girlfriend. Fiona had to admit it, she liked losers, perhaps because they seemed less likely to have to pay for their good fortune down the road.
Now Sam was trotting along next to her, escorting her to her car. She couldn’t recall the last time they had actually spoken. “Hey, Fi, could I get a ride? Fuckin’ Stan left without me.” Stan Brantley was Sam’s best friend, and Fiona had always thought it was at least in part due to their names, Stan and Sam, which made them seem a natural pair.
The last thing Fiona wanted to do was drive Sam over across Broadway. She was hungry and tired and had a history test. “Fine,” she said, and threw her book bag into the backseat.
“Attagirl,” said Sam.
Fiona pulled up in front of Sam’s house, a large stone home with a circular driveway, over by the river. There were three huge pine trees on one side of the front yard, and a large oak with a swing attached to a thick, horizontal limb, a swing that Sam, the youngest of the Greenfields, had surely neglected for years. Sam’s was the sort of house that avoided being a mansion by some slight trick of modesty—its lack of a third floor, or a more stately lot. Fiona wasn’t sure how rich Sam’s family was. She only knew that inside the house had bustled with Sam and his sisters, one of whom was now away at college, and his mother, who had what Fiona thought was the strangest habit of playing piano for hours on end in the middle of the afternoon.
Fiona put the car in neutral, and waited for Sam to let himself out, but he didn’t. “So,” he started, “there’s something I wanted to ask you.” He was looking at her sideways, his straight blond hair falling over one eye. His teeth were very straight and white. She found him laughably and unconvincingly good-looking.
“There’s this rumor going around, guys on the soccer team are saying—”
“I don’t want to hear about it.” Fiona put her hand up and turned her head away. Some guys who played soccer bought dope from guys like Davie Peacock.
“Seriously, Fi, just, you should know, guys are saying you went up to fucking James Kennedy’s room—”
“Shut up,” she hissed.
“That you’re blowing James Kennedy in his hospital room.”
She never knew where the idea came from. Perhaps she was sitting in too awkward a position to slap him, but a rage seized hold of her, and the primitive urge had been activated before she was able to think, and she’d spat at him. Sam wiped his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “Nice,” he said. “It’s nothing personal, bitch. I just thought you’d want to know.”
Once he was out of the car, Fiona pounded her fists against the steering wheel until they ached. It had been a setup. He’d gone out of his way to get her alone so he could say that. It was a punishment for tarnishing her image. He’d been linked with her in the past, after all, and a guy like Sam was scrupulous when it came to what people thought. If anyone was going to attack her, he’d save face by being first in line.
She should have known it was a mistake to go to the hospital on a Friday afternoon. Davie was just leaving as she pushed through the heavy glass doors. He nodded, a silent greeting. Once she’d walked in, there was no turning back. James’s bandages had been removed from his head, and there was Andrea cutting away at the wisps of hair the emergency room doctors had left when they shaved the areas around the wounds that required his hundred and twenty stitches.
“Hey there,” James said. He smiled, clearly enjoying the moment. “Andrea, you know Fiona?” There was a heavy silence.
“Sure,” Andrea said, “you’re the cookie girl.”
“Not today, unfortunately,” Fiona said. “I just came from track.” She’d showered and changed back into her school clothes—a pair of skinny jeans and an oversized sweatshirt. It wasn’t anything fancy, but she felt self-consciously clean-cut next to Andrea, who was wearing a loose-fitting tee with the neck cut out and leggings with combat boots. Her cleavage showed when she leaned over to cut James’s hair, her breasts hanging familiarly in his face.
“Oh, honey, I’m glad you didn’t bring any, because it’s one bite for him, one for me, and one for my ass.” She laughed at her own joke and then went back to cutting.
“So I guess you had a lot of visitors today,” Fiona started, looking for a way out. “Just saw Davie on my way in.”
“About time he left, my God,” said Andrea. “He cannot take a hint.”
“Well, I guess I can,” Fiona said. “Just wanted to check in.”
“Oh no, I didn’t mean you,” Andrea said. “He’s just so freaking boring, and all he wants to do is play that same freaking Terminal song over and over. That and light up in the bathroom, so of course the nurses are about to put James in lockdown.”
James laughed. “They say I could go into a coma. Davie’s going to turn me into a vegetable-boy.” James opened his mouth and made his eyes go glassy in imitation of a brain-dead patient. It was scarily convincing.
“Stop that.” Andrea swatted him. “That scares the shit out of me.”
At home, Fiona changed into sweats and got into bed. She flipped through a fashion magazine her mother had bought her. The cover girl had thick, light brown bangs. She wondered how she’d look with bangs. She felt like doing something drastic. She wasn’t jealous of Andrea and James. She obviously adored him, while Fiona felt toward James an odd mixture of attraction and disdain. Half the reason she’d gone back to his room was to prove to Davie and Sam that she could. Still, she didn’t feel like she’d quite won.
Her mother brought Chinese in, and the two of them ate distractedly. Her mother needed to go back out to a trunk show she was helping to arrange down on River Terrace. A new, local designer, a friend of her mother’s, had made a line of silk shawls and blouses, filmy earth-tone garments that went over a plain sweater or a tee. “The best thing,” her mother said, pulling a tie-in-the-front brown silk from her bag, “is that you can wear them for the holidays without being too dressed—they go over jeans.”
“Too hippie,” Fiona declared. “I’d like a brighter color.”
“I see what you mean,” her mother said. “A blue or green would be good for the line, but I like this print on you.” She held a muted, transparent green and brown floral up to Fiona’s face. “Maybe you want to come and model, if you’re not doing anything else?”
“All right,” Fiona said. “I guess I’d rather sneak some white wine off you all than sit around here.” River Terrace was down near Sam’s neighborhood, and without exactly telling herself why, Fiona had an itch to go there.
The woman who was hosting the trunk show was no one Fiona knew, a younger woman, with little kids who were supposed to be going to bed but weren’t.
“Hello, marvelous you,” her mother’s friend Liz said and kissed Fiona’s cheek. “I love those little white jeans you girls are wearing these days, but I fear they’d make my ass look a mile wide.” She spun Fiona around to get a look at her.
“They do,” Fiona said. “I mean on everyone. You have to wear a long top.”
“Yes, I see, but still,” Liz said. “I think I’m too old for new things.”
“Well, I like the blouses,” Fiona said, fingering the brown and green one her mother had her “modeling.” “Mom said maybe you’d make some bright ones.”
“Now that might get me into the department stores, love,” Liz said. Then she hurried away, mingling with her guests, her customers.
It was after a couple of glasses of wine that Fiona told her mother she was taking a breather, going out for a short walk. “Don’t be too long,” her
mother said. “I don’t know how much stamina these ladies have.” Fiona went back through the kitchen, but before she left she put her hand around a sharp little paring knife someone had left out when they were cutting fruit for the cheese platter. It was a completely spontaneous act, but she knew the moment she saw the knife exactly what she was going to do.
It was only two blocks east, away from the river, to Sam’s street, and then his house was a half block further. She told herself if the lights were all on, she’d keep walking, but it was a Friday night, and she knew Sam’s parents liked to go into the city.
The yard was dark, and the driveway was empty. Most likely Sam was at some jock party, some kegger at Indian Lake, or some other dubious party spot the soccer players would frequent until the inevitable arrival of the town cops. Then they’d be off to Larry’s Bar, or some other hangout that served underage kids. Fiona had been part of that crowd long enough.
She stood in the yard across from the old oak. It was warm for November, and the ground was soft underfoot. Fiona’s low, pointed heels dug into the dew-dampened grass. The limb the swing hung on was high up on the tree. Someone must have used a long extension ladder to get up there, someone enjoying the project of using the picturesque tree for the picturesque purpose of affixing the rope swing.
She put the knife against the rope, and began to saw back and forth. The rope was old and rotted, and the knife dug in with ease. Sam liked things to look a certain way. She was sure he felt proud, a little heavy with nostalgia, when he walked down that path to his front door and saw the old swing from his childhood still there. Maybe he’d pushed a girl on it, some soccer groupie like Sherry Anderson, some bubbly girl who’d screamed “Ooooh, Sam,” when he’d pushed her too high. She sliced deeper, and deeper, until, finally, with one last slice of the knife the rope gave way, and the heavy knotted end fell to the ground, leaving the unattractive, rough-cut rope dangling from its high, unrelinquishing limb.
Nothing Real Volume 2 Page 2