by Shen, L. J.
“Why? Because I brought you and Melody up? It’s okay to say gross things to her in public, but I can’t point out that you’ve ruined my life by sending me to the same school—the same class, by the way—you hooked up in?” She juts her chin out, standing up.
“Don’t excuse her behavior, Jaime. You invented the Hulk because you wanted to separate Daria from her bad behavior. The truth is, she needs to learn to rein in her anger when she’s upset,” Mel says, and this is going off-track, fast. I scan the Followhills individually, assessing the situation. Bailey’s eyes are glued to her iPad, and she looks like she doesn’t have a care in the world. The kid’s used to this fucked-up dynamic. Daria’s eyes are locked on her mom’s.
“Mother.” Daria plasters an arsenic smile on. “Do we have a problem here?”
Melody sits back and folds her arms over her sensible cardigan.
“Why can’t you be a little more like your sister?”
Daria’s physical reaction to those words suggests she’s been shot. She darts up from her chair, and it falls back from the momentum. Everyone around us snaps their heads to our table. Melody jumps up from her chair, too.
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t.” Daria lifts a finger. Her eyes are shining, but her face is stoic. She shakes her head. “Don’t say you didn’t mean it, Melody, because every fiber of you did. And maybe I should be more like Bailey. But you? You should be more of a mom.”
She turns around and storms away, taking the three stairs to the sidewalk and running to the street. She flings herself toward the boardwalk, bursting into traffic, and when a car brakes and honks at her, she jams her fist on its hood.
“Fuck you! This is Todos Santos. Your daddy will buy you a new one,” she screams.
My mind is telling me to sit this one out and let the shitshow unfold without my intervention. But my legs are assholes and so is my rusty conscience because they carry me down the stairs. Mel warns my back that when Daria’s Hulky, she doesn’t like to be interrupted. I think she needs some tough love and to be grounded until the next decade. She needs to be asked some hard questions. Questions like:
Are you fucking your principal?
Is your foster brother fondling you in the locker room?
Are your friends assholes who run betting rings in an illegal fight club?
What in the actual fuck is Hulky?
At the risk of sounding like a Dr. Phil wannabe, I keep this shit to myself. Jaime and Mel are still ten million times better than my parents. They care. Mel is just scared of her daughter, and Jaime…well, Jaime is a dude.
The light turns red, and I have to wait for cars to pass before I can cross the road. Unlike Daria, I don’t have a good health insurance plan and can’t go around slapping moving vehicles. I spot her sneaking into the dwindling line of the Ferris wheel and buying a ticket. She slips into a seat. My eyes flicker back to the traffic light. When it turns green, I sprint across the road. Since I left my wallet—which Jamie padded with a couple of hundred—at the house, I hop over the fence and slide into her booth a second before she closes the metal bar and locks it. The guy operating the wheel has already pulled the handle, and the wheel starts moving. He shoots me a look and shakes his head. I don’t mean to laugh in his face, but he should thank his lucky stars that Kannon and Camilo are not here with me. We’d have found a way to steal the entire Ferris wheel and sell its parts to travelers.
“What are you doing here?” Daria looks the other way toward the ocean. She is holding the metal bar in a chokehold. The wheel moves slowly, and our cart sways back and forth.
“Shit was getting real, so I decided to split.” I take out my pack of cigarettes, and she knocks it out of my hands, letting it fall to the abyss of tourists underneath us.
Why am I here? Because I recognize that, although she’s a brat, she’s got a case. Daria isn’t seen. Her mother barely talks to her, and when she does, it’s to tell her to stop being horrible. She’s normally left to her own devices, and other than a generic “How’s school?” I’ve never heard her mom ask about her friends or dates or cheer. It’s a vicious cycle because in order to get attention, Skull Eyes keeps on acting up.
You’re only lonely if you’re not there for yourself.
Some pearls of wisdom by the man himself, Dr. Phil.
“Cut the bullshit, Scully. What do you want?”
“A rematch, greasy burger, and your cunt on my face. In that order exactly.”
She scrunches her nose. “You’re disgusting. I can’t believe my parents took your side. We won because we kick ass, even if you guys didn’t look bad.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll meet you at the play-offs, by which time Gus will make the full transition from a dry vagina to the basic pussy he is.”
Now she full-blown laughs, shaking her head. We’re getting farther up, and people and places and palm trees are starting to look smaller. The lights dance across the horizon, and the ocean looks too blue and too infinite not to admire.
“Release the bar,” I tell her, out of nowhere.
“Why?” Her fingers are still curled firmly around it.
“Because I want to see if you trust me not to open the handle.”
She stares at me with the same wild gaze that made me give her the sea glass four years ago. As though I’m the most fascinating creature in the world. I want to pocket that look and save it for the next time the world lets me down. Which should be in the next twenty minutes.
“But I don’t trust you.”
“Let’s rectify that.”
“Thanks, I’m good.”
“Did you hear a question mark in my voice? It wasn’t an offer.”
She turns to me. “Tell me something real about yourself.”
“Like what?” It’s hard not to stare at her lips. She has great lips. She’s always had great lips. And the rest of her body is the kind of stuff that got Edgar Allan Poe and Pablo Neruda into writing poems about chicks. It saddens me that I can half-understand how rich, gorgeous girls like Daria turn out the way they do. Too smug to feel, too bitchy to be tolerated. They are so much yet so little. They have everything, but they earned nothing by themselves. It’s like winning the lottery and expecting to make wise investments on your own without any financial background.
“Why do you cut holes in your shirt?”
“Don’t go for the jackpot before you win the fluffy teddy bear at the fair,” I warn. “Ask me something else.”
She rolls her eyes at me, sighing as though I exasperate her. “What kind of name is Penn?”
“Release the bar, and I’ll tell you.”
“How do I know you won’t open it?”
“You don’t.”
Her face is so close, and I’m starting to realize why people love Ferris wheels. It feels like we’re alone in the universe, isolated. She lets go of the bar, almost in slow motion, and tucks her hands between her bare thighs.
Don’t look at her thighs, bastard. I can practically hear Jaime inside my head.
Why? Her thighs would make great ear warmers, I mentally answer back.
“Close your eyes.”
She does. Just as she did when we were fourteen. I like that she is obedient when we’re alone. I make a mental note not to abuse that power. Daria answers to no one and does whatever the hell she wants—except with me.
“Before drugs made my mom fall down the rabbit hole, she was this poetry chick with nerdy glasses and a library card. She met my dad at church when she was seventeen as a part of some Christian scouts program, and he knocked her up. Then a chain of really shitty things happened all at once. She was involved in a car accident that almost killed her and broke most of the bones in her body. My dad decided to leave with his mother and start a Christian cult. Mom got hooked on painkillers, then illegal drugs. I used to read poems to her when she was in the hospital, going in and out of there for one of her trillion surgeries. Anyway, her favorite poets are—were,” I correct myself, remembering
she is no longer alive, “Sylvia Plath and Alexander Penn. So she named us after them.”
“Who’s Alexander Penn?” Her cheeks flush.
She doesn’t want me to think she’s stupid. We are reaching the highest point.
“He was this Israeli-Russian communist poet dude. Off the rails certifiable. He was desperately in love with this chick named Bella. She rejected him, so he tried to commit suicide and shot himself. Failed. She was so enchanted by his love and devotion, she decided to marry him.”
“Just like Van Gogh. Only this girl said yes,” Daria muses.
“Yeah.”
“Kinda gross,” she says.
“Yeah.” I chuckle.
“Some fairy tales are screwed up,” she adds. She can’t shut up. She’s nervous. Her eyes are still closed.
“All the good ones are, Skull Eyes,” I say softly.
I unlatch the metal bar from its hook. She hears the click and sucks in a breath.
“What are you doing?” Her voice shudders.
“Tell me what’s going on between you and Prichard.” My voice hardens around the vowels.
Her eyes are still closed, not because she is still following my directions, but because she is freaking out and would probably faint if she looks down.
“You’re insane!” She squeezes her eyes shut.
“You bangin’ the old man?” I ignore her psychological assessment.
“You said I could trust you!”
“No, I didn’t. I asked if you did. For the record, you shouldn’t trust me. Our loyalties lie with different schools and people. But I answered your question, so it’s only fair you answer mine.”
“Dream on, Scully.”
I push the metal bar open. She can feel the breeze. I hold on to it, knowing I won’t be able to pull it back if I don’t, and that means I’m squatting, my ass in the air.
“Fine! Okay! Fine. No. We’re not sleeping together.”
I yawn loudly, so she can hear, dangling the handle from side to side.
“Not buying it.”
“We’re not!” she screams desperately. People from other carts can probably hear her and see this. Giving a damn, however, is not on my agenda.
“Then what are you doing together? Playing Caribbean poker?”
“That’s two questions,” she bargains.
“Since when are you good at math, Followhill?”
I know Daria would have a lot of fun rubbing the truth in my face. She knows I would never rat her out to her parents. Not only because she holds my residence a secret, but I’m just not that type of asshole.
“What do you care, anyway? Gus said you have a girlfriend.”
“Gus is an idiot.”
“It doesn’t make him a liar.”
True, and I notice she doesn’t ask me again about the girlfriend situation. Which is good, because she won’t like the answer, and I’m not done with her ass, literally and figuratively. I close the metal bar. She hears the click and lets out a breath. She opens her eyes and stares at me. It’s cool to see her like that. Vulnerable. Scared. She’s not the head cheerleader right now, and I’m not the football captain of the rival team. We’re just two teenagers who never stood a chance to be friends in this world, so we became what was expected of us. Enemies.
We reach the top.
“Ever been kissed on a Ferris wheel?” I ask.
“No.”
All your firsts, baby.
I take that as an invitation, pressing my mouth to hers, RSVPing that shit without thinking about her parents down below, the complications of it, or the consequences. Without thinking this is taboo, and wrong, and twisted, and can surely come back to bite me in the ass.
She opens her mouth, groans into mine, and we kiss, and we kiss, and we kiss until nothing else exists. My hand slips to her neck and squeezes it, and when she protests in the form of biting my lip, I laugh and lick her entire fucking face. Then she laughs, too.
“I thought you said you didn’t want all my firsts.”
“My mind changes according to my mood and how hot you look at that moment.”
“How very stupid teenage jock of you,” she murmurs against my lips.
“How very indeed.”
Our cart is an invisible cloak until it starts to lower. Her parents will be able to make out our faces if they’re standing underneath the wheel, waiting for us, which I’m sure they are because whether she realizes it—they give a shit.
We pull away together. Everything about us is a power game, and no one wants to be the side that got rejected.
My dick is hard and so is her expression. I think she’s regretting it. I should be regretting it, too. Not because of Jaime. Fuck Jaime. I never asked to crash at their house. But because of Adriana and Via.
But Via isn’t here for me to feel guilty about or sorry to.
Via left me, just like the rest.
“I still don’t like you.” Her whisper caresses my face.
“Me neither,” I say. About her. About me.
We spend the rest of the ride in silence. When we get out of the cart, the operator is tapping his foot, waiting for his money. Jaime slaps a twenty into his open palm, waving at us to join them.
“Keep the change. You two good?” He looks back and forth between us.
Daria says no.
I say yes.
We say it at the same time.
We look each other, and she rolls her eyes. I smile because it’s hard not to.
Melody complains about our level of cooperation when it comes to family functions.
On the drive home, Daria eats the entire apple I threw at her and tosses the core on my lap.
“Checkmate.”
It was love at first sight
Hate at second
Lust at third
But four is my lucky number
So mine your ass shall be
Time moves differently when you live a lie.
You swim against the stream, and every second feels like three hours and some change.
I park four blocks from school at buttfuck o’clock, an hour before practice starts. Mornings are for strength training, and afternoons are the real deal on the field.
Not only do I not live with Rhett anymore and dread the day he will get an unexpected visit or phone call from a school official, but I also have a brand-new Prius. The first time I have something semi-nice, and naturally, I don’t get to flaunt it.
To make sure my friends don’t ask Rhett about me when they see him at the gas station or supermarket, I tell them that he’s losing his mind.
“Early dementia,” I explain to anyone willing to listen. “The drugs really did a number on him.”
Nobody questions it. But to give my alibi an extra shine, I have Adriana—Addy, my girlfriend—tell everyone she spotted Rhett arguing heatedly with a jukebox at Lenny’s, the diner where she works.
This is the first time I’ll see my team since Friday’s game. I needed the buffer time to digest what happened, and when the players begin to trickle into our chipped-wall locker room, I’m already there, hands on hips, with one leg flung over a bench. Our rusty lockers have so much graffiti, the color lies somewhere between gray and purple. The place always smells of dust, piss, and poverty.
Josh, Malcolm, Camilo, Kannon, Nelson, and the rest arrive before Coach Higgins. The fact he ain’t here yet gives me pause. Coach is never late. Well, other than the time his wife went into labor. He was ten minutes late that day as he yelled at her on the phone. “Well, Meredith, it’s our first baby. You’re not gonna have her in the next hour. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
On the same note, I don’t know how his balls are still intact.
I close the door behind them and lean over the wall, crossing my arms.
“Care to explain the fuckery that was Friday night?”
They all stare at the ground. Shit doesn’t make any sense, and I’ve been trying to put it together all weekend. I know in my bones that my
teammates are savages. All Saints is not a bad team, but they usually get ahead because enough money is thrown into their shit like a mid-ranked NFL team. We have the talent, the motivation, the hunger.
“Cold feet,” Kannon spits out, looking around him for moral support. He lands on the bench with a thud, tugging at the beanie that secures his hair and letting it fall to his shoulders.
“All the trash-talking and the pranks just got to us. It was the first game of the season and on their home field. The bleachers were all blue. It was just too much,” he explains.
“Other teams will always try messing with our heads.” I rub the back of my neck. “We can’t let that shit get to us.”
“Why?” Josh sneers. “Because you have a scholarship to a D1 college lined up and we all need to fall into place and make you look good? Shit happens. You missed the after-game hangout. Is that how you’re gonna be every time we don’t meet your majestic expectations?”
I stare at him, trying to keep my fists to myself. Josh is a linebacker. He is talented but with a fuse shorter than a hamster’s dick. Possibly even Camilo’s. Twice, he got into fights with players from the opposite team last year, and one of them ended with both players rolling under the bus that was supposed to take us home, kicking and screaming. I know he frequents the snake pit, and that he’s fought Vaughn a few times. I also know his dad doesn’t want him to go to college. He’s got an auto shop business to take over, so he ain’t going anywhere. He was born in this neighborhood, and he’ll die here, too. Senior year is his last chance before he kisses the football dream goodbye.
“It’s not about me.” I bare my teeth, feeling white-hot anger climbing up my throat. Although, I know part of it is. And so what if I want us to succeed? Every single motherfucker on this team will benefit if we win the league. There’re enough scholarships to go around, especially when you’re from my zip code. Just because Josh is too much of a pussy to stand up to his family and say no doesn’t mean we need to look like shit.
“Leave it.” Kannon stands, putting his hand on my shoulder. “We’ll do better next time.”
I shake him off, stepping toward Josh so we’re nose to nose.