Nothing Real Volume 3

by Claire Needell

  It wasn’t a geeky thing to do, go see this band. The community center was behind the library, and you’d get busted if you drank there, but everyone smoked in the back of the building, in this little grove of tall pine trees that seemed left over from ancient times, when our town was supposedly some sort of Native American village. People always said the name of our town meant swamp in a Native American language, an explanation for why the soccer field was always under an inch or two of water, no matter what kind of elaborate drainage system the PTA installed in its noble effort to ensure a mud-free season.

  There was one time, though, when some of the teachers got together and invited this hipster-vegan-activist-type speaker to come to the school. This guy had just gotten out of jail for some pseudo-crime he’d supposedly committed ten years before, some sort of aiding and abetting an antigovernment internet secret-stealer guy. Anyway, a group of the younger teachers thought we were all too concerned with the Usual; not so much the sex, drugs, and rock and roll that they’d had their time with, but the selfie-taking social media crap that everybody over the age of forty thinks is melting our brains and causing their offspring to morph into a subhuman species. So they invited this guy to shake things up, and for some reason the administration went along with it. He got up there during an assembly in his ripped-up army jacket with his hair in a ponytail, and a long-ass beard, looking very upstate, and he said that what the name of our town really meant, in whatever Native American language it was supposed to be, was bullshit. That got some of the kids going. The rah-rah types anyway.

  The chaperones at the community center were Joe Perrone and Fred Lester. Joe was the middle school gym teacher, and Fred Lester was the high school lacrosse coach. They ran the social events at the community center, you had to figure, for beer money. Fred was big on telling boys how to tell if your girlfriend was cheating on you. He claimed to have developed something called the “smell test,” but I never had the stomach to listen to the explanation.

  My sister was painting her toenails when I came in to ask how things went. She was wearing her baggy overalls and a tank underneath, no bra. My sister almost always wore this same outfit, to school and wherever else. Since it was cold out, she’d throw on a giant sheepskin coat that she got at the thrift shop. She hated shoes and went barefoot all summer, and in the winter she wore these ridiculous white fur-lined boots without socks. Some girls showed up at school and you could tell they wanted to look like they weren’t trying. Lu actually didn’t try. There were two reasons for this. One was that Lu was insanely beautiful, and the other was that Lu liked to mess with people. Sometimes, when Mom raised her eyebrows at something Lu was wearing, Lu just said, “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” Mom let it go. On some level, you knew Mom agreed with Lu, and when the other mothers said stuff to her, Mom just shrugged and said, “Lu is Lu.”

  “So what do you think about this, Cath?” Lu asked me. “He says ‘no thanks’ when I ask does he get high, but I go smoke anyway, and when I get back we dance, and he holds me really close, but then when we leave, he drops me off and that’s it.” She stopped painting her nails and looked up at me, her chestnut hair spilling over her shoulders, her eyes wide, her face all gentle angles smoothed over with luminous skin. She is dark—dark eyes, dark hair, skin a light tan. She looks almost foreign, while I am blond, of ordinary height, with blue eyes, and a face so typically WASP I’m often mistaken for some other girl.

  “Maybe he’s slow,” I said. “Or likes to make the first move.”

  “I don’t know,” Lu said, shaking her head. “I’ve never met anyone so mysterious.” Mysterious in a guy meant, for Lu, someone who didn’t want to get into her pants.

  But Dean’s resistance didn’t seem to last long. He started calling Lu that next week, and pretty soon they were going everywhere together—and at first Lu seemed happy. She was nice to me, came into my room in the morning and lay down next to me and told me stuff that she and Dean did, not sex stuff, but just where they went to eat, how he liked salad, and wine, not beer, how gentle he was, how polite. Then she told me about something she found troubling. Lu was usually into things other people might find troubling. But she seemed worried, her eyebrows knit together in a V shape, and she had an uncustomary darkness in her eyes.

  It was after they’d been going out a couple months or so. It must have been February, and everyone was sick of snow and wanted it to be spring, except Dean, of course, who was from Chicago, and thought spring should arrive with summer. Lu and Dean had been out with some friends, and then went back to Dean’s house. They were hanging out, halfheartedly playing pool, which Lu is actually pretty good at, when Dean took a book down off the shelf. It was a photograph album.

  “He turned to this page, and pointed at this picture,” Lu told me. “It was of a boy, about fifteen, wearing a navy-blue sweater and a White Sox cap. The kid had his hands in his pockets. You couldn’t really see the face.”

  “This is the kid,” Dean told her, “the kid I shot.”

  Dean told Lu the whole story then. How this kid was his friend. He was a little fucked up, but not much more than anyone else. His parents fought a lot, may have slept in separate rooms. The dad was a tough guy. Ex-cop, and he kept guns in the house. So this kid, Tommy, Dean’s friend, shows up at Dean’s house one day, and he’s got a .22. It’s small and fits in the palm of his hand. Tommy starts messing around, pointing the gun out the window at some crows, at Dean’s cat, at the fishbowl. Then he turns around and smiles, lifts the gun, and points it right at Dean’s head. Dean thinks either it isn’t real or it isn’t loaded. He doesn’t know, because he’s never seen a real gun before. So what does Dean do? Well, Dean’s quick, and he takes karate, and he whacks the kid and wrestles him to the ground and gets the gun, and then chases him down the street back to his house.

  Tommy runs upstairs to his room. He grabs a baseball bat and acts like he’s gonna hit Dean with it. He’s swinging it around, and Dean thinks how the whole thing is too crazy. One minute they’re playing and now the kid is swinging the bat for his head, so Dean takes out the gun and points it at Tommy, and Tommy takes this tremendous swing at Dean’s head and clips him in the jaw, which hurts like hell, and so Dean pulls the trigger, and guess what? It’s a real fucking gun. And it’s loaded.

  “That’s fucked,” I said. “So, it must have been self-defense, right? That and Dean didn’t even know it was real.”

  “Well, it would have been self-defense for Tommy, too, right, since Dean had the gun, so Tommy was acting reasonably when he got the bat out, since he knew damn well it was real and it was loaded. So if Dean had dropped the gun, wouldn’t Tommy have dropped the bat? That’s what the judge said anyway, so they put Dean in juvie for a year. Then his folks moved here. For a fresh start.”

  I was speechless. My sister, my beautiful sister, was dating a murderer. “Have you told anyone else?” I asked her. Lu shook her head.

  “Just you, Cath. Don’t tell Mom, whatever you do.” I swore I wouldn’t. She didn’t even mention my telling Dad, because that went without saying. Dad worked 24/7. He was a biopsychologist—a researcher, not a therapist. Dad did animal research, the kind people get upset about. He was interested in reward systems. He had a theory that all behavior was shaped by rewards, however small. He would often challenge us to describe a single human behavior people engaged in voluntarily for no apparent reward. “Playing golf,” I would always chime, but Dad would just wave me off.

  Needless to say, I was worried about Lu after that. The way Dean told her the story, you could almost understand how the whole thing had happened. The kid Tommy was unpredictable and Dean didn’t believe the gun was real, much less loaded. It was almost as if Tommy had set Dean up for something to happen. But that was what was troublesome about it. How neatly it all tied together. Like maybe something was up.

  Then there was just Dean himself, the way he looked, his unblinking eyes. He was almost as beautiful as Lu, but in a frailer, almost
feminine way. His nose was long and thin. His upper lip a little too full, his chin perfectly chiseled. He looked like a model or an actor. I wondered if what seemed to be wrong with Dean was caused by the trauma of this incident with Tommy, or whether it was the cause of what had happened with Tommy.

  There was something alluring about Dean, though, not only to Lu, but to her whole crowd. I’d see Dean at school, hanging out with the kids who, like Lu, snuck off to smoke in the woods behind the English building and walked around the green barefoot. Dean and Lu were often together in the cafeteria, sharing french fries, and he came over to the house, after school, sometimes staying for dinner. He was surprisingly smart, well read, for a guy who’d done what he’d done. There was one night when I was struggling to get through Macbeth, which we were having a test on the following day. I just couldn’t keep all those Thanes straight, couldn’t tell who was loyal and who wasn’t. “You’re supposed to be confused,” Dean told me. “No one knows who to trust.”

  “Dean is Ms. Bachman’s favorite,” Lu said. “You should see how friendly she is whenever she sees him around school, and all she ever says to me is ‘Where are your shoes?’”

  Dean looked at Lu and shook his head. “It isn’t an unreasonable question,” he said. He sounded almost like Dad then, and not this kid who everyone thought was so intriguing.

  Lu graduated a few months later, in June, and spent that summer working at a little boutique in town. Dad said it was a head shop, but it really wasn’t. They sold leather sandals, these cool woven bags from Thailand, T-shirts, and cheap sundresses some girl in town silk-screened weird designs on—like rabbits with human heads. I liked to stop in and see Lu when I was done at the pool. I was an assistant swim teacher, teaching little kids how to float on their backs, kick with a kickboard, and taking them, one and two at a time, to the bathroom, or the first aid station when they scraped their legs getting in and out of the pool. I had to be at the pool at seven in the morning, but I was finished by one, and then I’d stroll down the hill to meet up with Lu. I’d pick us both up a grilled cheese with bacon at the coffee shop, and a cup of herbal tea, and then I’d walk the block over to Indigo, Lu’s shop. I’d sit with her in the back of the store by the dressing rooms and we’d listen to music. Lu was a Howling Lizard fan, but I didn’t like metal and was always trying to put on what she called easy listening—the Arnold Brothers, and Gotham Players Club.

  I had other friends in town that summer, but mostly I hung with Lu during the afternoons, and then went to bed early because of the swim classes. Lu was leaving for college in Vermont in September, and I was worried about being left alone with Mom and Dad. I couldn’t imagine it, and my throat tightened whenever I thought of her leaving. My best friend, Jill, said maybe it would be good for me, having Lu gone, that I wouldn’t be in her shadow anymore, but I saw it more like being in her light. It wasn’t just that people paid attention to Lu, so I got some of that attention cast my way as well, but that with Lu around, things were simply brighter. Mom and Dad, especially, seemed to sit up and take notice when she was there, whereas when it was only me at the house, they just went about their business. Maybe they were more relaxed when she was out of the house, but I kind of liked the way Lu made them more alert, watchful even. I’d already told Mom and Dad I’d be too busy to help them bring Lu up to school in the fall. It would be the start of my own senior year, after all. But mostly I feared breaking down at the sight of Lu in her dorm room.

  Dean was still in the picture that summer, but since I mostly went to bed early and was gone before Lu got up in the morning, I didn’t see much of him. But then, during a major heat wave in late July, Mom and Dad decided to rent a little bungalow down on the Jersey Shore. The lead swim instructor said it was all right for me to take the week off, since a lot of the kids’ families were doing the same thing, and Lu’s boss closed the shop and headed out to Long Island to get away from the heat. No one was going to the store, anyway. Who wanted to try on clothes or buy earrings, when the temperature was crossing the hundred-degree mark? The house my folks rented had only three bedrooms, but they said yes when Lu asked if Dean could come with us. After all, Lu was headed off to college in a few weeks.

  The house was right on the ocean in a little town called Manasquan. All the houses were almost identical, hardly more than shacks. Ours was one story with one bathroom, and a kitchen with pale-yellow cabinets and trippy green floor tiles. There was a front porch where you could catch an ocean breeze and stare out at the waves and the sand, which seemed to levitate into waves of heat, and a back porch where we watched Dad grill. The house next door had a clothesline, and it was amusing to see our neighbor’s enormous white granny panties fluttering in the breeze.

  The beach right out in front of the house was full of mostly families—little boys with crew cuts running around, throwing footballs with their chain-smoking, crew-cut dads. The people in the house behind us had three boys around my age, or a little younger, all of them brown and strong-armed. Lu drew some stares with her long, silk-screened dresses. Most of the girls dressed more like me, in canvas slip-ons and shorts. There were even some all-out preppy types from Spring Lake, decked out in pink and green and riding their fixed-gear Hampton Classics up and down the boardwalk, then back up to their stately Spring Lake homes. Manasquan, Dad explained, was where he’d always come as a kid, and it was for working people, whereas Spring Lake was for people who played golf. Dad had lately been warming up to my idea that golf was a uniquely perplexing human behavior.

  Dean continued to cultivate an eccentric appearance. He wore army pants cut off at the knee, and a straw Huck Finn hat. For shoes, he wore black old-man loafers. He still had those wide cat eyes, and the amazing chiseled features, but the style of dress he’d adopted made him seem less elegant somehow, less polished. When Lu had first revealed Dean’s past to me, it had made a dark sense. He seemed remote, like a kid with something to hide. But recently Dean struck me as more than a little off. A beautiful boy, but someone best to admire from afar. Of course, Lu didn’t think so. Lu was too close to Dean, at that point, I think, to see anything strange. Or maybe she was just enjoying herself, knowing it would all be over in a short time.

  I spent the first three days floating in the waves, walking with Mom on the beach, and Dad and I even went crabbing early one morning at high tide. Dad knew what he was doing, loading the crab trap with a foul-smelling fish he called bunker, and then lowering the trap down into the inlet. We caught five crabs in the first trap, three of them keepers. I didn’t keep tabs on Lu and Dean. They hung with us a lot during the day, but at night they liked to go out on the beach and drink wine in red plastic cups. There were no bottles allowed on the sand, but it seemed like people could consume limitless amounts of alcohol so long as it was poured into one of those cups. Some nights, I think they slept out there. There was one morning Dean and Lu slept really late, and when they got up, Lu complained of an awful headache. She kept her sunglasses on the whole day. They were the retro mirrored kind, and I found it hard to talk to her when she wore them, always staring back at dual images of myself.

  The third night we were there, I woke up feeling a strange presence in my room. The room was very small, with just the bed and a built-in bureau on one side, with an old, mottled mirror above it. It was very dark, but I could have sworn I heard someone breathing. I sat up. “Who’s there?” I croaked, but the words stuck in my throat. Then the door opened and the room brightened with moonlight, a reflection of something dark, a hood or sleeve, flashed in the mirror. Whoever it was had bolted.

  It could have been some drunk, stumbling into the wrong house late at night, thinking my room was his own, as our house was identical to the houses on either side of us. But something made me feel almost certain it was Dean. When I got up and checked the front door, it was locked, but the door to the back porch was open. I locked it, then went back to my room and locked that door as well. Whoever it had been was gone. If I woke anyone else up,
they would tell me the same thing. I returned to bed with a still-pounding heart.

  The next day, when I got up, it was late, around eleven. Mom and Dad had already gone to the beach, and Lu was out front, reading her book. Dean was at the long dining table in his straw hat and his loafers, reading the New York Times with his feet up on the table. He was chewing his lip like something was worrying him.

  “Did you ever wonder,” Dean asked without looking at me, “why the United States government finds it necessary to build these space labs?”

  It wasn’t a completely crazy question. Only a few weeks before, the president had to apologize to the Australians for a shower of debris that had fallen over the outback when an old space station disintegrated after hitting the earth’s atmosphere. “I guess to study space stuff,” I said, getting myself a mug of coffee. Dean looked up, his wide cat eyes boring into my own, his chiseled jaw shifting back and forth in a grinding motion. He was slightly sunburned on his nose, which seemed like an interruption of the flow of perfect features that made up his face.

  “What stuff would that be?” Dean asked. I decided to play dumb and cocky, kid-sister-like.

  “You know, scientific inquiry. Do you want the Chinese to know something we don’t?”

  Dean folded his newspaper. “I am not sure I know what you mean,” he said, “when you say ‘the Chinese.’” I stared at him blankly. This was like not knowing what you meant when you said “the New York Yankees.”

  “The Chinese government—the state, you know, the scientists behind all these spy satellites. It seems like there’s nothing that gets our governments more worked up at each other than space, and who controls it. I mean who explores it.” I was babbling, and Dean was looking at me with that calm cat stare.

  “Controls space,” Dean said with a chuckle. “Who does control space?” he asked. Then he walked out, onto the porch, as if we’d concluded some important discussion.