Nothing Real Volume 3

by Claire Needell

  That night, I thought I heard a tapping on my window, but when I got up to look, there was no one there. I walked around the bungalow, just as I had the previous night, and checked both doors, which were locked, and even peeked into Lu’s room. Lu was there sleeping, but Dean was gone.

  Maybe he had tapped on the window because he had gotten locked out. I decided to be rational about the whole thing and unlocked the door to the back porch, and then went back to sleep. Fortunately, since I was still tired from the night before, I fell right asleep.

  The next day was the hottest day yet. The breeze was coming from the west, out over the inlet, bringing with it only biting sand flies and dragonflies and no relief from the heat. We were all getting ready to head out to the beach, and no one had mentioned Dean. I wasn’t sure Lu even knew where he was, or whether he had ever come back the night before. Then the back door opened, and Dean came in. He was, finally, without his hat and loafers. He was bare-chested, wearing only the army shorts. Sweat dampened his hair so it appeared pasted against his forehead. He waved meekly and went to get a cup of coffee. When he turned to look at us, I thought his pupils were dilated. Lu, I was certain, also saw, since she immediately took a step closer to me. Dad was reading the paper and Mom was out front, getting the beach chairs together. I had always thought Dean was a straight arrow, but clearly, he was on something.

  For a minute, Dean just stood there staring at us, and we stared back at him. Lu, to my surprise, didn’t go to him, didn’t offer to make him breakfast or anything. When he broke the silence, it wasn’t with anything I’d expected, like an explanation for where he’d been all night or any kind of apology. He licked his lips before he spoke. Then he spoke, and I remember how he lifted his chin a bit, like he was giving some speech, or a presentation in front of a class. “I know the answer,” he said, with the coffee mug in hand, nodding at me and Lu, “to your father’s famous question.” He stood there looking at us. Then he cleared his throat, the moment going on one beat too long. “It’s remorse,” he said. “There’s no reward in remorse.” Dad looked up. Surely, he knew Dean was part of this game.

  Dad didn’t miss a beat. “Alleviation of guilt, forgiveness. Absolution. Huge reward in that. A whole system built on this called, I think, Christianity.” Dad was being smug.

  “No,” said Dean. “You don’t understand.” He walked around in a tight little circle. “I am talking about the mortal sins.”

  This town was filled with churches, and I wondered for a second if that’s where Dean had been, tripping his ass off in church, which really could drive anyone crazy. “Punishment for a mortal sin is eternal, so there’s no release, no reward.” Dean tossed his head back, raked his delicate hands through his hair. He seemed relieved to have gotten the idea out there. Dad just shrugged.

  “Too theological. It’s all abstract at that point. The idea of relief, the idea of forgiveness. In the legal sphere, remorse is rewarded, very concretely, with a lighter sentence.”

  Dean looked out the window, at the ocean. The water was very calm, and the beach was already filling up. He turned pale and started to sweat and rock back and forth on his heels. “I liked to win in fights,” he said, and then he made a strange attempt at a karate kick, then bounced on his toes. “I never once let that punk Tommy beat me. Not in chess. Not fighting. Not in anything.” He voice was clipped and too loud, though he was not quite yelling. He made another unsteady, karate-like move, so that Dad got to his feet quickly and stood in front of me and Lu, blocking us with his hand. Dad, who is a little over six feet, seemed suddenly much taller, too large for the bungalow.

  That was how we all learned that there was something true in Dean’s story, and something wrong with Dean. After a short argument with Lu about whether he should call the cops or just Dean’s dad, Dad relented and called Dean’s house, and talked to Dean’s father about the possibility that maybe Dean was tripping his head off at our beach rental, and could Dean’s dad drive down and get him. Lu argued with Dad, explained to Dad how the ’shrooms had been her idea, how she thought he needed to get more in touch with his feelings, and how Dean had been reluctant to do it, how he’d just put them in his pocket, so she’d completely forgotten he even had them with him.

  Dean sat on the back porch, bare-chested, and listened to his iPod. At one point, when I asked him what he was listening to, he handed me the headphones. It was the Code. “I thought you were against Lu’s jam band habit,” I said. Lu’s one exception to being a metalhead was, strangely, the Code, and some other bands that played incomprehensible music for epic periods of time. Dean didn’t seem high anymore. In fact, he seemed like he was coming down pretty hard. His face had an odd, rubbery look to it.

  “Yeah, I am,” he said, “but I’m too tired for anything else.” I left him there, sprawled out on a rusted beach chair, listening to the endless, weirdly melodic guitar solos.

  “What you took for eccentric,” I heard Dad tell Lu, “is actual insanity. How much do you even know about this kid?”

  Most of the rest of the sweltering hot day was spent with Dad keeping an eye on Dean, until Dean’s father got down to pick him up, which took a while, due to the beach-bound traffic on the Garden State. Dean sat motionless the whole time, just sat on the porch, listening and nodding out. It was like the music made his head too heavy to move.

  Once Dean left, Lu and I went to the beach for a swim. The surf was almost perfectly flat, like a giant, saltwater bathtub. We dove in again and again, right next to each other, and I could see that, between dives, Lu was wiping away tears. When we got out of the water, after about a half hour of diving in over and over, she looked at me and said, “You know something funny, Cath? During all this time, all these months, we’ve never really fooled around.” I stood there next to Lu, beautiful Lu, who could have any boy in the world.

  “What was it about then?” I asked her. I hated the idea that she’d wasted herself, and her whole senior year, on this guy who was flawed in some fundamental way.

  “I don’t know, Cath. I just wanted to know him, you know?”

  It occurred to me that that was the flaw with Dad’s theory of reward. Because people, or Lu, at least, could want something from someone that the person didn’t even have to begin with. And what was worse was she’d waited for it.

  It’s hope, I wanted to tell Dad then, that made a girl like Lu wait it out, get all obsessed with some guy who was completely checked out, caught in some mind trap, some psychological quicksand. It’s hope, I thought, the whole point of which was to hold out for nothing.

  Gone for Good

  “Why do you always do that?” Rand stared at me across the cafeteria table, his greasy grilled cheese resting on the cardboard tray in front of him, cheese congealing.

  “What?”

  “Look past me, like you’re waiting for someone.”

  “Everyone looks up when people come in.”

  “No,” Rand said. “I don’t.”

  “That’s because you sit with your back to the door.”

  “It’s kind of rude.”

  “Maybe you sit there so you don’t look up, so no one thinks you’re rude, so you’re not like everyone else.”

  Rand bit his lip. I knew I was bugging the shit out of him, but I also knew I wasn’t going to stop.

  With Rand, it started as a cigarette thing. I’d always have a pack, and he’d bum one after physics. We’d walk down to the river. Mostly, we talked about next year, how different everything would be—how we couldn’t wait to leave, how, most likely, we’d never come back. I told him my mom was thinking about selling the house, which was a total lie, but something I fantasized about. I liked to picture my mom emptying out the crap in my closet, the old shoes, piles of mildewed papers. I liked to think of her emptying the crawl space under the eaves, where you could hear the mice at night, how she’d find my cleats from when I played field hockey, the bag with my horseback-riding gear. How she’d think I’d wasted so much of my time a
nd her money, and she’d sigh, and chuck it all away. I liked to think about how she’d spend three whole minutes contemplating the emptiness of my high school years, and then she’d soldier on, get a new place with a bedroom for me that would be free of anything that was actually mine.

  I liked the idea of my mother being free of me. I couldn’t really consider my own freedom without cutting her loose as well.

  The first time Rand and I kissed, I was thinking of something else. I’d eaten one of those nasty packaged chocolate puddings at lunch, and the taste clung to my lips and tongue. It was like my taste buds were being invaded by an army of slimy, clinging, soy-based pseudo-food molecules. I wanted to puke, but that was dangerous. I’d been down that road. Junior year, I’d gotten so into the whole puking-everything-I-ate thing, I’d had to quit hockey just to keep with my purging schedule. Then there were therapy sessions that were about nothing, the biggest waste of time in my whole waste-of-time existence, because how do I say that I make myself puke as a kind of ambition? Because the idea of emptying myself out completely seems so difficult to achieve? How I am nothing if not achievement oriented?

  I stopped puking just so I wouldn’t have to talk about it anymore, which is, I bet, why therapy ever works at all. People get bored to death with their problems, and then they fade, like the pants you wore too many times one winter.

  Rand was giving me one of his stares across the table. He had the kind of eyelashes, blond except on the very tips, that made me feel a little heavy in the gut and light in the head. I felt the need to apologize just to steady myself. “I’m not calling you a poseur,” I said, trying to make it up to him for basically calling him one.

  “I know,” he said, and he took a bite of his inedible-looking sandwich. “But I still think if you’re talking to someone, you look at them, or else you’re being kind of a dick.”

  “Sorry,” I said. I didn’t actually want Rand mad at me. I wanted to hang with him after school. I wanted to walk down by the river, hold hands, and smoke. I wanted to watch him shake his pin-straight blond hair out of his eyes, and to lie down on his bed, and listen to music, so my mind could empty out, like the closets my mom would clean when I left. But it bugged me when he acted like something was wrong with me, how I was a bitch, how I was a social fuckup.

  When Rand and I first got together, it was the cigarette thing, but it was also a him-helping-me-not-be-such-a-bitch thing. That was the other reason, other than the puking, that Mom sent me to therapy last year. It was after the guidance counselor called me into her office, and my mom was already there, which was not a good sign.

  Mary Beth Kanner had ratted me out.

  “Sit down, Anne,” the counselor, Ms. A, said. I sat and tried to look confused.

  “A number of girls have come to me alarmed by what has been happening at hockey practice.”

  I never puked at the gym, so I knew what was up.

  “They say what began as verbal abuse has become physical, that you go after Mary Beth, hit her, bump into her, even smack at her ankles with your hockey stick. This is serious, Anne.”

  I eyed Mom. Her face looked thin, too narrow at the chin. She seemed really small, biting her lip, eyes brimming with either concern or humiliation, or maybe both.

  Mary Beth had a short, wide nose, long, greasy hair. When she ran, her legs jutted out at odd angles. She was always next to me, breathing her school lunch stink-breath at me. She got on my nerves like the silence of our house on a Saturday did. She got on my nerves like wind in my face, like dust and grit.

  Other than at hockey, I never thought about Mary Beth. I made her cry more than once, and when I did, even Jill had looked at me with alarm, trying to shut me down.

  I shrugged. There have always been things, people, I’ve had to get away from.

  “I can leave Mary Beth alone,” I said.

  “It goes beyond that,” Ms. A said. “The coach is benching you for the next three games. Practice too. If you want to stay on the team, you have to attend practice, but you cannot participate.”

  It was easy to see what they were doing. Sitting me there like some kind of criminal while they calmly explained the “consequences of my actions.” I went with it, though. That’s not what started the puking, but I definitely got more into it at that point. It got easier. Having to watch Mary Beth run around on the field, her hair no longer looking so greasy, some of my friends, even Jill, passing to her, never tripping her like before. I sat there thinking, Fuck them all.

  Rand and I were chem lab partners last spring, not that we’d chosen each other. Mr. Feinstein didn’t go for that, said “socializing is a hindrance to the scientific method.” I always thought Rand was okay. He was Mr. Protest. Everyone knew who he was, longish hair, all about the one percenters, even though we were their offspring.

  “You know, Anne,” he said one day when we were drawing a diagram to show how light converged in a lens, “I don’t think this is who you are.” He held the edge of the concave lens, waving it at me. He was talking about my hair. I had almost a crew cut, dyed black. He was talking about the leather jacket I was wearing, about the holes in the thighs of my jeans. About my red-red lipstick.

  “No?” I said.

  “I think you have an inner hippie chick,” he said, “dying to get out.”

  I shook my head. “You are so wrong.” But when he asked me later if I wanted to take a walk, I went. We walked through town, then over near the river where he lived, in a big-ass house in a big-ass-house neighborhood.

  We smoked, and when he kissed me, I kissed him back, but harder, showing him he was wrong about me.

  He pulled back, surprised, when I let my hands wander.

  “I won’t let you use and abuse me,” he said, so I had to laugh at him.

  After that, it was like I was his project.

  I wanted to tell him he enjoyed messing with people as much as I did. I wanted to say it was as much of a game to only see the good in people as it was to see only the bad.

  Rand’s first attempt to civilize me was to take me to this vegan-sprouty place in town for dinner. It’s called the Hearth, and they don’t serve meat, dairy, eggs, or even shit pretending to be any of that stuff. They have these teas that are flavored with ginger and ginseng, but I liked it, the food was tasty—I didn’t give Rand a hard time about it. He looked good, his hair tucked behind his ears, his shirt with a collar.

  After, he took me back to his house, and we went straight up to his room, which was on the third floor. There were dark wood floors and Oriental carpets, and you could hear adult voices, but he didn’t say hello to anyone. Like a normal guy, he put his finger to his lips and took me by the hand up two flights of stairs.

  He tried to put on a Catland song, but I said I’d scream if he did, so he laughed and played the Arnold Brothers, which was only a little better.

  “You don’t listen to anything new?” I said.

  “I’m trying to like Goliath,” he said. “But the guy’s so bitter.” He lay back on his bed and picked up his bong, loaded it.

  “Bitter is fun,” I said, and I bounced on the bed next to him. “Bitter is what holds me together. Bitter is the fiber of my being.”

  “That’s not what I feel right now.” He was stroking my hair, smoothing it over, as if it weren’t barely an inch long.

  He let me choose the next song, and so I put on Brian Evers, and we lay back on his bed and stayed there until the house was quiet, when we crept down the back steps, and Rand drove me home. It must have been about two, and I could see a faint light under my mom’s door, which vanished when she heard my steps in the hall.

  Our house has one story, a ranch, with my room on one side of the kitchen/living room area, and hers on the other.

  I felt giddy as I crept under the covers, giddy at what had happened between me and Rand, and how everything we did together felt halfway between a lie and the truth.

  Rand and I started sitting together so often at lunch, our friends, peopl
e who usually sat at completely different tables, began to converge. Jill sat across from Anthony Liotta. Jill with her blue hair, and Anthony with his surfer-dude beads. Jill seemed to be flirting with him, taking the rubbery fries from his tray and sticking them behind her ear like a cigarette. Anthony looked at Rand and shrugged. “They don’t get your barbaric humor,” I told Jill.

  “These are some tight-assed vegans,” Jill said, even though only Rand was, and Anthony wasn’t.

  “I think we can defy these teen-movie labels.” That was Rand’s shtick—he hung with me, kept his hair long, but wore these button-down, collared shirts and read the Times. He was waiting it out, trying to bring the whole senior class under one big umbrella before we left for college. It was his social experiment. I could handle that superior attitude he had when we were alone, but with Jill there, I felt I had to take him down.

  “You are such a fathead, Rand. You remind me of my dad,” I said. “The fucking professor.” This all came out harsher than I intended.

  The table went dead. I caught Jill staring at me openmouthed. I was afraid to look at Rand. No one knew how to break the silence, so finally I did, blasting my way out of there.

  “No one in this town knows how to take a fucking joke,” I said.

  I wasn’t surprised when Rand didn’t immediately follow me out onto the quad. Even Rand, with his shrinky attitude, was no match for the Death Bomb.

  People in my town were supposed to die quietly of something respectable, like cancer, if they had to die, that is. They weren’t supposed to do messy things, like run for trains that had pulled out of the station. They weren’t supposed to grab onto the back rail of a moving train in an act so irrational it seemed suicidal. But if you knew my dad, and you knew how stubborn he was, how he couldn’t put up with things not going his way, then you’d think it was less like a suicide, and more like asshole-icide.

  I knew that’s how my mom felt, though I was only twelve at the time. That’s why she didn’t speak at his funeral. She was as pissed in her quiet way as if he’d packed his bags and moved to California, like Kenneth Madson’s dad. And then we’d had to move out of our halfway decent modern-looking house on Kent, over to the nothingish ranch on Lefurgy, because Dad’s insurance hadn’t been much.