by Johi Jenkins
“What the frick did they do?” She paces herself with a breath for each word.
“I stopped them before they got all of your clothes off. Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not fricking okay,” she says. Then she adds sarcastically, “Am I fricking okay?”
“I stopped them. I punched one of them in the face and threw the other one against the wall,” he says proudly.
“Great…. What, do you want a medal?” Her voice drops to a low tone. “What are you thinking? If your mother was getting attacked by a dog, I’d kick it away. I wouldn’t think twice. Those fricking pricks…. I want to fricking gut them. Rip their chest open with a dull knife.”
She looks up. Tommy’s silent.
“Who did it?” she asks him.
Tommy’s eyes widen, almost intimidated. “You’re safe now. Stop….”
“You stop. I’ll hang their balls on my belt and bury the bodies by dawn.”
“Don’t… don’t ever do that. I don’t even want to hear that.”
“I’ll rake a razor over their sockets until they see with their eyes shut.”
“Holy mother…. Now I’m imagining it and shit.”
“It’s not fricking funny, Tommy.” She’s angry.
Tommy pulls over, afraid she might pounce. “Look, this is my sister’s house. Right down that street. Let’s go in there and get you cleaned up.”
“Are you out of your mind? I don’t want to go there,” she says quickly, slurring her words.
“You’re in no condition for revenge. Trust me. I’ll take you wherever you want tomorrow. But one problem tonight, we can’t talk. They will wake up.”
“We can’t talk? What kind of condition is that? Who’s they?”
“Her and her husband. They get up really unnaturally early in the AM.”
“Isn’t she just a few years older than you? And she has a husband?”
“She can drink.”
“So can we.”
“Legally.”
“That’s sooo fricking weird. I’m not staying with weirdoes.” It’s not really weird, she realizes after she says it, but she doesn’t want to take it back. “Besides, I don’t even know her.”
The anger remains but her survival instincts kick in. At least nothing happened, she thinks. This isn’t exactly how she thought her night would end up. She looks up at Tommy. The brake lights reflect in the woods and make the night behind him glow, giving the tips of his blond hair a red tinge. She stares into his blue eyes. He’s better-looking up close. She can see what the other girls have been going on about.
Staying awake becomes more of a struggle. She’s afraid she’ll start talking to him, and say something stupid. Or worse, start telling him everything he wants to know, as if the drug they gave her was some wicked truth serum.
“How old are you, really?” Tommy asks.
He looks over and she slumps down in the seat.
“How old are you?” he repeats.
“No officer, no….”
He smiles and lets his foot off the brake. Outside the back lights glow as the car rolls forward and the two evil red eyes snake through the night down the acorn-covered drive, snapping and popping as they go. Margarette’s hand falls to her side and she pulls down on the edge of the dress trying to cover her thigh. She wonders how it got that way, and whether he looked. But outside she keeps a stone cold face, unreadable to most, and most of all Tommy. He glances to the side, but doesn’t look directly into her eyes.
She leans forward putting her head on the dash, shaking, and her head droops. He looks over again and the skirt is riding up her leg not very far from his hand. So close. His hand moves toward her. He reaches over and touches her back, but only to offer a soft pat. Her head twitches and he pulls back accordingly. The car rolls up and stops in front of a wooden house with a small but well-kept yard.
Her eyes race back and forth under her eyelids and she drunkenly considers her life to this moment. Sometimes being intoxicated denies you from an experience…. Tommy goes around to her door and lifts her from the car. Sometimes things happen outside of your control…. She goes in and out of consciousness, and finds herself sitting on a strange bed for a few minutes before passing out, rethinking how her night went and finding out that there were many gaps.
Margarette makes a solemn vow never to drink at a party again. This is one of many rules she would eventually bend to the point of breaking. The second after she makes the vow she considers the stipulation that a drink isn’t the same thing as a sip.
Chapter 4. Naked Truths
Margarette wakes up with a sharp headache. After a quick inspection, she realizes she’s wearing only her panties under a white linen sheet and she’s in an unfamiliar monotone room with not a whole lot of light. She retains just enough body heat from the sheet to keep from shivering in the cool tiled room, but only if she stays still. She wants to run, but how, if she’s half naked? She refuses to be caught in a sheet. Each shift of her body exposes an appendage to the arctic room.
She hears footsteps outside on what must be stone floors. She returns to how she was when she woke and pretends to be asleep. The soft patter of footsteps enters the room. With a quick peek through narrowed eyelids concealed by the darkness of the room, she sees a well-groomed girl with dark shoulder-length hair fussing with a pile of clothes in the hamper.
The girl stops to stand over her and exhales audibly.
“I wish you would call when you were coming over. I did your laundry and cleaned up your stuff, Sharon,” the girl says.
The girl presses her hand on the bed but says nothing as she studies Margarette.
“Shar…?” She pulls back.
The girl digs into Margarette’s purse. Margarette lies there with her eyes cracked like a Venus flytrap, and through the edge of the darkness sees the girl move away from the bed, holding her bag. It is the worst robbery ever. Margarette finally recognizes May, Tommy’s older sister.
“It’s not Sharon?” May asks slowly. “Shit…. Who the hell are you?”
May leaves the room with a determined step. Margarette hears quick whispering in the distance, which develops into raised voices.
“Shit, did you wake her up?” That’s Tommy’s voice.
“Are you totally kidding me?” That’s May. “Wake her. I don’t know who the hell she is. Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were coming over?” Her voice lowers. “You know he’s got to go to work today.”
“Work?” Tommy asks. “It’s Saturday. It’s like barely nine o’clock.”
“You know he works a few hours on Saturdays,” she says, sounding annoyed, as if Tommy should really know. “He works so hard.”
Margarette assumes that May is talking about her husband. The girl seems fixated on her husband in some weird, psychotic abusive-husband syndrome. The faint murmuring nears the door and the two voices turn into a pair of chronic laryngitis patients arguing about a raspy horse. Margarette is unable to distinguish or decode their words.
The door swings open and Margarette snaps her eyes shut. She hears boots step heavily on the tile and she tenses her abdomen and chest. She’s in her underwear and still doesn’t know who took off her clothes. She pretends not to be in this predicament to allow her body to relax, but the thought of Tommy or his sister undressing her doesn’t allow her to. If it was him, why would he, and if it was her, eww. These thoughts go round in her head, unraveling her subterfuge. Margarette continues to wonder who was the one that touched her, and considers that maybe it wouldn’t be that bad if it was him, but then again it was probably May.
Tommy touches the bed and snaps her right out of the delusion. She peeks through her mostly cracked eye.
Tommy speaks in full volume, but softly. “See, when I was a kid, I had to hide a lot for all the things I either did or just got blamed for. In either case I would close my eyes and look through just my lashes, and I thought no one would catch me doing it.”
No one answers. He continues
after taking a deep breath.
“When I was like that, pretending to be asleep, I never knew how easy it was to see the muscle tense near the corner of my eye. I think only the people who use that trick know where to look. Don’t worry; she’s making him some whole wheat toast without butter, possibly because she hates him.”
Margarette fights the urge to smile. “Is she gone?” she asks in a guilty whisper.
“Yes,” Tommy answers.
“Great.” She opens her eyes in full and finds Tommy staring at her.
“Did you sleep well?” he asks.
She frowns. “This is possibly the worst night of my life.”
“Huh….”
She leans forward, pulling the corner of the sheet to cover herself. Tommy doesn’t break eye contact, and she watches him closely clutching the sheet.
“It’s my sister’s house,” he says. “Her name’s May.”
“I know,” she replies in a snide tone, covering herself with her arm. Everyone knows the Gallagers, even though May had already graduated by the time Margarette started high school. “She used to pick you up sometimes after school.”
He chuckles. “That was a looong time ago,” he says, almost embarrassed.
Oh, shit. She didn’t mean to admit that she noticed Tommy back when she was a freshman. She changes the topic quickly. “You’d think she would have a blanket or something.”
“Are you naked under that?” His voice rises.
“You didn’t know?”
“What?”
Just her luck. It was May. “Worst night ever.”
Tommy’s head drops to look at her silhouette and looks away quickly, realizing she is telling the truth and is mostly naked under the thin sheet.
She shakes her head with a confused look since she just told him, which she thought was clear for him not to look. Then she flushes realizing she was formally introduced to his sister. May. She curses into the air above her head. She rarely gets along with people named after months.
Tommy picks up her dress and tries to flatten the crumpled parts in his lap. She feels a throbbing pain in her head and the world wobbling. He turns to her to hand the dress back and he looks down again at her bare body through the sheer sheets. He can see her knees pressed together, and even the lace of her panties at the hip. Her body is thin and clearly toned. As he slowly looks up her body, her arm is pulling the sheets over her breasts and she’s staring at him with a cold look. He slides his foot out from under him and hands her the clothes.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were naked,” he says.
“You just handed me my dress,” she says sarcastically. “I thought I told you.”
“No, I mean, I thought she would have given you something.”
“Your pervert nature is the least of my problems.”
“I am not,” he says defensively.
“Exactly, you’re the least of my problems.”
Tommy almost laughs, so clearly he didn’t follow. “Who are you?”
“No one of consequence.”
Tommy smiles, but doesn’t know the origin of the phrase well enough to chime in.
“I’m nobody,” Margarette clarifies somewhat disappointed, when he doesn’t say anything.
“No body? You have a beautiful body.”
“A decent man never flirts shamelessly with a half-naked girl.” She rolls the dress up, so that it is easier to slide on under the blanket, in the process wrinkling what little bit he flattened. “Be still my beating heart,” she quips sarcastically.
Her flip-flopping is running circles around his ability to follow. So he continues to say what he’s thinking. “I’ve never seen anything, anyone as beautiful,” Tommy says, as if dazed.
“Oh Joy, the same word twice…. Do you mind if I get dressed?”
“You don’t have to,” Tommy says softly.
“Turn around, young man.”
Tommy turns his body away reluctantly, his head lingering back as long as he can. He smiles facing away from her; her body is etched into his mind.
“So why haven’t we hung out before?” he asks.
“I typically avoid vapid men like you.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re not my type.”
Tommy chuckles, then pauses. “What does vapid mean?”
“Ugh…” she groans.
“What? Everyone likes me.”
“Great. Go hit on everyone then. I like modest men. Humble to a fault.”
“Losers,” Tommy says with a chuckle. “If you don’t stand up for what you believe in, then no one will.”
“In other words, if everyone agreed with that… then there wouldn’t be a need to stand up for anything.”
He smiles, then stops smiling. “Wait, what?”
“Oh, never mind.”
He finds a welcome distraction seeing her change in the window’s reflection.
“Where… where do you work?” he asks her.
“Where do you work?” she counters, to avoid his question; but she already knows where he works. In fact, he told her just this week.
“At the bank for my father,” Tommy answers anyway.
“And what does the bank do?”
“We hand out loans for the people of this town so that they can buy the things they need.” He pauses for a second, as if trying to remember what he does at work. “And I help manage accounts for wealthy people and simplify their lives.”
“That’s decent of you. Rich people are far too busy already.”
“I know,” he says, glad to get her to agree on something. “So what do you do during the day?”
“I read.”
“Read what?”
“Anything and everything.”
“How do you make money?”
“I don’t, I’m poor.”
“Your parents?”
“Them too.”
“They read?”
“No, they’re just poor, Tommy.” She sighs. “Can you take me home now?”
She stands clothed, but is far from dressed. The edge of the dress is folded and torn from the edge of the car. Margarette doesn’t remember that exactly, and imagines something dark happening in a backroom at the party. She’s not sure if it is a real memory or what she invented in her head.
Tommy’s tone changes abruptly to surprise. “How did you get my knife?”
She turns and looks at him with a blank expression. He’s holding her knife partially open and then clicks it closed. She stands defensively with her arms crossed.
“How do you know it’s your knife?”
“Oh, this is my knife. Why didn’t you return it at the pump?”
She waits for an eternity and exhales the truth. There must have really been some truth drugs in her system. “I thought I would get to meet you by returning it.”
“Meet me? I thought you didn’t like people like me.” He’s surprised with her answer.
“I don’t like people like you for one reason.” She looks down diverting from his eyes.
“Yeah? What’s that?” Tommy asks.
She looks up quickly. “I don’t like the way you look down at me.”
He continues looking exactly as he did without breaking eye contact. “How do you claim to know how I look at you? I don’t look down at you.”
“If I wasn’t here now because of some random series of events, I don’t think you’d look at me at all.” Margarette justifies.
“That’s not true at all.”
“I think I made a mistake,” she says, ignoring his answer.
“I’ve failed to impress?”
“You never really had a chance. You were born that way.”
“Well, perhaps I can change your mind.” He gestures for her to take the knife from his hand.
Margarette smiles, but continues in a weak voice. “I assume you only want me for one thing.”
“I feel the same way.”
She raises an eyebrow. “What could I ever
get from you?”
“Well, my knife, apparently,” he says impishly.
“Charming.” She is unimpressed, but has his knife back. Her knife.
She puts her arm on an antique ivory table top and balances herself. Her other hand rises to her flushed cheek and forehead. She stares at her own reflection.
“Margarette, are you okay?”
“I must ask,” she begins as if dazed, pausing for dramatic interest. “Did you kiss me when I was asleep?”
“No,” he says sharply.
Margarette’s image shatters in the mirror, but she can’t see his eyes so she knows it is okay. She continues in a different tone. “Why did you take me?”
“I don’t know. You were alone. I didn’t want to leave you there.”
“Where did you find me?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Tell me again.”
“You were sleeping in a backroom.”
“Why would you pull me out of a room?”
“You weren’t really alone… and you had passed out. I found you with two guys, but I know you didn’t know they were there.”
Some of the story comes back to her.
“Uh huh….” Her anger flares. “Two of them…. Who?”
“I didn’t get a good look at them. I just kicked their asses. The one I punched was a big dude. Got him good, too. My knuckles hurt.”
“The least of my concerns is you or them. Filthy animals.”
“Don’t lop me in with them. I saved you.”
“Thanks. Is that what you want?” She is seriously pissed.
“I guess. Why are you angry with me?”
“What do you think you deserve from me? Huh? You are exactly like them.”
“No…. Totally not. I’m just….”
“All alike with innocent flesh and sex,” she says, nearly hissing like a cat.
“How innocent are you?” Tommy asks. He doesn’t know he is crossing a line. As far as lines go he had stepped on an exposed power line.
“What the hell do you mean? I don’t lead girls into dark rooms, for one.”
“You have the wrong idea,” Tommy says, almost angrily, fighting to recover. “I was defending your honor. I didn’t even kiss you.” His point is technically true, but somewhat misleading. “I heard someone at the party talking about you passing out. I went to find you and found them first.”