by Henry Turner
Maybe it was because I’d really stepped over.
I mean, I was doing something I’d never done before, and it really scared me, scared me so much I felt sick, and I worried, you know, about what I might do if I didn’t keep a handle on myself.
Of course, it could have just been the house.
I was still behind the chair, and I moved it very slowly. I tried to keep it along the wall so it wouldn’t seem too weirdly placed if somebody somewhere checked a monitor. I mean, I couldn’t just push it out to the middle of the floor. And once in a while I’d just stop and wait and listen, and look back over my shoulder at the big darkened room, at the blue glowing lights.
That day in my house when Laura had come over—the same day she noticed I don’t have a dishwasher and got sort of freaked out by it, which was also the same day she told me all about how her mom collected all this modern art stuff and fancy furniture—that day had actually begun really great.
Laura had said something to me then that I didn’t really know how to take—I mean, after she said the thing about the dishwasher, which sort of humiliated me.
What she’d said was, “I love your house.”
Now, one thing you have to know is that when she said this we were both wearing lipstick.
What I mean is that she’d put some lipstick on me, not because I asked her to, but the thing is, she rarely wore any makeup at all, but that day she had lipstick on, this very pretty dark red color that looked unbelievably sexy, and I asked her what it was like, I mean what it felt like to wear it. That interested me a lot, because the few occasions when she had it on, I’d noticed it hid her face behind a sort of sexy disguise.
So she said, “Put some on and you’ll find out.”
I guess she wanted me to look sexy too.
We were already in my bedroom, and she sort of gave me this look that made me kind of shiver, and she took her little lipstick out of the purse she had, took the cap off, and then carefully painted my lips with it.
Then she said, “How’s it feel?”
Her face was about two inches from mine.
I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I kissed her.
I guess having the lipstick on kind of wowed me, because it was like I was trying to swallow her head. When I took a break I saw lipstick all over her face and even on her nose and eyelids and ears.
I was lying there—we were on my bed like I said, and I was practically on top of her, panting my head off—and she was kissing me back with these really sticky, gluey kisses that just sort of felt incredible. And it was the first time I ever thought that maybe she liked me so much, loved me so much, that she wanted to actually go all the way with me.
I mean, she wasn’t really letting me do anything, and every time my hand strayed to a place it shouldn’t she sort of whacked it away. But this time it seemed more from reflex than anything else, because from the way her eyes were and from the way she lay there just squeezed to me, I could tell she really was as excited as me.
And then, I don’t know why—maybe it was to sort of break the moment, because things were really only going one way—she looked up and around my room and said, “I love your house.”
I guess I should have been prepared for it. Because coming in, after we’d said hi to my mom downstairs, we went through the hall, and every time she’d pass something of mine my mom had tacked to the wall, Laura would stop and say, “Did you do this?” or “Is this a picture you drew?”
I must admit I was embarrassed as hell, especially after my mom came over and both of them praised my artwork like I was Picasso or something, which was totally ridiculous, because at least five of the drawings Laura saw, and this weird clumpy clay thing I made that was supposed to be an elephant, dated back all the way to third grade.
So at the moment she said it I just couldn’t help but think she was making fun of me. I mean, she always bragged about her house, which she’d never even let me see, and my house was, well, if you want to know exactly what it was like, it was like one of those sort of cheap antique knickknack stores you find on little roads out in the county somewhere. I mean it had that same sort of cluttered atmosphere. Of all the houses around, mine was the king of too-much-stuff-not-enough-room, and everywhere in it—but especially the hallway leading from the front door—was like a menagerie of junk from the past sixty years. Everything we had came from my grandmother or great-grandmother, and so the inescapable deduction everybody would make was that we never really threw anything away, because it always was something that reminded us of whoever first owned it, and my mom and dad just thought it was way too sad to chuck any of that stuff. So we lived around literal heaps of it.
I must admit that what Laura said sort of broke my mood, if you know what I mean.
I lifted up on my elbows a bit and looked into her eyes.
“Why?” I asked.
“I just love it. I hate my house. It’s so empty.”
She looked into my eyes and smiled. “I like all the stuff you have,” she said. She seemed so incredibly innocent and truthful when she said it too, not her usual self, which could be quite hard.
“I don’t get it. My house is a dump.”
She was still looking at me, with her eyes—and I told you how liquid and beautiful her eyes were—just glued to mine. And she said, very softly, “It’s all about you.”
For a second that made me think.
Oh, I thought. It occurred to me she meant my artwork, all the dopey stuff my mom had put on the walls.
“You mean my drawings? God, I wish my mom would tear them down.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t ever do that. She loves you. You’re so lucky to have that. You can’t take it for granted.”
I suddenly laughed right in her face.
And that was stupid.
Her face changed. Her eyes flared.
Her whole body tightened; you can always feel that sort of thing.
Suddenly, she changed the subject and went off on her mom’s art collection. She talked about the artists and how much it all cost, or was worth now, and it was, like, millions. She sat up and started talking, almost yelling, about how she was going to go to art school and study art history and interior design.
She seemed to hate me all of a sudden, because she started harping on what I wanted to do with my life, and I must admit that I’m sort of like my dad and don’t have any idea, and she said that was totally idiotic. “Finding out what you want to do is the single most important thing in your life!” she yelled. “You’re a fool not to find out as quickly as possible! Your whole future depends on it! I think about it all the time! Do you? Do you? Don’t you want a future? How can you be with me and not think about the future? What do we have? Nothing! You better wake up and think about it!”
I swear, she sounded just like her mom, though I didn’t know it at the time. But it was more than that, because her mom had just sounded angry, but Laura sounded tortured by what she said, and under so much pressure she couldn’t help but scream.
She was so pissed at me that I felt I’d been electrocuted. I saw all this fury in her eyes. I almost wanted to cry. I said, “I just want you, Laura. I’m so sorry I laughed.”
She winced at that.
I just curled up on the bed. She’d pulled away from me. I put my fists between my knees and lay there.
What she’d said actually hurt.
I don’t think she understood how much.
How could she?
She had her life all figured out.
She was obviously at a great school and was great at gymnastics and had tons of friends. She was rich. She got everything she wanted.
She didn’t know it, but what she’d yelled at me was something I’d struggled with my whole life.
I mean knowing what to do.
Because I didn’t.
I never had.
I was just like my dad, but I never complained like he did. I never even talked about it.
But I don’t really
blame him.
I think it is more my own fault.
Because like I said, I don’t have a clue.
And even though I’d watched people in the neighborhood all my life, I never had decided what I wanted to do. I know they say that if you want opportunity you have to make it yourself. I really agree with that. It’s just that I’m not so great at seeing just how to make opportunities. I just don’t know how to participate. I’d like to participate, I know how valuable that is, and I know the neighborhood was made by a lot of people who did nothing but participate and they made the houses that sort of stare at you and the streets and everything, and they even made all the rules that nobody understands.
I’ve never really felt allowed to participate.
Maybe I’ve always felt left out.
Growing up like I did, there was a lot to tell me that I was just a sort of total nobody and really just a completely lame loser, and since there’s no point worrying about a lame loser’s future, I never gave it much thought.
But the truth is that all along I’ve felt in myself something more important than that, something in me that’s really better than that, even though it’d take a long time for me to get anybody to agree with me, probably because people don’t actually see me, or see any real value in me, which was probably the best reason I ever had to just start hiding all the time.
Laura had seen value in me, I guess, when she saw me at the party. But lying on my bed I thought I’d wrecked that.
I felt like telling Laura all this. She was sitting up on the bed and sort of trembling with anger, and I really did sort of want to tell her, but I guess I felt afraid.
So I didn’t say a word.
I just lay there.
But I really wanted to explain to her exactly who I was and everything, but the truth is, I just wasn’t sure, except that I knew I wasn’t just a lame loser.
And I wanted to explain to her that after a while—if you don’t know how to participate because really you’re not allowed, and all you do is just sort of stand around and watch everybody else participate—all you wind up with is yourself. So maybe you sort of start to refuse to participate, because you don’t want to mess with that. You refuse to mess with that because it’s all you’ve ever had and all you can ever trust, and refusing is the only way you know how to protect yourself.
But I thought she’d think I was selfish and crazy, or had really just left myself out on purpose, or maybe I was just lazy and stupid, so I kept quiet and didn’t say a word.
Lying there all scrunched up with my fists between my knees—I mean after what she’d said—I felt like such a total loser, I didn’t say a thing. I felt like I had nothing and never would, and she had everything, and I had no idea why she wanted to even be sitting on my loser’s bed, like what could she possibly gain from it, because she was a total winner, and I wondered why, instead of wasting time with me, she wasn’t out winning something and being told she was a total winner, instead of just sitting on my bed mad as hell at me because she thought I’d made fun of her. But I didn’t say anything or try to explain anything about why I wasn’t doing anything, because what I was doing was trying to hang on to myself—I mean literally just survive hanging on to myself. But I knew she’d think that was totally stupid, so I just kept my fists between my knees.
By this time she wasn’t even on my bed anymore. She’d gotten up, and a second later she bolted out to the bathroom down the hall to wash the lipstick off her face.
I just lay there.
I felt destroyed.
I regretted everything I’d said.
I was a fool for laughing.
Because let me tell you, if I’d understood her, I bet we would have gone all the way.
Maybe we would have gotten married, for god sakes.
I’d be married to her now, I bet.
I’d have done it, too.
Married her, I mean.
But I blew it.
Then and forever.
Because of all the times we talked, this was about the only time she’d ever let her guard down and given me a chance to see the real her. She had given me a chance to understand her; she bared her feelings, admitting that she liked my house more than her own, which I could tell was a really, really big thing for her to say.
I got it now, crouching behind a chair in one of her grand living rooms.
She liked the mess.
She liked how it was all about the people living there.
Because her house wasn’t like that at all.
I stopped pushing the chair a second and looked through the dimness of the huge room.
This house was perfect.
But it said nothing about the people.
Sure, it said something, I guess, about her mom’s interest in modern art, but that’s about it, unless you want to add that it said something about how much money they had, because it said that in spades.
But it said nothing about Laura.
If I had a house with Laura, it would be all about Laura.
It would be a Laura museum.
I’d have so many pictures of her she’d want to throw them out; she’d get tired of looking at herself. She’d understand why I’d laughed.
But I hadn’t even seen a picture of her.
Not one.
I wish I’d listened to her. She was trying to let me get to know her. And now when I think back, that would have been even better than going all the way.
I would have preferred to listen, now that I had some, you know, perspective.
But I blew it.
I wouldn’t even listen.
I just felt embarrassed and laughed at her. I didn’t even try to understand.
I got to the next room; I’d pushed that chair all the way across the floor. I looked in and saw it was a den.
She’d mentioned that.
The den.
It had everything; I’m sure you already guessed that.
Lots of video screens. Lots of things I assumed were games. A bar. A curtained wall that could only be a home theater. Rows of seats.
Boy, they were rich.
I was going in when the front door opened and sunlight flooded the living room through the archway.
Chapter
Thirteen
I froze.
Whoever was coming in would have to hurry because somewhere off in the kitchen the alarm had started making those sudden loud beeps.
My heart felt like it was stuffed in my mouth.
I heard footsteps go quickly up the hall.
That was my chance.
I darted forward into the den. To hell with video cameras—the room was dark enough.
I couldn’t immediately decide where to hide.
The bar.
I slid over to the right side of the room on my hands and knees to where the bar was, dodging between these swivel seats that were everywhere in the shadows. I crept behind the bar, froze again, and listened.
I heard a few more beeps in the kitchen, and the other beeps stopped.
The alarm was disarmed.
That was good.
I felt sweat dripping off me. Up until now it had been all fun and games. I suddenly realized how serious it was.
I was in Laura’s house.
It was a major crime.
If anybody caught me, they’d think either I was there to steal or that I was a total creep like Paul Stewart. I’d be arrested and put in jail. Nobody would believe anything I told them. Laura would hate me.
My mind was fumbling.
If I got up and went back into the hallway—which was the only way I knew to get out—I’d get seen. And recognized. They all knew who I was. They’d seen me waiting for Laura those times she wouldn’t let me come into her house, and at the play I went to—her school play six months ago—where I met her mom face-to-face.
What the hell could I do?
I kept thinking about it, but I had no plans because I just didn’t know who was out there or exactly where
they were. If I knew that, I could at least try to plan an escape route: either the front door—which would be pretty stupid because god only knows whether neighbors were out in their yards—or better yet, back downstairs and out the window I came in through.
That seemed best, so I had to get to the kitchen.
But I heard some rummaging and banging around in the kitchen, so I didn’t move.
Then I heard the person come back out into the hall.
They came up to the head of it, rolling something over the floor. I could tell they went as far as the front door. There was no sound for a second, then a sort of scratching noise.
A motor roared to sudden life.
For a second my heart stopped.
I was sweating all over by this time and damn near crapped my drawers.
But a second later I relaxed.
I suddenly felt cool all over.
I got it.
I almost laughed.
It was a vacuum cleaner.
It was the goddamn maid.
I came out from behind the bar on my hands and knees and scrambled up to the entrance to the living room. I looked across the living room toward the hall outside the arches, but I couldn’t see much.
I looked up at the camera on the ceiling.
The light still blinked, but I began to doubt it was a camera.
Probably a smoke alarm. And anyways, when the alarm was turned off, maybe the cameras were turned off too.
Maybe.
I had to risk it.
I darted across the living room like a flash, got over to the first archway, and looked through. I still couldn’t see much of anything; the angle was bad and just showed me those fancy glass stands with the old books on them.
I moved fast to the second arch, my back skimming against the wall.
There.
I saw her.
It was the maid.
I mean the cleaning lady.
She was turned away from me, a small woman in a pale blue knee-length dress, her graying black hair pulled into a bun. She was rolling this fancy vacuum cleaner over the floor, the kind that looks like a droid from Star Wars and probably cost a thousand bucks. She was bent over slightly and her head was lowered to check the red carpet as she rolled the vacuum back and forth.