Save the Enemy

by Arin Greenwood

  Later in the day that Donald and I were caught in our delicate state, as I tried to hide in my bedroom, Mom made me come downstairs and eat breakfast and talk. Were Donald and I a couple? Was I concerned that I might be pregnant? If I were pregnant, would I get an abortion? I’d have to get an abortion, she said. She cried, as if she were a teen mother being kicked out of her parents’ house in the dead of winter. (It was, I repeat, summer. We’d had Donald and Molly over for dinner just a couple of nights earlier.)

  “I’m not pregnant,” I whispered.

  “How do you know he doesn’t have AIDS?” Mom asked. “He doesn’t have AIDS,” I said.

  “He might,” she said. She started crying again. Now she’s being kicked out of her parents’ house, and she has just discovered that she has AIDS.

  “Mom,” I begged. “Please, please can we not talk about this?”

  She then told me that she’d always hoped I would tell her about the first time I was going to have sex, so that she and I could celebrate with champagne afterwards. She told me that she’d imagined I’d be in my last years of college, and it would be with someone who’d repeatedly asked me to marry him, but who I’d rejected because I was too young and had too much work to do on my career before I could get married.

  “Should we get out champagne?” she asked me, sniffling.

  “Please stop,” I said. The only thing I could imagine being more mortifying than the actual story of how my mother learned that I’d had sex for the first time was this idea she was now proposing.

  “We should make an appointment with Planned Parenthood for your abortion,” she then said.

  “I’m not pregnant,” I said again. I guess I could have been pregnant. But it seemed unlikely, since we’d used a condom, as Mom unfortunately knew.

  Mom then made me take prenatal vitamins, just in case I was pregnant, and just in case I decided not to have an abortion. Later in the week, she sat me down on the gold velvet couch she and Dad went out and bought from an upscale consignment shop—because nobody’s had sex on a used couch, of course—and told me that she was not ready to be a grandmother. But that if I had a baby, she would, of course, love it very much. I said I was sure she would. She hugged me. She slipped a package of condoms into my tote bag. Then she asked me which of several handsome movie stars I would have sex with, given the opportunity. I did not answer. She told me about her carnal feelings toward a surprisingly broad group of famous men, none of whom resembled my father in any way. This was Mom being her most motherly.

  And still, Molly didn’t have to know. I could have kept it from her. Donald had no reason to tell her, either. I wanted to tell her, because she was my best friend, and you tend to tell your best friend when you’ve done “it”—or, really, anything—for the first time. But, given the circumstances, I decided to stay mum.

  Mom did not stay mum. She was the one who brought it up. When Molly came over to get me for something a week or two after the devirginizing of moi. Mom said to Molly that kids these days are so much more progressive than they were when she was young.

  “You could never have made it with your best friend’s ex-boyfriend so soon after they’d broken up in my day and age!” Mom said to Molly, who was missing some necessary context. Which I provided when we got outside. Provided while expressing a lot of regret. Then, when that seemed not to be eliciting friendship, full of chortles, like, “Isn’t it hilarious that Donald and I drank schnapps and then my parents caught him with a condom stuck to his most Donaldy parts in the morning?” Then begging: “Molly, I didn’t mean to upset you. I didn’t know you’d even care. I honestly didn’t. You didn’t seem to miss him at all. And I just wanted to be done with this.”

  “That’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard,” Molly said to me as she left. She was crying. I don’t think it was about Donald. She didn’t love him. I don’t know what it was about. She could be irrationally emotional sometimes. Occasionally explosive. But usually pretty mild and unbothered by things that would, like, really get my goat. For example, if I think that my parents are going to send me to summer camp to learn how to horseback ride, but then they decide not to send me to summer camp to learn how to horseback ride, then I will become furious. Hysterical. Angry beyond belief, seized by emotions that take me over like some kind of a demon.

  When something similar happened to Molly—because we were going to go to camp together the summer we turned fifteen, but both had camp taken away when we got caught doing something really stupid (sneaking out in the middle of the night to play video games, in our pajamas, at the local 7-Eleven)—she just took it in stride.

  “We’ll get jobs then,” she said, shrugging, while I was sobbing and red-faced like a baby. And indeed, she got us both jobs at Howie’s, a local fried chicken fast-food restaurant, for that summer. And let me offer some advice: if you ever go to Howie’s, just off Route 2 in West Warwick, do not eat the coleslaw, because I know what the fifteen-year-old employees do to it when Howie is not around, and you would not consider these things to enhance the dish’s appeal.

  But Molly did not take this whole Donald thing in stride, such as by going out and getting us jobs together, which might have been a lot of fun and pleasantly constructive. (She was already working at a different restaurant, where they did not have an opening for me; I was spending the summer doing nothing you’d want anyone to know about.) No, she kicked me to the curb is what she did. Hasn’t been to Alexandria to visit, except for my mom’s funeral, even though she’s got relatives somewhere in the Maryland suburbs. Before I moved to Alexandria, we’d made plans to go see them in Maryland and have them take us out jousting, that being the state sport and all. Like all my horseback-related plans, this one failed to make it out of the gate.

  Yeah. The last time Molly and I hung out was when Mom told her about me and Donald. “Making it.” It might be the last time we ever hang out, if she never forgives me.

  Except that tonight, tonight I am determined to make sure she forgives me.

  Around midnight, I get up out of bed. I figure I’ll get dressed, find the keys to one of Aunt Lisa’s and Uncle Henry’s cars, and drive over to Molly’s house. Where I’ll … I’m not sure. I can’t really ring the doorbell at this time of night. Maybe I’ll bring my cell and call her when I get there. And if she won’t take my call, I’ll … figure something out. She’s my best friend, even if she won’t talk to me, and I need her back in what has become the mustered-up fustercluck of my life.

  I don’t turn on the light to get dressed in order to be as inconspicuous as possible, which leads to lots of knocking over lamps and stubbing my toe and shout-whispering “HOLY MOTHER THAT HURTS” and that sort of thing. When I open the door of my room, Pete is standing there in the hallway.

  “Hey!” I say to him, more loudly than I’d meant to.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” he says quietly.

  “About what?” I say back as quietly as I can.

  “Can I come in?” he asks, edging back into the bedroom.

  “Okay,” I say. I walk back into the room. Pete reaches to switch on the light, but I say, again in the loud whisper, “Leave it off. Don’t want to wake anyone.” I’m not sure why I think that banging into every piece of furniture is unobtrusive, but turning the lights on would wake everyone. This is midnight logic.

  “Zoey,” he says to me. “I really think we need to leave here. I think we should wake Ben up and go.”

  “I can’t,” I say.

  “Why?” he asks. “I’ll do the driving.”

  “There’s someone else I have to go see,” I say.

  “When?” he asks. “We have to leave early in the morning.”

  “Now,” I say. “I’m going to go now.”

  “Go where?”

  “Warwick.”

  Warwick is the town where I used to live. It’s where Molly still lives, at least I assume, at her parents’ house. I lived in that house, practically, back before everything. I tell Pete my
plan. Some of it, anyway. I say I’m going to try to win back an old friend.

  “I’ll drive you,” he says.

  “I don’t need you to,” I say.

  “I’ll drive you,” he says.

  But I don’t want him to. I feel like I need to see my friend, my ex-friend, without an audience.

  “I have to go alone,” I say to Pete. “But do you mind if I use your car?”

  We go downstairs, tiptoeing in a way that is surely much louder than mere walking would have been. His keys are in the pocket of his coat. I pull on my coat. It’s colder in Rhode Island than it is in Virginia. I’m feeling sleepy and energized at the same time. Terrified and calmly facing my crap. Pete hands me the one big black key that looks like it’s been chewed on, and touches my hand in the process.

  “Please be careful, Zoey,” he says. Then he touches my arm. “Are you going to see an old boyfriend?” he asks.

  “No!” I say, realizing that he doesn’t know my old life, my old friends. My old screwups. Only the new ones. “Oh, no. No. It’s not that at all, Pete.”

  “Be safe,” he says. Then he kisses me on the cheek. He holds his lips there. His lips are so soft. I feel … lost. But also present. And also like if I don’t move, I am not going to see Molly. Like I could just give up everything that I thought I had to do and just keep my cheek raised to these lips.

  But I can’t. I get too easily distracted. I always have. I pull back and look at that face, that wide-eyed face, those brownish curls falling over the forehead.

  “I’m just going to Warwick,” I say. “It’s the suburbs.” I pause. “Thank you for being worried,” I say.

  “Don’t thank me.” He stops. If I don’t leave, I won’t leave.

  “Thank you,” I say again. “For being worried. And for lending me the Volvo. For asking if it’s an ex-boyfriend.” I smile at Pete. He has a weird mix of expressions over his face, all at the same time.

  I can’t parse them all. Mostly, Pete looks tired and concerned, and angry. And I think I see a glimmer of something affectionate. But I’m probably wrong about that. He only kissed my cheek, not my lips. He’s probably just being familiar. And if I’m wrong about that then I’m probably wrong about all of what I think I’m seeing on him, in him. I don’t even know him. I don’t know why he’s here with me in Rhode Island, or why he wants to leave. I keep asking, but I still don’t know. My mood darkens, my anxiety rises again. What is going on here? How come Pete could just take off from school? Why is he helping me? He doesn’t even know me. He’s got a much prettier and more attractively dressed girl at Shenandoah who loves him.

  I leave Pete in the vestibule and go out to the car. Get in the driver’s seat, adjust the seat forward so I can reach the pedals, adjust the mirrors, try to remember what else one is supposed to do when driving in the wee hours of the morning. I’ve never driven a lot, and never driven this car. I turn the car on and turn on the radio because that’s what you’re supposed to do, listen to music. It’s a song I haven’t heard in a while, one of those melancholy songs that sounds like it should be cheerful but hits you right in the gut. I listen and I start to cry.

  For a few minutes, I sit in the driver’s seat, singing along with the radio and crying over some dumb song about a fisherman who’s got the blues and feels better with an unnamed “you” in his arms. Dad loves this song. Present tense; can’t fathom that the present tense might no longer be applicable. Dad says the song was popular when he was in college, which was a hundred million years ago. I’ve only heard it a few times, when it’s randomly been playing in some ice cream parlor or something. It’s not a song I could pick out by title or band or anything. But here it is.

  Then there’s a tap on the window. I see it’s Pete.

  “Okay?” he mouths.

  I give him a thumbs-up, then shake my head because, thumbs-up? Really, Zoey? Then I start the car again, even though it’s started, cringing as I hear something bad happening in the engine. At least I think it’s the engine. And then I drive off toward Warwick, remembering partway down the road to turn on the headlights, the flash of brightness coming just in time to see a small fox dash from in front of the car and into one of the neighbor’s yards—that neighbor also has faux turrets; I didn’t even know there were foxes in this neighborhood—and run run run away, off on some mission of its own, probably just as important to it as mine is to me.

  CALL A SPADE A SPADE

  Chapter Thirteen

  When I get to Molly’s house, the lights are all off. Of course they are. It’s almost one in the morning. I sit outside in the car for a few minutes, looking at the two-story house. A split-level in a neighborhood of modest split-levels and old pine and maple trees. I spent so many nights here for so many years.

  I get out of the car. My legs are shaking a little bit in my jeans. Bad jeans. They’re too dark. I thought I wanted dark jeans when I got these, but now I think they seem too severe. I wish I had new jeans. Walk up the driveway and then the gravel path to the front door. The door’s locked, obviously. I can’t exactly ring the bell. I pull out my cell phone, call Molly. No response. I text. Nothing. Shit.

  Walk around back. No lights. Not even in the basement. Molly’s older sister has been living there since her divorce. Or had been living there, last I knew; moved back from New Jersey, where her husband’s family worked in the trash hauling business. We thought that was hilarious when Shira married into the trash-hauling business. Imagine having to travel all the way to New Jersey to marry into mafia, when you can’t throw a recyclable bottle without hitting Casa Nostre in the Biggest Little! What, we used to say with exaggerated made-up accents, Rhode Island mobsters aren’t good enough for you, Shira? Shira seemed to find this funny, too, up until her actual divorce. (It was sad. Turned out he wanted kids, she wasn’t ready. You’d have thought they’d have sorted through that before getting married, but I guess the ring finger and the womb don’t always have compatible wants.)

  But that was a year ago. Before I moved to Virginia. Maybe Shira has a new made man who’s gotten her out of the basement. Or maybe she just goes to sleep at a reasonable hour now.

  I check the back door. Locked. Jiggle the sliding glass door, which we used to leave unlocked when we rambled away from the house in the middle of the night, back when we used to do that sort of thing. Locked. I could turn around and go back to Aunt Lisa and Uncle Henry’s now. I tried. But the thought of that makes me so sad. Like, unbelievably sad. Despairingly sad. But what to do?

  I circle the house one more time, looking for some entryway that somehow I’ve never before known about in the decade-plus since I first started spending time in this house. Nothing. Except … There’s that maple tree on the side of the house where Molly’s room is. The one Molly and I tried to play Lone Ranger on when we were about nine—she hung on the lowest branch; I pretended to be a horse and was supposed to run under her so she could drop onto my shoulders. The branch broke before I got there. Once she got back from the hospital (minor concussion, plus poison ivy from the unfortunate thicket she landed on), her parents said if we ever went anywhere near that tree again there would be certain unnamed Serious Consequences.

  It is time to try again.

  I skulk over to the tree, around the side of the house. It is so dark it’s hard to make out much of anything about it, except that it’s still there. I walk to the trunk and reach for the first branch. If I stretch, I can just get my hands around it. Will it hold? THAT is a good question. I’d rather not find out the answer with a concussion. Or poison ivy.

  There is some sort of shovel in the back of the house, I recall. A spade, I think it’s called? I’m not so familiar with gardening implements, or much of anything relating to the useful arts. I go back and fetch it from its spot leaning against the house. It’s heavier than I thought a shovel would be; hope I can lift it high enough to hit the branch and test its strength.

  And I can! These small victories. I bang the branch two or three times
. I’m getting a little bit winded lifting the shovel so high, then heaving it at the branch, but I do it, and the branch holds. Hi-ho Silver at last.

  Dropping the shovel with a bit more of a clang than might be ideal, I hoist myself onto the branch by holding on, then walking myself up the trunk. I’m nimbler than I thought I’d be. It’s possible that the loathsome lacrosse has got me into a little bit of an athletic way. I start feeling more confident, jaunty even, as I reach for the next branch up. Which, I realize, I can’t test, since the shovel is down on the ground. Hm. I just grab at it and tug. It should fall if it won’t hold me, I think. It holds. I climb up and sit on it, my legs splayed on either side. I’ve got one more branch to go, I think, then I should be at Molly’s window, at which point … I have no idea. Like usual. Oy vey.

  Up I go to the next branch. A fall from this height would produce, I think, quite a bad concussion. Some broken bones. The worst case of poison ivy ever. But no, my luck, like the tree, holds. And here I am, close to the branch, a couple of feet away from Molly’s window, assuming she hasn’t switched rooms. Now how to get in?

  I shimmy along the branch, smelling the earthy, barky smell, feeling bugs fall into my hair (real bugs, imaginary ones, I don’t know), praying to a higher power I don’t believe in to keep me safe as I attempt this profoundly stupid feat to win back my old friend. And more than that, within reaching distance of the window, I am making all kinds of unenforceable negotiations with that great nonexistent being in the sky about how good I’ll be if somehow this works out. I’ll be better than good. I’ll get up on time. I’ll make sure Ben eats real food. I’ll get Dad back. I’ll make sure Dad is punished for what he’s done. I’ll make sure no one else in our family is killed, or kills. I’ll thank Pete. I’ll do my homework. The thing that doesn’t exist comes through; the branch doesn’t fall to the ground, and neither do I.