Coming of Age: Three Novellas (Dark Suspense, Gothic Thriller, Supernatural Horror)

by Douglas Clegg

  She was shocked to see tears in his eyes. “Let go of me, damn it!”

  His face turned bright red. He was angry. She knew the look—it was half the reason they’d broken up before mid-terms. He had slapped her a little too hard, and she had seen that red face. He was scary, sometimes.

  Her wrists hurt where he gripped her. “Let me go. Please,” she said more calmly, looking down at his hands. “Please. You’re hurting me, David.”

  “I just want you,” he said. His breath was all sour beer. Right then and there, he began blubbering like a baby. He released her wrists. She shoved him backward, and he fell, ass-first, on Griff’s bed. “You don’t know what it’s like. To love someone so much. To love them, to want them, you just don’t know. Honey, honey, I love you. I love you like no man is ever gonna love you.” His tears came in hiccups and heaves. She began to feel bad for him, despite everything. Once she was dressed, she went over to the bed, and sat beside him. She put her arm around his back.

  “Look. You’re a good man,” she said, but felt as if she were telling the biggest lie on the planet. “You’ll find a girl who loves you because you’re wonderful. I’m no good. I really am not right for you. Maybe I’m not right for anyone. But you, you have a lot going for you.”

  “I know,” he said, weeping bitterly. “I know. But I can save you from your sinful life, Tammy. I can make you a good woman.”

  “Poor baby,” Tammy said, hugging him to her. “Poor, poor baby.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  He looked up at her with his tear-stained face. To her, he looked like a puppy dog that had just been hit by a car and lived to whimper about it. He leaned into her to kiss her, and she felt badly enough for him that she let him.

  And that’s when he grabbed her tight and thrust his tongue into her mouth. She pushed him away, but his grip was now around her arms and waist like a straitjacket. He maneuvered to the side, and brought her down on the bed, turning her around so that her face pressed into the blanket. “You know I love you,” he said, slobbering. “You know you’re my woman.”

  She tried to cry out, but her mouth was gagged with the blanket.

  She felt him grind against her.

  In what was called the Persian Room, in the basement of the frat house, but off beneath the stairs, a small room full of a haze of blue smoke, Ziggy got a bong in his face and clouds of sweet smoke billowing around him, and somebody said, “You look like a fire-breathing dragon, Zigster.”

  Ziggy laughed and felt his face go all red. He wondered if he’d ever been this high before. He looked at his hands to make sure they weren’t sprouting leaves. For a second, he thought he was turning into a tree.

  “What’s up with that?” he asked his partner-in-high, Joe Metheny.

  “With what?”

  “My hands? It’s like they’re ripping out of my arms.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Both of them laughed at once. Then stopped. Then laughed again.

  There were others in the haze of smoke, but Ziggy only noticed Joe, who had the most hilarious look on his face—a red smile and a sparkling around his eyes.

  “You know what I like about you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re always happy,” Ziggy said. Then, he took another hit from the Monster Bong.

  “Where the hell is Josh?” Bronywn picked her way through the rabble of the party—students passed out on the floor, others leaning into their girlfriend’s faces in the corners of rooms, still others managed to keep dancing to music that stopped ten minutes before, all the while the stench of beer and vomit, up and down the stairs—and just as she got to the top of the stairs, coming out of the bathroom, naked, in full-swing, Griff.

  She felt as if she’d been shot with a raygun and couldn’t move.

  She tried not to look at him. He was a golden Apollo. His hair, slicked back on his scalp, and it emphasized his high-cheekbones and his pool blue eyes and the way his nose was the slightest of ski-slopes and she couldn’t help herself—she looked down at his chest, developed from football and wrestling, and then along his abs, the striation of muscle prominent, his pale skin slick with water, and down to the blond tufts of pubic hair, and the artistically arranged penis itself.

  Then, the millisecond passed. He didn’t notice her watching, and passed by the stairs, heading back to his room.

  Bronwyn caught her breath and sat down on the stairs. Another cigarette, this time for several long-drawn-out puffs.

  The doorway at the top of the stairs went to one of the upperclassmen’s rooms. It was open, and she got up and walked through it to the balcony. She went out to the edge of the balcony and looked up at the stars that were just fading as morning came up along the horizon in a new day that was still too distant from the night.

  When she glanced down at the murky front lawn, she saw a guy she was pretty sure was Josh.

  “You’re drunk,” she said. She crouched down in the dew-wet grass beside his prone body.

  “No I’m not,” he said. “I’m star-gazing.”

  “You didn’t touch any booze?” She kicked at the empty bottle of Jack Daniels at his side.

  “Okay. Busted. Just a little.”

  “Damn it. We go in three hours.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Jesus. We’re never getting to L.A.”

  “We’ll get there. I drove from Chicago to Atlanta in one night once. We can get to L.A. in three days. At the most, four. I promise. How many people are coming?”

  “Total, five. I think. You, me, Griff, Tammy, and maybe Ziggy if he doesn’t get too messed up tonight. Everybody chips in, so it’s a free trip for you.”

  “That’ll be cozy,” he said, laughing.

  “You need to sleep this off before we go. Damn it,” she said.

  “You want to see Orion?” he asked. He pointed to a group of white specks in the dark sky. “Come on. Lie down. Here, use my jacket. There. Now, look.”

  “That’s not Orion.”

  “Okay, it’s something else. It’s the unnamed stars. Let’s connect the dots and make them into somebody.”

  “Like who?”

  “There’s Ziggy,” Josh said, drawing an invisible line with his finger, swooping it in the air, from a cluster of stars to a single bright one. “See, he’s got his bong.”

  “I see it,” she said. “And there’s Tammy. See the boobs?”

  Josh made a wish on the last star, just before it extinguished.

  Bronywn drifted to sleep beside him, her last cigarette falling on the wet grass as morning arrived.

  They both woke up at the same time, hours later, late in the afternoon on Saturday with Josh’s arm slipped beneath Bronwyn’s neck. He opened his eyes to what seemed like midday, and knew, instinctively, that she had also just woken up. She sat up, drawing away from him. Glanced at her watch. “We’re already late. Please tell me the Pimpmobile is running okay.”

  Ziggy had an acid-flashback tripticular dream and in it something small and nasty with eyes like green stones on fire and claws like shiny black hooks leapt for him like it was a jaguar from Hell.

  He awoke and drank an entire pot of coffee before going off in search of the others about to leave on the road trip that would get him away from the drugs for awhile. He hoped.

  The Pimpmobile was more than its name could ever suggest. Not just a car. The car: a boat on wheels. A big fat honkin’ Lincoln Town Car sedan. Given to Josh when he went to college by his grandmother, who was a doctor’s wife and changed cars every two years. She drove her cars hard and put them up cracked and dried out, and often was in accidents, so something always went wrong—a headlight that blinked, a strange push on the brakes, something about the shotgun seat that didn’t feel entirely comfortable. Small problems that could be worked around. His grandmother was named Alfreda, and she used to fart in the car so much that Josh was still sure it had her stink. She died soon after giving him the car—her smoking and drinking got
the better of her—and and he missed her and kept the car even though it was held together by duct tape and got about 10 miles to the gallon. Even though it had some issues—it was a little low in the trunk, and the backseat was covered with tape and smelled permanently like cigarette ash and there was this noise it made every few miles that sounded like the squeal of a cat getting hit. Josh took care of the Pimpmobile. He had spent all of Thursday, not studying for his Survey Course of the Early American History final, but washing and waxing and tuning up the boat for the big trip.

  Here’s how the trip evolved: back in February, Bronwyn’s dad and his new wife moved to L.A. from Chicago. Bronwyn hated the new wife, but loved her dad, and even though her dad didn’t want to see her, she told him she was coming for spring break come hell or high water.

  Josh’s Pimpmobile was the only ride she could get.

  “I can pay all gas,” she told him. “And two nights in a motel.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Josh said.

  She looked at him strangely. “Yeah—I do. It’ll take four nights at the most. But I know we can make it in under three if we take turns driving. Plus, I’ve got a radar detector. We can go 100 on some of the desert roads. They’re straight lines with no traffic at four in the morning and I love drinking a pot of coffee and driving through them before the sun comes up. Plus, we can get other people to pitch in on gas.”

  Because Griff and Tammy were going to go, too, and Ziggy, the car would be packed, but Bronwyn claimed the shotgun seat three weeks before the trip. The day of the trip—which turned into Saturday evening —the only person who hadn’t shown up at the designated spot was Ziggy, and they had to drive around for forty minutes before they found him in the college library, asleep on one of the leather couches.

  He opened his eyes to see all four of them standing over them.

  “What the hell?” he asked.

  “I don’t love druggies,” Bronwyn said as she took a long, last drag off a dying cigarette. “I just don’t like it.” She pointed down at him. “No weed goes on this trip. Understood? Beer’s fine. No drugs.”

  “Beer’s a drug,” Ziggy moaned, scratching himself under the arms like a dog after fleas.

  Bronwyn squinted and pursed her lips. “I think you know what I mean.”

  The road trip began about an hour later, and by nine they were on the main highway toward Tennessee. It took too long to get through the South, let alone reach the Southwest. Josh drove first shift, then Bronwyn, then Griff. After Griff’s six hours’ were up, he got in the backseat and, without anyone being aware of it, put Tammy’s hands on the bulge in his pants and whispered in her ear that she should just keep stroking it. Tammy pretended she was getting the little bottle of Vaseline moisturizer from her handbag because her hands were drying out. Ziggy pretended to be asleep, but he told Josh later how, when Josh was driving and Bronwyn was talking a mile a minute about why Ayn Rand was the most brilliant human being who had ever lived, Tammy had unzipped Griff and gave him a slow, easy handjob that had driven Ziggy nearly crazy as he watched from his nearly-closed eyes.

  “He’s got a big boy,” Ziggy told Josh later, when they got out to pump gas. “And Tammy was licking his ear the whole time she did it. Man, he is one lucky dude.”

  “Ew,” Josh said. “Skanky. In the back of the Pimpmobile. Nasty, nasty, nasty.”

  “He’s like the Alpha.”

  “What?”

  “The Alpha. Like in wolf packs. One male gets the hot chicks. All the other males—that’s you and me—never get laid.”

  “I get laid.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “No, I do.”

  “That’s why you’re all alone on this trip. Like me,” Ziggy said. Then, Ziggy sniffed his fingers. “God, even my fingers smell like sex. I can’t believe you and Bron didn’t notice. It was freaky.”

  “Sleazy’s more like it.”

  “Ah, you’re just jealous,” Zig said, and then went to use the restroom at the back of the gas station.

  Josh glanced at Tammy, who was just going into the ladies’ room. Griff stood outside it, grinning, his hands in his pocket. Then, thinking nobody was watching, he tapped on the door to the ladies’ room. The door opened. Griff went inside.

  Bronwyn was still in the car, smoking. Josh went over to her side. “You hear what Zig said?”

  Bronwyn took the earphones to her Sony Walkman tape player off her head. “You need money?”

  “No, not that. Did you know that Griff and Tammy…had sex in the backseat today?”

  Bronwyn’s eyes seemed to squint into tiny cuts, then opened wider. “That whore. She just traps men with sex. That’s all it is.”

  “Yeah,” Josh said.

  “Like you’re any different.”

  “I am.”

  Then, Bronwyn smiled, blew out a puff of smoke, and touched the edge of his wrist. “No, you are. You’re so different I thought you might be gay when I first met you.”

  “Gay? I’m not gay.”

  “Don’t get all defensive. It was the poetry you wrote. For creative writing. It was sensitive. That’s all. Not like the way other guys write stuff that’s all about them and their exploits. You wrote about something different.”

  Oh Christ, he thought. Oh Christ. She sees me as a dickless wonder.

  “I think they’re going at it in there,” he said, nodding toward the restroom.

  “Gross.” Bronwyn sucked back some smoke, and then heaved it out in a long sigh. She leaned forward into the dashboard, stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray. “Let me tell you something, Josh. Something about some girls. There are these girls like Tammy who boys really like because of this whole sex issue. But girls know about who she really is. She’s a sad pathetic idiot who thinks her whole life should revolve around giving the worst kind of men what they want.”

  “I thought you were still looney tunes for Griff.”

  “Once. Maybe. Not anymore. I don’t think I could ever want someone who slept with some of the girls he’s slept with. Back when I dated him, you know, he’d only slept with a few girls. At this point, the numbers are reaching the populations of small island nations. Tammy’s just one of many, I’m sure.”

  “You don’t fool me,” he said. “Not one bit. You like bad boys. Nice girl like you, rich family. It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Bite me, preppie boy,” she said, and then put her earphones back on.

  Nobody thought Tammy should drive because she had too many beers during the day, and Ziggy somehow managed to get stoned even though no one could specifically say when. It was assumed he went into the bathrooms at HoJos or Stuckeys or the Waffle Huts, and just got high fast. The rule in the car was “no weed,” and Ziggy somehow had managed to smuggle some in as if he were having to pass through U.S. Customs.

  They stopped six times the first day because Tammy had to pee so much. Or else, as Josh and Ziggy assumed, she and Griff had to sexually christen every sleazoid gas station bathroom in the Bible Belt. They drove through Memphis with Griff telling a story about how he got lost in downtown Memphis once and went to some big party there and passed out and woke up the next day in New Orleans. He thought it was a funny story, but no one laughed. Then, in Little Rock, Bronwyn called her father collect, and her father told her that she was an idiot to plan a trip like this with people she didn’t know and that he’d send a plane ticket if she wanted to come out. She hung up on him, and chainsmoked the rest of the day and evening, which got them to Oklahoma City, where they all crashed in one room at a Howard Johnson’s. They slept for eleven hours, when the maids finally banged on the door the next afternoon, trying to get them up and out.

  They went from Oklahoma down through the Texas Panhandle, and Ziggy wanted to stop at El Paso for something, and that’s where things started to go seriously wrong. Griff and Tammy wanted to spend a day in Juarez, bar-hopping, and Bronwyn’s period had started (she didn’t need to announce it, everyone knew when she went into sn
apping turtle mode), and Josh had to go rescue Griff from a fight at a badly-lit bar, even though Griff had been the creep who was coming on to other men’s wives in the bar.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Josh asked, yanking Griff by his wrinkled button-down shirt, out from the darkness of the bar, into the searing white light of mid-day. Griff crumbled to the ground, shielding his face as if expecting to get hit one more time.

  “I’m havin’ a little fun. You know about fun?” Griff giggled, and wiped a smidgeon of blood from the edge of his lips.

  “That guy could’ve done some serious damage to you. You asshole.”

  Griff raised his eyebrows in a “who cares?” attitude, and reached his hand up to Josh. “Come on, help me up.”

  Josh gave him a lift up, and smacked him lightly on the back of the head. “Get back to the car. Jesus, now I’ve got to go back in there and get Tammy. Could you just stay out of trouble once in your life?”

  “This isn’t trouble,” Griff replied, stumbling off in search of the others in the car, parked out on the main road. “The lacrosse trophies. Now that was trouble.”

  (Who could forget? Josh thought. Who could forget someone having stolen all the lacrosse trophies at Jackson College that had been won over the past ten years, the prize sport of Jackson, the Gods of Jackson had played lacrosse. Griff and his frat brothers had stolen all of them and then pissed in them and left them in front of Dean Egan’s house at the edge of campus. Griff was a moron and a thief, and he’d be doing shit like this since as long as Josh had known him, which was only two years now.)

  In Las Cruces, New Mexico, they got pulled over by the cops. Griff told Bronwyn to show the cop her boobs and they wouldn’t get the ticket. “My sister did that once. She had these big boobies. And I was riding shotgun, and this cop pulled her over for going 85 in a 55 zone, and she just unbuttoned her blouse three inches down and acted all baby-like and he didn’t give her a ticket. It works. Honest.”