It also leaves her alone.
Her wrists hit the dirt, launching her off her ass to wander back to Niko, who’s climbed onto the doorframe to look down on her subjects like a politician. Perhaps for effect or by coincidence, Niko has turned on the headlights. The low-beams backwash onto her. It looks really cool. “Look everyone, here’s how it is. A coolant hose has blown. The leak is slow and we’ve given some time for the engine to cool, so if we can get it to start, we can drive slowly to the next gas station. We may need to stop if it overheats again, I don’t know how many times, but when we get there, and if we can be inventive with what the place has got, we can jury rig the leak and buy enough coolant to refill us all the way home.”
The group agrees, except Timmy.
“Uh-uh, that’s not happening!”
“Oh yeah, and what’s your problem with that?”
“The problem is that it’s my van.”
“Baby, we know that.”
“No, you don’t understand. I won’t let it happen.”
“Because it’s your van?”
“That and you aren’t frying the engine because your friend got burned last night.” He means Sykosa and her coquettish behavior with Clyde and Tom. Apparently, it has led the group to several different conclusions about what happened. The majority opinion, which was subtly suggested by Clyde during a smoke break while reassembling Niko’s cottage, was an emotionally distraught Sykosa hooked up with Tom only after Clyde rejected her for SS1. Everyone was quick to believe Clyde since, sometime that evening, it became clear by noise alone that he was making it with SS1 in the lagoon. It’s made this moment incredibly awkward. And put a spotlight on Timmy’s stupidity. He tries to rally the group anyway. “I mean it, we all know it happened, and it’s what’s driving this—”
Tom interrupts. “Fuck you, man!”
Tom scoots chest-to-chest with Timmy.
Timmy’s staring him down and pointing his finger, which he’s hanging high and letting move with his words either like a diva or like it were an inverted handgun. “No, fuck you cause we’re not fucking up my van!”
“I don’t care. You don’t talk to her that way.”
“Don’t fuck up my van and I won’t have to!”
Niko’s between them. “Let’s get home, alright?”
It suffices.
Tom loads into the van, followed by the rest. As predicted, the engine overheats again and is turned off again, then run again, overheats again, and finally, manually pushed down an exit ramp—the only sign of civilization, save the 747s rumbling above—to stop at a dilapidated foodmart. The pushing part strained her abdominals. It forced her to shut her butt. It’s poop, but also gas from all the drinking. It’s hit in urgency, and before she expels it, she watches SS1—who stands in sunglasses, sports bra, and a thong riding visibly above her waist—and SS2—dressed the same, but in a different color scheme—put on a public spectacle.
Truthfully, it’s a miracle the Sluts lasted this long.
“Niko, are we trapped?”
“Yeah, are we trapped?”
Niko ignores them.
“Niko, don’t ignore me!”
“Yeah, don’t ignore us!”
Mackenzie’s in on it. “I think it’s a good question.”
Niko’s dumbfounded and infuriated. She’s yelling at them, but she’s really yelling at Timmy, who keeps getting in her way. “For a pack of retards all dying to get home, you’ve all got fucking asinine opinions that cannot go unvoiced.”
Regardless, that did not help.
SS1 loses it! “I knew this would happen! I knew we’d need the boys to fix something! We never should have come out here by ourselves!” She’s on a roll, bunching her face and crying like a baby. “This is your fault, Niko! You’re the reason we’re stuck out here! You’re the reason that…” She screams. “I want my daddy! Do you hear me? I want my daddy!”
SS2 collapses. “Daaaaaaaaaa-ddy!”
Niko nearly slaps the ‘ho. “Shut your fucking mouth!”
SS2 straightens up—frightened. “Sorry, Niko.”
Niko wears regret. “Come here, honey.” SS2 prances beside her and Niko uses her arm to hold her close. “Let’s see if we can’t find what we need inside, alright?”
“Okay, Niko!”
Once Niko’s gone, hostilities fizzle.
That’ll happen when the smartest person you’ve ever met, who also declared your existence to be a waste to all evolved life, disappears. But, it’s understandable. Everyone, including Niko, is too hung over and too underslept to be friends. And she still needs to shit, and this is as good a time as any, so she follows Niko. Inside, the store clerk, a redneck behind bulletproof glass, is halfway into a practiced speech about kids, like them, who stop en route to Seattle, peruse the post cards, try on sunglasses, spin round the personalized novelty plates and leave with pockets lined in cheese ball and candy.
He’s really passionate about it.
Niko’s unimpressed, mumbling through her teeth. “I need duct tape, cleaner, paper towel, coolant, a flashlight, gloves, and something I can create a splint with.”
The clerk, clearly intimidated, directs her, then looks back. He’s white as a ghost.
She understands. “I was wondering if I could have a key to the bathroom.”
The key is along a bay beneath the glass.
“It’s behind the utility shack.”
“Thanks.”
She exits the store, and once the door jingle finishes, she hears Tom’s voice. He’s at a picnic table with Mackenzie. “I know it’s stressful, but please don’t upset Niko, Sykosa says she can fix this.” Wow, he listened. That’s attractive. Though, while she agrees that Niko’s their best shot, she thinks she should be beside him, and Mackenzie should be kicken’ it elsewhere. She hears him again. “It’s stressful, but please don’t be upset, I’m trying, I am.” It’s a whisper that’s invented in her head.
Her eyes curl over her shoulder to see him. Mackenzie’s staring at her. She darts her head around.
Damnit, why does she always win?
Quickly, she applies her hair in a ponytail, that way when she looked, it was to her fix her hair. Still, the embarrassment is real, and she can’t shake the premonition that Mackenzie—being the gold standard—is going to steal Tom from her. Losing Tom makes her reconsider that list of grievances and… Damnit, Mackenzie won. The bitch has undermined this great, significant day. To hide her anger, she quickly—too quickly, actually—cuts between gas pumps to the toilet, where she’s gonna be emotional about this. Halfway there, she realizes she shoulda asked the Pep Squad to tag along since some nausea sets in, and she feels strained for breath at the edge of her lungs, and her eyesight—which, now behind the utility shack, stares at the scuffed door handle—loses its edge definition.
It’s stupid that the blackness would be provoked by this.
I need to sleep for, like, a year.
The blackness may be here, but so is he. He followed her when he noticed her fleeing from the gas pump. She’s receptive to him instantly and clutches him and forces the grooves of her jeans into his own. Finally after this time away from him, she gets what she needs—a long, meaningless, directionless, sexless hug. She doesn’t care how scientifically improbable it is, it soothes the soreness in her groin and almost distributes the pain so it’s less of a burden, then flushes it away with the relief her body feels to not be supporting its weight alone.
He’s overwhelmed by all the estrogen of this afternoon, but he guesses he understands. In the bedroom after they finished, she was almost afraid to go without touching him for longer than ten seconds. “Is this because of the van? I’m sure it’ll be fixed soon.”
“I guess, maybe, a little bit. No.”
“What’s it about?”
She whines in a whisper. “Can you see what she’s doing?”
“Who? Mackenzie?”
“Yes.”
“Please don’t involve me in this s
tuff between you two.”
His tone was diplomatic like this morning, but it also had an edge to it. He’s been telling Mackenzie the same thing. The little bitch is trying to break them up! “She wants to break us up, I know she does. She wants you to leave me.”
“Sykosa, she’s just worried—”
She interrupts. “Please don’t.”
“No, you need to hear this.”
This isn’t her story. This isn’t her life.
I swear if he defends her…
“Please, talk about something else.” He has nothing to say. She says something. “It’s cold.” He disrobes his hoodie. It’s gray, and, in red, the Academy logo is over his heart. She pulls her hair from beneath the collar, her arms slipped through the sleeves. It smells like him, like boy. Or rubbed off girl. Or more accurately, rubbed off Mackenzie. She’s back in his arms. “You aren’t cold, are you?”
“No, I’m fine.”
She sounds concerned. “You sure? You can have it back.”
“No, I want you to have it.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
She feels no need to answer and doesn’t, but when she puts her opposite cheek by his chest, she sees his arm in his undershirt. He rarely wears short sleeves. The scars are too numerous and some too deep for public display. Though, a lot of the superficial cuts—that left scars barely impacting the surface—seem to have resolved themselves back to skin. She’s surprised she hasn’t noticed before. “These have healed well.”
“You think?”
“Well, better than I thought they would.”
He is timid. He’s tried and failed so many times at this.
“I got them in a fight last year.”
“I know.”
“You were there, I saw you.”
“Yeah, I was.”
“You know, tomorrow is—”
She interrupts. “How much school did you miss?”
“I mis—”
She interrupts again. “Three weeks, I knew that.”
He almost sounds surprised. “You did?”
“I know it all, Tom.”
In a few minutes, she poops, or farts a lot, and in the few minutes after, he buys two microwavable burritos. They spin in the microwave and they wait by the foodmart window. At the van, Timmy distracts Niko with his belief that his years at the 7/11 out-qualifies her expertise. Inside it, Clyde strums his guitar—cause I’m in love and it’s just too much—for SS1, who stares like a groupie. SS2 also stares like a groupie. SS3’s along for the ride. Mackenzie’s in the front, her head in a schoolbook. He’s with me. They’re wedged between a coat stand of lunchroom-size potato chip bags and a cabinet of print media.
“That’s Niko’s mom, right?”
She looks at this magazine rack full of racks, specifically at the rack on Redbook. “Yes, that’s Kana.”
“I think people might be forgetting what happened.”
Hopefully. Probably not.
It’s hard to forget the biggest story of the year.
Last year, early in her sophomore year, a tabloid published pictures of Kana at a party. No big deal? Well, it so happens that Kana was in her underwear. That’s just the start. The signature photograph had Kana bent over a cocaine filled table-top with her boob popped out. It was obviously gravity being a bitch, but the news stations had to mosaic it, which made it risqué, and that made it—follow her here—the signature photograph. It also didn’t help that Niko’s father wasn’t at this naked, drug bash. What proceeded was Kana’s stay at an inpatient rehab clinic, the duration of which became extended since the only time Kana left was when she checked out, got wasted, then checked back in when pictures were published.
“Don’t mention it. You’ll make Niko uncomfortable.”
“I won’t.”
She decides to obsess about Kana. It’s easy to do since, if she had one or two features of Kana’s, it’d be Mackenzie thinking she was the gold standard instead of the other way around. “She’s natural. She hasn’t had any surgery or anything. I mean, that’s her. She looks like that all the time.”
“You look better.”
She looks like a blob, and in his sweatshirt, as if she were trying to hide that she’s fat. She still likes wearing it. “Thanks.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know I don’t look like her.”
“That’s unfortunate for her.”
“What?” The comment confuses her. It’s not blatant, which is typically his style. “Are you saying that—” She interrupts herself with a grin. Good boy. “Aw.”
She manhandles him close to her again. At first, he thought it was cute. Now, it worries him. He would think the longer and the harder she holds him, the less she would need to do so, but it seems like whatever owns her right now owns her damn good. So he holds her back, holds her tight, then wills away the resulting erection by thinking of video games and fat girls. That’s only 50% accurate. Inside, he really wants to fix it, to fix her, and to do it now. He wants to tell her about last year. He wants her to tell him what it was like for her. Then, after that, she can suck his dick like she did on the blanket, or he can fuck her until he comes, or…
Look, he’s gotta say it already…
All day long, every time he sees her, he gets vivid images of her fucking thirty guys. And her doing “anal.” (He even thought it in her own voice). Or, sometimes, he can’t stop wondering if, even by the tiniest probability, any of those lesbian rumors last year were true. He could walk into a room, maybe, and, possibly, see Niko and her, buck naked, sixty-nineing or putting dildos in each other or… He wonders what it might feel like if she exchanged sex for whatever parts are broken in the van with that redneck asshole and…
No! What he meant was…
The words never come. And when they do, they’re wrong.
Fixing Mackenzie is easy. Fixing Sykosa rips him to shreds.
She makes him feel too much. And that makes everything so much more complicated. Even now, he knows it’s a bad idea to bring this up, but he’s gonna do it anyway. Because she made it sound like she needed it, and because his stupid ass can’t ignore it. “I know you’re upset about Mackenzie, but you two have had problems forever and—”
She interrupts. “You’re not sitting by me in the van.”
That was impulsive. She regrets saying it.
He doesn’t, as he knows what she’s talking about.
After they slept together, she had a “way” about her and once Mackenzie caught its scent, Mackenzie had a “way” of separating them. Mackenzie got by him in the van and he thought he should sit by Sykosa, but it took ten seconds to decide. By then, he didn’t want to move cause he didn’t want anyone, especially Clyde, to know he knew he made the wrong decision and… This whole agonizing trip—he’s wished he was with her.
“I’ll sit next to you.”
That surprises her. “You will?”
“Yes, I didn’t… I hadn’t spent much time with Mackenzie this weekend and I guess… I don’t know.”
It’s gonna be hard to ignore the Mackenzie problem since he’s conceded it’s a serious one. She talks carefully, unsure how many of the grievances she should list. “You’re gonna have to try harder, much harder.”
“I know.”
“I don’t feel like your girlfriend sometimes.”
One of his hands has released her to rub his eye into his eye socket. He’s also trying like hell to hold back a yawn. He’s so tired. “And that’s because of Mackenzie?”
“I think…if you do something with, I mean, like, anything you do with any other girl, I should get to do it, too.”
“Like what?”
The first grievance that comes to her is also the dumbest.
“You talk to Mackenzie on the phone.”
He throws his hands in exhaustion. No, wait, in joy.
He’s smiling. “I do, but not like you think.”
On rare occasion, she’s okay wit
h being wrong. This would be ones of those times. “How do you talk to her then?”
He holds her close, and when he talks, it’s softly like she does. “On the Internet. She has AOL. We IM.”
She’s miffed. “I have AOL.”
“You never mentioned it.”
“Duh, I need it for school.”
“Not everyone…” Strike that. “What’s your screen name?”
“It’s Sykosacess.”
He smirks. “As in princess?”
She feels dumber. “Maybe. What’s yours?”
“ThomasBuilt.”
Never mind, his is dumber. “That’s your screen name?”
“Yeah, and when we get back, I’ll add you.”
She likes that.
She never uses the Internet, but she’ll start. “Okay.”
“Is there anything else?”
She thinks there is. It shoulda occurred to her long before.
“I don’t like how you waited so long to ask me to Prom.”
He pulls away from her a bit, then holds his place. “I wasn’t certain you would go.”
That’s stupid. “I’m not stupid, Tom.”
This time he does pull away. One hand goes back into his eye, the other goes through his hair. “It’s… You won’t talk about last year, so I didn’t know if you wanted to go or if you never wanted it mentioned.”
“I kept bringing it up.”
“Yeah—about how dumb the other girls were acting over it.”
He’s got a point. She lets it die.
Though, she knows this talk isn’t over—not by a long shot. It’s enough for her for now. Besides, the microwave bings and Tom shuffles hot burritos between his hands as he transfers them to a flimsy paper plate. She eats in small bites, and despite the indigestion, the warmth is disarming. Outside, they talk about school shit while she smokes a cigarette. It’s been a long time since she last smoked, and the buzz is like a freight train. It also helps with the indigestion.
She looks out at the group.
The Sluts sleep in the van, all leaned against each other for support. Mackenzie has a textbook pointed at a cabin light, ignoring Clyde who’s—overcome by rage, I surrender amongst the sage—made her his next conquest. She has to imagine Tom wants to save M from that loser, and he does want to save M from that loser. He also wonders how many girls Clyde gets by sheer shamelessness. He reminds himself it doesn’t matter.
Sykosa, Part I: Junior Year Page 29