Why They Run the Way They Do

by Susan Perabo

  I shut out the light. “Whatever you say, Tobes.”

  Downstairs, on the Hartsocks’ couch, I set about pretending to do my homework. I was trying to get through The Tempest for AP English, but trying to get through anything while sitting in the Hartsocks’ living room was next to impossible. The babysitting job was a total ruse—I’d pretty much given up sitting at fifteen—but in the last six months was always available for Mrs. Hartsock, day or night, weekday or weekend. Last minute? No problem! Sitting for Toby had become an excuse to sit among the things Dean touched every day, to imagine myself in this house not as a babysitter but a girlfriend. I’d sit on their overstuffed sofa with a book in my lap and consciously detach myself from reality, pretending he’d just gotten up from beside me, was in the kitchen fixing something for us to eat. Sometimes I’d look over my shoulder impatiently, wondering what was taking him so long. On more than one occasion I’d become so lost in the fantasy that I’d nearly called out his name to hurry him along.

  “Katie?”

  It took me a moment to realize he was actually there, standing in the kitchen doorway. He was wearing sweats and his Somerville Basketball T-shirt and his hair was wet and slicked back and he was just standing there smiling at me.

  “Hey,” I said, wrenching myself from the dream. I could almost hear the ripping noise. “Hey. What’s up?”

  “You looked really freaky just then,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “No, I mean. You just . . . what’re you thinking about?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I mean, you know.” I held up the book cheerfully. “Shakespeare or something.”

  He came and sat on the couch beside me. I inched myself away so that if one of us shifted, our knees would not accidentally touch. He smelled like honey shampoo and I either wanted to bury my nose in his brown hair or vomit on my shoes. There seemed to be no other choice.

  “You know what I was thinking just now, watching you?”

  I swallowed what felt like a walnut. “What?”

  He grinned. His top front teeth were a tiny bit gapped and crooked, a flaw that would have made most guys unappealing but somehow worked to his advantage. It was this imperfect thing that made his face perfect. “We used to do some crazy stuff, you and me. We were really whacked out.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Remember that time you put on my clothes and I put on your clothes and we thought we could fool people into thinking you were me and I was you?” He snorted a laugh. “Who does that?”

  “We were really stupid,” I said. “And we were like eight then. I can’t believe we thought that would work.”

  “It’s different now, with kids,” he said. I saw his eyes pass over Toby’s picture on the mantel. “They start worrying about being cool when they’re in kindergarten. They’d never be crazy like we were. It makes me feel really old, you know?”

  “We are old,” I said. “We’re seniors.”

  “Whoever thought we’d be so old?” he said. He paused and his face turned serious. “I been thinking about you,” he said. “A lot.”

  I tried to look casually intrigued. “Oh yeah?”

  “You know why?”

  My voice wouldn’t come so I shook my head.

  He sat forward, put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, looked at the floor. “ ’Cause you saw the plane,” he said. He glanced over at me. “I know this sounds crazy but I’m kinda jealous. I mean, I know it was really horrible for you guys, and I feel bad for saying it—”

  “Don’t feel bad,” I said.

  “I just mean, you know . . .” He looked straight at me. “Were you scared?”

  For a moment I thought maybe I could tell him, my friend Dean. Yes, I could tell him. I could say, listen, here’s a funny thing: my reed was broken, and then I stopped for a drink of water. But he was sitting beside me, the shift of his weight tilting us closer on the couch, and for the first time in a long time what I said mattered to him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. I thought . . . I thought maybe . . . you know . . . it was like it wasn’t real, like I was seeing myself see it, but . . . yeah, it was, I was. Yeah. You know?”

  He shook his head. “I just wish I had a little piece of it, Katie,” he said. “You have your piece. You saw it. So it’s like you’re my little piece of it now.” He smiled cautiously. “That’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, I know it is. It’s weird.”

  “It’s not weird,” I said.

  “Well, I guess maybe it’s not any weirder than anything else right now.”

  “I love you,” I said. But by the time I said this it was four hours later and I was lying in my bed next door, talking to the empty space beside me that for almost six months now had been named Dean.

  “I’ve been waiting so long to hear you say that,” the empty space said.

  “The wait’s over,” I said. “We don’t have to wait for anything anymore.”

  I turned over and looked at the clock. It was almost 2:00 a.m. I got out of bed and went downstairs, thinking a cup of tea might settle my thoughts and let me get some sleep. I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table eating cheese and crackers and reading an admissions brochure from the University of Pittsburgh.

  “What’re you doing?” I asked.

  She glanced up. Her narrow reading glasses were perched on the tip of her nose and she had a pencil behind her ear. “Did you know every room at Pitt has its own microwave? Isn’t that clever?”

  “Lots of places do that now,” I said, pulling a mug from the cupboard. “And Pitt’s out, remember?”

  “I was just . . . revisiting,” she said. “You know they have one of the top ranked fitness centers in the country?”

  “You want me to pick a school because they have great treadmills?” I sat down while my water heated in the teakettle. “What are you doing awake?”

  She pushed up her glasses. “I was hungry. I wanted some cheese.”

  “I didn’t like Pitt,” I said.

  “But you could come home on weekends,” she said. “I could do your laundry for you. You’d be the envy of all your friends.”

  I smirked. “Actually, no, they’d feel sorry for me.”

  She took the pencil from her ear and laid it on the table beside the brochure. “You don’t have to be nasty about it.”

  “I’m not. I’m kidding, okay? It’s just . . . I have my list. I feel good about it.”

  “Katie, honey,” she said. Then she whispered: “Do you know how much your father wants you to live close to home?”

  My mother blamed a lot on my father—the leaky pipes, the sullen cat, the patch of grass that never turned green—but this was a new one, so desperate she was not to blow her cover.

  “Tell him I’ll be fine,” I said. “Tell him I’m not going to the other side of the world.”

  “Every time you walk out of this house it’s the other side of the world.” She sliced a piece of cheese and placed it on her cracker. “As far as he’s concerned.”

  The Saturday before Halloween Mrs. Hartsock called and asked me to babysit for Toby. They’d gotten last-minute tickets to a hockey game in Pittsburgh and would not be back until after midnight. Toby was going to a fifth grade costume party down the block, but had been instructed to be home by 9:00. Dean, I knew from other sources, was going to a Halloween party thrown by the basketball team, so I would be free to pine among his things in peace.

  I was watching TV when Toby arrived home. He was dressed as a hobo—a torn coat three sizes too big, a tattered engineer’s hat, a stick over his shoulder with a bandanna-bag attached. He had three friends in tow: a skeleton, a ninja, and a boxer, who all grunted as they passed.

  “We’re gonna play Xbox in the basement,” Toby said.

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t care when he went to bed, as long as it was sometime before his parents returned. I heard them down there, those boys, playing their games. I thought of Dean and me, how we would someday tell our chil
dren how we’d met so young, been best friends, then a little later more than friends, how we would skip over the middle part, these last few years, because that would no longer be an interesting or relevant part of the story, and the further we got from it the more this time we’d spent apart would shrink to nothing until it would seem there had only been a day, perhaps an hour, between the time we drifted apart and the time we came back together.

  I fell asleep. When I woke the clock above the TV said 11:30 and the house was quiet. I went to the top of the basement steps. The lights were still on but everything was silent; no way there were four boys, even two, even one, down there. I took the stairs to the second floor two at a time, holding out a tiny glimmer of hope that Toby’d seen me asleep on the couch and gone to bed of his own accord. Of course this was not the case; his room was empty.

  “Shit,” I said.

  Then, from downstairs, came the sound of the front door closing. Quietly. I had never yelled at Toby before, never had reason to, but now he was in for it. What if the Hartsocks had come home early and found me asleep on the couch and him gone, at 11:00 on a Saturday night? I stormed down the stairs and came upon Dean, standing at the mirror in the front hall, wiping white paint from his cheeks with a paper napkin.

  “S’up, Kit-Kat?” he asked, his reflection acknowledging me with a nod. He was dressed as some garden variety ghoul: tight black pants, black turtleneck, white face, lips thick with bloody lipstick.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I scare you?” He burped, then smiled. “You don’t look so hot. You look like, I dunno, like maybe—”

  “I’m fine,” I said. He smelled as if he’d swum in the keg before pumping it. He went to work on his nose; the paint fell in flakes on the tiled hall floor.

  “Tobes asleep?”

  “No,” I said, before it occurred to me to lie, to cover my own ass.

  “No?” He turned. His forehead and chin were still white, his lips still red. Only his cheeks and nose were the color of flesh, and somehow this looked ever more ghoulish, half dead and half alive.

  “I don’t know where he is,” I said. “He was downstairs playing Xbox with his friends and now he’s gone.”

  “You didn’t hear ’em go out?”

  “No. I—I must have been in the bathroom or something.”

  “That little shit. Time are my parents coming home?”

  “I don’t know. Like, in an hour or something.”

  “Moron,” he said. “What’s he thinking? Where would a bunch of ten-year-olds go at this hour?”

  I drove his car to the Burger King parking lot; though he’d driven home from the party, I thought it best to designate myself his driver for the rest of the evening. The car stank of beer and (I was almost certain) Rachel Cook’s perfume. Where’d she gone? I wondered. And why had he come home so early? I snuck a look over at him as I drove. His eyes were closed. He had his fingers hooked in the collar of his turtleneck, pulled away from his throat as if he were having trouble breathing. Perhaps they’d broken up.

  “Dean,” I said gently. “We’re here. But I can go look for them myself. You don’t have to—”

  “I’m okay,” he said, sitting up straight. “I’m good. I just needed a little down time.”

  The night was cold and the ground squished under our feet as we made our way into the woods. In another few days the frost would come and the ground would get hard and the scorched earth where the wreckage had smoldered would turn brittle.

  “This sucks,” Dean said. He stumbled over a root and had to do a little dance to keep upright.

  “We should have brought a flashlight,” I said. “You have one in your car?”

  “Nah. I’m an idiot, Katie. I never have anything I need. Never. I swear, I’m like—”

  “Drunk,” I said. “You’re drunk. You’re not an idiot.”

  “Why’d we stop bein’ friends?” Dean asked.

  “We’re still friends,” I said. Something scuttled under a nearby branch; the moon slid out from a cloud and illuminated the tops of the trees.

  “You know what I mean. You were my best friend, Kit-Kat . . . Katie. You stood out there and watched that plane. You’ve always been there. You’re the best girl I’ve ever known. You’re the best—”

  “Dean,” I said. “Shut up, okay? You’re really drunk.”

  “So? That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  He grabbed my wrist. Maybe if it had been my hand he’d grabbed I would have felt differently about the whole thing. Maybe it would have been sweet and clumsy and endearing. Not that he knew either way; he’d just grabbed, and come up with what he came up with.

  “You’re awesome, Katie,” he said.

  He yanked me roughly back toward him and kissed me hard. His lips were tacky with lipstick and the thick taste of beer in his mouth made me gag. His grip on my wrist tightened and he locked his other arm across the small of my back and thrust himself against me. I felt as panicked as if I’d been jumped by a complete stranger, a faceless man who’d leapt from behind a tree. I forced myself to think I am kissing Dean I am kissing Dean and for a moment I let myself into it, thinking that it didn’t matter why Dean was kissing me and it didn’t matter where we were or anything but this kiss and his arms around me and as I gave into him in that instant I felt my knees give and then we toppled onto the wet ground. And he was on top of me and he was heavy, so heavy, and all I could think was how could I not have thought about how heavy a person would be on top of me? How in all my times imagining this, every detail and sensation, could I have neglected to consider the sheer weight of a man? Other things—the stink of his breath, his fingernails digging in my wrist, his flaking white forehead, the twigs stabbing my back, the cold, damp leaves mashing up under the collar of my shirt—none of these things in the moment were more of a surprise than the physical burden of being under Dean.

  I might have told him some of this, were I not being suffocated, but all I could muster was “Dean . . .” and even that was said so softly that I myself almost mistook it for a coo of passion. “Dean . . .” I tried again. “Dean, stop.”

  He paused and raised his head, his eyes wide, his bloody lips parted.

  “You hear that?” he asked.

  “It was me,” I said, my voice trembling. “I—”

  “No,” he said. He spun off me and in one move was upright. “It was them.”

  For a moment I’d forgotten why we were out here. “What? Who?”

  “The kids,” he said. “Listen . . .”

  Instead of listening, I took the opportunity to sit up, to wipe the muck from my back. And then, as I struggled to my knees, my heart still racing and my breath still short, I heard a whoop from the distance.

  “That’s Toby,” Dean said. “That goddamn—”

  He took a few steps away from me, in the direction of the sound, then stopped and turned back. I was still on my knees in the mud. His face softened.

  “Shit, Katie,” he said. He put his hand down to me and I took it and let him pull me to my feet. His hand was coarse and cold, and as we walked a few steps deeper into the woods I let my fingers slip from his.

  “Jesus,” he said. “That was stupid back there. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Whatever,” I said. I didn’t even know what he thought was stupid: kissing me, or kissing me the way he did. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m sorta drunk,” he said. “You know how sometimes you just want to know how it would be with a person? You know, somebody you’ve known forever? I guess that’s kinda stupid.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “I didn’t—” he started. “I mean, I didn’t hurt you or do something or—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  “I guess this is one of those things you look back on and it’s funny,” he said. “Like when we’re forty or something we’ll talk about the time we made out in the woods.”

  “Sure,” I said, thou
gh I knew for certain that we would not speak of it again, ever, that not only would Dean Hartsock never be my boyfriend but that he would also never be my friend. He was my neighbor, my acquaintance by coincidence. He was the boy I played with when I was a child.

  I saw their costumes first, in the light of the moon that filtered through the trees. A ninja, a skeleton, a boxer, and a hobo, cast off, crumpled in piles at the edge of the water. The four naked boys walked silent circles around the murky pond, the brown water lapping against their hairless chests. Their eyes were closed, their faces pressed in concentration. I imagined their toes clenching the mud.

  “Jesus,” Dean whispered. We crouched down in the brush. “What’re they doing?”

  “They’re on a treasure hunt,” I said.

  “Jesus,” he said again. “In that shit?” I thought then that he would yell at his brother, that—now sober, his wits about him—he would lay into all four of them, haul them out of the filthy water and march them back half-naked through the woods, raging the whole time about how he had to come out here and track them down.

  “Kit-Kat,” he whispered.

  I turned to him. He was smiling. “What?”

  “That’s just like something we woulda done. I love it. It’s totally crazy.”

  “Hey, Dean!” Toby shouted, catching sight of us. “Hey, Dean! Check this out!”

  Dean stood and unzipped his pants. “You guys find anything?”

  “Tyler found a bobby pin!”

  He looked down at me. “What d’ya say? Let’s take a look, huh?”

  I just stared at him. My brain was numb, my bones humming. After a moment he stepped out of his jeans, pulled his shirt over his head. Then, nearly naked in the dark, he reached for my face and wiped my bottom lip gently with his thumb. When he took his thumb away it was bright red.

  A bobby pin. Was there anything worth less than a bobby pin? Had anyone ever regretted the loss of one, dislodged during gym class or shopping for sweaters? The one buried in the mud in the middle of these woods could have come from a hundred different places, could have slipped from the hair of a girl on her back, before the plane, before any of this. And yet I watched them, unable in that moment to walk away from Dean, or from those boys who believed that the treasure they unearthed might bear some resemblance to the treasure they’d imagined. What exactly were they hoping to find? Something to give back to the people of our town, something we could keep as a memento, something to say, we were here, we saw it, we lived under it and now we live over it, this land, this water, we will walk in circles forever searching and some day we will find something that explains it all, something that says here is what transpired and here is why it is important. Here. Here. A gift from us. For you.