Damage

by A. M. Jenkins

  It wouldn’t surprise you if you didn’t bleed at all, you were dry inside. If you didn’t feel a thing.

  “Austy!” Becky bellows.

  The phone has stopped ringing. You’re floating somewhere between intention and reality.

  Socked feet pad down the hall. “Phone,” Becky calls from outside the door. When you don’t answer, she bangs on it. “Austy? Hey. You in there?”

  The doorknob turns tentatively—but hits the invisible barrier of the lock, and stops.

  “I know it’s you.” A rustling sound. “I see your feet under the door, you faker. I’m not going to fall for that stupid burglar routine again.” A light tap on the door. “C’mon, I know you’re in there.”

  The words fall into silence. You can feel this dark thing still bubbled up inside you, trying to burst loose.

  “Austin?”

  You blink. Becky always makes a point of calling Austy, because it annoys you. Curtis is the only allowed to call you Austy.

  “If you scare me, I’m going to call Mom.” Her voice quavers a little.

  You look down at the razor. You’re not stupid, you know it’d hurt. It’d burn sharp and clear, like digging with an icicle.

  “I’m not going to scare you,” you tell Becky, but comes out sounding strange, as if your throat has rusted shut.

  “Are you sick? You don’t sound too good.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Heather wants to talk to you.”

  “Tell her I’m busy.”

  You hear a couple of muffled words.

  “She says to tell you it’s really important.”

  It’s like clutching at the edge of a cliff. You can give up, let go, and drop completely.

  Or you can keep hanging on.

  You unlock the door. You can’t manage to lift your head enough to see Becky’s face, but you can feel the long startled look she’s giving you.

  “Here he is,” she whispers into the phone, and holds it out. You take it from her, shut the door, and lock again. The phone now hangs in your hand.

  “Austin?” Heather’s voice is thin and tinny, but you can hear every word. “Don’t hang up.”

  You look at the phone. You look at it the way look back toward land as the current pulls you slowly to sea.

  “I’m so sorry,” you hear her say. “Can you hear me?”

  You bring the phone to your mouth. “Yeah,” you say and now all you have to do is listen.

  It’s all about control, Heather says. It’s all about knowing exactly what’s going to happen to her, and when, and where. It’s all about having a plan. And knowing the future. And not handing her life over to somebody else.

  She’s never trusted anybody before, she says. You’re the only guy who’s ever really liked her as a person. knows that because you’ve always followed her rules, never pushed her to do something she doesn’t want to and you don’t tell everybody everything that happens in private. But what you did today freaked her out for second. It was like her body put on a performance you, while you stood there enjoying the show.

  “It wasn’t a show,” you tell her, the first words you’ve said besides yeah. “It was just…us.”

  “I know. I know. God, I can’t do this on the phone. I can’t tell what you’re thinking. I need to see you. I want make everything right, Austin. Can you come over Please?”

  You already know you’re going to go. You knew the moment you took the phone in your hand.

  “Yeah,” you tell Heather. And with the other hand you shut the lid of the razor’s box.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Are you okay?” Heather asks.

  She’s sitting beside you on her couch. You hadn’t noticed. “Uh-huh,” you answer.

  She lays her head on your chest. “I can hear your heart beating,” she says, nuzzling the cloth of your shirt.

  She’s said how sorry she is about a thousand times. And you can tell she meant it. It’s not her fault that every apology fell off you like rain running down a roof. Alarms are going off in the back of your mind, warning that you shouldn’t have come over, no matter how sorry she is. But the rest of you is afraid not to be here. Your pride has fallen in tangles somewhere around your ankles, but the rest of you is still clutching at the edge of that cliff.

  “Do you remember the time we fell asleep together on the couch? That’s the only time I ever did that. I can never sleep around anybody, much less a guy.”

  When you don’t say anything, she raises up, examines you for a moment, before leaning in to kiss you.

  “I love you,” she says—and seals your mouth so that you can’t say anything, even if you wanted to. A light flutter of her tongue, and then she pulls back to tuck herself into your side again. And plants yet another kiss on your chest.

  It all feels vaguely pleasant. Sort of like background music, the kind that will leave absolute silence behind if it is gone.

  “After you left—I’ve never felt like that. Like I was really completely alone. I thought, I’ve got to hear his voice. I wasn’t going to say anything—just hear your voice and hang up. But all the time the phone was ringing, I was so…”

  She doesn’t finish. The TV is on, but the sound is down so low all the voices are just punctuated hums.

  “You’re still mad, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You are. You’re acting like you’re not even here. You hate me, don’t you?”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “I wasn’t ready—I hadn’t planned to do that yet. Let you do that to me, I mean.” She takes a deep breath. “You can touch me right now, if you want.”

  It’s the last thing you want to do at this moment. You could almost feel sorry for her—Heather Mackenzie, scrambling to make things up to a guy who’s too empty and exhausted to respond. She gutted you, and now she thinks she can sew you up with one hand while handing you her heart with the other. What she doesn’t know is that you were already only half a person, before this evening even started.

  When you don’t move and don’t say anything, Heather sits up, pushing masses of golden hair back from her face. “You know what?” Her eyes are red rimmed.

  “What?” you ask after a moment.

  “I want to tell you something. I don’t know if it’ll make any difference—I don’t know if it will even make sense. But I want to try to tell you.”

  She waits, staring at you. “Go ahead,” you tell her.

  “When I was real little, my father said he would take me fishing on the lake. And I was all excited because I’d get to ride in a boat. You know how water looks from shore, all sparkly in the sun? I thought it would be so cool to go skimming along over that. But it wasn’t that way at all. We had to stab worms with hooks and drown them. And when I caught a fish, it flopped around and the pointy part of the hook was poking out from one of its eyeballs. And by the time we went back to shore, I knew that the water still looked shining and beautiful, but underneath it was full of all these slimy fish with staring eyeballs, and half-eaten bits of worm.

  “That’s the way my whole life has been,” Heather adds. “Everything. And it’s every guy I’ve been out with.”

  She lets the words drop. They hover there, sad and angry.

  “Except for you,” she says.

  And then she stands up.

  Her face is set now, determined. She takes your hand and gives you a gentle tug, so you obediently stand up, too. She leads you down the hall and into her room, dark except for a light shining from the open door of the closet. She takes you over to the bed. Pulls you down to sit beside her.

  “Okay,” she says in a breathless voice—but then doesn’t move. Her thigh presses along the length of yours. Her hand squeezes yours so hard it’s like being caught in a claw.

  “Nobody knows this,” she adds, still not moving. “I’ve never told anybody—you’ll be the only one. And then you can use it to hurt me, if you want. And we’ll be even.”

  You don’t say an
ything. After a moment she grows still. You feel the deep intake of her breath, before she gets up.

  She walks over to the dresser. Pauses in front of the mirror—for a second you think she’s going to stop and fluff her hair—but instead she opens one of the middle drawers and pulls out the wooden box with the duck on the lid. She’s moved it since you found it that time.

  She opens the lid and takes out the paper. Bears it to you, holding it in her palm like something made of glass.

  “This is the note he wrote to my mom. Before he died.” The closet light makes her skin seem like it’s glowing. “You should have seen the look on my mom’s face when she tore it up. She walked away before the pieces even hit the bottom of the trash can. Like that was that, end of story. She thought it was all gone—she never knew I dug out every last piece. She doesn’t know I still have it. I used to lock my door and take it out and read it sometimes.”

  She holds the note out, not for you to touch, but to read again if you want, in the dim light:

  it’s better this way i know Heather will forget i hope you will forgive

  “He did it after my mom told him she wanted a divorce. He was living in the garage apartment out back. Whenever I went to see him he was just mostly sitting in his armchair, staring into space. He didn’t care if I was there or not.”

  Sort of like the way you’re behaving now.

  When you look up, Heather’s staring sadly at the paper.

  “Maybe he was tired,” you offer.

  “All I know is every time I went out there I asked if I could spend the night with him, and he just said not tonight, Pumpkin, maybe another time. If he answered at all.”

  “Maybe he was depressed.”

  Funny how your mouth doesn’t trip over that word. Your mouth think it’s just another set of syllables to say.

  But your heart knows better. It starts beating shallow, fast.

  Depressed.

  The last time you heard that word, Becky was the one who used it. She said she was depressed because she had a pimple on her nose. But that’s not what you mean when you say that word. Not at all.

  “No,” Heather’s saying, “he was bitter. He hated my mom, because she made him move out. She said it was the ultimate act of revenge. And it was—that’s why he waited till he heard the car in the driveway, because he wanted her to be the one to find him. He knew he couldn’t manipulate her in life, so he tried to do it in death. Only it didn’t work out like he planned.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My mom and I were just getting back from grocery shopping, and right when we pulled up in the driveway we heard this popping noise from the garage. It sounded like a firecracker. And I was just six, you know? I thought he had some firecrackers out there. So then—” She touches the paper with the tips of her fingers, pressing the black-inked letters as if there’s something between the lines that can’t be seen, only felt. “God. This is so useless to talk about. What happened was, my mom went to see what the noise was, and it turned out he had shot himself.”

  It’s too tremendous an effort to think of even a single word to say. You can’t even manage to raise your head again and look at her; you just keep staring straight ahead through the doorway into the dark hallway, watching the walls flash day bright, then gray for a split second, then dark, then gray again, because the television is still on in the room down the hall.

  You sit there, letting the bed hold you up. Heather’s frowning down at the paper in her hand.

  “He was so selfish. And a coward. All he had to do was stick around a stupid garage apartment in Ohio. I mean, he had a kid, and it’s not like he had to climb a mountain or do something hard. All he had to do was stay alive.” Her shoulders give the slightest of shrugs. “So now you know. I wasn’t even enough to make my own father want to stick around. Hold it over my head all you want.”

  She gives the note one last look before she crumples it into a hard little ball. She tosses it toward the corner wastebasket; it falls about two feet short, but she’s already sitting—collapsing, really—next to you.

  You put an arm around her.

  “I love you, Austin,” she says, just like before.

  Only this time she looks at you, waiting for a reply.

  Of course you have to say it. You must love her—you need her more than you’ve ever needed anybody. You’re so addicted that you’ll die if she withdraws. And she just told you she loves you. Of course you have to say it back.

  She sits there with those big blue eyes, bright and clear as a little girl’s eyes, as a doll’s eyes, waiting to hear them: three, short, one-syllable words. Three little words—how hard could it be?

  “Me, too,” you finally manage. Too late. She’s already shriveling a little and looking away.

  You shrivel a little, too. You always figured that when you finally said that to a girl you’d feel great about it. All you can feel is that Heather Mackenzie tossed you something, and you were supposed to make one of those diving midair saves. But you—Pride of the Panthers that you are—fumbled it.

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” you hear her say.

  The two of you sit there. Heather’s so still that you can’t even see her breathe. You feel bad for blowing it, and after a few minutes when she turns and slides her arms around your neck, you’re ready to make it up to her, thinking she just wants to be held.

  But what she wants is to take back control; her lips are everywhere, fierce, marking territory, and they follow her fingers as she releases each button on your shirt. Nipping, sucking kisses as she spreads your shirt apart. And the next thing you know her hands are pushing you backward and her fingers are tugging at your belt buckle.

  You are not in the mood—of course you’re not, after everything that’s happened. But you don’t want to hear or feel any more and you don’t want to think, and you sure don’t want to talk; and she’s determined, insistent, and after awhile the parts of you that Heather is touching begin to insist as much as Heather herself, and it’s much easier just to go along and try to comfort her this way.

  Except that she won’t let you kiss her. And she won’t let you touch her. She just wants you to do it.

  So you oblige.

  It’s not till near the end that you look down to see tears in her eyes—and you know you should hesitate, but your body’s staked out a rhythm, and as it keeps on going you hear your voice gasp an “I love you” that sounds like an apology. And her eyes shut and she digs her nails into your back and that’s when she finally does kiss you, a hard and deep kiss that sets you quivering before it pushes you over the edge.

  When you finish, her eyes are dry. She still won’t let you touch her, just rolls out of your reach and scoops up her clothes and says she has to go to the bathroom and she’ll be right back. You don’t tell her that your back stings where her fingernails left marks.

  What you’d really like to do now is go home and get in your own bed and go to sleep, but that seems kind of out of the question at the moment. So you continue to lie there alone and naked on Heather’s bed, and you’re suddenly very, very tired.

  When she comes back in the room, she’s fully dressed. “I’m going to give you a test,” she says cheerfully, pulling the door shut behind her. “We’ll see how well you know me.”

  The springs creak as she comes to sit beside you on the bed. She shuts her eyes.

  “Don’t look—what color are my eyes?”

  “Blue,” you tell her without much interest. Something’s not quite right; you missed a moment somewhere back down the line and now everything seems a little off, a little skewed.

  “Really blue, or do you think I wear contacts?”

  “I think they’re really blue.”

  “That’s right.” She opens her eyes, gives you a smile. “Contacts won’t give you this color—you’re either born with it, or you’re not. And don’t think I’m being conceited, because I’m not,” she adds. “It’s just the truth.”


  The crumpled note lies on the floor where she dropped it. She gets up, walks over to the note, picks it up, smooths it out. Puts it back in the wooden box. Places the lid on the box, and the box back in the drawer.

  As she shuts the drawer, she glances at you. “You’re okay now, aren’t you? Everything’s okay again?”

  Your problem is that you dwell on things nobody else would care about. You can’t seem to filter out all the silly things nobody else even notices. What’s one little missed moment, when the most beautiful girl in town can’t get along without you?

  So you make yourself agree, from the depths of the bed. “Yes,” you say, as if saying it will make it true. “Everything’s perfect.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Late the next afternoon you enter the field house with fingers that feel like they’ve gone numb, like you’re going to be playing with blocks of wood, not hands, tonight. You’ve become disconnected from your own body, you feel like you’re slipping away, even though you know you’re right there in plain sight.

  You crept home from Heather’s house between two and three in the morning. You must have spent hours holding her and listening to her talk and talk, mostly about nothing. All you can remember now is one sentence: her voice, low and muffled, claiming that staying alive isn’t hard.

  That’s where you screwed up; that’s when you should have stopped her. You should have told her that you Austin Reid, can understand why her father didn’t stick around, and that it didn’t have anything to do with her. I he was like you, he was just tired of fighting. He was trying to erase a heaviness he couldn’t get out from under.

  In the field house you pass right by Brett Stargill, who stands in front of his locker with his back to You’ve known Brett since sixth grade, and you’re close enough to toss out a hi or give him a friendly shove—as you pass by you have the feeling that you’re not anymore. That Brett wouldn’t hear you, if you did speak. That your arm would go right through if you reached touch him.

  So you don’t say a word. Just go to your locker and start getting ready.