by Rene Steinke
“You’re friends with Willa Lambert, right?”
She lowered her phone and turned to him, lifted up her chin. “She’s my best friend. And if one more person tells me some sick rumor about her, I’m going to kill myself.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m not gonna do that.”
She held up her phone. “Someone’s texting a line about Willa and a stripper. I’m surprised no one actually took pictures. Thank God.”
“Does she know?”
“I’m just trying like hell to shame them into stopping. I swear we go to school with future criminals. These dickheads are going to end up in Huntsville.”
Dex figured that she didn’t know he had been at the house.
“She’s a cool girl,” he said. “She doesn’t deserve that.”
Dani threw back her head. “Nobody deserves that, idiot.”
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean. I know you have English together.” She looked down at the phone screen. “Shit. I can’t believe how mean people are. Now they’re saying she called up Bishop Geitner and asked him to come to the house. I hate this fucking place.”
“She didn’t do that.”
“Of course she didn’t.” She shook her head, put her chin in her hand. “If only we weren’t trapped in this idiotic place. Like if we were in Houston, someplace else, Willa and I could write songs, and I could play them and someone might even give a damn. I can’t even understand half the stuff she writes, but it’s cool to read.”
“What do you play?”
Dani shrugged. “Nothing. A little guitar,” she said. “Listen, just be nice to her. Those rapists just walked right back in here like they owned the place.”
“So tell me this. Because I don’t get it,” he said. “Why didn’t anyone call the police?”
“She doesn’t remember anything. It’s just their word against hers. You know that, right?”
“Huh.” He started to put pieces together, things he’d overheard in the locker room, and his defense of Willa felt even more crucial—as if it would prove something important to himself. “I’d like to hang out with her more,” he said. “How long is she on home study?”
“As long as she wants to be,” said Dani. “And good luck with trying to hang out with her, if her parents are around. You haven’t given yourself to Jesus yet, have you?” She slapped at a mosquito on her leg. “Actually, you should probably just leave her alone. She doesn’t need to have to negotiate anything with a guy. She hates all of you right now. She was telling me some crazy shit on the phone, and then her mother made her get off. They think I got her over there to the Lawbournes’ somehow. But I don’t even know that Lawbourne guy.” She stood up, smoothing the front of her jeans. “I’ve gotta go.”
IN ENGLISH, whenever he turned his head, he saw Willa’s empty desk, scratched blond wood top, black plastic seat back. Ms. Marlowe leaned against the chalkboard, sighed, and looked out at the class with doleful eyes.
“We’re about to start a unit on Existentialism.”
“Uh-oh,” said Ben Lawbourne.
“That’s about enough of that,” said Ms. Marlowe. “You’ll need a partner for the main Camus project at the end.”
Ms. Marlowe handed out a packet of papers that explained everything because she refused to give assignments online. As she outlined the work, marking up the board with her scribbled uneven notes, Dex felt uncomfortable in his clothes, the waistband of his jeans seemed to dig into his stomach, his socks felt tight around his ankles, his shoes suddenly too small.
At the end of class, as everyone was leaving, he went to Ms. Marlowe’s desk. She pushed back her wiry gray hair, raised her unruly eyebrows. “Yes, Dex?”
He didn’t care what Dani said—she didn’t know for sure what Willa would want. “I was wondering, I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard Willa was on home study.”
She pressed her lips together, and the muscles under her cheekbones seemed to twitch.
“I don’t know if she’d agree,” he said, “but I was thinking we could be partners on that project if that would be okay.”
Her face softened. “I can’t say it was my assignment,” she said, “or whether or not what you say is true. But if you have a way to get in touch with her and would like to do that, then by all means.” She smiled slightly. “That might be a good thing to do.”
Dex noticed Ben Lawbourne then, lingering around the door, tapping the floor with the heel of his boot. “I mean, I don’t know. Maybe. Whatever.” His ears felt hot.
Ms. Marlowe nodded to him indifferently, the way teachers tended to, and when Dex looked up at the door again, Ben was gone.
ON THURSDAY he drove to Walgreens and picked out flowers. He only had ten dollars to spend, but he found a nice bunch of assorted ones he didn’t recognize except for the roses. They were wrapped in a cone of green tissue paper and tacky clear plastic, but he didn’t know what to do about it. At the checkout counter, the pregnant clerk smiled and winked as she took his money.
He’d been surprised at how quickly Willa had written back, agreeing to do the project with him, willing to meet him at the Dairy Queen. Waiting for him at the red plastic table by the window, she looked prettier than he’d remembered, small curves of reflected light in the waves of her hair, her eyes large and clear and mature. She wore one of those billowy Mexican blouses with bright designs around the neck—he usually didn’t like them because they made girls look like fat cushions, but on Willa, it looked okay.
“Hey,” he said, laying the flowers down before her. “These are for you.”
She looked up and flinched, but her second expression was friendly, one side of her mouth curled up. “Well, thanks.” She took the bouquet. “You surprised me,” she said. Her face looked different, the bones more prominent, the skin pale. He wanted to reassure her that the bouquet was meant for her straight out, just because he liked her.
“So, hey, I just wanted to say thanks for working on the project.”
“Okay.”
“I wrote down some ideas.” She pushed a sheet of notebook paper toward him, her round neat handwriting like a neatly arranged ink garden. One column was marked “Life”; another was marked “Death”; and the third was marked “????”
They worked for half an hour—she had to help him understand the book first—and he bought them each an ice cream sundae, though she only ate a couple of bites of hers.
He told her he’d heard that Mr. Minkowell, who taught computers, was beating his wife, and that Mr. Ludman, the history teacher, tall and gray and dapper, had lost half a million dollars gambling in Vegas. She licked her small spoon, and he was watching her pink mouth when she frowned.
A little later, after they’d worked more, when she came back from the bathroom, her beauty rushed at him all at once, the intensity of her eyes flaming up in front of him. She smiled. “I probably shouldn’t stay too much longer. My mom’s coming.”
He didn’t know why he imagined they’d have more time. “Alright, then.”
“Thanks for coming by. And thanks for the flowers.” She touched a strange blue blossom that looked as if it had been dipped in paint. Another rose, yellow, was already drooping its sorry head. Now they seemed shabby and gaudy, and all wrong. A car honked in the parking lot, and she got up.
“Well, see you later,” he said, and he turned and walked fast to the opposite door, the vibration under his chest saying, Jackass. Jackass. Jackass.
AT LUNCH THE NEXT DAY, Dex ate a corn dog with mustard and those strange fried rectangles of potato slivers, a kind of food he’d only seen in a school cafeteria.
As he made his way with the crowd heading to the exit for fifth period, Bishop, Trace, and Cully were suddenly beside him. “Hey, Dex, what’s up?”
“Just getting to class.” He thought he might puke from the grease of the lu
nch.
Bishop lowered his voice and put his hand to the side of his mouth. “Was that Willa Lambert with you at the DQ yesterday?”
Dex felt a cold sensation on the back of his neck, and realized it was Trace’s hand, patting him there.
“We’re doing a project for English,” Dex said.
“Is she your girlfriend or something?” said Bishop, suppressing a smile.
“You don’t want to get yourself in the mix here, do you?” said Trace.
Cully didn’t say anything, but walked along, nodding.
They were out in the hallway near the water fountain now, and Dex leaned down to get a drink. He’d hoped they’d get the message and move on, but when he turned back, they were still there, waiting for him.
“That girl’s trouble, no way around it,” said Bishop. “Crazy and a liar, right?”
Dex remembered how in math class a couple of years ago, it became clear that the guy couldn’t multiply, though he pretended he was only making a joke. He was in that strange, quasi-frat group, the Texas Totem—they all wore matching baseball shirts on Fridays.
Dex shook his head. “I can’t believe you guys.” He turned his back to them and started to walk away. People stood in the halls now, watching.
Bishop grabbed the sleeve of Dex’s T-shirt, put his mouth up to Dex’s ear. “What the fuck? You know it’s the truth.”
From the other side of the hallway, Trace yelled, “Whoa!”
Dex swung around and punched Bishop on the side of his jaw.
“Fuck!” Bishop held his hand there and bent over. “You prick!”
Cully came at him in a bear hug, threw him against the locker, and his spine slammed against the metal. He felt a rattling in his head. Bishop was kicking his leg with the hard pointed toe of his boot, and he spit in his face. Dex rose up and pushed Cully away. He hit Bishop in the neck, heard teeth click as Bishop’s head flew back. A dance of white lights, and then Vice Principal Harrison was grabbing him by the shoulders. “Alright, son, you better hold up.” Mr. Harrison smelled of mouthwash, and his hair was sticking up in all directions. The security guards grabbed Cully and Bishop. Mr. Harrison screamed in his ear, “In my office!”
At first, the three of them sat in silence while Mr. Harrison glared at them from behind his desk. Dex scooted his chair away from the other two and touched the bruise on his leg where he’d been kicked. Finally, Mr. Harrison said, “Okay, gentlemen, what seems to be the issue?”
Cully slumped darkly in his chair, arms folded, and nodded to Dex. “That guy hit my friend.”
Mr. Harrison puckered his lips judiciously.
“Sir, we got out of hand,” said Bishop. He had a way of being overly polite with adults, fake and deferential. “But the truth is, we have a disagreement about a girl.” Dex could see where Bishop was going with this, with his slick features and sober expression. But if Bishop would only mention Willa’s name, it would have an effect on Harrison, make him see Dex was right. Behind Harrison’s desk, there was a shelf of self-help books—12 Qualities of Highly Effective People, The Better Than Good Life—a wooden plaque with a gold plate the shape of Texas.
“A girl, huh?”
But Dex didn’t want to bring Willa into this, to say her name and soil it again. She didn’t deserve it.
“Dex, what do you have to say for yourself? If you have something to say, son, you’d better say it.”
Dex stared at Mr. Harrison’s pale yellow tie with the Us of blue horseshoes. To not reply seemed the most honorable response.
Harrison warned Cully and Bishop that they were a hairsbreadth away from another suspension. Harrison didn’t know Dex had been at the party, or that he’d skipped school—because he’d had the fake note from his mom.
“Dex, you too. A hairsbreadth, you got me?”
After school, Dex went out to the field house, saw Cully run out to the field in his grimy practice clothes. He went to every practice, but he either wasn’t playing or he was playing like shit—there was some satisfaction in that at least.
Dex went into Coach Salem’s office, and as soon as Coach lifted his silver bristled head to him, Dex said, “I’m going to have to quit.”
Salem’s face always seemed to have the texture and energy of rock.
“You sure about that, son?”
“Yeah.”
“Mind if I ask why?”
“I’ve got some pressing things to do now, and they’re taking up all my time.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that then.” He nodded again. “You’ll be missed.” And that was good-bye.
When Dex got into his truck, as the players in blue jerseys and shoulder pads ran in a line out to the field, he tried to think how he’d break the news to his mother.
WILLA
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, she heard footsteps in the bushes. Through the curtain in her window, she saw grasshopper-like insects with strange long teeth shrieking all over the lawn outside, and she saw the moon, one full curve of it barely limned with red.
In the morning, white toilet paper hung in all the trees like an infinite tapeworm. Whole rolls dropped in the yard, a hundred white fingers poking up through the grass. She went downstairs and saw the shaving cream on the front porch: smeared now, but who knew what word had been there. She smeared it more with her foot and a crude paper ribbon fell across her face.
Her dad was already bent down, gathering the toilet paper in his arms. He should have been getting ready to go to work. She crouched and pulled up from the ground one of the white fingers—a plastic fork. They ruined lawn mowers, so you had to pick out every last one.
“Don’t you worry about this,” said her father. “Go on upstairs and get dressed.”
“I should help you.”
He was angry, though he was trying not to be, she could tell by the way his eyes squinted, how his smile pulled too tight across his face. “What you need to do is go put some clothes on. I’m going to take a break in a sec and get some breakfast.”
He grabbed a string of toilet paper from the branch above him, and a white clump fell onto his shoulder. “I’ve just about had it,” he said, and went inside.
Willa held a handful of dirty plastic forks. A gray car came to the corner, paused, then turned. The neighbor’s bulldog, Pugsie, came to the edge of their yard and barked at her. Pugsie growled and danced around a dirty rawhide bone. Through the branches in the trees, she looked up to tug down a last stream of white.
By lunchtime, all the toilet paper and plastic forks were in fat garbage bags by the curb. A little later she heard her father mowing the lawn. He’d taken the whole day off from work, and she knew that in the afternoon he’d be restless in the living room, flicking the remote, rustling through the newspaper and complaining that the air conditioner needed repair.
SHE READ THE BOOK OF REVELATION straight through, only looking up now and then to stare at the curtains in the window, to ponder a phrase or a line. There were several beasts, not just one “beast of the Apocalypse,” the way she’d sometimes heard it before. The beast she’d seen had the jigsawed body parts from different animals, and the eyes “front and back,” but the beasts in Revelation also had more than one head, and a dog’s face was not mentioned. She’d loved her dog, Junior, for the way he ate everything he could find—chicken bones, panty liners, Silly Putty—and for the way he lay over her feet in the bed and barked wildly at horses and mice. She’d loved his beastliness, actually, more than anything. She didn’t understand why his face had attached itself to the vision. She’d been taught that if your heart was open, you understood Scripture (because it was all there, Pastor Sparks said, clear as day). They and the beast will hate the whore; they will devour her flesh and burn her up with fire. For God has put it into their hearts to carry out his purpose by agreeing to give their kingdom to the beast. She understood that God was asking some
one to write this all down, that marks and words would be written on bodies, that people would die. Let anyone who has an ear listen. She recognized what she’d heard before, many times, that God would come like a thief in the night, that there would be an Antichrist, that you had to be ready when this world was about to be destroyed. But no matter how much she tried to open her heart, she could not make sense of the whore of Babylon, or the secrets that different people would harbor and why, and she couldn’t picture the four angels guarding the sky, or the scroll rolling up like a cloud, because the images as they were described kept changing. How could this be clear as day?
When her parents came home from church, they seemed to be angry with her—it was in the pinch of her mother’s smile, in her father’s averted eyes. “I was thinking we’d invite Miranda over for dinner next week,” said her mother.
They were in the kitchen, and Willa didn’t look up from rinsing off her plate.
“Willa, will you look at me when I’m talking to you?”
“Alright.” Willa looked at her. “Can we do it later? I don’t feel much like having company.”
Like a small propped-up structure that had fallen, her mother’s smile collapsed back into her face. “Come on, you need to see your friends.”
Her church friends had not emailed her, or texted her, or come to her house. They were afraid of her, afraid of what they might hear, afraid of how they might have to come to her defense, and then, by association, be called sluts too. Willa even suspected that Miranda had been the one who’d called her at home the other day, said, “Is Cully your boyfriend?” and hung up.
Today Dani emailed her to say that someone had painted white over the legs of the giant blue mustang in the mural in Hall A, so it no longer ran but “sort of sat.” She said she had spoken to Dex, who seemed nice and told her about the Camus project. “I wish I could see you. Maybe soon??”
She sat with her father in the living room, studying her history dates, the news blaring while he lay back in the recliner. A street with a mosque in the background, scattered scraps of cars and chairs everywhere, a man’s arm sticking out from under a crushed table. Two car bombings, thirty-four dead, sixty-two injured. With such violence Babylon the great city shall be thrown down and will be found no more. Her father glanced at her and sighed. “Never ending, isn’t it?” On the screen orange and yellow flames raged behind the glass, whipping up and waving like bright rags. Firefighters were flocking to California, to help contain the raging fires, said the newscaster. More than two thousand people had fled their homes. Hail and fire mixed with blood. Trees and grass burned up. Her father picked up his can of Coke and took a long sip, sighed, then set the can down again on the table beside him. “They just have to figure a way to trap it,” he said. “You know, one thing they do is to sometimes get a fire going in the opposite direction.”