by Nico Walker
I did. I sang:
Said I could disappoint you with a smile
Found out that’s true
After swimming forty miles
Yer ghost is my biggest fear
I’ve heard that it’s nice in Greenland this time of year
I ran in—to an elec-tric eeeel
Tried to teach me—about a scarlet whee-el
I was going along like that, while to the right of me the sky burned down. And I felt something. My heart was pressurized. I wanted desperately to be nice to someone.
I called Madison.
I said, “I miss you. What are you doing?”
She said, “Oh, gross. You sound fucked up.”
“I actually am not.”
“Then why do you sound like that?”
“It’s just cuz I miss you so much.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“I can’t talk right now.”
“Why not?”
“I have to go.”
“Don’t.”
“Goodbye.”
“Wait?”
“What?”
“…I’m scared.”
She hung up.
I’d made it to Fairmount. I went into Russo’s to buy some more cigarettes, and I ran into some Shaker kids I knew. They gave me Xanax. I had some ecstasies on me so I passed a couple out and took one. Outside it was dark. The Shaker kids said they were going to a party at this girl Maggie’s house. I went with them. It wasn’t far. The house was on Inverness. A brick house. We walked up the driveway around the back and through a garden gate, and I saw Emily. She was standing under a trellis strung with lights, wearing a white summer dress. And she was laughing.
She said, “Is that you?”
I said it was.
“You know these people?”
“Kind of.”
She said, “Small world, huh?”
“Yeah. So do you know Maggie, or?”
“Holy shit! Your pupils are huge.”
“I’m on ecstasy.”
“How is it?”
“It’s pretty good. I’m sorry I don’t have any more, I’d give you some.”
She said that was okay. “I already turned some down. This weird guy offered me some. He said I should pop the ecstasy in my butt. Those were his exact words. Pop it in my butt.”
“Who was it? I’m gonna knock him down.”
“Don’t. He was just lonely. It could have happened to anyone.”
“It’s kind of fucking disrespectful.”
“That’s just how some boys talk.”
“Who is this motherfucker?”
“I don’t know. He’s not here anymore. Please don’t worry about it. I thought it was funny. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that that shit ain’t fuckin right, you know? This motherfucker talking to you like that.”
She took both my hands. “Forget it.”
I said, “I’m really glad you’re here.”
“Why’s that?” she said.
“Cuz I like you a lot.”
“Shut up.”
“No, I really do.”
“Hmmm.”
“What?”
“I was just thinking.”
“…Yeah?”
“I was just thinking…that you’re shady.”
* * *
—
WE WALKED back together, Emily and I, all the way along the tree lawns and with the headlights going by us. Neither one of us was wearing shoes. She hadn’t worn shoes to the party and I was carrying my flip-flops because I wanted her to think I was nice.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
I said, “I feel like I do.”
“Look at you,” she said. “You are shady, aren’t you?”
“You’ve got me all wrong.”
We went like that. And we came to the room where we kissed for the first time. Where she looked away and said, “Do whatever you want, man.”
* * *
—
WE WERE awake in the morning. I had to be at work in two hours. Then the shoe store called and said I was fired. I said I understood and I hung up and went back to bed. I said to Emily, “There’s been a change of plans. I just got fired.”
She said, “Oh, fuck. I’m so sorry.”
“No, it’s alright,” I said. “It’s a good thing. Now I don’t have to go to work.”
“Was that the revisionist fat man you told me about?”
“It was his mother.”
“Your boss had his mother fire you?”
“Yeah.”
“What a fucking pussy!”
“Right? I told you he was no good, didn’t I?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I dunno. But I’ll think of something….Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for taking my side on this whole me-getting-fired thing. You’re a really nice lady.”
She smiled.
I said, “I think I adore you.”
“Stop it. Did you see my bra?”
She bent over and felt around under the bed; and I was thinking, No one’s ever had a better one of those.
I reached for her hips. “You’re fucking beautiful.”
“Hmm…fuck! Where did it go?”
“You don’t need it.”
“Yes I do. It’s my best one.”
“You’re an angel.”
“Help me find it.”
“No. I won’t. I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you.”
“…You’re killing me.”
“Goddamnit.”
“Come back….Please. I’m fucking serious.”
“Oh yeah?”
She was gushing.
CHAPTER FOUR
You’ll have friends. Usually it’s nothing. James Lightfoot was alright though. He’d remember your birthday, didn’t ever start shit. Strictly a pacifist. He had a lazy eye and half a heart. Born that way. Wore his hair long. Brown hair. Lived at his mom’s house. It had been a while since his mom had lived at his mom’s house; still it was done up like a family place. There were pictures on the wall, showed James growing up, year in and year out. School pictures. And the one eye, all the way back, fucking him up.
Tuesday he drove me to the bank. He’d just bought a $300 GTI. Faded blue. I could have walked to the bank, but I thought well of James Lightfoot and I thought well of his GTI so I went for a ride with him. The sun was shining on us that day: we had burned a peach White Owl with Train Wreck in it, and so we were high as fuck. Roy was with us. Roy painted houses but he wasn’t working that day. He was riding in the front seat. Roy was tall. Black hair. I was riding in the back. James Lightfoot had a noise rock album going on the stereo; it was like TV static set to blast beats; I thought it wasn’t possible that he could actually like the album. I thought maybe he was being full of shit about it, but it was his car.
James Lightfoot was yelling at Roy. Roy’s cousin Joe had been saying he would join the Marines. And James Lightfoot didn’t want Joe to join the Marines. But Roy was more or less okay with it and James was yelling at Roy about this now. Earlier he had said that Roy needed to talk Joe out of joining the Marines.
“IT IS THE OBLIGATION OF YOUR LOVE,” he had said. “YOUR LOVE FOR YOUR COUSIN, WHOM WE ALL LOVE SO MUCH.”
And now he was yelling at him again about this shit with Joe and the Marines and I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I saw James waving his arm around and I couldn’t help noticing that he looked helpless and that probably no one would ever listen to him as long as he lived.
I had received a letter earlier that afternoon. Th
e bank said I owed them money. It was a mistake. I was going to sort it out. James Lightfoot parked the car and Roy got out and put the seat forward so I could get out and I went into the bank and waited in line. I hadn’t thought about how much I smelled like Train Wreck. One of my shoes was coming apart, and I looked like my life was more fucked than it really was. But I was in earnest. I had a receipt and that was as good as the truth. I had their letter with me and I had the receipt and I was going to have the mistake sorted out. This wasn’t gonna be a problem.
I said to the lady behind the counter, “You guys sent me this overdraft notice but it isn’t right. I paid this off already.”
I showed her the receipt. The receipt was from the other day. I hadn’t taken any money out since then. She typed me into her computer.
“This is a new overdraft,” she said.
“But that’s impossible. I haven’t made a withdrawal since the last deposit. I put a hundred and sixty dollars in.”
“That deposit brought your account up to ten dollars’ credit, but there was an additional overdraft charge against your account that put you back into the negative.”
“How could you charge me another overdraft fee after I’d paid it off?”
“The deposit didn’t clear in time.”
“I paid it in cash. Right here.”
“It didn’t clear, sir.”
“It was fucking cash.”
“It. Didn’t. Clear.”
I went outside and the car was on fire. Smoke was pouring out from under the hood. James and Roy were watching it go. I walked over to where they were, and I stood beside them.
I said to James, “I’m sorry about your car.”
He asked me if I’d got my money back.
I said I hadn’t.
We took what we could from the car: the tags, the CDs, what stereo equipment we could carry. We started walking to James’s mom’s house. Roy had some Train Wreck and he packed it in a bowl and passed it to James.
We said nothing.
We hit the Train Wreck and we felt like we were winning again.
* * *
—
EMILY KEPT leaving her hair ties in my bed and I would give them back to her. One thing about Emily was her parents had divorced when she was 13. She was always saying how she thought love didn’t really exist, how it was just pheromones playing tricks on people and I was probably a dog and a liar. She told me about how she’d been the first one in her family to find out about her dad’s affair; she’d been eavesdropping on the phone. I asked her why she’d been eavesdropping in the first place.
She said, “You’re being a fucking jerk.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, that must have been awful.”
“I confronted him about it, and he tried to buy me off. He said he would send me to volleyball camp if I promised not to tell my mom.”
“Goddamn.”
“I wanted to go to volleyball camp,” she said.
“What did you do?”
“I told my mom.”
“Did you ever get to go to volleyball camp?”
“No.”
She had a habit of disappearing. Sometimes I’d go looking for her. It wasn’t always easy; she might be hard to find. I’d found her under a grate in the sidewalk before. I asked her how she’d got down there. She said she didn’t know.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I said.
She said she’d have to think about it.
“Whatcha doin down there anyway?” I asked.
“Studyin.”
“You been down there very long?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you hungry?”
She held something up to the light.
“I brought a little bag of Cheerios,” she said.
“What’ll you do if it rains?”
“Drown, I guess.”
And then there was Rollerblades. She was hanging out with him more than I’d have liked. So I said to her, “Why’s that fucking asshole always got those stupid Rollerblades on?”
And she said that I was the fucking asshole, that they were just friends and they’d never done anything.
“He’s so respectful,” she said.
I said, “You don’t actually believe that shit, do you? God knows what he’s got planned.”
“What about your girlfriend?”
She could be vicious like that.
* * *
—
MADISON FOUND one of Emily’s hair ties over Thanksgiving. But she didn’t make a big deal out of it because there was everything and we both knew that. So we were fine.
You couldn’t hurt Madison.
She wasn’t the type.
She was cold-blooded.
Really she was a murderer.
But then for all her being a murderer she could be lovely. Like I remembered a day the past April when I’d been on a headful of acid and she’d been fucking around on a trampoline. How it had been to see her like that, her light blue shirt spinning tracers in the air. Her laughter panning in the treetops. How it had made me cry. But she wasn’t the hill I was meant to die on.
CHAPTER FIVE
Emily worked nights in the Science Building. She cleaned out the cages and killed the lab mice with the little guillotine that the scientists made her use. She cut the mice’s heads off and squeezed the blood out of their bodies. She didn’t like it, but she figured the mice were doomed anyway and she needed the money. Her dad was some kind of special dentist, and he made enough money to see to it that she wasn’t ever going to get much help from the financial aid people. But he didn’t give her any of his money. And her mom wasn’t any help. So Emily’d do shit like walk an extra half mile in the fucking rain on account of Marc’s sold popcorn and diet soda a few cents cheaper than Russo’s did. She was doing shit like that while I was off doing whatever I wanted because I was a soft kid and my parents gave me everything I needed. And I could make up for whatever I didn’t need by selling drugs to the kids at school. Which was an easy thing to do. Emily half-thought I was a dirtbag, but then she was kind of into that so it was okay. All the same she liked to make a point of telling me she didn’t trust me in the least. And when I’d try and say something nice to her she had a tendency to laugh in my face. She couldn’t help that though. She was a tough girl.
It went like that and our first semester was over. Emily was going home to Elba for the winter break. And she had come over. She was lying on my bed. We weren’t doing anything but waiting to say goodbye. And I was just looking at her and how her body was so light and delicate, her expression all composed and enigmatic, and I knew that the girl could take my life if she ever felt like it, yet all I could think was that I never wanted her to come to any harm.
And like a fucking idiot I said, “I love you.”
The words had come out on their own volition, so I must have meant them. Now she was looking dead at me, not saying anything.
Then after a little while (I don’t know how long because time had stopped) she said, “Thank you.”
And that was it. She left. I wouldn’t see her again till mid-January, when school started up again.
And the whole time she was gone I was thinking, She loves you.
CHAPTER SIX
Can you look back to when you met the one you loved the most and remember exactly how it was? Not as in where you were or what she was wearing or what you ate for lunch that day, but rather as in what it was you saw in her that made you say, Yes, this is what I came here for.
I could say some dumb shit, but I really don’t know.
I liked the way she cussed. She cussed with great beauty.
And her body.
She was the best fuck. She really fucked you, or she really let you fuck her. She didn’t hold back. She always gave you everyt
hing and she wasn’t ever fake about it.
The way she smiled when she was nervous.
I don’t know what she saw in me. When we first were together we used to hook up in this empty chapel at school. And there was this altar. On the wall behind the altar were these ornaments. The ornaments were stick figures depicting the Stations of the Cross, metallic stick Jesuses hossing the crosses around. Sometimes Jesus would have the cross about upright. In other places He’d be about collapsed under its weight. I said to Emily that it looked like a man suffering an accident while setting up a basketball hoop. And she laughed like she’d die laughing. Maybe that was it.
The day I met her we went for a walk after class and we ended up in her dorm room. We talked for a while there and then for whatever reason I got to crying, like really bawling-my-fucking-eyes-out crying. I said I didn’t want to live because I’d already seen everything that was going to happen and it was a nightmare. Something like that. And she was really sweet to me. I don’t think there was ever anyone who felt more compassion for weak motherfuckers.
CHAPTER SEVEN
And it was January and Emily was back. She was having me watch a movie with her. Her mother had given her a $20 Best Buy gift card for Christmas, and she’d bought this movie on DVD with it. It was her favorite movie, she said. The movie was about different people who had all these intricate experiences of profound sadness, and some of the people freebased orchids. And there were car accidents.
We were in this room at school that had a TV and a sofa in it. And there was a microwave too. But the room wasn’t bigger than a very large closet. It didn’t seem like anyone ever came here. It was a room you wouldn’t know about. Emily had a gift for finding rooms you wouldn’t know about.
I checked my phone and I saw I had a voice mail. No one had tried calling; there was just a voice mail somehow. I listened to it. It was Madison Kowalski getting fucked in the voicemail. And there was a guy saying, “Madison’s so hot. Madison’s so hot. Madison’s so hot.”
It sounded like he was wearing wraparound sunglasses.