Cuts Like a Knife

by Darlene Ryan

  About six months ago, her grandmother had a stroke and died in the hospital. Mac had had to go live with her uncle, and because of the spazoid way they work out who goes to what school, she ended up having to switch over to Riverview. I didn’t even know what her uncle’s real name was, because all she ever called him was The Asshole.

  I can remember her walking into homeroom that first morning with Mrs. Robinson, the guidance counselor, and there was just something about the way she stood there, like she didn’t care that we were all sneaking looks at her, that made me know I was going to be her friend if she’d let me.

  I followed Mac into the bedroom. It was empty except for an air mattress against the end wall with a pillow and a couple of blankets folded all neatly on top. Pretty clear that Mac had been sleeping here some of the time. Or maybe more like a lot of the time.

  But the one thing that I saw right away—that I couldn’t stop looking at—was the slanted ceiling. It was painted the same pale purple color as the walls, but it was covered with writing, covered, side to side, top to bottom. The whole thing was Mac’s small, cramped lettering. I moved closer and started reading bits and pieces. It was all poems and song lyrics, a bunch of stuff I’d never seen before. I was pretty damn sure that Mac had written all of it herself, not copied someone else’s stuff.

  And it was good. I’m pretty fair at writing music, if you don’t count this stupid comp project. But I suck at writing the words. All I can ever come up with is dumb rhymes like “moon” and “June” or “same” and “lame.” But Mac was good. No, Mac was great. My fingers were actually itching because I wanted my guitar or a piano so I could start figuring out the notes to go behind the words.

  “Jesus, Mac,” I whispered. “These are good.”

  She didn’t say anything, and I walked back and forth for at least ten minutes reading what was written up there on the ceiling. Some of it was above my head, and it was getting dark, so I couldn’t see it very well. Finally I looked at her. She was sitting on the air mattress, her back against the wall. “You’ve got all this stuff written down, right?” I said.

  She pointed at the slanted ceiling above my head. “Yeah, there,” she said.

  “No, I mean on paper or on a memory stick or something.”

  She shook her head.

  I pulled a hand back through my hair. “Okay, so first what we have to do is go get a couple of notebooks and some pens. I can start at one end, and you can start at the other. We could do it in two or three days.”

  “They’re tearing this place down tomorrow morning,” Mac said softly.

  “Shit,” I muttered. “Okay. So we’ll go get Alex and Ren, and we’ll just stay here all night if we have to.” I looked around, and it hit me that there was probably no electricity connected anymore if the house was going to be torn down in the morning. I reached over and flipped the light switch.

  Nothing.

  “All right, copying it all down’s not going to work because we can’t see to do it.” I held out my hands and shook my fingers. They still had that itchy, tingling feeling. Then I remembered that I had my phone in my pocket. “Jesus, I’m so stupid,” I said. I pulled out the phone. “I think there’s enough light that I can just take pictures of everything.” I stepped back and snapped a shot of one small square of the ceiling. I looked at the picture. No. I was too far away to make out the writing in the image.

  “I’m going to have to get closer,” I said. I held the phone just a few inches away from the purple paint.

  Mac grabbed my arm. “No,” she said.

  “Are you crazy?” I asked, shaking off her hand. “You can’t let this get destroyed. It’s good! I mean it.”

  “Tomorrow it’ll be gone, Daniel,” she said with a small smile. “There’s nothing anybody can do. Let it go. I have.”

  I looked around. “I don’t get it, Mac. Whose house is this now? I mean I know it used to be your grandmother’s, right?”

  “Mine,” she said, letting go of me. “At least it was.”

  I held out both hands. “I don’t understand.”

  She looked up at all the words scrawled on the ceiling. “Gram left the house to me. She left everything she had to me—not that there was very much. The thing is, The Asshole is in charge of it all.” She shrugged. “He decided it would be better to sell the house and save the money for my education. There wasn’t anything I could do—can do. My grandmother’s gone. By tomorrow this house will be gone. Everything will be gone. It’s too late.”

  “Too late?” I said. “That’s just—”

  I didn’t get to finish the sentence, because she put one hand on each side of my face and kissed me full on the lips.

  Chapter Four

  “Jesus, Mac,” I managed to mumble before her warm tongue was in my mouth and I pretty much couldn’t think about anything else.

  She pulled me over to the mattress by the end wall, and the entire time her mouth was so warm and the blood was pounding in my ears and I couldn’t get my breath. I couldn’t think beyond the fact that Mac, who I was totally crazy about, had her tongue in my mouth, doing things that I’d only imagined her doing but never really thought she ever would.

  She moved her hands slowly over my back under my shirt, and everywhere she touched my skin, it felt like her fingers were still there when she moved them. I pulled her even tighter to me with one hand, and slid the other into her hair. Even though I’d kissed a bunch of girls, it was like I’d never kissed anyone before.

  We sank down onto the mattress on our knees like some cheesy movie love scene. Mac’s hand came around my body, and she started pulling down the zipper of my hoodie, and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew where she was going, and oh shit, did I want to go there. I’d dreamed of going there from pretty much the first time I saw her, and it took willpower I didn’t know I even had to pull my mouth off of hers, swallow a couple of times and whisper hoarsely, “Are you sure?”

  She smiled at me. The most beautiful smile I ever remember seeing, and all she said was, “Yes.”

  I studied her face for a moment, and I couldn’t see anything that made me think that she didn’t want to, or that she was afraid or even that deep down inside she thought I was gross. Of course, I didn’t want to see that either.

  “I have a…you know,” I mumbled, feeling my face get hot. I didn’t want her to think I was the kind of guy who carried protection everywhere because I was always looking for someone to jump.

  She grabbed the neck of my shirt and pulled me toward her. I dropped my mouth back onto hers, and I just let go and fell into the feeling of being with Mac, of loving Mac the way I’d been dreaming of for the past six months.

  Have you ever thought about something so much that when it happened, it just wasn’t as good, it just couldn’t be, because of how perfect you’d made it in your mind?

  This wasn’t like that. It was everything I’d always thought about and better. It wasn’t like I’d never done it before, but this was special, and I didn’t mean to, but I even whispered, “I love you, Mac,” softly against her hair, because I needed to do that.

  After, we lay wrapped up in the blankets with Mac in my arms, her head on my chest. Her hair smelled like flowers. I was almost afraid to say anything in case somehow it all turned out to be a mistake.

  “Hey, Danny Boy, remember that first day we talked, on the merry-go-round in the park? Back then, I didn’t know you had chest hair and muscles,” Mac said, tracing small, slow circles on my chest.

  How many times had I gone over that day in my mind? I’d been walking home after school. I always cut through the park because it was faster than taking the long way around on the sidewalk. There had been no one around except for Mac, who was sitting on the edge of the merry-go-round.

  I saw her and I had wanted to talk to her. I just wasn’t sure if I should. So I was walking along, sort of staring at my feet, trying to decide what to do, and I was almost past her when she called out, “Hey, you’re in my
homeroom, aren’t you?”

  I stopped and looked at her. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m Daniel, middle of the row by the window.” As soon as the words were out, I knew how dumb they sounded. Mac just kind of shrugged and said, “I’m Mac, stuck in the front row because I’m the new kid.” Then she had grinned, and wow, I couldn’t say anything at all, dumb or otherwise. There was pretty much no blood left in my brain.

  “Mac, why do you always call me Danny Boy?” I asked now, concentrating on the feeling of her finger, which was already starting to make me feel crazy all over again.

  She didn’t answer for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to. Then finally she said, “It’s an old song my grandmother liked. Sometimes she’d sing it to me.”

  “Oh,” I said, mostly because I didn’t know what else to say.

  I closed my eyes for a minute just to let myself enjoy the feeling of her hand moving on my skin. When I woke up, Mac was gone.

  Chapter Five

  I jerked upright and looked around. It was almost dark. I called Mac’s name a couple of times, but she didn’t answer me. I yanked on my pants and went barefoot across the hall to the other slanted-roof bedroom. She wasn’t there. I went down the stairs, still calling for her. I walked all around the downstairs. She wasn’t anywhere in the house.

  It wasn’t until I went back up to the room to put on the rest of my clothes that I saw the words written on the wall above the air mattress. They hadn’t been there before. I was sure of that. Just two words.

  Danny Boy.

  I didn’t know what it meant. Was she sorry we’d done it? Was she happy? Were we still friends? Were we something else?

  I pulled on the rest of my things and took one last look at that ceiling in the dim light, full of Mac’s words, full of Mac’s dreams. It was just wrong that it was going to be destroyed in the morning. And I wondered if I’d been wrong not to take pictures of as much as I could, even though she’d said she didn’t want me to. It was too late now.

  I let myself out of the back door of the little house, looked around to make sure no one was watching, then sprinted across the torn-up lawn and pushed through the opening in the fence. Once I was away from the house, I pulled out my phone and tried Mac. All I got was her voice mail. For a second, I didn’t know what to leave for a message. Finally I said, “Hey, uh, Mac, it’s Daniel. Call me. Please.”

  Not very original.

  So now what? I didn’t feel like going home. I’d been walking more or less down the hill, and I realized that I wasn’t that far from Frankie and Johnnie’s. Frankie and Johnnie’s was this retro diner, lots of neon, red vinyl and shiny chrome. Mac loved the place, and they probably had the best onion rings in the world, or at least in this podunkville part of it.

  Thinking about the onion rings made me hungry, so I figured I’d stop in for an order and maybe Mac would call while I was sitting there, or maybe she’d somehow already be there.

  She wasn’t.

  Alex and Ren were sitting at a round table by the window. Alex’s hair was purple again and spiked, which had to be Ren’s doing. I got my order and went over to them. Alex was sitting sideways in his seat, drumming on the tabletop to some beat only he could hear. He did that sort of thing a lot. Bass players are kind of out there. At least all the ones I’ve met.

  “Hey,” I said, snagging a chair from the next table with my foot and dragging it over so I could sit down.

  “Mac’s not here, Daniel,” Ren said, pulling her hands back through her thick blond hair and then letting it fall to her shoulders like some kind of shampoo commercial.

  “Kinda noticed that,” I said around a mouthful of onion and crispy, greasy deep-fried batter.

  “Yeah, well, don’t bug her, okay?” Ren said, dipping what looked like a cold French fry into a blob of mayonnaise on her plate and stuffing it in her mouth.

  Ren and Alex were more Mac’s friends than mine. The three of them had met in detention. I’d never been sent to detention, and Ren sometimes acted like that was a moral failure on my part.

  “What’s it to you?” I said, dunking half an onion ring into ketchup, because who eats fries or onion rings with mayonnaise anyway?

  “After last night, she just needs to be by herself for a while.”

  “What happened last night?” The only thing I knew that had been going on the night before had been the school dance, and I knew Mac would never go to one of those. She thought school dances were lame. Besides, she’d already told me she’d been in the music room finishing her comp project.

  Ren looked at me like I was stupid or something. Of course, compared to her, I was. Compared to her, everyone was dumb as dirt. Ren had an iq that made her pretty much smarter than everyone—for sure smarter than every teacher in school, plus the principal. (Okay, so you didn’t have to be a genius to be smarter than Mr. Kenner.)

  Teachers were always on Ren’s case because she “didn’t apply herself.” That’s school talk for she did dick-all in class. Ren figured, what was the point? Everyone went on to the next grade every year—holding someone back was too damaging to our fragile self-esteem. So she decided what was the point of actually studying? First of all, she pretty much knew everything anyway. If she read a book, what she read was in her head forever. And how smart was it to do homework for marks that you didn’t need?

  It made sense to me, and I guess it did to Ren’s parents too, because it didn’t matter how many times they were called in to the school, nothing ever changed.

  Ren shook her head and made a face. “You didn’t hear, did you?”

  “Hear what?” I asked, before taking a long drink from my Coke.

  She looked at Alex, and he shrugged.

  “There was a dance last night,” she said.

  “Yeah, I did hear about that.”

  “You know Gavin Healey?” she asked, dunking another cold French fry in mayo and eating it. For some reason, watching her made me think of a bird eating a worm.

  “Mr. Hot-Shot-I’m-Gonna-Play-inthe-NHL? He’s in my math class. He’s a jerk.” I stuffed another onion ring in my mouth, chewed and swallowed. “What does Gavin have to do with the school dance and Mac?”

  “Mac had a date with Gavin last night.”

  Chapter Six

  I almost choked on my drink. I coughed, leaning over the table trying to get my breath, reaching blindly for a napkin to wipe my face. “You have lost your mind,” I said to Ren. “In the first place, Mac wouldn’t be caught dead at a school dance, and there’s no way she’d ever go out with an asshole like Gavin Healey. No way!”

  “You don’t know her as well as you think you do,” Ren said, and there was something—pity, no, something else, sadness maybe—in her blue eyes.

  “Yeah, well, I know Mac well enough to know that she would never be interested in Gavin Healey.” How could she be, I thought, after what we’d just done? That meant something. It had to, didn’t it?

  “It wasn’t really a date,” Ren said. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Mac didn’t know that. It was just a big stupid setup between Gavin and his asshole friends on the hockey team. They wanted to make Mac look like a loser. They thought it was funny.”

  “No way. Shit! No.”

  Alex fished in the pocket of his jeans, got his phone out and pulled up something on the screen. He leaned forward, holding the phone out to me. “Sorry, man,” he said.

  It was a picture someone had emailed him, clearly taken at the dance the night before. In the background, I could see Gavin licking some girl’s face, with his hand on her ass. It wasn’t Mac.

  That’s because the rest of the picture was Mac, her face mostly, and the look on it made my chest ache. There was so much pain on her face, so much hurt.

  I turned my head away and stared out the window. My hands were clenched into tight fists, and I wished Gavin were there so I could pound him into a pile of hamburger.

  “Did you know Mac was helping Gavin with math?” Ren asked, leaning forwar
d with her elbows on the table.

  “No,” I said.

  Ren snapped the end of her knife with her thumb and finger and started it spinning. “Me neither. And mostly I think it was just Mac doing his work for him.”

  I pushed the plate of half-eaten onion rings away. I wasn’t hungry anymore. “Why would she do something like that?” I asked.

  The helping with math part, I got. Mac was a math genius. But doing Gavin Healey’s assignments? Doing anyone’s assignments? That wasn’t her.

  “She liked Gavin,” Ren said. “That’s why.”

  I shook my head. It still didn’t make sense.

  “C’mon, you didn’t think she liked you or something?”

  “No,” I said, feeling my cheeks start to burn.

  Ren did that hands-through-her-hair thing again, and I caught the sparkle of green glass in her ears. My arm shot across the table and grabbed her wrist. “Where did you get those earrings?” I said.

  Alex straightened up in his seat, and it crossed my mind that he was twice as big as I was and, if he wanted to, he could pretty much pick me up and break me into little pieces. I let go of Ren and held up my hand so they both knew I didn’t mean anything by grabbing her in the first place.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” I said. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then I asked the question again. “Where did you get those earrings?”

  Her hand touched the dangly glass and metal, and she smiled, sort of. “Mac gave them to me.”

  I didn’t know what to do with my hands, and the urge to grab her again was strong. “When?” I said.

  “A little while ago,” Ren said, sliding her chair back. Away from me?

  “Mac was here?”

  “Yeah.”

  I cleared my throat. “Those are her favorite earrings.”

  They were just two loops of copper wire with three rows of tiny glass beads strung across the loop—a couple of tiny abacuses. They’d been a present from Mac’s grandmother the last Christmas she’d been alive. They were the only earrings she ever wore. She’d been wearing them when we were…together at the house. They’d sparkled in the fading light when she’d lifted her head to look at me and I’d thought my heart was going to beat its way out of my chest.