“Jesus, look at that old Corvette,” Tim says suddenly. “Who owns a cool car like that in this town?”
“Oh my God, is it gold—where?” I’m half out of the door before I’m even awake. By the time I fight my way through the bodies to the Corvette, Mike Lyle is just getting out. A small crowd of admirers flocks around.
“Nice car,” a voice says.
Mike turns around. “Anyone touches this car, they’re dead.” He shoulders his way through the crowd. He looks like he’s been lifting weights. He hasn’t seen me.
With great authority, I step forward. Just because it’s after midnight doesn’t mean I’m not still the queen. Everyone’s staring at me. I point at Martin.
“Not so close to the car,” I bark at him. “You heard what the guy said.”
“Yeah?” Martin challenges me. “What if I piss all over it?”
I draw a line across my throat. “He’ll kill you,” I whisper.
“Go for it, Martin,” a guy behind him whispers.
Martin snaps his fingers. “Somebody get me another beer,” he orders.
I thread my way into Rack’s kitchen. The place is mobbed with people I’ve never seen before. It’s loud and dark and smoky, and the walls are throbbing with the music. Everybody looks like they’re having the best time they’ve ever had in their lives. I keep looking for Mike. I see a head rising above the crowd. It’s Grimshaw, still in the wedding dress. If she weren’t so drunk, she’d be half frozen. She’s walking in extremely high platform shoes—Angel’s, of course—stepping from chair to chair, picking her way across the room. She stands up on the kitchen table, which is covered with beer bottles and pitchers of melting ice and plates of cigarette butts and half-empty bags of chips. She bends down to pick up a jug of vodka and continues across the table. I still don’t see Mike. I see Angel nuzzling with some anonymous underclassman—it’s Brian, whose stock has risen since he accidentally won the game against Bavaria—feeding off the dazzled look in his eyes. I haven’t seen Rack since we got here.
The sliding plate glass door to the patio opens, and Junior and the Cougars’ quarterback step into the kitchen with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Everybody cheers. They’ve been wrestling outside in the snow, and they’re smeared with mud. As a committed athlete, Junior doesn’t drink, but it looks like the enemy quarterback does, and lost the fight.
“Somebody get this man some alcohol!” Junior yells.
“I have some!” Grimshaw holds out her bottle of vodka, and Junior holds up his hands, like he’s going to catch the football. Grimshaw cocks her arm behind her head and extends her other arm, like she’s going to throw the bottle in a Hail Mary pass into the end zone. But instead of letting go of it, she holds on to it, and Junior keeps his hands next to his face ready to catch it, and their eyes lock on to each other, and they just stare at each other, smiling across the room like they share a secret, private moment of open mutual admiration. All in the same split second, I remember the lilac blossoms Junior put in her hair during the Western Civ exam and I remember the bargain she struck with Rack over the summer and where that stands now that the cheerleading dream has come to nothing, and I wonder if Rack really is pregnant, and I worry because Mike Lyle is here right now, and I wish I had appreciated how uncomplicated life was when Grimshaw and I had only had one friend apiece. Then she gets an idea, and her eyes open wide.
“I know!” she calls to him. “We should go swimming!” For a minute, everyone is quiet. We all look out at the swimming pool. The Mizeraks have it lit from beneath, and it is a thin rectangle of turquoise wavering in the night.
“Yeah!” Junior bawls, holding his arms up for a touchdown. “Everybody into the pool!” The throng pushes out through the sliding doors, and I am carried with it.
Outside, the snow quiets everybody down as it touches our faces and disappears into the pool with a soft hiss. The impulse to jump in the water has just about died when Junior comes out of the house naked, gets up on the diving board, and poses like a statue of a Greek god.
“No clothes in the pool!” he announces.
“You’re full of shit,” says Lars Madsen.
“Hey—” Junior points at him. “Anyone wearing clothes in the pool is a loser.” He turns, moons everyone, and then does a backflip into the water. Everybody screams as he splashes them. More drunk football players start pulling off their clothes, from both Minnechaug and Colchis. They get up on the diving board, pose, and dive. Bodies start to fall. The pool fills up with naked guys, and they start playing water polo, using a pair of balled-up blue jeans.
Then Grimshaw breaks out of the crowd, in her wedding dress, still holding the bottle of vodka upside down. She approaches the water and stands there on her toes. All action stops.
“No clothes,” Junior orders from the shallow end of the pool. “If the boys do it, you have to do it.”
“I don’t care,” Grimshaw says. “I’ll do it.”
“Well, come on in, then,” he says. “Do it. The water’s fine.”
She walks down the perimeter of the pool to the deep end. Junior follows her with his eyes. She gets up on the diving board, picks through the piles of clothes, kicks some into the water, and waits there for a minute. Her shoes are off, and she stands on her toes, holding the hem of her dress up with her left hand while using the vodka bottle in her right for balance. The music stops. From the other end of the farm, we can hear the Mizeraks’ dogs barking. A cow moos.
“Well, are you gonna take it off, or aren’t you?” the Minnechaug quarterback calls.
“Don’t rush her,” says Junior. “She’ll do it. Then all the girls are gonna do it.”
“I’ll do it,” says Grimshaw. “But we need some music.”
“Mu-SIC!” bellows Junior at the house.
“You don’t own this place.” Angel appears at the edge of the pool, wagging a talon in his face. “You want some music, get your ass out of the pool and get it yourself.”
“OW!” Junior yells. He covers his crotch underwater with both hands.
At that moment, Mike Lyle appears on the patio behind Grimshaw.
“What are you doing here?” Junior Davis might not own the place, but he won the football game today, and his challenge to Mike is full of authority. Everybody turns to see who he’s talking about. For a split second, Mike doesn’t have an answer to that question. He looks out of place, a leftover, like everybody but him is in high school, everybody belongs here, everybody knows who they are and what they’re doing, except for him. Grimshaw hasn’t seen him yet. She is dancing on the diving board, moving her arms in a kind of drunken flamenco. She doesn’t need music.
Mike snaps his fingers at her. “Come on, Mel.”
Grimshaw stops dancing and turns slowly and blinks at him. She tilts her head at him like he looks familiar, but she can’t remember who he is.
“Let’s go,” he says again, more forcefully this time. He goes to the edge of the pool and reaches for her. She leans away from him, and he stretches forward. She loses her balance and starts flailing her arms. Mike lunges forward to grab her by the wrist.
“Let’s go,” he repeats. “I’m taking you home.” She manages to break his grip.
I step out. As he reaches for her, I pull her away. He leans out over the water, gets his feet caught in the clothes piled by the end of the diving board, and trips forward. As he falls, he puts his hands out for Grimshaw to catch him, but at that moment I step up onto the diving board and grab her. Just as I get her off the diving board, I hear a massive splash behind me. But I don’t turn around to see what happened. I push her in front of me through the house, past all the people, and out into the front yard. We find Tim asleep in his truck, with his head tipped back and his mouth wide open. I get in first and pull Grimshaw in after me.
“Tim.” I shake him awake. “We need you to drive us home, like, now.”
“Ah, sure,” he says. He sits there for a minute, staring straight ahead of him. �
��Where are we, again?”
“Mizerak’s. Now go.”
By now, Grimshaw is crying. “I didn’t know he was here. I thought he went to California.” She’s trying to get out of the truck. “But he stayed. For me! Because he loves me.”
“So what?” I snap at her. I turn to Tim. “Will you start your truck now?”
“I can’t remember where I put my keys,” he says slowly.
“In the ignition.”
“Everyone else thinks I’m trash,” she cries. “Did you see that today, with Allen Mizerak?”
“Allen Mizerak—Tim, can you please turn on your headlights?—has no class at all.” At that moment, Mike Lyle staggers out, sopping wet and coughing and held up by a crowd of naked football players from all the towns of the Minnechaug Valley, who are doubled over, laughing and yelling. Grimshaw doesn’t see any of this. Her eyes are closed.
“Yeah,” she says. “Who does he think he is, anyway?” She starts to cry into her hands. “Why do people have to be so mean? I don’t understand.”
“Melody!” Mike bellows.
She picks her head up and sees him. “Mike!” she screams, and throws herself at the door.
I reach across Grimshaw and hit the door lock. I turn my attention to Tim, who has forgotten how to drive his truck. “Reverse,” I coach him. “Turn to the right. Watch the van there. That’s good. Now shift into first. Watch the maple tree. Brake, brake! Turn left, out the driveway. Now second…” and so on, down Robinson Road, up Kingdom Road, while Grimshaw sobs out her guilt for how bad she’s treated the only one who loves her, until we roll underneath the gates of Versailles. We’re on private property now. I look behind us—no Corvette in sight. By this time, Grimshaw has bawled herself into semiconsciousness.
As we pull up to the front of the house, it occurs to me that my mother is in Maine, so I brace myself for dealing with Scot. The front door is locked, so I have to ring the doorbell. Tim and I are holding Grimshaw up by the armpits. I put my coat over her. As deadweight, she’s surprisingly heavy. When Scot comes to the door, he stares at us for a minute, nods, and lets us in. Grimshaw throws up in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. For about half an hour, she stays in the bathroom, half conscious, clinging to the toilet, still in her wedding gown and crying about how bad she’s treated Mike Lyle.
“He loves me,” she sobs. “He really loves me. Nobody else loves me. To them I’m a Grimshaw. Just trash by the side of the road. Like I fell off a truck.”
Scot and I get Grimshaw’s face washed. We ply her with vitamins, aspirin, and water, and then get her down the hall, up the stairs, and into my bedroom. I cover her up and smooth the sheets. She lies there, barely breathing.
“Poor kid.” Scot looks down at her and shakes his head. “It’s not like anybody chooses their family.” He pauses. “It’s just the luck of the draw. It’s not like my family’s any great shakes. She’s not … like them, is she?”
His question takes me aback. What are they like, the Grimshaws? Fierce. Loyal. Funny. Is she like them? But that’s not what he means. “No,” I tell him. “She’s not like them.”
“Who was she crying about?” he asks. “Some creep?”
“Yeah.” Actually, I wouldn’t mind getting some advice on the Mike Lyle situation. As of tonight, I think we’re in over our heads. Scot looks from the crumpled wedding dress on the floor to me, still in ripped tea-length pink.
He gestures at her with his chin. “I think she’s out now,” he says.
But she opens her eyes. She stares at the ceiling. “I’m a Grimshaw,” she announces, and then passes out.
“Poor kid,” he says again. “She wasn’t really getting married, was she?”
“No. It was sort of a joke.”
“Like a homecoming prank?”
“Sort of.”
“Good.” He nods. “It was a good game. That Junior Davis is a talented son of a gun. I hope he’s got some colleges looking at him.” Scot pantomimes throwing a football. “You’ll be glad for these memories, later on, so make as many as you can.” He nods again and puts a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve always been a good friend to her,” he says. “You get credit for that.”
* * *
Our landline ringing about twenty times into an empty house wakes me up. It’s Angel.
“Oh my God,” she says when I pick up. “Serena. I’m with Claudette. You have to come immediately. No joke. Do you have the car?” I look out the window. About three inches of snow have accumulated on the ground. From the fresh tire tracks on the driveway, I know Scot’s gone. He must have gone to church.
“No.”
“Well, you have to run, then. Melody, too. We need both of you.”
“What ha—”
“Just RUN!” she says, and hangs up.
I look at the clock. It’s almost ten. I shake Grimshaw, but she doesn’t move. “Grimshaw—”
“Leave me alone.” She sounds awake and stone cold sober. I keep shaking her.
“Grimshaw—it’s—”
She sits up and looks around her in disgust. “How did I get here?” she asks, like she’s never seen my bedroom before in her life.
“It’s some emergency at Mizerak’s,” I tell her. “Angel called.”
“Were you the one who pushed him in the pool last night?”
“What? No! He tripped and fell in.” But my voice is very high, the way it gets when I’m guilty of something. Was I the one who pushed him in? What do I care, anyway—if she wants that clumsy idiot and his loser car, that’s not my problem.
“I’m going to Mizerak’s,” I hiss at her. “And you better come, too, or you are shit for a friend. Not to me. To her.” I grab my coat and run out into a gray morning. It’s not that cold, and I run with my jacket open. Crosslots, the Mizeraks’ barns are only two pastures and a cornfield away from Versailles, but they’re big fields. The snow is wet and slushy and splashes with every step. I run across corn stubble, climb a fence, dodge semifrozen cow flops, and climb another fence. When I can see the tops of the big blue Harvestore silos, I start to hear the Mizeraks’ cows. I stop and listen. I’m not a farmer, but even I can hear an urgency to their mooing, like they know something’s wrong.
“Serena!” Angel is waving to me from the barn doorway. “We have to milk the cows!” she shouts. “The bulk tank comes at two o’clock!”
The shrubbery in front of Rack’s house is completely wrecked. Beer bottles are everywhere. “This is a disaster.”
“No, it’s not,” she says. “It’s a mess, not a disaster. Not getting the cows milked, that’s a disaster.”
“Where’s—”
“She won’t get up. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. She can’t stop crying. She tries to walk and then she collapses, crying.”
“Junior.”
“Well, yeah. Obviously.”
“Was she drunk?”
“No. She went to bed last night.” I follow her into the barn. “What about Melody?” she asks over her shoulder. “I thought she went to your house. We need her.”
I look up at the hill. No Grimshaw. I follow Angel into the milking parlor, where she puts a rubber apron over my head and shows me what to do. We’re down in the pit, and the cows are on a concrete platform raised about three feet. All I have to do is go from cow to cow, she tells me, and swab off the udders with this rag, like so. Then I take this apparatus off a hook and flip a lever on a black rubber tube which starts the suction going in these cups. I’m supposed to reach between the back legs of this very big cow and put the cups on the teats, like so. I’m to go down a line of twelve cows, doing that to each of them, then go back to the first cow, snap off the suction, and take the cups off with one hand and give the teats a squirt of iodine with the other, from a squirt bottle that hooks on the front pocket of my apron. Then those twelve cows will file out, Angel says, and twelve more will come into the parlor, and I do it all over again. She tells me all this in about ten seconds while she does the first c
ow, and then rushes back out of the milking parlor, leaving me to face the back end of the second cow alone. I do just what Angel told me to do with the lever and hose and when I reach between the legs with the cups for the teats, it seems to be exactly what the cow expects me to do. It doesn’t help that my hands are shaking, on account of my conversation with Grimshaw. Apparently, I am such a terrible person that I do terrible things without even knowing what they are. I’m just glad to have something to do. Cow by cow, I slowly get over my fear that I will be kicked in the face. Sometimes they try to lash me with their tails, which are wet and caked with burrs and manure. When you’re right up close to them, doing obnoxious things to their private parts, they seem like very big, very dangerous animals. But they just stick their noses in the grain, and don’t seem to notice.
After I get through two cycles of cows, Grimshaw shows up. Her job is to work with me, do what I do, and also give the cows grain as they come into the parlor. Angel keeps bustling in and out of the milking parlor, correcting what we’re doing, or telling Grimshaw to wash something. After half an hour, my back is about to break. My feet are cold and wet. My hands are numb, and I have a drip permanently established on the end of my nose that I can’t get rid of because my hands are covered with cow shit. I go out into the main barn to straighten up for a minute, and Angel rides into view on a little Ford tractor. It’s gray with red trim and a bucket on the front.
“I’m feeding out silage,” she explains. “With the new tractor you can feed out in, like, two scoops. This one takes about twenty. We’re not allowed to use the new one. Rack’s dad hides the keys.” She pats the fender. “I like this one, though. It’s so cute.”
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