by Joshua Furst
Now, here with Jarod, she was bored again. And it's not like she hated him. He'd let her stay. He'd fed her and they'd shared their drugs with each other. She felt tenderly toward him, sort of indebted. Something, even an ambivalent hookup, was bound to be better than nothing. There are lots of ways to care about someone, and pity's as valid as any other.
On their last night in the living room, the humidity crept in and covered everything like a thick and filmy layer of shellac. There was no way to escape it. Lying on the carpet, sweating out the beer she'd drunk, Cheryl kept thinking bugs were crawling over her. The idea of touching another warm-blooded thing—of letting herself be touched—was almost unbearable, but next to her, Jarod wasn't sleeping, either. She knew because his eyelids kept flickering as he watched her through the webs of his lashes, and she couldn't help wondering what it would take to get him to finally make a move.
“Don't you have like a fan or something?” she said.
He twisted onto his side, making a feeble effort to act like she'd woken him up. His ratty t-shirt, saturated with sweat, drooped toward the floor. “It's in my mom's room.” This meant that, even though his mom was off at work, they weren't going to touch it.
The last time they'd smoked had been hours ago, but the oily smell of marijuana clung to the air; it was something viscous, slithering and twisting, coming to strangle her in the dark.
She sat up and propped herself against the couch. “It's so fucking hot,” she said. “Can't we open the windows at least?”
Taking his shrug to be a yes, she went over and broke the windows loose from their sills, pounding them up with the base of her palm. The fresh air didn't help anything. It was too heavy to move. When she returned to her spot on the floor and closed her eyes, the creepy crawly things seemed to move faster.
“How can you wear that shirt?” she asked him.
“You're wearing a shirt.”
“Yeah, you're right.” She thought about this, then peeled hers off. For a second she felt like maybe this would help, but the heat wrapped right back in and sucked at her skin. “Now I'm not,” she said. “So?”
“So, what?”
“Are you gonna take your shirt off?”
Jarod reluctantly sat up and yanked his shirt over his head. His skin was pale in the darkness, like a glow stick losing its charge. He seemed embarrassed, more embarrassed than she was.
“See?” she said. “Much better.”
Pretending to be oblivious to the sexual dynamic of what they were doing, she laid down on her back, her head resting on a cushion she'd slid off the couch. His eyes kept veering toward her breasts and she wondered what he'd do if she took her bra off too. That would be too much.
Any thought other than how hot it was soaked through and wilted and curled at the edges. She felt like she was rotting. At home we had air-conditioning in every room, and the way she felt now, this comfort alone seemed almost worth returning for. She cursed herself for being so weak. Air-conditioning was a form of class warfare, unnatural, disastrous to the environment; it emitted freon or toxins or something, ate up the ozone, guzzled electricity. Jarod put up with the horrible muggy heat, and he wasn't even political.
She could tell from his breath that he still wasn't sleeping. How many ways did she have to say it's okay?
“Do you ever think of, like, going away?” There was no answer. “Like going somewhere with better weather? … Getting away from your mother?”
He tensed up behind her and she turned onto her side, facing him now, each of them loosely curled, knees almost touching, heads almost kissing—a big empty upside-down heart. She waited. Every time she moved, some part of her rubbed against him and he pulled a little tighter into himself. After what felt like an hour, she flung herself onto her stomach. Then in a quick burst of action, she draped her arm over his waist. He shivered. If this was a mistake, she couldn't take it back now.
Unwilling to make it any more explicit, she stayed like that, gradually dozing off.
In the moments of consciousness between intervals of sleep, she registered the changes in their positions. Jarod cradling her arm like a teddy bear. Later, his nose squished into the back of her neck. At some point, his mom was there and then she wasn't. Cheryl's back was to Jarod. He was holding her, his hand not quite cupping her breast, tense with the effort to avoid her nipple. She could feel his hard penis, through their layers of shorts, pressing up against her tailbone. But a greater tension stiffened his whole body. He was terrified. Even in his sleep.
When the air finally began to cool, she snuggled into him, and didn't wake up again until noon the next day.
SPRAWLED ON THE COUCH in her cutoff cargoes and bra, Cheryl watched Jarod doze. For someone so lethargic in waking life, his sleep was a mess of neurotic tics. He jittered. He rolled. He kicked. He repeatedly slapped at his face, itched his scalp. He wrapped himself around the puppy and spooned it in the same way he'd been spooning her earlier, like it was salvation, sweetness and succor and safety itself. She could be these things. She thought, Maybe I want to be these things. She'd have to put up with his tedious silence, the unreadable grunts and hours lost to the TV, but once she got past that, she might achieve a small degree of fulfillment in wrapping his hidden dreams up in her arms. She leaned over his head, and with a spit-daubed finger, scrubbed the dried drool off his cheek.
To distract herself until he woke up, she watched VH1, Behind the Music. It was entrancing even with the sound off. What tragedies had befallen Adam Ant in the years since he was all the rage? She wanted to know—or she didn't not want to, which was a pretty good way of approaching the world. No expectations. She didn't have to think about the show, and it stopped her from thinking about anything else. Just the way she liked it. She could spend years like this, remote in hand, waiting for nothing, becoming nothingness.
But excitement and meaning were rushing toward her, whether she wanted them or not. Trent was on his way, about to barge in on her comfortable boredom. Without a knock, with no regard for the peace he was disrupting, he and his pack of boys slammed the door open and spilled like floodwater into the room, shouting to hear themselves shout, slap-boxing, jumping onto each other's shoulders and falling in heaps over the empty beer cans. Three white guys and one black, young like her and punky, their tattered shirts covered with slogans, knobs of steel riveted into their faces. They were kinetic and startling.
As the puppy launched into a series of sharp yips and clambered away to hide behind the kitchen door, Cheryl zapped off the TV and hid her breasts with her knees. She wasn't scared, though maybe she should have been. Instead, she felt a dark thrill, temptation, trepidation; this was what she'd longed for, the lords of destruction come crashing in to beckon her forward.
Jarod just lay there, refusing to accept this disruption of his sleep. He twisted crankily, draped an arm across his eyes.
In these first few moments, Cheryl experienced the boys less as individuals than as a large mass of undulating chaos, spiraling through the room, then into the kitchen, a voice yelling back, “Jarod, man, where the fuck's the food?” Though she sat still, watching silently from her perch on the couch, she felt like she was being swept along with them. It was only when one of them peeled away from the group—a fierce-looking guy with short cowlicky brown hair and a tattoo of binary code strung around his right arm—that she was able to orient herself and differentiate them from each other.
The guy lurked over Jarod, kicked him in the ribs—softly, but still. When he saw Cheryl glare at him, he smirked and kicked Jarod a little harder. Jarod groaned. He curled in to protect himself. “What the fuck, man,” he said. “I'm sleeping.”
“What the fuck, man, it's two fucking o'clock in the afternoon.”
“So.”
“So.”
The other boys rummaged around in the kitchen. They'd quieted down. The only one shouting now was the puppy. Someone opened the refrigerator door.
Glancing at Cheryl again, the smirk ex
panding and sinking in, the guy with the tattoo said, “Get up, man. We've got shit to do.”
“Stop kicking me.”
“Get up.”
She'd made up her mind that she didn't like the guy. “Hey, why don't you leave him alone?” she said.
The guy stopped kicking. He leered at her. Then, making connections, he glanced at Jarod and chuckled. “What's your name?” he asked her. The question came like an accusation.
“What's your name?” Cheryl sneered, hoping to bluff herself as much as him.
“Trent.” The way he stared disconcerted her, made her feel like she'd done something to be ashamed of. “So?” he said.
“What.”
“What's your name, Betty?”
“Why should I tell you my name?”
“Fine. Don't, then. I'll call you Betty, Betty.”
“You do that, then.”
“I will, then.” He went back to kicking Jarod. “Listen, Jarod, fucking get the fuck up, or I'll fucking really kick you.”
Jarod rolled into a sitting position. “Jesus Christ,” he said. He slumped against the edge of the couch, head drooping between his legs. “Somebody turn off the fucking dog. My mother's trying to sleep.”
A voice from the kitchen barked, “Fuck your mother,” and Jarod lurched toward it, suddenly charged, ready to propel himself into action. “What?”
“Fuck. Yo. Mother,” said the voice.
Cheryl felt like she should intervene. Why, though? None of this involved her. Besides, she was excited, enthralled. This Trent guy was a dick, but he was reckless and charismatic. Jarod had finally shown a tiny hint of backbone. Something interesting was happening.
“Hey, Mike … Shut the fuck up,” said Trent. She wasn't sure how she felt about that. It was harder to hate him if he took Jarod's side.
“Gee, Dad, the fuck did I do?” came the voice from the kitchen.
Jarod shrank back and closed his eyes again. Trent touched him lightly on the top of the head.
“You know the fuck what you did.”
The black guy stood in the doorway, scratching his shaved head, looking skeptical. A series of earrings curled up both his earlobes, like they used to on big-haired girls in the eighties. “I do?” he said, grinning.
Trent flexed his fist, faked a punch toward Mike.
“Whatever, man,” Mike said. “You know who'd win.” He disappeared back into the kitchen.
“Look at all this shit,” Trent said. He nudged various bits of trash with his combat boot—an empty twelve-pack, a dried-up pizza rind, a childproof screw top that had once belonged to some now disappeared prescription bottle. “Jarod, man, you've got to get yourself together.” The boys had kicked the cans and bottles around. They'd knocked the bong over and a brown circle of water was seeping into the pile rug, letting a musty, sweet stench loose across the room. “Clean the fucking house, man. I know you've got Betty here and you want to impress her and shit but—”
“Hey—hey!” Cheryl couldn't help herself. “What do you mean he's got me? Nobody's got me. I'm my own person.”
Trent paused for a moment to scrutinize her. And then he gloated. He'd gotten to her.
“I mean, fuck!” he said to Jarod. “You look like ass too. How long has it been since you were out in the fucking daylight?” He plopped onto the lip of the couch, crashing into Cheryl, sitting on her feet, and began to roll a cigarette.
Digging at the corners of his eyes, Jarod said, “I go outside, man. I walk the dog. What do you want, anyway?”
All of Trent's weight pressed into Cheryl's knees. He was forcing her to hold him up and she could smell him—tobacco and mildew and his sour BO—but she refused to back down; no way was she going to cede her space to him. When he leaned forward to rough up Jarod's hair, she felt slighted and weirdly incomplete.
“Come on, Jarod, get up. We're all waiting for you.”
Jarod just stared at the blank TV screen. The puppy was growling at someone in the kitchen. “Where are we going?” he finally asked.
“Edina. The Galleria. We stole Little Tornado's mom's car for the day.”
“I don't want to go to the fucking Galleria. What do I want to go to a mall for? In Edina.”
There was a thud and the puppy let out a howl. Its claws could be heard clacking across the linoleum and then there was a crash and what sounded like a mass of cookie sheets tumbling to the floor.
The three of them—Trent, Jarod and Cheryl—peered toward the door, but the kitchen was still now.
Then, “Smooth move, ex-lax, it's dead.” Cheryl recognized this as the voice of that black guy, Mike.
Another voice shot back, “You're dead.”
“Hey, man, I'm not the one who kicked it.”
Jarod bit at the raw spot on his lip. “Hey, what the fuck, man? What did you guys just do to my dog?” He looked like he was fighting back tears, but he didn't make any moves toward the kitchen. “Those fuckers are gonna wake up the ho-bag.” There was pleading in his voice and he looked toward Trent as though the guy could magically fix everything.
“Don't cry, man, Jarod. Nothing could wake her up. She's on so fucking many sleeping pills you could fucking blow up the house without waking her up.”
“Yeah, well …” Jarod lost himself in dead air. He ran his hand like a washcloth over his face. “Where are we going again?”
“The Galleria,” said Trent. “Come on. Get up.”
The puppy came racing out of the kitchen and crawled into the arch under Jarod's legs.
“Yeah. So, why?”
“Fighting the good fight, man. Fucking bring down the fucking motherfucking system.”
It was Cheryl's turn to smirk. “How are you gonna do that?”
Twisting around, Trent rested his arm on the shelf of her knees. “It's a competition. Whoever steals the most shit—or no, the most money's worth of shit—wins.”
“Wins what?”
“Wins the satisfaction of being the best thief.”
He wouldn't stop giving her that heavy look and she couldn't stop returning it.
As Jarod begrudgingly pulled himself to his feet, the other boys shuffled back into the room. They'd found some cheese balls and were trying to bank them into each other's mouths. Cheryl got a better look at them this time. There was Mike, the black guy, a blond kid with a scraggly goatee and two silver rings pierced through his lower lip, and a grungy little boy, no more than twelve years old, with thick-rimmed plastic glasses and acne all over his face.
“Fucking finally,” Trent said. “Oh, and hey, Jarod, tell your girlfriend she can come too.” He shot Cheryl a look to see if she'd bite again, but this time she restrained herself. She was preoccupied with figuring out what expectations Jarod had for her and whether or not she owed him anything.
AT THE Galleria, she avoided Trent. She tagged along with Jarod, whose idea of fun was sitting on a bench and watching the people walk up and down the stairs. They blurred together, these women who all looked like they did too much yoga and spent too much money on haircuts that made them look like they had roosters sitting on their heads, these men shaped like hockey pucks, wearing pleated chinos. They all drank the same brand of bottled spring water and pushed strollers the size of SUVs. Cheryl couldn't tell what Jarod thought of them, or if they registered on him at all.
Each time Trent circled past, he snuck up and pile-drove his shoulder into Jarod, called him a lazy fuck, tried to goad him into wrestling matches. He acted like Cheryl wasn't even there. This either meant that he liked her or he didn't—it could go either way—but whatever the tactic was supposed to achieve, it succeeded in spurring on her hatred of him. And the more she hated him, the more she hated Jarod, without whose existence she would have been able to like Trent without the guilt of betrayal. This prompted her to hate Trent more. Which prompted her to hate Jarod more. Which prompted her to hate herself most of all.
To be safe, she scowled whenever he glanced at her.
“Listen, Jar
od,” she said when they were alone, “your friend Trent is an asshole. He's, you know? What the fuck? He doesn't have any respect for anything. The way he comes barreling in this afternoon? That didn't piss you off?” Jarod shrugged. “And then he was, like, kicking you? I would've … I mean, you know? What a dick! And he acts like—I mean, what am I? Like nothing? Like nobody? I'm sitting here and I'm your friend or whatever and he's come by like five times now and I don't even get a hello. You know what I mean?”
If only Jarod had agreed with her, they could have formed an alliance, sustained the awkward stasis until maybe one of them finally made a move. But Jarod just fidgeted and stared at the floor, not saying anything, acting like she was the one who was an asshole. She was asking him, begging him, to put a claim on her. Did he not understand what was at stake here? Or was he just incapable of fighting for what he wanted? It made Cheryl sad, but it also allowed her to feel like, whatever, she'd given him a chance and his hurt feelings wouldn't be her problem.
After the mall, they returned to Jarod's house to check out each other's loot. It was already dark outside. The ho-bag was at work and wouldn't be home until three a.m. Trent made them sit around the kitchen table and lay their catch out in front of them. He kept a running tally. The kid with the goatee—Devin, his name was—had nabbed a respectable eighty-six dollars and twenty-three cents' worth of merchandise: two cut-out-bin CDs, Snowed In, by Hanson, and Hot Dance Hits of 1993, retail value nine ninety-eight each; the current issue of Tattoo magazine, retail value four ninety-five; a Black & Decker power drill, fifty-nine ninety-nine; and three Milky Ways (eaten along the way but with the wrappers as proof of purchase they still counted), worth sixty-five cents apiece. Mike, claiming he was at a disadvantage because he was black, that he was watched too closely, he couldn't pull the shit the other guys could, had only a cheap pair of stainless-steel earrings, worth a mere fifteen dollars, to show for himself. Little Tornado, the kid with the skin problem, had a whole bunch of shit, a cornucopia of worthless checkout junk: five packs of Doublemint gum, two tins of Altoids, a tiny green water pistol, four key rings with Japanese doodads hanging from them, a ten-pack of blue Bic pens, a handful of brown replacement dress shoelaces and a Koosh Ball, coming to a grand total of thirty-two fifty-six. Trent turned out to be the big winner—how could he not?—though he had only snatched three things: a fourteen-dollar book by William S. Burroughs called Cities of the Red Night, a small but high-tech telescope worth fifty-nine forty-nine, and the real prize, a pea-green army jacket worth ninety-five dollars. Cheryl and Jarod both came up empty.