by Joshua Furst
The scabbier kids, who'd been on the scene longer, searched their veins shamelessly, and when they found one that was still uncol-lapsed, they shot up right there in the Wreck Room, the kitchen, right there on the futon where Cheryl and Trent slept.
When Mike came home from his job at Chipotle, kids would cascade over him as he opened the door. He'd press through them to drop his shit in his locker and find junkies nodding off on his army cot. “Motherfuckers have no sense. See? This! This is the problem with this fucking town.” He'd try to pull them off and push them out, to shut down the party completely, but there were too many kids. New ones kept streaming in all the time. “We're chaos, dude,” they said. “You can't control us.”
These parties metastasized. They went on for days. A solid mass of kids, puking, fighting, making out, fucking. Aching. Jostled loose, whisked to opposing sides of the room, Cheryl and Trent lost each other in these parties.
Devin, one afternoon, couldn't control himself. He flailed, naked from the waist down, wagging his limp penis in people's faces. He couldn't get it hard no matter how much he rubbed. Everyone laughed at him. He didn't shock them. They'd lived through worse explosions of despair themselves.
Sometimes kids cried in the corners, hiding their faces. No one knew why, but no one asked, either.
Eventually, two, three, four, five nights later, the drugs would be cashed and the alcohol gone. Anyone still around would be passed out on the floor, bodies strewn at random, a frozen half-finished massive game of Twister.
I remember one night like that in particular.
The scent of hops mingled, in the dank Wreck Room, with the smell of sweat and smoke and street. Some girl no one knew was wailing in the bathroom. Except for her, Cheryl and Trent were the only ones still awake. They crawled through the dark, feeling their way over wobbly bodies until they reached each other's voices.
“Betty?”
“Yeah?”
“Betty?”
“I'm right here.”
“Where?”
“Here. That's me.”
He groped up her arm and she cupped his hand, warm, against her cheek.
They huddled there, listening to the crash of breaths around them, and Cheryl wondered why comfort and sadness felt so alike, why she lost herself whenever she couldn't find him.
Trent nibbled her ear. “Maybe we should go see how Debbie Harry's doing.”
“Sure,” she said. “Okay.”
As long as she was near him, she didn't care what else went on. Stepping carefully, they picked a path over the carpet of kids and climbed out the window, crawled up to the roof, and laid themselves down in the kiddie pool up there.
A muggy heat had lingered into the night. The edges of her body blurred into his, like her skin was made of tissue, disintegrating. Tonight, Trent moved slowly, a quiet dream inside her, picking up speed for just a moment near the end, staring into her eyes possessively.
When he rolled off her, he gazed at the billboard across the street—a pointing McGruff, TAKE A BITE OUT OF CRIME—and said, “Wow.”
“What's the matter?”
“I'm just thinking. That's forty, Betty. I've been inside you forty times.”
She winced. She startled. “What? Is this a race?”
“I'm just saying … It's like I know things about you now, you know what I mean? Like I—like”—he paused, then said almost daintily— “your pussy is mine.”
She shot up on an elbow. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, like”—he stalled, quickly backing down—“I didn't mean it like that. It's, like, it's one of the things I understand in the world.”
The idea thrilled her. Then she thought about all the parts of herself this understanding excluded. She stopped herself. He was trying to be sweet, and she didn't want to ruin it.
Above her, the streetlights bounced off the clouds, turning the night sky a veiny orange, as though there was something organic up there. A breeze coasted down over the rooftops and hooked across her sweaty body. “How many girls have you been with?” she asked.
“I don't know. A few.”
“A few, like ten? Or like—how many?”
He squinted. “A few, a couple.”
“You can't remember?”
“A couple.”
“Like two?”
“What do you think a couple means, Betty?” He glanced at the billboard, at McGruff's finger jabbing back at him. “Why does it fucking matter?”
“I'm curious. I don't know.” Now that she'd started, she was desperate for every last detail. She wanted to contemplate and obsess and compare, to torture herself with his memories of them. Trent, tense, defensive, was trapped under her leg. His body felt weak and scrawny there, but she knew this was an illusion. A further question kept scrolling through her mind, an angry dot bouncing over every word: Do you love me? Do you love me? Just say that you love me, you don't have to mean it. It was hard to resist the urge to chant along. She felt queasy and shameful. Like a stupid girl.
The breeze was gone. Sweat was filling up in the kiddie pool, their intermingled sweat, sucking at her skin, gluing her to the plastic.
“Were their pussies yours?” she said.
He slid his arm around her shoulder and pulled her gently toward him.
“Were they?”
“Come here,” he said.
“No.”
“Fucking just come here.”
She could only oppose him for short, concerted bursts. Her cheek on his chest, she listened like she had that first day at Sabotage to the plodding sound of his heartbeat.
His fingers rooted lazily through her hair. His lips rested against the top of her head, almost but not exactly kissing her. He whispered something, but she couldn't understand him and she didn't ask him to repeat himself. It was safer to believe he'd said the thing she yearned to hear.
I wanted to tell her, don't put your trust in men, especially not if they're little boys. But I couldn't. Not yet. I had to wait. I was too upset to say anything right then. She was making all the same mistakes I had.
JAROD SAT halfway up the wooden staircase leading to the Sabotage Café's second floor. By now it was late July. Nearly two months had passed since Cheryl had ditched him for Trent, and in this time, she hadn't seen him. She'd hardly thought of him. She'd filled herself up with her new situation, with Trent and everything that came along with him, resisting the berculture, fighting its lies, building this gritty new world for herself out of all the crap it discarded. Jarod existed in Cheryl's memory not as a boy she'd almost loved but as a casualty of the corpora-capitalist system that had lobotomized America. He wasn't committed to the cause; the pull of his mother had been too strong. When the revolution came, he'd be left behind.
He looked somehow even more pathetic than she remembered him. He was shriveled, cowering, even in the muck of summer, under his hooded sweatshirt, his wide, watery eyes fixed on a nowhere spot in the broken step below him as though his last scrap of self had fallen through the gap.
Her first thought when she saw him was to cut and run, to hide out among the reeds and hubcaps in the empty lot next door and wait for him to go away, but he glanced up—briefly, indifferently— before she could.
The dog named Dog was crumpled like a limp towel under his feet. Its snout was long and pinched, thinner than Cheryl remembered, and uglier. The fur on its back had grown long and coarse and its coloring had deepened into rusty brown streaks, but it was still a sort of spindly little thing, its paws two sizes too big for it. It gave a little bark when it saw her and slipped out from between Jarod's legs, tumbling down the six, seven steps to slobber over her knees.
“Hello. Yes, hello. Yes, hello, little doggie.” She crouched, letting its tongue flip over her face. “You remember me, don'tcha? Yeah, don'tcha? He's gotten bigger.”
“She's a she,” Jarod mumbled. “She's a fucking girl.”
“Oh, shit, right.” She flushed, but he didn't seem to notice or care.
He was busy digging his fingernail under a thick splatter of green industrial paint adhered to the step next to him. “How's your mom?” she asked.
No response, not even a pause in the picking—he'd found an edge and was now working at prying it free.
“Something interesting there?” she asked.
“No.”
She'd forgotten how petulant he could be, like an eight-year-old, glum and pouty after having been forced to put the Lucky Charms back. A sudden anger—just a flash—bolted through her. He did this on purpose. He wanted something, or he knew something, and he wanted her to guess what it was. A tedious exercise, yet she felt compelled to play along. She was worried he might be here to fuck things up with Trent.
The dog stood almost three feet tall when she raised it by its front paws. It waltzed with her, taking clumsy steps forward and back, side to side, until it was able to shake her off. She tickled it behind the ears and ran her hand in circles around its nose, teasing it, waiting for Jarod to give himself away.
He just kept picking. Then, once he'd detached the splotch from the stair, he studied it like it was an ancient coin, rolled it in his fingers, scrutinizing its ripples and dollops of texture. “Hey, Dog,” he said. “Come here.”
Cocking its head, the dog peered at him, wagged its tail. He beckoned it with an open palm. Then he crumpled the paint into a pellet and held it out like a Scooby-Snack.
“Don't do that,” Cheryl said.
“Why not?”
The dog chewed, smacking its mouth like it was sucking on peanut butter.
Cheryl climbed up and dug her finger in the dog's gums, under its tongue, around its teeth, trying to rescue the paint. She was too late. “It'll get sick. There's probably lead in that paint,” she said.
Jarod slumped back on his elbows and gazed sullenly at his puppy.
“It's poisonous.”
The way he stared at the puppy frightened her. His eyes were hard and dull. He reminded her of a sponge, not because of what he absorbed but because of the way he just sat there in a state of suspended animation—or a mushroom cap.
“You don't care?”
“I care,” he said, pushing the words out, finally willing himself to look at her. The blood vessels were rising to the surface of his eyes.
Didn't he know he'd lost his chance with her? He should leave her alone. Just because she'd cared once didn't mean she gave a shit anymore. She willed him not to cry. The urge to comfort him was already returning. She implored herself, Fight it off, don't give in. “I know you care,” she said.
Leaning against the shaky wooden railing, she stared, pitiless, as he tried to corral his tears. The dog lingered on the step below them. It watched Jarod too. Then it lost interest—he was just sitting there, not even talking. It dropped to its belly, laid its head on its folded paws and, sighing, turned away.
“Where is everybody?” said Cheryl.
“That guy Mike's upstairs.”
“He won't let you in? He's a dick,” she said. “Come on. I can handle him.”
She started up the stairs, preparing herself for an attack on Mike, but Jarod just sat there. “You seen Trent?” he asked.
“I don't know. He's around. You don't want to go inside?”
There was that shrug again.
“Well, I'm gonna go in.”
When she tried to step around him, he placed his hand on her leg, held her there with his hangdog eyes, silently pleading, begging for that thing she'd closed off to him. What really pissed her off was that she couldn't stop herself from being affected. She plopped down on the step.
“You gonna tell me what the fuck's wrong with you?”
He patted the dog and it nuzzled its head up into his lap. “I'm just sad,” he said.
She softened. “I figured I'd see you around here sometimes,” she said.
“I've been working.”
Jarod working. Jarod counting money. Folding clothes. Busing tables. Jarod spearing litter in a park. It was too absurd. A smirk cracked across her face.
“What?” He frowned at her. “I'm not a fucking retard. I can do things. I'm working in the stockroom at Rainbow Foods. Listen, where's Trent? I gotta talk to him. It's an emergency.”
Something in her seized up. She tried to remember her time at Jarod's house, all the little ways they'd circled each other, sniffing and gauging the distance. Though there wasn't anything tangible to point to, it would be a lie to say nothing had happened. She'd tromped over him just like everyone else, but he didn't yearn for everyone else, he hadn't hoped to possess everyone else. At some point along the line, she'd made him an implicit promise, and then when Trent showed up she'd denied the whole thing.
“So, what, you can't tell me about it?”
“Uh-uh,” he said. “I'm just sad, okay?”
How could she have thought there'd be no repercussions? What did he have on her? Nothing. She'd done nothing. But he might lie. Who knows what he might say? And Trent would believe him. Jarod was his friend and she was just a girl—wasn't that the way it always worked with boys?
The conversation in her head bubbled over and suddenly she was shouting at him. “That's why we haven't seen you, isn't it? It's not his fucking fault you couldn't make a move. It's not my fault, either. Why do you have to come fuck everything up?”
He looked at her like she was acting crazy.
Calming herself, she said, “I mean, because—”
“I know what you mean,” he said. Withdrawing again, he peered at the dog, batted at its ears. Something had turned suddenly cold in him, and the thought that he might have more important problems than whether she was into him or not bounced through her mind like a wasp trapped in a kitchen window. She remembered how terribly she'd wanted to hold him during those torturous, she thought now, tender nights when they'd lain side by side pretending to sleep. “I'm sorry you're sad.”
She allowed her head to sink onto his shoulder. His body relaxed slightly, melting toward hers, and they sat there for a while, bearing the weight of the immutable past.
And in that moment, I believe, her sympathy for me expanded a tiny bit. She took one small step toward returning to me. She recalled the outrage that had coursed through her all those times she'd invited friends for sleepovers at the house only to watch them lose interest in her discussions of school crushes and join me in the kitchen, pouring all their troubles onto the table as we sipped Red Zinger tea and shoveled microwave popcorn into our mouths. They told me about the secret feelings they feared would turn them into failed human beings. The sexual impulses they couldn't control. The self-disgust that crept through them like mold. The raw places in themselves that everything outside said shouldn't exist. I treated them like I was a friend, not a parent. They knew that instead of frowning, instead of reciting the creaky platitudes that most adults used to dismiss their problems, I'd just feel. And maybe cry with them. That's why they trusted me. Jill Swenson. Danielle Reid. Jessie Clowen. Those are just the ones I can think of right now. It was as though Cheryl had delivered these girls to me. I soaked up the emotions they couldn't handle, told them they were good, normal and good, that they had a value beyond what they could see. We'd stay up late playing Boggle or Yahtzee, and all the while, Cheryl would be sitting there staring into her tea, her face sinking into a hard little airless padlocked place. Eventually, she'd hump off to watch TV and make a point to blare the volume. Then, the next day, they'd leave and I'd never see them again. Cheryl would drop them out of her life. “They're mine!” she'd scream at me after they were gone. “They're mine, not yours! Why do you always have to monopolize? Why do you have to steal everything from me? Can't you at least let me have my own friends?” It was a test I was always going to fail. I think, here with Jarod, though, she began to comprehend that I'd had no choice but to embrace her friends. Despair is a sickness that I understand and I had no choice but to feel what they were going through.
Slipping her arm through his, she clasped Jarod's hand. Thei
r fingers knotted together, and for a brief moment she felt submerged in a current, large and continuous and imperturbable. It was as though, drilling toward his pain, she'd tapped her own, and now they were bleeding together.
The dog suddenly jumped up. Footsteps were approaching. It lowered its head, ready to lunge toward the doorway at the bottom of the stairs.
As the clomping drew closer, she yanked her arm free from Jarod and waited.
The dog started growling, a gurgle deep in the back of its throat. Then the person walked past the door: some short Asian woman with aerodynamic sunglasses and blond streaks in her hair. Some nobody.
Cheryl punched the wall. She'd taken what had been mere insecurity and turned it into evidence against herself. Given Jarod something real to tell Trent. The head on his shoulder. The holding of his hand. All that complicated intimacy. “Fuck!”
The dog barked at her and flipped its tail. Slapping her fingers around its snout, she shook its head back and forth until it reared up. It bucked and whined, but she held on tight.
“Hey!” Jarod said. “Hey, let her go!” He slammed Cheryl into the wall and cradled the dog's head lightly between his hands, examining it.
The sidewalk outside the doorway glowed, a blinding rectangle of white at the end of the shadowy tunnel. She tapped at the wall with the side of her skull, unwilling to look at Jarod, unwilling to apologize, though some kernel of her being felt she should. The swath of bright light kept pulling at her, changing shape, pulsing. She was transfixed, unsure which she hated more, herself or everyone else in the world. Then a shadow cut through the light, and a moment later Trent appeared in the doorway.
Jumping to his feet, Jarod ran down the stairs. The dog lumped behind him, leaving Cheryl alone to gauge exactly what she was about to lose.