So Shelly

by Ty Roth

  He attempted to text “Get out. Got a girl,” but typing blindly with his cell wedged between his seat and the door, he spelled “Gnt nvt. Gnt d girl.”

  Apparently, Dadeno had decoded the message, for after an “I told you so” moment when Gordon and Caroline passed the welcoming placard in the lobby, Gordon found his seventh-floor room unoccupied. However, in the shaft of hallway light that rushed like a playful puppy ahead of him into the room, he spied his large equipment bag, labeled “Knights Lacrosse,” lying at the base of Dadeno’s double bed near the windows. He spun toward Caroline, clutched her wrist, and pulled her into the room and him as he closed the door behind them.

  Before their eyes had even adjusted to the semidarkness or she’d had a chance to consider playing coy, Gordon’s lips found hers, which he gently parted with his tongue. Caroline sighed appreciatively as a dam of pent-up desire broke deep within her. Without disengaging, Gordon slid downward, cupped his hands beneath her bottom, and lifted her to his eye level. Caroline placed a hand over each of his cheeks and opened her mouth wider. Later, she would remember the too-youthful smoothness of his face and curse herself for her stupidity, but in that moment, she instinctively wrapped her legs around his hips and thrust her body upward, as if she were shinnying up a pole. Her face above his, she fooled herself into thinking that she had assumed control of the situation.

  With Caroline grafted onto him, Gordon spun toward the room’s interior and walked to the foot of the near bed, where he seated Caroline in front of him.

  With her ex-boyfriend—the only boy with whom Caroline had ever been naked—Caroline, like most high school lovers, would undress hurriedly in the dark or beneath blankets. One can only imagine her titillation when Gordon confidently and arrogantly teased her by slowly sliding out of his jacket and unbuttoning the sleeves and front of his dress shirt. In the moonlight that squeezed through the narrow gap in the otherwise drawn curtains, his shaded torso appeared sculpted. She compulsively reached between her legs when, at a painstakingly slow pace, he slipped his belt from its loops, unbuttoned, and unzipped his pants without averting his gaze. Gordon turned his back to her and inch by agonizing inch tugged his khakis past his bare hips and ass (he never wore underwear) and let them drop and puddle at his ankles and cover his deformed foot, pausing to allow her to drink him in. When he turned full frontal toward Caroline, she gasped, fell flat on her back, and watched him approach through her widespread knees.

  Later, she wouldn’t remember the sequence of movements that left her lying naked. The only experience she could compare it with was the time when she volunteered to be hypnotized during an assembly at her high school. Her friends had accused her of acting when she’d claimed that she couldn’t remember what she’d done under the hypnotist’s sway, but she knew she’d succumbed to a force beyond her control, and it happened again with Gordon. She would, however, never forget and forevermore seek to repeat the sexual awakening that she experienced in that Holiday Inn, and she would forever love, hate, and haunt the man who unleashed and then left her.

  Caroline was not a virgin, but sex had been rough, brief, and disappointing on those previous occasions. She had never experienced an orgasm. With Gordon, she had one before he entered her. Then another before he carelessly finished inside her.

  In the half-light of the next morning, Gordon woke with Caroline already straddling him. With her in the final throes of a transcendent screw, applause and calls of “Bravo!” and “Encore!” burst from somewhere in the room. The shock of which launched Caroline off of Gordon and sent her sprawling in terror across the room, where she tripped backward over the lacrosse bag and landed flat on her pretty little ass. Legs akimbo, she lay staring into the leering faces of Dadeno, Justin Terlander, and David Thurston, who were recording the entire performance on Dadeno’s phone.

  As she rose to her feet and stripped Dadeno’s bed of its duvet in order to cover her nakedness, Caroline read “Knights Lacrosse” on the equipment bag that lay at her feet, from which the taped handle of a stick extended. Shamelessly, Caroline dropped the duvet, extricated the stick, and started swinging at the boys, who, despite repeated slashes against their shielding forearms, laughed hysterically and gladly suffered blows in exchange for the view of the hot naked chick.

  Only the arrival of Brother Lombardy in full collar and Coach Abbott, in boxer shorts and more body hair than an evolved man should be expected to bear, brought the burlesque to a close. One by one, Coach Abbott grabbed each boy by the nape of the neck and peeled him from the room. Brother Lombardy advanced until he spotted Gordon, naked and propped up on his elbows, bemusedly watching the bad vaudevillian skit that he’d initiated.

  Caroline dropped the stick (there have been only three substantiated lacrosse-related deaths in the United States in nearly twenty years) and wrapped the duvet around her.

  “Young lady, do you need help?” Brother Lombardy asked in a despair-filled voice, his eyes averted.

  “No. I just want to go home.”

  “That’s fine. Gordon, we’ll need to talk as soon as you’re dressed,” Brother Lombardy said, before turning and exiting, leaving behind all his dreams of adding Gordon to the brotherhood, dreams mingled and lost in the intoxicating smell of sex that still permeated the room.

  “Gordon? You told me your name was Will!” Caroline said.

  Gordon lay unmoved and silent.

  “You’re no mayor either, are you?”

  No response.

  “Are you even in college?”

  The evidence was beginning to pile up: the bag, the boys, the chaperones.

  “What are you? In high school?” Her voice rose several octaves. “Don’t tell me you’re in high school! How old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” Gordon finally spoke.

  “Fifteen! I just fucked a fifteen-year-old!”

  “Well,” Gordon corrected himself, “actually, I won’t be fifteen until January.” He grinned.

  “That’s statutory rape! I could go to jail!”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll cover for you,” Gordon promised without sarcasm.

  “I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this.” She must have said it a hundred times as she gathered her scattered clothes with one arm while the other insufficiently covered her swaying breasts.

  Bedraggled, one shoe on and one shoe in her opposite hand, she slunk toward the door.

  “Caroline,” Gordon called.

  “What?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, flipped him off, and then exited, slamming the door behind her.

  The boys were all suspended for the semifinal match. Without them, the Knights got smoked by a team of waspish blue bloods from suburban Cincinnati. By Monday night, Caroline’s naked tantrum was posted on several juvenile and sleazy, yet tremendously popular, file-sharing sites under the title “Crazy Naked Lacrosse Chick.” It had already received more than a thousand hits.

  Among the student body at the Rood, Gordon was instantly deified.

  Within six months, Gordon was expelled from the Rood. When rumors began to fly around campus regarding Gordon’s relationship with Willie, Wildman seized his opportunity to exact revenge for his room eviction. He alerted one of the Brothers to Willie’s website, where it was discovered that all of Willie’s most recent homoerotic drawings of heroes bore a striking resemblance to Gordon. They were both called into the office of the dean of students, Brother Randolph, where Gordon freely admitted to posing for and being flattered by Willie’s representations. Willie was forced to move to a single room on another floor, and further punishment and scandal were avoided.

  Three months later, however, when Gordon was discovered in the athletic director’s office, midcoitus with the athletics secretary, Mrs. Guiccioli, there was no saving him. The incident was covered up to save Mrs. Guiccioli her job, her husband and children, and the Rood’s reputation. Gordon was allowed to finish the term but was told that he would
not be welcomed back in the fall.

  On his last day at the Rood, as he marched toward the limousine that Catherine had sent to chariot him home to the Strand, Willie, Mrs. Guiccioli, and Brother Lombardy wept. But the vast majority of the jealous crabs in the bucket were glad to see him go. Gordon was too much of a reminder of their own boring choices and limited potentials.

  When the janitors cleaned Harrow Hall that summer, they found, “The meek shall inherit the sloppy seconds of the BOLD!” spray-painted in red on the walls of Gordon’s room.

  After the initial anger and shame wore off, Caroline found that she couldn’t get Gordon out of her mind. The following summer, she quit her job and dropped out of Ohio State. With the image of Gordon’s equipment bag seared into her memory, Caroline Googled all things related to Ohio high school lacrosse until she found and visited the Brothers of the Holy Rood’s Cleveland campus. A surprisingly empathetic Brother Lombardy informed her of Gordon’s real identity and of his return to Ogontz. She followed him, enrolled in community college, waited tables at a Denny’s (I guess she felt closest to Gordon there), and stalked him like it was her job.

  One evening that summer, after spotting Caroline’s Tracker parked outside the gates of Acedia for a third consecutive night, Shelly approached Caroline and introduced herself. They sat for hours drinking Red Bulls and eating pork rinds while they traded stories of their mutual object of addiction, including the story I just shared. In commiseration, they enjoyed one another’s company well enough, but, ultimately, each was a poor substitute for Gordon.

  I know this all sounds crazy. Don’t believe it if you don’t want to. I didn’t believe it myself until I had my first Caroline sighting on the day of Shelly’s wake. But be careful not to judge. There was just something about Gordon. He was the drug you hated yourself for using, but you smoked, snorted, or injected it anyway, because you loved his magic circle even more. Ultimately, he was the drug that killed Shelly, but he was also the drug that had allowed her to live—at least for a while.

  5

  We drove eastward through the half-light of the early summer evening and through the failing heart of Ogontz. At every turn, I half-expected a roadblock.

  “You have the disc?” Gordon asked.

  I performed one of those lame self-pat-downs people do when they’ve been caught empty-handed and know it but want to delay the admission of their screwup.

  “Shelly said she gave it to you,” Gordon insisted.

  “I know she gave it to me,” I said. I could feel a panic attack mustering in my chest. “I must have left it at home.”

  “Where do you live?”

  There it was. The real source of my mounting terror. Gordon Byron of literary, athletic, and erotic greatness was about to journey inside my miserable excuse for a life. This wasn’t part of the plan.

  * * *

  Ogontz, Ohio, is a worn-out notch on the rust belt that stretches beneath the bloated-from-economic-famine belly of the Great Lakes, from Detroit in the northwest to Buffalo in the northeast. It’s a onetime blue-collar city—too large to be quaint and too small to be worthy of note—full of American dream–believing suckers, the middle-class beneficiaries of the post–World War II manufacturing boom, especially in the auto industry. The past few decades, however, have seen that golden teat dry to a trickle. In desperation, Ogontz has chosen to prostitute its lakefront and transform itself into a resort town that caters to tourists, fishermen, boaters, and especially condo dwellers—who are willing to mortgage their futures for a killer view and are willing to drop an occasional dollar on the community nightstand.

  Before he died, my dad would sometimes recall the “old days” growing up in our east end neighborhood. “It was a fine part of town then, John. Working people [think white people]. Everybody knew everybody else and looked out for each other. Not like it is today. Hell, half these people don’t even own these homes around here anymore; they’re renters [think African Americans]. Renters don’t give a damn about their property or neighbors. It ain’t theirs and they don’t plan to stay. They invest nothing but want everything, like the world owes them a living.”

  It’s a good thing our home was bought and paid for, or I don’t know where Tom and I would live. It’s the one good turn the folks did us before dying.

  * * *

  “Fifth Street and Elm,” I answered Gordon, seeing no escape.

  Ogontz is laid out in an almost perfect grid. East to west streets are numbered, and north to south streets are named. West side streets are named for the array of Native American tribes who once occupied the area, downtown streets in the central city are named for presidents, and east side streets are named for indigenous trees. Gordon’s deceleration as we entered my neighborhood suggested what I assumed to be his unfamiliarity with my side of town. Or perhaps, I thought, it was a genuine sociological curiosity with how the other 95 percent lived. Or maybe it was concern for the attention his BMW was attracting as we passed porches and front yards crowded with “renters” driven from their non–air-conditioned homes into the still tropical night air.

  “The next corner,” I said. “The last driveway. You wait in the car. I’ll run in and get it. It’ll only take a minute.” It felt odd to be giving Gordon orders, but there was no way I was letting him inside that house of death.

  I handed Shelly to Gordon, then ducked hurriedly from under the automatically retracting shoulder belt. Climbing the cracked concrete steps two at a time, I bounded onto the porch in two strides. As I removed from my pants pocket the three keys necessary to unbolt all of the locks, I saw Gordon climbing out of the BMW.

  “Fuck,” I muttered. “Just perfect.”

  The disc that we were so desperate to retrieve was an R.E.M. mix that Shelly had burned; she called it the sound track of her life and had assigned a song from the R.E.M. catalog to every important person and significant event she’d experienced. She had entrusted it to me at the end—which I know pissed off Gordon—and we couldn’t go forward without it because it was central to fulfilling her final wish, which she had imparted to Gordon and placed him in charge of planning—which, trust me, pissed me off.

  My bedroom was upstairs, overlooking the street, and now overlooking Gordon, below. Tom’s was to the left of mine, but soon he would be too weak to climb the stairs, and, like Dad before him, he’d require a rented wheelchair and hospital bed placed in the first-floor living room. His world would rapidly shrink: first to the wheelchair, that room, the kitchen, and the bathroom; next, to those four walls of peeling wallpaper, worn carpet, and the stench of bedpans and atrophying flesh; finally, just to the decreasingly burdened mattress. For now, at least, when I peeked in, he was fast asleep, still in his own bed and recognizable skin.

  The disc, inside the clear plastic lid of its dust-covered case, lay on top of my dresser. I had set it there a little more than a week ago, a few days before her body washed up on the shore of North Bass Island. Seeing the letters “R.E.M.” scrawled in Shelly’s handwriting in black Sharpie across the silver face of the disc stopped me cold. More than the wake, more than actually holding the urn in my own hands, I felt the reality of her absence, and, for the first time, I felt its permanence.

  I was summoned from my private pity party by the sound of a multitude of voices filtering up through the screens in the bedroom windows. The cacophony itself wasn’t unusual. In my neighborhood, cars constantly cruised with stereos cranked, and legitimate east-siders regularly gathered in groups and always moved in numbers, and at all hours. So it wasn’t the noise itself that had caught my attention. It was the incongruous sound of Gordon’s refined pronunciations intermingled with the street talk.

  Unsure of how long I had left him abandoned, I tore from my room and down the interior steps at a breakneck speed. If it was trouble brewing, I had no idea what my scrawny ass could do to end it, but I actually felt that Gordon was in need of my protection.

  As I burst onto the porch, Gordon’s expansive back was to
me. He was surrounded by a half-dozen shirtless and ripped black dudes. T-shirts were slung over shoulders, wrapped around heads as makeshift do-rags, or half-stuffed into the waistbands of their shorts that sagged halfway down their butts. The largest one, whom the others called T and who had a body that looked like a photographic negative of Gordon’s, was clearly wearing nothing under his shorts. The rounded top of the two loaves of his muscled ass, where it met the small of his back, showed itself proudly.

  There were also two girls, one on either side of Gordon, who stood slightly bent at the waist with his cupped hands to his mouth. Each of the girls leaned heavily on an arm, as if they were holding him up, preventing his escape, or engaging in a tug-of-war for his attention.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Get away from him!”

  All eyes, with the exception of Gordon’s, turned immediately and menacingly in my direction. I’d never felt so exposed, or white, in my life.

  “Leave him alone,” I said with diminishing conviction.

  They exchanged looks with one another, then stared at me and back to the circle before they broke out in laughter.

  “Relax, White.” That’s what T called me. “White.” Not whitey, not white boy, just “White.”

  Finally, Gordon turned around with a face that looked like an imitation of a constipated Sean Penn sucking the juice out of the most tart lemon in the history of citrus. I wasn’t sure if he was in pain or angry until he let go a cough, and a tiny cloud of smoke passed his previously pursed lips.

  Pot. He was smoking pot with these guys! I didn’t know—still don’t—if Gordon somehow had known them previously or if he had just met them that day, but they were calling him G. There he was, already more a part of the neighborhood than I was, and I had lived there my entire life. That’s just Gordon. Most people fell in love with him right away. There’d be a glorious honeymoon period, and then, given any length of opportunity, he would wear his welcome out.

  “S’up, Keats?” Gordon turned to me before turning back to his circle.