Del leaned forward, shifting out from under Andrew’s arm, ostensibly to ask Katie something. When he moved his arm, she sat back. He waited until she relaxed again and then put his hand back where it had been, this time sliding his whole body in closer to her and smiling at her. I was stiffening with rage, envisioned smashing Andrew in the back of the head with the iron rod. I kept telling myself Del would not want me to make a scene. If I did hit him in the head, she’d probably be pissed off at me for calling attention to us. These thoughts were only barely working. If I killed him, however, I would have to go somewhere and that would mean being separated from Del. He touched her hair. I postured to slam him, one thinning thought remaining between the iron rod now firmly in my grasp and the back of Andrew Torie’s oval head: forced separation.
Gail who, like Susan and Edie, had been tracking me, blurted out, “I’m getting carsick.”
“Gail says she’s carsick,” Edie repeated, only louder, her eyes dashing back and forth from my hand to Andrew’s head. She looked at Andrew, her tone urgent, “Gail says she’s carsick, I’d pull over if I were you.”
Susan chimed in. “Unless you want to bring your dad’s car back with throw up all over it.”
Katie, who was busy finding radio stations, tapped Donald on the shoulder. “Gail feels sick. Pull over.” Donald kept going. Katie turned around and looked at Andrew.
“Whatever. Pull over.” Andrew sounded irritated.
When we stopped, Gail got out, and in the same motion, Del scooted away from Andrew toward the other door. I relaxed and leaned back against Edie, who put her arms around me. Gail walked around for a minute. Then she came back to the car and said to Del, “Will you switch seats with me? I need to be in the middle.” Del agreed.
Obviously bummed, Andrew said, “I thought carsick people need the window seat.”
Gail, who seemed proud of her intervention, climbed in beside him. “Nope, not for me. I have to be able to look straight out. If I’m stuck looking at the back of someone’s head, that doesn’t go too well.”
As we drove off, Andrew said to Gail, “Why don’t you lose weight? If you weren’t so fat, then you probably wouldn’t get carsick.”
When it was about Gail, I could fight, but all I could think to say was, “Why don’t you eat poison and die? You spoiled-rotten piece of shit.”
Andrew was startled but tried not to show it—like trying not to blink when someone nearly flicks you in the face. “Huh.” He was stalling, trying to think of a comeback.
Katie, having somehow figured out the ruckus had something to do with Del and me—or just wanting to get rid of Del, because she had a crush on Andrew—turned around and said to Andrew, “If we get off here, we can drop Del and Jenna off first.”
Andrew grinned. “I’m gonna take Del home last.”
Del was quietly staring out the car window. She was upset, and by the feeling cast by her last glance in my direction, I knew it was with me. Maybe because I had let my jealousy show; maybe because she had wanted something to happen with Andrew and felt thwarted; maybe because I was not a real boy, and I could not restore her to honor in the way a real boy could, or protect her in the way a real boy could. A real boy, I thought, could have claimed her, given her an alibi that made her rejection of Andrew make sense, fucked her on the field trying to be noticed. Del’s response to Andrew’s invitation to be the last one dropped off came slowly, her words written from her mouth one letter at a time. It felt to me like hours before her thought had been completed. Without moving her face from the window she said, “Jenna is sleeping over. And I’ve really gotta get home.” I told myself it was the pot, that it really hadn’t taken her so long to set the record straight.
Pascale was out cold on the couch. The younger kids were asleep. We crept in, the permutations of light from the television hurling our stretched, oddly angular shadows onto the wall and ceiling of the square room. We went down the hall toward Del’s bedroom. Del turned off at the bathroom without giving me any indication of what her plans were or whether I should follow her. I sensed her rage at me and sheepishly went to her room to wait for her. I took off my clothes, found the T-shirt I planned to sleep in, and pulled it on over my head. Then I looked around in my bag for my toothbrush.
A few moments later, Del appeared, face moist and scarlet from washing, her hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, a toothbrush hanging from her mouth, toothpaste bubbling from her lips and down her chin. What she had to say to me couldn’t wait a moment longer.
Hoping to prevent a fight, I said, upon her entering, “I’m sorry I acted jealous.”
Her eyes burning, tears forming, “Fuck you, Jenna,” Del yelled-whispered. “I can’t believe you stuck up for Gail and not for me.” All at once, she fought to speak, to hold back tears, to brush her teeth, and to keep toothpaste in her mouth. “He was putting his hands all over me. Why didn’t you say something about that?”
How, I thought, taken aback by the idea of what she had actually been hoping for from me. Expecting. I felt confused by her suggestion; where I thought my inadequacy was a given, she felt it was a matter of choice. I was distracted and disarmed by this glimpse of myself through her eyes. Not used to being undone in a fight, I groped for a more familiar mode and landed on accusation. “You were flirting with him. Gail was threatening to throw up on him. She was easier to stick up for.”
Del’s face cracked indiscernibly; she walked out to lose the toothbrush. Reentering moments later, “Okay,” Del said, “that’s really funny. Don’t make me laugh, Jenna. I’m really mad at you.” Her eyes filled again. “I wasn’t flirting with him. We had just been together. Did that mean anything to you?”
Mean anything to me? “Why’d we have to go with him?”
“I was thinking about getting us home. That was it.”
I looked at her. “Del, you do flirt a lot.” Gently, “Sometimes, I think you do it without even knowing it.”
She pushed me back onto the bed and then fell in beside me. We were on our sides facing each other.
“It’s hard to say no to Andrew. I don’t know”—she hesitated, then she admitted—“I think it’s because he’s rich.”
I was surprised. “So?”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
I stared at the wall behind her, pained and enraged that she felt small compared to Andrew Torie. Nothing could have been further from true, but I believed she didn’t know that. I laced my fingers with hers.
“Del, we’re going to college.” I thought about how powerful she had seemed to me at the concert that night, how beautiful and self-possessed. And here now, with her sweet face and sad eyes and tender touches, she made my heart hurt. “We have two more years, five semesters, and then we’ll be out of here. We can go someplace far away, and we’ll only come home if we want to.”
Del deserved for it to go that way. She covered bruises to go to classes and took care of her sisters and brother and she never got a B. Honors Algebra, AP English. And it wasn’t just that Del was doing so much with so little. It was that she was doing so much, with the little she did have constantly being stripped away.
“And who’s going to pay for it?”
“I don’t know. Scholarships. We’ll take out loans. We’ll work. We’ll do whatever we have to do.”
Del smiled a little, but her tone was sad. “Are we going to college together, now?”
“I hope so.” She looked away. “What is it, Del? Why are you against that idea?”
“I’m not against it. I just don’t think it’s gonna happen.” She paused to collect her thoughts. “I think you’re gonna get into a really good college, Jen. And I don’t want to hold you back.”
I didn’t respond. When we talked about the future, we fought. Any school that accepted me would also have accepted Del. And even if I had gotten in someplace she didn’t, she knew I cared more about her than going to some stupid Ivy League. She knew I’d be perfectly happy at a state school if it meant we co
uld go together. She knew I wanted to be with her—out in the open and forever. But for Del, no matter how close we felt or how in love we were, there was always this sense that what we had together was different than, outside of, what our real lives were and would be.
She took my face in her hands and said, before we fell asleep, that I was the air she breathed; she loved me more than anything; she couldn’t stand the thought of her life without me in it. She said being with me was all she wanted, all she cared about, but she denied us any fidelity or future. I let it go at that because I was scared. I had already begun in some small way to realize it wasn’t her desire for me she was calling into question—it was her desire to live at all.
“Andrew scares me,” Del said, changing the subject away from the future she wouldn’t commit to. “He comes on so strong. I don’t know what to do when he’s like that. I just go along with it, until I can figure out something else.” My hardened expression told her I wasn’t buying it. “I like the attention, Jenna, I admit that.” This statement seemed at the time like the greater truth. I’ve since come to realize that what rage is to me, sexual feelings were to Del: a circuit breaker for terror.
*
“I am glad I came,” I said resolutely.
Katie nodded acceptingly, her breathing becoming more audible. Some distance later, Katie began to pick up speed. I increased my speed as well. She was running harder and breathing harder than I was; sweat soaked her shirt and streamed down her face.
“Damn cigarettes,” she said, without a hint of slowing down. Her strong arms pumped, her long legs carried her along in powerful, graceful strides. We kept it up for about forty minutes, running in a five-mile loop.
Toward the end, approaching the block Gail lived on, Katie stopped running.
“Shit, you’re in good shape.” She fell out onto the grass and began to stretch. I joined her, falling on the side of the road into a small patch of prickly crabgrass and shoots of volunteer milkweed. Exhaust fumes from passing cars left an oily residue in the air. “You’ve changed a lot,” Katie said. “You’re happier. What’s she like?” She paused, then, “Madison?”
I noticed the tiny orangish-yellow flowers, reached out and touched one. “She’s smart and beautiful. I feel lucky.” I noticed Katie’s age then, the lines near her eyes when she squinted, the early specks of gray floating in her blond hair. She was looking at me, too. “What about you, are you with anyone?” I began to sift through the patch of clover beside me, looking for one with four leaves.
“He’s married,” she said. “I know it’s really masochistic, but I can’t help it. I keep going back.”
“Probably you go back a little less every time.” I could tell the comment surprised her; she was trying to decide if it was true. “Patterns are deceptive.”
Clouds moved in to block the sun, and a pigeon hopped along the sidewalk in front of us. I didn’t notice it had only one leg until it had passed. After a long silence I asked, “Do you remember the day we beat Key Biscayne for the state championship?”
Emphatically, as if she’d been anticipating it, Katie said, “I don’t want to reminisce about the soccer team.” The force of her rejection startled me. I felt quickly and deeply ashamed of my own need to talk about something that had happened over fifteen years before. Katie looked away. “It makes me feel pathetic, like there’s been nothing to speak of since. You’ve done things with your life, Jen. You have a lover and a good job. Me”—she dropped her chin—“I peaked in the tenth grade.”
I understood then that we both felt ashamed of the extent to which those things we had gone through so many years ago continued to plague and please us. “Just let me say this, okay?” I was staring at the patch of clover, running my hand through it. “It’s been on my mind for a long time.” She permitted it with her silence. “That day, that game, it was the three of us together who scored the winning point. Gail floated the ball half a field, I trapped it, dribbled, pushed it through, and you were there, right where I knew you would be. You faked and shot—what, fifteen yards, maybe?—to the high corner and scored. It was truly magnificent.”
“I do remember that.”
A scout from Florida State University who was present at the game had expressed an interest in recruiting her, made reference to the likelihood of a full scholarship—something that was just starting to be possible for girls in soccer. Katie had been only a sophomore.
“I remember feeling, that day, like the three of us together could do anything.” I kicked the ground, toed the dirt, looked away. “Right after that, my parents found out about my relationship with Del. Gail’s mother sent her to live with her father in New York, and you”—she knew where I was going, began crying before I got there—“Jason Schwartz raped you.” Heat from rage permeated my arms and the back of my legs, and rose from my neck to my face. I bit down to contain it, and in my well-practiced way, quieted my voice to appear calm. “Life just crushed us, Katie.”
“Not you.” She wiped at her tears defiantly. “How did you know about that?”
“I could tell. I knew something bad happened to you beyond what you were saying. I put that together with the timing of the abortion and—”
“How? What was it about me that made you think that?”
“You were vacant.” I left out the part about how she couldn’t walk right for a week.
Quietly, and with just a hint of suspicion, she asked, “You knew when it happened?”
“Pretty much. I think I figured it out when I went with you to the clinic. We were on the bus going home and you were holding my hand really tight, and you just seemed so sad.”
Her face was drenched. “I never told anyone. I mean, I didn’t even…You know, for the longest time, I just thought we were fooling around and I told him I didn’t want it to go any further but he did, so he took it further. I didn’t think about it as rape until I was in my twenties. It was rape.” She nodded. “I tried to get away but he held me down.”
She didn’t say it, but after it happened, soccer never held the same interest for her. Nothing did. She just became more and more promiscuous, as though she could disappear the non-choice under a mountain of bad choices.
Back to thinking about Del, I said, “That story about the Thomas kid is pretty bad. All of it—the videotapes, framing Sid, being an accomplice in a murder. Del got in way over her head with this guy.”
“The part about Sid bothers me more than anything else,” Katie said. “It wasn’t like Del. She was so protective of her family.”
“I think,” recalling what Sid had said, “it may be that both Del and Sid were protecting Khila.”
Now Katie laughed a little. “Del used to bug me, you know?” She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “I hated what happened to you. I don’t think I ever told you this, but I thought she was cruel to you. And, to be honest,” Katie said, “there was the sex thing. I was always hearing how good she was at it from the guys who dated me next. And Del and me competed for Andrew Torie and she won.”
“Andrew Torie?” I cut her off, bitterness silting my voice. “Did you thank her?” Katie seemed thrown by my instant rage. “Such a creep,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief of his outrageousness. “Where is he now?” I didn’t give her a chance to answer. “Probably a gynecologist at some preppy Ivy League college campus health center, where he has a captive caseload.”
With a look of disgust, Katie laughed. “Why do you hate him so much? Oh”—her head tilted in my direction—“isn’t he the one who told everyone Del fucked him in the back of his daddy’s Mercedes station wagon?”
I shrugged as if I didn’t know, but I did—and he was, and she had.
“Some first time that must have been. Almost as bad as mine.”
It was a kick in the stomach.
“Katie.” My chin fell to my chest. My voice was slow and stern, and I was desperately trying to hold on to the idea that it’s not malicious, this relentless disavo
wal of same-sex love. “When Del fucked Andrew in the back of his father’s station wagon, it was not her first time.” I took a breath, saw her eyes search and her face fall. I knew she was struggling now with the realization of how she had injured me. “I know he told everyone it was, and I know she didn’t correct him. But it wasn’t.”
“Oh my God,” Katie said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I looked at my watch. It was already ten a.m. “I want to go and get that box from Del’s house.”
Katie nodded. “I figured you would.”
“Look, you don’t have to go with me. I’ll understand if it’s too weird, or too dangerous, or too whatever. Gail kept me up half the night lecturing me on how I should let the police handle it from here.” I imitated Gail. “‘I called you because you’re a judge and I figured Child Protective Services would listen to you. I didn’t think you’d turn this into your own private murder investigation.’”
Katie laughed at my mimicry. “She knew exactly what you would do.”
Just then, I noticed a black Jeep with tinted windows, and my heart jumped. It slowed down a little, then sped up and turned a corner quickly in the direction of Gail’s house. I was able to make out two letters—S and E—on the license plate before it was fully out of sight.
Katie tossed the clover she was twirling between her fingers and moved to stand. “So you think he killed her?”
I nodded, watching for the Jeep to return. “I just don’t know how.” I wondered if I was starting to lose my mind, reminded myself there must be a million of those cars.
“Take Nicole,” Katie said. “She’s good at break-ins.”
Chapter Fourteen
Back at Gail’s, I left a message for Nicole on Pascale’s answering machine. Then I returned Bea’s call.
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