The Witch

by Jean Thompson

  “You were dancing by yourself with headphones on. I mean mostly by yourself. Every so often you sort of intersected with other people who were dancing, but it didn’t seem like there was anything personal going on.”

  “So things must have got personal later. Did you tell her you’re rich?”

  “I’m not rich rich,” Royboy said. “It’s more like an income stream.” Although the amount of money was large and whoopee-inducing. He should probably invest it or something. But investing was an anxious notion. It meant your money went somewhere else and had adventures on its own. And maybe that turned out fine but not always. The money was meant to last him the rest of his life, in case he was unable to achieve his full financial potential. That had been the language of the lawsuit. But that meant he ought to divide the number of years he expected to be alive into the total sum, and that too was an anxious thing.

  Anyway, if he’d told the mystery girl about his money, she hadn’t stayed around to try to get her hands on it. She was no gold digger. He liked her even better.

  “So we’ll ask around,” Mikey said. “Do a little research. We can have another party and invite the same girls and see which one of them rings your bell. Okay?”

  “I guess so.” But what if the girl had run off half-barefoot because she was disgusted with him, and with herself for having anything to do with him? Well, if that was the case, he’d still want to talk with her and find out why. “Sure, let’s have another party.”

  “We can fix the place up a little,” Dave D. said. “Have a bunch of fancy drinks ready, fruit drinks, and cupcakes, and olives on toothpicks, shit like that. Call it a Ladies’ Night.” Dave D. had gone to school in marketing and thought in promotional terms.

  “We’ll take you shopping, Royboy. We’ll dress you up fine.”

  “I don’t think I want to get dressed up.”

  “No bow ties this time. Promise.”

  “I’m going back to bed for a while,” Royboy said. His friends meant well, but they were making him nervous with all the things they had set in motion on his behalf.

  He took the shoe back to his room and made a space for it among the piles of clothes that had never quite made it either into the dresser drawers or the laundry basket. He got into bed and rolled around in the sheets, sniffing at the pillows. No perceptible trace of girl. But he still felt a little of the shining, benevolent energy that had filled his head earlier.

  It had either been a long time since he’d had a girlfriend, or else he had never had a girlfriend. It all depended on how you defined “girlfriend.” Girls sometimes gravitated his way, but they tended to take themselves off pretty fast. (Although never before had one escaped before he could even form a memory of her. That was a first.) He wasn’t very good at conversation. They got tired of waiting for him to say something interesting. Lance the Pants tried to give him pointers. “Just ask them a question they can run with, like, does she have any pets, or any brothers or sisters.”

  “Got it.” Royboy nodded. “Piece a cake.” The next time he and his buds were out for an evening, he spotted a likely girl at the end of the bar and ambled over to her. He said Hi. She said Hi. They smiled. Royboy asked her if she was having a good time tonight and she said pretty good so far. She seemed receptive. Her name was Sherry. She kept on smiling.

  “So,” Royboy said, summoning up his nerve, “do your brothers and sisters have any pets?”

  Would anything ever change? Was he doomed to klutzy lonesomeness? He still had hopes that somewhere out in the wide world was an attractive female person who would see past his awkward surface and lack of vocabulary, down to the essential Royboy: a not-bad guy who wasn’t inclined to cause problems, and who now had a little bit of money to spread around. She was out there somewhere, maybe even hobbling around on one shoe.

  His roommates were as good as their word. They let it be known that there would be an actual, planned party, with food and drink and merriment. Royboy accompanied them to the liquor store and paid for the rum and mixers, the wine and beer, the bags of ice. At the grocery they bought a quantity of delicatessen items and bakery items, also supplies of hand soap and toilet paper. There was a debate about flowers versus no flowers and no flowers won, because they had never had such a thing as flowers in the house before and so didn’t have vases. Vases were a bridge too far.

  Mikey was put in charge of Royboy’s hygiene and wardrobe. “Dress for success, dress to impress, dress not to be a mess,” he intoned. “Let me see your fingernails. Not good. Do you have a nail clipper? Never mind, I’ll get you one.”

  “Why can’t I wear my normal clothes?” Royboy asked. He was wrapped in a bath towel and he felt unnaturally clean, like if somebody ran a finger down his arm, it would squeak.

  “Because your normal clothes make you look like a farmer.” Mikey rummaged through Royboy’s top dresser drawer. “I need to introduce you to the concept of date underwear.”

  “I don’t think I want to go to the party, Mikey.”

  Mikey sat down on the opposite side of the bed from Royboy. “You’re nervous, right? That’s okay. That’s just adrenaline. Adrenaline is like a power surge. It helps you stand your ground in a fight or jump out of an airplane.”

  “I don’t want to do either of those.”

  “Or ask a girl to dance. You want to be able to do that, right? The girl of your dreams?”

  “If she’s the girl of my dreams, she asks me.”

  “I’m gonna fix you a drink, kind of a pre-party thing. Chill you out. Then we’ll go through everybody’s closet and come up with your new, GQ look.” Mikey reached over the stacks of laundry to the high-heeled shoe and gave it to Royboy. “She’s waiting for you, buddy. But you have to step up to the plate.”

  The party blossomed. Girls, whole flocks of them, arrived and were provided with high-caliber alcohol in the form of rum and coconut, rum and pineapple, rum and orange juice, rum and rum. Dave D. was the bartender and he kept the drinks coming. Lance the Pants did his DJ routine. Mikey was the official host and greeter, steering the guests toward the bar and other hospitality venues. Royboy was installed on a sofa in the corner of the front room, and as each girl arrived, he sent a verdict to Mikey by way of head shakes or shrugs: Nope. Nope. Maybe, no wait, I don’t think so.

  He was dressed up in his borrowed party clothes, a V-neck sweater with a T-shirt underneath, and jeans so tight that he kept shifting around, as discreetly as he could, to rearrange himself. The party picked up steam. It ebbed and crested around him. Some of their guy friends had come too, and Royboy watched them maneuver—effortlessly, it seemed—among the fluttering girls. He didn’t think the girl with the shoe was here, though he couldn’t have said why. He just didn’t feel it.

  Finally a girl came up to him, sent by Mikey, he suspected, and leaned over him to be heard above the music. Her breasts were so well framed and presented, they reminded him of the items on display in the bakery case. “Want to dance?”

  “Sure.” He let her pull him off the couch and take him by the hand to where the dancing was going on. On those occasions when he danced with somebody rather than by himself, his strategy was to imitate whatever his partner was doing. This girl was moving up and down with a grinding shimmy, which just didn’t work for him. He settled for doing what his roommates called his “monster dance,” bending forward with his arms extended while he trod out the beat. The girl kept sending her encouraging smiles his way. Her cleavage smiled at him too. It was confusing. The sweater made his arms itch. In an effort to focus, he watched the girl’s feet, though he didn’t recognize anything familiar about them.

  Then his brain must have taken one of its little vacations, because now he was dancing with a different girl, and he’d taken the itchy sweater off. Or maybe somebody else had. The party was banging. Everybody had loosened up. They were singing along with the music, or in some cases they were singing ot
her things. This new girl was wearing more coverage on top than the last one, and on a point scale she wasn’t as pretty, but she was dancing up close to him in a way that Royboy thought was friendly. She swayed against him. “How about we get some fresh air?”

  “Sure,” Royboy said. Always obliging. He followed the girl through the kitchen and out to the back porch. His roommates gave him encouraging nods. You the man, Royboy! At the far end of the room he thought he saw a different girl wearing the sweater he’d had on earlier. He had to wonder about that, but there was no time, because now here he was in this whole new situation.

  The back porch was where they piled up beer cans for recycling. There was also a dried-out sponge mop, the sponge worn down to a husk, and the parts for a hot tub that Dave D. had acquired in a burst of entrepreneurial activity but had never managed to assemble. It was not a romantic place, but the girl declared herself enraptured by the stubby moon, which was rising, or perhaps setting, above the roof of the detached garage. She perched herself on the porch railing and let her bare legs swing. She was wearing one of those shorty skirts, which Royboy appreciated, though her shoes were on the disappointing, casual side. She said, “Tell me more about your accident.”

  Oh shit. Had he been going on about that? Sweat percolated up from a deep, anxious well. The girl took notice. “Hey, never mind, I can understand if it’s a bad memory.”

  “No, see, I don’t remember it. People had to tell me about it.”

  The girl nodded. She was one of those encouraging nodders. “Uh-huh.” He was meant to keep talking.

  “I was riding my bike and a car hit me.” He didn’t want to get into the rest of it because it was stupid and it made him sound stupid, like he couldn’t get himself run over in some normal fashion. “How much did I tell you already?”

  “You said the guy who hit you lost control of the car for some embarrassing reason but you wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

  “Yeah, it’s a little . . .”

  “Yeah?” she echoed. More of the nodding. It was like her neck was coming loose.

  “He was putting on deodorant.”

  Once she got it, the girl started laughing. Everybody did. “Sorry,” she managed. She was trying to stop laughing by inhaling, but it only made her snort. “I mean, you couldn’t exactly drive, I mean, how awful.”

  “Uh-huh.” He didn’t feel like telling her the rest of it, which was hospital hospital hospital, and having to wear a helmet to cover the soft places in his head, and how he’d been put back together like a meat robot. He’d had to learn fourth grade all over again. That wasn’t so bad, because he liked fourth grade, where they’d played dodgeball and made a battery out of lemon juice, pennies, and zinc washers.

  The girl got it together and stopped making nose noises. “Sorry. Sorry. Wow. But I guess you’re okay now, right?”

  “Pretty much.” He disliked this part, because if he told people he was not entirely okay, it was like he was disappointing them. “I take medicine for these, ah, seizure events I have. Most of the time I don’t even know they’re happening. But it’s a lot better than it used to be.” He shrugged.

  The girl looked at him, recalibrating. Royboy knew that look. It would be followed by either disengagement or a fresh wave of goopy sympathy. Instead, she hopped down from the porch rail, steadied herself by gripping his T-shirt in both hands, and started kissing him. Which was all right. He kissed back. He was trying to remember if he already knew her name, and if he didn’t, if it would be necessary to know it.

  The girl said, “Maybe we could, ah . . .”

  “Oh yeah, sure,” Royboy said, detaching himself, dragging his attention away from all the interesting, bodily things going on. They grinned at each other in the low-wattage moonlight, then made their way through the back door. The party opened around them like a mouth. Who were all these people? He hoped that nobody had made themselves at home in his bedroom for the purpose of having sex, as sometimes happened at parties. Behind him, the girl lifted his T-shirt and licked his spine, which he guessed meant she liked him.

  Getting through the crowd was like surfing. You had to pick a wave and ride it as far as you could, then wait for the next one. Royboy kept looking behind him at the girl. He smiled. She smiled. There didn’t seem to be a lot to say, even if the noise had allowed for conversation. Facing front, he said, “Excuse me. Excuse me.” Diving between arms, butting against butts. Somebody had turned the lights down and there were some special effects going on, whirling blues and pinks and silvers. His vision broke up into shards of colors.

  Then he got smacked in the face. Smack! Royboy stopped moving and let the pain spread through him. “Hey,” he said. And, “Ow!”

  For a moment he thought it was one of the flailing dancers, then a girl with piled-up black hair stood in front of him, her arm cocked as if to take another shot at him. “Hey,” he said again, wanting it to mean all kinds of things, like, What? and, Wait a minute!

  The girl in front of him lowered her arm but gave him one of those laser beams of hatred looks, and vanished into the crowd. The girl behind him bumped into him. “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Royboy said. He did and he didn’t know, and he didn’t know how he did, except that sometimes his brain hotwired itself and presented him with a certainty: It was the shoe girl.

  Meanwhile, here was this other girl. She was giving him a look that seemed to offer a choice between forward and reverse. “Ah,” he said. “Mistaken identity.”

  It was a bad moment. Why couldn’t he pick and choose when to go iffy? Why did he have to stand here all slack-jawed and paralyzed by idiocy? Shouldn’t he find a microphone or something, “ATTENTION! WILL THE GIRL WHO JUST SLAPPED ME PLEASE RETURN TO THE BAR!” She was nowhere to be seen. All the faces in the crowd looked pretty much the same in the hectic colored lights, like the unnatural landscapes seen in photographic negatives.

  “What’s the deal?” The girl—the remaining girl, that is—looked him up and down. “I don’t want to get in the middle of anything. Was that your girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know,” Royboy said. Stupid but honest. “I mean, I don’t remember.”

  “So let me get this straight, there’s times you forget things right when they’re happening?”

  “That would be one way to put it, yes.”

  The girl looked around her as if seeking a witness to such absurdity, then shook her head and walked away.

  Royboy watched her disappear into the crowd of silvery pink-blue dancers, then he made his way upstairs to his own room. It was empty, and the bedside table drawer that Mikey had stocked with condoms was undisturbed. It seemed that nobody, himself included, had been having naked fun here. He lay down on the bed with the high-heeled shoe and balanced it on his chest. It was weird, but the slap on the face had recharged his happiness battery. He could feel little pulses of joy crawling beneath his skin. Who was this girl? He wanted to find her and let her knock him around some more.

  The next day, after everyone was up, and those ladies who had been overnight guests were escorted home, Royboy told the others what had happened, or at least, the parts he remembered, like getting clocked by the shoe girl. “It’s like she has superpowers.”

  “Or she’s a magical being, like in Harry Potter.”

  “Pheromones. She’s your perfect biological match. Something about your disability thing that keys in exactly to her chemical signature.”

  “Free what? Now you’re making fun.”

  Dave D. said, “Sorry, man. But how hot was this girl, that you’re all desperate in love? You need to take a deep breath, slow-walk it. Keep your cool, keep a little something in the tank.”

  “But maybe it’s different for him,” Mikey said. “Maybe the Boy imprinted on her. Like when birds hatch and think the first thing they see is their mother.”

  “She’s not my moth
er! That’s . . . I really really wish you had not said that.”

  “A poor choice of example. But I’m trying to come up with a theory, see, about how your specialness sets you up for a love-at-first-sight situation. Because it’s not such a normal thing.”

  They considered this, the sun gilding the wreckage of the party and giving their hangovers a more kindly aspect. Lance the Pants said, “You know, love is kind of like brain damage. You’re not in your right mind when you’ve got a bad case of girl fever. Think about it.”

  They thought about it. Mikey said, “Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. You’re all prepped for true love, Royboy, you’re halfway there already. In a sense, you’re gifted.”

  “No kidding?” Royboy was doubtful. He didn’t think he’d been gifted even before he got run over.

  “Sure,” Dave D. said. “Like those, what do you call them, savants, who can calculate giant math problems. Like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Congratulations, RB. Love has made you its bitch.”

  “Guys! I don’t even know who this girl is, and even if I find her, she hates me!”

  Lance the Pants said, “Yeah, but it’s not like she doesn’t care. If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t bother smacking you upside the head.”

  Royboy felt hopeful. Lance knew about these things. But they couldn’t just keep having parties and hope the shoe girl would show up in a better mood.

  A plan was devised. Tomorrow, Royboy and Lance the Pants, smoothest of the smooth, would embark on a mission. They would buy flowers, a shitload of flowers. (“Roses,” Lance specified. “No substitutes. This is not a time for carnations.”) They would seek out the female partygoers and present them with bouquets, sort of an after-party favor. The girls would be charmed. There would be opportunities for discreet perusal. Lance would do the heavy lifting, keeping the conversation going. All Royboy had to do was wait for his inner love alarm to go off.