“I’m sorry,” I say, wanting to reach for her hand but not moving.
“I was sorry, too,” she says. “I was very angry. The guy I thought was my boyfriend dropped me like I was worth nothing. And his girlfriend made it her mission to make my life hell. Going to school was torture. Lydia saw what I was going through, and she wasn’t happy in Nevada anyway.”
“You must have had a hard time trusting people again,” I say, finding her shoulder and squeezing it with my fingertips.
“I thought I would,” she says, turning to face me. “But I trusted you right away.”
I don’t know what to say. I can’t think of anything I could say that would equal that.
“I just wanted you to know,” Faye says, propping herself up on her elbow. “I wanted to tell you where nobody else could overhear.” She smiles and bites her lip. “I didn’t just bring you to an empty parking lot to make out with you.”
My eyes widen. “I didn’t think that,” I stammer, even though it’s exactly what crossed my mind when we rolled in here.
“Why? Don’t you want to make out with me?” she says, placing her hand on my leg and rolling over on her stomach.
I stare at her hand and then at her chest, which is moving up and down rhythmically with each breath she takes. I think about the night of the dance, when we almost kissed in the bathroom. I think back to all the little touches, the way her hair smelled when she hugged me. I think about her naked body on display on-screen.
I think about what it would be like to kiss her. It would be easy, to press my lips against hers and figure out if I was making those feelings up in my head. If I’m really attracted to Faye, or if I just like her because she’s not a guy. Nobody would ever know about it. None of the people at school who want to see me make a fool of myself. Not Charlie, who thinks he ruined my life. Not Angela. Not Zach.
But that’s when it hits me. I don’t want to kiss Faye. I want to be Faye. I want to be fearless like her, bold like her. I want to figure out a way to be unapologetically myself, just like she has. Kissing Faye wouldn’t make anything better. If anything, I know that it would make me feel guilty.
“You’re perfect,” I whisper. “But I can’t make out with you.”
I expect her to be disappointed, but instead her face breaks into a smile. “I thought so,” she says, sitting up and doing up her seat belt.
“Are you mad?” I say, wrapping my arms across my chest.
“Of course not, silly,” she says, starting the car. “I know exactly where you need to be right now, and I’m taking you there.”
My heart sinks when we end up on my street. For a horrifying second I think she’s taking me back to my house. Maybe she thinks I need to hash it out with Kim, find a way to forgive her and reconcile my fucked-up family life. And I don’t want to disappoint her, but there’s no Band-Aid big enough to put over that mess.
But we pass my house and keep driving. We keep driving until Faye pulls into Zach’s driveway and stops the car.
“Why are we here?” I say, aware that my heart is pounding erratically.
Faye leans over me and raises her eyebrow. “You’re a smart girl,” she says, reaching over and unbuckling my seat belt. “You’ll figure it out.”
She makes no motion to get out of the car. When it’s obvious she isn’t going to, I do. I shut the car door slowly and watch her drive away. When her car disappears from view, I smooth down the front of my skirt and walk slowly to Zach’s porch.
I ring the bell with shaking fingers. Nervous sweat is forming under my armpits, and I almost feel like I’m going to pass out. My mind flashes back to Evan Brown, how obvious his fright for being in a girl’s bedroom was. It was so foreign to me, the concept that people could be so terrified of sex.
But here I am, just as nervous to stand at a boy’s door.
Part of me doesn’t want Zach to be home. When he doesn’t answer the first ring, I almost turn and walk away. But then I think about Faye, about how I want to be more like her. Faye wouldn’t run from this. Faye would embrace it.
Zach opens the door in flannel pajamas, the same ones he was wearing when he took care of me after the dance. They look soft and harmless, and all I want to do is wrap myself up in him.
His eyes go big and he smiles. It’s his surprised smile, the one that reminds me of a hyper kid on Christmas morning, which means he had no idea I was coming over. I guess Faye has kept some secrets from him after all.
He reaches out to touch my face. “Hey.”
I know what I want to say, but the words get caught in my throat and suddenly I feel more naked and exposed than I did when Charlie leaked the video to the whole school. Like I have been stripped raw and hollowed out. I can’t even think it. If I had my notebook, I would call myself so many names. Weakling. Idiot. I’d rate myself a zero.
“Hey,” I say, and since I can’t seem to get any other words out, I wrap my arms around his neck and press my lips against his. His hands travel to the small of my back, underneath my shirt. He opens his mouth slightly, and I run my tongue along his bottom lip and curve my body firmly into his. I have the same thought I had the other night, when we were lying in my bed with our clothes on. I fit well here.
I’ve probably kissed Zach a thousand times, in countless different positions. In my bed. Pressed against the wall. In the backseat of the Jeep. In Kim’s pristine kitchen. Kissing was always a gateway to sex. I always figured, if you’re going to kiss a boy, you might as well have sex with him. I don’t know what it’s like to kiss and not have it lead to anything else. I need to know what the next thing is and go there.
This kiss feels different somehow, softer and looser and more reckless. And I don’t know how to handle it.
So I grind my hips against him and move one of my hands down to his chest, to the waistband of his pants. I pull the drawstring and start to reach inside, but he grabs my hand and intertwines his fingers with mine.
We’re holding hands, and I have never held hands with a boy before. All the positions I have been in in bed, as exposed as I was then, it’s nothing compared to this. Now he knows my fingers are sweaty. He knows I’m terrified.
I tug at his waistband with my other hand, but he stops me again. I bite his bottom lip and stick my tongue down his throat and try to make the kiss into something familiar, something I thought Zach liked.
This time he pulls away.
“Mercy,” he says. “Stop. We can’t do this.”
My cheeks burn with humiliation. He’s rejecting me. I wiggle out of his grip and drop his hands. I wipe mine on my skirt and he watches me do it and the way his face sags makes me hate myself even more than I already do.
“But I want you,” I say, even though my voice is flat and monotone and doesn’t sound like me at all. It’s not the voice I use in my bedroom, when I’m trying to be playful and seductive. It’s nothing like that. I can’t muster that right now. What is wrong with me?
“Look, nothing happened with Faye. It was all for show. I couldn’t be with anybody like that. Not when…” His voice trails off, and he shakes his head.
Not when what? I think.
I want him to say what he said in Kim’s kitchen, when I took it for granted and shrugged it off. I want him to say it again. I want to hear it now. I want to hear it now because if I have changed at all I might feel differently about hearing it.
But he says nothing and he’s not smiling and his eyebrows are pulled together. That’s his hurt face, and I’m becoming very familiar with it.
I follow him as he shuffles into the kitchen and opens the fridge. “Are you hungry?” he says. “My mom’s at her class tonight and she made all this spaghetti. I know you liked the spaghetti that Faye made. Will you eat some?”
I come up behind him and wrap my arms around his waist. I start kissing his neck. This will make him lose interest in food. I don’t think Zach and I ever actually ate lunch once during any of our lunch dates. This will make things normal again.
“Mercy,” he says, spinning around to face me. “I really can’t. Let’s just hang out, okay? Let me heat up this food, and we’ll watch TV or something.”
I wring my hands in frustration. “Why not? Why can’t we do what we know feels good? I’m not hungry. I don’t want to eat spaghetti. I just want you.”
He stares at the floor. “You don’t want me,” he says. “This is just your way of feeling normal again. I get it. But I can’t be that guy anymore. It’s too fucking difficult.”
Each syllable is a knife wound, a dagger. Too. Fucking. Difficult.
I bite my lip. I know I’m going to cry, and I don’t want to do it here. I don’t want Zach to see me with puffy red eyes and wet cheeks and snot coming out of my nose. I have put him through enough without being some stupid girl crying on his shoulder.
So I turn away from him and run, down the hall and out the door, before I change my mind.
He doesn’t chase me. He probably couldn’t keep up anyway. I’m better at running away than he ever could be.
I don’t stop running until I’m in front of my house and I’m all alone again.
“I do want you,” I shout to the darkness in between heaving sobs.
I think about what I should have said to Zach, the words I can’t bring myself to say out loud. I want to feel normal just hanging out. I want to figure out how, but I have no idea. Because you’re right—sex is my normal. Sex is my control. But now I’m careening off a cliff, and I have no idea where to find the brakes.
I suck in a deep breath. It hurts my lungs, makes my insides burn.
Maybe trust is the brake I’m looking for. Faye had something bad happen to her and she still found a way to trust people again, to put her faith in them not to hurt her.
So why can’t I do the same?
38
Zach has the decency to pretend the other night never happened when I get to school on Monday. He’s waiting for me in the parking lot, holding a coffee, ready to walk me to class. So I pretend nothing happened, either, that I didn’t break his heart and stomp all over the pieces.
“Look at us,” he says, holding the door open for me as people point and stare. “The two most popular naked people in all of Milton High. That’s got to be some kind of accomplishment.”
I link my arm through his. “Don’t give yourself so much credit,” I say. “You forgot about Faye. She probably has a bigger following than the both of us.”
It’s weird without Faye around. I keep expecting her to come up behind us and sling an arm around each of our shoulders and laugh that seal-bark noise that I have grown to love. I realize now more than ever that Faye has been the leveling force, the glue holding everything together. Now Zach and I will have to be our own glue.
“Our trio’s down to two,” Zach says, humming that song from the Lion King as we walk down the hall to chemistry together.
“I hope I’m not the warthog,” I say.
“There’s that sense of humor,” he says. “I miss her. Faye, not the warthog. She wasn’t supposed to take the heat. We agreed to do it together.”
We stop at my locker. It’s not easy to miss, considering somebody took a Sharpie and drew a very anatomically incorrect penis on the front, along with SLUT in giant capital letters, right beside the box where Zach blacked in WHORE last week.
“I miss her, too,” I say with a sigh.
“Look, do you think you’re okay to fly solo in home economics today? I really need to camp out in the library today to study. But if you need me, I’ll be there.”
I shake my head. “Of course not. I’ll be totally fine.”
Zach’s eyes widen. “Uh, Mercy—”
I whip around to see who he’s staring at. For a second I think I’m going to come face-to-face with Faye, even though she’s suspended. But it’s somebody even less likely.
Angela. Her hands are clasped in front of her, almost like she’s praying.
“Angela. Hi,” I say.
“Angela. Bye,” Zach says, and makes himself scarce.
She looks at her hands. I can tell by her red eyes that she has either been crying or smoking weed, and I’m willing to bet my life it’s not the latter.
“Can we talk?” She looks up with a funny half smile that is more of a frown, one I haven’t seen before. “Not here. After school.”
“Of course,” I say. “Do you want me to come over?”
“No,” she says quickly. “I’ll come to your house.” She reaches into her backpack and pulls out something in a plastic bag, which she thrusts into my hands. She turns on her heel and scurries away before I have a chance to say anything else.
I peer into the bag. It’s filled with black fabric. At first I have no idea what it is, but then I realize it’s my black negligee, the one I thought Kim must have taken. But it was Angela, the one person who I didn’t think was capable of stealing anything. My hands tremble slightly as I stuff the bag into my locker and slam the door. I turn to walk away but spin around and open my locker again instead. I pull out the bag and look inside again. Angela could have worn this for Charlie. Is that why she’s giving it back, because it’s a memory of what she did?
I ball up the bag and toss it in the nearest trash can. That’s where it belongs.
We have chemistry and home economics together, but Angela doesn’t so much as look at me during chemistry, and she doesn’t show up for home economics. Since I’m two rows behind her in chemistry, I can tell she has horribly botched today’s experiment, which is supposed to prove the heavy density of sulfur hexafluoride relative to air. Her hands are shaking, and halfway through class she drops a flask, which promptly shatters on the floor.
“What the hell did you do?” her lab partner yells.
I’m wondering the same thing. I’m wondering what Charlie did to her.
To make the day even weirder, today’s home economics topic is pregnancy. I should be taking notes to fill in Faye and Angela on what they’re missing, but Mrs. Hill’s information is so sterile. It’s nothing like what being pregnant actually is.
“This is what a baby looks like at four weeks,” she says, pointing to a tiny dot on a slide with her meter stick. “It’s nothing more than a speck. But that speck will grow into this.” She flips to the next slide, where the speck has turned into something resembling a peanut.
“This is two months. This is what is growing inside of you at two months. And pretty soon, that turns into this.” The next slide actually resembles a baby, and this is where I stop looking. Hot tears prick my eyelids. I can’t sit here and watch this, so I grab my bag and dart out the door, ignoring Mrs. Hill’s protestations and the stares and hushed murmurs of everyone in the classroom. I’m sure I probably left Chase Redgrave and Trevor Johnston with something much bigger than homework to think about.
I don’t go right home like I plan to. I take a detour in my Jeep, one I definitely didn’t plan on taking. I go back to the playground, the one Luke and I spent those summer nights at, the one I tried to go back to the other night but felt too haunted by. It looks different now, with the midafternoon sun slanting down, creating shadows underfoot. There are a few kids running around, whose moms watch from red painted benches. I stay in my Jeep and grip the steering wheel. I’m safe in here. One of the moms lifts her toddler to the top of the slide and keeps her hands on his puffy coat as he slides down. His face is contorted with tears. I know how you feel, kid, I want to say. That slide did me in, too.
I never went to this playground as a kid, probably because Kim never bothered to take me. When I finally did go, it was as an adolescent. It was where Luke and I got away from Kim, my mother and his employer. He taught me how to smoke joints here, sitting face-to-face on the seesaw. We would talk for hours about everything we thought was shitty about life. I complained about Kim. He told me about his dad, how he would smack Luke around when he had a few drinks. He said I was the only person he ever told that to, and I had no reason not to believe him.
&n
bsp; One night, when he asked me to be his girlfriend, I felt like I was on top of the world. Then he told me what girlfriends do for their boyfriends, and he pulled his dick out of his pants. I had never seen one before, and I had no idea what to do with it. I was thirteen. But I was about to find out what to do with it, when he pushed my head down. I wanted to make Luke happy, and if I had to do this to be his girlfriend, that was okay with me.
That became our nightly ritual. We would head to the park after dark, and I would give him a blow job. And one night, when I was pressed against the slide, he told me he couldn’t stop.
“You’re my girlfriend,” he said. “This is what girlfriends do.” I still remember how his breath smelled like the beer he had chugged on the walk over. It made me want to gag, but the last thing I wanted to do was say no to Luke. The last thing I wanted was for him to think I was a baby, a stupid grade-school girl who wouldn’t do the things girls in his high school would do.
“I haven’t been with anyone but you,” he said, kissing my neck. I wanted to push him off me, but he was so heavy, and I was trapped between the hard plastic of the slide and the hard weight of his body. He already had my skirt pushed up and my underwear pulled down.
I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t say no. And when I felt the burning pain between my legs, like I was being ripped in two, I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood, but I still didn’t tell him to stop.
Afterward he did up his pants and barely talked to me on the way home. He stopped calling after that, and he stopped showing up at our house for work. A week later, I heard through a mutual friend that he had been dating a girl from his class for the past year.
I never told anyone about Luke, especially not Kim. Kim was the one who hired Luke to be our gardener that summer, and she thought he did great work with roses, which never grew in our garden before Luke. I was afraid of what Kim would say, afraid she would blame me for leading him on. Terrified she would roll her eyes and tell me to just grow up and get over it. Besides, I was more embarrassed than anything. I thought I did something wrong. Maybe I was bad at sex, and that was why he stopped wanting to see me. I made a promise to myself to get better.
Firsts Page 25