The sky dimmed and after the talking, Avery and I fooled around for a bit. I want to say I couldn’t help it, but I could and I did it anyway. The colors popping in the sky and popping inside of me grew brighter, more brilliant, the more I ran my hands along her skin; soon I was panting again, all heat and original sin.
Avery, for her part, was earnest in her lust—eager, too, which I liked, and submissive, which I didn’t. But she touched me back and things were good for a while until it ended up kind of fizzling out. Embarrassing, but I was honest and told her how that happened to me sometimes, that my head and my body didn’t always work well together and that it was probably due to brain damage, although that was impossible to prove because it wasn’t like I had a sex life before I’d been hurt. I also told her that some people with traumatic brain injuries wanted to do it all the time and could also be really emotional, but that I was the opposite and that it was frustrating and irrational, because how could I want something but not really have the desire to do it?
Avery looked confused with my explanation. But then she shrugged and patted my shoulder, like I was a good little donkey who’d just carried her up a steep hill. “Makes sense to me,” she said. “Want and desire aren’t the same thing, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, want is for when there’s something missing. Desire is for going after what makes you feel good.”
I’d never heard that before but thought she might be right, so then I told Avery that maybe the reason desire was hard for me was because going after what made me feel good was a choice and that I didn’t like making choices. She sort of frowned when I said this, her eyes filling with more compassion than I could bear, and she told me she hoped that someday I might see things differently. Then she said she had to go.
By that point the sun was almost gone from the sky and it was true, we both needed to get back to the campsite. We couldn’t go together, so Avery left first. She didn’t really say good-bye or act like she’d miss me as she slipped back through the grass, and I felt sick with abandonment. Guilt, too, for failing Rose again for no other reason than lust. Also shame, for being so damn bad at it.
Kicking off my shoes, I went and sat on the boulder Avery had been perched on and dropped my feet into the black pool beneath. Then gasped. The cold nearly stopped my heart, pure polar melt, but I didn’t pull back. I let the depths of the water chew at my bones with its unrelenting force.
I thrust my legs in deeper still, to my knees, watching as bubbles frothed at the surface. Eager to indulge the greedy pull of the current, I was of half a mind to let it take me. To let it pull me under. Just to be wanted, if only in death.
I closed my eyes.
I let my hips slide forward, to the boulder’s very edge.
“Hey!” a voice said.
My eyes flew open, and I whipped around to see Clay Bernard holding a flashlight, which he was shining right in my face.
“What is it?” I yanked my feet from the current.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
Clay gave me a pointed you’re-full-of-shit look. “Well, you got that water or what? I’ve been waiting for you for, like, forever.”
“Yeah, I got it.” I scrambled off the rock before gathering up the dromedary sack along with my shoes and socks. “Let’s go.”
—
When the dishes were done, Mr. Howe announced that he would be leading a stargazing hike to a spot about a mile away up on the western ridge, where the entire sky would be visible. He’d brought a portable telescope and the view would be stunning, he said. No light pollution to dim the stars or crush our dreams. Plus, a meteor shower was happening. Long-lost pieces of ice and comet dust bursting and shimmering in their final fall to our ground.
I didn’t end up going on the hike. Someone had to stay back and keep an eye on the campsite. Not to mention I hadn’t been doing very well at the whole resting thing.
Archie, Rose, and Shelby also ended up staying behind, which worked for me. I planned on staying close to Rose and far from Avery, since I clearly couldn’t be trusted around her. I was starting to feel pretty lousy about that, especially given the fact that Avery wouldn’t look at me, not even out of the corner of her eye.
So I focused my attention on Rose. On all that I loved about her and all I could do to show her that. She’d cut her hand on a serrated knife while drying dishes and although she tried gamely to be brave, I could tell it hurt—Rose hated nothing more than physical pain. So when I got her alone, I sat her down outside our tent in the grass and insisted on tending to the wound with a first aid kit.
Her eyes brimmed with tears while I poured antiseptic on it.
“It stings, doesn’t it?” I asked.
She nodded.
After washing off the blood and cleaning the cut, I spread antibacterial ointment on her finger, making sure to cover the whole thing, before stretching an oversize Band-Aid across the area.
Rose smiled when I was done, although tears lingered to stripe her cheeks. “You’re always gentle when I hurt myself.”
“I try.”
“But you do more than that. You do more than just try.”
I looked up at her. “I hope that’s a good thing.”
“For me it is,” she said. “I don’t know what it’s like for you.”
—
While the others were off stargazing, the four of us spread a tarp on the grass and played cards by the light of a glowing lantern—first Asshole, then Blackjack, and finally a game Shelby taught us called Spite and Malice. I hadn’t heard of it, but Archie pulled a bottle of Jim Beam out of his bag—I knew full well where it had come from—and we all did shots while she explained the rules.
The game itself was simple enough: an exercise in the zero-sum conundrum. Or the tragedy of the commons. The goal was to get rid of a stack of facedown cards before anyone else got rid of theirs, but that task required the cooperation of others. I played dutifully, only I drank too much, too fast, and soon my mind got stuck on all the things I could think of that required the cooperation of others: from conception to love to betrayal. Did that list include death? Suicide seemed to say otherwise, but I kept trying to make it work. After all, someone had to sell the gun or sharpen the blade. But it was the forces of nature I couldn’t reconcile. Leaps from high cliffs. Or into fast-moving currents.
Anyway, as these things go, when only one can win, cooperation goes out the window, meaning Spite and Malice is really a game of trying to screw one another over.
“Jesus, Archie. Play an ace already,” I growled, because the game had stalled over his stubbornness. Archie was a mean drunk, it turned out. A spiteful one, too. I got the distinct feeling he was hoarding cards, not for his own advantage, but just to piss everyone else off.
Without his ace, I couldn’t do anything. I picked a card up from the center pile. It was a nine, which did me no good. Only I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do next, so rather than ask, I dropped my cards and reached for the Jim Beam. Took a longer swig than usual.
“Careful,” Rose warned.
“Careful,” mimicked Archie, which made Shelby giggle. I’d never heard Shelby giggle before.
“You sound like a bird,” I told her.
“What kind of bird?”
“A loon.”
“That’s rude,” she said.
“Calling you a loon?”
“Not finishing your turn.”
I swiveled back to Rose. “Wait. What do I need to be careful about?”
“Huh?”
“You just told me to be careful.”
“About the drinking. You don’t want to get sloppy, Ben. Not tonight.”
“I won’t get sloppy,” I said.
“But you already have.”
“What does that mean?
”
Rose dropped her gaze to the ground, to a spot right in front of me. I looked and saw that in setting my cards down, I’d somehow placed them all faceup, for everyone to see.
I swore and grabbed for them. Shelby giggled more, like we were all goddamn loons, and I guess I really was sloppy because I started to laugh, too. Rose shook her head but in a way that looked playful. I leaned to kiss her cheek, to feel her breath against my skin, but I caught Archie leering at us in an odd sort of way.
“So, Rose . . . ,” he started.
“So, Archie,” she finished.
“About that brother of yours.”
“What about him?” Rose said. “And no, I won’t tell you who he’s fucking.”
“So he is fucking someone?”
“So you care who he fucks?”
Archie gulped more whiskey. Didn’t bother wiping his mouth. “I don’t care about anything, sweetheart. That’s just it.”
“And yet here we are, the way we always are. With you asking questions and me still not answering them. You have a funny way of not caring.”
“Yours is even funnier,” Archie said, nodding at the way Rose’s elbow was resting on my thigh, and I frowned—I wasn’t laughing anymore—because what did Rose mean by the way we always are?
And what did Archie mean?
Dread spooled through my gut, a live wire of unease, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t say anything. What I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me, right? Instead I stayed very still and swallowed the shard of blackness rising in my throat. After a moment, I glanced at Shelby, who gave me a sweet smile in return, one of her prettiest.
It’s okay, she mouthed to me. It’s going to be okay. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that or if she really meant anything at all. What I did know was that I didn’t deserve to feel jealous or upset or angry. I deserved nothing because I was the worst of all. A cheater. A liar. And terrible at both. But maybe Shelby understood some of what I was feeling—that it was possible to hate the person you were but also feel deeply sorry for yourself, both at the same time—because she reached to hand me the liquor bottle, and honestly, it was about the nicest thing she could’ve done.
Thank you, I mouthed back.
22.
ARCHIE.
Rose.
Rose.
Archie.
After swigging more Jim Beam than was prudent, I set myself to sulking. Abandoning my cards for good, I promptly turned my back on the others—I was too drunk to storm off on my own. Instead I squeezed my eyes shut and proceeded to mine my brain for every instance I’d seen the two of them together. There wasn’t much. How could there be? Rose wasn’t merely too good for Archie; her worth was measured on a different scale than his, if his was even worth measuring in the first place, which I highly doubted.
A few encounters did spring to mind: the two of them getting paired together for driver’s ed sophomore year, much to Rose’s distaste—she said he drove with his dick, not his balls, whatever the hell that meant; that time we’d given Archie a ride home from our class cleanup day by the Eel River. He’d spilled Mountain Dew all over the backseat of the Pathfinder and left without saying anything. The most notable instance, however, was something that had happened last spring during a party out at the Richards’ miniature-horse ranch that was located on the eastern side of Teyber.
I hadn’t meant to go to the party that night. I really hadn’t. My mom’s back pain had been flaring that week. Worse than ever, and it scared me to see her like that—writhing helplessly, unable to get out of bed even to use the bathroom. I fretted and tried dragging her to the ER; hell, there was only so much I could do, no matter what she said about those doctors, how they looked down on her and made her feel like crap for needing help. For needing anything.
She wasn’t having it, though, and after going a few rounds with me, she ordered me to leave the house. To go be with Rose and not come home until morning. I tried to protest—she’d never kicked me out before—but I wasn’t dumb. My mom was forever warning me off sex, despite my swearing up and down I wasn’t doing it. But that never stopped her from lecturing me on the subject, always at times when I was least interested in hearing about it.
“You can ruin a girl,” she’d hiss at me, “without even knowing it. That’s what boys don’t understand. They don’t understand anything. They think nothing of their few seconds of thrusting, and then they’re gone. Onto the next one. The girl forgotten. But she’ll remember, Ben. It’s in her nature to be changed by that, to let someone else inside of her.” It always made me shudder to hear how gross I was for ruining Rose’s body or whatever—although when had I ever forgotten her?—but when my mom went off like that, the best thing I could do was smile and nod and pray she didn’t bring Jesus into it, like she would’ve if Marcus had still been around.
The point is, my mother’s pushing me to spend the night with a girl she hated let me know very clearly who she’d be inviting over to the house once I was gone and why. And, look, you can spare me the sanctimonious lectures on enabling and addiction. I’m neither stupid nor willfully ignorant, but I don’t make it a habit to police my mother’s choices. Pain is always personal. I should know that better than anyone.
So I left, and by the time I got over to the Richards’ farm, the place was packed. I had to park the Ford in the far pasture, way past the barn where the horses slept, and close to the waterline in a low spot slick with mud. Then I made my way back toward the main house. Everyone was crowded outside on the back patio because Connie Richard wisely didn’t want her parents returning to a trashed home. Walking up the drive, I witnessed my classmates doing the things they always did when they found themselves out of reach of adult awareness: laughing, shouting, drinking, fucking, whatever.
Bad music blared from a blown speaker, the air reeked of alfalfa dust, and that night there was a weight on my chest so heavy it almost got me to turn around and sink myself in the river. No one would miss me; I hadn’t told Rose I’d changed my mind about coming—or really, had it changed for me—because autonomy equaled pride and getting kicked out of my own house so that my mom’s dealer could drop by was wholehearted shame.
I made a beeline for the keg instead. I must’ve looked desperate, because Walt Nunez, who lived two doors down from me, shoved a beer in my hand even before pouring his own. Then he peeled away from the crowd to stand with me in the dark beneath a giant willow tree.
“Cheers,” I said, before gulping half the beer and ignoring the foam spilling down my arm.
“Cheers.” Walt watched me drink before taking his own sip. “Rose is here, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I don’t see you much without her these days.”
“I don’t see you much at all.”
Walt’s eyes widened, like I was being an asshole or something. That wasn’t my intent, and my first impulse was to apologize—it always was—but I resisted. Drank more instead.
“You having a good time?” I asked after a moment.
He shrugged. “Not really. It’s been kind of a shit year. Guess that makes tonight kind of a shit night.”
I nodded. Once Teyber Union’s prized defensive back, Walt had torn his MCL during a losing game that fall, tearing more than one heart in the process, along with his Division I dreams. Multiple surgeries later and no more football meant he’d gained a good twenty pounds since. Walt and I had never been close, despite our proximity, but even I knew there was nothing about his current situation that wasn’t depressing as hell. I caught sight of him every now and then, limping around school, around the neighborhood, with his eyes dull and his head hung low. More than anything, he’d come to resemble a shelter dog nearing the end of its days, and it was hard sometimes, not to look away.
“Want to smoke?” he asked brightly, tapping the breast pocket of his shirt.
“Sure,” I said, be
cause that was the easiest answer. It was Humboldt, after all, and smoking meant weed not tobacco. Walt’s eyes lit up at my agreement, making me wonder if the cause of his newfound moroseness wasn’t so much that he could no longer play a game he loved, but that no one had a reason to hang out with him anymore.
We walked back down the hill toward the rows of cars. I sat in the front seat of his truck while Walt rolled a joint on the knee of his jeans—his good knee, although I couldn’t tell you why he bothered. Then we got high together. It was a soft, lazy high that didn’t take me anywhere I hadn’t already gone but which made the stars loom large and my heart ache less.
The air inside the truck remained crisp, our breath mingling with the weed. Walt put music on—he didn’t seem to want to talk—and after a moment, I closed my eyes, rested my head against the seat back. The weight on my chest didn’t ease, but I’d stopped caring. Not caring was easier, a languid release, and there was a word, I realized, for my preferred mode of travel along the path of least resistance; it was called surrender.
Someone tapped on my window, making me jump. My eyes flew open and I turned my head. Saw nothing.
“What the fuck?” Walt growled.
I shoved the truck’s door open, letting in the night breeze and the crappy thud of the bass from the music playing up the hill. I’d placed one foot down on solid ground when Rose sprang from the darkness with a roar. She bounced against me hard, a feral girl, then fell into my arms, bubbling over with laughter.
“Ben!” she exclaimed. Her eyes were brighter than I’d ever seen, her pupils like saucers. “Come on!”
“Shhh,” I told her.
“Don’t shush me.”
When I Am Through with You Page 11