“Ah.” She’s quiet a moment, maybe out of respect for my mood, and for my head. “What are you going to tell the nurse?”
“I don’t know. That I fell on a stapler.”
“You fell on it?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Don’t you think—”
“No. So just shut up. Please.”
After a few more moments, Chlo’s voice sounds above me. “Hey. Trammel. You know I like you okay, don’t you?”
“No,” I say. Because I don’t.
“Well, I do. You’re not exactly in the comfort zone, but you’re real. That’s more than most people.”
My nose is about to drip again. This time I do the smart thing and use my sleeve.
“You hear me?”
“Yeah,” I say. She’s a pain in the ass, standing here watching me sniff like a moron.
She stays with me till the nurse comes in. I watch her black leather shoes walk away. Don’t ask me why, looking at the empty floor where her feet used to be, I feel like some of the air’s gone out of me, like an old basketball.
“What have we here?” the nurse asks. Her shoes are tan and flat, with little tassles on them.
“I fell on a stapler,” I tell her.
The nurse makes me put my hands down and look at her, and then she rips the staple out of my head. At least that’s what it feels like. Only all I end up with is a Band-Aid, no stitches, no trip to the ER. Just a Band-Aid.
And then comes the one single good thing out of the whole day, the only good part of the uprising of Alicia Doggett: I get a pass out of athletics, a note sent to Coach telling why I couldn’t participate today.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Not Quite the End
Driving home, I pull a baseball cap out from under my seat and put it on—gently—to hide the Band-Aid. Then I turn the radio up loud. Real loud. The dashboard is shuddering. At the intersection of University and Berry I can see an old lady in the next car glaring at me, even though all my windows are rolled up.
I don’t care. I’m alone. All alone. With a Band-Aid on my head. And my girlfriend—my ex-girlfriend—slept with another guy. I’ve been waiting and begging, holding back, trying to be a good boy…
It hits me like a flash: Now I have no reason not to go get laid as quickly as possible.
I see it now: Unloading my virginity is the only thing in the world that could possibly make me feel better right now.
Dori!
I think about it some more as I drive. I’m actually prepared, for a change, and have been for a while. I’ve been carrying a condom in my wallet for months now. In my closet I’ve got a whole box of lubricated ribbed I bought at Albertson’s earlier in the year. Of course, I didn’t know they were lubricated and ribbed till I got home and pulled them out of the bag along with the Dr. Scholl foot pads, Tylenol, hair spray, and Sinutab Non-drying Allergy Geltabs I bought, because at the last minute I couldn’t face going up to the checkout lady and tossing one lone box of condoms on the revolving counter. I thought I could, but I couldn’t.
I think about that rubber in my wallet, not like I’m deciding whether to go have sex for the first time, but more like I’m deciding whether to get fries to go with my burger.
I believe I will have the fries today.
I’ve perked up just the tiniest bit now. By the time I get to Dori’s house, when I’m pulling up in front of the cracked curb, the saggy screen door and aluminum foil in the windows to keep out the sun, I don’t even care that I could for sure do better than this.
On the way across the yard I catch myself pulling the bill of my baseball cap around to the front, like I always do when I’m about to go to Grace’s house, because it looks better to parents. But then I tell myself that this is just Dori and who cares, so I turn my cap around to the back again just as I’m stepping onto the flat porch slab.
I raise my hand to knock on the wood frame of the screen door, but Dori must have seen me drive up, because the door opens before I can bring my hand down. She’s got her hair parted down the middle and pulled back in a ponytail, but a lot of it’s come loose and there’s plenty of curls around her face.
“Colt!” She’s surprised, but happy to see me. I know, because she’s smiling, even while she looks concerned. “What happened to your forehead?”
I guess the Band-Aid shows. I shrug. Which is not like me. It’s as if every last smart-ass comment and lie leaked out, and there’s not any left.
Which is okay. I just want to get laid, you know. Not talk.
She pushes open the screen door to let me in. “Your dad home?” I ask her, just to check, as I step into the living room.
“No.” She peers up at me. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d drop by.”
“Oh, that’s nice. You want a Coke?”
“No thanks.” She leads me into her living room. We both sit on the couch. She’s got on jeans and a tiny little top. Her lips are the best part about her face, full and pouty.
She doesn’t say anything, just smiles at me. Even though the couch is very soft and comfortable, I can’t seem to settle into a position. Finally I sit forward on the edge. There’s a spindly-legged coffee table in front of us, with pieces of patterned paper spread out over it. It looks like she tore the sheets out of a wallpaper sample book. “You still picking out wallpaper?” I ask.
“Yeah.” She slides off the couch, onto her knees in front of the coffee table. “See my samples?” she asks. Her feet are bare. “Which do you like best?” She puckers her brow a little and starts patting and pushing the papers like they’re old friends.
“They all look pretty good.” I’m thinking how they say you shouldn’t keep a condom too long in your wallet, and I’m wondering how long is too long.
She’s frowning over the papers. A strand of dark hair is caught in the corner of her mouth; she pulls it out. Her hair is dark, so dark that her scalp is a white line where the part is.
It’s actually kind of delicate, that white line—as if she’s a real person who saves up money to decorate her room, and wonders which is prettier, vines or shells?
So I look straight ahead. But when I do that, I can’t help but focus on the cheesy kitchen curtains through the doorway. They’ve got smiling teapots printed all over them.
I shut my eyes for a moment. I don’t want there to be anything in my mind but the fact that I’m about to get laid.
Dori doesn’t notice anything’s different about me—well, besides the Band-Aid. When I open my eyes again, she’s still kneeling on the floor, happy with her wallpaper squares. Behind her, the tiny TV in the corner has a rabbit-ear antenna with a coathanger duct-taped to it.
I try not to think. It’s hard, though. There’s something about that TV. And that white line of skin. About those stupid curtains—they’re the kind of thing somebody would sew themselves, if they were trying to make this place look cheery and decent but they didn’t know how.
Suddenly I’m feeling funny. I know what I want. But it’s tied up with all this other stuff that I’ve never really thought about.
And don’t want to.
“Maybe I ought to go,” I tell Dori. But I don’t move.
“You just got here. We haven’t had a chance to talk.” She bends to look past me at the clock, which puts her shoulder inches away from my knee, and I can see right down her shirt, from her neck almost to her nipples.
No bra.
Grace and Palmer; Palmer and Grace. For all these months, she’s pushed my hands away.
Dori sits up again, which makes her breasts bob slightly, like two balloons. “I guess Jordan’s doing okay?” she asks, smiling down at the wallpaper squares.
“Oh yeah,” I tell her, low and shaky. “Jordan’s doing just fine.”
Dori looks up at me. Her smile fades a little. “Is something wrong?”
I don’t answer.
My head’s still throbbing, but not only from the staple.
Grace and Palmer, Palmer and Grace.
There’s nothing I can do. She picked him, that’s all. Not me. Palmer. His stupid smile, his goddamn talk about who moans, who gives head.
I lift my hand, and I’m surprised to see it’s trembling a little.
Dori grows very, very still. She freezes as my hand reaches toward her. She lets me do it; she doesn’t argue, doesn’t move a muscle, just watches my hand slip down into her shirt.
I’m hardly breathing; we both watch my hand as it does its thing.
Okay. Things are getting back to order; I feel like I’m really in control for the first time today.
I realize I’ve been holding my breath, and when I let it out, I glance at Dori’s face again.
She’s not smiling anymore. She’s not looking at my hand. She’s just staring straight ahead and her face is all frozen.
My hand’s still going, it’s just squeezing, squeezing, like she’s a melon, and her eyes are like, I don’t know, they’ve got shutters over them, and after a while my hand just kind of stops moving because she’s sitting there like a statue, and also because I remember what Chlo said about melons, and I can’t think of anything else for my hand to do, and there’s something about the way Dori’s so still and quiet, staring straight ahead like she’s got shutters over her eyes.
And finally, I get what they’re saying. I thought you were my friend, those shutters are saying.
She’ll let me do whatever I want. I know she will.
She just won’t ever call me again.
And hey, that would be a good thing. Wouldn’t it?
My hand feels stupid, just hanging there in her shirt, so I pull it out.
I almost want to say I’m sorry, but I don’t know why and I don’t know how.
She still hasn’t moved. Hasn’t said one syllable.
“If you don’t want me to do that,” I say, like it’s all her fault, “you could say so.”
She shrugs, like she’s tired. “I forgot. It was stupid,” she says, and she sounds tired too.
“What was stupid?”
“Guys always want sex.” She shrugs again, shutters closed. “It’s always part of the deal, isn’t it? I forgot.”
I don’t know about that, but me, I never forgot that I wanted sex. Not for a moment. “You shouldn’t have kept calling me,” I tell her, loud enough to inform the duct-taped rabbit ears and the teapot curtains, too. I finally sit back on the couch, fold my arms across my chest. Because I don’t know how to take it—her sitting there, not looking at me like that.
Like she thought it was enough, just talking to me on the phone—but now she knows it’s not.
“No, I liked calling you.” Her voice is small. “I just should have remembered.”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “You should have remembered.”
“It was because you never talked like the other guys, when we were on the phone. You never talked nasty or anything.”
“You talked on the phone. Not me.”
She clears her throat. “The other guys wouldn’t even talk to me at all. Jordan’s the only one who acted like I was a human being. And even he—well. But you—I just thought you weren’t like that.”
“I am like that. All the time. I’m a lousy bastard. Everybody knows it.”
She shrugs again, that tired shrug. “I don’t think you’re a lousy bastard. You want sex? Well, so does every other guy on the planet. I know I’ve heard you say mean stuff to people. But I always thought when people do that, it means they’re hurting inside.”
I’m just sitting there, arms still folded, but now I’m staring down at her with this horrible sinking feeling. Realizing what a mistake it was to ever, ever speak to her. I thought she was safe because she was a nobody, a slut, Jordan Palmer’s seconds. And all the time the danger wasn’t that she’d come up and talk to me in the hall.
It was that she’d say stuff like this and throw it in my face.
“I always figured,” Dori says, “that you just wanted to hurt people before they hurt you.”
It’s the most terrible thing anybody’s ever said to me. Jesus. My eyes actually start stinging. Shit.
I get up. “I gotta go.” My voice is thick. I head for the door. At least, I think I’m heading for the door. My eyes are blurry.
“Colt. Wait. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
“I’m not crying,” I tell her. “I’m leaving.”
“Colt.” She puts her hand on my arm. “You’re a guy and all. But if you were as lousy as the rest of them, you wouldn’t have stopped with just feeling me up.”
Now let me tell you what a lousy bastard I am. Her hand is warm on my arm, and behind this panicked feeling that I gotta run, the back of my mind is clicking—Wait, Colt! Use this! Play her, let her put her arms around you. And before you know it she’ll be doing you.
I’m looking down the barrel of an extremely easy pity fuck! Take that, Grace!
But somehow Dori has finished up what Chlo started. Dori has let the rest of the air out of me. This basketball is flatter than a pancake. All the shitty things I’ve ever done have come back and piled on me today. They’re all weighing me down so much that I can’t take doing even one more shitty thing.
I’m actually almost looking ahead for once, and what I see is that if I do this thing, what I’ll remember for the rest of my life is how I felt like a total turd afterward. Hell, I feel like a turd right now, even just thinking about it. The afterward, I mean.
So for once I follow through on something I know I should do.
“I’ve got to go.” I pull away, make it to the door. Push the screen open a little before I turn around. She’s still standing in the middle of the room. Dori and her breasts. “I can’t be trusted,” I tell her. “I know me, and I’m telling you. Don’t ever trust me.”
She doesn’t move—she’s standing in the middle of the carpet, her hands at her sides. She can’t argue my point, since she knows I came over for the sole purpose of screwing her.
“Maybe not in person,” she says. “But what about over the phone?”
That surprises me. I don’t know what to say to that. Jesus, I don’t know what to think of this girl. Finally I manage to croak, “I dunno. Maybe.” Then I shrug, and I walk out her door.
The screen door bangs shut behind me. The grass is long; it swishes against my shoes as I walk back across the lawn. I didn’t get laid, not even close—but still everything seems different from when I went in.
I get into the car. The sun’s heading toward the horizon. I drive away, knowing for sure that I am never coming back.
All I can say is I picked a really stupid time to grow up.
CHAPTER TWELVE
One of the Other Million People in the World
The way home is very weird. A lot has happened in a very short amount of time. And what’s strange is that just a little while ago I couldn’t stand another second of Chlo being around, but now I think I might want to be with somebody who’s not going to stare at my stapled face, but who’s going stare at a book instead while my mouth spills out everything that’s happened to me today. Who’s then going to say one sentence without even looking up, one sentence that’ll make everything clear, and then I’ll understand everything that’s happened.
I’m thinking all this, I can’t shake this feeling, and when I get home I head for the phone. I’m even about to pick it up before I realize that not only do I not know Chlo’s phone number, I don’t even know her last name.
It pretty much figures. Who else could sit alone with somebody in a room for weeks and weeks and not even know her name?
I’m standing with one hand on the phone, thinking all this, when it rings under my hand.
It scares the holy shit out of me. For one thing, it’s loud. For another, there’s a million people I don’t want to talk to right now, and one person that I do.
Chlo.
Every other time I’ve picked up the stupid phone—every time I ever w
anted to talk to one person—it was always one of the other million people in the world calling me. So what are the odds on this, the shittiest day of my life?
I pick it up. “Hello?” My voice is shaking.
“Trammel? That you?”
It’s Chlo.
I open my mouth—and for the first time in my life, I can’t think of one damn thing to say.
“You there?” Chlo says.
“Yeah,” I say, and my voice sounds like rusty nails.
“Just wanted to make sure you got home okay.”
“Yeah. I did.”
“Seemed like you had sort of a bad day.”
“This has been,” I tell her, getting my voice back, “the most extremely shitty day of my life.”
“Uh-huh. Well. I didn’t call to invite myself to a pity party. I called for two reasons. One, because I’ve been thinking about why I was staying there with you in the nurse’s office.”
That’s a good point. Why did she stay there with me?
“You’re no bowl of cherries, Trammel. You’re selfish. And you can be pretty mean. But like I said, I like you okay, and I think part of that is because I have this gut feeling that way down deep on the inside—waaaay deep down—you have the seed of a good heart.”
“Great,” I tell her. “Thanks for trying to pump me up here.”
“And I was thinking, Trammel, that since I like you okay, and you’ve got the seed of a good heart, and since you had the most extremely shitty day of your life, that I am going to make at least a somewhat half-hearted attempt to get your mind off your troubles, as a gesture of friendship. Knowing, of course, that you’ll probably laugh in my face. Please understand that I’m not asking you on a date,” she adds, “but I was going to a movie tonight, and since my usual crew is all busy—including my boyfriend, you hear that, Trammel? My boyfriend, whom I love with all my heart, is busy. So I was wondering if you, whom I merely like okay, would like to come with me. As a friend. Just keeping things straight here,” she adds. “And feel free to say no. It won’t hurt my feelings a bit.”
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