Wake

by Abria Mattina

  “He won’t,” I try to reassure her. “He’s going to be fine. He had a good day in group.”

  “And he’ll have a shit Monday at school.”

  “You can’t worry about everyone, you know. You’ll stretch yourself too thin.”

  Willa doesn’t say anything. I take her hands from under her chin and pull her up. I lead, she follows, out of the labyrinth, properly—together.

  *

  I thumb the children’s missal as I sit in the empty pew, waiting for Willa. She’s giving confession a try. It wasn’t her idea, which might screw up the whole spirit-of-contrition thing, but I think it could be good for her to unload to an anonymous stranger.

  In the back of the missal I find a list of the Ten Commandments. No wonder Willa has been in the confessional so long. Thou shall not kill. Broken. Honor thy mother and thy father. Broken. Thou shall not commit adultery. Grey area, but only because she isn’t technically married. Thou shall not steal. Way broken. Thou shall not bear false witness. Broken. As far as I know she’s an atheist, so there goes ‘Thou shall not worship any other God but Me.’ Likewise for thou shall keep the Sabbath day holy and thou shall not take the Lord’s name in vain. Eight out of ten Commandments broken. This could take awhile. I wonder if she covets shit...

  “Jem.” I look up to find Arthur standing at the end of the pew, arms laden with hymnals left at the back of the church. “Waiting for confession?” he asks. He’s being extremely polite, considering I told him to shut the fuck up not a full hour ago. I guess he’s turning the other cheek.

  “Willa’s worried.” Even outside of Group, I can’t stand to tell him about myself.

  “Oh?”

  “About Michael, harming himself.”

  “Michael has been doing better lately,” Arthur tries to assure me. Because people who are of sound nervous constitution burst into tears in front of a group of strangers. “Six months ago I might have thought that of him, but he’s made quite a bit of progress.”

  I’m still betting on Willa’s gut feeling. She’s been there; she knows what drives a person to his or her own personal ledge. I tell Arthur about Willa’s botched attempt.

  “It’s touching, the way you both take care of each other,” he says. “But you both need to learn to speak for yourselves in Group. Self-expression is an important part of healing and growing as a person. Will you encourage Willa to bring up her issues on her own?”

  “Will you at least start trying with people like Michael? When you suspected six months ago did you get him on suicide watch?”

  Arthur stares at me for a few seconds. He promises he’ll call that poor kid’s family to discuss the problem, in exchange for my promise to speak about my own junk in Group. He walks away to the parish office, tottering behind his stack of hymnals. If Arthur is full of shit, he’s good at hiding it.

  You did the right thing.

  What if that kid wasn’t really going to hurt himself?

  What if he was?

  You’d resent him.

  Would not.

  You resented her for trying to jump.

  I shake away thoughts of Willa in the same state as Michael. I can’t think of her like that. It makes me so intensely uncomfortable that I can’t breathe.

  It seems like an hour has gone by before Willa opens the confessional door and steps out. She looks bewildered and little sad.

  “Can I borrow that?” She takes the missal and flips through until she finds the page with the Our Father prayer printed on it. Willa sits down on my lap with it and sighs.

  “Apparently I need to recite this ten times and everything will be better.”

  I take the book from her, closing my fingers around her little hands. “No one ever taught you how to pray, did they?” I already know the answer. She described herself as a heathen two weeks ago. Religion wasn’t part of her upbringing.

  “It doesn’t make everything all better,” I tell her quietly. “It centers you.” Even still, she recites the Our Father ten times. I say it with her, and it reminds me of monks of various religions, chanting to focus their attention on the divine.

  “I don’t feel any better.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You really think you want me?” She sets the missal in the slot for hymnbooks.

  “Yeah, I do.” I brush a lock of hair behind her ear. Willa has her problems, but for all her flaws she’s still a good person, even when she doesn’t mean to be. She would comfort a total stranger if they needed it. She would stay up all night with me, riding out the pain. The food she makes, and lending me her notes… Before I even liked her on the most basic level, she was good for me, refusing to put up with my bad moods.

  “I think I want you too,” she says quietly. I can’t help but smile. “One condition, though?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not dating the old Jem,” she says firmly.

  “I’m trying.” Only not really. I think Willa knows I’m lying. She slips her hand into mine.

  “You’ve got to let me be with the new you. I don’t like Old Jem. That guy’s a prick.” Her smirk is infectious.

  “Okay.” She bends her neck for a chaste kiss—we are in a church—and she still tastes like maple syrup from breakfast.

  I could fall uncontrollably in love with you.

  “Come on.” Willa gets off my lap and offers me a hand up. “Lets get out of here.”

  *

  Willa fits in seamlessly with my family. I resented that when she cut me out because her absence was everywhere, but now I love it, because her presence fills a gap I never really noticed. I love the way she talks to my mother with such patience, not seeming to mind that Mom can’t stay on one topic for long and the conversation always comes back to architecture eventually. Mom doesn’t think anything weird of the arm I keep wrapped around Willa as we sit on the couch, but when Dad comes in from the yard he does a double take. He actually stops mid-sentence and gapes at us.

  “Yes?” Mom prompts when he doesn’t finish.

  “Er, have you seen the rake?”

  “I might have.” She gets up and goes to the garage to help him look. The minute they leave I capitalize on their absence, turning Willa’s chin up for another kiss. We keep it simple and tongue-free, just in case my parents come back suddenly. It’s hard to deny that we’ve been making out if our lips are swollen and wet from exchanging saliva.

  Suddenly I feel a breeze on my cheek. I open my eyes and find Elise standing behind the couch, hands and chin resting on the backrest. She’s got an impish grin on and looks from Willa to me with eager eyes.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  What the hell does it look like?

  “‘When,’ Elise,” Willa answers. My sister squeals and throws her arms around Willa’s neck.

  “Don’t strangle her.”

  “Finally!” Elise sings, and skips away flapping her hands excitedly. I apologize to Willa about my sister’s behavior, but she waves it away.

  “As long as Eric doesn’t react the same way.”

  My brother already likes Willa—he’s tasted her food—and doesn’t say much when he finds out that she and I are a couple. He just tells us not to violate any of the downstairs furniture and asks if Willa is staying for dinner.

  “Sure. I’ll make chicken pot pie.”

  Eric turns to me. “Marry her.”

  *

  You’d think our parents don’t feed Eric, the way he eats. The chicken potpie (made with Elise’s gleeful assistance and Mom’s thank-God-I-don’t-have-to-cook support) gets devoured quickly. There are no leftovers and Dad jokes that we should have rationed such good food. I can see Eric eyeing the sweet potato soup made just for me and I shift my bowl away from him.

  After dinner I take Willa upstairs, away from the hubbub of family life. I know she enjoys being in such an active home, but for the moment I want her all to myself.

  Willa makes herself comfortable against the headboard with her knees pulled up.
If I lay down so soon after a good meal I’ll fall asleep, so I sit in the desk chair instead and prop my feet up on the edge of the bed. I try to play footsies with her and she calls me a romantic dork.

  “You’re not changing your mind about us already, are you?” I say it teasingly, but I do worry about that. Willa could decide that she doesn’t want to be with Cancer Boy, and I wouldn’t be able to find fault with that reasoning. I know what a pain in the ass I am to deal with.

  “Are you?” she challenges.

  “No. But if you decide you can’t put up with me…”

  Willa rolls her eyes. “You still think you’re special for having baggage?”

  “Whatever.” I hate admitting that she’s right. “So we’re really doing this?”

  “So it would appear.”

  “How are we going to tell your brother?” Frank probably won’t like it. He may even come down hard on Willa because of it. But she and I owe him that little bit of honesty, and there’s always the remote chance that Frank will be okay with it.

  Somewhere in hell, a snowball is laughing at me.

  “We don’t have to tell him.”

  “We should be honest. You live with him, after all.”

  Willa shrugs it off. “If he’s not going to introduce me to his boyfriend, I don’t owe him the same.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  We’ll come back to that issue later. Right now I want to do right by Willa’s guardian.

  “It’ll be no different than introducing me to your parents.”

  “I haven’t introduced friends to my parents in years, never mind boyfriends.”

  “You’ve had several?” It’s a complicated sort of question. I can’t hold it against her—I’ve probably had as many girlfriends since the beginning of high school as she’s had boyfriends. But there’s the fact that she might have expectations of what a relationship is like, or leftover baggage from some jerk that didn’t do right by her, and that can complicate the present.

  “Just three,” she answers quietly. “Maybe only two, if you want to get technical.”

  “Who was the sort-of-boyfriend?”

  Willa looks at me with a sarcastic tilt of her eyebrows. “What, you want his name?” I give her the you-know-what-I-mean look and she relents. “He ran the Group I used to go to in St. John’s.”

  “Like, he led it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Old enough to be a counselor, but not-quite-dating Willa. It doesn’t take much to figure out what was probably going on: some jackass counselor taking advantage of the people who came to him for help. She can’t call him a boyfriend, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t do things.

  “Did you sleep with him?” Immediately after the words are out I feel like a complete ass for saying them. I try to take them back, to apologize, but Willa doesn’t seem so offended by the question.

  “Yes. I slept with the others, too, in case you’re wondering.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Sure.”

  Willa smirks. “What about your girlfriends?”

  “What about them?”

  “Which one took your cherry?”

  I consider how to answer that, but my red ears beat me to it.

  “Still a virgin, huh?” Willa snickers at my embarrassment and I hurry to correct her.

  “Technically.”

  “What’s technically?”

  “We played put-the-tip-in a few times, but it hurt her so we didn’t…”

  Willa nods. She’s got her sense of amusement under control now. “Was she an everything-but kind of girl?”

  Yes.

  “Neither of us was ready to be doing…that. We just got carried away a few times.”

  “You never know where you might end up,” she says philosophically. I get up from my chair and sit next to her on the bed. Willa unbends her knees and rests her feet in my lap.

  “Can I ask about your first time?”

  “My first time what?”

  “Sex.”

  “Define sex.” I stare at her for a few seconds before I realize that it’s a serious question. She sees my delayed thought process and makes a suggestive hand motion.

  “Yeah.”

  “That was with one of the other people from Group. He was an anger management case.” I worry that he hurt her. “He was hearing impaired. People had bullied him and he was a really angry guy as a result. Picked a lot of fights.”

  “And he was one of your boyfriends?”

  Willa nods. “Ray. It was interesting. He could only hear loud noises so the whole thing was very…tactile.”

  I hate to picture Willa with another guy. But even worse than that mental image is the idea that she goes for guys with physical problems. One boyfriend with a hearing problem, another recovering from cancer…

  “And your other boyfriend?”

  Willa shrugs. “Just a guy I worked with at the music store. He was older than me. We were on-again off-again for awhile.” She rolls her eyes at some memory. “He liked to collect things. His place was full of useless shit. He had a whole shelf of shrunken heads and he was really into the idea of a zombie apocalypse.” I can’t help but picture the stereotypical pierced, tattooed freak that would be into crap like that. Surely Willa could have done better than that guy.

  She can do better than you too, idiot.

  “Willa?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you report your counselor?”

  She shakes her head. “No one would have believed me.”

  “Of course they would have.” I reach out to touch her face, fixed into immobility because of this personal subject. Willa doesn’t react to the thumb I brush across her cheekbone.

  “He got into counseling because he was a heavy drinker in college. Got behind the wheel wasted one night and ended up in a bad accident. His shtick was motivating kids not to end up like him. He had a whole speech laid out, about how being a paraplegic was the best thing that ever happened to him because it led him to help screwed up kids.”

  Willa throws her hands up. “He was a good guy. Active in the community, went to church. People thought the sun shone out his ass. If I told people about him they’d think, ‘What? Steve?’ and he could refute my claim easily. He’s paralyzed—people look at guys in wheelchairs and think ‘oh, he’s harmless.’ Like he couldn’t possibly want sex, let alone have it, so what could he do to me?”

  I see her point. I know firsthand how people look through those with physical problems, like we’re ghosts or witless children. But that means I also disagree with her, because I know just how much someone in that position can do to take advantage, and it’s no more or less than an able-bodied guy.

  “He touched you.”

  “I never said no.”

  “Did you say yes?”

  “Sometimes,” she admits. “It felt good. Distracting.” The corner of her mouth turns up in a sarcastic smirk. “Are you sure you still want me?”

  “It’s not you that bothers me.”

  “It’s them?”

  I nod.

  “None of them raped me, Jem. What happened was my responsibility, too.”

  “Do you want me to hold it against you?”

  “People generally do.”

  “Does your mom know?”

  “That her daughter is a slut? She doesn’t know the details, but she’s neither blind nor an idiot, so I’m sure she does.” Willa shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. She resents me anyway.”

  I sigh. “You know, most people, when they realize they’ve dug themselves into a hole—they let go of the damn shovel.”

  “But I’m almost to China,” she says with a fake pout.

  “You think your parents want to resent you?”

  Willa sits up and smiles without humor. “I moved here for a clean break—and to get away from my mom. Do you know how awful it feels to sit across the dinner table from someone who is clearly thinking You killed my daughter?” I don’t know ho
w to answer that, so I don’t, and she continues. “You’re a bit of a dreamer, I know, thinking you can forgive me, but she won’t.”

  “I don’t think you’d know what to do with yourself if you were forgiven.” The words hang there for a beat, and then Willa smirks.

  “That’s the difference between me and you: I don’t dream of impossible things.”

  Monday

  I wake up to find Elise tickling my ear. I swat her hand away and roll over, hoping that she’ll leave me alone to sleep some more. My alarm goes off and I smack it so hard the clock falls off the nightstand.

  “Oh, good, you’re awake.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Can you bring Willa home for dinner tonight?” she asks.

  “She was just here last night.”

  “So?”

  “So she has a life, Lise. She might have to work tonight.”

  Elise pouts. “I like having her around. You’re less of a grump when she’s here.” Elise kisses my forehead and hops off my bed. “At least invite her, okay?” she says as she leaves my room.

  I force myself out of bed and into the shower. The warm water on my skin is the only consolation I get for climbing out of bed so freaking early. As I lather up, my penis begins its usual morning tease. It’s been happening for a few weeks now, on and off: the beginnings of an erection, which, if encouraged, completely vanishes. My dick is like a damned gopher, poking its head up and withdrawing at the first sign of attention. Not that the attention feels that good. The touches that used to excite me barely do anything anymore.

  I lather up my thighs and crotch first, knowing that even the casual brushing against a washcloth is enough to kill my boner. But today it doesn’t. It twitches and hardens further until I’ve got a promising semi.

  I don’t know what I’m expecting, but I take a few casual strokes anyway. My usual grip feels too gentle to be pleasurable, but anything tighter almost hurts. I lean against the shower wall and experiment a little, varying strokes and grip. All of it feels foreign and mediocre compared to my pre-cancer activities. The only good thing I get out of it is the pride of knowing that I can still get it up—under the right circumstances. I don’t even come close to a climax, but I decide that’s probably for the best. My last one hurt like hell.