Skin

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  “Crap. I’m out,” Karen says, tossing her cards on the bed. The rain has stopped. “I’m going to meet Mom on her walk with Maddie.”

  Karen and Mom are better together up here. They barely fight, especially because Karen stopped saying “I’m not hungry” all the time and started eating with the rest of us.

  Amanda deals.

  We play a few more rounds.

  “I’m sleepy,” Amanda says, and she flops back on the bed, closing her eyes.

  Kiss her, kiss her, kiss her. I don’t. But I do lie down on the other end of the bed, facing her, the way we do every time it’s raining, except this time Karen’s not lying between us.

  This is the best room I’ve ever been in. I force myself to close my eyes, peeking at Amanda every few seconds till I fall asleep. I wake up, and in her sleep she’s stretched her arm out across the bed toward my hand, her wrist facing out. I can see its green-blue vein; I think I can see it pulse. I watch her shut eyes, reach out my fingers, and touch the pale skin of her wrist. Her eyelids flutter open and she looks at me for a moment and smiles, and then closes her eyes and falls back asleep.

  The screen door slams and Karen calls, “Where are you guys?”

  8

  Things are going to be different in high school. I’m not going back to school the same kid I was in junior high. There’s no way I’m going to spend the whole year getting run ragged by Chris and Bean. I let things go too far before school ended, I should have fought back right away. Whatever it was that started to happen with me and my friends last winter, it’s going to end this fall.

  Chris is the first one at what I guess will be our usual lunch table on the first day of school. He must have grown at least four inches over the summer, both up and out. He looks like a gym teacher or the guy who comes to clean out our septic tank. As I get closer to him, I see stubble on his chin. The first of his three sandwiches is already half eaten, and when I sit down at the table, he just looks at me and licks a blob of mayonnaise off his bottom lip.

  “You missed some,” I say, nodding toward his chin. He wipes at it with the back of his hand and looks over his shoulder at the kids streaming into the cafeteria.

  “Where the hell is Bean?” he mumbles.

  “How was your summer?” I ask, reaching into my lunch bag and finding not the sandwich I made this morning but the bag of carrots and celery Karen packed for herself. Great.

  Chris shrugs and says, “All right.” He starts in on the second sandwich, looking over his shoulder again and clearing his throat. I watch him ignore me while he chews, and I feel something like the flicker of a flame in my chest. I should just get up and walk away, say “Nice talking to you, asshole,” and not look back. I don’t do it, though. I stay sitting there, and when Bean sits down and keeps his eyes on Chris, I know he’s waiting for Chris to give some sign about how they feel about me. And I sit there, waiting for the same thing. Maybe it’s because it’s the first day of school and he feels some kind of pity, or maybe because it’s really hard to ignore someone who’s sitting right in front of you, but Chris finally stops eating his sandwich long enough to ask, “How was your summer?” He sounds bored with the question and I know he’ll be bored with my answer.

  I think about not answering him, about letting his pity question just fall flat on the lunch table and leaving it there to rot.

  “It was good. I went up to the lake with my friend Amanda.”

  That last part just pops out. I wanted to say something that would knock Chris out of his stupor, clear up that glazed look in his eyes.

  “Your friend Amanda?” Chris drawls out the sentence, doing his best to sound disinterested.

  “Yeah, who’s Amaaaanda?” Bean asks, leaning over the table and laughing in my face.

  I shrug and bite a piece of celery. God, she could at least put peanut butter on it. It’s all stringy and I can feel it getting jammed up between my teeth.

  I know the look Chris and Bean are giving me. They want me to say something they can laugh at. I suck on a string of celery between my teeth and mumble, “She’s my friend . . .” Bean’s mouth is twitching, waiting to laugh. “From Chicago.”

  “Chicago!” Bean’s in hysterics, practically laughing himself under the table.

  Chris laughs so hard he pretends to choke on his soda, and coughs out, “Yeah, they’ve got some hot girls in Chee-ca-goo.”

  I know there’s nothing funny about Chicago. I know it wouldn’t matter what I said. They just want to pick up where they left off last year.

  “You do it with her?” Chris asks.

  “Yeah, you do it with her at the laaaaake?” Bean squeals.

  Then I have an entire conversation with Chris and Bean by doing nothing but laughing and shrugging and trying not to think about the fact I’m flailing deeper and deeper into a pit of lies. I wish I’d made up a name, I wish I hadn’t said Amanda. Every time they ask me a question I force her face out of my mind. I try to forget the way she would sit next to me on the dock, our feet hanging in the water.

  “You guys do it every day?”

  “Five times a day?”

  “I bet she liked it in the water.”

  “She was some sort of nympho, right?”

  I just keep laughing and shrugging, half hoping that someone will change the subject and half hoping that we can talk about this every lunch period for the rest of my life. They’re huddled around me, and even though I don’t really say anything, we don’t talk about anything else the whole time. By the time lunch is over, Chris and Bean think I spent the whole summer having sex twelve times a day with a girl named Amanda who had a thing for doing it in rowboats. I walk out of the cafeteria in something like slow motion, with Chris and Bean pressed in around me, still asking me questions and laughing at their own answers. It’s a good first day back to school.

  9

  There is a message from Dad on the machine when I get home from school, just like there’s been every Friday since we got back from the lake. And just like all the other Friday messages, this one says there’s a problem at the plant and he can’t come home this weekend, but next weekend he’s definitely coming. It means we haven’t seen him since he left the lake house this summer.

  This whole first week of school Chris and Bean have hounded me for details about my Summer of Skanky Sex with Amanda. Every day, I think they’ll be tired of thinking of new and disgusting questions to ask me about her, but they aren’t. I still don’t really say anything. I shrug my shoulders, shake my head, maybe laugh a little. Enough to keep them from ignoring me, but not enough to make me feel any guiltier than I already do. Today when Bean launches into an Amanda story that is both nasty and physically impossible, I finally clam up. I don’t shrug, or smile. I shut down and don’t give them a thing to work from. They leave me sitting alone at the lunch table.

  Even though Karen and Amanda have looked at the photographs a thousand times in the week since school started, they have been sprawled on their stomachs in the den all afternoon going through the pile of pictures we took at the lake. At every picture they squeal and laugh, sometimes even holding them up for a split second so I can see them from where I lie on the couch. I don’t laugh with them, don’t say a word, just glance over when they wave a picture in front of me. Since we’ve come back from the lake, since before school started even, I’ve lost my position as a point of our triangle. They’re back to being a straight line, with no time or patience or interest in being part of any other geometric shape. They let me be near them, but if I make too much noise, make myself known, they get up and leave.

  I watch Amanda flip through the pictures of our summer at the lake and wonder if she knows what we do together in my sleep. I stare at her and try to telepathically insert my thoughts into her head. So she’s thinking, Oh, look at this picture. Hey, wait a minute, you know who’s really hot? Donnie. Donnie is really hot and I want to kiss him and let him feel me up.

  “Ohhhh. My God.” Karen holds a photo up clo
se to her face “Look at that.” She whips the picture under Amanda’s nose. “Look, Amanda. Look at how huge my ass is!” Karen’s almost breathless. “It’s oozing out of my bathing suit!”

  Amanda shrugs and rolls over onto her back, plants her palms on the floor, and pushes her pelvis up, stretching herself into a bridge, her shirt sliding up so I can see her belly and the very edge of her underwear. I watch her and try very hard not to lose my mind.

  “God! Donnie, stop staring at us. You’re so creepy . . .” Karen doesn’t even look up from the picture when she says this.

  Amanda drops back down to the floor and winks at me. I look into her eyes and think, Take off your shirt, take off your shirt, take off your shirt.

  “Donnie! Go do your homework. Mom said.” Karen jumps on the couch, knocking my legs off, her fingernails scratching my knuckles as she grabs the TV remote from my hand. It’s Amanda’s laughing that makes me knock Karen to the floor and sit on her stomach with her arms pinned by my knees on either side. I let drool hang out of my mouth and suck it back up before it hits her face. She’s screaming at this point, and Amanda’s a curled-up pretzel, laughing.

  “Get OFF!”

  The garage door opening makes the floor shake, and I slide off Karen, letting the last bit of spit land on the floor next to her face. I want to wink back at Amanda, but I can’t because Karen’s got my T-shirt pulled up over my head and she is trying to shove my face into her half-eaten bowl of ice cream. All I can think of is the zits on my back that came on after the summer, and how Amanda must be seeing the spray of nasty little white-tipped mountains on my skin. I shove Karen off, hard, and yank my T-shirt down in time to see Amanda putting on her jacket and saying hello to Mom and calling goodbye to Karen on the way out the front door. Karen’s stomping upstairs, studying the rug burn on her elbow and calling me an asshole.

  Mom yells at me for the ice cream on the rug, and Karen gets it for breaking the remote when she knocked it out my hand. Later on, when Karen’s taking a bath, I take two photos from the pile on her desk. One is of Karen, Amanda, and me sitting at a picnic table behind Jake’s, smiling at the camera. The other one is of Amanda standing on the edge of the dock, arms stretched above her head, ready to dive. That’s the picture I tape up by my bed, just where the mattress hits the wall. Before I go to sleep, I stare at it in the dark.

  10

  I know right away something is wrong when I come home. Mom’s car is in the driveway, and Karen’s and Amanda’s bikes are lying in the front yard, looking like they were ridden onto the lawn and dropped while they were still moving. When I walk in the house I can hear voices in the kitchen, and when I shut the door behind me, the voices stop.

  Mom is standing with her hand on Amanda’s shoulder. Amanda is sitting with her elbows on the table, and holding her head in her hands. Karen has her chair pulled up next to Amanda’s, and the way they try to kill me with their eyes, I know right away what has happened. Nobody died. Yet. For a second they all just look at me and I just look at Amanda, and then Karen clenches her teeth and says, “I should kick your scrawny butt.”

  I do the first thing I think of. I smirk at her and say, “I’d like to see you try . . .” I glance at Amanda, who keeps her eyes on the kitchen table.

  “Donnie, what were you thinking?” Mom has her I-just-can’t-understand-you voice on. “Why would you start a rumor like that?”

  I think about telling Mom to leave the room so the kids can talk.

  I watch Amanda study the table and think, Look at me, look at me, look at me. She doesn’t.

  “Donald, a girl’s reputation is—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ma,” Karen snaps.

  “Don’t swear at me, Karen. It’s true. A girl’s reputation is all she has.”

  Karen rolls her eyes and then levels them at me.

  “Donnie, why’d you make up lies about Amanda?”

  Amanda glances up at me with fierce but interested eyes.

  I shrug.

  Amanda looks back at the table and Karen rails on.

  “Did you think it’d make them like you? That’s it, right? You wanted your loser friends to like you. Fucking pathetic—”

  “Karen!” Mom snaps. “Watch your language!”

  Karen ignores her, and as Karen talks, Mom just keeps making these little meep sounds in her throat every time Karen swears, like she wants to interrupt her but more than that she wants Karen to tear me a new butt hole.

  “You know even the upperclassmen make fun of you guys, right? You know that the only reason you don’t get the shit [meep] beat out of you is because of me and Amanda, right? You care so much about what those fucking [meep] rejects think, you make up lies that nobody—nobody—in their right mind would believe. Seriously, Donnie. Did you think it wouldn’t get back to us? Did you think someone would believe that you and Amanda—”

  “Karen, that’s enough,” Mom says.

  “I mean, she’s a JUNIOR!” Karen finishes, shouting.

  Mom says, “Amanda is too upset to even talk to you, Donnie.”

  “No I’m not, Mrs. LePlant. I’m just mad.” Amanda sniffs and looks me full in the face. It was better when she was looking at the table. She wasn’t lying when she said she was pissed off. I’ve never had someone look at me like that. Look back down, look back down, look back down.

  “What happened, Donnie? Why’d you say those things about me?”

  Karen jumps in. “Do you know what they’re calling her, Donnie? Do you know what they wrote on her locker at school?”

  I shrug.

  “Rowboat.”

  I smile. I smiled! Oh, shit, I just smiled. I cough to try to cover it up, but Amanda is already across the kitchen and in my face.

  “You think that’s funny, Donnie? You think it’s funny that guys are taping pictures of their little brothers on my locker? It’s only the second week of school and I have to deal with this shit!” She’s so close I can feel her breath on my face. I could touch her lips with my tongue. “You think it’s funny that they call me a cradle-robber and ask if I’m still breast-feeding? Yeah. Real funny, Donnie. Good one.”

  She hates me. She hates me so much; I can feel it coming out of her. Everything’s gone wrong.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble, and turn to walk out of the kitchen. She hates me; I’m the world’s biggest jerk, fine. But I don’t have to stand here and get reamed by her in front of my mom, for God’s sake. But Amanda has other ideas. She moves in front me.

  “You’re right, you are sorry. You’re a sorry little snot and you need to stay the hell away from me.” She pokes me in the chest with her finger and it makes a hollow thump.

  Amanda grabs her backpack off the floor and heads toward the door. She stops and turns around.

  “You don’t know what it’s like, Donnie. I have to be on the defensive every day—just because some guys at school make a sport out of trying to feel you up in the hallways or listening to every word you say to see if they can turn it into something having to do with sex that they can shout out to their friends. It’s exhausting, Donnie, and then you throw them a jewel like this and they practically pee themselves with excitement.“

  The sound of Amanda slamming the sliding glass door stays in the room for a long, long time. Then Mom says, “They try to feel you up in the hallways?”

  Karen says, “For Christ’s sake, Ma,” and pushes past me out of the kitchen.

  Mom says, Meep.

  11

  I’m on the couch when Mom and Karen get home. There’s a marathon of kung fu movies on cable that I’ve been watching since I came home from school. I was hoping Karen and Mom would be gone long enough for me to watch them till my brain melted and nothing mattered anymore.

  Across town, Chris and Bean are watching the same thing. I should be with them, they even invited me, the first time they’ve asked me to hang out since school started, but instead I’m home. Alone. Because Dad is trying to ruin my life.

  Karen co
mes in first and runs past me and up the stairs—thud, thud, thud SLAM! I can hear her start to wail before the bedsprings sink under her.

  Mom’s slow up the front stairs. One step. Rest. Next step. Rest. She drops her bags at the top of the stairs and leaves them there, puts the teakettle on before she even takes off her coat. I’ve stopped watching TV and am waiting to see what happens. Karen’s wailing upstairs, and I can hear her smacking her minibasketball against the headboard of her bed, making new little dents for Mom to freak out about. I turn off the TV and listen to the teakettle boil, the ball smack against the wood. I don’t make a sound. I’m almost not even here.

  “Donnie.”

  Mom catches me right as I’m about to float out the window. I get up and stand in the doorway of the kitchen. She’s taken off her coat, left it hanging inside out on the back of a chair. She’s resting her head in the palm of her hand, I can see it’s heavy. She gives me a tired smile.

  “How was your afternoon with your dad?”

  I don’t know how to answer this, so I don’t. When the third week of school started and he still hadn’t come home (“Big problem at the plant, kids. Next weekend, I promise.” BEEEEP), Mom called him and yelled at him and he said he was going to come after school today to see me. I stand in front of my mom, feeling heat rise up to my face. I should have lied and said he’d come, but I think of it too late. She’s already getting furious. It’s embarrassing, knowing that she’s going to call him, that she has to yell at him to guilt him into coming to see me.

  Mom leaves a message on Dad’s machine. She ends with, “This is not what we agreed on. This is not what we discussed. The pieces of his heart can only break down so much; you are crushing them into dust. You are giving our son a heart of dust.”

  She slams the phone down, twice. I leave the room before she can give me her I’m sorry hug, my consolation prize for being a loser.