by Paul Rudnick
“Catey, you’re shaking. And sweating. Is it Billy? Is this how you get ready for a big date?”
“I … I … I …”
“Catey?”
My hands fluttered, at shoulder height. My eyes darted in every direction, refusing to see anything. My brain lunged for every usual response, for counting or knocking on wood or repeating my family’s first names, but I couldn’t latch on; nothing was working. I slammed my hands on the dashboard as hard as I could, over and over again, trying to make them bleed, trying to replace all of my horrible thoughts with physical pain.
“Catey! Stop!”
Heller tried to grab my hands but I kept pulling them away, flapping them wildly as my head started to jerk, as if I could shake every terrible thought out of my brain. I was making sounds, not words, just high-pitched repetitive noises.
“CATEY!”
Heller threw her arms around me, like a straitjacket. She held me as tightly as she could while I kept spasming. I slumped against the seat, breathing hard through my nose. Heller released me but kept her arms a few inches from my heaving body.
“Catey, it’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”
“I … I … I …”
“Don’t try to talk, not yet. You’re having a panic attack.”
“Nnnn … no …”
“Yes, you are. You’ve always had them. I was there. Only not like this.”
She … Heller knew? I’d always had panic attacks but I’d convinced myself that I covered them and that nobody noticed. They were my secret. My parents had taken me to a therapist but that was private. I was homeschooled. No one had to know.
“I know how bad they can get. It’s okay.”
“Not … not … no …”
“Let’s try something, I think it might help. I’ll do it with you. We’re gonna hold our breath and count to three and then slowly let it out. One … two … three …”
I held my breath. I counted. I let it out.
“I saw that email. I think I know what’s going on. North Carolina is far away. You’ll be alone. They’ll want you to sing. Of course you’re scared. But this is me. I know you. And, Catey?”
I looked at her.
“You can do it. If you want to. You can do anything.”
I tried to smile, but I couldn’t. I was reaching for the dashboard.
“Catey?”
I was trying so hard, to pull my hand back. But I knew that my parents were going to die and it would be all my fault. I had to touch the dashboard, only I’d already done that, so I started to pound my fist on the window, in threes, hoping I could break the glass. Heller grabbed my wrist and I jerked around to see her face, and I knew she’d look fed up and disgusted, only she didn’t. She looked frightened.
“Catey, this also helps.”
Heller dug into her shoulder bag and found a plastic pill bottle.
I shook my head violently back and forth—no! That wasn’t the answer! I tried to reach for the bottle to throw it out of the car, but my arm was too weak.
“It’s not what you think, I’m clean and you know that. These are left over from when I was trying to quit smoking. They’re called Heliotrex and all they do is calm you down, so you can function. You probably won’t even notice. I’m just going to give you one.”
Sophie and Billy were waiting. My parents were depending on me. Everyone was depending on me, even if I didn’t know who they were.
Heller handed me the pill and a bottle of water.
I held the pill in the palm of my hand.
I didn’t want to feel like this. I didn’t want anyone to see me feeling like this. I wanted to make all of the terrible feelings and the compulsions and the shivering go away.
I swallowed the pill.
“Good girl,” said Heller.
* * *
The tattoo parlor was in a storefront and the walls were covered with drawings of different tattoos. The possibilities included a tattered American flag, a skull wearing a pirate scarf and a hoop earring, tumbling dice, a woman in a leopard-skin bikini riding a lion, a peace symbol, and characters from Star Wars, Avatar, Star Trek and every known video game, which made me wonder, Why would anyone want the Super Mario Brothers across their stomach? There was also Chinese calligraphy with English translations, for words like friendship, eternity, war, blood brothers, family and for some reason, “to vomit.” There were also frillier designs of roses and lilies but these were surrounding hearts with daggers through them, dripping blood. There was a whole section devoted to stick figures, which at first looked like one of those charts on the wall of a restaurant that demonstrate the Heimlich maneuver, but then I realized that the stick figures were having sex with each other, in different positions.
“Billy!” said a woman emerging from behind a beaded curtain. I couldn’t tell how old the woman was because every inch of her was covered in tattoos, including her face, which was patterned with tiger stripes. Her arms looked like comic books and she was wearing a tank top so I could see that her neck and shoulders had realistic pictures of smiling babies’ heads; she was like a human grandchild bracelet. She had on tight, faded jeans with what I thought were patches but which turned out to be holes exposing tattoos that looked like patches. She had long jet-black hair and piercings along both ears, both eyebrows, both nostrils and her lips; her head was like a jewelry display at a street fair.
“Larinda!” said Billy, and as they hugged I began wondering if, once we were married, Billy and I would invite Larinda over for Thanksgiving dinner or on Saturday night for board games and mac and cheese.
“Larinda, this is Heller and Catey and Sophie. Sophie wants some ink.”
“Welcome, one and all,” said Larinda. “I love my Billy! Are we just talking about little Sophie here, or how about you girls getting in on the action?”
“I’m so there,” Heller told Larinda. “I love your stuff.” From what I’d glimpsed over the weekend, Heller already had tattoos of her mom’s face, a smiling banana wearing a top hat, SpongeBob with his hand down his SquarePants, and the Statue of Liberty smoking a joint.
“Catey?” said Larinda. “Are you in?”
Ordinarily, right about now, I wouldn’t be able to breathe or I’d be running out the door and trying to drag Heller and Sophie along with me. For some reason, and maybe it was the pill I’d swallowed, I was feeling incredibly serene and centered. The tattoos on the walls seemed very friendly, like a mural in a nursery with a dancing parade of Disney characters.
“Sophie, while I don’t approve, I understand why you want to get a tattoo,” I said. “As for me, I am the last person on earth who would ever, ever do anything like that. I just don’t believe in doing anything overtly pornographic or reprehensible or trashy.”
“You are the sweetest girl I’ve ever met,” said Billy, which was when I grabbed him by the neck and started kissing him, only instead of like when I’d kissed Mills, this time I opened my mouth.
The next thing I remember I was behind the wheel of a cherry-red convertible with the top down, going ninety miles per hour down a highway, singing along with a pop song on the radio at the top of my lungs, with Heller beside me and Sophie in the backseat singing even louder. I was feeling fantastic and when I glanced in the rearview mirror I saw that my hair had been hacked off and dyed at least five neon colors and there was a little silver post sticking through the side of my nose. I felt something on my forearm and I looked down to see a white bandage. Which was how I knew I wasn’t wearing my blazer and that I’d ripped the sleeves off my blouse.
Heller had a bandage on her forearm too and Sophie’s wrist was wrapped in gauze and her topknot was now hot pink, tipped in bright blue and orange, like a snow cone. As I was processing all of this information there was one central detail that stood out and stopped me cold: I was driving.
While I had a learner’s permit, I hadn’t used it for almost a year because I was terrified of driving. My parents and several of my older siblings had sa
t beside me while I’d taken very, very slow test drives on empty back roads, but on each trip I’d stopped after half a mile, convinced that I was about to careen off the road and slam into a nonexistent tree or house. I’d eventually stopped trying and my mom had comforted me by saying, “Driving isn’t for everyone,” and my dad had said, “You’ll drive when you’re ready,” and my brother Callum had said, “Maybe you should practice driving while you’re sitting at your desk, unless you’re worried about ramming into a floor lamp.”
I wasn’t just driving, I was breaking the speed limit by at least forty miles an hour and I only had one hand on the steering wheel because I was pumping my other fist in the air, keeping the beat.
I yanked the wheel to one side and drove onto the shoulder of the highway and slammed on the brakes.
“What … what am I doing?” I asked.
“You were doing great!” said Heller.
“You’re fucking amazing!” said Sophie. “You’re my new hero!”
“Excuse me?” said Heller.
“My second new hero! My assistant new hero! You’re both incredible!”
“But … but … I’m driving,” I said. “My hair is … gone. There’s something in my nose!”
I looked down at the seat beside me.
“I HAVE A GUN! WHY DO I HAVE A GUN?”
“Catey?” said Heller. “What’s going on? Don’t you remember?”
“Dude,” said Sophie, “you were on fire! You were like … Lynnea! If she wasn’t always so bummed about the end of the world!”
“What—what did I do? The last thing I remember is—oh my good Lord, I was kissing Billy Connors! Where’s Billy?”
“You left him at the tattoo parlor,” Heller explained. “He was running along behind us when you stole the car.”
“When I WHAT?”
“She didn’t steal it,” said Sophie. “She, like, borrowed it. The keys were in the ignition, which means that whoever owns it, they wanted us to borrow it, right?”
I wasn’t sure which was more horrifying: the things that Heller and Sophie were telling me I’d done, or the fact that I couldn’t remember any of it.
“All right,” I said, trying to keep my breathing and my heartbeat under control. “You have to tell me. Step-by-step. Don’t leave anything out. What did I do?”
“Well,” Heller began, “at the tattoo place you were a wild booty-humper. You were kissing Billy for a really long time—no, I would say that you were devouring him. All I could see were his feet sticking out of your mouth.”
“Which at first I thought was kind of gross,” said Sophie. “Because of all the slurping. And the moaning.”
“Then you pushed Billy away,” Heller continued. “You said, ‘Thank you, William, and bless you,’ and you said to Larinda, ‘If your schedule permits, I would truly enjoy a tattoo.’ ”
“It was so great!” said Sophie. “You were like you, only, I don’t know, wild! Because after Larinda did all our tattoos you said, ‘Thank you so much and may I ask, what other services do you offer?’ You were so, like, super polite, like you were ordering brunch or something, and when Larinda asked if you wanted to get your nose pierced you said, ‘Might I?’ You sounded, like, English or something! It turned out so awesome and it didn’t bleed almost at all! I was gonna get mine pierced too but I decided to just let my parents kill me for the tattoo.”
I looked in the mirror and gently touched the stud in my nose, which was throbbing. It looked like my nose had been in a construction accident.
“And then,” Heller said, “I couldn’t believe it, I was so pissed. Once we went outside, our van was missing. Gone. Not there. Some asshole had probably hot-wired it, and there weren’t any cabs so I didn’t know how we were going to get back to the hotel.”
“Catey, you were so on it,” said Sophie. “You just stood there and you looked around and you saw this convertible. You pointed at it and you said, ‘The Lord provides.’ ”
“You looked up to heaven and you gave this little salute,” said Heller.
“That’s right, that’s right, that’s right!” said Sophie.
“You walked over to it,” said Heller, “you found the keys and you smiled at us, and you said, ‘It’s such a lovely spring day. Let’s put the top down. And perhaps I’ll take mine off.’ ”
“Whoa!” said Sophie. “So cool! Billy was just staring at you, he was all like, what?!”
“We jumped in and you floored it, before Billy could get in,” said Heller, “and you waved to him and you said, ‘Ladies only, William! I enjoyed your tongue!’ ”
“I LOVE YOU!” said Sophie. “You should have your own video game!”
I couldn’t comprehend any of this. I refused to. None of it was possible. There was simply no way that I, Caitlin Mary Prudence Rectitude Singleberry, could have performed any of the criminal acts Heller and Sophie were describing and cheering for.
This was all Heller’s fault. She’d been planning this all along, to catch me at a weak moment and drug me. This was her evil triumph. She’d crossed the ultimate line.
The pill Heller had given me must have knocked me unconscious, or maybe the drug had changed my body chemistry in some hideous way. I’d once seen a TV commercial for an antidepressant that had shown a cartoon woman with a cartoon rain cloud over her head, and the cloud had followed her around until the woman had taken the antidepressant and then the cloud had turned into a bouquet of daisies with smiley faces. All during this commercial a voice-over had been saying, “Side effects may include dry mouth, a loss of sensation in the fingertips and toes, kidney failure, night blindness, stroke risk and intense homicidal or suicidal thoughts.” I didn’t understand why anyone would take that drug with all of those risks attached, so now I needed to know, what were the warnings on the pill Heller had given me?
“Heller,” I said, trying to speak calmly and evenly. “What was in that pill you gave me? Was it a street drug? What are the possible side effects?”
“Nothing!” Heller insisted. “It’s totally mild! On the bottle, it doesn’t say anything about stealing cars or flashing people.”
“Did you say … flashing people?” I asked, hoping against hope that by flashing, Heller meant blowing kisses or making a peace sign or maybe just waving.
“It was so stellar,” said Sophie. “We’re driving along having a blast, and this big tractor-trailer tries to pass us, right, and there’s a dude hanging out the window and he’s yelling stuff and he’s being, like, so rude.”
“So you say, ‘Hel, could you please take the wheel,’ ” said Heller, “and I grab it while you pull your blouse open and you say to the guy in the truck, ‘These belong to Jesus! But I’ll pray for you!’ ”
“BOOM!” said Sophie. “I think that truck drove right off the road!”
I looked down to button my blouse back up, which I certainly would have done if the top three buttons hadn’t been missing.
“And then, oh man, I love this part,” said Sophie, “you see this hairstyling place called Tiffani’s Happening Hairbomb. And you say, ‘Ladies, I think I could use a little touch-up,’ and you pull over.”
“At first I was worried that you might do something that Kenz and Nedda wouldn’t approve of, like a perm,” said Heller. “But you had a plan. You walked right into that salon and said, ‘I would like to speak with Tiffani.’ So Tiffani came over and you sat down in one of the chairs and you said, ‘I would like the full Happening Hairbomb experience. Look at all of those marvelous bottles over there with so many different hair colors and rinses, and are those called cellophanes? Tiffani, I trust you.’ ”
“You were so fucking outlaw,” said Sophie. “You shut your eyes and Tiffani got busy. And that, like, gave me courage, so I told Misti Ramona, who was one of the other stylists, to get goin’ with my topknot. I told her to think parfait Popsicle on Mars. Do you love it?”
“It’s … it’s really colorful,” I said, turning to look at Sophie, because that way I co
uld stop staring at the active crime scene on top of my own head.
“Just when Tiffani had run out of colors and was finishing up,” said Heller. “That’s when we heard it.”
“I got so scared,” said Sophie.
“What? What did you hear?”
“Gunshots,” said Heller, “from the Valu-Brite convenience store, which was right next to the Happening Hairbomb at the strip mall. Somebody was robbing it and everyone at the Hairbomb was all, ‘Lock the doors! Let’s hide in the back! Call 911!’ But you were so totally together, you didn’t even bat an eye, you just said, ‘If everyone would please excuse me?’ ”
“We followed you,” said Sophie, “but we stayed like a few yards behind you. You reached into the convertible, into the glove compartment, right, and that was where you got the pistol. You held it up in the air and you cocked it, like you’d been using a gun your whole damn life. Then you shut your eyes and you, like, prayed or something.”
“And then, oh my God, I couldn’t believe it, I was like, go, Catey, go,” said Heller. “You marched into that Valu-Brite and we crouched down and watched you from the window. There were these two guys wearing ski masks, and one of them had a sawed-off shotgun and he was pointing it at the woman behind the counter, who was so nice, but she could barely speak English and she was shaking. The other creep kept telling her, ‘Gimme the money from the registers or we’ll splatter your brains all over the fucking breath mints.’ ”
“So I’m going, oh no, they’re gonna kill that poor lady, and then they’ll kill us,” said Sophie. “But you walked in there and you pointed your pistol right at those two jerkwads, and you said, oh my God, it was so beyond badass, you said …”
“ ‘I’m certain that you fellows hail from underprivileged and possibly abusive backgrounds, and I will do everything in my power to help you overcome those obstacles,’ ” said Heller.