“I’m not with her.”
“Technicalities. She’s at college, big deal. You have a car.”
“She’s not at college,” I said. “She didn’t go back after Christmas break.”
“What?”
I mumbled through the details. Neecie looked shocked. More shocked that Hallie had quit college than that I’d been doing it with her.
“Was it, like, too hard for her or something? College?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is she’s depressed or something.”
Neecie was quiet for a minute. Then: “So, that’s why you go fuck her, then? Because she’s so sad and pathetic?”
“Jesus!” I said. Because saying it that way was blunt. And pretty much true.
“Or because you’re so sad and pathetic?” she asked.
“Jesus! Is that why you fucked Tristan?”
“Obviously.”
“You’re not sad and pathetic, Neecie.”
“Whatever.”
Then she wouldn’t look at me, so I had to stop talking if I wanted her to hear me right and I thought it was a pretty sweet system she had for controlling and cutting off conversation. Until I realized she was crying. Oh god. Crying girl, in my car. I wanted to hit the eject button.
“Neecie. Neecie, come on. Neecie, it’s okay . . . Okay?”
My words being feeble and probably hard to hear as I was almost whispering and she wasn’t looking anyway.
I touched her knee, and she looked up.
“Hey,” I said. Then I couldn’t think of anything to say.
She wiped her eyes a little, her makeup getting smudgy. It was the first time I’d noticed she wore makeup. She didn’t seem like a very make-uppy girl, I guess.
“I didn’t think you believed me at first,” she said. “That we were doing it, me and Tristan. Because, you know. I’m me, and everything. And he’s, like, Tristan.”
I hadn’t believed her, really. But there was no way I’d ever tell her that.
“And he’s not, like, you know, always a dick to me,” she continued. “Sometimes he’s really nice, Sean. Plus, I know a lot about him. Not on purpose. But it’s been, like, you know, like half a year. He doesn’t get why I wouldn’t text him back. He was so mad! And, like, whining. Sad. But what did he expect me to do? Start crying? Start fighting with him, like I was his girlfriend? Be all crazy and possessive? I mean, he’s gone out with like four other girls since all this started. So, what was I supposed to do? I mean, I know all these things. All these little weird things about him. Like, he’s only ticklish in one spot. And he loves country music. I mean, how geeky is that? Like, not just the cool alt-country stuff. I’m talking Taylor Swift and Tim McGraw, all the shitty new stuff. And all the twangy old stuff. He knows all the words, too. He’s kind of a good singer, actually. Sometimes he sings along with it, when we’re in his car alone. He has tons of it on his iPod. No one knows that about him but me, because, you know, he doesn’t really advertise. I mean, country music sucks, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“And he has this cat? At his mom’s house. He misses that damn cat so much when he has to stay with his dad. He sits and cuddles with that cat. He talks to it. The cat stays in the room, on the bed, while we’re doing it, you know? Because he feels bad closing the door on her. I mean, what do I do with all that information, Sean? I can’t do anything with it. But I can’t really forget it. And I can’t really break up with him, either.”
“It sounds like you tried.”
“Yeah, but I think Tristan thinks . . .”
“Hey, who cares what he fucking thinks?” I said, a little loud. “Him and Hallie both. I mean, it’s fine, I guess. Just to be hooking up. I mean, obviously both of us think it’s fine or we wouldn’t do it, right?”
She nodded.
“And so, what?” I continued. “It feels good. That’s fine. I mean, not gonna argue with things that feel good, right?”
“Well...”
“Does it not feel good, Neecie? Tell me it did, at least little. Because, otherwise, why would . . .?”
“God!” she shouted, and laughed a little and covered her mouth. “I can’t believe you. I mean . . . yeah. It felt good,” she said. “We got good at it. I’ll say that for the whole thing.” Then she got all red and laughed some more. “God.”
“Well, that’s a fucking relief,” I said. Though I didn’t feel relieved. Not at all.
“It wasn’t good at first, though,” she said. “It was, you know. Boring, a little. For me, at least. Then, later, it . . . wasn’t.”
I couldn’t look at her for some reason, then. She was kind of smiling, and red, and she had tears, and it was like, I didn’t want to hear the sex stuff when there were tears. Or maybe I did. But I didn’t want to hear it and then pretend everything was normal and there wasn’t The Horn or that I wasn’t insanely curious to know every last detail. Every last one. Because I was curious. And jealous. Because it was Tristan. Just, too many things.
“I mean, too bad if he’s sad or Hallie’s gone mental or whatever,” I continued. “Tough shit, right? I can think of a whole lot worse shit than Tristan not getting laid or Hallie failing out of college.”
“Hallie failed?”
“No. I don’t know. She wasn’t getting along with her roommate or something. Who cares, that’s not the point.”
“Right. What is the point, then?”
Shit. What was I trying to say?
“The point is that we did it and we enjoyed it and that’s good enough. Like, just fuck the whole thing, you know? Don’t worry about it.”
I had no idea what I was talking about anymore. This pep talk had just been aimed at stopping the crying. Beyond that, I didn’t really know what the point of anything was.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay, okay, okay.” She wiped her eyes, wiped her hands on her jeans, shook out her hair.
“Now go take a nap. And I’m gonna . . . I don’t know. Do something.”
“You should take a nap, too, Sean,” she said. “All that running. Aren’t you tired?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Kinda sore, too.”
“Take a bath,” she said.
“A bath? No way.”
“Good for sore muscles, my mom says.”
“Guys don’t take baths, Neecie.”
“Whatever. You’re just being an idiot about it. All the pro athletes take hot baths and stuff. I’ve seen it on ESPN. It’s like you don’t watch television, I swear. You need to take care of yourself so you don’t get injured. I mean, is this our new Saturday tradition? I get free breakfast and then pick you up miles away from the starting point?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. It’s kind of a whole big pain in the ass.”
“Look, you can’t flunk out of boot camp, Sean! You’ve got to keep up or the gunny will humiliate you and you’ll blow your brains out in the latrine.”
“What?”
“Full Metal Jacket,” she said. “You need to see that movie.”
“Oh.”
“Or just join track,” she said. “Then all the workouts are figured out for you. Like, the coach’ll do it all.”
“But I don’t want to compete and stuff. I mean, I don’t want to . . .”
“Just join for the workouts. Who cares if you compete? Even if you just run with the B squad, it’ll be easier. And over with. Just think, every day, you’ll be done at 5:30. No weekend bullshit.” She unclicked her seat belt. “I can’t imagine you with no hair, Sean.”
“What?”
“They shave your head, you know. You’ll be all bald. I can’t even imagine you like that. Like, what if your skull is all lumpy? Or covered in moles or something?”
“What are you even talking about?” I ran my hand over my head, though. Like I was checking for lumps already.
“You know they shave your head, right? How can you not know that?”
“I know that. But, just, who has moles on their damn head?”
&
nbsp; “I don’t know; I go to the dermatologist a lot. They have some pretty weird photos on the walls there.” She started gathering up her Thrift Bin bags and stuff. “See you at work tomorrow?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Sean?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for cheering me up. I mean, sorry for crying and stuff.”
“It’s okay. What . . . what are you doing tonight?” I said it all casual. Didn’t want to sound date-y. It was Saturday and everything, but we weren’t like that.
“I said I’d go out with Ivy,” she said.
“Okay.”
“But I’ll text you if that’s boring.”
“Text me if it’s fun, how about.”
She laughed. “I will.”
And there it was, again, us, friends. But The Horn, man. The Horn was all over Neecie Albertson’s shit. The Horn didn’t know what he was doing. I swear, though, it was The Horn that texted Hallie before I could drive away.
Chapter Thirteen
Valentine’s Day at school was more than a day. Since the actual day landed on a Wednesday, it dragged on all damn week. Nothing but announcements about the flower and candy sales and girls fluttering around the student council table at lunch getting all insane about who they were sending stuff to and a few cases of swaggering guys doing it too. Like buying one-dollar carnations made you some kind of romantic badass.
Neecie was home sick most of the week, which was good, I guess, because then she wouldn’t have to watch that Hannah chick Tristan went out with lose her mind about her cheap, assysmelling carnations that she got in the middle of our goddamn English class. I kind of wanted to clock her, to be honest, the way she was acting all fake-surprised and all “OH MY GOD WHAT IS GOING ON” like she didn’t know damn well what was going on.
Two days after Valentine’s Day, Eddie and me were eating lunch in the cafeteria. He told me he’d gotten Libby a candy bar but she hadn’t really seemed that into it.
“I think she’s pissed,” he said. “Maybe she wanted flowers?”
I didn’t say anything. Mostly because it a no-brainer: go buy her some flowers, then, too. Or a whole box of candy. Or some other thing she liked. Mostly, though, buying stuff for people in order for them to know you liked them seemed like the creepiest thing in the world. Prostitute-y.
Obviously, I was kind of salty; I’d gone over to Hallie’s after school the day after Valentine’s Day and she was also in bed, sick. I wondered if she had the same thing Neecie had.
Whatever it was, she was sick enough to not even want to go down to the laundry room. And though we were in her bed, she didn’t seem into it. I mean, she was the one who texted me, so I guess she was. But mainly, it was just me doing my thing. A little too fast, probably.
“Now I’ve gotten you sick,” she said, when I coughed while getting dressed.
“I’m just clearing my throat,” I said.
“Mine started with a cough,” she said, pulling her sweatshirt over her head and coughing herself. No bra. Hallie seemed uninterested in wearing underwear lately. This might have been sexy, if not for the fact that she seemed so dull and sad since leaving college. Even when we had sex, I felt like she was about to sigh the whole time.
It would have been okay, beyond the fact that she never had anything to say anymore, because she said she just sat around in her old room in bed all day watching movies on her laptop. We walked out to the TV room and she flopped on the sofa. I started putting my shoes on and then, out of the blue, she just started crying.
It was real crying, too. Messy. Like she’d been holding it in for a long time, and while I felt like escaping through the sliding glass door onto the deck, I just couldn’t. Neecie had cried in front of me, and I’d managed to deal with that.
“Hallie, what’s . . . What’s going on?”
She didn’t talk for a long time; she blew her nose, she sniffled, she gasped for air, she shook her head. Basically, she was more animated than she’d been with my dick up her. Which made me want to cry along with her. The both of us were so shitty. I went to the bathroom and got her a wad of toilet paper, hoping that would help, that she’d wipe her eyes and get over it.
But she kept crying. It went on so long, I didn’t know what to do or say. I’d never heard anyone cry that long before. And I was running out of patience, which was shitty to admit. I was starting to think it was all an act. Nobody could cry that much. Not in front of another person who was standing there looking concerned and handing you toilet paper, at least.
I tried to interrupt her crying, asking her what was wrong again, but the only things she would say was that everything sucked and she hated her life and nobody even gave her a Valentine except her mom and dad and they didn’t count and why the fuck did this happen to her? Why did it feel like everyone hated her?
“Why, Sean?”
I didn’t know why. I kind of hated her, too, at that moment. And then her mom came home with a bunch of bags from Walgreens and she looked at me sitting by her sobbing daughter on the TV room sofa like I had fallen from the sky into her house. But she didn’t seem surprised by the endless crying, and I just handed Mrs. Martin the wad of toilet paper and she nodded and hugged Hallie, and this time I went out the front door because I didn’t want her to connect me with the footprints in the snow on the back deck, since obviously she had enough problems.
Since he was in trouble with Libby, Eddie and me decided to hang out one Friday. We spent the first bit of it in his basement playing video games and eating dinner (Eddie’s mom made the best food, I swear). Then we decided to go to this party he’d heard of, even though I thought it’d probably be a bunch of sophomores, from the sound of it.
But it wasn’t; it was a pretty great party, some dude he knew from lifeguarding’s house. And strangely enough, Neecie was there, with Ivy. And Ivy was drunk and hanging around Neecie’s neck, and Neecie looked super happy and a little buzzed and her face was all red, down to her neck and the top of her boobs and she wore this shirt that was really low and I wondered if she got red like that all the way down under her shirt. And then Ivy started hanging off Eddie, after a while, and Eddie and her went into another room because he wanted to smoke his little bit of weed and Ivy was all about that so it was just me and Neecie standing next to each other in this cram-packed party when the cops showed up and everyone bolted in a million directions.
Running from a house party when the cops come is a stupid thing to do. They’re looking for you to run, really, which is why you should just stay put until you know the situation. Like if they’re more cops out on the street or if it’s just a warning or whatever. But Eddie and Ivy freaked and with a bunch of other kids, shot through the back door, right into the snow drifts and started running.
But it was just a cop responding to a noise complaint, wanting everyone to leave, not to bust anyone. That’s all they wanted, really: to make the fun end.
I explained this to Neecie, because she wanted to run at first too. Then we played pool in the basement for a while. The kid whose house it was hung out with us; with most everyone gone, he shut off all the lights and music and sat on the little built-in bar thing and smoked weed out of a pop can and told us about how he was going to college in North Dakota and it was boring as hell, but I knew Neecie wasn’t paying attention anyway, and I was mostly paying attention to her low-neck shirt and her pink bra sticking out at the shoulder and wondering again, now that her skin was all calm and pale again, what her boobs looked like and thinking I was gross, because it’d only been like a week since the Hallie crying thing had happened, and it was like I had some kind of addiction with The Horn or something.
“I have some pretty good news, Sean,” Neecie said when we’d left the party. The kid who’d been smoking out finally passed out on his sofa watching Cartoon Network. Neecie and I sat in my car; I was spitting sunflower seed shells into an empty bottle of Amp while she kept checking her phone for texts from Ivy.
“What’s th
at?” I asked.
“I got into Carleton,” she said. “I just found out this afternoon.”
“Really? You’re kidding! That’s awesome!” I wanted to hug her, but it was awkward in the car, plus I didn’t want to spill the sunflower seeds everywhere.
“I know,” she said. “It’s expensive as fuck, though. My mom’s making me work with Gary’s brother’s company all summer, plus the Thrift Bin. She’s sort of crazy about all the loans and stuff.”
“Well, but still, that’s great, Neecie. I’m really happy for . . .”
“Oh!” she said, as her phone beeped. She scrolled through the text. “They’re going to the King Pin. She says to meet them there.”
“For what? To go bowling?”
“Yeah, I guess. They got a ride from someone Eddie knew. And Ivy’s car is still parked over here, so, I don’t know how she’s gonna handle that shit.”
“But, bowling?”
“It’ll be fun,” she said. “We gotta go. She said they’ll get us a lane.”
“I hate bowling.”
“Everyone hates bowling. Just drive.”
The King Pin was past its prime. Seriously. You went to the bowling alley connected to the movie theater if you wanted something decent, because that place had cool games and shit to do.
But the King Pin was for people who actually still bowled competitively, and not for a joke like kids did. Though the King Pin had probably been a hopping joint back in its day. It was still all kitted out with gold walls and bright orange plastic seats, the kind that looked like the old version of spaceships, in what people thought was so cutting-edge back then. There were still ashtrays built into the curvy seats, and you know the million-year-old score machine that looked like the overhead projector our Global Studies teacher still used must have been considered pretty fancy too.
But I was feeling a little shitty. Because I was supposed to be happy for Neecie, celebrate her going to college. Instead I was just thinking about my own dumb self, how I didn’t have a good answer, still, when someone asked me what I was doing after graduation, because I couldn’t tell my mom because I was a giant pussy about everything. Neecie was the only one who knew about me, and now if anyone asked what she was doing after graduation, Neecie could pop up like toast and chirp, “Going to Carleton!” and everyone would smile and be impressed and think she was super smart—which she was and which they should be.
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