I wondered again what she left behind in Thailand, and while I thought that, I saw her sort of sinking, breathing deeper and deeper. Every breath, she seemed smaller, shorter, browner. Her back was all criss-crossed with ridges, and there was dark spots on her butt like she run into a door or something.
I wanted to feel those stripes with my hands.
Then I remembered her turning into a tiger woman in her sleep.
Instead of touching, I pulled the sheet up over her.
I curled up at the foot of the bed. I listened for her breathing until it was all I could hear. I had a new superbody too, with super-ears. I could hear her heartbeat. I pulled the sheet over me and made sure to give her bare feet lots of room, so’s I wouldn’t startle her by touching her in her sleep.
Next day I was picking up Jee’s dry cleaning and I heard the voice that always turned me to stone.
“So, you got a job finally? My son is an errand boy? And you’re blowing your paycheck on trashy clothes instead of paying your mother rent finally! You couldn’t tell me. I had to find you by accident.”
I felt myself shrivel up until I was like seven years old. Felt like I actually got shorter. The dry cleaning bag brushed the sidewalk and I jerked it up so’s it wouldn’t get dirty. Jee would have a fit if her stuff got ruined.
Ma got hold of my ear. “You’re coming home right now! The windows need cleaning and the dog’s been shitting in the basement.”
I winced, thinking about the basement. “Aw, Ma, you ain’t let him out this whole time?” My rug would be a mess. I’ve tried to teach him to pee on the concrete by the drain hole over in the laundry room, but no. The dog din’t even like me. Bit me every time I fed him. Lot like Ma, actually.
“Well, are you gonna deliver that, so I can take you home?”
She was bigger than me. She was taller than a tree. I couldn’t look her in the eye.
What do I do now? I started sweating. I couldn’t lead her back to the Lair. She wouldn’t let me go to the Lair alone, that was for sure. Nor I couldn’t leave Jee’s dry cleaning nowhere, ‘cause Jee’d hit the ceiling. I started feeling seven again, like there was no way to win. Never, ever any way to win. My stomach hurt.
“This is a nice dress. I can’t believe they trust my no-good son with such a nice dress. Is that where you got these clothes you’re wearing? Did you steal them from the dry cleaner?”
Lie, lie, lie. I licked my lips. “Abandoned. People don’t pay for their stuff. It’s like a garage sale.” I sneaked a look at her. She was buying it.
“Really?” She got a crafty look. “I wonder if they have any more of these dresses?” Her hand reached out for Jee’s dress in the dry cleaner bag and I jerked it away.
“Reginald!”
Panic made me think faster. I jumped over to the curb where an empty cab was waiting for the light to change. I ran around to the cabbie’s window. “Look, deliver this stuff for me, will ya?” I grabbed money out of my pocket. There was maybe two or three hundred there, but I couldn’t keep that. Ma would get it. I put it all in the cabbie’s hand. “Take it to 4121 North Ravenswood. Ring the doorbell and keep ringing it until somebody comes and takes it from you.” I shoved the dress through the window into his lap. When I looked over the cab at Ma, on the sidewalk, her eyes were narrowed at me.
“Wait!” I added. The light was changing. People were honking behind the cab. “Just wait, will you?” I pulled out my phone and called Jee. Got her voicemail. I was grateful for that. What if she’d ordered me to come back to the Lair? “Jee, my Ma caught up with me. I hadda put your dry cleaning in a cab. He’s bringing it to the Lair now. Cab number, uh,” and I checked the door, “Forty-five sixteen. Yeah,” I added, as if I was talking to Jee, not her voicemail. “Right. Okay, thanks, bye.”
I hung up. Then I had a inspiration. I reached in, grabbed the dress back from the cabbie, tucked my phone into the accessory bag hanging on the neck of the hanger, and shoved it all back at him. “Go, go!”
The cab roared off, nearly running over my foot, and I hopped back to the curb where Ma was waiting for me.
Jee
I stared at my phone in amazement. I’d been so sure Reg was trained. Now, boom, he runs into his mother and he’s gone? What the fuck?
I got my credit card back from the Neiman’s clerk, stuck it in my purse, and called the Lair.
Pog was home. I told her, “Listen, a cab is coming by with my dry cleaning.” I explained what Reg had said in his message. Then it occurred to me to call him back and say what the fuck directly. “I gotta go.”
But Reg didn’t answer. Some guy with a Caribbean accent did. “No, he has left his phone with me. I’ll deliver it to your door in one block.”
“What? Did—” I was speechless for a moment. “Did you see his mother?”
“Oh yes. She looked very angry.”
“What else did she look like? Height weight yadda yadda?” I was running down the Fields escalator, flight after long flight, barging past tourists and rich teenagers.
“I’m sorry, Miss. I don’t remember. I’m ringing your doorbell now.”
I hung up and called Pog back. Over the phone I heard her walking down the metal stairs to the factory floor, heard her sharp heels crossing the plywood basketball deck, heard the doorbell ring, heard her voice and the cabbie’s voice. She said to me finally, “He had Reg’s phone.”
“What the fuck?” I exploded. I bolted through the choking stinks of the perfume and jewelry department and through the revolving doors, out onto Michigan Avenue.
“I know, right?” Pog said. “What the fuck?”
I hung up. There was a cab right there. I grabbed it.
When I got back to the Lair, Pog was sipping beer in the kitchen, staring at Reg’s phone with her brow wrinkled.
“I don’t get it. I thought he liked it here.” she said.
Something inside me was shriveling up, hard and painful. “Yeah,” Now my throat was too tight to talk. I forced out, “Fuck.”
Pog and I looked at each other.
“Oh,” Pog said abruptly. “The cabbie tried to give me some money Reg gave him. Like three hundred bucks. It’s as if he just emptied his wallet at him. I told him to keep it.”
“Reg doesn’t carry a wallet,” I said numbly. “He likes to have a big wad of cash in his pocket. Makes his dick hard.” I wasn’t criticizing. Getting ridiculously overpaid was part of what made my world go around, too.
“It’s like he met his mom, he got overcome with whatever, like, he’s how old? He’s only been here three weeks,” Pog complained. She stared at his phone, as I had.
I felt my chest tighten up and go hot inside. I couldn’t breathe. My ears rang.
“I thought he liked it here,” Pog grumbled again, and then looked up at me accusingly, as if somehow I’d chased him off.
I turned away and blundered to the kitchen door. Then I stopped, went to my fridge, grabbed out a sixpack, slammed the fridge shut, opened the freezer, grabbed a bottle of vodka, slammed the freezer shut, and blundered through the kitchen door.
I locked myself in the bathroom, opened all the bottles, turned out all the lights, and turned on the steam in the shower compartment.
In the dark and hot, moist, thickening air, I proceeded to get shitfaced.
“What’s the matter with her?” I heard Beth say outside the steamed-up glass of the shower compartment.
“Reg went back to his mom,” Pog said.
“What?” Beth always made you repeat everything, like somehow the reality would go away if she misheard it.
“Reg. Left.” Pog sounded pissed.
“I thought he liked it here,” Beth said, and my guts tied themselves in another knot.
Somebody tapped on the bathroom door from the hall. “Is Reg in there?” Amanda said from outside. “He left the laundry wet in the machine.”
“He went back to his mother,” Pog and Beth chorused.
“What? I thought he liked it here.�
��
I turned the steam up, curled into a ball, and put my hands over my ears.
Pog
“She’s been in there for four hours,” I said. I put the brisket platter on the table. I’d taught Reg to make brisket only last night. He’d caramelized the onions himself and put the browned brisket in the crockpot on low for twenty hours. It smelled great.
Beth looked at the platter with a grim face. “This is creepy.”
Amanda glanced at her and forked a chunk of beef off the platter.
“Any good?” I said.
“Holy shit, yeah.” Amanda chewed, her eyes shut.
The kitchen door opened and Jee stalked in wearing a bathrobe and a thundercloud face.
“The brisket’s amazing,” Amanda said.
Jee grabbed a paper plate and a fork and dug in.
“Did he sound like he was glad to see her?” I said, and got a Jee death-ray glare for my trouble.
“Why would he give all his money and his phone to the cab driver? Beth said.
“Didn’t want his mom to have ’em,” I guessed.
Amanda grunted.
“What if she’s hurting him?” Beth said.
“Maybe he was just homesick,” Jee said.
“Maybe he’ll come back when he’s tired of her cooking,” I said. I could outcook anybody’s mom. I knew this for a fact.
“When she dies, maybe,” Jee said, sounding like she was eating broken glass. “Boy’s best friend is his mother.”
“Unlikely,” Amanda said, speaking thickly around a giant mouthful of brisket.
We looked at her in surprise.
“His response to Jee’s jerk whispering.” she said when she’d swallowed that mouthful. “Typical battered sub response.”
“What do you know about it?” Jee demanded, looking guilty and intrigued and hopeful and hurt. Ouch. It embarrassed me to be caught looking at her face. This wasn’t my hard-as-nails roomie. This woman was a mess.
Amanda raised her eyebrows. “I did my homework. Before I signed on to Second Circle I did the research.”
“Kinsey report?” Jee said derisively.
“Among other things.” Amanda went back to chowing down.
“I don’t believe it,” Jee said. I went contact-humiliation hot all over. If she started crying, I’d have to leave the room.
I tasted the brisket. No, I wasn’t leaving that. That boy had talent.
“This is bullshit,” I said, and pulled out my own phone. I hit number five on my speed dial. “Ish? Pog. Our onsite manager has gone AWOL. Do you have an original address for him?”
All eyes turned to me. All mouths were busy chewing brisket. I took another bite myself. It was tender and beefy and juicy and sweet with caramelized onion sugars. We hadda get this boy back.
Ish sounded injured, as he always does when we want something he can’t give us. “What? Of course not. You know policy. Everybody gets a clean slate when they sign on.”
“Shit!” I exclaimed, and threw down my phone.
“You could get him back here,” Amanda pointed out to Jee.
Jee didn’t look up from her plate, but her fork slowed. “How?”
“You’re the only one of us who’s had sex with him. Home in on him and find him in a wet dream. Boom.”
“Knowing Reg, he probably beats off in the bathroom every night before bed,” I said hopefully.
“I won’t!” Jee muttered. She shoveled down brisket like a starving person. Well, she’d been in the bathroom for four hours. She probably was starving.
“Why does it matter if she’s had sex with him?” Beth wondered, of course.
Amanda rolled her eyes.
Jee got up, grabbed one of the giant two-pound bags of Cheetos off the top of her fridge, yanked some weed out of the weed freezer, and stomped out.
We heard her bedroom door slam.
Amanda and I looked at each other. “Now what?” I said.
Amanda shrugged and took another big mouthful of brisket.
Reg
You’da thought I’d spend the next few nights worrying who was taking care of Jee and rubbing her feet and keeping her from scaring herself to death in her sleep.
But to tell the truth, the whole thing seemed like a dream.
My room was a shit hole, literally, because Ma din’t let the dog out the whole time I was gone. It was a nightmare getting it all up and the carpet clean. It still stunk. As I scrubbed, I remembered scrubbing under the fridges in the Lair’s kitchen with Beth, one fridge after the other, talking about her divorce all afternoon, and cleaning the oven, too. But even that memory kinda faded into vapor.
Because here was Ma standing over me, pointing out spots I missed.
As for what Jee and me did sometimes in her room, I din’t even dare think about it—not when I was awake. Ma had this way of getting me to tell her what was in my head, any minute she was to ask, and I couldn’t lie. She knew if I lied.
I felt weak and stupid, but also safe in a sick way. It was like I never left.
After a while I started thinking things, though. Things I din’t have to tell Ma. That freaked me out a little. I mean, I’d got so used to taking care of her when she was sick and telling her everything, I’d felt like there wasn’t any me anymore. There was just her, and that was kind of like an us.
Only I’d had better us, now. Jee was sorry when she hit me. She healed me. Beth said Jee was a sucky dom, but I’d had sucky before and I had it again now, and now I knew better. It wasn’t just my imagination. Not just the sex. God, I could actually think that word and Ma couldn’t drag it outa me and make me tell her what I done with Jee.
My head couldn’t always think too straight, but when I did think, I thought new things. Like how I missed Pog’s cooking. I wondered if they played basketball when I wasn’t there to coach them. Who would rinse all the beer bottles before they put ’em down the recycling chute? Who cleaned the weed pipes? Boy, Ma would have a shit fit if she knew they smoked weed over there and grew it and gave me some and everything.
I even remembered going to that restaurant that one time, and we was dressed up, all of us, and the girls let me pretend I was their pimp for real. Every guy in the place was looking at me like to die of jealousy. God, what a night.
But it wasn’t real. Nothing was real except this shit hole I slept in, the video games Ma let me play, the dog that bit me when I made him come into the house after he shit in the yard, the basement fulla stuff I’d had all my life like broken toys and old clothes that din’t fit me no more and the smell of Ma’s foot cream and stuff. It was gross, but it was home. It was like putting on a pair of old shoes you wore so long, they was part of you.
Only I guess I soaked all my calluses off in the hot tub or something. Because these shoes hurt.
At night sometimes I dreamed about doing things with Jee. That was when I’d wake up crying. Now I knew what her crying was about. More than ever, I wished I could be there with Jee.
Who would comfort her when she had a night terror? She had that stupid cone of silence on her bedroom now. She could scream the place down, turn into a weretiger and scratch herself in her sleep, something bad. She’d cry. She’d be all alone.
One night I actually felt like I was holding her in my arms. She was crying like a kid that’s afraid to be heard ’cuz his Ma will wake up and beat him, little whimpers and gasps and chokes. I dreamed I put my arms around her. She snuggled right into me, just buried her face in my armpit and sobbed real hard, holding tight-tight-tighter. It felt so real. I could smell her skin. I think I was crying too. She fell asleep in my arms, and then I fell asleep.
In the morning, same old same old.
I had a scare one day. I looked in the mirror after my shower and I seen myself, only I looked like I was sixteen. A head shorter. Zits all over my face. Stupid haircut, the way Ma used-a cut it. I was rubbing my head with a towel and when I took the towel away and looked, that’s what I saw. Freaky.
I rubbed
my head some more, thinking scared thoughts. When I took the towel off my face again and looked, yep, I saw my older face, less zitty but still dorky.
That’s when I remembered how, when I lived with Jee, I could make myself taller. I’d looked better when I lived at the Lair. I’d felt better. I’d felt like a man.
I stared at myself in the mirror the way I seen Beth or Jee do, changing theirselves for a party, or to try out a new look.
I thought about how I’d looked when I lived with them. Did that happen? Did I have a new face then, or did I just dream the whole thing?
But yeah. Or no. I kept staring at the dork in the mirror, willing him to look smarter, taller, stronger. More grown up. Fuck, I’m twenty-three. Serial killer age. Shooter on a tower age. I got the imagination it takes to picture this, don’t I?
Because that was another thing Jee taught me. If I could imagine it, I could do it. I could be it.
There—I done it! I looked in the mirror and saw the new Reg, a man, a guy with a girlfriend, a decent wardrobe, a houseful of hot babes who liked him and needed him. Okay, I cleaned their oven and took out their garbage, same like for Ma. But they liked me. They were nice to me. And Jee—
I stared at the guy in the mirror. This was the guy Jee took to bed. The guy she hit, and then healed. The guy she trusted enough to cry on.
Then I heard my Ma’s voice. “You’re awful quiet in there. Are you abusing yourself again?”
The door bust open and she stood behind me, glaring at me, at my back and at my face in the mirror same as I was. Her eyes got big. Her head snapped back, like, Whut?
Panic grabbed my guts like a case of the shits. I met her eyes, thinking, What’s she gonna do to me if she finds out I can do this?
Then I looked back at my reflection. Same old Reg. Shorter, dorkier, zittier, fatter, narrower in the shoulders, slack-jawed, stupid-looking.
“If I catch you touching yourself, I’ll thrash you so hard you don’t sit down for a week,” Ma promised.
I shook my head. “Aw, Ma, I wouldn’t do that.”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 31