by Averil Dean
It’s a humble town, peeling and briny. So it makes no sense for me not to sleep at night, but the fact is I can’t. I haven’t slept in the dark since I was thirteen years old. Instead, I spend the nights working on my manuscript—Zebra Down, fifth in the series of young adult novels that’s been paying my bills since I left high school—and in the mornings I take a walk or ride my bike to the Beanery for a cup of coffee.
I brush the crumbs off my fingers, open a book of writing prompts and choose one at random. This is my daily routine, my exercise, prescribed by an online writing teacher who believes in the importance of keeping the creative muscles loose. Ten minutes, scribble like hell, see what comes out.
Faceless men.
I set the timer on my phone and begin.
At night I dream of faceless men. They move through the architecture of my imagination like spirits, shadowy incubi who wait for sleep to deliver me. They press me into the walls, the floors, and I am trapped here in the structure, with all my ghosts inside me and all my rooms on display. I let them seduce me, reveal me and all the secret places where I simmer and burn, let them lift me up and drag me down and nail me with their need, until I feel the push of everything male against all that is female in me.
My phone beeps at the end of ten minutes. I read my page of scrawled handwriting as I sip my coffee and crumble a bite of muffin over my plate.
Nail me, I think disgustedly. Paging Dr. Freud. I cross it out and write it back exactly the same way. Twice.
I obliterate all three versions with lines that dent the paper, rip the page from my notebook, crumple it and toss it toward the trash can. The paper bounces off the rim and lands on the sidewalk. Before I can get out of my chair, a man on his way out of the coffee shop stoops to pick it up.
Jack Calabrese. He grins and starts to open the page.
I leap up and snatch it away.
“Whoa,” he says, laughing. “Check out the reflexes on the little cat burglar.”
I back away, the ball of paper in my fist, and begin to pack up my notebooks. My heartbeat accelerates—I feel the pressure rise in my neck.
“Don’t go,” he says.
“I need to get home.”
“Why? Is someone waiting for you?”
My mouth tightens. No one is waiting for me, but his tone implies that he knows this already. As though such a thing is outside the realm of possibility.
“Sit with me for a few minutes,” he says.
He is unshaven but his hair is damp, and he has a freshly scrubbed look about him. His flannel shirt is soft with age, drooping over the bump of his shoulders, the cuffs rolled up over his brown forearms. He has a cup in his hand and under his arm a book that he lays on the table as he claims the seat across from me. Intensity. Dean Koontz.
In the distance, the tsunami siren blares. We recognize the test pattern and ignore it.
“You’re a writer, then,” he says.
“Nothing gets past you.” I sink into my chair, still collecting my notes and battered index cards. I wind a rubber band around the latter and shove them into my satchel.
“So hostile. You got no time for the guy who caught you breaking and entering?”
His tone is even, but the challenge in his eyes, framed by the heavy rims of his glasses, stops me. I snap my bag closed and lean into the back of my chair.
“I apologized for that. What else is there to say?”
“People do have unnecessary conversations sometimes, Alice.”
My name sounds too easy coming from him. Too familiar.
“Look. I get that you feel entitled to mess with me. But unless you’ve got something to tell them down at Barney’s cop shack, you can fuck straight off.”
“Got it. But have dinner with me first.”
“Yeah. That’s not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
I don’t want to answer. The fact that he’s here makes me uneasy. I know his schedule—at 7:00 a.m. he should be at work. It occurs to me that he may have followed me, and I don’t like that turn of the tables at all.
I get to my feet and sling the satchel over my shoulder. “Let’s just say, it seems like a bad idea.”
“I can’t believe that’s something that normally stops you.”
Heat rushes up my neck. I pull up my hood to cover it, and carry my dishes to the plastic bin next to the trash can.
He raises his cup to bid me goodbye. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
I grit my teeth and turn away. It feels like a long walk to the corner where I’ve left my bike, and with every step I feel his stare at my back.
It takes all I have not to turn around.
* * *
He is all I can think about on my way home from the café, through my hot shower, as I brush my teeth and hair and crawl at last, at 9:00 a.m., into bed.
At first his face fills my mind’s eye. The sharp line of his jaw; the row of even white teeth, flashing like sunlight on water; the double frame of his glasses and thick dark eyebrows, under which his eyes gleam with mischief. But as I lie in my bed with the memory of him, stroking tentatively over the thin, warm fabric of my cotton underwear, his face becomes shrouded, dissolving into obscurity. I know it’s him the way you know it in a dream: it’s his presence, his name in my mind, but he has become both more and less than himself. In my fantasies, he’s an archetype, faceless and almost formless. He is what he does. He is the idea of a man.
I remember his house, the doorknob cold in my hand, his long arm stretched above me to hold the door closed. He’s angry that I’ve invaded his space, angry that I want to leave. I have crept deliberately into his den and my curiosity has a price.
You want to know me, he says, and his hand is in my hair. The scent of him fills my mind. He tips my head back and kisses me openmouthed, laying a first easy claim to the inside of me. I feel his attention, all his focus on me. He has tasted me now. He can smell me. His hand moves down the front of my body to my breast, and I feel my nipple gather in his palm. His body stiffens, slows for a moment, and I sense the predatory tension in him.
One of my hands is flat against his chest, the other clutching the doorknob at the small of my back. But I know from his kiss and the boldness of his hand on my breast that I won’t be leaving until he has fucked me. The inevitability panics and excites me. This could hurt, it could be awful; I could get pregnant. A procession of frightening consequences marches through my mind, but every protest is swept aside by the simple, profound need of his to fuck me. Of my need to let him.
He reaches under my shirt, subduing me with the weight of his body, and unclasps the front of my bra. He moves back, assessing, arrogant, and lowers his head to my breast as he unbuttons his jeans, then gathers my skirt to hitch it over my hips. He strokes me through my underwear, one finger teasing at the hem as if there is a choice in this for either of us.
I open my mouth and he kisses me again, puts words literally into my mouth.
You wanted to get caught.
He drags one knuckle over my clitoris and traces my lower lip with his tongue.
Wanted to get fucked, didn’t you.
He slides a finger under my panties, inside me, and I hear the breath hiss past his teeth as we discover together how wet I am. His one finger is joined by a second, and he draws them up my folds, over my clitoris, circling.
He moves back to see my face, my bare breasts, then his mouth returns to mine. His mouth is hotter, more demanding. He licks my teeth and bites my lip. His fingers are back inside me, two and then three, his eyes on my face as my resistance dies away.
I begin to move with him, following his rhythm. The tips of my breasts are drawn up tight against the rasp of his shirt. I test him with a twist of my wrists and feel the fingers of both his hands tight
en against me. This comforts me somehow. I know he won’t let go, will not stop, and the knowledge gathers between my legs like lightning in a storm, and with his mouth over mine I am coming. Pain and desire meet inside me, sharp as a thunderclap. My cunt grabs and releases, clenching hard around his fingers, an undulating ripple moving upward through my body. I am still coming when he lifts me up and open, his hands around my knees, then pulls me down on top of him. He is huge and I feel the invasion of this, but I spread my legs and let him in until he’s buried inside me, immediately orgasmic, pounding his need to the depths of me with long, firm strikes against the wall of my cervix. He shudders, and I feel the trembling pulse of his ejaculation—the final evidence of his domination, of my surrender.
Yes, he says, oh, fuck yes.
I open my eyes, blink into the morning light with the blood still roaring in my ears. The sheets are damp, my limbs buzzing as though I’ve just taken a hard electric shock.
Jack’s face reforms in my mind’s eye. It’s his smile I see as I drift off to sleep, my hand still clamped between my legs.
CHAPTER THREE
There was a boy in my third-grade class named Danny Kukal. When they lined us up for the yearbook photo, he was at the tall end, while I brought up the rear as the smallest in class. He ran with a pack of unruly boys with chapped lips and cowlicked hair, easily dominating even the fifth-graders on the playground. Every recess they took over the tetherball courts and the coveted red rubber balls, merciless and loud and endlessly annoying.
I felt myself somewhat protected from the worst of their behavior. I was a girl. A pretty girl, apparently. But as the school year went on and the boys settled on their targets, my distaste for them grew. Danny Kukal was the worst. I resented his popularity, his quick cruelty toward the smaller kids, his arrogance. I detested his wide yellow teeth, too big for his face, and the swaggering upturn of his butt under the school corduroys. Quietly my disgust swelled into a hatred too big to contain. I began to offer a snarky counterpunch to his taunts, under my breath at first, then bolder as others heard and appreciated my childish wit. I felt my power. The power of words, of mind over might.
Danny heard, too, and didn’t know what to do about me. I could see the struggle play out on his face and in his attempts at bluster. I was an unfamiliar target. A girl. Even a kid as charmless as Danny Kukal knew it was unacceptable to punch me in the nose or call me out after school.
In the spring, he came upon a solution at last.
“I heard about your mom,” he told me. “A little prostitute, that’s what I heard.”
Looking back, I can see the word was as foreign to him as it was to me, but neither of us was too young to understand an insult when we heard one. He’d picked up some ammunition and was set to deploy it.
“Should’ve kept her knees together.”
Baffling. But accompanied by howls of appreciation from the boys, along with other words I did understand.
“Slut.”
“Whore.”
“Trailer trash.”
My wit deserted me. I ran sobbing to the girls’ room and sat in crumpled agony for the rest of the day, trying to make sense of what was clearly a monumental insult. When I got home that afternoon, I told Nana all about it.
I had never seen her so angry. Usually Nana’s temper was quick and loud, easily triggered and quickly forgotten. This anger was different. This was slow, deliberate, maternal fury. Her face hardened and flushed a plummy red.
She folded up the dishcloth and sat next to me at the wobbly Formica table. Pulled my chair around slightly to face her.
“Did you start this?” she said.
I opened my face to her, tried to hold my eyes steady. “No, he started it, he—”
She held up a hand.
“I see.”
We sat that way for a minute or two.
“Lovey,” she said, “when someone insults your mum, when they use that kind of language, you mustn’t let it pass. There are some words that... There are things that require a response. You understand?”
I nodded.
“If you were a boy, I would tell you to knock the piss out of him. But you can’t very well do that, can you? You’ll have to think of something different. You’re a clever girl, Alice. Learn to use what you have.”
She dismissed me after that, but called to me as I left the room.
“Don’t mention any of this to your mother,” she said.
The next day, and the days after that, I worried over the problem of Danny Kukal. He was the large centerpiece of a straggling army, and I was a loner, now more than ever. I had no ally, no rebuttal to what he’d gleefully hit upon as a successful series of taunts that the group repeated now and then, with gradual loss of interest, as at a joke that has played out. I kept my face still and thought about what Nana had said.
On my way home from school about a week later, I stopped in front of the Kukals’ double-wide. The family dog came rushing up to edge of his pen, broken teeth bared, snapping and growling as he did every day. He was junkyard ugly, a bad-tempered nuisance with a grizzled brown coat and one missing ear. All the neighborhood kids hated and feared Schultzie. Everyone but Danny Kukal. He was proud to be the only one the dog didn’t bite.
“Hey, Schultz,” he would croon, tossing down his backpack after school. “Hey, Schultzie, I saved you a cookie.”
Danny really loved that dog.
That afternoon, most of the boys were at baseball practice, so the house stood empty. No car in the driveway, no bikes in the street.
Learn to use what you have, Alice.
I went around the side of the dog pen and sat down in the grass with my back to the fence. The dog made repeated runs at me, barking dementedly, snarling with his muzzle stuck through the chain links. For several minutes I sat quietly, braiding strands of grass like hair, and let him carry on. When the barking turned to grumbling, I took out what was left of my ham sandwich, broke off a piece and fed it to him carefully, keeping my fingers out of reach and avoiding his filmy eye. He devoured it with grunts and wet snorts, slapping his nose with his wide pink tongue. A bite at a time I fed him all I had, followed by a few leftover chips I was saving for an after-school snack.
He ate it all, thinking he’d made a friend.
That night, after my mother and Nana went to bed, I snuck into the laundry room and found Nana’s rat poison. I mixed it with a gob of peanut butter, made a sandwich and stowed it in my backpack.
I thought about the sandwich all day. Several times when the teacher spoke to me I didn’t hear her, and during the morning’s math test I thought I would be sick and had to run without permission to the girls’ room, where I stayed until the teacher came to get me.
At lunch I took the sandwich out and looked at it. Sniffed it. Turned it over in my hands.
“You should eat that,” Danny called from across the cafeteria. “Maybe you’ll get fat. Maybe you’ll get boobs like your mom.” And then, “Would take a lot of sandwiches, though.”
The boys hooted and carried on, chanting. Eat it, eat it. I didn’t look up. Just kept turning the sandwich over in my hands. Eat it, eat it, eat it.
After school I walked alone to the Kukals’ house and sat down at the far end of Schultzie’s pen. This time the dog didn’t bark as much. He put his muzzle through the pen and flapped his tongue at me.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I rolled up the sandwich and stuffed it through the chain-link fence.
The poison didn’t take effect immediately the way I thought it would. At first the horrible old mutt rolled his eyes almost comically, nipped and growled at his stomach as though he was angry at whatever was happening inside him. He was so ridiculous about it that I began to smile, with the beginnings of a sort of relieved remorse bubbling in my chest. The stupid dog was too tough
and mean to die. This was a lame attempt on my part. I’d let it go and find some other way to get even with Danny Kukal.
But then Schultzie began to cry. The comical expression on his face became a grimace, freakishly exaggerated with the whites of his eyes unnaturally wide. He limped in circles, tearing at the skin of his flanks, stretching it, letting go, biting again, drawing blood. He flopped to the ground like a fish, stiffly one way, then the other, crying. Crying. At last his body flexed so far sideways that it stuck that way. He didn’t roll then, he simply lay there, strangling, a string of sandwich-flecked foam oozing out the side of his mouth.
The filmy eye rolled back and locked on me, and the life dimmed from him like a flame sinking into wax.
I walked into the woods, sat down on a stump and rocked forward and back, one arm clamped around my stomach, the heel of my hand shoved into my mouth. My teeth dug small blue trenches into my skin, then drew blood.
My mother came in that night and said she’d heard the Kukal’s dog had been poisoned.
“Poor old guy,” she said. “How could someone do a thing like that? They’ve had that dog since he was a puppy. I remember when they brought him home from the pound.”
Nana was in her chair, watching TV and working on a crossword puzzle. She looked up slowly, looked right at me, and winked.