I heard my phone buzz then and I turned around and looked for it. It was sitting on the nightstand, up on top. I don’t remember when I put it there. I went over and picked it up. I had a text message from my trainer Dean. I pressed on it and read it. He just wanted to re-schedule our session for later in the day. I also had two others, but from my crazy ex-girlfriend Kristie. She’d been hounding me for months about getting back together. I broke up with her because she beat up another girl that she got some crazy idea about. I told her I wanted nothing to do with her. I told her that I think she is crazy. Yet, she shows up on my doorstep sometimes and knocks on the door and when I answer it she just smiles and acts like things are normal and she’s not living in bizarro land. Sometimes when I leave the gym I find her waiting by my car. I’ve told her each time to go away and leave me alone, but nothing seems to penetrate. Emma used to even tell me that she worried she was the creepy stalker type and I might come home one night to boiled bunny on the stove.
The messages she had left there today were more of the same old crap. They said things like: “I love you, I miss you, and I can’t wait to see you.” The girl needs medication, seriously. I started to sit the phone back down when I realized that there were two other messages from her from last night. I looked closer and saw they had been sent in the dead of the night. I had been with Alexa. I know that I didn’t read those, but then how was it that they’d already been read? I checked the time on them…they came in one minute apart from each other, two a.m. and two o’ one a.m. Fuck! I think I just solved the mystery of why Alexa left like she did. She thought I had her over here, naked in my bed while I had a girlfriend waiting for me somewhere else. I can be an asshole if the situation calls for it, but I’d never cheated on a girl…and I’ve never taken advantage of one. Shit! That’s what she thinks. It made me sick to my stomach just thinking about it, but she thinks I took advantage of my own sister’s death to get a piece of ass. No wonder she couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here! Damn it! I wish she would have just asked me. I could have shown her the other messages and told her what a crazy person Kristie is.
I got pissed then and I sent Kristie a text that said, “Stop texting me! We have nothing to say to each other! If you don’t stop, I’m going to get a fucking restraining order you crazy…” I left that part blank, she could fill it in. Then I sat there staring at the phone, wondering if I should call Alexa and explain. I wondered if she would believe me if I did.
Chapter Two
Alexa
I went home that night after reading Ian’s text messages and went to bed. I stayed there most of the next day, watching sappy love stories on the Hallmark channel and bawling my eyes out. I’m not sure what I was crying over. Was it the movie? Was it Emma? Was it Ian? I had no idea. I just knew I needed to cry. My poor dad kept looking in on me and asking if I was okay. I think he just assumed it was Emma I was crying over and that was okay too. I finally got up that next evening and found my father in the kitchen. He had all the ingredients out to make a meatloaf. He was reading a recipe and he looked distressed.
“You want to order a pizza?” I asked him. He looked relieved and said, “Yes, please.”
I called in the order and when it got there, we ate and watched television. Half-way through the movie my dad said, “Are you doing okay…really?”
I finished chewing the last of my second piece of pizza and took a big gulp of water. “I am doing okay,” I told him. “I’m not great or fantastic or even awesome…but I’m okay.
“It will get easier…with time,” he said. That was hard for me to imagine. I had two holes in my heart now, one from the loss of Emma and one that Ian had punched in there right next to it. I knew none of that was Dad’s fault though and he worried too much about me already, especially since Emma died.
“I know Dad,” I lied. “Things are getting better already.”
*****
Two miserably long days after I skulked out of Ian’s apartment, feeling like a fool, I woke up with the same two thoughts in my head I have every day now. First, my best friend is dead. I let that wash over me like it does every day and I lay still until the pain that comes with it and radiates through me stops throbbing. When that was over, I remembered that Ian made a fool out of me. I really wish that I could stop thinking about him. Instead of just thinking of my best friend who I would never see again…now I had to also keep trying to get my mind off of her stupid, cheating brother. I’m so stupid. How the hell could I look at Ian and not even consider whether or not he had a girlfriend? He was gorgeous and sexy and he seemed so nice. He was funny and fun to talk to because he was smart. Only an idiot wouldn’t think a guy like that wouldn’t have a girlfriend. He probably has two or three of them…he probably collects them and he wanted to make me one of his harem girls.
Shit! I need to just get him off my mind. I’m sure that I was off of his as soon as I walked out the door the other night. Unless he’s pretty proud of himself for getting the girl with the messed up head to have wild sex with him…no strings attached. I thought about the text message that said, “I can’t wait to see you,” and I wondered if he was with her right now. I wondered what she looked like…and then I remembered her hooch picture on his phone. I wondered if that was why he was with her, or if he really loved her…Then, I realized again what I was doing to myself. I said out loud, “Oh my God, Alexa! Knock it off! He’s a cheater. Why would you want him? If he would cheat on her, he would cheat on you. Once a cheater, always a cheater!” He’s a slime-ball and it doesn’t matter if he was Emma’s brother or not. Being my sweet friend’s brother didn’t make him a saint. I already knew that he wasn’t a saint anyways. He definitely had issues that I’d managed quite nicely to overlook. He stopped going to school his sophomore year. Emma wouldn’t talk about it, but I knew that her parents were torn up over it and it had all trickled down onto poor Emma. Things were tough in their house because of him and she always wanted to stay over with me. She said they were fighting all the time…Ian and her parents. Yes, I knew then that he was no saint. I don’t know why now that Emma died, I thought it would be any different. People don’t really ever change, and I should have never slept with him. I can guarantee him it is never going to happen again. I am thoroughly disgusted not only with him, but with myself. It doesn’t matter how much it made me forget for that moment that my best friend was dead. I was nobody’s booty call and I never would be.
These thoughts weren’t helping anything. I finally pulled myself up out of bed. Before I went to bed last night, Dad had asked me to go out for breakfast with him at some new coffee house or café that he was in love with. It would get me out of this house and I think I needed that. I pulled my underwear out of the dresser and then went over to the closet and picked out my clothes for the day. I carried them into the bathroom and as soon as I got in there, I heard my phone buzz. I went back into the bedroom and looked at it. It was two or three text messages from Ian. I ignored them and went back into the bathroom. I took a long, hot shower and when I got out, I actually felt human again. I could do this, all of it. I was strong enough to handle things on my own. Screw Ian. That big talk and bravado lasted all of five full minutes.
After I dressed and fixed my hair I found my dad on the patio having coffee.
“Morning dad, are we still on for breakfast?”
“Absolutely if you still feel like going with me.” he said.
“I feel like it,” I told him with a smile. “I’m ready when you are.”
Dad drove and the ride there was mostly silent. My dad was not big on small talk. He could talk for hours on a subject that interested him or provoked a passion in him, but he didn’t like talk for the sake of talking. I was glad, because I wasn’t really in the mood for chit chat.
The café he took us to was like a little deli, situated right next to the train station and bus depot so it was busy with a lot of commuters coming in and out. The company that my dad works for supplies restaurant equipment
so every time they get a new client, me and Dad have to try the place out and critique it. This place looked nice on first glance. The outside was made out of the shell of an old rail car that had been refurbished and painted a bright red. Inside, the floor was white and black checkered tile and the tables were the black wrought iron ones with the Formica tops that you see in IKEA catalogs. There were black and red vinyl stools at the bar like the cafés of the old days and there were prints on the walls that depicted all of the places a person could travel to and I found myself staring at one with the Eiffel tower in the background and suddenly wishing I was there…far away from the looks of pity my father gave me every time he looked at me, and far away from Ian so no matter how tempted I was to see him, it would be impossible.
The servers wore white shirts and black pants and everyone was cheery. They served bagels and croissants and fancy little breakfast sandwiches. My dad ordered a smoked ham and Gouda sandwich with a fried egg in the middle of it. I shuddered at the though. I ordered a bagel, plain. Then I ordered a coffee…no fancy latte or espresso for me. Just give me coffee, black, plain like my bagel. I suddenly felt numb again and I was in no mood for anything fancy. When the waiter left my dad looked at me once again with those worried eyes and said yet again, “Are you okay honey?”
I gave him one of my false smiles. It felt strange on my face. “I’m fine, Dad. Please stop worrying about me.” He raised an eyebrow and didn’t look like he was buying it, but it was the best I had at the moment. We ate our breakfast, hardly talking again and then he dropped me back at home while he went to work for a few hours. I prepared myself for another less than ordinary day and began to wonder if taking the semester off had been my best idea. At least if I was in school, I’d have something else to think about.
Half-way through the day when the quiet was eating through my brain I switched on the speakers my I-Pod was attached to and turned it up loud. Then I went into the kitchen and searched until I found the pasta maker that I had hounded my dad into buying a few years back. I was fairly sure that it hadn’t been used since the last time I was home and made pasta for us. I sat it up on the counter and started collecting the flour and eggs that I needed to make them. I put on an old apron that had hung in the kitchen since I was a kid. I don’t even know who it belonged to or where it came from. I mixed up the flour and eggs and water and I kneaded the dough. Then I dumped in a can of spinach that I’d already drained and I kneaded and mixed some more. I started humming along to the song that was pounding out of the speakers in the living room and I realized that my stress was beginning to dissipate a little bit.
When the dough was ready, I flattened it out and began feeding it through the little pasta maker machine. It was like playing with Play-Doh. I liked watching it grow longer and thinner as it came out the other side. Once it was out, I’d change the thickness on the rollers and feed it back through. I did it over and over and the repetition was soothing to me. When it was eventually long and papery the way I wanted, I cut it to the size I wanted and put it on the rack to set. When it was set, I put it in the pot to boil and looked around the kitchen. Flour covered nearly every visible surface in the kitchen. I wasn’t a neat cook, but I was a good one. I fished around in the cabinets until I found a few cans of tomato sauce and paste. I mixed them up and added oregano, garlic and basil until it looked and smelled like pasta sauce and then I put that on to boil too.
By the time Dad got home from work it was ready and I had heated us up some sourdough bread sprinkled with butter and garlic. I topped off the pasta with the sauce and some parmesan cheese and when I sat it down in front of my father he said, “Wow, maybe this is what you should do with your degree.”
I laughed as I sat down across from him. “I should use my degree in biology to become a chef?” He shrugged, “Why not? You’re an amazing cook.” I could tell by the way he closed his eyes and held it in his mouth to savor it that he really liked it and he wasn’t just trying to make me feel good.
I took a bite of mine and I had to agree with him…I was amazing. “I’m afraid that I’d weigh three hundred pounds if I cooked like this all the time.”
He laughed and said, “I’ve gained five just in the two weeks you’ve been here.”
“That’s good,” I said, “You were too skinny.”
He told me about his day at work while we ate and then after dinner, he did the dishes. We watched some television again and I turned in early. I lay there for hours, thinking about Emma and remembering what it felt like when Ian touched me. I remembered it in intimate detail and I despised my body for responding to the memories. I finally fell into a sweaty, fitful sleep sometime early in the morning. When I woke up not that many hours later, I lay there again wondering what I was going to do with another long day on my own. I’ve had my fill of Facebook and Twitter. I’ve read every book on my Kindle. The house was clean, the laundry was done…I decided that I could go and see some of my friends that I went to school with. Other than at the funeral, or online, I hadn’t seen or really even talked to any of them since last summer. I reached for my phone with the intentions of texting my friend Laurel to see what she was up to. When I pulled up the messages the first things I saw were the ones from Ian. It was the one’s that he’d sent me yesterday morning and I hadn’t looked at. I wondered what he could possibly think he had to say for himself. I wondered if he had ever even figured out why I left. I wondered about it until I had a headache and then I finally pressed “view.”
I read the message twice. It was actually like three messages because it was really long. The first time was read with cynicism and leftover anger and the second time I relaxed a little bit and let myself imagine that it was the truth. It said: “Alexa, I’m not sure if you left because you saw the messages from Kristy. Just in case though, she’s my ex-girlfriend. She’s crazy and disillusioned. I haven’t actually been with her in over a year. She won’t stop calling and texting and sometimes she even shows up…but I send her away. I don’t want her and I’m not with her and I’m sorry if you saw those messages and thought otherwise. Can we talk tomorrow maybe? I’ll be at the gym all day and I have a fight tomorrow night, but if you want to meet me at either place, I’d really like for us to talk. I feel like you’re the only one who understands me, Alexa and I had so much fun with you the other night. Please talk to me.”
I put the phone down and lay there for a while longer thinking about what he said. He could be telling the truth. He could be telling a big fat lie too…but why would he lie? He really didn’t have any reason to lie to me. He’d gotten his piece of ass; he could just walk away now. Something was nagging at the far recesses of my brain. It was something that Emma mentioned one night when we were watching a movie. There was some crazy chick in the movie that was obsessed with this guy and wouldn’t leave him alone. She’d said, “That reminds me of Ian’s last girlfriend. I keep telling him he’s going to come home and find her boiling a bunny.” I don’t recall her saying a name, but it was maybe six or eight months ago. The timing would fit. I finally got out of bed and called Laurel. I arranged to meet her for lunch. I was trying to get Ian who was suddenly back on my mind, off of it again.
I met Laurel for lunch at a little grille in town. Some people never escaped their childhoods. For whatever reason, they just don’t feel safe in the adult world. Laurel was one of those people. Her clothes still looked like she bought them at the Children’s place. There was a big Hello Kitty on her bright pink t-shirt and glittery Hello Kitty sequins across the pockets of her jeans. I almost cried when I saw her because my first thought was, “I can’t wait to tell Emma.” It would have been one of those things we had a big laugh over. We would never talk about Laurel to anyone else and we would never hurt her feelings, but it was one of those fun things that best friends did with each other. One of the little things that was now a big thing, because we’d never be able to do it again.
Laurel had her hair in not one, but two pony tails and she still didn’t
wear any make-up except for clear lip gloss. I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect the lip gloss tube was adorned with Hello Kitty. She was strange but sweet and I was glad I called her because talking to her at lunch was refreshing. She told me how sorry she was about Emma but then she let it go. Even though she lacked a lot of the complexity of other people, she had a deep seeded sense of compassion. The other great thing was that with Laurel, what you saw was what you got. She didn’t pretend to be anything she wasn’t for anyone. We talked about all of our old friends and Laurel updated me on what had been going on while I’d been gone. She told me about her boyfriend and how wonderful he was and she told me that if I decided to stay in town, she could get me a job at the yogurt shop in the mall. That was another one of those things that I wanted to tell Emma.
I left lunch feeling more energetic, just from feeding off of Laurel’s energy. It was so much better than the self-imposed isolation I’d been going through lately. I thought about the way Laurel saw the world on my way home and decided that maybe sometimes when we get stuck in this crazy adult world, we get cynical and assume that everyone has the worst of intentions. At the very least, I owed Ian enough to go hear him out. Besides, I really want to see him again too.
Chapter Three
Alexa
My seat for the fight wasn’t as good as it was the last time. Tonight the little stadium was even fuller than it had been the last time and by the time I got there and bought my ticket, I was relegated almost to the back row. It was nice though that the seats were raised so that I would still be able to see. I was also closer to the door this time, just in case Ian was getting beaten too badly and I couldn’t stand it and had to leave. I was surrounded by a group of half-drunk college guys and they were loud and obnoxious, but at least while I was waiting for the fight to begin, their antics entertained me and took my mind off of what I was going to say to Ian when I saw him. I was also trying not to obsess over whether or not I actually believed the text messages were from an “ex.”
Dirty Maverick (The Maxwell Family) Page 30