Fear and Laundry (10 page)

He asked me what time I’d go back to, but seemed distracted and only halfway interested. The rock came unstuck and flew over the side of the porch, bouncing a few times in the grass.

I thought about it. “Maybe the sixties?” The music had been pretty good. And a lot of stuff had happened then. “I mean, our parents were lucky, in a way, to have so many things to be pissed off about. Don’t you think?” I hopped off the porch and walked backward down the path to the next exhibit. There were a few other people out on the trail with us, but none of them very close.

“You still seeing what’s-his-name?” he asked me, abruptly. “Layne?”

“Huh?” Layne was a guy I’d hung around with for a few months the previous winter. Jake had met him only briefly, when he’d been home at Christmas. I was surprised he remembered him, much less his name. “No.” I glanced at the flier again and used the handrail to guide myself backward up the porch steps of the next building, The Wallace Bunkhouse.  

When Jake didn’t say anything, I felt compelled to fill the silence with an explanation.

“Layne moved away,” I said, folding the flier and stuffing it in my back pocket. “So we broke up. Or,” I corrected myself bitterly, “I guess we didn’t.”

He shot me a questioning look.

“According to him we were ‘never really dating’ in the first place.”

“He said that?” He followed me up the steps and sat on a barrel situated near the bunkhouse’s front door. “You guys seemed pretty serious.”

I shrugged.

He paused and then asked, “You haven’t seen anyone since Layne?”

I thought about how to answer. I’d been on a few dates here and there. And there’d been Coty, a guest at the Crawford over Spring Break, in town to visit his dad. But that had really been more of a fling... “No,” I said. But then I thought of Dustin. As little as they’d ultimately amounted to, my few weeks fooling around with him had been the closest I’d come to another relationship since Layne left. “Well, sort of. You know Dustin Tran?”

He thought about it. “Mike Tran’s little brother? From Bart?” Bart was short for Bartholomew High. Both Tran brothers went there.

I nodded.

Jake’s jaw twitched. “You dated that
guy?”

“No. I just hooked up with him.”

Jake looked a little sick. Probably because he was disgusted with me, I decided.

“Not my finest moment,” I admitted, regretting having brought it up.

“Wanna talk about it?”

“Not really.”

He kept looking at me.

“It’s a pathetic story,” I warned. “You don’t really want to hear it.”

“Try me.”

I suspected he was only being polite. I’d listened to him last night and now maybe he felt he should do the same for me. “We fooled around a few times,” I said, thinking I’d give him the condensed version. “I was into him. But I guess he didn’t feel the same.”

“And?”

“And...that’s it, I guess,” I murmured, knowing it wasn’t.

“That’s not a very juicy story, Nic. Where’s the pathos I was promised?”

“Sadist,” I accused. Leaning against the wall, I looked at my shoes, noticing the lace on my left Converse had almost come untied. I bent to fix it. “I didn’t think he’d ever noticed me. I mean, he hadn’t ever paid much attention to me before. But we wound up messing around one night.”

I thought back to it. He’d made a show of helping me with my technique at the pool table at Lynch’s. Later, I’d gone outside with Katrina to get a fresh pack of cigarettes from her car. Dustin had been outside, smoking alone, an orange spot of fire arcing through the dark as he brought the cigarette to his lips and then lowered it again. When Katrina went back inside, he’d called to me, telling me to stay and talk to him. But we hadn’t really talked much.

“I hung out and messed around with him a few other times,” I said, straightening. “Then he invited Lia and me to this party.” That’s where I’d found out that before leaving town, Layne had talked.

Jake stayed quiet, giving me room to explain.

“Dustin pulled me into a bedroom. At this party. He said he’d heard I would...do stuff. And it had to have been from Layne, ‘cause he’s the only person...Anyway...” I faltered, blushing. I’d started to pick at the paint on a windowsill beside me. A long, thin strip came off in my hand and I dropped it to the porch, brushing my fingertips against one another to dust the paint flakes from them.

When I looked up, Jake had the sick look on his face again. “Nic. What happened?”

“Nothing. Well, not much. Not enough for him.” I tried to smile, make it sound like a joke, but he seemed to sense something about that night had upset me.

Had Dustin gotten rough with me, Jake wanted to know?

“No.”

“He say something to you?”

The answer, voiced in Dustin’s angry drawl, resounded instantly in my memory. I shook my head, surprised to feel my eyes stinging. I couldn’t repeat it. Didn’t want to. With dismay, I felt a tear slip from my lashes.

“Whoa. Hey.” Jake stood and came over to me, patting his pockets. I ducked my head and used the collar of my shirt to dab at my eyes until his search yielded a wrinkled Kleenex. “It’s clean,” he assured me, pressing it into my hand. I laughed, in spite of myself, and wiped my face. “I’m sorry,” he said regretfully. “What I said, about the pathos...I was just kidding.”

“I know.
I’m
sorry,” I said. “I dunno why this bothers me so much.”

“Guy was a dick to you. You don’t have to apologize for the way you feel about it.” He put his hand against the wall and looked down at me. Against the backdrop of cloudless sky, his eyes looked bluer than ever.

“It’s just...I know it doesn’t matter.” I squeezed the tissue in my fist. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

My remark seemed to disconcert him. “Yeah it does,” he said, frowning. “Or it should, anyway.”

I took a breath, exhaled, and looked out over the porch. “You know the really weird part?” I described how Dustin had acted since then, first talking to me as though nothing had happened, like he’d never yelled at me, almost like we’d never been together at all. And then suddenly, yesterday, all but ignoring me. Not even wanting to look at me. I didn’t know which was worse. And I didn’t understand any of it.

I shouldn’t waste my time, Jake said, trying to decipher the motivations of a guy “like that.”

“Like what?”

His answer was unkind, punctuated by choice words.

“That’s a little harsh,” I demurred.

“You want harsh,” he said, “wait and see what happens next time I run into that little punk.”

I laughed shortly. “Okay, tough guy. What’re you gonna do?”

Rearrange Dustin’s pretty face was what, apparently.

I sniffled.

And Layne, he added, had better not show up in Carreen again, either.

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll mess him up, too.” He said it unemotionally, less like issuing a threat than stating a plain fact.

“Right,” I said, unbelieving but appreciating the sentiment. He was trying to make me feel better. And it was working.

A small group of people was coming up the path to the building we stood in front of. I looked out again, into the distance. There was a rise a few yards off, and another exhibit building on the other side. I told Jake we ought to keep moving.

The dirt was dry and kicked up in clouds as we trudged along, approaching the little hill. It was after noon now, the sun high in the sky, and we sweltered. A hot gust of wind carried a tumbleweed across our path.

***

A
s we continued the tour, Jake let me change the subject. I told him I was glad he’d been so willing to fill in for Sierra, and he told me he’d welcomed the opportunity. He “needed to play,” he said. It was how he coped with school, with stress, with anything, really.

We talked about the band, and how we needed to come up with more songs. We agreed that if it came down to it, we could throw a few covers into our set, and listed songs we might use. Then we talked about television and movies and people we both knew; superficial stuff.

The A. P. Center path formed one big loop, so the last stop was only a short distance from where we’d started out. Lia’d told us to wait there when we were done and she’d walk the few yards the wrong way down the trail to meet us as soon as she could.

The last exhibit was a railroad depot complete with ticket window and waiting area. When we reached it, I sat on a little wooden bench just inside. From there, I had a view of the genuine steam locomotive parked outside, and of several of the buildings we’d just passed.

Jake paced around the stuffy little room, inspecting the framed bits of memorabilia tacked to the walls. I watched him cross his arms and tilt his head, examining the antique train schedule by the ticket window.

I sat on my hands, kicking my legs. Could he imagine, I asked, what it would be like to actually be a pioneer? Any sort of pioneer? Jake shook his head no and came to sit beside me on the bench.

In the ensuing silence, I pondered the unsettling idea we’d been born into a conquered realm, a place that didn’t really need us because there was nothing and no place left to discover. Rationally, I knew this wasn’t true. There were plenty of problems still left in the world. But I certainly didn’t feel prepared to solve any of them. And after my conversation with him last night, I knew Jake didn’t, either. The realization unnerved me. If someone as smart and talented as him didn’t know what to do with his life, then what hope did any of the rest of us have?

After a while, he nudged me with his elbow. “You awake?” he asked. Or had I fallen asleep on him again? I didn’t want to tell him what I’d been thinking. Instead, I said I wondered how Lia was faring with the lemonade.

As if on cue, she appeared on the horizon, searching for us with her hand cupped above her eyes.

Part Two

August 14
^th
- September 3
^rd
, 1994

I rehearsed with Lia and Jake after the A.P. Center excursion, but then not again for a week and a half. Spending time with my mom and George, practicing my driving, and folding towels at the Crawford took up most of the last full week and final weekend of my summer vacation. School didn’t start until Wednesday the seventeenth, so my mother asked me to work Monday and Tuesday of the following week, too, to pick up the slack while Alma trained the “new, new” hire.

I called Lia the night before school started and apologized for how busy I’d been. I knew I was far from ready to play either the Housewives show or the benefit, and felt pretty anxious about both. As usual, she told me to relax. Everything was going to be fine. We could practice this coming weekend. She said she was pretty sure Jake and Paige would both be available then.

“How’d the two of them get along?” I asked, knowing the other members of Impressionable Youth had met and rehearsed without me a few times while I’d been tied up.

“Oh, swell. Like gangbusters,” she said. “But then, you know how it is with Paige — dudes love her.”

The one and only time I’d been on a roller coaster, my stomach felt like it’d stayed behind while the passenger car plummeted over each hill. Hearing Lia’s remark made me feel the same way, only slightly more nauseated.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“Oh, Vee,” Lia breathed, assuming I was thinking of Dustin. “That was the wrong thing to say. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m over it.”

She hurriedly changed the subject, telling me she’d tracked down Katrina Sampson and told her to keep her mouth shut about the Clyde Kameron interview. She’d passed the message along to Dustin and Roy, too. Although she wasn’t worried they’d be the ones to say anything. Katrina was the one known for her big mouth.

After I hung up with Lia, I popped a horror movie I’d rented at Cell Farm – some vampire thing called
Subspecies
– into the VCR, sat back and tried to watch it. But I paid only partial attention, my mind instead dwelling on Lia’s remark about Paige.

Dudes love her.

I’d said I was “over it,” and it was true I hadn’t given much thought lately to what’d happened with Dustin. As though admitting the pathetic details to Jake had somehow allowed me to lay the subject of him to rest. If I wasn’t mooning over Dustin anymore, or upset at Paige for messing around with him, then why had Lia’s words bugged me so much? I finally had to admit I didn’t like the implication Jake had fallen for Paige. Not that it was any of my business if he had.

But he was my friend, I told myself, and I worried she was wrong for him. That was all.  

***

I
t seemed Katrina’d kept her promise. So far, no one at school had said anything to either Lia or me about the Clyde Kameron interview
The Blank Slate
was supposedly running. I’d actually started to relax about the whole thing, thinking maybe we’d be able to pretend Lia’d never made the claim in the first place.

At lunch on Friday, I met Lia at our usual spot. “So, my life’s over,” she said when I sat across from her at the lop-sided table in the back corner of the cafeteria. She had an assortment of snack cakes spread out on a paper towel in front of her and as I watched, she tore open the cellophane on an oatmeal cream pie and shook the cookie out into her hand.

“Now what?” I put down my bottle of vending machine orange juice and dug in my backpack for my lunch.

The first few days of school had been fairly typical and boring for me. Lia, on the other hand, had already become embroiled in both literal and figurative drama. She’d decided to audition for the female lead in the fall theater production (tryouts for the Halloween weekend performance of
Dracula
were today, during her last period Drama class), and she’d gotten into a verbal fight and shoving match with Eugenia Ridley.

According to Lia’s side of the story, Ridley had taken offense to Lia “accidentally” bumping into her outside the administrative offices on the first day of school. Before Lia knew what’d happened, the two of them had been trading insults at high volume and pushing one another back and forth until the vice principal’s secretary emerged from her office to pry them apart. It was probably a combination of Lia’s stellar academic record and her parents’ community clout that got her off the hook with only a reprimand.