Fear and Laundry (8 page)

“If you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch it,” she told him. “Who even invited you, anyway? Don’t you have anything better to do than crash my life?”

“Hey, guys,” I jumped in, making them aware of my presence. “What’s for dinner?”

Lia said she knew we’d just had pizza for lunch, but without her parents around to force her to cook she’d opted to thaw another one out anyway. She hooked her thumb at the oven and I saw the interior light glowing. And now that she mentioned it, I smelled warming pepperoni.

“So you’re all set to spend the night?” she asked, crossing to the sink to wash and dry her hands. I said yes, and told her about my mother’s date.

“This George guy’s a paper salesman, right?” she said, opening a cabinet and pulling out plates and glasses. “You think if she marries him, he’ll give us a deal on cardstock for the zine?” She’d always wanted the
Slate
to have a nicer cover, she explained, but the paper was way too expensive.

“Funny.” Pimping my mother out in exchange for paper, I said, was the most hilarious idea I’d ever heard in my life. Lia smiled and opened the freezer, scooping ice cubes out with her hands and depositing them tinkling into the glasses.

“What movie do you want to watch, Nic?” Jake asked, leaning against the counter.

“Do not let him pick,” Lia ordered me, reaching into the refrigerator for a two liter bottle of Diet Coke. It hissed as she twisted off the cap, the neck of the bottle fogging up. “It’ll just be something nightmare-inducing.”

Jake protested.

“I’m serious,” she said to me while she poured the drinks, “Every time I let him talk me into watching something it turns out to be super weird. And usually gross.”

“Exaggeration,” said Jake. He’d taken a quarter from his pocket and now played with it, spinning it around on the counter.

“Really.” Lia narrowed her eyes at him. “What about that
Hellriser
movie?”

“
Hellraiser
,” he corrected.

“Whatever. I couldn’t sleep for a week after watching it. I was worried the guy with the nails in his head,” she used her pointed index fingers to mime nails sticking out of her skull, “would pop out of a crack in the wall and kill me while I slept.”

“That’s because you didn’t pay attention,” said Jake. “Pinhead would never just
pop out of the wall
for no reason.”

“He appears when summoned,” I concurred.

“And not to kill people,” Jake explained, “but to drag them into a hell-dimension and torture them for eternity.”

Lia flipped him off. “We’re watching
The Breakfast Club
.”

“What?”

“End of debate.”

He started to say something else but she cut him off. “If you don’t like it, you can get lost.”

The oven timer beeped and Lia turned around to shut it off. Jake put his quarter back in his pocket, scooped a soda glass off the counter and walked out.

Putting her hands into a pair of oven mitts, Lia opened the oven and withdrew the pizza pan, dropping it onto the counter with a clatter. “Guess he decided to pass,” she said when she turned back around and saw her brother had gone.

“On dinner, too?” I said.

She gave a disinterested shrug. “Open that drawer and get me the pizza cutter, would you?”

***

L
ia and I ate dinner in front of the television, watching re-runs for a while after her
Breakfast Club
video ended. Lia wanted to move the coffee table out of the way and camp out in the living room, so we went into her bedroom to change clothes and grab sleeping bags.

Clyde 2 trotted in just as we’d finished arranging our pallets on the living room floor. Lia gathered him to her chest, cooing and talking to him. “Mommy’s had a rough day, hasn’t she? Yes, she has.
Yes, she has
.” She held the cat up, touching his nose to hers. He hissed and swiped a claw at her but she ignored it, lowering him with her to the floor. I turned out the table lamp and fluffed my pillow.

“Vee?” I heard Lia’s sleeping bag rustle as she fidgeted beside me. “When Clyde comes to Carreen, you think he’ll stay at the Crawford?”

I hadn’t thought about it, since before today I’d never seriously believed Clyde would return. But I realized Lia might be right. The Crawford was one of the nicest hotels in town. A lot of VIPs stayed there. But it wasn’t the only possibility. The Vega across town, for instance, was also known for being fairly fancy. Most of Elyse and John’s out-of-town anniversary party guests were booked over there.

Still, I guessed what she was getting at. “Forget it,” I said.

“Your mom could get us in to see him,” she said, not asking. “So we could get the interview.”

I shook my head against the pillow and said “No.” I explained the Crawford took its responsibility for guests’ privacy pretty seriously. My mother could potentially get in a lot of trouble for using her position to let someone gain access to any guest, let alone a VIP like Clyde, and I knew she’d never risk it.

“Vee, everyone’s going to be expecting me to run an interview with Clyde Kameron.”

“Whose fault is that?!”

“This isn’t all about saving my own reputation,” she tried to convince me. “You heard what Roy said. We’ve got to sell a lot more magazines if we want to raise enough money to save Lynch’s. You know an interview with Clyde would move a ton of issues.”

“I’m sure it would. But I told you: Mom would never go for it. She could get fired for something like that.”

“Then she doesn’t have to be involved. Or even know about it. We can sneak in. Who knows that place better than you do?”

“Um,
no
,” I repeated. “My mom would kill me if she found out.”
Then I’ll really never get to drive
, I thought.

“Yeah right, Vee,” she said, frustrated. “You’re mom’s never even grounded you once in your entire life.”

“Look, I’ll help you try to get an interview.”
Since there doesn’t seem to be any choice
, I added to myself. “But it can’t involve the Crawford. We’ll have to find some other way to do it.”

I heard her roll over, grumbling that she couldn’t understand me, she really couldn’t.

“What’re you talking about?” I asked.

I slept with pictures of movie maniacs over my bed, she explained, and probably thought that meant I was “daring or something.” When in reality I was nothing but a “big weenie.”

I was not, I protested.

I heard more rustling and imagined her pulling the top of her sleeping bag up to her chin. I listened for a while, waiting for her to say something else but she didn’t. Eventually I heard the steady rhythm of her breathing and realized she’d fallen asleep.

***

H
ours later, I still lay wide awake, thinking that deep down I knew what Lia’d said was true: I really
was
a big weenie. And rather than let it deter her, I knew Lia would somehow find a way to take advantage of my weenie-ness to get her way. That seemed to be what always happened. Well, this time I couldn’t let it. Because even if Lia’s stupid plan to sneak into the Crawford didn’t get my mother fired, it probably
would
get me into big trouble. And while it was true I’d never really been punished before, that was only because there’d never been a reason. Unlike Lia, I didn’t doubt my mother’s reproach, if finally provoked, would be swift and severe. Why else did Lia think I never misbehaved?

Tired of tossing and turning, I eventually got up and crept to the bathroom, noticing that down the hall, Jake’s door stood open and his light was on. After washing my hands, I ran Lia’s brush through my hair a few times and quietly made my way to the kitchen.

I’d heard John and Elyse get in about an hour before and assumed they were asleep, so I didn’t want to turn on the light. Luckily, bright moonlight streamed in the kitchen window. I tip-toed to the refrigerator and pulled out the plate of leftover pizza Lia’d covered and stowed away for later. Removing the Saran Wrap and gently tearing a paper towel from the roll above the sink, I carried the leftovers and makeshift napkin to Jake’s room.

From the doorway, I saw him sitting on his mattress beside an acoustic guitar, scribbling in a notebook. Light from the television played across his face and the wall behind him, but the sound was turned down and he didn’t pay attention to the screen. In fact, he seemed so absorbed by his writing I almost turned around and left, not wanting to interrupt. But then he looked up and noticed me. I apologized when he jumped.

“It’s alright,” he said, waving me in, “Guess you owed me one.”

I edged just inside the door. “Huh?”

“A scare,” he clarified, closing his notebook and putting it aside. “For making you watch
Hellriser
,” he repeated Lia’s mispronunciation.

“Oh. Right.” I glanced around the room. He’d made modest progress unpacking and cleaning up. “You haven’t gone to bed yet?” I asked.

“I don’t sleep much.” He ran his fingers through his hair. It stayed standing in some places. “What about you? What are you still doing up?”

I mumbled something about not being able to sleep, hoping he wouldn’t ask me why.

“That for me?” he asked, eyeing the plate in my hand. I carried it to him.

“Figured you were starved by now,” I said. He took the plate, biting hungrily into the first slice of pizza. “Sorry it’s cold. I was afraid running the microwave would wake someone.”

“No problem,” he said, taking another bite and thanking me with his mouth full.

The television was visible from my new vantage and the image on the screen caught my attention. A vaguely familiar blonde woman reclined on a bed. As I watched, Nicolas Cage climbed on top of her.

“What’re you watching?”

He followed my line of sight. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he promised, wiping his fingers on the paper towel I’d given him. He scrambled to switch off the television with his remote and then rummaged through a pile on his night stand for the video cover, passing it to me.

“I’ve heard of this,” I said, scanning the cover art. I recognized the woman now. Laura Dern, her long curly hair trailing over the shoulder of her hot pink dress. Nicolas Cage leaned insouciantly beside her in his snakeskin jacket.
Wild at Heart
.

“You haven’t seen it?”

I shook my head and handed the box back. “What’s it about?”

“Couple of weirdos,” he said. “Thought you were a David Lynch fan?”

“He’s okay. Scott Connor convinced me to watch
Blue Velvet
once. I don’t think I got it.”

“Don’t let Roy hear you say that.”

He might bar the door to Lynch’s next time he saw me coming, I acknowledged.

“Wanna have a seat?” he asked. I sat down in his desk chair.

There was a stack of posters on the desk, wrinkled at the edges, multiple thumbtack holes marring the corners. “These from your Cell Farm days?” I asked. The Celluloid Farm was Carreen’s biggest and best video store. Jake had worked there for about a year before leaving for school.

“Some,” he said as I paged through them. “I had ‘em up in my dorm room but they sort of freaked out my roommate.”

I uncovered the poster for Dario Argento’s
Deep Red
, featuring a blonde woman impaled on a broken window, rivers of her blood pouring over shards of jagged glass. “Like this one?”

“Now that,” he said, “is an underrated film.”

“I don’t know,” I said and told him my theory that Argento was more important for his overall influential impact on the genre than for his individual film contributions. Jake seemed appalled by this supposition and tried to argue with me, but I was unconvinced and in the end we had to agree to disagree.

I settled the posters back where I’d found them, swiveled the desk chair a little and caught sight of the notebook he’d been writing in when I entered. “Were you working on something for school?” I asked, not really thinking he had been, but looking for an excuse to broach the subject. If Lia wasn’t going to question him about his unexpected return to Carreen, I might as well.

“No,” he said. Then, realizing how terse he’d sounded, “Sorry. School’s sort of a sore subject for me right now. You may’ve heard.”

“Lia said something about you dropping out.” I tried to sound neutral.

“That surprise you?”

It honestly did. “I thought school was, like, your
thing
,” I said.

He shrugged a little. “Yeah, well, it’s started to feel like a waste of time.”

“Since when?”

“Freshman year.” No, longer than that, he corrected. Since before he’d even left for college. He’d thought things would get better, he said, once he “got going,” and he’d tried to throw himself into the work, spending the last two summers in Austin doing what he was “supposed” to do, taking summer classes and volunteering at hospitals. But his ambivalence had only deepened as the semesters passed. While the other pre-med students researched medical schools and prepared for the MCAT, he’d started to look for ways out.

He said he’d never intended to wind up back in Carreen in the middle of the night but as the fall semester neared, his doubts had overwhelmed him. He said he couldn’t face going back “for more of the same.”

“So I threw all my stuff in the van and drove back here, instead,” he told me. “Looking back, probably not the greatest decision I ever made. I mean, I don’t know what sort of reaction I expected to find here.” But he didn’t have anywhere else to go.

“Your parents are giving you a hard time,” I said, remembering what Lia’d told me.

“They don’t believe me when I tell them I’m done. They think I’m just burned out; that I’ll come to my senses and go back if they just bother me about it enough.”

“Maybe you
are
burned out,” I said. “Sounds like you’ve been working pretty hard.” He could try taking fewer classes, I suggested. Or switch his major to something less demanding.

The terms of his scholarship, he explained, complicated both those issues. Not that he was convinced it’d matter even if he could make changes. He knew pre-med wasn’t for him. “But nothing else seems to interest me all that much, either. I mean, besides playing music.” He smiled joylessly. “My parents flipped when I told them that. They’re scared I dropped out because I think I’m gonna be the next Clyde Kameron or something.”