The Language of Silence (6 page)

Chapter
Eleven

Ed
:

Evelyn talks more than I thought was humanly possible. We sit in my car parked behind the local Dairy Queen. It’s early December, and while Wendall rarely gets extremely cold, I can’t see us attracting a lot of attention at an ice cream shop. Besides, anyone who matters wouldn’t be caught dead at a Dairy Queen.

It’s all about the gelatos.

Shoot me.

I’m pretty good at zoning Evelyn out
. My body somehow knows when to nod and when to grunt a reply.  I would rather we got back to the making out. Easier that way.

“I knew him since pre-school, you know?”

“Who?” I ask as I reach and push a strand of her auburn hair behind her ear.

“Tristan.”

“Oh, right.” I unclick my seatbelt.

“It’s just so sad. I mean
, think of all the things he never got to do. He’ll never go to college. He’ll never get married. He’ll never have kids.”

“Tragic,” I whisper into her ear. I nuzzle her throat.

She pulls away.

“It just goes to show you. You gotta live every day to the fullest. I mean, sure, you hear that crap all the time on television, but this like, you know, proves it.”

“Can we not talk about this?” I ask, unable to keep my frustration out of my voice. I don’t want to talk about Tristan, and not just because all of her comments are so damn meaningless it makes me crazy. I don’t want to talk about him because he was a selfish ass who left us.

My brain feels like a damn game of ping pong. One second I feel like it’s my fault that he’s gone, and the next
, I hate him for leaving.

I can’t keep wondering if feeling like this is normal.

I don’t want to even think of about it right now.

Us.

Brett.

Me and Brett.

We’re alone now.

Don’t think about it.

“Oooooookayyy,” she drawls. “Well, then, you want to get high?”

I chuckle. I am eternally grateful that she has said something to distract me from thinking about Brett. Sometimes, I think it would be better to have never met her or her brother at all.

Sometimes.

Mom and I moved around a lot. I don’t blame her for it. In fact, I love my mom. She’s great. I’ve got a lot
of anger to go around, but it’s never directed toward her.

My father
—sperm donor—left us both.

We stayed in New York until I was about five. Grandma had gotten cancer when
Mom was a teenager. Even after Mom got pregnant with me, she was dedicated to taking care of Grandma as well. I grew up knowing all about breathing machines and rent-a-nurses. My mom worked double shifts as a cocktail waitress to support me and Grandma’s medical needs.

Occasionally, my dad would pop in, drop off some money, beg my mom to keep her mouth shut, and disappear without so much as asking me if I wanted to throw the old pig skin around in the backyard.

He was a grown man.

When h
e and my mom hooked up, he was twenty-seven. She was fifteen. Pervert.

When
Grandma died, my mom wept. It was the only time in my whole life I have seen her cry. She didn’t cry when my dad stopped coming around. She didn’t cry when she missed prom and high school graduation because she was busy cleaning the pissed on sheets of both a four-year-old and her sixty-year-old mother. She didn’t shed a damn single tear when Grandma would go on one of her pain-induced rants, calling my mother a whore and me a bastard.

But when
Grandma died, something died in her too.

I never understood it.

After that, we moved where Mom could find work. She got offered a job in the peanut factory here in Wendall, so when I was fourteen, we moved once again. I was an outsider the minute I stepped into this town. Sure, before, when we moved somewhere, I was the new kid, but this only lasted a while. Most of the time we moved to some big city and there was a new kid waiting to take my place a few weeks after my arrival.

Not true in Wendall.

Nothing has changed in this town in a hundred and fifty years.

It wasn’t that the kids were mean to me. They didn’t acknowledge me at all, and that’s a different sort of pain. I must have gone months without anyone saying a damn word to me. This isn’t an exaggeration. Even the teachers only spoke my name when they called roll.

And there’s nothing to do here. Wendall has one movie theater. One bowling alley. A shooting range. A Civil War museum. Two churches. A Dairy Queen. A McDonalds. A Starbucks. The DAR Headquarters. Five or six four-star restaurants—too bad I could never afford going to one of those. A dance hall—I hate dancing. Two buildings that serve as our jail and court. And mansion after mansion after mansion. So unless I suddenly decided to become a gun-wielding, super bowler, I was going to spend many weekends bored.

Lunch was the worst. Fuck the nature channel. You want to see true predator and prey action? Watch any cafeteria at any school and you’ll see the hunt. Except unlike the lions
that attack with claws and teeth, teenagers can destroy with a cold glance or malicious whisper.

One day
, as I sat buried in a Batman comic, Tristan sat down across from me. Tristan Jensen. One of Wendall’s golden boys. Even though he was a freshman, he had achieved obtaining the adoration of everyone around him. I knew his dad was some hot shot lawyer, and his mother’s family was one of the town’s founding members. He was Wendall.

Or so we all assumed.

“You know you aren’t really helping matters by sitting here reading
that
,” he said with a lopsided grin, nodding toward my comic.

I cleared my throat, willing my voice to work. “And I want to help matters why?”

“Because you sitting here by yourself for the next four years is pretty pathetic. Even the nerds have someone to talk with. Besides, if I let you continue to sit here all by yourself, it will only lead to some quarter-life crisis down the road where you will feel the need to write some angsty novel or song, make millions, and do some tell-all interview in
Entertainment Weekly
or
Rolling Stone
about Wendall. And as an upright citizen of this glorious town, I can’t sit by and let that happen.”

“Are you trying to be funny?” I asked, closing my comic book.

Tristan shrugged. “Are you trying to be even more of an outsider?” he countered.

I laughed. “Last time I checked
, I wasn’t being greeted by the welcome wagon.”

“Consider me the welcome wagon.”

“Right.”

“You hate this place
, don’t you?” he asked, suddenly serious.

“Can’t hate something you don’t acknowledge. This place is just a place. It do
esn’t mean anything to me at all,” I replied, hoping to keep the smug smile off of his face.

“You really sh
ould read something else. Your slumping over comics day in and day out paints a rather unfair picture of you. Here I was thinking you were an idiot,” he replied before walking away.

“And here I am still thinking you’re a jackass,” I muttered.

And we were friends ever since.

I spent countless afternoons over at Tristan’s before meeting Brett. She was a seventh grader and was stuck doing her time at Wendall Middle. Tristan and I would be reading comics or playing video games when I would hear the door down the hallway slam shut.

“It’s just my sister. She’s mad at me,” Tristan would reply, barely looking up from the comic. He had slowly but surely become a fan of Superman.

Brett’s slamming of the door stunt was like clockwork. Every day for weeks at around 4:30
, I would hear the slam of her bedroom door. The day I didn’t hear it changed my life. Instead, she threw open the door to Tristan’s room.

Before me stood an awkward, lanky twelve
-year-old girl. Looking at her, you could see that one day she would be attractive. One day. Not yet. But there was something about the directness of her glance that pulled me in. The game controller dropped from my hands. I fumbled to pick it up.

She seemed to feel the connection as well. She mumbled a few noises and pulled at her shirt. Tristan simply raised an eyebrow. She cleared her throat. “Who the Hades are you?” she asked me.

“Get out, Brett,” Tristan demanded.

“I will not. This is a free country. Sort of. I mean, sure, we still have an electoral college
, but…”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“I do not enjoy being laughed at,” she snapped.

“Brett,” Tristan warned.

“No. I will not be dismissed. This is our time together,” she said, turning her attention to her brother. “Do you know what today was like? I had to sit at lunch and listen to Opal make a list of girls she was and was not inviting to her pool party. You should have heard her. You would think she was waving her baton around, directing people to the left and right like some freaking S.S guard.”

Brett took a shaky, deep breath, pausing only for a second before sitting down between her brother and myself. She grabbed the controller from my hands. As she did so, our fingers grazed each other. She began to blush, frowning as if she was unused to the sensation.

Tristan sighed. “Ed, this is my sister, Brett. Brett, this is Ed.”

I nodded.

And with the flashing colors of the video screen against his face, I saw Tristan smile.

“Helllllllllo?” Evelyn calls out, snapping me back to reality.

“Well, Evelyn Goodwin! Who would have guessed it? Who knew you were such a juvenile delinquent?” I force a smile and slide away from her. I can see she’s in the game now.

“Right. I forgot. You have us all figured out,” she replies saucily.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She smiles
, shaking her head. “I’m not an idiot, Ed. I know your type. I know what you think of us.”

“So, you admit there’s an
us
?” I reply with a wink.

She shrugs. “There will always be an
us
, Ed, no matter where you go.” It’s the first honest thing I have ever heard Evelyn Goodwin say. And it makes me want to kiss her, not to prove a point, but just to kiss her.

She takes out a joint, lights it, and puts it to her mouth. She stretches a leg to the windshield and leans back in the seat.

“Want me to turn on some tunes? How about some Bob Marley?” I tease, suddenly enjoying parking with Evelyn Goodwin.

“We’re not all as predictable as you are, Ed,” she replies, taking a drag and offering me one.

I decline. “Wow, twice in one day.” She raises an eyebrow. “You’re the second person today to tell me I am utterly unoriginal.”

“So, what’s up with you and Brett?”
she asks suddenly.

I snatch the joint from her hand and take a drag. I ignore her question. I begin to cough. I have never been into the whole pot thing.
             

“Are we going to make out or what?” I ask, suddenly very annoyed.

“Awww, I think you might like me, Ed,” she purrs as she unclicks her seatbelt and moves closer to me. She presses her lips against mine, biting my bottom lip as she pulls away. “I just want you to know one thing,” she murmurs.

“What’s that?” I manage as I begin to kiss her neck.

“Don’t treat me as if I am some idiot like Georgina.”

I freeze. I look her in the eyes and am startled by the coldness in them. She means to destroy me, and if any one of the Wendall royalty can do it, she will be the one. But she doesn’t know the truth. She doesn’t know that I’m too destroyed inside already. She doesn’t know that while I want her, and I do, it’s only superficial
. I want her because as much as she thinks she is different from Georgina, she’s not.

I want her because maybe I deserve to be punished.

I didn’t stop him. I didn’t stop Tristan from leaving.

Because it wasn’t an accident.

Don’t think about it.

“Fair enough.”

I drop Evelyn off at her house an hour later. She makes me promise to take her out to the basketball game on Friday night. We didn’t have sex. She means to publicly flog me before that ever happens. Of course, I agree to take her. It’s like playing a game of chicken. We’ll both wait to see who gives in first.

She did give me a present
, though. A bag of shrooms. She rattled on about me needing to broaden my horizons. Next thing, she’ll be asking me to go to some music festival deep in some wooded area where I’ll end up dropping acid, covered in mud, and wearing, of all things, sandals. Everyone is playing a part. I doubt her parents know about her extra-curricular sports.

And while my fun with Evelyn has left me content, I know I have to do something about Brett. I can’t face another unexpected encounter with her. I barely was able to control my need to reach out for her this morning.