Cuts Like a Knife (3 page)

She grabbed the neck of my shirt and pulled me toward her. I dropped my mouth back onto hers, and I just let go and fell into the feeling of being with Mac, of loving Mac the way I'd been dreaming of for the past six months.

Have you ever thought about something so much that when it happened, it just wasn't as good, it just couldn't be, because of how perfect you'd made it in your mind?

This wasn't like that. It was everything I'd always thought about and better. It wasn't like I'd never done
it
before, but this was special, and I didn't mean to, but I even whispered, “I love you, Mac,” softly against her hair, because I needed to do that.

After, we lay wrapped up in the blankets with Mac in my arms, her head on my chest. Her hair smelled like flowers. I was almost afraid to say anything in case somehow it all turned out to be a mistake.

“Hey, Danny Boy, remember that first day we talked, on the merry-go-round in the park? Back then, I didn't know you had chest hair and muscles,” Mac said, tracing small, slow circles on my chest.

How many times had I gone over that day in my mind? I'd been walking home after school. I always cut through the park because it was faster than taking the long way around on the sidewalk. There had been no one around except for Mac, who was sitting on the edge of the merry-go-round.

I saw her and I had wanted to talk to her. I just wasn't sure if I should. So I was walking along, sort of staring at my feet, trying to decide what to do, and I was almost past her when she called out, “Hey, you're in my homeroom, aren't you?”

I stopped and looked at her. “Yeah,” I said. “I'm Daniel, middle of the row by the window.” As soon as the words were out, I knew how dumb they sounded. Mac just kind of shrugged and said, “I'm Mac, stuck in the front row because I'm the new kid.” Then she had grinned, and wow, I couldn't say anything at all, dumb or otherwise. There was pretty much no blood left in my brain.

“Mac, why do you always call me Danny Boy?” I asked now, concentrating on the feeling of her finger, which was already starting to make me feel crazy all over again.

She didn't answer for so long that I thought she wasn't going to. Then finally she said, “It's an old song my grandmother liked. Sometimes she'd sing it to me.”

“Oh,” I said, mostly because I didn't know what else to say.

I closed my eyes for a minute just to let myself enjoy the feeling of her hand moving on my skin. When I woke up, Mac was gone.

Chapter Five

I jerked upright and looked around. It was almost dark. I called Mac's name a couple of times, but she didn't answer me. I yanked on my pants and went barefoot across the hall to the other slanted-roof bedroom. She wasn't there. I went down the stairs, still calling for her. I walked all around the downstairs. She wasn't anywhere in the house.

It wasn't until I went back up to the room to put on the rest of my clothes that I saw the words written on the wall above the air mattress. They hadn't been there before. I was sure of that. Just two words.

Danny Boy
.

I didn't know what it meant. Was she sorry we'd done it? Was she happy? Were we still friends? Were we something else?

I pulled on the rest of my things and took one last look at that ceiling in the dim light, full of Mac's words, full of Mac's dreams. It was just wrong that it was going to be destroyed in the morning. And I wondered if I'd been wrong not to take pictures of as much as I could, even though she'd said she didn't want me to. It was too late now.

I let myself out of the back door of the little house, looked around to make sure no one was watching, then sprinted across the torn-up lawn and pushed through the opening in the fence. Once I was away from the house, I pulled out my phone and tried Mac. All I got was her voice mail. For a second, I didn't know what to leave for a message. Finally I said, “Hey, uh, Mac, it's Daniel. Call me. Please.”

Not very original.

So now what? I didn't feel like going home. I'd been walking more or less down the hill, and I realized that I wasn't that far from Frankie and Johnnie's. Frankie and Johnnie's was this retro diner, lots of neon, red vinyl and shiny chrome. Mac loved the place, and they probably had the best onion rings in the world, or at least in this podunkville part of it.

Thinking about the onion rings made me hungry, so I figured I'd stop in for an order and maybe Mac would call while I was sitting there, or maybe she'd somehow already be there.

She wasn't.

Alex and Ren were sitting at a round table by the window. Alex's hair was purple again and spiked, which had to be Ren's doing. I got my order and went over to them. Alex was sitting sideways in his seat, drumming on the tabletop to some beat only he could hear. He did that sort of thing a lot. Bass players are kind of out there. At least all the ones I've met.

“Hey,” I said, snagging a chair from the next table with my foot and dragging it over so I could sit down.

“Mac's not here, Daniel,” Ren said, pulling her hands back through her thick blond hair and then letting it fall to her shoulders like some kind of shampoo commercial.

“Kinda noticed that,” I said around a mouthful of onion and crispy, greasy deep-fried batter.

“Yeah, well, don't bug her, okay?” Ren said, dipping what looked like a cold French fry into a blob of mayonnaise on her plate and stuffing it in her mouth.

Ren and Alex were more Mac's friends than mine. The three of them had met in detention. I'd never been sent to detention, and Ren sometimes acted like that was a moral failure on my part.

“What's it to you?” I said, dunking half an onion ring into ketchup, because who eats fries or onion rings with mayonnaise anyway?

“After last night, she just needs to be by herself for a while.”

“What happened last night?” The only thing I knew that had been going on the night before had been the school dance, and I knew Mac would never go to one of those. She thought school dances were lame. Besides, she'd already told me she'd been in the music room finishing her comp project.

Ren looked at me like I was stupid or something. Of course, compared to her, I was. Compared to her, everyone was dumb as dirt. Ren had an iq that made her pretty much smarter than everyone—for sure smarter than every teacher in school, plus the principal. (Okay, so you didn't have to be a genius to be smarter than Mr. Kenner.)

Teachers were always on Ren's case because she “didn't apply herself.” That's school talk for she did dick-all in class. Ren figured, what was the point? Everyone went on to the next grade every year—holding someone back was too damaging to our fragile self-esteem. So she decided what was the point of actually studying? First of all, she pretty much knew everything anyway. If she read a book, what she read was in her head forever. And how smart was it to do homework for marks that you didn't need?

It made sense to me, and I guess it did to Ren's parents too, because it didn't matter how many times they were called in to the school, nothing ever changed.

Ren shook her head and made a face. “You didn't hear, did you?”

“Hear what?” I asked, before taking a long drink from my Coke.

She looked at Alex, and he shrugged.

“There was a dance last night,” she said.

“Yeah, I did hear about that.”

“You know Gavin Healey?” she asked, dunking another cold French fry in mayo and eating it. For some reason, watching her made me think of a bird eating a worm.

“Mr. Hot-Shot-I'm-Gonna-Play-inthe-NHL? He's in my math class. He's a jerk.” I stuffed another onion ring in my mouth, chewed and swallowed. “What does Gavin have to do with the school dance and Mac?”

“Mac had a date with Gavin last night.”

Chapter Six

I almost choked on my drink. I coughed, leaning over the table trying to get my breath, reaching blindly for a napkin to wipe my face. “You have lost your mind,” I said to Ren. “In the first place, Mac wouldn't be caught dead at a school dance, and there's no way she'd ever go out with an asshole like Gavin Healey. No way!”

“You don't know her as well as you think you do,” Ren said, and there was something—pity, no, something else, sadness maybe—in her blue eyes.

“Yeah, well, I know Mac well enough to know that she would never be interested in Gavin Healey.”
How
could she be
, I thought,
after what
we'd just done? That meant something. It had to, didn't it?

“It wasn't really a date,” Ren said. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Mac didn't know that. It was just a big stupid setup between Gavin and his asshole friends on the hockey team. They wanted to make Mac look like a loser. They thought it was funny.”

“No way. Shit! No.”

Alex fished in the pocket of his jeans, got his phone out and pulled up something on the screen. He leaned forward, holding the phone out to me. “Sorry, man,” he said.

It was a picture someone had emailed him, clearly taken at the dance the night before. In the background, I could see Gavin licking some girl's face, with his hand on her ass. It wasn't Mac.

That's because the rest of the picture was Mac, her face mostly, and the look on it made my chest ache. There was so much pain on her face, so much hurt.

I turned my head away and stared out the window. My hands were clenched into tight fists, and I wished Gavin were there so I could pound him into a pile of hamburger.

“Did you know Mac was helping Gavin with math?” Ren asked, leaning forward with her elbows on the table.

“No,” I said.

Ren snapped the end of her knife with her thumb and finger and started it spinning. “Me neither. And mostly I think it was just Mac doing his work for him.”

I pushed the plate of half-eaten onion rings away. I wasn't hungry anymore. “Why would she do something like that?” I asked.

The helping with math part, I got. Mac was a math genius. But doing Gavin Healey's assignments? Doing anyone's assignments? That wasn't her.

“She liked Gavin,” Ren said. “That's why.”

I shook my head. It still didn't make sense.

“C'mon, you didn't think she liked you or something?”

“No,” I said, feeling my cheeks start to burn.

Ren did that hands-through-her-hair thing again, and I caught the sparkle of green glass in her ears. My arm shot across the table and grabbed her wrist. “Where did you get those earrings?” I said.

Alex straightened up in his seat, and it crossed my mind that he was twice as big as I was and, if he wanted to, he could pretty much pick me up and break me into little pieces. I let go of Ren and held up my hand so they both knew I didn't mean anything by grabbing her in the first place.

“Hey, I'm sorry,” I said. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then I asked the question again. “Where did you get those earrings?”

Her hand touched the dangly glass and metal, and she smiled, sort of. “Mac gave them to me.”

I didn't know what to do with my hands, and the urge to grab her again was strong. “When?” I said.

“A little while ago,” Ren said, sliding her chair back. Away from me?

“Mac was here?”

“Yeah.”

I cleared my throat. “Those are her favorite earrings.”

They were just two loops of copper wire with three rows of tiny glass beads strung across the loop—a couple of tiny abacuses. They'd been a present from Mac's grandmother the last Christmas she'd been alive. They were the only earrings she ever wore. She'd been wearing them when we were…together at the house. They'd sparkled in the fading light when she'd lifted her head to look at me and I'd thought my heart was going to beat its way out of my chest.

“She said she didn't want them anymore and she knew I'd always liked them, so she asked if I wanted them, and I said yes.”

“You didn't think that was weird?” I asked.

“No,” Ren said, and her eyes kind of slid off my face. “When she wants them again, I'll just give them back to her.”

Ren was a crappy liar.

Chapter Seven

“You think she's going to take off again, don't you? Did she tell you that?” I hadn't eaten any more onion rings, so why did I have this lump in my throat that I couldn't seem to swallow down?

Ren looked away and didn't answer.

The thing was, when life got too hard for Mac, she ran. I knew she'd run away right after her grandmother died, when she had to switch to Riverview, and then she'd taken off a couple of months ago after some big blowup with her uncle. I wondered if that was when he'd told her he was going to sell the little green house.

I didn't know where she'd gone or what she'd done those two times before. She was just gone, and everyone—Mr. Kenner, Mrs. Robinson—kept asking, had she called us, had she said anything? And then three or four days later she was back like nothing had happened. When I asked her where she'd gone, she just shrugged.

The last time, before she took off, she'd given Ren her favorite purple scarf, and she'd given me this funny little windup chicken that did the bird dance. It was like she didn't want us to forget her in case she didn't come back, but of course she had.

Now Mac had given Ren those earrings. That had to mean she was planning on taking off again, except she hadn't given anything to me yet. Then it hit me that she kind of had.

I still couldn't swallow whatever was caught in my throat. “What did she say, Ren?” I said.

“She didn't say anything. She just gave me the earrings.”

“She's taking off again. I know she is.” I pulled a hand over my face.

“You don't know that,” Ren said. “And anyway, you can't say anything to anybody. Just let Mac work things out in her own way. She needs some time by herself, that's all.”