two
Britney
and Ricky had begun fighting at Troy’s party after he’d found her alone in the basement. Even though she was the only one down there, he’d accused her of flirting with other guys.
Now, nearly an hour later, idling the car in front of her father’s big house in the Green Pastures housing development, Ricky still wouldn’t let it go. His anger seemed to have more to do with the teasing he’d had to put up with from Jeremy and Digger than with anything that Britney herself had done. They’d used her absence as an excuse to pummel his shoulder and say things like, “You better watch out for her, man. You should have seen the way she was looking at Lawson,” and, “I bet she’s run off for some nasty with him,” and—poking two fingers under his ribs—“Ricky P. can’t even keep track of his own girlfriend.”
She listened silently and hoped he’d talk himself out, but this tactic didn’t seem to be working well. The longer she was quiet, the more paranoid Ricky became.
“Don’t you understand, Britney?” he said, his green eyes wide and pleading. “I love you.”
She liked that he loved her, she
loved
that he loved her, but she didn’t like hearing it in this horrible begging way.
“You’re drunk,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”
She tried to tune him out. They’d been sitting in front of her father’s house for half an hour, and she was starting to become afraid that they’d never stop fighting. She gazed at the street. The city had re-paved it last summer, and it was such a glimmering shade of black that it looked slick even when it was dry.
Despite the fact that the heat was running full blast, Ricky’s car was icy cold. It was an old green Honda with over a hundred thousand miles on it. In warm weather, it smelled like mildew, but now it just smelled like cold. The cracks in the plastic on the dashboard seemed to grow in this weather. She didn’t understand why he couldn’t get a new one. Anything would be better than this junker.
She shivered and tugged Ricky’s giant letter jacket, its sleeves hanging down past her fingertips, tighter around her, afraid that she might have to give it back soon. Nuzzling her nose in the collar, she picked up faint whiffs of Obsession for Men and hair gel. Quintessential Ricky smells.
She stared out the window of the old car and thought about how nice it would be to finally be allowed to get out of the car and go inside the house, where it was warm.
“I love you too,” she whispered, her mouth tight, her lips thin, the skin of her cheeks taut and tense.
The house, with its white shutters and the pale gray stonework around the doorway, reminded her, as always, of a great old cottage plopped down in the middle of a wide empty plain. Green Pastures was a newish development on the west side of town, and though there were trees, they were all still so small that they had to be supported by stakes. In the winter, the snowdrifts nearly covered them over. The spindly tips of the trees’ trunks poked out of the center of weird moonscape craters.
“So … so … so why can’t we …”
And now he sounded like he was going to cry. Hockey players aren’t supposed to cry, she thought. He hadn’t cried when his pit bull, Spur, died. He hadn’t cried when he’d almost failed trigonometry and been put on academic probation—and he’d had to miss most of last year’s season for that. Why was he crying now? Did getting her answer immediately really matter
that
much to him?
“Just … w-w-w-why can’t … I mean, Britney … Britney … it just seems like …”
He was blubbering. His face, usually so chiseled, was puffy. His lips curled like those of a fish gasping for air.
“Listen, Ricky, I’ll have to think about it. But I’m not mad at you, ‘kay? And you, don’t be mad at me either. Please?” she asked. She
was
mad at him, but if she could just get out of the car, she’d get over it.
She liked being his girlfriend. She’d dreamed about it for years, ever since the two of them were in eighth grade and she was a full foot taller than him. He’d looked so cute playing for the JV team. She’d been such a nerd then. She’d played French horn in the band and said things like “gosh darn it” and “fudge” when she thought she was going to curse.
Smoothing his hand between her two palms, she said, “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
The look he gave her—she couldn’t tell if he was going to scream at her or try to kiss her. He did neither, just stared at her forlornly, and she slowly pulled her hands back to her lap.
“Okay?” she said. “Just … don’t be mad?”
He laughed bitterly.
“No, I mean it, okay?” she said, trying to look deep into his eyes. But as soon as her eyes caught his, he turned away to stare at his own reflection in the windshield.
“So, good night,” she said, opening the door.
His tousled hair, frosted blond with brown roots, sparkled in the strong moonlight. Shadows accentuated his cheekbone, which pulsed as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. She wanted to reach across and touch his face one more time, but she didn’t.
Instead, she stepped out onto the curb and slammed the door—maybe a little too hard. The sound rattled like a gunshot across the empty street.
Ricky didn’t seem to notice. He kept staring at the wind-shield, his cheek pulsing like it did when he was trying to keep his emotions from bursting out.
Just as she was about to turn to go, he rolled down the window, reached across, and grabbed her wrist. “Wait … Britney, I—”
“Tomorrow, okay?” she said, pulling her arm away. “Bye.” She crouched down and waved at him. But he didn’t move.
“Goodbye,” she said again.
He nodded stiffly, and that was enough for her. She turned, her blond hair flying behind her, and marched toward the front door. She heard him turn the ignition over.
“Oh, hold on,” she said. She turned and ran toward the car. “I need my CD.”
He pressed the eject button and handed it to her—the rock classic
Led Zeppelin IV,
the one with “Stairway to Heaven” on it. They’d listened to the song about two hundred times that first night in her bedroom when her father had been away meeting with a client in Milwaukee.
“Thank you!” she said, surprising herself with the sickly sweet voice she usually reserved for Mr. Massey when she wanted him to give her an extension on her English paper.
Resisting the urge to turn around, she walked slowly away, lingering until she heard him pump the gas. His tires buzzed like chain saws as they spun on the ice, and then he caught traction on a dry spot and the car jerked forward, squealing. He fishtailed for a moment and then he was off down the street.
With Ricky gone, Britney’s emotions came flooding to the surface. She was more upset than she’d realized. Enraged, really. And sad.
Even though she was cold, she didn’t want to go inside. The chilly air made her more alert, cleared her mind. She’d lived with cold weather her entire life and she didn’t mind it. Instead, she stood on the front stoop and stared out at the snowdrifts. She needed to talk to someone who might understand. Shivering, Britney pulled out her cell phone and scanned through the names in her address book.
Her heart was racing. After two twirls through the list, she found the name she could trust. She hit send and waited for the voice that would come to her rescue.
“Hi,” she whispered. “It’s me.”
three
Ricky
was driving too fast. To get out of Britney’s development, he first had to navigate through the cove of looping cul-de-sacs, and as he hit the first turn, he almost spun out of control. His wheels locked up and he slid toward the snowbank. His brakes didn’t have any effect at all. Somehow he got the car to stop sliding and he sat there for a minute, trying to calm himself down.
The first few times he’d been here to see Britney, he’d gotten lost in the maze of streets, some of which didn’t even have street signs yet. Now he knew: Take the first right, then another right at the top of the slope. Stay on this street until it dead-ends at Pine Crest and then take a left and you’re out. But tonight each of these turns was treacherous. He was still a little buzzed from the Old Milwaukees he’d pounded at Troy’s party. He was going to have to take it slow.
Ricky lived five miles away from Britney, on the opposite side of town. Once he was out of her neighborhood, he swung onto Cedar Street and down past Green Haven Country Club, skirting the outer edge of the UW campus. Now that he was on a major thoroughfare, the street was salted. He sped up a little, but still rattled by his spin in Britney’s development, he kept himself five miles under the speed limit.
The quickest route home was to cut across the Washington Avenue strip that ran along the northwest side of town and speed past the fast-food restaurants, warehouse stores, and strip malls. The lights were coordinated there: hit the first and you could cruise through the others as well, all the way home. And it meant that he didn’t have to crawl through downtown, where the cops were always out in search of college students they could nab for drunk driving.
A pickup truck with its high beams on turned in behind him as he rolled past the multiplex. Annoyed, he flicked the rearview mirror into tint mode and sped up.
When Ricky stopped for a red light, the pickup pulled right up behind him. He noticed that it was swerving quite a bit. It crept up on his bumper as if the driver were playing fast and loose with the brake—as if the driver were drunk. In the streetlights, Ricky could make out that it was an old Ford, red and rusty. This town was full of them. Every farmer in Wisconsin seemed to have an old red Ford pickup. The front license plate was iced over with thick white frost.
Almost out of gas, Ricky veered across the street into Super America when the light turned green. He rattled to an abrupt stop and hopped out the door to run inside and pay the attendant.
Before he was two steps away from the car, the sound of the pickup’s revving engine startled him. He turned—too late—and saw that it had jumped the curb and was gunning straight for him.
He fumbled with the door handle, which suddenly seemed to be a complicated device that he couldn’t remember how to operate. The closer the truck came, the more confusing the door handle got.
When the truck was almost on top of him, he gave up on the door handle and tried to run toward the attendant’s window—he slipped in his sneakers; it was hard even to walk. He couldn’t make it out of the way fast enough. The truck rammed into him, crunched into his car with a sound like thunder, knocking it into the gas pump. It barreled back onto the road, dragging Ricky along with it, his arms splayed across the hood, his feet bouncing along the road.
Gas spewed from the pump like water from a hydrant. It soaked into the snowbank, turning it into a dirty yellow sludge. The attendant working the cash register ran out to see what had happened, but by the time he got there, the pickup was just two tiny dots of red in the darkened distance. He was the only witness, and he had seen nothing. A red truck spun out of control; that’s all he could tell the police later. The same one everyone had.
As the truck sped off, Ricky’s body gradually slipped under its chassis. His jeans caught and ripped on the rough pavement, and as they pulled away, his skin began to chafe as well. The muscles began to tear from his body. A bloody trail of unidentifiable body parts was strewn out in the truck’s wake.
Finally, three blocks later, Ricky’s torso slipped and spun under the pickup’s rear right wheel, but the truck roared on, leaving Ricky where he fell in a twisted heap. A mangled raccoon on the side of the road, his blood creeping slowly into the ice.
four
Thank
God, Britney’s best friend, Melissa, was home. They talked for twenty minutes about the argument Britney had just had with Ricky. Their conversation was filled with all the details of the party and the car ride home.
“It’s not like I want to break up with him,” Britney said into her cell. “I just get so mad when he’s drunk like that and then I start acting bitchy. I can’t help it.” She sat on the steps leading to the front door, gazing at the cliffs of snow along the edge of the driveway. The Montgomerys across the street had installed a freestanding basketball hoop at the edge of their driveway, and it looked terribly lonely in the moonlight.
“Where is he now?”
“Probably at home.”
“Well, don’t call him tonight. I’ve been reading this psych book about power dynamics, and I can tell you right now, if you call him, you’ll lose the advantage. He needs to call first and apologize to you for acting like such a jackass.”
Melissa was a carryover from when Britney had been unpopular, the only one of her old friends she still talked to. She was embarrassed now about some of her old friends—Bobby Plumley, for instance—but Melissa was different. Melissa knew her almost as well as her father did. The two of them had met when they were in second grade. They’d taken a modern dance class together at the Madison Voices and Visions Children’s Resource Center. Throughout middle school and the first few years of high school, they were both in the advanced math and English classes, but last year Britney had stopped studying to build her social life, and Melissa had gone on to place into the freshman comp-lit class at the University of Wisconsin. Britney still trusted her with almost everything.
“What you should do, I think,” Melissa went on, “is give it a day. Let both of you simmer down and get some perspective. If you really love each other, a day away won’t hurt anything.”
“Yeah, I guess. If you love something, set it free and all that, right?”
“Exactly,” said Melissa, and she spontaneously broke into the old Sting song—
“If you want to keep something precious, you got to lock it up and throw away the key….”
This made Britney laugh, and by the time she hung up, she was no longer angry. Instead, she was sad that she and Ricky seemed to have more fights than fun together. She lingered outside and tried to remember all the great times she’d shared with Ricky.
For instance, there was that school-sponsored brat fest on Lake Mendota, where they’d first gotten together at the end of last year. There’d been a bonfire along the rocky shoreline, and as it died out, everyone had headed over to Troy’s for the after party. One of the few people left stirring the embers, she was standing there, feeling sort of lonely and wishing she had somebody to talk to, when he’d come up beside her. She could still remember odd the way his white-and-green Packers baseball cap rode so low on his forehead that she was surprised he could see where he was going. He’d grinned at her and almost chivalrously taken the hat off, bending it back and forth to preserve the crease.
“What’re you smiling about?” she had said.
“Nothing, just … you look like your mom just died or something.”
“That’s not funny,” she’d said, making the beady-eyed look that she’d perfected after years of fending off the barbs of people who thought they were better than her.
“Oh, damn, you’re the one whose mom really did die, aren’t you?”
“Uh—yeah.”
“I’m sorry.” The mortified expression on his face told her he wasn’t pretending. Then very softly, he’d said, “I know it’s not the same, but I lost a good friend this year too.”
“Really?”
“Sabrina Reynolds.”
Sabrina, the cheerleading captain, had been killed the previous spring behind the Hardee’s where she worked on the weekends. Her body had been found in the Dumpster and she had been stabbed thirty-four times.
“I didn’t know you and Sabrina were close.” Britney’s carefully plucked eyebrows rose in concern.
“Oh, we didn’t date or anything like that, but we were … She was a bud of mine.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Britney said.
Sabrina had been the second student from La Follette to die last year. The week before school started, Danny Boyle, a friend of Bobby Plumley’s whom Britney had sometimes hung out with, had been found hanging from a noose in his grandparents’ barn. Britney didn’t like to talk about the deaths. They depressed her. She awkwardly tried to change the subject. “So, was there some reason you came here to talk to me?”
“Yeah, so listen.” As he spoke, the flayed fingertips of his two hands bounced against each other. “I was thinking that you could hang out with me at the Union this Thursday. It’s the first day of Music on the Lake, and some group called The Wunderkind is playing. I think they’re a polka band or something like that.”
As what he’d said sank in, she began to giggle at its absurdity. Why would someone like him want to date her? Her giggles grew into great guffaws. She laughed so hard her gut began to ache.
“I guess that’s a no, huh?” he said.
Holding her breath until she got herself back under control, she held up a finger as if to say “Wait a sec,” Able to talk again, she said, “I didn’t say no.”
Or the evening that he’d taken her out to Giovanni’s, the fanciest restaurant in town, and presented her with a beautiful friendship ring—a modest opal centered on silver. She had it on right now! That was the night of their first kiss. She could still remember the way his lips had tasted, salty and warm with a slight touch of tomato.
So many moments they’d shared together.
Gazing at the CD in her hand, Britney remembered the night back in July when it had become so special to her. “Stairway to Heaven.” She’d put it on auto-replay on the centralized stereo that fed to speakers all over the house. Then she’d led Ricky by the hand up the stairs, into her room, and they’d done things she’d waited her whole life to do, things she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do unless the time was perfect and the boy was perfect and the future was assured of being perfect too.
The tears, once they started, just wouldn’t stop. They froze to her face, stinging and deepening the chill in her bones. When her bottom lip quivered, it rattled against her teeth like an ice cube, and numb, it seemed to hold the contorted shape of her sadness. Her whole body heaved and shuddered with each new wave of emotion. The cold merely egged on the convulsions. She felt like something outside herself had taken control of her body and was now shaking it with furious might.
She couldn’t go inside, not now, not like this. Her father was usually asleep by this time, but Adam was probably awake. Adam was the son of Steven Saft, Britney’s dad’s old U. of Penn law school buddy. Two months ago, he’d been shipped here from their home in New Hampshire to shield him from what her father called his parents’ “misunderstanding.” At least, that was the official story. He had other problems too, but Britney’s father wouldn’t tell her what these were.
She’d picked up enough to know that he’d gotten in some sort of serious trouble, but she had no idea what it could be. To her, he seemed more like a geek than a deadbeat. She couldn’t imagine him being bold enough to do anything really dangerous. Right now, he was most likely logged on to his computer playing EverQuest or whatever it was he did up there. He’d been in Madison for two months now, and it seemed like all he did was play that game. She definitely didn’t want him to see her like this.
She wiped the wet mascara from her cheeks and pulled her hair back into a bright yellow binder. She dug her brush out of her black imitation Kate Spade bag and stroked it through her ponytail a few times. Then she double-checked her face in her compact mirror, carefully daubing the streaks of black from her cheeks.
Her pink snow boots were sopping wet, so before going inside, she slipped them off her feet. The protocol was to carry them to the bathroom and let them dry off in the tub. Otherwise they’d create big puddles and warp the hardwood floors.
The foyer was full of shadows. The dark outline of the chandelier above her head seemed to hang especially low tonight, as if there might be something heavy sitting in it.
On tiptoes, she tried to sneak upstairs as quietly as she possibly could.
The shadows wavered and quaked like there was something alive, a person lurking in them.
A voice came from the darkness. “Britney?”
“Wha—” She jumped. Her boots thudded to the floor.
“You’ve been sitting out front a long time, haven’t you?”
It was her father. Sitting in the shadows in the hard-back chair they kept next to the small antique table in the foyer.
“Can you turn on the light or something?” she said. “You scared me to death!”
She swiped at the light switch and illuminated the room. Her dad’s face was long, his nose pointy and shrewd. His exceptionally long, thin legs stuck out into the middle of the room. He wasn’t that old, but his hair had turned shock white after Britney’s mom had died. Tonight he looked especially pale under the bushy wings of his eyebrows, and Britney knew he was worried about something. On the table next to his large, meaty hand sat a telltale glass of ice cubes melting into the dregs of what had been scotch. He collected single malts but only drank them when he was either trying to impress guests or was upset about something and unable to sleep. Usually he drank cheaper stuff.
“It’s really cold out there,” he went on, “but you didn’t want to come in.”
Britney shrugged.
“Because you and Ricky had a big fight.” He arched his right eyebrow. “I could see you through the window. What did I tell you about him and his friends? You’re such a smart girl, Brit. And so sensitive. I really … it baffles me why you want to be with a guy like that.”
He kept his voice soothing and controlled, but his disdain for Ricky still came through loud and clear. He’d been against the relationship from the very start. To his mind, Ricky and his friends were nothing more than thugs. It especially irked him that because they were among the star jocks in town, when they were caught drinking or fighting, the police gave them preferential treatment.
She tried to find something to look at that would conveniently hide her face from him. Though she’d cleaned up, there was no erasing the redness that her tears had coaxed to the surface of her eyes.
Taking her chin softly in his hand, he turned her face up toward his so he could look at her.
“What happened?” he said.
He was such a kind man and so many things had gone badly for him. Britney’s mom, Jan, had accidentally drowned while they were white-water rafting up near the Wisconsin Dells—her body had never been found—breaking his heart and filling him with an unshakable loneliness. As if that weren’t enough, Jan had also run his law office. He was a prominent Madison defense attorney, and keeping track of everything was too much for him to do alone. It took him a year, but he’d eventually had to go hire someone new, a recent college grad named Tamara Lederer. Now, even eleven months since she started, this batty girl still hadn’t mastered the filing system.
Britney had seen the strain it put on him. The harrowed eyes. The way he picked at his food. She hated to burden him with her problems with Ricky.
“Nothing happened,” she said, and gave him a weak smile.
“Something must have happened, Britney. It’s right there on your face. Wet cheeks, raccoon eyes. Something’s definitely wrong. I don’t know what—and I won’t unless you tell me, but I can tell it’s something.” He measured out an inch of space with his fingers. “I’ve known you since you were this big, Britney. I’ve become pretty good at recognizing these things.” As an afterthought, he added, “And that frown looks like it needs to be turned upside down.”
“You’re sweet,” she said.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“It’s nothing. Just … Ricky.”
“What about Ricky?”
Britney paused. She wasn’t sure exactly what to say. “He—nothing ,” she said finally.
Looking meaningfully into her eyes, he said, “You should tell me when something’s upsetting you. I can help more than you think.”
He held her gaze for what seemed like too long. She turned away first, stared at the photo of the family that hung on the wall leading up the stairwell: all three of them, Mom, Dad, and her, wearing their matching Christmas sweaters, the ones with the corny knit panda bears on them, posed with stiff smiles in front of the fireplace.
“We just had a fight, that’s all. We—I’ll be fine.”
“Well, if you won’t tell me, will you let me give you a hug anyway?”
His arms felt like heavy weights around her waist, but they still comforted her. She burrowed her face into his chest. He knew her so well.
She was crying again.