Save the Enemy (16 page)

But he’d always done that. She seemed … I don’t know. Not in love. Just in like. They liked a lot of the same subtitled movies. And many of the same artists, whose works featured things like decaying animals and full bosoms. But apparently these shared interests, plus hanging out all the time, was not enough to sustain their relationship. They broke up after about two years.

So, that was a long time to be halfheartedly together, I will admit. But neither of them seemed really
upset
after the breakup. They stayed pals. So did Donald and I. We’d always liked each other. Before and even during the time that he and Molly were together, sometimes we’d sit on the couch together, under a blanket, and talk. Sometimes we’d hug. It probably wasn’t appropriate. After they broke up last summer, when I turned sixteen, it seemed less inappropriate. Still not
perfectly
appropriate. But less inappropriate.

We went to the movies together one time after he and Molly broke up, just Donald and me. The movies up the street from my parents’ old house. It was supposed to be a funny movie. It wasn’t a funny movie. We stayed through the whole thing, though, and shared a popcorn mixed with peanut M&Ms that he bought, of course. We held hands. He drove me home. Came inside to hang out some more. My parents were already in bed. We decided to have some schnapps from their dusty, rarely used liquor cabinet. Make that
I
decided. Donald was up for anything. Schnapps, no schnapps. It tasted like sweet, peachy fire. My brother wandered downstairs while we were drinking the schnapps. He saw the bottle on the table.

“You’re drinking Mom and Dad’s liquor?” he asked, sleepily. “What is that?”

“A little schnapps,” I said. I giggled. This all seemed hysterical.

“It’s funny that Jews drink an alcohol originated by German monks,” said Ben. “They thought it had medicinal purposes.”

“I’m feeling very healthy,” Donald said. He laughed.

My brother smelled the liquor. “Peach,” he said. “Peaches originated in China, though the name suggests that the fruit originally comes from Persia. Peaches have been cultivated in China for thousands of years. About four thousand years, in fact.” And as he did most nights, Ben poured a glass of milk, drank it, scratched himself in the crotch, and went back to bed.

It got to be one in the morning, two in the morning, two thirty. Donald started off on Dad’s leather reading chair while I lounged on the somewhat severe wool couch, shoes off, feet akimbo, hair spilled over the throw pillows. But over time our seating arrangement shifted. I invited him to sit with me on the couch. Then Donald and I sat on the severe couch together under a blanket, watching infomercials. And cuddling. He smoothed my hair with his hands.

It was easy, once we were tucked in, for me to kiss him. And at that point, I seized an opportunity, by way of seizing my best friend’s ex-boyfriend’s pants zipper. I was tired of being a virgin. No one I knew was a virgin anymore. (Note: it’s possible I didn’t know that many people.)

Donald, not a virgin, had a condom. We used it. The experience itself was not especially loving, or exciting, or painful. It lasted a little while, long enough to get through part of an ad for something called the ShamWow!, and I felt a little bit embarrassed as it was happening, plus a little curious how
one cloth could do so
many
different things. But I was glad to do it.

And then, sweet relief, it was done.

Afterwards, I said to Donald, my new lover (ew gross), “I need to go up to my room so my parents don’t catch us here.”

“Good idea,” he said. He stroked my hair again. And then I fell asleep.

My father found us in the morning. He shrieked. Donald jumped up. The condom was now stuck to a part of him that my parents—and, arguably, me—should never have seen. I covered myself tightly with the blanket, willing all this not to be happening. As with all the things I tried to control mentally, this trick did not work. It was happening.

My mother heard the commotion. More Trasks then saw Donald in his most private of ways. Mom also saw me, on the couch, wrapped in blankets, trying to die on the spot.

“Jacob, let’s go get a new couch today,” Mom said to my dad. Then she left the room. Dad followed. He busied himself with some project in the backyard. Mom went into the kitchen for breakfast. Donald got dressed and went home. He’d always gotten along so well with my parents before this.

I suspected he wouldn’t join us on the back deck for grilling on hot summer nights anymore. He and Molly used to both come over for that. Dad would cook steaks on the grill. Mom would ask my friends if they thought she needed a facelift, and that sort of thing. She’d dole out what seemed like really misguided advice about love. Dad would rail against the government. Ben would recite facts about whatever obscure subject was catching his attention. All the weirdness, and there was a lot of it, these evenings were really fun and cozy, and they’re over.

Later in the day that Donald and I were caught in our delicate state, as I tried to hide in my bedroom, Mom made
me come downstairs and eat breakfast and talk. Were Donald and I a couple? Was I concerned that I might be pregnant? If I were pregnant, would I get an abortion? I’d have to get an abortion, she said. She cried, as if
she
were a teen mother being kicked out of her parents’ house in the dead of winter. (It was, I repeat, summer. We’d had Donald and Molly over for dinner just a couple of nights earlier.)

“I’m not pregnant,” I whispered.

“How do you know he doesn’t have AIDS?” Mom asked. “He doesn’t have AIDS,” I said.

“He might,” she said. She started crying again. Now she’s being kicked out of her parents’ house, and she has just discovered that she has AIDS.

“Mom,” I begged. “Please, please can we not talk about this?”

She then told me that she’d always hoped I would tell her about the first time I was going to have sex, so that she and I could celebrate with champagne afterwards. She told me that she’d imagined I’d be in my last years of college, and it would be with someone who’d repeatedly asked me to marry him, but who I’d rejected because I was too young and had too much work to do on my career before I could get married.

“Should we get out champagne?” she asked me, sniffling.

“Please stop,” I said. The only thing I could imagine being more mortifying than the actual story of how my mother learned that I’d had sex for the first time was this idea she was now proposing.

“We should make an appointment with Planned Parenthood for your abortion,” she then said.

“I’m not pregnant,” I said again. I guess I could have been pregnant. But it seemed unlikely, since we’d used a condom, as Mom unfortunately knew.

Mom then made me take prenatal vitamins, just in case I was pregnant, and just in case I decided not to have an abortion. Later in the week, she sat me down on the gold velvet couch she and Dad went out and bought from an upscale consignment shop—because
nobody’s
had sex on a used couch, of course—and told me that she was not ready to be a grandmother. But that if I had a baby, she would, of course, love it very much. I said I was sure she would. She hugged me. She slipped a package of condoms into my tote bag. Then she asked me which of several handsome movie stars I would have sex with, given the opportunity. I did not answer. She told me about her carnal feelings toward a surprisingly broad group of famous men, none of whom resembled my father in any way. This was Mom being her most motherly.

And still, Molly didn’t have to know. I could have kept it from her. Donald had no reason to tell her, either. I wanted to tell her, because she was my best friend, and you tend to tell your best friend when you’ve done “it”—or, really, anything—for the first time. But, given the circumstances, I decided to stay mum.

Mom did not stay mum. She was the one who brought it up. When Molly came over to get me for something a week or two after the devirginizing of
moi
. Mom said to Molly that kids these days are so much more progressive than they were when she was young.

“You could never have made it with your best friend’s ex-boyfriend so soon after they’d broken up in my day and age!” Mom said to Molly, who was missing some necessary context. Which I provided when we got outside. Provided while expressing a lot of regret. Then, when that seemed not to be eliciting friendship, full of chortles, like, “Isn’t it hilarious that Donald and I drank schnapps and then my parents
caught him with a condom stuck to his most Donaldy parts in the morning?” Then begging: “Molly, I didn’t mean to upset you. I didn’t know you’d even care. I honestly didn’t. You didn’t seem to miss him at all. And I just wanted to be
done
with this.”

“That’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard,” Molly said to me as she left. She was crying. I don’t think it was about Donald. She didn’t love him. I don’t know what it was about. She could be irrationally emotional sometimes. Occasionally explosive. But usually pretty mild and unbothered by things that would, like, really get
my
goat. For example, if I think that my parents are going to send me to summer camp to learn how to horseback ride, but then they decide not to send me to summer camp to learn how to horseback ride, then I will become furious. Hysterical. Angry beyond belief, seized by emotions that take me over like some kind of a demon.

When something similar happened to Molly—because we were going to go to camp
together
the summer we turned fifteen, but both had camp taken away when we got caught doing something really stupid (sneaking out in the middle of the night to play video games, in our pajamas, at the local 7-Eleven)—she just took it in stride.

“We’ll get jobs then,” she said, shrugging, while I was sobbing and red-faced like a baby. And indeed, she got us both jobs at Howie’s, a local fried chicken fast-food restaurant, for that summer. And let me offer some advice: if you ever go to Howie’s, just off Route 2 in West Warwick, do not eat the coleslaw, because I know what the fifteen-year-old employees do to it when Howie is not around, and you would not consider these things to enhance the dish’s appeal.

But Molly did not take this whole Donald thing in stride,
such as by going out and getting us jobs together, which might have been a lot of fun and pleasantly constructive. (She was already working at a different restaurant, where they did not have an opening for me; I was spending the summer doing nothing you’d want anyone to know about.) No, she kicked me to the curb is what she did. Hasn’t been to Alexandria to visit, except for my mom’s funeral, even though she’s got relatives somewhere in the Maryland suburbs. Before I moved to Alexandria, we’d made plans to go see them in Maryland and have them take us out jousting, that being the state sport and all. Like all my horseback-related plans, this one failed to make it out of the gate.

Yeah. The last time Molly and I hung out was when Mom told her about me and Donald. “Making it.” It might be the last time we ever hang out, if she never forgives me.

Except that tonight, tonight I am determined to make sure she forgives me.

Around midnight, I get
up out of bed. I figure I’ll get dressed, find the keys to one of Aunt Lisa’s and Uncle Henry’s cars, and drive over to Molly’s house. Where I’ll … I’m not sure. I can’t really ring the doorbell at this time of night. Maybe I’ll bring my cell and call her when I get there. And if she won’t take my call, I’ll … figure something out. She’s my best friend, even if she won’t talk to me, and I need her back in what has become the mustered-up fustercluck of my life.

I don’t turn on the light to get dressed in order to be as inconspicuous as possible, which leads to lots of knocking over lamps and stubbing my toe and shout-whispering “HOLY MOTHER THAT HURTS” and that sort of thing. When I open the door of my room, Pete is standing there in the hallway.

“Hey!” I say to him, more loudly than I’d meant to.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he says quietly.

“About what?” I say back as quietly as I can.

“Can I come in?” he asks, edging back into the bedroom.

“Okay,” I say. I walk back into the room. Pete reaches to switch on the light, but I say, again in the loud whisper, “Leave it off. Don’t want to wake anyone.” I’m not sure why I think that banging into every piece of furniture is unobtrusive, but turning the lights on would wake everyone. This is midnight logic.

“Zoey,” he says to me. “I really think we need to leave here. I think we should wake Ben up and go.”

“I can’t,” I say.

“Why?” he asks. “I’ll do the driving.”

“There’s someone else I have to go see,” I say.

“When?” he asks. “We have to leave early in the morning.”

“Now,” I say. “I’m going to go now.”

“Go where?”

“Warwick.”

Warwick is the town where I used to live. It’s where Molly still lives, at least I assume, at her parents’ house. I lived in that house, practically, back before everything. I tell Pete my plan. Some of it, anyway. I say I’m going to try to win back an old friend.

“I’ll drive you,” he says.

“I don’t need you to,” I say.

“I’ll drive you,” he says.

But I don’t want him to. I feel like I need to see my friend, my ex-friend, without an audience.

“I have to go alone,” I say to Pete. “But do you mind if I use your car?”

We go downstairs, tiptoeing in a way that is surely much louder than mere walking would have been. His keys are in
the pocket of his coat. I pull on my coat. It’s colder in Rhode Island than it is in Virginia. I’m feeling sleepy and energized at the same time. Terrified and calmly facing my crap. Pete hands me the one big black key that looks like it’s been chewed on, and touches my hand in the process.

“Please be careful, Zoey,” he says. Then he touches my arm. “Are you going to see an old boyfriend?” he asks.

“No!” I say, realizing that he doesn’t know my old life, my old friends. My old screwups. Only the new ones. “Oh, no. No. It’s not that at all, Pete.”

“Be safe,” he says. Then he kisses me on the cheek. He holds his lips there. His lips are so soft. I feel … lost. But also present. And also like if I don’t move, I am not going to see Molly. Like I could just give up everything that I thought I had to do and just keep my cheek raised to these lips.