Something Wicked (20 page)

Forty-Four

For
some reason I get all clingy with Fortune. I hate losing control and I hate myself for being that way. Even when I’m doing it, I’m aware that I’m being an idiot, but I just can’t stop myself. It’s like I have this addiction, this yearning in the pit of my stomach that needs its hourly fix. I call him a thousand times a day, I walk by his house hoping to bump into him, I email him and text him. The more I do all this, the less he wants to see me. And even though I know this, I still do it.

My thoughts are crazy. I think he’s found someone else. I think he’s avoiding me. I think he doesn’t like me anymore. One afternoon I wait outside his house till he gets home and then I show up at his door and basically jump him. I give him such amazing sex he’s bound to want me more. Then, when he goes to shower, he leaves his jeans on the floor and I get the phone out of the pocket to check his text messages. It’s just what I thought: full of messages from girls.
Baby. Honey. Miss you babe. Want you. Kiss
…

When he comes back, I confront him, holding the phone up in the air, reciting the messages. He grabs it out of my hand and starts erasing.

“Don’t bother! I’ve already seen them!”

He whips the phone down onto the bed and then pauses a second, like he’s thinking about what to say next. Then he glares directly up at me. “Why are you going through my phone? Why are you in my property?”

And just like that, he turns it around. Instantly, he’s the one who gets to be angry. Suddenly I’m on the defence, despite the fact I just caught him fooling around with a ton of girls. “You’re an asshole. You know that?” I start to walk away.

“It’s nothing, babe. They’re just texts. It don’t mean nothing.”

“I’ve read them.” I raise my pitch to a flighty-girl voice. “
Miss you. Love you. Baby
…”

“They don’t mean nothing.”

“Who—the girls or the texts?”

“Both.” He comes toward me, all sexy with a sweet smile. His shirt is off and his skin is still wet. “Come on, babe, you’re the only one. You’re the one for me.”

“Puh-leeze! You think I’m an idiot?” I push him away and grab the cellphone off the bed. “Get away from me, prick. You can take those girls. All of them. Go fuck them. Go use them. Go party with them … You can have all of them. Know why? ’Cause you don’t deserve me.” I’m talking fast and crazy and can’t stop myself even though I know I should shut up. I keep going, blah blah blahing, clenching the phone in my hand. I head toward the window. “’Cause I’m better than that. I can’t believe I fell for a stupid loser like you, driving around in your stupid-ass car like you’re all that. And you’re nothing. You’re a piece of shit. You’re a fucking dumb-ass—”

“Shut up!” he shouts forcefully. He reaches out to grab my arm as I’m about to chuck the phone at the window. He squeezes so tight I drop to my knees in response. He holds my arm up above my head and I feel like it will rip out of its
socket. “Let go,” he warns in a growly voice. I drop the phone. He releases his grip, leaving my skin burning. I quickly stand up, but then he pushes me. “Bitch!”

He pushes so hard I go flying and hit the corner of the dresser and then fall to the ground. My ribs pain. I lose my breath.

It’s like everything is still for a minute.

I don’t breathe.

I don’t blink.

My face is flat against the hardwood floor.

My lips hang loose from my face, my mouth open wide.

I look out of the corner of my eye and see his expressionless face towering above. He doesn’t move to help me. And for a split second it’s like I have become my mother. That night she fought with Scott. And it’s like I’m in her skin. And I see myself and her all at the same time, like we’re this overlapped person in the same body. And then … “Huuuhhhh.” I take a choky, choppy gasp.

Breathe.

I scramble to my knees, onto all fours, and then up. I grab my backpack and coat and rush toward the door because I’m afraid of what might happen next.

As I run down the stairs, trying to put my jacket on, his voice trails after me. “What about you? All the guys you fuck? Everyone knows you’re a slut! You know what they call you? Black hole. You bitch. Yeah! You hear me? ’Cause guys disappear inside your huge, slutty pussy.”

His words are like forceful blows as I pass through the front door. I run down the porch stairs, but it seems as if my feet are barely moving. I stop a second to catch my breath.

Everything before me is in slow motion. I take it in all at once, like a painting. A sharp, cold wind blows the single remaining yellow leaf off a tree. Threatening black clouds surge. A woman walks her little white mutt past the driveway. A red car goes by. A squirrel prances across the road then up onto the fence that separates Fortune’s house from his neighbour’s.

A bang from inside the house brings me back to reality. I begin to move again. Another gust of wind takes my hair and blows it up and all over my face, into my mouth, but I don’t stop to take it out. My legs just go. Too scared to think. Just running against the strong wind. Fight or flight. I choose to fly.

I start bawling again when I get into my room. I take off my top to inspect my ribs. Already my skin is red and purple from hitting the furniture. Slut? After being with me, after saying he loved me even though we both knew it wasn’t true, he calls me slut? Uncle Freestyle was right, guys do talk shit about you. Not that I really care. Jerk. I hate Fortune. I fucking hate him. I knew he was with other girls. I hate all men.

I go into the kitchen and down three shots of vodka and wait for my head to clear. I turn on the TV and flick the channels. Then I go take three more shots.

Even when I start feeling drunk, I still feel a little weird. Shaky. Like I’m scared or something. I hate myself for being afraid of him. It’s stupid. It’s not like anyone has ever hit me before. I’ve seen it happen to my mom, when I was little and she had some idiot boyfriends. So maybe that’s why I expect it will happen to me. When a guy raises his hand, I brace.

I hate this weakness. I hate being a girl. There’s always this
inevitable submission. Men will
always
have the last word. The last fist. They will always have that ultimate power.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling really bad, I reach into my mind and bring out a memory of Bradley. It’s the only thing that can possibly make me feel better, as if somehow I’m not alone. As if somehow the ghostly memories bring his spirit to my present. I go take two more shots and lie back down on the couch, just letting my mind roam, like one of those roulette machines that bounces a ball around until it randomly lands on a number. My head spins and spins and spins until it lands on this:

I’m playing with Bradley on the front lawn of our apartment building. His favourite thing to do was spin. I’d take his wrists and pull him up into the air and twirl around and around, his feet flinging wildly. I have this image of his face imprinted on my mind: his open, laughing mouth, his ecstatic eyes locked on mine, intoxicated with his cocktail of pleasure and thrill and trust all mixed together. I remember loving this face ’cause I could recall feeling like that when I was younger. I used to cherish that feeling of weightlessness.

“Faster!” he’d shout tirelessly. “Faster!” And I’d propel his featherweight body through space till my arms ached and I had to let him drop. And his bare legs dragged along the ground, leaving him with green grass-stained reminders of the inevitable fall, because everyone, even little kids, must pay some kind of price for the dizzy high.

Suddenly my stomach churns. I jump up and run to the toilet, grip it with both hands, and hurl into the brownstained bowl. Just the stench of the toilet bowl makes me puke more. When I’m done, I lower myself onto the bathroom tiles
and curl up in a ball, lying on my side. It’s dark. I didn’t turn on the light. I hear my breathing. And a slight pounding in my head.

My mind spirals down to somewhere dark and cold. I suppose it’s natural to think only of the good times with Michael, but the bad memories have always been there, hovering somewhere in the past. Sometimes, it’s the body that remembers. Sometimes, the body’s memory is so much more powerful than the mind’s. Even if you don’t want to think about it, even if you fight it, the moment comes to you anyway in its entirety, flashing through your mind, smashing your skull like a bullet.

It happened on our last night. Before he said the words and I walked out the door.

Michael had applied for teacher’s college before I met him. He was so nervous about it, always saying he feared he wouldn’t get in. I knew it would be no problem because his high school marks were so good, even if he did drop out of his science degree. But he said the acceptance would depend on a number of things, like volunteer work and experience, so it was all a gamble. He was all doomsday-like, which made me oddly optimistic. I swear, if you want to cure depression, put a sad person around someone even sadder, and that’s better than five years of Prozac.

The closer the acceptance deadline came, the more agitated he grew. And when the acceptance deadline passed, it was like there was an instant fog over his eyes.

“You’d make a great teacher,” I encouraged. I was jumping up and down on his bed while he sat at his desk surfing the Web. “Maybe you could teach at my school. Excuse me, Mr. Butler?” I raised my hand as I jumped. “Excuse me, Mr. Butler, but may I go to the bathroom? And Mr. Butler, while I’m in the bathroom, can we have sex?”

Michael threw a pillow at me. “Stop it. That’s gross. I couldn’t be your teacher. That would make me some kind of pervert.”

“So what are you now?”

He turned in his chair and stared strangely at me. “I don’t know. Not a pervert. Maybe fucked up. Maybe irresponsible. But not a pervert.”

“Pervert. Pervert. Pervert …” I taunted, turning round and round on the bed, bouncing up and down.

Oomph.

My feet were pulled out from beneath me and I landed face first on the bed, just inches away from the wooden headboard. I was stunned, the air knocked out of me. Michael was on my back, pinning me down, knee digging into my spine. Despite the soft mattress, I felt like I was being crushed. I felt his hot breath at my ear. I held my own breath. I closed my eyes. I braced.

“It’s not a joke,” he said firmly, in a gruff, deep voice. An old voice. A voice that sounded twenty-eight.

Forty-Five

I’m
fired.

Dr. Williams asks me to come into his office as soon as I arrive at work. He gets all serious and tells me someone has tampered with the filing cabinet in his office. He says he has a security camera and knows that it was me.

“Where’s the camera?” I ask, sensing that he’s lying. Adults who don’t have a lot of experience with teenagers are so transparent. They think we’re six-year-old gullible kids who will believe anything.

“It’s hidden,” he says. Then he swallows. A sure sign of lying.

“So what did you see?” I challenge him, because he’d have to mention Rachel being in the room if there was really a camera. “If you saw me, who else did you see? Was anything taken?”

“You know what happened, Melissa.”

“No, I don’t.” I start to get angry. “What happened? Tell me. Exactly. What did you see?”