Something Wicked (9 page)

Even my voice would get all squeaky and high-pitched, and I’d giggle like a little girl.

“I just don’t get how he could leave me,” I tell Jess over the phone after going over it for the millionth time.

“Don’t be a stupid idiot,” she comforts me. “You are twelve years younger than him. He couldn’t take it, Melissa. The fact that he left you proves he loved you. It was too much for him. If he didn’t love you, he would have stuck around and just duped you. You see? He had to leave. Put a barrier between your love. It’s so romantic, really.”

“Yeah, tragic.”

“Yeah. Tragic. Anyway, he’ll probably come back,” Jess speculates. “He’s probably just confused. You guys were really in love.”

I want to believe what she says, because of all my friends, Jess knows the most about love. She has a good boyfriend. She and Devon have been together for eight months and they’ve never had a fight. But that’s because he’s so dull he could never bring his heart rate up high enough to get upset about anything.

I call Ally next. Big mistake.

“You need to forget about him,” she blurts out, and then puts me on hold to answer the other line. She was always jealous of Michael and me. I know she’s tired of me talking about him all the time. Even I am getting sick of me. “He’s a loser. It’s his loss,” she adds when she comes back.

“You can’t stop loving someone just like that, you know. You can’t just turn it off.”

“Well, he did.”

“Shut up.”

“Well, he did.”

“He was good to me,” I persist.

I can hear Ally’s eyes rolling. “Whatever.”

I make up a reason to get off the phone. I don’t need to hear that. I know he loved me. What we had here was real. And even if it wasn’t, I’m still grateful for it all, because my heart isn’t dead like before. Sure, it’s a pathetic, wheezing, oozing open wound, but it’s not dead. And I’d rather it be whimpering than numb.

Sixteen

I come home after the day program and my mother’s bedroom door is closed. I see our superindendent Giovanni’s grimy shoes in the front hall, and his dumb-ass waist pouch on the couch.

I grab a Coke and chips and go back out. I don’t want to be in there when they’re together. I don’t want to see Giovanni come out of the room, his hairy fat belly hanging over his ugly tighty-whiteys, shuffling off to the bathroom.

Giovanni and my mother have been screwing for years, almost ever since we moved in. I don’t know what to make of it. I used to not have a clue, but now that I’m older, they don’t hide it. It’s like he’s the man
around
the house without being the man
in
the house. He fixes our toilet. He bleeds our rads each fall. He hooked up our cable TV to the new satellite dish. And when my mom’s car got smashed up in the parking lot, Giovanni had the guy in a headlock until he coughed up his ID and insurance papers.

“He’s a nice person,” my mom explained one night. “We have a good time together. But it is what it is. It’ll never be more, and we’re both happy with that. There are some men
who just can’t be in a relationship.”

“So why are you with him?”

She pauses, fluttering her long, overly mascaraed eyelashes, which means she’s thinking hard about this one. “Because it’s easy, I suppose.” She takes a long, pensive drag on her cigarette.

What I don’t ask is if she tells her boyfriends about him. Or if she’s getting a reduction in rent. Or if she’s fucking him because she’s using him. But I don’t think it’s as clear as that. I don’t think they even spend much time worrying about it. It’s just this unspoken thing that happens. And I suppose that’s what sex is sometimes.

“Sometimes sex is just sex,” my mom said one time. “Sometimes it’s love. Sometimes it’s a physical need. Sometimes it’s a barter.”

“Barter?”

“You know. Like a currency. That happens even in marriages. You know, the wife wants a new kitchen, so she puts out. It’s sort of weird.”

“Weird,” Echo repeats, pretending not to know what she’s talking about. But truthfully, I get it.

It’s like me having sex with Sid, the boy in my building whom I’ve known for a thousand years. He likes me. He always has. So every once in a while, before I met Michael, we’d screw around. Why? Because there’s some kind of obligation, some kind of guilt, I suppose. He’s always giving me alcohol or weed, whenever I want it, so it’s sort of just understood. I try to find other sources, but it’s hard to give up something that’s free. I suppose, if I were honest, I’d say I sleep with him because of all this. But it doesn’t feel that way when we’re together. It doesn’t feel icky, though most of the time I’m high. It just feels, well … like sex. A climax. A shudder. An absence from my life. And then a beautiful, beautiful stillness.

It’s ironic that the one person I love, the greatest love of my life, won’t have sex with me. Michael said it wasn’t right. That we’d wait until I was eighteen, when he’d marry me. But we did mostly everything else, which was confusing at first, because I didn’t see a difference. But the longer we went without having sex, the more I realized just how amazing sex was. How much I longed for him to be inside me. Not in a sex way, but in a love way.

Now I know there’s nothing more beautiful than sex between two people who are truly in love. That’s real sex. And the longer you wait, the more sure you are, the act becomes something so much bigger than any physical sensation. And I think even if Michael had changed his mind, even if he wanted to, I’d have said to wait until we were married. I think I loved him that much.

With Michael, I didn’t see love happening. It’s like one day, out of the blue, he kissed me, or rather we kissed each other. I don’t think it was premeditated in any way. It simply happened. At work, by the sterilizing machine. When we were both bending down to check if the surgical utensils were ready.

“Wow,” I reflected like an idiot after it happened.

“Yeah. Wow.” Was he making fun of me?

“What was that?” I asked, still bewildered.

“I think it was a kiss.” Now
he
sounded like the idiot.

Then we did it again. More. I pushed my face onto his, opened my mouth. My whole body was on fire. I fell in love, right then. It felt so right.

“How did you learn to kiss like that?” he said, pulling away and simultaneously wiping his mouth.

“Do I kiss by the book?”

“What?”

“Am I good?” I paraphrase, smiling proudly.

“Too good for eighteen.”

“I’m sixteen.”

“Shut up,” he said, putting his finger over my lips.

I opened my mouth and took his whole finger inside, sucking.

“Ughh!” He pulled away his finger and made a face like I was the Devil.

I’d done something wrong. “Sorry.” I was embarrassed. Was it childish? Normally a guy would have liked it. They always do.

“It’s okay.” He opened the door of the sterilizer and pulled out the tray. The room instantly smelled sanitized.

“I’m not a virgin, you know,” I said, following him down the hall to the operating table, where poor Dexter the daschund was spread-legged on his back, ready to be snipped.

He laughed, stopped, and looked at me. “It was just a kiss.”

“I know.”

But it wasn’t just a kiss. We avoided each other for the entire next week, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him. It wasn’t like I was thinking about his body or kissing or anything like that. I went over every conversation we’d ever had. I imagined living with him. Making him dinner. I imagined marrying him. Having his children. Growing old together. Dying together, and then being buried side by side in the same cemetery. It was going to be perfect. Like it all made sense now, as if everything in my life had been leading up to us getting together.

The next time we kissed was when he gave me a lift home in his hatchback Volkswagen that stinks ’cause its diesel. We talked the whole way about music and work.

Finally we pulled up to my apartment building. “It’s ugly,” I remarked apologetically.

“It’s just a building,” he said. “Everybody has the same four walls. It’s what’s inside that matters.”

“Yeah. Well. The inside is pretty much the same. Thanks for the lift,” I said, pulling my knapsack onto my lap. I looked directly at him, waiting for him to kiss me.

“You’re welcome.” His hands remained fixed on the steering wheel.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

He laughed. “I wasn’t thinking about it.”

“Liar.”

I waited, but he didn’t move, so I leaned over and kissed him. He kissed back. And we kissed for a long time. The sloppy wet sounds were unavoidably awkward until he reached out and turned up the radio. We kissed some more. Then he stopped, like he was suddenly aware of something, and started to look around outside the car.

I pulled back. “What happened?”

“Nothing.” He sat up and put his hands back on the wheel. “I better go.”

“Okay,” I said in my “whatever” tone, pissed off that he couldn’t face up to what he was really thinking. What—I’m too young? I’m poor? Ugly? Dumb? Slutty? “See ya when I see ya,” I said, and slammed the door shut before hearing his response.

The passenger-side window went down. “Melissa!”

“What?” I poked my head into the car.

“We could meet for coffee sometime. Or a movie?”

“Movie’s good.” I smiled. “Give me a call,” I said coolly, but my heart was racing.

Seventeen

I decide to cut my appointment with Eric today. I’ve gone to school every day, every period, this week, and I’m tired and I feel too busy to make the effort.

I’ve been seeing Eric for almost two years, ever since I started skipping school more, getting into fights, and doing more than just pot. My social worker, who until lately only talked to me once a year, hooked me up. She used to do more when I was about twelve, for a couple years after my little brother Bradley died, and then it was only a phone call or visit every once in a while until I got my charge.

Eric’s office is on the main floor of a creaky old house that is now a family services agency. He’s an okay guy. I’m sure there are better counsellors out there. He’s nice enough. Honest. He’s got a good sense of humour and he’s sort of simple. Not “simple” as in stupid, but simple as in “easy.” Anyway, he’s definitely better than the last counsellor I saw for only two sessions when I was twelve, after Bradley died. All I did with her was draw pictures and play with dolls, which was pretty much a waste of time.