I got in the shower and scrubbed my entire body with mint shower gel, then rinsed myself and did it all over again. After the shower I stretched out on the bed and let myself cry for a few minutes in the soft flash of the purple Christmas lights that ran along the edges of the ceiling around my room. I told myself that it was okay that I was crying, that it was a necessary part of mourning, because that’s what I was doing. I was mourning the end of everything that had defined my life up to this point: Pablo, my parents’ marriage, this house and Cedarville and the very idea of home. My new home was in the life that was waiting somewhere on the other side of the summer. It was college and Fairmont and the great tower of adulthood that loomed before me. I stared at the lights and thought of these things until I wasn’t crying anymore, until their mild flickering had coated me with a numbness that I was able to confuse with acceptance.
Chapter 4
Jessica and Fessica lived on the outskirts of Cedarville on a residential street that had somehow been built in the industrial area of town. The recycling plant loomed at the south end of the block, and the massive cereal factory was at the north. Train tracks zigzagged across the blocks, and the trains seemed to come every five minutes, black capsule-shaped cars moving to and from unknown destinations, from what I imagined as dark, lifeless warehouses. The house itself was painted golf green and had a perfect square shape capped off with a similarly geometric triangular roof. It looked like a child’s drawing of what a house should be.
People were crammed into every room on the first floor, and between the dense cloud of cigarette smoke and the din of noise, it was hard to even think. Everyone was holding red plastic cups full of beer, and some insane hip-hop track that mainly consisted of guys barking was blaring from the stereo. I didn’t see Judy or Jessica anywhere, but I imagined them watching this all on closed-circuit televisions upstairs, talking about which ones of us they wanted to sleep with and which ones of us they wished would take a spill down a flight of stairs. Someone let out a meaningless scream, a wild-child howl from the highest peak of Party Island.
“Hey, Dade!” said some pimply kid I didn’t recognize.
I waved awkwardly.
It was all too chaotic and there was no chance of finding Pablo in all of the insanity, so I pushed my way through to the crowded staircase and made my way upstairs. I went to the end of the hall and stood by an open window that looked out onto the street. The air from outside was warm and carried the smell of the burnt rubber from the recycling plant at the end of the block.
The next thing I knew Fessica was standing beside me. She put her hand on my shoulder, wavered back and forth like a stop sign in heavy wind. We stood there for a few moments, her looking down at the darkened yard while I watched her out of the corner of my eyes.
“I shouldn’t be drinking with my medication,” she said, a lazy grin spreading across her face.
I gently moved her hand off my shoulder and guided her to the wall. She leaned against it and slid slowly down to a seated position on the floor. A few people standing at the end of the hall glanced over at us. They spoke in low voices, laughed, and motioned toward Fessica and me. I knelt down in front of her.
“What kind of medication are you on?” I asked.
“Xanax.” She said it dreamily, like it was the name of a boy she liked. “It’s good. It relaxes me. I get kinda tense in social situations.”
“Do you want me to get you some water?” I asked.
She smiled and looked into my eyes in a way that made me regret offering to do something nice for her. It was the same look she’d worn in English class when doing a presentation on
Wuthering Heights
, the face of a girl lost in a close-range haze of romanticism.
“You’re sweet,” she said. “And my middle toe tingles.”
She reached up to touch my face, but I stood before she laid a hand on me.
“I’ll be back with water,” I said.
I moved down the hall, skillfully recovering from a small stumble over someone’s purposefully outstretched leg.
“Where you going, Dade?” a voice called from behind me as I reached the top of the stairs. “Getting your
girlfriend
another drink?”
I didn’t turn around to see who had said it. I just raised my hand and gave them the finger as I headed down the stairs. Of course, Jessica and Judy were standing right there at the bottom. They were scanning the crowd casually as if they were too cool to be there. They heard me coming down and both turned to see who it was. When they saw it was me, they each cocked a nostril and squinted at me in disgust.
“What were you doing upstairs?” Jessica said. “Upstairs is off limits.”
“I’m sorry,” I said slowly. “There were other people up there. And I was talking to your sister.”
Judy let out a noise of disapproval and rolled her eyes dramatically. Judy was pretty enough, but her beauty was completely ruined by the fact that, like Pablo, she was always scowling unless there was some adult or authority figure that she needed to butter up. She had a pointy nose and shiny brown hair that reminded me of something from a shampoo commercial, a wave of silk in constant motion. She also had huge breasts. Pablo had once told me that sucking on them was his favorite thing in the world other than pot and football. The sight of her right then sent a pang of defeat through my chest. She had Pablo, and I didn’t. I never would. For a one twisted moment I wanted to be her. I wanted to get in her skin and lead her life and have all the things that she had.
“Are you my sister’s friend?” Jessica asked.
“Your sister has friends?” Judy said with a smirk.
Jessica knew who I was. We’d had several classes together, and we saw each other on almost a daily basis at Food World. She was just being a bitch.
“It’s Dade,” Judy said. “You know.
Dade
.”
“Oh,” Jessica said, lowering her voice. “Pablo’s Dade?”
Judy clicked her tongue. “Don’t say that. It’s not true.”
“Oh,” said Jessica. “Sorry.”
“Great party,” I said.
Judy moved closer to me. She smelled like vanilla perfume and the mall.
“Listen,” she said in a serious tone. “I don’t know why you’re here, but if I catch you talking to Pablo or even
looking
at Pablo, I’ll have Bert and every player on the team beat the living fuck out of you. Do you hear me? The living
fuck
.”
Jessica covered her mouth in a poor attempt to hide her laughter.
“You’ll be toast,” Judy said, as if it was the most simple equation in the world. “Consider this your one and only warning.”
Jessica smiled brightly and thrust her empty cup at me. “Dave, will you be a gentleman and get me some more beer? Keg’s in the kitchen. And not a lot of head, please.”
Judy and I traded death glares. I grabbed Jessica’s cup and made my way to the kitchen, where I immediately tossed it on the counter in a sea of empties and half-empties. The kitchen was just as crowded as the living room. Pablo and a couple of football players were manning the keg, filling their friends’ cups first, and constantly overlooking the empty cups of the kids who weren’t as cool. I watched him for a bit, thought back to us in his room that afternoon. All of that seemed so far away. I stood there wondering if there was any space in his mind that was occupied by the thought of me. I thought of what Judy had said she’d do to me if I even looked at him, and averted my eyes, but after a few seconds I was staring at him again, reaching for him through the crowd with my gaze.
“Who do I have to blow to get a beer?” someone called loudly.
“Me!” Pablo yelled into the crowd. “You have to blow me, fag.”
“Yeah!” said one of the other players standing at the keg. “Settle down. We’ll get to you soon enough.”
I found a coffee mug in the cupboard and filled it up with tap water for Fessica. I told myself that Pablo wasn’t there, that I didn’t know the guy handing out the beers. I ran into Judy and Jessica on my way back upstairs to Fessica.
“Where’s my beer?” Jessica asked.
“Keg’s dry,” I mumbled. I brushed passed them and went upstairs.
Everyone had vacated the upstairs hallway except for Fessica. I kneeled down in front of her and held out the water. Her eyes were closed.
“Hey,” I said. “Drink this. You’ll feel better.”
She slowly opened her eyes. She looked at me, then at the mug, and then back at me. I sensed that she wanted me to put it to her lips and help her drink, but I wasn’t about to do that.
“Come on,” I said. “Take it.”
She took the mug and downed the water in loud slurps. When it was gone, she let out a dramatic “Ah!” and handed it back to me. I set it on the floor.
“Take me to my bedroom,” she said. She nodded to the door across from where she was sitting. “Right there.”
I pulled her up and dragged her into her room. The pink canopy above her bed sagged in the middle, and the walls were covered with posters of horses in nature and posters from horse movies. On the far wall at the foot of the bed was a large table and a vanity mirror whose edges were decorated with pictures of Fessica riding a horse at what appeared to be various competitions. There was a white dresser across the room, and on top of this was a mirrored tray covered with bottles of drugstore nail polish and pop star concocted perfumes, fragrances with names like Forever Girl and Galactic Kiss.
She fell onto the bed with a sigh, her eyes still half closed. I turned off the light and stood in the middle of the room and watched her for a while, the low-hanging Pluto on a mobile of our solar system sometimes brushing across the top of my head. Above us were the sounds of people skidding down the roof, laughing.
“Do you want to get in with me?” she asked.
Her voice was small and narrow, the voice of someone who spent a good portion of her life trying to not draw attention to herself. I’d sensed the same thing in my own voice at times, and it occurred to me that there were people downstairs who thought I was just as sad of a case as Fessica Montana. I moved slowly across the room and lay next to her. Our shoulders touched as we stared up at the sagging canopy, at the shadows that came through the window. They shifted whenever a car passed by before finally settling back into their primary pose.
“Remember when someone wrote faggot on your locker after that thing in the lunchroom?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What about it?”
“That was my sister. I heard her and Judy laughing about it on the phone.”
The thought of it caused an ache in my chest that blossomed like a firework and then faded.
I let out a sigh. “Yup. That makes sense.”
She turned onto her side. She was staring at me, her eyes so wide, they seemed to give off their own light.
“I heard the strangest conversation down in the kitchen,” she said.
“Yeah?” I asked. “What about?”
“These two guys were saying that they were smoking pot on the golf course the other night and they saw that girl who disappeared. Jenny Moore. They said she walked out of the woods right by the seventh hole and then walked right back in. Like she was stepping out of the house to see what the temperature was like.”
“Really?” I said. “And what do you think about that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “People see things.”
“People lie, is more like it.”
“That too,” she said. “I bet you never lie.”
“I lie every day,” I said.
“About what?”
“About everything. Sometimes I lie about the lie itself. That’s where things get tricky.”
“What’s that mean?”
I shook my head. “Never mind. I’m being stupid.”
She swallowed. It made a wet, foreboding sound.
“Dade?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Can we try something?” she asked.
“Try what?”
Her response came in the form of her hand working on the button of my fly.
“Whoa,” I said. I tried pushing her hand away, but she resisted. “Not cool.”
She kept at it. She even sat up a little bit to get a better handle on it.
“Stop,” I said.
I jumped off the bed, falling onto the ground in the process. I checked my fly and fixed the top button that she’d somehow managed to undo.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind?”
“I’m sorry.” She sat up quickly and backed against the head-board as if repulsed by what some outside force had just made her do.
“Not cool,” I said. “Not cool at all.”
“It’s just—”
“I should go.”
“Please don’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”
“I gotta go.”
I was out the door before she could respond. A girl at the end of the hall was sobbing uncontrollably while two of her friends hung on either shoulder. I stumblingly ran down the stairs into a sea of people bouncing in unison to some hip-hop track that had been popular two summers before.
“See ya later, Vagisil!” someone shouted as I made my way to the door.
When I reached the porch I was out of breath and my heart was racing. It was as if I’d just saved myself from drowning. I bounded off the porch and walked quickly down the shadowed sidewalk, my eyes on my shoes as I passed the row of darkened houses. My mind was a chorus of voices all telling different reasons why I shouldn’t have come.
“Party this way?”
He caught me off guard. I looked up from my shoes and saw a boy in a sleeveless black hoodie coming toward me on the sidewalk. I noticed his arms. They were tan and toned. He stopped walking, but I kept moving past him.
“Back there,” I said.
“You need anything?” he called two seconds later.
I stopped and looked back. “What?”
His hood was up. His face was all shadows.
“You need anything?” he said again. “You know. Smoke?”