Golden

by Andrea Dickherber

  “Cheerio, pip pip! Cheerio!” The coiled springs of the mattress didn’t strain under her weight but flicked her lightly up into the air. My head thumped against the pillow each time she came back down.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I moaned exaggeratedly.

  She was skipping now and beaming as she kicked her heels up against her ass.

  “Cheerio! Top o’ the mornin’ to ya.” Her feet got tangled in the blankets and she crashed down on top of me, her knee slamming into my hipbone. She burst out laughing – deep, embarrassing belly laughs – with her mouth thrown wide open and a string of sticky saliva clinging to her bottom lip.

  “You’re fucking nuts,” I told her.

  Every time I felt like I knew her, she changed, became wild and crazy and did things that I couldn’t assign a reason.

  Once her laughter had subsided, Rudy rose from the bed and walked across the room to her dresser. Her back to me, she dug around in the drawers until finally she pulled out a bottle of cheap vodka – vanilla flavored, three quarters of the way empty and clearly forgotten years before.

  “A throwback to freshman year.”

  She held the bottle by the neck and thrust it above her head in celebration, grabbing two clear plastic shot glasses from the same dresser drawer.

  I sat up in bed, my back braced against Rudy’s headboard as waves of nausea rolled like heavy tides through my empty stomach. She set the glasses on the nightstand and poured until each was full, tiny drops of vodka sprinkling the wood finish where she’d missed. She handed me a full shot before lifting her own in a toast.

  “To great nights,” she said.

  “To shitty mornings.”

  “To college guys.”

  “To weed.”

  “Hair of the dog.” Her eyes were smiling behind the smudged make-up.

  “Hair of the dog.” I clinked my glass against hers then threw my head back and tossed the liquor into my mouth, wetting my sandpapery lips and blazing a fire down my hungover throat. I thought for sure I would throw up, but it never happened.

  Our volunteer project was four weekends long, and that’s exactly how much time we spent with Benji and Tank. The boys would drive us home from East St. Louis on Saturday afternoons and we would scarf down dinner with Rudy’s parents before we ran up to her bedroom to get ready for our evening outings. We ripped extra holes in two pairs of Rudy’s designer jeans, rubbing them with sandpaper around the hems and the knees until they looked sufficiently worn. We raided Kent’s closet – how strange it was to be in his bedroom again for the first time since that peculiar night my freshman year – and collected a few vintage t-shirts we tried to wash and dry until they shrunk enough to fit us snugly (that idea hadn’t really worked). We didn’t get our noses pierced – our mothers would have murdered us – but we wore our second ear piercings proudly. I tried out double silver hoops. Rudy said it looked good on me.

  The boys, it turned out, smoked a lot of marijuana. They taught us how to pack a pipe and how to use a bong and what kinds of weed were better than others. And they did other drugs, too – their “get togethers” always featured a buffet of illicit pharmaceuticals, ripe for the taking. Rudy seemed intrigued, but I was petrified, druggy horror stories playing through my brain just like they’d played on the TV screen in my junior high health class. I liked smoking okay, but I thought I preferred the buzz of drinking to the paranoid feeling I got when I was high.

  Late one night, when we’d stumbled into Rudy’s house, she’d pulled me into the foyer and up the marble staircase. She flipped the light switch that turned on their enormous chandelier.

  “Rudy, what are you doing?” I’d whispered harshly. I turned the light off, but she just flipped it on again.

  “Aren’t they gorgeous?”

  “What?”

  “The crystals,” she said, leaning against the banister and pointing, her index finger shooting an invisible arrow toward the glistening lights. “They’re so pretty.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, when I was little and we moved in here, I always thought it’d be fun to swing on it.”

  I stood behind her and watched. The prisms were dancing rainbows in my vision.

  “It’s so close, I bet if I jumped I could reach it.”

  She leaned out further, and my arm shot out to grab hers.

  “Rudy, stop it.”

  “I’m not going to do it.” She laughed. She relaxed in my grip and pulled back from the banister. “Silly.”

  She patted my cheek.

  I didn’t think I was being silly. It’d be nice, I thought, if we could just get drunk again. Rudy wasn’t so weird when she was only drunk.

  Of course, I didn’t voice my opinion to anyone. I just went with the flow. Don’t rock the boat, you know?

  In between those weekends Rudy and I acted like our normal selves, whatever that meant. In her new capacity as a junior yearbook photographer she had to go to soccer games and tennis matches and choir concerts to take pictures, and I went with her and held her big, ugly camera bag while she fiddled with the bulky lenses. We did our homework and I ran on the cross-country team (Rudy had hung up her running shoes when she got the photog position) and we sat with Deena and a table full of other junior girls at lunch. We wore sweatpants and hooded sweatshirts to school most days because, really, who were we trying to impress there? To be fair, I was still trying to impress everyone, but I wore what Rudy wore because it was her I wanted to impress the most.

  The Saturday we finished the house, our team went out for ice cream to celebrate. Calissa thanked us for all of our help, and I had to admit, Rudy was right. It really did feel good to see the clean beige carpet, the freshly painted walls, the cute little cubbyhole shelving Jim had built for the closet. We’d scrubbed the windows and with the sun gleaming through the streak-free glass, everything looked really good. I was proud of us.

  Benji and Tank took us out to dinner that night, to a funky little sushi restaurant in the Central West End. They wore button-up shirts (untucked though, of course) with their converse sneakers, and they helped us order from the long, foreign menu. Benji let me try his sashimi, dropping a piece into my mouth with his chopsticks from across the tiny table. The boys used their fake IDs to order four sake bombs, and I was proud to drink mine down like a champ. When the waitress returned with our check, Benji and Tank made a show of paying for our meals, and we thanked them with polite smiles before excusing ourselves to the restroom, where I immediately devoured a handful of breath mints.

  “Wasn’t that good? And even the sake bombs,” I said, leaning over the sink and smiling into the dimly lit mirror to inspect my teeth for bits of food. “I didn’t think I would like them.”

  “They were okay,” Rudy answered from behind the blue stall door. The toilet flushed, water swirling down into the depths of the floor, and Rudy emerged. She flipped her hair behind her shoulder and squirted soap into her palms.

  “They look really good tonight. They dressed up for us.” I was an unstoppable force, a gushing geyser of effervescent girliness that evening.

  “They do look nice,” Rudy smiled, rinsing her hands beneath the faucet while I stood beside her, adjusting the waistband of my jeans.

  “Does my breath smell okay?” I asked as she reached for a paper towel.

  “Come closer.” She motioned with one dripping hand, and I leaned in close to her nose and breathed cautiously into her face.

  “Eat another mint,” she advised.

  I emptied the little box into my mouth.

  The boys were waiting for us outside on the sidewalk, their hands thrust into their shorts pockets. As we stepped through the glass door, they looked up at us expectantly. Benji reached for my hand as we began to walk, weaving his stubby fingers through mine, sending warm tingles down my spine.

  “Where to now, ladies?” Tank whistled through pursed lips as we made our way down the crowded sidewalk. It was a brisk, beautiful fall evening. Couples we
re sitting around little aluminum or wrought iron tables outside the restaurants we passed, sipping from wide wine glasses and talking loudly. The sun had just set behind the clouds, and the street lamps flipped on as we passed a frozen yogurt shop with a line of people stretching out the door and down the sidewalk.

  “What about a movie?” Rudy glanced back at me and I smiled.

  “Nah,” Benji frowned. “Nothing good out. Let’s go back to the car and drive around for a bit. Maybe stop at a park.”

  I would have liked seeing a movie, I thought. A tub of popcorn, holding Benji’s hand in the dark theater and snuggling up against his shoulder during sad or scary parts.

  “Driving sounds fine to me,” I said.

  We turned off the sidewalk and started down a darker alleyway, between two brick apartment buildings. The pavement was scattered with rocks and grass sprouting up through wide cracks. An overflowing green dumpster sat at the end of the alley, under a single streetlamp that cast a yellowish circle of light over lumpy trash bags tossed haphazardly to the sides of the dumpster. As we came closer, one of the bags shifted, and a shoe appeared, scooting out from under the black plastic.

  I screamed. The sound escaped me like a howl, before I could do anything to stop it. Both of the boys jumped back, Benji pulling me with him, and we watched as two sets of dirty fingers tugged at the bag until I could see dark eyes under bushy brown eyebrows. His eyes darted from one of us to the next before he yanked the bag back up over his face. Hiding, like a child.

  “Come on,” Benji nudged my shoulder with his. “Let’s go.”

  But Rudy was already crouching down beside the man, kneeling in a pile of newspapers.

  “Sir?” She spoke softly. “Are you okay?”

  At the sound of her voice, the pile twitched. Slowly, she reached one hand toward the lump, resting her palm on the shoulder of his soiled sweatshirt.

  “Are you hurt?” Her voice must have been like honey, some sort of golden nectar in his ears, and he lowered the bag, revealing a dirt smudged face. He had a bushy, matted beard that covered the bottom half of his weathered face. There were deep lines in his forehead, under a thick helmet of ratted brown hair. The whites of his eyes were more grey than white, shot through with pale red veins, and his mouth was bleeding, leaving a thin red trail oozing through the tangles of his beard. I averted my eyes.

  “Leave him alone, Rudy.” Tank stood beside me frowning, his arms crossed over his chest. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Rudy ignored him, touching the man’s cheek with her fingers.

  “Your lip is bleeding. Do you need to go to the hospital?”

  “We’re not taking him to hospital.”

  The man shook his head, his startled eyes meeting Rudy’s gaze.

  “Are you sure?”

  He raised one hand, the fingernails long and pale, dirt trapped underneath and at the cuticle, and he wiped at the blood, exposing a small cut on his bottom lip.

  “Spare change?” His voice was softer than I would have guessed – kind, like someone’s jolly grandfather. “Can you spare any change?”

  Rudy reached into her back pocket and retrieved a neatly folded twenty dollar bill.

  “Don’t give him that,” Benji sneered. “He’s an addict. He’s just going to spend it on drugs or beer.”

  “We wouldn’t spend it on anything better,” Rudy said, without missing a beat. She placed the money in the man’s quivering hand and gave his shoulder a quick squeeze before climbing to her feet. There were light circles of dirt covering her knees.

  Without another word, the four of us turned out of the alleyway and walked down the street to Tank’s car without speaking. Benji reached for the back door and held it open as I climbed inside, hopping in after me. Rudy got into the passenger’s seat and closed the door. Tank pulled away from the curb before, finally, Rudy broke the silence.

  “Take me home, please.” She looked across the console at Tank, her mouth a straight line.

  “Huh?” Tank raised his eyebrows.

  Huh was right. I was bewildered. Go home? But our big evening, our date night, was just getting started.

  She swiveled so that she could look at me in the backseat.

  “Jillian can stay, obviously, but I want to go home. Please.”

  “Why?” Tank pressed. “Because of that homeless guy?”

  “I thought you wanted to help people. Isn’t that what you’re going to school for?”

  “Twenty bucks isn’t going to save him. What, a fraction of your weekly allowance?” Tank said. “Look, you think you know what that guy needs, but the reality is it’s not about him at all. You just want to feel all high and mighty, swooping in from your big shiny house spreading your money, feeling like you’re so much better than all those other rich people who look down their noses at anybody who’s poor. But you know what kept my mom on drugs? Handouts from people like you. People who didn’t really give a shit about anyone other than themselves and their own motives. I’m going to school to help people who’re ready to change their lives, and that means getting my hands dirty, not throwing money at the problem then turning my back on it like I solved it.”

  Beside me in the backseat, Benji clasped his hands over his head and let out a low, whistling sigh. Rudy didn’t respond, just stared straight ahead, into the darkness outside the windshield.

  “I’ll take you home, then,” Tank sighed, and we exited the highway toward our neighborhood.

  On the ride to Rudy’s, all I could think of was how things had gone all wrong. If only we had turned down a different alley, or maybe if I’d been able to suppress my scream. But rolling up to the end of Rudy’s driveway – seeing the silhouette of Mrs. Golden watching from one of the front windows as the car idled, I felt relief. The expectations were too high. We had only known them for four weeks.

  Rudy got out first, and as she turned to shut the door behind her, I could see tears glistening in her eyes. She stood a few feet away from the car as I pushed open the back door.

  “Do you want to hang out again next weekend?” I asked Benji hopefully. Apologetically. Ignorantly.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, climbing from the back seat of the convertible and getting into the front.

  “Maybe a movie or something?”

  “Sure. We’ll call you.”

  They didn’t call. But you could have guessed that, right?

  “How long do you think he’s been playing?” Rudy had her head cocked slightly to the left, the viewfinder of the camera pressed up to her eye. She snapped a picture then checked the image on the screen.

  “Caleb Rowling?” I looked out onto the soccer field, where the guys were practically indistinguishable from one another aside from their jersey numbers. I could pick him out by the black and white captain’s band around his bicep. “Probably since he was little.”

  “I think he played on a traveling team when we were in fifth grade.” She fiddled with the buttons on the side of the screen and lifted the camera to her face again. “He looks sort of like David Beckham.”

  I promise, we thought about things other than boys. We just spent quite a bit of our time talking about boys. I had my legs stretched out in front of me, and I wiggled my toes free from my black flip-flops, letting them drop onto the grass. I’d just come from cross-country practice, and there was a blister growing on the side of my pinky toe. I needed new tennis shoes.

  “He does, sort of.”

  Caleb Rowling was the senior Rudy had been preoccupied with since the departure of our college boys. He wasn’t rugged or quirky or risky, like Benji and Tank had seemed, but he was arguably the best-looking guy in the entire school. Yes, that was how Rudy rebounded.

  “I played soccer when I was in kindergarten. Did I tell you that?”

  “No,” I laughed. “That’s hard to imagine.”

  Rudy was graceful, but she wasn’t exactly coordinated when it came to sports.

  “Should I tell him that, you think?” she tea
sed.

  “I’m sure it would impress him. Maybe you could show him some of your preschool art projects while you’re at it.”

  The sun was going down behind a line of trees just past the soccer field, and with it, the temperature was dropping. I zipped my sweat jacket up to my chin and pulled Rudy’s blanket tighter around my shoulders.

  I had liked Benji and Tank, but I liked Rudy wanting Caleb Rowling better. It felt so much nicer to stay within the comfort zone of our private school; at least I thought I knew what to expect from the boys at Ogden. If they hurt her, I thought, it wouldn’t be as bad.

  The action on the soccer field moved down toward the opposing team’s goal, and Rudy adjusted her position so she could follow it.

  “You should streak naked across the soccer field after the game and ask him to Sadie.”

  Yes, that Sadie Hawkins. The dance where the girls asked the boys.

  “Maybe if they win.” She made a face at me and stuck out her tongue.

  “Seriously. Do it.”

  “How about, if they win, you do it for me?”

  “Streak across the field? You’re insane. I’m not the one trying to ask him out.”

  “Not streaking. Just asking. Please?” She looked at me with wounded puppy-dog eyes.

  “Don’t you want to do it yourself?”

  “I’m nervous.” She batted her eyelashes and stuck out her bottom lip. “Pretty please?”

  “Fine,” I relented. “But only if they win.”

  Ogden’s boys’ soccer team sucked. We were down two points at the beginning of the second half. It had seemed like a safe deal, but of course, the surest things are the ones about which you should be most worried, and somehow the team pulled it out and managed to win by one goal in overtime.

  Rudy and I took our time folding up her blankets and packing up her camera, stalling as the team celebrated. I tried to smooth the hairs on the sides of my head, but my efforts were useless. My drying sweat had made poufs of hair fan out above my ears.

  “I’m going to the car. Is that okay? You’re okay, right?” Rudy said when the players started walking our way.