A dark feeling crawls over my body, a shadow of dread. There’s something else in this room and I can feel it through the prickles at the base of my neck. I can’t turn around.
But then I’ve spun around and the rest of my sentence spills out as I stare at Charz pawing at the glass of the door. “—I’ve never felt this way about anyone in my entire life.”
Frozen all over, I don’t remember darting out of the hospital, but I remember her face when I met her at the door. That look of absolute confusion.
And a wound of dread opens up inside of me, thinking that maybe she’d heard my confession.
14. Deadly or Delicious?
Charlee
No one saw Dexter walk in. Apparently. Dad wasn’t scheduled for a check-up so nurses and doctors didn’t have a reason to go in either.
I’m scrambling for answers. This happens when I swim. Too much time to think.
When I touch the wall, I look at the sixty-second time clock and decide to do a set of butterfly. A third of the way through the set my body regrets the decision, and I’m thinking push, push, push so hard that my tongue aches from repeating the line. By the second-last sprint, I’m heaving so hard my throat hurts, and my chest feels bigger every time I gulp down air. I think I die during the sprint; my legs are lead, my arms are spaghetti made of lead, and my abs are so stiff they ache, even when I gasp at the air.
Why do I do this to myself, I think. Didn’t I quit competitive racing for this reason? For a full minute, butt prickled by the rough edge of the pool and shoulders hunched over, elbows resting on my thighs, I try to remember what I was thinking before I pushed my body through training.
Oh, Dex. I did this to not remember. I wish I told him he shouldn’t care so much about what others think. I wish I told him it would be easier if he were mine because I could tell him how cowardly those guys were to call him guilty and to attack him when two official investigations called Mason’s an accident. Plus, Dex is too consumed by his guilt to have been a careless criminal. I wish I said a lot to Dex, but I never seem to say much of the important stuff.
With my dad, though—I just don’t get it. Dex seemed to be talking to Dad from what I saw. But I would bet my last dollar Dad was still out of it. He’d fallen into a pattern of being awake only a few hours a day, according to the nurses, and he was struggling to make it through full conversations with me.
And I know I saw his eyes closed the entire couple of minutes I watched them. The oddest thing was Dex’s body language. The way Dex clung to that window—trying to melt into it? Trying to slip through the other side where he’d plummet to the ground?—it made the conversation seem serious.
Dex’s body language shocks me because I’ve only ever seen Dex seem tall and confident, but the way he fell into that glass, talking to Dad over his shoulder as if checking my father hadn’t died on him mid-sentence, sparked thoughts of everything I am. Of how I prefer to sideline confrontation. When I’m trying to blend into a group of people, or turn into the shade Off White so the wall can’t tell itself apart from me, it’s because I don’t want to cause trouble. Dex is trouble. In my history, Dex hasn’t shied away from girls, gyms or arguments. I deflect conversations that turn down paths I refuse to follow…and now this damn pool.
I decide it’s enough. That I am sick of swimming, and swimming is horrible for someone like me. There’s only one towel left in the linen cupboard in the corner of the pool house. I pluck it out, have to dust off the layer of dirt collected on top, and then smack it a few more times to be sure. Mom never let the towel supply run this short. I don’t know if I’ve ever used this one before.
Since I’m not with friends I do the dorky thing of wrapping it over my shoulders and cuddle the ends of the towel into my chest. But I’m not done. I go curl up in my favorite deck chair. The tongues of steam licking halfway up the room are a tease. I imagine the heat being leached from Dad’s once-pink skin, turning it gray and then yellow.
Steam indicates heat but there’s nothing remotely warm about this room. The steam shouldn’t be fogging the windows of the pool house when I’m shaking like this. Because it’s quite cold. Because everything feels like a lie.
I try to find a comfortable position in the chair, finally tucking my knees up to my chin and clutching the towel around myself. I start the cycle of using my body heat to warm my toes up inside the towel. I duck my head under the material, so only a few fingers are outside of my makeshift oven. The air is steamy in seconds, the chlorine heavier in the air between my legs and lips, but I sit and just breathe until finally I feel too warm.
As soon as I stand, I’m shivering.
I almost—almost—swear to God to make up his mind about the temperature, but I catch my thought before it’s too late.
The windows are still fogged. I dance my fingers on the water’s surface and it’s still the same temperature. I glide my hands through my hair and squeeze out the ends over my shoulder. A splash of water lands on the rough tiles of the pool house. But the water slipping over my fingers is warm, too.
I’m losing my mind. That’s the real issue, I deduce, after three miles of training and ten minutes of rocking on my deck chair, cuddling my towel around my knees like a baby.
I turn off the heat to the pool, dry myself and pull on fresh cotton shorts and a tank top. I scoop my hair into a messy bun on top of my head and make sure to comb out any loops so I won’t be tempted to pick at them.
Once my laptop boots up, I walk back to the pool house. Because I left the outside door open, most of the steam has been replaced with slithers of a chill if I move to the wrong area. I shut the door, satisfied my laptop won’t drown from the humidity. Actually, I’m more bummed, because my laptop fizzling to a quick, short-circuited death would have been my last distraction.
But now? My computer is loaded and Google’s white background emphasizes the colorful letters on the homepage where a search box sits underneath.
I take a breath, close my eyes and let my fingers touch the keys from memory.
When I open my eyes, “Dex” is listed with a graph and results, a computer store and Wikipedia page.
No, I tell myself, you’re not searching for your Dex.
Eyes open this time, I suck in another breath and type “Dexter Hollingworth Mason’s Ski Resort accident”.
This time, every result in my screen is a related article.
* * *
Though there are news articles above, the first link I click from the Google search is Dex’s Facebook profile. I could tell myself that I am putting off searching about the accident—and frankly, I am doing that, too—but the fact is I’ve been obsessed with him and everything about his history for far too long.
Out of all the things to click on, I go to his photos first. Out of all the photos, I click on the one of him at a beach where he’s wearing only a pair of cropped khakis.
At first all I notice are the tats. The ones I recognize, plus more I haven’t seen before. A stretch of symbols frame his arms. They begin at his wrist and curl around his hard muscles and wind up to his lean neck. Inch by inch, I follow each line, each twist, each curve, and by the time I’m done studying his tattoos, I feel dizzy and faint. Oh. That’d be because I’ve twisted my neck so my head is nearly upside down to view the horizontal pictures.
After some time I rub at my stiff shoulders. I massage away the tension and when I see the time, I realize just how long I’ve been ogling his half-naked body. I’m surprised there isn’t drool on the keyboard.
And they say boys are bad.
I get up and stand in front of my pantry, hoping to find something to eat. While I consider toast with honey drizzled on it, I end up wondering what it’d be like to drizzle honey over Dex’s rock hard abs—and lick it off. More than a little bit mortified, I open the freezer looking for something to cool me down (since I’m suddenly hot), but as I start to unwrap the packaging of the ice cream… I can’t even describe how embarrassed I am about imagining De
x as the ice cream.
Since it’s almost three, I go to pick up Darcy from school. Focusing on driving and traffic and such helps.
You’d think after a few weeks of doing this since Darcy went back to school, pick-up trips would feel normal.
They don’t. Mom would be the one to pick Darcy up. She was the one who remembered what days he needed his sports uniform, whereas I send him to school on sports days with his normal uniform, and vice versa. I forget when he has tests and projects and speeches and special performance days.
My brother is probably the loser of his classmates.
In a different, mismatched way, this is the same as Dex.
Dex would come back from lunch to assemblies and I’d catch a whiff of smoke as he trudged past me, heading to the back corner with his buddies. But most times he’d bring a guitar to school and disappear into the music room at the beginning of lunch. One or two of the little kids would walk in and out of that door. Dex would only come back out a minute before the bell, shoving a sandwich down his throat. When I sat in class I would see his buddies across the court scribbling graffiti on a building or bench. That stopped when I was fifteen because the kids Dex hung out with had dropped out. Dex stayed all the way to graduation.
I remember the last time I saw him. I was still a year away from graduating, but I was invited to go to one of the several senior prank day parties to celebrate the end of exams and classes.
It was the first time I’d played “I Never”.
Sitting behind my friend, an appendage to the edge of the circle, Dex, like all the graduating students, was too drunk to remember I was there.
“I Never slept with my best friend’s girlfriend.” Out of the thirty or thirty-five playing the game, four guys downed a shot and two girls downed their shots.
“I Never cheated on a test this year.” Some people checked out others first, and after a while, a dozen people sucked down their shots. Dex’s buddies both drank and other random people. But not Dex.
“I’ve never stole money from my parents.” I used up my one and only shot to that. Thankfully I was hidden behind my friend anyway. Thirty-five or whatever the number of the people playing minus two downed their shots. There was a collective fit of gasps, coughs and laughs when everyone realized how common something petty like this was. Only Dex and a Mormon girl didn’t drink.
The honk of a car horn brings me back to the present. Spotting a parking spot in the lot, I focus my thoughts on being here, park my car and pick up Darcy from his classroom. He’s a non-stop radio as I take him back to my car. Topics: Dad, friends, Dad, Mom, school, sports, Dad.
“Nana once told me Daddy uses dialysis to make his kidneys work,” Darcy says as I fasten my seat belt.
Backing out, I squeeze into the jam of cars trying to exit the school without so much as a flipped finger or honked horn. “Dad’s kidneys aren’t working.”
“Nana tells me the dialysis does make his kidneys work but…” Darcy says.
Half a minute goes by, during which Darcy stares at the side of my face as I drive. “Nope.”
“Pa says his blood got poisoned. And Pa says Daddy’s heart is very weak.”
Darcy goes on like this for ever and ever. Heat swells in my eyelids, the first sign. My throat constricts, a second sign. Darcy’s still talking to someone, I think. I can’t be sure of how I’m responding other than the occasional shrug or “mm-hm”. When I scratch at an itch on my cheek, my finger comes away wet. Confused, I wipe that cheek again and do the same to my other cheek. Both hands are shining wet.
I realize I’m crying when I breathe, when my throat makes a gurgling sound.
“Are you crying, Charlee?” Darcy says, craning his neck to inspect me.
I swat him away. I should have made myself tell him to be quiet, that my heart is too weak, not Dad’s. Our dad isn’t going anywhere. Darcy, don’t you know that?
I am an outsider. Everyone but me is so sure my dad will die. But I will not succumb to those negative thoughts. Thoughts like that show on the outside and my father needs strength from me.
It’s while I’m considering that I would never be so defeated as to think my dad will die from his injuries that I finally make up my mind.
An eighteen-year-old guy who has never stolen money from his parents and who never cheated on the hardest exams of schooling life, overcoming pressure from friends to deface property, or cheat or drop out, is not the type of guy to plan an accident that could tear apart so many families.
More than that, when I stare into Dex’s eyes and there’s a longing inside so deep, I wonder how far he’s probing inside me, how long he’s wanted me, despite his words otherwise.
The more thinking I do the more Dex appears…innocent.
Next thought: what’s stopping us being together, then?
15. The Hypo Hero
Dexter
Charz is the only one home. I know this because I caught the bus here after work today and have watched her wind up the long driveway and open the middle roller door to park inside. Like the idiot I am, I’ve been crouching behind this bush for longer than I want to find out. My ankles and calves almost give way after all this time.
I haven’t manned up and knocked on that door, and the cramps are horrific pains by now, so I guess that means I’m not going inside to chat to Charz. As I climb over the bushes and back to the road, I taste something at the back of my mouth. I run my tongue over that spot and swallow, feeling the taste, and how I have food cravings and that…I hold out my hand horizontal to the ground and it trembles. Now that I’m thinking about it, my head’s light and my thoughts are jumbled.
I cross the street, not fazed if someone sees me emerge from the bushes. I cut across the path, stomping through emerald-green grass and stepping through plant beds full of red, pink and orange blooms.
Since everything feels sick and happy and woozy and weird, I almost walk through the door. To stop my nose from smashing into it, I steady against the wood.
My muscles are so, so heavy in this moment. Slow, too, because I hang my head against the door with my hands still resting on the sides and the world seems to rock.
Definitely a hypo. I should turn around. I don’t want her to see me like this. Better yet, I should be able to reach into my pockets and eat the candy I’ve stashed there as Mom suggests but I still don’t carry any with me.
But I need sugar. And I’m too far away from any other source. This leaves me one option. I rap on the front door and wait, shoving my hands in my pockets. I count to twenty, then wait some more because I can’t trust my judgment to guess the time lapse. I rap again.
But she’s here! Why isn’t she answering?
“Charz?” I whisper, poking my head through the door. A moment later, when it occurs to me that I’m staring at a wall-sized projector screen, three individual leather recliners and a massive U-shaped leather sofa, I realize I’ve walked into Charz’s house just like that.
I poke my head in a few doors, asking myself with a faint voice how I’m doing this when for three-quarters of an hour I was crouching behind a damn bush trying to work myself in.
The house seems dreamy, yet modern, and like a haze in the distance after walking for hours under a hot sun, I can’t be sure if I’m dreaming, or I’m really here, in Charz’s house. Fucking low blood sugar.
I repeat what I see to keep my eyes open, and keep my body functioning. Hallway. Turn a corner. Another room. Kitchen.
Food.
I don’t call Charz’s name this time. Stumbling, I rip open the pantry and see glass containers that hold cookies dunked in chocolate so I scoff one of those. There’s a container with rum balls so I take one of those, too. There’s a family-sized bag of potato chips so I eat them, taking only double the time as it took to gulp down the rum ball.
Slowly, the room stops spinning and the light-headedness is all but gone. I wipe my hands on my jeans but they’re still sticky with the fat and sugar from the food I ate. From Charl
ee May’s house!
Once the feeling of passing out and the splitting headache and trembles pass, I realize what it is that I’ve done. I look around the huge, spotless room, with not a crumb of food on the tiles apart from mine, and panic. I crouch and swipe the mess into my palm. Swipe, swipe, until it seems all traces of my shame are gone.
As I’m crouched near the floor with a palm full of crumbs, I hear a splash. A splash? I stand and check for a garbage can, opening two cupboards before I find a built in system on wheels hidden behind another cupboard.
I want to eat more, or at least I think I have to. It’s the cravings because my body is still adjusting from the hypo. When I’m in this state, my mind is a ten-foot monster demanding I eat everything I can and it doesn’t matter if I don’t have the money or I’m already full. I don’t have the willpower to rebel against that voice.
But here in Charz’s kitchen some rational part of my brain fights back for a moment, and when I shush that voice, I hear more consistent splashes.
I follow the sound, methodically weaving around the coffee table and another leather sofa until I can see her through the glass door. It seems to be some type of pool house attached to the main mansion.
There are two palm trees planted in each back corner of the pool house, surrounded by dirt and small green sprouting leaves. A rough tarmac surface covers the rest of the space, holding reclining deck chairs in a clump in another corner, and a waterfall spilling at the far end of the pool. There’s a floor-to-ceiling-length shelving system too.
But no Charz.
Until the darkened, wet-blonde of her hair breaks the water’s surface. She’s swimming in the opposite direction to me. Her head barely bobs above the water before she goes under again.
I slip my workout shorts down, yank off my tank in record time and dart to the end of the pool closest to me, away from her. She does this flip at the wall, her feet and ass tumbling in a circle before she springs off the wall under the water. Shaking my head, I slide into the pool with my boxers on. I brace for the freezing sensation to cup my dick and balls and it doesn’t take long to hit. I don’t know how she stands swimming in this temperature, but it takes me a moment to be able to move and then I slip under and wet my hair, shaking it out of my face when I stand up.
Drowning in You Page 11
