Maybe it was because what I really wanted was a slut, because a slut is up for anything, and even though Christina seemed like she could get into it . . . eventually, she was not there yet, not on my level, as I too was, and remain, a manwhore (just calling it as it is).
Christina emerged from the bathroom in her bathing suit and announced that it was hot tub time, and I found my suit and got another bottle of champagne. So far, no blinding headache, which I almost always got from champagne, so, as always, I had to continue to tempt fate, opening the second bottle and taking a selfish gulp.
We settled into the tub and passed the bottle between us. The water was at first boilingly hot and I felt like I was being cooked alive, but then as I got used to it, it felt good. She seemed happy, so I asked her if she was and she said, “Relieved.” And I asked her what she meant, and she explained that she had put too much pressure on herself about it, so she was glad it was over and she didn’t think it was great for me, but promised, “I’ll do better next time.”
And we continued to drink until the second bottle was done, and while I’m used to drinking big-time and handling my alcohol, the combination of champagne and steam got me to a point of total zombiness. Yet it didn’t seem to affect her at all.
I wanted to get out, but couldn’t admit it, so I fell deeper into a comalike state and she started getting frisky again and I started feeling sick.
I crawled out and made my way to a deck chair, where I passed out.
When I woke up, it was pitch-black out, beyond the darkness of summer camp, no lights from anywhere all, except for this magnificently starry sky. For a moment I forgot where I was, and when it hit me, I was more than a little spooked by the extreme darkness. Plus I was cold, not just cold, but freezing, as the temperature had dropped and I was still in my wet bathing suit. I was, in fact, shivering uncontrollably.
I stumbled back into the bedroom and called out for Christina. No answer.
Freaky.
“Christina?”
I glanced at the clock radio. 11:25. How long had I been out? I climbed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and went from room to room, getting increasingly nervous. Could she somehow still be in the hot tub? What if she had drowned?
I was saved from my panic by the sound of her voice. She had apparently snuck down to the lower level, settled comfortably into the modular couch, and was playing with my MacBook, all curled up, eating frozen pizza, occasionally looking up at the huge TV, where some movie was playing.
“Want some?” offering me a slice.
And, that’s when I noticed what she was doing.
From across the room I assumed that she was on Facebook or IMing her friends, or going on whatever websites girls go onto (as opposed to me and my friends who are all into all of those free porn sites).
She was doing none of those things.
Instead, she was reading one of the chapters from my book. I noticed my writing on the screen and quickly grabbed the computer away from her.
“What the fuck?” I practically screamed at her. Not only had she gotten into the files that contained the chapters about McAllister and Meadows, stuff she mostly already knew about, but what was worse, she was reading one of the present-day chapters, the one titled “Another Night of Partying with Jungle Juice and Weed” which was about the party at Kelly’s earlier this summer. Her reading any of this was a major violation as far as I was concerned.
“I thought you said I could read it,” she said defensively.
“That’s a lie!” is what I shouted, although I may have kind of told her I would let her read some of it when she asked when we were driving up. But even if I did, I meant the few chapters that I already sent to Sally.
“OK, maybe I should have asked,” she responded. “But you were passed out and I couldn’t wake you, and seeing as you said it was OK . . . I didn’t know that you were writing about us now, this summer.” Which made me feel even more exposed.
“My agent,” I started. “Sally . . . wanted my current impressions, after everything went down, not just the events leading up to 4/21. So there are some chapters that deal with the time after, some of those chapters aren’t chapters yet, just segments.”
“You mean like the interview,” she responded, and I thought fuckme, how much did she actually read. Problem being that some of these segments not only contained my notes for the main part of book but also detailed my trips to the Westchester Mall with Claudia, stealing my father’s weed, and worse, way worse than that, was the fact that almost every entry talked about Christina, at length.
“Like the interview,” I repeated. “These segments aren’t ready for anyone. I don’t even know if I would send any of them to Sally.”
“Well, you should. It’s all really good, Steven.”
“How much did you read?” I demanded, still on fire with anger, but, not gonna lie, besides being really pissed off and feeling violated that she had seen what I considered to be my secret stuff which also contained plenty of stuff about her, I kind of liked the idea that she liked what she read. So I was in conflict mode, as in, do I stay mad or let it go so I could find out more?
“How much?” I repeated.
“Whatever I could open,” she said. “The chapters are all different files, so I didn’t know where to start, really.” Which seemed like an honest answer, but which got me nowhere in terms of whether or not she had seen stuff about her. I didn’t exactly know how to ask.
“Like?”
“Like how Burn saved you from going to military school.”
“And?”
“Your visit with Roxanne. That was really sad and actually hilarious, at the same time.”
“And?”
“And OK, I get now why you are so devoted to Felicia and how she’s been there for you. So I apologize for what I said about her before.” She seemed sincere, but I sensed that she was being purposely evasive.
“And?”
“And, OK, I did look at some of the stuff with my name in it, I mean, you can’t blame me. I couldn’t help but notice that you have this section called ‘Christina and the Dark Night,’ so I had to . . .”
I panicked, and tried to concentrate on the section that was displayed on my laptop screen, and it instantly took me back to the moment we were driving to the movie theater. As she talked, I scrolled down and reread what I had written, and from what I could tell, this part wasn’t so bad if she read it. It seemed mostly complimentary to her, so it looked OK.
Also, as I read about my reaction to Claudia calling me constantly, I wondered whether she knew about the sex part, as in head from Claudia. Christina, like everyone in the entire universe, had seen the picture with me and her and the blunt, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Except she made me swear that I hadn’t had sex with Claudia, sex of any sort, and I may have stretched that particular interpretation a bit.
Anyways, I probably didn’t have anything to worry about, seeing as how she didn’t bring it up and instead kept apologizing to me, and, in a total Crash move, she even tried to convince me that she was actually doing me a favor, that she had always known, even back in middle school, that I had this great potential that I wasn’t using, which the book clearly showed, and that the summer stuff was so good in her mind, at least from what she read, that it had to somehow be included in the actual book and she even went so far as to insist that I send an email to Sally and attach the segments, so that Sally would get them all at once and could see for herself.
She got me so psyched about it that I followed her instructions. And as soon as I hit send, I got back a confirming email from Sally, saying that she would read them and get back to me. It was after midnight. Did that woman ever stop working? Probably not, as she was one of my father’s people, and they all seemed like they worked 24/7 with their BlackBerrys and iPhones attached to them, buzzing at whatever hours of the day and night.
In the meantime, I was still shivering from being cold, so I draped a blanket over my should
ers and followed Christina up the stairs and into the kitchen, carrying the remainder of the pizza, which I practically inhaled, though it seemed to do nothing for my appetite. In addition, I still felt half frozen, and for some reason not thawing out.
She made some more food, and I borrowed one of her uncle’s sweatshirts from the closet. She looked at me like it might not be such a great idea, but didn’t say anything.
We ate the rest of the stuff we bought and I was feeling better. And then we went back to the family room and had a follow-up, this time on the couch, and still she was more bossy than into it, or so it seemed to me. It was better but not brag-worthy. And we were both pretty gone afterward, lying across each other on the couch, which I thought would be a good time for—you guessed it—weed.
So I reached over to the pouch containing the second stash of Jacob’s Gold along with one of my favorite glass pipes and lit up without asking, no point in having to argue if she said no. But she didn’t complain, she even took a hit, although it didn’t look like she was doing much inhaling, and I ended up finishing the bowl and packing another. Then I lay back down and asked her to tell me about her thing with Burn during sophomore year. I hardly saw Burn during sophomore year, so I was thinking, if Christina could cover sophomore year, that would help me to fill in the gap.
Thanks to Jacob’s Gold, I was able to close my eyes as she talked and could totally visualize her version of the story, picturing her and him in chemistry with Ms. Reynolds, the superdyke teacher with arms like a wrestler and a face that was almost but not quite manly and a smell like salt-and-vinegar potato chips.
So there she is, the second day of sophomore year (I am picturing her in one of those sundresses, which she wears a lot), when Burn announces to the class that he’s going to marry her. Thing is, up to that point, she had never interacted with him before. She only knew him as the boy who cried during her performance in West Side Story, and then as April’s boyfriend, and then as a boy who was asking about her a lot during freshman year. So she didn’t even know that he was in her class, but then here was Reynolds taking attendance, and when Ms. Reynolds gets to Burn’s name, he yells “PRESENT” at the top of his lungs (I guess he was back to being Up on the scale of Up and Down), and then Burn proceeds to volunteer that in ten years’ time, on this date, as in September 6, he would be getting married, and he officially wanted to invite the rest of the class to his wedding, which of course would be with Christina Haines, and please RSVP by the end of class to reserve a seat at the reception.
So of course Christina puts her head down, hand over her eyes all embarrassed, not thinking it was cute at all, but not thinking it was all that strange coming from Burn, because, among other things, Burn was also known by then for these insane outbursts, which made him kind of famous for being “so random,” which at the time was an expression girls used for virtually everything, except in Burn’s case it was actually totally and completely true.
So she is about to leave Ms. Reynolds’s class, sneak out, knowing in her bones that Burn is going to try to talk to her and she skulks toward the back exit, but he beats her to the door and, with an open notebook, starts to ask every kid in the class, well, are you coming to the wedding or not, and will you be having the fish or the prime rib, and most kids laugh but then he gets to Christina and she looks at him dead on and says, “David Burnett, I don’t think this is funny.”
And he says, “It’s our destiny, Christina,” and she says, “it’s not my destiny,” and he says, “well it is mine.”
And now she is arguing with him, and this goes on until everyone else is gone and they are both late for their next class, and she tells him again that it can’t be destiny for only one person, not both, it’s not physically possible, and he says this, he says, “I know physics, Christina, and it is possible that something can be in two places at the same time. Consider quantum mechanics. And by the way, nothing is actually random.”
So next class is Spanish, and guess who’s in her class again. Sure enough there might actually be something to this destiny thing, because he, Burn, sits right behind her; both of them are late. Señorita Sanchez calls attendance, and guess what, there’s Burn again, announcing to another class that there will be a wedding in ten years’ time, September 6, who wants to come, and do they want the chicken or the steak, and he whispers to Christina, who is already totally fed up with him:
“Destiny.”
So she flees, and then next class is American history, and guess who’s in her class again? Yep, and the wedding thing for the third time. Only this time it’s the grilled salmon or the rack of lamb.
Me, I didn’t see any of this, and didn’t really see much of either of them in tenth grade at all. I was busy with my boys, mostly.
Back to Christina, still with me on the couch, I am totally picturing her dilemma first day of school. She’s explaining how there she was, three classes in a row with a total lunatic who even if you pretend not to notice him is constantly staring at you, at your back, at your profile from across the room, at your hands when you’re writing, at your feet when you slip them out of your flip-flops, which is how she described it. And when I asked how she knew he was watching, she said, “Crash, when you’re a girl, you just know,” which made me wonder what they knew about me.
But back to Christina, because by the end of that first week, she was thinking, what was she going to do about this guy in her classes who totally freaked her out? And then sometime in the middle of the second week, Burn did the most unexpected thing:
He totally backed off.
After all that over-the-top talk about destiny and how they were meant to be together and how she was his soul mate, he just stopped. Cold. And instead, he started pretending that she didn’t exist, so no more staring or making her feel uncomfortable or defensive, no more outbursts about her in class or to her friends. And she even had to ask some of them, was he still watching her, because it didn’t make sense that he suddenly stopped.
But he did. He started hanging with Paige Thompson, who was one of the black girls, before she moved to Boston. But Paige was superfriendly with Zoë who was also superfriendly with April Walker, who now hated him because of his overwhelming obsession with Christina, even when they were going out, which meant that Zoë wasn’t about to let Paige hang with Burn for too long. Plus Zoë was in chorus with Christina and was also into acting, so she knew about Burn’s proposals and relentless pursuit of Christina even though he was no longer relentlessly pursuing, but that all got back to Paige and kind of scared Paige off.
So it seemed that Christina was finally free of him, except, she admitted, which she never admitted before, she kind of missed the attention, because despite everything else, she always thought that he, Burn, was essentially harmless, despite his reputation, or so she was beginning to believe after weeks of being in the same classes. Oddly as it turned out, she actually began watching him, not in the same way he had been watching her when he was watching her, but she was becoming curious, especially as to how he could go from like superobsessive to nothing at all, as in not even acknowledging her. Did he forget or did he just get over it, the whole destiny thing?
So she finally asked him, not directly, you don’t go direct on something like this in high school, but through channels, as in Zoë, who asked her sister Farrah, who knew Roxanne. But Roxanne either didn’t know or wouldn’t say anything about her brother and his motives, so dead end there, but not completely, as Roxanne suggested she ask Kenny, because Kenny was always over at their house doing something with David on the internet. But Kenny never really talked to girls, so that left Zoë to talk to Evan who talked to Kenny who talked to Burn who said, when he was asked why he stopped talking to Christina, that it didn’t matter whether they talked because, talk or not, “destiny is destiny.”
So destiny was basically still involved, or so it seemed to Christina, which meant that he, Burn, pretty much still believed that in ten years they were destined to be married. A
nd it began to bother her again that he still believed it, and it bothered her enough that a few days later, she had to let him know that he was wrong, but she couldn’t just come out and tell him, since he hadn’t brought it up again. So instead, being as he sat behind her in Spanish, she simply asked if he thought the Mexican cultural section was going to be on the quiz although she definitely knew the answer to that, as in, of course it was, why would they put it into the book if it wasn’t going to be on the quiz. Which is exactly what Burn told her in an overly sarcastic voice.
And that was their entire conversation, leaving her feeling so Cady from Mean Girls. Did he, Burn, know the scene in that movie? Because she had just played it out so completely and he must have seen it, she thought, as Burn was one of those guys who saw every movie, especially since, everyone knew, he never slept.
So now she had to know if he knew about the Mean Girls scene with Cady asking Aaron Samuels a question that she already knew the answer to, because if he did know the scene, then he was probably thinking that she was thinking about him, not thinking about whether or not Mexican culture was on the quiz, because who was she kidding, he knew that she knew what was on the quiz. So she couldn’t help but feel stupid, and knowing she couldn’t take it back, she promised herself she wouldn’t ever talk to him again or even look his way so he would have to take it as just a random question and not a Mean Girls thing at all.
OK, I absolutely would not have been able to follow the whole Christina drama-story thing at all if I hadn’t been blazed on Jacob’s Gold, because my mind would have gone to so many places while she talked that I would have absorbed absolutely nothing. But now, every time my mind started to wander, this particular strain of weed allowed me to focus again, to get into Christina’s mind so I could tell her story.
Except that I started to feel like my mind was spinning the way her mind seemed to spin, which was, in a way, the same felling that I got when I connected with Burn.
Crash and Burn Page 27
