Crash and Burn

by Michael Hassan

  Roxanne, however, couldn’t do it. In fact, she was going to have to cut back, because her own schoolwork was getting intense. And then one week she had to cancel on me entirely, which made me out-of-my mind panicky about not seeing her again. Not only panicky, but by Wednesday of that week, I was going through severe withdrawal, as in once you start having sex and expect it on a schedule, your body starts to get all twisty if things don’t work out the way they are supposed to (OK, maybe not you, but most definitely me).

  Plus, on an emotional level, I simply could not stop thinking about her. During classes, then after school, during baseball practice . . . truth was she made all of the girls in my grade seem like, well, like kids by comparison.

  So when we finally got together again the following week, I had to tell her. After all, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to her, given her special talent, and given that I was all about emotion at that point.

  She was changing into her sweats, when I said it. Well, not it, I was going to get to that; I started with, “I missed you.”

  And she stood there as naked as the first time I watched her change, and she said this in response: “Crashinsky, don’t you fall in love with me. Don’t frickin’ do it. Do you understand me?”

  And I said, “I thought you already knew.”

  She just nodded like she did, but she was pretty much silent for the rest of our time together, and I was silent and I couldn’t even guess what I was working on that afternoon.

  Then, on Wednesday night she canceled the Thursday session. She called my mom to tell her.

  And after hours of deciding whether or not to call her, I broke down and did it, and when she picked up what I said was:

  “I need help in history.” OK, I had nothing else to say.

  And what she said was “Crash, you need a frickin’ girlfriend. Call me after you get one.”

  She hung up, and I couldn’t tell if she had dumped me—which didn’t seem possible as I guess we were never actually going out—or challenged me, the way she had challenged me to answer five questions correctly. She was always testing and then rewarding me. So I had to believe that if I somehow found a girlfriend, Roxanne would be back in the picture again.

  But then I started thinking that maybe she told me to get one because she was cutting me off for good.

  So I was depressed. Not depressed in the way that Burn was depressed when he was in Down mode, but depressed as in confused about what I needed to do to get back to with Roxanne. By the second week, I was having my mom call her, and she promised that once she finished some major school project, she would be back on track with me. It sounded like a lie to me, so I texted her and she responded:

  did you get a girlfriend yet?

  Clearly I had no choice. Which left me with a number of possibilities. There was Annie Russo, who had been coming on strong all year. There was Christina, who was in my history class, but although we talked and joked around a little, there was nothing to prove that what Burn said about her liking me was true, not that I would have even noticed because I was so over-the-top obsessed with Roxanne. There were a few other girls who were friendly, but they mostly hung out with other groups, so I didn’t really know them and didn’t have the time to invest in the possibility of establishing something just to prove it to Roxanne.

  And of course there was Madelaine Brancato. The obvious choice. Sure, she might still be pissed off as hell. Except that I knew that she still liked me, so I wouldn’t have to work too hard. The problem was how to get Maddy back. The solution was to call Pete, who was friendly with Nancy, who was Maddy’s best friend, because Pete could tell Nancy my version of the “truth,” as in my recollection was that Maddy dumped me, not the other way around, since she ended up hooking up with Burn behind my back.

  Point was, in my version, I was the victim. Sure, this version had its flaws, but given that it was coming from third-party translations, and counting on some confusion between Pete and Nancy, by the time it got back to Maddy, I was sure that she would end up feeling sorry for me.

  And sure enough, Maddy ended up calling me, to explain that the only reason why she went out with Burn in the first place was that she thought that I had dumped her and of course she wanted to get back at me. And I told her that what I said so many months ago was that I needed some space, not that I was breaking up with her.

  We were back together by the end of the week. Good, because now I had Roxanne covered. Bad because I had forgotten how painfully annoying Maddy could be.

  Now comes the weird part.

  We were in her car (she got her license before me, being older and all), and she tells me she’s ready. Ready, as in ready. Reason being, she confessed, she went all the way at summer camp. So it wasn’t going to be a problem for her now.

  We parked by the nature preserve and talked some more, and then we started making out, with her turning up the radio again, which to me signaled that something was going to happen. Only, get this, I didn’t really want it to. I was missing the hell out of Roxanne and couldn’t stop thinking about her. So when Maddy started to get it on, I actually stopped her, telling her that I had to call my mom and tell her where I was. I stepped out of the car and pretended to call, but what I actually did was text Roxanne.

  OK, I have a girlfriend, now what?

  Try out some of the things I taught you was the response.

  So I did. I got back into the car and got busy and, using every technique that Roxanne had taught me, I did to her what no other kid my age was capable of doing to a girl her age. Not going to get into it, but when Maddy dropped me off at the end of the night, she was a changed woman.

  Me, not so much. Sex with Maddy was absolutely meaningless, didn’t make me happy, didn’t turn me on, didn’t make me feel anything at all. If anything, it was merely practice to better prepare myself for the next time I would be with Roxanne, if there was a next time.

  In fact, I almost forgot to call my boys and report back and only did so because this would count to them as my first. And of course, the second I got home, I texted Roxanne.

  OK, done. Can you be my tutor again?

  And the following Tuesday afternoon, after school, like nothing had changed, I was back at Aunt Peesmell’s Victorian house, this time having to deal with the cold damp rain of late autumn, shaking myself dry on the welcome mat while I waited nervously for Roxanne to come down the stairs.

  And then, there she was, back to goth again, new piercing in her nose and apparently her tongue because when she spoke, she had a distinctive lisp. Not a trace of the hippie stuff left.

  “Come on up, Thteevin. I have thomething to show you. Firtht tell me about your date.”

  So I told her how I did all these things to Maddy and how girls were looking at me differently in school after the weekend, because apparently Maddy was telling her friends that I was absolutely amazing and that I was her first, carefully omitting the fact that she was with some summer guy at her camp, and she was now my girlfriend again.

  Which brought me to ask Roxanne why she did the tongue thing.

  She closed the door to her room and turned to kiss me so I could feel the tongue, and it clinked against my teeth as I tasted metal. I was not an instant fan. But still, her actions were making me think that things were back to normal. So that was good.

  Then she unbuttoned her shirt, and I thought that maybe we were just picking up where we left off, and then she took it off completely, revealing a humongous and incredibly frightening tattoo that ran the length of her arm.

  “You like?” she asked.

  It was an outline of images of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center all ablaze, and an image of the devil in the smoke, intertwining snakes, then, across her shoulder, gravestones and her mother’s name and the dates of her birth and death.

  “Cool” is what I said.

  But it wasn’t cool at all. It was truly disturbing. Psycho crazy.

  “I’ve been having it worked on, like, every day. It
won’t be done for a month,” she told me.

  I couldn’t imagine how much more work was necessary or what she was planning. I also couldn’t imagine why she needed to totally deface her body that way. I understood how you could get a few tats, and will probably even get one myself when I start college. But this was out of control. Then she asked if I was ready to work on history.

  And I said that I was, even though the furthest thing from my mind that afternoon was history and even though all I wanted to talk about was what I was feeling and whether she was feeling anything, even though I knew that she had to be. Otherwise why was I there?

  “Five quethtions,” she said, and I started to read.

  I got halfway through when her cell phone rang.

  It was Burn. He was, she told me, somewhere in Massachusetts. He had Christina Haines with him. He wasn’t coming home.

  Chapter Nineteen

  How Burn Went Too Far One Day

  “My Mom warned me that something like this was going to happen.”

  This from Roxanne as we pulled into Kenny’s driveway. She blasted the horn until I stopped her, reaching out to grab her hands. Car horns in particular cut straight into my brain, part of my ADD I guess, but I cannot handle certain sounds and Roxanne’s horn was exactly one of them.

  She had this worried, severe look about her. What she was, was nervous, supernervous, and she was totally making me jumpy. I had a joint in my backpack that I had planned to smoke with her after my tutoring session. I took it out now to calm me down, and she instantly gave me a look like I had better put it the fuck away. So I did, and then Kenny came charging out of his house.

  He got in, and as soon as he slammed the door, Roxanne jolted the car back into the street, just missing an oncoming Lexus. The driver blared his horn at her, and she blared back on hers, Fuck you, NO FUCK YOU without any words or hand signals. Her horn beat his horn, no contest.

  My head was spinning.

  This was all happening too fast for me, and I couldn’t help feeling that it just wasn’t fair. This was supposed to be my time with her, and I was nervous enough about it all day, but finally thinking that everything was going to be OK since she let me back into her life and resumed our sessions.

  Then, after receiving Burn’s call, everything changed. She calmly went to the mirror and removed her tongue ring (I didn’t know it could come out that easily), then changed into one of her mother’s shirts, telling me that she needed to look and sound mature if anyone stopped us along the way. She said that we had to be prepared for anything, as she applied makeup in a way that made her look much older than her actual age. As she prepared herself, she instructed me to go over to her computer and print out a map of the Berkshires in Massachusetts, concentrating on the town of Great Barrington.

  When she was done, she turned to me and asked who were the best guys to bring along if we were going to talk Burn into coming home, keeping in mind that we had to get to Christina and bring her back home before her parents called the police. Because if Christina’s parents called the police, they could bring charges against Burn, maybe even felony charges. She admitted that she didn’t exactly know the legal terminology, but she knew that transporting a minor across state lines was like a federal crime, which, according to her, made it way worse, so we had to get to him and Christina before anyone else did.

  As she switched from the shirt to a business suit, one that didn’t look good on her at all, she said, “I know he’s crazy, but he’s not just my brother, Crash, he’s all I frickin’ have left.”

  We passed Aunt Peesmell in the hall and said nothing; without speaking, we understood each other that she should not be the wiser for anything that was going down. Aunt Peesmell eyed the business suit suspiciously, but at that point, I was pretty sure she had seen everything in that house.

  As for the best guys for the trip, picking Newman was my choice. Kenny was hers, since she knew Kenny, and Kenny was exactly the kind of geek Burn related to, even though he didn’t really relate to people at all.

  Next up, Newman, who was at his curb, ready for us. Minutes later, we were on I-684 heading north toward Great Barrington. Newman shoots me a smiling nod like we have a secret between us, and it’s all about the girl next to me and how I’m banging her. I react with immediate anger until I realize that nothing that I told him in any way let him in on my real feelings, so it wasn’t his fault. After all, Newman didn’t know Roxanne at all, and only knew about her from the word at school, and the word on Roxanne was never any good. He couldn’t know that she was intelligent and intuitive and caring and compassionate and funny. In fact, sitting there beside her as she drove us in search of her brother, I felt like I was finally understanding this myself.

  And I got it, got the reason that she tried to kill herself the year before, got the reason that she didn’t like Lindsey (as if there was only one reason), got the reason that she saw something in me.

  And of course, all of this only made her even more beautiful to me.

  And of course, I couldn’t show it.

  Which was hard, because at that very moment in time, I loved Roxanne so deeply and completely that it was actually painful.

  Newman pulled out a joint and began to light up, not knowing that I had tried it earlier with negative consequences.

  “Are you frickin’ kidding me?” she yelled at him.

  He dropped the joint, still lit, into his lap, looking ashamed. I could tell that he didn’t like being yelled at. Not one bit.

  I turned the radio on, flipped through stations.

  “How are you going to find him?” I asked her.

  “I don’t frickin’ know,” she said, then turned to Kenny, who busied himself with his laptop in the seat behind me. “Where do you think we should go?” she asked, tapping the GPS system, which had been set for Great Barrington as I handed him the maps that I had printed out. Certainly not specific enough.

  Kenny was on his laptop, using a wireless card to connect to the internet, Mapquesting several possibilities, names of hotels, malls, parking lots, state parks. . . . “We have about an hour to figure that out,” he told her. “Do you have any ideas?”

  “Not yet,” she said, pulling off the highway for gas. “I was hoping you would think of something. Aren’t you two supposed to be some kind of frickin’ geniuses?”

  “She’s got a pretty big stick up her ass for a slut,” Newman whispered across the car seat when Roxanne was in the gas station with Kenny and it was just me and him. I stared back at him from the front seat. I’m not going to lie to you, that was the only time in my life that I considered hurting him, even though then, as now, Newman could have demolished me if we actually came to blows.

  “Actually, she’s pretty cool,” I said feebly, in her defense. “And she’s not a slut.”

  And now he was staring back at me. “Oh I get it,” he said. “I thought it was totally about the sex for you, dude. I didn’t realize that you are totally and completely into her, aren’t you, Thteeevin? I thought it wuth all cathual, thame on me.” A little of the residual tongue-ring lisp still came through when she talked.

  “It’s not what you think,” I told him, not knowing what he thought.

  “Dude, you’re in frickin’ love.”

  I felt exposed. This was hazardous territory, completely and utterly dangerous, because if Newman could guess that I had feelings for her, then what was going to happen when Burn saw us together? I flashed back to the Thanksgiving dinner when a younger Burn was perceptive enough to see the connection between my father and the woman who worked for him. He figured out their relationship right off, and he didn’t even know them at all. Now Burn was older and considerably more experienced. There was not going to be any way to hide from him.

  And when I didn’t immediately deny it, Newman was all over it, realizing that the jokes he was making were hitting a sore spot, and that the inferences from his observations were correct. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me? Were you afraid t
hat I would have reminded you how absolutely crazy it is to be in love with David Burnett’s sister? Exactly how do you think he’s going to react to the news? Are you out of your mind? Couldn’t you have picked someone who didn’t have a psychotic brother who also happened to consider himself your friend?”

  They were coming back.

  “One more thing, Crash,” Newman said, laughing at himself. “Stay away from my sister.” This, just as the car door opens.

  Roxanne climbed back in, tossed us bags of chips, pretzels, Slim Jims, Combos, and other assorted road food junk. We circulated the bags, and I boosted up the radio when “Holiday” from American Idiot started to play. I thought of other days with the entire Club Crew crammed into someone’s car, blazed and bouncing as we shouted the lyrics “Hear the sound of the falling rain. Coming down like an Armageddon flame . . . ,” outscreaming the full-volume audio system, deaf to the sounds of the outside world. And now, not a peep from anyone.

  A little over an hour later, we passed the “Entering Massachusetts” sign. It was totally winter dark by now and you could feel how cold it was outside even though the car was warm and toasty. Roxanne attempted to call her brother again. First time, no cell service for like ten minutes. Newman made a sigh like we’re wasting our time, but he knew better than to say it out loud. She gave me her phone with instructions to hit send as soon as the signal bars returned, which happened, like, the very second I took it from her.

  Then mostly we listened to Roxanne as she tried to get him to tell her where he was. “David, please, just tell me.” Then, “I’m not going to call anyone, I swear.” Silence. “Wherever you are, I can be there in an hour.” More silence. “OK, two then.” More silence. “I know it’s been hard for you—it’s been hard for me too.” More silence. “You have to bring her home before her parents call the cops.” More silence. “I don’t know, can you put her on?” More silence. “Yes, I’m still tutoring him, and, no, he never mentioned her.”