Pretty Bad Things

by C. J. Skuse

  I was sneaking a smoke before class when he said his first words to me.

  “Who are you?”

  “Paisley. Who are you?”

  “Jason.” He grabbed both handles of his wheelbarrow and checked out my skirt, or more accurately my belt. “You always dress like that, or is it just for me?”

  “What, too long?” I said, hitching it up a little higher.

  Pretty soon we were sharing cigarettes behind the toolshed, talking about movies. And then it got physical. I’ve always seen couples pawing each other and going all cupcakey and sending text messages every five seconds and stuff, but me and Jason weren’t like that. We were more your frantic smash-and-grab sessions. Kissing but missing, like magnets. Grappling like wrestlers. Not Elizabeth and Darcy, but romantic all the same. And then I kinda understood the point of shaving.

  I remember everything about our nights inside the toolshed after all the other immaculate girls had gone to bed. The sweet smell of deoderant and the stinking rubber of new tennis balls. The candlelight flickering, making our shadows bigger on the wall. His hot breath in my ear. His skin on mine, his hands on my back. Feeling down my glossy, smooth legs. All that kind of crap.

  We’d talk, too, all night long about nothing in particular, and he’d listen to me. Just like Beau did. Not interrupting. Not going off on some boring tangent. Just listening. Laughing. Passing cigarettes and laughing. It was like having Beau there, in a weird way. Although with me and Beau it had been candy, not cigarettes.

  It felt like it was the start of something. The start of me feeling something other than anger.

  “Tell me you love me,” I’d say to him.

  “I totally do. I love you so much,” he’d say. And I’d believe him.

  “I love you, too,” I’d whisper into his shoulder and hold him tight.

  How sweet. How heartbreakingly sweet.

  We talked. We kissed. He tasted of green apples. He smelled of grass cuttings and lawn-mower gasoline. He held my head and stroked my earlobes. And for a short while at school, I was happy. I lived for our nights in the toolshed. A softer, kinder Paisley was born. Desk lids were scored with P.A. Luvs J.T. instead of When I Die Bury Me Upside Down So The Whole World Can Kiss My Ass. My grades rose. I noticed birds and clouds. Tension drained through me like a sieve.

  So you can kinda guess what came next.

  BEAU

  TWO

  9976 CAHUENGA BLVD EAST,

  HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA

  I shouldn’t have been there, ergo I should never have known about it. What happened was, I had to come home from school early to change my clothes. O’Donnell and his merry men had found a new way to humiliate me—they’d dunked me headfirst into the trash cans by the cafeteria. Despite the walk back in the California sunshine, my Eels T-shirt clung to my skin like Saran Wrap.

  I walked in through the back door and our maid, Concepción (Connie to us), was in the kitchen reading a letter.

  “Hey,” I said, making her jump about a mile in the air, and she fumbled the letter back into its envelope.

  “Ooh, what’s that, Connie?” I asked, thinking it might be from her son, Nando, who’d been sent back to Mexico a few months earlier. I knew she was desperate to hear from him.

  “It’s nothing. No, don’t worry,” she said, flapping her arms like she had ants down both sleeves. She noticed my soggy T-shirt. “Oh, you are wet. I will wash—”

  “No, I just had an accident at school,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  She attempted to tuck the letter into her apron, and I saw the front.

  “That’s addressed to me and Paisley.” That’s when my heart started to thump real hard. I asked her who it was from, but she wouldn’t tell me, just kept going on about taking my clothes off so she could wash them. She practically had my shirt up over my head before I wriggled away.

  “Connie, if that letter’s for me, I wanna see it, ’kay?” I tried my best to be polite, for real; I still felt bad about catching her off guard.

  She sighed, took the letter out of her pocket, and placed it quietly on the counter. Then she walked out of the room, and I heard her go upstairs.

  I looked at the envelope. Mr. Beau and Miss Paisley Argent. It was postmarked Paradise, Nevada. I picked it up and slowly pulled out what was inside. Words scrawled in blue pen covered one side of a small piece of white paper. And this is what it said:

  To my Wonder Twins,

  Well, here I am in Paradise, like I said. It’s not Las Vegas but it’s close, so maybe when you come visit we can go see the lights. Eddie’s putting me up for now in his suburban ranch. It’s kinda on the small side, but it has four walls and a shower, so it’s good enough for me. As I’ve explained in all my other letters, it’s just a stopgap. I’ll get a good job in time and my own place and maybe then you guys could come see me. You’re both probably doing so well, you don’t need your old man back in your lives, sticking his nose in your business. But whatever you think, I’ll be here waiting,

  Dad xx

  There was a rush through my whole body and this water-clear release in my head. Dad. He wanted us. He’d always wanted us. He’d gone to jail when we were six, charged with armed robbery. Now he was out of jail. A free man. A free Dad! We hadn’t seen him, hadn’t even heard from him the whole time he’d been inside. I held in my hands the first shred of contact we’d had with him in ten years.

  But “other letters”—what did that mean? When did he say he’d be staying in Paradise—wherever that was? Who was Eddie? How did he know we were doing “so well”? I didn’t think we were doing so well. Who’d told him that?

  “Connie?”

  I couldn’t hear her upstairs and found the lack of floorboard creaks troubling. I heard a distant clatter coming from the far end, near my room. I two-stepped it up the stairs, finding her in the spare bedroom, sitting on the floor in front of the bureau, a shoe box full of letters on her lap. She was crying into the hem of her apron.

  “This is all,” she said to me. “Miss Virginia made me throw away the presents. This is all yours now. I want no more of this. It is too sad.”

  I looked down at the letters. There must have been fifty of them. “How long has he been writing to us?”

  She smiled, her wide eyes melting into moons. “You and Paisley were seven. Your seventh birthday, a card came. He loves you so much, Beau. So much …”

  I started bawling, as is my wont. My sister, Paisley, says I cry way too easily. She never cries if she can help it. Once when we were kids we were freewheeling on our bikes down the street, and Paisley fell off and slid along the concrete until she’d scraped off all the skin down the side of her leg. When I got to her, she was pretending like she hadn’t shed a single tear, blinking her eyes and saying she was fine. She could barely walk. “I’m gonna have a cool scar,” she said, and got right back on the bike like nothing had happened, the blood still trickling down. She’s always been like that. I think it’s because she knows if she starts crying, it’ll be hard to stop. She says tears are a sign of weakness. At least that’s what our grandmother always told her.

  “You kept them from us?” I said.

  Connie got up and handed the box to me, closing the bureau drawer behind her. I hated to see her cry. She’d always snuggle me if I cried as a child. It had always been her job to feed us, tuck us in, take us shopping, and give us hugs.

  I still stank of the rotten kitchen waste I’d been dunked in at school but offered her a hug anyway. I tentatively put my arms around her, feeling her tense up, and then go limp and hug me back.

  “You kept them all this time?” I said, feeling her nod against my head.

  “I might lose my job.”

  “It’s all right.”

  We released each other and she tapped the top of the box. “These are yours now. Please, I don’t want them. You read them.” She pinched my T-shirt on my shoulder. “Please change your clothes; I will wash them before I go.”

 
And then she left the room and me and the box, and disappeared down the stairs. Moments later I heard the vacuum cleaner humming in the den.

  I stripped off my rancid T-shirt and sat there, all afternoon, reading through every single letter Dad had sent us from prison. Letter after letter that my sister and I had never seen. I held each one like it was some ancient document that would disintegrate beneath my finger grease. Each one took me back ten years in time, back to New Jersey. Back to Paisley and me as children. Back to Dad and how it used to be when he took us out. To the park, to the country club, to eat pancakes on low-lying tables where he had to bend over to eat. To hotel lobbies where he’d show us coin tricks and we’d play baby blackjack for candy.

  Then I knew who Eddie was. I wandered back in my mind to the times when Dad used to take us with him on his trips into the city (he was a sales rep for New Jersey Gardenia, which sold toiletries to hotel chains). He’d give us Junior Mints and Mike and Ikes if we behaved. We got to go inside these swank hotels and play on the massive winding staircases, go in and out of the elevators, slide around on the pristine marble floors in the bathrooms while he did his work. Just like in that children’s book, Eloise. Sometimes, if the hotel was really busy, Dad would get someone to watch us—usually a real old geezer who’d keep reminding us how lucky we were and tell us about the crap Christmas presents he used to get as a kid, like oranges and, whatever, a bar of soap or something. But sometimes we’d get a concierge like Eddie.

  Eddie, at The Roosevelt, was awesome. Like Will Smith only shorter. He always wore this pristine black uniform with a burgundy collar, and he’d show us coin tricks like Dad’s and make us laugh with stories about the guests, telling us who was superrich and which ones were just superweird. “Suits” he called them. Suits with golden wives. Certain companies would hold conferences in the hotel and there’d be a horde of suits with matching designer luggage. The men would always do the checking-in and the wives would stand around, sighing and clicking their heels against the marble. Me and Paisley would take our candy up to the mezzanine and find ourselves a quiet nook where we could look down on the marble lobby, staring at the twinkling chandelier, watching the tourists check in and out, and waiting for Dad to emerge.

  I remember the last time he took us into the city. It was our birthday the following day, and as a pre-birthday treat he took us to this restaurant in Grand Central Station, where we had burgers and cheese fries and Dad had a BLT. After lunch we looked down from the marble balcony at all the intense New York commuters running for their trains. I was dying to ask him about the fight he and Mom had had the night before. Our neighbor, Mr. Wong, had even called to complain because it was thumping through his walls. Mom going all high and screechy, Dad being all deep and defensive. And then him all high and defensive and her all deep and judgmental. Paisley and I shared a room above the kitchen, which was where most of their arguments took place. That night Mom had called us “little shits” and complained that Dad was never home to help, and always gave us candy to curry favor. That part is sort of true. Dad did buy us a lot of candy. You want me or my sister to do anything, you give us candy. It’s kind of a key to get in with us.

  In the diner, Paisley had ketchup all around her mouth. She asked Dad about the wives at The Roosevelt.

  “Are they made of gold, Dad?”

  “No, honey. Why d’you say that?”

  “'Cause they look gold.”

  “No, they’re not gold. They sure got a lot of it, though. I wouldn’t mind a piece of it myself.”

  “Do they have jobs?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “What do they do all day?”

  “I don’t know, honey.”

  I couldn’t wait any longer. “Are you and Mom going to get a divorce?” I said.

  I remember him chewing really hard on his sandwich and frowning. “Why d’you ask, B?”

  “Cause we heard you shouting again last night.”

  He took another bite of his sandwich and scrunched up his napkin to wipe his chin. Then he said, “I’m sorry, guys. We thought you were asleep.”

  “We were,” said Paisley. “It woke us up.”

  Dad shook his head. “We just had a little argument, like you two do sometimes. We’re not getting divorced.”

  “Where does it hurt you, Dad?” Paisley asked him.

  “What do you mean, baby?”

  “You told Mom you were broke. Where are you broke?”

  Dad bowed his head and wiped his chin again with his napkin. When he came back up, he was smiling. He grabbed a menu from the stand. “Who wants cheesecake? Let’s see what they got … ooh, strawberry, I think. Or chocolate swirl. Who wants chocolate swirl?”

  We both nodded and dunked our fries in our joint pot of ketchup.

  I remembered it so clearly. On the way home, Dad throwing Peppermint Patties over his shoulder to us in the backseat, them raining down on us like stars. Me and Paisley snuggling into the old wool blanket we always kept in the car.

  “Try and get some sleep, okay, guys? Traffic’s gonna be pretty bad on the way back to Jersey. We got a long drive.”

  About a week later, Dad went to work like usual but didn’t come home. We just assumed that Mom had kicked him out, and we were too afraid to ask her. We didn’t know about him going to prison until later. Mom spoke to us less and less and started talking to bottle necks more and more. And then, pretty soon, she wasn’t saying anything at all. Paisley and I were the ones who found her.

  Paisley misses Dad like crazy, even now. She’s always talking about him. His on-the-spot bedtime stories in which we had starring roles. His BLT subs—the best in Jersey, he always said. The way he always called us his Wonder Twins. I kinda resigned myself years ago to the fact that he didn’t want us anymore. Finding the letters threw me all out of whack. I didn’t know how I felt now. I didn’t know what to do.

  All afternoon spent worrying about it and reading and rereading the letters brought me to one conclusion: I needed to tell Paisley. That was the next step I had to take. But I didn’t know how to do it. She was banned from all the computers at her school, so I couldn’t e-mail her. I tried calling, but I kept hanging up the second I heard a voice on the other end. I couldn’t figure out what I would say. I knew I’d get all tongue-tied and say the wrong things, and she’d go on a rampage and get all Paisley about it. For the sake of her school, I needed time to work out the best way of telling her. I decided to write a letter. I spent all evening on it. My numerous attempts lay beneath me on the carpet in slowly uncurling balls.

  Pais, I have to speak to you urgently….

  Sis, you are seriously not going to believe …

  Dearest Paisley, this is such a hard letter to write, I don’t know how you’re going to take it….

  Pais, I don’t know how to tell you this …

  Paisley, this is really difficult to say, so I’ll just come right out and say it….

  PJ: Well, look what just turned up on our doorstep! …

  Dear sis, you will NOT believe what happened today. I came home from school and Connie was in the kitchen …

  Paisley, I have some really big news, so call me….

  P, it’s about Dad….

  Pais, remember our dad? Well, he didn’t just abandon us from his prison cell after all; he’s actually been writing to us for ten years and our grandmother didn’t bother to tell us….

  However I ended up phrasing it, I knew one thing for sure: She was gonna go ballistic.

  PAISLEY

  THREE

  IMMACULATE CONCEPTION ACADEMY FOR GIRLS,

  LODI, NEW JERSEY

  I caught Jason screwing a cheerleader. What a friggin’ cliché. And not a significant cheerleader, either; not Emily-Jane Bulow or Jessica Walsh, the two most popular bitches in school, but Mandy Fugazi, aka Paris Hilton in a broken mirror. Diseased little alley cat, too. She’d once done two St. Anthony’s boys behind the tennis courts, using an empty potato chip bag for pr
otection. All right, I’ll admit, I’m no Jonas Brother when it comes to chastity, but Mandy had those kinda eyes. A slut’s eyes.

  Seeing those two skanks together became another one of my instant replays. Like the time we found Mom’s body. In those moments between being awake and asleep, my brain has a habit of puking up bad memories. Finding Mom dead, for example. Being lost in the woods. The time Dad was pushing me on the swing and it swung back and caught his head and made him bleed. And from that day on, this scenario: getting to the toolshed twenty minutes early. Taking three tokes of my cigarette. Hearing the floorboards creak, a giggle. Rubbing a space on the dusty window. My cigarette dropping to the ground. Seeing them naked. Her lying beneath him like a doll. Him looking up at the window and smiling. Him thrusting on. Harder.

  I ran back to the dorms. Ran and ran and ran, like some stupid hamster on its wheel, running off its night energy. When I got to the building, I stopped, knowing that my heavy breathing and wheezing would wake up the others. I couldn’t go in. But I couldn’t go back. And because I’d stopped running, I started to feel it. The punch to my stomach. The big black boot stamp to my rib cage. I needed to keep running so it wouldn’t get me. So I ran deeper into the woods behind the school and spent the night there, nestled in the nook of a large tree trunk. I think I was born to live in a fucking tree trunk.

  And when my breathing got less and the pain came back, I started thinking about my brother, Beau. The last time I went all Girl Scout under the stars, he was with me. But now I was on my own. No frightened twin brother to hold my hand. No more angel of salvation in paint-splattered jeans. Just me. Fucked-up, fucked-off me. I let it take me over. This was why I didn’t cry. Because it hurt so damn much.