Sex & Violence

by Carrie Mesrobian

  Baker said, all snotty: “Evan came over to hang out, and we’re eating. I couldn’t sleep, and I was bored. Not all of us pass out first thing.”

  “I didn’t pass out. I fell asleep watching that movie.”

  “A Clockwork Orange,” Baker said, even more snotty. “Right, so enjoyable for me.” She turned to me. “Did you know that, Evan? That after getting down, all girls love to cuddle in bed with their boyfriend and watch freaks in nut cups sing show tunes while beating the hell out of old men with canes? It’s what we all dream about when we’re little girls.”

  Jim looked super pissed, but Baker looked all stubborn, like she wouldn’t take it back. They went back to staring at each other silently and uncomfortably, while I stared at the table feeling flooded with information in that way that sometimes happens when you’re high and everything is bombarding your brain. Finally, after I managed to sort out all the data—this could have been an hour or thirty seconds, there was no telling—I came away with three things. One, Jim wasn’t going to kill me. Two, Baker Trieste was clearly not a virgin. Three, what the fuck was it with jock guys and A Clockwork Orange?

  “So, what’s going on, Evan?” Jim asked. Like he hadn’t just been called out for being a loser in the sack. Like we did this all the time. Had midnight snacks in our underwear with his girlfriend’s tit hanging out.

  “Evan here was taking a bath in the lake,” Baker said. “He’s like survivor man.”

  “Were you with Conley? Skinny-dipping?”

  “No.” Baker was clearly happy to be my spokeswoman.

  “That’s lame of Conley,” Jim said, yawning, putting his arm around Baker’s chair. “So pussy. Who hasn’t skinny-dipped with other people?”

  Me, for one. But I wasn’t going to mention it, since Jim and Baker started bickering about everyone’s Last Chance Summer plans and I couldn’t keep all the names straight. Smoking pot makes it harder for me to talk than normal—and thinking analytically? Forget it.

  They were still arguing when we moved to the living room, Jim and me to the sofa, and Baker to her chair. Jim wrapped himself in a fuzzy knit blanket, which was funny, given how huge he was, but fine with me, because he sort of hogged the sofa and I wasn’t a big fan of having another guy’s naked skin that close to mine.

  Their argument stopped, finally, because Jim got up and went back to the bedroom. I thought Baker would follow him, but she stared into the fire.

  “What’s your Last Chance thing?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You never said what you wanted to do this summer.” I tried not to stutter.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “That’s because no one wants to do it with me.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not sexual, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I want to go to Story Island,” she said. “I want to go inside the Archardt House. For real.”

  I was quiet. A little surprised that she’d want to do that. Since it hadn’t been exactly fun scraping Jim’s ass off the rocks that one night and she didn’t strike me as a survivor-man chick who relished getting dirty and wet. But then neither did I, and I bathed in a cold lake regularly.

  “But I can’t do it, anyway,” she said. “It’s illegal.”

  “So is doing mushrooms and skinny-dipping.”

  “Story Island is a bird sanctuary,” she said. “The DNR would notice if people pulled up in a boat and started exploring.”

  “Well, go at night, then,” I said.

  She laughed and said it might be easier if she swam ashore like a Navy Seal. Then I suggested a U-boat landing at dawn and she said, no, a helicopter dropping her off with a knife in her teeth was better yet and then I was laughing in that unnatural way that happens when you’re high and can’t tell how long time is lasting and whether what you’re laughing about is really what you’re laughing about, but you don’t care. The definition of Not Thinking About It.

  I woke up the next morning wrapped in my own fuzzy knit blanket—Baker must have put it on me, but she was nowhere to be seen. The room was cold, the fire was dead, and the kitchen table was perfectly cleared of food and cans and the bottle of Cherry Lick. Everything had been wiped down of crumbs. I slipped out of there, then. As if the whole night had never happened.

  Dear Collette,

  I should write about normal things. Like how I applied for a job at a grocery store and got my first car and that kind of shit.

  But I’m not normal. Lucky you, the focus of all my imaginary therapy! You get to hear about what a fucking freak I am. Of course, Dr. Penny knows about you because my dad told her everything. So the point of this letter is to clearly identify my responsibility in what happened, but not to assign blame. Dr. Penny’s big on defining responsibility. I smile at her and say I get it, but I don’t, really. I know that I deserved everything I got. But you didn’t deserve anything that happened. So I don’t know what to say about that. Or how to fix it.

  Probably you’ve noticed, but guys are fucking dirtbags. Me included. Well, I was. Sex is completely off my mind these days but before? You have no idea. Even now, out here in middle-of-nowhere Minnesota, I still see girls and strategize who’d make a good target, how I’d get laid, etc. I don’t act on it, but I never really stop seeing it. I’ve been avoiding people as much as I can, but out here on this lake, people are always coming over and just walking in. It’s okay if it’s this one guy, Tom, who’s pretty cool. We go fishing, because even though fishing is boring, it’s kind of nice to have something to do. But this one girl, who has a boyfriend, is always coming over to our cabin, and I’ve taken to telling my dad I have headaches so he’ll just tell her I’m sick or whatever. But I see her, with her friends, jumping off the diving platform in the lake, and I stare like a horndog at them and feel like I’m sick in a way that I’ll never recover from.

  Don’t think about it too much—that’s Dr. Penny’s catchphrase. I don’t understand it. I’ve never heard an adult tell me to think less about things—people always want you to think MORE.

  It’s not like what happened was because I didn’t think about anything too much. I thought a lot—about the wrong things. When I could get you alone. How far you’d let me go. So I wasn’t thoughtless at all. I figured I’d get what I wanted, and then we’d move, to some new city, some new beige condo, some new school where I didn’t know anyone, and it’d start all over again. I didn’t think about how small Remington Chase was, how I wasn’t anonymous. But I see now that it was just a matter of time. That makes it sound like destiny, what happened to you and me. It can’t be, though. Destiny sounds too goopy and romantic for such a horrible thing. But it happened and there’s nothing I can do about it. Is this what Dr. Penny means? Don’t think about it too much? Or accepting responsibility, but not blame? I can’t tell the difference between those two words. So I just nod until the hour is over. And go home and ignore people and lie in bed all night without sleeping.

  This is the worst letter in the world. Fuck it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I got hired as produce stocker at Cub Foods. It was a good job because I wore jeans and an apron and it didn’t matter if I took a shower because I got dirtier than hell and nobody else I worked with seemed any cleaner than me. At least I brushed my teeth, unlike the other stocker, Terry Gribbener, and didn’t walk around with a flap of chew under my lip, like Layne Beauchant, who was my supervisor and who pronounced his last name in a completely un-Frenchy way. Layne was only a few years older than me but already had a kid.

  “What’s your kid’s name, Layne?” I asked while we were restocking bananas.

  “Don’t put those there. Them are organic. Look at the sticker. They’re different colors.”

  “Okay.”

  “His name’s Harry,” Layne said. “And don’t even look at me, because it was my girlfriend that picked it out. She calls him Harrison, but I hate that. It’s just so faggy-sounding. I call him Harry. And
you do too if you ever meet him. His mother needs to get it through her head that my boy’s not getting his ass beat every second he walks out for recess. Harrison.”

  “Why didn’t you pick a name you both liked?”

  “’Cause I was in the county workhouse and couldn’t get out in time for the birth.”

  “Oh,” I said. And shut the hell up. I watched Layne’s tattooed knuckles (KICK on the right, ASS! on the left) point out where the rest of the bananas should go, and then he sauntered to the back room to get more, his wallet on a chain making his jeans sag.

  When my shift ended, I drove home. It had been raining when I’d gone into work, but now was clearing off, and the sky was a weird sick-looking bright blue with the sun beating down hard but with a long line of clouds in the distance. I was starving, tired, and sweaty, and happy to see my dad had bought a bunch of stuff to make sandwiches. My father has never looked at food as anything besides fuel, so when he did set foot in a grocery store, he just bought a ton of stuff to put on loaves of French bread. He had left everything out on the counter for me. Meat and lettuce and tomatoes and hot peppers in the jar and three different kinds of cheese. I made two sandwiches and plopped down across from him at the table.

  “I’m going for a swim,” I said, when I finished.

  “Taking your shave kit?”

  I stopped, pushed in my chair. Did he know about my fake showers and late-night baths in the lake, after all?

  “No, I think I’ll let it get scruffly,” I said. “The ladies like that.”

  “The ones I meet never do,” he said, but he sounded light. Maybe because he never met any ladies? Apart from the ones on Pearl Lake.

  “How’re things with Dr. Penny?” he asked, as I set my plate in the sink.

  “Fine.”

  “You like her?”

  “She’s okay.”

  When I got to my dock, I saw Baker out on the diving platform with Jim and Conley. Baker wore her striped bikini and her legs dangled into the water and Jim was beside her, shirtless. Conley lounged on her back behind them.

  I waved—what else was I going to do?—and Baker waved back. Then Jim turned and stared at me. But didn’t wave. He tilted his head and said something to Baker, and I felt like a dumbass and turned away. Hating that I had to take off my shirt in front of them.

  I’d come up from underwater when Baker hollered, “Evan! Come here!” Unable to figure a way out of the situation, I swam to the diving platform.

  When I pulled myself up the ladder, I could smell weed. Conley offered a joint to me, but I was all wet so I shook my head and sat down. I tried not to stare, but Baker looked pretty damn good in a bikini. Her bikini was the kind with the little knots tied at the hips—the kind where all you can think about is untying. Or at least they used to make me think that. Now I was like a fucking frozen eunuch.

  “Where’ve you been, Evan?” Baker asked.

  “Working,” I said, looking up at a fat dark cloud that had just blocked the sun. The wall of approaching clouds bothered me. I wondered how long I’d have to stay to seem normal.

  “Where do you work?” Conley asked.

  I told her, and she nodded from behind her sunglasses, like being a shift worker at Cub Foods was about what she’d expect from someone like me.

  “Bath time comes early today?” Baker asked.

  “There’s a reason they tell you to wash your vegetables before you eat them. And that reason is me and Layne Beauchant and Terry Gribbener.”

  Both Conley and Baker laughed, but Jim said, “Terry Gribbener? You work with that fucking loadie?”

  “How do you know him?” Baker asked Jim.

  “He used to go out with my sister,” Jim said.

  “What happened there?” Conley asked, passing Jim the joint.

  “What do you think happened?” Jim asked, after he exhaled a bunch of smoke. “She went to college; he’s working at Cub Foods.”

  My chest got all tight. I couldn’t help but be offended. Not that I hoped to make a career at Cub Foods myself, but the fact that Jim could be that obvious of a prick flared through me. But then Baker chucked me a towel and told me to dry off my hands so I could smoke with them. I watched her light the joint, her boobs all awesome under the triangles of her bikini, and hoped this was the same pot from the night I’d first smoked with her. The kind that made me sleepy and lazy and would erase this for-no-reason panic feeling I was getting every time I looked at the sky.

  I took a big hit off the joint and handed it to Conley, who passed it to Jim, who put it out and tucked it in the Hello Kitty pencil case that was sitting on a little inflatable thing, which they must have used to transport the towel and everything else.

  “Taber’s parents are out of town ’cause his grandma died,” Jim said. “I told him we should get a keg.”

  “I don’t think Taber’s up for a party right now,” Conley said.

  “Taber’s kind of a little bitch about stuff sometimes,” Jim said, his hand running down Baker’s bare back.

  “God, Jim!” Baker said. “His grandmother just died! He might not want a house full of drunk people right now.”

  “It was just his grandmother,” Jim said. “She was, like, ninety-nine years old. He’s acting all sensitive, like it was his mother or something.”

  Baker glanced at me, all nervous. For a second, I regretted our dead parents talk. Most people didn’t know shit about me, and moments like these were the exact reason they didn’t.

  “If you can’t be sensitive about death, what can you be sensitive about?” Conley said, like some philosopher wearing sunglasses.

  Jim stared at Conley, then Baker, looking completely hacked off.

  “I don’t know what it is with you girls lately,” Jim said, sounding like a little bitch himself. “Conley’s either talking about her ugly swimsuit or you’re all mopey about school being over. There’s fuckall I can say without you two jumping down my throat.”

  “You think my bikini’s ugly?” Conley shouted, sitting up.

  “No, god,” Jim shouted back. “I couldn’t give a shit!”

  “Jim, come on … ” Baker started.

  “Evan, you heard him!” Conley shouted. “I mean, who says that to someone?”

  I looked away from everyone, away from the wall of approaching clouds and the shouting. This right here was reason #674 that most of the time I Didn’t Say Anything.

  “How’d you get that scar, dude?” Jim asked.

  “Bike accident,” Baker said for me.

  “Bullshit,” Jim said. “That looks like you got in a fucking knife fight, dude.”

  Christ, I hated the way Jim said “dude.”

  I shrugged, and said, “Yeah, so what if it was?”

  “You told me it was a bike accident,” Baker said.

  I shrugged. “I didn’t want you guys making a big deal about my cancer.”

  “You have cancer?” Conley asked.

  “The tumor was the size of a grapefruit,” I said. Christ. Whatever weed this was, it was working.

  “He’s just making shit up, Conley,” Baker said, catching on.

  “My dad’s an oncologist,” Conley said. “Seriously, what kind of cancer was it?”

  “I didn’t have cancer,” I said.

  Baker kicked water at me. “Evan, god, just tell us what it was! You make it sound so mysterious. It’s probably something totally basic.”

  Jim, shaking his head like he thought I was mental, started to roll another joint.

  “I don’t want anymore,” Baker sighed, looking down at her toenails.

  “Conley?” Jim asked, gesturing with the rolling papers.

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  “Cancer Boy?”

  There was that same flare in my chest again. Why’d this football-playing shitheel get a girl like Baker—who was smart as hell and had an awesome rack and gave him a pass to be with other chicks on top of it? In no universe was this fair or sensible. But given t
he fact that I was terrible at thinking of good insults to say on the spot, and the weed was good, I just nodded. I’d passed the joint to Conley when Baker suddenly stood up, adjusted her bikini sort of roughly, and dove into the water, splashing Jim, and swimming back to shore without another word.

  Dear Collette,

  Since Dr. Penny doesn’t bother explaining to me the finer points of psychology and just has me do this stupid letter-writing thing, which makes me feel like a stalker and also miss you, if it’s possible to miss you, since we didn’t even know each other that well, and the thing I miss the most about you was watching you do the long jump. And also your boobs. That second thing I would never say to you—or anyone else—in a letter or in person. But this won’t get sent, so what the hell, right?

  Therefore, today’s bullshit topic: What have I learned from someone else lately?

  What I have learned from someone else lately is that you have to remember your anniversary with your girlfriend or else your life is miserable. I learned this from a guy named Tom, who I would call a friend, since we hang out a lot, but a couple of the times were accidental, so maybe we’re just acquaintances. I don’t know the rules.

  So, the anniversary part. This is the date from which a couple has been together from some significant start point. This start point depends on the girl. Like, she could decide it was the first time you talked. Or the first time you kissed. Or the first time you hung out or went on a date. Which Tom doesn’t have a clear memory of, or he’d have remembered, I suppose.

  (For us, would it have been the first time you talked to me? But that was about Farrah. Which, by the way, I always wonder why they didn’t take anything out on Farrah? Wasn’t it all about Farrah and Tate, in the first place? Or was it about you and Patrick? Or would it have been that first time when we skipped chapel? Maybe we don’t rate an anniversary, because we were a secret. Not that big of a secret, obviously, since someone must have seen us in the courtyard and told Patrick and Tate. Sorry I even brought this up.)