Sex & Violence

by Carrie Mesrobian

  When I woke up, I was in Baker’s backseat, feeling pain tingling out of me like invisible steam.

  “Where’s Randy?” I asked, my mouth cracking open fresh.

  “Jesus,” Jim said. “Get that towel, again, Baker!”

  “Don’t worry about him,” Taber said, and he didn’t sound dopey like usual. He sounded—as cheesy as it sounds—like a goddamn man who’d handled it. I shut my eyes, relieved I didn’t have to be that goddamn man anymore.

  “What the fuck were you doing here in the first place?” Jim asked.

  “My car needed a jump,” I heard Baker say.

  “What the fuck was that guy’s problem?” Taber asked.

  “That girl,” Baker said. “Was she the one Evan fucked at that party?”

  “Evan didn’t fuck any girl from that party,” Jim said.

  “Well, he’s been fucking someone,” Baker said, all pissy.

  “I can’t believe he hit that dude,” Taber said. “That dude was fucking crazy.”

  “My mom told me it’s not the first time he’s been in a fight,” Baker said.

  I opened my eyes, wanted to protest, to sit up and explain that this wasn’t who I was. But then Jim looked back at me, said, “He’s waking up again.” His eyes were serious and calm. “Easy, man, we’ll get you outta here,” he said, and I passed out before I could hear anything more.

  Dear Collette,

  What does it look like, real people getting down? Do they plan it? Do they think about how they must look while they’re doing it? Do they think about other shit while it’s happening, or are they strictly focused on the matter at hand?

  Do they enjoy every second of it?

  Do they even think about the other person? Or just about their own bodies? Or just about the other person’s body and what it’s doing?

  Have you ever been with someone who acted one way and then you started the getting-down process and they acted different? Like a super-quiet chick getting all nuts and loud when you touch her? Or a super-funny dude who’s always joking and then gets serious when it comes to taking clothes off?

  Why do people do that? I know I do that. I feel weird about it. Shouldn’t we always be who we are, no matter what (or who) we do?

  For the record, you seemed the same as you were, both ways, whether half-naked or not. Sweet. Sexy. Nice to me for no reason I can imagine.

  Later, Evan

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I barely got out of bed for the next few days. Only to eat and piss. I couldn’t shower, not because of fear, but because I didn’t think I’d be able to stand up without passing out.

  One morning, my father came in my room. He looked furious and sad.

  I didn’t move.

  “Get yourself cleaned up,” he said. “I’m going to fill that prescription. When I get back, we’re going to the going-away brunch for the kids.”

  I rolled over in my sweaty, nasty sheets and groaned, and he said, “Goddamnit, I’m serious, Evan. I’ve had enough of you lying around like this.” He stomped down the stairs, and I heard the door slam.

  The prescription was for crazy pills. Yesterday, Dr. Penny had called, and my father brought the phone to my bed. She went on and on about a million things, but I could barely listen. The main point was scolding me about getting into a fight. I didn’t think she understood what had actually happened because she blamed me for learning to box. I wanted to say I was trying to defend myself, but I was too blown out to explain it. Finally, she said she was prescribing me some antianxiety medication. “For the trauma of the latest assault,” she said.

  I got up and stood around in my boxers. Looked longingly at Under the Waves, though I’d already finished it. The past couple of days, there hadn’t been much else to do, since I couldn’t get out of bed but couldn’t sleep, either. My brain was a horrible mash-up of Randy punching me, of Patrick and Tate punching me, of my nose breaking, of my back slashed up by the rough gravel of the parking lot. Of Collette crying. Of Baker’s face, completely shattered and shocked.

  I didn’t want to see everyone off—especially Baker—smelling like ass and blood, so I took a quick shower, my sore muscles practically vibrating as the shower walls closed in on me like a vertical coffin. I barely stopped to dry off before I dressed—there was still something really upsetting about coming out of the shower naked. A fear I could inhabit, but not for long.

  It wasn’t that I was the outcast of the Going-Away Brunch. Everyone was nice to me. Gentle, even. Like I was a retarded kid who might bash his skull on a rock at any moment. The only person who said anything about it was Tom. When he saw my black eyes and busted-up mouth, he said, “Fucking bummer, man.”

  Everyone at the brunch was nice enough. Still, I felt like my getting beat in a parking lot sucked just that much more joy out of what was already a sad day. Like I’d pissed in the pitcher of orange juice and spat in the egg bake out of spite. The whole thing would have been like a junior high dance as it was, segregated with the girls all giggly and squeaky and sad and happy at their table, except for Baker sitting at the guys’ table, on account of how she and Conley still weren’t speaking.

  Baker smiled at me but didn’t say much, which was weird for her—she was always talking her head off—but seeing as she sat between Jim and Taber, I supposed she was a little hemmed in when it came to conversation. Thinking of us almost doing it, of everything that had happened in the bathroom—me taking a shower, for god’s sake—plus the chicken stir-fry and the parking lot beat down, it was a relief that everyone at our table talked about other dumb shit. It let me pretend everything was normal. Tom was talking about some guy on his baseball team who’d got in a fight with an umpire, but I barely listened. Just watched Baker eating her fruit salad and seeming as cool and comfortable as ever. I knew she wouldn’t tell Jim about us. She’d kept Taber a secret long enough, and that was actually a big deal, a V-card level violation, while everything with me was lame and shameful, pointless even. It made sense that she’d want that memory to just dribble away.

  The talk turned to other things. Sports, someone’s party getting busted, the strip bar in Windham getting closed down for not checking IDs. I didn’t say much, though. Just sat there looking at Baker, since it was my last chance to really do so, and feeling thankful for how Taber and Jim had saved me. Which made me feel like a prick, because at the beginning of the summer, I’d written them off as douchey assholes.

  Okay, maybe they were douchey. Jim with his bleached teeth and “rebellious” pierced ears, Taber with his XXXL “Abercrombie Sailing Team” T-shirt. It would have been easy to label them assholes, but for people I’d only known for a few months, they’d been pretty decent. And the way all the guys gave each other shit, talked about everything else besides my destroyed face, was about the nicest thing anyone could do for me at this point. I wondered if being a man was mostly about knowing when to shut up about something. If that was the case, then my father had trained me well.

  I was at work when Brenda took Baker to the airport for Oregon, so I never said good-bye to her, and the rest of them left on their own timetable, which was fine with me. Tom was the only one I said good-bye to formally. I had his phone number, but we linked up all the other online ways, and I told him good luck with Kelly, because he’d mentioned at brunch that she had talked about going on the pill, which set off a shit storm of advice and teasing.

  “I’ll text you if anything happens,” he said to me, all earnest, as he got in his dad’s Suburban, and I waved and pretended my weepy eye wiping was just a reaction to the driveway’s gravel dust.

  As bad as it was to see Tom go, the day Brenda closed up the cabin and packed up for the season—she taught at Marchant Falls Community College—made me feel the worst. I sat in my room to give my father space, should he need to make some passionate plea to Brenda, which I doubted, since Keir was in the picture. But still. My father’s lone farewell to Brenda seemed more pathetic than sad. I was surveying the shit I’d nee
d to pack when he came into my room and told me we weren’t going to Boston.

  “What?”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t bear it. I want to be here. I feel … it’s good here. I hope that’s okay with you?”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you mind going to school in Marchant Falls?”

  “I guess not,” I said. Though I minded going to school anywhere. But all my friends having left, I felt back where I started. The Eternal New Guy. Nothing new about that.

  “Have you taken your pills like Dr. Penny said?”

  “Yes,” I said. I didn’t say that I wasn’t sure they were working. I’d been taking them since the Going-Away Brunch, but I felt like I was getting crazier. I kept waking up in the middle of the night so jumped up that I’d have to do a ton of push-ups and sit-ups to shake off the excess energy thumping through my heart.

  “It’s a pay cut to stay here,” he said. “Boston was good money. You might have to pay your own insurance, too, on the car.”

  “Fine.”

  “I think it’s worth it, though.”

  “All right.”

  When he left, I considered how it was a big talk for us, even though it seemed so small. But I felt frustrated again. Leaving was something I knew how to do, even if I hated it. And now he wouldn’t even let me have the satisfaction of doing that.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  My dad got a consulting gig in Minneapolis a week before school started, so when he left for a few days, the east side was even quieter than usual, with everyone gone and the docks pulled in and the diving platform put away, the buoy that held the chain bobbling sadly in the grey water. I spent my time running and working and stalking Collette online. I hadn’t done that before, which was weird; even weirder was that I found her address and e-mail with frighteningly little effort. I stored it away with the notebook of magical letters to her I’d accumulated through Dr. Penny’s therapy and told myself one day I’d be man enough to contact her. I’d brought up the idea of sending a real letter to Collette once, and Dr. Penny latched onto it and wouldn’t let it go. Though even imagining that felt like sadness was coming down around me in buckets and I had no umbrella. I was Almost-Weepy all the time, constantly fending off dread. Being alone didn’t help, either.

  Dr. Penny said that was the crazy pills. I almost quit taking them, but she told me to be patient, to tire out my body so I could sleep, that it would pass. So every morning, completely keyed up, my legs jittery and spastic, I’d put on my shoes and run down the county road until I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I’d walk back to the cabin and take the longest shower possible. My dad had arranged for a door lock to be added before he’d left for Minneapolis. And had talked about getting someone in to seal the cracks so there wouldn’t be spiders, maybe even a full remodel. Somehow this made me feel more dread—dread that we were staying here. Like I couldn’t escape anything anymore.

  I’d agreed to school, though I felt mixed about it. I knew sitting alone in the cabin doing online classes or taking the GED would be even more depressing, though walking into a new place, a small town place, small like Remington Chase, where everyone might know what had happened to me with Randy Garrington, wasn’t much better. Still, I started school on the first day with all the other seniors in Marchant Falls, which was weird; I often transferred midsemester and rarely started the term at a new place in September.

  What kills me about teen movies is how they make high school into this endless string of insane, sleazy fun. Like every party involves a band and a throng of dancing people and every day is a pep rally for the big game where shit goes down between the head cheerleader and the dorky misfit girl who’s actually hot once she takes off her glasses.

  What movies never show is how goddamn boring high school is. The bigger the school, the less excitement, actually. A consolidation of kids from a whole bunch of littler towns, Marchant Falls High School was a huge, prisonlike building. Grey and ugly, with no windows. Trying to find my classes the first week, it even sounded like a prison: English on A Block, science on B Block, etc. Strangely enough, my transcripts from other schools showed that I could take a lot of electives, and so I took a bunch of weird things. Physical Conditioning: basically gym, but you made your own fitness goals (which I had with Jesse, the one kid I knew). Ceramics: where a) kids tried to make bongs and b) kids hide the fact that they were bongs. My favorite class, though, mostly populated by the pregnant and the visibly high, was the simplistically named Foods.

  Those first weeks were a blur of Class-This-Is-Evan introductions, which I hated, but I supposed were only good manners. Usually after being introduced like that, I just faded into the background, but in Foods, everyone was grouped together—the classroom was basically a series of mini-kitchens—so it was a little harder to ignore when a new guy suddenly appeared next to you while you made eggs in a frame or whatever the hell.

  In Foods, I was in a group with two girls and a guy. A blonde girl named Jordan, who looked at me kind of shy but didn’t say much and this homeless-looking guy who, when he bothered to come to class, mostly sat there reeking like he’d just woken up under a bridge and trying to eat everything before we could even cook it. The other girl was this pregnant chick who had a big fat Starbucks coffee milk shake thing with her every morning. She sucked on the whipped-cream–covered straw so hard that Homeless Guy said her baby was going to be born with the goddamn jitters.

  One morning in October, we had a field trip in Foods. The teacher wanted us to learn how to comparison shop so we went to the Cub Foods just a few blocks away. Jordan and I were the only ones from our group who showed up. Pregnant Chick had a doctor’s appointment, and Homeless Guy skipped. The teacher made us walk, which was fine, but field trips suck. They’re so pointless. Not that learning is so important to me, but at least normal classes keep you from having to make small talk.

  I pretended to be looking at something on my phone until Jordan went ahead of me, her shoes clattering on the sidewalk. I had so many dumb little tricks like that. Though I hated it, the awkwardness in being the Fucking New Guy was shockingly easy to cope with. There was a routine to it, at least: figuring if I’d be able to swim or do track (no to the first, maybe to the second); profiling which chicks might Say Yes and staring at them openly (left-of-normal girls with raccoon eyeliner sulking around the industrial arts annex, smelling like cigarettes, arty, hippie chicks in Ceramics, wearing no bras under their long flowy dresses, smelling like patchouli). All this while trying to blend into the walls.

  But I didn’t blend. People stared back at me, girls, too. I looked normal now, I guess, my old self, no ears sticking up, because I’d quit cutting my hair. There was a little bit of bruise left under my right eye, and though it made me feel like a liar, I was fine with letting people think I was a badass. At least I showered every morning, so I didn’t smell like Homeless Guy.

  My showering was a little weird. My father laughed at me when I emerged from the bathroom, a gush of steam rolling out behind me. It was like I was making up for lost time, all the luxurious hot water I’d missed. I’d bought a fog-resistant mirror on a suction cup so I could shave in there; I brushed my teeth in there too. And yanked it, of course. Maybe it was Dr. Penny’s crazy pills or the new door lock, but I was coming to like everything about showering again: getting clean, coming out all pink and raw (though still checking the door lock, of course), looking at myself in the mirror, and making big plans for how I’d get huge so if anyone saw me shirtless again, maybe they’d notice that instead of just the scar on my chest.

  Once we got to Cub Foods, we got a worksheet that instructed us to find various products and take notes on price and ingredients. The point of Foods was not just cooking but understanding everything involved in feeding a family. Jordan shoved a cart toward me.

  “Ready?” Jordan asked. I nodded and pushed the cart while she walked ahead. I wondered if we’d see Layne. He told me the other day that Harry was starting preschool, so now t
hey had to be extra careful about swearing.

  Jordan took over the worksheet, all business. She was tall for a girl, had a cute enough face and short blonde hair, in one of those styles that looks like a boy’s but better. She always dressed nice, nothing remotely slutty, and today she wore this huge blue sweater and jeans. Her shoes made this solid clip on the dirty linoleum that was hypnotic to me, I guess, because suddenly in the soup aisle, Jordan turned around and surprised me.

  “We got the wrong bananas,” she said. “We’ve got to go back to produce.”

  “What?”

  “We’re supposed to get regular bananas; I grabbed organic.”

  I smiled at this familiar mistake.

  “I mean, who cares if they’re organic?” Jordan grumbled to herself, her shoes snapping sharply. “Unless you’re a freak who eats the damn peel?”

  Grades-wise, I was doing pretty good academically. For me, at least. Though I sometimes ate with Jesse and some guys he knew, mostly I spent lunch in the library doing homework and reading. For English, I read Jane Eyre, which I hated, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I loved. For Physical Conditioning, I focused on getting decent arms. In Ceramics, I pinched together a bunch of shitty bowls and stared at braless girls. And I made all kinds of stuff in Foods. Coffee cake. Corn bread. Stuffed peppers. Something called Taco Bake that looked like a bunch of tacos had been sent to their deaths but which tasted awesome. Jordan refused to eat Taco Bake. I got the impression she preferred finer stuff, but on Taco Bake day, Homeless Guy had some competition.

  I began cooking at home too. Takeout food was so boring after a while. Plus our Foods teacher railed against the salt and fat in it and the wasteful packaging and how people didn’t understand where their food came from, that Americans lacked a national cuisine. I didn’t care about that shit, but I liked cooking. I’d get groceries after a shift at Cub Foods and test out the recipes on my dad, which he seemed to enjoy. Apparently, he now realized that sitting down to eat wasn’t some silly thing lesser people did. He even talked to me while we sat at the table. Sometimes he talked about his work—he was consulting with a big financial company—other times he just asked the routine dad questions: