“Who’s there?” he said like a security guard. “Kate?” Then, more warily, “Natasha?”
I just walked toward him. It didn’t matter who I was.
“Oh,” he said, losing interest. “It’s you, Flannery. What do you want?”
“Nothing,” I said, “from you.”
“Oh, right,” he said, sarcastic in that loud tacky way everybody else stopped doing in sixth grade. The rum punch was getting geometrically sharp in my head, its corners piercing my head in distinct places, like ice crystallizing.
“Adam–” I said.
“Right,” he said. “That’s my name. Good night, Flan. Go back to the party.” He started to turn around again but I grabbed his arm. He jerked it off and looked at me in scorn. “Don’t touch me,” he said. “Good night.”
“How could you?” I said. “How could you? Did you see what you did?”
“Look,” he said impatiently, “I’m sorry.” He shrugged and smiled a small smile, sharp around the edges like my headache. “You probably won’t believe this, but I thought it was you at first there upstairs, but, you know”–he started to laugh, then coughed. “Everybody makes mistakes. Now, if you’ll excuse me–”
“I’m not talking about what you did to me!” I said. I don’t know why I lied to him like that. “I mean how could you do that to Kate!”
“To Kate?” he said, laughing again, louder. Whooping. “That’s a good one, Flan. What I did to Kate? Why, I seem to recall that you were more than perfectly willing to do it with me!”
“That’s not true,” I said. My head roared, sheer lioness rage. “That’s not true.”
“Oh, it isn’t?” Adam asked, wide-eyed. “Then why did you come upstairs in the first place? Fresh air?”
“Shut up.”
“Look, you know it’s true. We were both screwing Kate over, both of us. Not to mention Gabriel,” he said. “At least Kate and I had broken up. You and Gabriel–”
“Shut up!”
He laughed, leaning back with his hands on his hips, presenting himself clearly in the half-light. He was drunk and I was going to kill him. We had reached the trees. Adam swayed unevenly, his face alternately flickering from the shade to the distant light of the party: dark, light, dark, light, a slow strobe. “Just face it, Flan. You’re as bad as me. ‘How could you?’” he said, imitating me in a high screechy voice I’d heard coming from myself so many times, always hoping no one else had noticed. “‘How could you?’ How could you say that, Flan, considering what you’re doing to Gabriel?”
“Shut up about Gabriel,” I said. “He’s twice the person you or Shannon or any of you will ever be! Three times!”
“Why is that?” Adam said. I saw his eyes roll at me for what would be the last time. “Because Gabriel is part of the precious Basic Eight?”
“Shut up!”
But he was on a roll. “Who will be invited to the next dinner party?” he asked in my voice. “Well, the Basic Eight of course–”
“Shut up!”
“But will we invite Adam? Is Adam one of us? Oh, I don’t know.”
“That’s right,” I spat, “you don’t know. You’ll never know. You’re not going to be invited to the corner store with any of us–”
“What punishment!” He laughed. “I won’t survive! What will you do to me next, hit me with that baguette you’ve been lugging around all night like a substitute dick?”
Dark, light, dark, light. His face looked so scornful, so savage, and finally, gloriously, ugly. Not cute at all, not attractive, just an ugly scornful boy face. I hadn’t felt such disgust for a boy since the early days, when they’d tease girls on the playground, kicking us and throwing gravel and raising their voices in high screechy mockery. “They do that because they like you,” all the adults said, grinning like pumpkins. We believed them, back then. Back then we thought it was true, and we were drawn toward all that meanness because it meant we were special, let them kick us, let them like us. We liked them back. But now it was turning out that our first instincts were right. Boys weren’t mean because they liked you; it was because they were mean. This Halloween, we knew better. Everything was different this Halloween. This Halloween, nothing was drawing me toward him except this glorious headache of anger, the sheer agile ease of Natasha’s dress against my skin and the heavy wood of the croquet mallet in my hands, ready and obedient. Dark, light, dark, light, dark–I swung and missed.
“Adam!” I screamed, and heard all the screams backing me up: Kate, Shannon, all my friends, Natasha screaming in my ear. “Do something!”
Adam was still laughing. “This doesn’t sound like the kind of talk from a girl who sent me that lovely postcard!”
I stopped, staggered, reeling in his sheer dishonesty even now. “You got my postcard?” I said. “You said you never–”
“I was lying,” he said to me, like it was the easiest thing in the world. He sounded like an exasperated teacher, perhaps some Advanced Biology idiot or a vice principal maybe. A talk-show host. A therapist.
“You got my postcard?!” I screamed at him, and his voice rose in schoolyard recess mockery one more time.
“What did it say?” he said, laughing. “Let me think.” Laughing, laughing, dark, light, dark, light. He spit on the ground. “Oh, yes, ‘Listen what my letters have been trying to tell you is that I love you.’” He stepped into the shade of the tree and stayed there, so the rest of the postcard came out of the dark like the voice of God, or the devil. “‘And I mean real love that can surpass all the dreariness of high school we both hate.’”
“Shut up!”
He stepped into the light and laughed right in front of me with his mouth wide open, as brazen as only the star of the high school play can be. “This isn’t just the wine talking!” he shrieked: the punch line. The line where you punch.
I swung up, vertically, the way you don’t usually swing things. The hit was solid, like the right answer to a test. His eyes widened and his jaw crackled; I watched his mouth as he coughed up blood, tasted it. He stepped back into the shade, then forward again. Dark, light, dark, light. My mallet followed him exactly, waiting for another clear shot, but I wasn’t worried. I had plenty of time. The thrill of cold night air swarmed around me like something I was riding, something I could control. For the first time that night I was having fun. It was the biggest event of the year. A day to be remembered–a famous day.
“You bitch!” he sputtered, still coughing. He spat something on the ground; teeth maybe. He kept moving, stumbling around: dark, light, dark, light. “You bitch! You fat bitch!”
I inhaled, and stepped into the light myself, blocking it so my shadow fell on him. Dark, dark; there was nowhere for him to go. Adam stepped back once and looked at me, and that’s the last time I ever saw him alive, I swear.
Vocabulary:
You can’t be serious.
Monday November 1st
A new month. I can only remember its opening in fragments. From that moment on, ladies and gentlemen, to the bright slap of Tuesday morning, it’s all separate fragments, clear enough in the slide show of my skull but disconnected from everything else, like a chain of bright pearls broken and rolling everywhere down the stairs or like disembodied teeth: individual, personal but separate. I have noted them all in my journal like a careful jeweler but cannot attest to their exact sequence. I swear on all I have done that this crazy quilt is the best I can do.
The croquet mallet was stuck in something wet and jagged, like a half-melon. I was unable to pull it out, even with both hands. My own breathing was wet and jagged too, misting in the dark. Tugging and tugging and finally giving up. Stepped back, felt something sharp beneath my feet, like a sprinkler head or maybe bone.
A bloody handprint on a sliding glass door, or maybe just muddy. Little pieces of grass crawling around the handprint like caterpillars. Kate’s face behind the handprint, like she was wearing it.
“OK!” V__ called out grandly, clapping her hands.
What time is it? “Everybody go home! Everybody out; go home! The party is over!” My gritty hands on the banister; I knew I couldn’t move.
“I can’t leave,” I whined.
“Not you,” Kate said in a hurried voice, tense and sounding disgusted. She had a light blue towel in her hands, curled up like a baby. One of those babies that just came out, its eyes still closed and its body limp in the absolute trust of grown-ups. I took Kate’s tiny hand.
I thought the music they’d put on was the most boring I’d ever heard: just a simple beat, pounding away like a rapist, with cheesy synthesizer noises washing over it, like an aquarium pump. Wondering what in the world album it was, I walked back into the living room, judging by my view that I was staggering. The stereo was off. None of those electric bar graphs, showing you bass and treble and only-boys-know-what-else, were jumping and skittering like usual. There wasn’t any music on. Kate’s face loomed in front of me. She was crying. “For God’s sake get upstairs!” she said. “Upstairs! Oh God!”
I sighed at her. “Calm,” I said, “the hell down.”
Adam stepped back into the shade, then forward again. He spat something on the ground; pearls maybe. Outside the cold night air swarmed around me like something I was riding, something I could control. For the first time that night I was having fun, finally after this dreary drunk screaming all night. I was having fun and it wasn’t even–I had no idea. I felt my own smile bright as headlights, blaring and blaring away, while inside my head I felt a small certainty like a termite biding its time. Satan is going to kill us. Satan is going to kill us all.
Natasha pulled my head out of the sink and everything snapped back into place like bright red plastic building blocks. “You know,” she said, in a conversational tone of voice I would have fallen for had her eyes not been white coals, “you know, I’ve heard that turkeys are so dumb you have to drag their heads out of the trough before they drown.” She grabbed my hair back like a caveman and wrung it out into the overflowing sink. “But I never thought you were much of a turkey, Flan.”
I looked at her; she was looking at me like her room was a mess. Where to start? I blinked and looked around the bathroom. It wasn’t the one with books all over it. It was another bathroom. I didn’t know where it was. Hopelessly stained guest towels, little soaps in the shapes of endangered animals still wrapped in cellophane, a small glass bowl with potpourri in it–OK, I was obviously still at V__’s house, but what was I doing here?
“Yes?” she said.
“What time is it?” I tried.
She shook her head. “The least of your problems, Flan. Stand up.”
I gripped a towel rack, slippery with something. I blinked again. Where was I? No, I mean, V__’s bathroom, but what was going on? “Um–” I said.
“Stand up!” she said, cracking. “Hurry up, Flan!” The bathroom stumbled by me, another door opened and I was in V__’s brother’s room, everything suspended in time like rooms are when their occupant is a junior at Yale University. This wasn’t helping. Natasha opened the sliding door of his closet and the mirror lurched off left. Prim suits stood in a line like commuters. “Jesus,” Natasha muttered, looking at them one by one. She turned back to me in astonishment. “Don’t sit down!” she yelled, running to me and pulling me off the bed. She looked at the bedspread and tore it off the bed. “Jesus, Flan,” she said. “Get it off and don’t touch anything!”
“What are you–what are you talking about?” I said, and looked down and realized I had ruined her dress. Rum punch and water were all over it and the fabric seemed saturated with it. No wonder she’s mad, I thought, but I felt a small rush of relief, realizing it was punch stains. Because if it wasn’t punch stains–
“Get it off get it off get it off!” she screamed. “Oh, God!” She grabbed me again and the bedroom stumbled by me, another door opened and I was back in the bathroom. “Stand up!” she said and I stood up. Downstairs somebody was shrieking; I was therefore upstairs.
Natasha pulled the dress over my head like I was a baby; it slid by me like an eel and left me shivering alone in the bathroom with my hands above my head. I thought Natasha would come back but nothing happened so I lowered my arms. Through the crackle and gurgle of my head came the sound of the water running. Behind the gauzy curtain the shower was running and empty, so taking a wild guess I got in and felt the water wash it off me. I wasn’t staying up very well, so I stretched each hand out to balance me: one on the bright clean tile and the other on the shower curtain; I slowly slid down until I was sitting in the shower, water spitting all over me, forgotten. I thought maybe I’d just stay there but Natasha clawed the curtain back and forced me out of the tub again. I chattered and chattered and suddenly felt myself heaving into Natasha’s arms. One of us was crying but I didn’t know who.
Natasha leaned over me and turned off the shower. She was wearing a man’s suit that was way too big for her and stacked in her hands she had the clothes she’d borrowed from me that night at V__’s party: the plain white T-shirt with a tiny stenciled flower at the center of the neck and a pair of blue jeans. “They’re sweaty, but wear them,” she said tersely, and threw me a towel.
I rubbed my face and the world went terry cloth for a minute. “I’m sorry about your dress,” I said sadly, into the towel. “Is it going to be OK?”
“No,” Natasha snarled. I kept rubbing my face, not wanting to meet her eyes. Then I heard her sigh. “It’ll be OK,” she said, as if to herself, but then repeated it to me. “It’s OK,” she said, “but listen to me, Flan. Listen to me. Take the towel off.”
I took the towel off. The suit made her look less and less ridiculous and more and more OK, glamorous even. She was holding up a paper grocery bag; inside it I could see her ruined dress, curled and coiled like a captured snake. “You’ve never seen this dress,” she said. I was looking straight down into the bag, right at it. “You didn’t wear a costume tonight. You’ve never seen this dress in your life.”
I started to laugh but Natasha grabbed my face, turned it to look right at me. With one hand grasping my cheeks and the other pointing right at me, she said it again. “You’ve never seen this dress.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve never. Seen. This. Dress!” She let go of me and my head darted back, like I was startled. I was startled.
“What?” I said.
“What?” she screamed back at me.
“OK,” I said.
“OK what?”
“I’ve never seen that dress,” I said, pointing at it. The mirrors were fogging over with the shower, or maybe they weren’t; maybe they were reflecting exactly what was going on. “I’ve never seen it.”
Natasha rolled the bag up and put it under her arm. “Put your clothes on,” she said. Foggier and foggier.
Suddenly, something grabbed my ankle. I stumbled and put my hand on the damp grass to stop myself from falling. I picked up a baguette, thin and incredibly stale, and beat at the hand until it let go, until it stopped moving, until it was barely a hand.
Natasha had opened the shades so the irksome blaze of dawn was upon me like, I don’t know, too much salad dressing. “Today’s the day!” she said, straddling me like a rider, or a rapist. “I can’t wait! The biggest event of the year.” Then I woke up and she was kneeling beside the bed peering into my half-open eyes. “You OK?” she said tenderly. I was grasping the blanket to my chin like a baby, but everything was cold: the gray mist outside, the windowpanes, the floors and walls of the room and my whole body, solid with cold like something stretched out on a slab. I felt like shit. I looked right back at Natasha, who was dressed curiously in a man’s suit and sharp perfect lipstick. I looked at her and she looked back at me, sharply, theatrically, until all of a sudden the air didn’t feel like a stark glacier, ending our Age as we knew it. It just felt like the morning blues. “I’m thirsty,” I said, and shifted under the blanket, looking for a warm spot. “What did I do?” I said. Natasha had p
ut a glass in my hand, so large and cold. She didn’t answer my question. It wasn’t the right question. I licked my lips in anticipation, finally, of water, but floating at the top of the glass was a thin layer. Of something. I raised it past my mouth to my eyes; Natasha’s face skittered and rippled behind it. Dust was dancing at the horizon of the water, like plankton. My stomach gurgled; I didn’t want to sip it. “This water looks gross,” I said to Natasha. She was looking at V__’s brother’s clock radio.
“I’m not surprised,” she said, turning the clock toward me. The bright digital numbers danced in front of my eyes like hot red sparks: HED, DED, DIE, 5IE, 53E, 5:30. It was five-thirty and I was in V__’s brother’s bedroom. “It’s been sitting around all day. Like you.”
When I woke up I found myself in V__’s brother’s bedroom, terribly thirsty and still in the clothes I had worn the night before: my white T-shirt with the tiny flower in the center, and blue jeans. Through a dusty glass of water, red sparks of a clock radio were winking at me, but I couldn’t read them. I was experiencing what Natasha has been known to call a déjà typhoon–a storm of familiarity, a rush of can’t-quite-place-it-ness. There was something right in front of me, something I knew the shape of but couldn’t quite know, like I’d just had a baby but hadn’t yet gotten to know it, but there it was, suckling away.
Somebody was feeling me up. I could feel the feel of somebody’s hand along my very spine, teasing me until the plain white cotton felt like something silky, like a kimono against my skin. I opened my eyes; Yale pennants spun. Outside the window showed moonlight against fog, a dense shrubbery of gray half-light. Somebody was breathing heavily, and their fingers were trembling on my skin. When he kissed me I sucked him in like a fish, taking him down with me. We kissed superhard, and his fingers were still shaking when they slipped under my elastic and across my hipbones, cold and hard as marble. I followed him, grabbed his fingers and slid them inside me. He moaned; it was Gabriel. I grabbed at this: It was my boyfriend. My legs were spread so wide it was impossible to take my underwear off; he got them halfway down when they stuck, overstretched like those little wire things that don’t always keep bags closed properly. Gabriel needs to cut his nails. I kept thinking things like that the whole time, little sentences. Reduced sentencing. My underwear is ripped and I don’t have another pair. In this case it is true about black men. Not being able to remember V__’s brother’s name. It hurts. The light is weird in here. Harder. Tasting Gabriel’s shoulder, biting down on it. We’re not using any birth control. Harder. It hurts anyway. Is somebody watching us? Would I be able to get into Yale? Gabriel breathing in my ear. My hips moving in a way I wasn’t planning–instinctively, I guess. The familiar taste of blood. Gabriel’s noises and my own. Natasha’s unblinking eyes in the dark, like cat’s eyes. The hot tip of her cigarette, riveted and bored. The sound of the bed. The sound of us in the bed.
The Basic Eight Page 29
