So I said, “Yeah. Sometimes he did call.”
“Oh, good. That’s good. That’s good news,” Bill said. “It’s nice, to get calls. It’s nice.”
“You’re right. It is nice. Thanks.”
“Then what happened?”
“To me, you mean?”
“To the man?”
“Well, he did something kind of cruel.”
“Oh.”
“He and his friends took advantage of me. Or maybe his friends took advantage of him and me. I’m not sure. I don’t know if he meant to; I mean, I think it might have been their fault and not his, but I—”
It was the first time Bill had ever cut me off. “Are you all right?” he asked, as if that was more important than whether Kyle had done it on purpose, or by drunk accident, or force of peer pressure or something.
“Yes, I’m all right, thank you. Could you, um . . . ?” We had made our way back in a circle to the produce section, and I pointed at some apples.
Bill took a plastic bag from a spinning roll of them six feet above my head. He put some apples in the bag and then tossed the bag into the high cart so effortlessly he looked like an Olympic athlete.
“Apples,” he said as the apples settled between some tuna cans and relish, and then, “Thank you.”
We walked by the flower freezer, and I picked out a gardenia. I love gardenias, because they smell gorgeous, and even though it was nine dollars, I wanted something alive in my room. Maybe this was a good sign that I wanted to keep living too, at least as long as it takes to find out what will happen to me. Maybe because I don’t want to miss the end of my own story. Or maybe because I don’t want the idiotic pigs on Celebrity Apprentice to have the last laugh when I’m hanging off a terrace somewhere.
Bill put the groceries on the counter, and I dug into my bag for my wallet, which I found but then promptly dropped while I was fumbling for bills. My beloved picture of Peter Dinklage fell out. I looked at it there, on the floor, and knew suddenly, in a terrible and certain way, that I would have to leave it there, that I didn’t deserve to carry him around anymore; what would he think of me now, ruining the reputation of the very word dwarf ? I know it’s silly, because of course no one can represent everyone else, and I’m not every dwarf in the world any more than I’m every teenager or every girl. Not to mention I could have gotten another picture of him from a magazine or online, which is how I got that one, but I felt so ashamed of my life at that moment in the lonely Kroger that I couldn’t bring myself to put the picture back in my wallet. Of course I felt sick deserting my hero there too.
Bill didn’t seem to notice any of my paralysis, just waited patiently while I came back to life, collected everything but the picture, reassembled the contents of my wallet, and handed him forty dollars. He paid, and then carried the groceries all the way back to the motel, where the desk clerk was back and there were several people milling around but no one spoke to us and I kept my eyes pinned to the floor and ran up to my room, vowing never to leave it again. Bill set the bags down outside the door.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Judy.”
“Are you kidding? Thank you,” I said. “I mean, for putting everything in the cart and for being so helpful all the time and carrying all my stuff,” I said. “Why don’t you come in? We can have some juice or something.”
He came in and sat politely on the bed. I rinsed out the glass by my bed and the one I’d been using to hold my toothbrush so I’d have two, and poured Red Machine berry juice from one of the Naked bottles into both cups. I offered one to Bill, thinking how glad I was to have met him, even if he was a complete freak.
“Looks like blood!” he said, and took a big swig of the juice.
I was drinking when he said this, and suddenly had hiccups. So I bent over and tried drinking the juice backwards from the top of the cup. Usually that really works, but this time it didn’t, so I kept hiccupping. Bill didn’t say anything about it. Maybe he didn’t notice. We sat there quietly for a while, drinking our blood juice. I thought about how AP biology was happening now without me. I wondered if Mr. Abrahams had seen the video. Probably. My stomach went hurling through space at the thought, which led to the next one, one I’d had so many times it was like breathing: of Mr. Luther watching it, Ms. Doman, Ms. Vanderly. Of how sickening they must have found it, and yet how they went back to Darcy, kept teaching their classes. How everything went on anyway.
I was holding the gardenia I’d bought. “Remember how you asked what happened then?” I said to Bill, hopefully.
“What happened? What happened?” he asked. He sounded nervous.
“No,” I said, “it’s okay. I just meant the story I was telling you. About my high school and that guy, Kyle Malanack?”
“Oh yes. Oh yes. I remember. I know that story. That’s a good one. That’s a good story,” Bill said.
“Thank you. So—what happened was that our play opened. The play we were doing was called Runaways. And my friend Meghan—you know, the one who’s also a dwarf ? From California? Well, she was in town for opening night, because even though it was a high school play, for us it was kind of a big deal.”
Bill nodded. His juice was finished and I opened the second bottle I’d bought, poured the blue goo into his glass, thought of Dr. Seuss, the Goo-Goose chewing. Bill smiled, took a sip. I thought he might be hungry, too, so I stood up, left the gardenia on the bed, and got the cheap can opener I’d bought at Kroger, used it to pry the top off some tuna, which I stirred into a bowl. I added an individual package of mayonnaise he had retrieved from the skyscraper of a deli counter. I took out four pieces of bread and two slices of American cheese, twisted open a jar of pickle relish until I felt the pop under the palm of my hand. I was glad my mother wasn’t seeing this; she’s a believer in nutritious food. Of course, she’s never had to live at the Motel Manor or walk down East Michigan to hunt for a meal. I slapped the cheese on the bread, scooped some tuna onto each sandwich, put a spoonful of relish on top of the tuna, and covered it with the second piece of bread. I don’t like the relish stirred in; I like the surprise of a huge clump of it, like pickles on a hamburger. I put the sandwiches on paper plates I’d bought my first day there and had started reusing since I only had six.
I set one in front of Bill. “Your tuna platter, sir,” I joked.
“Thank you. Thank you, tuna and juice,” he said.
I sat back down on the edge of the bed and took a bite of my sandwich. It was pretty good. But then as soon as I started telling Bill the story again, something about eating the tuna sandwich seemed disrespectful. But when I thought about that, I realized it was only insulting to me, since I was the tragic character in the story. And maybe it was a sign that I’m callous and unfeeling about my own history, because I was hungry. So I disrespected myself by eating a tuna sandwich while I told Bill the worst part.
Meghan had talked her parents into buying her a plane ticket to come for the opening of Runaways, and to letting her skip three days of school to hang out and visit D’Arts. She was scheduled to arrive the day after Kyle told me about his sister and we got drunk at his house.
I woke up that Saturday morning naked, on Kyle’s basement couch, which had been folded out into a bed. To say I had no idea where I was is an understatement. It took me three full minutes of the kind of panic I thought was reserved for near-death experiences, just to regain actual consciousness. Five minutes into being awake, I felt pretty certain that I was human, that it hadn’t been an alien abduction, that I was in a body that belonged to me. After ten minutes, I looked down at myself, found I was still there, alive, familiar.
“Oh my god, I’m a dwarf,” I said to myself, and almost laughed. I mean, you can’t deny that that’s pretty hilarious. I wish someone other than me had been there to hear it. But even before I could enjoy my ability to make myself laugh during what would turn out to be the worst memory of my life, I had to put my head in my hands. Because it was pounding, screaming. My e
yes hurt, shards of amazing pain jabbed at them from inside my brain.
“Where are my clothes?” I wondered. I sat up, and the room spun so horribly that I had to lean over. That made me think I might throw up, so I rested my weight on my arm at the edge of the sofa bed for a moment, and that’s when I saw Alan.
He was asleep on the floor next to the bed, wearing a pair of boxers with prints of dogs on them. He didn’t even have a sleeping bag or anything, just one of the huge couch pillows under his head. It was at that moment that I knew for certain I was going to throw up. I heaved myself off the side of the bed into a standing position, and staggered into the bathroom, where I sat down on the floor again, rested my throbbing head against the side of the bathtub. There were tan bathmats on a tile floor, and matching tan towels hanging so high above me that they looked miles away. The room was wobbling like a canoe, so I sat for a while before crawling over to the toilet and barfing. I felt slightly better. I wished desperately that I had my own car, could not see calling my parents and admitting that I hadn’t slept at Sarah’s, or waking Kyle. I was too dizzy to walk, so I crawled back out into the room where Alan’s nightmare triangular body was still lying on the floor. I dug around like an animal under the sofa bed and finally found some of my clothes. I threw them on, backwards, inside out, not caring, focusing on the pain in my head, trying to ignore everything else I felt and saw. I barely looked at Alan, stood up, shaking a little bit, and climbed as fast as I could up a short flight that led me to Kyle’s palatial foyer. I had to brace myself against the banister twice. My purse was on the bench right at the front door, so I opened it and looked at my cell phone. No missed calls. I put it in my pocket and headed for the front door. I had no plan, but wanted to get out of that house as fast as I could and never see it again. In the reflection of the enormous foyer windows, I could see the living room behind me, and a body asleep on the black leather sofa with silver feet, and felt my stomach turn over again. I tried not to, but couldn’t help myself and turned and looked. It was Chris Arpent. I couldn’t tell whether he had clothes on or not, since he was covered with a throw that had been resting on the back of the couch. One of his hairy legs was sticking out of the blanket, and he looked like a giant, muscley insect. I had some kind of physical memory when I saw that leg, knew that I had seen it before, or touched it even, but that thought too I pushed back into my bones.
I tried to think, but could not. My mind separated from my body in a kind of revolt I’d never experienced, and propelled me to the front door, which I reached up and opened. I scrambled out onto the porch, leaving the door open behind me, hoping an intruder would come in and steal everything in the house, maybe even kill Chris and Alan. I couldn’t quite hope for Kyle’s death. I stood there for a minute, trying to orient myself, the world coming at me the way I guess it does when you don’t know what you did the night before or how long it’s going to take you to recover from whatever it was. The morning light was soft over the trees in the front yard, sprinkling shadows of leaves over the wooden porch and the side of the house. But it felt offensively, impossibly bright. It was very cold. I hobbled down the stairs into the cul-de-sac, wondering where his preppy mom and dad were, whether on vacation or a work trip, why they were both out of town so much, what it felt like to be Kyle, popular and tragic and abandoned.
I walked out of the circle and onto the main road, looked at a street sign: Beckinsdale Court. With no other choice I could think of, I called Chad. But it was 5:26 a.m., and he didn’t pick up. So I called Sarah. I knew she slept with the cell phone next to her bed, in case Eliot called, and sure enough, she answered. Her voice sounded horrible on the phone, all craggy and scratchy and asleep.
“Helllllllooo?”
“Sarah!” I whispered, “It’s Judy. I need your help. Can you come get me, please?”
She was instantly awake, the way you are when someone calls you with an emergency. I could hear her sitting up, scrambling around.
“Judy? Where are you?”
“Kyle Malanack’s.”
“Oh my god,” she said. “Okay. Um. Where is that?”
“Right off Huron Parkway—on Beckinsdale Court. Across from Huron High,” I said. I blinked at the light again, looked at the street sign and then down the road to the nearest intersection. I couldn’t see far enough to read that sign. “Turn left when you get to Bridge-way College.”
I could hear her opening her front door. “I know where that is. Don’t move. I’ll be there in ten minutes,” she said.
I sat down on the curb. “Stay on the phone with me, please,” I said.
“Oh, okay. Jesus, Judy. Are you okay? What the hell happened? What are you doing at Kyle Malanack’s house at five in the morning?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think I might still be drunk.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. “Okay. Um. Where’s Kyle?”
“I don’t know. Sleeping, I guess.”
“Um, okay, Judy. I have to hang up now so I can drive. Just wait for me there.” She hung up.
The light began to shift over the street, getting brighter. I started worrying that Alan or Chris or Kyle would wake up and come outside and find me, and whatever had happened would actually have happened. What if they drove out onto this main road, and saw me sitting here like an orphan? If I could just escape entirely before they got up, I thought, no one would ever know and then whatever it was might as well not have even taken place. I was grateful for the cold, even though it was hurting my eyes and nose. It froze the headache and nausea a little bit.
Years passed before Sarah pulled up. She did a dangerous, screeching U-turn and I opened the passenger door before the car had even stopped moving. I appreciated the turn because she was usually such a goody-goody about her safe driving. Her car radio said 5:48 a.m., and we tore down the street and took a right turn immediately. As soon as we weren’t on his street anymore, I felt a little bit of relief. We drove by Gallup Park; the Huron River was still lit with the kind of light that had just woken up, and all the houses and buildings we passed were still asleep. The world was in place. My head was beating so intensely I thought someone might climb out of my forehead, and I leaned forward in the car, took my seat belt off so I could rest against the dashboard.
“You okay, Judy?” Sarah asked again.
“I think so,” I said.
“What the hell happened?”
“I’m not sure, honestly.”
“Do you mean you’re not sure at all? Or you don’t want to tell me. Because either thing is okay, just tell me the truth.”
“I mean I literally don’t remember.”
“That’s not good.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Do you think you and Kyle, you know, hooked up for real, like—?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you before? I mean, other than the hand holding or whatever?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
She was quiet, hurt, but I had bigger things to worry about.
“There’s something worse, though,” I said, figuring I’d make up for some of my silence with increased disclosure.
“What?”
“Some of his friends were there this morning.”
“Who?”
“Chris and Alan.”
“Were Kyle’s parents there?”
“Of course not.”
“So, so what about Chris and Alan being there?”
“So I think maybe something . . .” I trailed off.
“Something what?”
“I don’t know. I don’t feel well.” I leaned my head against the window, and when I looked through the cold glass, I saw my parents’ house with my dad’s car in the driveway, and realized it would make no sense if I arrived home at six in the morning.
“Wait, Sarah? Can we go to your house?” I asked. “I told my parents I was sleeping there.”
“Oh,” she said, “okay.” She put the car in reverse and drove out of my driveway, and I
felt relieved again for some reason. Maybe because I knew that Kyle’s house and my house were two places I could never be again without having to admit that whatever had just happened—had actually happened.
“I have to be home by ten,” I said, thinking out loud. “Meghan’s coming today—remember? I have to go to the airport to get her with my mom.”
“Oh, right, cool. When am I going to get to meet her?”
“Tonight, if you want. Hey, Sarah?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks a lot for coming to get me. You really saved my ass.”
“No problem. Um—”
“I’ll tell you everything as soon as my head stops exploding.”
“So you do remember what happened?”
“Not last night, but I’ll tell you the stuff before. I wish—”
What I meant was, if I had just told you, then maybe you would have warned me and I would have listened. Maybe none of whatever happened last night, whatever horror it was, would have happened. But even as I said it, I was thinking, I still haven’t told Sarah or Molly or Meghan anything, so maybe if I keep on that path, and continue to say nothing, we can all just pretend nothing happened. Hell, since I didn’t even know what had happened, it would almost be true.
Sarah’s parents were still asleep, so we went to her room and pulled out the trundle bed. I collapsed onto it and slept until 9:30. When I woke up, light was coming in sideways through the row of horizontal windows along Sarah’s ceiling, blinding me and then lodging deep in my forehead.
“Sarah?” I heard her come down the stairs. She peeked her head around the corner into her room, looking oddly unlike herself. She had a headband pulling her hair back, and no makeup on. Maybe she had been washing her face or something. She looked very pretty and clean, like a young picture of her mom.
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