by M. E. Kerr
Parental Guidance, the band that was playing for the dance, was just beginning to go up onstage.
“I like your hair,” I told Dill.
“Then I’ll always wear it this way,” she said sarcastically.
“Dill,” I said. I don’t know what I would have said if she’d let me finish.
“You’re number nine,” she said, “after Todd Greenwald and Mildred Gregory.” Ice could have formed around her words.
She started writing out the ticket.
A guitarist from the band began practicing a few chords as the speakers went off and other members of Parental Guidance slipped into place.
The guitarist was warming up with an old Beatles song.
I shouldn’t have said, “Hey, maybe Gustavo Quintero’s showed up after all these years.”
“Don’t,” Dill said flatly.
I tried again to mumble something about being friends, about being sorry, but I was tripping over my own attempt at sincerity, mocking it inside, the way I knew Dill would if I ever got out the words. At the same time I caught a fleeting glimpse of dalmatian spots running by, throwing me off altogether. I looked over my shoulder, but Nicki’d disappeared into the crowd.
When I glanced back at Dill, she had that crooked smile. “She’s lighted on Roman now, up by the dance stand,” Dill said.
I tried grinning, shrugging. “You make her sound like a mosquito.”
“More like a flea,” Dill said coldly. “Mosquitoes glide, almost gracefully. Fleas hop. From person to person.”
“Well, Dill,” I said, “you haven’t lost your bite, either.”
“I haven’t lost anything, Rudd,” said Dill. “You’ll be the ninth couple.” She handed me the ticket.
I took it and headed down the dance floor toward Nicki. Roman Knight, in a long black trenchcoat, carrying a black cane, and wearing one skull earring, was barking down at Nicki’s legs.
I rescued her. We were the first couple out on the floor as Parental Guidance began playing.
“See, that sleazeball doesn’t like me at all,” Nicki said. “Barking at me! What’s his problem?”
“You’ve got on dogs’ legs,” I said. “When you put them on, didn’t you know someone would bark at them?”
“It’s more than that,” she insisted. “It’s him. It isn’t that.”
“It’s that!” I said firmly. “Just keep dancing.”
We danced. She was a fantastic dancer. She’d do things to music I’d never seen anyone do.
When the floor got very crowded, after several numbers, she said she wanted to go out to the SAAB and have her “nicotine fix.”
We stayed there awhile after she smoked, while we made out. I never thought I’d choose a dance in a high school gym over making out, but I was up to here making out, I think. I was hungry to get back to the action, and to be part of things again, to have Nicki there with me.
“Let’s go!” she said suddenly. “Do you want to stay?
“Go where?”
“Back to Kingdom By The Sea.”
“Why?”
“Because everything’s in full swing, Eri. I hate to stay until things are over…. And we’re ninth in that march!”
I just looked at her. “So what?”
“Dill did that purposely. Nine is a mystical number, not lucky!”
Dill knew as much about mystical numbers as Nicki knew about slumber parties. “Dill didn’t do anything,” I said. “Nine was what came up. What’s wrong with nine?” I said. “No, don’t tell me.”
“What’s wrong with nine?”
“Don’t tell me,” I said again. “I don’t want to know what’s wrong with nine.”
“There were nine rivers of hell,” Nicki said, “and the Hydra had nine heads.”
I thought of the time in Jack’s Mustang when he said Help me figure this girl out! I’d given him some zinger for an answer.
“I’m serious, Eri. I’d hear my mother warn about nine. Haunted people have to throw black beans over their shoulders and say, Avaunt, ye spectres from this house!’ nine times. Nine, our cat? He’s haunted.”
That was when Roman Knight’s black cane tapped against the rear window, and when we heard him barking. Heard other guys laugh and bark.
I thought that would do it. That would be the final straw, and I reached down into my trousers for the keys. They were inches away from the ignition when Nicki said, “He thinks he’s going to intimidate me so I’ll leave? Now I won’t!”
“What about nine?” I said. “What about rivers of hell and the Hydra and your haunted cat?”
“Don’t make fun of me, Eri. Please?” Then she said, “Does Dill know her initials are inside the ring you’re giving me?”
“No.”
“I wish she knew.”
“I know you do,” I said. “That much I know about you.”
“I want to go back to the girls’ room and fix my eyes,” she said. “I almost cried, but I’m all right now.”
When we got out of the SAAB, we could hear Roman Knight calling out Nicki’s name from behind a row of cars. “Nick-ki? Woof woof!”
“What am I going to do about him?” she said.
“Bark back?”
She surprised me by laughing, hanging on to me. “I love you because you’re funny. I like funny. Jack was never funny. Even Ski was never funny. Am I funny?”
“You’re funny. But not ha ha funny.”
“Do you love me anyway?”
“I love you, Nicki, but you’re not easy.”
“You had easy,” she said, “and it bored you. When we get inside that plastic ring, do we kiss?”
“First I give you the ring.”
“Let’s kiss first,” she said. “I can’t stand to be one of the bunch.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her.
The march was beginning to form as she ducked into the girls’ john, and I went into the boys’, across from it.
Jack and I were the only ones in there.
It was the first time we’d faced each other alone since the night he’d sat in the wet paint, in our kitchen. That long.
He didn’t say hello or how are you. I didn’t expect him to. He mumbled something I couldn’t hear, and I didn’t ask him what it was. He wasn’t dressed for the dance. He was in old 501s and a sweater, with a bomber jacket over it, his blond hair longer, falling into his eyes.
“Has she said she wants to leave yet?” he asked me. “She will.”
I didn’t say anything back. I walked up to the urinal and unzipped.
He said to my back, “I wondered if you’d show up here tonight.”
“I didn’t think you would,” I said.
“I brought Dill. She didn’t have a date.”
I kept my mouth shut.
“I didn’t have one, either,” he said.
“Well, you don’t like dances,” I said.
“I like them. I just never learned to dance. I was never very fast on my feet, not like you.”
“You’re fast enough on the football field,” I said.
“That’s the only place,” Jack said, “and I never did learn to come from behind. Not like you.”
When I was finished, I zipped up my trousers, turned around, and said, “Jack, I never planned it. You have to believe me.”
“I believe you,” he said. “I know what she’s like.”
“It isn’t her fault, either.”
“She always thought you didn’t like her. That bugged her.”
“I didn’t like her.”
“She’d say, ‘Jack, Erick doesn’t like me. What am I going to do?’ I’d say, ‘Sure, he likes you.’”
“I didn’t. At first, I didn’t.”
“I’d say, ‘Why wouldn’t he like you, Nicki? What’s not to like?’”
“Honest to God, Jack, I couldn’t help myself. It was something that couldn’t be helped!”
“I know that, old buddy,” he said softly.
“Do you? Really?”
He shook his head yes. He smiled at me the old way.
“So’s this something that couldn’t be helped,” he said.
The next thing I knew I was on the floor.
Chapter Eighteen
WE WERE DRIVING VERY slowly through a wet snowfall when she said, “Eri, is there a way you can spend all night with me?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “We’ve got company coming for Thanksgiving, and I think my nose is broken.”
“See, that’s why I want to be with you all night. It’s the least I can do.”
“What do you mean it’s the least you can do?” I said. “You sound like it’s a mission of mercy.”
“Well? Look at you!”
“Not like something you want to do.”
“Of course I want to do it! We never did it.”
“I haven’t even told anyone about you. I can’t tell my mother I’m staying all night at Dill’s. She’d never believe it.”
“She thinks that’s still going on?”
“Of course she thinks that’s still going on. I didn’t tell her any differently.”
“Can’t you call her and tell her you got into a fight, and you don’t want to face the company just yet? Can’t you say you’re staying with a friend?”
“Jack’s the only friend I’d stay with, and I’ve never stayed at Jack’s.”
“I can see why.” She laughed. “I’m sorry to laugh. Do you hurt a lot?”
“A lot,” I said.
She was sitting so close, she could just reach up and touch the egg on the back of my head.
“Don’t,” I said. “It really does hurt. And I have to concentrate on the road. I can’t see a damn thing, either. My right eye’s closing.”
“We’re two roads away from mine,” she said.
“I’ll watch. How come you never told anyone about me?”
“You don’t know my family. They’d want to meet you. If you think Jack’s family gave you the once-over, you should see mine.”
She lighted a Merit, blew out a stream of smoke, and said, “Don’t they even wonder why you and Jack aren’t friends anymore?”
“They don’t know anything that’s going on in my life lately.”
“Daddy always knows what’s going on in mine,” she said, “but it’s like he’s been in shock since my mother died. He tries to recapture his youth with all those kids who hang out in the bar.”
“They’re older than you are,” I said.
“No they’re not. Just in years. Daddy calls them The Gnats. They’re good for business, but they get on Daddy’s nerves. See, he loved my mother. Really. If I ever loved anybody that hard, I’d take sleeping pills and walk into the ocean.”
“Nicki,” I said, “I almost got my back broken because of you. I don’t even want to hear that you’d take sleeping pills and walk into the ocean if you ever loved anyone that hard.”
“You know what I mean, though, Eri. I’m talking about dark, flawed passions. I’m attracted to them, but I’m also afraid of them. They drag you down.”
“So does a fat lip and a cracked rib! Jesus! What are you going on about suddenly? I’m a basket case! Did this happen to me because of some little lightweight thing I got into with you?”
“No,” she said.
“What the hell are you talking about then?”
“I’m just talking,” she said. She quickly changed the subject. She said, “Anyway, nothing stopped that stupid march, did it? No fight could stop them from lining up with their school rings in their wet little hands.”
“Who says they had wet hands?”
“Oh, they were all nervous and excited over that march, so you know they had wet hands, probably wet their pants, too…. I didn’t say anything to you because I know you had your heart set on it, but I’d rather be in a march to the garbage dump than in that one. Jack did us a favor.”
“Some favor.”
Nicki had her hand, with my ring on it, on my knee.
“You know what I said to Jack?” she said. “This is your turn here, on the right, Eri.”
“I see it.” I made the turn, feeling the pain in my left shoulder. “What did you say to Jack? I didn’t even know you spoke to him.”
“I shouted at his back. ‘Anybody who’d do that to his best friend is a scumbag!’ … Roman Knight goes, ‘I thought I was the scumbag!’”
“What about what I did to Jack?”
“You didn’t really do anything,” she said. “I had my eye on you the first day I met you. The night we went out to Dunn’s? Way back then.”
“You did not.”
“I did, Eri. Only I thought you didn’t like me, and I’d never get you away from Dill Pickle.”
I sighed. “Don’t make things up. You told me yourself you didn’t start noticing me until we talked at Pete’s apartment that morning.”
“That’s what I told you,” she said, “but that wasn’t how it really was. Why would I have planned that whole New York weekend?”
“To see Bruce Springsteen,” I said.
“No. Way before then I knew. I knew that day in the stadium when I tried out for pom-poms? You were a challenge to me because I knew you didn’t like me.”
“Nicki, I feel bad enough,” I said. “I think my nose is broken. I might have a brain concussion. Don’t tell me you had some Machiavellian scheme going to get me away from Dill way back in early September.”
“What’s a Machiavellian scheme?”
“Something characterized by craft and deceit,” I said.
“That describes it perfectly!” She laughed while we went over the drawbridge. “How do you spell that? I want to remember that.”
When we got out of the SAAB, I said, “Where’d all the cars come from?”
“You mean all six cars?” she said. “Holidays we always get a few guests. I remember Thanksgivings we’d be full up. … Are you going to have turkey tomorrow?”
“If they strain some for me, I might get it down,” I said.
She laughed and grabbed my hand. “Anyway, it’s still early. It’s not even midnight, so we can go to Dream Within A Dream, and I’ll make you feel better.”
“Promises, promises.”
“Want to bet I can?” she said, as we headed toward the entrance to Kingdom By The Sea. “We’re going to have turkey tomorrow, too, if our cook is sober. Our new cook looks like Ozzy Osborne.”
She was launched on some story about Ozzy Osborne checking himself into the Betty Ford Clinic to get off drugs and alcohol. She’d read an interview with Ozzy Osborne in Circus magazine.
When we got inside, Toledo was out from behind the front desk facing down some short fellow with glasses and black curly hair.
“… that’s when I found out Ozzy was married,” Nicki was saying.
The short fellow was asking Toledo if it was customary to listen to other people’s conversations at the bar.
Nicki whispered to me, “Not only customary, but its Toledo’s only recreation. He’s got radar ears, Daddy says.”
“Nicki?” Toledo said. “Take the desk a minute, will you?”
“Shall I take it upstairs with me?” she said. “We’re going upstairs, Toledo.”
“Just stand here a minute until Cap gets back. This party’s checking out.”
Then Toledo said, “You can wait out in your car,” and the short fellow was all red in the face, staring up at Toledo, but backing away, too.
“Out in your car,” Toledo said, and he got him all the way to the door.
Nicki was standing by the desk in her jacket with the traffic accident on the back, putting out a cigarette in the ashtray.
Toledo went outside with the fellow.
Nicki just said, “Shall we get some Cokes from the bar to take up with us, Eri?” as though that sort of thing went on all the time.
So I shrugged and said I’d rather have some ice, for an ice pack.
Nicki reached up and played with the little crocodile I had around my neck,
looked all over my eyes, and said, “The ice would only melt? You know, Eri?” and the way she looked at me, and the way she said it, proved she could make me feel a lot better.
I could hear Billy Ocean’s “Loverboy” playing in the bar. Nicki was smiling at me. I was thinking of how I’d like to spend all night up in Dream Within A Dream.
Then Toledo lumbered back inside and came over to us, wiping his mouth first with the back of his hand, then with the front, as though he was getting rid of any awful remnants left of something gross.
Toledo said, “These two guys register, go to the bar, have an argument in there about going someplace tomorrow where some guy has that AIDS disease. Four-eyes there”—pointing his thumb over his shoulder at the door—“doesn’t want to go. His friend tells him to stay here, and he’ll come back after dinner and get him.”
Nicki was shrugging off the information when I heard the familiar Oklahoma twang, and saw Cap starting down the spiral stairs, with Marty Olivetti following him, carrying suitcases.
“… doesn’t matter if we overheard it,” Cap was saying. “We’re asking you to go peacefully. I don’t want to fight. The bar bill’s on us. Okay? We can’t have anything to do with anyone visiting someplace where there’s that disease.”
That was the point when Marty looked down and saw me.
That was when he said, “Erick?”
“Hi, Marty!”
“I didn’t think I was going to see you until tomorrow!” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He pronounced it “hail.”
As he got closer, he did a double take when he saw my swollen face. “Did someone beat up on you? Who got you involved in this thing?”
He pronounced it “thang.”
I took a very deep breath and then, slowly, began letting it all out.
Chapter Nineteen
I TOOK MARTY HOME with me that night, and he stayed in Pete’s old room.
Shawn drove their Buick back to Connecticut.
“I shouldn’t have sprung it on Shawn at the last minute,” Marty said. “I kept putting off telling him about Pete. Shawn’s a hypochondriac, anyway. AIDS scares the shit out of him. I don’t want Pete to know anything about this, Erick.”
I told Marty I didn’t want my family to know about Nicki, or my fight with Jack.
