Good Girls

by Laura Ruby

  “No, I don’t,” I said, “but I also don’t doubt my animal weight.”

  “You’re as light as a feather. Actually, you’re lighter than a feather. You’re like a mote of dust.”

  “That’s romantic,” I said.

  He kicked open the door of one of the bedrooms and tossed me on the bed. It was a twin, which made things cozy when he jumped up on the bed, too. I tried to keep breathing. It was a struggle.

  “I missed you,” he said. He cupped my chin with his hand and kissed me, hard and deep and twisty-twirly. My mind turned into Luke’s little mote of dust. An angry, stompy little mote that wanted his shirt off NOW, IMMEDIATELY; that found shirts unnecessary and absolutely, utterly criminal. I pawed at his T-shirt, and let out a strangled mewl as he yanked it off. The sight of him, lean and rippled, threatened to unknit my skin. It didn’t take long for his hand to slip inside my top, his fingers tracing my ribs.

  “Your bones are so cool,” he said.

  “Huh?” I said, kiss-drunk.

  He brushed against the lace trim of my bra and crawled under the underwire. Cupping my breast, he squeezed in the most delicious way. I heard myself make a low animal noise somewhere deep in my throat.

  He rolled over with me in his arms, so that I was straddling him. He tugged my shirt up around my armpits and had my bra undone about two seconds later. Rubbing our chests and hips and thighs together, we rocked until the bed started creaking like an old wooden boat, until my underwear was drenched and he was groaning like his own bones had spontaneously shattered all at once.

  Later, on the way home, Ash asked me sarcastically if I’d had a good time.

  “It was okay,” I said, brushing my swollen, couch-pillow lips with the back of my hand.

  So this is what I became: strangled and mute at school, when I could see but not touch, and a frothing wildebeest at this party and that party, none of which I would have gone to if I didn’t think there was a chance that Luke would be there. I’d watch him flirt with the universe and I’d want to die; then he’d come find me and we’d disappear into bedrooms or closets or basements, wherever we could. Ash kept warning me to be cool, to not take things so seriously, to not be surprised that Luke flirted so much. “He’s a player and you know it. If he wasn’t, he’d be calling you, all right? You’d, like, have a real date or something? But he’s not calling you. This is a casual thing, a hookup thing, a friends-with-benefits thing. Don’t lose your mind,” she said. “If you don’t chill, you’re going to get hurt.”

  It wasn’t just Ash. I’d walk into a room and the first thing I would get was a report on Luke’s whereabouts from people who liked me, glares and sneers from anyone who didn’t. After that, we retreated to the only private place left, his mom’s van, which he would drive to some dark corner so that no one would show up and peek through the windows. He removed the last bench seat in the back and replaced it with a fluffy old comforter we could roll around on, or roll up in like human enchiladas. We’d jump into the van, shut the door, and fall against each other, falling into each other, going further and further every time we were together.

  One night, my top and bra were stripped off and flung into the driver’s seat before we even had a chance to kiss. Instead of going for my mouth, Luke started to kiss my breasts instead. My eyes rolled back so far in my head that I thought they were going to keep rolling; I wouldn’t be seeing Luke, I’d be seeing the happy thoughtless cloud of my own brain, that bright white pulsing nothing, and it seemed like the very nicest thing that could happen, the sweetest thing, to see your brain.

  I covered us with the blanket as he unbuttoned my jeans and eased them off, and I worked him out of his. The two of us were wearing only our underwear, which should have made me stop, which should have made me think, but didn’t mean much to me except for the fact that now his hands could go almost anywhere and were everywhere and I loved his hands best of all because they had these beautiful fingers that poked me and tickled me, rubbed me and hollowed me out. He tapped the inside of my knee and my legs fell open as if he had just pushed a lever. I couldn’t stop them and I didn’t want to. More! bubbled my bright, cottony brain, Moremoremoremore, as his hand danced between my legs. I thought about grabbing it, guiding it, showing him exactly where and how to touch me, but as bold and brave and going-places-I’d-never-gone-before as I was, I wasn’t that bold or that brave. My own hands started to travel. He had miles and miles of saltysmooth skin and all of it was mine. I could feel his hard-on burning a brand on my hip, heard the sharp intake of breath when I pressed against it.

  He shifted and pulled the blanket off us. I felt the rush of cool air and the pressure of his lips as he kissed his way down my neck, breastbone, and stomach, past my belly button and lower and lower and lower. His fingertips curled into the top of my underwear and started to peel it down my hips. I lost the yummy feeling in my head and my body. My brain got all chattery like it always did, chattery and stupid and judgey: I want him to feel me but don’t want him to see me my boobs are like pancakes and my stomach sticks out and my butt is all squished against the floor and what if I like it and start flailing around or what if I don’t like it and start flailing around or what if I taste funny and he doesn’t like it and…

  I grabbed his face and hauled him eye level.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I want you up here.”

  He looked at me for what felt like a century. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” I said. With all that we’d done, it was dumb to be embarrassed, but I was embarrassed. I felt more naked than naked. I felt like crying.

  “Okay. Whatever you want,” he said. He stroked my body. “You’re pretty.”

  I wanted to believe him and I sort of believed him, but I reached for the blanket and pulled it back over us.

  We lay there for a while, not touching, not talking. Then I felt his hand around my wrist and thought, Okay, here it comes, he’s all mad, he’s going to start complaining, he’s going to ask me to have sex with him or at least go down on him or something, because he at least TRIED to do it to me and it’s only fair. But all he did was massage my wrist and palm, press my knuckles between his thumb and his index finger.

  “Your hands are so small,” he said.

  My hands always seemed pretty regular to me. “They are?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “They’re nice.”

  Him saying my hands were nice made me feel nice. I took one of my nice hands and put it on his nicer chest. His heart fluttered under my palm. I thought about the ventricles pumping his blood through his veins. And then I thought about the veins themselves, pushing up through the skin on his arms and legs as if they could barely contain the fluid.

  I slid my hand down his chest and stomach and then wriggled my fingers in the waistband of his underwear. His breathing went ragged as I brushed the tip of his penis, wrapped my hand around it. I couldn’t believe that skin and blood could get so hard.

  I squeezed. “Does that hurt?”

  His eyes were like pools of motor oil, dark and glazed. “Are you kidding?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “No, it doesn’t hurt,” he said. “I like it.”

  I ran my thumb in circles over the tip, where it was plush and sort of spongy. It felt like a warm and fleshy version of a video game control. Luke control. It was cool, but also kind of odd. Like, guys walk around all day with this thing hanging off them, this thing that seemed like it could make you feel really good, insanely good, but also could betray your thoughts or maybe even work against you. What’s it like to have this THING?

  He closed his eyes. “You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?”

  My face burned. I didn’t know what I was trying to do except maybe drive him crazy. I liked the idea that I could drive him crazy; I wanted to keep doing that. And I wanted to keep him coming back to me, I wanted to keep him kissing me and touching me and telling me I was pretty. I started to move
my hand, hoping I was doing it right. “I am trying to kill you,” I said. “But I hope you’ll die happy.”

  A Long, Cold Winter

  Once we have the lumber and the supplies, I throw myself into designing the Hamlet set. My minions are thrilled to be put to work nailing and building and painting, even more thrilled when I yell at them for not following the drawings I created on my computer (I always feel horrible after I yell, so I buy them corn chips and pizza). I spend my free time—all twenty-two minutes of it—raiding thrift stores for random items: phones, curtains, dishes, chairs, and one human skull. My studying is done between the hours of ten and two every night, and I’m beginning to look like a skull myself.

  Because Pam and Cindy have nothing better to do, they visit me on the set every afternoon, teasing the minions mercilessly and making snack and beverage runs to keep us going. Ash hangs out in the back of the auditorium, weeding through bad poetry submissions and pulling out her hair. “Tentacles!” she shrieks at one particularly tense moment. “Why is everyone writing about tentacles?!”

  The performances are right before Christmas break. In Ms. Godwin’s updated, girl-power version of Hamlet, Joelle rocks the house, as we all knew she would. She’s fierce, she’s confused, she’s furious, she’s sexy, she’s murderous, she’s sad, she’s scared—she’s every emotion a person ever had, all packaged up in the body of a pop star. Watching her, I feel this funny feeling, this end-of-life-as-we-know-it feeling. We all thought that Joelle had no plans after graduation except to do more commercials, but Joelle has submitted an application to the drama program at Juilliard and is scheduled to audition in January. When she takes her final bows and someone runs out to give her a bouquet of flowers, I feel like the curtain is coming down on us all, that we’ve got to start gearing up to leave this school behind. I don’t know how I’ll make it without seeing Ash and Joelle every day. All I’ve ever wanted was to be older, to be free, and instead I feel young and lost and stupid. I tell Ash, and she tells me to knock it off. “Months, Aud. We’ve got months left.”

  “If you include vacations, it’s only four months,” I say.

  “I keep telling you, the key word is months. Now read this and tell me what you think of it. Is the line about the black bile spewing from the dead guy’s mouth a little much, or what?”

  Christmas comes, and I take Joelle to Christmas Eve services with us just so that she can see what it’s like. She freaks over the church—“This is so cool! Like Europe or something!” she says, and really gets into singing the hymns. She promises that she’ll take me to temple sometime if I really want to go. There are no pretty stained-glass windows to look at, she says, and there’s no Jesus, but she thinks I’ll like the rabbis singing in Hebrew. “Just don’t expect any Bat Mitzvah, wedding, ‘Hava Nagila’ stuff. It’s not all dancing around with chairs.”

  Over Christmas vacation, I spend practically every second reading and studying for finals in January. The girls drag me out of the house a couple of times for a movie, shopping, or whatever, but I refuse to go to any parties and they have to go without me. When they talk about them later, I can tell that they’re not telling me everything or everyone they saw, but I don’t care. Well, I do, but I don’t. I’ve got college applications, I’ve got studying, I’ve got exams, I’ve got plans. I’ve got my seventeenth birthday in less than two months—hallelujah!—but that means driving lessons with my dad.

  Ugh.

  “Let’s try this again, Audrey. Bring your foot down on the clutch and put the car in reverse. When you have it in gear, ease up on the clutch. Okay. Back up slowly. That’s it. Turn the wheel all the way to the left. To your left! LEFT!”

  Mom had promised to take me but at the last minute changes her mind. I know what she’s up to. Me and my dad haven’t been getting along all that well or even speaking all that much since the infamous photo appeared in his e-mail box. She wants to bring us together. I think she could have picked a better way to do it, something that didn’t involve the operation of large pieces of machinery and a whole lot of yelling.

  “Don’t do that! You’ll burn out the clutch!”

  “I’m sorry! I’ve been driving your car for exactly ninety seconds, okay?” I fiddle with the gearshift and try again.

  “You’ve been riding around in this car for five years,” he says. “You mean to tell me you never noticed how it sounded? You never paid attention to what I was doing? What did they teach you in Driver’s Ed, anyway? I thought you were good with mechanical things.”

  The car bucks, stalls, and dies.

  “Audrey!”

  I don’t bother to restart the car. “Dad, can’t we take Mom’s car out? That way I won’t burn out your clutch and you won’t give yourself an embolism screaming at me.”

  “Audrey, I’m not screaming.”

  “You’re screaming.”

  “I’ve barely raised my voice. Anyway, you should know how to drive a standard. What if you’re out with someone and they get sick?”

  “Uh, I call an ambulance?”

  “Not that sick, but sick enough that they can’t drive and you have to?”

  Oh, I get it. “You mean drunk, don’t you? What if I’m out with some person who gets smashed and I have to drive him home?”

  “Well, yes. It happens.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  He opens the glove compartment, takes out a napkin, and starts to dust the console. “I hope I don’t have to remind you about the dangers of drinking and driving, Audrey.”

  “You don’t.”

  “You can kill or injure yourself permanently. Or you could hurt someone else.”

  “Dad, I know that.”

  “If I catch you drinking and driving, I will personally bring you down to the jail myself.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I say.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he says. “I’m just reminding you how dangerous drinking and driving is, that’s all. It’s not that I don’t trust you.”

  Of course it is, but I nod anyway. That’s my job. Nodding.

  “I know that kids sometimes lose their heads, especially when they’re seniors. Their parents go out of town, someone has a party, somebody gets the idea to steal from the liquor cabinet. Things can get out of control.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not going to any parties anymore,” I say.

  “Yes, well. Maybe there will be some that you’ll want to go to later on. Spring parties. Or graduation parties.”

  More nodding.

  “You have such a bright future ahead of you,” he says.

  Not if I drive this car into a telephone pole.

  He stops wiping the dash and folds the paper towel into squares. “I don’t want to see you hurt.”

  “Neither do I,” I say.

  “You’ll be careful?” he says. “From now on?”

  I don’t need to ask what he means. “Yes, Dad. I’ll be careful all the time.”

  Now he nods. “Good. Let’s try this again.”

  January. We suffer through the last week of classes and then suffer more through finals, which means that classes change and I’m out of both history and study period—and Chilly is out of my face, hopefully forever. The thought of a totally Chilly-free semester is enough to keep me from crying over the short, dark days and the long, freezing nights. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

  Ash has a gift of her own, a copy of the winter edition of Ebb&Flow, the literary magazine. (She’s surrendered and named the edition “Tentacles.”) It’s a huge hit with the Goth and Emo kids. Pam and Cindy each get a copy and take turns reading the angriest poetry out loud to each other over lunch, alternating lines:

  Pam: “Beware, little boy, I am Death.”

  Cindy: “The chemical cold in your gut.”

  Pam: “The churn of rot in your head.”

  Cindy: “I am the jerk in your knees.”

  Pam: “And the ghost in your bed.”

  Cindy: “I
am the wet dream.”

  Pam: “And the frozen dread. Wait. Did you just say ‘wet dream’?” She waves the pamphlet at Ash. “They let you publish that?”

  Ash shrugs. “We have advisors, but they’re not much for advising. We pick what we want and wait for someone to notice. Any minute now, some mom will call and complain. But that’s the fun part.”

  Pam flips through the pages. “Any more in here about wet dreams?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What about doing it?”

  “Jesus!” says Ash.

  “So,” Joelle says to me. “What are we doing for your birthday?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We have to do something! You’re finally going to be seventeen.”

  “If I actually pass my road test, I’ll drive you guys around in my dad’s stick shift.”

  Pam says, “Oh, wow. The fun never stops with you, does it?”

  “I know,” says Joelle. “We’ll all get dressed up and go to that new club. Stoke.”

  “A teen club?” says Pam. “They’re so lame.”

  “We can’t get into a real club. Come on,” Joelle says. “It will be fun! I overheard Cherry Eames talking about it in the hallway.” Joelle catch’s Ash’s expression. “What?”

  “I’m not going to an under-twenty-one dance club. And I’m not going anywhere Cherry Eames has been, okay?”

  “Ash,” Joelle says, “she doesn’t own the place. I doubt she’ll even go again, I—”

  “I said I’m not going.” Ash grabs her backpack and stomps out of the cafeteria.

  Joelle’s eyes tear up. “What did I say?”

  I sigh. “You said the word ‘Cherry.’”

  “But that was so long ago!” Joelle says.

  “Obviously not long enough,” Pam says. “Not that I really know what the hell you guys are talking about.”

  “I’m going to go and make sure she’s okay,” I say, and run out of the cafeteria after Ash. She isn’t in the hallway or by her locker, so I race out to the parking lot to see if her car’s still there. It is. Even though it’s like minus a hundred degrees, Ash is sitting in the backseat with the door wide open, sucking on a cigarette so hard that she’ll need another one in about thirty seconds. I hug myself tightly and jog to her car.