“You’re speaking in riddles and I don’t understand.”
“I’m not upset because we didn’t have sex, I’m upset because we did. And you don’t remember, and it’s like it never happened, but it did happen, and you keep complaining because things are different except that nothing’s different.”
He stares at her. “Wait, what? What do you mean, we had sex?”
“What else could I possibly mean?”
“When? Althea, when?” he yells.
“When you were sick.”
“I was asleep?” he cries. He covers his face with his hands.
“Christ, I’m not a fucking rapist. You were awake, but, you know. Like the fat mouse.”
“I feel nauseous. I told you, I said I wasn’t ready—”
“You wanted to,” Althea says stridently.
He pushes her, grabbing her arms and pinning her against the car, screaming into her face. Rage contorts his features and gives her a glimpse of something she recognizes, reassurance that there’s another side to him she didn’t make up. “You stupid bitch, it wasn’t me! You knew it wasn’t me, you knew I wouldn’t remember, how could you let it happen? I didn’t want to, I told you—”
“Oh no? You didn’t want to? What did you think happened, then? Do you think I forced you? Do you think I held you down and made you do it?”
It’s their proximity that gives him away. Betrayed by his own body before he can protest again, he responds to her closeness, to their tension. She holds his gaze, feeling him waver as his body seems to remember what he can’t. As they stare each other down, the flicker of desire on his face is driven away by disgust, disdain for her and maybe for himself as well.
“You knew it was a big deal to me,” he says. “You knew I never would have wanted it to happen like that. How could you not tell me? You’ve been lying to me for months.”
“You said you wanted things to go back to normal.”
He shoves her against the car again. She winces, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “You said I was imagining things. I asked you on the dock why everything seemed so fucked up, and you pretended that nothing happened. How could you keep it a secret? When did you turn into such a creepy fucking scumbag?”
“It wasn’t exactly how I pictured it, either,” Althea shouts back. Her legs are shaking. “How the fuck do you think I feel, that it didn’t even make an impression on you? It’s like I’m the only one it happened to. Do you think that’s what I wanted?”
“I think you wanted what you always want. To win, to get your way.”
“Have I been acting like a winner? Do I seem triumphant to you?” she asks.
“Then why did you do it?”
Althea stares at him, knowing if he even has to ask, it’s already over, she’s already lost. “I don’t think I could have stopped it. And if you could remember, you would know what I mean, and you would know that I’m right.”
Releasing her, he takes a step back, shaking his head. There’s gravel in his voice, a roughness she’s never heard before. “I’ll tell you what I know. This, you and me, this is all just geography. If it had been some other little girl who grew up down the block from me, I would have been her best friend for ten years, too, until I realized one day that I wasn’t sure I even liked her very much. You’re like an incumbent president that no one can stand but you get reelected anyway; you have the advantage because you’re already in, and when someone’s in it’s so much fucking harder to get them out. It should be you, you know,” he says flatly. “It should be you that has this fucking thing. If you threw a pitcher of syrup across a Waffle House and started screaming for no reason, it would just seem typical.”
Again Oliver shakes his head ruefully, like he’s not even that surprised, like he should have known better, like what else could he expect, then he breaks away and runs for home.
• • •
Coby hears her coming up the stairs and waits for her in the doorway.
The apartment above the garage is as fixed up as it’s ever likely to be—a few posters tacked to the walls and a brown velveteen couch he bought at a yard sale, opposite a small television. It hasn’t changed at all since the summer, when she spent plenty of evenings drinking on the roof, listening to the classic rock wafting up from the garage where Coby’s dad worked on his Mustang and smoked joint after joint of Zorro’s product. It smells of cigarette butts floating in the last half inch of beer at the bottom of a bottle. A few Bukowski poems, hammered out on an old typewriter, are nailed to the walls. Something about the reproductions is comforting; she dreads the day Coby starts writing his own offensive missives. Through the doorway off the main room, Althea can see his bed, a mattress thrown down on the bare floor next to a milk crate full of books. A Mexican rap album is playing on the stereo.
“Got anything to drink?”
Coby pulls a six-pack out of the mini-fridge and sets it on the aged black trunk that serves as a coffee table. She tugs two beers free from their plastic nooses and throws one to him.
“I thought I’d seen the last of you for tonight.”
“I was bored. You got a deck of cards?” she says.
He produces one from somewhere in the bedroom and squeezes into a spot on the floor between the couch and the trunk. Splitting the deck in two, he riffles the cards together, then begins to deal.
“Seven times,” Althea says. “You have to shuffle seven times.”
“Is that a superstition or something?” he asks, collecting the cards and cutting the deck again.
“It’s mathematics,” she replies. “What are we playing?”
“Egyptian Ratscrew?”
“Sure.”
As the six-pack dwindles and the pile of cards in Althea’s hand grows, her anxiety slowly abates. The game gives her focus at the same time the beer throws a layer of gauze over everything, making it easier to sit across from Coby and laugh at his unfunny jokes while she trounces him again and again. Even as the pace of their game increases, she’s filled with a steely calm. A wave of apathy gently washes over her, lapping pleasantly at the edge of her consciousness.
Coby produces two glasses, surprisingly heavy and clean, like Garth’s crystal highballs, and pours a little tequila into each. He tips his glass toward hers and says something she doesn’t understand.
“What was that?” she asks as she touches her glass to his.
“It’s a Polish toast. It means ‘a thousand more.’”
As she brings it to her lips she has a glimmer, a mental sneak preview of the rest of the night, beginning with this small sip and culminating with her doubled over in agony somewhere, most likely the floor of Coby’s bathroom, and nothing but trouble in between. Oliver was right. It should have been her with the disease. And she should have grown up on this block, with Coby as her perpetual playmate. She’s nothing like Oliver. He was the good twin and she was the bad; she had even dyed her hair black to prove it.
“I’m sorry I haven’t come around,” she says.
“I get it. You’ve been busy.” Coby turns on the TV and grabs a video game controller from the floor.
She couldn’t see herself in Oliver, except when he was sick. Those were the only times he collapsed to her level. But Coby has been down here all along. Nobody would ever look at Coby and wonder what he’s doing with someone like Althea, just as Coby would never look at Althea and ask her why she is the way she is. If she hadn’t been blinded by history and circumstance, she might have seen it sooner, but here on the couch, alcohol clarifies everything. Despite the many ways in which she finds him wanting, there is something endearing about Coby, something reassuringly boy about the way the cuffs of his jeans hit the tops of his shoes, and the tendons that flex in his thumbs when he plays video games.
They toast again—a thousand more—and this time Althea takes it literally, imagining her future in this s
tifling apartment, playing Mortal Kombat and stealing liquor from Coby’s parents, who would eventually evict them for wrapping his father’s Mustang around the inevitable telephone pole. Renting another apartment somewhere, filling it with drunken arguments and cigarette smoke instead of furniture until they set it on fire during a match game tournament and end up sleeping in her car, a fifth of whiskey in the glove compartment amid Minty’s vegan propaganda and maps of places they would never visit. Someday, there would be a mobile home and a trailer park and eighteen identical white wifebeaters flailing on a clothesline.
Soon Althea’s apathy returns, a warm blanket she wraps around herself, pulling it tight as she joylessly plays Duke Nukem until the bottle is empty and Coby takes the controller and tosses it to the floor. Placing one hand unceremoniously on her breast and winding the other through her hair, suddenly he mashes his face to hers, and she is clinging tenuously to her indifference. His lips are oddly cold, and the Mexican rap album is on repeat for what must be the third or fourth time. Moving her tongue mechanically inside Coby’s mouth, she tries to translate the lyrics in her head; all she can pick out are random words, something about a flavor, a butterfly. She raises her arms impassively as he slips off the bloodstained suit jacket of her Halloween costume and removes her tank top. He fumbles with the clasp on her bra; a full twenty seconds pass without success. She brushes him away and unhooks it herself. The sooner this is finished—well, then the sooner it will be finished. So she pulls his T-shirt up over his head, and when he reemerges from underneath it, he kisses her with even more enthusiasm; he’s mistaking her impatience for lust, for excitement. Desire, even. He takes her hand and leads her into the bedroom. They flop onto the mattress, unbuttoning, unzipping. Coby kicks off his pants and Althea wriggles out of her skirt and then they are naked, and the look in Coby’s eyes terrifies her because it’s victorious. Althea has never been more grateful for the anesthetic properties of alcohol; maybe tomorrow she won’t even remember this. People black out all the time from drinking, she thinks. Maybe I’m blacked out right now and I just don’t know it yet.
She thinks of Oliver crushing himself into her. All the parts of him that were so familiar, and still, so much was new. The look on his face when he pulled her down to him. Not victory, but need.
Coby fumbles with a condom and sits up when he’s ready.
“Turn over,” he says abruptly. “Get on your knees.”
With every one of Coby’s grunts she’s sobering unwillingly, like a diver headed for the surface before she’s ready. When it’s over, the panic goes away and is replaced with something worse when Coby pulls out and looks down with disdain and says:
“By the way, you’re bleeding.”
“Excuse me?” she says.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I’m bleeding?” she says, her voice ringing shrilly in her ears. “The fuck did you do to me?” Althea rolls over and wipes herself with her hand; sure enough, her fingers come away red.
“Lots of girls bleed their first time,” he says. “It gets better, you know. It hurts less.”
It seems impossible that anything could ever hurt more.
“That was your first time, right?” he says.
She grabs her underwear and pulls it on impatiently. The rest of her clothes are in the living room. Coby follows her there, smugly watching her dress. She stalks out the door, not feeling the gravel under her bare feet, not stopping or looking back. She gets herself to the car and steadies herself on the bumper. Bending over, she sticks a finger down her throat, evacuating as much of the tequila and beer as she can. Doubled over in pain. The night has wound up pretty much where she predicted it would.
Althea is tired of being right all the time.
There’s a rumbling in her chest like a train pulling into the station, and then she is crying. Althea can’t remember the last time she cried that wasn’t at a movie, but here she is, the final shreds of dignity dispersing, her breath still sour with tequila vomit, her pubic hair itching because it is matted with her own blood. Suddenly the last four months seem like nothing but a series of tactical errors made in quick succession. If ever there was a time to let the tears rip, she thinks, this would probably be it, so she sits on the ground and lets them.
• • •
Oliver knows her schedule so well he can avoid her easily; by lunchtime on Monday, she’s convinced that’s what he’s doing. When the last bell rings, she races from her class to his, waiting eagerly by the door as the other students file out, but Oliver does not emerge. She looks inside the classroom, but he isn’t there.
“Hey, Al.” It’s Coby, sallow and thin, wearing a black pro-vegan shirt Valerie and Minty Fresh have been selling to support Bread and Roses. It says MILK IS FOR BABIES in white ink, and Althea remembers the day she helped Valerie make the screen for it, spreading some of Nicky’s old newspapers on the floor of Oliver’s kitchen while Minty Fresh played his guitar at the table and Oliver searched an old cookbook for new recipes to make for BAR on the Internet. Coby’s shirt is stained, his pants are too long, and the torn cuffs have wrapped around the soles of his tennis shoes. He’s smiling that awful smile at her, and even though he has her attention now, his hand lingers on her shoulder. “If you’re looking for Oliver, I don’t think he’s here today.”
Althea just stares at him, saying nothing.
“You feeling better?” he asks.
Later, when she tries to tell the story, the best Althea will be able to say is, “And then my head exploded.” But it is so much more than that. It’s like that dream everyone has when you’re trying to run away from something or run toward something, but your legs won’t work right and you can’t get any traction. When Althea throws the first punch and it connects squarely with Coby’s jaw, it’s how that dream would feel if everything came together, and instead of having to convince your body to do what you want, it’s your mind that can’t process how fast your body is suddenly able to go.
Coby doesn’t see it coming. It lands beautifully, snapping his head to the side. The pain shoots up her hand and wrist, quick and electric. He turns to look at her, mouth agape, and he must think she was just making a point, because he doesn’t see the second one coming, either. This one catches him in the nose, and something gives inside his face; blood leaks matter-of-factly from his nostrils.
“What the fuck—” he starts, wiping the blood and looking at his hand in disbelief.
The third punch is a left, aimed at his cheekbone, and this time it blows his head back and his feet go out from under him. On the third punch, Coby goes down.
Around her all motion has ceased, everyone is staring, and Althea doesn’t understand why no one has tried to stop her, and she hopes it’s because Oliver is standing right behind her and everyone is waiting for him to do it. She waits for his familiar tackle but it doesn’t come, and she has the thought, tender but fleeting, that Oliver doesn’t want to stop her, Oliver wants to see Coby torn to pieces also, and before Coby can get up, Althea drops to her knees and straddles him, switching back to her right hand as she hits him again and again, remembering the future she imagined for them, how a picture of the two of them eking out their pathetic life together came to her so easily, had been so real she could smell his dirty socks poisoning their trailer. Blood is oozing from a cut above his eye, from his split upper lip, and there is a stir in the crowd as they realize she isn’t going to stop until somebody stops her, and that’s when the arms wrap around her, dragging her to her feet, but it’s not Oliver, it’s someone else, a hostile grown-up, probably Principal Nelson, whose stubble scrapes against her cheek as Minty Fresh and Valerie rush to get Coby out of harm’s way. He pushes himself backward with his feet and hands, crab-walking, as he looks up at her, bewildered. Minty and Val help him to his feet while eyeing Althea with what she supposes is justified trepidation.
Even though she’s not struggling, N
elson keeps his arms locked around her while Coby disappears around the corner of the hallway, and her face aches from her first smile in days.
chapter six.
OLIVER’S JACKET IS ZIPPED, his duffel bag over his shoulder; he’s watching Nicky sift through the mess on the kitchen table when the doorbell rings. “That’s probably the taxi,” he says.
Fanning out a pile of medical journals, she discovers a thick paperback, the title in raised red lettering. “What the hell is this? Is this yours?”
“It must be Garth’s.”
“What’s it doing in our kitchen?” she asks.
“I don’t know how half this crap gets in here.”
“Should we take it back?” There’s a bookmark two-thirds of the way through. “He wasn’t even finished with it. Maybe we should drop it off before—”
“No. Give it to me.” Oliver snatches it. “We have to go.”
“Althea should be home from school by now; don’t you want to say good-bye?”
“We already said our good-byes. Hurry up.”
“I’m almost ready,” Nicky insists.
“You need to be really ready. Ready like Freddy.”
The doorbell rings again.
“Just tell him to wait a minute. I’ll be right there.” She compiles a haphazard stack of random sections from the newspaper.
“Mom, you’re never going to read the business section.”
She threatens him with the offending material. “Get the fucking door!”
Oliver expects to find an irate cab driver standing on the porch, but Valerie and Minty Fresh greet him there instead. They’re strangely lacking in their typical enthusiasm, nervously pacing the rotting wood boards in their combat boots, hands identically stuffed in their back pockets. Had they been worried by his unexplained absence at school? Had they somehow gotten wind that he was leaving for New York and wanted to say good-bye? Instead of being heartened by the possibility of their concern, Oliver’s irritated. He’d been so close to a clean getaway.
Althea and Oliver Page 12
