Crushed

by Laura McNeal

  “It’s just that my letting you . . . It made me feel . . . funny. Bad funny.”

  “Ah,” Wickham said. “You’re a believer. You believe if the rules get written, they ought to get followed.” He chewed some more and smiled. “It’s one of the things about you I find endearing.”

  Audrey said, “And you don’t think the rules got written for a reason?”

  Wickham swallowed, took a deep breath, and laid down his chopsticks. “Look, the other night I was talking to this taxi driver, a middle-aged guy named John Mokumbu or something like that—he was from Nigeria or Rwanda or someplace, a nice guy with this great cackling laugh—and we were just talking and I said, ‘What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?’ and he got quiet and said, ‘Something that happened to my son.’ His son was a paperboy, and one morning a white kid threw a snowball at him from a passing car and hit this guy’s kid in the eye. They did three operations, but he’s still blind in that eye.”

  Wickham sipped from his glass, and Audrey said, “That’s horrible.”

  He gave a somber nod. “It gets worse. The bills were astronomical, but the newspaper that employed the kid didn’t pay a penny. Why? Because under the law, that twelve-year-old boy was categorized as ‘a little merchant’—not an employee.” He stared at Audrey. “That boy had delivered papers for that company for three years—never late, never missed a day— and because of what you might call ‘the rules,’ he could be labeled an independent contractor and the newspaper company didn’t have to pay a penny.”

  Audrey saw where this was going. “Look,” she said, “there are good laws and there are bad laws. That law seems really unfair, but the no-cheating rule is pretty straightforward.” She said now what she’d already formulated in her mind. “It’s what protects those who do the work from being equaled or exceeded by those who don’t.”

  Wickham picked up a single chopstick, and for a few seconds used it to draw furrows through his rice. “Here are the facts of the matter,” he said, with his eyes lowered. “My dad’s back in South Carolina, and my mom and I are here wondering whether we’ll ever hear from him again.” Wickham looked up. “No, I haven’t lost my sight in one eye or anything, but, you know, metaphorically, we’ve all been hit by icy snowballs.” He paused and let his gaze settle on Audrey. “You say the rule keeps those who do the work from getting hurt, but you tell me, who exactly does it hurt that you let me sneak by with a C minus on a physics quiz?”

  Audrey studied Wickham’s hands. His fingers were flattipped, and strangely intimate to her at that moment, as if she had been used to seeing them covered by gloves. “Nobody,” she said, somewhat startled by the sound of her voice. Then, with more resolve: “Nobody at all.”

  He reached across the table and lifted her hand—the very thing, she realized, that she’d been willing him to do. “You have the slenderest fingers,” he said, and his touch, combined with these words, seemed to awaken every part of Audrey’s body. For just an instant, she thought her eyelids might actually have fluttered.

  Mrs. Wong came to the table to ask how everything was. Wickham sat back and, releasing Audrey’s hand, introduced Audrey and then added, “Audrey’s shooting for valedictorianism.”

  Mrs. Wong nodded and smiled demurely.

  Wickham smiled up at the woman and asked, “When did you know Mr. Wong was Mr. Right?”

  Calmly Mrs. Wong said, “First time I see him.”

  “I’m not the first one to ask that question, am I?”

  Mrs. Wong smiled and blinked slowly. “No,” she replied, and discreetly left them the bill, which Wickham took care of merely by signing his name. (This was just one more of his mysteries, as far as Audrey was concerned, right along with his serious talks with African cabdrivers. Normally these things would have bothered Audrey, but she felt so overcome by Wickham’s handsome face, body, and wry, easy manner that every time her instincts flared up and warned her that she didn’t know him very well, she casually snuffed them out.)

  Wickham had gotten a ride to the restaurant, so after he signed the check, they drove around in Audrey’s Lincoln, which Wickham found amusing. (“My dorm room at Leighton Hall was smaller than this,” he said.) They stopped by the Old Town Pharmacy to pick up a prescription his doctor had called in for him (“Imitrex,” he told Audrey, “for migraines”), and then they drove along River Road, talking and listening to The Mikado, which for a month now had been stuck in Audrey’s cassette player.

  “So let me get this straight,” Wickham said. “The girl is named Yum-Yum, and the guy is Nanki-Poo?”

  “Right,” Audrey said.

  “And they live in Titipu?”

  “Right,” Audrey said, laughing.

  “Well,” Wickham drawled, “I just hope I don’t have dreams about this.”

  Two hours streamed past. When Audrey finally pulled up in front of Wickham’s house, a trim, two-story brick house in one of Jemison’s old, upscale sections, she turned to look at him. Without any hesitation or awkwardness whatsoever, he leaned close and kissed her. His lips were soft and moist and smelled sweetly of sugar, and when he pulled away, she wished he hadn’t. It was her first kiss, it was a perfect kiss, and she didn’t want it to be over.

  He got out of the car and came around to her window. “You know what this is, don’t you?” he said.

  “What?”

  He gave her his easy grin. “The beginning.”

  And then Wickham Hill walked into the house.

  Chapter 20

  Audrey’s Father

  Audrey couldn’t sleep that night. Every time she closed her eyes, thoughts of Wickham Hill came swimming into her mind and could only be stopped by opening her eyes. She got up, did some homework, wrote This is the beginning in her green notebook, stared out the window, went back to bed, and still couldn’t sleep.

  At 1:15, she heard her father come home, but instead of him tramping slowly upstairs, the way he usually did, Audrey heard the refrigerator door open and close, then the scraping of a chair, then silence. When Audrey put on her robe and went down, no lights were on, and it took her a moment or two to spot her father sitting motionless in the dark dining room.

  “You okay, Dad?” Audrey said.

  She could make out his dark profile shifting, his face turning toward her. “Oh, hi, Polliwog. Did I wake you? I was trying to be quiet.”

  “I was already awake,” Audrey said.

  “Studying?”

  “Yeah,” Audrey said. It seemed simpler than the truth.

  “Worrying?” her father said.

  This was a surprising question, not the kind of question her father ever asked. “No,” she said, “not really.”

  “Because you shouldn’t worry,” her father said, in a voice so low it was almost as if he were speaking to himself. “You’ll get plenty of chances for that later on.”

  A few seconds passed; then Audrey said, “Dad?”

  “What, Polliwog?”

  She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say, but she didn’t like this, standing here in the dark hearing her father ask strange questions and say gloomy things in a quiet voice. “Why can’t we turn on the lights?” she said.

  This brought her father to life. “What do you mean?” he said. “Has the electricity been turned off?”

  This was weirder than anything preceding it. “No,” Audrey said, “I meant, do we have to talk in the dark?”

  “Oh,” her father said, sitting back. “Sure. A little light would be fine.”

  But when Audrey flipped on the lights, her father visored his hand over his eyes, as if shielding himself from harsh sun. The skin under his eyes sagged in heavy, waxy folds. Beside him on the table was a can of Milwaukee’s Best. He was wearing the same worn suit he’d been wearing the last time she saw him.

  She said, “So you sold your good car. The one you said was for sunny days.”

  He nodded, and didn’t even ask her how she knew. “Now what will you do on sunny days?”
r />   He’d turned away from her now. “Walk,” he said.

  Audrey thought he might explain why he’d sold the car, but he said nothing, and the silence had a heaviness to it.

  “Is everything okay, Dad?”

  “Everything’s fine,” he said quickly, and made a grimacing kind of smile. “Just a long day at the office.” Another second or two passed, and then he slowly stood up. “Let’s hit the hay and dream sweet dreams,” he said.

  Audrey did finally sleep, but she didn’t dream at all that she could remember, and when she awoke early and glanced out the window, her father’s everyday car was already gone— which would have depressed her more if she hadn’t at that moment remembered that the night before, Wickham Hill had leaned across the broad front seat of the Lincoln and closed his eyes and kissed her.

  Chapter 21

  Knoll Talk

  “He did?” Lea said in a voice soft with wonderment, and Audrey nodded.

  “Nuptials on Sunday,” C.C. said.

  The girls were back on the knoll today, eating with their collars turned up. Lea and C.C. peppered Audrey with questions, which she answered discreetly, trying not to indicate how completely she was smitten. Finally C.C. summed it up: “Well. Your first kiss, and it came from wickedly handsome Wickham Hill.” She beamed a smile at Audrey. “Not bad.”

  Lea frowned. “I’ll tell you what bad is. Bad is getting your first kiss from Artie Hall on the squash court.”

  Audrey laughed and separated a cluster of currants in her hand. Artie Hall was a math genius who’d gone to the Tate School for a while. At the time of the squash-court kissing, Audrey had actually been envious. At least someone had a crush on Lea, even if he looked like a baffled giraffe.

  “What does Wickham Hill drive?” C.C. asked.

  Audrey shrugged. “He got a ride to the restaurant, and I drove him home.”

  “He got a ride?” C.C. asked. “Like with his mom?”

  “I don’t know who gave him a ride,” Audrey said. “And I’m not sure I care.”

  “He seems like the sort of guy who would have a car,” Lea mused. “Not the sort of guy who gets rides.”

  “What difference does it make?” Audrey said.

  Lea didn’t seem to notice the hint of peevishness in Audrey’s voice. “Maybe he left his car behind when he and his mom left South Carolina,” she said.

  Audrey thought about this briefly. It didn’t make sense to leave a car behind when you moved to a new state, but the truth was, she didn’t care if Wickham rode to dates in a bus. She just wanted to look at him, and sit beside him in her car, and have him lean forward to kiss her. This morning, before school, he’d sent an e-mail saying, Problem. Now I can’t eat dinner without you. Pick you up at seven? Audrey counted the separated currants in her palm—seven. Seven, she thought. Seven, seven, seven.

  Lea was saying, “I saw that Clyde Mumsford guy in Mrs. Arboneaux’s room a little while ago. He was at one of the potter’s wheels, making a pot. Or trying to.”

  “Really?” C.C. said. “At lunch? Was anyone else in there?”

  Lea shook her head. “Just Mrs. Arboneaux.”

  Audrey stared off into the distance and tried to imagine Clyde Mumsford throwing pots, but it wasn’t easy. Pot-throwing didn’t seem like the kind of thing vaguely creepy Clyde Mumsford types did.

  “Check it out,” C.C. said, nodding toward the quad, where Theo and his goons swept through like prison guards. Even from here, Audrey could see kids averting their eyes, looking up again only when Theo’s group had safely passed.

  “Miscreants,” C.C. said. Lea added, “Muckers.” Audrey thought, To-do list, and didn’t say anything at all.

  They put their lunch gear away and collected their books. From the knoll, they all went their separate ways, and when Audrey found herself cutting through the art wing, she slowed to peer into Mrs. Arboneaux’s room.

  Mrs. Arboneaux wasn’t at her desk, but, toward the back of the room, Clyde Mumsford’s tall body could be seen bent over the potter’s wheel, both hands on a wet clay vase, which, as it twirled, grew taller and taller and thinner and thinner until, finally, it collapsed.

  Clyde Mumsford’s eyes closed, his head dropped, and the wheel began to coast to a stop. For perhaps three seconds he sat, head down, shoulders slumped, perfectly still. Then he suddenly and roughly scraped the clay together and slammed it to the floor. He stared at the flattened mass for a moment. Just as he began to lift his head, Audrey stepped back from the doorway.

  Chapter 22

  Another Point of View

  Clyde had no control over the most important things in his life—the growth of the cancerous nodules within his mother’s body, for example, or who Audrey Reed spent her time with—but here, working with the clay and the wheel in Mrs. Arboneaux’s room, the results were completely his own doing.

  Spending his lunch hours in Mrs. Arboneaux’s room had been Clyde’s idea, but his mother was the reason behind it. One day, just before school started, she’d been thumbing through a thick-papered catalog and had come upon a blue-and-pink vase with a slight hourglass shape. After staring at it for a full minute, she’d shown it to Clyde and said, “There is the perfect vase for the first lilacs of spring.” Then, with a wry little smile, she’d added, “And it’s only one hundred and seventy-nine dollars.”

  Clyde regarded the photo. It was nice, he guessed, but a hundred and seventy-nine dollars? “Kinda pricey,” he said. His mother had nodded and continued browsing. A few days later, seeing one of Mrs. Arboneaux’s students carrying a vase around, Clyde wondered if he couldn’t make one himself, and had paid the art teacher a visit.

  “So you want to throw pots?” Mrs. Arboneaux had said. When Clyde had nodded, she’d said, “Any particular kind of pot?”

  From his wallet he’d unfolded the page he’d torn from the catalog and had handed it to the teacher.

  Mrs. Arboneaux had laughed, but it wasn’t a skeptical laugh. It was merely a laugh of pleasant astonishment. “Well,” she’d said, “at least there are no spouts or handles.” She kept smiling as she looked directly at Clyde. “Who’s this for?”

  Clyde looked down.

  “Is this for your mother?”

  He kept his eyes lowered.

  “Okay,” Mrs. Arboneaux said. “When do you need it?”

  “Before the lilacs,” Clyde had said, in such a low voice he had to repeat it.

  “Ah,” Mrs. Arboneaux said. “Well, we might have time, then.”

  Two months had passed and Clyde was making solid progress—he’d learned how to knead his clay, center it, and throw it into a basic rough cylinder—but he was having a hard time re-creating the curves of the vase (“bellying out,” Mrs. Arboneaux called it). He was supposed to try to let his inner and outer hands pinch the clay lightly, but not too lightly, and the way to do that, Mrs. Arboneaux said, was “to relax and practice, practice, practice.”

  And so today Clyde had been sitting at the potter’s wheel in Mrs. Arboneaux’s room, wet clay running smoothly through his hands while his right foot steadily pumped the wheel. One hand was slipped into the interior of the pot; two fingers of the other hand ran along the outside base of the clay. To pull up the walls of the pot, he began gradually to exert a pinching pressure between his inside and outside hands.

  When he’d sat down at the wheel today, he’d noticed one of Audrey Reed’s friends—the pale, pretty one with the arctic blue eyes—glance in at him, and he’d immediately wondered what she called him in her mind. “Mummy”? “Freak”? “The Croakster”? Because whatever term she used, Audrey Reed would use. He thought of the word written on the front of Audrey’s green notebook: Hopeless. Hopeless hopeless hopeless. When he’d had to quit Pop Warner because of his mother’s cancer, he’d told his father he wanted to keep playing because he wanted to play high school football, and his father had said, “Sometimes you have to put your hopes in a safe place and come back to them another day”—which had made no sense at
all to Clyde, because how could you play football later if you didn’t learn how to play football now? It was more or less the same with Audrey Reed. She was rich now and she’d be rich later, so what was the point of stashing hopes in a safe place?

  He thought of the way Audrey Reed’s face had lit up the day before when she’d seen the new boy in the hallway.

  The easy way the new boy talked to her.

  Clyde pinched the clay a little tighter, pumped the wheel a little faster.

  The way, as Clyde had passed, she hadn’t even seen him.

  His hands pinched tighter, the clay thinned in his hands and rose and then, suddenly, it collapsed. He dropped his head, took a deep breath, and let the wheel coast to a stop. He sat slumped over with his eyes closed for a few seconds, then—he didn’t know why—he pushed the clay together and slammed it to the floor, where it flattened and sat.

  The abject mass, Clyde thought, and as he raised his eyes from it, he sensed movement at the classroom door, though when he looked, there was no one there.

  Chapter 23

  Transported

  It was 6:57 that night, and Wickham was due at seven.

  Audrey stood before the full-length mirror in her bathroom and wondered where they were going to eat and whether she was too dressed-up. She’d impulsively bought an outfit that afternoon: new shoes, new hose, new earrings, and a thin black spaghetti-strap knit dress. There was something about the cut that made her seem gracefully slender instead of depressingly flat-chested.

  6:58.

  Audrey turned sideways and studied her reflection. She’d read in a fashion self-help book that thin girls, by dispensing with bras, could get away with “subtle nipple exposure.” She turned to the side to see if she was, indeed, getting away with it. She’d bought a matching beaded cardigan to go with the dress—“the modesty cardigan,” as she thought of it. She put it on, thinking that Oggy would never have approved of this dress.

  6:59, and a set of headlights swept into the driveway.

  Audrey stared again at the mirror, and for the first time she could remember, she felt fine about what she saw. Besides, Oggy was in Germany. She took off the cardigan.