by Kim Hood
So there hadn’t been any pressure to try to be cool or anything, which was why we probably ended up together in the first place. When Dell came over with bottles of cola for all of us, I held mine up and said the dorkiest thing. May the force be with you, because, yes, I tend to get a bit obsessed with certain movies, even if it’s sometimes years out of step with everyone else.
I twisted the beads of the bracelet Emma had made for me, thinking of that night. It turns out Dell knew a lot about Star Wars. It turns out he was happy to talk about that topic all night, which turned into kissing, which was probably his aim all along, because I don’t remember talking about Star Wars much once we’d been together for a couple of weeks.
That’s what happens though, isn’t it? You think you have this great connection with someone, just because they say something you care about, but really, it’s just an excuse to go off and make out with them. It’s like those mating calls that birds make. Once you are with someone, there isn’t any need to keep making the same noises.
Still. I had really liked Dell. I know that I should still really like him. There’s nothing not to like. Okay, so there are some limitations to him. He is a little socially awkward, in a way that you only notice after you have known him for a while. And he doesn’t dance – not at all, not even in that drunk, end of night kind of way. And conversations with him are sort of limited to the immediate happenings. But none of that is really bad. It actually makes it pretty comfortable to be around him.
But sometimes, like now, when I didn’t even care enough to go home to change into something nicer, or at least less blood stained, before going to his house, it crossed my mind that maybe Dell was just convenient to be with. Being with him meant that I never had to think about what I was doing on the weekend. I never had to think at all—I just had to roll through his window and into a world where the screen ruled. It told me what to think. Easy.
I liked that Dell mostly liked to stay in, and didn’t try to drag me to parties. Once, only once, he told me that his dad had drank enough alcohol for the both of their lifetimes. I could see his point. Alan wasn’t known for being a ‘happy’ drunk. People kind of avoided him as soon as he had more than one beer in him.
I liked that I could be going over to Dell’s house without a stitch of makeup and just thrown-on school clothes, and Dell wouldn’t notice. I knew what to expect, and that was maybe a life saver for me. At Dell’s, I didn’t have to make up rules for myself to make it through each hour, or pretend that I actually gave a shit about conversations so that I didn’t offend anyone.
So, yeah, maybe I wished a little that I felt something more, if only so that Brenda’s jealously wouldn’t be so, so wasted. But on the scale of most shitty to pretty good, Dell was on the pretty good end of my life.
That was about what I was thinking when I went to open the window to the basement rec room and found it locked. Dell never locked the window. We don’t exactly have a huge theft problem in Verwood.
I was rapping on the window for the third time, when Dell opened the front door wearing a suit. Well, it was as close to a suit as Dell owns – a button down shirt, a jacket and his best pair of jeans. I had only seen him in that sort of get up once before, at his uncle’s wedding. I’d thought he looked pretty hot in it then.
For some reason, seeing him in it now just made me think of Farley. I imagined Farley standing beside him in his brown corduroys and huge Guatemalan hippie-hoodie. It was hard to tell what kind of body was under that, but his hands were beautiful. It was only now, with Dell standing in front of me instead, that I remembered how beautiful they were.
‘I hope you’re not dressed for a funeral!’ I said, looking to see if his dad’s truck was in the drive before I went in the front door. It wasn’t. Usually Dell would have at least attempted to reply with equal sarcasm, but he just stood there, shuffling from foot to foot, until I reached the steps.
‘It’s your birthday,’ he said, as if I didn’t know. ‘I wanted to, you know, make it special.’
Special. I didn’t like the sound of this coming from Dell. I peeked in the door suspiciously. What if he had a bunch of people in there, and here I was still wearing clothes splattered with my sister’s blood?
It was worse though. At first I wasn’t sure what it was because the hallway was pretty dark, but when I looked closely, what I saw were rose petals. Red rose petals leading down the hall and to the kitchen. It was all I could do to stop myself from getting a broom and sweeping them up. It was so wrong in so many ways. Blood-red petals. Roses. Red roses. Leading where? This couldn’t lead anywhere good.
The rational part of me could see Dell buying the roses, tearing them apart and putting down these petals, not because he thought it would make my birthday special, but because someone had told him it would. It wasn’t his fault that it only made me think of a trail of blood.
So I smiled. I bit my tongue. I mean, I really bit my tongue, until I tasted iron flooding my mouth. It was a sensation I could hold on to. If I didn’t hold onto something I wouldn’t be able to follow that blood trail through the kitchen and down the stairs.
Dell was right behind me, grinning like a Cheshire cat. No, that’s not right. I think I was grinning like the Cheshire cat. Dell was smiling more like a big yellow Labrador. I tried to imagine him like one, so that I would only want to hug him, instead of flailing out and hitting him as I ran the other way.
Down the stairs, with the yellow Labrador right behind me.
There wasn’t anybody down there though. And there wasn’t some mad quartet ready to serenade us, while we ate lobster and sipped champagne, either.
There was just a little box, obviously wrapped by some shop owner, and a bouquet of roses. Dell handed me both of these as soon as I had collapsed on the sofa in relief.
‘Come on, Jane, open it,’ he urged, reminding me even more of an eager puppy. He really was so sweet.
I swallowed blood and tried to look as sweetly back at him, though I was starting to feel like throwing up now.
I was careful with taking the wrapping paper off. Silver paper with black tiger stripes through it. Deep purple bow. God, what if it was a ring? The thought made blood drain to my feet. I felt it dripping down my veins, leaving ice in its wake.
Inside, nestled in sliver satin though was … at first I wasn’t sure. It was a pendent. A big circular pendant. On a chain. It was chiselled gold, with a fairy on a toadstool inside the circle, so shiny that even the meagre light from the bulb on the ceiling made every carved detail glint.
Dell wanted me to put on now. He was actually holding his hands out to help me put it on. And I let him; the heavy pendant knocked against my chest like a medal as he tried to fasten the clasp at my neck.
It was a horrid thing – unless of course you were mad into fairies, and I don’t think that I had ever mentioned anything like this to Dell. But it was a medal all right. It was a medal to reward me for using Dell so spectacularly for so long.
‘Do you like it?’ His face was lit up in anticipation. I’m sure it had cost him a fortune. And he still hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t said a word. I still couldn’t say a word. I nodded and smiled my Cheshire cat grin instead. Which made him smile back at me in the most genuine way.
‘I wasn’t sure if you wanted to do anything,’ he said, still sitting up straight, in his good clothes. I wasn’t used to seeing him out of his slumped position on the sofa. There was only one thing ‘to do’ in Verwood if you were underage and couldn’t go to the pub, and that was to go for dinner at Shirley’s. I really couldn’t face that though.
Poor Dell. He had gone to so much effort. Everyone had. Even Mom had tried her best in the end. It didn’t help. All I felt was tired.
I smiled at him again, but I could feel a sting in the corners of my eyes.
‘I’d really like to stay in,’ I risked saying, ‘with you.’
I nearly felt all defences let the tears through when Dell grinned back at me and nodded. I
was so relieved.
Dell ordered pizza instead. It’s our only delivery choice in Verwood, but that is okay because it’s pretty good pizza. And I kept feeling relief until it came. Everything was back to normal. Dell flipped through the television channels, and then turned on the game console when there was nothing on.
But I couldn’t seem to quite find our groove again. Usually I filled the empty spaces with banter. My voice was somehow gone. The circle hanging from my neck seemed very heavy. Very, very heavy and I couldn’t stop thinking of that sensation. I picked up another piece of pizza, even though I had only eaten the pepperoni off the first piece. I wasn’t hungry, but I needed to have something in my hands to stop myself from ripping the chain from my neck.
Dell had his eyes firmly on the screen now, immersed in running from the sniper who was firing at him from the burned out building across the street. All I had to do was sit there, like every other night. Sit there and enjoy this really good pizza. The medal was ruining everything.
I watched Dell play, watched his hands automatically find the buttons that were the extension of his on-screen world. His fingers were too short. Not for the game, they worked just fine for that. But just, too short. I felt annoyed at myself for even thinking this. What the fuck had I ever cared about fingers for? I didn’t. But I couldn’t help being irritated by them.
‘Dell, can we watch something instead?’ I couldn’t just sit there and think about how Dell had the wrong hands. I had to stop thinking all together.
Dell switched off the console and turned the television back on. There was still nothing on, and he kept going through the channels. There were only bad game shows and talk shows on. Every second channel was adverts. Shoes, antacid pills for heartburn, antibacterial spray for cleaning, Zantec for anxiety, Diovan for high blood pressure. Dell was going through the channels again, only faster and all I saw were drugs flashing across the screen now. Companies trying to shove drugs down our throats. Were these the same companies that made the cancer drugs? The ones that made Emma so sick?
Even though Dell had stopped on a channel now, I couldn’t stop seeing the ads flash through my mind. It was a strange sensation.
‘Stop!’ I knew I’d shouted that because Dell jumped so much he practically levitated from the sofa.
‘What is up with you, Jane?’ he asked when he’d landed again. He squinted at me, as if he were trying to read the fine print. I wish I knew what it said myself. I felt like I had to stop the pictures in my head for anything to make sense.
‘Stop! Please stop it!’
‘Stop what?’
I knew I wasn’t making much sense. I was tired. I just had to calm down. Fast though, because Dell was still squinting at me.
‘It’s just, it’s been a weird day. Can we maybe talk?’ I remembered how much better I had felt after talking the whole bus ride with Farley.
Dell turned the television off. Not just with the remote, but by going straight to the button on the television. I suppose it was on the way to his docking station, because he stopped there, scrolling through his files. Dell didn’t have a lot of music, but the stuff he did have was mostly metal, which I hated. He knew that, and so we hardly ever listened to music together. He picked the only album that he knew I liked though. Dell was such a decent guy. Thinking this was making the corners of my eyes go all prickly again and I blinked hard as Dell came back to sit on the sofa.
He didn’t talk, but just tried to put his arms around me. I’m sure he had pictured a kind of rugged-man-saves-damsel-in-distress moment, but it ended up way more awkward than that. One, you really can’t ‘sweep’ someone into your arms when you come at them from the side. Two, it was me he was trying this move on.
This might be the place to tell you just how sexual, or not sexual, my relationship with Dell was. Everyone totally assumed that we were doing it every other day. We could have been; there wouldn’t be anyone noticing to stop us. But we weren’t.
It wasn’t exactly anyone’s business to know that though. Even Tracey wasn’t sure what I had or hadn’t done with Dell. I was vague about it.
When Dell and I got together, I was completely hot for him. He only had to look at me and I imagined everything I wanted to do with him. The only reason we didn’t go all the way in the first few months we were together was that I was fourteen and I guess I was scared. There’s this kind of code around Verwood. Any girl who does it before they’re fifteen is a complete slut. Don’t ask me what the difference between fourteen and fifteen is. Also, I’m not sure why that should have stopped me. It isn’t like I had to tell anyone. But anyway, Dell was sixteen, and even though we never talked about it, he knew the code. He could encourage me to ignore that code, but only so much if he was a ‘nice’ guy. And Dell is most definitely a nice guy – in every sense.
But then what happened, before I reached fifteen – the grey area, not necessarily slutty, but a tad young – was that Emma got really sick again. The cancer showed up in new places; it was the first of her surgeries to remove bits of lung. You know those horror movies where you think the scary parts are all over, and then a hand reaches out of a calm lake to grab the main character? It was like that.
And then there was Grandad. Well, there wasn’t Grandad anymore, but, you know, there was thinking about there not being Grandad anymore. Basically, he died. And I didn’t like to think about it. I didn’t like to think about him at all. He wasn’t my favourite person. Or, at least, I wasn’t his favourite person. So, yeah, somewhere in there he died.
I say somewhere, because Emma was way more important at the time, and when I think back about it, that’s what I remember. That’s what I try to remember. I didn’t even go to the funeral because Emma’s immune system was too shot to chance her spending an afternoon in the company of everyone else’s germs and so I volunteered to stay with her instead. She was a little more important than an old guy who hadn’t even liked me much.
Dell thought I didn’t want to make out anymore, or do anything else, because I was so upset about it all. Maybe it really was the reason, or what made it happen in the first place anyway. I don’t know; all I know is that I kind of stopped feeling anything then. Have you ever tried to kiss a guy who you feel absolutely no attraction to? It would make you gag. It was like one day Dell was this guy I could barely keep from jumping, and almost the very next day he was this guy I only wanted to hug like a teddy bear.
I am probably a complete coward, but I thought that pushing Dell away every time he tried to put his tongue in my mouth might hasten a breakup. It didn’t though. Dell has stuck with me for a whole year – like a brother. Did I already say that he is the nicest guy I have ever met? Except maybe my dad. My dad is pretty much in a tie with Dell for nicest guy.
Tonight, though, I was sixteen. Sixteen is a completely acceptable age to have sex, especially with a boyfriend you have been with for over a year. Hell, there were probably bets on as to whether we’d end up married, because it would be more normal than not around here to marry the guy you are with when you are sixteen. If you think that is a bit twentieth century, you probably haven’t grown up in a village of 423 people. Around here, it is the norm.
So, I can’t know what exactly was going through Dell’s mind, but I knew the rose petals and the beautifully wrapped fairy medal and the music just for me, meant that this night meant something to Dell. Besides acting very strangely, I hadn’t exactly steered him from thinking that it meant something to me too. He’s not a mind reader.
After the awkward hug, Dell just moved in closer. He managed to get me facing him and then kind of buried his head in my neck. This didn’t look like we were gearing up for a talk.
‘Jane, you are so special,’ he whispered in my ear. His hand was just reaching out, ever so gently, to bring my face around to meet his, and I couldn’t bottle up the feeling of needing to get rid of that pendant any longer. Even as I stood up, I hated what I was going to do to Dell. If I would have paused even for a second, I mi
ght not have done it, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I physically could not stand it anymore. I’d crack up if I did.
I grabbed the pendant and yanked it as hard as I could, snapping the clasp. I put it as gently as I could on the coffee table.
‘Dell, I’m not special. This is me, just me.’ I took a breath, trying to think of how I could explain, but I didn’t understand this myself. Everything was starting to buzz and my thoughts were getting drowned in it. ‘I can’t.’
That was all I could say, and I walked up the steps to the kitchen before I could see my words put an end to his delusions.
Before I had gone to Dell’s house I’d rang Dad and left a message saying I was doing something with Tracey and the girls. I didn’t exactly spell out what that something was, but I did say ‘the something’ was for my birthday. Since Mom and Dad had clearly forgotten that fact, I thought it would probably cover me. I really didn’t want to face any more of the thrown-together family birthday.
I was lying of course. I never told them when I went to Dell’s. It isn’t that they didn’t know that Dell and I were together, but it wasn’t a topic I went looking to talk about. I didn’t even know if my parents liked him or not. I just know that at one time there would have been lots and lots of discussion if I had said I was going over to some guy’s house. Like, what I was planning to do there and which parents were going to be home. Why I should do something else instead. Now all I had to do is not talk about something and it was as if it never happened as far as my parents knew.
I was a bit worried that Dad would still be up when I got in, and I would have to actually lie, rather than just avoid talking, but I shouldn’t have worried about that. He hadn’t even pretended to stay up by falling asleep in front of the television. All of the lights, except the one in the entrance, had been turned out. I doubted that Dad had wanted to play out my forgotten birthday any more than me.
