by BK Loren
Laura’s eyes light like the flash of a camera—everything frozen for that second. The guys in the truck roar, words but none of them comprehensible, all of them obscene, then Laura peels out, tires screeching, back end fishtailing. She runs a red light and cuts off onto Lookout Mountain Road, a steep thing that coils skinny as a whip up the side of a mountain. She and Vicki crack up laughing, but it doesn’t seem like laughter to me. They clench their teeth, lips pulled taut, eyelids propped open like puppets, and they’re so giddy I can almost see the nerves underneath their skin, feel the electric current pumping through their bodies like hot sparks.
I’m in the back seat, and when Vicki asks her question, I laugh a little bit, too. It’s funny, the randomness of it all when you’re sixteen and the world won’t make sense no matter how you twist it; still, I know Vicki shouldn’t have done what she did. When I see headlights bouncing in our rearview mirror, swerving from one side of the narrow, sinuous road to the other, I really know she shouldn’t have done it.
“Are they following us?” Laura says, incredulously.
Vicki looks back, and their laughter recharges like the sound of an engine downshifting to pick up speed. “Sheeee-it.” Their words mock fear, all in fun.
But that changes. We near the top of the mountain, and our 1967 Chevy Nova is too clunky, too fatigued to make this feel anything like the very cool high-speed chase Laura and Vicki are pretending. The car chugs along at thirty-five, fifteen on the horseshoes, and the truck tailgates us, the guys in it quiet now, not leaning out the window, not playing any games.
Laura pulls out a cigarette, touches the end to the red hot coils of the car lighter, inhales. “Shit,” she says, a whisper, no mockery this time. Her eyes cast upward to the rearview mirror.
“Are they still there?” Vicki says.
Laura nods, her eyes skittish, from mirror to road to mirror.
We’re coming to a scenic overlook with a small parking area. I say, “Stop the car.”
“What?” Laura says.
“Pull over, and stop the car.”
Vicki turns all the way around in her seat to glare at me. “Fucking crazy.” She looks back at Laura. “She thinks she can fucking beat them up.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Laura snorts, because this is what she and Vicki hate about me, that I don’t smoke pot or cigarettes, and already I’m teaching a martial arts class at a private high school. They want nothing to do with my goody-goody, health nut, oh-so-philosophical bullshit, and just then, the truck goes from tailgating to bumping us. We feel the slight jolt, enough to steer us off course for a split second, almost enough on this skinny road to send us flying over the edge of the mountain. Water wells in Laura’s eyes, but no tears fall. “Fuck,” she says. She pulls over, shifts into neutral, then turns around in her seat and looks at me.
Before going out that night, Laura and I were hanging out at her place by the pool—unheard of in our little cracker box suburb where front yards consist of tufts of grass in dry dirt, the whole area cluttered with Big Wheels, car transmissions, and stacks of old tires. Any day of the week, you can see fathers sitting in lawn chairs under their carports, radios tuned to Broncos highlights. They don’t move, other than to sip their iced tea or beer. But Laura’s parents are different. They’re real partyers; they spend their money on fun, rather than necessity, and as far as most high school kids are concerned, Laura’s house is the place to be. Her parents are active in the community—PTA, church barbecues, Sunday evening softball, the Elks Club, and because her mother is the Avon lady, people frequent their house, strangers who become friends because Laura’s mother, a woman with dark auburn hair and a Lois Lane body, is sweet and gracious. “Thank you. Come again,” she says.
“Thank you, Norma. Thanks for the iced tea, too.”
Laura was allowed to smoke in the house. She was allowed to say bullshit and fuck. She had cool parents.
As we were getting ready to leave for the night, her father joined us out by the pool. He leaned on the cheap umbrella table, sipped his cocktail. It was not his first of the day. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and shorts in an effort to be suave, but with his bony legs and long face, he looked like Pinocchio on a tropical vacation. Laura and I were just getting out of the pool, and she stopped for a minute to talk to him. “Can I use the car tonight?” she said.
“Where you going?”
“Out.”
The smart-aleck answer that every teenager gives bothered Laura’s father, I could see it in his eyes, but he said nothing. He just turned back and gazed at the pool, lazily, as if he were rich and had all the time in the world. Then slowly, smooth as a Vegas lounge singer, his arm reached out toward Laura and he tucked his first two fingers into the cup of her bra, feeling her breasts. “You need money?” he said.
Laura pulled back and pushed her father’s hand away. She said, “Dad.” He retreated like a shunned boyfriend who knew he’d get what he wanted in private. He handed her a twenty and the keys. He laughed a little.
The headlights flood the car like an interrogation, then go dark. It’s pitch black up here, the stars like holes torn in a blanket of night, the light of heaven shining through, if you believe in heaven. If you don’t, it’s just a black dome specked with light that is already history, the distance creating a chasm you could never cross. And it is silent.
The guys don’t close the doors as they get out, and the beat-up, powder blue Ford looks winged, too heavy to fly. There are four of them, and for a second I wonder how all those guys were crammed into the cab of that truck. Then my mind clicks in; I size them up. One guy is skinny, probably not considered strong, but his arms are long as a monkey’s. He’s wiry, and I know he’s more powerful than he thinks. Another guy is huge, solid as a pit bull, but his legs are skinny and he locks his knees with every step. He’s an easy target, and I’m not one to wait. Once, when I answered the phone and heard an obscene phone caller whisper into the receiver, I gave him my address. Then I went out and sat on my front lawn. He never showed. No unfamiliar cars drove by. My mom and dad were angry, but the whispering voice never called again.
These guys, however, are not on the end of the phone line. They laugh as they walk toward us. They swagger, swig their beers, take their time. They’re not bent on hurting us, not really. Their pride’s been hurt—and they half-believe Vicki’s provocative question was a come-on by a bad girl who wanted them to follow her. They might be half-right, but when you’re seventeen and pregnant, you don’t always know what you want. All these thoughts run through my head in a few seconds, because they’re not really thoughts. It’s just the way my body responds to fear: assess the danger; find the quickest way to skirt it. And this time, I realize, we can skirt it. I look at Laura and say, “Floor it!”
She stutters to say something, but I interrupt.
“Pull a U-ey, then floor it!”
Laura wastes no time. In a minute, we’re flying down the road we had crawled up seconds earlier. The guys from the truck scatter like pool balls to get out of our way, and Laura and Vicki find this hilarious. They howl louder than ever.
I sit with my head propped on the back seat between them, peering out the windshield. There’s a turnout behind some bushes, and I tell Laura to pull off and cut the lights.
“What the fuck?” Vicki says.
Laura does what I say.
“What the fuck? Fucking stupid. No, Laura, keep going.”
When the truckload of guys passes us, Laura laughs, a real laugh this time. Her brown eyes catch mine in the rearview mirror, a kind of thanks that doesn’t need words. Vicki turns quiet. We pull out and follow the distant taillights of the Ford down Lookout Mountain, James Taylor singing that sweet lullaby to himself, and no way for any of us to turn around on this tight mountain road.
At school Laura and I have become estranged. I carry a paperback in my pocket and read whenever possible—lunch, study hall, mandatory assemblies—and Vicki and Laura make fun of me w
henever possible. When they retell the story of what happened Friday night, it goes like this:
Laura picks me up before school, and Vicki and her friend Cindy are already smoking a joint. Cindy hands the stogie to me, obligatorily, and as usual, I decline.
“She’s too good for us,” Vicki says. “’Bout got us killed the other night.”
“What?” Cindy says.
“Thought she was all hot shit with her karate crap. Got us to the top of Lookout Mountain, four guys after us, and she tells Laura to pull over, like she’s going to take them on.”
Cindy’s eyes go wide. “Did you?”
I shake my head no.
“No fuckin’ way. She couldn’t. Chickened out so we had to speed down the mountain at the last minute.”
“What about the guys?”
“They passed us, went on their way.”
I haven’t known Cindy all my life. She’s Vicki’s best friend in the way I am Laura’s, since first grade. Still, Cindy seems disappointed in me, and it’s hard not to let it get under my skin. She drags on her cigarette, closes her eyes, and rests her head on the open window. The wind tangles her long, dark hair.
When we get to school, Laura, Vicki, and Cindy run ahead of me because Adam Dupree, recently voted “Best Hair,” is standing at the school entrance, waving to them. I hang back, take my time getting to class. At noon, I’ll leave these familiar hallways in order to teach at a private Catholic high school called Marycrest. Already, I’m looking forward to the lunch bell.
I have a picture of Laura and me that was taken in first grade. Our faces beam at the camera, and our blond hair falls in curls around our shoulders in a manner I’ve seen only on dolls. It’s out of place, our hair, because it is perfectly well behaved, and we are anything but. Our eyes squint at the camera, not with fear or to hide from the bright flash, but because our smiles are so wide we can’t help but squint. We hold hands and kneel in front of three other kids whose gazes meander to the borders of the photo. Our free hands make fists, not for fighting, but as if we’re trying to rein in the excitement that is pulling us gently but firmly through this remarkable life. We look like we should be in a pop-up book, instead of flat on the page. We have that much energy.
The photo is a still shot that embodies, for me, my entire childhood friendship with Laura. From first to third grade, we shared the same classes at school. We did well in our studies, but we talked too much—mostly to each other. During recess, we usually stayed inside, writing, “I will not talk. I will not talk.” We shared secrets, made pacts, swore we’d remain forever friends.
When we did make it to recess, we played four-square, a game at which Laura excelled. She was an athletic, competitive kid who, one day, used her hard-earned winnings in foursquare to declare that, for a week, Wilfred Yost would be the leader of all games. Wilfred was the school’s whipping boy. His clothes were always torn, and he picked his nose with less shame than most of us. But for a week, he was king of the court, by Laura’s command. She was well liked, wicked-smart, determined.
When I returned to Colorado in high school, I anticipated my reunion with Laura. We’d go into her bedroom and talk for hours. We’d confess things we wouldn’t dream of saying to another person.
The meeting, however, went nothing like I’d dreamed.
We did scream and hug and do all the things girls do when they haven’t seen each other for a long time, and we did sit in Laura’s bedroom, catching up on old times. But ten minutes into our conversation, her eyes drooped, then meandered, lighting on nothing. We were sitting on the floor, and she twisted around, reached up, and opened the drawer of her nightstand. She pulled out a compact mirror, lines of coke sparkling like the tail of a shooting star. “You want some?”
I shook my head.
She pulled a rolled-up dollar bill from the same drawer, snorted two lines, cleaned the mirror with her finger, and rubbed the dregs along her gums. She shook her head like a woman getting out of a swimming pool, refreshed. “They have good shit in L.A.?” she said. “I heard they have good shit out there.”
It wasn’t that I had never tried drugs. I’d lived in L.A. in the late sixties, early seventies, when a single concert at the Forum could get you high—no chance of claiming you didn’t inhale. But everything I ever tried made me sick, or lethargic, or just plain stupid. I didn’t get the draw, and when I told Laura that, she lost interest again. She looked around the room as I spoke. She fidgeted.
Oddly, as if our childhood pact had been chiseled in stone tablets, we kept seeing each other. A month or so into our awkward, struggling friendship, Laura told me her biggest secret. We were in her room again, and she was smoking a Kool. We had plans to go out that night, but she was dragging her feet. I said, “We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
“I want to.” She sat in one place.
“We could stay here, hang out by the pool.”
“It’s my father. He doesn’t really want me to go.”
“I thought he said it was okay.”
“It is okay. He said it was okay. It’s just, he makes me sleep with him.”
“What?”
“He makes me have sex with him if I want to go out. If I want to drive the car, have friends over, anything.” She was speaking in the same tone of voice my other friends used when they said things like, “My dad won’t let me go to parties.” “My mom won’t let me drive.” “My parents want me to get all A’s.” “My father makes me have sex with him”—as if whatever takes place within your own family is the benchmark for what is normal, acceptable, inescapable.
I don’t remember how I responded. My memory fades to black when I recall the moment. I remember Laura telling me that Mitsy, Laura’s older sister, had gone through the same thing—her father raped her when she asked for permission to do anything; it was the family rule. I learned that Vicki’s father sexually abused her, too, and that was one reason Laura and Vicki had become such good friends.
Laura and I didn’t go out that night. Instead, I slept over at Laura’s. I didn’t want to leave her alone. We talked until way past midnight, then she took a small handful of Valium and went to sleep. I lay there awake, wondering how I could be a real friend, someone who could get her out of this situation. When I came up with nothing, I tried to forget about it. But it was like a splinter of glass underneath my skin. I forgot it was there till something touched it. Then the sharp sliver dug in deeper.
After Laura told me, I began to see it more often. Mr. Deloria was shockingly indiscreet, as if he had a right or, sometimes, as if trying to make an example of Laura, daring me to object. He knew I’d studied martial arts, and he found the notion of a woman being able to defend herself inane. “I’ve got a black belt, too,” he’d say. “And I’m not afraid to use it when someone needs it.” He eyed Laura.
Things fell apart in the most fascinating ways back then. The day yearbook photos were taken, Adam Dupree, best hair, arrived on campus with a completely shaved head, bald as a Zen monk. Then, after school, he asked me to a party at Laura’s. It was unprecedented: I was a geek; he was a star.
Adam and I arrived at Laura’s place stylishly late. Her father greeted us at the door and handed us both a beer. Mr. Deloria was popular with the kids, an all-around good guy, a father who would dance with us and not tell us to turn down the volume when Robert Plant sounded like he was spitting pieces of his lungs into the speakers.
To this day, I sometimes wish I’d been raised Catholic. Maybe then I would have known the significance of the St. Christopher medals my friends wore back then, and I would have understood that popular prayer my friends liked so much, the one asking God to grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. It was a wisdom I did not possess at sixteen.
The party was a big hit. Mr. Deloria had rented a mirrored disco ball and hung it on a cable above the pool. The red, yellow, and green floodlights that nor
mally lit the area like a cheap Hawaiian luau refracted off the ball. Cool. Psychedelic. On the patio, kids danced in front of a strobe light, their silhouettes flickering like disjointed frames of a black-and-white movie. Kids smoked pot, French-kissed each other randomly, no parents to stop them. We drank beer. We cursed like adults. It was a good time.
Adam Dupree was the social magnet, as usual, this time not because of his hair, but because of his lack of it. People asked him if they could touch his head. They took bets on whether or not it was a joke—maybe Adam had donned a skullcap for the day of photos and the whole thing was a fake. I took a back seat to his popularity, and eventually, I slipped inside the house, hoping maybe I could help Mrs. Deloria bring out more pretzels or pizza.
The Deloria house always smelled a little foul to me, a combination of stale cigarette smoke, booze, and a fleet of small dogs (dachshunds?) that Mrs. Deloria raised and sold. Save for the dachshunds, asleep in their crates, the place was empty. A dim, sallow light, like pus, lit the kitchen. On the linoleum table sat several bowls of Fritos, Bugles, sour cream dip, and a pink and white cake. I sat down, away from the crowd, rejuvenating my slender extroverted tendencies before I returned to the party.
I leaned back in my chair, sighed, and closed my eyes. That’s when I heard a sound coming from the darkened living room. I tried to tell myself it was the dogs, but I knew before I opened my eyes what was happening. I knew Mr. Deloria had not seen me sitting in the darkness. It was Mr. Deloria, grunting.
I stood up, and I walked toward the living room. There, I saw the silhouette of his skinny body. His back was to me, and Laura was against the wall, her father’s body pressed too close to hers.
I froze. I didn’t know whether to leave or to confront him. Before I made my decision, Mr. Deloria pushed Laura aside and walked toward me. “You having a good time?” He smiled.
