by JL Bryan
“Don’t touch him,” Jenny said. She moved herself in front of Seth, blocking Ashleigh’s access to him.
“Get out of my way, Jenny Mittens,” Ashleigh said. “I can touch my own boyfriend.”
“Try it.” Jenny raised her own bare hand. “I’ll scratch your face open, Ashleigh. Remember how that turned out last time?”
Jenny couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Ashleigh scared, but at that moment, Ashleigh looked terrified and confused. Ashleigh’s jaw rubbed from side to side, working the muscles in her face.
“Let’s kick her ass right now,” Cassie said, bouncing on the balls of her feet, full of new energy. Her jaw was making the same weird, grinding movements. “I am so ready for a fight or something exciting to happen.”
“No,” Ashleigh warned Cassie. “Don’t touch her. Don’t let her touch you.”
“Why not?” Jenny asked. “Cassie, bring it on. I can take you.”
“No!” Ashleigh threw an arm across Cassie’s stomach to block her. “Listen to me, Cassie.”
“What’s your problem?” Cassie asked Ashleigh. “It’s only Jenny Mittens.”
“Why don’t you tell her?” Jenny asked Ashleigh.
“Why don’t you?” Ashleigh countered.
“Is there something dangerous in my touch, Ashleigh?” Jenny asked. “Or is there something dangerous in yours? Something that makes people love you, even though nobody should?”
Ashleigh froze. She was looking a little pale.
“But that’s your secret, isn’t it, Ashleigh?” Jenny said. “Everyone thinks they like you because you’re just so lovable and so perfect. But you enchant them. It’s your big secret, isn’t it? You touch and they love you. Maybe, after all these years of doing it, you even believe all these people really do like you.”
Jenny stepped towards Ashleigh, raising her bare hand towards Ashleigh’s face. Ashleigh screamed and ducked behind Cassie, using her best friend as a shield.
“That’s why you hate me so much, Ashleigh Goodling,” Jenny said. “Because I’m the one person you can’t control. You do remember. You know you’ll get Jenny pox.”
“Shut up, Jenny Mittens!” Ashleigh lunged forward on the balls of her feet, then stopped herself and swayed back. “You’re such a bitch. A crazy, crazy bitch. Doesn’t she sound crazy?” she asked Cassie.
“Totally,” Cassie agreed automatically, but her face looked dubious. Maybe it didn’t sound completely, entirely crazy to her.
“All three of us have it, Ashleigh,” Jenny said. “Different kinds of it. Now we all know it. And you know what I can do to you.” Jenny batted her open hand at Ashleigh’s face, and Ashleigh recoiled.
Jenny took Seth’s hand and they started down the stairs. Ashleigh stood and watched them with her fists clenched at her hips. Cassie gave Ashleigh a confused look, and so did Davis and Kevin.
“Man,” Davis said. “What have y’all been smoking?”
“And do you have any left? Ow!” Kevin added.
Jenny and Seth continued down the stairs with their hands together. Jenny’s touch actually seemed to help him, like giving a strong cup of coffee to a sleepy drunk. His eyes became clearer, and he walked straighter as they reached the bottom of the stairs. It was the first time her touch had ever helped anyone.
Jenny led him through the central hall, which widened into the front receiving hall, with her eyes on the open front doors and the driveway and the night beyond. They only needed to get through that doorway, and they’d be free.
They passed the monumental granite chimney under the stern glares of Seth’s grandfathers. Jenny accepted a wine glass from a passing waitress, drank it down, replaced it on the tray.
A loud commotion sounded from the ballroom. Ashleigh and Cassie charged into the front hall, followed by the Barretts, the Goodlings, and curious onlookers trailing after them to see why their hosts were running.
“There they are!” Cassie shouted. She and Ashleigh both pointed at Jenny.
“Stay put, you two,” Mrs. Barrett ordered. “Liza May, I am disappointed in you. Where are your parents?”
“Her name isn’t Liza May, ma’am,” Ashleigh said. “Her name is Jenny Mittens. Morton.”
Jenny couldn’t remember another time when Ashleigh had said her last name correctly.
“Is this true?” Mrs. Barrett asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jenny said.
“She wasn’t invited,” Ashleigh said. “She’s a country grifter.”
“No, I invited her,” Seth said. “I told her she could come over anytime. Right, Jenny?”
“She wasn’t on the invite list,” Ashleigh said. “You can check.”
“I don’t think I know any Mortons,” Mrs. Barrett said. She turned to her husband. “Honey, do we know any Mortons?”
Mr. Barrett looked at Jenny very carefully with his bleary, drunken eyes. Jenny knew the look well—he was trying to solve a problem that would have been very easy, had he been sober. He took a long drink. He sighed a little. Then he said, “Mr. Morton. Business associate of mine. I probably invited them. Sorry, honey.”
“We’re going for a walk now,” Seth said, still pretty doped. “I like Jenny.”
“I don’t think so, Jonathan Seth Barrett,” Mrs. Barrett said. She opened her hand. From her fingers, she dangled the plastic baggie of cocaine that had once belonged to Davis Jordan, sophomore in the pharmaceutical school at the College of Charleston. The amount was much diminished, no more than a thimbleful.
“Ashleigh tells me you brought this into my home,” Mrs. Barrett said. “And gave it to Seth and the other kids.”
“I did not!” Jenny said. “Ashleigh and Cassie were doing it in the bathroom with some random guys—”
“We happen to know Ashleigh very well,” Mrs. Barrett said. “And I don’t believe she would lie about this.”
“Why would we bring it to Mrs. Barrett if it was ours?” Cassie asked. “Duh.”
Mrs. Barrett raised her eyebrows, as if to say that Cassie had just made a very astute point.
“Ashleigh’s a manipulative liar,” Jenny said. “She makes Dick Cheney look like Mr. Rogers.”
“That is an ugly thing to say about Dick Cheney!” Dr. Goodling snapped. “And my daughter, as well.”
“I didn’t know anybody had coke,” Seth said in his doped-out voice. “Who has coke?”
“It’s a little late to pretend, Seth,” Ashleigh said. “Heaven knows you’re obviously all druggied up.” Ashleigh darted in and seized Seth’s other hand, the one Jenny wasn’t holding. Jenny was already too stunned at the drug accusation to react. She didn’t register the importance of Ashleigh’s sudden grab, or the need to stop Ashleigh, until it was too late.
Seth’s eyes drooped, his pupils dilated, and he gave Ashleigh a big, relieved smile. Ashleigh pumped the energy hard to take control of him, and an enormous wave of it washed through Seth and into Jenny. Jenny felt a sudden, painful, physical urge to strip off her clothes and jump in bed with both Ashleigh and Seth, but especially Ashleigh. Jenny’s heart bloomed, and she really could feel it open up like a delicate, many-petaled flower in the middle of her chest. She didn’t know how she could ever have disliked Ashleigh at all. The girl was magnificent. She was angelic. Jenny longed to be close to her, and felt sad that her touch would only hurt Ashleigh.
“Let go of her,” Ashleigh said. Seth released Jenny’s hand. The bright, glowing adoration of Ashleigh faded quickly inside of Jenny, but left her with a happy, drugged afterglow. After all, Ashleigh was still nearby. Maybe Ashleigh would do it again.
“Come on, Seth,” Ashleigh said. “Let your mom sweep up the trash.” Ashleigh steered him up the front staircase. She kept her shoulder under his arm as if he were drunk, which he wasn’t, and she were supporting him, which she wasn’t.
“Where were you and my son going?” Mrs. Barrett asked.
“Nowhere,” Jenny said. “Just for a walk.”
“She told Ashleigh sh
e planned to drug him up more and have weird drug sex with him.” Cassie spat the words out, fast as machine-gun fire. Her eyes were very bright, her jaw grinding hard now. “She wanted to have weird drug sex with everyone.”
“I didn’t say that,” Jenny told them. She was still buzzing with Ashleigh-euphoria. Too bad Ashleigh was out of the room.
“Are you calling Ashleigh a liar?” Mrs. Barrett said.
“Oh, no,” Jenny said. “Ashleigh wouldn’t lie. Not without a good reason.”
Cassie seemed confused by this.
“Then you admit it,” Mrs. Barrett said.
“Okay,” Jenny said. She was a little dazed. What was she admitting to? The whole room had a warm, weird glow to it. Seth’s dead ancestors leered down on her like funny zombie puppets.
“I think it’s best you leave,” Mrs. Barrett said. She put the cocaine in her own purse. “And we’ll be holding on to this, in case we need to contact the police.”
“Okay,” Jenny said. More than twenty people were looking at her now, some of them amused by the minor scandal.
A college guy emerged from the ballroom, carrying a glass of beer in one hand and a whiskey sour with the other. He saw Jenny, raised his chin upward in a greeting, and winked at her. It was the boy who’d given up his chair to Jenny on the veranda.
“One whiskey sour for the pretty lady,” the guy said. He sauntered towards Jenny, but none of the crowd moved to let him through. Twenty heads turned to stare at him with disapproval.
He stood there, perplexed, for a long minute.
“Oh-kay…” he finally said. He headed for the stairs, keeping both drinks. The faces all turned back to Jenny.
“You’ll want to go that way.” Mrs. Barrett pointed at the door.
Jenny followed her finger. She turned her feet in that direction and wandered outside. Dr. Goodling stood with her while the valet fetched her car.
“Young lady, you seem troubled,” Dr. Goodling said.
“Actually, I’ve never felt this happy,” Jenny said. She had eventually learned that her dad didn’t call Dr. Goodling a “carnie-booth crook” just as a slur. Dr. Maurice Goodling had, decades ago, been an actual game-booth operator in a traveling carnival.
“But that’s just the drugs, isn’t it?” Dr. Goodling asked. “How would you like to feel high all the time, without any drugs? Do you realize how wonderful it feels to be born again, to be part of a new covenant with God through His Son?”
“I’m okay,” Jenny said. She watched for her headlights on the driveway. She wanted to leave. Something had gone wrong inside the house and she had to leave, but she couldn’t remember exactly what. The details were fuzzy and wouldn’t sharpen in her mind.
“Have you studied the Word of God?” Dr. Goodling said.
“No,” Jenny told him.
“You should come by my office,” he said. “Call the church and schedule an appointment. We can talk about the way to righteousness.”
“Okay.” Jenny watched her car arrive and she drifted toward it. The valet smiled and gave a joking little bow as held the door for her, and then he closed her inside.
“Thank you,” she told the valet.
“Yeah, thanks for the tip, lady,” he muttered as she drove away.
Jenny swerved down the long brick driveway, occasionally slipping off the road into the lawn. She made it out the gates and onto Barrett Avenue, then pointed the car towards town. The Barretts owned a buffer zone of farmland around their house, so it was an empty drive for a few minutes. She felt good inside. She drove slowly through the night, thinking delicious thoughts about Seth and Ashleigh, images and fantasies full of longing and need. She wondered when she could see Ashleigh again.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The day after the party, Seth’s father called him into the office, a spacious room located at the back of the first floor. Seth had never liked the office. It was well-lighted, but by small rectangular windows near the ceiling, giving the lower part of the room a stuffy, shadowy feel. As a boy, Seth had been frightened of the collected trophies of past generations: the lion head mounted above the fireplace, the stuffed dead falcon perched on a lacquered limb jutting out from the wall, the big buffalo-hide rug, and the row of heads that looked down on you from the wall as you sat on the visitor side of the desk: jackal, hyena, jaguar, grizzly bear, snow leopard, a big black wolf that always reminded Seth of the Three Little Pigs. Great-grandfather had been quite the skilled hunter, if by “skilled” you meant “able to hire a gang of men with high-powered rifles.”
Below the heads were a row of old photographs like the one in the back stairwell, depicting Seth’s grandfathers going back several generations, the same men immortalized in oil around the front stairs. He didn’t know what scared him more as a boy, the dead animals or the stern looks of his ancestors bearing down on him and casting their judgment from beyond the grave.
The rest of the room was dark wood paneling, like too much of the house. One entire wall was taken up by rows of pigeonholes and wooden file cabinets. In the back corner sat a liquor cabinet that looked like it came from an Old West saloon, every bit of it handmade, with no two pieces exactly alike: the rough-hewn drawers and shelves, the iron handles, the thick cloudy glass doors in front of the bottles. Seth’s father stood there now, pouring amber whiskey from a bottle with a faded, illegible label into two 19th-century drinking glasses that had a primitive, not-quite-circular look.
“Did you still want to talk?” Seth asked.
“Close the door and have a seat,” his father said. Seth took one of the chairs, which had wide arms and a hard back, upholstered in leather pinned by brass tacks. The ancient material creaked under Seth, and it smelled like drunk old men.
Seth’s father eased into a taller chair across the big black slab of the desk, which was carved entirely from petrified wood. A blue iMac sat on top of the desk, as incongruous in the office as a Roomba sucking up bone fragments and rock chips on a Neanderthal cave floor. They had a satellite on the roof for high-speed internet, since the TV and phone companies still didn’t offer that in Fallen Oak.
His father placed a glass of the old whiskey, neat, in front of Seth. Then he raised his own glass.
“To another year gone,” he said.
Seth clinked his glass against his father’s, and drank a sip. It was smooth and smoky on the way down. In his belly, it turned into a fire that burned up his esophagus and into his brain. He wondered what whiskey became if it aged too long.
“So,” his father said. “Are you still thinking about medical school?”
“I never was,” Seth said. “I think physical therapy is about my speed.”
“We looked into that. It sounds like you’re just a nurse and a personal trainer. We don’t think you’re setting your sights high enough, Seth.”
“You didn’t break out the good whiskey to have this talk again,” Seth said.
His dad looked at him for a minute. He opened a wooden box, lifted out a cigar, and lit it with a match. He offered Seth one, and Seth shook his head. Whiskey and cigars, he thought. The big guns.
His dad eased back in the office chair and smoked. Eventually, he said, “You’re right. This isn’t that talk again. This is a bigger talk. This is about responsibility.”
“Okay,” Seth said.
“It’s not a pleasant word, is it?” his dad asked. He gestured at the row of dead men behind and above him. “When you look at those old pictures, you see it in their faces. Makes them all sour. Like they’ve been carrying a load of bricks on their backs.”
“They don’t look happy,” Seth said.
“You can feel the weight of them in this house, can’t you? The old generations pressing down on you. I never liked it here as a kid. Don’t like it now.”
Seth smiled. “Me, neither.”
“We’ve been in Fallen Oak a long time,” his dad said. “The last of the great families, that’s what my father used to call us. Most people who could leave, a
lready have. The horse market’s long ago abandoned. The cotton exchange is just a roofless shell full of weeds. The textile mill—you probably don’t remember that, either. And this town really started dying when they built the federal highways. We’re not any kind of crossroads anymore.
“Your great-grandfather didn’t keep all his eggs in this henhouse. He put money out in New York and London, kept the family diversified--he didn’t build this house with just farm mortgages and loans to haberdashers. Now, we’re seeing some good things in Shenzhen and Bangalore. That’s where you’ll want to focus during your life, China and India.” His father looked at him carefully, making sure this sunk in.
“Okay,” Seth said. He took another nip of whiskey, letting it burn him inside. “China and India.”
“Now, we have a lot of legacy investments in this town, a lot of assets bringing in bad returns. There’s negative growth. There’s falling property values. There isn’t much future. So why do we stay here, with the old Merchants and Farmers Bank?”
“Um,” Seth said. He took another burning sip, stalling for time, but his father kept looking at him and waiting for an answer. “I don’t know, Dad. So we can squeeze the last few pennies out of the people that are left?”
“No.” He puffed on the cigar, regarding Seth intently. “We could sell out to a national banking chain, if we wanted. Wash our hands of all this bad debt, all the headaches. But we don’t, and we won’t. Because if we did that, one-third of this town—that’s not an exaggeration—would lose their homes or businesses tomorrow. Most of them, within a few years. The people would leave, property values would hit rock bottom, the town would implode. There’d be nothing.
“There’s a lot of leverage in this town, backed by shrinking assets. The Merchants and Farmers Bank keeps the town alive on float, month to month, year to year. We rework credit terms all the time. We take what they can pay.” His dad puffed the cigar for a minute. “Now, tell me why.”
“Because we’re such generous, kindhearted people,” Seth said.
“No.” He flicked his cigar into a big, wrinkled ashtray made out of a rhinoceros foot. “Because we settled this town. My great-great-great-grandfather cut down the giant oak at the crossroads to make way for his farm and store. He left it there as a landmark. All that is forgotten now. You don’t even learn about it in school. No respect for your own history, no knowledge of it. These kids all think everybody came over on the Mayflower. And you remember why we moved you from Grayson Academy to Fallen Oaks High in ninth grade?”
