“It’s okay,” I said.
I got the couch and Bill got a sleeping bag on the floor. I didn’t sleep. I waited awhile, then got up, quietly, and retrieved my still-damp clothes from the bathroom and put them back on. I let myself out of the apartment as quietly as I could manage.
I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I was thinking that I’d walk back to the field, but it would have been a long walk in the light of day and a good pair of sneakers. I had neither advantage. I used a pay phone at a gas station to call my mother.
She picked me up, and we didn’t exchange a single word on the entire ride.
August
The night of the Davies Pauliny concert, Willow had been unable to get anywhere near the Porta-Potties as a result of the mob (or so she claimed). Instead, she’d found Andrea, and the two of them had scavenged the area for a long time looking for me; at last they gave up and went home, taking nearly forty-five minutes to cover a distance that usually could be covered in less than five minutes. I never told Willow where I went that night. I told her I’d met a friend when I couldn’t find her, and he’d given me a lift home.
I felt bad lying to her, and the thing is, I’m almost sure she knew I was lying. I think she did make it to our meeting spot. I think she waited for me, and I think she realized at some point that I was never going to show, that I’d ditched her. She didn’t hate me for it—that would have been something I could deal with. Rather, the incident broke her in some way.
So, when she called me up to ask me to go to Florida with her, I think she thought that I’d say no. This is all hypothesis, of course, but it was a different Willow who called me up to go to Florida. It wasn’t the same girl who’d called me almost a year before to invite me to go boating on Lake Mohawk, that was for sure. Willow was about to drive a thousand miles on some wild, reckless adventure, and when she asked me to come, her voice sounded listless. Did she really not care, or was she just prepared for disappointment? When I said yes, the surprise in her reaction was unmistakable. For the briefest of moments I could hear Willow, the old Willow, on the other end of the telephone, and it made me smile.
“This is going to be our journey,” Willow said. “The way I see it is, we only get to be seventeen once, so we might as well enjoy it.”
What she didn’t say, and what I didn’t say, but what we were both thinking, was that when we returned from our excursion, the trial that would determine the fate of the rest of our lives would begin. There was a chance that we would never have another opportunity to do something so young and carefree.
In the week and a half since the concert, Willow had been doing more and more work for Craig. She didn’t talk to me about these things and I had ceased to be her partner in such affairs, but I knew about them. I hadn’t talked to Christian since the concert and I didn’t intend to talk to him again. I no longer felt the need to collect little jewels of information to feed him. I’d convinced myself that he wasn’t going to help me out with the trial, that he never had intended to. The only thing I had left was Willow. I had to go with her to Florida. I had no choice. So we might as well try to have a good time.
Willow never bothered to tell me that the reason we were going to Florida was to do a favor for Craig, and I never let on that I’d already assumed this was the case. Things had changed between us, but we were both trying hard to pretend that they hadn’t.
Despite this or because of this, the Florida trip was our secret. Neither of us told anyone that we were going. I left a note for my mother to find when she came home from work. I’m not sure that Willow even did this, but she might have. The only person who could have known about the trip was Craig, but he hardly counted. Randy didn’t know. The night before we left, Randy asked me if I wanted to go out the next day, to “the movies or something.” It was the only time Randy had ever asked me out on a date, and I said “maybe,” as if I didn’t know that I wasn’t even going to be in the state the next night.
From the moment Willow backed the car out of the driveway, I had the feeling we were running away. It felt like a great big weight had been lifted from my shoulders. We weren’t like those kids running away from bad families or even oppressive environments. What we were running away from was something even more intangible. We were running away from our own lives.
It didn’t matter how fast we went or how many miles we covered. This was something that we were never going to be able to escape. Didn’t we know this? Of course we knew this, but we were just too full of optimism to believe in such a bleak reality.
So off we went in Willow’s father’s car. A cynic like Bill would point out that we had, unbeknownst to me, a trunk full of Ferocity; that it was worse than trying to run away from our problems—we were bringing our problems to others. This is bullshit for two reasons. First of all, people make their own choices and their own mistakes in life. I’m all too aware of this. And second, if we didn’t bring the Ferocity, someone else would have. We were just the mechanical parts that made the weapon work. We were not the weapon itself.
Sometime In August
Who hasn’t wished for a time machine in order to go back and change that one little thing that made everything go ugly? Maybe Sherman wouldn’t have done a damn thing differently—I can’t say. I’ve got a lot of if onlys. They haunt my dreams.
In South Carolina, the highway patrol drives Dodge Chargers. This one was metallic blue. Except for the spinning police light, it looked completely innocuous. I half expected a young guido tough to step out with slicked-back hair and a girl-charmer strut.
“Shit,” Willow said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
We were busted. I could see Mr. Jenkins in my mind’s eye, his face flushed an angry red as he returned from his business trip and found an empty garage. He would have called the cops immediately. That’s the sort of person he is. Then what? Maybe have them issue an all-points bulletin or something. Perhaps there was a nationwide manhunt underway. I fidgeted while Willow continued to swear.
“Do you think he’ll press charges?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Your father. Who else?”
“Oh, him,” Willow said. Then she added, “Do you know that in South Carolina it’s legal to beat your wife as long as you do it on the steps of the court house?”
“Fucked-up state.”
“Yeah, I know. Look, if he asks, we’re two high school kids going to Florida for vacation, okay?”
I nodded. What else would we be?
No guido emerged from the car. Instead, it was a towheaded cop. He did the stiff, robotic policeman walk to our vehicle. He poked his head inside, and there was a flicker of a smile as he took in our tank tops and short shorts. I hated men.
“License and registration, please.”
Willow’s hand trembled as she handed them over. I wondered if he would decide to search the car. Although I didn’t know that our cargo was Ferocity, I knew Willow hadn’t exactly packed light for this trip. I imagined him searching her suitcase and arresting us both for possession.
“You were going a bit fast there, miss.”
“I didn’t realize,” Willow said. “The car rides so smooth.” She sounded like an Acura spokesperson.
“It’s a nice car,” he observed. “Does it belong to you?”
Here it comes, the arrest for stealing a car. I wondered if he’d already radioed for backup.
“My father’s,” Willow explained. There was no point in lying. His name was on the registration.
“New Jersey, huh? A bit far from home.”
“Just going on vacation to Florida,” Willow said. Her voice had become strangely childish. I knew the voice—it was her innocent voice. What she used on her father. Sometimes it actually worked.
“Still got a bit of a trip ahead of you. You driving straight through?”
I tried to smile and look as innocent as I could. The cop, though, wasn’t even looking at our faces. The bare flesh of our thighs proved far more interesting. I
hated the hunger in his eyes, but it seemed wrong to hate someone whose crimes I was also guilty of.
“We were going to stop in a little while.”
“That’s good. Don’t want you falling asleep at the wheel.”
He returned to his car. Willow and I both let out our breath. Nothing about a stolen car, no request to search the car. We might get through this thing unscathed. Little did I know that we would have been better off getting arrested there and then.
Willow ended up only getting a warning. I don’t think such leniency was in any way due to the strength of our character. I think it had a whole lot more to do with the amount of flesh we were showing off in our warm-weather clothes.
So down the road to ruin we went. It wasn’t the first time that a sexual appetite had fueled the fires of my own destruction.
We stopped in Santee, South Carolina, because it seemed as good a place as any to stop.
“Pool’s open ’til eleven,” Willow read as soon as we’d dumped our things into the immaculate Best Western room. “Come on, let’s go.”
Before we even made it to the pool, I could tell we weren’t the only ones who’d decided to do a little night swimming. The sound of voices on water reverberated off the brick walls of the hotel. The voices belonged to a guy and a girl, a good old-fashioned, heterosexual, racially integrated couple. They cavorted in the water. They shouted. They laughed. I fell in love.
“Earth to Scilla,” Willow said, and I looked up. “What the fuck is with you?”
“What?”
“I asked you if you wanted to go in or not.”
“Um, sure.” But I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I was watching a girl with chocolate-brown skin and a pale pink bathing suit treading water in the deep end. She looked like a mermaid.
“We don’t have all night,” Willow said.
I forced my feet to move and we climbed down the stairs into the shallow end of the pool, but I couldn’t stop staring.
The guy with her looked shabby and ugly by comparison. He didn’t have a lot of muscle, but he wasn’t a string bean either. He had a head of bristly dark hair and several tattoos on his pale chest and arms. The right side of his face looked scraped up, as if he’d been in a fight or taken a nasty fall. I stared at him, too, because he seemed so ill-suited for the girl. What could she possibly see in this guy? He had one of those familiar sort of faces. I thought maybe he looked something like some actor I’d seen once in a movie. It was something about his dark eyes, or the set of the jaw, or some other indefinite characteristic that I couldn’t place.
The girl seemed to glow. Her hair was pulled back from her face and neatly braided down the back of her head. It showed off her perfectly shaped face. Her skin looked smooth and flawless from her pristine forehead down to her sculpted chin. Her eyes were as rich and heavenly as her skin. They radiated warmth and goodness. She was fairly tall. Her body was long and smooth. The seamless bathing suit showed off the smooth roundness of her breasts and the pinched thinness of her waist. Her dark legs danced through the water with beautiful ease. Looking at her was like being seven years old and seeing the perfect bicycle in a store circular, and knowing that you just had to have it no matter what it took, but also knowing, somewhere deep down, in that dark place at the center of the soul where reality dwells, that it was never ever going to be.
I needed to have this girl. I needed to possess her fully. Never had I felt an attraction so intense. Forget Andrea—this was something different. This was something deep and powerful. I wanted her so badly it hurt.
I knew, of course, that she was with the shabby boy. She had no interest in me. Any effort I made would be in vain. Still, though, I couldn’t silence my desire.
“Quit gawking,” Willow said. Reluctantly, I returned to reality. “You mind not checking out girls when we’re together? People are going to think we’re together.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, and apparently unavailable. So keep dreaming.”
I turned my back to the deep end. I couldn’t bear to look at something so beautiful when I knew I couldn’t have it. It felt like torture.
“Willow, if that cop today had decided to search the car … ” I allowed the question to go unfinished, could feel it hurtling up to heaven in a plume of smoke. Willow knew where I was going with it. Spelling things out would only make us both feel worse.
“I would have just turned on the old Willow charm.” I rolled my eyes. “What? You don’t think I can be charming? I sure as hell can charm the pants off a horny cop.”
“What if it had been a female cop? This is the twenty-first century.”
“Why do you think I brought you along?”
“Seriously, what would’ve happened if we got pulled over by a morally righteous cop?”
“Like such a thing even exists. Look, I’ve got things under control. I’ll stick to the speed limit from now on. Everything will be fine.” It was anything but reassuring.
“Willow, why are we going to St. Petersburg?”
“For all the right reasons.”
With that, she dove underwater and began to swim straight toward the two lovebirds. I watched with horror and excitement. Would she say something to embarrass me? Would I actually get to speak to the beautiful girl?
Willow burst through the surface inches away from the guy’s arm. He looked alarmed, but then he laughed.
“Well how y’all doin’?” Willow said in a phony southern accent, and the guy laughed again. The girl smiled. “Where y’all from?” she added.
“Boston,” the girl said quickly, quietly, in a voice as beautiful as the rest of her.
The guy gave her a look, but then said, “Yeah, Boston. What about you guys?”
Before Willow could say something stupid with that twangy accent, I said, “New Jersey. We’re from New Jersey.” Then I swam over to them.
Up close, the guy looked more scruffy and unappealing, but the girl was still radiant. Willow, whose bad habits had certainly left her somewhat diminished, clung to the wall and breathed heavily. The guy also clung to the wall, with one tattooed arm. I tread water with the object of my desire.
“Where you headed?” Willow asked.
“Oh, wherever,” the guy said, and I would have had to have been blind to miss the look that the young couple exchanged. There was a whole different conversation taking place in complete silence. The looks, though, were not loving looks. I saw no batting eyelashes, no sultry winks. This was something else entirely. It made me think of parents looking at each other over the head of a child. Whatever they were saying to each other, it was stuff they didn’t want us to hear.
“I’m Willow. That’s Scilla.” She waved a hand at me.
“Aaron,” the guy said, then gestured at the girl. “And Raisin.”
Raisin. The way he said it, it was ugly, but it was a truly beautiful name. The only name that would have suited her better would have been Hershey Bar, but you couldn’t go and name your daughter something like that. Still, she brought to mind an image of the candy bar, its perfect little squares, the shine of the foil wrapper. I wondered if her skin tasted as sweet as it looked. I didn’t think I would ever get the chance to find out.
Perhaps our meeting there in the pool was a random coincidence, but looking back, it seems so strange. If we’d only gotten off one exit sooner, if we’d decided to stay at the place across the street, we never would have met Aaron and Raisin. At the time, I didn’t think it was significant that we did. It seemed like nothing more than a casual encounter.
For an hour, maybe more, we talked about everything and nothing at all. None of us bothered to say where it was we were headed or why we were going there. We were just traveling down the road of life, which for our purposes was named I-95. I took my cues from Willow on this point, but it wasn’t as if I was informed enough to say anything intelligent on the subject. I had the feeling, by the looks that were exchanged, that in the other camp it was Raisin who took cues fro
m Aaron. Either way, we spent our time discussing the absolutely despicable world of high school, about Davies Pauliny, but mostly, we talked about Ferocity.
“It’s the new big thing,” Aaron said. “It’s everywhere.”
“I heard it’s a real thrill ride, the biggest rush around,” Willow said. From the way she spoke, I got the sinking sensation that she was looking for this new thing, this big rush. Alarms sounded in my head.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” Aaron said.
“I heard it’s practically lethal,” Raisin said.
“No doubt a rumor circulated by our own beloved government,” Aaron said. “They’d have you believe that smoking a joint will land you in a hospital bed.”
“I just heard it’s some bad shit,” Raisin said. “It was on the news and stuff. Kids who went crazy from trying it.”
“Parents can make kids crazy and they’re still legal,” Willow said.
I laughed and so did Aaron, but I stopped when I saw the scowl on Raisin’s face. Aaron cupped his hand and splashed some water at her, but she raised her hand and batted it away.
“Ferocity is dangerous,” Raisin said. “It’s not good.”
“Maybe you should just keep your mouth shut,” Aaron said. “It’s not like you even know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s not like any of us really know,” I said. “We’re all just talking about rumors. Maybe it is really bad. Or maybe people exaggerate.”
Silence followed. Aaron and Raisin silently fumed. Willow glared at me. I shrugged my shoulders. We’d accidentally wandered into some touchy territory.
Finally, when the night breeze brought us not only the smell of the fires but also a case of goose bumps, we emerged from the pool into the cool air. Shivering, we wrapped ourselves in towels and dried off.
“I’m parched,” Willow announced. “Is there a soda machine here?”
“Around the corner,” Aaron said. “I’ll go with you. I’m thirsty too.”
Ferocity Summer Page 16
