Of course, even though my hand was all covered in lotion, I still got up to look. I couldn’t resist. It could have been Hallie texting again. I’d never replied, but that didn’t stop me from thinking she’d text again.
Buzz.
I got up, wiped my hand off on a T-shirt lying on the floor, picked up my phone.
But the texts were from an unknown number.
don’t tell anyone about that okay? pls?
Next one:
this is neecie from work btw
Like I knew any other Neecies!
The third:
sorry to bug you. nobody can know. he’ll get really mad. pls don’t tell anyone Sean
I stared at the screen. I kind of hate texting, because my phone’s an old piece of shit and my thumbs are giant. And worse still, my hand was all slippery. So I just hit the call button on her name and let it ring. Figuring she wouldn’t pick up, because that’s why you text, right? Because you don’t want to actually talk to anyone?
But of course, Neecie picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hi. It’s Sean.”
“Hi.
“How did you even get my number?”
She sighed, very loud. “From the staff phone list that Wendy gives out.”
“Oh.” I always got that list; Wendy updated it whenever someone was hired or quit, but I never looked at it. I only had Wendy and Kerry’s numbers in my phone. There was no one else who worked my job that I could call to sub in for me, anyway.
“Hey, sorry to bug you about this, but it’s really important you don’t say anything.”
“About what?”
“You heard me on the phone behind the store, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, about who I was talking to.”
Great. We’d have to go through this dumb little quiz game, circling around the situation.
“Right. Tristan. Tristan Reichmeier. Hockey guy.”
“Shit.”
“I won’t say anything,” I said, sitting down on my bed. Otis started scratching at the door, and I opened it up for him. He instantly jumped up next to me and started snuffling around my crotch.
“Goddammit,” I said, pushing him away.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“I can’t hear very well on the phone,” Neecie said. “Sorry. That’s why I texted you.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Well, thanks, Sean,” she said. “I know it’s weird, but just . . . thanks.”
“Is he like your boyfriend or something?”
“What?”
“Your boyfriend,” I said, louder and clearer.
“No,” she said. “It’s not like that. It’s kind of . . . I don’t know. It’s just like, you know. Hooking up. I guess.”
“You have sex with him?” I said. Blurted, really. Whoops.
“Umm, well . . .,” Neecie said. “I guess. If you want to put it like that. Yeah. But it’s just sex. Not a real thing or anything. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Neither of us said anything for a minute. I was being silent, punishing myself for blurting. I worried for a minute that she’d hung up. Like she was one of those people who don’t say goodbye and just hang up when they’re done talking. Brad was like that.
Then she said, “I mean, it’s just stupid drama. And it’s, like, no big deal to me that you know. But it’d be worse if other people found out. Just Ivy knows, so far.”
Ivy Heller was this girl Neecie was always hanging around with. She was one of those chicks who barely talked but always dyed her hair weird colors like purple or blue and then, if you looked at her for one second, being that you couldn’t really help looking, since most people don’t have purple or blue hair naturally, she’d give you a shitty evil glare like you were being discriminatory or something.
“Sean? You there?”
“Oh, sorry. Yeah. Don’t worry, it’s cool. I won’t say anything. I mean, I don’t really know the guy, anyway.”
She didn’t say anything. I wondered again if she’d hung up. I wondered if she’d even heard me.
“Hello?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m here.”
“What’s your name short for?” I asked. Because I’d just thought of it. Blurting still happening, I guess. But it occurred to me, talking to her, imagining her on the other end, what she was looking like, and whether her family was around her, like her mom and dad or whatever, and wondering what made them name their baby daughter Neecie. Like, it had to be a nickname, obviously. Nobody named a baby “Neecie.” It’d be like naming a baby “Bill” or “Vicky” or something like that.
“What?”
“Nothing, it’s nothing,” I said.
“Okay, well . . .”
More silence. I didn’t know if I should bother repeating my dumb question. Now that I was super curious.
“I have homework, so I better go,” she said. “Again, sorry to bug you.”
“It’s fine.”
“Okay. Bye then.” Then she clicked off so quickly I felt a little surprised. Weird. Neecie was weird. And not just her name.
Then, it was like I’d just drank a whole can of Amp. I just felt hyper. Like I could run around the goddamn block. Except we didn’t live on a block anymore.
So I rolled on the floor and did some push-ups. Then some crunches. Just to knock off some of the hyper feeling. I hadn’t talked on the phone to a girl in a million years. A girl not Hallie. With Hallie, we usually texted, not talked.
The floor was crumbly and gritty and gross, but I just laid there, breathing hard, Otis trying to lick my face, human sweat being like the sweet nectar of the gods for dogs, I guess.
Just sex? I couldn’t fit it in my head: Neecie was too nerdy to have sex.
I laid on the floor for a long time. Imagining Neecie Albertson having sex. Jesus. It wasn’t hard to picture, actually, me being me, and The Horn and all.
I got up, brushed the crap off myself from my nasty carpet and got into bed. But still, I couldn’t wash out the whole Neecie Albertson sex thing.
Then I felt like jerking it again. Which was pretty gross of me.
But then the channel switched to Hallie again. The first time she’d given me head. We were at her house; I’d been lying on her bed, the one with the big purple blanket, in the same position I was now. And we’d had a dumb fight just before it happened too. But I couldn’t remember what we’d fought about.
The only part I remembered was how it was basically the best feeling in the world. Total relaxing luxury. Not having to do anything at all but lie back and feel it. Feel everything.
And when it was over, it was just over. Nothing for me to clean up, no condom to ditch in the bathroom. And it was quiet, too. Hallie’d get up, without a word, and then come back, usually drinking a glass of water, and then she’d lay down beside me again and still not say anything. That first time she’d put her head on my stomach, her hair tickling me a little. She was always oddly quiet and peaceful after doing that, like she didn’t need anything from me, like she was feeling as good as I was, though I doubted that was true. I didn’t care, though. That first time, I remembered looking down at her and thinking, I would do anything for you. Anything. Name it, and I will do it.
But then I couldn’t jerk it anymore. Because then my eyes were just leaking, dripping down over my temples, into my ears, all over the pillow, and it was like I was being crushed from the inside, like my organs were failing. I sat up, then, and dropped to the floor and did twenty more push-ups, so fast I thought I’d choke. Otis didn’t even move, just slumped his head on his paws as if to say, Enough of your up-and-down shit, man. I’m not moving anymore. Finally, I got back in bed. Otis settled his hot head on my shin, and I listened to the water heater kick on and scream for a million years until I finally fell asleep.
Chapter Five
We were in a stand of trees between two cornfields, me and Eddie and my grandpa and Brad. Deer hunting.
It was earlier than fuck, the sun not all the way up, and it was kind of cold, but not as cold as Eddie was bitching it was, and though I didn’t like smelling like the doe piss that Grandpa Chuck insisted we had to wipe all over us, and I was sick of Brad telling everyone what to do every second, it was good to be here. I loved deer hunting, especially with my Grandpa Chuck.
Eddie was nervous. He wouldn’t stop whispering questions about what was going on, and I didn’t exactly know the plan, either, because this was Brad’s deal. Brad had been out hunting a couple of times this season but hadn’t bagged one yet, so he was extra bossy. I was just glad we weren’t at the same farm where I’d met Hallie last year.
“You two, up that stand over there,” Brad said, pointing at me and Eddie, then at a tree down at the edge of a frost-covered cornfield.
“Why do we have to go up?” I asked. The wind was kicking up and it’d be worse in the tree.
“Don’t be a bitch,” Brad said. “You can’t track for shit, and you know it.”
“I’m a better shot than you,” I said.
“You can’t be still for one second, though,” he said. Which was true. We just stared at each other. Eddie looked back and forth at us.
“Grandpa’s on the south end,” he said. “Once he crosses the road, you’re cleared.”
I nodded. Then I nudged Eddie and we headed toward the deer stand.
“We have to set up a deer stand?”
“No, there’s one up there,” I said. “The guy who owns this land? He leaves them up for people.”
“Jesus,” he said, struggling to catch up with me. “Your brother’s all professional.”
“He’s a dickhead,” I said. “He takes all the fun out of it.”
“What’s it mean, to be cleared?”
“You can’t discharge a firearm across a road; that’s illegal. Technically, that little road there?” I pointed. “Where probably just the farmer and his family go across once in a while? That counts as a road. But, still, it’s kind of a big deal, and the guy whose farm this is? You have to respect their safety and whatnot. Which isn’t, you know, hard to understand. So Brad means, once we see my grandpa, we know he’s flushed anything ahead and we can come down.”
“Oh. Do you always do this, in the middle of a farm?”
I stood at the bottom of the deer stand, motioned to Eddie to go first.
“Sometimes. It’s a fuckload easier than tracking through woods,” I said. “Plus, there’s corn and crap for the deer to eat. Makes sense. And it’s less noisy, too, for us. Less stuff to give us away. Plus you can see better from up high, too.”
Eddie could barely make it up the deer stand. It was kind of hilarious, when I thought of of Hallie doing it in no time flat. Eddie and all his swimming and lifeguarding and caring about his clothes and how tan he was, losing his mind when he broke a pair of his expensive sunglasses. He’d wanted to go hunting with my grandpa and me forever.
Once we got up top, Eddie was still winded. And he looked freaked. Normally, deer hunting was no big thing; we went, tried to fill our tags—sometimes succeeding, sometimes not—and my grandpa did all the field dressing and then we’d haul it out and go have a big breakfast somewhere and then he made it all into venison and that was awesome. We’d eat venison all winter long. But I hadn’t really ever given much thought to the details until Eddie asked me all these questions today. But now he wasn’t talking. Just breathing his frosty-ass breath out, looking around the fields. Like it wasn’t deer coming but some kind of enemy.
I ran my hand down the stock of the shotgun my grandfather had given me for today. It was a nice gun, a 12-gauge, better than the .410 he’d given Eddie. But I had the M16, the Marine-issue rifle, on the brain. I’d watched a show about the history of Marine snipers, and it was pretty cool, what they could do, the scout snipers. The M16 was a pretty sweet-looking gun, too. I liked the scope especially. It was sort of a little-boy idea, but I wished I had it now, since shotguns, having no range, don’t have scopes. At least I didn’t have the goddamn .410. Eddie seemed unlikely to fire it, though. He held it too tight, for one thing. Like it made him nervous. At least the safety was on. I told him I’d tell him when to take it off. I really didn’t want him shooting at shit up here, when I thought about it.
Guns didn’t make me nervous, for some reason. I got how they worked. Pretty simple, really. Not a lot of time for dicking around when it came to guns. You cleaned them, you loaded them, they worked.
“I don’t see your grandpa,” Eddie said, looking through the binoculars.
“Give it a while,” I said.
“What do we do? What if you see one?”
“You don’t have to take any shots,” I said. “It’s fine. It’ll be over pretty quick, anyway. If it happens at all.”
“Oh.” He breathed out a long, visible exhalation.
I’d figured Eddie wouldn’t like hunting, but we hadn’t done anything together, with no girls at least, in a long time. I just wanted to be normal with him again. Do stuff. Get past the whole broken-nose thing, the whole ignoring him all summer for Hallie thing. We’d picked him up in my grandpa’s Suburban at three thirty in the morning, and Eddie’s mom had been standing on the doorstep in her bathrobe, handing him a little tiny cooler and his backpack, as if he was going to kindergarten or something. She looked at us, all decked out in blaze orange, like we were nuts. Eddie’s dad had been there, too, in his windpants and stocking cap, smiling and putting his earbuds in like he was about to go out for a run. Eddie’s dad was pretty fit, he ran marathons and stuff, but he was the kind of dude who got his hair cut every week and liked to golf for fun, not kill things in the woods. And Eddie had two sisters. It wasn’t a big man cave, Eddie’s house.
“Why do you want to kill a doe?”
“I don’t,” I said. “Brad’s the one with the doe tag.”
“But why would you want to do that in the first place? Don’t you want the mothers to live and have more baby fawns and stuff?”
“There’s too many of them, bucks and does, in the first place,” I said. “That’s the point of the hunting season. To reduce the population. Too many deer, and they’ll starve. The cute little fawns won’t have anything to eat.”
“What if the doe is pregnant?”
“She won’t be now,” I said. “That’s not till spring. Jesus Christ. How come you don’t know all this shit? This is like Science 9 shit, Eddie.”
“It’s just weird, is all.”
“Why would you want a doe, though? What’s the big deal with a lady deer? Doesn’t Brad want, like, a giant trophy head with antlers and stuff?”
“Shh,” I said. Because I could hear something. That little picky sound deer made. Skittering over stuff. Deer were dumb. They didn’t know how to keep their steps quiet.
We kept listening, and then soon enough, I could see something. I pointed.
“Where?” Eddie said, reaching for the binoculars.
“Shh,” I hissed at him. I wondered if Neecie’d be able to hear this. Probably not. Neecie wouldn’t be a hunter, if we were cavemen. Some giant creature would probably have eaten Neecie, with her bad ears and all, if she’d been alive back in the Stone Age.
Which meant probably she wouldn’t be a Marine. Couldn’t pass the physical requirements. They’d talked about that in the sniper-scouts show. You had to pass a vision test, so for sure you couldn’t be a Marine if you couldn’t hear. For some reason, as I raised my shotgun and exhaled, the way Grandpa Chuck had taught me, I was bummed out for her.
Then the deer stepped into view, right in front of me: a buck, not a big one, but big enough, judging from the size of its rack. And then, in that weird slidey way deer have, instantly there was another beside it. Like a magic trick, like it had slipped out of the other deer’s pocket. Then another. Three of them, pausing in a row. Like they thought it’d be sneakier if they were hiding behind each other or something.
“Right there,” I said as quiet as possible. Pointin
g.
“Where?” Eddie looked panicked. Like they were going to attack us or something.
“Shh,” I said again. And then, as if they’d heard him, they were running across the cornfield, kicking up frost and dirt, and Eddie was about to say something but I didn’t hear it because that’s when I unloaded the 12-gauge, all five shots.
“Jesus Christ!” Eddie said. He’d been knocked with the brass as they’d been spent. I wanted to laugh. The 12-gauge’s trigger was slicker than normal; most guns, you squeeze the trigger, you don’t pull it. But the 12-gauge was especially light; the barest squeeze made a pretty damn loud shot.
“What the hell, Sean!” Eddie said. He looked like he might have shit his pants. Which made me laugh. That, and I was happy. It looked like I’d got at least two of them. Maybe even all three of them. Two bucks and maybe a doe. Unless it was a first-year buck. We’d need to get closer to see for sure.
I put the safety on, nudged Eddie to start moving. But he just sat there, his breath coming out of his mouth, all dumb.
“Seany, you do all that shooting?” My Grandpa Chuck, calling up.
“Yeah,” I said. “There were three of them. I got at least two. Maybe all of them.”
“No shit,” my grandpa said. “That’s unbelievable.”
“I know.”
“What if they’re not dead?” Eddie whispered. Now he was whispering. Like it still mattered.
“If they’re not, they’ll be soon enough,” I said. “Doesn’t take long for them bleed out.”
“God,” Eddie said, looking sick. Like he didn’t want to come down from the tree.
Eddie had no idea how lucky this was. Not just one good shot, but two or three? If I’d got them all, then I’d filled almost all our tags. Something Brad couldn’t say this year. Or last year, either. I mean, I wasn’t happy to make things dead. But what did people do before, when there were no grocery stores and stuff? This was how you ate. This was how you lived. It wasn’t like we were doing it to be mean. If you wanted meat, well, you had to deal with deadness.
“Where’s Brad at?” I asked my grandpa once Eddie and me were both on the ground.
Perfectly Good White Boy Page 6
