“Oh, sure, I remember,” I lied. My words came out gravely. I cleared my throat. “My head really hurts. I was hoping a nurse had taken mercy and slipped you some pills for me on our way out.”
“Sorry,” Ashley said with an exaggerated sorry face, bottom lip poked out. “The nurses were preoccupied with your boyfriend.”
“Doug?” The gremlin in my head had given up on the balls of increasing size and was now taking whacks at the inside of my skull with a baseball bat. “You know my boyfriend, Brandon. He worked at Slide with Clyde with us this summer? You hired him?”
“Ohhhh.” She and my dad gave each other another look through their sunglasses. Ashley said, “We thought you’d gotten together with Doug, the way the two of you were acting last night.”
“Right. That was because of the wreck. We were so relieved to be alive.” I hoped I sounded embarrassed instead of mortified. No wonder Doug had thought we were together now and I would break up with Brandon for him. What had I done? Had I freaking humped Doug Fox in the ER?
“Wasn’t he the one there with the policeman last Monday at the emergency room?” my dad barked. “And suddenly you’re in a wreck with him?”
“I have almost every class with Doug, and we’re on the swim team together.” I had been ready to accuse Doug with some conspiracy theory a few minutes ago, but now that my dad verbalized it, I heard how ridiculous it sounded.
“Honey!” Ashley patted my dad’s hand insistently, glancing at her diamond watch. “We need to leave for the airport right now and we haven’t finished packing, haven’t showered . . .”
My dad stood and held out a strong hand to help up his fiancée. Ashley continued to fill the void among the three of us with busy talk until they escaped inside, leaving me alone on the edge of my seat, straining my ears for the familiar breath-sounds of the ocean.
Dizzy and sick, I wandered into my bathroom and found a bottle of over-the-counter pain pills. I took two. Examined the label. Under absolutely no circumstances was I to take more than two at a time. I shook out another and swallowed that. Read the label again and wondered who had written it and how serious she was. Then slammed the bottle into a drawer. It was too much, calculating the line between reasonable under the circumstances and overdose.
I filled the bathtub. This would use all the hot water and ruin the showers for my dad and Ashley, but they probably were taking one together anyway. Then I pulled off my damp clothes. And got another shock when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.
Mottled purple extended from my left shoulder diagonally down my breast and disappeared at my waist on my right side.
I squinted into the mirror and tried to picture the wreck. It was dark. It was raining. A deer appeared in the road. I swerved and stomped the brakes. My car skidded on the slick road and crashed into Mike’s Miata, hard enough to heave me forward and snap my seat belt. My head whacked the rearview mirror. I sat up and saw the boys past the crumpled hood of the Miata, in the front seat: Mike trapped behind the wheel, fumbling for his phone, Doug in pain and struggling to open the passenger door.
No, I didn’t remember a bit of this.
I shook my head—mistake, renewal of throbbing—and sank into the bathtub. This would make me feel better, to scrub off the dirt and germs and God knew what from unknown people and places. I wanted clean, dry clothes. I wanted straight, smooth, tangle-free hair.
But first I wanted to soak. Not to relax, exactly. That would have been impossible with the noise of Ashley and my dad in their room over my head, rushing around getting ready for their trip (or just Ashley rushing around and my dad lying on the bed watching CNBC). At a particularly hard bump overhead, I jumped, sloshing water against the sides of the tub. That was okay. The way I felt, I would never relax again. I just tried to clear my mind and start over, like rebooting a computer when it got clogged with spyware, so I could make sense of what had happened.
My mind wouldn’t reboot. The same window kept popping up, the one snippet of the last twelve hours I did remember: Doug coming to my car and pulling me out of the wreck. I suppose it was because of the concussion, but I didn’t recall the snippet with shock or fear or pain or anything but giddiness at being saved by Doug. If my memory of this was accurate, I’d acted like such a dork, no wonder he thought we’d connected and I’d fallen for him for real.
His wet black hair lay against his skin glowing white in the headlights. His voice rumbled in my ear. He smelled like chlorine. After twenty replays, I realized my subconscious was trying to tell me something. The wreck had been awful, but some elements of it I needed to be true, only changed a bit. I’d had sex with Brandon last Monday, and despite my best efforts, I hadn’t seen him since—or if I had, I didn’t remember. What if he’d been in the other car instead of Mike and Doug? What if he were my hero?
“Zoey,” said Brandon. Did he have a broken leg like Doug? No, he wasn’t hurt—at least, not yet. He reached into the Bug, lifted me out, and carried me across the grass. Behind us, the Bug exploded (the deer was clear of the blast zone). Even as big and solid as Brandon was, the shock wave slammed him to the ground. He twisted in midair so he took the brunt of the landing and I was cushioned on top of him.
“Brandon, I’m so sorry,” I murmured.
“Sorry!” he groaned, in pain because of his heroics. “It’s not your fault. Hush now.” He stroked his fingers across my scalp. My hair didn’t tangle. It wasn’t raining.
This new and improved scenario was less satisfying. Maybe I’d been with Brandon earlier in the night, and that memory was more appealing than this fantasy, if only I could access it. After making love with Brandon at the beach party and dropping him off at his house in the main part of town, maybe I’d been headed home when I wrecked.
The thought made me flush in the hot bathwater. If we’d done it, would I be able to tell? The first time I’d felt it the next day. How about the second?
I glanced into the corners of the ceiling as if cameras would suddenly materialize in my bathroom, of all places. I pressed my fingers into myself, then outside. I rubbed my fingertips in wider and wider circles. I wasn’t sore.
That didn’t mean anything. I’d taken painkillers for my head. They might have dulled the soreness. Maybe Brandon and I had done it after all.
What if we’d done it? I was on the pill. I reached into the drawer nearest the bathtub to check and, sure enough, I’d taken my pill yesterday like a good girl. Right after my seventeenth birthday, my mom had suggested I get on the pill. At the time I didn’t bother to tell her she had nothing to worry about.
Now she did. God bless the pill. But that wouldn’t protect me against a venereal disease. Surely Brandon had used a condom again. I wouldn’t have let him do it otherwise. I hadn’t hit my head and gone crazy until the wreck after.
The more I invented worst-case scenarios and dismissed them logically, the more deflated I felt. Catching a venereal disease or getting pregnant because of something Brandon had done to me would be the end of me. Yet the idea seemed so normal and teenage and, dared I say, romantic compared with everything else going wrong in my life just then. Comforting.
I was scaring myself.
Reboot, reboot, reboot. I sank deeper into the water and massaged myself again. Testing for tenderness gave way to making myself feel better. It helped with my headache. I forgot all about my headache and Brandon as I opened for Doug. He slipped his hands into my jeans and explored me with his fingers, and finally took me there in the wet grass.
I STEPPED FROM THE BATHTUB WITH a smaller headache (marble-sized) and a resolution to stop being so screwed up.
After drying my hair (which still didn’t cover the bruise very well), putting on makeup (which did), inserting fresh contact lenses, and pulling on dry clothes, I sat on the living room sofa, waiting for my dad and Ashley to leave. As I painted my fingernails, I brainstormed for ways I could find out exactly what I’d done last night without revealing the extent of my amnesia and getting
myself committed.
I would ask around carefully. If that didn’t work, I would hope Doug wasn’t out to get me after all, and admit to him that I’d lost my memory not just of the wreck but of the whole night. If, and only if, I exhausted all my other possibilities, I would trust him with this.
I smudged the paint on that fingernail and had to remove it and start over.
And otherwise, I would keep my own counsel. In middle school I dreaded the rare times I rode somewhere in the car alone with my dad. He wouldn’t say a word the whole time. Maybe I remembered it wrong (and I sure wouldn’t place any bets based on my memory now ), but it seemed we’d gotten along fine when I was little. He wasn’t home much, but on weekends he would play with me. Swim with me in the ocean, before we built this new house with a pool. Lie on his back in the sand, balance me on his feet raised above his head, and let me play airplane.
Something happened when I was in grade school—the opening of Slide with Clyde, I suppose—and suddenly he was in a bad mood all the time. My mom would say that unlike her, unlike me, he was a quiet person. He didn’t want or need to talk out his observations about life or his problems. He kept his own counsel. I resented him for that. But considering that my mom had gone insane, it wasn’t wise to continue along her path. I would keep my own counsel from now on.
And I would get started on my investigation, asking Keke and Lila what happened, if my dad and Ashley would hurry up and leave already. Waving my fingernails in the air to dry them, I glanced up at the cameras every ten seconds. There was no reason for the cameras to irk me. No one would be watching me but my dad. Like he said, it would be as if he were here in the house with me. And I’d never done anything to alarm a parent anyway. Except have sex with Brandon.
But now, with the cameras rolling, I wanted what I couldn’t have. I wanted to take advantage of my dad leaving me alone for a week. I wanted to throw a wild party, roll a joint on the cutting board in the kitchen, make love to Brandon on my dad’s bed. Anything bad. I wanted to make out with Doug right here on the sofa where he’d sat an hour ago. It still smelled faintly like him, of chlorine and sea.
Finally they came downstairs. My dad’s arms were full of Ashley’s luggage as he blustered through the room, but I called to him anyway. I had to take care of myself and my own needs, because clearly nobody else was going to. “Dad, if I get an insurance check in the mail while you’re gone, can I shop around for another car?”
“You owe me out of that check,” he said. “I paid to have your car towed to the junkyard from the road into town.”
I filed away this information: he’d just told me where the wreck happened. And I nodded, trying not to make waves. “I’m pretty sure I can get another classic Bug for the same price as the first.”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “No Bug.”
I looked to Ashley. She looked out to sea. She couldn’t see it through the living room wall, but she looked in that direction.
“Why not?” I asked.
“You’re not buying another heap,” he said. “That Bug had no air bag. The aftermarket seat belts broke on impact. That’s how you got so banged up in the first place.” He gestured to my forehead. “Next time you’ll be dead.”
I realized I’d been rubbing my head. I put my hand down, took a deep breath, and asked reasonably, “If you want me to use my own money for a car but you won’t let me buy an old car I can afford, what do you expect me to drive?”
He shrugged. “You can drive my Mercedes next week while I’m gone. Next summer you can work again and add to your money.”
“And in the meantime? How am I supposed to get around? Is Ashley going to homeschool me?” Never let the jury see how angry you are. My mom had taught me that. Never let them see you lose your cool. However, my mom did not argue cases in court while people whacked her in the head with marbles.
Ashley laughed. “I’m sure it will all work out,” she said, patting my dad’s butt to scoot him on out the door. He had to make a second trip upstairs to carry down all her luggage. They were lucky to fit everything in her Beamer. In the end Ashley seemed fonder of me than she’d ever been before, while my dad glared at me like it was my fault he had to worry about me dropping dead from brain damage, thus ruining his vacation. I wanted to reassure him that when I started school a few weeks ago, I’d listed only my mom as an emergency contact. If I dropped dead at school, they wouldn’t have a phone number for my dad anyway.
I decided to let him sweat it. I kept my own counsel. Cheerfully I waved good-bye and best wishes to them as Ashley executed a seventeen-point turn in the courtyard and sped through the gate. Then I sank onto a teak bench on the porch and called Keke and Lila.
“WHERE WERE MIKE AND DOUG HEADED when you hit each other?” Lila asked from the backseat as Keke sped their rusty Datsun through the warm morning. Hitching a ride with them was the best way I could think of to reconstruct last night. They could take me by Brandon’s for a visit and debriefing. Then I’d go with them to the swim meet and grill the team about what happened, though I wouldn’t compete. And I didn’t think I should drive myself. The headache was still marble-sized, but I felt like I was standing on marbles too. I might lose my balance at any second.
“I don’t know where they were going,” I said, hoping I wasn’t supposed to know. I’d been trying to get Lila and Keke to tell me what happened since they’d picked me up. It was harder than I’d thought. I’d admitted to them only what I’d told Doug: that I didn’t remember the wreck itself. More than this and I was afraid they would report it to their mother, she would try to report it to my mother but get my dad instead, and he might actually make good on his threat to have me committed.
The twins didn’t automatically offer a recap of events. Very frustrating. And as I prompted them, I had to choose my words carefully so I didn’t give away how little I knew. I couldn’t say I had such a great time at the football team’s party or I had such an awful time at the football team’s party because the opposite might have happened. After a few seconds of a boy band wailing on the CD player, I settled for, “Wow, what a party. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.”
“Why?” they asked at the same time.
I threw up my hands like they were so dense. “Because of what happened. You know.”
“No,” Keke said, “we don’t know. You told us you couldn’t find Brandon, and then you disappeared. Then it started raining, so Lila and I came home. What happened?”
“Oh, just the usual,” I said.
“What was so great about it that you’ll remember it for the rest of your life?” Lila persisted. “Maybe I was drunker than I thought, but it sounds like we weren’t at the same party.”
“My head hurts,” I said out the open window. We’d reached the straight stretch of the road into town, where my dad had said I’d wrecked. Sure enough, black tire tracks careened across the road, and broken glass twinkled in the grass on the shoulder. A deer stood in the trees, chewing, watching traffic. I shook my fist at it.
“You’re nuts,” Keke said.
We reached downtown. The high school and the football stadium. City hall. The police station. The county courthouse where my mom worked. A historic town square with striped awnings on storefronts, including the police station and my mom’s office. The dried skeletons of petunias in pots outside her office door, because no one was there to water them. It was a quaint little downtown like any small town’s, built in an era before tourists cared about the beach. The only difference was that ours was built on sand.
Keke turned the Datsun off the square, down the road with new housing developments: the one where Gabriel lived, then the one where Keke and Lila lived. After a couple of miles, the impressive entrance to Brandon’s neighborhood appeared, an enormous facade of an antebellum mansion with faux marble columns painted to look like they were smothered in wisteria. The neighborhood itself was a grid of brand-new identical brown brick houses, one story, on such narrow lots that they’
d put the front door on the diagonal, set back from the wide two-car garage door dominating the front.
“And I thought all the houses on our street looked alike,” Lila said. “How do you find him in here?”
“Count three streets over and then six houses down,” I said. Not that I came over much. We’d been together only a week, and he’d been busy. I had cruised by a few times on my way home from swim practice in case he was outside. His family didn’t seem to be outdoorsy types. His house was always shut tight.
Today we didn’t need to count. Clouds parted. Angels trumpeted. In the grassy strip that passed for his lawn, powerful spotlight beams crisscrossed, advertising his house. An airplane flew overhead like the ones that dragged advertisements for tourists at the beach, proclaiming BRANDON LIVES HERE. He stood in his driveway, soaping slow circles along the Buick, with his shirt off.
“You can say that again.” Lila breathed at the sight of the muscles moving in Brandon’s back. I wondered what strangled noise I’d made that she was agreeing with.
“Stephanie Wetzel can say it again,” Keke declared, nodding toward the house across the street from Brandon’s. A curtain in the diagonal front door fluttered shut.
“Do you think she needs us to give her a ride to the high school?” I suggested.
“She’s the one who’s been giving Brandon rides,” Keke said.
Lila hit her.
“Hit her again for me,” I grumbled.
“I don’t mean that kind of ride,” Keke said. “I mean, she’s been giving Brandon rides to school since Brandon’s Buick broke. You didn’t know that?”
I had not known this. I had not known the Buick was broken. It explained why Brandon hadn’t popped over to my house for a visit during the week. It didn’t explain why he hadn’t asked me for a ride.
“If the Buick is so broken, how’d he back it out of the garage?” Lila asked.
I whirled in my seat to face her. “What happened to Brandon and me being perfect and dreamy?”
Forget You Page 7
