Beautiful (12 page)

“Strawberry,” I say. My voice sounds strange, smaller and higher than usual.

He orders the milk shake. I take it and turn toward the window as far as I can go so he cannot see me, so he cannot see the tears running down my face and into my mouth as I drink.

“Cassie,” he says.

I don't move.

“Look at me,” he says.

I turn my head so I am facing him. My eyes can't find a place to settle. I see his nose, his chin, his shoulder. Finally, I meet his eyes, but I look away before they see too much.

“Are you really okay?” he says.

I can see his eyes in the sound of his voice, and there are explosions inside me, giant gusts of warm, red wind rattling everything solid. I nod because it is the only thing I can do to keep from crying, to keep from telling him everything.

“Okay,” he says, and I hold my breath until we get home.

Before he opens the door to our apartment, he says, “I'm not going to tell your mother about this.”

All I can do is nod. I hand him his coat and suddenly feel cold. I go to my room and close the door, take off my shoes, and crawl into bed without changing my clothes. Even though I am covered with blankets, even though I am hugging my knees as hard as I can, I am shivering. I wonder what my father is thinking as he gets into bed with my mother, who will never know any of this. I wonder what it will be like in the morning, when we act like everything's normal, when we don't talk, like always.

It is the last day of school before winter break and I am behind the gym, sitting on concrete. Justin is sitting next to me and I am waiting for him to give me what I'm here for. I am letting his leg touch mine, letting his mildew-smelling coat touch my shoulder, my arm, my hand. I let him talk about Bill Gates and computers and microchips and macroeconomics and anything else that's in his ugly little brain. I imagine it is gray and slimy like the rest of him, smelling of mildew and old greasy food.

I have a theory that the closer I let him sit, the shorter this will take. But it has been four weeks now, four Tuesdays, and it always takes all lunch.

All I had to do was ask him if I could copy his homework,
even though I didn't need to, even though I'm probably smarter than he is. But he doesn't know that. As long as I'm doing this, he'll never suspect that I'm smart at all.

He calls this “our dates.” He said it too loud in class, “Do you remember our date at lunch?” and everyone looked at me like they were going to throw up, even Mr. Cobb. And all I could do was smile and say, “Yes,” and remind him quietly that it's our secret and try not to burst into tears and run out of the room and out of the school and down to the lake and drown myself in the freezing, polluted water.

This is where Justin gives me his medicine and asks for nothing in return. Just time. Just ears. Just the blank look on my face that I have mastered. Ritalin makes him normal and it makes me invincible. I took four every day, then six, then eight, now I can't keep track and nobody has any idea. Alex and Sarah think he only gives me half his normal prescription, that we're all getting the same tiny amount to save up for the weekends. They don't know they're getting nothing compared to me. They don't know he gets his prescription filled four times more than he's supposed to and his mom doesn't notice and the pharmacist doesn't notice and his doctor doesn't notice and nobody notices because Justin is invisible.

Nobody notices that I don't sleep, that I sit up awake in my chair by the window and look out into shadows that are
sometimes still, sometimes shifting, sometimes flat, sometimes textured and breathing. They don't know about the hole I drill into my arm with burning needles I keep in a little fake gold box Mom bought me for my thirteenth birthday. Even when I'm naked, Ethan doesn't notice the dime-size scar on my arm that never heals, the hole I keep opening and cutting and burning and scarring because it is the only thing to do at four in the morning when everything is quiet and dark and my heart is thumping fast and heavy in my chest.

This is too easy. It should not be this easy. I should not be able to slip a box of sleeping pills in my back pocket at the grocery store whenever I need to recharge. I should not be able to wake up and feel fine and do it all over again. I should be dying. My stomach should be falling out. My parents should be grounding me. I should be getting arrested. Someone should be trying to stop me.

I should not look forward to these meetings behind the gym, Justin's incessant chatter about things that don't matter, his awful, wet chewing on the lunch I can't eat. This should not be the calmest I feel all week, sitting on concrete behind the gym, watching the rain pounding on dumpsters, feeling so grateful that I'm not inside. There is no Alex, no Ethan, no James, no Wes, no gangster girls, no potheads, no tweekers, no skaters, no sluts. There is no giant glass wall dividing
us from the normal kids who sit at their tables and eat their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and plan slumber parties and play video games and fantasize about first kisses. It is just me and Justin and the rain and his sandwich and his pills and the weird things he says, things like “Your friends aren't nice to you,” things like “You're not like them.”

He is talking about microchips and he is excited and little bubbles of drool emerge from the sides of his mouth and hold on to his gray skin with surface tension or some other scientific principle he could explain to me. I am tempted to say, “Explain the scientific principle that makes your drool bubbles hold on to your skin,” but I don't. But not because of the usual reasons I don't speak, not because I am concrete and my mouth is stuffed with glass. I don't speak because I enjoy my silence here. I enjoy listening to his endless ramblings, his words that do not matter. I enjoy that he wants nothing from me, just me sitting here, just my ears, just my silence. He asks for nothing because he is the boy who gets shoved into lockers. He is the boy who even the smart kids don't want.

I don't ask him about his drool bubbles. I don't ask him why his coat smells like mildew or why his glasses are held together with tape or why he sits alone at lunch every day except Tuesdays. Instead, I ask, “Is there anything else you want from me?” I do not think these words. They just come
out, like a reflex, like I need to make up for the twisted gratitude that I feel when I'm with him. I don't realize what I've said until I notice that he's stopped talking about microchips, that he's looking at me in a funny way. He blushes, which makes his pimples seem extra greasy and extra erupting, and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and the drool bubbles are gone. He looks at me with his squinty eyes and leans over and whispers even though there's nobody around to hear, just me and him and the memory of drool bubbles, and pills in my pocket and erection in his.

“What do you mean?” he says, and his breath smells like beef jerky.

I say, “Anything.” I am leaning closer, pressing my breasts against his shoulder. “Anything you want.”

He thinks for a moment. His mouth opens slightly, then closes. Finally, he looks at me. Finally, he leans over and whispers, “I want to touch you.” He sniffles. “I want to touch you down there.”

“Okay,” I say. This is easy. This is nothing.

He is shaking and he flinches at the sound of the zipper. He flinches when I grab his wrist and lead his hand down into the sexy underwear I only wear when I know I have a date with Ethan. He lets his hand lie there a while, not moving at all, and his eyes are closed and his nostrils flare with heavy,
wheezy, snotty breaths, like this is the most important thing that's ever happened to him. His hand is lying there so gentle and scared and I want to slap him.
Just do it,
I want to say. I want to slap him.

“You are so pretty,” he says.

“Fuck pretty,” I say.

“Why are you so angry?” he says.

“Fuck you,” I say.

His fingers move a little. He stops breathing. His face is red and still and he smells like mildew, like eggs and toast, like computers, and the bell rings, and I want to slap him even more, not just slap but punch and kick and bite until he bleeds and jump on his ribs until they are all broken. His eyes shoot open like he's heard the thoughts inside my head, and he takes back his hand and runs off without his backpack, holding his hand to his chest as if it is broken, running like a boy with asthma runs, trailing dirty boy smells behind him, smells of mildew, smells of something musty from myself.

I zip up my pants and smoke a cigarette even though I am already late for class. I sit on the concrete and watch the rain fall in sheets, pounding on the dumpster and turning the field into mud. Across the field, one of the gangster girls is beating up a tiny goth girl while others cheer her on. They are all ant-size, nothing. The goth girl's pain is nothing. The
gangster girl's cruelty is nothing. They do not see me. I am ant-size, invisible.

I pick up Justin's backpack and walk to class. The halls are empty and silent and smell like sneakers. This is a foreign place, a place I pass through but do not belong. Someday it will be gone and I will be somewhere else, ant-size, invisible, passing through. It will smell like something else. It will be made out of something different than linoleum and brick and metal lockers. It will be different, but I will be the same.

When I enter the classroom, eyes roll as usual and Mr. Cobb tells me I have detention, my third tardy in two weeks. He hands me the pink slip. “Whatever,” I say, and sit in my seat next to Justin. I drop his backpack on the floor. He pulls it toward him without looking at me.

Mr. Cobb says, “Did you do your math homework?” wanting me to say no, wanting me to admit I don't belong here. But I pull it out of my bag and hand it to him. I want to tell him it took me five minutes. I want to tell him I'm smarter than everyone in here. But that is not what I do. I let people think what they want.

A giant sign at the entrance to Ethan's neighborhood reads oak heights. I don't see any trees, but all the streets are named something like Spruce, Madrone, Alder, Redwood. We drive by row after row of small, two-story boxes in varying shades of pastel. He seems to know where he's going, even though there are no landmarks of any kind. The yards are all identical, with the same manicured hedges and plots of hibernating flowers, the same toys and bicycles tidily arranged on the same small front lawns. The only thing that distinguishes some houses from the others is an American flag hanging to the left of the front door and a few tasteful strings of white Christmas lights. Ethan informs me that these are the only
decorations that are allowed. Each house has a limit of two pumpkins at Halloween.

“One family tried to paint their house purple and they got kicked out,” he tells me. “It was on the news.”

“Why?” I ask him.

“You sign a contract when you move here. There's only four colors you can choose from.”

He pulls into the driveway of one of the houses. I look around for some clue that he lives here. There is nothing, no skateboard in the front yard or graffiti on the trash can, no cigarette butts or empty beer cans on the ground.

“Here we are,” he says.

“The yard is nice,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “They have someone do it.”

I wonder who “they” are. I wonder what this place would look like if “they” weren't around.

He opens the door. We go inside. I can see the light from outside reflected off of dust in the air, like speckled laser beams cutting through the bare living room. The walls are white with nothing on them. There is an ugly green couch and matching chair, a coffee table holding candles that have never been lit, with no candleholders or anything that implies they belong there. There's a bookshelf that's mostly empty, with only a few fitness and self-help books, a vase that matches nothing, a
boom box. A StairMaster, rowing machine, and weight bench take up a whole side of the room, in front of a fireplace that's never been used. If “they” saw the inside of this house, Ethan and his mom would definitely get kicked out.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

“No,” I say. I have not been hungry in weeks. Usually Sunday is the day I eat. I take a bunch of sleeping pills the night before and spend all day on the couch drinking coffee and eating everything I can find, taking periodic breaks to go to my room to smoke pot and cigarettes. Ethan does not know this. Nobody knows this. But he has been saying things lately, like he can see my ribs poking out, like he can feel my pelvic bones stabbing him when he fucks me. I just shrug and bat my eyes and kiss him. We had an assembly at school about eating disorders that I skipped to smoke pot behind the gym. Since then, he has been trying to explain to me that guys don't like skinny girls, that he misses my curves. I should think it's sweet, his concern, but all it does is annoy me.

“I'm starving,” he says, like always, and he takes me to the kitchen.

“What's all this stuff?” I say. There's something like an altar on a shelf next to the dinner table—dried flowers, candles, a silver tray full of multicolored coins and key chains, a framed embroidered plaque that reads
ONE DAY AT A TIME
.

“Oh, that,” Ethan says. “My mom's in AA. That's all her AA crap.”

FIVE YEARS
, reads the coin on the top of the pile. One year after Ethan's father left.

“That's cool,” I say.

“Which one do you want?” he says, thrusting two boxes of microwave dinners in my face. Salisbury steak or fried chicken.

“Neither,” I say.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I forgot. You're on a diet.”

“No, I'm not,” I say. “I'm just not hungry.”

“At least eat some of my mom's crap,” he says.

“Okay,” I say.

He opens the fridge and all that's in it is a flat two-liter of Coke, some Slim-Fast shakes, an apple, and leftover pizza. He hands me the apple. I take a mealy bite.