Falling Together (11 page)

“Oh,” said Jason finally, snapping his eyelids open, “the Hispanic chick.”

“Filipino,” corrected Pen automatically. Her heart was beating fast. “Half Filipino. Her dad’s side. Filipin
a,
actually, is what you’d say. But she’s, you know, from Houston.”

Will shot her a look that said,
For the love of God, stop
.

“Where is she?” Will asked Jason, but Jason didn’t answer him.

Instead, he said to Pen, “Houston? Ha. She’s from Crazyville is where she’s from.”

“What?” said Pen.

“That is one spooky chick,” said Jason. He scratched his ear and shook his head for emphasis, then said, “Seriously.”

Pen saw Will’s hand around Jason’s upper arm. “What are you talking about?” asked Will. His voice was icy.

Jason tried to shrug Will’s hand off and said, “We’re just down in the Crater, hanging out or what have you, and she goes totally freaky on me. Sits up, says, ‘Hold on a sec,’ and then lies back down and gets all stiff, like a freaky-ass”—he searched for the word that would describe the freaky-ass thing Cat had become—“board.”

“Oh, man,” said Pen, turning to Will. “She had a seizure.”

“No,” said Jason, “she wasn’t throwing herself around or anything. She just got stiff and kind of shook, tremored or whatever, and, like, disappeared, so to speak. Scared the shit out of me, if you want to know the truth. Ow! Dude!” He slapped at Will’s hand, which had evidently tightened its grip. “Get off me.”

“You left her?” Will’s voice was quiet and deliberate, but scary. Pen looked up at his face, which was scary, too, taut, the muscles working beneath his skin.

“You would’ve done the same thing, man,” avowed Jason. “Believe me. Anyway, I’m sure she’s fine.”

“Oh, you’re sure she’s fine,” said Will. “That’s good.”

“Ow! What the hell?”

Pen yanked on Will’s wrist, trying to pull his hand away from Jason’s arm. “That’s not helping,” she said, trying to catch his eye and failing.

She turned back to Jason. “Just tell us where she is.”

“The Crater. Like I said.”

The Crater was a large, shallow, scooped-out field in the middle of fraternity row, part beach, part playing field, a place where droves of students hung out on sunny days. In snow, it was a fairly lame but very popular sledding and peppermint-schnapps-swilling destination; in wet weather, to Pen’s eternal disgust, it morphed into a mud-wrestling pit. “The very last—and I mean
very
last—people on the planet you would want to see shirtless, covered in mud, and slapping their bellies together are shirtless, covered in mud, and slapping their bellies together,” she’d told Cat, shuddering, after once having walked past it after two days of spring rain. “Goody!” Cat had cried, grabbing her jacket.

Pen tugged at Will’s shirtsleeve and said, “The Crater. Let’s go.”

“Show us,” said Will, his eyes never leaving Jason’s face, “exactly where she is.”

“Naw, man. You’ll find her.”

In a single, violent motion, Will turned the doorknob and sent the door flying open with one kick. He caught it before it rebounded shut again, took Jason by the shoulder, and shoved him out of it.

“Whoa!” Jason lost his balance and fell sideways, grabbing at the first thing he found, which, unfortunately, turned out to be the arm of a rocking chair. He went down hard on the porch and the chair somersaulted onto him with a whack. For a moment, everything seemed to go still. Pen heard some people standing in the yard start to laugh, and then Will was yanking the chair off Jason and telling him to get the hell up.

“What is your problem?” Pen hissed at Will. “Enough with the Bruce Willis crap. Let’s just go!”

When Will didn’t even look at her, she turned her back on him, yanked off her black pumps, and, with one in each hand, took off across the lawn in the direction of the Crater, gaining speed until, before she realized it, she was running full tilt, flying by startled face after startled face, the cold burning her eyes and filling her chest. She knew she must look insane, but it didn’t matter. Her legs pistoned; her breath clattered; her heart banged.

“Audrey!” someone yelled after her. “Late for breakfast?”

Let her be there,
she thought.
Let her be there. Let her be safe
. A sob rose in her throat, and she thought,
This is what it feels like to be a mother,
which only struck her as a peculiar thing to think later, when everything was over.

Her wig slid backward, and she pulled it off, faintly aware of the scrape of hairpins. In the same way that she could leave off being herself and become the act of bicycling, she became the running. Even when she thought she heard someone running behind her, she didn’t turn around, didn’t do anything but fling her body forward through the night, until she found herself on the rim of the Crater. She stopped short and wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands.

It was hard to see anything inside the Crater. The moon was high and its light didn’t clarify, but stretched tightly over everything, like the skin on hot milk, making what lay under it appear liquid and uncertain. Pen realized that she was light-headed. She dropped her shoes, and leaned over, her hands on her knees. When she straightened back up, Will was beside her, Jason a few stumbling steps behind.

Jason, who was having a manifestly bad night, knocked his fist against the seismic heaving of his chest. His breathing had an alarming seal-bark quality to it, and when she glanced his way, even in the dark, Pen could tell that he was looking bad, slack-faced, pale, and sweating. If he had been a sixty-year-old man or even a forty-year-old man, Pen would have dialed 9-1-1 without a second thought.

“Where?” demanded Will.

Jason flapped his hand weakly in the direction of the Crater’s center. Pen squinted into the dark and couldn’t tell for sure, but thought she saw a small spot where the darkness condensed.

“Okay, we’ll take it from here,” she said to Jason, although her words were really meant for Will, whose face was marble-hard and cut with shadows, more full of barely contained rage than ever, but when Will started off down the hill, he took hold of Jason’s shirtfront and towed him along behind.

As Jason went by, the expression on his face startled Pen. She thought he would look pissed off, even dangerous, but what she saw was much worse: a bleak and weary resignation.
He looks kidnapped,
she thought, and, for a moment, Pen wondered if that’s what he was. Then she ran down the hill, leaving Jason and the Will who wasn’t Will behind.

Cat was curled up and wrapped in a gray blanket, her black hair fanned on the grass and catching light.

“Oh, thank God,” whispered Pen. Cat was not confused and wandering in the dark alone. She wasn’t being hurt by drunken strangers. No one had taken her, although Pen thought that anyone could have, could have so easily lifted her up like a rag doll and carried her away. In the big field, she looked tiny and abandoned, like a toy forgotten on a beach.

Pen dropped to her knees next to Cat and lifted a flap of blanket away from her face. Cat’s eyes were open and she looked confused, as though she’d been sleeping, which she probably had. Pen saw that she was crying without making a sound, tears falling sideways down her face and into the grass.

“Please don’t cry, Catsy. You knew we’d come to get you, didn’t you?”

Cat smiled. “I like it when you call me ‘Catsy.’”

She sat up and put her arms around Pen’s neck. “It happens sometimes,” she said, “after a seizure. Tears for no reason.”

Pen thought to herself that being left alone mid-make-out-session, mid-seizure in an empty field in the dead of Halloween night would be reason enough for anyone to cry, but she didn’t say this out loud. Over Cat’s shoulder, she saw Will coming toward them, Jason behind him, slumped and shadowy, and she put up her hand and said, “Don’t.”

Will stopped.

She pulled back and scanned Cat’s face. “You’re okay?”

“Tip-top.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“See, man. Told you she was okay.” It was Jason.

Pen held her breath, thinking,
You are dumber than krill
.

“What happened next was like the moment in the movie when the grenade flies through the window and lands on the floor and everything stops. I swear to God, even the crickets stopped chirping. And then the grenade exploded, except that it was Will instead of a grenade, and the whole night blasted open, and everything got surreal and slow motion, and it was the wildest thing I ever, ever saw.”

Cat would say this over coffee the next afternoon to a group of students from her and Pen’s Twentieth-Century Women Writers class. It was how she would tell the story to other people in other places for years, and, even though Pen would be repulsed every time by the excitement gleaming in Cat’s eyes, she wouldn’t say a word because what had happened that night belonged as much to Cat as it did to Pen.

But what Pen knew was that it wasn’t like a grenade or a movie. It wasn’t surreal or exciting. It wasn’t like anything but what it was: one wholly human body slamming into another one, packed dirt and spit flying and animal grunts and sobbing and the sickening sound of a fist hitting skin and bone.

It was the first time Pen had ever seen Will lose his temper, although “lose his temper” never seemed like quite the right way of describing it. What got lost was everything else, all the things that made Will himself: empathy and patience and decency, his sense of humor, his sense of justice, everything fine and good deserting him in one ugly rush.

Before that night, she had only seen the fallout. After a visit from his parents (his father handing him a box of condoms, saying, in front of his mother, who was drunk, “Learn from my mistakes, Will. One slip-up and I’m stuck with this pathetic cow for life.”): broken hand, cracked windshield. After a phone call from his father (“Drop the creative writing bullshit. I’m not paying for any faggot courses.”): scabbed knuckles from punching a tree. Smashed dishes. Broken chair. A ragged hole in the plaster where he’d yanked out a light fixture with his hands.

He had told Pen and Cat about how he had been suspended twice in eighth grade and had been kicked out of one boarding school after six months for fighting. But Pen had never been able to reconcile that information with the Will she knew, and assumed he had been that person in the same way that Jamie had spent his seventh-grade year as a skate punk (bad haircut, an anarchy “A” inked onto the bottom of his sneakers).

For at least a whole minute, all Pen could do was watch. Jason was a big guy, broad-chested, with the meaty muscles of someone who spent a lot of time in the weight room. Will was over six feet tall and just this side of slight, no more than 175 pounds, but he was strong and had the advantage of being both sober and unhinged by rage.

As she watched, though, Pen saw that he was not wildly out of control. After they had rolled over a few times, they ended up not ten feet away from Pen, with Will on top, his left hand against Jason’s chest, the right angle of his right elbow jutting out again and again.
Not wildly out of control,
Pen thought,
controlled out of control,
which was somehow much worse.

Pen watched that methodical punching, heard Jason yell, almost scream, “Stop!” and was herself walloped so hard by a sense of wrongness that she felt dizzy. It didn’t matter how much Pen loved Will, how much they both loved Cat, didn’t matter that Jason had put Cat in danger and had forgotten about her like she was nothing. The why of what was happening was weightless compared to the what: a person on top, hitting, a person on the bottom, not fighting back, defeated.

Pen stood up and threw her full weight against the side of Will’s rib cage, knocking him off Jason. For a second or two, she lay sprawled on top of Will, before she scrambled up and pinned him to the ground by sitting on his chest. There was no way he was getting back to Jason. She expected him to struggle, to try to get up, but he lay still, except for the sharp, fast rise and fall of his ribs.

She could feel the bones and muscles of Will’s chest, could feel his heart beating under her hands, but she didn’t look at him. Instead, she watched Jason painfully clamber to his feet, openly sobbing, spitting what Pen knew must be blood and hoped did not include teeth. “Thank God,” she said hoarsely, so relieved that he could stand, that he wasn’t unconscious or worse.

Jason walked unsteadily backward, wiping his face with one hand and pointing at Will with the other, yelling, “You’re a fucking maniac. I didn’t do shit to her. I put the goddamned blanket over her, you fucking maniac. I will kill you. I will bring my buddies back and kill your ass. I didn’t hurt her. I put the blanket over her. I will sue your ass from here to fucking eternity, I swear to God.”

He turned around and ran up the hill, out of the Crater, and away.

“Are you okay, Will?” asked Cat in a tremulous voice. She was still sitting where Pen had left her, the blanket bunched around her shoulders and coming up over the back of her head like a hood.

Will didn’t answer. Suddenly, Pen didn’t want to be touching him. She slid off his chest onto the sparse grass and realized how cold she was. In the name of costume authenticity and foolhardy vanity, and because they’d assumed they’d only be walking to and from the party, not sitting around for what seemed like hours inside the Crater while Will pounded a fellow human being into the ground, she and Cat had eschewed outerwear. Pen’s bones felt brittle. She tucked in her knees and pulled the skirt of her dress as far over her bare legs as it would go.