Fear and Laundry (15 page)

When we got home, Mom actually thanked me for being so friendly to George. I wondered, briefly, if she was kidding, but she didn’t seem to be. She gave me a big squeeze and a kiss on the cheek goodnight and then left me alone to wrestle with an English writing assignment.

Later, I lay in bed watching
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
on mute and listening to Jake’s tape on my Walkman for about the fifth time since he’d given it to me. I drifted off to sleep to the sound of his guitar-playing, telling myself I’d stop thinking about him tomorrow.

***

I
t's hard not to think very much about someone when you see them first thing almost every morning.

“We missed you at rehearsal last night,” Jake said to me in the van on Friday. “Lia said you had a date.”

“Sort of,” I said. “I guess.”

“The Kalivas kid?”

“Mm-hm.”

Where had he taken me, Jake wanted to know? I told him the name of the restaurant, adding that we’d gone to the football game afterward and watched Bart’s Bolls crush our Carreen High Cowboys.

“Didn’t know you were into sports,” Jake said. He sounded as impassive as ever, but for some reason I had the feeling he was mocking me. Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about my date with Alex anymore.

I spotted a piece of drab green fabric bunched up between the seats and tugged at it. “What’s this?” I asked, as the bundle came unstuck and flew into my lap. But now I saw for myself it was an Army jacket, the name Mlinarich embroidered in black on a cloth nameplate above the right breast pocket.

Jake glanced over. “That was my uncle’s.”

“Your uncle? You mean Michael,” I said, remembering. “He, uh, died in Vietnam, right?”

Jake nodded once. “Dad’s knee kept him out of the draft, you know.”

I commented Lia’d mentioned this to me before.

“Good thing for us, I guess. Or else she and I might not be here now.”

“So your uncle was drafted?”

“Yep.” In the interim between high school and college, apparently. Until then, Michael had planned on medical school.

“Where’d you find this?” I asked, running my fingers over the jacket’s stitching. There was a yellow dry cleaning tag clipped to a pocket.

 “In one of the boxes Mom and Dad had stashed in my room.” He’d had it cleaned, he said, picked it up and unwrapped it but then forgotten it was in the van until I’d found it just now. “You think it’d be stupid if I wore it?” he asked

I told him it’d be very
Taxi Driver
. Why would he think it’d be stupid?

He wasn’t in the military, he explained, hadn’t earned it. “But who knows. Maybe I’ll join up yet.”

“You’re going to join the Army?” I asked, incredulous.

Would I miss him if he did, he asked?

I couldn’t tell if he was kidding, so I ignored the question. “So you’re really not going back to school?” I asked. If he were thinking of alternate career plans, I guessed he wasn’t.

He glanced over again. “You think I should?”

“I dunno.” I folded the jacket and tucked it between the seats. “I think you’d make a good doctor.”

He half laughed. “Based on–?”

“You were pretty good with Paige the other day. Taking care of her ankle.”

He made a dismissive noise. “That was a twisted ankle. That wasn’t anything.”

As usual, the drive seemed too short. In no time, he’d pulled up to the school, maneuvering the van into place behind other cars already lined up at the curb.

“I’m not cut out to be a doctor, Nic,” he said when he’d put the van in park and it stood idling.

“Okay,” I told him, opening the door. “Don’t be one. Do whatever you want.”

“Whatever makes me happy?”

“Yeah,” I said, dropping to the sidewalk. I thanked him for the ride, told him I’d see him later.

“Nic,” he said before I could shut the door.

I looked up at him.

“You’re coming to Mom and Dad’s party, right?”

I was caught off guard by the question and wound up stammering my affirmative.

Was I, he asked, bringing the “Kalivas kid?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t thought about it. He didn’t respond, only looked at me with that familiar, maddeningly enigmatic expression on his face, that again gave me the impression he was having some sort of silent laugh at my expense. I repeated my goodbye and closed the door.

With everything else going on, I hadn’t thought about the Mlinarichs’ party in a while, or about Jake obviously being there, too. As I went up the school steps and down the hall to the Biology lab, I fought to keep from reading anything into his questions, to stop fantasizing that he didn’t want me to go to the party with Alex – that he’d really  rather I be there with him instead.

***

“W
hat’s with you? You’ve been on time every morning this week,” Lia marveled in Biology. It was eight ten. For the first time in history, I’d arrived early to a morning class.

“I dunno. Guess your harping finally sunk in,” I told her, referring to the countless times she’d lectured me about my lack of punctuality.

“Ha, ha,” she said. “How was your big date last night?”

I pulled my text book out of my backpack. “Okay. We got smeared all over the field. To no one’s surprise.” CHS wasn’t known for its athletics.

“Do I look like I care about the football score?” She poked me with the eraser end of her pencil. “Get to the good part. The dirt. How was Alex?”

“No dirt. Alex was...polite.” It was true. He’d been perfectly nice all throughout dinner. And even the football game hadn’t been too bad, thanks to Alex taking the time to explain the rules to me while we watched. But there’d been no fireworks between us or anything.

“That good, huh?”

I shrugged, and she looked disappointed. I knew she thought I was being too picky and not giving Alex a fair chance. But she hadn’t been out with us last night. She hadn’t watched me make awkward small talk or try to follow up more of Alex’s adventure stories with lame anecdotes about hanging out at Lynch’s. I felt like I’d spent the whole night deflecting questions about myself so he wouldn’t find out how boring I was compared to him. That couldn’t last.

“Well, you missed another great band practice.”

Picking up on the sarcasm, I asked her what’d happened. “Paige showed up early,” she said. The Mlinarichs were still at the dinner table and Elyse had insisted she sit down with them for dessert. By the time she’d emptied her ice cream dish Elyse had invited Paige to the anniversary party and roped her into serving as an usher at the vow renewal.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Yeah, it’s real funny,” Lia said. “It’s all I can do to keep from strangling Paige during band practice; I really need her turning up at my family gatherings, too?”

Mr. Liddell came in then and Lia quickly whispered one other piece of news to me. She’d just seen the audition results posted by the theater classroom and learned she’d landed the part of Mina Harker in
Dracula
. I had just enough time to congratulate her before Liddell started class.

As the lecture wore on, the significance of Lia’s earlier news slowly dawned on me. Paige was going to be at the Mlinarichs’ party. With me. And Jake.

Wonderful.

***

P
aige was scheduled to work during the day on Saturday and Elyse had recruited Lia and Jake to run errands, so Friday night was our last chance to rehearse before the Housewives show. We practiced late, until almost midnight.

Lia invited Katrina over to watch and give feedback, and Jake invited Caleb, Trent, and a few other people from their class that I didn’t know so well. Everyone was already gathered and socializing in the garage when Lia brought me over. There were no introductions or reminders of people’s names but I recognized one girl as one of Jake’s ex-girlfriends. I remembered she was a little older than him. I thought her name was Annalise or Annabel or something like that.

She was cute; a petite redhead with glasses, a row of silver hoops running up one ear and a sleeve of tattoos sheathing her left forearm. And whatever her name, she was obviously still into Jake. She touched him a lot, putting her hand on his arm almost anytime she said something to him. I couldn’t tell if he noticed. He talked to her in an easygoing way, but really no differently than he spoke to anyone else.

“Katrina claims it wasn’t her,” Lia said to me during a break.

“What?” Lia and I sat off by ourselves in a corner of the garage while most everyone else clustered together on the opposite side, chatting and drinking beer that Caleb had brought over.

“She says she didn’t tell anyone about the Clyde interview.”

“Well, someone did,” I murmured, distracted.

“Duh.” She cocked her head. “You alright?”

I tore my eyes away from Annalise-or-Annabel and Jake to focus on Lia and said I was fine. “Maybe Dustin told,” I suggested. I wouldn’t put it past him.

“Maybe. Whoever it was, I could kick ‘em,” she said. It was getting harder and harder to evade people’s questions about Clyde.

“You could tell the truth,” I suggested. “Tell people you’re not really interviewing him.”

She pretended I hadn’t said anything, asking me if I’d thought anymore about her idea of trying to reach Clyde if and when he checked in at the Crawford. I reiterated she should forget it; it wasn’t going to happen.

“Maybe you can get close to him at the museum on Sunday?” I said. The dedication was open to the public, wasn’t it? And I reminded her she’d mentioned the Lynch’s benefit in her last note to him. Who knew; maybe he’d show up. My point was there were other possibilities that didn’t involve the hotel.

She seemed unconvinced. And annoyed. I knew it was because she wasn’t used to my saying no to her. Though she probably wouldn’t admit it, or maybe even realize it, my defiance rubbed Lia the wrong way.

She moved off to round up the band. “Hey people, we ready to roll?” she called, approaching the crowd on the other side of the garage.

Between his friends, Annalise-or-Annabel, and Paige all competing for his attention, I hardly said a word to Jake all night. The temperature had dropped considerably by the time we stopped for another short break, and I saw him shrug into his uncle’s Army jacket. I put on my denim one and made some dull comment about the cold weather that he agreed with. Then I helped him close the garage door to keep out the wind. And that was all.

At least Katrina and Caleb and everyone else seemed to like the way the band sounded. We were, they assured us, going to “kick some ass” tomorrow night.

They had no idea.

***

“N
ice axe,” the singer of the 50s Housewives admired Jake’s guitar as he carried it from his van into Lynch’s. She stood smoking a cigarette near the back entrance, looking the part in her vintage aquamarine dress and white apron, a string of pearls around her throat. I’d heard the Housewives symbolically “sacrificed” a different household appliance at each of their shows and it seemed to be true; a band mate in a sweater set and cat’s eye glasses stood beside her, holding a tube-shaped Electrolux vacuum cleaner and a sledge hammer.

I carried my borrowed cymbals from the van into the building as Jake, walking ahead of me, stopped to talk to the Housewives. I tried not to stare as I passed them, but couldn’t help noticing the singer reach up to pat at her teased and sprayed hairdo, laughing flirtatiously at something Jake said.

“Ready to rock?” Lia asked me when I reached the stage. Her microphone was already set up and Paige was sound-checking her bass. I told her I was, though I was actually so nervous my t-shirt was stuck to me. I fidgeted with the cymbals, keeping my back to the audience.

By the time Jake finally joined us and we completed our set-up, I was seriously questioning the wisdom of playing our first official show under this kind of scrutiny. The 50s Housewives were a pretty popular band from Denton and drew a big crowd. There were already about twenty people idling in the dining room, waiting for the show to start, and I guessed that would at least double before the night was out. I didn’t recognize most of them and guessed they were from out of town. They seemed jaded and hostile, looking at us like we’d just fallen off a farm wagon with pieces of hay between our teeth.

As I sat down behind the drum kit I saw Eugenia Ridley, Penny Aikman and the rest of Electric Torch slink in the door. They pushed their way to the front of the crowd and stood with their arms crossed as April hopped up on the little stage to introduce us.

I’d been indifferent when Alex told me he wouldn’t be able to make it to this show, but now I almost wished he were there, if only to have a friendly face in the crowd to focus in on. The closest I came was spotting Dustin standing near the front. But he wouldn’t look at me.

Lia, Jake, and Paige, as veteran musicians, acted oblivious to any audience antagonism, and I was infinitely glad they stood between me and the crowd. I kept my eyes downcast as we launched into our set. I was so wound up I entered a sort of fugue state, my arms and legs working mechanically. Later, I couldn’t remember having played the first few songs at all. But at some point, a smattering of applause broke through my daze and I chanced a look around. I encountered an encouraging smile here and there, and went into the next song with slightly less apprehension.

A minute later, though, I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up just in time to see Lia dodge something that’d sailed out of the audience. She took an awkward little hopping step to regain her balance but recovered quickly, continuing to sing. Undaunted, she modified her lyrics, throwing in a warning to “
watch it, bitch,
” as she flashed her middle finger directly at Ridley, who just sneered back at her.

Beside Ridley, Penny reached into her jacket, pulled something out and lobbed it. I watched the indistinct blob arc through the air toward Lia, who deftly side-stepped it and kept on singing. With a sinking feeling, I heard the projectile smack softly, wetly onto my bass drum. Penny doubled over with exaggerated laughter, elbowing the pixie drummer standing beside her. Obediently, the pixie reached into her jacket for another missile.