Friendswood (20 page)

“I mean, Mom really let her have it in front of all the other mothers. It was a costume meeting, so our uniforms look right. And Mom threw down my skirt on the floor. Don't you want to know what she said?” Layla sighed, and he felt her looking over his shoulder at the screen. “Dex!”

He concentrated on the wizards rising out of the pool, exploding with stars of color as he sent his lasers. “Kind of.”

“Yes, you do.”

Layla walked to the kitchenette stove, and he heard three hissing sounds. Then she was behind him again. “So this is what she said to the other mothers. She said these boys need to learn that not everything comes to them—they're not entitled. They need to stop spending so much time staring at the Internet, thinking they can have whatever they want.”

Dex didn't turn around. He wondered for a second if his mother had found out somehow that he'd once, almost accidentally, visited the advertising clip on the porno site. Two girls had lifted up their T-shirts to bare their breasts, their nipples like laughing eyes.

“Anna's mother said girls are always the gatekeepers. She said girls need to remember that—to set the line at a reasonable place. And Willa was reckless to go to a house full of boys if she wasn't looking for trouble. The message she sent just by going, she said, was
I'm trouble
. Boys can't
be expected to control themselves in a setting like that. When the present is right there in front of them, they're going to open it. That was when Mom flipped. It was super embarrassing. She was like, ‘Men have been using that excuse for years—where have you been? My Dex knows how to control himself, no matter what
present
he's offered.'”

Sometimes when he got an erection it was like falling through the air and not being able to stop yourself, or like getting the flu.

Dex didn't turn around. He blasted the wizard, then two more enemies emerged from the pixelated woods.

“You know what I think?” she said. “That girl thought it was going to be one thing, and when she got there, it was something else. It's like those movies that start out seeming like country vacations and end up with bloody axes. It could happen to anyone.”

He swung around in his seat, looked at his sister now, her brown eyes wide, her mouth twisted into a smirk, her cheerleader's T-shirt spattered with grease. “You better not trust anything any guy ever says to you, that's what I think.” She was trying to look like she knew it all. “No matter what they say, always assume he wants to get in your pants.” His father would have put it less crudely, given it a gallant cowboy spin, but Dex didn't know how else to express his authority on the subject.

Her smile shrank, and he realized he'd scared her. “But Cully Holbrook—he's okay, isn't he?”

He softened his voice, but kept it stern. “Doubtful,” said Dex. “I don't want to say.”

“You know Willa Lambert?”

He looked back at the screen, crowded now with bright haloed green trees. “Yeah, I do.” He moved the keyboard to scope for the bad sidekick. The screen popped out in a green bubble because he'd been shot and the game was over.

His mother came home a little later, out of breath, her full face grim. “Dex, what do you know about this thing at the Lawbournes'? I really
can't believe it—Steve Snow and Cully Holbrook? They were both there?” She slammed the door.

Dex looked down at his jeans—they were worn at the knees and stained on the thigh, he noticed, with something brown from lunch. He'd already pictured telling her that he was at the party too, how he'd explain that he had nothing to do with what happened to Willa, how he wasn't even drunk like the others, and that was something. He looked at her swollen arms tight in her thin sweater, at her small, fierce dark eyes, the extra chin cupping her original, delicate one, that face which was both beautiful and terrible to him. “I heard about it.”

“There were all these boys there just sitting drinking downstairs or swimming. Why didn't they do anything to stop it? It just kills me that boys here would do that, boys I've had in my own house.”

“Mom, you're yelling at the wrong people,” said Layla.

Dex's mother threw her bag down on the floor, keys jangling, and plopped down on the easy chair. “I just don't like what it says about this place that something like that could go on here.”

It bothered him that she couldn't let it go. “I heard most of the guys didn't even know there was a girl upstairs.”

“Oh, honey, they knew,” she said. “Believe me, they knew. That's what I told Ms. Louder.”

“Hey, Mom? Lionel Louder was there,” said Layla.

Dex's mother turned her head. “Well, that explains it. She's not going to be talking to me anytime soon.”

Dex turned back to the screen, where pixilated monsters ran amok, blinking behind and above Egyptian pyramids. He turned it off. He thought his mother might ask him about where he'd been that day, but she trusted him too much, and that was a wrench in his heart.

W
ILLA DID ALMOST ALL OF HER WORK
for school independently in the mornings, finished by noon—she'd written ten poems in just two weeks, and she'd numbered them. That Tuesday she began her day eating yogurt in front of the computer, watching the
Looney Tunes
she'd liked as a child, and looking up random facts about Emily Dickinson: She liked white dresses. She attended Mount Holyoke Seminary, but left for mysterious reasons. After a certain age, she didn't like to greet people at the door. She had a dog for sixteen years, and when he died, she mourned him. She only attended church for a few years, and never made a formal declaration of faith. At some point, she wrote to a friend, “Home is so far away from home.”

When Willa clicked on her email, she saw the headline about Iraq, and she went to the news story—the video clip of a bomb exploding in a café in a street, plastic chairs and broken glass blowing up out of the smoke, then settling. She didn't look closely at the sidewalk, but thought she saw a severed bloody foot next to a crushed Coke can. Alone today in the house with the tick of the coffeemaker and the digital chimes of the clock, the odorless smell of clean carpet and sunlight, she saw nothing out of place except a mug next to the easy chair, as if someone had been spirited up from their seat. She looked back at the computer screen, clicked on the video, and watched the explosion one more time. It gave her a strange solace.

She finished her science homework, and that was all the work she'd been assigned for the day. She made a sandwich for herself and sat at the picnic table on the back patio. After lunch was when she usually got most anxious because there were fewer things to occupy her, and the visions tended to come. Sometimes she tried to pray, but she couldn't lately—she only heard her own words come back to her, but in a nasal, mocking voice.

As she ate her sandwich, she watched the neighbor's black-and-white cat balance along the top of the wooden fence, its tail curled as if to hold it up. It took a few tentative steps, then fell, scurried down, and ran through the hole near her mother's vegetable garden. On the other side of the yard, trash lay scattered where a possum had got into the garbage can. When she finished eating, she walked through the trees to clean up the mess. Otherwise, her mother would be irritated and ask her why she hadn't bothered. She picked up a plastic bottle, and saw three strange mushrooms with broad, dotted hoods, red berets on top of them. She'd gathered up the milk carton, orange juice tube, and foil pan when she saw the pink and orange wildflowers lolling above the grass—she'd never seen them before, their orange velvet middles surrounded in a sun of pink. She looked at them for a long time.

Later in the afternoon, she was emailing with Dani, who was in the school library, supposedly doing research for her paper on the Constitution. She'd gone to see Cherry Bomb at a club called Sevens in Houston, Dani wrote. There was a singer who wore a red choker like a slit of blood and two cute guys on guitar. Willa knew she was trying to cheer her up. “Strange-trend alert: Ellen Almodóvar and Pam Riggins dressed up like pirates at school today, eye patch on one eye, full mascara and blue eye shadow on the other. Then I saw three girls I didn't know wearing the same thing. There's a rumor that they are stealing people's wallets. One girl got sent home because she wouldn't take off her eye patch, and she couldn't read the overhead screen in calculus. I gotta know, are people always this weird? And, excuse me? There are felons in my classes with
me. And you're at home. What's fair about that?” Dani wrote. “I heard Ms. Carpenter call Cully ‘trash' in the hallway. She actually said it to someone else, but loud enough for him to hear it. He just kept walking.”

Willa glanced away from the screen, thinking what to write back. In the corner of the room emerged a shadow the size of a large dog. The wet fur appeared first, two huge paws, then eyes scattered across the body and limbs, eyes she'd seen before but couldn't place. The face was so much like her dog, Junior's, when she'd held him as the vet injected the needle—she recognized that hurt, relieved look just before he'd died. But this beast's head sprouted a tangled, mangy lion's mane, crawling with worms, and ears that flapped like skin-covered books. The voice seemed to be inside of her, as if she'd already heard it, even before the noise of it hit her eardrum. “What does she want?”

The beast defecated on the floor, and the shit ran bloody all the way under her dresser. The eyes began to look less like eyes and more like weeping sores, and she was crying. She stared beyond the beast at the chair, the wall. Finally, its shape blurred, first hovering like hundreds of colored dots and then dissolving as if the dots had been rinsed away with water. She had to find out what the beasts meant, what message they carried.

P
ASTOR
S
PARKS'S OFFIC
E
was in the back of the church, next to the sanctuary, a large auditorium. The walls were filled with photographs and notes like pages of a scrapbook. There was a photograph of him preaching next to an American flag, with “The 700 Club” printed beneath it. She'd watched his televised testimony a couple of times. Standing on that TV stage, he'd looked smaller and thinner than he did at the pulpit, as if fame had shrunk him, and he paced back and forth in his brown suit, punching the air, preaching how he'd been saved. She still remembered parts of it well, how he'd grown up in a fancy, formal Presbyterian church
where everyone was quiet and no one would know the Holy Spirit
if it bit them in the face
; his mother had told him he was stupid and after that he stuttered whenever he talked.
There was something in me, just mean and ugly. I couldn't shake it. Sunday morning came, and I was in a ditch of despair.
He'd almost died twice, and the bullets were still in him somewhere.
I was working the late shift. And one day, this guy comes through the door, blasting a gun.

Willa's father had made the appointment for her. “Pastor will set you straight,” he said.

His eyes shone, even in this small office light—there was a fierceness in them that had sometimes moved her during church services. “Well, Willa, what can I do for you? Why has the Lord brought you here?” He had a strange accent, a Northerner turned Texan.

She was confused because she hadn't expected to have to explain herself. “Well, my dad thought—”

“I want to know what you think.” In church, she'd watched his face up close, projected large on the screen that hung over the altar, the tired, red lines wound under his skin, especially near his nose, just above his gray mustache. She'd heard him preach lots of times, had shaken his hand after the service, but had never before had a conversation with him alone.

She studied the beige carpeting, very clean, thick weave. “Something happened to me, but I don't remember it.”

“You don't remember.”

“No.” She looked out the window. Outside, a pudgy man calmly rode a John Deere mower across the church's lawn; on either side of the vehicle spouted furious wings of grass blades.

“Wow. Now, Willa, were you drinking?”

Her parents had made the full report to him of everything they knew. But she wanted to show him that she was a good person. “I don't like the taste of it.”

“Is that so?” Before he was saved:
I tell you, I held a dirty knife right against my wrist.
“Don't keep having a taste for it, thinking it's bound to
be better the next time.” He shook his head. “Your folks sure are worried about you,” he said. “You know that? Your mother is so worried.” It was the same voice he used from the pulpit, emphatic, as if he were speaking to a thousand people and not just to one. He told her about a woman he'd known back when he was young, someone who had the world at her feet, beautiful, smart, poised. He looked at Willa and said, “You've got a lot in your favor, you know that?” Then he went on to say how the girl had started to drink, and she'd started to go with one young man and another. And she ended up a “lush” without a church or a home. “She lost everything,” he said. “Just chasing boys who said she was pretty.”

“It's not like that. I mean. It's just . . .” She didn't know how to fix the misunderstanding. “The whole thing still doesn't seem real.”

“But you know it was real, right, Willa?”

She nodded. From the hallway, there was a smell of coffee and cookies baking in the church kitchen.

“Willa, have you ever thought that might be a blessing that you lost your memory? Even in our darkest times, God wants to save us from that pain. That memory loss might just be a gift.” His voice went softer and higher. “You sure you weren't drinking anything that day, Willa?”

In the trash, there was a cup with a bright, twisted cartoon face imprinted on it, smiling through the waste bin's metal bars. “I just want it not to have happened,” she said.

“Of course you do. Of course you do. I tell you what, I'm sure you're not the only one either.” He paused. “I'm sure there's another person who wishes none of that business ever got started. Is there anything else you'd like to tell me, Willa?” He smiled at her skeptically. It would have been a relief to tell him how Cully had put his arm around her, how he'd implied that other girls would be there soon.

“Let me ask you something, are you angry?” He seemed to shift his tongue around in his mouth. “Are you angry at Jesus for letting this happen?”

Her arms felt suddenly too bare, goose-bumped in the air-conditioning. “Because you know you had free will to go to that house, didn't you? God gives us free will because he loves us—he doesn't want us to be robots.”

Fifteen years earlier, in an instant, everything had changed for Pastor Sparks. As he told the story, God streamed straight into his blood, and he ran out into the street screaming, “I'm alive! I'm alive!” Willa always remembered that. She wanted to know what he'd told Cully Holbrook, or what he'd like to say to the other two, who didn't attend their church. Did he think they were angry at Jesus too, and that's why they'd done it?

“I'm not trying to be a robot.”

“Well of course you're not,” he said, his voice suddenly gentle. “You just keep praying, and Jesus will tell you something. Wait for that. It always comes.”

The snow globe at the edge of his desk resembled a giant, empty eye with tiny hidden things clotted at the bottom of it. It was becoming clear to her now why she was here, how adversity might have come to her for a purpose, to make her a messenger, and it suddenly seemed urgent to tell him. “Can I ask you something?” Willa said.

“You can ask me anything.”

“In your sermons you're preaching that these are the end-times.”

“Certainly seems that way.” He nodded to a photograph of the soldiers on the wall. “See that? The troops are bringing Jesus to the Holy Land. Even some of those Arabs can still be saved. That's what the message is.” Around his eyes, there was a new, open expression.

“I think I might be seeing signs—you know, of the end of days.”

His upright posture sagged. “Phew. I think I need you to tell me what you mean by that.”

“I think I saw the Beasts that are in Scripture. The ones before the Rapture.”

He rubbed at his temples and bunched up his lips. “You saw them where?”

“A few places, in my room mostly.”

“In your room. Now, Willa, don't you think if Jesus was coming back this very minute, that he wouldn't be keeping the signs secret, just showing them to a teenage girl?”

It hadn't occurred to her that he'd accuse her of arrogance. “But Joan of Arc, right? She had visions from God when she was only twelve.”

“Joan of Arc. Was she even real? Well, that's what the Catholics say, sure, but with all due respect, you know what I think, right? I don't believe in saints that way. You know why? I don't believe you have to be special to know what God wants for you. Let's be honest. Catholics don't know Jesus the way we do. We don't pray to statues, we pray to the man himself. Believe me, when the end-times are coming, we'll know. We'll all know, and it won't be any secret.”