Friendswood (23 page)

He didn't know why he imagined they'd have more time. “Alright, then.”

“Thanks for coming by. And thanks for the flowers.” She touched a strange blue blossom that looked as if it had been dipped in paint. Another rose, yellow, was already drooping its sorry head. Now they seemed shabby and gaudy, and all wrong. A car honked in the parking lot, and she got up.

“Well, see you later,” he said, and he turned and walked fast to the opposite door, the vibration under his chest saying,
Jackass. Jackass. Jackass.

A
T
LUNCH THE NEXT
DAY
, Dex ate a corn dog with mustard and those strange fried rectangles of potato slivers, a kind of food he'd only seen in a school cafeteria.

As he made his way with the crowd heading to the exit for fifth period, Bishop, Trace, and Cully were suddenly beside him. “Hey, Dex, what's up?”

“Just getting to class.” He thought he might puke from the grease of the lunch.

Bishop lowered his voice and put his hand to the side of his mouth. “Was that Willa Lambert with you at the DQ yesterday?”

Dex felt a cold sensation on the back of his neck, and realized it was Trace's hand, patting him there.

“We're doing a project for English,” Dex said.

“Is she your girlfriend or something?” said Bishop, suppressing a smile.

“You don't want to get yourself in the mix here, do you?” said Trace.

Cully didn't say anything, but walked along, nodding.

They were out in the hallway near the water fountain now, and Dex leaned down to get a drink. He'd hoped they'd get the message and move on, but when he turned back, they were still there, waiting for him.

“That girl's trouble, no way around it,” said Bishop. “Crazy and a liar, right?”

Dex remembered how in math class a couple of years ago, it became clear that the guy couldn't multiply, though he pretended he was only making a joke. He was in that strange, quasi-frat group, the Texas Totem—they all wore matching baseball shirts on Fridays.

Dex shook his head. “I can't believe you guys.” He turned his back to them and started to walk away. People stood in the halls now, watching.

Bishop grabbed the sleeve of Dex's T-shirt, put his mouth up to Dex's ear. “What the fuck? You know it's the truth.”

From the other side of the hallway, Trace yelled, “Whoa!”

Dex swung around and punched Bishop on the side of his jaw.

“Fuck!” Bishop held his hand there and bent over. “You prick!”

Cully came at him in a bear hug, threw him against the locker, and his spine slammed against the metal. He felt a rattling in his head. Bishop was kicking his leg with the hard pointed toe of his boot, and he spit in his face. Dex rose up and pushed Cully away. He hit Bishop in the neck, heard teeth click as Bishop's head flew back. A dance of white lights, and then Vice Principal Harrison was grabbing him by the shoulders. “Alright, son, you better hold up.” Mr. Harrison smelled of mouthwash, and his hair was sticking up in all directions. The security guards grabbed Cully and Bishop. Mr. Harrison screamed in his ear, “In my office!”

At first, the three of them sat in silence while Mr. Harrison glared at them from behind his desk. Dex scooted his chair away from the other two and touched the bruise on his leg where he'd been kicked. Finally, Mr. Harrison said, “Okay, gentlemen, what seems to be the issue?”

Cully slumped darkly in his chair, arms folded, and nodded to Dex. “That guy hit my friend.”

Mr. Harrison puckered his lips judiciously.

“Sir, we got out of hand,” said Bishop. He had a way of being overly polite with adults, fake and deferential. “But the truth is, we have a disagreement about a girl.” Dex could see where Bishop was going with this, with his slick features and sober expression. But if Bishop would only mention Willa's name, it would have an effect on Harrison, make him see Dex was right. Behind Harrison's desk, there was a shelf of self-help books—
12 Qualities of Highly Effective People
,
The Better Than Good Life—
a wooden plaque with a gold plate the shape of Texas.

“A girl, huh?”

But Dex didn't want to bring Willa into this, to say her name and soil it again. She didn't deserve it.

“Dex, what do you have to say for yourself? If you have something to say, son, you'd better say it.”

Dex stared at Mr. Harrison's pale yellow tie with the
U
s of blue horseshoes. To not reply seemed the most honorable response.

Harrison warned Cully and Bishop that they were a hairsbreadth away from another suspension. Harrison didn't know Dex had been at the party, or that he'd skipped school—because he'd had the fake note from his mom.

“Dex, you too. A hairsbreadth, you got me?”

After school, Dex went out to the field house, saw Cully run out to the field in his grimy practice clothes. He went to every practice, but he either wasn't playing or he was playing like shit—there was some satisfaction in that at least.

Dex went into Coach Salem's office, and as soon as Coach lifted his silver bristled head to him, Dex said, “I'm going to have to quit.”

Salem's face always seemed to have the texture and energy of rock.

“You sure about that, son?”

“Yeah.”

“Mind if I ask why?”

“I've got some pressing things to do now, and they're taking up all my time.”

“Well, I'm sorry to hear that then.” He nodded again. “You'll be missed.” And that was good-bye.

When Dex got into his truck, as the players in blue jerseys and shoulder pads ran in a line out to the field, he tried to think how he'd break the news to his mother.

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE NIG
HT,
she heard footsteps in the bushes. Through the curtain in her window, she saw grasshopper-like insects with strange long teeth shrieking all over the lawn outside, and she saw the moon, one full curve of it barely limned with red.

In the morning, white toilet paper hung in all the trees like an infinite tapeworm. Whole rolls dropped in the yard, a hundred white fingers poking up through the grass. She went downstairs and saw the shaving cream on the front porch: smeared now, but who knew what word had been there. She smeared it more with her foot and a crude paper ribbon fell across her face.

Her dad was already bent down, gathering the toilet paper in his arms. He should have been getting ready to go to work. She crouched and pulled up from the ground one of the white fingers—a plastic fork. They ruined lawn mowers, so you had to pick out every last one.

“Don't you worry about this,” said her father. “Go on upstairs and get dressed.”

“I should help you.”

He was angry, though he was trying not to be, she could tell by the way his eyes squinted, how his smile pulled too tight across his face. “What you need to do is go put some clothes on. I'm going to take a break in a sec and get some breakfast.”

He grabbed a string of toilet paper from the branch above him, and
a white clump fell onto his shoulder. “I've just about had it,” he said, and went inside.

Willa held a handful of dirty plastic forks. A gray car came to the corner, paused, then turned. The neighbor's bulldog, Pugsie, came to the edge of their yard and barked at her. Pugsie growled and danced around a dirty rawhide bone. Through the branches in the trees, she looked up to tug down a last stream of white.

By lunchtime, all the toilet paper and plastic forks were in fat garbage bags by the curb. A little later she heard her father mowing the lawn. He'd taken the whole day off from work, and she knew that in the afternoon he'd be restless in the living room, flicking the remote, rustling through the newspaper and complaining that the air conditioner needed repair.

S
HE READ THE BOO
K OF
R
EVELATION
straight through, only looking up now and then to stare at the curtains in the window, to ponder a phrase or a line. There were several beasts, not just one “beast of the Apocalypse,” the way she'd sometimes heard it before. The beast she'd seen had the jigsawed body parts from different animals, and the eyes “front and back,” but the beasts in Revelation also had more than one head, and a dog's face was not mentioned. She'd loved her dog, Junior, for the way he ate everything he could find—chicken bones, panty liners, Silly Putty—and for the way he lay over her feet in the bed and barked wildly at horses and mice. She'd loved his beastliness, actually, more than anything. She didn't understand why his face had attached itself to the vision. She'd been taught that if your heart was open, you understood Scripture (because it was all there, Pastor Sparks said, clear as day).
They and the beast will hate the whore; they will devour her flesh and burn her up with fire. For God has put it into their hearts to carry out his purpose by agreeing to give their kingdom to the beast
. She understood that God was
asking someone to write this all down, that marks and words would be written on bodies, that people would die.
Let anyone who has an ear listen.
She recognized what she'd heard before, many times, that God would come like a thief in the night, that there would be an Antichrist, that you had to be ready when this world was about to be destroyed. But no matter how much she tried to open her heart, she could not make sense of the whore of Babylon, or the secrets that different people would harbor and why, and she couldn't picture the four angels guarding the sky, or the scroll rolling up like a cloud, because the images as they were described kept changing. How could this be clear as day?

When her parents came home from church, they seemed to be angry with her—it was in the pinch of her mother's smile, in her father's averted eyes. “I was thinking we'd invite Miranda over for dinner next week,” said her mother.

They were in the kitchen, and Willa didn't look up from rinsing off her plate.

“Willa, will you look at me when I'm talking to you?”

“Alright.” Willa looked at her. “Can we do it later? I don't feel much like having company.”

Like a small propped-up structure that had fallen, her mother's smile collapsed back into her face. “Come on, you need to see your friends.”

Her church friends had not emailed her, or texted her, or come to her house. They were afraid of her, afraid of what they might hear, afraid of how they might have to come to her defense, and then, by association, be called sluts too. Willa even suspected that Miranda had been the one who'd called her at home the other day, said, “Is Cully your boyfriend?” and hung up.

Today Dani emailed her to say that someone had painted white over the legs of the giant blue mustang in the mural in Hall A, so it no longer ran but “sort of sat.” She said she had spoken to Dex, who seemed nice and told her about the Camus project. “I wish I could see you. Maybe soon??”

She sat with her father in the living room, studying her history dates, the news blaring while he lay back in the recliner. A street with a mosque in the background, scattered scraps of cars and chairs everywhere, a man's arm sticking out from under a crushed table. Two car bombings, thirty-four dead, sixty-two injured.
With such violence Babylon the great city shall be thrown down and will be found no more.
Her father glanced at her and sighed. “Never ending, isn't it?” On the screen orange and yellow flames raged behind the glass, whipping up and waving like bright rags. Firefighters were flocking to California, to help contain the raging fires, said the newscaster. More than two thousand people had fled their homes.
Hail and fire mixed with blood. Trees and grass burned up.
Her father picked up his can of Coke and took a long sip, sighed, then set the can down again on the table beside him. “They just have to figure a way to trap it,” he said. “You know, one thing they do is to sometimes get a fire going in the opposite direction.”

Later, her parents sat on the patio furniture in the backyard. Her mother's face seemed a faded blur through the window, but the movements of her head suggested that she was telling Willa's father something she wanted him to do. Her parents knew more than they revealed to her and seemed to be planning some new resolution. Her father had not spoken about it to her, but had relayed through her mother the message about not going to the police because it would only be worse for her. It seemed better for him to never look at her directly again for the rest of her life than to have to tell him what she did and did not remember about that afternoon. Her dad rubbed his neck as her mother spoke, and then his hand shot out with his finger pointed, and he shook it at her mother.

That night her mother came with a box to her bedroom door in the afternoon. “Ms. Marlowe sent you something. Isn't she your English teacher?” She put it on the desk and stood slumped against the doorjamb waiting for Willa to open it. Her mother's hair hung limp, framing the sadness of her sagging cheeks. “We want you to see your church friends,
but I talked to Ms. Ryan, and we can keep you on home study until the end of the school year. That's the best thing, right? I just have to fill out some forms for homeschooling, not that I'm going to do anything but make sure you do your homework. I told her that, and she said it was okay.”

“Well, that's good.” Willa slid off the bed and went to her desk.

“They'll keep sending out a substitute teacher every other week.”

Her mother handed her a pair of scissors and Willa cut through the packing tape, folded back the box flaps and tissue paper. There was a book of poems by Emily Dickinson.

“Oh, what's that?” Her mother touched her shoulder.

“Poems. We read some of them in school.”

“Oh, look at the
gold
,” she said, thumbing the gilt on the cover. “But it's not like it's Scripture. They make it look like the book is holy or something.” Her mom's shoulders slumped as she put the book down. “Was she a Christian writer?”

“I think so.”

Her mother opened the book, and Willa wanted to take it from her because she knew she wouldn't understand and might even find the poetry blasphemous. But her mother just closed it up and put it down again. “Too deep for me, I guess. I never was able to get poetry—the symbolism and all.” Willa took the book and read to herself:

Just Infinities of Nought—

As far as it could see—

So looked the face I looked upon—

So looked itself—on Me—

I offered it no Help—

Because the Cause was Mine—

The Misery a Compact

As hopeless—as divine—

Willa sat at her bedroom window, looking out. A jay pecked at a twig, its tiny black eyes bright and unseeing, and as it fluttered its wings to the next branch, revealed an otherworldly fan of blue. The tree swayed slightly, light patching through the leaves. She tried again to pray, to summon up at least a reach to what wasn't visible, but she kept thinking of her butt cheeks pressed to the corner of hard wood, the scrambled eggs roiling in her stomach, and a very faint taste of blood in her mouth. She didn't even try to say words anymore because then the prayer sounded fake and rehearsed, even demonic. She admired how the leaves on different branches fluttered at various syncopations, how the thinner branches swayed and gestured.

The meanings of the poems seemed to move as soon as she thought she'd found them. She read pages and pages of them. She fell asleep with the journal open on her bed, the pen tucked inside it, leaking onto the page.

At some point in the middle of the night, she woke up, glanced between the curtain sheers at the moon, turned off the lamp, and went to sleep. It was a sleep like a tunnel, as if she were going into the deep past, before anyone she knew had been born. In the dream, she saw face after face like fabric screens she was falling through.

She woke up in a patch of sun, eyes wincing at the light. She pushed herself up against the headboard, started to stretch. The muscles in her bare arms felt good as they lengthened, and she tightened the muscles around her knees, pointed her toes. Then she noticed it. On her forearm, there was writing. Cramped and spiked, but unmistakable.
Sense flies away from spirit. The purple ages pause.

She rubbed at it, her heart pounding, the skin where the words were written was hairless and healed in the space where there'd once been a small scar.

Her mother opened the door and came in with an armful of laundry. Willa was still staring at her arm. She felt a strange satisfaction and relief
seeing the words, as if they'd claimed her, and there was a sweet taste just under her tongue.

“Here's your fresh shirts,” said her mom, laying them on the dresser. “You need a new nightgown.” Her mother looked at her, straight at her arm, and didn't seem to see the writing. “You slept late. Hope you're not fighting off something.”

Willa turned her arm again, held the writing face up to her mother. She still didn't see it. “Want some oatmeal, honey? Why are you holding your arm like that? Did you hurt it?”

If demons were showing her these signs, then they were demons born from her own head, and why wouldn't they also come from God? Had the visions come from some rogue part of her brain trying to escape? Because there was something inside her trying to loosen itself lately, in the poems she wrote so quickly, pressed down so hard on the page that her hand hurt. And she didn't know what the loosening meant, in the same way she didn't always know what a poem meant—or it was like a jewel that had a different shape and color depending on the angle you turned it.

Something clattered in the hallway, and just for a few seconds, she looked back into her room, and there were both of the beasts, standing side by side, Lamb and Dog, she called them now, to undermine their nastiness. Lamb's face was streaked with a substance the color of pus, and around its neck, a chain of severed ears. Dog was part lion, with a cantaloupe-sized tumor on the side of its head, and a fluorescent green powder all over its fur, eyes erupting in patches of it. “She's going in the night like a thief,” said Dog.