Jesus Land (15 page)

“What do you want?” I yell back.

When we cross paths at school, he smiles and I scowl.

My hand is on the doorknob; I can slam it shut anytime. I have a sharp letter opener hidden in my pillowcase. David’s right downstairs.

Whoops of laughter roll down the hallway from the great room; how many of them are there? I circle the doorknob with my fingers and eye the offered glass. I’m thirsty and could use a drink. I take it from him and sniff it—whiskey—and gulp a few swallows. It warms my throat. Scott takes a step toward me, and I start to close the door. He drops to his knees holding his glass.

“Please, please, please,” he prays, and by the way he wobbles, I can tell he is drunk, harmless. “I want to talk to you.”

The mighty Scott Cooper is kneeling at my feet. This is highly entertaining. Finally I’ll have something interesting to tell Elaine and Mary on Monday as we sit on the floor next to the locked gymnasium, eating our junk food picnic.

I walk past him down the dark hallway, then turn and beckon to him like a femme fatale in an old movie. He’s in my power now. He lurches to his feet.

The ghost of Mother’s Enjoli perfume lingers in the air of the master bedroom. I turn on her bedside lamp and shiver with excitement as I sit on the spotless white bedspread of my parents’ bed, sipping whiskey and waiting for Scott to walk through the door.

He sets his glass on the King James Bible on Mother’s night-stand, and I move it to the carpet and put mine beside it. The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads to Another” is now blaring from the stereo, and I giggle at this as I close the door and sit back down on the bed.

I turn to face Scott in the quieted room and his shorts shimmer red in the lamplight.

“Julia,” he says, breathing out the three syllables of my name in a deep voice. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

He sits heavily beside me, his leg brushing mine, and suddenly I feel shyly stupid in his presence, my tongue big and sloppy inside my mouth. His breath is warm and yeasty on my cheek.

“You’re so alone,” he says, tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear, his fingers brushing my cheek. “You and me. We could be friends.”

His hand slides down my neck to my shoulder, where it rests. He starts to fall back on the bed and steadies himself by tightening his grip on my shoulder.

“Your hair is beautiful. It’s like . . . like . . . corn silk. Long and soft.”

He pets the back of my head, a little too hard, but I yield to his hand and close my eyes. No one’s ever talked to me this way before.

“Sorry ’bout the other day. Got out of hand. Jerome . . .”

“I hate Jerome!” I say, opening my eyes and leaning away from him.

“Shh, I know,” he says, rubbing my back. No one’s ever touched me this way before.

“Why do you hate him?” he asks softly. He pulls me sideways into his warmth, and I put my head on his shoulder, inhaling his brothy musk.

“He . . . he does things to me.”

The words fall easily from my mouth, and I’m glad to have them gone. There. It’s no longer a dirty little secret; someone else knows. Maybe Scott will know what to do.

“What kind of things?” he asks, still caressing my back.

“He picks the lock on my door at night and he . . . he . . .” I stop because these are things I cannot pronounce, and bury my face in his neck.

“Well, he’s not your real brother.”

True. But then neither is David. I start to sob.

Scott drapes his arms around me, rocks me back and forth like a monstrous baby.

“Shhh, it’s okay,” he says. His voice has thickened, deepened. “It doesn’t matter. Everything’s fine. I’m right here.”

Hearing these words, a peace descends on me and I relax in his grip. Scott will protect me from Jerome and Brad and everything else. I wipe my nose and smile. Everything’s fine.

Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You” floats down the hall. It’s the song I practice kissing the mirror to, the most romantic song ever, and I’m listening to it with Scott.

Scott scoots back on the bed, lifts my head from his shoulder and guides it toward his lap. I close my eyes. Yes, I would like to lay my head down for a spell and rest. But my cheek doesn’t fall against red satin, it falls against something warm and hard and flesh. I open my eyes, and in a boozy blur, see his penis jutting from his shorts. He grabs it by the root.

“Lick it,” he says in his thick voice, pressing my head toward it.

I’ve heard girls giggle about blow jobs at school; it’s something a boyfriend requires of you.

I stare at Scott’s penis. There’s a pearl balanced on the tan tip. It smells like liverwurst.

“Like a lollipop,” he’s begging now, breathing hard. He wags the penis with his hand to get my attention.

I close my eyes and stick out my tongue and it touches the side of it.

“Open your mouth,” Scott says, and I do. He puts it between my lips and grabs my hair and pulls my head up and down on it. A moment later he groans and something slimy spurts into my mouth that tastes like pool water. Scott collapses onto his back on the mattress and I spit the slime onto my parents’ white bedspread and roll onto my back beside him. We lay together in silence, not touching, and my head swirls with booze and what I’ve done. It was sinful, yes, but necessary. I need Scott to be my boyfriend.

Hours later, I wake alone and drag myself to my room. My stomach is in turmoil, but I’m elated. Now that I have a boyfriend, everything will change.

Mother got angry, and David got in trouble.

Seems he was always doing something to set her off: not paying attention, not eating all his food, not coming when she called.

I’d do the same things, but it was David she’d punish, digging her nails into his arm or whacking his butt with the handle of a toilet plunger.

One time we played hospital, washing our stuffed animals in the bathtub and wrapping them in gauze bandages. We were playing doctor and nurse, like our parents. Mother was not flattered. She tossed our patients into the trash, sent me to my room, and spanked David. It was a typical scenario.

In a photograph from the time, David is posed stiffly against a wall in a blue suit jacket, a white turtleneck, and plaid pants—Sunday clothes. There is no date on the back of the picture, but he looks about six or seven. He winces up at the camera, his eyes swollen with tears, his small hand clutching tissue, patently miserable. He wore that expression a lot in those days.

After Mother punished him, he’d stick his fingers in his mouth to stifle the sobs and gaze at me with those soulful brown eyes. At me, his twin sister. Wanting an explanation for life’s cruel vagaries. I looked away, having convinced myself that Mother knew something about him I didn’t, that he needed discipline to keep him from growing into a bad person.

It was years before I knew better.

My heart’s chugging like a runaway train when I walk into the cafeteria on Monday. There’s Scott, sitting at the jock table, contorting in his chair as he says something that has everyone spasmatic with laughter. I stop walking and stare. Is he telling them what I did? I don’t want to be one of those girls that guys make up nicknames for.

Mary and Elaine yell to me from the snack bar. I phoned them both on Saturday, impatient to share the news. I told them Scott kissed me, and it was beautiful and romantic and amazing. But it’s a lie; he never did kiss me, not even after he dirtied my mouth.

“So, did he call you?” Elaine asks when I slip into line beside them. On the phone she called Scott a phony who flirts with all the girls, and said that no one takes him seriously because he’s a half-breed.

“He’s like one of those miniature horses you country folk keep chained in your yards,” she’d said. “Amusing, but nothing you’d want to ride.”

I almost hung up on her.

“Did he or didn’t he?” she now insists, flipping her long red hair over her shoulders.

“I was gone most of the day,” I lie. “He probably tried but . . .”

“Here he comes,” Mary says, looking over my shoulder. I turn and see Scott strutting over in his varsity football jacket, a wide smile parting his face.

“Damn Sam! Got me all Charlie’s Angels here at once,” he yells, spreading his arms.

“What a dork,” I hear Elaine mutter behind me.

He stops a few inches from my face. “So what’s up?”

The corners of his almond-shaped eyes tilt upward when he grins, and his breath smells like the soy burger he ate for lunch.

“Not much,” I shrug.

“Wanna go somewhere and talk?”

He cocks his head toward the dim hallway to the left of the snack bar, which ends in a glass doorway. Outside, gray sky hangs over dead fields.

I shrug again and follow him down the hall, wishing I had a piece of gum to freshen my breath. Halfway to the glass door, he stops and faces me.

“Didn’t think I’d talk to you today, did you?” he asks.

I look at him, puzzled.

“Of course I did,” I say. “I’m your girlfriend.”

“My what?” He spits out the question, incredulous.

“I mean . . . after . . . the . . . bedroom,” I stutter, as I sometimes do when I’m nervous. A boy sprints past us out the door, and a blast of arctic wind rips over us. I shiver and Scott starts to laugh, slapping his knees with his hands.

“You think that just because you . . . we’re going out?”

I can feel my pulse throb in my temples, and stare at him in disbelief. I did that to him for nothing? Tears sting my eyes, and I start to walk away from him.

“Hold on!” he says, grabbing my arm and spinning me around.

“I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t want you, dummy,” he says, pressing me against the cold metal of a locker. I stare at the collar of his pink Izod, which is starched straight up, preppy style. He leans into me, one hand resting on the locker behind me, the other lifting my chin. His lips are full and soft on mine, and his tongue swishes into my mouth, thick and wet and salty. I pull my head away; I don’t know what to do with a tongue and don’t much like it.

Scott frowns.

“You sure could use some practice kissing,” he says, before smashing his mouth onto mine.

Mother’s waiting for us after school. Swim practice was canceled today, so I rode the bus home with the boys.

“What in God’s good name happened here?” she demands when we walk through the back door.

They got home late last night, after we’d gone to bed. I heard them tiptoe down the hallway and prayed they wouldn’t notice their bedspread. I scrubbed it with soap and a nailbrush Saturday morning, but the faint yellow stain would not come out.

“What in God’s name happened in this house?” she repeats, as we stand there in our winter coats and snow-crusted shoes, our backpacks still curved against us.

Mother ticks off a list of things she’s discovered: spit tobacco on her rubber plant, beer cans under the sofa, her Aztec calendar in the trash!

On Saturday, Jerome vacuumed the great room and put the spoiled food back into the refrigerator before returning to bed, complaining of a headache. On Sunday, he slept right through church TV.

David and I now turn to glare at him, and he turns his bloodshot eyes to the ground.

“Someone’s going to pay for this, or you all are,” Mother says before pounding up the stairs and slamming the basement door.

“Well, what are you going to do?” David asks Jerome after she’s gone. “Get us all in trouble?”

Jerome walks to the boys’ room and slams the door, and David and I take off our coats and sit on the green cot next to the ping-pong table and listen to Mother bang pots and pans upstairs and Jerome bang drawers downstairs.

A few minutes later, Jerome emerges from the bedroom, still wearing his coat and carrying a duffel bag. He throws open the back door without a word and marches across the field as snow swirls around him. When he disappears behind the tree line, David stands and shuts the door.

“Guess that takes care of that,” I say, turning to walk upstairs.

I pause at the bottom of the staircase and look back at David, who’s still peering out the window into the frozen afternoon.