manicpixiedreamgirl (24 page)

Standing in her driveway, Becky says, “I don’t want to talk about it.” She says this as she hugs me. “I want to talk about what’s in that plastic sack.”

I step back and hold the bag toward her. “Ben and Jerry’s, as requested.”

“You are made of awesome,” she says. “Come on in.”

I follow her back to her bedroom, where she shuts the door and sits down at the head of the bed, her back against the headboard. I sit beside her.

“So, you broke up with Syd, huh?” she says, digging in to the ice cream.

“She broke up with me,” I say. “Technically.”

“Yeah? How are you feeling?”

“Good, mostly,” I say, which is true.
Jesus
, I think,
I’m sitting beside the girl of my dreams on her own bed. It isn’t the first time, and yet it never, ever gets old. I have no complaints
.

I mean, we could be doing
more
than sitting … but whatever.

“How about you?” I ask her.

“Tyler, you worry way too much,” she says, taking another bite of her ice cream.

“Sorry,” I say. “Just haven’t heard you talk like you did tonight on the phone.”

“Yeah?” she says around a mouthful of chocolate ice cream. “How’d I talk?”

“Upset.”

“You’ve never heard me upset before?”

“Not like that.”

Her mouth stops working, as if the ice cream has frozen her jaw. After a moment, she swallows and puts the carton on her night table. She swaps chewing ice cream for chewing her lip.

“Did I ever tell you that my parents only stayed together because of me?” she asks.

“Yes, actually. A while back. You said your brother told you something along those lines.”

“Well, it’s true.” Her shoulders spasm up and down, a careless shrug.

“How do you know?” I ask, except from the feeling in my gut, I’m pretty sure I have the answer.

“They said it tonight.”

Bingo.

“Not long after Mom told me she hated me,” Becky goes on. “After Dad came home. We had a bit of a discussion. It was volcanic.”

For the most part, I’ve never known Becky Webb to get overly emotional or melodramatic, so I use a joking tone to cover the truth of what I say next. “I feel like I should put my arm around you now or something.”

She turns her head to me. “Why?” Her face is serious.

So much for a joke.

“Because I hate to see you hurt,” I say. And then once that’s been said, I can’t stop the rest: “I hate
them
. Both of them. I hate how they treat you, I hate how they dismiss
you. I hate that you put a poster for the last show on your fridge and they ignored it. I hate how they went off about how great Matthew was last year and didn’t say one word about you.”

Becky’s face grows even more serious, more inquisitive.

“You remember that?” she says quietly.

“Yes. I wanted to kneecap them right then and there.”

Becky centers her head, appearing to gaze down the bed at her outstretched legs.

“That’s …,” she begins, then stops. Shakes her head wonderingly.

I sit quietly. She’s clearly thinking hard about something. Time drags. I study her star tattoo. The blue in the ink seems vibrant tonight.

“Sometimes,” she says at last, “I wish they hit me.”

I start to argue this view, but she steamrolls on.

“Or were into drugs,” she says, “or were alcoholics. I’ve tried for years to … if there was something I could blame, it might be easier, you know? Instead, they’re just genetically predisposed to be assholes.”

I risk putting my hand on her leg. Low, near her knee.

“It sucks,” I say.

“I’m supposed to be grateful,” Becky says, her voice edged. “I’m supposed to be happy they don’t do those other things, that they have money. That they’re still married, if you can believe that.”

“Who says that?”

“My psychiatrist.”

I try not to react to that, but the news kind of surprises me. On the other hand, who
hasn’t
seen a therapist? More to the point, really: who
shouldn’t
?

“That’s a pretty messed-up thing for a psychiatrist to say,” I tell her.

Becky nods. “Yeah, isn’t it? But it
might
be, it just
might
possibly be because he’s a golfing buddy of my dad’s.”

My head juts out from my neck in disbelief. “That’s bullshit!” I say. “He can’t do that! He can’t have a patient who’s the kid of one of his friends. That’s totally unethical! Hell, maybe it’s illegal, for all I know.”

“Which is exactly what I said,” Becky goes. “On a number of occasions. Including this fine evening.”

“Jesus, Becky. You can’t get out of it? Out of going to see him?”

“Not if I want dear old Dad to pay for college, I can’t. You should see the list of meds I’m supposed to be on, Sparky. He’s trying to get me doped up so I don’t interfere with his precious job or his precious fucking mistress.”

“What are you on, exactly?” I ask tentatively.

“Nothing. I don’t take them.”

“What about … are you still smoking?”

“Nah. I only did it so the drug tests he gave me came back positive.”

Which at least clears up what she meant by smoking out only when “they” were looking for it. But it leaves another question.

“Um … why did you want the tests to be positive?”

“See if it made any difference. It didn’t. Mom insisted on it, I guess to factor rehab and defense attorneys into their budget. My brother’s had more than one issue with drugs, and … damn, Sparky, you are really hung up on this drug thing! You precious prude, you.”

“I just worry about you.” Which is one way to put it.

Becky’s snarky tone drops. “Thanks,” she says. She takes another bite of ice cream. “We’re all just counting the days till I can get out of here, get out of the way, and we can all go on with the rest of our lives.” The bitterness in her voice could pierce concrete.

“So you can … I mean, you have the grades to get into a good school?”

“I didn’t say a good school,” Becky says. “Just out of town. Anywhere. They don’t care. I don’t care. Maybe a junior college in a former Soviet state. Wherever.” She pauses for a moment, glaring at her toes. “Hey, do you like my tat?”

“Your—yeah. I do. It’s pretty cool.” Cool enough to factor into my
LQR
story, anyway.…

Becky contorts her face into a malevolent grin, a super-villain divulging her master plan. “Wanna know what my dad thought when I got it?”

“Oh, man. What?”

Becky drops the villainess act. “Couldn’t tell you. They didn’t say a thing.” She studies her hands. “William did, though. He swung by for a little visit in between rehabs. He saw it, took a good look, and said, ‘It won’t work.’ That was all.”

I rub my eyes with my other hand. “God,” I say, at a loss for anything else.

“Oh, don’t even get me started on him,” Becky says with another sick laugh.

“Why the nautical star?” I ask, since we’re on the topic and I’ve always wondered. “What made you choose that?”

“It was the first thing I saw on the wall,” Becky says. “Good god, I picked it off the wall. That’s how seriously I took getting a tat.” She shakes her head. “Stupid,” she adds in a whisper.

We sit in silence for a few more minutes. I vaguely wonder if she’ll get up to put her ice cream in the freezer for later.

That’s when I remember the
Literary Quarterly Review
, folded once and stuffed in my back pocket.

Reading it to her, telling her everything, seems like a terrible idea now. She’s got to have so much on her mind, so much going on with her family, it seems selfish to ask her to add me to her list of worries.

So instead of whipping out my story, I ask her, “What can I do? I mean, I know there probably isn’t anything, but …”

Becky says nothing. She takes a deep breath through her nose, holds it a moment, and lets it out. She slides down the length of the bed, and I move my hand so I don’t accidentally touch her somewhere else as she moves. She sits on the edge of her bed, crosses her knee with one foot, and starts unlacing her shoe. Once it’s loosened, she flips
the shoe into a corner, then switches to the other foot. Her socks are blue, her feet small.

I wonder if she’s going to repeat her shower thing. Which would be great.

And then—

Then.

Becky lifts her shirt up and over her head, tossing it toward her shoes. Her hands reach behind her back to undo her black bra. She wriggles out of it and drops it to the floor.

“One rule,” she says as I try not to let my mouth hang open. “You ever tell anyone about this, it’ll never happen again. Got it?”

I have lost forever any power of speech.

Becky stands up and faces me. It’s a physical impossibility for me not to gawk at her bare chest.

Her hands move to the button on her jeans, but stop.

“This is a lot easier if you take your clothes off,” she says.

She’s not smiling, not being sexy, and not kidding. I hardly recognize her voice.

Mechanically, I slide off the bed to one side and pull my shirt off. I step on the heels of my shoes and step out of them. Seeing this, Becky continues to undress in front of me, pulling her jeans down, kicking them into a denim puddle at her feet.

I follow her lead, taking my jeans off. I stop, thumbs hooked into the waistband of my boxers, when she slides her underwear down.

This isn’t happening—this really is happening—this can’t be happening—it’s really happening
.

My hands quake at my hips, and tremors vibrate my legs. My breath comes out in tiny, silent gasps. I pull my boxers off as Becky climbs back onto her bed and rolls to one side, opening the drawer in her night table. She pulls out a bottle, squirts something into her hand—

I get on the mattress, on top of the same floral comforter she had the first time I was here. She rolls over again, now on her back, and scoots up a bit, a pillow under her head.

My entire body is shaking now, as if in the throes of frostbite. I crawl my way between her, above her, elbows locked.

I lower my head toward hers, looking straight into her eyes, so deep I can see my own reflection. For the first time, I see little flecks of gold and amber in her irises. Guess I’ve never been close enough to see them before.

So beautiful.

Becky blinks up at me. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

The volume in her voice startles me. Not yelling, but speaking in an everyday tone of voice, not all whispery and soft like Sydney does. Did.

“Like what?” It’s impossible to keep from panting.

“No, I mean … at all?”

Not knowing what else to do, how to answer, I bend my head down to, at long last, kiss Becky Webb.

She twists away.

“What—what’re you doing?” she says.

“… Kissing you.”

“Why?”

Why?
I almost say it right back to her. Why? Why
else
? Isn’t it obvious? How can I possibly make it more clear that not only is my single biggest dream in life coming true, but that she is at the center of it?

Becky tilts her head against the pillow. The frown on her face slowly relaxes away, replaced by something else. I don’t know what. My arms are starting to shake so bad I’m afraid I’ll lose strength and crash into her. Not that this would be totally horrible—

“Wait,” Becky says.

So I don’t move. I can wait as long as she wants. “Okay,” I say. I lick my lips.

I watch Becky’s eyes begin to dart all over the place: the window, door, bathroom, my shoulder. Everywhere but
my eyes. When her hands land lightly on my ribs, I almost scream.

“Stop.”

She says it so softly that it’s almost mouthed rather than spoken.

And once again—I almost scream.

“Just—don’t kiss me,” she says, not meeting my eyes. “Okay?”

Unbidden, I see Matthew. Ross. Scott.

I wonder how many more.

Part of me screams in agony,
Go! Just do it, what are you waiting for, you idiot, go go go!

Becky’s gaze is still turned away from me, her eyes open, absently studying her desk chair. Like she’s doing math homework in her head.

“You’re beautiful,” I say. It just sort of pops out.

One of Becky’s eyes twitches. The corners of her mouth turn down, and her lower lip trembles ever so slightly as she looks back at me.

“What?” Becky says.

I stare into her eyes so hard that soon all I can see is the blackness of her pupils. I fall into them.

“… I love you.”

Becky’s head twists to one side again, but she keeps her eyes on me, lids narrowing to near slits. She slides to a sitting position, making me shuffle backward. She points shamelessly to my groin.

“
That’s
not love,” she says. “So you don’t get to say that.
Not you. You fucking asshole, don’t you say that to me, don’t …”

Her eyes squeeze tight, breaking our gaze. A soft hiccup escapes her throat.

Then she wraps her arms around her belly and bends at the waist, her legs crossed, until her forehead meets the comforter, her shoulders shaking, soundless, naked. A moment later, a high vibrato sob pours out from her and chills my whole body.

Unthinking now, I scramble off the bed and pull up my boxers. I grab the royal-purple robe from the hook in the bathroom and take it over to her, draping it over her hunched form. Then I sit beside her, crossing my own legs too, and pull her against my body as tightly as I can.