Margarette (Violet) (4 page)

Margarette wakes up when he runs over a railroad
track on the way to his sister’s house. She presses her arm against the door to
sit up and looks down at her chest. Her breast is partially exposed and her top
is loose. Some of what happened in the field rushes back to her. She pulls up
her dress and looks over at Tommy.

“Holy shit. It wasn’t a dream. Where the frick are
we going?”

“I told you I don’t know where you live. Thank the
Lord you’re awake. I’m low on gas.”

“Of course I’m awake,” she says. “What the hell am
I doing there? I mean here? Fricking hell… my head hurts.”

Tommy looks at her. “Where should I take you?”

“Where are we now?”

“Near the airport.”

“I live a few miles away. Go down Covenant.”

“My sister lives a few blocks from here.”

“What?” she mutters confused, not realizing it is
an offer.

“You could sober up.”

“Shit… my mom thinks I’m at Alice’s house
tonight.”

“Alice Walker?”

“Alice Cherise. Her dad’s name is Walker.” She
pauses for a second. “Why are my clothes torn, Tommy?”

After an even longer pause, Tommy turns down the
radio and softly clears his throat. “You were… you were almost attacked
tonight. Some guys tried to take advantage of you.”

“What?”

“Do you remember what you drank?”

Margarette sits forward, fear sobering her
instantly. She thinks of her evil bitch faux friends—her
one
friend, she
corrects herself almost instantly. How could Alice do this to her? The
stupidity of her actions becomes clear. She even resents correcting Tommy about
Alice’s last name. She thinks about how wicked these girls are, and her lips
buckle. She begins to cry.

“Not me! I didn’t do anything,” Tommy says
awkwardly, then recalls his actions.

“What happened?” Margarette asks tearfully.

“I found you in a bedroom and some guys were
messing with you.”

“What the frick did they do?” She paces herself
with a breath for each word.

“I stopped them before they got all of your
clothes off. Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not fricking okay,” she says. Then she
adds sarcastically, “Am I fricking okay?”

“I stopped them. I punched one of them in the face
and threw the other one against the wall,” he says proudly.

“Great…. What, do you want a medal?” Her voice
drops to a low tone. “What are you thinking? If your mother was getting
attacked by a dog, I’d kick it away. I wouldn’t think twice. Those fricking
pricks…. I want to fricking gut them. Rip their chest open with a dull knife.”

She looks up. Tommy’s silent.

“Who did it?” she asks him.

Tommy’s eyes widen, almost intimidated. “You’re
safe now. Stop….”

“You stop. I’ll hang their balls on my belt and
bury the bodies by dawn.”

“Don’t… don’t ever do that. I don’t even want to
hear that.”

“I’ll rake a razor over their sockets until they
see with their eyes shut.”

“Holy mother…. Now I’m imagining it and shit.”

“It’s not fricking funny, Tommy.” She’s angry.

Tommy pulls over, afraid she might pounce. “Look,
this is my sister’s house. Right down that street. Let’s go in there and get
you cleaned up.”

“Are you out of your mind? I don’t want to go
there,” she says quickly, slurring her words.

“You’re in no condition for revenge. Trust me. I’ll
take you wherever you want tomorrow. But one problem tonight, we can’t talk.
They will wake up.”

“We can’t talk? What kind of condition is that?
Who’s they?”

“Her and her husband. They get up really
unnaturally early in the AM.”

“Isn’t she just a few years older than you? And
she has a husband?”

“She can drink.”

“So can we.”

“Legally.”

“That’s sooo fricking weird. I’m not staying with weirdoes.”
It’s not really weird, she realizes after she says it, but she doesn’t want to
take it back. “Besides, I don’t even know her.”

The anger remains but her survival instincts kick
in.
At least nothing happened
, she thinks. This isn’t exactly how she
thought her night would end up. She looks up at Tommy. The brake lights reflect
in the woods and make the night behind him glow, giving the tips of his blond
hair a red tinge. She stares into his blue eyes. He’s better-looking up close.
She can see what the other girls have been going on about.

Staying awake becomes more of a struggle. She’s
afraid she’ll start talking to him, and say something stupid. Or worse, start
telling him everything he wants to know, as if the drug they gave her was some
wicked truth serum.

“How old are you, really?” Tommy asks.

He looks over and she slumps down in the seat.

“How old are you?” he repeats.

“No officer, no….”

He smiles and lets his foot off the brake. Outside
the back lights glow as the car rolls forward and the two evil red eyes snake
through the night down the acorn-covered drive, snapping and popping as they
go. Margarette’s hand falls to her side and she pulls down on the edge of the
dress trying to cover her thigh. She wonders how it got that way, and whether he
looked. But outside she keeps a stone cold face, unreadable to most, and most
of all Tommy. He glances to the side, but doesn’t look directly into her eyes.

She leans forward putting her head on the dash, shaking,
and her head droops. He looks over again and the skirt is riding up her leg not
very far from his hand. So close. His hand moves toward her. He reaches over
and touches her back, but only to offer a soft pat. Her head twitches and he
pulls back accordingly. The car rolls up and stops in front of a wooden house
with a small but well-kept yard.

Her eyes race back and forth under her eyelids and
she drunkenly considers her life to this moment.
Sometimes being intoxicated
denies you from an experience
…. Tommy goes around to her door and lifts her
from the car.
Sometimes things happen outside of your control
…. She goes
in and out of consciousness, and finds herself sitting on a strange bed for a
few minutes before passing out, rethinking how her night went and finding out
that there were many gaps.

Margarette makes a solemn vow never to drink at a
party again. This is one of many rules she would eventually bend to the point
of breaking. The second after she makes the vow she considers the stipulation
that a drink isn’t the same thing as a sip.

Margarette wakes up with a sharp headache. After a
quick inspection, she realizes she’s wearing only her panties under a white
linen sheet and she’s in an unfamiliar monotone room with not a whole lot of
light. She retains just enough body heat from the sheet to keep from shivering
in the cool tiled room, but only if she stays still. She wants to run, but how,
if she’s half naked? She refuses to be caught in a sheet. Each shift of her
body exposes an appendage to the arctic room.

She hears footsteps outside on what must be stone
floors. She returns to how she was when she woke and pretends to be asleep. The
soft patter of footsteps enters the room. With a quick peek through narrowed eyelids
concealed by the darkness of the room, she sees a well-groomed girl with dark
shoulder-length hair fussing with a pile of clothes in the hamper.

The girl stops to stand over her and exhales
audibly.

“I wish you would call when you were coming over.
I did your laundry and cleaned up your stuff, Sharon,” the girl says.

The girl presses her hand on the bed but says
nothing as she studies Margarette.

“Shar…?” She pulls back.

The girl digs into Margarette’s purse. Margarette
lies there with her eyes cracked like a Venus flytrap, and through the edge of
the darkness sees the girl move away from the bed, holding her bag. It is the
worst robbery ever. Margarette finally recognizes May, Tommy’s older sister.

“It’s not Sharon?” May asks slowly. “Shit…. Who
the hell are you?”

May leaves the room with a determined step.
Margarette hears quick whispering in the distance, which develops into raised
voices.

“Shit, did you wake her up?” That’s Tommy’s voice.

“Are you totally kidding me?” That’s May. “Wake
her. I don’t know who the hell she is. Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were
coming over?” Her voice lowers. “You know he’s got to go to work today.”

“Work?” Tommy asks. “It’s Saturday. It’s like
barely nine o’clock.”

“You know he works a few hours on Saturdays,” she
says, sounding annoyed, as if Tommy should really know. “He works so hard.”

Margarette assumes that May is talking about her
husband. The girl seems fixated on her husband in some weird, psychotic
abusive-husband syndrome. The faint murmuring nears the door and the two voices
turn into a pair of chronic laryngitis patients arguing about a raspy horse. Margarette
is unable to distinguish or decode their words.

The door swings open and Margarette snaps her eyes
shut. She hears boots step heavily on the tile and she tenses her abdomen and
chest. She’s in her underwear and still doesn’t know who took off her clothes.
She pretends not to be in this predicament to allow her body to relax, but the
thought of Tommy or his sister undressing her doesn’t allow her to. If it was
him, why would he, and if it was her, eww. These thoughts go round in her head,
unraveling her subterfuge. Margarette continues to wonder who was the one that
touched her, and considers that maybe it wouldn’t be that bad if it was him,
but then again it was probably May.

Tommy touches the bed and snaps her right out of
the delusion. She peeks through her mostly cracked eye.

Tommy speaks in full volume, but softly. “See,
when I was a kid, I had to hide a lot for all the things I either did or just
got blamed for. In either case I would close my eyes and look through just my
lashes, and I thought no one would catch me doing it.”

No one answers. He continues after taking a deep
breath.

“When I was like that, pretending to be asleep, I
never knew how easy it was to see the muscle tense near the corner of my eye. I
think only the people who use that trick know where to look. Don’t worry; she’s
making him some whole wheat toast without butter, possibly because she hates
him.”

Margarette fights the urge to smile. “Is she
gone?” she asks in a guilty whisper.

“Yes,” Tommy answers.

“Great.” She opens her eyes in full and finds
Tommy staring at her.

“Did you sleep well?” he asks.

She frowns. “This is possibly the worst night of
my life.”

“Huh….”

She leans forward, pulling the corner of the sheet
to cover herself. Tommy doesn’t break eye contact, and she watches him closely
clutching the sheet.

“It’s my sister’s house,” he says. “Her name’s
May.”

“I know,” she replies in a snide tone, covering
herself with her arm. Everyone knows the Gallagers, even though May had already
graduated by the time Margarette started high school. “She used to pick you up
sometimes after school.”

He chuckles. “That was a
looong
time ago,”
he says, almost embarrassed.

Oh, shit
. She didn’t mean to admit that she
noticed Tommy back when she was a freshman. She changes the topic quickly. “You’d
think she would have a blanket or something.”

“Are you naked under that?” His voice rises.

“You didn’t know?”

“What?”

Just her luck. It was May
. “Worst night
ever.”

Tommy’s head drops to look at her silhouette and
looks away quickly, realizing she is telling the truth and is mostly naked
under the thin sheet.

She shakes her head with a confused look since she
just told him, which she thought was clear for him not to look. Then she
flushes realizing she was formally introduced to his sister.
May
. She
curses into the air above her head. She rarely gets along with people named
after months.

Tommy picks up her dress and tries to flatten the
crumpled parts in his lap. She feels a throbbing pain in her head and the world
wobbling. He turns to her to hand the dress back and he looks down again at her
bare body through the sheer sheets. He can see her knees pressed together, and
even the lace of her panties at the hip. Her body is thin and clearly toned. As
he slowly looks up her body, her arm is pulling the sheets over her breasts and
she’s staring at him with a cold look. He slides his foot out from under him
and hands her the clothes.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were naked,” he
says.

“You just handed me my dress,” she says
sarcastically. “I thought I told you.”

“No, I mean, I thought she would have given you
something.”

“Your pervert nature is the least of my problems.”

“I am not,” he says defensively.

“Exactly, you’re the least of my problems.”

Tommy almost laughs, so clearly he didn’t follow.
“Who are you?”

“No one of consequence.”

Tommy smiles, but doesn’t know the origin of the
phrase well enough to chime in.

“I’m nobody,” Margarette clarifies somewhat
disappointed, when he doesn’t say anything.

“No body? You have a beautiful body.”

“A decent man never flirts shamelessly with a
half-naked girl.” She rolls the dress up, so that it is easier to slide on
under the blanket, in the process wrinkling what little bit he flattened. “Be
still my beating heart,” she quips sarcastically.

Her flip-flopping is running circles around his
ability to follow. So he continues to say what he’s thinking. “I’ve never seen
anything, anyone as beautiful,” Tommy says, as if dazed.

“Oh Joy, the same word twice…. Do you mind if I
get dressed?”

“You don’t have to,” Tommy says softly.

“Turn around, young man.”

Tommy turns his body away reluctantly, his head
lingering back as long as he can. He smiles facing away from her; her body is
etched into his mind.

“So why haven’t we hung out before?” he asks.

“I typically avoid vapid men like you.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re not my type.”

Tommy chuckles, then pauses. “What does
vapid
mean?”

“Ugh…” she groans.

“What? Everyone likes me.”

“Great. Go hit on everyone then. I like modest
men. Humble to a fault.”

“Losers,” Tommy says with a chuckle. “If you don’t
stand up for what you believe in, then no one will.”

“In other words, if everyone agreed with that…
then there wouldn’t be a need to stand up for anything.”

He smiles, then stops smiling. “Wait, what?”

“Oh, never mind.”

He finds a welcome distraction seeing her change
in the window’s reflection.

“Where… where do you work?” he asks her.

“Where do
you
work?” she counters, to avoid
his question; but she already knows where he works. In fact, he told her just
this week.

“At the bank for my father,” Tommy answers anyway.

“And what does the bank do?”

“We hand out loans for the people of this town so
that they can buy the things they need.” He pauses for a second, as if trying
to remember what he does at work. “And I help manage accounts for wealthy
people and simplify their lives.”

“That’s decent of you. Rich people are far too
busy already.”

“I know,” he says, glad to get her to agree on
something. “So what do you do during the day?”

“I read.”

“Read what?”

“Anything and everything.”

“How do you make money?”

“I don’t, I’m poor.”

“Your parents?”

“Them too.”

“They read?”

“No, they’re just poor, Tommy.” She sighs. “Can
you take me home now?”

She stands clothed, but is far from dressed. The
edge of the dress is folded and torn from the edge of the car. Margarette doesn’t
remember that exactly, and imagines something dark happening in a backroom at
the party. She’s not sure if it is a real memory or what she invented in her
head.

Tommy’s tone changes abruptly to surprise. “How
did you get my knife?”

She turns and looks at him with a blank expression.
He’s holding her knife partially open and then clicks it closed. She stands
defensively with her arms crossed.

“How do you know it’s your knife?”

“Oh, this is my knife. Why didn’t you return it at
the pump?”

She waits for an eternity and exhales the truth.
There must have really been some truth drugs in her system. “I thought I would
get to meet you by returning it.”

“Meet me? I thought you didn’t like people like
me.” He’s surprised with her answer.

“I don’t like people like you for one reason.” She
looks down diverting from his eyes.

“Yeah? What’s that?” Tommy asks.

She looks up quickly. “I don’t like the way you
look down at me.”

He continues looking exactly as he did without
breaking eye contact. “How do you claim to know how I look at you? I don’t look
down
at you.”

“If I wasn’t here now because of some random series
of events, I don’t think you’d look at me at all.” Margarette justifies.

“That’s not true at all.”

“I think I made a mistake,” she says, ignoring his
answer.

“I’ve failed to impress?”

“You never really had a chance. You were born that
way.”

“Well, perhaps I can change your mind.” He
gestures for her to take the knife from his hand.

Margarette smiles, but continues in a weak voice. “I
assume you only want me for one thing.”

“I feel the same way.”

She raises an eyebrow. “What could I ever get from
you?”

“Well, my knife, apparently,” he says impishly.

“Charming.” She is unimpressed, but has his knife
back.
Her
knife.

She puts her arm on an antique ivory table top and
balances herself. Her other hand rises to her flushed cheek and forehead. She stares
at her own reflection.

“Margarette, are you okay?”

“I must ask,” she begins as if dazed, pausing for
dramatic interest. “Did you kiss me when I was asleep?”

“No,” he says sharply.

Margarette’s image shatters in the mirror, but she
can’t see his eyes so she knows it is okay. She continues in a different tone.
“Why did you take me?”

“I don’t know. You were alone. I didn’t want to
leave you there.”

“Where did you find me?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Tell me again.”

“You were sleeping in a backroom.”

“Why would you pull me out of a room?”

“You weren’t
really
alone… and you had
passed out. I found you with two guys, but I know you didn’t know they were
there.”

Some of the story comes back to her.

“Uh huh….” Her anger flares. “Two of them…. Who?”

“I didn’t get a good look at them. I just kicked
their asses. The one I punched was a big dude. Got him good, too. My knuckles
hurt.”

“The least of my concerns is you or them. Filthy
animals.”

“Don’t lop me in with them. I saved you.”

“Thanks. Is that what you want?” She is seriously
pissed.

“I guess. Why are you angry with me?”

“What do you think you deserve from me? Huh? You
are exactly like them.”

“No…. Totally not. I’m just….”

“All alike with innocent flesh and sex,” she says,
nearly hissing like a cat.

“How innocent are you?” Tommy asks. He doesn’t
know he is crossing a line. As far as lines go he had stepped on an exposed
power line.

“What the hell do you mean? I don’t lead girls
into dark rooms, for one.”

“You have the wrong idea,” Tommy says, almost
angrily, fighting to recover. “I was defending your honor. I didn’t even kiss
you.” His point is technically true, but somewhat misleading. “I heard someone
at the party talking about you passing out. I went to find you and found them
first.”

“Oh, you intervened and what, now you’re my hero?
Thanks for being human. For keeping people from committing…. This disgusts me.”

“Why were you in there to begin with? Why were you
alone?” He stops her cold.

Margarette’s head drops, sad and furious at the
same time. “Because I have no fricking friends, okay? I thought I did, but I
know no one. No one I can trust or respect on this earth.”