Save Yourself (10 page)

Patrick smiled again, but this time it wasn’t because anything was funny. When he was her age, his mom had been dead and his dad was knocking back half a case of beer on the nights when he took it easy. “Let’s not compare you at your age to me at your age.”

“Why not?”

“Because I wasn’t crazy, and you are. Christ.” She had taken another chip and started the cheese-removal process all over again. “What do you have against tortilla chips?”

“Nothing. They’re the perfect vehicle for cheese. Anyway, you’re not the first person to think I’m a weirdo, Patrick Cusimano. Look who’s talking. You’re like Norman Bates with facial hair.”

Somewhere in the parking lot, somebody leaned on their horn, an angry, discordant noise. “At least I’m not dressed like Raggedy Ann on LSD.”

She laughed. “Raggedy Ann on LSD. I love that. That’s great.” She shook her head. “Look, you can’t walk home. Only losers walk places. Let me give you a ride.” His wariness must have shown on his face, because she added, “Oh, come on. What’s the worst that could happen? You get home quickly and without incident?”

“Or we get pulled over halfway there, and I get arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. No thanks.”

She folded her arms across her shiny plastic chest. “You’re only nine years older than I am, O paranoid one.”

“Nine legally very important years,” Patrick said, “and how the hell do you know how old I am?”

“I told you. I looked you up in the yearbook.” She jumped down from the hood of her car, tugging at her skirt in a way that utterly belied all of her phony sophistication, and held out the tray of nachos. “You want the rest of these? If I eat any more of that cheese, I’m going to puke.”

“If I watch you eat any more of that cheese, I’m going to puke.” The inside of Patrick’s mouth felt greasy and synthetic. He looked away from her, toward the road that led, more or less, to his house.
When he and Mike were kids, the SuperSpeedy had been Mick’s Market—smaller, dingier, owned and staffed by an actual guy named Mick—and they used to walk here to buy Coke slushies, shoplifting candy bars by burying them in the thick, opaque goo. It was a twenty-minute walk. Twenty minutes of picturing Mike and Caro in their room, doing things he didn’t want to imagine but knew he would imagine, in great detail. If he took the ride, he’d be in bed in five minutes with some loud music to drown out his thoughts. The kid was crazy and Caro would say,
Jesus, Patrick, don’t encourage her
, but—

The goth girl was watching him with a faint smile. As if she could see the path his thoughts took, as if she knew she would get her way. “Coming?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Whatever.”

Patrick liked his music angry, but the noise that blasted out of the car speakers when the girl turned her key in the ignition felt like being slammed against a brick wall, and not in a good way. It was like her: plastic and crafted and fake. Not a real guitar string or drumhead anywhere to be found. She moved her thumbs over the buttons on her steering wheel and the sounds changed, went from aggressive and soulless to deep and cool. It still wasn’t his kind of thing, but it was better than the noise. “This is my current favorite song,” she said, as they pulled out of the parking lot. “Where am I going?”

“You know where Division Street is?”

She nodded. Away from the arc lights of the SuperSpeedy, the too-much makeup didn’t show. Her car smelled new and spicy and expensive. He’d smelled that smell before, that first night, when she leaned in his car window behind Zoney’s, and with that memory came the image of her lacy purple bra, the soft white flesh disappearing into it and an increasingly familiar
we’re-here-now-we-can’t-go-back
feeling. He’d spent the last three hours in a bar full of legally
drunk girls and now he was alone in a car with jailbait. He pushed that thought away.

“I scare you,” she said. “Why do I scare you?”

He looked out the window at the dark houses. “You’re seventeen. You’re a stranger, and you’re strange. And my life is complicated enough right now.”

“From what I can see, your life is about as complicated as a piece of Wonder bread.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve got a pretty limited vantage point.” Her dashboard lights were red and purple, very gothy. He wondered if she’d had to special-order them that way. “Anyway, you didn’t exactly make the best first impression.”

“So it was the worship group thing. I would have had to tell you eventually, you know. I thought it would be weirder if I waited, like we were friends under false pretenses.”

“It was plenty weird the way you did it, actually. And we’re not friends. Friends have something in common.”

“Like a fetish?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of school or work.”

“Is that where you met that girl from the store? At work?”

“Girl?” he said, like he didn’t know.

She smiled. “Oh, aren’t you coy. The brown-haired one. Pretty, if you like that type.”

“Which type is that?”

“Ordinary.”

Nothing about Caro was ordinary. He didn’t dare say so. This girl didn’t miss a trick.

“You didn’t go to school with her. She wasn’t in the yearbook.” Dangling from her earlobe was a silver rectangle with a cutout center and notched corners. A razor blade, too small and polished to be real. “So how did you meet her?”

“She’s my brother’s girlfriend. I think they met in a bar.” He tried
to sound casual but failed miserably, even to his own ears. Talking about her felt like hitting his own funny bone with a hammer.

“Your brother’s girlfriend?” They were stopped at an intersection. When she turned to look at him, her razor blade earring caught the red light along its edge. “Is that what you meant when you said your life was complicated?”

Her tone was a little more amused than Patrick would have liked. “Yeah, that’s it all right. Nothing to do with my dad going to prison or my face being plastered all over the Internet.”

“Quit changing the subject. What’s her name?” He chose not to answer that, and she laughed. “Okay, then. What’s
my
name? Do you even remember?”

“What if I don’t?” he said, feeling belligerent.

“Nothing. It’s only a word my parents liked the sound of. It doesn’t mean anything.” Her thumbs moved again and the song started over.

“Try saying that when your name is Cusimano. Pull over on the right.”

She did. “Everybody in town thinks you come from a family of murderers. They think I come from a family of zealots. Every time I talked, it was because my dad had his hand up my ass, making my lips move. People have been putting words in my mouth for so long I don’t even know which ones are mine anymore.” She shook her head, making the razor blade dance, and turned to him. Her mascara-smudged eyes were serious, the lines of her face like an ink drawing. “Look, forget my name. Forget yours, too. Let’s give each other new names. Be new people.”

He wasn’t sure what she was talking about. “It wouldn’t change anything.”

“It would change everything. Didn’t you ever want to erase your whole life, everything you’ve ever done? Because I do. I want to be somebody completely new. I want to be somebody I’ve never even met.”

Somehow, the way she said them, the words were an invitation. Division Street was deserted. The parked car was filled with the croon of her music and her eyes on him were so huge and so dark that he almost felt suffocated. Her lips were full and round and black, a perfectly outlined patch of night in the middle of her pale face. Like bitter coffee with no milk. Nobody knew her. Nobody knew he was here.

Everybody wants
, she’d said, back in the SuperSpeedy.

“Is that your house?” Her voice was intimate. She nodded toward the window.

It wasn’t, he’d deliberately told her to pull over too early, but he looked anyway. He could see his parked car, Mike’s truck and Caro’s white Civic. All at once the moment broke, like a rubber band stretched too far. When he looked back at the girl, he saw her for what she was: a weird, screwed-up kid, wearing too much makeup and saying things she couldn’t possibly understand. He wanted desperately to be away from her before he did something stupid. Since stupid seemed to be his stock-in-trade these days.

“No,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I don’t want you knowing where I live.”

“How weird and secretive of you.” She gave him that same goddamned knowing smile, and even though he’d seen it on her face a dozen times he was suddenly filled with the unpleasant certainty that she knew how close he’d come, that she’d seen it in his face. The urge to be away from her quintupled and why was he still
sitting
there?

“Thanks for the ride.” Sounding rude, not caring. He got out of the car and stood there on the sidewalk until she left: his fists jammed in the pockets of his jeans, so she wouldn’t see how they trembled.

The next morning, he took some solace in his headache. He stayed in bed until he heard Caro in the shower and Mike tromping around
in the kitchen, then went downstairs. “Jesus, little brother, you reek,” Mike said. “Where’d you go last night?”

“That place out on Thirty.”

“How’d you get there?”

“Bill.”

“He drive you home, too?”

“Yeah.” Patrick poured himself a glass of chocolate milk.

Mike laughed. “You liar. You totally picked up some chick last night. Sat in the car making out for ten minutes.”

“What, were you watching from the window?”

“Don’t get pissy. We were cheering you on.”

We. Patrick finished his chocolate milk and put the gray-filmed glass in the sink. It made a small, sad clink on the chipped ceramic. “That explains why I kept hearing megaphones.”

“Maybe if you start getting laid again you’ll stop being such a miserable bastard,” Mike said cheerfully. “How long has it been, anyway?”

A week
, Patrick almost said. He almost said more than that. The words sat on his tongue as uneasily as the previous night’s five beers sat in his stomach, and felt just as likely to leap out.

Mike snapped his fingers. “That girl Angie, with the red Kia, right?” He laughed. “Remember the time you and me pushed that damn thing all the way to the Shell station?”

“Vaguely.”

“That car sucked. She was hot, though.”

Had she been? She’d worn long acrylic fingernails and thong underwear, she’d been obsessed with this television show about two brothers who fought demons, and she’d liked having sex in semipublic places. At the time she’d seemed fun, but now Patrick barely remembered the sound of her voice.

“Hey,” Mike said. “You want to go to the SuperSpeedy? Throw a little egg and cheese on that hangover?”

The rush of water through the pipes in the walls abruptly ceased
and Patrick heard the bathroom door squeak open upstairs. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

In direct contrast to the nastiness inside Patrick’s head, the weather outside was idyllic—sunny and clear, with that wide-open weekend feeling that automatically made a person want to relax outside somewhere. When he was a kid, on a day like this, he and Mike would have wolfed down their Cheerios, hopped on their bikes, and ridden off in search of a game of kickball or street hockey or guns or whatever, and they wouldn’t have come home again until hunger drove them there. Or at least, that was how he remembered it. Patrick didn’t generally trust memories that glittered like that, because he’d found that if you spent too much time with them you discovered unpleasant things you’d tried to forget: a broken finger that never straightened again, a treasured ball or glove held where you couldn’t reach it even if you jumped, a monster lying in wait to terrify you at home. Drunk monsters. Dying monsters. Rooms with open curtains that still felt dark.

Nonetheless, it was the kind of day that made a person want to do things. And what Patrick wanted to do right now, he quickly realized, was not be in this truck, listening to cheerful shitkicker music with Mike, who wouldn’t let the previous night’s parked-car incident drop. Saying, “Do I know her? Is it some girl I’ve been with? Is that why you won’t tell me who it is?”

“Actually, yeah,” Patrick said. “In fact, it’s all the girls you’ve been with. Every single one, all the way back to Krista Porter in ninth grade. Like those circus cars with all the clowns.” He rubbed his forehead. Despite the beautiful weather, he was sweating. “Last night was nothing, okay? Just some chick I’m never going to see again.” And wouldn’t it be nice if that were true, but somehow he doubted it.

“Why not?”

“She’s not worth the trouble.”

“Dude, trust me. She’s worth the trouble.”

“You don’t know her.”

“I know being alone sucks,” Mike said. “Even for you.”

Patrick gritted his teeth and said nothing.

The SuperSpeedy was just like Zoney’s. The place never changed. The lights and the smells and the lines felt the same as the night before, distinguished only by a thin veneer of sunlight. They ordered two egg sandwiches with double cheese and double sausage, but the smell of cooking meat and burned coffee was too much for Patrick so while Mike waited for the food he went back outside. Across the lot, he could see the parking space where he and the goth girl had eaten their nachos. Soggy tortilla chips littered the strip of lawn separating the asphalt and the sidewalk like used condoms. In his mind’s eye he saw her car from above, the way it would look from Mike and Caro’s bedroom window: the fumes billowing from the tailpipe, the night-quiet street, the car’s roof a blank slab of metal under which anything could be happening, anything at all. He turned away.

Layla. Her name was Layla.

Back at home, Mike settled down in front of the TV with a beer, his sandwich, and an exhibition race, but sitting on the couch watching a bunch of guys drive around in circles felt too goddamned metaphoric for Patrick. He put his running clothes on, grabbed his MP3 player, and left through the back door.

Where he found Caro, sitting on the step. He’d assumed she was at work because he hadn’t heard her in the house, but there she was, painting her toenails and reading the kind of magazine that you could smell long before you saw it, full of perfume samples and glossy photographs of lipstick. A pen stuck out from behind one of her ears and a checkbook topped off the stack of envelopes on the concrete slab beside her.