Save Yourself (15 page)

Maybe Verna swelled a bit when Justinian said that, allowed herself to think, why, yes, I am quite tough, aren’t I? Never mind that sometimes she tucked her cross into her collar when nobody was looking; never mind that she felt ashamed every time she did it, and sent a silent apology to God. And never mind that she had avoided telling Justinian—any of them—about her date with Jared. I am tough, she thought.

“Pull out a few hairs,” Brad said. She could practically hear him turning to Kyle for approval. “We’ll look at them under the microscope. Maybe they’ll tell us why you’re such a slut.”

Mr. Guarda was in the back of the room. Verna pressed her eye against the eyepiece of her microscope so hard that her eye socket hurt. She was going to have to fix her makeup after this.
I am titanium
.

“By the way,” Kyle said. “Jesus told me he wanted me to come on your tits.”

Anger surged inside her, hot as fresh blood, and she wheeled around, glaring at him. He smiled sweetly.

“Would you like that?” he said. “Would you like some nice, warm
come on your tits?” and then the bell rang and Verna stood up. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the open bottle of methylene blue sitting on Kyle’s lab table and before she even knew she meant to do it her hand darted out, grabbed it, and threw it right at his smug, beautiful face. Her aim was bad. It landed on the breast of his letter jacket, right under the curling letters of his name. Blue dye flew everywhere: on Kyle’s lab report, on his face, on his open textbook, even on Brad Anastero, who clapped his hand to his eye and yelped. Kyle’s hands flew up, as if he could somehow knock the dye away. He looked, in face and body, like he’d just been shot, only he was bleeding blue instead of red. As Verna watched, the blue dye beaded on the smooth leather of his sleeves and soaked into the white embroidery.

The look on his face was stunned. Beyond stunned: furious. From the back of the room, Mr. Guarda said, “Uh-oh.”

Sure, Verna thought. Now you notice me.

Kyle stared at her and, in a voice full of wonder, said, “You bitch.”

Verna’s fists clenched. The tendons in her wrist strained against the bracelet Justinian had given her. “It was an accident.”

“Like hell,” Brad Anastero said, still rubbing his eye, and Kyle’s face grew even more dangerous.

“I’m going to get you.” He spoke quietly, so Mr. Guarda couldn’t hear. “You’re going to be sorry you were ever born.”

She didn’t care. She was tough. She was titanium. On her way up to Art, she felt like her heart was going to bounce right out of her chest. At camp, they’d talked about feeling the Spirit inside you. Verna had wanted to feel it, she’d told herself that she did. Now she knew she’d been wrong. This was what it was like: this power that came from somewhere else, running through your body and your veins and your soul like fire. Her hands wanted to clap, her feet wanted to dance, she wanted to jump up and down and make joyful noise after joyful noise. Instead she walked, her spine straight, her heart filled with a savage gladness.

·   ·   ·

She told her parents that she was going to see a movie with the nonexistent (but increasingly useful) Brittany, something called
First Kiss
that she chose out of the newspaper because it sounded innocuous. The movie that Jared and Verna actually went to see was called
Fireblaze
. Jared told her it had been based on a comic book. Verna thought it must have been an extremely violent one. Whenever anybody was decapitated or impaled or incinerated, Jared laughed.

“I do?” he said after the movie, looking surprised.

Verna nodded. “Almost every time.”

“I didn’t know I did that. Maybe it’s a startle reflex. Or cheesy special effects, I laugh at bad special effects a lot.” He stuck his hands into the kangaroo pocket of his sweatshirt. “I guess I should have asked if you liked violent stuff before I bought the tickets. You had your eyes covered for half the movie.” He sounded so downhearted and self-incriminatory that Verna reached out and touched his arm.

“I liked it,” she said. “Maybe not the really bloody parts. But I liked the story.”

He grinned. “It was awesome, when they were in the truck and it was on fire,” he said. When they left the theater, he was holding her hand.

He took her to the graphic novel section of the bookstore. As it turned out, he knew a lot about comic books. “If you liked the Sorceress,” he’d say, handing her a glossy paperback, “you’re going to love this.” He said it over and over again until the stack of books in front of Verna was ankle-high. His face was lit up, engaged in a way she had rarely seen in school; once, he actually pushed his hair back from his face instead of pulling it forward. He had a pierced eyebrow that she’d never noticed and Verna wondered: why get a piercing that nobody ever saw? She asked him if he wanted to draw comic books, and he said, no, he wanted to do video game design. “Why make static worlds when you can make them come alive?” he said. His fingernails were clean and short, and the face of his wristwatch was cracked, and
he wore green canvas sneakers and smelled a little like Scotch tape. It was a nice smell; it made Verna think of Christmas.

Then it was only nine o’clock and Verna didn’t have to be home until ten, so they went back to his house. She met his mother and her boyfriend, whose insistence on first-name familiarity was so intense that within minutes Verna could think of them as nothing but Call-Me-Keith and Call-Me-Carmen. Call-Me-Carmen was blond and wore a lot of necklaces, including a peace sign and an ankh and—Verna was surprised to see—a cross. Call-Me-Keith’s shirt said
Beam Me Up, There’s No Intelligent Life Down Here
, and no sooner had Jared and Verna walked through the door than he began grilling Jared about the movie: did they leave the supervirus subplot in, was the gay villain still gay, and what about the woman who played Kai-One, could she act at all because he’d seen the trailer on the Internet and it didn’t look like it. And since when was Kai-One a redhead, anyway.

“Boys will be geeks, huh?” Call-Me-Carmen said with a smile. Her teeth were coffee-stained. Mother and Dad kept theirs perfectly white, they paid a lot of money at the dentist’s to do it.

“I guess so,” Verna said.

“Jared tells me you’re a Christian. It’s such an interesting story, the life of Christ, and such an interesting thing to be in this day and age. Religion has become so politicized, don’t you think?” Call-Me-Carmen shook her head. “All of the moral legislation. You just wonder how much is the politicians and how much is the actual will of the people, don’t you?”

Jared interrupted. “Easy there, Mom. Verna just came over to play some video games. Come on,” he said to Verna. “Let’s go downstairs.” He led her through the kitchen, which smelled like beans and garlic, to the basement, where there was a couch and a television and what looked like four different game systems. The walls were covered with framed movie posters; there was a pinball machine here, too, but it didn’t look broken. The lights were blinking.

“Sorry about that. My mom likes to think of herself as a student of all religions. That’s what’s with the necklaces.” A small refrigerator hummed in the corner; Jared took out two bottles of soda, both red, and handed one to her. “Hang on a second, there’s a bottle opener around here somewhere.”

As he rummaged in a cabinet Verna said, “What did she mean, ‘moral legislation’?”

“You know. Here.” He opened her bottle; the cap came off with a hiss and a crack. “Gay marriage, abortion rights, all that stuff. Do you mind that I told her you were Christian?”

“Only if it makes her hate me.”

“I’d be more worried about it making her annoy you.”

“Do you mind?”

“If she annoys you? Yeah, I mind.”

“No,” Verna said. “That I’m Christian.”

Jared flopped down on the couch and picked up the remote. “Are you kidding? Keith is all into animism and shamanism and that kind of stuff, and my mom’s religious tastes change with the day of the week. If I weren’t a reasonably tolerant person I’d lose my freaking mind.” He took a sip of his soda and so Verna did, too. It was organic, with lots of quirky text on the label.
Be a free-drinker!
it read, in part. “Do you mind that I’m not Christian?”

She sat down next to him. “Well, the Bible says that you shouldn’t yoke yourself to an unbeliever.”

“So we won’t pull any carts together,” he said.

He taught her how to play a video game; not a violent one, a racing one, with a squirrel and a beaver in cute little cars. Verna was terrible at it. She was better at pinball. Upstairs, she could hear Call-Me-Carmen and Call-Me-Keith moving around, talking in the kitchen, flushing the toilet. According to the Price Above Rubies reading materials, rule number three for maintaining your virginity was
Avoid Temptation
. Do not be alone with a member of the opposite sex. Do not watch movies together in low light, or cuddle, or
listen to soft music. These things were the worldly equivalent of Eve sitting beneath the Tree of Knowledge. Socialize in groups, in public, in well-lit, well-chaperoned places.

When Jared kissed Verna by the pinball machine, he tasted like her soda had: sweet and wet, with crisp little bubbles that tickled her teeth and her tongue. When he pulled her down to the couch, all she could think about was how many rules she was breaking. He put his arms around her. She could feel his breath on her skin, she could smell the soap he used. His tongue pushed tentatively into her mouth.
You’re tough, you’re titanium
. Only God was infallible but Justinian was usually right, even Layla said so. Jared slipped a hand up under her kitty-skull shirt and did she want this? Did she like it? She didn’t know. She couldn’t think. It was like there was a hole in the center of her and around the hole spun her father and Justinian and her mother and Toby and Layla and all of the faces from all of the prayer groups and church camps and lock-ins and revivals, and Kyle Dobrowski, too, all swirling like water around a bathtub drain. Jared shifted his body next to hers and she felt an awkward knob pressing against her thigh. He smelled like Christmas. She wanted to tell him to stop but she didn’t know how. She wasn’t supposed to have to tell him to stop. She wasn’t supposed to be here.

He shifted again, pressed against her more insistently. Because he liked her. He had chosen her. Her, of all the girls in school. He was talented, he didn’t treat her as if she were crazy for drawing pictures of angels. She didn’t want him to think he’d chosen wrong. So she said nothing and did nothing except kiss him when he kissed her, and after a while he pulled back and looked at her. His lips were wet with their shared saliva and his temples were damp, too.

“Did you know that you’re very cool, in a totally weird way?” he said, and Verna could practically feel her heart growing misshapen inside her chest.

He took her home. Layla was gone, Dad was in bed. Mother sat at the kitchen table, doing a jigsaw puzzle. The picture on the front
showed an image that Verna knew represented the Sermon on the Mount. She’d memorized the entire sermon one summer, Matthew five, six, and seven. Dad said they were the three most important chapters in the Bible.

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot
.

“Thank goodness,” Mother said. “A fresh pair of eyes. Come look at this thing with me, Verna, I can’t make any sense of it at all.” She scanned the pieces on the table in front of her. “Do you see three-quarters of a lamb’s head? I need three-quarters of a lamb’s head.”

“Here,” Verna said, and handed it to her.

FIVE

Caro found the note on Tuesday morning, scrawled onto a piece of notebook paper in watery ballpoint ink and fixed to the door with a hairy piece of Scotch tape. The hair caught in the adhesive was coarse, three inches long, black on one end and gray on the other. Dog hair. Caro heard that dog barking all the time. Its owners lived next door. They worked shifts and she thought they must crate the poor thing, the way it barked. Sometimes it woke her up. On hot days, the sweet nauseating smell of dog shit drifted over the high wooden fence separating the two yards. Last summer she’d tried to sunbathe out there a few times and the real or imagined buzzing of flies had made her itch.

Please do not park your car in front of our house (149 Div), that space is our legal property and we will call the cops if we have to.

Caro didn’t like neighbors. Neighbors made trouble. Standing on the porch in the sun, she squinted at the house next door. A wooden
duck wearing a weather-stained bow tie hung crookedly from a nail on their front door, probably meant to be cheerful and welcoming but actually just cheap-looking and sad. Then she looked at the offending car, which Patrick said was barely drivable. It was, indeed, parked in front of 149 Division Street. The Cusimanos lived at 151.
Division
was a lousy name for a street. Residential streets were supposed to have bucolic, optimistic names, like Morning Dew Drive or Hibiscus Avenue. In Pitlorsville, Caro and her mother, Margot, had lived for a few months on Jenny Lane, which sounded like the sort of place where people walked around carrying baskets of flowers and bursting into spontaneous song. Not that anybody had done that, but at least it sounded that way. Division Street, on the other hand, sounded like the product of a late-night city planners’ meeting where everyone had stopped trying. Which was appropriate since that was how Division Street itself felt: bedraggled and worn-out, both giving and given up. Dead leaves and garbage choked the storm drains and the neighbors could have bathed their stupid neglected dog in some of the potholes. But, hey. Why spend your time trying to make the world a better place when you could harass your neighbors for parking in a spot you didn’t even need?

Inside, Mike was washing the breakfast dishes and Patrick sat at the kitchen table, staring morosely at a can of cherry Coke. At least she thought that was what he was doing. These days, they got along better when she didn’t look directly at him. “Guess what we won,” she said to Mike, and showed him the note.