Save Yourself (21 page)

“She’s cool,” he said, carefully.

“What about me?”

And under Layla’s own cool, he thought he detected a hint of urgency, some deep neediness—the kind of neediness, maybe, that led screwed-up girls to give blow jobs to scumbags that were way too old for them. His arm tightened around her in reaction. He stroked her back, the bumps of her vertebrae under his fingers like stones at the bottom of a river. The caress made him feel like a liar but at least it didn’t make him feel like a scumbag. “You’re cool, too.”

She made a face, crawled on top of him. “I’m cool? I just swallowed
your goddamned sperm, and all you can say is that I’m cool?” Her eyebrows were up, amused but expectant. He could feel the softness of her chest against his even if he couldn’t see it.

“Very cool,” he said.

She leaned down so that their noses were almost touching, so that her hair fell in a curtain around their two faces, and kissed him. “And am I pretty?”

“Very pretty,” he said, but the words rang hollow inside him. This was the sort of stupid game you played with a girlfriend, silliness born out of familiarity and satisfaction. Here it felt wrong, like sitting down to a fabulous meal and realizing all the food was plastic.

She kissed him again, lingering a little longer this time, pulling back just far enough at the end to let her tongue dart out like a snake’s and lick his lower lip. When she spoke again her voice was barely a whisper. “Prettier than your brother’s slut girlfriend?”

All of the play, false though it had been, vanished. “Be nice.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she said. “You’d like me to be nice to you.” Under the blankets she was moving against him in a way that would have been tantalizing if he hadn’t suddenly wanted her and her Hollywood sex kitten act as far away from him as possible, and fortunately just then his phone rang.

He pushed her away—not looking—grabbed a T-shirt from the toppled pile of folded laundry on the floor, and threw it at her. “Put some clothes on,” he said, as he stood up and zipped his jeans. “And be quiet, okay?”

The look she gave him could have started a forest fire three counties over. He ignored her and picked up his phone, which was on the floor next to the bed. “Hey, how’s the garage coming?” Mike said, on the other end of it.

“It’s coming,” Patrick said. Leaving Layla behind, he carried the phone down to Mike and Caro’s room, where the flowered dress still lay across the bed. The sight of it made him feel slimy and he hung it back in the closet, glad it wasn’t something Caro wore often.

“Well, I’m at the restaurant. Caro and I both got sent home. We’re going to stop by Mickey D’s, you want anything?”

Patrick returned the lipstick to the basket, fixed the throw pillow, and looked around for anything else Layla had left out of place. “I just ate.” He hadn’t eaten since that morning, but he sure as hell wasn’t hungry now. They wouldn’t be long—ten minutes, maybe fifteen if he was lucky. He went back down the hall to his room.

Layla still lay on his bed. She was wearing the shirt he’d thrown at her. Black Sabbath. It was big on her, made her look young, which she was. He wanted her out.

“Get up,” he said. “You’ve got to go.”

She stared at him. Her lips pressed together. “First shut up, then get out? Thanks for the blow job, summarily dismissed?”

“It’s not like that.” Though it was, kind of. “That was my brother. They’re on their way home.” He held out a hand to help her up.

She didn’t take it. “So what?”

“So, you’ve got to go.” He found her shirt on the floor and handed it to her. She stared at it as if she’d never seen it before. Then she threw it at him.

“Hey,” he said, startled.

She grabbed her boots from the floor. “You’re lucky it wasn’t one of these, asshole,” she said, starting to pull them on. The sex kitten was gone. She looked furious. “Sit down, shut up, and suck your dick. Very enlightened. I do have feelings, you know. I’m not just some toy for you to play with.”

Stung, Patrick stared at her. “Wait a minute. You’re the one who—”

“What’s next in the script?” Her face was so ferocious that Patrick took a step back, but her eyes were glassy with tears. “Am I supposed to cry and plead and beg? Please don’t kick me out, please let me stay so you can fuck me? Is that the way this goes?”

“Whoa. Who said anything about—”

“Oh, never mind.” She finished with her boots, pushed past him,
and stormed downstairs. He went after her. Partially because he wanted to make sure she actually left, but mostly because he felt like a slimeball. Most of what she’d said had flown wild but a few of those arrows had hit home. And, Jesus, what if she went to the police? She was just crazy enough to do it, too—concoct some insane story, land him in jail. She was almost at her car before he caught her.

“Layla.” He grabbed her arm.

She pulled away again, wheeled on him. “Go to hell,” she spat.

He put up his hands, as if she had a gun. “Just wait a second.”

Her cheeks were wet. Some of her hair was sticking to them. Her eyebrows were low and her lip was curled in anger. But she waited.

“I was a jerk,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

It was the best he could come up with. Her lips worked for a moment and she swallowed hard. “You are a jerk,” she said, finally, and blew a contemptuous huff of air out of her nose. “At least kiss me good-bye, jerk.”

So he did. Because he felt guilty he put more into it than he might have otherwise, and she responded in kind. When her hand drifted down to the front of his jeans and stroked him, he didn’t stop her even though he knew he should have. She was a lunatic, and Mike and Caro were coming, and he didn’t even really like her—

She pushed him back and gave him a look full of disdain. “Enjoy that hard-on, loser. Take it to your brother’s girlfriend,” she said, and he winced and felt like the loser she’d very correctly pegged him as, and then she was gone.

Not fifteen seconds later, Caro’s tiny Civic rounded the corner at the other end of Division Street. By the time they pulled in he was kneeling on the garage floor, elbow-deep in a box as if he’d been hard at work this whole time, as if he had nothing to be ashamed of.

When he left the house for work that night, Mike and Caro were out. The beautiful day had turned into a chilly night and he was wearing
a jacket for the first time in months. In the sky a cartoon moon drifted between clouds and he was glad he was walking. The dirty little secret of his postautomotive life was that he rarely minded walking, particularly at the time of night when he was likely to do it. It would be worse at four in the afternoon, when the grassless Ratchetsburg streets were packed with cars and fumes and noise. At midnight, though, it was a kind of bliss, even if every cop on the road did slow down as they passed him.

Work was Layla-free, for which he was grateful. Caro had told him once that the definition of insanity was expecting a different outcome from the same actions, and if that was the case, he was out of his ever-loving mind. Because part of him wanted Layla to come in. Part of him wanted to drive off somewhere in her big black car, to find some empty cornfield where the fat cartoon moon could reach through the windows and make her pale skin glow. He counted his drawer, restocked drink cups, made new coffee; and all the while that loathsome part of him was back in his bedroom reliving that blow job, standing on the street feeling her hand on his cock. That part of him wished he’d pulled the sheets away from her instead of covering her. The rest of him would have liked to hit that part of him with a brick until it stopped moving, and then dump the corpse in the nearest and deepest body of water.

It bothered him that Caro knew he’d been with her. He didn’t feel like it should, but it did.

When he got home, the sun was rising sweetly and pinkly in the east, but for Patrick it was still the day before. He took a shower and lay down, but he was restless and his pillow was thick with Layla’s smell and with Caro’s, from the perfume Layla had put on. The combination was erotic and upsetting. After a while he got back up and put on his running clothes. On his way out of the house he heard noises coming from the garage and went down to see.

It wasn’t Mike, it was Caro, sitting on a milk crate in her bare feet with her hair pulled back, reading a magazine. Surrounding her
were other piles, clothes and papers and all sorts of random things—Patrick’s dad’s things. She was very beautiful: her ankles crossed in front of her, the delicate sweep of her neck. The smell was strong in the garage and she shouldn’t have to do this, he thought, she shouldn’t have to be the one to clean up the old man’s mess. He said something to that effect and she blew him off, so he left her to it, and went for his run.

It was only nine thirty but the streets of Ratchetsburg were loud and hot and that sweet pink sun from the morning bounced hard scalpels of light off the cars. He ran until he reached the railroad cut, and then he turned left and ran along the tracks, feet sinking in the gravel, dodging beer cans and empty packs of cigarettes and round plastic chew containers. Patrick ran and he thought about Layla and he ran and he thought about Caro and then Layla and Caro and Mike and the old man and Layla and Caro and he started to feel like something was chasing him, he started to feel like he had that day in the warehouse when Frank DiCriscio had made that dumb joke, the aisles had started to close in, and all the air had vanished. His lungs and his calves burned. The bones in his feet felt like glass. But he ran harder and harder, pushing himself past the point when he knew he should stop, out of the railroad cut and through the park and back down Main Street. He could not run fast enough, he could not run far enough. By the time he pounded his way through the alley to collapse in the cool grass of the backyard, the world was gray around the edges and his heart was beating so fast that he felt sure it would stop, that whatever was so loathsome inside him had wrapped itself around the muscle and was squeezing. Killing him at last.

Dimly he heard a rustle. Caro said, “Are you okay?”

No. No, he was not. But all he could say was “Ran too hard.”

She brought him a glass of water. A cold wet rag appeared magically on his forehead, where it felt like heaven, and then she told him that she’d finished the garage and that was almost better. To not have to go back in there. To not have to smell that smell again. She sat
down in the grass next to him and that was best of all. That simple act, that she hadn’t gone back into the house and left him to whatever happened. Gradually the thing around his heart loosened and the air came back into the world. When he opened his eyes the infinite sky made him dizzy and he closed them again.

His pulse slowed, his sweat dried. She stayed. The silence between them was not uncomfortable.

Finally he opened his eyes. He had pulled up his T-shirt and she was looking at his stomach. Which didn’t matter, in and of itself. She might not even have been seeing him, her thoughts could have been a million miles away. What mattered was that he’d lost her, the night they’d slept together, what mattered was that ever since then her face had been a dead end and now it wasn’t. Now her face was soft and her eyes were sad, the way her cola-colored hair fell on her shoulders was sad, her everything was sad. She looked up, straight into his eyes, and then he saw a way through and the way was her, the way was them. The afternoon opened like church doors, letting in an airy brightness in which everything seemed possible, even her. Even the two of them in his room together, even that safe place he’d found with her that he’d never had before or since. Why had they made everything so complicated when all that was necessary was this?

“Come upstairs with me.” He did not know the words were there until he heard them come out of his mouth. For half a heartbeat he thought she was going to say yes but she didn’t, she said something else entirely. And he saw in her face that she felt it, too, the awkwardness and the wrongness and the despair, and maybe seeing it there should have made him feel better but it didn’t. Mike was a good guy. He wasn’t smart but he was loyal. He would never cheat on Caro, he would never fantasize about being with somebody else in her bed, he would never let another girl put on her lipstick and suck him off. She deserved nothing less and Patrick could give her nothing more. The sky above him that had seemed so infinite just moments ago felt too hard and too close, as if it was sinking in on him, and Patrick
found that he had nothing to say. Sitting there with her under the closed-in sky hurt him. Like sitting with his mother had hurt him, once he knew she was dying. When he’d wished that if she was going to die, she’d hurry up and get it over with. That it was fair to none of them, this waiting, this long, excruciating falling away.

He’d wanted that to be done then and he wanted this to be done now. He forced his aching body to its feet and turned away from her, and went into the house. He gave up.

SEVEN

The sun was shining when Verna woke up on Saturday but by nightfall the rain sounded like a thousand tiny boots dancing on the roof. The noise was as persistent as her anxious thoughts. Because she, Verna Elshere, had kissed a boy; had let a boy put his tongue in her mouth and his hands on her chest, had let him press against her with parts of his body that she couldn’t quite bring herself to think about. The skies opened and wept and Verna could not keep her mind away from what had happened in Jared’s basement. She was accustomed to feeling uncertain about many things but her own status as a good girl was not one of them.
I’m bad
, she would think. And then giggle, and then want to cry. Part of her thrilled at the thought, both of what they had done and that they had done it at all, but part of her wanted to throw herself at her father’s feet, confess everything, and beg him to send her away to a nice single-sex Christian school.

She tried to talk to Layla on Sunday but Layla only said, “Christ, Verna, fuck the whole football team if you want to. Leave me alone. I’m sleeping.”

Layla had been sleeping, or out, all weekend. She insisted that she
was fine and on Monday she woke up and dressed without complaint. As they drove to school, water ran in thick, gooey rivulets down the windshield and lay in sheets on the roads. Even after a mad dash into the building—no early-morning cigarettes on the loading dock that day—Verna’s feet still squelched in her boots. The halls and classrooms smelled like wet hair and the floors were slick with tracked-in water. In the grim light, the building seemed unfamiliar, the way it did at night for school board meetings or open houses.