Save Yourself (28 page)

Justinian bent down over her arm. His hair fell around his face. She felt the hot slick of his tongue, a sting, as he licked the blood away, again and again. Each lick was another thin sting, shooting up her arm and behind her ribs. The pain was negligible but her breath caught. This was the most intimate thing Verna had ever done. His hands, holding her arm like he was holding all of her. His breath, his mouth, on her skin like a kiss.

The cut was a minor one and it stopped bleeding quickly. When Justinian raised his head, Verna was almost sorry. Her arm felt too bare. Layla pressed a gauze pad over the wound, and her hand felt warm and good.

Then Justinian showed her his own arm, etched with countless scars, and cut himself. He didn’t even wince. His blood looked darker than hers. Was that possible?

From somewhere over her shoulder, she heard Layla’s voice, barely even a whisper. “Verna,” she said, but she didn’t say anything else. Verna didn’t turn, didn’t look at her. She put her mouth to the cut on his arm, and she licked. His blood tasted like salty metal.

“That’s good,” he said. “That’s exactly right. Just like that.”

He said he wanted a lock of her hair, so she made a thin braid and let him cut it off. Layla brought the wooden box from his bookcase. He opened it and said, “There’s something from each of you in here. Something that represents your potential transformation.” The box held a crumpled tissue, a cheap-looking pin shaped like a rainbow, and a braid of golden hair. He picked the last up and looked at Layla. “Remember this?”

Layla nodded. “The day Calleigh tried to burn it off.”

“Your first time,” he said, and she said, “For a lot of things.”

He smiled and twined Verna’s purplish braid around the golden one. “There. Now you’re together.”

Layla called Criss and Eric. They had seen the video like everybody else in the universe, but they treated Verna normally. She was grateful, but not surprised. Here, with Justinian and his people, was the only place she would ever feel safe again. The cut on her arm stung a little, like a cat scratch. It was a song, singing:
you are more than this, you are more than that moment
.

“Welcome to the family,” Eric said. The can of beer in his hand, the handcuffs on his wrist, and the oily skin on his face all gleamed in the dim, twitching light. The way he looked at her had changed, become more appraising. This pleased her. When he was around she’d always felt shrunken. Now she didn’t.

“Thanks,” she said.

Criss handed Verna a beer and she took it. She had swallowed Justinian’s blood; what was a little alcohol? “Doesn’t it feel good?” the blue-haired girl said, sounding dreamy. Judging by the slackness of her expression, the beer in Criss’s own hand was not her first. “When the knife cuts into you, the way it pulls?”

“Makes me want to get laid,” Eric said, and Criss grinned.

“Me, too,” she said. “Oh, me, too.”

Verna didn’t say anything. The bloodletting had not made her want to get laid, but in this room, with these people, she felt like a puzzle piece that had finally been put in the right place. Justinian had shown her on his arm the places where he’d first cut himself for the others, first Criss and then Eric and finally Layla, naming each scar.
This one is Layla’s
, he’d said, as if that little piece of his body belonged to her, always.
This one is yours. It will always be yours. And this
—touching the cut on her own arm—
this one will always be mine
.

Verna had wanted to see Layla’s scars, but Justinian had laughed and said later, maybe. The expression on Layla’s face had almost been
relief, and Verna realized that, given the nature of Layla’s relationship with Justinian, some of Layla’s scars were probably on more interesting places than her arm.

Justinian, like everyone in the world except for the Elsheres, had a video game system, and when he and Layla came back from the kitchen, they turned it on. This game was about killing zombies. Because they didn’t look human, it felt less horrible than the war games Eric sometimes played where agonized faces disintegrated on-screen and detached limbs spurted scarlet blood. Verna tried her beer. It was bitter and the bubbles nipped at her throat. She didn’t like it, and thought she wouldn’t drink any more, but the game continued and after a while she took another sip, and then another. When she stood to go to the bathroom she discovered that she was tipsy. Her joints seemed too loose, and she had to put a hand to the wall for balance as she walked down the hall. In the bathroom—more candles—she put her fingers under the tap and pressed them to her temples. Staring into the mirror, she thought, This is what I look like when I’m drunk. The reflected image seemed to gaze back at her from a great remove. Maybe this was what other people saw all the time: tangled hair, grease-smudged eyeliner, eyes watery and red.

From the living room came the sound of an electronic explosion, and laughter.

Verna looked under the sink for a comb and found a pornographic magazine tucked against the inner wall of the cabinet like a book on a shelf. Opening it, she looked almost clinically at the stretched, distended places where flesh met flesh. All of the models’ bodies were hairless; their faces looked angry, or pained. On one page she found a woman with her mouth stretched wide around an immense veined penis. The man’s face wasn’t in the photo but one of his hands held the back of the woman’s head—caressing her or gripping her, it wasn’t clear which. Verna studied the woman’s face for a long time. When I get married, she thought, I am never going to do that.

She put the thought away. No boy, ever, would be able to look at
her and see anything other than Banana Girl. She had Layla and Justinian and Criss and Eric. Nobody else would ever want her. She put the magazine back under the cabinet, found a comb in the medicine chest, fixed her hair, and went back out into the living room.

Criss was very drunk. “So are we going to get some serious revenge on these assholes, or what?” she asked, as Verna sat down.

Justinian paused the game and it froze on an image of a hand reaching for a door. “Yes. We are going to get serious revenge on all of the assholes.”

Criss clapped her hands. “Excellent. What’s the plan?”

“The plan is that Justinian and I are working on the plan,” Eric said, “and they’re all going to pay.”

“I wish we could just leave,” Layla said.

Justinian nodded. “I was thinking Montreal. It’s not too far, and it’s out of the country.”

Leaving. In her head Verna saw her bedroom at home, her closet, her slippers. “Why do we have to leave the country?” she asked.

Eric laughed. “Because your psycho father doesn’t have an international calling plan.”

“And because you and Criss and Layla are all minors,” Justinian said. “Until you turn eighteen, you’re property. They think they can do whatever they want to you. But they can’t. Not without going through me.”

He sent Criss into the kitchen for more bottles of beer, and one of them was for Verna. She drank it. Later there was another and eventually Verna found herself in the bathroom, throwing up into the toilet. Somebody else had discovered the magazine and left it splayed open on the floor. The angry, copulating figures stared up at Verna as she kneeled on the cold tile. When she was done she squirted some toothpaste on her finger and rubbed it around the inside of her mouth, then stumbled and lurched out into the hall. The ground would not stay level and the walls would not stay straight and halfway down the hall she decided that she’d better sit down.

Outside Justinian’s room. The door was closed. Light shone underneath it. She squinted even though it was her hearing she was trying to focus, and heard her sister, talking too low to be heard.

“Be quiet,” Justinian’s voice said, clearly. “I told you not to talk.”

Verna held her breath. Nothing. A faint rustle, maybe a whimper.

“Stop moving. Do you want to fix this or not?” He sounded stern, commanding. Verna had never heard Justinian sound that way before and she felt like she was going to be sick again, so she crawled back down the hall to the bathroom.

A few hours afterward, when they left, everything seemed fine between Justinian and Layla; he put his arms around her, they kissed. It felt the same. In the morning—the dragging, nauseous morning—it was easy for Verna to look back on that moment in the hallway, and decide that she’d imagined it.

The sisters went to school the next day. Despite the fact that Layla’s eyes were bleary and Verna’s, in the mirror, were the same; despite the fact that Layla’s movements were stiff and awkward, and since Verna’s entire body hurt she figured that hers were, too. Somebody had scrawled the word
slut
on Verna’s locker and she barely even felt a pang. The world seemed to flicker just as Justinian’s living room had flickered, and her ears felt dense, as if they were filled with water. While they ate lunch on the loading dock Justinian talked about Montreal. The vision he painted of the five of them living in a house together, being responsible only for and to themselves, was compelling beyond words, the kind of dream you were sorry to wake up from, but it felt like a fairy tale. She no more believed that she would be in Montreal on Monday than she believed that the faithful would be pulled into heaven Tuesday afternoon, that surgery patients would disappear from operating tables and planes would crash.

In Bio, she found a banana on her desk.

She picked it up. It was cool and smooth and repulsive. She could
feel the expectant faces behind her, waiting to see how she would react, what she would do. Would she cry? Flee the room? Throw it in Kyle Dobrowski’s face? He wasn’t wearing his letter jacket. She hoped she’d ruined it. She hoped the stain never came out and his parents couldn’t afford to buy him a new one. She hoped that when he found it forty years from now, reliving his high school football glory in some dusty old attic, he saw the blue stains on his embroidered name and hated her. The very idea brought a nasty, unexpected pleasure.

But right now, Verna did nothing, because there was nothing she could do. There was no comeback withering enough, no put-down clever enough. The Kyles and the Calleighs of the world would always win and the world would always love them. Justinian had sworn that he would never let anything like the second-floor bathroom happen to her again.
I swear it on the blood we share
, he’d said. The tape holding the gauze over her cut itched and the pain was a low comforting throb. She tried to pull strength from it the way he’d told her, to feel the throb and know that she was special and strong and capable of things other people weren’t, but the other pain was greater. There would always be more bananas. There would always be more second-floor bathrooms.

Right then, standing in the bio lab. That was the moment. That was when she started to believe. There was no other option; she could no longer endure. Even as flickering and muted as the world had become, she, Verna, could not exist in this place and this time. There was no room for her here.

In art, Mr. Chionchio talked about shading. Imagine the light source. Fill in the shadows where they’d fall naturally. He told them to draw an object from memory, something simple that they could easily imagine in multiple situations. Verna chose the paper coffee cup she’d seen on the floor of Layla’s car that morning. She could think of nothing else except knives and bananas.

Jared pulled his hair down in front of his eyes. “So Justin Kemper says I’m not allowed to talk to you anymore.”

A coffee cup was a cylinder, tapered toward the bottom. No. Too much. Erase. Erase erase erase.

“Although his exact words were ‘Stay away from Verna or I’ll cut your fucking throat.’ ”

Stay away from Verna. Jared had seen the video, he would not need to be told to stay away from Verna. The plastic lid had the same degree of taper as the cup, but inverted.

“At the time, it was actually your sister that I wanted to talk to. I was trying to get your phone number.”

The hole in the lid: a rectangle with rounded edges. “Why?”

“Because I was worried about you. Because I wanted to make sure you were okay after—” Verna heard a snap and a tiny conical piece of graphite shot across the table. “Jesus,” Jared said, and then, “Sorry.”

“Say whatever you want,” Verna said. “I don’t care.”

“Whoever wrote that post about me saying things about you was lying,” he said.

Because of course, if it was true, he’d just admit it.

“Verna—” There was a pleading note in his voice. “Don’t be one of them. Don’t get all creepy and obedient.”

Verna didn’t say anything.

“I know the rest of humanity hasn’t exactly treated you supergreat lately, but that guy’s a psychopath. He talked about you like you were his property, Verna. Like he was Count Dracula and you were one of his vamp-whores.”

“Are you calling me names now, too?” Verna said, softly.

“No.” Jared sounded exasperated. “I learned that word,
vamp-whore
, from a comic book. The only person I’ve ever heard use it in real life is your sister. Somebody asked if she was Kemper’s girlfriend and she said, ‘I prefer vamp-whore.’ ”

“A joke.”

“She called herself his whore, Verna.”

“You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know him. You don’t know anything.”

“I guess I don’t,” Jared said.

Around them people were talking and laughing but there was a heavy silence.

Finally he said, “If you’re not going to listen to me about Kemper you’re probably not going to listen to this, either, but your parents should take that video to the police.”

The video. She wondered if he’d liked it. She wondered if, when he watched it, he’d imagined that the banana in her mouth was his penis, if he’d imagined his hand gripping her head.

Lick it. Suck it. You like that, slut?

Jared was saying, “My mom said, if your parents wouldn’t do it, she would.”

Call-Me-Carmen, with her pantheon of religious jewelry, who didn’t even have enough sense to suggest that Jared and Verna drink their sodas upstairs, in the family room. Who’d done nothing but dishes as in the basement, her son had pushed Verna’s legs apart with his own and groped inside her clothes. “Tell your mother it’s none of her business.”