Sex & Violence (21 page)

“What is that?” she asked.

“A book.”

“No kidding.” She edged closer to me. “Is that your man journal?”

“Yeah. It’s my man journal where I press leaves and draw pictures and tell all my private thoughts.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Someone’s crabby today. Need your loadie girl to come give you more hickeys?”

She brought up my mystery loadie girl a lot, but I never admitted to anything, and her annoyance with me was kind of enjoyable, actually.

I shut the book and slid it into my pack.

“Why are you being so secretive? Did you find it here?”

“I found it in the summer kitchen,” I said, sighing, because, of course, then she wanted to go to the summer kitchen and look around. Which I normally wouldn’t have minded. But right now I wasn’t up for it. I didn’t want to have another meeting of the Dead Parents Club. And I didn’t want her assuming the book belonged to local history, either.

“Are you mad at me or something, Evan?”

“No, I’m fine,” I muttered. “Let’s go.”

Once in the summer kitchen, I pointed out where I’d found the book, and Baker began examining the corner cupboard.

Gently laying the contents of the peanut butter jar on the floor.

Running her fingertips over the fishing lures and lead weights.

Holding up the BB gun to see if it would still shoot. I sat on the floor and opened the blue cloth book to a drawing of a loon’s head, the red eye creepy but somehow beautiful too. Below it, a list of loon calls—the hoot, wail, tremolo, and yodel—and all their various meanings and uses.

Just as I started to wonder if my dorky fondness for E.

Church Westmore was a sort of throwback gene from my uncle, I turned the page. And then I was caught again, my throat getting hot and tight, sure signs of being Almost-Weepy. It was a drawing of my mother. Her head tilted to one side, not facing front directly, like she was looking toward another point on the horizon. Obviously, she was much younger in the drawing, but I could still recognize her. Her hair black as the diagram of the raven’s wing, black as mine. With a slight smile, and her name below the fading shadings of her neck:
Melina
.

Written in fine, gentle script, as if the letters themselves were precious to him.

Beneath were these words:

Loons do not mate for life. This is wrong, and a persistent
myth, though many would like it to be so. The importance of
a nest site is the main factor of consequence in mating habits,
and it is determined by the male. Fighting for a home is the
province of the male alone. So it is the territory they protect
and cherish above all, not a mate, not the young that they
lose all too easily.

I stared at the drawing and the words, so dazed that I again didn’t realize that Baker had sat down by me. I quickly turned the page back to the red-eyed loon.

“That’s really beautiful,” she said
.

“It’s my uncle’s book,” I said. “He’s the one that came here first. On a dare, my dad said. Soren. My father’s brother. They never speak. My dad doesn’t know where he is, even. They haven’t seen each other since my mom’s funeral.”

Quietly, we looked at the loon’s red eye. I was still feeling Almost-Weepy. Probably closer to Actual-Weepy. With Baker sitting beside me. I felt like dying because I was going to cry in front of her. Over my mother. Over
loons.
It felt like another occasion for an overly long German word.

Then Baker turned the page to the drawing of my mother.

Which made me suck in my breath even more.

“Is that her?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“What’s she doing in your uncle’s book?”

I didn’t want to say what I suspected. That my father was as big a dick about women as his son, though his count was admittedly much lower than mine. But the same principle remained. That Adrian Carter had somehow, in his silent, math-geek way, managed to steal away my mother from Soren. Maybe in the same way he was dancing with Brenda and drinking whiskey sours and not caring if his gas gauge broke.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you think they were together? Or was he just secretly in love with her?”

I shrugged, looking at the drawing. Maybe I was the least romantic guy on the planet, but I didn’t think you made a drawing like that if you didn’t feel something intense.

What happened next was horrible. Baker touched my mouth. My lips. With her fingers. Softly. Then she kissed me and I swear, I felt like I’d been shot. I shut my eyes and couldn’t move.

After all the time we’d spent together, on Story Island, on the docks and the diving platform, that night in the lake skinny-dipping, on her screen porch or the Tonneson’s deck, at the goddamn Dairy Queen with Tom and Kelly while she scarfed down a Peanut Buster Parfait (which she liked to call a Penis Buster Parfait, something that cracked her and Tom up, because it made Kelly shriek in embarrassment)—all the times I’d thought about her, naked or otherwise (okay, mostly naked) and how out of reach she was for me—I’d never considered she would do this. Because it was pointless, liking Baker. Because I was me and she was Baker and she was awesome and going to college, long jumping away from me and my stupid, tortured, late-night lake bathing, daily haircutting, scarred stomach and broken nose and elf ears and constant split-lip existence …

She pulled back, then. Before I could even open my mouth. Before I could even enjoy it. Our little moment of non-monogramy.

She said, “Your mouth is bleeding. I keep forgetting to get you that salve Keir makes.”

“It’s okay.” I sounded like a sick twelve-year-old.

“Sorry, Evan.” She stood.

“It’s okay.”

“I don’t know why I did that. I’m with Jim. Even if … Well.

Sorry.”

I wanted to say that technically she could do whatever she wanted. But maybe things had changed since the big fight?

Maybe they’d figured things out, ditched non-monogramy? I watched her silently collect up the bits from the peanut butter jar and the BB gun and put everything back into the cupboard.

Then she started looking around the summer kitchen, like nothing had happened. So I did the same. Strapped the book shut with the belt and shoved it into my backpack. Stood up and tried to get a hold of myself.

She turned to me and checked her watch. “Tom should be here soon. Meet you at the drop-off point?”

I nodded. She had kissed me, and I sat there, frozen. She probably thought I was gay. Or lying about all my sex stories.

Or maybe it was a pity kiss, because I was a sad orphan with a dead mother. Whatever it was, I wanted to die. Especially thinking about how she packed everything up afterwards, like the whole thing was too shameful for comment. Baker, who had a comment about everything.

Dear Collette,

Fear is our topic today. Dr. Penny says we cannot eradicate fear
entirely, because it’s a biological response designed to keep us safe. She
says we can dial back our fears should they overtake our life, though.

Learn to balance them, especially if they complicate our lives. Like
cutting one’s hair every morning. Like bathing in a lake instead of
showering. Like sleeping with a girl you don’t really like but not being
able to stop. Like wanting to get your GED instead of attending your
senior year. Though I don’t understand why a GED is so crappy—

isn’t it the same thing as the damn diploma?

I’m supposed to take an incident where I was recently afraid.

Examine that incident and then inhabit the way I felt, then pull
back from the situation and rotate around it. Look at all the possible
responses available; see all the other angles. Because that’s the thing
about fear. It’s single-minded. It reduces your choices. And what’s the
point of being alive if you don’t have choices?

But I can’t talk about the incident where I was recently afraid
with you. It involves another girl, and I’m afraid (ha-ha) that it
might hurt your feelings to know about it, because, though it has been
months since we were together and our relationship was pretty new,
I still feel warm and kind toward you. And after what they did to
you—my fault—all I want is to sit beside you in bed and smooth
your hair. (I imagine this with both of us fully clothed, by the way.

Totally legit, Collette.) So, I’d smooth your hair, like my mother used
to when she was trying to get me to fall asleep and I was too hyper. I’d
tell you that you’re an amazing girl. I remember you in the Connison

hallway, your legs in red socks, calling me a dummy and telling me to
let you in my room so you wouldn’t get caught. Helping yourself to the
guy your friend liked. No fear in that, Collette.

That is the angle I like to inhabit the most. I’m too chickenshit to
inhabit any angles where I could have changed what happened in that
unmentionable situation. So I just think of you, pushing yourself into
my life, and me opening the door and both of us inside, the door locked,
safe. I inhabit that angle just fine.

Later, Evan

“My break’s over in fifteen minutes,” Lana said, hooking her fingers into my belt loops.

We were in the penned-in area enclosing the Dumpster and the recycling behind The Donut Co-op. There were people in this world who ate out of Dumpsters, and the owner of The Donut Co-op had spent extra money to enclose everything because he couldn’t stomach the idea of such desperation.

Speaking of desperation, there I was, at 10:17 on a Friday morning, condoms in my pocket and my hands under Lana’s Donut Co-op apron, pushing up her skirt. Far from the cover of darkness, breaking all of Layne’s rules about his half sister.

Because both of us were desperate. Me, because I couldn’t stop thinking about Baker in the summer kitchen; Lana, because she had a big exam in her vet-tech class at the community college that afternoon. She called me on her way into her shift at The Donut Co-op saying she needed me to get her mind off it.

So, of course, I shot up from a dead sleep and rinsed off in the lake while the fog at sunrise was still burning off the water, then brushed my teeth and drove into Marchant Falls like a goddam firefighter headed to a four-alarm blaze.

Only to sit through The Donut Co-op’s morning rush.

While Lana satisfied the carb and caffeine demands for the entire population of Marchant Falls, I paged through my uncle’s blue cloth book. I couldn’t look beyond the drawing of my mother, though. I just went back to the beginning of the book, seeing what I’d already read. Safer there.

The sleaziness behind the Dumpster took longer than fifteen minutes, though. Which sucked, even if Lana seemed to enjoy herself. Maybe it was smelling a million dead donuts while bees buzzed around crushed pop cans. Maybe it was the way the sun dipped behind a slab of clouds, turning the bright morning grey and depressing. Maybe both, because even with those spectacular noises girls make when they allow you to touch them, I couldn’t close the deal. Finally, Lana said she had to get back.

“Sorry,” I muttered, chucking the condom into the Dumpster and zipping up. Lana giggled while she straightened her apron.

I felt like a complete loser. There’s nothing like sex for knocking out
persistent, negative thoughts
—Dr. Penny’s phrase for my anxious brain. And now even that relief was unavailable.

The sun blasted out again as the clouds passed over. I felt like doing something ridiculously showy for Lana, like buying her flowers, something gigantic like they put around the winning horse’s neck at the Kentucky Derby. Lana just gave herself to me, and now it looked like even that wasn’t enough.

I didn’t know if I should apologize or what. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Though Lana didn’t say much to me, usually, anyway. Beyond telling me where she’d meet me and whatever, she mostly just told me I was
good.
As in, after we’d finished doing it and I was coming back to life, she’d say, “Damn, Evan, you’re
good
.”

Probably a year ago, I would have been insanely proud of this compliment. No other girl had said anything like that to me before. But Lana saying it just made me feel shitty. Because fuck if I knew why what I was doing was
good
for Lana.

Before she went back inside, I kissed her good-bye. Something we never did, really. But I felt awful at that point. Lana stood there, a little shy—SHY! after fucking me behind a Dumpster!—tucking her hair behind her ears while I wished her luck on her test and kissed her again on the cheek. And she blushed—BLUSHED! after fucking me behind a Dumpster!—

and went back inside The Donut Co-op.

Completely wrecked and depressed, I drove to Cub Foods because Friday was payday and I figured I’d pick up my check before heading home. But I wasn’t thinking clearly, so I didn’t consider that I’d see Layne—he’s the one who gave me my check, obviously—and I felt like what I’d just done was written all over my face.

Luckily, Layne was distracted. It was Harry’s third birthday party tomorrow and Jacinta’s mother was out of town helping some relative and Layne and Jacinta had no idea how to make mini Elmos on five dozen cupcakes.

“Listen,” I told him. “I used to work in a cupcake shop.

Why don’t I make the Elmo cupcakes? It’s the least I can do.”

Layne looked at me like I’d just announced I was gay and leaving for Hollywood to become a movie star.

“I’m serious,” I said. “It’s no big deal. We did special orders like that all the time.”

“You sure, man?” he asked. “’Cause I can get a couple of those mixes in a box or something …”

“I got it, don’t worry. What time is the party tomorrow?”

“Three o’clock.”

“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “And call me if you want help cleaning or whatever.”

I filled up a cart with everything I’d need for Harry’s cupcakes. Butter and sugar and eggs and flour and food coloring and paper cups and chocolate and the whole nine. Fully from scratch—no bullshit mixes in a box for me.