Almost Kings (7 page)

I walked slowly back to the room. Everything was silent, save for the occasional knock of a pool ball followed by a groan or a “hell yes.” As I closed the door behind me, though, all I heard was Emily’s breathing, deep and steady. I took off my shirt and unzipped my pants as I walked toward her. There’d be no going back.

Up on the bed, I hiked up her skirt to reveal white panties, bluish in the moonlight. I knelt over her and, pushed up her arms and took off her shirt, pulling at the long sleeves to get them off. When her arms flopped back down onto the bed, I stopped.

There, running from just below the wrist up to her elbow, were neat little cuts. Some of the scars were old and lifted up high over the surrounding skin like mountain ridges. A couple were fresher, still scabbed with blood.

I got up and rolled off of the bed. I was aware of my own breath now, short and tight, and my pulse in my thumbs and wrists. The veins there seemed to stick out more than usual, over-clogged with blood.

I imagined Emily in a bathroom, a razor in hand. How often did she do it? Had she done it earlier tonight? Why would a girl carve up a pretty arm like that. What did it even feel like?

I took my Swiss Army knife out of my pocket. I accidentally pulled out the miniature saw instead of the blade at first. When I finally did get the knife out, I turned it over in the moonlight trying to hold it up at an angle so that the thin part faced me and became nothing more than a line, barely there at all.

I rolled up a pant leg to right below my knee and ran a hand up the thin hairs of my calf. I listened to Emily’s breath and the sound of pool balls as I put the blade against my shin. I pushed softly, but the blade was old and dull, and though the skin pushed in, it didn’t split.

I took a breath. Then I slashed quickly. A small, shallow, red cut, half an inch long appeared. Three or four beads of blood sprung from the wound and finally merged together, and I touched the cut with two fingers. It barely hurt at all.

I checked the blade to make sure it was clean before I carefully folded it back into the Swiss Army knife and rolled down my jeans. The wound would be shallow enough to scab on its own. I waited maybe ten minutes, long enough for the blood on my fingers to dry, before I walked back to the living room.

The game of pool had ended, and Truck, Reggie and Hass, who’d finished with Pearl, sat drinking beers and watching MTV2. The shot glasses on the pool table were all either drunk or spilled, and the smell of Vodka permeated the air.

“How’d it go?” asked Truck as I sat down on the couch next to him. When I held up my hand and showed him the blood on my fingertips, he smiled and handed me the beer he’d been drinking. He opened a new one for himself.

“Fuckin’ cherry,” said Hass. “Nice. Looks like Little Truck is a man today. Hey, Reg, you got a pen?”

Hass reached into a duffel bag and felt around until he found the yearbook. He pulled it out and flipped to the back page.

“Let’s see here. Seven times two is fourteen. Hell, that puts you—let’s see here—fourteen points ahead of Reggie.”

“Eff you, man,” said Reggie, slurring. He tried to lean forward, then melted back into his armchair.

“This here,” said Hass. “This makes you a King. Then there’s just one more thing. If your brother’s cool with it.”

Truck lifted his bottle.

“To the next King,” he said as Hass and I raised our bottles to meet his.

We did the branding a couple days later, out in a campground near Sawyer’s Lake. During the summer, the place was packed with tow-headed hick children, barbeques and motor boats, but in the winter the lake was completely abandoned. When fresh powder came, guys brought snowboards to the abandoned boat ramps and used them as runs, daring each other to bail at the last second before they ended up in the lake.

On this night, it was cold but not frozen, and the Kings had built a bonfire out of wood we’d gathered from the lakeshore. The five of us sat in fabric and metal foldout chairs around the burning logs, sharing a bottle of Jack.

By Truck’s feet lay one end of an unfolded coat hanger. The other end, they’d bent into the shape of a crown some years ago. Now it reddened in the bonfire’s heart, readying itself to meet my skin.

“Going to be a while before the thing gets hot enough,” Reggie said. “I brought dogs.”

Wood tossed a pine cone into the fire, where its sap hissed and popped. He said, “’Course you did.”

Reggie had whittled down one end of a long stick, and he speared a pair of Ballpark franks on it. He put the meat in over the side of the fire, where their skins soon started to bubble. It looked like bad acne appearing in fast motion and made my stomach turn.

“I was thinking,” Reggie said. “Long as we’re doing Bug, maybe it’s time we do me too.”

“Hell no,” said Wood, stringing out the “hell” so that the word took up a sentence.

“Last time I checked, you didn’t put up any points on the scoreboard,” said Hass. “So unless you drive-by-banged some girl on the way up here while I wasn’t looking, you’re still a virgin. And I’m not putting this here crown on the back of no god-damned virgin.”

“Pearl Tan was totally mine until you cock-blocked me,” said Reggie, bitterly.

“You know,” said Hass. “Come to think of it, she did call out your name a couple of times while I was doing her.”

“Hilarious,” said Reggie, turning his dogs.

“You snooze you lose,” said Hass, taking a drink.

Truck said nothing. He stared into the flame’s heart, drinking from a bottle he didn’t share. Without looking at me he said, “You don’t have to do this, if you don’t want.”

I nodded my head. “I do.”

He finished the bottle and tossed it out into the woods.

“Okay,” he said. “Strip down and come over here.”

He gestured to a nearby spot, and I took off my shirt as I walked over to it.

“Kneel there and put your arms over the log. You’ll want something to bite down on, too.”

Hass pulled a quarter-inch wide stick from the woodpile, broke it into smaller pieces, and walked it over to me as he peeled off the bark with his fingers.

“Here,” he said. “But don’t bite down on it just yet. We got a few questions for you.”

As Hass handed me the stick, Truck took the coat hanger and adjusted it in the fire, plunging it deeper into the coals that had formed at its base. Hass kneeled in front of me and put his face so close to mind that I smelled his bad breath and felt his spit against my skin as he spoke.

“You swear allegiance to the Kings forever?” asked Hass. “We’re your brothers now.”

“Yes.”

“You never betray those brothers. Do you?”

“No,” I said.

He slapped my cheek playfully.

“Okay. Bite down on the stick.”

I put it in my mouth and got hit by a memory of eating grass by the sidelines of a soccer field as a kid while I watched Truck play goalie. Looking at the sky, I’d noticed for the first time that I could see the small grains of dust stuck to my eye, like ghosts or black strings, and I watched them roll against the blue above.

I heard the sound of logs shifting behind me and knew Truck had pulled the hanger from the fire.

“Tell me to give you this brand,” said Truck.

I did my best to shout “yes,” but the stick muffled the word in my mouth.

“Tell me!”

“Yes,” I tried to shout again, louder now.

And then it came, the hot bite of it against my shoulder, like a mouth, its teeth on fire, had chewed away my skin. My own smell, like cooked bacon filled the air, and I thought of breakfast. I spit out the stick, coughed on bile, and swore. The guys stepped back to give me space, and I tossed the stick into the fire.

“Here,” said Truck, holding up a bottle of vodka, and I reached for it.

“No,” he said. “For your back. Got to sterilize that mother.”

I turned my scar toward him and let him pour it over me. There was a moment of sting, and then a sudden coolness as my body adjusted. I felt dead sober and aware of every touch as Truck took off his shirt and used it to dry the skin around the wound.

“I’m proud of you little brother,” he said. “Really, really proud.”

I looked at him, standing shirtless and smiling at me, and then down at my own body in the firelight. I’d been lifting for a month now, and sapling muscles had sprouted in my arms and chest. I wasn’t him yet, but the distance between us no longer seemed impossible.

The rest of the Kings were whooping and hollering. “Bug!” They shouted. “Bug! Bug! Bug! Bug! Bug!”

“Thanks,” I said to Truck, and we went back to join the other Kings around the fire.

By morning, the wound had already crusted over, and the t-shirt I’d slept in stuck to it as if the cotton had become a part of me. I spent my first five minutes of consciousness slowly peeling it away. As I finally detached myself from the fabric, a large shadow fell over me, and I looked up to see Reggie smiling down.

“How you feeling, Bug?” he asked.

“How you think, fat ass?” asked Wood. “Oh wait. I guess you’re the only one who doesn’t know.”

“Fuck you, Wood,” said Reggie.

“No, no, that’s the problem. You don’t know anything about fucking, either.”

A shot rang out, followed by Hass’s voice, “Winged it.”

“I’m gonna go take a turn,” said Wood. “You help Bug pack up his stuff.”

Reggie walked over to a cooler, pulled out a gallon jug of water, and handed it to me.

“For your back,” he said. “Or if you want to drink it.”

Another shot echoed across the lake.

“Fuckers,” Reggie muttered under his breath.

“You’ll get yours eventually,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Hell yes I will. I mean, I’m not saying I’m going to score as many points as Hass or Truck or even Wood, but something’s got to give at some point right?”

“Not Truck.” I corrected. “He’s not playing.”

He snorted. “That what he told you?” Reggie walked over to Hass’s duffel bag, pulled out the yearbook, and handed it to me. “Don’t tell Truck I showed you, okay?”

I nodded, and he handed it to me. The cover was slightly damp and bent, and the whole thing smelled like beer. I flipped to the back where they kept the scoreboard. It was the first time I’d seen it since the night I signed up, and in the months between it had become a mess of symbols and numbers.

The Kings had made three columns: “BJ (1/2), S, and V (x2).” Below that was each guy’s name, except for Miller’s, which had been crossed out in an angry jumble of lines.

Hass had 55 points. Wood had 32. Reggie had none, and I had 14.

My brother had 60.

14.

The morning after my branding, Truck and I headed home so he could make Dad breakfast. The brand ached as I leaned forward in the car seat and wished we had the money for better shocks.

The radio was off, and Truck was whistling the hook to a Jay-Z song and drumming his hands against the wheel. He kept looking over at me and smiling, waiting for me to start whistling too, but I stared into the dashboard.

“You’ll be okay,” he said. “We’ll put some aloe on it when we get back. It should be healed in a couple of weeks.” He turned on the radio, and Nirvana played. I turned it off.

“I saw the yearbook.”

“You saw it, huh?”

His smile disappeared, replaced by a hard look. Dad had used to shift like that. Jubilant until something small—a broken dish, an umpire’s bad call—set him off.

“I thought you weren’t doing it. All those girls—”

“I needed it,” he said. “Something just for me. Jesus. Four months from now, I’m going to have you plus another kid wandering around. Gonna be fucking married. So yeah, I did it. This was my last chance to have a little fun, maybe in my whole life.”

“What about Lizzie?”

“I fucking love Lizzie,” he said. “You think I don’t? That’s my kid’s mom right there. That’s why I stopped all this stuff a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t stand looking at her, all suspicious and shit. Hell, I didn’t want you to know about it either.”

“You’re done?” I asked.

“I swear to you.”

I thought about it for a second. My brand ached too bad to be having this talk.

“Okay,” I said.

“You won’t tell Lizzie?”

“I said okay.”

He let out a long breath. “Thanks. I owe you one. ”

We drove for a while in silence.

“Lot’s going to change,” he said after a while. “I’m down to half a pack a day on the cigarettes, and I’m gonna start weaning myself on the drinking. I’d cut it out completely, but—you know. You saw what happened to Dad when he tried that shit.”

I nodded.

“You remember how he looked that day before he headed off to the ranch? Like he was a god-damned popsicle wrapped in skin. Can’t believe he even got on a horse much less fell off of one. No, for me, it’s all about getting better, improving myself a little at a time, you get me?”

“It’s almost 8:30,” I said, looking at the clock. “He’ll be up by now, and pissed.”

“Yeah,” said Truck. “You don’t worry about it. Just tell him you’ve got homework and head to the room. I’ll deal with him.”

I was hanging out with the other Kings a couple days later under the big Sequoia at the center of the school. The first snow of winter had dusted the quad the night before, and some kids had started going straight to their next classes instead of hanging out outside for a few minutes. The school seemed emptier than before.

The brand had healed some by then, but it still stung like hell when Hass slapped me on the back and asked, “Hey, how was that Emily chick, anyway?”

“Good,” I said. “Better than average, I guess.”

“What you know about average?” asked Wood.

“I think he’s right,” said Hass. “Definitely a geeky chick, but there’s something about her—”

“Speaking of geeky chicks,” said Wood. He gestured over to Kallea, who was walking straight toward us in full Arctic gear. She’d bundled up her hair under a winter cap, giving her the look of a cancer patient. The Kings went quiet as she approached.

“Here,” she said, handing me the gloves I’d lent her. “I wanted to give these back.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking them. They were my only pair, and with the weather getting even colder, I’d been missing them.

“I heard you hung out with Emily a couple of nights ago,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t be jealous, Kallea,” said Hass. “There’s plenty of Bug to go around. Second time’s always better anyway.”

“You slept with her?” Her face betrayed no emotion, only coldness. The Kings didn’t bother pretending not to listen.

“What do you care?” I asked.

“I can’t believe I liked you,” she said. She left as the bell rang, and I hated myself as she walked away. Maybe one day when I got her alone, I’d explain that nothing had happened. Maybe after the rest of the Kings graduated.

“What the hell was that, Hass?” I asked.

Hass smirked as he put on his backpack.

“I just did you a favor, Bug,” he said. “You spent the whole first quarter following that girl around like a damned puppy. Now you don’t have to anymore.”

“Don’t do me any more favors.”

I put on the gloves Kallea gave me and felt the warmth returning to my hands. I wondered if she was in a bathroom somewhere, cold and crying. I stuck up my gloved middle finger behind me as I walked away.

“I’ll take that as a ‘thank you’,” Hass shouted as I left the quad.

The first people to notice my brand were Joel and Sam. They saw it when we were changing for gym.

“Fucking sick,” said Sam. “Looks like you got flesh-eating bacteria.”

“Fucking sweet is more like it,” said Joel. “How’d you get that?”

“I earned it,” I said.

“Looks good.”

I turned around to find Miller and Zack staring me down. Miller had his shirt off and turned so I could see the crown on his back.

“Guess Hass and them are your ‘brothers for life’, huh?” he asked. “What a bunch of crap. You’re their little mascot is all. Entertainment.”

I ignored him and turned away. What did he know? He hadn’t even been around in a month. All he’d seen was the way it used to be.

He pushed me lightly from behind, and Sam and Joel stepped away from us, over to the corner of the room. I doubted they’d ever even seen a fight before.

I said, “Well at least I never tried to fuck someone else’s fiancé.”

“Let Truck say what he wants. Guy’s a psycho, hick alcoholic, just like your dad. Ask anyone.”

I punched him in the mouth. It was a good hit—I twisted my wrist just before I made contact like Hass had shown me once at a party—but Miller had five inches and fifty pounds on me. His spit got bloody, but he didn’t go down.

Miller stared at me hard, then threw one quick punch to my eye. It hurt a lot more than I’d expected, a dull star of pain that went nova and spread through my skull. I don’t remember going down, only the woozy feeling of looking up from the floor to see Zack and Miller looming over me.

“Fuck him up,” Zack said, but Miller backed away.

“Nah,” he said. “It’s like beating up a chick. Let’s get out of here.”

“So you’re picking fights now?”

I was in the parking lot with Hass and Wood, standing by the Ford and waiting for Truck to show up. It was cold as hell, and the skin around my eye stung, as tender as chapped lips, but I felt high, like I’d won the fight. Hass smiled and he took a closer look at my black eye. It had almost swollen shut and when he touched it with his thumb, it hurt worse than the brand.

“Knocked Miller a good one from what I heard,” said Wood. “Fucked him up, like. Hell, maybe we should give you points for it.”

“Popping Miller’s cherry’s gotta be worth something,” said Hass. He pulled the yearbook out of his backpack and flipped to the back page.

“What you give Miller?” he asked Wood.

“Zero?”

“Come on now,” said Hass. “Pretty boy like that?”

“He’s got to be worth at least as much as Diana Fox. Two words, man. Cottage cheese. I seriously can’t believe Reggie was thinking about—oh shit, incoming.”

Truck and Lizzie, arm in arm, walked toward us from across the street, and Hass hid the yearbook back in his bag. They both wore big coats, and just looking at Lizzie, you wouldn’t have known she was pregnant. I wondered how long it took for a girl to show. Maybe if you just wore loose clothes, you could go most of the way without anyone knowing.

“Boys,” she said. “Hope we didn’t keep you waiting.” She looked me over and noticed the black eye. “Teddy. What happened to you?”

“Mark of valor,” said Hass.

“Not bad, little brother,” said Truck, examining the eye. “You’re gonna tell me all about that on the way to Reggie’s place.”

“You gonna come out tonight?” Hass asked Lizzie. “It’s always good to have a sober chick around.”

Lizzie shook her head. “I’m working.”

“Corner of Third and Main again?” Hass asked.

“Easy,” said Truck. “Liz, I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? Give me a call if you need anything.”

He bent over, pushed away her hair, and kissed her lightly on the neck.

By the time the party got started, I knew I wasn’t going to have fun. My eye was throbbing, and the pain only got worse the more I drank. The rest of the Kings were scamming on freshman girls, but by that point they were the same ones I’d seen at other parties, and it was all starting to seem like a game of musical chairs. Kallea wouldn’t be there, I knew, or Emily either. The whole exercise was a fainter echo of every other party we’d already thrown.

At some point, I lost track of Truck and ended up with Wood and Hass in the kitchen. There were no girls around, and they had the yearbook open, double-checking points.

“Cheer the fuck up,” said Hass, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You got a war wound. Yeah, it’s pretty sick, but girls don’t give a damn. Tell them how you popped Miller one. They’ll fucking melt. Keep your roll up. A few more chicks, and you’ll be ahead of Wood.”

“Too bad your mom’s not a freshman girl,” said Wood. “Or I’d have like twice as many points.”

“Hell, if my mom was a freshman girl, I’d do her,” said Hass. “Have you seen her—” Suddenly, his face fell. “Oh, shit.”

I turned around, expecting to see Zack and Miller, rolling in for round two. Instead, I saw Lizzie, weaving through the party toward us, avoiding drunk guys and holding her belly.

“Lizzie—” I said.

“Something’s wrong.” She was shaking a little and crying, and she wouldn’t take her hand off of her stomach. “I need James. Now. He’s not picking up his phone.”

“Sure,” said Hass. He looked nervous. “Yeah. I’ll just go look for him. You all wait here.”

“I’ll help,” I said.

“No. You stay here with Lizzie. Make sure she’s okay.”

Hass left the kitchen. He poked his head out on the deck, checked the rec room, and headed upstairs. I found Lizzie a chair as Hass left to look for my brother.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

“Just find him,” she said.

I walked outside to see if the Ford was still outside and found it still in place. A light snow had begun to fall, but the earth underneath the Ford was still dry. I was about to go back inside when I noticed a light on in the detached garage and walked that way.

As I approached the building, I heard a girl’s soft moaning, and adrenaline shot through me. I hadn’t prayed since my mom took off, but if I was the type, I would have knelt down then. Let that be some random guy from the party with that girl, I thought. Reggie maybe? Anyone but Truck.

I opened the door and saw them. Nadine Khan, a confirmed nine, and no virgin, was up on the hood of a rusted Corvette. Her head was tilted back in pleasure, and her neck was long and alien. Her hands pressed down on the old metal beneath her, helping her thrust and keep balanced. Her legs were wrapped around my brother.

I banged my fist against the closed garage door, which clattered and shed dust.

“Jesus,” my brother twisted his neck to look at me. “Bug. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“You said—you said—”

“Who fucking cares what I said? Get the hell out of—”

“Lizzie’s here,” I said.

“Jesus. Get rid of her.”

“Baby, baby, I don’t care if you have a girlfriend,” said Nadine, trying to pull my brother back toward her. Her eyes were out of focus, and I could tell she was annihilated.

“Something’s wrong,” I said. “Lizzie sent me to—”

My brother was pulling up his jeans by then and looking around for his shirt. Nadine leaned back and put her head against the windshield. Her skirt was still pulled up to her hips, and I saw everything.

“Shirt,” he said. “Shirt, shirt. Damn it.”

I backed out the door and took a few steps toward the main house. There, standing in the snow, was Lizzie. She must have followed me out.

“You found him,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

I was an ice sculpture, the falling flakes not melting on my coat. I said nothing.

“Well?”

My tongue was a frozen lump. She pushed past me through the door, and I heard her scream as she entered the garage.

“James,” she said.

“Damn it, Lizzie. You said you weren’t coming.”

She backed out the door and tripped on the gap where the concrete floor gave way to dirt. She fell to the wet ground, and my brother, still shirtless, ran out to help her up. Her arms were coated in mud and snow that rubbed off on him as she pushed him away and fell back down.