Althea and Oliver (13 page)

“You already keyed her car,” Oliver says to Jason. “You're even, so back off, okay? Don't make it worse.”

“What about you?” Jason counters, batting away Oliver's outstretched hand. “I didn't key
your
car.”

“I don't have a car, so I guess you're shit out of luck.”

“What, you think I'm scared of you because you're a fucking head case?” Jason says. “You think you go psycho in one Waffle House and I'm not going to kick your ass? You were in that bathroom, too, you crazy—”

Before Jason can finish, Althea tucks her chin and drives her head into his chest, grabbing his shoulders and hanging on as the world tilts crazily and the ground rushes up to meet them. Jason hits the asphalt and lies stunned beneath her. His keys go flying, but his hat remains atop his head, albeit at a skewed, jaunty angle. Holding his arms, Althea presses her knee into his stomach while he looks up, winded, his blue eyes circled by long, girlish blond lashes. Saliva bubbles in one corner of his mouth. “Get the fuck off me!” Jason gasps.

“You motherfucker,” she shouts, lowering her face so it's inches from his.

“Fuck you, bitch.”

Althea pulls back her arm like the sprung handle of a pinball machine, poised to set its hapless metal sphere into motion. Oliver grabs her by the wrist and pulls her up.

“Stop it,” he whispers.

A crowd has gathered, and Minty Fresh and Valerie are closing in from its fringes. Althea shoves Oliver aside. While Jason staggers to his feet, she finds his car keys by her back tire and dangles them in his reddened face. He reaches for them and she snatches them away. She winds up her arm again and he flinches—“like a bitch,” she'll say when she tells the story later—but instead she pivots, hurling his keys into the same scraggly patch of woods where Coby had ditched the empty bottle. She is going for distance and she gets it, the keys arcing beautifully, their parabola disappearing amid the darkness and the trees, everyone watching so breathlessly, there is a barely audible clink when they land. It's the only clue Jason will have in their retrieval. She flashes him a winsome smile as a parting shot and gets into her car.

Oliver dives into the driver's seat and peels out, leaving Coby in the lot with the rest of the onlookers, but she can see him smirking as the crowd disperses in the taillights. The inside of her chest is warm. The muscles in her legs are cramped and twitchy, like she just ran down thirty flights of stairs. She lights one of Coby's cigarettes and exhales out her open window. Her hand trembles as she raises it to her mouth.

“Can we, like, skip to the part where this is a hilarious anecdote?” she asks.

“No more speed for you,” Oliver shouts. “Were you absent on the day in kindergarten when we talked about why we don't hit?”

“Did we also cover what to do when someone keys your car?”

“In all fairness, you did destroy an expensive mirror and flood his bathroom.”

“Fuck a bunch of that. Remember the Jell-O massacre at my house? I didn't go out looking for vengeance after that, did I?” she says.

“You didn't have to make it worse,” he says. “I don't want to be looking over my shoulder for that asshat every time we go to a party.”

“Why are you defending him? Did you not hear what he said to you? I can't wait to run into him again. I hope I'm this drunk when we do. And if I were you, I'd want as many sucker punches as I could get.”

“I don't want sucker punches!” he says.

“Then what
do
you want? If you don't want me to dispatch our enemies, then tell me what you do want. Tell me and I will procure it.”

He pauses.

“Tell me!” she shouts.

“I told you months ago. I want things to be normal.”

After a thoughtful moment, she tosses her cigarette out the window and rolls the window up. Without the sounds of traffic, the car is too quiet and the silence is full of tension. Althea rests her forehead against the cool glass. She can still feel herself tackling Jason, the certainty of his weight, their joint fall to the ground, and the unexpected intimacy in the moment when she was straddling him and he was looking at her, defiant but afraid, seeing into the darkness of her anger and intentions. “I don't want to pretend like everything is the same.”

“That's not helpful,” Oliver replies.

“I think you had better set a more realistic goal. You're talking about normal and not normal, but what you really mean is then and now. You didn't wake up in a parallel universe. It's more like you got into a time machine and it took you into the future and you don't like it here.”

“Because things are fucked up and I don't know how they got that way.”

“Don't do that!” she shrieks. “Don't use it as an excuse! You're sick and that sucks, but don't use it as an excuse to point a finger at me for everything.”

Oliver pauses, long enough for her to wonder if he's going to pretend he doesn't know what she's talking about. He turns onto their street and pulls into her driveway, and only after he's killed the engine does he answer.

“I'm sorry. I know you're pissed. But I want things back. The way they were. I know it wasn't fair, the way it happened. The first time we ever—you know—and for me to disappear like that after. That must have really sucked.”

Althea pauses, choosing her next words carefully. “What exactly do you think I'm so upset about?”

“That night,” he says. “After the party. Things ended really abruptly. I know you were disappointed. I thought you wouldn't want to talk about it, but if it will make you feel better, we can.”

“Make me feel better,” she repeats. The measured tone of his response infuriates her. The immediate, electrified feeling she had in the parking lot is gone, and with it the potential for infinite and lawless possibilities. The night reached its zenith when they sped away from Lucky's, and now she is trapped in the car riding out the downward trajectory. Or it could, she realizes, just be the pills wearing off. “Did you really think I was all devastated because you denied me the honor of, like, thirteen seconds of drunken intercourse?”

“That's not exactly what I meant,” he says, hands still clutching the steering wheel at ten and two.

It seems so ridiculous to be harping on the night when they didn't have sex when all she can think about is the day that they did. “I'm not upset because of that.”

“Then what is the fucking problem?” he shouts.

Althea can't have this conversation with the parking brake between them. Jumping out of the car, she runs around to the driver's side, flings the door open, and pulls Oliver out. He stands there with his arms crossed, waiting for her answer, while she searches his face for any vestige of that boy who had been ravenous for her. “Tell me you're faking,” she says. “Tell me you remember but you're just embarrassed. I won't care. Just tell me it registered.”

“You're speaking in riddles and I don't understand.”

“I'm not upset because we
didn't
have sex, I'm upset because we
did
. And you don't remember, and it's like it never happened, but it
did
happen, and you keep complaining because things are different except that nothing's different.”

He stares at her. “Wait, what? What do you mean, we had sex?”

“What else could I possibly mean?”

“When? Althea,
when
?” he yells.

“When you were sick.”

“I was asleep?” he cries. He covers his face with his hands.

“Christ, I'm not a fucking rapist. You were awake, but, you know. Like the fat mouse.”

“I feel nauseous. I told you, I said I wasn't ready—”

“You wanted to,” Althea says stridently.

He pushes her, grabbing her arms and pinning her against the car, screaming into her face. Rage contorts his features and gives her a glimpse of something she recognizes, reassurance that there's another side to him she didn't make up. “You stupid bitch,
it wasn't me!
You knew it wasn't me, you knew I wouldn't remember, how could you let it happen? I didn't want to, I told you—”

“Oh no? You didn't
want
to? What did you think happened, then? Do you think I forced you? Do you think I held you down and made you do it?”

It's their proximity that gives him away. Betrayed by his own body before he can protest again, he responds to her closeness, to their tension. She holds his gaze, feeling him waver as his body seems to remember what he can't. As they stare each other down, the flicker of desire on his face is driven away by disgust, disdain for her and maybe for himself as well.

“You knew it was a big deal to me,” he says. “You knew I never would have wanted it to happen like that. How could you not tell me? You've been lying to me for months.”

“You said you wanted things to go back to normal.”

He shoves her against the car again. She winces, but he doesn't seem to notice. “You said I was imagining things. I asked you on the dock why everything seemed so fucked up, and you pretended that nothing happened. How could you keep it a secret? When did you turn into such a creepy fucking scumbag?”

“It wasn't exactly how I pictured it, either,” Althea shouts back. Her legs are shaking. “How the fuck do you think I feel, that it didn't even make an impression on you? It's like I'm the only one it happened to. Do you think that's what I wanted?”

“I think you wanted what you always want. To win, to get your way.”

“Have I been acting like a winner? Do I seem triumphant to you?” she asks.

“Then why did you do it?”

Althea stares at him, knowing if he even has to ask, it's already over, she's already lost. “I don't think I could have stopped it. And if you could remember, you would know what I mean, and you would know that I'm right.”

Releasing her, he takes a step back, shaking his head. There's gravel in his voice, a roughness she's never heard before. “I'll tell you what I know. This, you and me, this is all just geography. If it had been some other little girl who grew up down the block from me, I would have been her best friend for ten years, too, until I realized one day that I wasn't sure I even liked her very much. You're like an incumbent president that no one can stand but you get reelected anyway; you have the advantage because you're already in, and when someone's in it's so much fucking harder to get them out. It should be you, you know,” he says flatly. “It should be you that has this fucking thing. If you threw a pitcher of syrup across a Waffle House and started screaming for no reason, it would just seem typical.”

Again Oliver shakes his head ruefully, like he's not even that surprised, like he should have known better, like what else could he expect, then he breaks away and runs for home.

• • •

Coby hears her coming up the stairs and waits for her in the doorway.

The apartment above the garage is as fixed up as it's ever likely to be—a few posters tacked to the walls and a brown velveteen couch he bought at a yard sale, opposite a small television. It hasn't changed at all since the summer, when she spent plenty of evenings drinking on the roof, listening to the classic rock wafting up from the garage where Coby's dad worked on his Mustang and smoked joint after joint of Zorro's product. It smells of cigarette butts floating in the last half inch of beer at the bottom of a bottle. A few Bukowski poems, hammered out on an old typewriter, are nailed to the walls. Something about the reproductions is comforting; she dreads the day Coby starts writing his own offensive missives. Through the doorway off the main room, Althea can see his bed, a mattress thrown down on the bare floor next to a milk crate full of books. A Mexican rap album is playing on the stereo.

“Got anything to drink?”

Coby pulls a six-pack out of the mini-fridge and sets it on the aged black trunk that serves as a coffee table. She tugs two beers free from their plastic nooses and throws one to him.

“I thought I'd seen the last of you for tonight.”

“I was bored. You got a deck of cards?” she says.

He produces one from somewhere in the bedroom and squeezes into a spot on the floor between the couch and the trunk. Splitting the deck in two, he riffles the cards together, then begins to deal.

“Seven times,” Althea says. “You have to shuffle seven times.”

“Is that a superstition or something?” he asks, collecting the cards and cutting the deck again.

“It's mathematics,” she replies. “What are we playing?”

“Egyptian Ratscrew?”

“Sure.”

As the six-pack dwindles and the pile of cards in Althea's hand grows, her anxiety slowly abates. The game gives her focus at the same time the beer throws a layer of gauze over everything, making it easier to sit across from Coby and laugh at his unfunny jokes while she trounces him again and again. Even as the pace of their game increases, she's filled with a steely calm. A wave of apathy gently washes over her, lapping pleasantly at the edge of her consciousness.

Coby produces two glasses, surprisingly heavy and clean, like Garth's crystal highballs, and pours a little tequila into each. He tips his glass toward hers and says something she doesn't understand.

“What was that?” she asks as she touches her glass to his.

“It's a Polish toast. It means ‘a thousand more.'”

As she brings it to her lips she has a glimmer, a mental sneak preview of the rest of the night, beginning with this small sip and culminating with her doubled over in agony somewhere, most likely the floor of Coby's bathroom, and nothing but trouble in between. Oliver was right. It should have been her with the disease. And she should have grown up on this block, with Coby as her perpetual playmate. She's nothing like Oliver. He was the good twin and she was the bad; she had even dyed her hair black to prove it.