Another Little Piece (7 page)

Now I tilted my head back, so that my eyes could see into his. As if this was the signal he’d been waiting for, he tilted down toward me, so that our eyes, noses, and mouths were all lined up and on the same level.

Except, I couldn’t hold his gaze. It was too direct. Too knowing. I was afraid of what he might see.

Maybe he was thinking along similar lines, because the moment I took a step back, he did the same. Our movements felt almost choreographed.

“Sorry, I—”

I was going to explain that I’d knocked, that I’d come for my razor, that I hadn’t meant to watch him, and that I shouldn’t have called him a monster the other day. Or even more than that. There was so much I was sorry for.

But my apology had stalled, when he’d said the same words, with me: “Sorry, I—”

We’d uttered each syllable at the exact same instant, oddly in sync.

For a long moment we stared at each other. Then he smiled at me and I beamed back, a big goofy grin I held for so long that my cheeks started to hurt. And while we smiled and looked deep into each other’s eyes, I thought that I might kiss him or tell him all my secrets. Or both. There was something about Dex that made me want to confess and kiss. Kiss and confess. Like the two things went together.

I decided then that it might be better to avoid Dex. He was a strange and unpredictable boy, and that seemed like a dangerous combination for a girl like me.

I was about to make an excuse to leave, but Dex spoke first, and that changed everything again.

FRIEND

WISTFUL

Wistful.

Wanton.

Woeful wonderment.

More words.

All meaning:

I WANT.

—ARG

FIRST KISS

“You probably don’t remember, but you were my first kiss,” Dex said with a crooked smile. “I mean, I know you don’t remember anything now, but before . . . well, before everything, I’m not sure if it’s something you particularly thought about. It probably wasn’t a big moment for you. We were in seventh grade, and most people have already kissed by then, or it seemed that way to me. I’m a late bloomer, that’s what my mom used to say.” His face, so open and bright, suddenly went still. “She doesn’t say that anymore; that was from my before.”

I didn’t want to know about the circumstances of his before, any more than I did my own. Befores were a bloody business, and I wanted to go back to hearing about kisses.

“Most girls remember kisses, even the ones that aren’t their first.”

“Point taken,” Dex said with a grin. He collapsed into his computer chair, and did a little spin in it, before facing me again, serious once more. “I think what I really meant was how well remembered it was. Let’s say it was a love letter. No, that sounds too serious. A like letter—instead of a kiss.”

“A like letter?” I said, skeptical but amused.

“A note of affection?” Dex kicked a second chair in my direction, and I grabbed hold of it before it went flying past.

“Okay,” I said, sitting down. “Let’s stick with a like letter.”

“A like letter it is. One that’s been written on the back of an envelope. If it were a love letter, it would be scented stationery, monogrammed too. But a like letter—you just scribble it down on whatever’s handy.”

A giggle escaped me. I hadn’t known that I giggled. It was a nice surprise. “Thank you. I have a very clear picture of it now.”

“But wait, the picture isn’t complete yet. There are actually two different versions of these back-of-an-envelope like letters. The first is creased and bent from being folded up to fit into a pocket. One corner might have a coffee ring, and somewhere in the middle there’s a pink blob from a jelly doughnut. This like letter’s often reread over breakfast.”

“I see,” I answered softly.

I did see, or I was starting to. Dex must have been in love with Annaliese. Or in like. Or something. Did he think this was his second chance with her? For a second I imagined giving it to him. A second chance at a first kiss. Quickly, I shook the thought away.

“Now, the other version of this letter,” Dex continued, oblivious. “It’s stuck between the pages of
Moby Dick
, left there after having been used as a bookmark, and then forgotten right along with Melville’s masterpiece. And I’m guessing this second one was exactly how it all played out for you way back in seventh grade when you gave me my first kiss.”

If that was true, then Annaliese was an idiot.

“I don’t know. I wish I did,” I said, unable or unwilling to squash my wistful tone.

Dex, who had once again been spinning in his chair, came to an abrupt stop. “Wait, did I make you feel bad about not remembering stuff? ’Cause I was joking around.” Stepping one foot in front of the other, he walked his chair forward until our knees were touching. “Seriously, I’m sorry.”

I looked down at our knees instead of at him, his sincere concern shaming me. “It’s fine. It’s just . . . I can tell it meant a lot to you.”

“Oh shit, oh no.” Dex sprang to his feet, the chair flying away behind him, and then he planted his hands on the armrests of my chair, leaning forward and boxing me in so that I couldn’t escape his gaze. “Look, I think we can be friends, I’d like us to be friends, but there’s something you have to understand about me if that’s gonna happen.” He took a deep breath, and I braced myself for something terrible. Would this be the before he’d alluded to earlier?

“I talk a lot,” Dex said, as if confessing a dark secret. “And that means a lot of what I say is total and complete shit. Just utter nonsense. I put words together to hear myself talk—well, to make other people hear me talk; I’m not really into talking to myself. So all that stuff I said about the letters, it was just that. I don’t have this grand passion that I’ve been holding on to since seventh grade. That would be nuts. And also, no offense or anything, but at that age I’d already discovered internet porn, so the kiss was not the most exciting sexual moment of my life up to that point. It was the same for you, I’m sure. Well, not the internet porn. But hell, maybe.”

He didn’t want Annaliese. He wanted to be friends with me. My heart thumped with the joyful rhythm of a dog’s tail slapping the floor beside his master’s feet.

Dex pushed himself away from me, falling into his chair once more. “Here’s the story. Bullshit-free. The Braverman twins started it all. Amelia and Danny. She invited all the girls in our class to their joint birthday party, and Danny invited all the boys. I think there might have been some idea of keeping the two parties separate, but that lasted all of ten seconds. So we ended up playing spin the bottle combined with seven minutes in heaven. Heaven was the closet where the twins stored their soccer equipment, and seven minutes was more like whenever everybody got tired of waiting and decided to throw the door open.

“To be completely honest, when it was my turn to spin, I aimed for Kayla Robins. All the boys were aiming for Kayla Robins. She was—I want to say she was hot, she is definitely hot now, but to think of a seventh grader that way seems kind of wrong. Let me put it this way—she had this Dr Pepper lip stuff that she wore on a string around her neck so that it hung right between her—well, right between nothing. She was flat chested and remained that way until the next year when the hormones kicked in, I guess, and she was suddenly va-va-voom. . . .” Dex stared into space for a moment, lost, I could only assume, in a vision of Kayla’s curves.

I, meanwhile, remembered exactly where I had heard the name Kayla before. It was the name of the girl who had texted Rice Sixteen the night he was with Annaliese. The beautiful girl who every guy wanted had dated the same boy Annaliese wanted badly enough to trade her very soul for him.

“But my lips never touched those of Kayla Robins, and I doubt they ever will,” Dex continued cheerfully, and I was thankful to be pulled out of my own thoughts. “The bottle landed on one Annaliese Rose Gordon instead. You didn’t jump up and down with joy, but you also didn’t wrinkle your nose and turn to your friends and roll your eyes. I found this to be fairly encouraging. Seconds later we were in the dark closet. I took your hands in my own damp and sweaty ones, and we kissed. We were probably in there for all of thirty seconds before Jason Snyder flung the door open. Lucky bastard, spun that bottle and pointed it straight at Kayla Robins. Or maybe not so lucky; she told everyone his braces scraped her lips, and that his breath smelled like bananas. You’d think that wouldn’t be so bad, I mean I could think of a lot worse things to taste like, but in junior high . . .”

Dex shook his head. “I think people still call him Monkey Boy to this day.”

“Wow,” I said in response, a huge grin on my face despite the fate of poor Monkey Boy. “So that’s it, huh?”

“Nope, there’s one more thing I forgot to tell you about—the magical words we exchanged in those final moments in the dark.”

This time I saw the mischievous twinkle in Dex’s eyes and wasn’t worried about any declarations of love. “And they were?”

“You said to me—and I remember this exactly—‘It kinda smells like feet in here.’”

I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing. And in that instant Annaliese’s skin fit me perfectly. I forgot it was her head being thrown back, her hands covering her mouth, trying to stop the helpless whoops shaking her whole body. Dex had told the story so perfectly that I was almost there too, remembering it with him. I was Annaliese. Almost.

Like birds, my laughter fled. One second there; the next, nothing but distant specks in the sky.

I wasn’t Annaliese. I never would be.

I shot to my feet. “I should go.”

Dex, who had been laughing with me, changed gears quickly, following my new, more urgent mood. He stood as well, and before I could make a move toward the storm doors, he took my injured hand in the same gentle yet insistent manner he had earlier. A stray bit of sunlight found its way through the cracked door and brought to life the dust motes dancing between us.

His long, jangling body was still. Already I was learning to identify this as a sign he was preparing to say something serious. “I meant what I said earlier about us being friends.” His voice was pitched so low, I had to lean closer to hear his words. “I’d like to be friends with you. I don’t have many, in fact the number right now stands at zero. Okay, that’s not totally true, there are several chat rooms where the screen name Dexterious is a welcome addition to any thread. But here in the nonemoticon world, I’m a bit of a hermit.”

I squeezed Dex’s hand with my injured one. It only hurt a little. “I could use some friends too.”

I’d hoped for a lightening of the mood, or at least a smile, but, if anything, Dex became even more serious. “As your friend, there is one thing that I have to tell you. Your mom hates me. She put the fence up because she couldn’t stand seeing me. And I don’t think she’d want us to be friends, or even long-distance pen pals.”

“No,” I said immediately. Even though I’d seen the fence, I couldn’t believe it was directed at Dex, now that I’d met him. Now that I knew him. “That can’t be right; she’s protective, but she’s not like that. I don’t even think she’s capable of hating. . . .” An image popped into my head: the mom striking Rice Sixteen over and over, and the look on her face.

He’d hurt me. And yes, she hated him.

“What did you do?” I asked, knowing it had to be something big, something awful.

And I was right.

“I watched you die. I watched you die, and it was because of me that the rest of the world was able to watch it too.”

SCREAM

The video clip lasted all of one minute and twelve seconds.

It began with the camera moving, scanning the crowd. Dozens of teenagers milled outside in air cold enough to turn their breath frosty. Almost every one of them clutched plastic cups of beer, a sort of security blanket. Eyes were glazed and laughter was plentiful, but shrill. Wherever the camera’s mechanical gaze landed, people shaded their eyes against the glaring light that was its constant companion.

“Dude,” one guy grumbled, after his jerk of surprise caused him to slosh beer onto his shirt.

Another girl blinked blearily, before stumbling away.

“Hey, over here,” a different girl catcalled. The camera turned her way and she was ready, lifting her shirt. There was only the quickest flash of flesh, before the camera pointed down, illuminating the camera operator’s shuffling feet.

“Not cool,” his voice said. He must have tossed the words over his shoulder, because the camera was already on the move again, this time finding a couple huddled in a corner. But not making out, like the other shadows surrounding them.

The girl repeatedly stabbed her index finger into the boy’s chest while she ranted at him. They were too far away for the mic to pick up her words, not over the pounding music and noise of the crowd.

Like everyone, they turned to the camera as the light hit their faces. She immediately extended her middle finger, and it didn’t take an expert lip-reader to translate the “fuck you” her lips formed. The boy merely looked grateful for the interruption.

He was wearing his sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head, and even if I hadn’t recognized his face, I would have known for certain when he turned away again. Rice Sixteen. The camera almost made the big white numbers at the center of his back glow.

I recognized the girl too. She was the girl in the bikini at the party last weekend. The one crying to the cops. So this was Rice Sixteen’s girlfriend. Kayla Robins.

My fingers fumbled the pack of breath strips as I pulled them from my pocket.

The video continued, and the screaming began.

It started with one scream. There was terror and pain in that scream, and something else too. Something so deep and dark I didn’t even have a word for it.

The crowd fell silent. For three seconds there was only the scream and the stereo blasting some guy rapping about his bitches.

Then came the reactions.

“Who the fuck was that?”

“Is this a joke? ’Cause it’s not funny, guys . . . okay?”

Someone else started sobbing. Maybe it was more than one person.

And all the time, the camera roamed, pushing through the crowd, which seemed to be turning in the other direction, toward the house, away from the terrible scream that only grew louder.

The camera scanned the outer edges of the yard, where citronella candles stuck into the grass like tiki torches cast flickering shadows onto the line of trees that stood like sentries at the gate between the party and something terrible.

At thirty seconds she stumbled from the trees. The girl in red. I’d known it would be Annaliese, and yet seeing her hit me with a physical zap of shock. Still screaming, she stumbled and lurched her way forward; it seemed impossible that she didn’t fall, that she could keep coming.

“Oh my God,” a girl cried.

And then it was impossible to make out any other words, because others had joined Annaliese in her scream. It seemed like the whole world was yelling and screaming in a terrible chorus of fear and pain.

And as she came closer, the blood became clearer. It was everywhere. Streaming from her forehead, it obliterated half of Annaliese’s face. Her mouth, open wide in an O, was nothing but a red, moving wound. The blood dripped from her hands too, even as she held them out in an obvious plea for help.

No one moved forward. I couldn’t see, but could sense the crowd shrinking away. Only the camera came closer, the zoom finding Annaliese’s eyes as she turned toward its light the same way everyone else had. Blood coated her eyelashes, and against this the whites of her eyes seemed unnaturally bright. Unblinking, she stared into the camera, as if trying to communicate something that her desperate scream could not.

And then everything went dark. The camera still ran, because there was sound, but every last bit of light had been extinguished.