Breathless (12 page)
“You know what he’s doing in there, right?” Stetson asks. He is behind the bar, casually prying open the lock on a glass case of what appears to be very old and expensive scotch. “He’s throwing up. He’ll be sick for, like, three days.” The lock opens. Stetson looks at the bottles for a few minutes, picking them up to examine their labels more closely, and then puts them all back, replacing the lock without taking so much as a sip.
“You have to loosen him up for us,” he says to me, lighting a cigarette between his teeth, which are just a tad crooked. “Okay? Drew is my boy, but he’s uptight as hell.”
“He wants me to go to church with him,” I say. I can’t believe I’m actually
talking
to Stetson McClure. I’m amazed I’m able to form a complete sentence.
Stetson shakes his head. “He’s just nervous. He likes you.” He blows smoke in my face. “Sorry. He does, though. A lot. He talks about you all the time. And Drew could have any chick he wants, you know? But he’s picky, so you should be flattered.” Picking up his drink, he starts to walk away. “You’re a lucky girl.”
It’s a little past three in the morning, and pretty much everyone is asleep in different rooms all over the house. As far as I know, Drew is still in the bathroom downstairs, sick as a dog.
I’m by myself in one of the spare bedrooms on the third floor. I haven’t been able to fall asleep, even though I’m so tired and thirsty that my muscles are starting to cramp up.
The door creaks open. It’s Mazzie.
She perches herself on the edge of the bed and pokes at my head. “Hey. Are you awake?”
I nod.
“Do you want to go home?”
I nod again.
She pauses, thinking about it. “We don’t have a car. It’s the middle of the night.”
“It’s okay. We can walk.”
It has started snowing, a thick wet layer of slush that won’t stick. There are no cars on the road, nothing but big white flakes falling onto our faces, erasing the buildings around us, and the low swish of our feet on the road as we try to keep our footing, a soft wheeze humming from the bottom of my lungs from too much smoking.
In the middle of National Road, Mazzie turns to me without any warning. She grabs my arm and we both fall down, and then we’re sitting there in the middle of the bare road, and for a few seconds we just sit there, quiet, listening to the eerie silent noise of snow falling against land.
Snow covers Mazzie’s eyelashes, making her look like a tiny ice princess—the closest she will ever come to wearing makeup.
“You look pretty,” I say.
“Shut up.”
“I’m serious.”
But she doesn’t want to hear it. Instead she says, “So—you and Drew?”
I nod. “I think so.”
She starts to get up, pulling me along with her. “I don’t like him.”
“You don’t like anyone,” I say. I grin at her. “Except me.”
We’re both standing now, but neither of us seems in a hurry to get back to the dorms. There is such constant pressure at Woodsdale, with academics and swimming and this whole new social life, sometimes I don’t realize how tense I am until I’m with Mazzie, and I notice its absence. The only other time I feel this way is when I’m underwater. I’ve started to realize that, when it is only the two of us, I feel a kind of separateness from everyone else. Sometimes she tells me things about myself that even I don’t know.
“No,” she says, “I don’t like you.”
But even though Mazzie isn’t a snob like Estella or a pushover like Lindsey, she still knows a different world than me. She’s never set foot inside a public school. Her opinion of Woodsdale as subpar, as far as boarding schools go, hasn’t changed. I’ve told her everything about me and I still know so little about her. But I can’t imagine anything she could possibly tell me that would make me like her less.
Back in our room we strip down to our underwear, red faced and breathing heavily from the trek. I know she will grind her teeth all night, giving a beat to my wheeze. It will sound like this:
crunch-phee-crunch-phee-crunch-phee
—it’s almost like our song. After so many nights of the same thing here, I cannot fall asleep without its melody.
Will is home. My parents don’t even tell me. But I know, as soon as I walk in the front door for winter break, that he’s here somewhere. On the family photo that hangs over the mantel in the living room, my brother has drawn big red horns and a tail on the Ghost with permanent marker.
I’ve been dreading Christmas break up to this point. I even considered staying at Woodsdale—there are a few kids who do that, mostly from other countries and different religions that don’t celebrate Christmas—but the Ghost wasn’t about to let that happen.
I run up the steps to Will’s room, knock on the door, and open it before he can even respond.
I want to close my eyes and turn away. I cover my mouth with my hand. He looks like a different person: twenty, maybe thirty pounds lighter, paler than the Ghost himself. He’s shirtless, on his back in bed, headphones over his ears, tapping a bare foot as he gazes at the ceiling. He doesn’t notice me. His music is so loud that I can clearly hear it outside the headphones. He’s so thin that each of his ribs is visible. I can see his hip bones beneath his jeans.
More than anything, though, it is his arm that makes me want to look away. His wounds have healed into a network of scars that cross and weave over each other like a map leading to nowhere. They are deep and thick and will never fade. The injuries are so bad that they go beyond simple scarring; they’re a deformity.
I remember everything again, like a flood that I’ve been blocking since I left for school: all the blood, my mother covered in it, the Ghost pale and horrified as he knotted his tie around Will’s arm, all the neighbors standing there watching.
If I were still at Woodsdale right now, I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this. I could be swimming, or else driving around with Lindsey and Estella, music blasting from the car speakers, without a care in the world.
“Katie,” Will says, sitting up as soon as he notices me. He slips his headphones off. The music becomes louder, heavy and grating. I’m amazed he can hear anything.
I try to smile. When he crosses the room to hug me, I can feel the veins in the soft tissue connecting his ribs.
He closes the door and we sit on his bed. We both light cigarettes.
“I’m surprised you still smoke,” he says. There’s a new hoarseness to his voice. “They let you smoke at that fancy school?”
I shake my head. “Just when I go out on weekends.”
“Yeah, I figured.” His eyes look huge. His cheekbones, which I’ve never noticed before, are high and pronounced. This is not my brother.
“I tried to call you,” he says.
I nod. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m so busy there, I leave really early for school and you didn’t leave a number or anything, so”—I pause—“well, you didn’t call back. If I’d been there when you called, I would have talked to you.”
He shrugs. “It wasn’t important or nothing. Just wanted to, you know, shoot the shit. See if you were homesick.” He tries to smile. His teeth are yellow and more crooked than ever, the braces gone. “A big brother has to look out for his little sister, you know?”
I nod. “Sure. It’s okay.” We stare at each other in the smoke-filled room, the music coming from his headphones like a fly in the room that’s driving me nuts. It doesn’t seem to bother him.
“Hey”—he’s excited all of a sudden—“didja see what I did to the picture down there?”
I nod, forcing a smile. “Great work.”
“Mom just had it reframed and everything.” He claps his hands, downright giddy. “She’s gonna cry. Oh God, I can’t wait.”
“She just had it reframed?”
“Yes.” He elbows me, fist to his mouth, snickering. “The Ghost is gonna soil his tightie-whities, Katie.”
Watching him, I feel the annoyance spread into a mixture of anger and pity. It’s an odd feeling to have. I feel the same way about my parents as Will does, for sure. But he’s twenty-one. He’s a
grown-up.
And our mom cries all the time already. Why would he want to make things worse?
“Katie, you know what we should do? We should give him cloven hooves, too. Damn, I should have thought of that before. Hey—what the hell’s the matter with you?”
“I missed you,” I say. My eyes are filling with tears. He looks away. “I was homesick for you.” I reach for his bad arm but he pulls away quick, like a reflex. I wonder if it still hurts.
“Shut up, Katie.”
“I was worried about you.”
“You shoulda been there when I called. What were you doing—out riding ponies? At a polo match? Out playing tennis with someone named Bunny?”
“I couldn’t help it, Will.”
“Okay.” He nods. “Okay, then, I’ll call you more. Okay?”
But that’s not what I want, either.
His voice is weaker than I’ve ever heard it. He says, “Don’t be homesick, all right? No good home to be sick for, that’s what I say.”
Even though I sleep late, Will always sleeps later. It’s not unusual for him to sleep eighteen hours a day. He’s been up at least once already, and is now asleep in the basement, the TV blaring so loud that I can’t imagine how it’s not keeping him awake. His whole body is covered, right up to his chin, in a thick white comforter. I stand close to him for a moment, listening to the sound of his breath, before I go back upstairs.
On the kitchen counter, there’s a note from my mom.
Katie,
Good morning, sleepyhead! Gone to a watercolor workshop for the day. Empty the dishwasher if you get the chance. Call me when you wake up. No car today—we want to actually see you for once!
—Mom
I pick up the phone. There’s only one person I can think to call. Candy Huzak was my friend before I went to Woodsdale, and I know she’ll want to see me. Besides, I’m dying to get out of the house; I don’t know what I’ll say to Will when he wakes up.
“Katie freakin’ Kitrell!” Candy’s voice has its familiar, impoverished twang. “Hell yeah, come on up! Just give me a while, okay? I’ve gotta do a few things.” She giggles. “Gotta give my girl a proper homecoming, you know?”
My mom is sloppy, too trusting for her own good. The Ghost would have thought to pocket the car keys on his way out, but my keys are right where I left them the night before, on top of the micro wave, next to a carton of the Ghost’s cigarettes. Not that it matters; I can walk to almost anywhere I’d want to go from here. Hillsburg doesn’t even have a traffic light. Yet they’ve got a historical society that keeps its members busy trying to get government grants for improvement; I know because my parents are devoted members. All that’s happened so far is that the vendors for the annual historical festival have switched to deep-frying in vegetable oil instead of peanut oil.
Regardless, it’s
cold
outside—too cold to walk anywhere without my nose going numb. And I know that my mother won’t be back for hours, that the Ghost is working God knows where—it isn’t like they’ll even know if I take the car. I don’t bother with the dishwasher. When we were younger and our mom would ask us for help around the house, Will and I both used to get a kick out of saying, “That’s okay, Mom. You go ahead and do it.” Eventually we got a house keeper, but I guess she’s not here today.
I wander around the empty house for a while in my pj’s, tinkle a few notes on the piano in the living room, go nose-to-nose in a staring contest with my parents’ cat, Priscilla, and smoke a few cigarettes while catching the end of the midday news. I go up to my room and get back into bed for an hour or so and spend the whole time debating whether or not to fall back asleep. I reread my favorite scenes from
Wuthering Heights,
especially the part where Heathcliff bribes the gravedigger to let him sleep on Catherine’s grave. I go into Will’s empty room and poke around for anything interesting, listening to a Phish bootleg with headphones, paging through a copy of
Playboy
from his closet.
I’ve been taking a gender studies class at Woodsdale; students are encouraged to take it every year. Our professor is a man, a great-looking guy in his early thirties, on loan from the local university. They do that sometimes—recruit local college professors to teach advanced courses.
During our last class before winter break, we had a long discussion about what he called the “normalization” of pornography in our society. This professor—his name is Dr. George, but he tells everyone to call him Evan—is really cute, married, and is deeply concerned with our self-esteem. All the girls have crushes on him.
“Pornography,” he told us, “is a way of anesthetizing ourselves to our own humanity. I’m sure all you girls have been told by many of the boys you know—maybe even by many of the adults you know—that it’s something men look at out of necessity. That it isn’t a big deal. Am I right?”
Sitting in class that day, he took a moment to look each of us in the eye as he spoke. “I’m here to tell you, as a heterosexual man, that it isn’t something you have to tolerate. It isn’t something a man can’t live without. You girls all deserve to be treated in a way that makes you feel valued and comfortable. Please, girls”—he seemed almost ready to cry for us—“please don’t let anybody tell you differently.”
I bury the magazine under the newspaper in the kitchen compactor and replace its spot in the closet with my dog-eared copy of
The Yellow Wallpaper,
then head off to the shower. It’s two thirty in the afternoon, and I’m not even dressed yet.
When I knock on Candy Huzak’s door, she’s holding her two-year-old daughter in one arm and smoking a Kool cigarette with her free hand. Her apartment, which she shares with her older sister, is low-income housing. It’s the kind of place where you don’t even want to sit down on the furniture because you start thinking about what kind of fluids might be dried onto the upholstery. I’ve known Candy since elementary school. We were in the
gifted
class together. It’s funny, you never stop along the way to think about who will end up pregnant at fifteen or dropping out of college or dying in the river, like Greg Phillips did last summer.
Candy is a single mom now, and she thinks she’s got it made with her own place. The rooms in the apartment are sectioned off with piles of dirty clothes, baby toys, and clusters of empty beer bottles whose labels she’s peeled away as she’s watched her afternoon soaps.