Hot Pink (15 page)

I put it out with my hand.

“Jesus,” she said. “Not even a paper towel?”

I made like I was confused and then I wiped my hand on my head. It was the first joke I'd cracked in weeks.

“You're so gross,” she said. “Wash your head. I can't talk to you like that.”

I went into the kitchen and washed my head in the sink.

“So I have a new boyfriend,” she said.

“Is he a Rick or a Steve?” I said.

“His name's Aaron, weirdo.”

I said, “How's Dad? You guys are cool, right? You've always been tight.”

“What's wrong with you?” she said. I came back into the living room. She was jacking around with the equipment in my window-washing bucket. She peeled the foam handle off my chrome-plated squeegee.

“Stop messing with my stuff.”

“Jeez,” she said. “Who made these pictures? That girl Dad talked to on the phone?”

“No one,” I said. I was being a dick to my little sister like some Steve in a sitcom.

“They gave me money and I'm supposed to take you out for pancakes and tell you about my new boyfriend.”

“Okay, but let's walk,” I said.

She said, “It's ninety-five degrees outside. And pouring.”

“I'm not letting you drive me anywhere,” I said.

“Then you drive.”

I said, “I don't want to drive. Do you know how much I have to drive for work? I hate driving.”

“I thought you only said you were an addict to get pity from the judge.”

“I did.”

“Then quit acting like a dry drunk. They send their love and say they miss you. Dad especially. He keeps telling us you're becoming a man. ‘He's growing up. He just wants space.' It's sad. They think you don't like us anymore. And you should really start calling them back.” Then she left and I was glad and didn't want to be.

We sat on the tracks that night, smoking cigarettes. Jane Tell had a swelling eye. Blood at the corners of her mouth. I was staring hard, wanting to touch her. When I turned away, the string of dormant freight cars across the ditch looked small as a train-set. I had to throw a rock and fall short to get my eyes straight. We finished our cigarettes and I lit two more, handed one over.

“You're a gentleman,” she said. She wiped blood from her mouth with her sleeve, her thumb pushed through a tear in the seam of her cuff. “I think I bit my tongue,” she said.

I didn't respond, continued to smoke.

She pulled her knees to her chest and worried the drawstrings of her hood. “I'm sick of the tracks,” she said. “Let's walk to the park behind the high school.”

Tell stood first and pulled me up. We headed toward the school. The moon was orange and the stars were blue and the sky was black. There were slugs in the grass of the outfield. They shined up at us like new dimes, their antennae eyes bent sideways, placidly, stupidly, daring us to put them out beneath our feet. They reminded me of a vacation I'd been on with my father. We'd flown to L.A. and were taking a week to get to Portland in a rented Mustang—a convertible—that he let me drive on Highway 1, even though, at fourteen, I was still months away from getting my permit. “Don't speed,” he told me. “If you get in trouble, I get in trouble. We're both breaking laws. Don't get us in trouble.” I didn't. We ate good fresh food and saw a couple movies and stayed at motels with cement patios outside their sliding-glass doors that I would go out onto to smoke.

One time I woke up in the middle of the night and wanted a cigarette, but I didn't want to wake my dad, so I kept the light off on the patio. I'd gone out without a shirt, just boxers and Chucks, and I grew cold and I paced. The ocean was washing against the beach across the motel lawn. From under my shoes came other sounds, crackling and squeaking. Something like the screams of pot-dropped lobsters, but in short bursts and pleasant to listen to. I watched the water move and I thought loosely that I was stepping on wet seashells or unripe berries. To make more of the sounds, I ground my feet against the cement with each step. When I finished smoking, I dropped my cigarette on the patio, and there was another sound, a sizzle. I knew something was wrong.

I crouched down and lit my lighter and saw scores of dead snails, their shells in shards that punctured their skin, some of them torn in half, inside out, wet with that substance that trails them. I'd killed spiders before, and silverfish. I had set fire to anthills. I'd won my only fight in grade school by raking the other boy's face over playground gravel. I had done those things to be cruel. This was different. I got sick. The next morning, my father went out to smoke on the patio. He said, “What the fuck is this? You were sick? Are you better? Are you sick? Were you drinking?”

“The snails,” I said. “It was an accident. I feel dirty. I really don't want to talk about it.”

He said, “You sound like your sister with her spiders, boychic. They're just slugs.” They weren't—they were snails. Slugs don't have shells.

The ones in the field lacked shells—they were slugs. Tell hooked her arm in mine. “They catch the moon like bullet casings,” she said. “These slugs look like bullets. Don't I pun so cleverly? Aren't I delightful?”

“Stop it,” I said.

Our arms came unhooked. She said, “Do you want to hurt somebody, Ben? We could find somebody,” she said, “and we could hurt them.” She tackled me and put her mouth on my neck. “We could kill them,” she said. We rolled around for a little while. At home, later, I'd find blood on my shirt collar and wonder whose it was.

Tell sat up. Her hood was off and some of her hair had come out of its rubberband. Static held it up in front. “I think we're sitting in wet,” she said.

“It's the ground,” I said. “It's just colder than your body.”

“You're so smart,” she said. “But if you're so smart, why aren't we plotting the perfect murder?” She had the edge in her voice that meant I wasn't playing well.

“Who hit you?” I said.

“I fell.”

“You're a liar, Tell.”

“Why won't you fuck me?”

“Because someone hit you.”

“Listen to you,” she said. “Listen to
that
. You and all that power in your voice. You won't fuck me because someone hit me? You won't drive your car because you fuck me when someone hits me.”

This was the point in the fight-routine at which I could either make her cry by shutting down or fix it up by showing some novel form of affection. I didn't want her to cry. I put a slug on her knee.

“Hi there, gross cutie,” she said to the slug.

“I want you to meet my family.”

“Let's get the car and go.”

“We don't need the car,” I said. The house was across the street.

I let us in through the side door. I could hear them making noises with dishes. We stopped at the threshold between the hallway and the kitchen. My mom and dad were at the table, eating ice cream. Tell stood behind me.

My mom saw me first. “Ben!” she said. “Come here!”

We walked over to the table. “This is Jane Tell,” I said. “We're getting married.”

I don't know if it was because they hadn't seen me in so long or because I shocked them with the marriage bit or because she'd pulled her hood back on, but neither of my parents really saw Tell until after we'd sat down and I'd been kissed by both of them.

Then it registered. “Oh my God!” my mom said. “What happened to your face, baby? Ben, what happened to her?”

“I just fell down some stairs,” Tell said.

“You
fell down some stairs
?” my dad said. He looked a wish away from flattening me.

“We need to clean those wounds,” my mom said. She was frantic. She made for the bathroom down the hall. “I'll be right back,” she said.

I said, “I'll come with you.”

Tell said, “Don't go, Ben.”

I left with my mother. I sat on the second step of the stairway, just outside the entrance to the kitchen, waiting while she made noise with the cabinets in the half-bathroom.

I watched the kitchen through the spaces between the bars supporting the banister. I could see my father's back and Tell's face. She was crying, and through her tears she winked at him. I didn't know if she knew that she did it or why she did it and I couldn't see what she saw. My father's shoulders moved and I couldn't see what he was doing with his arms, and, for a second, everything seemed possible, and the horror of that, of unlimited potential, made me feel so strong, almost as if I were bodiless, and I knew the feeling had less to do with body than with law, that it was lawlessness, and I would have remained lawless had Tell's face not right then been obscured by my father's hairy hand, shaking out the fold of a white cotton handkerchief. She took it, and, rather than putting it to her cheek, she folded it back up and held it in her lap to have something to look at.

“Listen,” my father said softly, “I know you don't know us, but we're good people and we would never hurt you. We need to ask if Ben—”

“He didn't,” she said.

“If he did,” my father said, “it's okay to tell us. We won't harm you. We'll make sure you're safe. You can stay here if you need to.”

She shook her head.

“You really fell down the stairs?” he said.

“No,” she said. “But Ben didn't hit me.”

“Someone else hit you?”

“Could we talk about something else? I'm sorry, I just—”

“Hey,” my father. “Hey hey. It's fine. We'll talk about something else. How about… Well, the engagement. I mean, my son's a great kid, but I'm fairly certain he put every last penny he had to his name toward buying you that obscenely lavish invisible ring you're wearing. I mean, do you really think it's good idea to get married before he finishes college and gets a real job?”

Tell laughed for him. She said, “Ben was just kidding about the getting married thing. He likes to exaggerate.”

“Well, look,” my dad said. “I know you'd rather not talk about it, and I'm trying not to, but I just—I'm a parent, and I feel like I have to tell you that whatever's going on,
whatever
happened, Jane, you don't deserve to get hurt.”

My mother rushed past me with a first-aid box and Tell looked up on hearing her. She spotted me sitting there. I ducked back, reflexively, like I'd been caught at something. I didn't know exactly what.

I stayed on the stairway for a little while. My mom turned a brown bottle onto a ball of cotton and pressed the cotton to Tell's bottom lip. My dad offered her some ice cream. Tell declined. My mom told him to get her some anyway. Tell asked her what kind of accent she had and my mom started talking about immigration.

While my dad was getting a bowl together for Tell, he said, “Where's Ben?” and I crept outside to smoke on the driveway and figure out how to say that I loved her so it meant something better than
I accept you.

By the time Tell came out front, it had been raining for at least twenty minutes and I was on my third cigarette, pacing carefully to avoid stepping on the worms that had come up onto the pavement.

“You wanted to see if he'd Rick me,” she said.

“I don't think that's true.”

“You know, you could have just asked me if he'd do it, instead of testing me out like a fucking lab rat. I feel like such a piece of shit now. It's your fault this time. Feel guilty.”

“I don't think I was testing you out,” I said.

“You don't
think
you were?” she said.

“Quit it,” I said.

“Quit it and stop it and cut it out,” she said. “Smoke. Walk. Park. Tracks. Denny's. All we do is repeat, you know that? Like an error message. Like a beeping fucking circuit board.”

I couldn't tell if she was crying or if it was anger cracking her voice.

“Everything repeats,” I said.

“Look at these worms,” she said. “They think they've saved themselves from drowning in the grass.”

Anger.

I said, “Quit analyzing the imagery, Tell. It's manipulative.”

“Listen to you!” she said. “It can't be that manipulative if you know to call it imagery.” She slammed me on the nose. It broke. “If
I
was so manipulative,” she said, kicking my legs out from under me, “you'd be manipulated by now.”

Coughing, my face flat on a dead red worm, I said, “I was jealous.”

“You just figured that out?” She made for the street. “I'm moving out,” she said.

“Wait,” I said, “I'll drive you.”

Soaked and bleeding and limping beside her, I felt romantic, like I could prove something simple.

Then we were standing next to my car.

“Take me to my mom's,” she said. “I'll come back for my stuff tomorrow when you're gone.”

I got in the car and started it. I hadn't driven in months and all the dread came on. I closed my eyes and there they were: the trucker and the tow-trucker and the sales clerk with his glasses. Manx. The therapist. A soldier. A café owner. Any number of cops and vice principals. Every man whose face I could remember but for me and my father. They waited in line to leave their impression and Tell told me it was okay, take it easy, she liked it. I opened the door and got sick in the lot.

“I'll drive,” she said. “You sit shotgun and by the time we get there, you'll be used to the car. You'll be able to get yourself home.”

I kept my mouth shut. I did what she told me.

I tried escaping the panic by thinking of fucking, but every time I closed my eyes I'd see all the men lined up in front of her.

After we'd driven a couple of miles, I covered up my closed eyes with my hands, thinking irrationally—however deliberately—that it might be possible to blot out the images appearing on my eyelids by shielding them against the backlight of the streetlamps. Instead I saw Jane's body bruising, breaking, deforming, her bloodstained hair in a flat-knuckled fist that dragged her along the shoulder of a highway, one swollen eye winking, the other turned to look placidly skyward.