Know Not Why: A Novel (21 page)

“I don’t think she really cares if I—”

But then everyone’s favorite boinkable
elf-turned-alien spots me.

Oh, God, it’s all over.

“Jenkins! What are you, like, turning into my
stalker or something?” Cora demands, bouncing over to us. Taking in
the sight of Amber, she adds, “He dragged you along this time?”

“No, I did all the dragging,” Amber replies. She
sounds totally normal, but she turns to look at me and something
darkens a little in her eyes and her voice and it’s enough to make
it really flippin’ obvious that I am completely and utterly
screwed. “You came before?”

“He was here last night with the rest of those
losers I work with,” Cora reports, oblivious that she’s
singlehandedly crafting my destruction. She loops an arm through
mine and nestles up against me. “Really, darling,” she adds,
pinching my cheek (
ow
), “it’s touching that you care.”

“Yeah, well,” I reply, forcing a smile at her
and trying, for a few blessed seconds, to be unaware of Amber’s
whole existence, “I’m your number one fan.”

+

Amber and I don’t talk until we’re in the car. I
make sure the CD player’s on, so that even then talking isn’t
really a requirement.

She does it anyway. “Why didn’t you tell
me?”

“About the whole me-seeing-the-play-last-night
thing?”

“Yeah,” she says darkly, “that.”

“I didn’t
not
tell you.”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what you
did.”

“I dunno, I … it was just work stuff, okay? I
figured you wouldn’t want to get mixed up with those guys.”

“I’m pretty sure I could have handled two hours
at a play with them. I’ve got fortitude that way.” She pauses just
long enough for me to hope that maybe she’s given up on this
conversation. But then,
bam!
— “Since when are you even
friends with them?”

“I don’t know,” I say, because it’s not like I
can tell her they’ve made my life so newly great. “They’re who I
see every day. I guess I’m just … I don’t know, Amber. Whatever.
Does it matter?”

“No,” she replies, toneless, “I guess not.”

For a merciful ten seconds,
Good Feeling
is the only sound in the car.

“You’re not sleeping with Cora or whatever, are
you?” Amber asks then.

The correct answer would be a resounding ‘No,’
and I’m about to tell her as much – but then I remember Mitch, and
it’s probably smartest to stick with one lie all around, right? So
instead I throw out a suitably vague, “Why would you care?”

“Um, I don’t know, maybe because I’m your best
friend and you’re supposed to tell me that kind of stuff.”

I glance over at her. She’s not looking at me:
she’s staring out of the windshield and she’s leaning about as far
away from me as she possibly can, like if this conversation takes a
sucky enough turn she’ll throw herself out onto the road.

“No, I’m not,” I say, feeling pretty
chastised.

She snorts. “Yeah, right.”

It doesn’t take someone of my boundless mental
abilities to tell that she’s pissed off. Like,
weirdly
pissed off. I want to restate my whole ‘Why would you care?’
question, because seriously,
why would she care?
But my
boundless mental abilities also tell me that maybe that’s not the
best course of action.

“I hate this stupid band,” she says then,
hitting me where the sun don’t shine. “Gordon Gano’s voice is like
getting stabbed in the brain.”

I choke back the five thousand ‘This from
someone who worships Colin Meloy’ retorts that threaten to bubble
over in that split-second and say, “Fine.”

I eject the CD, and we listen to pizza
restaurant jingles all the way home.

+

Kristy’s jaw drops. “Maybe,” she breathes,
“she’s
in love with you
.”

It’s the next morning, and I’m sitting at her
kitchen table. She’s still in her pajamas, a pink tanktop with a
baby polar bear on it and white pants spattered with pink hearts
and really profound sayings along the lines of ‘You are sweet!’ and
‘You + Me.’ It seems fitting that even her PJ pants make me feel
better about myself.

Arthur’s in the process of making coffee, or at
least trying to. His staunch tea-drinking ways are finally biting
him in the ass, because the dude’s at a total loss face to face
with a coffeepot. Still, it’s pretty nice that he’s insisting on it
anyway – especially after he saw the donuts I brought and almost
went catatonic at the unhealthiness of it all. I’m starting to
think that maybe there’s only one thing weirder than me being with
a dude, and it’s me being with a healthy eater. What
is
that?

I, for the record, am on my fourth donut.
Desperate times.

“She’s not in love with me,” I say with a hearty
shudder. “Don’t even say stuff like that.”

“But it sounds like—”

“She’s in love with my brother. She has been
forever. Like, foreeeever.”

“Who’s in love with who?” Nikki asks, stepping
into the room in – why, lookie there, nothing but a towel.

Score
, I think, for old times’ sake, even
though just between you and me, I’m a little more preoccupied by
Arthur’s battle against the coffeepot. He’s measuring coffee
grounds into the filter with immense concentration, and he’s one of
those people who actually sticks their tongue out a little bit in
moments of immense concentration. Hot chicks in towels with errant
droplets of water glistening on their smooth milky skin are great
and all. But when it all comes down to it, my loyalty lies with
Arthur’s tongue (which, quite frankly, has done more for me).

“Howie’s best friend Amber loves his twin
brother Dennis,” Kristy informs Nikki. I feel queasy, and I can’t
even blame the donuts: I know,
know
that me getting drunk at
a shady production of Rocky Horror and then not telling Amber about
it is delightful as cupcakes next to her finding out that I’m
spilling all of her private business to a bunch of strangers. All
of a sudden I’m acutely aware of just how shitty it is to do it –
but Jesus, I need to tell
somebody
. And it’s not like she’ll
find out. Never the twain shall meet, and all that.

“Ooh, you have a twin brother?” Nikki asks. “Is
he cute?”

“Of course he’s cute,” Kristy pipes up
courteously. “He looks like Howie.”

There’s a pause. A definite unmistakable
pause.

“Oh, right,” Nikki says, and gives me this huge,
simpering smile.

On second thought, maybe she looks merely
adequate in that towel.
Booyah.

(Still, it’s a little bit depressing to think
that my work-at-a-craft-store-to-get-some-booty scheme of
ingeniousness did fail, and Kristy’s implying otherwise was all an
elaborate matchmaking charade. Cute chicks are brutal.)

“Anyway,” Kristy continues, “maybe she realized
after Dennis went so far away that she was being unrealistic, and
the one she should have been with all along was
you
!”

“No.” The concept’s so sickening that it drives
me to set down my fifth donut. “No way. No how.”

But she won’t be stopped. “Ohhh, it’d be so
perfect, though! It’s like, you’re the boy next door who she’s
already loved for
ages
, and you’ve always been there for her
through thick and thin, and you understand her like nobody else
does, and how awesome to just
realize
one day, all of a
sudden, love epiphany! And now she’s upset because she can’t figure
out how to tell you, but it’s okay because you’re so
nice
and it’s not like you’re going to—”

“Uh.” Right. Can’t take it anymore.
“Kristy?”

She stops mid-rhapsody. “Yep?”

“Hello,” Arthur throws in helpfully.

“Ohhhhh!” She slaps herself on the forehead.
She’s like the world’s cutest Little Rascal. “Gosh, gosh, okay, I
take it back, you know I didn’t
mean
that! It’s just it all
seemed so romantic for a second! But that’s right, Howie, of course
you can’t be with her. You’re
Arthur’s
!”

This is enough to send her and Nikki into a fit
of “aww!”s and giggles. I don’t like that at all, if we’re being
honest. It’s just – it’s hard to feel, like,
human
, even,
when your relationship or whatever is such an anomaly that it sends
people into what, God help us all, can probably be best summarized
as a tizzy. I still don’t really get when or why our previous
arrangement got abandoned, the one where Kristy pretended to
believe we were just buddies, and
of course
Arthur and I
were down on the floor in the supply closet when she walked in
because we were searching for his lost contact lens. I was a big
fan of that arrangement.

I make sure to sound unbothered, though. “Ehhh.
Depends on whether he figures out how to work the coffeepot.”

“Patience, Howard,” Arthur orders without
looking away from his opponent.

“Hey. Watch yourself there, motherfucker.” Okay,
that came out a little harsher than I’d intended. Stupid tizzy
giggling. It’s got me discombobulated.

He doesn’t burst into tears or anything, though:
just rolls his eyes and smirks a little. So maybe I’m being
paranoid. Wouldn’t be the first time.

“Poor Amber,” Kristy says, shaking her head
woefully.

Something about her saying that makes me feel
like the absolute scum of the earth. Amber, she’s a badass. She’s
brilliant. You don’t
say
‘Poor Amber.’

She’ll never know
, I console myself.
She’ll never, never, never know.

I polish off another donut and a cup of warm
water poorly endeavoring to masquerade as coffee (“I thought I’d
err on the side of caution,” Arthur says, chagrined), then get
ready to take off. My mom is determined to present the illusion
that we have a functional household to my bro’s new ho, so there is
much cleaning and grocery shopping to be done.

“If she
is
in love with you,” Kristy says
in parting, “let her down gently, okay? And, hey, you know what,
maybe if she’s really lonely, I could try to set her up! Reddy’s
got a bunch of really cute friends in his band, and most of them
are single—”

“Nah, that’s okay,” I interrupt. “She’d never go
for a blind date. Definitely not Amber’s thing.”

“Sometimes you’ve got to take a chance to find
love,” Kristy says sagely.

“Yeah, I’ll pass that on,” I deadpan. “Peace,
Quincy.”

She starts talking to Nikki, which gives Artie
and me the chance for a one-on-one farewell.

“Word of advice,” I tell him, “don’t go into
barista-ing.”

“That’s not a word,” he replies, “and I wouldn’t
worry about it.”

“Good. You’re such an inspiration as an arts and
crafts store manager. It’d be a shame to lose you to a lesser
vocation.” He’s absently folding his sleeves up to button them; the
sunlight pouring through the kitchen window glints off the gold
hair on his forearms and the whole process is infinitely,
inconveniently fascinating.

He moves in closer to me, and I notice Nikki
throwing a glance our way.

And so I knock my fist against his shoulder and
say, “See you Monday, man.”

“All right,” he says slowly.

He doesn’t seem pissed – just minorly confused –
but I still feel a little bad after I leave. I dunno, maybe that’s
just my specialty now: feeling bad about Amber, feeling bad about
Arthur. But, you know. It’s one thing if we’re alone. It’s another
thing if there are bystanders.

Chapter Fifteen

“You don’t think that—”

“No, Mom.”

“Oh, come on. It could be charming. Quirkily
so.”

“No one wants to get off a plane and hear Rock
Lobster.”

“Then how about Tom Jones?”

“Depends. Are you going to seduce her with a
sexy dance? Because I’m not sure if Dennis is gonna be down.”

“I thought I raised you to appreciate quirky
charm.”

Then my mother unearths the be-all-end-all of
aural horror.

“Oh, Jesus Christ, where did you get
that
?”

“Your Aunt Claire. She’s quite the fan.”

“Figures.” I groan, staring at the fiend’s
fearsome mug on the CD case.

Mom pokes my shoulder. “Eyes on the road,
junior.”

“You never listen to that kind of shit. That’s
why I keep you around.”

“Normal mothers listen to Josh Groban. I would
like to project some normalcy around this girl, thank you.”

“Yeah, what’s the whole deal with that?”

“I just want her to have a pleasant time here,”
Mom says. She sounds poised, but she’s scratching the ‘Great Value!
[Price Blacked Out]’ sticker off of ol’ Grobie’s forehead with
scary vehemence. “It seems like your brother is very attached to
her, and from what he told me about going to her home for
Thanksgiving, it sounds like her parents are very normal
people.”

“You’re normal people.” I even mercifully leave
out the whole Rock Lobster thing.

“Yes, but I just don’t want to drive her
away.”

It’s such a dumb thing to say that I want to go
into a taunting frenzy, but I take mercy on her. I can tell that
she actually
means
it. It’s kind of sweet and a little bit
sad, to see her so eaten up about wanting Dennis to be happy. I
know she’s proud that he got out and up and far, far away, but I
think she gets scared that he’s gonna stretch his little pre-med
wings so far that he’s going to forget this place even exists, and
us along with it. The whole she’s-still-got-me part apparently
isn’t much of a consolation.

For the record, she doesn’t even bother to get
out of her PJ’s when Amber and Mitch come over.

We get inside and wait around for awhile,
because the flight’s a little delayed. I wind up buying a bag of
ridiculously overpriced M&M’s and picking out blue ones for Mom
because they’re her favorite. She’s got her hand out for them when
the passengers start filing in, looking rumpled as they burst on
into this quaint sea of hugging and happy exclaiming. A couple of
blue M&Ms hit the floor, casualties of Dennis’s sudden
appearance.