Woman in Red (48 page)

“True, but I could always learn.”

Alice thought about how long it had been since she’d been on a real date. Even if it was with her ex-husband, it would be nice to dress up, put on high heels for a change.

An image of Colin intruded once more. The tenderness with which he’d kissed her when they’d parted at his house,
as if he’d known it was the last time. As if he’d already made his decision, a decision that, even though it pained her, Alice could respect. For didn’t she feel the same pull of the past with Randy? Letting go was hard, even when all you had to hang on to was memories.

Jeremy reappeared at the table just then. His face was flushed and he looked more at ease than he had in a while. Alice smiled up at him. “Having a good time?”

He grinned in reply. “Kent and Tyson are heading over to Bucky’s. There’s supposedly a good band playing tonight. They want me to go with them. Is that okay?”

“As long as you promise not to stay out too late,” Randy told him. “I want you home no later than midnight.”

Jeremy looked a little surprised, as if it had been a while since he’d had a curfew, but he played along. And although it was clear to Alice that Randy was only exercising his authority in order to impress her with his parenting skills, she was touched by the effort.

“Mom?”

Alice became aware of Jeremy’s eyes on her. She realized with a start that he was asking her permission as well—his way of letting her know that she was still his mother, no matter what. Her throat tightened, but she didn’t want to embarrass him with a show of emotion, so she merely said, “Okay with me. Just remember, tomorrow’s a work day.”

Watching him bound off, like any teenager eager to get back to his friends, his impending trial seemed to her a distant threat.

It hit him as soon as he walked through the door, a solid wall of sound, its pulsing beat seeming to surge up through the soles of his feet, filling him with excitement and a wild sense of possibility. Jeremy waited in line to get his hand stamped, but when he turned to his friends, Kent and Tyson were already moving off in the direction of the dance floor. Kent called something over his shoulder to Jeremy that he couldn’t hear, then the two were swallowed up by the crowd. Jeremy started after them, but by the time he’d made his way through the crush of bodies, he’d lost them.

He hadn’t known either of them that long. Kent Park was his lab partner in bio, a quiet-seeming Korean kid who’d turned out to have an offbeat sense of humor—Jeremy had arrived at class one morning to find the frog they were supposed to dissect arranged in a prayerful pose, as if pleading to be spared. Through Kent, he’d gotten to know Kent’s best friend, Tyson Fowler. They weren’t the coolest kids in school, Kent a self-proclaimed tech geek and Tyson president of the chess club, but they weren’t off the grid in terms
of popularity, either; Jeremy’s reputation wouldn’t suffer from hanging out with them. Not that that was such a big deal to him any more; stuff like that had stopped seeming so important after he’d learned the hard way what it took to get noticed. And with Kent and Tyson he could be himself; he didn’t have to put on an act to try to look cool.

Occasionally he still ran into Rud and his posse. They would always greet him with hooting calls and pump their raised fists at him, their idea of a friendly gesture, and he’d always wave in return. But on those occasions he didn’t automatically fall in with them as he had in the past. Instead, he’d find himself noticing things he hadn’t before, like the other day when he’d observed with a mild shock that Rud’s hair was thinning, his pale pink scalp visible through the gelled spikes of his albino hair—
He’ll be bald by the time he’s thirty,
Jeremy had thought—and the time they’d walked past Bettina Stromberger and she’d screwed up her face and flapped a hand in front of her nose in their wake, at the stench from the smoker’s pit that followed them everywhere they went.

Jeremy would marvel then that he had ever thought they were “dope,” as Rud would have put it. His dad had been right about them.
You hang out with losers, you’ll become one yourself,
Randy had cautioned
.
And by the time Jeremy was his dad’s age, he sure as shit didn’t want to be pushing a broom for a living or reading his name upside down off his shirt pocket. He had bigger plans for himself.

Then, inevitably, would come the sudden, sickening sensation in his gut, the realization that instead of going to college he could be spending the next few years behind bars. It was like his shadow, something he wasn’t aware of most of the time but which followed him everywhere he went.

For a while he’d fooled himself into believing the whole thing would get buried in the shit storm over his uncle. But that wasn’t proving to be the case. The same D.A. who’d come down so hard on Jeremy had been a soft touch with Gary. The matter had been handled quietly, and though his uncle wouldn’t be returning to his job any time soon, he’d been spared a trial.

It helped that the mayor hadn’t pressed charges. He’d been quoted in the newspaper as saying that, while Gary Elkins’s actions had caused him and his wife a good deal of trauma—Mrs. White had been holed up in her room the whole time; it was she who’d called the cops—he understood that there had been no criminal intent; the former deputy chief of police had merely been reacting to the “mental stress” he’d been under.

Jeremy knew, from listening in on his mom’s and Colin’s conversations, that the old man had had something to do with his uncle’s crackup and that he was in some way responsible for the D.A.’s coming down so hard on
him
. But they couldn’t prove it, so nothing had changed as far as he was concerned.

While he was contemplating this, as he pushed through the crush at Bucky’s he ran headlong into Carrie Ann Flagler. She was carrying a large plastic cup of what looked to be Coke—they only served non-alcoholic beverages on teen Fridays—and when he accidentally plowed into her, some of it splashed over onto her top. He froze for an instant, staring at her in horrified disbelief, before he managed to fumble out an apology.

“Shit! I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.”

Ignoring his apology, she began furiously dabbing at her top with the napkin in her other hand. In the dim light, he
wondered for a second if she’d even recognized him. Then her head jerked up and she glared at him. “So, what, are you, like,
stalking
me or something?” she demanded, raising her voice to be heard above the loud pulsing of the music. Silvery flecks of light from the twirling mirror ball overhead funneled down like snowflakes, catching in her light brown hair and bouncing off the spangles sewn onto the scooped neck of her top, which showed a fair amount of cleavage. The spillover from the dance floor crowded in around them, gyrating couples bumping up against them, pushing them closer together, close enough for Jeremy to catch the scent of her perfume—something light and grassy that smelled like a meadow after a rainfall.

Jeremy shouted over the music, “Can I get you another one?” He pointed at her half-empty cup.

Unexpectedly, she shrugged in what he took to be an assent. They made their way through the crowd to the bar, where he bought them each a Coke. The situation was already so surreal that when she suggested they go outside, where it wasn’t so noisy, it didn’t seem all that strange.

Outside, she used a fresh napkin to dab once more at her top. “Shit, I think it’s ruined. And this is only the first time I’ve worn it. What do you think, is it too late to exchange it?” She looked up at him, and he saw a small smile peeking from under her frown. “A joke,” she said. “It was a joke.”

He wondered if she also considered it funny to be falsely accusing someone of rape. “I get it,” he said, in a surly voice.

Her smile abruptly fell away. They were standing on the concrete landing above the steps that led down to the parking lot. He could hear the music, muffled now, thumping on the other side of the door through which they’d just exited and smell the after-hours punch-bowl odor of empty cups
and rotting fruit that drifted up from the Dumpster below. A breeze was blowing, lifting the hair off her face, lifting it and gently lowering it again. In the light from the quarter moon caught in the trees branches overhead, her eyes, ringed with mascara that had already begun to smudge, were bright as they fixed on him with the same look of faint bewilderment that Jeremy imagined he wore.

“This is weird, isn’t it? If my dad could see us, he’d be calling the cops right now.” A note of defiance crept into her voice, as if she were somehow thumbing her nose at her father, and Jeremy noticed that her words were slightly slurred. She’d been drinking. He knew that some of the kids who came to these things brought their own booze, which they either smuggled inside in flasks or drank outside in the parking lot. She wasn’t drunk, though, like on the night they’d had sex. The mere thought of which made his dick stir.

What made him even angrier than what she’d done was that he could still be even remotely attracted to her. “Why, you scared I’m going to rape you?” he said sarcastically.

“I didn’t say that.” Now her defiance seemed directed at him.

“You didn’t have to.”

“It’s not all my fault, you know.”

“Oh, and just whose fault is it then?” Throwing aside every caution, from Mr. McGinty, from his mom and dad, he spoke his mind. “You fucking
lied
. You know what really happened, but that’s not what you told the police.”

A sullen look came over her face. “You’re making it sound like it was on purpose. It wasn’t like that.”

He pounced. “So you admit you lied.”

“That’s not what I said. You’re twisting my words.”

Jeremy pressed on. “What I want to know is
why
. Why did you do it?”

Her eyes met his then, and he saw the confusion in them. “I don’t know,” she said, with a small shrug. “It just . . . kind of got away from me, I guess. Once my parents got the police involved, it turned into this whole big deal. Like, it wasn’t really about
me
anymore, you know?”

“Not really,” he said coldly.

“If it means anything, I’m sorry.”

He felt a surge of hope. “So you’ll tell them I didn’t do it?”

She shook her head slowly, and tears welled in her eyes, making them shiny as newly minted nickels in the moonlight. “I can’t. My dad would kill me. That’s how this whole thing started. That night, when he caught me sneaking into the house, he went ballistic. It wasn’t just that I’d been drinking. It was like he
knew
what had happened, like he could smell it on me. I was crying, my mom was crying, and somehow it all came out. I guess I must’ve made it sound like it was all you—shit, I had to tell him something, didn’t I, or he’d have blamed
me
—and before I knew it, he was on the phone with the cops. What was I supposed to do?” Her eyes pleaded with him to understand.

But to Jeremy it wasn’t at all complicated. “You could have told the truth.”

“You don’t know what my dad’s like when he gets like that. He’s scary. If I told him I’d made the whole thing up, I . . . I don’t know what he’d do.” She hugged herself, shivering, and Jeremy could see, from the look on her face, that it wasn’t just from the cold.

Strangely, he wasn’t unsympathetic. He used to think his family was more screwed up than anyone’s, but lately he’d begun to realize that there were families worse off than his,
like Carrie Ann’s. He couldn’t let that get in the way, though. She might be too scared to stand up to her father, but Jeremy was equally afraid of what would happen to him if she didn’t. “There’s got to be somebody you could talk to. A teacher, or maybe Mister Bradley,” he urged her, thinking of their school guidance counselor, who really did listen and who didn’t talk down to you. “If things are really that bad at home, there are people who can help.”

It was the wrong thing to have said, he could see that at once. Her face closed off as suddenly as a door slamming shut. “You make it sound like he’d actually hurt me or something.” Her tone turned belligerent. “Just because my dad has a temper, it doesn’t mean he’s some kind of psycho. Anyway,” her eyes narrowed, “it’s not like
you’re
so innocent. How do I know it didn’t happen the way I said? We were both pretty drunk that night.”

“Because,” he said, “If I
had
raped you, you wouldn’t be talking to me right now.”

Even Carrie Ann couldn’t argue with that logic. She went on glaring at him, though, wearing the sullen expression that made her look closer to six than sixteen. In the parking lot below, he heard the sound of an engine roaring to life. As the car swung around, the glare of its headlights caught her full in the face. In that instant he saw in her eyes that she was torn, between what she knew was the right thing to do and her desire to protect herself and her family. He understood that desire. After his brother died, Jeremy had tried to protect his mother from the grief that he could see, even at such a young age, was tearing her to bits, and he’d failed. It was part of the reason he’d been so angry all those years. He’d been angry at himself as much as at her, for letting her down.