Badd (4 page)

Brianna says I’m being ridiculous—you can’t fall in love at six years old—but I swear the first time I saw Tillman in Mrs. Gray’s first-grade class, my stomach did a backflip. It didn’t matter how big his Adam’s apple was or that he was a little bit dense—he was dark and brown-eyed and hard-muscled as a Doberman pinscher. No one in our grade could take him in a fight. And tough as he was, something about his eyes made you want to take care of him, made you want to lean your head
against his, stroke his hair, and say, “Everything’s going to be all right, Tillman Grant.”

Besides a lot of wrestling in the grass, nothing ever happened with Tillman till fourth grade. I couldn’t help myself. We were stuck together in the classroom during recess—the teacher sentenced us to hard time because she overheard us cussing—and we started to get rambunctious as usual. I chased Tillman around and around the room, both of us jumping from one desk to the next, and finally one of the desks toppled over and he crashed to the floor. In the next second, I straddled his hips and without thinking at all, I leaned down and smacked a big, wet kiss right on his mouth.

This is the part I’ll probably never forget till the end of recorded time—he reached up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Damn you, Ceejay,” he said, all disgusted. “I don’t want your ugly frogmouth on me.”

That’s what he said! It’s not enough that I’m what I guess some people would say is a little stocky—just a little—but now I’ve got a frogmouth!

I know a lot of girls would’ve burst into tears at that, but not me. No. I punched him right in the eye and then rose up and sat at the back of the class with my arms folded across my chest. Didn’t talk to him for the rest of the week.

But the bad thing is, still to this day, I’ll look in the mirror at my mouth and see he was right. My mouth is too wide and my lips are too thin, just like an ugly frog. I try sucking in my cheeks and it works for a moment—I actually look almost pretty—but you can’t hold them in forever. Lipstick doesn’t help either. I’m a frogface, and kissing Tillman didn’t turn me into any princess.

Anyway, his sister Dani lives in a trailer home south of town with her two-year-old boy, Ian, and whatever stupid boyfriend
she’s hooked up with at the time. Right now it just happens to be a weed dealer named Jace. Most of the people who hang out over there are the typical Knowles late-teens, early-twenties losers, and this night is no different. You know the type—they probably dropped out of high school and can’t keep steady jobs. Most of them I see around town all the time, but there are also some out-of-towners who came in to buy weed and whatever else Jace has to sell. They’re not the best types to hang around, but I’ll take them over the goodie-goodies of this town any day.

When we get to Dani’s, everyone is packed into the living room and kitchen, drinking beer and smoking weed. Plus, some idiot brought some OxyContin, which is like this extra-high-strength prescription painkiller, so half the gang gets to walking and talking like they just stepped out of a bad dream. Don’t worry, I stay away from that kind of thing—I don’t even like smoking weed—but Gillis, Tillman, and Brianna get a little more messed up than what they’re used to. I’d drag them out of there, but Sophie still hasn’t shown up.

At one point, Dani has little Ian asleep on the floor between a couple of chairs and Gillis accidentally steps on his head. Ian barely lets out a whimper, but Jace gets all pissed off and righteous and threatens to kick Gillis’s ass. Like stepping on the kid’s head is somehow so much worse than having him lying around in the middle of a cloud of cigarette and weed smoke. Nothing comes of the threat, though. As soon as Jace starts to get up, he loses his balance and falls back over his metal folding chair and lies there laughing so hard he forgets about Gillis completely.

Having had only a couple of beers, I see all this as very pathetic, but not as pathetic as what Brianna and Tillman get up to later. Brianna is a big girl, and I don’t mean stocky like me. She’s B-I-G. So she dyes her hair black, wears a nose ring and
black, baggy clothes and black fingernail polish. You just have to know that’s not the look her parents had in mind when they gazed down into the crib at their little pink baby and thought of a sweet name like Brianna. Me, I never went in for that look myself because it seems so obvious that you’re trying to make people think you don’t care about not being pretty. But whatever helps Brianna make it through the day is all right with me.

Still, there’s nothing she wants more than a boyfriend, but this guy who starts hitting on her at the party is not what she needs. Not at all. For one thing, he must be thirty years old, and for another, he has this pockmarked, smooshed-in face that makes him look like a bank robber with panty hose over his head. To top it off, he’s all proud about how he just came back from a year in jail for possession with intent.

None of that matters to Brianna, though. She’s standing next to him at the kitchen counter, giggling and playing touchy-touchy and trading hits off a blunt. I try to get her to come outside so I can talk some sense into her, but she pushes me away and goes, “Just because Tillman’s found himself a slut, don’t start trying to ruin my time.”

I don’t know what hurts more—that Tillman really is hitting on some tramp or that Brianna went out of her way to say the meanest thing she could to me.

It’s a fact, though. Tillman’s latched on one of the out-of-towners. She looks like she’s thirty too, but she’s probably really only about twenty-four. She’s just lived hard. Has a skeleton figure and gray teeth that you’d swear could fall out on the orange carpet any second. An absolute skank. It wouldn’t surprise me if she worked part-time hooking at the truck stop by the interstate.

This is what I can’t understand. What attracts a guy to one girl and not another? Why does he fumble around with someone he knows doesn’t have any staying power when there’s someone
else right across the room who’s mooned over him practically her whole life? No way is this girl even better-looking than me. Sure, she’s thin, but as far as I’m concerned she’s downright ugly, and I don’t mean just physically. She has an ugly spirit too. You can see it in the droop of her eyelids and the slant of her mouth. Still, there Tillman is brushing her hair back and kissing her neck like she’s the love of his life while his beer sloshes down his pants leg.

I go to the kitchen, get a beer, and stand there staring at this stupid wall hanging with all these corny sayings about how to be happy on it:

Not a single word anywhere about taking a handful of OxyContin and hitting the bong.

“Hey, Ceejay.” It’s Jace. He has a look on his face like he just came out of a coma. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Just admiring the artwork.”

He grins at me and narrows his eyes. He thinks he’s a cocksman. “You know, there’s something about you. You ever think about maybe wearing some makeup?”

“Why? Do you think I’m a clown or something?”

“What?” He’s too much of a moron to get the joke.

“Nothing,” I say. “I heard Sophie Lowell was supposed to be here.”

“Sophie Lowell’s a pain in the ass.” He takes a drink of beer. “So, Dani tells me your brother’s in Iraq.”

“He was. He’ll be coming home pretty soon.”

He leans against the counter and runs his hand through his mop of thick brown hair. “Yeah,” he said, “I thought about joining the marines, shipping over, and kicking some hajji ass.”

“So why didn’t you, then?”

“I don’t like taking orders. I still might go over there, though. Recruit some of my buddies, get us some assault rifles, and do our own private commando deal. Shit, we’d take Baghdad in a day.”

“I don’t think they allow private commandos over there unless they’re part of some big corporation.”

“Hey, I’m not gonna ask for permission.”

“Well, but I think the military would probably stop you before you got there.”

“Screw the military. Bunch of meatheads. We’d have us a special chopper with rockets on it, machine guns. Black as metal-flake death. No one could stop us.”

“So, what? You’re gonna fight our military too?”

“We’ll fight anyone who gets in our way.”

I just shake my head. It’s too stupid to even get offended by. “I gotta go,” I say, and squeeze past him.

“Where you headed?”

“Outside. I feel a little sick to my stomach.”

“Take a drag on the bong. That’s the best thing for a sick stomach.”

I don’t even bother to respond to that. The whole party is too much for me—the drunk talk, the smoke, the baby on the floor, and especially Tillman’s lips on that ugly girl’s neck. But what did I expect? That he would get drunk and declare his undying love for me? Superpathetic.

If I had my own car, I’d hit the road, take a cruise in the country, but I don’t, so I go out and sit in Gillis’s, stare at the silhouettes moving across the closed curtains of the doublewide, and wait to see if Sophie will show up.

About five minutes later, the front door swings open and here comes Gillis walking across the yard to the car, his body leaning slightly to the side like someone walking in a high wind. Messed up again.

“What are you doing out here?” he asks, plopping down on the seat next to me. “The party’s inside.”

“I’m having my own party.”

“Looks pretty boring.” He puts his hand on my thigh. “But it doesn’t have to be.” He doesn’t even look me in the eye. He just stares at my boobs, this goofy, loose-lipped, drunk smile scrawled on his face.

I yank his hand away and tell him to quit thinking with his penis because it’s even stupider than he is. It’s not like I’m surprised, though. Ever since about sixth grade, Gillis has had these periodic attacks of the raging hornies. If you’re a girl—any girl—you don’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity when it happens. It’s not so great if you’re a guy either because at the end of the evening, after all the girls have shut him down, he goes looking for a fight. How about that for gay?

“Come on, Ceejay.” This time he puts his hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eyes. He almost seems tender for a change. “What are you holding out for? It’s not natural.”

I’m like, “How many times do I have to kick your butt before you learn it’s never going to happen with us?”

“Hey, you gotta get some experience sometime. You might as well get it with someone you can trust.”

“Trust to do what? Run the other direction if I get knocked up?”

“You’re not gonna get knocked up. We’ll be careful.”

“Famous last words.”

His hand slinks down toward my breast. I swat it away, and he moves it back to the headrest behind me. “We can just do oral if you want. That’s not even really having sex.”

“That’s what you say. I say it’s sex as soon as Mr. Trouser Snake takes the stage.”

“Look.” His hand slides down to the back of my neck. “It won’t even be like it’s me and you doing it. It’ll be like two different people.”

“How do you figure that?”

He leans forward like he’s going to kiss me, but stops short. “Because I’ll be pretending you’re somebody else.”

I have to laugh. “That makes me feel real romantic, asshole.”

“Damn, Ceejay, is that what you’re waiting for? Romance? Don’t be stupid. You think any guy’s going to go around buying roses and lighting candles for a girl like you? Forget it. I’m just trying to do you a favor so you don’t have to go through life not knowing what sex feels like.”

Oh my God—don’t you know I slap the shit out of him then? And I don’t hold back either. But it doesn’t faze him for a second. Instead, he takes it for some kind of weird invitation
to pounce on top of me and squeeze his hand between my thighs. It’s superpathetic. The boy needs to be on some kind of medication—anti-Viagra. I could almost feel sorry for him, but I’m too pissed, so I haul off and head butt him as hard as I can. I mean,
wham!

The secret to a good head butt is to drive the hard part of the top of your forehead right into the fleshy part of the guy’s eyebrow. Not only will it daze him, but you’re likely to draw a decent amount of blood, nothing serious, but enough to put a scare into him. And I’ll tell you this—the head butt I put on Gillis is as good as it gets.

He rolls off onto the floorboard, and I’m out of the car before he can grab me again. I only look back once. Blood’s trickling down beside his eye as he leans out of the car, propping himself up with one hand on the ground. “Goddamn you, Ceejay,” he whines. “Goddamn you. You gave me a damn brain clot.”

I just keep walking. “Shit,” Gillis wails behind me. “Jesus Christ!” But I don’t slow down.

About a half mile down the shoulder of the highway, I start to rethink my choice. Sure, someone I know is bound to drive by, either leaving the party or going to it—maybe Sophie will even stop for me—but at the same time, you never know what kind of creep might be loose on these little country highways—a serial killer, a rapist, the police. Too late, though. A pair of headlights pulls up behind me. They’re so bright I can’t even tell what kind of car they belong to. One thing for sure—if it is a serial killer, he’d better be ready for a fight.

The car turns out to be an ancient Volkswagen. The window rolls down and a voice calls, “Hey, do you want a ride or something?”

Suspiciously, I walk over, and what do you know?—it’s Mr. White sitting behind the steering wheel. “What happened?” he asks. “Car break down?”

“Not exactly. Are you heading back to town?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Hop in.”

Mr. White’s definitely not the rapist type, but he’s strange enough you can’t completely rule out serial killer. So what, though? I really need a ride, and if I can’t handle myself against Mr. White, I deserve to end up sliced and diced and stacked up in his basement freezer. Besides, the mood I’m in, I don’t really care what happens to me.