Brood (15 page)

Adam steps into the spray of water broadcast by the shower's corroded head. He lifts his right arm and worriedly runs his finger along his armpit's moist skin. A single, nearly invisible hair is growing, and he pinches the top of it and yanks it out. He hunches his shoulder until it touches his cheek and sniffs. A very faint odor of something that reminds him of turkey soup. Uh-oh. He is on constant lookout for early signs that his body is transforming, and he knows that a change in your body's smell—a deepening, an intensifying—is an early volley puberty shoots across the bow of childhood. Next thing you know, the pirates of adolescence have boarded your ship…

Adam grabs the soap. Once this perfumed bar was animal fat, and now it seems to be reverting to its original state. Hairs, long and short, dark and yellowish, are embedded everywhere in that slippery pinkish parallelogram. Adam tries to pick the hairs out of the soap, but there are too many, and he is defeated by the hopelessness of the task. He decides the hot water alone will be enough to wash him clean. He steps farther into the spray, letting the water beat against the top of his head. He tilts back, opens his mouth, and lets the water fill it. He glances down at his lower half. Every time he visually visits this part of his body, his heart quivers with anxiety—one day his stuff is going to be bigger, encircled by a disgusting doughnut of hair; one day the silvery down on his shins is going to darken and curl. Who knows? Even the knuckles on his toes might sprout their own wiry vegetation.

He inspects himself through a squint. So far, so good.

His shower completed, Adam steps out of the tub. The racks are jammed with towels, and the black-and-white-tile floor is strewn with everything from washcloths to bath sheets, not one of them dry, all of them redolent. Adam chooses the least gross one he can find and quickly dries himself as best he can, keeping his eyes half closed so he won't see something on his own body he doesn't care to see.

Rodolfo—whom Adam has never trusted, and whom he now trusts less than ever—has come back from their house with two laundry bags full of their clothes. It's sort of annoying that the clothes that Cynthia folded so nicely have all been crammed together and wrinkled, but nevertheless, Adam is happy to see his Levi's with the perfectly frayed cuffs and his green Bruno Mars T-shirt that he has owned since he was nine and that still (sort of ) fits him.

Adam emerges from the bathroom. The moisture from the shower is soaking through his clothes—but it's preferable to him than using any more of the towels. He shakes his hair to get some of the wetness off, and the shake moves down his entire body—his shoulders, his torso, his hips, his rear.
Don't do that,
he thinks.
You're acting like a dog.

He walks to the front of the apartment, where he'd left Alice, Dylan, and Rodolfo before taking his shower. But they are gone. The visual clutter here is extreme—racing bikes, a broken Segway, video games, a foosball table, an attic's worth of furniture, crumpled potato-chip bags, crushed cans of energy drinks, candy wrappers—and at first, Adam doesn't see that someone is there.

It's Polly, kneeling in front of the sofa. On it is a yellow tin tray rescued from an old Thames and Kosmos chemistry set, but in place of the playthings that were originally held there are thirty vials of blood, each with a little piece of masking tape on it. Using a goofy ballpoint pen—the case is sparkling, and the back end supports a little rubber troll holding a chartreuse feather—Polly is numbering each of the vials.

“Hi,” Adam says, not wanting to startle her.

“You looking for your sister?” Polly asks without glancing at him.

“I guess.”

“She is in Rodolfo's room,” Polly says in a tone that invites him to draw the most dire conclusions from that simple fact. She might as well have said they were taking their clothes off or were perched on the windowsill sky-grabbing at the pigeons.

“Where's that?”

“End of the hall. The big-door room.” She finally does glance at Adam. “I wouldn't go there, though. Rule number two hundred forty-four: Come knocking when the door is closed, get ready for a punch in the nose.”

“For real?”

“Totally.”

Adam gives the hallway a long look. He hears music. He can't tell what the song is. Just the stiff bang of a drum, the deep slur of the bass, a voice that sounds as if it were coming from a tomb, a monster in a tomb, but in the fakiest way. Here's what Adam knows about monsters: Most of them look real regular. They like fish tacos and cry at stupid sad movies and some of them hold your hand when they walk you to school…

“So what's that?” Adam says, looking over at Polly and the neatly arranged, carefully labeled vials of blood. She is wearing a pair of black shorts and a white T-shirt that has a couple of bloody streaks on it. The sleeves are rolled up. Her arms are like sticks, like the arms of a little princess who'd never done a day's work, who didn't even have to carry her own toothbrush. Her legs are skinny too, and Adam guesses that under that T-shirt is a chest no different than a boy's. She is doing what Alice is doing, holding back the rising river of puberty with a dam built of low-calorie days.

“Didn't Rodolfo explain to you?” She has a kind of head-of-the-class voice, the tone of the kid who's always first with all the right answers.

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Then no. I don't know. Explain what?”

“We pay for this place with these.” She picks up a vial, shakes it back and forth.

“What is it?”

“It's us. Some of us, anyhow. Peeps out there pay to have a little taste so they can be young and stuff. Me's—” She slaps herself on the forehead. “Ye gods, I'm starting to talk like the rest of them. I. I am in charge of organizing the product, keeping track of what goes out.” She picks up a narrow ledger with a maroon cover. “It all goes in here.”

“Where do you get the blood?”

“From arms. Where did you think? Needles. Stick it in, suck it out.”

Adam makes a face.

“You're not very tough, are you?” Polly asks.

“Maybe I am and maybe I'm not.”

“I think you're not.”

“Wanna try me?”

Polly smiles. She slowly stands up. Her face is very, very serious. Her brows are hooded over her intense green eyes, and she holds her bony fists in front of her, moving them in a tight circle, like a slow-motion boxer. She moves ever closer to Adam, who reluctantly raises his hand, not to strike but to defend.

“I'm serious,” he says.

“I am too,” says Polly.

She moves ever closer. There are little flecks of darkness in her green eyes. The tear ducts are bright pink. Her nostrils dilate and constrict, dilate, constrict, dilate, constrict. And all of a sudden her head jerks forward like a snake striking its prey. Startled—hell, scared—Adam tries to get out of her way, afraid that she is going to head-butt him and knock him unconscious. But she has anticipated his move and her hand is on the back of his head. She holds him steady and…what? She kisses him full on the mouth.

It's a first. His mother used to kiss his cheek. His father used to tousle his hair. His new mother seems afraid of him, though she kissed his eyelids when she thought he was sleeping. Once, when he was in second grade at his old school, he fell in the hall running to class and Mrs. McBurney swooped him up—she was a giant of a woman, with a mole on her face as big and moist as a puppy's nose—gave him a gigantic, explosive raspberry on his bare stomach, and then put him down on his feet again and went on her merry way.

Polly's kiss is hard, inflexible—not like those tonguey, drooly ones on TV, where the two kissing seem to be having a contest to see who can get the most spit down the other one's throat. It is way more surprising than it is pleasurable.

She pulls away and pushes him back, shoving his shoulders as if he had kissed her.

From somewhere deep in the apartment, a door bangs open, followed by the sound of laughter and the pounding of feet. Moments later—with Adam standing there, still stunned, wiping the kiss off his lips with the back of his hand—Rodolfo comes galloping into the front of the apartment with Alice on his back, her knees pressing into his sides. She grips his long shiny hair as if she were holding on to the reins of a very spirited stallion.

“Put me down, put me down,” Alice says, not very convincingly.

But like most boys his age, Rodolfo is drawn to do the opposite of what has been asked of him. He runs faster now. It looks as if he is going to go straight through the window and out into thin air, a last ecstatic giddyup before he and Alice are obliterated on the sidewalk two hundred feet below.

Alice screams with fright, but the giddyup game has made her giddy and there is a shimmer of delight in her scream, and though the mixture is nine parts terror and one part joyous excitement, Rodolfo chooses to heed only what he wants to heed.

He comes to a sudden stop, but then the pace of his equine rounds through the apartment picks up radically. Now it seems as if Alice is riding not a boy who is playing at being a horse, but an actual horse. An unbroken horse with its first human rider. He careens from one corner to the next, leaping over furniture, crushing Coke cans in his way.

Polly watches, her arms folded over her chest like an overwhelmed babysitter just about to blow her top. Her lips are pressed together, their color drained.

“Your sister,” she mutters to Adam.

My sister what?
he wonders. She's not doing anything wrong.

At last, Polly can't restrain herself any longer—as uncontrollable as the urge to cavort is in Rodolfo, the urge to stop him from touching Alice is just as strong in Polly. “All right, you two, stop!” she fairly screams. Her fingers curl; her teeth are showing. “You want to get us fucking kicked out of here, is that what you want?”

At first, it seems as if Rodolfo has not heard a word. He continues to charge around with Alice, but he makes his way back toward Polly, and just when it seems he is about to race past her, as if she were just a checkered flag in some weird Grand Prix, he comes to a full stop.

“You's say?” he asks, grinning.

“You're acting stupid,” Polly says. “Really immature and stupid. Fucking stupid.”
Stupid
seems to be the operative word. She must keep her anger torqued; if she were to relax even a little, she fears she might start to whimper. It is so unbelievably painful to see how he carries on with that little shrimp. She knows she is acting like a bitch, but better to let them all hear the full blood-soaked and bloodcurdling roar of bitchiness than the brokenhearted whimper that is underneath.

Alice slides off Rodolfo, rearranges her clothes, and tries to look as if she is relieved to be standing on her own feet again. She also tries to look a bit annoyed with Rodolfo's roughhousing—but her smile of delight, as inexorable as a sunrise, gives her away.

“Your hair's wet,” she says to her brother.

“I'm sure he did not want to use one of the dirty, smelly towels in our bathroom,” Polly says, showing she can sneer and explain at the same time.

“What's your problem?” asks Alice in as pleasant a tone as one can pose that question.

“The way we live?” Polly says. She gestures first to the vials of blood on the sofa—for all the wildness of his tour around and around the place, Rodolfo has managed to leave the product unmolested—and then, with a larger gesture, she takes in the entire apartment. “It's not for you. You don't belong here. Let me guess.” She points at Alice. “You sleep in a little-girlie nightgown.” Now she points at Adam. “And what about you? Gym shorts and a T-shirt?” Quite correctly, she takes their silence as confirmation. “Well, you know what we wear when we sleep around here? Nothing.”

“So what?” Alice manages to say.

“We sleep nude.”

“Since when you's stripping all the way down?” Rodolfo asks Polly. He stands close to her, and then closer. He bumps his forehead against hers.

“There's a lot about me you don't know.”

“Is really stuff, or just the talking?” Rodolfo asks.

“Stupid,” Polly says, but she is warming to him, and the warmth creates a little crack in her façade of anger and disapproval.

“Me's the stupidest boy in New York,” he says gleefully. And with that, he swoops Polly off her feet and slings her over his shoulder as if he were a fireman rescuing a girl from a house in flames.

“Let me down, you stupid boy,” Polly says, with only the faintest trace of complaint in her voice.

Alice and Adam stand there as Rodolfo charges down the long hall, off of which are three of the apartment's bedrooms.

“What's with him?” Adam asks.

“I don't know. He's okay.”

“Where did he put our clothes and stuff?”

“Back there. We're getting our own room.”

“Really? How long?” Nothing has ever been permanent in Adam's life, so why should this be?

“For as long as we want.”

“Who says? Rodolfo?”

“Don't be against him. He's awesome.” She sees the look of pained disapproval on her brother's face. “Well, he is. I mean, he's okay. He went all the way over to our house and got our stuff.”

“Ever think about how he did it? You think he knocked on the door and said, ‘Oh, Ms. Kramer, I came here…' ”

“I know how he did it,” Alice said. “He was brave.”

“Who's even paying for this place?” Adam asks. “It's really big.”

“It's not as big as our house. And anyhow, it's on the West Side.”

“Were you back there doing it with him?”

“That's gross, Adam.”

“Well, were you?”

“No.” She shakes her head; her expression is pained. “Never.”

“For real?”

“Look at me!” Alice exclaims. She steps back, moves her hand from her forehead to her waist. “I'm not like that.”