Dirty Love (30 page)

Luv U!

The break room is a wall of lockers behind the dishwashing machine, and Devon stands under the fluorescent light with her glass of Diet Coke scrolling through her iEverything the way she used to draw in on a cigarette. She wants one. She’s pissed she wants one because she hasn’t for a while, but that essay stirred things up and she’s been working hard all night to push it back down again. She needs music for that. Mean music. Her Dr. Dre’s are on the shelf of her open locker, but she only has three more minutes. She can smell cigarette smoke the way someone on a diet smells melting chocolate. Behind her, the door to the loading dock is propped open and a new dishwasher she doesn’t know leans in the doorway, his back to her, smoking. He’s older, a bald spot on top of his head, and she almost feels sad for him that he’s still doing shit work like this. She’s close to asking him for a butt.

Sick: Wuz up D?

She flicks her finger over the screen and scrolls back to the first words she got from him after Trina posted everything.

Sick: Y Devon? Y???

Then he was on her doorstep on a cold morning in his Cobain T-shirt. When she opened the door he stepped back and made a funny sound in his chest, like the last thing he expected was for that door to ever open. He stood there staring at her. His hair hung down over half his face and she wanted to be closer so she could push it back behind his ear.

She didn’t know what to say. Her throat felt hot. “Hi.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Fine.” She crossed her arms. There were goose bumps there, though she wasn’t cold.

He held out to her their butterfly cup. That’s what they called it. When they were together they drank vodka and cranberry juice in it, or hot chocolate, or just water. He’d won it for her last summer at the beach, working the mechanical arm in the big glass box and picking it out of a pile of stuffed animals. But it was in a cardboard box, one of the game’s “mystery” prizes, and only when she opened it, standing in the sun outside the loud arcade, did she see the butterfly etched into the cup. It was blue and green and its wings were spread in flight as if it was going to take her with it, wherever it was going. Then she was kissing him, and Sick’s kiss back was soft and kind, like he wasn’t trying to get anything from her. Like this kiss she just gave him was enough.

“Why, D?” He stepped toward her in the doorway and pushed the cup into her hand. He swung his hair away from his face and stared at her. Both eyes were puffy and they didn’t look so beautiful anymore, but they were the same cracked blue she’d stared into as she let him be the first, the second, the third, only him. No one else. But how could she tell him she didn’t cheat? How could she tell him that what she’d done had meant nothing to her? She was crying, and Sick was walking away. She may have called his name, but she can’t remember. There was screaming in her head.
Sick!
Sick!
And it was like stepping on a baby bird. It was like plucking a flower and tossing it into a fire. It was like shitting on the pillow of a bed someone had made just for you.

Then she was in a tattoo parlor on a road of auto body shops and gun stores and a thin man with no more empty skin of his own, shirtless in a black leather vest, was holding her bare right foot in his hand. He’d offered her some Tylenol, but she wanted to feel it. She leaned back on one arm and held the butterfly cup for him to keep glancing up at, and there was the buzzing of the tool, the pricking of her skin against her bone. Her eyes filled and she said to the man, “Put red in there too. I want red.”

Sick. Whose parents treated him like he was a nothing and would always be a nothing. Sick. Who brought her small gifts every time he saw her. A pebble. An old nickel. Once a silk scarf he pulled from a trash bag out of the Salvation Army box. Sick. Who made sad, sweet sounds during and after. The way he held her and stroked her hair as lightly and gently as if she too had wings and might one day fly away.

“Break’s over, honey. Let’s
move
.” Danny Sullivan claps his hands twice.

“I know.” Devon pushes her iEverything back into her locker and padlocks it. She takes her Diet Coke and walks past him and his smell of cigar smoke and old coffee and she’s relieved to hear him yelling at the new dishwasher behind her because that means he’s not staring at her ass as she pushes open the swinging doors into the loud, reckless din of people eating too much and drinking too much after lying too long in the sun with too many other people and now they’re spending too much money. Devon drains her Diet Coke. She sets her glass onto a tray, then carries it out into this room full of reckless noise she wants only to block out with more noise, the kind she can control with just the flick of her thumb.

I
T’S QUIET NOW.
The air is cool, and she can smell the dark ocean. She’s standing near the front door of The Whaler waiting for Francis to pick her up because he never lets her walk home this late. She pulls out her iEverything. She keeps rereading Sick’s message from yesterday:
Wuz up D
? Normally her thumbs would start answering texts before she even started thinking about them. But this was the Sick before he became
her
Sick. This was the quiet boy with dyed hair and skinny jeans who only came alive on his iEverything. Onscreen he was funnier and more relaxed. He knew what to say and when to say it. Then he started sending her links to things he thought she’d like—that funny YouTube of the baby smiling after it burped, an interview with Kurt Cobain when he still loved life or at least tolerated it, color pictures of deep space from the Hubble telescope that scared her because it was all just too big and endless and how could there ever be a God for it?

Sick: Do you need a God?

D: I guess.

Sick: Why?

D: Don’t you?

Sick: No.

D: Why not?

Sick: God’s just a big babysitter. Don’t you want to be FREE?

D: Yes.

Sick: Me too.

Wuz up D?
This is his old self from his pre-D life. It’s the tone of the boy who doesn’t hurt anymore, and so maybe he’s just curious about her: Where’s she been for five months? What’s she been doing? Though she’s only ten miles away and everybody knows the answers to those questions. Since April, when Danny Sullivan hired her, Devon’s seen people in the Whaler she knows: the Welches (and twice Mark drunk at the bar by himself). She’s seen the Battastinis stuffing their faces in the corner booth. In June or July, Luke McDonough’s parents, Nancy and Carl, came in. Nancy had smiled up at her and asked where she was going to school in the fall. Devon had always liked Nancy. She was small and pretty and good to people, but could she really not know one thing about her son’s senior year and the people in it? Did she really not know all about Dirty Devon Brandt standing in front of her in her restaurant clothes holding an empty tray in her hands? Devon’s face was smiling and talking. Words were coming out of her. Words like
travel
and
Gap Year
and
Europe.
A sentence fragment like
saving up for it
. And she kept glancing at Nancy’s husband not because he was smiling generically up at her, but because he had Luke’s eyes—or Luke had his—and now Devon could see a slight shift in Carl and Nancy’s smiles: they were trying not to show how sorry they felt for her, this girl who so young had already given up on climbing to the top of some shining fucking mountain with swimming pools and boathouses and drunk boys killing men in
Call of Duty
. She wanted to tell them it was Luke who’d started everything. She wanted to tell them that their lacrosse-playing son heading to Dartmouth had practically
made
her suck on his penis. But that wasn’t true. She’d wanted to. Or at least she’d wanted to get it over with so she wouldn’t be a mouth virgin anymore.

Walking away from his parents’ polite table, she could feel it again in her mouth. This warm, hard animal that seemed to have a heartbeat of its own, a life that wasn’t just Luke’s. He’d rested his hand on her back and then her hair. “Squeeze it.” She didn’t know if he meant with her lips or her fingers but she did both and then he was pushing himself in and out of her mouth, and she had to pull back so she wouldn’t choke and the animal that belonged to Luke stiffened even more and spurted Luke’s wet moans down her throat she swallowed so she wouldn’t gag.

They sat in the boat for a few minutes. Luke kept stroking her hair. He zipped himself up and got out of the boat first and offered her his hand to help her out. On the walk back across the lawn he put his arm around her. He was different. He seemed so calm and peaceful, and it was as if Devon had opened a door inside herself that held a gift she hadn’t known she had. Something that had the power to do what she’d just done to Luke McDonough, changed him from being restless and grasping and distracted to this quiet, satisfied boy with his arm around her, this boy who first thing he did when they walked back into the thumping, sweating party was get her a hard lemonade he opened and handed to her, nodding at her lips to drink, the taste in her mouth not terrible but not as good as this. She drank down half the bottle and smiled at him. It was like stepping into the first chapter of a book all about her, and she felt more important somehow. She wanted to know what would happen next.

N
OW IT’S AFTER MIDNIGHT
and she’s sitting against the headboard, her laptop open on her bare legs, her Dr. Dre’s on. Devon’s heard this song but never really listened to it. Behind her eyes, the famous white rapper is shout-singing over a drum machine and a sad violin about the daughter he never sees but wishes he did. Devon can hear how much he means this. How he really does miss her.

I didn’t raise a fucking
whore
! Her father’s reddened cheeks and forehead, the Sunday morning light coming through the kitchen window onto the side of his face. It was early, and he hadn’t shaved yet and there was a lock of hair sticking up behind his ear. She’d been up all night, and maybe he hadn’t slept either, though he was in a V-neck T-shirt and boxer shorts, his legs pale because it was March, and it was funny how Devon seemed to hover slightly above herself and to the right. Like he was yelling at Devon the body, not Devon the girl. Then her mother was rushing in from the hallway. She wore that terry cloth yellow robe, but it was open and Devon could see her mother’s white nightgown, her breasts and belly beneath that. Devon thought: That’s where I came from, that’s where I started out.

That’s
enough
, Charlie
!
Enough
!

Then her father was whirling around to yell at her mother, to blame
her
, and Devon was back in her body yelling at them both.

The young father in her head is too much. His whole life is his daughter, even though he never sees her because he’s too busy writing songs for people like Devon. She flicks to something else and doesn’t care what it is.

She types in
Chatroul
, and the rest of the word comes up. Not yet, though. For so long she’s stayed away from everybody’s Fuckbook pages, but now she types in Facebook. She stares at the login screen and tries to remember her username, her password. DDBrandt and ButterFly. She types in her username but then stops. The last page she was on was Trina’s, but Trina had unfriended her so Devon had scrolled down her news feed. Party talk. Beach talk. Mall talk. Devon moved to Trina’s wall. Nothing but chatter about Dirty D. About Skanky Sick C. trying to kill himself.

Which he never did.

He probably has his own Fuckbook page now. Maybe he finally started a band. Maybe he’s got a lead singer and she’s cute and skinny like him. Devon doesn’t want to know. That Irish band’s in her head now, the singer’s voice high and angry, so tired of all the fighting, so damn tired of it. She pulls the headphones from her ears and picks up her iEverything and finds
Wuz up D?

With one thumb she writes:
I’m not here anymore. Where r u?

She sends it and tosses it down near the foot of the bed. She exits the login screen, tapping the red x box much harder than she needs to. Then she’s in the roulette room running her fingers back through her hair, though she never wears makeup for this. Before sitting on the bed she put the blue stud back in her nose, and she started to fill every hole in both ears with all the silver she had, but that felt too much like putting on a show for whomever she might meet and she is not putting on a fucking show. Not for anyone. Whoever she meets does not know her. Whoever she meets does not know one little thing about Devon Denise Brandt.

She presses start and the wheel spins to a dark screen in Texas. Then it lights up and a boy is staring at her. His head is shaved, and he’s not wearing a shirt, and she’s about to next him because she thinks he’s going to point his screen down at his hard dick, but he says, “Hey.” Like he’s known her a long time. Like he just got back into town from a trip far, far away.

She types:
Hey.

I
N THE DARKNESS
Francis wakes into an old body, its diminishing state a continual surprise to him. The time glows in digital numbers on the bedside table, but even squinting at it he can no longer read it without his glasses. No matter. For years now his bladder and prostate have made him shuffle to the toilet for a long wait and then just a few drops, but he knows that if he does not follow their commands now there will be no sleep.

In the bathroom he has to steady himself with his hand on the wall. He holds himself over the toilet and closes his eyes and waits. Before shutting out the light hours ago, he’d been reading a book on the history of the duel. A duke in 1700s England had killed over twenty men in defense of his honor, a word we don’t seem to use much anymore, and it seemed to Francis that this “gentleman” must surely have been looking for affronts to his honor whenever and wherever he could.

A trip with Beth to the Adirondacks. It was early fall and he must have been retired for he had no memory of gearing up for the school year. Instead, there was a lot of rain. Beth in her blue raincoat with the belt at the waist. The way she hurried past him over the puddles in the gravel lot and into the antique barn. It had smelled like dried flowers and damp sawdust and was filled with artifacts up to the trusses: coats and hats and cane chairs; ornate fire tools and books and framed lithographs of families long gone. There were nautical flags from around the world and old road signs and a glass case of tarnished jewelry the owner sat behind reading a children’s book nearly one hundred years old. She was young, which surprised Francis, thirty-five or forty, and she wore glasses and a sweatshirt with a construction logo on the back.