Drain You (11 page)

I stood up slowly, dizzily, my body stiff and achy from sleeping cramped in a weird coffin room. I stretched out
my muscles and cracked my joints and yawned groggily. I looked down at my naked body and reached for underwear and the kimono. I cinched the tie around my waist and walked toward the door, pulling the silky fabric around me.

“James…,” I said, my voice trailing off as I walked outside. The sun was high in the sky, the brightest time of the day. Twelve-ish, one, two in the afternoon.

I went back inside, and that’s when I saw it. I dropped to my knees, began to cry quietly. There, peeking out of the front pocket of my cutoff shorts, was the corner of a folded piece of white paper.

My heart stopped. Even my tears stopped. He was gone.

Empty windows of
nothingness punctuated by meaningless details involving totally mundane nonevents.

Morgan left me a message. I got fired from Video Journeys.

Of course I couldn’t claim getting sacked came as any sort of surprise. I’d abandoned the number one rule of the prescheduled work shift: showing up. And just to seal the deal and make it absolutely obvious that Jerry was justified in laying me off, I somehow lost the keys to the store’s front door, dead bolt, and outer gates. And I ignored his messages to please return my stupid work shirt.

I spent hours numbly watching the pool sweep silently cruising the bottom of the pool. I imagined swimming down and letting my long knotted hair get sucked into one of its vents. I lay out on our deck chairs for hours,
days, praying the sun would burn my skin, erase me. I tried to substitute heavy sweating for tears; I swam laps for escape; I slept and slept and slept just for something to do.

The idea of boundaries slowly sunk in, became crucial. It worked like this: I left everyone alone, they left me alone.

It had been only five days since I’d drifted away from that tiny upstairs room and transformed into my current state as a pathetic speck of dust. But five days feels like five years to a speck of dust. And to a particularly sad, brokenhearted speck of dust like me, five days felt like forever. It felt like a really, really, like, long time.

But when five days feels like infinity, it’s amazing how much your life can change. It was amazing how all of a sudden I could sit through the NBA finals start to finish, every game, the preshow warm-ups, the play-by-plays, the elaborate halftime shows, the locker room follow-up interviews. I even amazed myself by eating entire sit-down dinners with my parents. Multiple nights in a row.

Also amazing: I cleaned my room. I thought my parents would see it as a testament to my fine-ness, but my mother knew me too well. She saw straight through the semicleanliness and recognized it for what it was: a small, twisted cry for help. This was when my mother realized for the first time that I was in the throes of some greater
tragedy. Of course, in her classically clueless Mom way, she assigned the blame to typical teenage dramarama between me and Libby. But it was such darkness to even hear her name spoken that I dissolved immediately from tight-lipped to wet-eyed to broke-down, thus validating my mother’s theory and making everything worse, worse, worse.

In my attempt to stay grounded, my parents literally grounded me. They had a solid laundry list of reasons: for getting fired from my job, for lying about being at that one place when I was actually at another place, for casual auto theft, and for looting through my parents’ closets to steal clothes that they finally noticed were missing. Like I cared. I didn’t even put up a fight, which I think bummed them out at first and then sort of scared them. But I was a different Quinn now. I was Speck of Dust Quinn. So ground me the entire summer, lock me in the house, handcuff me to a wicker chair. Whatever. Specks of dust can live on Diet Coke alone.

Without an excuse to put on my Video Journeys shirt, pajamas became my new uniform. Well, pajamas meaning a leopard-print bikini top and a pair of old athletic gray sweat shorts. I didn’t shower, was incapable of concentrating for more than five minutes at a time, wouldn’t read, wouldn’t listen to music, stared at magazine ads like I thought they might come to life, unfolded my origami
collection, threw away pictures of myself, compulsively cut pieces of paper into tiny strips of confetti.

All of this—the pretending that my life actually had to continue forward even if not in the same way or in any recognizable way to the previous Quinlan Lacey—was at least better than thinking about
them
. Anything was better than thinking about Naomi or Morgan. Torture was better than thinking about Libby.

James.

It was one p.m. My father was home, for whatever random reason, working on the crossword puzzle in an old
LA Weekly
. His Jaguar was in the garage, which meant he wasn’t stranded at the house. We didn’t have any food in the fridge, which usually factored into his daily afternoon plans. There wasn’t anything special on the Western channel—I checked. So why then was my father cussing at a musty, yellowing, half-finished word search?

“You’re here to babysit me, aren’t you?” I yelled from the top of the stairs. “Go away. I know I’m grounded. I’m not going anywhere.”

“You know, the world doesn’t revolve around you, Quinny,” my father recited from some ancient text my mother had written on parental platitudes.

“Dad, the world doesn’t, like, revolve at all. Don’t worry about it.”

“Morgan called while you were sleeping. He wants to talk to you.”

“Um, obviously not, because if he wanted to talk to me he’d have called on my personal line. When he calls on your line, it means he wants to annoy me by turning my family against me. Now you love him and you’re on his side. It’s a plot. So I’m not calling him.” I exhaled.

“Honey, am I supposed to understand any of that?”

“Like you care, seriously. I’m fine, stop babysitting me.”

“If I leave and you jump out a window, your mother will kill me.”

“Hilarious, Dad. What’s a six-letter word for jail keeper?”

“Warden.”

“Parent.”

“Actually, you’re not grounded anymore,” he said, walking up the stairs toward me.

“I want to be grounded,” I said. “I like it.”

“You don’t like anything.”

The truth was ruthless. So my parents had been paying attention.

“And as much as I’m proud to have a daughter totally unimpressed by material things,” my father said, guiding me by the shoulders into my bedroom, “it’s time for you to put on a new outfit and some makeup.”

The sweat shorts were affecting my whole family.

“Go outside and do something, Quinn. Pretend to have fun. No one wants to be around a miserable teenager.”

“Cool, Dad. I’ll just go hang out with none of my no friends. Beauty idea.”

“Do you want to run some errands?”

“Obviously.”

Then my father sat on my bed for the first time ever in the entirety of my bed-having life. Like at least twelve or thirteen years. He patted the spot next to him on my worn-out bedspread and looked at me with the sappiest fake frown on his face. I hated when my dad got cute. I hated more when he walked in on me watching television during a tampon commercial and nodded at me knowingly, like he understood the feeling of an inserted foreign object into a bleeding body part he didn’t have. That sucked. But nothing could be worse than my father trying to heart-to-heart it out with me on the subject of boys. Oh my God, un-bear-able.

“I forgot what the floor looked like in here,” he said, looking down at the carpet.

“Yeah I know, I’m so disgusting.”

“I love you, you’re my daughter, but you’re driving us crazy.”

“I cleaned up.” I glanced around the room. “A little bit.”

My father blinked and then raised the corners of his
mouth into an apologetic smile. My defenses were failing. I couldn’t drive everyone crazy.

“It’s the sweat shorts, isn’t it?” I said. And then, magically, for the first time in five days, I laughed. “And the bathing suit too.”

My father nodded, laughed with me, and said, “It’s all bad, really.”

Then he put his arms around me and hugged. I was loved; I couldn’t deny that.

“Okay,” he told me, “I’m arming you with a twenty-dollar bill and a Diet Coke, and I don’t care where you go or when you’re coming back.”

“Oh, you really shouldn’t have said that.”

“And I know you don’t want to hear this”—I cringed into his chest as he started—“but you should forgive Morgan. Clearly this breakup is taking its toll on you. Give him a chance to explain himself at least.”

It was a cruel, cruel summer.

“Dad, I hate…everyone.”

“I know you do, but could you do it somewhere away from the house for a while, please?”

I took the cash, took the wardrobe advice, took the car keys, and bounced.

On Melrose, at Headline, sifting through Bauhaus records and old weird punk stuff, I felt sort of normal again. Sort
of. In my rush to get out of the house I’d slipped on my cutoff shorts, the ones I was wearing
that
night, and in the back pocket was his good-bye whatever note. I pretended like I had gunpowder in that pocket, like my shorts were flammable. I pretended like the paper was blank, or just some receipt or movie ticket from ages ago. But it ached again: my heart, my head, my everything.

I would’ve just ripped it up, but I wouldn’t have. Keeping it was better, whether that made sense or not.

My father was right about one thing, though: A toll was being taken. I was paying seriously high rent on an imaginary place in someone’s faraway, unbeating heart. It was draining me. I couldn’t focus on the racks at Wasteland. Even the soda-fountain soda at Johnny Rockets didn’t taste as sweet. And the stupid damn note said he was coming back anyway.

I was walking, dripping sweat, when I saw four kids from my school. They didn’t notice me, thankfully, but seeing them reminded me of my real life as a soon-to-be senior and a badass and a lover of fine things like Kate Moss Italian
Vogue
s and River Phoenix movies. It was then, impossibly, hanging out on the cheesiest tourist trap in L.A., that I allowed myself entry to the living world again. On day five—the day God created the weekend—I remembered to try to be human.

It was the kind of L.A. day that’d haunt you forever if
you had to spend an eternity in endless nights: bleached-blue sky, total sunshine, faint Pacific Ocean breeze. I inhaled and exhaled, smelled the burgers, the hot dogs at Pink’s, the clove cigarettes, the cheap stupid leather jackets. Every inch of my body was alive to the now, the reality of a warm summer day in Hollywood. It was a very small, not-so-bad feeling.

But “alive” wasn’t psyched, and it didn’t mean I was ready to interact with people. Morgan, maybe. Baby steps.

I walked back to the Jag and unlocked the door. On the radio was that old band Talking Heads, that “Psycho Killer” song, which is actually kind of dancey and cool and made me turn it up and roll the windows down. After five days of media blackout, hearing the song felt vivid, like a comeback montage, the best part of the movie. I was going to see him again. I
would
see him again.

Then, turning left off Laurel Canyon onto Lookout Mountain, I saw him again.

James whizzed right past me, riding a beat-up old Schwinn ten-speed. I jumped out of the car, forgetting to pull over, park, stop the engine, anything, and sprinted down the street in his direction. I ran like crazy, like the crazy person I’d become. My legs were flying, too fast, faster than the rest of my body, and I shouted and shouted his name.
James. Come back.
I was racing, my head throbbing from the insane heat, then my body
tripping over my own feet. I wiped out hard, first landing on my shins and knees, then bombed onto the palms of my hands and finally twisted to a halt on my left shoulder.

I shouted again into the burning black concrete.
James.

It wasn’t a mirage. I had seen his face, that awesome face, and his painfully soft white T-shirt. Something inside of me, a secret sixth sense, felt his presence. James was back.

I was crazy in pain and bleeding, but I didn’t care. If James was back, then five days was just an insignificant
pling
in a deep, ancient well when compared to the immeasurable loss I thought I was facing for maybe the rest of my life.

If it had been James. It looked like him, sure, but it was two thirty in the afternoon. In blinding sunlight. A guy on a bike. I felt my insides crashing, crushed. My body was scraped and bloody, but I didn’t move. I almost passed out in the middle of the road, Jaguar still running, KROQ still blaring.

Then some cars honked, and I lifted myself against my will.

James was gone. Again. And I was a goner, too, man.

It wasn’t so much a bad idea as it was the worst idea ever, but my father had sent me out in one piece, so I
couldn’t come back in the ten or eleven pieces I was currently shattered into.

Coworker turned life raft, anyone?

Morgan’s house was a ranch-style thing, flat and casual and sprawling and rustic. It was decorated like bonkers because Mrs. Crandall was obsessed with collecting weird whimsies and tchotchkes, all that crap Amish families and clueless craft fair moms make for people who love floppy bunnies in overalls, quilts as wall hangings, wheelbarrows, quaint country whatsits. As I walked down the driveway, I lightly kicked an antique, rusted wheelbarrow hand-painted with ivy and tiny burgundy wine grapes that was leaning against the mailbox.

“Hey, don’t kick that.”

Morgan stood at the bottom of the walk in his swim shorts. His blond hair was wet. His freckled body looked…kind of good, stronger than I would’ve guessed. Or, like, buff. I hadn’t ever noticed.

“Why not, is it art or something?” I asked. “Do you wheel stuff around in it?”

“Fine, kick it.”

“Sorry.”

“I thought you were dead. You look dead.” He picked a stray piece of thistle out of my hair. “I thought you were mad at me for telling you you got fired. I thought you were grounded.”

“I’m not mad at you.”

“You look like you’re going to cry.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Well, what’s wrong?” Morgan ran his fingers through a few strands of my hair again, but he didn’t pull anything out this time.

“It’s, like, nothing.”

We stood in front of his house for a few minutes, neither of us speaking.

“Can I have a Band-Aid?” I asked, breaking the silence.

He led me in, and I went into the bathroom off the main hallway. I wet a small navy hand towel and dabbed at the blood on my legs and knees, then on my arms and hands. Inside the medicine chest I found a box of Band-Aids and stuck a few peach-colored ones over the deeper scrapes. Then I tied my hair into a loose ponytail, filled the sink with cold water, and dunked my face into it.