Drain You (19 page)

She was barefoot, in a pair of Lynn’s jeans that were dated and too baggy, wearing an oversize tie-dyed T-shirt, and in her right hand she loosely held a book—
Stranger in a Strange Land
, obviously Lynn’s, Libby hated sci-fi—the pages turning in the wind. She didn’t break her gaze into the black, silent distance.

“Hey, it’s Quinn,” I said. “I came to visit.” I touched her shoulder.

“Oh.” Her voice was an alien thing.

“How are you?”

Then for the first time she looked me in the eyes. Hers were glassy, fogged over. She gripped the hand I’d put on her shoulder and held it in her lap. She rubbed along the inside of my wrist. “Why did you come?” she said.

“I wanted to see you. See how you were doing.”

She stroked my skin. My veins? I felt James move in
closer toward us. “That’s cool of you,” she said slowly.

I needed to make this moment saner. I needed to get to my point and get my hand back and get the hell out of here. “Libby, I need to ask about some stuff, but I don’t want to upset you.”

She didn’t react. Then James sat down in the chair next to me, and Libby’s eyes locked on him, her nails digging into my hand. “Who’s that?”

I wrenched my hand free and rubbed at where she’d scraped the skin.

“You remember James,” I said.

James stiffened. “Hello,” he said. No handshake.

“No,” Libby said, eyes still locked on James. “Who are you?”

“He’s Naomi’s brother,” I said. “Remember Naomi Sheets? From school?”

“Hello,” he said again.

“Hi.” Finally she looked back to me. “Ask about what stuff?” she said, without any expression.

“Listen—,” I started.

But James interrupted, “We need to ask about Stiles. He wants to kill us. Do you know why?”

Her eyes scanned every inch of James, searching for something. Then she said, “I think so. It’s because I’m here.”

James nodded.

“It’s not that big a deal, though,” she said, looking back to the desert. “He’s not like that. He’s just…possessive.”

My mouth fell open. Like in a cartoon. “Possessive? That’s a joke.”

But she wasn’t joking. Her face was cold and dazed, an empty skull with two hazy eyeballs looking out of it. “He’s just really into me.”

I felt that getting-up-too-fast feeling, blood rushing in the wrong direction, then spiraling away in a whirlpool. I was lost: Libby never knew Stiles wasn’t human. Even though he bit her. Even though he sucked her blood. She must’ve thought he was just kinky or weird or a little too intense. I could’ve felt relieved that Libby was so oblivious, since that made James’s secret safer, but I didn’t. I felt sucker punched. If anything, the idea made me lonelier. Libby and I couldn’t share our shared fate. We weren’t both in love with forever twentysomethings. In her mind she was just in love with an average post-high-school, food-eating, James-Spader-looking jerk. I was flipping out.

I turned to James, hyperventilating. Libby couldn’t help us with anything if she didn’t understand anything.

“Okay, so maybe he won’t kill us,” James said, going along with Libby’s cluelessness. “But he wants to hurt us. He’s angry. We need to avoid him.”

Libby nodded vacantly.

“Where does he usually hang out?”

“I don’t know. He leaves after I’m already asleep.”

“Doesn’t he go out to eat?” James asked.

“I don’t think so.” She hesitated, her eyes drifting. “But he drinks a lot. There’s nothing ever in the fridge but bottles of wine.”

James said, “Thanks, Libby.”

“That’s it?” I whispered.

He shushed me.

She said, “Okay,” and let her eyelids slide closed. She sat frozen in the dark.

“We’re gonna go now,” James said, standing up.

“We’re leaving?” I said.

He nodded. “Bye, Libby.”

She opened her eyes and looked at us. She beckoned with her hand to come nearer.

I didn’t want to, but we both stepped closer.

“Don’t hurt Stiles,” she said. She was dead serious; becoming dead to me. “I love him.”

I couldn’t deal. I snapped. I put my hand on her cheek and shoved her face away, hard. She barely blinked. I turned and stormed back toward the side gate.

All of this, this whole visit, the hand-holding and the looking-in-the-eyes, it all meant nothing. Less even than the last time I’d been here. We’d known each other since
forever, but it meant nothing now. It was as empty as the desert. I heard James call my name, but I shut it out like everything else.

I pushed open the gate and got into the car and slammed the door. No one was getting a good-bye. Tears wanted to come, but I didn’t listen to what tears wanted anymore.

James scrambled out from the backyard and walked fast to the car and got into the driver’s side. “Why’d you do that?”

“Who cares?”

“She has no idea.”

“I don’t care.” I turned away from him, because he was part of this and I wanted no part of any of this.

“That’s not true.”

“Drive.”

“Okay.” But he sat still, waiting, the keys dangling from the ignition.

“Just drive, James.”

Finally he turned on the car and pulled out of the driveway. Minutes later we were getting on the highway, leaving it all behind.

“You should know,” he said suddenly. “If it’s just a little bit at a time, it isn’t that painful. The feeling can be pretty…subtle.”

I didn’t want to hear it.

“They sometimes don’t even realize what’s happening. They’re too in the moment.”

I remembered my fantasies of James’s bite, the way my imaginary body melted into his bloody kiss. Libby had actually felt that. She’d felt it and she liked it. But she didn’t even know the kiss wasn’t a kiss, that Stiles was drinking her, taking her life.

I shook my head. “Whatever, that isn’t even Libby.”

“Of course it isn’t.”

“Doesn’t matter now, though.”

He rubbed my shoulder. “It still matters.”

But I didn’t know if it did.

“She’s becoming one.”

He said, “She
was
,” and looked right at me.

So Libby was something in between.

We rode for a while without talking. The radio was on low. There were other voices. Outside it was a black blur.

I tried to picture the future: senior year, rushing home every day right at dusk, avoiding the big game, homecoming, tech rehearsals for the fall musical, anything that met at night, avoiding Naomi, Morgan, my parents. And in this vision of daytime yearbook staffs and study groups, Libby was just a mysterious dropout, another high school casualty to gossip about.

I glared at James. “So what now?”

He looked at me, saw the pain on my face, but didn’t answer.

“Why did we even come here?”

“I know what we’re going to do,” he said.

“What?”

“We’re going to poison them.”

What? “How?”

“Before I got sick from that girl’s blood, I didn’t know anything like that could happen. I’d never been wrecked like that. But that was just accidental, some pills, drugs or something.”

“Okay.”

“So we could fill Stiles’s bottles with something way harsher. Something chemical, completely toxic.”

“Do you mean, like, laundry detergent or paint thinner?” What were we supposed to look for, warning stickers with a skull and crossbones? I didn’t know where to get poison.

“Maybe. I’m not sure.”

I wasn’t too numb to feel his hand squeezing mine.

“It might work.”

I nodded.

“Remember how bad I was?”

I nodded more.

“That was just traces. This could be brutal.”

“But if it doesn’t kill them, will they at least be
screwed up enough for us to finish them off?” I couldn’t believe I lived a life where I could seriously say sentences like this. It was Valley girl/scary movie/action flick stuff.

“They’ll definitely be screwed up.”

“So…this is going to work?”

“Yeah, I think so.” He paused, thinking. “Totally.”

I looked outside, at the Inland Empire racing by, at my city sleeping, lonely truckers headed nowhere. I looked back at James. It felt like he was all I had left, and I tried not to think he might leave again.

“I believe you.”

“Then come closer.”

I leaned closer.

He kissed me on the lips.

“Can I come home with you?” I asked.

He said, “Whit and Naomi are there.” But it wasn’t a no.

“So?”

He paused then said, “So. Come home with me.”

I could’ve cried. And this time I’d let the tears have their way.

Back before I
had someone to wake up next to, I used to daydream about waking up next to someone. Now that the fantasy was finally possible for me, it was impossible with James.

You can’t share a magic morning moment in a pitch-black closet. Can’t do anything really but inch your body like a worm down in the direction of the exit. Because lingering in there doesn’t mean gazing into your sleeping lover’s face, watching his chest rise and fall, tracing the contours of whatever with the tips of your fingers. It only means staring into so much darkness your eyes start to cross.

Lying there like a blind person, I tried to imagine James next to me, looking beautiful, tender, dreaming of our future together. But the longer I imagined it,
the lonelier and lamer everything got. When our future seemed as black and bleak as the stupid closet, I peaced out of that hotbox.

And into another hotbox. James’s room was stuffy, dusty, and dim. I stumbled across the carpet and stepped outside the door. The day—what day was it anyway? Monday?—felt especially sweltering, a numb blanket of light, the sky bleached white with smog. The air buzzed with the distant drone of a thousand air conditioners blasting at full power. Out of it, I wandered down the stairs to the garden, where everything was either limp and browning or dry and dying. Charlotte Sheets’s basil plants in particular were scorched, the color of mud, the smell of a plate of pasta sitting way too long under the heat lamps at Olive Garden. I tore off a leaf from a honeysuckle bush, and it disintegrated against my fingers. I stared at the ashy bits, letting them blow away into the warm wind, and thought,
This could be Stiles.
Then,
James
.

“So now you’re torturing our plants?” Whit asked, walking toward me in only a pair of plaid boxers, his hand over his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun.

“Whatever, already dead, see?” I picked a dead leaf up off the ground and crumpled it into dust.

“Yeah, I see.” His voice was sarcastic but tired. “But isn’t it dead enough without your help?”

I didn’t answer, just picked dead leaf fragments off my hands.

“What are you even doing here?”

“I slept over.”

“I mean in the garden.”

“Just looking at the plants.”

“They were a lot more to look at when they were alive.”

“Whit,” I said. It was too hot for this.

“‘Whit,’ what?” He said it like a challenge. “Nice outfit too, by the way.”

I glanced down: I had on only a T-shirt and underwear, and my feet were dirty from walking in the garden. Whit still shielded his eyes from the sun, unamused. He didn’t shield his eyes from my naked legs, but it didn’t matter. His face already looked different. Like he’d convinced himself not to forgive what I’d done. Like he’d convinced himself to move on. I pulled the T-shirt down as low as it’d go.

“You should go home. He won’t be up for hours. And Naomi gets back from the stables at three. Probably shouldn’t be sunbathing in your panties then.” He turned to leave.

I rushed out, “Hey, what are you doing?”

He paused, looked confused.

“I mean, like…today.”

He stared at my face for a few seconds, squinting in the harsh light. The sun was bleaching us out, erasing us. Whit was disappearing—and not just to his room.

“I’m hanging out,” he said. “Alone.”

“Why are you so mad at me?”

“Don’t ask questions you know the answers to,” he said sharply. “It makes you sound stupid.” Then he turned around again, held up three fingers to remind me of Naomi’s return time, and went inside.

I was alone with all the dead stuff again. I wandered through the garden, feeling sweat on my face but not caring. There was another bed of herbs behind the honeysuckle I hadn’t seen, so I plopped down next to them and stuck my hands in the dirt, stretching my fingers into the warm, dry texture.

A couple of feet away toward the house I noticed a half-rusted tin watering can lying on its side. I reached over and grabbed it. There was still a decent puddle of old water left in it, so I found the only plant with some green leaves left—some mint or cilantro or something—and gently poured the contents of the can down over it like a hot, short rain. It still looked pretty dead. Too little too late.

I let my body fall forward, my chest against my knees, my head on the ground, and let my eyes get blurry. Sunshine soaked my skin, scalding, numbing me. Every bridge was burned or burning.

I needed to run away, but James had driven and he wouldn’t be getting up till later, and I couldn’t justify stealing his car since he was the only person I still knew who didn’t hate me. I thought about walking, I thought about the line in that song: “Only a nobody walks in L.A.” Leaning against the house was Whit’s black Schwinn ten-speed, but I’d never learned past training wheels. Triple stranded. No choice but to go back upstairs and flip through old magazines and think about all the movies where someone dies from being poisoned.

An hour later, in James’s room, still in my panties, hot as hell, woozy, sweating, trying to remember if anyone actually died in that poisoned goblet scene in
The Princess Bride
, I had a brief but important reality check: my parents. What day of the week was it? When had I promised them I’d be home next? When was the last time I’d gotten a note stuck to my cheek? I had answers for none of these. I had to at least call. But James had no phone, only the main house did. This day just kept sucking.

I hunted around for my clothes, but when I found my skirt I remembered why I wasn’t wearing it: James had accidentally ripped a huge tear down the middle of it last night. Hot and heavy then, stupid and annoying now. I glanced around the room for something to cover myself with, but he wore the same clothes every day, he
owned nothing. Folded neatly in a corner I found a faded, threadbare quilt and wrapped it around my body like some toga-dress thing. It’d have to do. I slipped on my high-tops and headed for the front door.

Knocking would only bring someone who didn’t want me around, so I tried the knob first and it opened. I tiptoed through the living room, maneuvering for the phone next to some hand-carved African lamp. Then I heard a spoon against a bowl and Whit’s voice: “Breaking and entering?”

He was in the doorway to the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal, staring at me.

“I just needed to call home real fast, sorry.”

“I don’t care, go ahead,” he said, going back into the kitchen. I heard him drop his bowl into the sink and then pad down the stairs.

I dialed, waited through three rings, then left a message: doing fine, be home soon, no big thing. As vague as possible. Obviously I was—as my mother would say—cruisin’ for a serious bruisin’ in the grounding department. Somehow not the top worry on my list.

Now what?

The question echoed in my head. James was in a coma till dusk. Naomi’s arrival was impending. Whit wanted nothing to do with me. I was still half-naked. I felt pathetic, depressed, a wreck. No pants, no car, no training wheels.

I collapsed at the top of the stairs and sat on the first step. In my head I saw Libby floating in the desert, Morgan scowling by the pool, Naomi screaming, Whit frowning. Then suddenly I saw Whit—in reality, at the bottom of the stairs—not frowning, just looking at me, a slight smirk around his mouth, one hand on the banister. Something had thawed.

“The song remains the same with you, huh, Lacey?”

I dropped my head—it was all so seriously ridiculous—and then Whit was there, putting an arm around my shoulder, leading me to his room.

With Whit not hating me, I saw it all again like I did the first time: William Claxton, Woody Allen, Edward Hopper, Groucho Marx, Arthur Miller. Plays, records, drawings, photos. Whit was the coolest. He slouched against his pillows, and I sat on the edge of the bed.

“So,” he said. “How’d everything go last night?”

I dragged out a long sigh.

“That awesome, huh?”

“I’m over it.”

He sat up next to me. “You’re never over anything.”

“Can’t help Libby, and she can’t help us.”

“What did James say?”

“Nothing.”

Then Whit said nothing. He opened his mouth but just to breathe through it. When he lifted his hands, I
thought they were coming for me, to touch my face or stroke my hair, but Whit only took off his glasses for a second and rubbed his eyes. “So is there a plan?”

“Sort of. I don’t really understand it.”

“It’ll be okay, Quinn.”

“I guess.”

Life was a Malibu wave, surf it or sink. Or stay out of the water. But it was too late for that.

Eventually we relaxed. I curved my body like a C around Whit. The room felt safe and sound. The night felt far away. At some point I sank into sleep.

And when, sometime later, Whit roused me awake, the room was much darker.

“Naomi’s in her room,” he said.

“I better go.”

“Don’t forget the, uh”—Whit pointed to my bare legs—“thing.”

“Thanks.” I ruffled the hair on the top of his head, grabbed the quilt, and hobbled my way out his door and up the stairs, still yawning.

I was a couple of steps into the kitchen when my heart seized and I froze: A stranger in an old sweatshirt with his back to me was rummaging through the cabinet beneath the sink. I started to back away but bumped against a picture frame, making a noise, and he spun around.

“There you are.” James had his hood up, and he looked tired.

“Wait, what time is it? What are you doing up?” I rushed to his side and took off the quilt, holding it up to shield him from the wide beam of low purplish light coming through the kitchen window. The sun was setting, but it wasn’t gone.

“It’s okay, it’s not direct,” he said. “I’m fine.” He kept digging around under the sink. “There it is.”

I looked inside the cabinet to see what he’d found. In his hands was an economy-size jug of liquid Drano.

“What’s that for?”

“You know what it’s for. Will you go wait in the living room?”

“Why?”

“I need to talk to all of you.”

“What do you mean ‘all of us?’”

He gave me a look. It was a “Get with the program” look.

“What? Why?”

Three of us in the same room was bad news. Four of us would be war.

“Please just do it.”

“You’re going to use Drano? Will that even work? I thought you were going to get, like, arsenic or rat poison or something.” I tried to remember
Heathers
. Her lips
turned blue and she smashed right through a coffee table.

I heard footsteps, and Whit came up the stairs, nodded at me, and passed into the living room. I followed him and found Naomi already there, leaning against a windowsill, twisting a piece of hair, staring into space. Whit perched on the edge of the couch and tapped his fingers nervously on some ashtray lying on the mantel.

“Would it kill you to put some clothes on?” Naomi asked, snapping her head toward me, her eyes ice.

“I…don’t have any,” I said, then shrugged, then looked to Whit. He shrugged back.

“Naomi, just give her something,” James said as he came into the living room, a small black plastic bag in one hand, the top of the Drano bottle sticking out. He put an arm around my shoulder, obviously making things worse.

“It’s fine, I’m cool like this,” I said.

“Not really,” Naomi mumbled under her breath.

Whit sighed and snapped his fingers twice. “Let’s just get on with it.”

James gestured to the mudcloth couch Whit was on, but Naomi didn’t move, so I didn’t either. “I need you all to stay here while I’m gone tonight.”

“Done,” Naomi interrupted.

“Yep,” Whit seconded.

“No,” I said. “I’m coming with you.”

“Not for this.” There was no debate. “I have to leave now while there’s still a little light, before they wake up.” James pulled his hood forward and looked me in the eyes. “Stay with Whit, promise?”

“I promise.”

“I’ll be back. Don’t worry. No one needs to worry.”

But I was already worrying. And I was already preparing to break my promise. I couldn’t risk James alone against the twins, armed only with a bottle of drain cleaner and a hoodie. Things could go wrong. They always did.

James hugged Whit, who hugged him back, and then Naomi, who kept her arms straight at her sides but nuzzled her head into his neck, and then me. I squeezed him with all my strength. Then I kissed him on the lips, right in front of everyone. This was where we were, and I was done pretending we were somewhere else.

Finally he stepped back, his eyes moving across us. I didn’t understand the silence, but then I realized: He was hesitating. He was scared.

“What’s in the bag?” Naomi asked.

“Drano,” James said back.

“What for?”

Whit shook his head. “Don’t say it.”

“Say it.”

I looked to James. “Is it a secret?”

Whit interrupted, “It’s
all
a secret. Just go.”

“Tell me,” Naomi said.

“Chill out,” I said.

She opened her mouth, maybe to scream, but Whit shoved a finger in her face. He also pointed a finger at me.

“Both of you shut up.”

Naomi stared at the ground. I stared at the ceiling.

“Please,” James said, and then he turned and went out the door.

No one did anything for a second. I looked down at my naked legs, over at a family portrait, around the room, anywhere.

Naomi stared at me. “What’s he going to do to Stiles?”

I had nothing to say. The truth was retarded, ridiculous. A lie seemed even more so. “Poison him.”

“He’s not going to drink that stuff.”

“But if he did…,” I said. “You remember that night.”

“What about it?”

“James was screwed up.”

“You bitch.”

“Naomi!” Whit yelled. “Just go get her something to wear.”

Naomi sharpened her stare, knifed me with it. “You made your coffin, now lie in it.” Then to Whit, a little disgusted, “You’re smarter than this.” Then she left.

Whit shrugged, gave me a sweet look. “Whatever. Guess I’m not.”

A second later Naomi flung some balled-up black dress up the stairs. “Here.”