Drain You (6 page)

Libby was white, translucent. I could see the blue veins running along her forehead and under her eyes, more pronounced than usual. She drifted her limbs in a weird pendulum motion, like she was keeping time with an inaudible song. Her wrists were frailer, and the one she’d worn the silver bracelets on was now wrapped in a bulky white bandage. She looked drained, wild-eyed, sick. Her perfectly straight, flat hair was kinked like a bad home perm.

“Okay. So what’d you take? Stella’s prescriptions?”

She shook her head. She didn’t blink.

“All right. So what, you’re stoned? Tripping? Alien invasion? Poltergeist?” I pointed to her nightgown. “Help me out here, Lib.”

“Let’s just sit here, okay? Let’s just enjoy the night.” She closed her eyes and smiled up at the starless sky. “It’s best at night,” she said, reaching out to hold my hand. Her palm was warm, but her fingers were cold.

“Come on, you’re scaring me.”

She laughed a light, empty laugh. Then Libby slid off the hood and started to twirl slowly in the street, humming something foggy and quiet.

Then it hit me, and I said it out loud: “I dreamed this.”

“Did you have fun at my party?” Libby asked.

“No. It sucked.”

Libby smiled a vacant smile to herself, said nothing.

“And thanks a lot for protecting me from those guys. I thought they were going to wear my skin over their skin. Cooper especially.”

“You lived.”

“Whatever, dude. Not cool.”

Nothing about this was cool.

She danced over in my direction, her arms out, eyes still closed. “You know, you used to like hanging out with me. Aren’t you happy to see your best friend?” She stopped in front of me and stroked under my chin, holding my face in her hand.

“Yeah, this is great.” My voice was trembling. I prayed for James to come later, because if he came now, there’d be no way to explain what he was seeing. I couldn’t understand it myself. Libby was the living dead. She wasn’t there. I felt like if I reached out my hand it would pass right through her skin.

“Do you want to talk about the bandage on your wrist, or what? I’ve seen this episode.
Dateline
calls them ‘cutters,’ you know.”

More twirling.

“What’s with the melodrama? You came here in a nightgown?”

“I never got dressed today. Long night.”

“Right. You’re high, and it’s bad stuff. I’ll go inside and get you a Diet Coke or something. Triscuits. Whatever. You need a nap and a bag of chips, pronto.” I started for the house, but she danced over and blocked me from the steps.

“I’m meeting Stiles at midnight, so you can go find Morgan and—”

“Look,” I interrupted, finally pissed. “You’ve gone crazy, obviously, which would normally only sort of be my problem except for the fact that you’re not here to visit me, you’re here to drive
me
crazy. What the hell is wrong with you?”

I was panting, livid. Libby and I had only been in one
fight ever, in the eighth grade. She’d promised to go with me to the culmination dance. We’d agreed together: no dates, no matter what. Then two nights before the dance she called and pretended to be too sick, claiming Stella wouldn’t let her go because she might be contagious. Then five minutes later, Jordan Justman called to invite me to the dance as his date. He’d bribed Libby to bail on me so he could swoop in. Then when I wasn’t into him groping me behind the gym, Jordan admitted to the whole scheme, swearing Libby had given him the green light. She and I didn’t speak for that entire summer before high school. But eventually I had to forgive her. I still remembered her crying over the phone to me, “We’ll go to a dance together next year.”

But by next year she was with Nathan. So whatever.

Then Libby’s face changed. Suddenly she looked sad, puzzled, like she didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten here. She fingered her nightgown like it was the first time she’d seen it. My anger gave way to sadness. My eyes welled up for the second time tonight.

I reached out my hand to Libby, but she just sat on the ground and began humming again softly to herself. I could see her bare feet, dirty and cut up. She started to hum a little louder, and then I could make out some of the words.

“‘One baby to another says I’m lucky to have met you,’” she sang.

I knew the song. Libby and I knew all the same songs.

“I’m worried about your wrist. You don’t look good. Talk to me. I won’t tell Stella, I swear.” A few tears ran down my cheeks, but she didn’t notice. I wanted her to cry with me. I had that sick feeling again. It was that top hat in the dirt. I didn’t want to ask, but I did: “Did you do it to yourself, or did…someone…do it to you?”

She ignored me, sang more. “‘It is now my duty to completely drain you…’”

Nirvana.

I got on the ground too and hugged her and held on tightly, pushing her face in my shoulder. She felt light and breakable. I felt like I could break her bones if I hugged hard enough.

But Libby’d never broken a bone, and I knew that. I knew everything about Libby, but everything I knew about Libby was about some other Libby, a younger, different version that didn’t exist anymore. Up until now our friendship had been slowly dissolving in a totally normal, undramatic way, because of time and distance and the general growing-up-ness and growing-apart-ness that happens in high school. But losing her like that wasn’t the same as having her ripped away. It wasn’t at all the same as having her just taken from me.

At some point Libby chose boys over best friends, but I never held it against her because I would’ve done the same thing—if I’d had a boy. I’d never wanted to be a loner, never wanted to be alone, but I realized I was except for Libby, and holding her was like holding the last person on earth who really knew me. I wanted to tell Libby that I couldn’t keep letting her drift away, and that I had to do the opposite now: I had to reclaim her. To protect the only real relationship in my life, I had to revive the bond we had back when we were fragile fourth graders who loved each other more than candy.

But first I’d have to stop this craziness. And that meant stopping Stiles.

“I’ll kill him,” I said. “I’ll get Morgan to run him over in his Dodge Shadow.”

“Won’t do any good,” she whispered. She looked up at the moon. “It’ll be midnight soon. I’ve got to go…home.”

“I want to come with you.” I shouted, “I’m coming with you!”

“You can’t go with her.”

The voice was behind me: James.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

“She can drive.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“But she’s been hurt,” I said.

“Quinn. Believe me.” Then, “You want your parents’ friends to see this?”

I imagined the woman in the pashmina sweaterdress walking out arm in arm with her husband and discovering this teenage meltdown so close to their Infiniti.

Together we lifted Libby up and walked her to her car. She paid no attention to James, didn’t ask who he was, didn’t even look at him.

“James,” I said, not wanting Libby to go, not wanting Libby to stay. Not knowing what to want. And when he opened the driver’s-side door and helped Libby climb into her Mustang, I still didn’t know.

Libby turned on the engine, and James reached in and flipped the headlights on. Then, finally—and for the first time—she noticed him. Her eyes fixed on his face. She reached out a hand, put it on his cheek. James gently removed it and placed it back inside the car and leaned in to say something I couldn’t hear. Libby nodded and drove away, never looking back.

James turned to me. “Are you crying?”

“No.” Not anymore.

“I went to the video store.”

“Why did you even come here?”

“Didn’t you get my note?”

“Yeah.”

“So don’t be like this.”

“Whatever you want, James.”

Everyone’s hopeless tragedies just bled into one another. In an easy world I’d be with Morgan, James would fade away into the Valley, the hills, to Massachusetts or wherever he came from, and Libby would tell Stiles to chill on the drugs and violent stuff. But in a perfect world all the Spaders would disappear, so would Morgan’s feelings for me, and James would love me.

“This is what I want,” he said as he reached out a hand for my neck.

I didn’t collapse into him, or wrap my arms around his waist, or press my face against his chest. I didn’t know how to get the things I wanted now that I knew to want them. I didn’t move as he stroked my hair.

“But I want something more,” James said.

I wanted something more too, so badly, but he didn’t mean that, or anything like that. He was talking about our trade.

“I can’t give you my dress,” I said, looking down at it. “I don’t have anything else.” I thought of my body, what there was to give. A fingernail. An eyelash. A lock of hair. But James wasn’t a forensic scientist. He was my date. Sort of.

So I unclasped one of the knotted gold chains from
my neck and held it up for him. He fastened it around his own neck. It hung just slightly lower than the small gold cross shining against his pale white chest. I never wanted it back.

James didn’t ask
questions because he didn’t want to answer questions, but he did give me small, warm looks as we walked quietly through the canyons. I noticed it most when we passed under one streetlight, then another. Everything was better in the dark, cooler, like in a black-and-white photograph.

Sometimes James’s shoulder brushed against mine as we walked, but mostly it didn’t. Mostly we just paced on, staring ahead at the curving black road. My body felt exhausted, but I couldn’t relax. James wasn’t Morgan, he wasn’t just a dude, some guy I could joke with, then flirt with, then leave.

“Do you like living in Cambridge?” I asked finally.

“I guess. I like the seasons, the leaves changing colors.”

I said, “We have colors and seasons here, too,” but
then stopped myself. No, we didn’t.

“The color of money at the Four Seasons doesn’t count.”

“Ha, ha.” I fake-smiled.

“But here’s cool too.”

“When do you go back? I mean, when do your parents get back to L.A.?”

James looked up like he was counting weeks or days in his head, but he took too long so I interrupted, “You know, my parents think I’m with that guy Morgan right now. It’s the only way they’d let me go out. I don’t know what they’d do if they found out I was with you.”

“No MTV for a week?”

I rolled my eyes. “Maybe. Maybe they don’t care.”

“I’m sure they care if you lie.”

“Probably. I don’t know. I mean, I’m seventeen. Pretty hard to deal with.”

“Sure. I remember seventeen.”

“Spare me. You turned twenty and your life’s so great?”

“Not at all. I used to rock out. I used to shred.”

“You were in a band?” I said it like it was dreamy. I said it in the dreamy way a dumb groupie at the Roxy would.

“Yeah. I played, like, two chords, just through pedals. We sucked.”

“Artsy, huh?”

“Thurston Moore came to one of our shows. Pretty artsy.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Ask him about it,” he said. “Ask him about Malcolm Hex.”

“Ew.”

“Told you we sucked.”

“Well, now I believe you.”

“We covered ‘Stairway.’ Or part of it. More like a deconstruction really.”

“Disgusting. When’s that from? The sixties?”

He pretended to be offended.

“So,” I asked, “what’s the deal with your parents?”

“Daniel and Charlotte are fine. They let me do my thing.”

“I wasn’t aware you had a thing.”

“Sure. Stalking, sixties culture-jamming, other hideous stuff.”

“Reading?”

“I shuffle between
Green Eggs and Ham
and
Ham on Rye
.”

“Sports?”

“Please.”

“Dating?”

“Less so.”

“Bummer. Anything else of note?”

“Not really. I’m kind of in a ‘me’ phase.”

“You’re preaching to the preacher with that one.”

“What about your parents, are they so bad?”

“No,” I said. “They’re neutral.”

“They’re neutral but they side with Morgan?”

“He’s just really safe.”

“Oh. Safe.” James thought about that for a minute. “Makes sense.”

“It’s stupid. Everyone’s safe. It’s high school.”

He said, “Well, I’m not safe.”

“Yeah, you’re a total heartbreaker. Obviously.” I waved my hand at him.

He didn’t say anything to that, just motioned to a small patch of grass on the side of the canyon, where we sat down.

“Morgan totally doesn’t matter,” I said. It felt weird saying it.

“It’s okay. He can matter. I only met you less than a week ago.”

“Still,” I said, reaching for his hand. I held it in mine and traced the veins between his knuckles and his wrist bone. In the dark it looked like he had no lines or wrinkles. My fingers stroked his fingers, then moved down again to his palm.

“That was your best friend Libby back there?” James lifted his free hand to my face, pushing my bangs to the side.

“‘Was’ being the crucial word. I don’t know what she is now.”

“You should stay away from her.”

I pushed his hand, then backed away from him and folded my arms across my chest. “That’s, like, the exact opposite of what I’m going to do.”

“She’s messed up. You know I’m right.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“You’re going to get hurt.”

“Yeah, when the twins run me over in their Mazda.”

“This is serious.”

“Then help me,” I said. “If you don’t want me to get hurt, then help me help Libby.”

“I am helping you. Some advice: Libby’s on her own trip now.”

“It’s not her, it’s her boyfriend, Stiles. We have to threaten him or something.”

James shook his head.

“What?”

“No.”

“You know something, don’t you?” I squinted my eyes to read him. Mostly James was a mood ring and I just had to guess what the different colors meant, but right now he was a decoder ring and I had to guess the hidden message. “What do you know?”

“I know she’s toast.”

“She’s not toast. She’s a warm Pop-Tart—she’s not crispy yet.”

“She’s in trouble. And if she’s in trouble and you’re around her, then you’re in trouble. I know guys like Stiles. Not safe.”

“You know guys like Stiles?” I asked.

“The not safe”—James tapped his chest—“can spot the not safe.”

“What did you say to Libby? When you leaned into the window, before she drove away.”

“I told her to leave you alone.”

“Why? She needs me.”

“You can’t do anything.”

“Shut up.” I pulled my knees up to hide my face and turned away from him.

“Quinn.”

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand.” I felt James up against my back, cradling me. He pressed his lips to the back of my head, then kissed across my neck, to my earlobe, and held his mouth there.

“It’s not the end of the world.”

“Yes, it is.” I braced my arms over his, locking them into position around me.

“It’s not. Trust me.”

I lifted one hand behind me and interlocked my fingers with his messy hair. I noticed his eyes were down, lined up exactly with the bare skin on my collarbone, watching my black cotton bra rise and fall. After a
second it felt like I was holding his head there. Like if I let go he’d pull away.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just give me a second.” James turned his head and faced away, down the hill.

“I’m mad at
you
. You give
me
a second.” We sat in silence.

Then he said, “Second’s up,” and he was back.

I moved my body around so we were facing each other again.

“You’re pretty pissed at me.”

It was weird; I could be pissed and totally not pissed at the same time. “Listen,” I said, touching my chain around his neck, “if I tell you to go away, like, if I shout at you to go, will you?”

“Not if you don’t mean it,” he said.

“I probably won’t ever mean it.”

“You’re tired,” he said.

“
You’re
tired.”

He didn’t look tired, though.

Then my eyes closed again and he said, “I’m boring you.”

I would have fake-yawned to be cute, but if it turned into a real one it’d be too soon. “So tell me a secret.”

“I have one, but it’s pretty weird.”

I waved my hand, like,
Lay it on me
.

“Last Wednesday, in front of the video store, that wasn’t the first time I’d seen you.”

“What do you mean?”

In my worn-out haze, I tried to think back. I had no recollection of ever seeing Naomi outside of school. I’d never seen her at a party, renting a movie, at the mall, at the grocery store. And of course I’d never seen her with him. I would’ve noticed.

“It was around Christmas. Like, a year and a half ago.”

“Was it at Libby’s party?” Dudes, dudes, and more faceless dudes.

“No.”

“Were you a mall Santa? Did I sit on your lap?”

“At least you’re not freaking out.”

“James, just tell me.”

“I was walking on Laurel Pass. I saw you skateboarding.”

“And?”

“And you wiped out. It was late.”

Casually I said, “I remember that,” but it wasn’t casual; it was bizarre. That night I’d actually been skateboarding home from the Blocks’ Christmas cocktail party. Libby was supposed to drive me home, but she and Nathan got into a huge fight over something very unhuge. Whatever. My board slipped out from under me and I did a serious
face-plant on the concrete. I got a crazy bloody nose and a split lip, but I was alone. I knew I was alone because I called out for help for ten straight minutes and no one came. Not even a car drove by.

“I didn’t want to creep you out,” he said. “Some weirdo coming out of the darkness.”

“Yeah, real horrifying.” Remembering the pain and embarrassment annoyed me. And then to realize he’d been watching me the whole time, yelling and bleeding and cussing at myself, annoyed me even more.

“But you were cool, remember? You got up and skated home.”

“And you were where? Hiding in the bushes?”

“Sort of.”

“Doing what?”

“I was just out.”

“Just out checking for bloody asphalt?”

His voice laughed a short, “Yeah.”

“What am I missing here?”

“Look, I saw you and didn’t want to bother you.”

“Well, I’m officially creeped out.”

“Good. Be creeped out.”

“I wish you’d just…hung out with me.” This was the most aggravating point of all. James had been there, and if he’d just said hey, we could have met, spent two amazing weeks together, started a correspondence, had a
long-distance thing. Then I would’ve already been friends with Naomi and not had to deal with Morgan’s weirdness for all of junior year because I’d be making out at this exact moment on the grass, on a date, with my sexy older boyfriend.

Then I said, kind of angry, “Doesn’t matter if you’d scared me. Who wouldn’t help a bleeding, limping girl in a Christmas dress all alone on a dark, cold night?”

“I wasn’t in any condition to be helping anyone.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. That’s why you like me anyway, right? Because I’m mysterious?” Then he looked up and met my eyes for the first time all night, and I didn’t like it.

In a very small voice I said, “That’s not why.”

“Sorry. Sometimes I’m rude to girls I think are sexy.”

“You’re confusing.”

“I described you to Naomi afterward. She told me to leave you alone.”

“Why? What’s wrong with me?”

James stopped to think about the question for too long.

“Wait,” I said, “you think I’m sexy?”

His eyes drifted across my face, down my neck, to my unbuttoned dress. He left them there and nodded, slowly, yes.

“With a bloody nose? You think bloody noses are sexy?”

He squinted. “That’s a harder question to answer.”

“Is it?”

Then he cupped my face in his hands and pressed his lips to my forehead, leaving them on my skin. I closed my eyes to enjoy the moment, but it was impossible to open them again once he pulled away. The rest of my body screamed at me:
BED
. I shook my head to fight off the feeling, but it must’ve looked like slow motion to James, because he started lifting me off the grass.

“Home, dude?”

“Home, dude,” I said, and yawned for real. I hung my arms around his waist and let him half carry me, half shuffle me along.

“So are you going to put my picture in your locker?”

“It’s summer. I can’t get to my locker.”

“How about your diary?”

I stuck out my tongue. “That’s private.”

And then we were quiet for a while.

Then, because there was nothing to say, I started saying everything. I confessed my random crushes on young Springsteen and Will Smith, stuck up for television, citing the many ways it’d shaped my once vulnerable mind, bashed baseball, admitted to having a retainer I never wore. I told him I wanted to learn how to play,
in no particular order of importance, the upright bass, the tenor saxophone, and the drums, but I’d settle for a drum machine. I recited Tennessee Williams lines,
Seinfeld
quotes, Smashing Pumpkins lyrics, told my only good joke, performed my only celebrity impression, badly. Strong beliefs on eighties Lakers versus nineties Bulls, Diet Coke versus Coca-Cola Classic, Kurt versus Courtney, West Coast rap versus East Coast rap, Converse versus Vans.

At times James looked at me like I was an alien, and other times he looked at me like I was his kind of alien. Most of the time he just pulled me in tighter to hug his body and smelled my hair and kissed the top of my head.

Soon we were on my block. When I could see the tea lights outside of my house, James interrupted me.

He was like, “First crush?”

If it counted: “Aladdin.”

“First kiss?”

Skip that. “Boring.”

He asked about my first…anything else.

Skip that one too. “Nothing to tell.”

He wanted to know had I ever had my heart broken.

Easy: no.

Had I ever broken anyone’s heart?

Simple: one person’s, every day for a year.

But he didn’t ask the most obvious question in this line of questioning: Had I ever been in love?

Not before now. Not even close.

When we reached my stone steps, I said, “Come upstairs. Please.” I smiled at him, wobbly. The yawns were coming on strong. I was almost asleep on my feet.

He said, “You can’t even open your eyes.” But it wasn’t a no.

I pulled him through the front door and up the stairs. He hesitated in my doorway and raised his eyebrows at the janky state of my room.

“Don’t judge me, Mr. No Windows No Phone No Bed No Furniture,” I said between yawns. “Bless this mess.” I jumped on the bed once and then flopped down on it.

James stood over me, his expression soft but preoccupied.

I pulled on his arm a little. “Lie down with me, please.”

“Saying please doesn’t work on me. What about mom and dad?”

I pointed at the pillow next to me, at the small folded white piece of paper lying on it.

James picked up the note and read aloud: “‘Quinlan, great dinner party, wish you had stayed for dessert. Next time invite Morgan in. If we’re gone when you wake up, don’t forget to eat a proper meal. No soda, please, although the odds of us paying your college tuition with
money from recycled cans are increasing. This room has gone beyond a mother’s reproach. Love you, Mom.’”