Jeremiah Quick (5 page)

"Of course it does." She could taste her own
impatience. "I've had pain. I deal with it, let it flow into me,
through me, and then out again. I don't grasp it. I don't let it
hang around to stagnate, or allow it to poison me. I make my way in
the world, Jeremiah, but I don't let the world get in my way. And
yes, I am all right. I would go to the ends of the earth, give up
everything, to have this time with you. I just did."

"Do you remember Martin Luther King Day?" he
asked. It was such an unexpected question that she laughed, despite
her panic about her phone being halfway down the goddamned
hill.

"I remember the fallout more than the day.
Do you realize I had to have Becky Brewer rewrite every absence
excuse my mother wrote for the next two and a half
years
?"

His mocking laugh came from right next to
her ear. "Such a goody-two-shoes, you were," and she nodded, the
top of her head bumping his jaw, making his teeth click
together.

"What about it?" she asked, to cover the
fact that she didn't remember the details. "We missed the
parade."

"Fuck the parade. We had our own, through
the skywalk, around the ice arena."

"It was the first time I'd seen curling,"
she said, thinking of the push of brooms and the heavy, slow slide
of the stones across the ice.

"It was the first time I saw
you
–
away from everyone and without the good-girl mask."

She didn't feel like laughing anymore, in
fact, she felt like she hated him, and wanted to hurt him, bruise
him. He really was cruel.

"And you didn't like me, still," she said,
the words a hot breeze, dry as dust, more pathetic than any of her
tears.

"It wasn't like that," he said, and his
right hand pulled free from her right pocket and wrapped around
her, so he had both arms around her now, holding tight.

"What was it, then?"

"It was that you tamed me with chocolate,
capable of trapping me forever with your kindness and your
sunshine. Dark things shrivel in the light. I wasn't ready to stop
being who I was, or to become the person you would make me. And I
knew when I was finally ready, I had to have a boy. And that's
something I could not change. Not even for you."

She thought about those words, just resting
against him, letting her body relax. She liked the feel of him
against her spine, long and lean, stick-thin, and so fragile the
wind might decide to take him away. Who was anchoring whom, she
wondered for a second, but only very gently.

So. He was gay. And yet.

The wet crotch of her underwear reminded her
there was more to sex than orientation or love. Regardless of love,
there was and always would be a bit of
Mine
attached to
every thought of him, every memory.

He steered her away from the wall, and back
to his car.

He didn't get in, but leaned against the
passenger door, his face in clear view by a nearby streetlamp. She
watched his jaw tighten so hard the muscle in his face jumped. He
watched her too, his odd eyes illuminated by the light. He closed
them, as if he didn't want to see her, and she could see them
moving beneath the lids, like REM sleep. Or like he was
thinking.

She could have run, then. To another car, or
toward the building where surely someone was looking at a map or
buying something out of the vending machine, or taking a leak. She
could have, but it wasn't a real live thought.

After a minute or so, he opened his eyes,
and he looked surprised to see her still standing there.

"I could take you home, right now."

She wasn't sure what he meant. He wasn't
asking, yet it felt like a question. "Do you want to?" she
asked.

He shrugged. "No. But it would be the right
thing to do."

Yeah, probably. He already wasn't good for
her marriage. But then she pictured herself at home alone, a few
minutes from now, her phone lost down the hill, her car abandoned
at the shopping center. Jeremiah driving away for another twenty
years.

Even inside her head it felt awful and
restless and lonely.

"I… well. It's up to you. You're the
teacher. It's always been up to you."

Just saying the words started a hollow ache
in the center of her chest. She cried when she was told he was
dead. Just… go home now? How could she?

An expression flashed across his face she
didn't know how to read. It looked like a warning, or like he was
laughing at some internal joke he wasn't going to share. It was...
disconcerting. She'd never been afraid of him, but for a fraction
of a second she wondered if she should be.

He stepped aside and she got into the car.
When she pulled the heavy door closed, it latched into place with a
dull and solid thunk.

Jeremiah Quick got into the driver's seat
and drove away.

He didn't take her back home.

He just took her.

Pause, old life.

Goodbye, old Pretty.

"Music?" she asked, staring out the window,
at the quiet of the night, at nothing. There had always been music.
She didn't think she could live without it. Her life had a
soundtrack, like so many lives, from the earliest years of her
dad's favored twanging country to the most recent band that rocked
her world.

He jabbed a finger at the car stereo. The
classic station, maybe, because the song playing was the original
Behind Blue Eyes
by The Who, which made her think about her
brother as a teen, all Kiss and AC/DC, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and
this song, which was still beloved to her, made her heart ache, her
guts, for some kind of nameless relief.
Make it stop
, she'd
wanted to scream, a thousand times in her life,
make the pain
stop
. Even when she wasn't in any discernible pain, not really,
except for the pain of never quite fitting in anywhere.

She never belonged anywhere, in any group.
She was too bright-shiny-sun for the Jeremiahs, too bright
altogether for the addicts, and too fucking dark for the normal
people.

She was too cynical for the Christians, too
skeptical for the Satanists, and not quite interested or bright
enough for the Atheists.

There was no place, no safety, except for
that which she built herself.

Oh, she had her little group of friends,
yeah, but she didn't really belong there either. She just did a lot
of pretending to fit, and they did a lot of ignoring her
pretense.

She'd often thought Jeremiah left just when
she was on the verge of understanding… something more.

"Where are we going?" she finally asked,
when the silence stretched too long despite the music.

"You'll see."

She rolled her eyes. "Okay, fine. Honestly,
Jeremiah. I
loved you
, and never managed to decide if you
liked me or hated me. I'm still not sure."

"Sometimes it was both," he said, keeping
his eyes focused on the road.

"But why? What's wrong with me?" Her voice
rose, almost into a cry, and she shook her head, embarrassed, and
turned a little, crooking her knee up on the seat as if it could
create more distance between them.

He glanced over at her, a flick of eyes, and
then back to the road. "Seriously? I find you at Walmart, of all
fucking places, and you have to ask me
that?"

There was a twinge low in her belly, a bad,
ugly feeling. Like she'd been fucking up all along and all along
had known she was fucking up. She wanted to defend herself – she
was tired, it was so easy to get all her stuff at one place. But
she also knew it was lazy, and she hated the place, hated
capitalism in general, and wished she knew how to make a
difference.

Jeremiah had always talked about making a
difference. Free will, free thought, anarchy.

"You've turned into one of
Them
," he
said, and she could almost taste his bitterness. "Just another
sheep in the herd. How does it feel, Sunshine?"

She felt sick. Unsafe. She said, "Maybe you
should take me home."

He didn't look at her, just stared at the
road, his voice as unmoving as his posture. "It's too late for
that."

Dread went through her like a seizure, then
settled like a clenched fist in her stomach. "So, now what? What
are you going to do with me?"

"You know."

She looked to his profile for clues.

His eyes did that quick flick again. "Change
you. Fix you. Teach you all over again."

Ah, yes.

Yes.

She understood the ugly feeling in her belly
then, as much guilt as fear. She deserved his punishment, whatever
it might be. She'd spent the last too many years taking the easy
road. Falling into things she knew she didn't believe in, morally,
but were so convenient they were difficult to resist. Walmart.
Sheep. American society. Truth was, Jeremiah had no idea how far
she'd fallen. She hadn't watched the news or read a newspaper in
years. All the bad shit in the world hurt too much to look at, made
her feel too helpless. How could she possibly make any difference
at all? The problems were too big, starting with the fact that the
source of all news was biased toward government and big business
and the beauty of capitalism.

But was she broken? She'd survived life the
only way she knew how, by closing her eyes, burying her head in the
sand, and trying to exist without worrying too much.

And now, well, the sense that she and
Jeremiah
were not finished
was tremendous. She wanted to be
here, in this car beside him. But if she wasn't broken, would he
break her somehow, to have something to fix? And how does one go
about that?

"How?" she asked.

He glanced at her, face tipped a little bit
to the side, the way he seemed to do when he wasn't quite answering
the question.

"The how is unimportant," he said, and his
voice was soft but steel, velvet-wrapped words reminding her how he
licked the tears from her eyes, so very thirsty for them. And again
came the little niggle that perhaps having more fear than
fascination was appropriate. "I'll take everything you have left,"
he said, and the calmness, almost deadness, of his tone washed over
her in a cold wave. "The use of your hands, your voice. Whatever I
want to take, I will."

She shivered, and he seemed to take note of
it, teeth gleaming in the light of the dashboard, an expression
that might have been a smile.

His right hand left the steering wheel,
jabbed the radio into silence, then drifted into his pocket, and
came into view with an iPod. "Plug this in?" he asked.

Pretty took it from him, found an auxiliary
cable hanging beneath the dash, and connected the two. She
requested songs and scrolled up to shuffle. The first song that
played was
Storm
, by Lifehouse. It was one of her very
favorite songs. No one had it. No one she knew had ever heard of
it.

She tapped the skip button, and heard the
beginning notes of another oddball song she adored.

She tapped over to the title list and
scrolled down, recognizing every single one.

It was her own iPod. Well, technically it
belonged to her daughter since Pretty had graduated to an
iPhone.

"Where did you get this?" she asked, a
squeeze of panic in her chest.

His tone was nonchalant. "Kitchen window
sill."

"You stole my daughter's iPod?"

"I was hoping it was yours." The words
sounded as sour as the look on his face in the glow of the
dash.

It was suddenly too warm in the car, and far
too small. She cracked the window of this steel beast, unrolling it
an inch via hand crank. "Do you have a cigarette?"

He dug in his pocket and handed over a pack
of Camels and a lighter. She lit up with a deep inhale, and exhaled
with a murmured sigh. She hadn't had a cigarette in eight or nine
years. Her daughter had childhood asthma so smoking was one more
thing given up in the name of parenthood. She fought a cough,
loving the heavy feel of the smoke in her lungs. She blew a stream
of it toward the top of the window. God, she'd missed nicotine.

She settled deeper into her seat and
confessed, about the iPod. "It used to me mine. It'll be a mixture
of love and hate."

"Perfect. You'll have to tell me what you
love the most."

"So you can use it against me?"

He shrugged. "Sure."

He was… so comfortable, but not a warm kind
of comfortable, more of a cold, in-charge sort of feeling. She
remembered laughing with him, at him, even, she remembered him
looser than this, easier, even if he was never all that easy. She
wanted to shake him up a little, make him drop his cold control.
Maybe even get him to smile.

"If I tell you which songs I love, you can
tell me what you hate about them. It'll be like old times."

"What, me hating your music? Come on, even
you have to admit Motley Crüe never had any redeeming value."

"Sure they did, the old stuff. And so did
Bryan Adams, and Bon Jovi."

"Ugh, the syrup. I'm gagging."

"You were always a music snob. Shit, Bon
Jovi's still producing hits. Where's your music, that's what I want
to know. Even the Sex Pistols are out of vogue – what have you been
listening to lately?"

"No one you've ever heard of, I'm sure."

"Bullshit. ICP. Pantera," she suggested.

"No, and no. Bauhaus. Manson. In This
Moment. Sisters of Mercy. Nine Inch Nails." Even his voice was a
sneer. But then, almost like a confession of his own: "And yeah,
the Sex Pistols. Still."

She couldn't resist, and sang a line of the
one song she knew by In This Moment, so quiet she wasn't sure he'd
even hear. A song of aching heartbreak, of death. "
Can anybody
tell me why… we're lying here on the floor?
"

The car swerved, and the tires hit the
rumble strip on the shoulder of the freeway with a jarring
buzz.