Just A Small Town Girl: A New Adult Romantic Comedy (9 page)

 Somehow I managed not to run after him. I went indoors and walked softly past the living room, where my Dad sat watching his nature shows. I went to pee, but when I wiped the toilet paper was still white, which meant several more days of strange behavior on my part. It was weird how it stopped the moment my period started - every single time - as if you could turn craziness on and off like a tap.

 I had a song playing in my head - it had been there all day - one of those old croony numbers he liked to listen to. Sinatra, I think.
I've Got You Under My Skin
. And damn him, he was. He was needling under my thin, translucent skin, pricking where I was soft and stupid. Why would you bother inventing the telescope? Yes, why would you? When you could sit on your ass, enjoy the view and do the bare goddamn minimum - just like me. Oh, I was my mother’s daughter all right. Didn’t even have the guts to
try
.

 As if to make a point, I opened my laptop and wrote several hundred words, but when my spleen was well and truly vented I looked back at what I'd written and hated myself so passionately that I began to understand those girls who got so choked with their own rage and self-loathing that they turned razorblades on themselves - not to kill, just to scar and mortify. A kind of secular self-flagellation.

 I deleted the whole thing, snarled 'fuck, no' at my computer when it asked me if I wanted to save changes and slammed down the lid.

 My eyes were still sore the next morning. I looked out of the window and hoped that Clayton might show me some kind of deference by not turning up, but when I stuck my head out and peered down the alleyway I could see the wing of his ratty white Honda. I crept down the stairs and got some coffee, expecting him to wander into the office and start bothering me, but he didn't. I heard the lathe turning in the workshop, then it shut off and all I could hear was the inane jibber-jabber of the local radio station that Dad refused to change.

 Through the store's front window I saw a blonde head bob past Rita's bakery. Rita saved my life - she popped out of the bakery door and caught Aunt Cassandra in conversation, giving me time to flip the sign to CLOSED and dive for safety in the workshop. Of course, it wasn't safety at all because Clayton was right there looking at me like I was some kind of crazy person, but I was far too fragile to handle Cassandra today.

 "Are you still mad at me?" he said.

 "I don't know. Are you?"

 He rubbed his hands on a rag. "I dunno. Why would I be mad at you?"

 "Because I'm stupid," I said. "And I make stupid assumptions about people and work myself into tempers over nothing."

 He said nothing. The inside of my head felt like a pressure cooker. "I'm apologizing," I said. "Now it's your turn."

 "For what?" he said.

 I couldn't believe him. "Don't be obtuse, Clayton."

 "I'm not," he said. "Whatever that means."

 "It means you're playing dumb. Which you are. You know exactly what I was pissed about."

 "Okay," he said, folding his arms. "I'm sorry you took offence, but can you honestly look me in the eye and say you're fucking thrilled to find I live in a trailer park?"

 It was about to say that was the worst non-apology I'd ever heard, but I was cut short by the approaching click-clack of Aunt Cassandra's heels. "What the hell is going on?" she said, ducking under the garage door. "Why is the store closed?"

 "I had to go to the bathroom," I said.

 "So ask Clayton to mind the store. What's got into you lately?"

 Clayton's eyebrow slid northwards; oh yeah - his brain went there. I could tell.

 "Nobody's asking you to do anything complicated, Lacie," said Cassandra. "You're lucky to have your family give you a job straight out of school..."

 I thought of the '& Son' hanging above the door and my palm itched. "Yeah - and I'm grateful," I said, but it came out more sarcastically than I meant it to.

 "You?" said Cassandra. "Grateful? That'll be the goddamn day."

 Clayton had the useless look of man caught in the crossfire.

 "I'm sorry," I said, my temper flaring. "What do you want me to do, Cassandra? Prostrate myself every morning? Put on sackcloth and pour ashes over my head because I'm so unworthy?"

 "No," she said. "Just a smile now and again would be good. Or some indication that you mean to do
something
with your education."

 "And what exactly am I supposed to do?"

 "I don't know," she said. "Write that book. It can't be that difficult, can it?"

 I wanted to scream. It was like she could see through my eyes and she'd seen the mess I'd made on the screen the night before - the moronic, self-indulgent squealings that told me I could never, ever, in a million years hope to write anything that anyone would care to read. Then to my intense surprise Clayton coughed.

 Aunt Cassandra turned to stare at him. She was almost a full foot shorter than him, but I swear he was trembling as he spoke. "It...might be," he said. "If you've never done it before. Do you know how to do it? Because I sure as hell don't."

 "No," said Cassandra, unmoved. "But do you have a four year degree in Literature?"

 He swallowed. "No."

 "There you go then," she said. "Open the store, Lacie."

 This was so much worse than I could have ever imagined. The tears came bubbling to the surface before I could even think of getting a grip on myself. Aunt Cassandra just sighed and said, "Fine. I'll do it," as if I'd started crying just to spite her. I'd run out of reasons to be mad at Clayton and let him hug me.

 "Come on," he said. "She doesn't have a four year degree either, so what the fuck does she know?"

 Everything, I thought. She knew. She knew I was lazy and insecure, which was enough to set me off again. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm a mess."

 "You're not a mess."

 "I am."

 "Okay, so you're a little messy right now," he said. "But in general - you're not that bad. I've known worse."

 I shook my head. "You can't. It's impossible."

 "Is too. You should meet my friend Bog. Look up 'mess' in the dictionary - it's right there next to his picture."

 "Bog?" I said, searching for a spare Kleenex. "You have a friend named
Bog
?"

 "Yeah," he said. "It's not his real name, obviously. It's just he used to get letters mixed up and say things like 'Bog knows' when he meant 'God knows', and so it kind of stuck. It suits him. He's nuts. Seriously. Thinks he's the great great something grandson of Genghis Khan."

 I sniffed hard. "Well, he could be."

 "You're shitting me."

 "Is he Asian?"

 "No. Russian, I think."

 "Then he could be," I said. "If there was one thing Genghis Khan liked nearly as much as violence it was sex. And sometimes he liked to combine the two. There's a whole lot of Temujin DNA out there, and it's not just confined to Mongolia. I think Dostoevsky was one of his possible descendants."

 "Wait, I've heard of him. He was a writer? Russian guy?"

 "Yep."

 "Wow," he said. “You're serious? Bog could be the real deal?"

 "It's not outside the realms of possibility."

 He shook his head. “The things you know.”

 After the store closed that day he came creeping into the office and leaned on the back of my chair. "You okay?" he said, gathering my hair up in his hands.

 I tipped my chair back against him. "I guess," I said, feeling tired.

 "So...you want to come back to my place?"

 "I thought you'd never ask."

 He bent over me and I felt his breath warm on my scalp as he spoke. "Just...you know. Don't freak out at the mess. And don't say I didn't warn you."

 "I won't. I promise."

 It was enough just to get the hell out of Westerwick for a few hours. And a bed. An actual bed. He had Christmas lights strung over his bed, even though it was August. "It's ambient," he said, pronouncing it with an absurd faux French accent that made me laugh. "Like mood lighting."

 He stripped off his shirt, revealing his stupid tribal tattoo and another on his shoulder blade - an old-fashioned sailor design, all bluebirds, roses and scrolls, adorning a giant red heart. I sat on the end of his bed and tried to look demure, like I wasn't there for sex, but he made it impossible when he dropped his pants, taking his underwear with them.

 "Come on," he said. "I think it's about time we evened the score, don't you?"

 "I can't think what you mean."

 "Yes you do. You’ve seen me naked." He came over to me and pushed my knees apart so that he could stand between them. I pressed my face to his skin, my arms around his waist. "No fair," he whispered, swaying against me. His cock swelled under my heart and I thought about distracting him by sliding to my knees. "Clothes," he said. "Lose 'em."

 When I felt the touch of his bare skin on mine I regretted that we hadn't come here and done this a whole lot sooner. It was insanely sweaty and afterwards we were too hot to touch one another, so we lay side by side. I could see where the moisture pooled in the dip of his belly button, and the humidity had made a magnificent afro of his pubes.

 "I guess I should have mentioned the lack of air-con," he said.

 "I don't mind."

 He rolled over and propped himself up on one elbow. "No," he said, peering down at me, his hand on my hip. "You don't, do you?"

 "Nope. Why did you think I'd mind?"

 He traced the edge of my navel with a fingertip for a moment. "You got me," he said. "Projecting, I guess. This wasn't where I thought I'd be in life."

 "You shouldn't be so hard on yourself."

 Clayton sighed. "No, maybe not." He sat up to rummage in his jeans pocket and I got a good look at the tattoo on the back of his shoulder. The scroll read 'Bryan'.

 "Your brother," I said, tracing it with my finger.

 He fished a joint out of his pocket and straightened it out. "Yeah," he said, lying back down beside me. He propped an ashtray in the middle of his chest. "I'm still surprised the tattooist even agreed to do it - I didn't think they tattooed drunk people."

 "The good ones don't," I said. "They have policies." I felt a weird little flash of fear - what if he'd got hepatitis from a dirty needle and passed it onto me? We'd been careful since that first night and from the way my hormones were acting I was pretty sure I couldn't be pregnant, but that was all it took. Just once, as they used to tell us in health class. I squashed it down - it felt somehow rude to think of him as diseased, especially since he was so sensitive about living in a trailer.

 "Why your brother?" I asked. "Why not 'Mom'?"

 He took a long draw on the joint and passed it over. "I told you he was in Afghanistan, right?"

 "Yeah."

 "Well, after a while it got so I couldn't watch the news any more. Every time they talked about another US casualty I'd be bouncing off the walls, freaking out, thinking this was it. I felt it. I told myself that whole twin thing was real, and that if anything happened to him I'd know. I'd feel it - like telepathically or something, you know?"

 "I've heard of that," I said.

 "Well, it's bullshit. I stopped watching TV, avoided it as best I could on the internet. I got so good at tuning it out that it was like nobody died over there. In my head it became every inch the clean, casualty-free, America fuck-yeah war they were trying to sell way back in 2001. But when it actually happened I felt nothing. No telepathic connection, no spooky twin sense. Nothing. I was hanging out on the treadmills at the gym where I worked at the time. It was about this time of year - 2008. I remember it clearly because of the election. When I came back from showering there was a message from my Mom and I just remember thinking 'That can't be right - not Bryan. I would have felt something. I would have
known
.'"

 I'd gone this far without interrupting, but it was impossible not to ask. "But he was okay?"

 "Yeah. But for a while we didn't know anything. He was on the other side of the fucking world and we didn't know if he was gonna make it through the night. I remember wondering if he was conscious and if he felt nearly half as alone as I did right then. My Mom was falling apart, Brad was still a baby to me - fifteen."

 I brushed my lips against his shoulder. "You can't have been that much older yourself."

 He sighed. "I was twenty. Thought I knew it all - as you do. I wanted to tough it out but I just...snapped, I guess. I got my fake ID, got blackout drunk and woke up with a fresh tattoo. I must be good at seeming sober when I'm hammered - get it from my old man."

 "Your Dad - is he still around?"

 Clayton rolled over, stretching out his belly, his head on his folded arms. "Not so much. He's back in Chicago - Twelve Stepping. Keeps writing me these fucking e-mails about how sorry he is and how God says he needs to make things right."

 I tried to imagine how that would make me feel, coming from my mother, but I couldn't picture her writing anything. I couldn't remember what her handwriting looked like. I'd never seen her at a keyboard. I saw her knuckles in my mind's eye, white on the steering wheel. "Do you want to?" I asked. "Make things right?"

 He screwed up his nose. "Will you think I'm a terrible person if I say no?"

 I shook my head and carded my fingers through his hair. He had nearly as bad a case of bedhead as me. "I don't think it's my place to say so."

 He didn't say anything for a while, just gave me a long, thoughtful look. His eyes were bronze-green in the late evening sun and I could see the faded spatters of old freckles on the high bridge of his nose. With the lights of red in his tousled hair I could make out the carrot-topped kid he'd once been, one of a matched pair. "You have a clever way about you," he said. "I like that."

 "What do you mean?"

 "You could have said yes, you could have said no. But you say it's not your place."

 "It's not," I said. "It's not my business to tell you how to feel about your Dad. I don't know what happened between the two of you."

 "All of us," he said. "We all suffered from his drinking."