Night Kites (16 page)

We were coming apart at the seams.

So I was glad when I saw Nicki standing by the front desk at Kingdom By The Sea, kibitzing with Toledo, rolling her cigarette around between her teeth.

She was wearing the dalmatian-dotted stockings with high black heels, some kind of black off-the-shoulder corset dress, with beads and crosses and chains, her crucifix earrings in her right ear, and black lace fingerless gloves. She had on the rhinestone ankle bracelet, and over her shoulder the jacket with the traffic accident on the back.

She had a bow in her hair with the same dalmatian pattern, and super-long false eyelash wings. And First. She smelled of that scent that had become so familiar to me, so her to me.

I waited until we got inside the SAAB to tell her something I dreaded telling her. Way back in September, when the seniors had ordered their rings, I’d ordered mine in Dill’s size, as a surprise, with Dill’s initials and mine inside.

Nicki was sitting close to me, with one hand under my thigh, the radio playing Julian Lennon’s latest, while I broke the news.

She reacted the way she always did when I told her something important, completely opposite from how I thought she would. She clapped her hands together and said she just
loved
it
,
couldn’t wait to wear it now!

“It’s so dark and flawed, you couldn’t give me anything more marvelous, Eri! I wish I could wear it inside out!”

After we parked the SAAB and walked toward the gym, Nicki tossed her Merit over her shoulder and hung tightly to my arm. “Here we go down the gangplank. Watch out for all the sharks, Eri!”

The first thing you were supposed to do, if you were giving someone a ring at the Ring Dance, was get your assigned place in the march.

Nicki sauntered into the girls’ john to comb her hair while I walked up to the front table to pick up our number.

That was when I found myself face to face with Dill. She was sitting at the table with some other seniors.

Shed let her hair grow out. She was in white. She looked up at me.

“Hi, Dill.”

She said, “Oh, you’re going to be in the march?”

I nodded. “Are you?”

“Hardly.”

There were blue-and-silver lights bobbing across our faces, while Wham! sang their old number “Careless Whisper” over the speakers.

Parental Guidance, the band that was playing for the dance, was just beginning to go up onstage.

“I like your hair,” I told Dill.

“Then I’ll always wear it this way,” she said sarcastically.

“Dill,” I said. I don’t know what I would have said if she’d let me finish.

“You’re number nine,” she said, “after Todd Greenwald and Mildred Gregory.” Ice could have formed around her words.

She started writing out the ticket.

A guitarist from the band began practicing a few chords as the speakers went off and other members of Parental Guidance slipped into place.

The guitarist was warming up with an old Beatles song.

I shouldn’t have said, “Hey, maybe Gustavo Quintero’s showed up after all these years.”

“Don’t,” Dill said flatly.

I tried again to mumble something about being friends, about being sorry, but I was tripping over my own attempt at sincerity, mocking it inside, the way I knew Dill would if I ever got out the words. At the same time I caught a fleeting glimpse of dalmatian spots running by, throwing me off altogether. I looked over my shoulder, but Nicki’d disappeared into the crowd.

When I glanced back at Dill, she had that crooked smile. “She’s lighted on Roman now, up by the dance stand,” Dill said.

I tried grinning, shrugging. “You make her sound like a mosquito.”

“More like a flea,” Dill said coldly. “Mosquitoes glide, almost gracefully. Fleas hop. From person to person.”

“Well, Dill,” I said, “you haven’t lost your bite, either.”

“I haven’t
lost
anything, Rudd,” said Dill. “You’ll be the ninth couple.” She handed me the ticket.

I took it and headed down the dance floor toward Nicki. Roman Knight, in a long black trenchcoat, carrying a black cane, and wearing one skull earring, was barking down at Nicki’s legs.

I rescued her. We were the first couple out on the floor as Parental Guidance began playing.

“See, that sleazeball doesn’t like me at all,” Nicki said. “Barking at me! What’s his problem?”

“You’ve got on dogs’ legs,” I said. “When you put them on, didn’t you know someone would bark at them?”

“It’s more than that,” she insisted. “It’s him. It isn’t that.”

“It’s that!” I said firmly. “Just keep dancing.”

We danced. She was a fantastic dancer. She’d do things to music I’d never seen anyone do.

When the floor got very crowded, after several numbers, she said she wanted to go out to the SAAB and have her “nicotine fix.”

We stayed there awhile after she smoked, while we made out. I never thought I’d choose a dance in a high school gym over making out, but I was up to here making out, I think. I was hungry to get back to the action, and to be part of things again, to have Nicki there with me.

“Let’s go!” she said suddenly. “Do you want to stay?

“Go where?”

“Back to Kingdom By The Sea.”

“Why?”

“Because everything’s in full swing, Eri. I hate to stay until things are over…. And we’re ninth in that march!”

I just looked at her. “So what?”

“Dill did that purposely. Nine is a mystical number, not lucky!”

Dill knew as much about mystical numbers as Nicki knew about slumber parties. “Dill didn’t do anything,” I said. “Nine was what came up. What’s wrong with nine?” I said. “No, don’t tell me.”

“What’s wrong with nine?”

“Don’t tell me,” I said again. “I don’t want to know what’s wrong with nine.”

“There were nine rivers of hell,” Nicki said, “and the Hydra had nine heads.”

I thought of the time in Jack’s Mustang when he said Help me figure this girl out! I’d given him some zinger for an answer.

“I’m serious, Eri. I’d hear my mother warn about nine. Haunted people have to throw black beans over their shoulders and say, Avaunt, ye spectres from this house!’ nine times. Nine, our cat? He’s haunted.”

That was when Roman Knight’s black cane tapped against the rear window, and when we heard him barking. Heard other guys laugh and bark.

I thought that would do it. That would be the final straw, and I reached down into my trousers for the keys. They were inches away from the ignition when Nicki said, “He thinks he’s going to intimidate me so I’ll leave? Now I won’t!”

“What about nine?” I said. “What about rivers of hell and the Hydra and your haunted cat?”

“Don’t make fun of me, Eri. Please?” Then she said, “Does Dill know her initials are inside the ring you’re giving me?”

“No.”

“I wish she knew.”

“I know you do,” I said. “That much I know about you.”

“I want to go back to the girls’ room and fix my eyes,” she said. “I almost cried, but I’m all right now.”

When we got out of the SAAB, we could hear Roman Knight calling out Nicki’s name from behind a row of cars. “Nick-ki? Woof woof!”

“What am I going to do about him?” she said.

“Bark back?”

She surprised me by laughing, hanging on to me. “I love you because you’re funny. I like funny. Jack was never funny. Even Ski was never funny. Am I funny?”

“You’re funny. But not ha ha funny.”

“Do you love me anyway?”

“I love you, Nicki, but you’re not easy.”

“You had easy,” she said, “and it bored you. When we get inside that plastic ring, do we kiss?”

“First I give you the ring.”

“Let’s kiss first,” she said. “I can’t stand to be one of the bunch.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told her.

The march was beginning to form as she ducked into the girls’ john, and I went into the boys’, across from it.

Jack and I were the only ones in there.

It was the first time we’d faced each other alone since the night he’d sat in the wet paint, in our kitchen. That long.

He didn’t say hello or how are you. I didn’t expect him to. He mumbled something I couldn’t hear, and I didn’t ask him what it was. He wasn’t dressed for the dance. He was in old 501s and a sweater, with a bomber jacket over it, his blond hair longer, falling into his eyes.

“Has she said she wants to leave yet?” he asked me. “She will.”

I didn’t say anything back. I walked up to the urinal and unzipped.

He said to my back, “I wondered if you’d show up here tonight.”

“I didn’t think you would,” I said.

“I brought Dill. She didn’t have a date.”

I kept my mouth shut.

“I didn’t have one, either,” he said.

“Well, you don’t like dances,” I said.

“I like them. I just never learned to dance. I was never very fast on my feet, not like you.”

“You’re fast enough on the football field,” I said.

“That’s the only place,” Jack said, “and I never did learn to come from behind. Not like you.”

When I was finished, I zipped up my trousers, turned around, and said, “Jack, I never planned it. You have to believe me.”

“I believe you,” he said. “I know what she’s like.”

“It isn’t her fault, either.”

“She always thought you didn’t like her. That bugged her.”

“I
didn’t
like her.”

“She’d say, ‘Jack, Erick doesn’t like me. What am I going to do?’ I’d say, ‘Sure, he likes you.’”

“I didn’t. At first,
I
didn’t.”

“I’d say, ‘Why wouldn’t he like you, Nicki? What’s not to like?’”

“Honest to God, Jack, I couldn’t help myself. It was something that couldn’t be helped!”

“I know that, old buddy,” he said softly.

“Do you? Really?”

He shook his head yes. He smiled at me the old way.

“So’s this something that couldn’t be helped,” he said.

The next thing I knew I was on the floor.

W
E WERE DRIVING VERY
slowly through a wet snowfall when she said, “Eri, is there a way you can spend all night with me?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “We’ve got company coming for Thanksgiving, and I think my nose is broken.”

“See, that’s why I want to be with you all night. It’s the least I can do.”

“What do you mean it’s the least you can do?” I said. “You sound like it’s a mission of mercy.”

“Well? Look at you!”

“Not like something you want to do.”

“Of course I want to do it! We never did it.”

“I haven’t even told anyone about you. I can’t tell my mother I’m staying all night at Dill’s. She’d never believe it.”

“She thinks
that’s
still going on?”

“Of course she thinks that’s still going on. I didn’t tell her any differently.”

“Can’t you call her and tell her you got into a fight, and you don’t want to face the company just yet? Can’t you say you’re staying with a friend?”

“Jack’s the only friend I’d stay with, and I’ve never stayed at Jack’s.”

“I can see why.” She laughed. “I’m sorry to laugh. Do you hurt a lot?”

“A lot,” I said.

She was sitting so close, she could just reach up and touch the egg on the back of my head.

“Don’t,” I said. “It really does hurt. And I have to concentrate on the road. I can’t see a damn thing, either. My right eye’s closing.”

“We’re two roads away from mine,” she said.

“I’ll watch. How come you never told anyone about me?”

“You don’t know my family. They’d want to meet you. If you think Jack’s family gave you the once-over, you should see mine.”

She lighted a Merit, blew out a stream of smoke, and said, “Don’t they even wonder why you and Jack aren’t friends anymore?”

“They don’t know anything that’s going on in my life lately.”

“Daddy always knows what’s going on in mine,” she said, “but it’s like he’s been in shock since my mother died. He tries to recapture his youth with all those kids who hang out in the bar.”

“They’re older than you are,” I said.

“No they’re not. Just in years. Daddy calls them The Gnats. They’re good for business, but they get on Daddy’s nerves. See, he loved my mother. Really. If I ever loved anybody that hard, I’d take sleeping pills and walk into the ocean.”

“Nicki,” I said, “I almost got my back broken because of you. I don’t even want to hear that you’d take sleeping pills and walk into the ocean if you ever loved anyone that hard.”

“You know what I mean, though, Eri. I’m talking about dark, flawed passions. I’m attracted to them, but I’m also afraid of them. They drag you down.”

“So does a fat lip and a cracked rib! Jesus! What are you going on about suddenly? I’m a basket case! Did this happen to me because of some little lightweight thing I got into with you?”

“No,” she said.

“What the hell are you talking about then?”

“I’m just talking,” she said. She quickly changed the subject. She said, “Anyway, nothing stopped that stupid march, did it? No fight could stop them from lining up with their school rings in their wet little hands.”

“Who says they had wet hands?”

“Oh, they were all nervous and excited over that march, so you know they had wet hands, probably wet their pants, too…. I didn’t say anything to you because I know you had your heart
set
on it, but I’d rather be in a march to the garbage dump than in that one. Jack did us a favor.”

“Some favor.”

Nicki had her hand, with my ring on it, on my knee.

“You know what I said to Jack?” she said. “This is your turn here, on the right, Eri.”

“I see it.” I made the turn, feeling the pain in my left shoulder. “What did you say to Jack?
I
didn’t even know you spoke to him.”

“I shouted at his back. ‘Anybody who’d do that to his best friend is a scumbag!’ … Roman Knight goes, ‘I thought
I
was the scumbag!’”

“What about what I did to
Jack
?”

“You didn’t really do anything,” she said. “I had my eye on you the first day I met you. The night we went out to Dunn’s? Way back then.”

“You did not.”

“I did, Eri. Only I thought you didn’t like me, and I’d never get you away from Dill Pickle.”