Sex & Violence (7 page)

Great. Silence usually went unnoticed by chatty girls like her.

“Uh, thanks for the introduction,” I stuttered.

“We’re pretty accepting over here. It’s the north side you need to worry about. They’re houses are sickening. Though Conley’s is pretty big too.”

“Who’s Conley again?”

“The blonde girl? Who came in with Jim and Taber?”

I nodded. “Is she Taber’s girlfriend?”

“No,” Baker seemed disgusted by the thought. “Conley hasn’t had a boyfriend forever. Because last summer she went out with this loadie dude on the south side? Who had a grim reaper tattoo on his chest? God, he was a freak. But her parents caught her with him and made her break up with him, and she’s not over it yet.”

“Pearl Lake’s starting to sound like
West Side Story
,” I said.

“Exactly,” she laughed. “Except no violence. Or singing.

Unless it’s the Tonneson’s Midsummer Party. That’s always nuts. And Jim’s party might be crazy too. I’m a little nervous about that, because he’s invited way too many people. I don’t get why he did that.”

“Because it’s the summer of no rules?”

She laughed. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

It was hard to keep track of the people I met, but I tried.

Baker dragged me around by the elbow of my hoodie. You could tell she liked being social and that people liked this about her too. She could talk to everyone without pause. Old people. Moms holding sleeping little kids. Men bullshitting about boats. My father was there, too, shockingly, standing by Baker’s mother
—Brenda
, I told myself,
Baker and her mother Brenda,
trying to remember—and this gay-looking guy, who was supposed to be Brenda’s boyfriend, but I seriously doubted he was any female’s boyfriend because he was wearing purple yoga pants. Brenda Trieste looked a lot like Baker, except she wore a long hippie sundress with hiking boots. Brenda laughed with my father, who then smiled at me while he drank beer from a plastic cup.

All of this made me nervous. I’d had no idea we were moving to a place where everyone was up in our business. But my dad never gave me any information about places we moved before, beyond what to pack and how long the trip would be. I kind of wanted to get away from this, from Baker especially, but she wouldn’t leave me alone.

Finally, I said I needed to piss and went into the Tonneson’s cabin to do it. The Tonneson’s cabin was shabby likes ours but had way more stuff on the walls and none of it the Gone Fishin’

variety. The bathroom was basically a shrine to male frontal nudity, and above the saggy living room sofa was a pretty por-nographic print of a naked woman spread-eagled in a chair.

“My mom’s nuts,” Tom said, catching me looking at the nude lady picture.

“Your dad probably doesn’t mind.”

“She teaches theater arts,” he said, as if that explained it.

“So there’ll be fairy costumes and shit at our Midsummer Party in June. I’m just warning you now.”

“I hate the Midsummer Party.” It was Jim of the piano-key teeth, holding a bag of Chili Cheese Fritos and shoving them into his mouth by the handful. “It’s so gay.”

We all went to sit down in the TV room, where Taber The Giant was stretched out watching SportsCenter.

“When’s the Midsummer Party?” I asked.

“June 20,” Tom said, sounding tired, as if it he was the one making the fairy costumes himself.

June 20 was my birthday. I was turning eighteen. Though I would be a senior—if I bothered to set foot in a school again, that is—I was always the oldest kid in my class, as my mother had held me back from kindergarten. My mother hadn’t been one of those grasping, hovering moms—I mostly remember her as a very calm woman who was always reading—but apparently she thought me too much of an idiot to handle sitting still for storytime with everyone else. But for some reason, being held back like this made me feel stupid, so I never mentioned my birthday as a rule.

“We should do the ’shrooms on Midsummer,” Jim said.

“That would make it less gay.”

“Looking at a bunch of glitter and rainbows isn’t gay enough?” Tom asked. “You want to hallucinate on top of
that
?”

“I can’t figure out what Baker’s mom is doing with that gay guy,” Taber said suddenly. “I mean, he teaches yoga? To goats?”

This was very funny to me, mostly because Taber talked very slowly, like he’d taken too many hits on the football field without a helmet.

“It’s a sheep farm,” Jim said. “Keir just teaches yoga on the side. But they sleep together,” he added. “Baker says they share a bedroom.”

“Maybe they just do each other’s hair?” Tom said.

“No, it’s some fucked-up feminist thing,” Jim shook his head. “Some shit where you act as gay as Christmas and women think it’s hot. At least weird professor women like Brenda think it’s hot.”

“What’s she a professor of?” I asked.

“History or something.” Jim was all pissy, like it made him mad that people did history for a career. “I think the dumb
non-monogramy
thing was Brenda’s idea too.”

I was kind of loving it that he mispronounced this again and might have laughed, but I had to let it ride, since he’d been smoking weed and I was lucky to string together three words in a row when I was high.

“What does that even mean?” Tom asked.

“It’s like an open relationship,” Jim explained. “We’re together, but we can see other people. She said it’s that or we just break up completely. At first, I was like, ‘Okay, is this a trick?’”

Jim’s head lolled back on the sofa, like he was exhausted by such complexity. “She thinks it’ll make it easier when we leave for college, because she doesn’t believe in long-distance relationships.”

“Where’s Baker going to college?” I asked.

“Out in Oregon somewhere. But I don’t think she’ll hook up with anyone else. She’s so fucking picky about everything.

Like she’ll be able to find anyone who’ll do everything how she wants.” He didn’t sound exactly smug about this but more like he recognized that his own stellar capacity struggled to keep up with her requirements.

Aside from his super-white teeth—which were somewhat gay to me, in all their upkeep—Jim was a handsome guy. Easy to see why any girl would want him. He had normal hair—

not all gelled and stupid—and the muscles I would like to have but never do because the strutting-douche quotient in school weight rooms is always too high. Still, Jim looked like the kind of guy whose favorite place to eat was a sports bar. Who’d probably grow up to be the vice president of something and make more money than was reasonable and who’d marry a superhot chick but still secretly go to titty bars. I naturally leaned toward hating such a guy—would’ve hated him before my elf ears and chemo hair patheticness too.

“Hey, maybe all the girls will decide to go for that …

thing
,” Tom said, not mentioning non-monogamy, as if he wasn’t sure how it was truly pronounced.

Then Kelly K. dribbled into the room, looking all girl-wasted, and saying, “
Tommmmmm …
” in that dragging way that girls must think is appealing but I’ve always found to be a dick-shriveler. I stood up to head out.

“Loadie party, dude,” Taber said, holding out his concrete block fist to me so I could bump it. Then, because I suddenly felt like I would die if I couldn’t get in my bed, far away from everyone, I followed Tom and Kelly out, where they staggered and veered off toward the compost patch presumably for some kind of groping that didn’t involve penetration. My father was now talking to the gay, yoga-sheep-farming, feminist boyfriend, looking like he was actually enjoying himself, and I shuffled home without saying good-bye to anyone. Not that I could remember their names, to start with.

***

Back home in the bathroom, feeling panicked and a little drunk, I trimmed my hair with the scissors I kept in my shave kit, snipping a bit on my left ear, which bled like hell until I wrapped it in toilet paper. I stripped out of my shitty, bonfire-smelling clothes and got in bed, eager for descriptions of beaver dams and the sound of waves from the open balcony window to knock me into the usual oblivion.

But just as E. Church was lulling me into my coma, I realized that the only person who didn’t declare her Last Chance Activity was Baker. She had asked everyone else to say theirs but hadn’t spoken hers. Was that because there was too much a bossy, virgin girl like her had left to experience? I thought about how weird she was. Her name, her mix of normal and deviant. Her potty mouth, her tour guide act. Her nice legs and cute face. It was a long time before I slept.

Dear Collette,

Say it’s your last summer before college. Or your last summer
after high school. Whatever. Going to college for me sounds like going
to Mars. Anyway. What would you do, your last summer? Your Last
Chance to hang out with the same people you’ve gone to school with this
whole time? What would you do?

Except, that doesn’t really work for you and me. Because you’ve
switched schools and so have I. Maybe you have old friends in Boston? I
don’t know anyone. Anyway. What would you do? Your last summer
as a teenager. Kinda. WHATEVER. I’m trying to come up with
something myself.

Nothing sexual, for one. That’s been done, and while I’d hope
to have it happen again sometime before I hit the old coffin, it’s not
exactly on the urgent must-do list.

And I don’t need to try any drugs or whatever. I mean, I like getting drunk and smoking weed here and there, but I’m not crying out
to learn what crystal meth feels like or anything.

I guess I just don’t want to do anything risky with my body. Not
anymore. My body is so fucked up, and I feel like an old man sometimes. So cliff jumping or skydiving or driving at high speeds (my
car’s a fucking Subaru, which disqualifies it from coolness in all ways)
all sound like terrible ideas. I don’t want to get in a fight with anyone.

I think I got that experience covered.

All I talk about is shit I don’t want to do. I don’t even know what
I like.

Later, Evan

My father must have drank too much at the bonfire, because it was almost noon and he was still in bed. This was his first hangover I’d ever been aware of, and it was working in my favor so far. Across the way, I could see Baker and her mom and Gay-Yoga-Sheep Guy setting up food around a picnic table.

I went to brush my teeth and have my daily staredown with the shower. Pushing back the curtain, I didn’t see any spiders, just one of those ladybug things that aren’t ladybugs but some kind of exotic beetle. I smelled like hell since I couldn’t go in the lake last night because of the bonfire. But even reaching out to turn the water on freaked me out. So I just wiped down my pits with a washcloth, put on deodorant, trimmed down my hair a little more, and got dressed.

Then I drove as quietly as I could up the drive and then into Marchant Falls to this place called The Donut Co-op to eat breakfast and read
Under the Waves
. I rang the counter bell, and the guy who came out gave me a two-for-one on the donuts and free refills on coffee and didn’t care that I sat there all afternoon reading about the life cycle of the mayfly, as presented by my boy E. Church Westmore. I was about to mark my place in the book, when I came to this passage:

Formally known as Two Storey Island, later shortened to
Story Island, this formation has been a distinct feature of
Pearl Lake since time immemorial. Purchased in 1859 by
Anson F. Archardt, it was left inviolate for over fifty years
until noted lumber baron Barrett A. Archardt decided to
fortify the property with boulders to prevent erosion and
build his family a lake house on it. Archardt intended it as
a vacation home for his wife and three young children, but
tragically Archardt’s wife drowned not long after completion.

Archardt then leased the property to Kent County, on the
strict condition it be preserved in perpetuity as a sanctuary
for loons.

I drove around Marchant Falls, killing time, wondering how long a barbecue could last. I went into Cub Foods and got a bag of chips and a soda and saw they were hiring. My father paid for the car and insurance but had said gas was my responsibility, so I needed a summer job. That was one thing he always insisted on, wherever we lived—that I got some kind of part-time job. I grabbed an application from customer service and headed back home.

Once in the drive, I could see the empty picnic table at Baker’s cabin. Evidence of a barbecue but no people. I went into our cabin, flopped on the sofa and drank my soda and ate my chips. I thought about Story Island. The sanctuary for loons, the abandoned house, the motherless children. Barrett Archardt and his drowned wife. I thought of him holding her in their old-time clothing and her saying, “Oh, Barrett” all breathy, which was ridiculous, because what chick could get all worked up over anyone named “Barrett”?