Spontaneous (7 page)

I
've been a cagey little weasel, haven't I? You're probably wondering what happened after that kiss in the woods, aren't you? Did Dylan throw me down on the moss and ravage me? Are our clothes still hanging from the trees? Does the moon blush, thinking of the raw carnality she witnessed?

Sorry to disappoint, but it was only kissing and petting, but kissing and petting aren't nothing. Especially when helicopters show up and start stabbing the woods around the school with spotlights. Kissing and petting feel downright illegal at that point. And trust me, it's always best to be fully clothed when you run out of the woods and find your peers huddled up and asking each other, “Again? Really? Again?”

Really. Again.

The police couldn't round up and interview everyone at the football game. They certainly couldn't rope off the scene. So when Joe Dalton spotted me, he rushed over and said, “We're
hightailing it out of here before shit goes crazy. Jenna's pulling the car around to Rumson Road and we're heading to Laura's house to get blind. You in?”

“Who's gonna be there?” I asked, because guest lists are important when blindness comes into play.

“Me, Jenna, Laura, Holly, Greer, and Rasheed,” Joe said.

A more-than-acceptable roster, so I turned to Dylan and asked, “Do we join them?”

It was like Joe didn't even notice Dylan until I addressed him, like Dylan was some mythical beast that only materialized when its name was spoken. “Oh, hey, man,” Joe said. “Sure. You should come too.”

Dylan pursed his lips for a few seconds, then replied, “Nah. Go on ahead. Get somewhere safe. I'm going to stick around here for a while.”

I was in a bit of a pickle. I wanted to be with Dylan but I wanted to leave. The buzz of the night was wearing off and I was sinking back into the sludge of awareness.

Really? Again?

“Come on,” I said. “Nothing good will come out of staying here.”

“Have fun,” Dylan said, and before I could object, he kissed me on the cheek and jogged away, in the direction of the flashing lights.

I could have chased after him, I guess, but I didn't want to. He had left at the exact right moment, leaving me in a state of anxious anticipation. At Laura's house, all I needed was some gin and SunnyD to pick the buzz back up, and while everyone was trying to piece together what happened on the field, I was
musing about what might happen next with me and Dylan.

What happened next was a text, arriving at nine a.m., as I burrowed under a blanket on the living room couch. It read:

Everything,

I wrote back immediately.

Me: Deep.

Him: I meant that last night I felt everything
.

Me: Not every THING. Next time. Maybe.

Him: When's next time?

Me: Not today. Parents got me doing a double shift at the hug factory.

Side note: My parents weren't big huggers but, after Katelyn, they rolled up their sleeves and did their due diligence, smothering their daughter whenever her face got all droopy. It worked at first, but ever since Brian, it was the opposite of what I needed. Still, Mom and Dad wanted me home that Sunday to be their little stuffed animal. I think they'd come to depend on the hugging, in fact. This was no longer about me.

Him: When then?

Me: Not tomorrow either. Working at Covington Kitchen. Keeping busy helps.

Him: Should I stop in for an Oinker?

Me: Yaaassss! Wait. No. Not because I don't want to see you.

Him: Too much of a tease?

Me: Exactly. Monday?

Him: MONDAY!

As you already know, my deli gig was interrupted on Sunday by the emergency town hall. Cell reception was terrible at the theater, so even when I tried to connect with Dylan, I didn't get through, and I certainly couldn't spot him in that sea of anxiety. I'd love to break down all the bullshit that was shat out at that meeting, but I think covering Tina's DNA witch hunt is enough. Because it represents when the theories went off the rails.

That Sunday evening, my parents were still huggy, so I was constantly retreating to the bathroom for alone time and giving in to the stupid urge to pull out my phone and shake a virtual fist at all the trolls. TV was even worse. A tour of cable news resulted in teeth-grinding and blind-pulling because I was sure that some helmet-haired reporter was creeping through our shrubbery, about to thrust her head through our window and say, “So is it terrorists, homosexuality, or the overall crappiness of your hometown that's tearing your generation apart, young lady, and do you mind holding your answers and tears back until my cameraman gets the proper lighting in place?”

So I went dark for a few hours. I didn't text Tess or Dylan because if I couldn't see them in person and hold on to them, then it wasn't worth it. All I could do was get in bed and wait for sleep to grab me and whisk me along to a future closer to my date with Dylan.

O
n Monday morning, less than three full days after Perry Love spontaneously combusted, Cranberry Bollinger's dad waltzed into his daughter's room to wake her up and found Cranberry sauce all over her Miyazaki posters.

Fuck. Sorry. Bad joke. Old habits die hard. But come on, the girl's name was Cranberry.

It was and has always been Cranberry, as far as I know. My earliest memory of her is the first day of fourth grade, when Ms. Caldwell took attendance and said, “Cranberry Bollinger. Is Cranberry Bollinger here?”

“
Here
,” came a soft voice from the back and we all turned around to see a purple-haired, dark-skinned girl wearing a black T-shirt with a ghostly face on it. I didn't know until years later that the ghost face represented a Guy Fawkes mask, the symbol of Anonymous, everybody's favorite zit-faced army of hackers.

Yes, Cranberry was a hacker, a gamer, a cosplayer. Even back in fourth grade. I would tell you more about her if I knew more about her, but I don't. She was always just Cranberry, the girl whose name launched a thousand corny puns.

“Don't get bogged down, Cranberry.”

“Hey, Cranberry. You know what my favorite cocktail is? A Cape Codder. Because it's a mix of vodka and you.”

“Yo, Ocean Spray!”

She seemed to take it in stride, usually rolling her eyes and saying, “Hilarrrrrious!” or “Only heard that one about a billion times.”

Granted, most of it was harmless. Can't pack much punch into cracks about cranberries. It wasn't like she was named Cherry, Peach, or some other sexy fruit. Cranberries aren't sexy and neither was Cranberry. She was awkward. She was quiet. Outside of class, her headphones were always on and her head was always buried in a tablet. And yet . . . and yet . . .

She had a boyfriend. A
serious
boyfriend. Her consummate companion since ninth grade was Elliot Pressman, a fellow hacker, a fellow gamer, a fellow cosplayer. In other words, Cranberry was not gay. She was a lot of other things. She was black. She dyed her hair—pink being the latest and last incarnation. She was aggressively nerdy. But she was not gay.

Elliot Pressman could certainly attest to that fact.

When word got around that Cranberry was gone too, everyone turned to Elliot's Tumblr to offer condolences. What we found there was a tribute to a girlfriend. Tender and, well, I should let it speak for itself:

Cranberry, my love. While I was making love to you last night with the moonlight streaming in through the windows and caressing our naked torsos, and as the sweat from our bodies pooled up on the floor, and when our moans of pleasures shook the heavens, I knew our love was eternal and . . .

Okay, that's about enough of that. It goes on and on and you get the picture. Turns out Cranberry, bless her heart, was a wildcat in the sack, a lover for the ages. At least by Elliot's estimation. Not that he had many points of reference, but there are worse ways to be remembered by your boyfriend. No wonder I was once jealous of the girl.

That was a while ago, late spring of sophomore year. Tess and I were in chemistry. I was doing my best maintaining-my-B by gazing out the window at a gym class softball game. Cranberry and Elliot were in the outfield, but they weren't exactly waiting for their call up to the big leagues. They were lying next to each other in the grass, holding their phones aloft. Their other hands were buried in their softball gloves, but since Elliot was a lefty, and Cranberry a righty, they could hold hands with the gloves. How very cute and hygienic.

Ms. Schultz, our boxy and Botoxed gym teacher, must've had a romantic streak, or maybe she'd stopped giving a damn—rumor had it, she was perpetually on the verge of retirement—because she didn't budge or blow her whistle when the couple ignored the pop fly that dropped a few feet from them. Greg Holder sprinted in, scooped the ball up, and fired it toward second base, but not before shouting something at the couple.

“Get a room”?

“Email me that selfie”?

“Long live your everlasting love”?

I don't know, because I couldn't hear. But I could certainly feel the pangs of my insignificance as I sat there in a class that promised the world could be broken down into formulas.

Okay, fine. Then what the hell was the formula for what these two lovebirds had?

When the bell rang and broke me out of a daze of self-pity, I turned to Tess and said, “I would kill to have a boyfriend like Elliot Pressman.”

“Really?” Tess said as she packed up her notebooks. “But he's so . . . Elliot.”

“Sometimes all you need is an Elliot. A guy who'll hold your hand with a softball glove while you update your status. A guy who won't expect you to do things like talk to him or bathe.”

“So who'd you kill for your Elliot?”

“Cranberry, I guess.”

“Oh no. Not Cranberry. Cranberry is innocent. Cranberry is harmless.”

“For me to find happiness, Cranberry got to get got,” I said, and I held my hand out like I had a gun and tilted it sideways for the gangsta effect.

Of course, our incredibly kind chem teacher, Mrs. Otieno, was standing behind me when I did it, and I turned around and witnessed this tolerant woman, hanging and shaking her head. Not in disgust, exactly. In exasperation.

I felt like a total shit.

I don't know if Cranberry's spontaneous combustion made a lot of people feel like total shits, but it certainly made them rethink things. Besides eradicating the gaysplosion theories, it shattered any ethnicity arguments. We had a black girl, a white guy, an Asian dude, and a . . .

What exactly are people from Turkey? Turkish, of course, but are they European or Asian? Are they Arab? It doesn't matter, right? Because it obviously didn't matter then, which I think frustrated a lot of people who were hoping for some excuse for their racism.

“Well, leave it to them [
insert your least favorite skin tone
] folks to start poppin' off like bottle rockets!”

The more valid proximity arguments were becoming problematic too. The first three explosions took place on school grounds and so many, including myself, suspected something was in the air at Covington High. Magnetic waves? A grand confluence of cellular data? The chemicals wafting from the cafeteria food?

Cranberry lived at least five miles from school, in a split-level near the highway, so it was clear that even if the problem originated in the high school, it wasn't contained to the high school. A virus seemed a likely culprit, but the powers-that-be weren't quite ready to go down that path. There was something else to focus on.

D
rugs?” Mom asked me Monday afternoon as I waited in the armchair by the window.

“What's that?” I replied. My eyes were fixed on the driveway. Dylan was supposed to arrive at any minute.

“Drugs?” Mom asked again.

“No thanks,” I responded. “I did a bump of coke with breakfast.”

“Ha-ha, hilarious,” she said, and reached to put her hand on my shoulder, but pulled back when she remembered how I'd been avoiding hugs lately. “I mean with this Cranberry girl. I looked her up online and she, well, her hairstyle choices were interesting.”

“So she's on drugs?”

“Hey, all I'm saying is that the druggies stood out when I was in high school. A girl with orange hair? Come on.”

“Did you really call people druggies?”

“What do you call them?”

“Katelyn Ogden.”

“Wait, so Katelyn did . . . ?”

“Not like meth or anything. But I understand that she dabbled.”

Protip: When your parents ask you to confirm rumors that you know are factually true, it's best to start your confession with “I understand that . . .” Because, one, it's not a lie. You do understand. You understand the hell out of it. But, two, it distances you from the rumor. You're analytical about things, not emotional, which means you're not all wrapped up in the mess. You're an observer.

“Dabbled?” Mom asked. “Who else dabbles? Shit. Tess doesn't dabble, does she?”

“Tess neither dabbles, tinkers, nor flirts,” I said. “Don't worry about darling Tessy. She is squeaky clean.”

I wasn't thrilled about the momentum of this conversation because it was obviously barreling toward me, a serial dabbler. I had yet to tell my parents about my dabbling, though I suspect they had their suspicions. Luckily, the momentum was stopped in its tracks by an ice-cream truck that pulled into our driveway.

When Dylan had texted earlier that he was coming to pick me up, he hadn't specified the mode of transportation. I had wondered for a second if he expected me to also have a skateboard, but I quickly convinced myself that he wasn't that naive. I'd never seen him driving a car, which led to me picturing horse-drawn carriages, Segways, and even bicycles built for two. I definitely did not expect a rusty old ice-cream truck, though I suppose I should have.

I leapt from the couch and through the front door to intercept Dylan as he made his way up the walkway. “Nice ride,” I said. “A bit cliché, don't you think?”

He didn't take the bait and turn around to look at the boxy white truck with the faded Popsicle and sugar cone decals on it. He simply shrugged and said, “Date a lot of ice-cream men?”

“Of course you don't show up in a Hyundai or something,” I said. “You've gotta be the kid who rolls up in something quirky, endearing, and yet strangely manly.”

“First time I've driven it actually. I usually take my mom's minivan or my brother's pickup, but they're both occupied.”

“You've got a brother? I didn't know you had a brother.”

“There's a lot you don't know about me.”

Mom was in the doorway, watching our exchange, sizing up the chariot that was going to whisk me away. I wondered what she knew about Dylan. Surely the rumors hadn't reached the adult sphere. But you never know what she overhears at the deli.

“Nice to see you again, Dylan,” she said. “I'm guessing that thing doesn't have airbags.”

Dylan shook his head and said, “Seat belts though. And it reaches a maximum speed of forty-five miles per hour when it's going downhill, so there won't be any drag racing, I can assure you of that. Strictly an around-town vehicle.”

“Like a trolley car,” I added. “You're not afraid of trolley cars, are you, Mom?”

She shook her head. “I'm not sure what to be afraid of these days.”

While I would have loved to shrug off her worries as typical parental jitters, how could I possibly do that? It was a tough time to be a kid, but, good God, I couldn't imagine what sort of panic had overtaken our parents' brains. The best I could do was redirect
things with a joke. Only it wasn't really a joke. It was more of a test.

“Don't worry, Momma Bear,” I said. “Dylan is only taking me to meet his three kids and then we're going to burn down a convenience store or two.”

She rolled her eyes. A good sign. She detected hyperbole.

Dylan, on the other hand, rolled with the punches, which I wasn't sure how to interpret. “That wasn't the plan, actually,” he said. “But I guess if we have time, we can fit those things in.”

Grumbling audibly, Mom accepted this all as teenage snark. “Be safe,” she said.

Be safe. In the history of moms, has there ever been a more useless declaration? My mom isn't stupid, of course. She knows saying “be safe” won't make me any safer. She knows that hugging me won't make me any safer either. Still, she rushed over and hugged me because even if I wasn't gaga for that stuff lately, and even if that stuff wouldn't prevent me from blowing up, she couldn't let me leave her sight without at least squeezing the ever-living fuck out of me.