Sway (17 page)

“I don't think you're perfect,” I said, “if it makes you feel any better.”

“Much. Thanks,” she said. Most people didn't know that Bridget was sarcastic, because she never gave it away with the tone of her voice. I realized in that moment it was one of the things I liked about her. Listening to her talk was like listening to a perfect minor chord progression in a song.

“You're welcome,” I said, matching her nonsarcastic sarcasm.

“Why is it so easy for me to talk to you?” she asked.

“Maybe because you don't care what I think of you,” I said.

“No, I think maybe it's because you don't expect me to be anything but myself.” She laughed suddenly. “I think perfection would be boring for you.”

The sound of her voice had started to lull me to sleep and I tried to prop the phone against my ear so I wouldn't have to use the strength of my arm to hold it in place. My breath became slow and even as my body settled toward sleep.

“Jesse,” she said, so softly that for a minute I thought I had only imagined it.

“Bridget,” I said, savoring the feel of her name on my lips.

“Do you think that there is only one soul mate for every person in the world? That there is only one person we're meant to be with? That once you find the person you're supposed to be with you never have a doubt about it, ever again?”

“I don't know,” I said hollowly. “I hope not.”

She murmured in agreement and there was the muffled sound of her hair and face against the phone. “My parents have been together since they were sixteen. My mom's never been with anyone other than my dad. At least that's what she told me. They're not exactly an advertisement for early marriage.”

“Mm.”

“What about your parents?” she asked absently. “Were they like that? Married really young?”

“My mom was young,” I said as I suppressed a yawn. “Early twenties. My dad was a little older.”

She cleared her throat then, a soft
ahem
that made me conscious of her being halfway across town from where I was at that moment, and forever distant from me.

“What was your mom like?” she asked quietly, apologetically.

For a long time I thought about just not answering her. If it had been anyone else, my first reflex would have been to end the call.

“My mom—” I stopped, the words completely foreign on my lips after not speaking them aloud in so many months. “My mom was … incomprehensible,” I said. A pounding had started up in my head, a heartbeat of pain behind my eyes.

“What happened to her?” she asked. “The paper just said that she died from a possible overdose.”

“Is that like your hobby or something?” I asked. “Googling other people's personal tragedies?”

“I wanted to know,” she said simply.

Again she waited through the long silence, her breath in my ear. “My mother was not well,” I said. Dramatic understatement.

Even when my mother had been present she wasn't much of a presence. For most of my childhood she had lived in a twilight of depression and functional alcoholism. Artistic or eccentric is how people described her when they were being polite, which most of the time people aren't. My mother had been distant from me for so long before she left this world that I hardly felt anything about it at all when she checked out for good—I neither loved nor hated her by the time she died. Shit, if I was married to someone like my dad, I might be tempted to take my own life too. He's the quintessential douche bag.

In the summer between my sophomore and junior years she ate several bottles of antidepressants and pain medications. They were all prescribed, just not prescribed to be taken all at once. She chased it with half a bottle of whiskey. My dad was the one who found her. Thank God.

“The rumors are true,” I said dully. “She killed herself.”

“Jesus,” Bridget said, then, “Jesus,” again since there wasn't really anything else to say. “Suicide. Such an awful word.”

“They didn't call it that,” I said, finding it almost easy to talk now, speaking to the darkness and music that enveloped me like a cocoon. “Not to our faces. They were very polite about it—the police.”

“And now you carry that around with you,” she said.

“In the place where the Wizard would put a heart if he gave me one,” I said.

“You do have a heart, Jesse. Even if it's broken. I'm so sorry.”

“Don't,” I said quickly. “I don't like pity.”

“I'm not giving you pity.”

“Good, because I don't want it.”

The silent game again. And, shit, if I wasn't going to lose. Again.

“Have you ever had a concussion?” I asked.

“No,” she said, her voice sleepy now.

“I did, once, when I was about twelve. I wasn't looking where I was going and rode my bike right into the corner of a moving van. No helmet,” I said, unconsciously lifting my hand to touch the side of my head where a three-inch scar was hidden by my hair. “I was knocked out for a few minutes. The next day when I woke up I couldn't remember anything that happened right before the accident, didn't remember the accident at all. My friends were with me, saw the whole thing and described it to me, to my parents, but I never could remember. It's as if that piece of my life was just lifted out and taken away.”

She didn't interrupt, didn't ask me the point to my story, just listened in silence, making me wonder if she had fallen asleep.

“It's like my brain decided to protect me from the whole experience, didn't let me remember the crash, how it felt,” I said thoughtfully. I had contemplated that incident many times in recent months, trying to decide if that biological mechanism was at work within me now—my brain trying to protect me, not allowing me to feel things that were too awful to examine in the light of day.

“I don't remember how anything felt before a year ago last month,” I said to the dark. “Just like that period of time that was wiped out when I was knocked unconscious—my mind won't let me feel anything,” I said, grasping for the words that could never adequately explain. “I don't know what it was like when I had feelings—it's lost and I can't remember it.”

There was nothing appropriate or helpful that she could say and she seemed to know that. Most people don't. They forge ahead, filling the moment with meaningless chatter.

“You won't say anything?” I asked. “Not even to Pete.” I hated this, the knowledge that she now owned a part of me. Secrets were power, but I was banking on the fact that Bridget had no use for power.

“You know I wouldn't say anything,” she said. “If you have to ask, you don't even know me.”

“Nobody really knows anyone,” I said, knowing it was a lie as I said it. I knew Bridget. And now she knew me. Fuck.

 

TWENTY-FIVE

Pete and I were sitting on the sidelines watching as Bridget conducted after-school practice with her team of knuckleheads. She had begged us to come so we could give the kids empty encouragement in the form of cheers and applause while they ran through their practice for the Special Olympics–knockoff event she was planning. We were in constant peril from the balls flying in every direction but their intended, downfield toward a hoop that was big enough a legally blind person could hit it.

There were lanes set up with cones for the kids to run short sprints and relays, half the time ending up in a big pile of arms and legs at the finish line when they all crashed into each other. Bridget wasn't daunted by their extreme lack of coordination, giving the kids pep talks like a real coach, always praising their efforts.

Ken showed up not long after and came to where we sat to deposit his backpack. “Hey, Pete,” he said in a tone that implied Pete was slow or hard of hearing, or both. “What are you doing here, Alderman?” His question was friendly enough but there was underlying tension in his tone.

“Just watching the debacle,” I said, letting boredom register in my voice. “Bridget wanted us to come and cheer them on.”

“Yeah?” he asked. “She didn't mention to me that you were coming.”

“I didn't tell her definitely either way,” I said. “You know how it is.”

“Sure, yeah,” he said uncertainly. He wasn't going to say more with Pete there but I knew Ken's hackles were up and he didn't like me being around his girl. I didn't blame him. I didn't like it when other guys looked at her either.

Ken went over to join Bridget then. He leaned in to kiss her on the mouth but she turned her face to accept a kiss on the cheek, her eyes darting nervously to the kids to see if they were watching.

A few minutes later the courtyard door opened again and out walked a real big girl with long, full brown hair pushed back from her face with a headband.

Bridget waved to the girl and flashed her signature angelic smile. Even out of earshot I could tell the girl was cool toward Ken, but she greeted him with a nod and favored Bridget with a brief hug. I caught Ken's expression of distaste as his eyes passed over the girl's lumpy, oversized figure.

Though she was overweight she was unapologetic about it, in tight red jeans and black ankle boots with a platform heel. She wore an oversized sweater covered in beads and sequins that made your eyes hurt if you studied it for too long.

“Who's that?” I asked Pete.

“Theresa. A friend of Bridget's,” Pete said without much interest. “She comes sometimes to work with the kids.”

Theresa wasn't much of an athlete, but she huffed and puffed around the courtyard retrieving balls and cheering like a lunatic. The kids loved her and showed as much affection for her as they did for Bridget.

Ken put on a good show for Bridget but after a while he had trouble hiding his boredom, kept studying his phone every time he thought Bridget wasn't paying attention. He was always all smiles for Bridget and never missed an opportunity to put a possessive hand or arm on her. At one point he put an arm around her shoulder and she rested comfortably against him. I looked away as he leaned in to plant a kiss on her forehead. Jesus, I hated seeing them together.

After Ken, Theresa, and Bridget had cleaned up the gear, Bridget came to talk to Pete and me. “Hey, guys. We're going to get something to eat. Want to come with us?”

“Sure,” I said before Pete could respond. He glared at me but I ignored him.

“Man, why did you say we wanted to go?” Pete asked when the others had piled into Ken's car.

“I'm hungry,” I lied.

He sighed but just climbed into the passenger seat of the T-Bird. I slapped Pete's hand away from the radio controls as he tried to change it from the classical station and he sighed again.

*   *   *

The diner where we ended up was a popular hangout for most of the douches from school. Half a dozen tables were taken up by people from Ken's clique and the satellite cliques that form around football players and cheerleaders. People were talking across the aisles or moving from one table to the next to visit with each other. This wasn't a place where I would find any of my people, but all of Ken's posse was here.

We sat in a booth—Ken and Bridget on one side, Theresa next to me, and Pete hanging awkwardly at the end of the table in an extra chair.

“Theresa, you know Jesse, right?” Bridget said, making introductions as we slid into our seats.

“How you doing?” I asked with a nod.

Theresa appraised me coolly, seeming to size me up in one long glance. “Sure,” she said without much enthusiasm.

I had the best seat in the house, across from Bridget. My foot bumped Bridget's under the table and came to rest against hers. She didn't look at me or acknowledge that our feet were touching, and she didn't pull away. Even that insignificant physical contact was enough to make my body hum with desire. Pete moped and Ken shot me wary glances while Bridget and Theresa kept up a steady stream of meaningless chatter and I savored the feel of Bridget's foot against mine. Had I been stoned, it would have qualified as one of the most surreal moments of my life. By the way she behaved toward me, it was unclear how much Bridget remembered of our conversation from the other night, though I had replayed it in my mind so many times, I could almost watch it like a film reel in my head. I wondered if Bridget's mind was on me too, or if she thought nothing of our feet pressed together under the table.

Pull yourself together, Alderman.

After a few minutes, Ken tugged at Bridget's sleeve and said, “Babe, let's go over and say hi to the guys.”

“Uh—” Bridget glanced uncertainly at the three of us and didn't move to follow Ken as he started to slide out of the booth.

“Go ahead,” Theresa said as she sipped on the straw of her milk shake. “Don't worry about us.”

“We'll be back in just a minute,” Bridget said. As she slid her foot away and broke our physical connection, our eyes met and I detected disappointment in her gaze. She ruffled Pete's hair with her fingers as she slid out of the booth and took Ken's waiting hand. Annoyed, Pete jerked his head away from her and smoothed his hair.

With Bridget gone I turned my attention to Theresa and Pete. Theresa's wide thighs took up more than her fair share of our bench, and my leg was hot where it touched hers. The waitress dropped our food at the table a minute later—a huge burger piled high with bacon and cheese and a mountain of fries for Theresa. It surprised me that she ordered so much food—basically a public announcement that her large size was not due to some rare metabolic disorder, that she really did eat like a pig. But she didn't show any shame about it.

Pete and I both watched as she squeezed a glob of ketchup onto her plate. “So, what the hell is wrong with your sister?” Theresa asked Pete, her eyes on her food. “She could date just about any guy in school and she chooses to go out with that loser? What does she see in him?”