The Best Kind of People (27 page)

SHE WENT TO
Jimmy’s house after school to pack her things. Forget about breaking it to Jimmy. What would he care? She’d gathered everything together in the guest room when she heard his skateboard in the driveway. She decided to ice him out, hauling her bags downstairs as he was coming in, but he looked suitably contrite.

“Baby, I’m so sorry about earlier. Come to my room?” He grabbed her hand. His fingers were red and freezing. It was getting too cold out to skateboard.

She obliged, reluctantly, following him down the hall, knocking one of the sunflower frames off its hook with her shoulder by accident. She set it right. She sat on the edge of his bed, which she noted he had actually made. He’d also picked up the strewn clothes and the room smelled less of decay and corporal pleasures and more like fresh air blowing in through the open window. He had prepared for her to be here. He wanted her to come back to his room.

“Nice cleanup job, babe,” she said. She got up and ran her hand over a stack of magazines on his desk, all in order, fiddling with a pen stacked neatly amongst its peers in a Mason jar beside his computer.

“You’re not my fucking sister,” he said. “It was starting to seem like we’re siblings instead of lovers. I
love
you, Sadie. I thought last night changed things back, but it doesn’t seem like it.”

He patted the space beside him. She sat down, but she didn’t want to.

“I was super stoned last night. I don’t even remember,” she said.

Jimmy’s eyes widened and then contracted, hurt. “I don’t
care
if we don’t fuck right now. I mean, I care, but more important is our love, right?” He spoke to the bookshelf, hands balled up.

“Yes, it’s important. I’m just so … stressed.”

She sat down on the carpet and grabbed his guitar. She played the C chord, the only one she knew. She heard herself being a jerk again but couldn’t stop. This was important to him, maybe the most important moment of his day. And she couldn’t bring herself to care.

“I know, but, like, being boyfriend-girlfriend is more than just doing it. You don’t even look at me, not the way you used to. You bristle when I touch you, even just a hug.”

She played the chord over and over again, feeling like a failure as a girlfriend.

“I’m going to move back home.”

Jimmy just stared at her. That wasn’t what he’d been expecting to hear.

“Maybe it would be better if we took a break from each other. Get some space, like, not break up but, like, spend less time together,” she said, lifting the guitar back up and placing it on its metal stand in the corner of the room.

He looked as if he might start crying. “I guess so,” he said.

She reached out to him, traced her hand along his jaw and tried to kiss his face.

He turned away, got up, and stormed out.

THERE WAS NOTHING
left to do but go back home. She decided to knock on Kevin’s door before leaving, to say goodbye. She opened the door and found his laptop was gone, and his clothes were actually neatly ordered into piles. She ran downstairs.

“Where’s Kev?” Sadie asked Elaine. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

Elaine was folding towels on the kitchen table. “Oh, honey, he went to Iowa today, remember?”

“Okay,” she said, pretending to be fine with that.

“I see you’re leaving us,” she said. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, you’ve been so nice, but I should go back home.”

“I’ll give you a ride, then,” she said.

Sadie shoved her backpack in the back seat of Elaine’s little Kia. Jimmy was skateboarding in the driveway, ignoring her. She pretended to look at her phone but kept him in her periphery.

When she got home, she curled up on the couch in the den and watched a marathon of home improvement shows. It was something she knew absolutely nothing about. If forced to build a house, she wouldn’t know where to start. She appreciated that feeling.

She pressed Mute, and heard her mom on the phone with Aunt Clara.

“She’s moody, she’s stomping around with a sour look on her face. I’m so happy to have her back.”

Every few hours she went out to the boathouse and used the one-hitter she’d stolen from Kevin to smoke what was left of the secret pot stash he’d hidden in the film canisters. She dropped the last bit between the boards of the floor and it fell into the water. Out on the dock she could see a bonfire on the beach at Amanda’s house, the sound of Amanda’s favourite song playing on repeat.

She was supposed to be writing in her feelings journal every day for Eleanor. So far she’d scrawled
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
across every page.

Fuck it
, she decided. She got on her bike, not bothering with a helmet or a reflective jacket the way she normally did at night. She biked close to the edge of the ditch, her resolve strengthening the closer she got to Amanda’s house, the music growing louder. She parked her bike against the oak tree and wandered around the house to the front, where a large crowd had gathered around a bonfire. A bunch of kids were drunk enough to be making out on the grass despite the cold weather. She felt a lurch in her stomach at the thought of coming across Jimmy making out with some other girl.

The kids sober enough to notice her gave her curious looks. Some said hello or nodded. She walked into the kitchen to get a drink and looked for Amanda. She’d been in this kitchen a hundred times before. She took a plastic cup and filled it with vodka from a bottle on the kitchen island. It was hard to believe, she thought, but she’d never really been all that drunk before. A little bit tipsy on wine once, but that was it. Never enough to forget anything, or do anything regrettable. She took a long swig and nearly threw up in the sink, but held it down. Her face burned hot, and she could feel the liquid going all the way down. When she regained her composure, and filled the rest of the cup with Coke, she noted a different group of kids in the room, all staring at her. They were young. Amanda’s sister rose from the group.

“What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean? I’m here all the time,” Sadie said, shrugging, her high quickly sharpening.

“I love that you’re just pretending everything is normal. Not
everything
is normal. I don’t want anyone from your disgusting family coming here ever again, do you hear me? Everything has been fucked up since that dumb trip!” She was screaming now, her friends gathering around her in a huddle.

Sadie stepped back, shocked. It stung, right in the middle of her chest, as though she’d had the wind knocked out of her entirely. “I’m sorry, but
I
didn’t
do anything
to
you.
”

The face she’d seen as a toddler, and on the annoying seven-year-old who followed them around, had become this girl’s face, full of rage, with circles of black eyeliner around each eye.

A girl stood up behind Amanda’s sister. “It’s not Sadie’s fault,” she said. Sadie recognized her long wheat-blond hair. Miranda.

“Shut up, Miranda. You know what? Maybe it’s
your
fault. We weren’t going to say anything before you convinced us, and now my mom reads every text message, and no one will date me, and Mrs. Clarke suggested we all write essays about a time when we were dishonest and our lies ruined an innocent person’s life, and she looked at me the
entire time.
”

“We can’t turn against each other,” Miranda said weakly.

“Get out of my house, both of you,” Amanda’s sister said.

Sadie downed the cup of Coke, watching Miranda gather her oversized purse and leave, walking deliberately slowly with her head held high. No matter what she did, she seemed to have the grace of someone twice her age. Sadie gave her a head start before pushing through the dancers on the porch and stumbling down onto the grass. She watched Miranda peel out of the driveway in her mom’s Lexus. She felt bad for her.

“Sadie,” she heard a voice say before realizing it was Amanda, who put a hand on her arm. “Uh, listen, I’m sorry I didn’t invite you, but you’re not allowed here anymore, remember?”

Sadie nodded. She felt so foolish. Everyone was staring. One girl laughed, high-pitched and drunken.

She noticed Jimmy sitting by the fire, nursing a tall can of
PBR
, looking her way but not getting up. He was sitting next to Brooke Neissen, who was poking at the fire with a long stick and looking casual and beautiful and calm in a way that made Sadie want to push her into the flames. Sadie stared at Jimmy for a few beats, waiting for him to get up and come to her. When she realized that wasn’t going to happen, she ran around the house and got back on her bike. She peddled to the end of the driveway and paused, watching the darkness, hoping to see Jimmy, her ally, come into focus. The song switched, the crowd sang along with the chorus. She was already forgotten. She left, trying to stifle her sobs until she was surrounded only by forest. Then she began sobbing loudly, her cries echoing all around the lake.

Her phone beeped and she stopped on the side of the road, hoping it was Jimmy or Amanda. But it was an email from Kevin. “I’ve been thinking about you, a lot. I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye. How are you holding up?”

Instead of biking around Lakeside Road, she turned left at the Coffee Hut, which was the exact midpoint between her and Amanda’s houses. At first she rode just to feel herself go, and then picked a destination: the park close to the public high school. There was Billy’s One-Stop Burgers at one end, a parking lot, and a circle of picnic tables near the edge of the woods that led into the state park. Teenagers hung out there at night. Everybody knew that. Sadie didn’t, though. That area was for townie girls and the punk kids and people who did drugs. When she was thirteen, her father had bought them ice cream from Billy’s after a piano recital. They’d walked by a group of teenagers, one with high blue hair that looked like cotton candy. As her father unlocked the car, he’d said, “I don’t want to ever see you here hanging out with these kids, okay? This is what happens when teenagers don’t have enough guidance.”

Sometimes Amanda went there on Fridays with her friend from gymnastics club, but mostly Sadie thought it seemed dumb to just sit around and look cool, drinking beer out of soda cups and watching whoever inevitably started to fight. She’d been there with Jimmy before, but only to stop for food.

The area was pretty dead that night. Maybe she could just disappear. This was the kind of place where teen girls just faded into the trees, or wound up in Dumpsters, maybe not in Avalon Hills but certainly on
TV
. The cops must have come around. It seemed too quiet.

Inside Billy’s One-Stop, the lights were so bright that her inebriation came roaring back. The restaurant hadn’t been renovated in years, and still looked the same as it had when she was a kid. The radio played classic rock, and a girl was singing along, mopping the far corner and staring out at the parking lot. There was only one table occupied, by a woman who was feeding french fries to a chihuahua. Sadie stood near the counter and watched the dog eat a few fries. The woman smiled at her as though they knew each other somehow. Sadie thought that she had never seen anyone look so lonely. Although the woman didn’t seem sad at all.

Sadie ordered a Diet Coke from an acne-scarred red-haired kid. She gripped the edge of the counter, watching the kid fill the cup and glancing towards the door, where she saw Dorothy enter with a teenaged girl. She looked down at the counter, staring only at the cup and removing the paper slip from the straw, hoping Dorothy wouldn’t talk to her. She didn’t want to be invited back to one of those fucked-up meetings. She was aware of them behind her, heard Dorothy say, “Buy whatever you want, Miranda, it’s on me. Have a sundae! A burger — really, anything you want.”

Miranda?

In her periphery, she noted that it was indeed Miranda, slumming at One-Stop Burgers. And with the school secretary? Was she in a David Lynch movie? Sadie bolted, knowing she had only a few seconds before she’d be noticed, and ran towards the picnic table closest to the restaurant door, where she sat as though waiting for a friend to come out. She could see Miranda and Dorothy hunched over trays of food. She noted Miranda’s Lexus sparkling between the scattered offerings of Hondas and Toyotas.

The table was carved with missives, declarations, pejoratives, and dick drawings. She chewed at the straw, running her finger along
Jane Is So High
and
Missy Fucks Hard
and glancing back in the restaurant, both curious about and repulsed by Dorothy and why she would be at One-Stop Burgers with a student.

She pulled her hood over her head and looked down, scrolling through various apps on her phone, then reread Kevin’s email. A group of kids showed up eventually, settling in at the next table, and looked over at her. She had her headphones on so they would think she was listening to music, but she was eavesdropping on bits of their conversation.

That’s that girl.

Her dad, fucking pervert.

Rich kid.

Slutty private-school girls.

Best blow jobs, am I right?

Like you would know.

Shut up.

What is she staring at?

She looks sad. You like those emo girls, don’t you?

Sadie was readying to leave when one of them lit up a joint, and she remembered what she had come for. She cocked a hip and performed the confidence she didn’t feel. “Hey, are you holding? Or know anyone who is?” She’d heard that in a movie once.

When they stopped laughing at her, they pointed out an idling car at the edge of the lot. “He’s a balding guy named Gary. He always wears a plaid shirt and smells like onions, but he’s harmless.”

“Thanks,” she said.

The girl nodded and smiled warmly, before Sadie left and walked over to the car.

Gary was amicable enough. When she’d pocketed the two grams of pot, he said, “I also make my own organic yogurt and we’re starting a line of pickled beets and radishes. Tell your parents! I mean, only about the pickles!”