The Princesses of Iowa (28 page)

My throat was tight, but I forced the words through. “You know what? I take it back. I
am
sorry for you, because you’re going to end up all alone. Too bad you didn’t die in the accident; everyone would forget what a bitch you are and make you into some kind of hero.”

“I wish I
had
died!” she screamed. “I wish we both had!”

I stood in the doorway of her room, shaking, as the words echoed through her and she collapsed in on herself, weeping.

And then I left. Left her sitting all alone in the middle of her room, barefoot, boobs shoved into a strapless Wonderbra to create the illusion of a chest in her satiny dress, the curling iron dangling in her right hand, half her hair still hanging straight and limp across her shoulders.

My flight brought back memories of the previous weekend: running down the wide front steps, taking them too fast even though my ankle still winced at the memory of its last journey down these stairs. I darted across the open doorway toward the dining room, hoping to avoid Brenda. The house was eerily quiet, and I imagined I could sense the gaping absence Lacey’s father had left behind him. I was burning with pure adrenaline and anger, hearing the ugly echoes of my own voice reverberating in the house’s gaping silence, shaking and shocked by my own capacity for evil. Maybe I
was
the bitch. Maybe we both were.

In ninth grade, Lacey and I saw this dumb made-for-TV movie where the girl comes home to find her boyfriend in bed with another woman. The boy sits up in bed, looking vaguely embarrassed, and the girl grabs this framed picture of them off the dresser and hurls it at his head, scattering glass everywhere, while the other woman grabs her things and runs from the house. The movie was terrible, but there was something about that scene that struck us, and we spent weeks afterward discussing it: In the girl’s place, would we do the same thing? Would we scream, break things, make a scene? Lacey said yes, but I worried that I wouldn’t, that I’d just run from the room without a word, silent and crying. Lacey laughingly agreed.

Well, now we know,
I thought wryly. I should tell Lacey.

And then it hit me.

I couldn’t tell Lacey. I couldn’t tell anyone. The adrenaline drained from my body. “I just broke up with Lacey,” I whispered to myself. She would never forgive me. Our friendship was done. I couldn’t remember a time I’d felt more out of control — or more alone.

I had to get out of there.

Jake’s. I’d go to Jake’s. I nodded, glad to have made the decision, because a person who could still make decisions wasn’t totally lost yet, was she? Armed with a plan, I headed toward the kitchen door. And then I was gone, realizing only much later that it might be for the last time.

Five minutes later, I pulled up in front of Jake’s house, my heart throbbing in the base of my throat. The radio went off with the ignition, and for a moment I sat in the car’s clicking silence as the engine cooled and tree branches bobbed against the windshield. The night was cloud tossed and windy.
“Wild nights!”
I whispered, remembering Mr. Tremont smiling to himself. The thought calmed me. I reached for my makeup bag and took a few moments to do my eyes in the rearview mirror. My hair looked surprisingly decent, considering I hadn’t managed to curl it or put it up or do anything but run my fingers through it on the drive to Lacey’s. A dab of my favorite lip gloss and I was good. Good enough, at least.

My hair was ruined the second I stepped out of the car; it whipped across my face in fierce strands like something living. Nikki wouldn’t be happy, I thought, before remembering that I’d messed up with her, too. Could I stay friends with Nikki after breaking up with Lacey? Would she choose Lacey over me? Would we make her choose?

I went in through the garage, mindlessly punching the numbers into the keypad. I knew this house as well as my own. My mother had been working for Stella Austin Events since the summer before eighth grade, and even before that I had come with Lacey, who’d been friends with Jake since they were little. The summer after seventh grade, my mother finally got her invitation to join the Willow Grove Country Club, and she immediately signed me up for tennis lessons. Afterward, Lacey and I would play doubles against anyone she could tease into joining us. Most days we played Chris Jensen and Jake. I spent the summer feeling strong and loose, savoring the way the sun warmed my suddenly long legs until I was sleek and tan and unstoppable.

That summer, for the first time in my life, I felt like everything was right. Lacey and I were inseparable. Any leftover loneliness from elementary school had faded away. Grown-ups started treating us differently, looking at us with something like respect, listening when we had something to say. Brenda started asking us for the latest gossip, and Lacey and I would tell her, crowded around the kitchen table with magazines and diet sodas. My mother never missed a chance to introduce me as her daughter.

At the end of that summer, Lacey and I snuck out of her house in the middle of the night and ran around the golf course’s perimeter, clinging to the wooded edge for cover, to meet Jake and some of his friends on the sixteenth hole. Five of us sat at the base of an old oak tree, in a circle like it was story time. Chris brought his iPod and tiny speakers. Jake brought a bottle of vodka-spiked Sprite. Lacey brought the skinny menthol cigarettes that Brenda pretended not to smoke. I sat between Lacey and Jake, watching the shadows shift on the blue grass in moonlight, shivering in the chill of the evening and the excitement of sneaking out. Jake took off his sweatshirt and draped it over my shoulders. And when, almost two years later, he kissed me under the misty trees in Lacey’s backyard, I remembered that moment, the scent and warmth of his sweatshirt against my summer skin.

I took a deep breath and pushed open the garage door. I paused in the mudroom between the garage and kitchen, listening. Jake’s house was almost identical in layout to Lacey’s, the same kitchen–dining room–foyer–living room pattern across the first floor. I always knocked, in case someone was in the kitchen; one time I’d startled Mrs. Austin and she’d screamed and dropped a very expensive wineglass on the Mexican tile. All was quiet, and I leaned my forehead against the door’s cool surface for a moment before opening it. The kitchen was dark, but I could hear voices in another room. Jake’s house always smelled light green, clean and sagey. I slipped out of my shoes and left them by the kitchen door, padding across the dark floor toward the front staircase. The voices got louder and my steps slowed, the back of my neck tight and prickling. I rested my fingers on the banister and silently lifted myself up the stairs, one at a time.

“I don’t care if it’s for a girl,” Jake’s dad was saying. “You are going to be a lawyer, not a damn poet! The only writing you do will be legal briefs and client letters, and most of the time you won’t even write them, your secretary will. You understand what I’m saying, son?”

I stopped, hardly daring to breathe.

Jake’s response was too quiet for me to hear, but his father’s rumbled back. “Then buy her something nice! Take her out to dinner; buy her flowers! I won’t have my son writing poetry like a damn faggot!”

A door slammed, and I sprinted back down the stairs and slid across the polished wood of the dining room. Heavy footsteps followed, tromping down the stairs, and my heart jumped against my rib cage. I quietly opened and loudly shut the kitchen door and turned the light on. “Hello?” I called.

Mr. Austin’s voice answered. “Hello? Is that Lacey?”

I bit my lip, but called back cheerfully, “No, it’s Paige!” I bent down like I was taking off my shoes and pressed my hand to my chest, trying to slow my breath.

I stood up just as Mr. Austin appeared in the kitchen. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Paige. How have you been?” He walked over to the fridge and peered inside. “Do you want something to drink? Diet something? Juice? Beer?” He took one for himself.

“Water’s fine,” I said. “I can get it myself.”

He ignored me and grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator door, setting it next to his beer on the counter. “You don’t need ice or a lemon, do you?” I shook my head. “No, you’re low maintenance. It’s a rare quality in a woman, I tell you what.”

He passed the water bottle to me and leaned against the sink, tapping his fingers against his beer.

“Jake will be right down.”

I nodded. The bottle was wet with condensation in my cold hands.

Mr. Austin’s voice was sudden in the empty room. “You don’t like poetry, do you? You want something concrete: flowers, chocolate, jewelry.”

“Um.” I took a sip of water. Something outside triggered the motion-sensor light, and sudden shadows skipped across the wide kitchen window. A raccoon, maybe. Or a cat.

“When I was your age, I was working my ass off to get into college. I had focus. I was going pre-law and then law. We wrote papers. We had to study Latin for chrissakes. We didn’t have time to lie around writing
poetry.
” He spit the word out like it was poison.

“Well . . .” I said.

“My brother used to write poems. He was always inside when we were kids. We were running around the neighborhood, whatever, but he stayed inside and wrote little stories. And then he goddamn went off and disappeared, never even called until the day he got sick.” He shook his head, staring out the window, and I wondered if he was even talking to me anymore.

I took a step toward the dining room. “I’m just —”

Mr. Austin turned back toward me. “Jake shouldn’t be wasting time trying to ‘express his feelings.’ He can’t even spell. He’s eighteen and he doesn’t even know how to spell ‘you’ or ‘to.’” He looked at me. “Do you do that? Abbreviate everything with letters and numbers? Teenagers.” He slammed the bottle down on the counter near the sink and grabbed another one from the fridge.

“Maybe I should —”

“Why don’t your teachers teach something worthwhile, like how to spell a damn word? We had to diagram sentences and read the classics.
Tom Sawyer. The Old Man and the Sea.
Goddamn
Moby Dick.
”

I set the water bottle on the counter. “I’m just going to —”

Mr. Austin beat me to it, striding over to the foot of the stairs. “Hey, Allen Ginsberg! Your girlfriend’s here! Get your ass in gear!”

I kept my eyes glued to the kitchen floor, hoping it would keep Mr. Austin from continuing our conversation. The tiles were perfectly clean, perfectly shined, except for a toe print just in front of my feet. I inched my right foot forward and pressed my big toe down on top of the print. It matched perfectly.

Jake clattered down the stairs and I looked up, seeing him much younger in the shadowed hallway. He was twelve, thirteen, eager to show me and Lacey his newest game console. He was in baggy blue shorts, ready to teach me how to sink a layup. He was surreptitiously checking his face for zits in the hallway mirror; he was shoving books into a duffel bag. He was damp from the shower; he was sneezing into a paper towel; he was tugging at a new tie. He was tired, uncertain, proud, nervous, eager, disappointed, pleased. He was everything I’d ever known him to be. He was five years of Jake all at once.

Mr. Austin shook his head. “See if you can do something with him.”

Jake scowled, but I smiled my first genuine smile of the night. “I will.” I held out my hand to Jake and he crossed the room to meet me. He looked tired and grumpy. I slid my fingers into his hard hand and held tight.

“We’re taking the truck,” he told his father, and pulled me out the door.

In the truck he didn’t talk, and I pressed my fingers against my knees. Jake drove through the neighborhood and turned onto the slow country highway that stretched between the gates of Sauvignon and the edge of town, twelve miles of empty hills and paper stalk cornfields. The moon hung low over distant trees, a circle of deep orange.

Jake slapped the steering wheel. “Goddammit!” His voice was deafening in the quiet night, and I imagined entire fields of geese waking to startled flight. “That fucking . . . He had no fucking right.” I wanted to reach over and place my hand on his leg, to comfort or maybe distract him, but in his voice I heard something of his father, and I stayed still.

“Fuck!” he said, and pulled over to the side of the road. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

We sat in silence for a moment, staring straight ahead. The engine murmured beneath us. Jake reached across me and flipped open the glove box. Inside, a silver flask glinted in the low-wattage light. He grabbed it and took a long swallow, and another, and then handed the flask to me. I drank without thinking. “Jake,” I said. “Is everything —”

He shook his head, staring through the dark. A last, late firefly glowed briefly and disappeared. “He found my — I was trying to — I wanted —”

For one crazy second, I thought of Ethan in his Jeep, staring out the window and talking about his mother’s boyfriend, his little brothers. Is this how boys confess? Staring through windshields into darkness? But thinking of Ethan made me feel guilty. I turned my focus back to Jake.

“It’s so fucking stupid. I was just . . . I wanted to write something . . . for you. . . . I know how much you like that stuff, and Lacey said . . .” He shook his head. “He fucking ripped it up.”

“God,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He punched the steering wheel. “Never mind. It’s so fucking stupid. My dad’s right.”

I spoke quietly. “No he’s not.”

“Yes, Paige, he is. Poetry is for chicks and fags.” His voice was heavy with disgust, and he sounded like his dad.

“Jake —” I ached to think of his first, fragile attempts at writing, real writing, ripped apart and sagging in strips against the sides of his wastebasket.

He didn’t look at me. “Lacey says some girls just go for gay guys, but I thought if I could —”

Lacey? She was behind this? I suddenly wanted to punch something myself.

“Fuck it,” Jake said. He shifted the truck back into first gear and revved the engine.

I wanted to make him feel better, but I didn’t know any words that could temper the strange severity of his tight fists and sharp voice. My hand reached for his and faltered in the space between us, hanging, until it felt unhinged from my body. The headlights stretched down the dark road before us, catching bits of leaf and dust blowing through the blustery night. “At least let me drive,” I said, but he shook his head.