The She (15 page)

Bear said after me, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do, and with Harley, I wouldn't do anything. Ha-ha." Harley and Bear were the type of friends who were always hanging out—and always arguing.

They'd been telling me for some time that Chandra was hot for me, and I could sort of tell it was true. But she was too close to Grey. I had never gotten past the thought that it would bring Grey Shailey into my airspace. I hadn't told anyone but Bear that it had been Grey who'd sent me tripping, and I made him swear not to tell. It was too much of a ball-buster and I hadn't wanted to give Grey the pleasure of other people hearing it from us. I don't suppose Grey found it useful to tell anybody, either not after what I went through that weekend. People would have sided with me.

Chandra had sat down on the couch with her eyes shut, and she was rubbing her forehead. Although she was smiling, she didn't look too happy. She opened one eye and watched me plop down on the far end of the couch.

"This is all your fault that I'm babbling on about Bloody Mary! You shouldn't let me drink!"

"I'm sorry."

"I get so...
morosel
Sometimes. Actually, I'm usually a happy drunk. But there's something very
morose
about the shore in the dead of winter. Have you noticed?"

I couldn't help letting some big laughs escape.

She watched me. "What's wrong with you tonight, Evan Barrett? You're looking a bit
morose
yourself."

She was slurring but looking sincerely interested. Not that I would blather about an issue this big.

"You can tell me," she insisted. "I am sitting on a well of secrets, bro."

I watched the seriousness in her eyes and realized that was probably true. "I know about Grey. I went to see her on Wednesday."

She looked surprised. "How did you know?"

"Mrs. Ashaad called me in. Grey had asked Mrs. Ashaad to send me over there. Mrs. Ashaad wrote it up as a KHK, thinking I would like getting some service points. Or maybe she was thinking there's no other way I would go, unless she, like, ordered me."

"Grey keeps telling me that you don't like her anymore, but she also knows that most people don't like her." She shrugged like she was used to that opinion. "For all the things she probably did to you, I'm sorry. That's my job, you know. She gets ugly on someone and then I apologize. We're Jekyll and Hyde. In two bodies."

Chandra was pretty nice. Ditzy, but nice. I could never figure out how the two of them could be friends. I asked her.

"Do you mean, how do we
stay
friends, or how did we
become
friends?"

"Starting at the top, I guess."

"Well..." She twirled a piece of hair and tied it in a knot with three fingers. "Sophomore year she got the secret flash on me. I did something totally embarrassing, and she swore not to tell. Then, I got the flash on her. I swore not to tell."

"So your friendship started with blackmail?" I grinned down at my thumbs, which were picking at each other.

"Well, that's how we
became
friends. That's not how we
stayed
friends. I mean, you can get to be friends because the person knows you went down on four guys at the same party. I mean, I don't mind telling you. I just don't want the world to know, okay? They were from a different school."

She was ripping drunk, I realized, and would be sorry tomorrow that I'd heard that. I reached over took the bottle away from her and put it on the coffee table. Someone had popped a Pepsi, which was still cold, and I put that in her hands. Too
much information, thank you.

"So why'd you stay friends?"

"We stayed friends because ... I understand her." She sipped from the can, looking over the top of it at me with laughing eyes.

"I'm glad somebody does. Everybody needs somebody like that. That's nice she has you." I laid my head back and shut my eyes. The room was spinning just a little.

"That's very generous, considering what she did to you last year. I know about that, too."

I opened one eye, looked at her and closed it again.

"I think you've been
...great,
" she said. "Considering you were remembering the night your parents died and ... whatever else. She completely low-balled you. But in case you don't know, she was really, really sorry afterward."

I gazed at the ceiling, feeling my eyebrows turn in. "She had interesting ways of showing it."

"Well, that's one thing about Grey. She doesn't apologize. For anything."

I laughed pretty hard. "Well, guess what? She's going to learn."

I could feel Chandra watching me, and I thought about telling her that Grey was coming down here tomorrow. But I decided against it pretty fast. If Emmett was right and it was stupid to let her see Edwin Church, it would be beyond stupid to let Chandra talk her into going to see Bloody Mary or something.

"She won't let me in to see her. She won't let anybody in. Only you, so far."

I could feel her watching, like maybe I would tell her what Grey was up to. I settled on, "I don't think she would mind me saying, if she's done anything awful to you in the past couple of years, she
is
going to apologize."

That made her crack up totally, and she leaned back, howling at the ceiling. "I'm sure to hear four or five in that case!"

"That's it?"

"Hey." She piped down to just the grin. "Like I said, I understand her. Put some of that brandy in here."

She weaved the Pepsi can over in my general vicinity, and I did it, just so not to be difficult, but I pretended to put more in than I did. I remembered two things about Chandra's drunkenness: She got overly talkative and she got overly flirty. I didn't mind her talking, but I didn't want to dive into some great temptation that would put Grey in my face every day at school, even if rehab improved her enormously. Rehab can't perform miracles. Chandra put her toes on my leg and started flexing them. I bit my knuckles, wishing I could think of something to talk about.

"Okay, so ... I told you about my four guys. Now you have to tell me what's bothering you. It's only fait"

I just sat there in silence.

"Must be pretty serious," she slurred. "Your grandfather okay?"

"Yeah. I just..." I was trying to think how to put it so that I wasn't lying and would have to remember how to cover my tracks later "I just heard some family dirt tonight that I didn't know, and it's pretty awful, and I really can't talk about it, okay?"

She sat up, pulled her feet up cross-legged, watching me. "Okay. Don't tell. I know about awful family problems. It really sucks no matter how you look at it. Because most of the time? You did nothing to cause it. I mean, it's bad enough when you do something and you have to be embarrassed by it. But get this. My dad filed a false insurance claim last year. Fifteen thousand big ones. Well, guess what? In October he got caught."

I turned to stare, and she was nodding at me, swaying just a little, but very sympathetic looking. I almost kissed her. It's like she read my mind.

"Sure makes you feel closer to someone when you tell them some of your dirt, doesn't it?"

"Yeah."

"Good, so can I jump on you now? I've always wanted to."

I put my hands up before I could even think about it, which made her look ready to die, which I didn't really want, either. I stammered, "Let's wait until you're soben We're on two different planets right now. It just wouldn't mean anything."

She groaned and threw her head down toward her lap. "You think I'm an idiot! That's one of your famous send-off lines that I'm always hearing about in school. The corridors are littered with injured females who've heard all kinds of garbage from you, like, 'You're too important to me! I want to go out with you in a couple of years, when I'm more serious about things!'"

At least she was laughing and not crying. I started to deny it, but first I wanted to think on whether I was serious about what I'd said to her. It had just come flying out. Maybe that meant I wasn't serious. But it didn't matter because there was an issue here that was serious.

"Chandra, this is not a very good night for me, okay? Besides, you never flirt with me when you're soben That is true."

She shook her head, picking at her feet and sighing. "Can we just roll the tape back? Forget I said any of that stuff? Especially if you're feeling bad about your family."

I kept quiet, but her face came right up to mine, all sympathetic. "Because you shouldn't, you know. You didn't have anything to do with it, am I right?"

I heard my own laugh hit the air which surprised me, being that I wasn't even smiling.

"I just told my dad, 'Listen, why ever you did it, I don't care. However you pay it back, I don't care. Just don't think you can put me in public school and use my tuition money to pay your stupid fines and reimbursements. I had nothing to do with it!'"

I nodded pretty hard, feeling resentment build up in my gut—toward Emmett for telling me, toward my parents for whatever the hell they actually did. I tried to tell myself Emmett was right, and I would just have to get used to all this. It was where all the evidence pointed. Bloody Mary had been doing good, proving the existence of some dark force, until she asked for sixty-five bucks. My stomach bottomed out, and I tossed an arm over it.

"And whatever it was, just be glad you don't have Grey's family. They are in a class all their own, believe me."

"She says her mother's a drunk and her father cheats on her."

"He cheats? That would be nice, if he was just a cheat. He's a total cokehead."

I swung my neck to stare. I'd been upset by my dad's little sandwich bag of Colombian gold.

She must have gotten some steam power from my concerned gaze, because she went on a real tear. "A cokehead, and he's a decent lawyer but I'm telling you, half their money was not made the legal way, okay? Are you with me? And at least when our parents do wrong, they don't try to mix us up in it. That's the goods I had on her back when we started being friends—what her dad did to her freshman year. Not that I would ever ever tell anyone but..."

She stopped long enough to take a huge sip of soda, but I could see it all coming like a train, and I felt like asking, "What am I? No one?" I didn't really want to hear any stories about Grey being used as a cocaine delivery girl. It would make me feel sorry for her and I didn't want to.

It wasn't exacdy drugs.

"When she was a freshman, her dad
lent
her to a prospective client. At least once, maybe more times. He sent her out to dinner with some fat, aging bald guy in a limo. Is that the most disgusting thing you've ever heard in your entire life?"

I watched her face to see if her meaning of the word
lent
was the same as mine. She kept nodding, and my stomach flipped almost completely upside down. I hadn't drunk that much, but I hadn't drunk for a year before that. And it was on top of Thanksgiving turkey and lobster butter and whatever else. Maybe it was just that I'd never heard so many puke-inspiring tales all in one day.

"Excuse me." I got up, started walking to the bathroom slowly, but by the time I got halfway there, I was running.

My dreams that night were all twisted, the kind that keep waking you up because people turn into snakes or eels and then say, "What's up?" like nothing's wrong. This bitch of a stomachache I'd brought home from Chandra's shortly after I tossed didn't help things. I was lying on my side in bed, because lying on your side kills stomach pains, according to Aunt Mel. Maybe that's why my brain tossed up an image of my dad from the side. I was seeing his profile, though I was very close up to him, about nine inches from his ear. His jaw was moving a little, sending his reddish beard a little up and down.

"
Spin thy safety net thus here; guide me through this deepest drear; guard my crew from early grave..." His voice is clear; even his breathy pauses ring clear, "...from wailing winds, from witch, from wave. Upon thee I do hence depend, to bring my vessel home again.
"

His eyeball turns until his eye catches mine. Then his
whole head turns. He's looking at me dead-on. I can see every freckle on his nose, and his eyes, so ... deep.

"
When do you say that poem at sea, Daddy?
"

I shot up in the bed, staring through the darkness and gulping air like I was going to get sick all over again. I remembered I was at Opa's, in the twin bed in the smallest of the guest rooms, where soft sheets are supposed to make up for a hard mattress and a hard pillow. I couldn't move to find my watch and look at it. This one wasn't a dream; it was a memory.

The more I breathed, the less it felt like I was catching my breath. I could feel gray doors blowing open, and it was petrifying, worth trying to fight off. One of those doors might bring me an image of my parents shooting heroin or cheating on each other or lying to the cops or...

Or, or, or...

"
I'm saying it now because I'm going up to Nova Scotia tonight. There's weather. We Barretts, we always say that in weather, and I'm not ashamed to tell my own son so, to tell him we spit over the stern when we say it.
"

"
Why would you be ashamed to say that, Daddy?
"

"
I'm not. I'm not ashamed of being respectful of the weather. I'm not ashamed of thinking that certain sayings bring you luck, hope, deliverance. That little chant has been with our family a long, long time. I want
you
to say it someday, when the weather tosses your ship mightily.
"

I grabbed for the crank to open a window, feeling heat barreling up from the radiator vent below the bed. I liked the cold air hitting my face, but with the window open I could hear the roar of the sea. It rumbled and thundered from miles out, and the closer part smacked against the pilings under the drawbridge. But, somehow, it sounded better than the artificial heat felt.

"
I'll say it, Dad. I want to be you someday.
"

He's chuckling, rolling his eyes. "Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it—"