Thirst No. 3 (45 page)

“Have I been sleepwalking?” he asked.

“No. Don’t you remember? You went to sleep standing here.” I pushed him back into my parents’ bedroom and closed the door. “Amanda’s here.”

He immediately tensed. “Downstairs?”

“No, down the hall, in the bathroom. You almost peed on her.”

Sometimes my sense of humor could be cruel. Jimmy sucked in a breath, and his blue eyes got real big. My brother’s pretty cute, if I do say so myself. It runs in the family. He’s the solid type, with a hint of refinement. One could imagine him herding cattle all day from the saddle, playing a little ball in the evening with the boys, taking his lady to an elegant French restaurant at night where he would select the proper wine to go with dinner. Except he would mispronounce the name of the wine. That was Jimmy. He was totally cool, but he wasn’t perfect.

“Did she see me?” he asked.

“No. I saved you. You were about to walk in on her when I steered you this way.”

“You’re sure she didn’t see me?”

“I’m sure.”

He relaxed. Jimmy always believed everything I told him,
even though he knew what an excellent liar I was. I guess he figured if I ever did lie to him, it would be for his own good. He thought I was a lot smarter than he was, which I thought was stupid of him.

“What’s she doing here?” he asked with a note of hope in his voice. I couldn’t very well lie and tell him Amanda had come over to see him. When I had been in the bathroom with her, she hadn’t even asked if he was home.

“Her mom brought her over. She’s downstairs cleaning up the mess from the cocktail party. Amanda wants to ride to Beth’s party with me.”

“Why’s she going? Is she a friend of Beth’s?”

“Not really. I don’t know why she wants to go.” I had to wonder if Amanda had had time to buy a present, if she even had the money to buy one. She and her mom didn’t exactly enjoy material prosperity.

“Is she still in the bathroom?” he asked.

“I don’t know. You’re not going to talk to her, are you?”

“Why not?”

“You’re not dressed.”

He smiled. “I’ll put my pants on first.’’ He started to open the door. “I think she’s gone back downstairs.”

“Wait. Jimmy?” I grabbed his arm. He stopped and looked at me. “When was the last time you called her?”

“Monday.” He added, “Four days ago.”

“That was the last time you talked to her. You called her
yesterday. You called her the day before that, too. Maybe you should give it a rest.”

“Why? I just want to say hi, that’s all. I’m not being fanatical or anything.”

“Of course you’re not,” I lied. “But sometimes it’s better, you know, to play a little hard to get. It makes you more desirable.”

He waved his hand. “I’m not into all those games.” He tried to step by. I stopped him again.

“I told her you were asleep,” I said.

“She asked about me?”

“Yeah, sure.” I wasn’t even sure why I was so uptight about his not talking to her. I guess I couldn’t stand to see Jimmy placed in a potentially humiliating situation. But perhaps I was just jealous. “We have to leave for the party in a couple of minutes,” I added.

He began to reconsider. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t bother her.” He shook his head. “I wish her mom would tell her when I’ve called.”

“Jimmy—”

“No,” he said quickly. “Amanda really doesn’t get the messages. She told me so herself.”

I couldn’t imagine that being true, but I kept my mouth shut. “I’ll drop sly hints to Amanda tonight that she should call you tomorrow.”

He nodded at the brush in my hand. “Isn’t that mine?”

“Yeah, mine broke.”

“You have a dozen brushes.”

“They’re all broken.” I gestured to our mom’s makeup table behind us. She never went out of the house without fixing herself up for an hour. Some might have called her a snob. I had called her that myself a few times, but never when my father was around. We didn’t have a lot in common. “And mom wouldn’t let me use one of hers.”

“What did Amanda ask about me?”

“If you were getting enough rest.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Go to bed.”

I tucked Jimmy back in bed so that he could be fresh when his alarm went off at three in the morning and finished getting ready. When I went back downstairs, I found Amanda and her mom in the kitchen discussing whether a half-eaten chocolate cake should be divided into pieces before squeezing it into the jammed refrigerator.

“Why don’t we just throw it in the garbage?” I suggested.

Mrs. Parish looked unhappy about the idea, which was interesting only because she usually looked so happy. Maybe I should clarify that. She wasn’t one of those annoying people who go around with perpetual smiles on their faces. Her joy was quiet, an internal matter. But if I may be so bold, it often seemed that it shone a bit brighter whenever the two of us were alone together. I could talk to her for hours, about everything—even boys. And she’d just listen, without giving me advice, and she always made me feel better.

Jo, “Little Jo,” had given her a nickname, too—“Mother Mary.” I called Mrs. Parish that all the time. She was a devout Catholic. She went to mass several times a week and never retired for the night without saying her rosary. That was the one area where we didn’t connect. I was never religious. Oh, I always liked Jesus, and I even went to church now and then. But I used to have more important things to think about than God. Like whether I should try to have sex with my boyfriend before I graduated from high school or whether I should wait until the Fourth of July and the fireworks. I wanted it to be a special moment. I wanted my whole life to be special. But I just hardly ever thought about God.

I’m repeating myself. I must be getting emotional. I’ll try to watch that. Not everything I have to tell is very pleasant.

Back to that blasted cake. Mrs. Parish felt it would be a waste to throw it out. “Shari, don’t you think that your mom might want some tomorrow?” she asked.

“If it’s here, she’ll eat it,” I said. “And then she’ll just complain about ruining her diet.” I ran my finger around the edge and tasted the icing. I had already tasted about half a pound of it earlier in the day. “Oh, wow. Try this, Amanda. It’s disgusting.”

Amanda looked doubtful. “I’m not a big cake person.”

Mrs. Parish suddenly changed her mind about saving it. “Maybe we should throw it out.”

“You don’t like cake?” I asked Amanda. “That’s impossible—everybody likes cake. You can’t come to Beth’s party with me
unless you eat cake. Here, just try it. This little piece.”

I could be so pushy. Amanda had a little piece, along with her mother, and I had a slightly larger little piece. Then I decided that maybe there was room for it in the refrigerator after all. I didn’t care if my mother got fat or not.

Mrs. Parish sent Amanda to check to see if our vacuum cleaner needed a new bag. For a moment the two of us were alone, which was nice. I sat at the table and told her about the party we were going to, while she stacked dishes in the dishwasher.

“It’s for Big Beth,” I began. “I’ve already told you how she’s been flirting with Dan at school. It really pisses me off. I’ll see the two of them together on the other side of the courtyard, and then when I walk over to them, she greets me like she’s really glad to see me, like nothing’s been going on between them.”

“How do you know something
is
going on?” Mrs. Parish asked.

“Because Dan looks so uncomfortable. Yeah, I know, why get mad at her and not at him?” I chuckled. “It’s simple—he might leave me and run off with her!”

I was forever making jokes about things that really mattered to me. I doubted that even Mrs. Parish understood that about me. I may not have been obsessed with Daniel the way Jimmy was with Amanda, but I couldn’t stand the thought of losing him. Actually, I honestly believed he cared for me. But I continued to worry. I was never really cool, not inside, not about love.

“Is Dan taking you and Amanda to the party?” Mrs. Parish asked, carefully bending over and filling the dishwasher with detergent. She had an arthritic spine. Often, if we were alone in the house, she would let me help her sweep the floor or scrub the bathrooms. But never if anyone else was present. I’d noticed she particularly disliked Amanda knowing she needed help.

“Yeah. We’re picking Jo up, too. He should be here in a sec.” I paused. “Mary, what do you think of Dan?”

She brightened. “He’s very dashing.”

I had to smile.
Dashing
. Great word. “He is cute, yeah.” I took another forkful of cake, although I needed it about as much as I needed another two pounds on my hips. “What I mean, though, is do you like him? As a person?”

She wiped her hands on her apron and scratched her gray head. Unlike her daughter’s, her hair was not one of her finer features. It was terribly thin. Her scalp showed a little, particularly on the top, whenever she bent over, and she was only fifty. To be quite frank, she wasn’t what anyone would have called a handsome lady. She did, however, have a gentle, lovely smile.

“He seems nice enough,” she said hesitantly.

“Go on?”

“How does he treat you?”

“Fine. But—”

“Yes?”

“You were going to say something first?”

“It was nothing.”

“Tell me.”

She hesitated again. “He’s always talking about things.”

“Things?” I asked, even though I knew what she meant. Daniel liked
things
: hot cars, social events, pretty people—the usual. Since the universe was composed primarily of things, I had never seen it as a fault. Yet Daniel could be hard to talk to because he seldom showed any deep feelings or concern for anything but “things.”

Mrs. Parish shrugged, squeezing a couple more glasses into the dishwasher. “Does he ever discuss the two of you?’’

“Yeah, sure,” I lied.

“You communicate well when you’re alone together then. That’s good. That was the only thing I was concerned about.’’ She closed the door on the washer and turned it on. The water churned. So did my stomach. I pushed away the cake. I’d heard a car pulling up outside. It must be Daniel, I thought. I excused myself and hurried to the front door.

I found him outside opening our garage. Graduation was a couple of weeks off, but my parents had already bought me my present. I can’t say what it was without giving the impression I was spoiled rotten.

It cost a fortune. It was fast. It was foreign.

It was a Ferrari.

Oh, my car. I loved it. I loved how red it was. I loved everything about it. Daniel loved it too, apparently. He hardly
noticed my shining presence when I came out to greet him. He fell in love with my car at first sight.

He had taken longer to fall in love with me.

I had officially met Daniel after a high school play in which he played the lead. I have an incredible memory for facts, but I cannot remember what the play was about. That says a lot. He blew me away, and he wasn’t even that great. He had forgotten several lines, and he’d been totally miscast. None of that mattered, though. He just had to strut around up there under the lights, and I felt I just
had
to go backstage afterward and commend him on his artistry. Of course, Jo had to drag me kicking and screaming to his dressing room. I was sort of shy, sometimes.

Since we went to the same school and were in the same grade, I naturally knew
of
him before we met after the play. I would like to record for posterity that the reverse was also true, that he had noted with approval my existence the four years we had spent together at Hazzard High. But the first thing he asked when Jo introduced us was if I was new to the area. What a liar. He didn’t want me to think I was too cute.

But he asked me out, and that was the bottom line. He asked me out right there in front of his dressing room with Jo standing two feet away with her mouth uncharacteristically closed. Later, it seemed so amazing to me that I wondered if Jo hadn’t set it all up beforehand. But she swore to the day I died that it wasn’t so. . . .

I must talk about his dashing body. It was smooth and hard. It had great lines, like a great race car. Except Daniel wasn’t red. He was tan. He hugged the road when he moved. He had legs, he had hips. He had independent rear suspension. We used to make out all the time in his bedroom with the music on real loud. And then, one warm and lustful evening, two weeks before Beth’s birthday party, we took off our clothes and
almost
had sex.

I loved to think about sex. I could fantasize six hours a day and not get tired, even if I was repeating the same fantasy with only slight variations. I was a master of slight variations. But one can think too much. When we got naked together in bed, things did not go well. Daniel couldn’t . . . Oh, this will sound crude if I say it, so I’ll say instead that I shouldn’t have overdone it comparing him to my Ferrari. Yet, in a sense, he was as
fast
as the car. I left the room a virgin.

He was
so
embarrassed. I didn’t understand why. I was going to give him another fifty chances. I wasn’t going to tell anyone. I didn’t tell anyone, not really. Maybe Jo, sort of. But she couldn’t have told anyone else and had enough details to sound like she knew what she was talking about. Unless she had added details of her own.

Daniel and I had other things in common, other
things
we liked to do together. We both enjoyed going to movies, to the beach, out to eat. That may not sound like a lot, but when you’re in high school, it often seems like that’s all there is.

Anyway, when I went outside to welcome Daniel, he was in ecstasy. He had turned on the light in the garage and was pacing around the car and kicking the tires like guys are fond of doing when they see a hot set of wheels. I didn’t mind. He had on white pants and a rust-colored leather coat that went perfectly with his head of thick brown hair.

“Did you have it on the freeway today, Shar?” he asked.

“Yeah, but I didn’t push it. They told me to break it in slowly over the first thousand miles.”

“This baby could go up to one forty before it would begin to sweat.” He popped open the driver’s door and studied the speedometer. “Do you know how many grand this set your dad back?”