What Happens Next (17 page)

When we’re done, I am on top of the world. We say our good-byes and I am sent home with a box of one dozen damaged, but still tasty, clothespin cookies to share with my family. The sun is shining and it’s rather pleasant out, so I carry my coat over my arm. I’m practically skipping down the sidewalk as I approach Malloy’s Pub. A lot of people are standing around outside, coming in and out of the place, and I can hear fiddle music when the door swings open and shut. A group of guys standing against the building notice me as I approach the corner where the pub sits. They’re in their late twenties, early thirties maybe, and their lecherous whistles and gawking send my high-flying mood diving straight into the dirt. I can’t cross the street until the light changes, so I’m stuck listening to the catcalls. They’re smoking cigarettes and cigars and pipes and god knows what else, and judging from the way the one guy is hanging on the other, they are all completely drunk.

“Hey, sunshine. How’s it going?” a guy in a black peacoat says, handing his pipe to his friend. He breaks off from the herd and walks up to me. “Come inside for a little. It’s hoppin’ in there. I’ll buy you breakfast and a Bloody Mary.”

He thinks I’m older. Ugh. Still, his hands are in his pockets and he’s wearing an Irish derby and rocking back on his heels. Even though he’s glassy-eyed drunk, he looks fairly harmless up close.

“I’m sixteen,” I say and force a smile. Then I pull out my uncharged phone and pretend to dial a number as I wait for the light to change.

“Whoa, sorry,” he says, pulling his hands from his coat and holding up his exposed palms. “You look older’s all. I ain’t looking for jail time.”

He starts to turn away, then pauses, smiles sideways at me.

“Sixteen, huh? You sure?”

“I think I would know my own age,” I say, trying to look occupied and distracted with my uncharged phone and box of cookies. I listen to my phone not ringing and wait anxiously for the invisible person on the other end to pick up. I watch the traffic light and tap, tap, tap my foot. Busy, busy me, no time for chitchat.

As the light changes, I start to cross. Peacoat heads back to his crew and one of them gets vulgar. It was bound to go there. It always does when drunken men gather uselessly on street corners.

“Shake those humps, baby! Magically delicious!”

The group busts up laughing. I look back to make sure they aren’t following me and see Peacoat shove a short, chubby guy in the shoulder. Chubby defends himself—“Sixteen? No way! She had tits for days, man! Didn’t you see ’em?”—and they all laugh.

I head down the sidewalk feeling gross. I put my jacket on while awkwardly maneuvering my box of cookies. They’ve ruined everything. Still, I try to rekindle the good feelings I had two minutes ago. I say to myself,
Corey Livingston is a cute baker. C-U-T-E, cute. He bakes waffle-wafer thingies and looks cute doing it.
But as I walk home, block after block, the Corey shine refuses to resurface. The butterflies that were floating around in my stomach when I left the bakery have grown thoroughly frenzied, flailing around like hornets in a jar. The brightness of the sun has gone from pleasant to glaring.

I dig down and really concentrate on Corey and the bakery and the fun we had together, but the images that keep popping in my head are of drunken assholes and dead kittens or images of a young Corey standing on a lawn, yelling and crying his eyes out. While he never said he cried, my brain adds that part because, well, he was eight years old when it happened, so of course he was crying. Then I think of his words again:
Rage can do strange things to the mind. Rage can make you forget things.

And before I know it, my mind is back at that night. And then the morning after. And I start thinking maybe I wasn’t drugged after all. I start thinking maybe my brain is choosing to forget all those hours I can’t account for, that maybe it was consensual and things went bad afterward. There was a lover’s quarrel, or his girlfriend walked in on us, or I saw his driver’s license and realized he was like twenty-five or something, and there was drama—a verbal confrontation.

I walk faster as I try this new scenario on for size. I run the words and ideas over in my head and try to smash and squeeze the puzzle pieces together. Consensual Sex interlocks with Ski Trip Guy interlocks with Girlfriend Scene interlocks with Rage Amnesia.

I stop walking and stand, holding my box of cookies, staring at nothing. I consider this churning, spinning, misshapen picture puzzle that I have forced together in hopes that some kind of lightning bolt will hit it and it will somehow gel together, forming a crystalline portrait of truth, and I will finally see what really happened to me. My subconscious will jump up and down with relief and scream from the rooftops of my mind:
That’s it! There it is! It’s been there all this time!

But this doesn’t happen. All I get is a dark, spinning whirlpool of images that makes a hissing sound. And a creep of flesh up my leg, up my thigh.

No. Rage Amnesia is not it at all. As much as I’d like to believe that I’d unleashed some superhuman fury within myself that resulted in amnesia, I know this is wishful thinking. There was no confrontation or rage coming out of me that night; the only thing I did that night was lay there while it happened, my mind and soul drifting in the void, my body laid out like a gift.

The thought of this makes me start to tremble. I start walking again, faster this time. I look down and realize that my shaking hand is holding a cookie. I have reached into the box at some point without knowing it. I go ahead and eat it, and then another, thinking,
Just two. I can run later.
The fear and paranoia are growing and the need to run is niggling at me, relentless, like an itch that needs to be scratched. The ringing in my ears is getting louder. The Truth is calling. So I eat a few more cookies, trying to block it out with the crunching in my mouth. I’m so full and I’ve eaten too much already today, but I can’t stop. I turn into an alleyway and cram the remaining cookies in as fast as I can because I need to get rid of them so I can lose the box and run. I can’t stop myself. I start sobbing as I eat them. I eat them until every single one is gone. I get dizzy as I look into the empty box. I feel disgusting and dirty. I tense up and try to fight it back down but am seized with an uncontrollable urge. The Urge comes to life. It takes form and crawls up my body, sinking its monstrous hooks into my gut. It leans into my face and with a screaming whisper, it tells me:
Get rid of it.

Get.

Rid.

Of.

It.

Before I can stop myself, my finger goes down my throat. Far down. And it takes a second, but with persistence, everything comes out in wracking heaves. All my beautifully imperfect cookies are now on the pavement where they are mixed into this grotesque and runny cookie-and-corned-beef-and-cabbage omelet.

I cough and drop the box next to it.

I lean against the building, crying. But the tears are not because I feel bad; they’re falling because I feel good. And the Truth is so, so still now.

But the ecstasy is short-lived.

When I feel the sick in my mouth, feel the bits and pieces of the food that didn’t make it out, I start to feel guilty. I spit the acrid remnants out and then look up at the wedge of sky, so clear and blue, peeking out between the rooftops, and I wonder what is wrong with me.

As I lean with my back against the building wiping my eyes and mouth, an elderly couple walks arm in arm by the opening of the alley. They look over at me and wave. I wave back, smiling, as if to signal,
Everything is fine here, there’s nothing to see, so move along
.

When they pass, I stand up straight and step over the mess. Then I start running. I run for over three hours.

As I shlump up the sidewalk, I see my street sign up ahead and a whimper of gratitude escapes my lips. I am exhausted and weak. I lost my zing way the hell down on Lake Avenue, almost into Rocky River, the next town over, and have been dragging myself home for almost an hour. My house, my bed, my pillow, have floated in my field of vision like a mirage. I seriously thought I would never get here.

Right as I turn down my street, my mom’s car pulls up, and Liam’s in the backseat. She stops and rolls down her window.

“I bought you a phone for a reason, Sid. Please keep it on. I have an open house for a ranch on Belle Street. I have to fill in last minute. Janet’s having gall bladder trouble. Vince is meeting us there to take Liam down to the parade. He said you and Kirsten could join them if you want.”

Then her eyes plead for forgiveness. “You’re not mad that I can’t go, are you?”

“Oh, no. God, no,” I say. Then it hits me what she just said.
Kirsten.

“Wait, what? Did you just say Kirsten?”

“Yeah, she’s at the house. Have you two been fighting or something? When she showed up at the door, I realized how long it’s been since she’s been over. Anyhow, she could use a parade, she’s not looking so hot.”

“So she’s at the house?”

“Uh-huh. Anyhow, I gotta run, so call Vince if you want him to pick you guys up for the parade.”

“Yeah, okay,” I say and then lean in to give her a kiss, thankful that I don’t have to go to the parade after all. She pulls away and I think,
Holy crap. Kirsten is at my house right now.

17

I walk down
the street and think about how three minutes from now I will be face-to-face with Kirsten Lee Vanderhoff, former BFF, who dumped me two months ago. I mean, I flub one time and I’m cast out like the devil? And after all those times, all those years, that I was there for her. Countless nights that she’d slept over because her parents were drunk and fighting. She’d spoon in next to me in bed and look up at my sticker stars and wish out loud that she could live at my house, wish out loud that we could be sisters. Then she dumps me flat because of one lousy mistake?

I concentrate hard and summon up images of protection—imaginary plates of armor sliding up and over my heart, rusted barbed wire wrapping itself around me. I lock out all warm, fuzzy thoughts and feelings of Kirsten Lee Vanderhoff, Public Enemy Number One.

Then I think of Public Enemy Number Two and wonder where she is right now. I wonder why Kirsten isn’t at
her
house looking “not so hot.” Paige Daniels with her Harry Potter–loving, closet-gamer, half-Bible-beater, half-elf self, scampering around school like a chipmunk, all the time maneuvering so we’d never be caught on the same side of the hallway. That little squirm. She took the simple act of ignoring someone and elevated it to an art form.

I see Kirsten’s clownmobile in my driveway and I walk up my yard. She’s sitting on my porch. She looks at me and I give her my best
Whatdoyouwant?
face. She says nothing but I can tell from her eyes that she’s been crying. This makes my insides start to thaw and crackle for a moment, but then I think:
Good. Cry, then.
I march past her up the steps. I go inside and almost,
almost
find the strength to shut the main door and lock it but at the last second, I can’t do it. I let the storm door bang shut, but the main door hangs open.

As I walk toward the kitchen, I can hear her creeping inside behind me. I kick off my shoes and dump my coat on the floor. Leaning on the door of the fridge, I down half a carton of orange juice without getting a glass. Kirsten settles into a seat at the kitchen table. I don’t offer her anything. I put the juice back, slam the fridge shut, wipe my mouth with my sleeve, then turn to her.

“What? What do you want?” I say.

Her eyes slink back into her skull. She shifts, tries to get comfortable in her seat.

“I came to tell you”—she says, pausing, and her voice is like splinters, dry and cracked, like she’s been crying for days—“I came to tell you that I get it. I get why you did it.”

“Did what?” I say, and I’m trying to stay solid, trying not to yield, but it’s getting harder by the second, what with her face and voice looking and sounding as pathetic as they do.

“Why you ran off with that guy,” she says. “Why you ditched everyone and everything and took a chance. I get it now.”

I say nothing. I don’t know what she’s talking about. And as much as I’m dying to know what she’s talking about, I don’t want her to
know
that I’m dying to know what she’s talking about. She picks her purse up from the table and walks to the sliding door that leads to the back patio. She pulls out a pack of cigarettes, slides the door open, and looks at me before stepping outside.

“Follow me, Sid? Please?”

She reminds me of a sad, beaten-down puppy that just wants to be picked up. Ugh, I hate her. I step over to the door and she is sitting on a wrought iron chair with her knees up. There are no cushions—we put those away in the fall—so I know it’s probably cold and uncomfortable. Still, the sun is out. It’s crisp and bright, and even though it’s still technically winter, you can sense that the world is about to melt. I walk out, grab the chair across from her, and sit down.