“He’s so respectful,” she said.
I said, “You don’t actually believe that shit, do you? God knows what he’s got planned.”
“What about your girlfriend?”
She could be vicious like that.
* * *
—
MADISON FOUND one of Emily’s hair ties over Thanksgiving. But she didn’t make a big deal out of it because there was everything and we both knew that. So we were fine.
You couldn’t hurt Madison.
She wasn’t the type.
She was cold-blooded.
Really she was a murderer.
But then for all her being a murderer she could be lovely. Like I remembered a day the past April when I’d been on a headful of acid and she’d been fucking around on a trampoline. How it had been to see her like that, her light blue shirt spinning tracers in the air. Her laughter panning in the treetops. How it had made me cry. But she wasn’t the hill I was meant to die on.
CHAPTER FIVE
Emily worked nights in the Science Building. She cleaned out the cages and killed the lab mice with the little guillotine that the scientists made her use. She cut the mice’s heads off and squeezed the blood out of their bodies. She didn’t like it, but she figured the mice were doomed anyway and she needed the money. Her dad was some kind of special dentist, and he made enough money to see to it that she wasn’t ever going to get much help from the financial aid people. But he didn’t give her any of his money. And her mom wasn’t any help. So Emily’d do shit like walk an extra half mile in the fucking rain on account of Marc’s sold popcorn and diet soda a few cents cheaper than Russo’s did. She was doing shit like that while I was off doing whatever I wanted because I was a soft kid and my parents gave me everything I needed. And I could make up for whatever I didn’t need by selling drugs to the kids at school. Which was an easy thing to do. Emily half-thought I was a dirtbag, but then she was kind of into that so it was okay. All the same she liked to make a point of telling me she didn’t trust me in the least. And when I’d try and say something nice to her she had a tendency to laugh in my face. She couldn’t help that though. She was a tough girl.
It went like that and our first semester was over. Emily was going home to Elba for the winter break. And she had come over. She was lying on my bed. We weren’t doing anything but waiting to say goodbye. And I was just looking at her and how her body was so light and delicate, her expression all composed and enigmatic, and I knew that the girl could take my life if she ever felt like it, yet all I could think was that I never wanted her to come to any harm.
And like a fucking idiot I said, “I love you.”
The words had come out on their own volition, so I must have meant them. Now she was looking dead at me, not saying anything.
Then after a little while (I don’t know how long because time had stopped) she said, “Thank you.”
And that was it. She left. I wouldn’t see her again till mid-January, when school started up again.
And the whole time she was gone I was thinking, She loves you.
CHAPTER SIX
Can you look back to when you met the one you loved the most and remember exactly how it was? Not as in where you were or what she was wearing or what you ate for lunch that day, but rather as in what it was you saw in her that made you say, Yes, this is what I came here for.
I could say some dumb shit, but I really don’t know.
I liked the way she cussed. She cussed with great beauty.
And her body.
She was the best fuck. She really fucked you, or she really let you fuck her. She didn’t hold back. She always gave you everything and she wasn’t ever fake about it.
The way she smiled when she was nervous.
I don’t know what she saw in me. When we first were together we used to hook up in this empty chapel at school. And there was this altar. On the wall behind the altar were these ornaments. The ornaments were stick figures depicting the Stations of the Cross, metallic stick Jesuses hossing the crosses around. Sometimes Jesus would have the cross about upright. In other places He’d be about collapsed under its weight. I said to Emily that it looked like a man suffering an accident while setting up a basketball hoop. And she laughed like she’d die laughing. Maybe that was it.
The day I met her we went for a walk after class and we ended up in her dorm room. We talked for a while there and then for whatever reason I got to crying, like really bawling-my-fucking-eyes-out crying. I said I didn’t want to live because I’d already seen everything that was going to happen and it was a nightmare. Something like that. And she was really sweet to me. I don’t think there was ever anyone who felt more compassion for weak motherfuckers.
CHAPTER SEVEN
And it was January and Emily was back. She was having me watch a movie with her. Her mother had given her a $20 Best Buy gift card for Christmas, and she’d bought this movie on DVD with it. It was her favorite movie, she said. The movie was about different people who had all these intricate experiences of profound sadness, and some of the people freebased orchids. And there were car accidents.
We were in this room at school that had a TV and a sofa in it. And there was a microwave too. But the room wasn’t bigger than a very large closet. It didn’t seem like anyone ever came here. It was a room you wouldn’t know about. Emily had a gift for finding rooms you wouldn’t know about.
I checked my phone and I saw I had a voice mail. No one had tried calling; there was just a voice mail somehow. I listened to it. It was Madison Kowalski getting fucked in the voicemail. And there was a guy saying, “Madison’s so hot. Madison’s so hot. Madison’s so hot.”
It sounded like he was wearing wraparound sunglasses.
Then Madison took the phone: “And yer just mad,” she said, “cuz you can’t have it.”
I said to Emily, “You gotta hear this shit.”
I cued up the voice mail for her. She listened to it.
“Holy shit!” she said. “Such a bitch….Baby, I’m so sorry….I’m so sorry you had to be with her.”
“I told you it didn’t matter. The chick is a fucking cunt. She always was. I just didn’t know any better.”
Emily got quiet.
“What’s wrong?”
She looked away.
I said, “What’s the matter? What did I do?”
“…I hope you never say that I’m a cunt.”
“Of course I’m never gonna say you’re a cunt. I love you. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“I love you too.”
And we were on each other.
I started working on her belt.
She said, “Wait….I’m on my period.”
I said I didn’t care.
She said, “Fuck it….No, wait.”
“What?”
“We can’t. The sofa. I don’t want to get blood on it.”
“Fuck, you’re right.”
“Here. Stand up,” she said.
She was being real serious about it. She went as far as she could, and she caught her breath.
“Do whatever you have to do to come,” she said.
I brushed her hair back and tried to be nice about it, and I came and she swallowed it.
I kissed her chin. Her chin was wet.
I said thanks.
She said, “Don’t mention it.”
* * *
—
AND THAT’S when we were in love. And I felt lucky for a while. Till it all got fucked up about a month later, when she said she’d be leaving for good at the end of the semester. She wanted to go to school in Canada. That was what she said. And I thought it was just like a girl to go and say some shit like that.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I was fucking off school pretty bad and I tried to balance that out by getting a job helping make the pizzas at Gerasene’s. It was okay so long as Old Man Gerasene wasn’t there. But when he was, watch out.
I had just started when he caught me trying to learn how to throw the dough in the air and all that. He was hardly five feet tall with a slight frame, and he had his little grey suit on so he looked like a puppet. I saw him and I thought, Oh, here comes a nice old man.