Lindy leaned in close to me and lingered there. She stood on her tiptoes to speak, her face right next to mine. I felt her hot breath in my ear.
“Let’s go somewhere,” she whispered.
I was unprepared for this request.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
Lindy looked at me again, not directly, but in the vicinity in which she thought my face ought to be. She then smiled dumbly, a million miles away, and leaned in to whisper again. “I know you want me,” she said, and I felt her lips on my neck. “Let’s go somewhere.”
How can I explain the utter disappointment?
It wasn’t so much that Lindy was on to me that made her remark so depressing. The secret, after all, was not well kept. I’d done what I could in that year to let her know of my affection. I’d let the word slip out to friends in random conversations about who we would like to bed down, who deserved the attention of our awkward desires. I’d also dressed like she had and trotted the sidewalk in front of her house like some doomed C student in a teenage love film. I’d sent Mrs. Peggy, her mother, home with my kindest regards. And although she didn’t know this, although it’s possible she may not have known any of this, I’d also spent countless nights perched in a tree outside her house, watching her shadow play opposite the closed white curtains of her bedroom and praying for her to open them.
All I’m saying is this: if there are vibes in this world, I had sent them.
So, it wasn’t that she’d busted me.
It was instead the obvious way in which she didn’t understand what she’d uncovered.
“Let’s go somewhere,” she’d said, as if it were as simple as that. “I know you want me,” she’d whispered, as if “want” was the same thing as “need.”
I did what I could to stall.
It didn’t go well.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
Lindy put her hands on my stomach. She leaned against me as if she was falling asleep.
“Let’s you and me go,” she said again.
“Lindy,” I told her, “I think you might be drunk.”
This was the wrong thing to say.
Lindy stood up straight and glared at me. She squinted her eyes as if someone had turned on the lights. She said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Lindy then pushed herself away and wheeled toward the other kids in the room. I saw a purple hickey, the shape of a continent, on her neck. She looked furious and petty in this pose, and a blue vein rose in her forehead. She pointed at me. “This guy,” she told them. “This guy watches me all the time. You can’t trust this motherfucker.”
“Lindy,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
Lindy glared at me, and I wonder, even now, if she felt she’d finally cleared the air between us. If maybe the real reason she hadn’t spoken to me in all that time was not only because I’d spilled the beans about her rape, but also because my adoration had become too obvious for her to bear. There’s nothing worse, after all, is there, than having to endure a love that you don’t return? So maybe she thought outing me might do it, might finally cut me off from her completely, might end whatever admiration I’d held for her for so long. She stood before me after she’d said this, panting, and waiting for my defense.
I didn’t get a chance to reply.
In the background, one of the guys sitting on the sofa said, “Go home, you drunk bitch,” and the room filled with laughter.
At this, my heart broke for Lindy—it died for her—for the first of two times that night.
Lindy scowled at these guys, a couple of jocks who had long ago written her off as some skank, I suppose, some girl who deserved nothing but scorn, and she threw her cup across the room at them, splashing red juice on the pool table. This gesture had no effect. The guys just laughed more deeply and turned their attention back to the game.
Lindy stomped out of the room.
“Why do you talk to that slut?” one of the guys asked me.
“Don’t call her that,” I said, and stood there energized, ready to defend her again.
They had no interest in debate.
So, with nothing left to do, I let my mind implode around what had just happened. I’d wanted to run after her, of course, to clear things up. In fact, I’d wanted the whole scene to be played over again. And the truth is, at that moment, when I was sixteen, if I could have done it all over again, I probably would have reshuffled the scene to end with me and Lindy kissing in the backseat of a car, in a bathroom, or maybe wrapped around each other on the very pool table upon which she had pressed me. I wondered angrily why I had let that opportunity slip out of my hands, and couldn’t fathom how another would ever appear. So I threw my pool stick onto the table and went into the bathroom, where I locked the door behind me.
I raged in this place.
I threw around inconsequential things like toilet paper rolls and toothbrushes, yet couldn’t bring myself to do any real damage. I stood for long minutes in front of the mirror, cursing at my pimpled and drunken face. I spat in the sink like a tough guy might do and recognized little about my own reflection. You fucking sissy, I called myself. You fucking loser. Yet I felt no connection to these words as I said them, no connection to anything at all.
Eventually, this anger waned and I grew hopeful.
After all, she had spoken to me, had she not? She had expressed some desire, no matter how drunkenly, how clumsily. Surely that must mean something. I began thinking about the number of guys at that party and why, out of all of them, she had chosen me. Even as a teenager I knew how alcohol was said to let loose your most sunken desires. So maybe there was something behind it all to believe in? This was not outlandish. Alcohol had also given me the confidence to play for her that night, to pick up a stranger’s guitar and let fly. This type of stardom was mere fantasy before this party, before the booze, and so maybe her display in the pool room was similar. Perhaps she had been watching, all those days, as I walked the sidewalks of Piney Creek Road. Maybe she, too, had just been waiting for the right moment to speak.
Yes, I thought, all of that.
I washed my face in the sink. I rinsed out my mouth. I tidied up the place. And when I emerged from the bathroom, the party was over.
A few stragglers still lounged around on the leather recliners, but the only noise I could hear now came from outside, where I later learned a fistfight had broken out over Matt Hawk making out with somebody else’s date. So I stumbled through the filthy house, full of adrenaline, and ran into a guy I used to play soccer with.
“Have you seen Lindy?” I asked him, and he laughed.
“Last time I saw her,” he said, “she was standing over there, trying to make out with Chris Macaluso.”
“What?” I said. “That’s impossible.”
Chris Macaluso was an average kid. He sat the bench on the basketball team. I remember an anecdote about his parents not letting him drink Cokes. All this to say that he was nice enough, I guess, but a mere afterthought on the high school landscape. So this was no small blow. Surely my friend’s eyes had deceived him. Surely he’d mistaken some other drunken beauty for Lindy. Surely all was not lost.
I did what I could to erase this image from my mind and walked outside to smoke the last crumpled cigarette in the pack I’d bought earlier that night. Here I saw the swimming pool, shimmering and littered with garbage, and at the far end of the pool, I also saw Lindy. She was sprawled across a lawn chair, passed out cold. Nobody else was around.
I figured this was my chance.
I walked over to her and pulled up a seat.
There, with just the two of us, I was finally allowed to study Lindy’s body.
Her legs, still muscular and lean from her years of running track, from her former joys on Piney Creek Road, from youth, were strewn to the sides of the chair. Her arms were flung over the rests. She looked as if she had been dropped there from a great distance, and her hair covered most of her face. As I scanned her body I noticed that the hem of her dress was lifted well above her knee, exposing her inner thigh, and I saw in this place the tail end of what looked like a scar.