“She has dark nipples?” I asked.
“Ugh,” Lindy said. “They’re disgusting.”
I knew these things must have been blood oaths between Meagan and Lindy, pinkie swears, and yet Lindy’s betrayals didn’t bother me then. I was happy to talk about anything she brought up. I thought she was confiding in me. I figured we were getting close.
On the night Meagan dropped her off, Lindy was staggering drunk. She stumbled up the sidewalk and through her front door in an obvious way that I would never attempt at my house. I always thought it would crush my mother to see me drunk, to see me stoned, or even to see me smoking a cigarette, although I’m sure she knew I did all of these things. She was no idiot. She had seen the contents of my hidden box, after all. She’d heard my music, read my strange poetry, smelled my dank clothing. She’d also, I knew, considered deeply the idea of me being a violent criminal. She’d thought of me unbuckling my pants, hurriedly, in the heat of a Louisiana night. She’d imagined me forcibly taking sex from an innocent girl, shoving her face into the grass and knocking her out, right outside the home she had made for me, the one I was raised in. I wonder now how often she thought of these things, how realistically she entertained them, and how much this aged her. These thoughts could be no small deal for a parent.
My awareness of this, even then, may be why I continued to hide relatively insignificant things from my mother, well into my late teens, in order to spare her feelings: half-empty cigarette packs in the molding above my closet door, mediocre grades on algebra exams. I was careful about everything. I stashed joints in old cassette cases. I never once brought a roach inside our house. It all felt very natural to me, squirreling things away from her, protecting her from her own child.
Lindy felt differently.
I watched her ramble through her house, clicking on the overhead lights in each room. I could see it all from my window, her home like a waking yacht at sea. The foyer lights first, then the den. After a while, a dull hue from the refrigerator, maybe, an open microwave. Another long pause and then the bathroom light upstairs. A lamp, I imagined, in the hall. Eventually, her bedroom. A television set. Finally, the glow from her telephone keypad and then some darkness, to my delight, as Lindy pressed the seven numbers to call me.
I didn’t even let it ring once.
I picked up the phone and watched through my binoculars as Lindy opened her second-story window. She pulled up a chair and lit a cigarette.
If I was up in the water oak that night, you understand, in the full bloom of summer, Lindy still would not have been able to see me. That’s how good a spot it was.
“My God,” Lindy said. “Te-quila.”
I wanted to slam down the phone. I wanted to break something.
The joy I’d felt upon seeing her with Meagan was gone. I was instead enormously jealous that she was drunk without me, jealous she had gone to that party, jealous that other people had spoken to her, that other people had seen her. This was an emotion I had no handle on then. If Lindy talked about smoking pot I got jealous, although I smoked pot all the time. If she talked about going to the mall I felt jealous, although I had no desire to go to the mall whatsoever. If she talked about other schools where she knew people that I didn’t know, other towns where she vacationed as a child, other streets besides the one we lived on.
Worst of all, if she talked about boys.
I couldn’t stand it.
The slew of jerks she’d dated, the cute guys that bored her, the bozos she’d “only made out with.” Information like this turned me inside out. Yet for some reason, I couldn’t get enough of it. I was like a masochist in his becoming and constantly mined Lindy for sexual anecdotes even though they all inevitably left me feeling miserable—the torturous details about how Jimmy Cants kissed too softly, about how Alex Boudreaux had what Lindy called a treasure trail. It killed me. The idea that she could so casually give to these people what I would cherish. It was outrageous.
I became overwhelmed, I suppose, by the simple fact that the past is unchangeable and that Lindy had a past I couldn’t tidy, that the two of us had a past that I’d perhaps ruined. It frustrated me to the point of devastation, and yet I still believed that if I could only create another situation like the one I had blown at Melinda’s, one that would allow me to kiss her, allow me to touch her, then Lindy would understand where I was coming from. If only she knew that I was honorable, that I was genuine, that I was there for her. If only everybody else would get out of the way, I figured, things could be good for us.
So I became a petty and manipulative person. Whenever Lindy would mention a guy’s name, any guy, I did what I could to vilify them. Some of these people were my friends. Some of the things I said were patently not true. I became a liar, a backstabber, a sellout.
I just wanted the girl, so badly, to like me.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were going out?” I said.
Lindy laughed. It was a low and boozy sound.
“Why would I tell you that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just sat here all night. I thought you might call.”
“Wow,” Lindy said. “That’s really pathetic.”
My heart felt like a fist.
“You didn’t miss much, anyway,” she said. “Assholing Jenny Linscomb was there. I swear, one day I’m going to punch that bitch in the tit.”
I’d heard this story before.
Ever since I’d let the word slip out about her rape, Lindy had cultivated an impressive number of enemies at school. As such, I spent much of that late summer listening to her skewer them. There was the aforementioned Jenny Linscomb, for instance, who had written “Whorebag” on Lindy’s gym locker. There was Amy Broad, who told the principal that “girls like Lindy Simpson” snort coke in the school parking lot. And on the guys’ side, there was Russell Kincaid, who called Lindy by the nickname of Lindy Simplex instead of herpes simplex, which we’d learned about in biology class sophomore year.
“Who cares what those idiots say?” I’d always tell her. “They don’t really know you.”
“Nobody knows me,” she’d say.
“I do,” I’d tell her.
“You think you do,” she’d say.
She was right. I thought I did.
But my knowledge had a certain disorder.
I knew, for example, that at that exact moment, Lindy was sitting Indian-style on a white wooden chair with her hand outside her bedroom window. I could see the cherry of her lit cigarette through my binoculars, a silhouette of its smoke. I knew that her bicycle, the banana-seated Schwinn, now had weeds growing up through the spokes. I knew that she would likely sleep late into the afternoon the next day, opening her window to sneak a cigarette while her mom tidied up the front porch. I knew, also, that I wanted to be with her.
“Anyway,” I said. “I just wish you would have told me you were going.”
“Poor little kitten,” Lindy said. “You should have come. Artsy Julie was there. Aren’t the two of you, like, lovers or something? She’s always walking that big-ass dog in front of your house. I saw you watching her at the dance. I figured y’all must have weird Dungeons and Dragons sex all the time. Are you her dungeon master?” She laughed. “Do you put your magic wand into her boiling cauldron?”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “We got set up for that dance. My mom made me take her. I had nothing to do with it.”
“Relax,” Lindy said. “I’m kidding. Plus, I know all about that.”
“You know all about what?”
“The dance, idiot,” Lindy said. “Your mom asked me to take you, too.”
I watched Lindy put her cigarette out in a cup on the windowsill and suddenly believed myself at more of a disadvantage with her than I had ever been before. I suppose now that I could have interpreted this news as a positive, perhaps the final piece of evidence that my mother did trust me with Lindy, after all, that she always thought I was innocent. However, I didn’t even think of it then. The simple idea that the two of them had shared information about me, that they had corroborated, was humiliating. I imagined a touching scene between my mother and the Simpson women, all sitting around a table drinking tea as if embarking on some philanthropic enterprise, and I grew furious.
“Are you fucking serious?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “It was right after your sister died.”
“I know when it was,” I said. “I can’t believe she did that. What did she tell you? What did she say?”
“Why are you freaking out?” Lindy said. “It was kind of sweet. She was all worried about you. She thought you were depressed or some shit. But, you know, Matt Hawk had already asked me.”
“Awesome,” I said. “Isn’t that great. Congratulations. Lucky you.”
“Don’t be a shit,” Lindy said. “I probably would have gone with you otherwise. I felt bad.”
“For who? Me or my mom?”