CHAPTER 11
Josh
At 4:00 on Sunday the doorbell rings.
When I open it, I find Drew’s mom on my porch with a plastic container in her hands.
“It’s Sunday. I made sauce. Drew said you weren’t coming for dinner so I wanted to drop it by.” She knows I can’t make spaghetti sauce to save my life and it pisses me off, so she always brings me some.
“Thanks.” I step aside and push the door open so she can come in. “You could have had Drew bring it to me. You didn’t have to come all the way over here.”
“Drew disappeared somewhere this afternoon. Probably to see whichever girl he’s chasing now.” She raises her eyebrows questioningly at me and I keep my expression blank, wondering if I know exactly which girl that is. I take the container from her and turn to put it in the refrigerator, while she sits down on a barstool at the kitchen counter, in front of the plate of cookies that appeared at my front door earlier today. “Besides, you know I like to check on you and interrogate you on your life every now and then. Even if I know you won’t answer.” She smiles, picking up a cookie.
“Thanks,” I say for the second time in as many minutes, not sure what I’m thanking her for: coming by, checking on me, not expecting me to answer. Any of a number of things. I could probably thank Mrs. Leighton all day long, but she wouldn’t expect me to.
“You could make it easy on me and just move in with us.” She doesn’t even try to hide the smirk on her face. She’s asked me to move in with them every week since I found out my grandfather was leaving.
She always gets the same response, but she never stops asking. I’m not sure how I’d feel if she did.
“Thanks,” I say again and now we’re up to three. I don’t need to refuse anymore.
“I’m just being selfish, you know. I need you to be a good influence on Drew.
Someone needs to save that boy from himself. I’m not old enough to be a grandmother.” She looks knowingly at me.
“I think you give me too much credit.”
“Josh, I love my son, but some days I think you may be the only good thing about him. You are, quite possibly, the only reason I keep him.” She shakes her head and I know she’s not being serious. Drew is a mama’s boy, through and through. He just also happens to be a huge pain in her ass most days. “You’ve been holding out on me. When did you start baking?” She turns the half-eaten cookie over in her hand, examining it.
“I didn’t,” I pause, looking at the plate. Now that part of the bottom is visible, I can see the blue paisley pattern around the edges. I wonder if it’s part of a set and if I should return it. “Someone else gave me those.”
“Someone
else?”
she
says
suspiciously. I can tell her interest is piqued. She got tired of asking Drew about the girls in his life because they come and go so fast that there’s never any point. But she’s never stopped questioning me, waiting for the day when she might actually get an answer. “Well,” she takes another bite of the cookie. “Someone else can bake. These are delicious.”
“I’m not being evasive,” I smile, answering the question she asked without asking. “I don’t know who it was. They were on my porch this morning.”
“Oh,” she says, pulling the cookie away from her mouth, her smile gone.
“I have a good idea who it was. I think you’re safe.” Her expression softens to slight relief. I do have a good idea who it was but I can’t know for sure. There was no note with them when the cookies showed up but I couldn’t help the feeling that they were a thank you of sorts. And really, there just isn’t anybody else it could have been. “Besides, I’ve eaten like six of them already. If someone wanted to poison me, I think we’d know by now.”
We talk for a few more minutes and she gets up to leave, asking me one more time if I’m sure I won’t come to dinner. I won’t and she already knows that. I’m still pissed at Drew for Friday night and I don’t feel like dealing with his shit yet.
***
“I waited for her in the parking lot this morning,” Drew says when I run into him before the warning bell Monday morning. He called me last night but I didn’t pick up and I deleted the message without listening to it. I haven’t spoken to him since he showed up on Saturday afternoon, wondering what happened with Nastya after he dumped her there. I could say he dropped her off, but we both know that’s not what happened. It would be one thing if he was actually concerned about whether or not she made it home ok or how she was feeling, but his primary concern was finding out how pissed she was at him and I didn’t do anything to try to ease his mind. I hope she’s pissed at him. She should be.
“She won’t talk to me,” he laughs as we make our way to first period. “Well, you know, she won’t make distinctive facial expressions at me. She did make one expression involving a finger but it could have just been a tic or some sort of muscle spasm.”
“Of course,” I reply.
“Are you still pissed at me, too?”
“I’m over it.”
“You should be. Come on, I dropped a really hot drunk girl, who doesn’t talk, off at your house. That’s like a gift.” I stop walking and look at him, wondering, yet again, why we are friends.
I know him well enough to know that he’s not being serious. Drew is an ass and a whore but he’s not a complete douchebag.
Still, I can’t help but call him on it. He deserves it this time.
“Sorry,” I apologize with an utter lack of conviction and keep walking. “I thought you were just asking me to clean up your mess. I didn’t realize you were being a friend and giving me an unresponsive drunk girl to rape. Next time, be a little clearer for me so I don’t miss such a golden opportunity.” I can’t hide the sarcasm in my tone and I don’t try.
“You know I was kidding.” He has the grace to at least sound like he feels bad. “I left her with you because I knew you wouldn’t do anything.” Now he makes me sound like some sort of monk and I don’t think I like that any better.
“She doesn’t know that. She probably thinks you did exactly what you said you did. Dumped her with some strange guy without thinking twice about what would happen.”
“What did happen? You were so pissed at me on Saturday you wouldn’t tell me shit.”
“Maybe because I was up half the night cleaning up vomit.” I stop walking and look at him so he realizes that I’m not joking. There is nothing at all funny about the amount of puke I faced on Friday night.
I may never be the same again. “You want to know what happened? She threw up. A lot. She passed out. She woke up. I took her home. That’s it.”
“Dude, I so owe you,” he says, still cringing from the discussion of vomit.
“You have no idea.”
***
Nastya
When I get to shop on Monday, Margot’s blue paisley plate is sitting on the counter in the back of the room where I usually sit. Josh isn’t at his regular table but he must have put it here. I see him on the other side of the shop where all the power tools are. I don’t want to stare at him long enough to figure out what he’s doing, so I shove the plate in my backpack before he gets back to his seat. The bell rings and he slides onto his stool without a glance in my direction and things are normal again. The normalcy doesn’t last long, which shouldn’t surprise me. I don’t think anything is normal where Josh Bennett is concerned. Though, I really shouldn’t be judging him on normalcy, especially when I’m watching him from the confines of my own, very precarious, glass house.
“Hey, Bennett! Is it true you got emanci pated?” Emancipated? I look around to see who’s asking the question.
It’s some punk-ass skater kid whose name, I think, is Kevin, but I haven’t paid enough attention to know for certain. Mostly what I’ve picked up is that his hair is overlong in the front, his pants are always baggy and he thinks he’s pretty awesome. I really don’t care who asked the question but I’m definitely interested in the answer.
Josh nods, but says nothing. He’s looking down, working on the scale drawing we were assigned Friday. He doesn’t bother to lift his head and acknowledge Kevin or anyone else whose attention is now on him.
“So that means you’re, like, free to do whatever the hell you want?”
“Apparently so.” He turns the ruler and traces a line along the edge of it with a pencil. “Of course, I can’t murder anyone, so it has its limits,” he adds dryly, still not looking up. I have to stifle my own smile, especially when Kevin soldiers on, completely oblivious to the innuendo.
“Man, that’s awesome. I’d be having parties every night.” Kevin doesn’t seem to take the hint that Josh has nothing to say to him and keeps pushing. I’m kind of wishing Josh would give this kid the f*ckuppance he so richly deserves, but I think that’s more my style than Josh Bennett’s.
I hear someone tell Kevin, in a hushed voice, to shut up. The kids around him look anywhere from curious to uncomfortable to downright astonished by his line of questioning. I’m in the curious camp myself, but I’m trying to act disinterested. I can tell Mr. Turner’s picked up on it, too, because he keeps glancing in that direction.
He’s not going to interfere, but he damn sure wants to know what’s being said. He looks almost disgusted. I know that I’m missing some vital piece of information here and I can’t ask anyone what it is. Why has he been emancipated? Are his parents abusive? Dead? In jail? Out of the country?
Maybe there’s a top secret spy mission involved.
My mind turns while the conversation continues. I’m still trying to figure out why Josh has been emancipated and what it has to do with the fact that everyone stays the hell out of his way. We’ve been sitting here for all of forty-five seconds and yet I almost feel like the air in the room has gotten heavier.
***
Josh
I can see their expressions without looking. Usually everyone ignores me, but the times when they don’t are worse. Like now. You either get the ignorant crap spewed by morons like Kevin Leonard or you get the sucks-to-be-you stares.
Especially from the girls. The girls are the worst. Drew says I should use it to my advantage; that I waste the shitty cards I’ve been dealt and that I should at least get something out of being such a tragic figure.
But there’s something about being pity-f*cked that just doesn’t sit well. It’s hard to want a girl who looks at you like you’re a lost puppy she wants to take home and feed or a dejected child who needs to curl up in her lap and be coddled. There’s nothing hot about a girl feeling sorry for me. Maybe if I was desperate, but probably not even then.
The adults are even worse because they love to make their dumbass comments about how well I’m doing; how well adjusted I’ve become; how well I handle everything. As if they have any clue. The only thing I’ve learned to do well is avoid, but everyone would rather believe it’s all good. That way they can crawl back under the shelter of that rock they live under. The one they think death can’t see them through.
It’s even the same with the teachers. I can get out of almost any assignment I want if I play the death card. It makes everyone uncomfortable, so they’ll do just about anything you want to get you to go away so they can pretend it doesn’t happen. They get to convince themselves that they empathize and that they’ve done their good deed for the day. When I’m lucky, they just ignore me because that’s easier for all of us anyway. Easier than having to acknowledge death.
One death card might be more than enough to play for a missed assignment or copping a feel on some girl, but I’m racking up a full deck at this point, and I can probably get away with almost anything. People started looking the other way a long time ago. Maybe I did, too.
When I was eight I went to a spring training game with my dad. Once a month my parents would split up and each take either my sister, Amanda, or I out for the day. One month I’d go with my dad and Amanda would go with my mom. The next month we’d switch. It was March and it was my turn to go with my mom, but since that’s when the game was, I begged to go with my dad instead. I told my mom she could have me April and May to make up for it. Because I was such a f*cking prize.
My mom said it sounded like a good deal to her and made me shake on it.
My dad and I got home at six o’clock.
I had fallen asleep in the car on the way home. He woke me up when we pulled in but he ended up carrying me into the house anyway because my ass was not crawling out of that car. We ate too much, laughed too much, yelled too much. My stomach hurt. My face was sunburnt. I lost my voice and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. It was the last happy day of my life.
When I woke up, I didn’t have a mom or a sister anymore, but apparently it would all work out, because we’d end up having more money than we would ever need. The trucking company’s lawyers said it was a generous settlement. My dad’s lawyers
said
it
was
fair.
Fair
compensation for my mother’s life. Fair compensation for my dead sister. They didn’t consider the fact that I really lost my father, too, that day. That something in him broke, shattered, melted, combusted, disintegrated like the car my mother was driving when an 18-wheeler delivering soda drove right over it. But I’m sure if they had considered that, too, they would have determined that it was also more than fair. Generous, even. I don’t have a sister to bitch about or a mother to talk to or a father build things with. But I have millions of nearly untouched dollars in bank accounts and brokerage funds and life is so very f*cking fair.
“It’s completely awesome,” I reply, hoping my agreement will get Kevin to turn back around and impress someone else with his ignorance and talk of legendary partying. “Nobody gives a shit what I do.” It’s true in more ways than one. I look up and focus my eyes on his, hoping he understands.
I go back to finishing the scale drawing I’ve been working on, glad that everyone’s attention has shifted back to more important things, like math tests and hot girls. Mr. Turner is making his way around the room, looking over everyone’s shoulders to check their progress. He passes my table and glances behind me.
“Nastya, you can’t draw sitting up there. Why don’t you move over and sit at the empty seat next to Kevin?” He sounds almost apologetic for asking her to move.
I’m surprised he’s even expecting her to do the assignment. So far he’s been acting like she’s not even in the class, which we both know she shouldn’t be. But I guess he got stuck with her, because she’s still here. I think she makes people as uncomfortable as I do. Mr. Turner’s never been awkward with me, but he sure as hell is around her.
Maybe it’s the clothes, or lack thereof, because he always seems kind of scared to look at her. I had forgotten she’d been behind me this whole time, and that she probably heard the entire exchange earlier.
She starts picking up her things and Mr.
Turner shifts his attention back to me.
“Looks good,” he says, checking out the sketch in front of me. “What are you going to use?”
“European ash, probably. Natural finish,” I reply. He nods, but stands there a second longer.
“Everything ok?” he asks and I know he’s referring to the Kevin situation, which is stupid, because I don’t let that crap bother me anymore.
“Everything’s good,” I tell him, turning the ruler on my paper as he walks back up to his desk. Behind me, I hear Nastya hop down off of the counter, the click of her heels hitting the floor. She passes behind me, moving around my table to the one where Kevin Leonard is laughing his self-congratulatory ass off.
Everyone’s working on their own now, and the noise level has kicked up considerably, so I’m not sure if I’m imagining things, or maybe I’m just crazy, when I hear the words.
You lie. They aren’t even a whisper.
They drift into my consciousness so soft they almost have no form, as if they’re made of air and longing, but I swear I hear them anyway. When I look up, the only person who could have said them is settling down on a stool next to Kevin Leonard and I kick myself for being ridiculous, because I know they can’t be real, and that the longing those words were born from is mine.
***
I make it to art just under the wire, slipping in and sitting at an empty table in the back, behind Clay Whitaker. I’m not much for art but there were no course numbers left to sign me up for an extra shop class. I’d taken them all, so I needed another elective to fill my schedule.
Preferably one without homework or thought involved. The path of least resistance is well worn by my boots. Mrs.
Carson lets me get by with turning in sketches of furniture that I love and whatever I’m designing to build at some point. Sometimes I draw stuff I see in antique stores. Things I wish I had the talent to make. Maybe one day. I’m not that great when it comes to the drawing. I’m ok.
Not terrible, not amazing. I glance at the table in front of me. Clay Whitaker is amazing. He can do with a sketchbook and charcoal what I wish I could do with lumber and tools. I pull out my backpack and rummage through it for the picture I printed off the internet last night. I barely get started when Clay turns around.
“What are you drawing?” He inclines his head to get a better view of the picture in front of me.
It’s a late 19th century George II-style marble-topped
console
table.
Our
assignment was to bring in a photograph to recreate so that’s what I picked.
“Table,” I say.
“One day you should try drawing something with two legs instead of four.” Drawing people doesn’t interest me, plus, I suck at it. “What are you drawing?” I ask.
“Who, not what,” he corrects. Clay rarely draws anything other than people.
He’s obsessed with human faces. If I’m forever drawing furniture, he’s forever drawing people. He’s damn good at it, too.
It’s almost creepy how realistic his drawings look. There is some arcane quality about his sketches; some way he makes you see past the face itself and into it. I’ve seen him make even the plainest, most uninspiring face interesting in ways I don’t have words for. I’m jealous of his talent. If I didn’t have something of my own to love like that, I’d be insanely jealous. As it is, I can appreciate his ability without hating him for it, but I know there are a few people in this class who can’t. Sometimes I think Mrs. Carson, herself, is one of them. It must be kind of depressing to have to teach someone who surpasses your abilities on every level.
My attention shifts back to Clay as he drags a 4x6 photograph off his table and passes it back to me with a shit-eating grin on his face like he knows something I don’t. I take the picture out of his hands and look down at it. I’m not sure who I expected it to be, but it certainly wasn’t the girl whose face I’m looking at now. Even so, I can’t say I’m surprised. If there’s an interesting face in this school, it’s Nastya Kashnikov’s, maybe just because she never opens her mouth to take away from the mystery. I stare at the picture a second longer than I should. She’s looking in the general direction of the lens, but not directly facing it. The camera must have been zoomed in on her, because it’s not that well focused, and it’s obvious that she didn’t know the picture was being taken.
“Why her?” I ask, reluctantly handing it back.
“Her face is insane, even with all that shit she covers it up with. If I can do that justice, I’ll never need to draw another girl again.” He’s staring at the photograph like he’s picturing how she looks without the make-up. I want to tell him he’s right. What she looks like in that picture is nothing compared to what she looks like without a trace of make-up on and her hair pulled off her face. That’s what I’d like a picture of, instead of having to rely on my memory of her, lost and dripping sweat in my garage at one in the morning.
“I wouldn’t think she was your type.” I yank my attention away from thoughts I shouldn’t be having and put the focus back on him so maybe he won’t notice, but Clay always notices. Clay’s as much of an outcast here as anybody and I know he’s a watcher, too. I’ve seen enough of his drawings to know how many people he studies when they don’t know he’s looking.
And when Clay looks, he sees, and that’s the most disconcerting thing of all.
“My dick doesn’t have to want her.
Just my pencil.” He smiles at me again, like he’s got some secret of mine. He probably does. He’s always watching me like he never got the message to leave me the hell alone. For some reason, I don’t mind. He stays in the fringes, and other than the shit he still occasionally takes for coming out, he flies under the radar. I go back to my own crappy drawing and then kick myself when my mouth opens again.
“How did you get the picture?”
“Michelle.” The name is an answer in itself. Yearbook Michelle. Clay’s the only one who doesn’t throw the word yearbook in front of her name when he says it. She sits with him every day at lunch, camera all but surgically attached to her hands. “I got her to take it in the courtyard one day when Nastya wasn’t looking.” He shrugs, looking a little guilty, though not at all apologetic. He uses her name like he knows her and I wonder how well.
“She’d kick your ass if she knew you took it.” It’s a dumbass thing to say. I don’t know her well enough to know what she’d do and I’m talking about her like I do.
She’s ripped enough to kick his ass, and mine, too. Really, she should have kicked my ass for handing her a glass of vodka when she was hung over, but she laughed in my face instead, so what the hell do I know?
“There are a lot of people who want to kick my ass,” he responds nonchalantly, as if it’s just a fact of life. It’s true that a lot of the a*sholes in this school want to kick the crap out of him, but wanting and doing are two different things. They still talk shit about him, but nobody’s laid a hand on Clay since eighth grade and he and I both know why.
When my mom died, I went through the angry phase. It’s okay, of course, because anger is acceptable when you’re grieving, especially when you’re an eight year-old boy. People will make a lot of excuses for you. I dealt with my acceptable anger by doing unacceptable things like beating the crap out of other kids who pissed me off. Pissing me off didn’t take much. I was pretty liberal about what would be enough set me off. Turned out, even the unacceptable things I did with my fists were considered acceptable and brushed under the carpet.
I punched Mike Scanlon in the face, twice, because he said my mom was in the ground getting eaten by maggots. I don’t think there was even enough of her body left after the crash to feed a maggot, but I didn’t argue with him. I just nailed him in the face. Gave him a black eye and a split lip. He told his dad. His dad came to my house and I hid around the corner, listening and wondering how much trouble I was going to get in. But he wasn’t even mad.
He told my dad it was okay. He said he understood. He didn’t understand crap, but I didn’t get in trouble. And that’s the way it always went.
The only time I really had to answer for it at all was the one time it happened at school. I punched Paul Keller on the soccer field during P.E. and I thought I was in for it. The principal called me in, which had never happened in my life. Lucky for me, he also understood and I got off with a warning and a few trips to the school psychologist. All the kids I beat up learned that no one was going to touch me for anything I did. I could hit them in broad daylight with ten witnesses and even their own dads would tell them to give me a break.
My angry phase had ended by the time I got to eighth grade, just in time for my dad to have a heart attack. By that time, almost everybody left me alone. No one would give me an excuse to be angry at them. Then one day I was walking home from school and ran into three shits beating the crap out of Clay Whitaker. I didn’t even know him at the time but they were kicking him good and I needed an excuse to kick someone back. I had a lot of healthy, acceptable anger built up and they were good therapy. There were three of them and I wasn’t the biggest kid around. They should have been able to grind me into the sidewalk without breaking a sweat. But they had only garden-variety cruelty to fuel them. I had pure unadulterated rage.
Clay was sitting on the ground when the other kids finally ran off. I was hurt and out of breath so I sat down, also, because I didn’t know where to go and I didn’t care if anyone else came looking for me. No one did. I probably would have hit them, too. Clay didn’t say thank you, or anything else to me for that matter, which was good, because I didn’t deserve any thanks. I didn’t do it for him. There weren’t any noble intentions.
I didn’t care if I got in trouble. I didn’t care about Clay Whitaker, sitting a couple feet away, bloody and crying. I just didn’t care. That was the last time I hit anyone. After that day, I decided to wait until someone gave me a good reason. But it didn’t matter, because everyone had already learned that I’d get away with it if I did. I wasn’t even sure what a good reason would be, but I figured I’d know when the time came. And maybe it never would.
I didn’t say a word to Clay before I finally got up and walked home and we never spoke about what happened. I was used to people not bothering me, but after that day, nobody bothered Clay Whitaker, either.
“I’m starting to understand the feeling,” I mutter, and he knows I’m not serious but he throws his hands up and takes the hint.
“Fine. I’ll leave you to your very compelling table. I’m going to draw a girl,” he says smugly and turns around to open his sketchbook.