“Fucking mice!” I said.
“I’m with Greg,” said Marlena. “Ryder, I haven’t even seen your mom in forever. I want to thank her for the groceries.”
“I said no. Something’s up,” Ryder said. “Something’s not right.”
“What are you talking about?” Marlena put her hand on his leg, right above his knee, her voice full of exaggerated concern. She was reinsinuating herself into the role of Ryder’s confidante. She’d go weeks treating him like an annoyance, but the instant she wanted something—information, cigarettes, a ride—she’d turn on this over-the-top act that everyone—except, apparently, Ryder—could tell was a lie. Greg squeezed my wrist. I couldn’t see him, but I knew the face he was making.
“First, I saw someone poking around the cabins.” Ryder glanced down at Marlena’s hand, and then met her eyes. She nodded. “I thought he was looking to buy. I walked up to him and he looked at me hard, like he was like, trying to remember my face. And then he just shook his head. It was so fucking weird. I think he was a cop.”
That was it? I expected Greg and Marlena to laugh it off, but they were both quiet. “Did you see what kind of car he got into or anything?” Marlena asked.
“No. I acted like an idiot. I didn’t want to lead him into 42 where my shit was all out, so I just strolled out into the woods and froze my dick off hiding there for like an hour.”
“Did he have facial hair?” asked Greg.
“Greg, you are such a fag,” Ryder said.
“You said ‘first,’” I said. “Was there something else?”
“I’m telling you, cops don’t have facial hair. Have you ever seen a cop with facial hair before?”
“I’ve been getting these emails,” said Ryder. “Someone who says he’s gonna bust me, that he’s taking me down. He says he has video evidence. That he saw me online.”
“What the fuck,” said Greg.
“Why didn’t you tell us this sooner?” Marlena asked.
“Now he’s talking about blackmail,” Ryder said, miserably.
“Jesus.” Greg whistled. I thought of the video Greg had posted on YouTube, the bike falling apart and coming back together, the long glimpse of Ryder carrying that acetone, the hit counter ticking up, perhaps not entirely because of us. I heard myself saying the word audience. It obviously hadn’t occurred to Greg. Marlena teased me for my habit of apologizing for everything—maybe Greg’s video and Ryder’s tormentor weren’t connected. Or maybe, I wanted Ryder to get caught. Either way, I said nothing.
Would it have mattered, though? If Greg had taken the video down? It wouldn’t have stopped Ryder from what he was about to do.
“If it’s not a cop, we can talk to my dad,” Marlena said.
“Yeah, right,” Ryder said. “He’s not going to help me.” He said “he” with such sudden viciousness that the word cut right through my thoughts, stopping them. “He’d arrest me himself if he could.”
*
In Pontiac, Jimmy was always surrounded by a cluster of boys who barely knew my name. They hogged the remote and stank up the living room with their sock-and-pot smell. But I guess in Silver Lake, he was lonely, because little by little, he wormed himself deeper into our group. At the time I thought it was pathetic, but now I realize how hard it must have been for him—a nineteen-year-old working at a plastics factory, living with his mom and sister in a new town. He’d join us on the couch when he got home from work, or knock on Marlena’s door if the four of us were over there, carrying a six-pack or a forty that he refused, on principle, to share with me, though he didn’t exactly object to my drinking—he just didn’t want to be the supplier. There was a BP station on U.S. 31 that would sell him beer, if the female cashier was working. He only had a couple nights off a week, but more often than not he spent them with us, especially when Greg and Ryder were off doing something else. Neither of us could quite look the other in the eye when we hung out with Marlena and Ryder, Tidbit and Greg—Jimmy treated me less like a sister than like an inconveniently placed object. A chair in the middle of the room.
But sometimes, in our sibling way—that particular closeness that’s been lost to us since I left Michigan—we had moments of inspired collaboration. I came up with the idea—the statue, the cover of night, that it would be a penis—the basics. But the logistics of the penis plot were all Jimmy. He suggested building it from papier-maché, and even volunteered to drive the car. At first he spoke hypothetically, stoned and a little rambly, but the more invested Marlena got, the more he did too. “Paper, chewed!” Marlena said. “You are a genius! So gross and right.”
We found a bunch of conflicting recipes online, but in the end we just tore up a bunch of yellowy newspapers unearthed from a junk pile in Marlena’s house. To give the penis its shape, Jimmy began with a piece of wood that Marlena claimed had once been part of her mother’s favorite rocking chair, and layered the wet strips on top. “Mom would approve,” Marlena said, dipping a crumpled washcloth into a plastic Tupperware full of rubber cement. My eyes stung from the glue. She carefully wound an extra strip around what would be the head. “The frenulum,” she said, using her fingertips to mold a little ridge.
“Like anyone’s going to be able to see that it has a frenulum.”
“What kind of person are you, Cat? The kind of person who takes the easy way out, or the kind of person who makes sure they get things right?” She brushed the blond wisps that had escaped her ponytail away from her eyes with the back of her wrist, too purposeful, and very obviously directed toward Jimmy.
For the balls, we settled on two grapefruits that Marlena nicked from the natural foods store downtown where the tourists shopped. It took an entire newspaper and another half of a jumbo tube of glue to get them to adhere to the shaft. After it dried, Marlena said the balls were a little too bookend-y, but it looked like a dick to me, like a 3D version of the drawings that Micah kept leaving on my desk in Algebra.