She nodded.
After washing off the blood and cleaning the cut, I spread antibacterial ointment on her finger, making sure to cover the whole thing, before stretching an oversize Band-Aid across the area.
Rose smiled when I was done, although tears lingered to stripe her cheeks. “You’re always gentle when I hurt myself.”
“I try.”
“But you do more than that. You do more than just try.”
I looked up at her. “I hope that’s a good thing.”
“For me it is,” she said. “I don’t know what it’s like for you.”
—
While the others were off stargazing, the four of us spread a tarp on the grass and played cards by the light of a glowing lantern—first Asshole, then Blackjack, and finally a game Shelby taught us called Spite and Malice. I hadn’t heard of it, but Archie pulled a bottle of Jim Beam out of his bag—I knew full well where it had come from—and we all did shots while she explained the rules.
The game itself was simple enough: an exercise in the zero-sum conundrum. Or the tragedy of the commons. The goal was to get rid of a stack of facedown cards before anyone else got rid of theirs, but that task required the cooperation of others. I played dutifully, only I drank too much, too fast, and soon my mind got stuck on all the things I could think of that required the cooperation of others: from conception to love to betrayal. Did that list include death? Suicide seemed to say otherwise, but I kept trying to make it work. After all, someone had to sell the gun or sharpen the blade. But it was the forces of nature I couldn’t reconcile. Leaps from high cliffs. Or into fast-moving currents.
Anyway, as these things go, when only one can win, cooperation goes out the window, meaning Spite and Malice is really a game of trying to screw one another over.
“Jesus, Archie. Play an ace already,” I growled, because the game had stalled over his stubbornness. Archie was a mean drunk, it turned out. A spiteful one, too. I got the distinct feeling he was hoarding cards, not for his own advantage, but just to piss everyone else off.
Without his ace, I couldn’t do anything. I picked a card up from the center pile. It was a nine, which did me no good. Only I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do next, so rather than ask, I dropped my cards and reached for the Jim Beam. Took a longer swig than usual.
“Careful,” Rose warned.
“Careful,” mimicked Archie, which made Shelby giggle. I’d never heard Shelby giggle before.
“You sound like a bird,” I told her.
“What kind of bird?”
“A loon.”
“That’s rude,” she said.
“Calling you a loon?”
“Not finishing your turn.”
I swiveled back to Rose. “Wait. What do I need to be careful about?”
“Huh?”
“You just told me to be careful.”
“About the drinking. You don’t want to get sloppy, Ben. Not tonight.”
“I won’t get sloppy,” I said.
“But you already have.”
“What does that mean?”
Rose dropped her gaze to the ground, to a spot right in front of me. I looked and saw that in setting my cards down, I’d somehow placed them all faceup, for everyone to see.
I swore and grabbed for them. Shelby giggled more, like we were all goddamn loons, and I guess I really was sloppy because I started to laugh, too. Rose shook her head but in a way that looked playful. I leaned to kiss her cheek, to feel her breath against my skin, but I caught Archie leering at us in an odd sort of way.
“So, Rose . . . ,” he started.
“So, Archie,” she finished.
“About that brother of yours.”
“What about him?” Rose said. “And no, I won’t tell you who he’s fucking.”
“So he is fucking someone?”
“So you care who he fucks?”
Archie gulped more whiskey. Didn’t bother wiping his mouth. “I don’t care about anything, sweetheart. That’s just it.”
“And yet here we are, the way we always are. With you asking questions and me still not answering them. You have a funny way of not caring.”
“Yours is even funnier,” Archie said, nodding at the way Rose’s elbow was resting on my thigh, and I frowned—I wasn’t laughing anymore—because what did Rose mean by the way we always are?
And what did Archie mean?
Dread spooled through my gut, a live wire of unease, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t say anything. What I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me, right? Instead I stayed very still and swallowed the shard of blackness rising in my throat. After a moment, I glanced at Shelby, who gave me a sweet smile in return, one of her prettiest.
It’s okay, she mouthed to me. It’s going to be okay. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that or if she really meant anything at all. What I did know was that I didn’t deserve to feel jealous or upset or angry. I deserved nothing because I was the worst of all. A cheater. A liar. And terrible at both. But maybe Shelby understood some of what I was feeling—that it was possible to hate the person you were but also feel deeply sorry for yourself, both at the same time—because she reached to hand me the liquor bottle, and honestly, it was about the nicest thing she could’ve done.
Thank you, I mouthed back.
22.
ARCHIE.
Rose.
Rose.
Archie.
After swigging more Jim Beam than was prudent, I set myself to sulking. Abandoning my cards for good, I promptly turned my back on the others—I was too drunk to storm off on my own. Instead I squeezed my eyes shut and proceeded to mine my brain for every instance I’d seen the two of them together. There wasn’t much. How could there be? Rose wasn’t merely too good for Archie; her worth was measured on a different scale than his, if his was even worth measuring in the first place, which I highly doubted.
A few encounters did spring to mind: the two of them getting paired together for driver’s ed sophomore year, much to Rose’s distaste—she said he drove with his dick, not his balls, whatever the hell that meant; that time we’d given Archie a ride home from our class cleanup day by the Eel River. He’d spilled Mountain Dew all over the backseat of the Pathfinder and left without saying anything. The most notable instance, however, was something that had happened last spring during a party out at the Richards’ miniature-horse ranch that was located on the eastern side of Teyber.