Cycler (15 page)

Ignoring her, I get the wig fixed over the front of my head and try to guide it back over the rest of my head.

“Here,” Ramie says. She puts her hand on the front of the wig to help, but I yank my head away.

“Why do you keep doing that?” she says.

Holding the wig perched on the top of my head, I stare at her from a few feet away. She looks so confused, so scared.

“Is it . . .” She looks down. When she looks up again, there are tears in her eyes. “Is it chemo?”

I hold her gaze for a few seconds, then stare into the mirror and pull the wig all the way on.

“Jill?”

Chemo? Can I use this? Is this the lie I need to escape Ramie’s mind probe?

“I’ve got to go,” I say. Shouldering my backpack, I head to the door.

Ramie hops off the sink and follows me. “Where are you going?”

“I’m late,” I say.

Whipping the door open, I rush down the mercifully empty hallway.

But I don’t go to class. Instead, I sneak out through the goth door into the harsh bright sunlight of the parking lot. I stare at the pavement as I head to my car. The wig charade is over. Now I have to decide whether to go with the chemo story. Is it too depressing? Will I have to lose weight and wear pale makeup to sell it? Would that be offensive? I think it might be offensive to pretend you have cancer when all you have is a penis once a month.

When I get to my car, I spot Tommy leaning against the bumper.

“I had a feeling you’d run,” he says.

I stop a safe distance from him, my backpack heavy on my shoulder. “Tommy—”

“I won’t,” he says. “Run, I mean.”

I let my backpack drop with a thud. “Tommy, it’s not chemo.”

“Really?”

In the distance, by the Dumpsters, the goths laugh at something and stomp out their cigarettes.

“Really,” I say.

He doesn’t believe me.

“I have to get out of here,” I say.

“Did you join the marines?” he says.

Is it possible to mock someone while still being incredibly sweet?

Yes.

“You still want to go to the beach?” I say.

He nods.

It’s only a fifteen-minute drive down Argilla Road to Karn Beach, but the silence stretches it out. I can’t figure out a way to disprove the hastily formed but apparently universally agreed upon “Chemo Theory” without blowing the lid off the even worse truth.

Karn Beach’s huge parking lot, packed during summer vacation, is empty but for two cars parked on opposite corners. I pull up near the entrance to a little-known boardwalk that snakes into the dunes. Silently, we get out of the car and I retrieve a blanket, which has been in the trunk since last summer. There’s a ketchup stain on one side of it and I can’t remember which.

Tommy eyeballs the boardwalk entrance, which is partially obscured by an overhanging tree. “Isn’t there supposed to be a psycho living back there somewhere?”

“Yup.” I close the trunk. “And a nudist colony and the Karn Beach rapist and I think the Unabomber at one point. Scared?”

He laughs, then follows me under the tree.

The boardwalk creaks beneath us, and the overhanging trees create a welcome chill against the hot sun. When we emerge from the trees, the rolling dunes spread out in all directions, but only a sliver of ocean is visible in the valley between two of them.

“Wow,” Tommy says. “I didn’t know it was so big.”

“Yeah.” I take off my gold flats and step barefoot into the still-cool sand. “It stretches for miles, you know. Gets pretty hot back here in the summer.”

“I bet.” He steps out of his white Adidas and joins me barefoot in the sand. “Where to?”

“This way.” I head off toward my favorite dune.

When we get there, I spread the blanket out and sit on one corner. The ocean is just visible over the top of another dune, and the rhythm of crashing waves reaches us. Tommy puts one shoe on each corner to secure the blanket, then sits next to me.

“So,” he says.

I reach over him and pull his heavy backpack onto the blanket. Unzipping it, I pull out the calculus book.

“I hate math,” he says. “Can’t I just resign myself to not being a numbers person?”

“It’s not about numbers.” Sitting cross-legged, I open the book. “It’s about nature.”

“Nature?”

“Yeah.”

He sits directly across from me, mirroring my cross-legged position. “All right. I’m listening.”

The breeze unsettles the ends of my wig, and I keep checking to make sure it’s secure. “All right, well, everything in this book is proof that all of this . . .” I gesture to the surrounding dunes. “That everything around us works the way it should.”

He smiles suddenly, but the smile fades.

“It’s a way of describing the natural order,” I say, “and the relationships between things in an abstract way.”

The smile won’t return.

I close the book. “Go ahead,” I say. “Ask me.”

“So it’s not from chemotherapy?” he says.

I stare at the cover of the book with its nerdy geometric drawing. “No. It’s not.”

He traces the blue line in the drawing on the book. “So how did it happen?”

I realize at this moment how reckless it was to rely solely on the integrity of the wig. I should have brainstormed a backup story.

Tommy’s elbows rest on his knees as he leans forward, anxious for my answer.

Stalling, I lean back and drop onto the blanket. “I guess this is my fate.”

Tommy hovers above me, his face blocking the sun. “What fate?”

“Always having to explain myself,” I say.

Pulling myself up, I grab my sunglasses from the backpack and put them on.

Tommy lies on his side with his head propped on his hand. “Explain what?” he says.

I want to join him, to stretch myself out in his shadow, but I’m too scared.

“You know,” I say. “This condition I have.”

“The blood condition?” he says. “The transfusions?”

I turn my mirror shades to him. Feeling suddenly safe behind them, I fantasize for a nanosecond about spilling the whole truth. “Yeah,” I say. “That. It sucks. It deeply sucks. And sometimes at the hospital . . .” I face the crest of a distant dune.

“They make mistakes.”

Tommy sits up. “Mistakes?”

I feel him studying me.

“Yeah.” Now I can’t look at him. Not when I’m lying like this.

“Are you telling me they cut off your hair by accident?”

It’s only when
he
says it that I realize the full extent of its malness. But now I’m committed.

“Hard to believe,” I say. “I know.”

He scoots closer, takes my sunglasses off and places them on the blanket. “Jill,” he says. “You can tell me anything. Or you can tell me nothing. But please don’t lie to me.”

When I breathe in, the jaggedness of it surprises me. I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to lose control and tell him the truth. He only thinks he wants it. He can’t possibly want it. How could he?

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Tommy wraps his long arms around me and pulls me to his chest. “It’s okay,” he says. “You can tell me when you’re ready. I’ll wait.”

“Okay.” The word limps out as a few tears moisten his neck. Pulling back, I wipe his skin dry and try to stem the sniffling. “I’m sorry.”

He pulls me back to his shoulder and says, “Go ahead. Cry all you want. I’m not going anywhere.”

I let loose with a full-throated sob. “Thank you.”

He places his hand on the back of my wig and I hold my breath in embarrassment. Then he strokes it very gently. “It’s okay,” he says.

I wrap my arms around him and press as much of myself against his chest as I can manage. As soon as the well of tears dries up, he whispers as quietly as the breeze, “Jill.”

But it’s not a question. It’s just a word, a sound. Then his lips are on my neck. After a few gentle kisses, they wander to my cheek, my forehead. He pulls back just enough to focus on my eyes, and my body goes liquid.

Softly, our mouths connect. The sun appears and disappears behind the shadow of his face. He pulls himself impossibly close to me, our bodies growing hot against each other. I feel dizzy, like I’m falling. Then I realize he has been pushing me in the smallest of increments backward toward the blanket, his lips never leaving mine. With his hands firmly grasping the small of my back, he lays me down. Then slowly, gently, he lays his full length down on me. Our legs intertwined, he kisses me deeply. Our tongues connect. I feel pressure on the inside of my right knee. He’s pressing it. As his hands wander to my shoulders, then my face, the pressure grows until he’s slid both of his legs between mine.

“Jill,” he says.

I can’t speak. My lips can only find his and kiss him deeper. Always deeper. I can feel him pressing against my pelvis. My knees bend and he positions himself lower, sending a warm ripple of pleasure through my torso.

His hand wanders across my shoulder to the top button of my shirt. The kiss grows harder. As I wrap my legs around his hips, he slips open the first button of my shirt, then the second, then the third. At the last button, he pulls his lips from mine, leans back and opens my shirt. His eyes flutter closed for a second. Then his face descends to my chest, over my bra and downward, his lips brushing the exposed skin of my ribs. Downward to the notch beneath my ribs, his lips find my stomach. He brushes them over the waistband of my jeans while fingering the front clasp of my bra. I don’t know where to focus. He’s touching me everywhere. After fumbling for a few seconds, he pops the clasp, looks up at me and pulls the bra open. An excited breath escapes his lips; then he pulls himself up and kisses my neck.

I clutch the back of his head as my eyes squeeze shut, the sun making pinwheels of color against my lids. “Tommy,” I say. “Oh, Tommy.”

I feel the wetness of his mouth on my neck as it slides lower. He’s moving faster now, his hands never stopping as they stroke and caress my arms, my legs, my stomach. My thighs squeeze tightly around his hips as my hands wander up and down his back. When he moves his face downward over my ribs to the soft flesh of my stomach, my back arches and I feel my head dig into the yielding sand beneath the blanket.

Tommy sucks and bites at my stomach, then tugs at the snap of my jeans.

I gasp.

He looks up, eyes full of hope. His teeth come together in a knowing smile and he rips the snap open.

I freeze.

All feeling disappears.

Eyes glued to mine, Tommy grasps the zipper between his thumb and forefinger and, with an impossible slowness, pulls it downward. The sun burns my eyes, but I can’t stop looking at him. As if challenging me to stop him, he stares back while pulling the zipper.

The sound of metal against metal is huge, all out of proportion. Everything but my own crotch and Tommy’s hand on it disappears as the descending zipper reveals the pink cotton of my underwear.

“Wait.” My hand clamps down on his.

The unzipping stops. He waits for my signal.

Everything’s wrong.

His face. His hair.

My exposed breasts, the smooth hollow beneath my ribs. All wrong. Where’s the fine trail of hair? Where’s the bulge beneath my jeans where Tommy’s face is?

And why is it Tommy’s face? Why isn’t it—

“Oh mal,” I hear myself say.

Squirming out from under him, I pull my shirt closed. I don’t even bother to reclasp my bra, which dangles gracelessly from my shoulders.

Tommy gets to his knees. “It’s okay. We don’t have to . . .”

I button my shirt as quickly as my fingers will manage.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m moving too fast.”

I don’t look at him as I battle with my zipper. I have to kneel to zip it.

“I’m sorry, Jill. I—”

“What?” I close the button of my jeans and glance around the dunes. No one is there.

“Are you okay?” he says.

The wind blows his hair so feebly.

“I mean, we don’t have to, you know, if I’m moving too fast. It’s cool.”

It’s anything but cool. My body’s on fire with a devouring hunger that’s all wrong. I want to run. I want to burrow into the dunes and disappear. Tommy’s face—the faint hint of stubble, the severe jaw—is all wrong. Everything is wrong.

Saying nothing, we shake out the blanket and make our way back to the boardwalk and the parking lot.

I’ve freaked Tommy out. He has no idea what’s going on. I know it’s up to me to say something, but I’m so afraid of what I’m feeling right now, I can’t speak.

I drive him back to school in utter, agonizing silence, watch him walk back inside, then drive home and go straight to my room.

Jack!

He’s polluted my mind. All the disgusting things he does and thinks and dreams about have escaped his phase and are perverting mine!

But I won’t have it. It’s bad enough that he’s driven a creepy wedge of uncomfortable pervitude between me and Ramie. He’s not taking Tommy Knutson away from me too.

I put a note on the outside of my bedroom door telling Mom to leave me alone to meditate; then I do four and a half hours of it. I don’t care how long I have to lie here conjuring the black dot. I am burying that little pervert in an unmarked grave.

When I get to school the next day, the Chemo Theory has become dogma. There’s even talk of making me prom queen as a final tribute before I snuff it. The worst part is I can’t refute the theory because I have no alternate.

In art class, I’m washing blue tempera paint out of a brush when Ramie comes in with the bell.

“Let’s ditch,” she says. “Want to hang out in Vietnam?”

Vietnam is a big obstacle course in the woods behind the visitor bleachers of the football field. For three weeks every year, Mr. Gibbons uses it to torture sophomores to build self-esteem. His or theirs, I’ve never been sure.

I shake out the brush and place it in the drying rack as the rest of the class gathers their stuff and vacates.

“Come on,” Ramie says.

“I don’t know, Rames.”

I do not make eye contact, because despite all the meditation, I have not been able to evict the residue of Jack’s icky wrong feelings. Undaunted, she presses her body right up to me and sticks her bony finger in my side. “You’re coming with me, princess. This is a gun and I’m not afraid to use it.”