Heft (13 page)

Keller, what the hell is all that, asks Peters.

Jealous? I say, and realize suddenly that it is what I say to everyone who ever teases me. About anything. Peters is eating pita bread or some shit like that. His mother probably packed it up for him with her own hands.

Kind of, he says.

I’m quiet. Among my friends I am quiet except for when I am very loud and calling someone out. Or when I am mad or upset or drunk.

My cell phone rings. Normally I am very good about squirreling away my cell phone and making sure it is on silent (they’re strict here, they’ll take it from you if it rings or if they even see it) but suddenly I feel it vibrating in my backpack. There is only one person it could be because all my friends are here and a chill comes over me. What does she want. Is she all right. Sneakily I look at the phone inside my bag.

It’s an unavailable number. I wait to see if they’ll leave a message. I wait to see if it is a hospital or a police station, but after a minute it becomes clear that there’s no voice mail. And then I wonder if it was another scout.

We get up from the benches, we trot outside. Coach is in a bad mood. Probably because of the Yonkers game which he knows we will lose but must pretend we will win. It must be a terrible thing to be a coach. Today he cuts us no slack and me in particular. Separately he makes me take my drops until my legs shake. We do passing plays for an hour. I am distracted and I can’t tell anyone why. Coach has the JV defensive line go up against us while our real defense is doing drills down the other end of the field. JV is supposed to play like Yonkers’ defense, which is made up of boys that are probably three times their collective weight. We are the first-string offense and we should crush them. But my head’s not in it. I hold the ball too long. I get sacked on the first play.

Later, when I throw a pass to no one, Coach says, KELLER! WHAT! IS! YOUR! DEAL!

I say nothing. I shake my helmeted head.

• • •

A
fter practice, I shower. After I shower I get into my car.
After I get into my car I take several breaths and put on
Sports Talk
and listen to Charlie Rasco. Then I head for Lindsay Harper’s house down back roads that I’ve learned well over the years I’ve been at PLHS. It’s 4:45 in the afternoon. The sky is orange.

Some days, driving around Pells Landing, I become so aware of how pretty it is that I forget everything that I should be worrying about. This is one of those days: most of the leaves are off the trees, but it’s warm for November, and so every little family in Pells is out in the front yard of their gigantic home, raking and laughing and being very happy. There is a smell of wood smoke in the air and, not for the first time, I feel like an intruder, like somebody staking something out.

Lindsay’s house is near Trevor’s in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Pells. In high school everyone knows a few facts about almost everyone else, even if you’ve never spoken to them. Sometimes these are stories that follow a person for years, from eighth grade, from fifth: the kid who peed himself in gym class, the girl who cried when she got a B+. About me people probably say, He’s poor and his mom is sick and crazy. No one’s ever seen his house which probably means it’s a dump. He’s the best baseball player in school or in the state. He’s stupid. I don’t know. Before Lindsay and I started hanging out, these were the things I knew about her: her family, like most families in Pells, comes from money; her father is the superintendent of schools; her mother is a lawyer in the city and has a job defending large corporations; she used to have an older brother but he died when Lindsay was in middle school, which lends her an extra air of mystery and desirability.

Her house, when I first saw it, was a shock: the size of it. It is tan with brown beams all over it like an old-fashioned English house, and old. Two huge trees frame it. It has a big porch and a porch swing on it. As I pull into her driveway I look up at all the windows on the top floor and wonder which one is Lindsay’s. I get out of my car, but before I have a chance to walk to the house, the front door flies open and two little blond girls come running toward me. They are sock-footed and skinny.

Are you Lindsay’s friend? says one of them. They look about five and seven.

Yes, I say.

Could you please park over there, says the other, very polite, and gestures to a little space off the side of the driveway.

There? I ask, dumbly, and turn to follow their orders.

Lindsay appears in the doorway then and says What are they telling you!

To park over there, I say.

You guys. He’s fine where he is, says Lindsay, and her sisters begin to complain.

We want to play
soccer,
says the littler one. On the
driveway.

Play on the grass, says Lindsay, and then tells me to come inside.

Sorry, she says.

Her house is even nicer inside than I’d imagined. It has this kind of lobby with a ceiling so high our voices echo.

I start to follow her across it and then she turns and says Um—I’m so sorry—could you take your shoes off? My mom . . .

I am wearing two different socks and I am so embarrassed I almost leave.

Instead I make a joke about it, a stupid one, and Lindsay laughs.

There are red patterned carpets on the hardwood floor. All of the furniture is delicate and breakable. She introduces me to her two big dogs, Angelo and Maxie. Through eight glass doors at the other end of the living room I can see the Harpers’ backyard: there is a pool, covered for winter, landscaped to look like a mountain lake, with low bushes and trees all around it. In one hallway there are seven or eight photographs of their family from the time Lindsay was very small. I glance at them quickly as we walk past. I see Lindsay as a baby and Lindsay at five, pigtails and pierced ears. In all of them but the last one there is a boy. By the second-to-last he is almost a man. And in the last one he is not there. In the photos I recognize her father, a short bald-headed man, from the school board meeting I went to. I say a prayer that he will not be here to remember me.

You want something? asks Lindsay, as we enter the kitchen, filled with sharp-looking silver appliances and an island in the middle the size of my car. Soda? Are you hungry?

Smoothies! says a voice off to the side, and Lindsay’s mother emerges from a nook that I didn’t notice, wearing a red sweatsuit with a zipper up the front of it. It is meant for someone younger than she is and it shows the top of her freckled breasts. Her hair is dyed yellow. Her eyelashes are spidery.

Who’s this! she asks brightly, and Lindsay says, I told you my friend Kel was coming over to do a history project.

Kel, I’m Jeanie Harper, says her mother, and she holds her hand out to me very officially and suddenly I remember Kurt Aspenwall telling me she was a lawyer. Welcome to our home.

Lindsay looks pained.

Do you want a smoothie, Kel? asks Mrs. Harper. I was just about to make smoothies.

Um, I say, and glance at Lindsay. If . . .

Have one! says Mrs. Harper.

OK, I say. The truth is that I do want a smoothie. I’m hungry. I like them. Thank you, I say.

You guys go ahead and start working, says Mrs. Harper, I’ll bring them to you.

I don’t want one, says Lindsay.

Linds, says her mother, but then she says OK, fine, and kind of throws her hands up in the air and rolls her eyes at me like
What am I going to do with her!

Lindsay leads me to the basement which is finished and huge and cold and floored with a rough white carpet. A giant curved couch faces a low table and beyond it a flat-screen TV. The whole thing smells like strawberries or the sick sweet plastic of a doll.

All of a sudden I realize that we are alone and for the first time in a long while I get very nervous and can’t think of what to say. The other times we have hung out it has felt different, less frightening. She is wearing warm-up pants and a tight T-shirt. Her dark hair is down around her shoulders and she keeps brushing it back from her face with her pretty hands which I want to do also. I remember her head on my shoulder, last weekend at the movie.

We talk about nothing for a while and then Lindsay talks about the project while I listen. Then Mrs. Harper comes downstairs with smoothies and hands me one and then hands Lindsay one.

I made you one anyway, Linds, she said, and then she sits down on the leather couch next to us, crossing her legs, propping her chin up with her right fist. Lindsay takes the smoothie and puts it on the table in front of us, as far away from her as possible.

What’s your project, guys? Mrs. Harper asks brightly. I take a sip of the smoothie. It is the most delicious thing I’ve ever had in my life. I think it is made of raspberries. There are seeds in it that I burst between my teeth.

It’s on the Beat Generation, I say, because Lindsay isn’t saying anything.

Oooooh, says Mrs. Harper. Bongos and berets and stuff? She drums on her lap for a minute.

Thanks, Mom, says Lindsay. Thanks for the smoothies.

Mrs. Harper snaps her fingers repeatedly. That’s how they clapped, she says. After poetry.

Thanks, Mom, Lindsay says again, shortly.

After her mother leaves Lindsay looks at me, worried. Do you think I was rude? she says.

I do think so but I say no.

We work on the project for an hour, reading passages aloud to each other and writing stuff down that doesn’t even make sense. I had kind of figured that she would just do everything and I would watch because she is so much smarter than me and so much better than me at this kind of stuff. But she seems like she wants me to help.

Hang on, says Lindsay, and she springs gracefully from the couch and trots toward a door across from it. When she opens it I see it is a closet with many perfectly organized shelves. From one she removes a large stack of posterboard in many colors. From another she removes Magic Markers.

Wow, I say, why do you have all that stuff?

You know, says Lindsay. School projects and stuff.

It astounds me that someone can have a closet full of art supplies just for school projects.

She brings out a piece of light blue posterboard and says You’re good at art, right?

We have never talked about it, so apparently this is one of the things that people at school say about me, and for some reason this makes me really happy. I have taken art every year. I shrug.

She tells me what to write on the poster and at first I’m not thinking and I write
The Beet Generation
—beet, like a goddamn vegetable—but on my second try it looks very good. We talk more naturally. I find my words: we talk about other people in our grade, the most natural subject to talk about. Her best friends are Christy and Jill. We talk about them and their boyfriends.

She asks me for the first time about other girlfriends I have had, and I say, truthfully, none.

That’s not what I’ve heard, says Lindsay, but she lets it go, she doesn’t ask anything more of me.

Now there is silence again. Now we are alone in Lindsay Harper’s basement and neither of us is saying anything. Lindsay glances at me and then away. She is very still but for her left hand, which is coloring in the words that I have sketched.

I’ve been here at this moment dozens and dozens of times, with other girls. I try to imagine it: how it started, those times. How it normally starts. Normally it involves being drunk, but there was a time before I regularly got drunk when I knew how to do this, when I could lean toward a girl slowly and feel very certain that she wouldn’t move away, when I could put a hand on a girl’s waist and feel her stomach tense with desire, feel her body bend and move beneath my hand. I imagine reaching behind Lindsay and putting one hand on her back, just leaving it there on her smooth back, under her shirt. I imagine it so clearly that I can almost feel it happening.

It is almost dark outside. Only a tiny bit of light is coming in from the small windows set high in the basement walls. I move closer to Lindsay as imperceptibly as possible. I inch my right foot over and then my right thigh and then my left foot and my left thigh. Our arms touch. She is left-handed and I am right-handed.

She seems very calm, beside me. She keeps pausing to admire her work.

It’s getting dark in here, she says finally, and then she turns toward me and I can still make out her light large eyes and she pauses and then I do put one hand on her side. And leave it there.

What are you, she says, and I think she is going to say
doing,
but she doesn’t.

When I kiss her I almost knock her over backward. We do bend backward, she is up against the couch, and I try to gently encourage her onto it, but she doesn’t move. We stay there, kneeling, twisted toward each other.

I put my hands on her back under her shirt because I have imagined it so thoroughly already. There is her skin. There is her smooth muscled back.

She makes a little noise like a mew. It shivers me.

Just then we hear the basement door fly open and one of her baby sisters shrieks
LINDSAY!
Then we hear them come barreling down the stairs, which we cannot see from where we are.

WHAT! Lindsay yells, and springs to her feet athletically before they can see us.

What, she says more quietly, when they appear. I am not as quick as Lindsay and I have one knee on the floor and the other leg up as if I am proposing.

Margo broke something, says the older one, and Margo nods solemnly.

My left taillight is shattered.

Jesus Christ, you guys, says Lindsay. How did this happen?

The older one points to little Margo.

I was swinging a baseball bat, says Margo.

Into his car?
asks Lindsay.

—No, behind it. I swinged it backwards.

She looks as if she might cry.

Hey, it’s OK! I say. Don’t worry about it!

Like a jerk.

But I am very worried about it. I have no idea what it might cost but whatever it is I can’t afford it.