Inexcusable (11 page)

“Now I won't,” I said, hands out in front of me. “I think . . . maybe I'll just go and find a drink. If that's okay. You know, I wasn't really planning on staying, so I'm sorry I didn't bring anything . . .”

“Hey, shut up,” he snapped, as if the strain of keeping his eyes clear was infuriating him and I was somehow responsible for it.

I was about to apologize again, when I realized I had it wrong.

“Bozo,” he said. “Killer, Bozo. Don't you dare apologize. You don't bring drink here.” He started slapping himself on the chest. “I provide, for my friends. You're my friend. Everything is on the house here. Here . . .” He reached into his pants pockets and came up with something cupped in his hand. He took me by the wrist and with a little flicking gesture ejected all the contents of his hand into my open palm, like an old-timer giving pocket change to a little kid.

They were pills, a few like the blue triangle one I scarfed earlier, a few gel capsules, a few that looked like aspirin.

“I don't want these,” I said. “Ken, this is too much. This is your stuff. You keep it, don't go wasting it—”

“I'm not
wasting
anything,” he said. “I got millions. Anything you want. What do you want?”

“Really, nothing,” I said, and then took a harder look at the contents of my palm. Hmm. The pill from earlier . . . I was, in fact, feeling awfully better. Awfully warm. Awfully . . .
nice.
Awfully fearless and in control.

“Maybe just this one,” I said. “Maybe—”

“Maybe nothing,” he said, grabbing my fist and curling it up into a ball so I couldn't refuse any of it. “If you don't just shut up, and take my gift, and be a good party guest . . .” Here he either lost his train of thought or was actually thinking about what he would have to do if
I didn't be a good party guest.” . . . then we're all going to kick your ass. And then drop you out that window.” He looked quite pleased with his solution. “Aren't we, guys?” he called out, to general murmuring and gurgled support from the team.

I looked at the pills. I looked at Quarterback Ken. I looked at the open window. I shoved the pills into my pocket.

“Happy graduation,” Ken said.

“Thanks,” I said.

He hugged me. “I love you, man.”

“Well no, really you don't,” I said, hugging along.

“Ah, you're probably right,” he said, spun, and went back to the silver tray, where scholar athletes were now gathering like big cats around a carcass.

“I'll just go get a drink then,” I said.

Nobody objected. I left.

When I stepped back out into the hallway on the second floor of the Quarterback Ken residence, my senses were swarmed, inside, outside. Everything seemed brighter, like a floodlit movie set. The music was enormous, filling my body and rattling it, from the bottom up. My stomach was filled with I didn't know what, but whatever it was I had swallowed it whole and it was dancing. And here is a thing: I flashed on my sisters. Not like that, not like a freak. But I couldn't believe they were not here. I couldn't believe this day was here and they were not.

I had never had a day, I mean, you know, a
day
in my life without them. I missed the hell out of them. I was so goddamn mad at them. They knew how important they were. They knew, Mary and Fran.

Your family should be there. Your family should always be there. What does it say about you if they aren't? It's inexcusable.

Then my eyes came to rest on Gigi Boudakian, still at the telephone table.

Only, “rest” would not be the correct word. They were not resting, my eyes, when they were on Gigi Boudakian. She glowed, in my eyes, above and apart from everything around her. She was powered from within, wattage firing up from her while the rest of the hallway, the rest of the world, went completely flat.

I was so stunned, I was so jumpy inside, I was so much running on pure feelings now rather than my own thinking power, that I nearly failed to notice that Gigi Boudakian was not in a party spirit as I stood there shamelessly staring at her. I nearly failed to notice that Gigi Boudakian was in tears.

Her full bottom lip puffed out and pulled back, puffed out, pulled back as she talked to whomever she was talking to on the phone. Then it puffed out, remarkably, pneumatically, dramatically, as she sat in unhappy silence listening to the words of whatever monster could possibly speak words to make Gigi Boudakian cry. I
watched, I suppose, the way people watch sports on TV, moving, twitching, shifting along with the action as my body language attempted to influence the outcome of whatever was going on there in that phone conversation.

I was doing the lip thing as I watched her doing the lip thing, puffing it out, pulling it back, puffing it out, and then biting it to stay in place and show Gigi Boudakian to be happy now and not, and not, and not anywhere near tears.

“What are you
doing
?” Gigi Boudakian yelled at me as she placed the phone receiver in her lap and glowered.

What was wrong? It wasn't me. It wasn't me making Gigi Boudakian cry. It would never be me making Gigi Boudakian cry, it was me standing here rooting for her, rooting for her lip and for happiness and rooting for whoever it was to say the right thing and do the right thing, whatever the right thing was that would put Gigi Boudakian's face back the way it should always be. Even if that right thing for her and for him was not the right thing for me. Even if that.

“Do you
mind,
Keir?” she said to me. “Go downstairs. Or go back in there with the secret society.”

For lack of any other ideas, I treated this as an actual conversation. “No,” I said, nodding back toward the bedroom door. “That's not my kind of—”

“Go!” she snapped, with a small shriek that could not ever have come out of Gigi Boudakian.

I walked down the hall, passing by her with a dumb little mumbled “Sorry,” and took the stairs.

“And could you bring me a drink, please, Keir?” she said in a whole different voice, sad and tired and something apologetic all at once.

I went directly to the food and drinks center and realized quite clearly the minute I got there that I really wanted neither food nor drink. But I found the lemon vodka drinks that Gigi Boudakian wanted, and I got two of them.

Like a good boy, like a very good boy, I returned directly with both drinks. Like we were somehow having a drink together, Gigi Boudakian and the phone and myself. I stood there. I could have been waiting for a tip.

“Ke-ir,” she said, exasperated, saying my name with two syllables.

She did not need to say more. I saw her lip quavering again, I saw the effort, I saw the time that was passing over this phone conversation, and I saw I had better go before I saw more than I wanted to see. Good or bad, I had the feeling the outcome would not be something I would like to watch.

Once more downstairs. Once more in this room and that. Once more—no, twelve times more.

And in every room I found what I didn't want. I didn't want any food and I didn't want any drink, and I didn't want any party.

I wanted other people. Not any other people, but
my
people. I don't know where or how I had lost my ability to
really enjoy hanging around with the general population, but I had well and truly lost it. It was like I couldn't bear to be very long with people other than the people I loved, and the people I loved were a very compact list and all the rest just made me tense and awkward and angry after the first twenty minutes.

I wanted to go.

The party had become one of those parties. Only more. It seemed perfectly okay with everybody that I just bee- lined out as arbitrarily as I had come in.

I found Rollo asleep, or intensely reading the paper draped over his face. I didn't even bother to wake him as I slipped back into my private spot in the backseat, thinking about what to do, what not to do.

A whole huge part of me wanted just to go home. I could do that, just go back to the house, go quietly to my room, put on music and whack myself to oblivion. That would be good. That would work. It always did, always made me feel mellow and harmless and right.

W
hat I am afraid of now, deeply worried about now, is that Gigi Boudakian is going truly crazy. She is not acting right. She is not acting any way I recognize as normal.

“I'm worried,” I say to her after one alarming half hour of silence.

“You better be.”

“Gigi, why are you taking this out on me? It's Carl who didn't come. It's Carl who's responsible, for getting you all upset and making you cry and making you crazy. I was the one who was here for you. Why can't you understand that? I was the one who was here, Carl was the one who didn't come.”

“Well he's coming now. Today Carl is coming, Keir. And so is my father. So is everybody, coming for you, Keir Sarafian.”

This was just crazy. It was all gone so crazy, I couldn't believe it.

I
wasn't even aware how long I was sitting there, staring out the window like a zombie. Rollo was still sleeping, though.

Gigi emerged from the house and marched straight across the lawn, straight toward the limo, very much like something in a dream. If I were sleeping like Rollo, this would be exactly the dream I'd be having.

There she was at the window. I even tried to preserve her there. Just for a few seconds, a few seconds with her lovely soft sad face framed in the window, mine to keep. She pressed her face to the glass, cupped her hands around her eyes, trying to see in through the smoke.

“Keir,” she called loudly, knocking on the window. “Keir, are you in there?”

She must have disturbed Rollo's sleep, because suddenly
my electric window was opening, and he was growling, “For god's sake, you don't keep a quality girl waiting.”

“Hi,” said Gigi Boudakian, who looked like she had tired and sad panda eyes now, reddish and watery, black drippy makeup pooling and overflowing from shallow hollows above her cheekbones. It was like when the window opened it revealed what was real, dark and unlovely, and I for one was anxious to not see it.

“Hi,” I said, and it sounded like a long, slo-mo sentence as it slurped out of me. “You were looking for me?” My stomach did a sudden leap as I said the words, and heard them.

“Yes,” she said.

“Excellent. What for?”

She paused, smiled shyly. “I don't know, actually.”

“Good enough for me,” I said brightly.

“Stop that,” she said, laughing, smacking my arm.

I reached out then, pulling the sleeve of my jacket down over my hand, and dabbed at both of her black, streaky pools to clean them up some.

“You okay?” I asked, squinting for the response.

Gigi Boudakian lowered her determinedly lovely chocolate eyes. “Not really,” she said.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

She nodded graciously. “Buy you a drink?”

I shook my head graciously. “But I could buy you one.” I motioned at my mobile bar.

Gigi blinked twice, nodded, and climbed in.

We drank a drink, and then another, and Rollo drove us around, looking for the middle of nowhere. And that suited us just fine.

At least it suited me. I was into Gigi Boudakian. Everything else had become background, bordering on interference. She talked to me, about people we knew, I think, about music, about college, I think, and maybe about families, definitely, about families, about Sarafians and Boudakians and all and I think, yes, I know, she talked about her boyfriend Carl in the air force and his fateful and nasty and stupid decision not to come home for her graduation. I never enjoyed talking with a pretty girl about her boyfriend more than I was enjoying it right there.

I watched, I listened, I smiled. Gigi Boudakian drank, and Gigi Boudakian was not really a drinker, but sometimes there are just those times.

Then she nearly ruined everything by asking to borrow my new phone.

“I have to try,” she said, before stepping just outside the car. “A person has to try, Keir, that's what I think. So I have to try at least one more time.”

“I guess,” I said, not believing at the moment that a person did, necessarily.

While I waited in the ether of the presence of Gigi Boudakian, I thought it might be a good time for a charm- bravery-confidence booster. I reached a hand into my
pocket, fished around, took out a couple of pills. There were a couple of triangles left, and the others, and I thought I would be conservative for now and stick with the tried and true. I gagged one, washed it down, stood there numb and waiting and hoping like hell that my old friend Carl was going to continue to be the most foolish young man in our entire armed services and
not
come to Gigi Boudakian on her graduation day.

Until, just minutes later, I set eyes again on Gigi's eyes, on her so sad red drippy eyes, and right there I repented, reversed, and wished so badly that whatever bad wishing I had done did not contribute to making this so. Because I would even rather have seen him come swooping down out of the sky with a chest full of medals and sweep her away from me than see what I was seeing.

“I'm sorry, Gigi,” I said as she sat back in the car, sniffing, wiping with a messy sweep of her elegant hand, then sniffing some more.

“He's not even there now,” she said, voice quavering with rage and sadness. “He said he had to stay right there on base, and now he's not even there.”

She leaned right up to me, right up close, close enough so I could feel heat coming off her skin, off her flushed face.

“My sisters didn't come either,” I said.

“Yes, I know. You told me.”

“Did I?” I said.

She giggled. She was sad and sad-faced, but she could giggle too. She could do it all, Gigi Boudakian.