Love in the Time of Cynicism (15 page)

“It’s alright, mom,” Rhett says as we enter the house, which has been cleaned up since I was here a week ago. The boxes are gone and it’s quiet. “I know you’ve got a lot going on.”

Mr. Tressler jumps in at this juncture with a pointed glance in my direction. “I see you’ve brought our favorite listener home. Isn’t it getting late?”

“Dad,” Rhett explain emphatically, “Cordelia Kane has never seen
The Breakfast Club
.”

He gapes at me. “Then I fully understand the urgency of the situation and apologize for questioning the necessity of this meeting.”

“Apology accepted. We’ll be in the basement.”

Mr. Tressler’s eyes narrow. “The basement?”

Rhett rolls his eyes, seeing his father’s meaning. “There are soon to be six sleeping individuals in this house and I don’t want to keep anyone up with the heart-breakingly honest sounds of one of America’s best films. This is for simple courtesy and nothing else.”

“Keep him in line, Cordelia,” he says to me with a paternal wink. Susie squeezes my shoulder and they retreat up the stairs.

“Are you ready for this experience?” He asks seriously, then shakes his head. “Stupid question. You could never be ready.”

I bite my lower lip and hesitate before saying, “Actually, I was wondering if I could borrow a shirt or something.” I indicate the guilt of the tight sequined top Amanda picked out this morning. “I think I’ve developed some very severe wounds from this shirt and can’t imagine wearing it much longer.”

Rhett blushes for a reason I don’t quite understand even though my own face is red simply for making the request. After a while, he says, “Absolutely. Be right back.”

Then he runs quietly up the steps and I’m alone in his living room. No matter how long I’ve known him, being alone in someone else’s house without the person who invited me will never cease to be weird and uncomfortable for me.

When Rhett returns, a black shirt in hand, I feel the weight of awkwardness leave me. He tosses is to me and says, “That’s from when I was, like, fourteen, so it should fit you.”

After I change in the bathroom of pre-teen existential crises, though, he’s proven wrong because the shirt is way too big for me but has the redeeming qualities of being significantly more comfortable than the medieval torture device I was wearing previously and smelling like Rhett.

When I emerge, Rhett grins at me. “Nice. You can keep that, if you want. Suits you better than pink sequins, I’d say.”

“Thanks,” I reply lightly while tugging at the hem of this shirt, which ends about half-way down my thigh. “I didn’t realize you were this much bigger than me, though. I’m pretty tall and-”

“You are
not
tall.” He laughs, “You’re the size of a fairy princess.”

“I’m five-eight!”

“And I’m six-three, so that’s not impressive in the slightest.”

I shake my head.
Tall people.
“Are we going to do this thing or what?”

“Without a doubt.”

He leads me down a set of stairs behind a door I’d assume was a closet and into a basement clearly dominated by the youth of the house. Down the center of the room is a line of duct tape, which obviously separated the space into Rhett’s and the little kids’. One on side of the tape there’s a very impressive pillow and blanket fort erected in the back corner, held up by a ping pong table on one end and four or five chairs on the other. It’s surrounded by a slew of action figures and such. On the other side is a well-organized stack of DVDs that reaches up to my head and a huge black couch in front of a massive old box TV as well as quite a few bean bags. A complex tangle of wires connects various speakers and movie players to the television, held to the wall with a convoluted duct tape rig.

“You own a lot of movies,” I comment stiffly, unsure of how to proceed.

As Rhett gets to work pulling out his copy of the movie and turning on the various electronics that need to be plugged in and rewired, he replies, “I guess. I used to skip school a lot and stay home, so I’d watch movies until everyone else came home. My collection is the accumulation of a year’s worth of problem avoidance.”

I can’t stop the question from coming out. Every moment we’re together, I crave more knowledge about him. From the constant long sleeves to certain lines in his poem, I’m dying to understand who he was relative to who he is now. “Why’d you stay home so much?”

The TV shrieks on, stopping Rhett from answering. He soothes the TV and fiddles with it until the DVD menu shows up. After hitting play, the first notes of that classic song
Don’t You (Forget About Me)
start up and he falls back on the couch, then gestures for me to do the same with a broad smile. “Join me and prepare for the wonder of eighties cinema to cleanse your soul.”

The bright orange names shake over the screen as Rhett sings the words under his breath. Throughout the beginning, he quotes every line quietly, starting right at
Saturday, March 24
th
, 1984
and going through the parents’ speeches in the car.  As Judd Nelson’s walking in wearing that ridiculous outfit of his, Rhett explains quietly that Brian’s his favorite character for more reasons than he could say. He makes comments on the characters’ personalities and relationships so often I can’t focus on the movie; while Rhett extols the ‘brutally honest, raw brilliance’ of Brian, Andy, and Allison, he berates Bender and Claire to no end. Rhett abhors how the relationships play out but loves the writing. Frankly, he criticizes the movie to such an extreme extent it’s hard to believe it’s his favorite. It’s a very intense experience, watching
The Breakfast Club
with Rhett, as he points out metaphorical resonances in
every single scene
to the point where I start to think that, for him, at least, the movie means something more to him.

I’ve forgotten the exact details of each person’s story and am surprised to find myself getting sucked in during when they’re sitting around in a circle giving testimonials. My head’s on Rhett’s chest and my eyes are drooping through the stream of agonizing words. His heart beats below my ear, a heavy, constant sounds that calms me. And then, a few minutes after I’ve gone misty-eyed from Andy talking about his asshole parents and how much he hates them, I feel Rhett’s ribcage heave right when Brian begins to cry and says,
“So I considered my options, you know?”

The lines continue and sobs rack thunderously from his chest. I sit up and rest my hand against his chest. Rhett sucks in a trembling breath and apologizes, “Shit, sorry; it’s just this damn movie gets me every time.”

I can tell beyond a doubt it’s more than that. Not sure what to say, I merely ask, “You want to talk?”

“Later,” he promises. “For now, let’s finish this movie.”

Chapter Eight – A Dawn Augur

I wake up before the sun rises, my head on Rhett’s lap and his arm draped over me. Rhett shifting under me to start the movie again jostles my head enough to wake me and I bolt upright.
Crap
. The clock over the TV reads 2:14 and I’m in Rhett’s basement.

“You alright, Sleeping Beauty?” He jokes and leans in closer to me, face barely illuminated by the orangey glow of the television.

I stare at him, study the features of his tear-stained face. “Are
you
?”

He rolls his beautiful eyes at me and replies, “Always. Never been better.”

“I’m serious.” I give him a small shove on the chest, to which he presses a hand where I hit him and mumbles a sarcastic
ouch, Rocky
. “We should talk about…whatever. If this is ever going to happen, I need to know more about you. Your past. And I’ll return the favor.”

He sighs heavily, nods. “I’m only going to agree to this because I want us to work out, alright? So what do you want to hear?”

I run through the long list of questions I have for him. “Why do you where long sleeves even though we live about as far South as you can go without touching Mexico?”

“You want complete honesty? Full disclosure?”

“Exactly.”

Instead of responding verbally, Rhett stands up and shrugs off the blazer he’s been wearing since the poetry reading. My heart doesn’t race like I thought it would; it pounds against my ribs hard enough I feel like my bones might shatter. He sits down next to me and we face one another as he takes my right hand in his. I follow his motions as he flips over his left wrist to reveal a series of thick vertical scars ranging from raised and white and fading to flat and pink and angry.

My breath catches in my throat as Rhett guides my fingers over the scars. They’re smooth as my calloused finger tips run over their ridges. I let out breath I’d been holding as my thumb traces them. I can only imagine the kind of garish wounds that caused these, and it makes me shudder.

“This was me,” he tells me seriously while holding my gaze steadily. “For two years of my life, this is what I chose to do to myself.”

The image of Rhett, alone and clutching a razorblade over his flawless skin, makes me bite my lip out of anguish. Something falls in my stomach; it’s the opening a deep pit that can only be fixed by knowing he’s okay and doing better.

I lace my fingers in his and turn his wrist over again. “This isn’t you anymore, Rhett, and what matters to me is that you’re taking care of yourself now.”

“I know.” He brushes some hair behind my ear and laughs a bit. “I haven’t felt that bad in months, thanks to my genius therapist and a regular cocktail of antidepressants.”

Completely and totally exhausted but not wanting our first real, personal conversation to end, I return my head to his chest and ask quietly, “How’d it get so bad in the first place?”

“It’s hard to remember,” he admits with a shrug. “I hated my parents, my family, my teachers, the people I used to call my friends. School was crap and my grades were bad enough to make me stop going altogether.” He sucks in a breath and summarizes his thoughts. “All I know is that six months ago, you could’ve slit my throat and with my last dying breath I would’ve apologized for bleeding on your shirt. That’s how badly I wanted to die. Then we moved away from everything that was bringing me down and things started to brighten up.” I don’t respond for a long time, simply listening to his heart beat under my ear slowing down after the adrenaline rush of telling this to me spiked it. The sound is compelling, relaxing, and I feel myself nodding off until he interrupts my drifting thoughts by asking, “You have anything to say?”

“
Shh
,” I whisper softly. “You heart is telling me a story of its own.”

Chapter Nine – Family Matters

Rhett manages to get me home via his motorcycle after feeding me a quick breakfast at three in the morning without much fuss. After hearing some of his story to keep locked away, my heart flutters even more when his lips graze mine as I get off the bike.

Before I run up the lawn to my house, he asks, “See you this afternoon?”

“Unfortunately,” I sigh, going through the schedule in my mind, “it had completely slipped my mind that my mother’s holding our seasonal family dinner tonight, or as I like to call it: two hours of
how old are you now do you have a boyfriend why did your mom let you dye your hair that color
. My other step-sister will be there and, if I’m horribly unlucky, so will my step-brother. By then, I’ll probably be more grounded than I am already after trying to explain myself out of this mess.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

“Without a doubt.”

He drives off once I, very gingerly, unlock and open the door. Shutting it behind me is nerve-wracking as I try to keep the sound nonexistent. Trent’s the first one to catch me, it being four in the morning. He’s camped out in the living room adjacent to the door, slumbering like a bear on the white couch until he heard the door open.

“Hey, baby sister,” he greets me sleepily but dead-serious. He stands up and leans against the archway. He looks me over, shaggy hair rumpled over his eyes and hands in the pocket of sweat-pants that probably belong to his girlfriend, like I’ve done something wrong. “Where were you last night?”

“Ah, at Sky’s,” I reply in hushed tones while remembering she agreed to cover for me.

“We both know that’s bullshit,” he calls me out. “Lucky for you, that’s what I told mom and Michael so they wouldn’t be on your case. So I deserve the truth.”

As I make a valiant attempt at walking up the stairs behind him, I ask, “What’s with the sudden burst brotherly protectiveness?”

“Come on, kid, we both know you’re my responsibility more than anyone else’s. I want to identify the guy who needs a good punch in the jaw.”

“
Trent
,” I groan, “this isn’t a big deal.”

“You’re right.” He threatens, “But it will be if I tell mom.”

I give in. There’s no way this can make it to my parents. Trent and Amanda and Sky knowing about Rhett is one thing, my parents knowing is something completely different. “I was with Rhett. Nothing happened, though, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“You stay out all night and I’m supposed to believe nothing happened?”