Places No One Knows (8 page)

The thing about the Captain's house is, someone pretty much always winds up puking. This time, it's Ollie.

He makes it to the kitchen sink and then leans there, spitting into the garbage disposal. When I ask if he wants me to take him home, he shrugs and says he just needs to lie down for a while, which is Ollie-speak for yes, he wants to go home, but he's worried about puking in my car. I get him a glass of water and leave him lying on his face on the floor of Hez's bathroom.

Without him there to run interference, I'm fair game for the kind of life choices he'd usually keep me away from. When I scroll through my phone, though, Heather's name is missing from my contacts. Instead, there's a new entry all the way at the bottom: You Don't Want to Do This.

I laugh a little, but it's not a good laugh. It's short and dry, and even when he's not around to say it, Ollie knows the deal. How long has it been since I texted her? Long enough that her name could have been missing for months. Long enough I've nearly forgotten how shitty it feels knowing I don't feel that way about her. But her mouth is warm, her breasts are amazing, and she will always call me back.

I'm in the living room messing with the stereo when she finds me.

She's the girl I'm supposed to be with—the one who will always wait for me to call first, and maybe even notice that I've spent every night for the last week getting stoned at my brother's house, but won't make things weird by asking about it. She's the girl who will always have a joke or an excuse, and then back off if things get too close to actual.

She's clearly drunk and doesn't mind that I'm not in the mood to talk. It's easy to just lean into it. Make out with her. Enjoy it.

I can't remember if the Captain's story about Hez and the recliner actually involved him pissing on anything. Chances are pretty good that it did. The chair is more comfortable than the couch, though, and when I put my face down close to the upholstery, it smells okay.

We're tangled up with each other, sinking into the cushions, and then Heather starts running her hands up and down my shoulders. When she touches my chest, it makes me feel keyed up in a dirty way. I put my hand on her back, right above her butt, and she presses against me, leaning in for the kiss.

Her body is soft, and I wish that whatever I'm feeling for her would be more than just a crazy urge to put my hand up her shirt. The way I feel when she wedges her thigh between my knees kind of makes me hate myself.

“I'm not wearing a bra,” she whispers, like I wasn't already obscenely aware of it. She's getting lip gloss all over my ear.

I touch the side of her breast, the curve of her waist. There's nothing but a layer of shirt between us. I'm falling into it, getting lost in the feeling of her mouth on mine, when someone starts to laugh. It's a flat, scornful sound.

When I open my eyes, Waverly Camdenmar is standing in the corner with her hip cocked out to one side, arms folded, eyebrows raised. She's wearing blue pajamas, with a collar and a pocket and buttons shaped like birds. She has the weirdest look on her face—this mix of fascination and disgust, like she's watching something repugnant on TV. Like I'm the punch line.

Heather McIntire is in all the general-track classes at school and is exactly the kind of girl who wraps herself around boys like Marshall—too much eyeliner, not enough shirt. He's holding her in his lap, touching the outside of her hip, her thigh. I lean against the wall and wait for him to notice me.

As I watch, he moves higher, fumbling for her breast. I'm conscious of my mouth suddenly, how dry and empty it is. How untouched. CJ Borsen materializes in my head and stays for exactly one unenticing second. I can't even imagine kissing him the way Marshall's kissing Heather—all lips and hands and too much tongue. The scenario is impossible, not to mention vaguely repulsive.

Heather clearly has no such reservations about Marshall. He's got his head tipped back, eyes half-closed. She attaches herself to his neck, writhing against him like a squid.

He sighs, slipping his hand down the back of her jeans. And I can't help it—I laugh. I don't know what else to do. I laugh because the scene is so profoundly
uncomfortable.

His eyes fly open and pin me where I stand. He goes rigid, sucking in his breath.

Heather must think he's demonstrating ecstasy, because she kisses him harder, apparently under the impression she's improving on her technique. He's staring over her shoulder, eyes fixed on my face. When I smile, he yanks his hand out of her pants.

“Hi,” I say.

He flattens himself against the chair, shaking his head, and mouths the word
what?

Heather turns in my direction, but her gaze doesn't quite connect. “Are you talking to someone?”

Marshall doesn't answer, only shakes his head and untangles himself from her arms. She slides out of the chair and onto the carpet, looking indignant, but he just stands up and steps around her.

“Hey,”
she says, sounding shrill and confused. “Hey, what's wrong?”

The music is a thrumming racket of bass and suburban angst, and he walks out of the room and toward the back of the house.

“What the
hell
?” she calls after him, but she doesn't sound angry, just hurt.

After a minute, I push myself away from the wall and follow him. The house is dim and smells like popcorn. The carpet is itchy. Every surface feels very, very real.

I find Marshall in the little back-porch laundry room, wedging his way past an umbrellaed patio table to lean against the washing machine. I stand in the doorway while he lights a cigarette. He doesn't smoke it, though, just holds it. He's looking through the porch screen, into the backyard.

“You should put that out,” I say, and his whole body jerks like I've electrocuted him.

I slip past the table to stand next to him. “Didn't you hear? They found tentative evidence suggesting smoking kills you.”

He's huddled against the washer, leaning away from me. His mouth is so tight that his jaw looks wired shut. “What is
wrong
with you?” he says in a hard whisper.

I smile, but it feels breakable. “Nothing's wrong with me.”

He laughs in a tired, breathless way that lacks conviction, but makes me feel small anyway.

I draw myself up—shoulders back, chin raised. “Nothing's wrong, except that you're breathing your sad chemical dependency in my face, and secondhand smoke is the silent killer.”

“Seriously.” His expression is rigid and he still won't look at me. “Why are you
here
?”

Under the reek of the cigarette, he smells like beer and pot and a girl's sugary perfume. I gesture behind me to the living room, where Heather is probably still sitting on the floor. “Hey, I'm not the one making a cornucopia of poor decisions. Why are
you
here?”

He glances at me, then mashes the cigarette out in a chipped saucer. “Why am I at my brother's house? He's my
brother.
Am I not supposed to visit my brother?”

I look at him so long he looks away. Finally, he scrubs his hands over his face and sighs. “Fuck, it's complicated. I mean, come on, don't you have problems?”

I don't answer. It's not the kind of question that you answer. Everyone has problems.

“Just…things are kind of shitty right now, okay? Sorry if I don't feel like talking about it with someone whose entire life revolves around good grades and being popular.”

He looks angry, and under that, tired. I think of how he starts to doze in class, like there's no way to keep his eyes open when the transitive verbs come marching out.

“You could, you know. Talk to me.” When I say it, my voice sounds very soft, like it's not coming from me, but from the girl who wrote well-meaning advice on the wall today. The one who has a place in her disposition for tenderness, even if it's small. “If you wanted.”

He laughs dryly, turning to stare out into the yard. “Look, all I want right now is to go back inside and get a beer and act fine and okay and normal.”

Act,
he says. Act, not
be.
He's standing with his back to me, like he wishes he were still kissing Heather.

“It is completely appalling to get drunk and make out with strangers.”

“It's
normal.
”

I raise my eyebrows. “Well, you know what they say—everyone loves a self-medicator.”

“Shut up.” He says it flatly and I can't figure out if he sounds bored or mad or just hopelessly, profoundly hurt. “That's not what I meant. And she's not a stranger. She's just…she's Heather.”

His voice is scaring me a little. It makes him different from Marshall in class—the boy who gives bored, insolent answers or sleeps through unit review. The boy who shoved a hall pass at me and gave me a look like I was negligible. Nothing.

He's fidgeting with the dead cigarette, squeezing it, picking at it. The paper bleeds tobacco from a collection of little wounds.

I reach over and take it away from him, dropping it in the saucer. “Stop it.”

Instead of arguing or taking it back, he squints at me. “What the shit happened to your hand?”

I turn my palms up. The porch light is dim, but it's enough to illuminate a dusting of soot, a small, shiny burn on my index finger. In the saucer, the cigarette has a black smudge on it the size and shape of my thumb.

“Nothing. A science experiment.” I look away and wipe my hand clean on my pajamas. “I was lighting matches.”

Out in the yard, someone is setting off a handful of bottle rockets. They tear across the sky, leaving a trail of sparks, followed by the small, hollow pop as they explode.

He doesn't ask what I'm talking about, just digs in the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a red plastic lighter. “Try this next time.”

I move closer, a little, almost touching his arm. Here in the laundry room, it's just the two of us, me and my strange, nocturnal phenomenon. Everyone else is far away.

“I don't sleep,” I say.

Marshall shakes his head, still holding up the lighter. “What?”

“You asked if I had problems. I never sleep. That's my problem.”

He doesn't answer. He watches me so long I start to feel awkward, like he's actually seeing me.

“I could do better,” he says finally. His voice is low, like we're trading confessions. “At school,” he adds. “It's just that my whole life is completely buried under all this other stuff. But I
could.
”

“But you don't,” I say, when what I want is to whisper it like he's on his deathbed. Like the tragedy it is.

Marshall sighs and rakes his hair back from his forehead. “I don't want to talk about this.”

“Because you know I'm right.”

“Fine, yeah, you're right. Can we just skip this part?”

“Which?”

“The part where you tell me I'm lazy or a slacker or—or not worth anything. I already know how pathetic my life is.”

Neither of us says anything else. I'm the one who looks away first.

Out in the yard, another round of bottle rockets goes off. The shower of sparks is industrial and beautiful, like someone's welding crossbeams in the sky. I wonder where a person gets bottle rockets, how much they cost. Maybe I'll invest in some. I like things that increase velocity and then explode.

“I look at you,” Marshall says, and his voice is very gentle suddenly. “I look at you and I think, why is that girl so sad? Why are you sad?”

I turn to face him, crossing my arms over my chest. “I'm not sad.”

Slumped against the washing machine, he looks broken. His face is wistful, half lit by the dull yellow glow of the porch light. And he smiles. “I call bullshit,” he says. “I'm calling bullshit all over that one.”

I stand with my shoulders back. “Forgive me if I don't think unbiased evaluation of someone else's emotional state is really your area of expertise.”

He shrugs. “Whatever. Not like it matters, but you're not
fooling
anyone.”

“I'm fooling everyone,” I say, and know it's the truth.

Everyone except him.

I can feel my blood thinning, becoming air or water. My hands are weak, losing my hold on the world, losing track of Waverly, and I dread the moment when I wake up in my own bed.

“I'm sorry,” he says abruptly, staring out into the yard.

“For what?”

“For this—for not being…” He stops and takes a breath like he's about to say something else, but in a second, when the words stop eluding him. His mouth is open and I can see the frustration as he struggles for it. I want to jump in, start suggesting conclusions to his sentences, but I wait.

Instead, he holds out the lighter, offering it to me, but when I reach to take it, my hand is tingling and numb. The way he's looking at me is so cautious, so impossibly kind. Suddenly, I can't feel the cracked linoleum or the cold or anything at all.

“Better,” he whispers as I start to disappear. “For not being better.”

I wake up breathless, with a squeezing feeling in the center of my chest like my heart hurts.

I'm beginning to suspect that I can only converse meaningfully with strangers. My true, unfiltered personality is unsuitable for everyday use, and the whole morning is just one long object lesson.

In the commons before AP Lit, I told Maribeth that Kelly green for the balloon arch at the dance was fine, when everyone knows that Kelly green is hideous, and in the last twenty-four hours, I've been more honest with Autumn Pickerel than I've ever been with any of the people I call my friends. At night, in my dreams, I have the capacity to say and do and be exactly what I want, but never in the daylight. Not in real life. I spend most of second period considering all the ways my ability to communicate is fundamentally broken.

Anyway, objecting to Kelly green would require me to produce a compelling alternative, and I just don't care that much.

When my daily stream of texts from CJ starts rolling in before trig, I take out my phone and set him to
ignore.
His persistence should be flattering, but it makes something sink in my chest.

Slumped at my desk, I pretend it's Marshall texting me instead, and smile for the first time all day. His imaginary correspondence would be witty and surprising. He wouldn't talk about nothing. He would limit himself to one question mark per sentence. I can't decide if it's impressive or pathetic that even my wildest fantasies involve appropriate punctuation.

I tear a sheet of loose-leaf from my binder and compose a note I know I won't pass to him. It says things that seem largely self-explanatory and leaves out a lot of other things, which are too hard to put into words.

Hi,

I thought about what you said last night. It's nice of you to ask, but I don't think that I am sad. I think I might just be tired. Also, I'm sorry I said your poor decisions were a cornucopia. That was probably uncalled for.

Sincerely,

Then I tear it into sixteen tiny squares and put it in the pocket of my messenger bag. During the passing period, I throw away the pieces, despite the fact that no one's name is on it.

Maribeth meets me after Spanish and we walk down to the locker bay, talking about how we still need to go dress shopping and how hard the work will be when we have calculus next semester. Dependable, reassuring. That's the thing about Maribeth. She believes in a predetermined future.

Marshall wasn't in class, which was clearly a personal choice because when we reach the junior bay he's slouched at his locker, looking sullen and bored with his waster sidekick, Ollie Poe. His eyes are dark, and I look at him a long time before I look away.

Maribeth leans against me, draping an arm around my neck. “I'm thinking we should do something really intense and glamorous, like crystals or jewel tones, don't you think?”

From the corner of my eye, I see Marshall step away from the wall. And now he's coming over, crossing the bay. I turn my back on him and keep my expression neutral.

Maribeth soldiers on, explaining in loving detail how important it is to coordinate our corsages, but I can't focus.

Marshall's presence has the weight of an off-course planet. He's so close I can smell his crumpled T-shirt and his hair, that mix of detergent, pepper and licorice and deodorant and pot, but I don't look at him, and he doesn't say anything.

Maribeth is staring past me now, shifting her weight from foot to foot.

I focus on my open locker—my math book, sitting crooked on the shelf. The publisher's emblem is stamped on the spine in gold foil and he stays right there behind me.

Finally, when I can't realistically ignore him any longer, I turn, hands on my hips. “I'm sorry—can I help you?”

He's six inches from me, looking down with an expression like I've just hit him in the stomach.

He's holding a plastic cigarette lighter.

For one towering moment, I'm certain my heart will stop. My face feels numb. The locker bay is too bright. The lighter is cheap and cherry red. It's the same one he offered me on the porch last night.

We stand toe to toe, facing each other across countless fathoms.

Then he presses the lighter into my hand and walks away.

“Wow,” says Maribeth. “What was
that
?”

I turn back to my open locker, trying to sound unaffected. “His name's Marshall Holt. He's in my Spanish class.”

“But why was he like…completely
stalking
you?”

I make an ambiguous noise and line up my books by descending height. This gives the illusion of order.

Maribeth is wriggling with excitement. She pops her eyes wide, leaning in, grabbing for my wrist. “What is that? What did he give you? Did he give you a
present
?”

“Nothing. Just something he thought I needed. It's not important.” When what I mean is,
nothing
is important. The most basic logic of the world is broken. Nothing will ever be important again.

“Waverly, seriously—what's in your hand?”

For a second, I'm sure we're going to wrestle over it. She'll pry my fingers open, get the story out of me one way or another.

But then she tosses her hair back and slips her arm through mine, pulling me toward the bathrooms. “God, why are we even
talking
about this, though? I need to tell you what Hunter told me CJ said about you at practice!”

I want to sit down on the floor until I'm sure I'm not going to hyperventilate. I want to bolt for the science room and spend the next fifty years examining the lighter with a microscope to make sure it's real. Even after I manage to parse all her various pronouns, everything about that sentence is meaningless.

In the bathroom, Maribeth stands at the sinks, leaning close to the mirror with her compact open.

“What you've been needing is exactly this,” she says to her reflection. “CJ will literally revolutionize your life. Now you can finally go on dates, like someone who is
not
destined to end life alone under a blanket of cats. And he's just nerdy enough about math and logical fallacies and stuff that you won't want to murder him. It's
perfect.
He is basically the most Waverly-appropriate thing I can think of.”

I nod. The gap between myself and the facade of myself must be growing exponentially.

The lighter feels smooth and solid in my hand. Already, my pulse is beginning to normalize. I touch the surface of the spill wall, thinking how someone wrote these things, their confessions, their wishes, their hearts.

This is being brave or stupid to an alarming degree.

If someone put a marker in my hand, I could write,
I never sleep.

For the covert New Ager in us all, I could write,
I transcend space and time.

I could write,
Last night, Marshall Holt told me I was sad, and now I can't stop wondering if it's true.

“Come on,” Maribeth says. “I'll walk you down to the tragedy office. I need to make copies of the food drive information for Stu-Co.”

When she says
Stu-Co,
it makes me want to get out a sheet of paper and tear it into little tiny pieces. I let my hand drop and follow her out of the bathroom.

By the time I finish my night run, there's a hot pressure behind my eyes. I'm moving too slow all the time now, too tired to run out the loose pieces rattling inside me. It's hard to get free with my legs so heavy.

Things have changed. The boundaries of the waking world have shifted, and even now, part of me wants to insist it can't be real. People don't just close their eyes in their bedrooms and open them someplace else. They don't start conversations in their dreams and finish them in the daylight. Everything about last night is impossible.

But the lighter is real. It came from somewhere. It used to be in Marshall's pocket, and now it's sitting upstairs on my desk. Everything's getting tangled in my head. I can't stop thinking about the way it felt to stand next to him on the porch, and the way he said
better.
The whole day feels like a dream.

I know this stage of sleeplessness—the unreality, the confusion. Insomnia is ruthless, but familiar. I have routines. Now is the point at which I eat a box of Popsicles and curate a personalized horror movie marathon. My blood is so wired my skin feels itchy. I've seen all the good ones a million times.

I fling myself down in front of the TV and flip through channels, looking for something bloody. It's not that I'm sadistic. It's just that things never really bother me. Nothing bothers me. And when it's hard to find things shocking, sometimes it's good to know that something in the world can still make your heart beat faster.

I click past
Seinfeld
reruns and ads for unusually durable blenders, and finally settle on cage fighting. It's a rebroadcast—after midnight, cable programming all starts to repeat itself.

The title match is Nikolai Federov, the Serbian Psychopath, against defending champion Andrew Saint John, and even though I've seen it twice and already know how it ends, I pull up my feet and cover my throat with my hand. This is the elemental truth of the world. It might be crude and senseless, but at least it's real.

Halfway through the second round, the door opens, making me jump. It's my mother. Her silhouette sends a jolt of adrenaline down my back like I've just been caught doing something shameful.

“What are you watching?” she says, tilting her head at the TV, where Saint John is grinding Federov's face into the mat.

I answer fast, and even sort of sound like I'm telling the truth. “I'm writing a paper on male dominance behaviors. For school.”

The real tragedy is that this seems normal to her. “Well, I'm glad you're working on something challenging. It seems like so many kids would just pick the simplest topic and not really get anything out of it. And anthropologically speaking, human aggression is incredibly interesting.”

I want to tell her that human aggression is not the easy one-two punch she thinks it is. Not every form of violence is a frontal assault. Aggression can be sitting in the cafeteria with Maribeth Whitman every day at lunch. The hardened criminals I know all deal in secrets and subtext. Maribeth's power is evident in the way that Loring hasn't come to a single committee meeting this week.

My mom is considering the television. “Are you almost done?” she says. Saint John has Federov trapped against the cage now, bleeding and squirming. “You should go to bed.”

“I will,” I say. “In a minute.”

I know I don't have to lie to her. If anyone understands the deleterious effects of an active mind, she does. But still, there's a certain quiet defeat in telling the truth.

I could ask for a cure and she'd give it to me. She'd gladly point me in the direction of psychoanalysis and pills. It would feel like surrender, but it might mean sleeping through the night.

On-screen, Saint John is smothering Federov with the weight of his body.

My mom watches with her hands on her hips. This is her, Taking an Interest. “Will he give up, now that he's being held down like that?”

I shake my head as Saint John transitions into full destruction mode, lifting Federov half off the mat, then slamming him back down, dragging him along through a trail of his own blood.

My mom stands in the middle of the room, eyebrows delicately knit. “And they won't stop the fight?”

“Not while he can intelligently defend himself.”

“Intelligent?” she says, and I hear the wryness in her voice—I get it—but she's not seeing everything and there are more elemental factors at work.

The fact is, blood is slippery. Blood can be a strategy all by itself. If there's enough of it, sometimes it can turn a fight.

Suddenly, Federov slips the hold and jerks his arm out. His fist plows the side of Saint John's head, once, twice. On the third impact, Saint John comes loose, rocking against the side of the cage and Federov is there, Federov is on his back with his arm around Saint John's neck and his other hand clutching his bicep.

The commentators are screaming over each other now. Saint John's face turns an ugly shade of purple, and suddenly the ref is sweeping in to save the day.

“Well,” says my mother. “That will certainly make him think twice about knocking people's shoulders in the hall.”

I don't answer. She means it as a joke, but the comparison is perfectly apt. High school popularity is a blood sport.