Save Yourself (12 page)

He smiled despite himself. The rat again. “You’re nuts.”

Layla settled deeper into her shabby Vincent Price armchair, looking satisfied. “It’s not for lack of dead rodent availability, is what I’m saying. When you’re curious about somebody, it’s only natural to try and find out more about them.”

The boots she wore today were tall and pointed and hugged her ankles, making her look as if her calves were made of smooth black leather. “What about you and your sister?” he said, trying to turn the tables.

Layla winced theatrically. “My sister is sweet and kind and gentle and the world is eating her alive. The dark side is her only chance. Besides, the good-sister-bad-sister routine is getting tedious. I’m tired of being the only one who ever gets in trouble.”

“What does she want?”

“To sing with the choir of angels,” she said. “My turn. This thing with your brother’s girlfriend. Is it an unrequited love-that-shall-never-be thing, or did you just get really drunk one night?”

“Pick another topic.”

Layla smiled. “I knew it. You’ve got, like, serious lust issues with her. You two totally got it on, didn’t you?” She took another sip of coffee and licked at her upper lip to catch a stray drop. “Was it only once, or is it an ongoing habit? Are you utterly racked with guilt?”

“I’m not going to talk about this with you.” He was blushing so fiercely that he was almost sweating. “Why do you care, anyway?”

“Because it’s salacious and filthy, why do you think?”

“No,” he said. “I mean, why do you care about any of it? Why do you care what I do or when my mom died?” He shook his head. “And you wonder why I’m suspicious of you. You know why? It’s because you don’t make any damn sense. I feel like I won some stalker lottery, like you were flipping through those goddamned yearbooks, found my picture, and said, ‘Okay,
that
guy.’ ”

She popped the last of the Krispy Rice Treat into her mouth, chewed for a moment, and then swallowed. “Actually, it was that picture from the newspaper of you and your brother leaving the courthouse. He looked sad, but you didn’t. You looked pissed off. Why did you look so pissed off?”

A hot day, overheated in a suit reeking of wet wool and sweat and worry. The photographer scuttling in front of him like a bug as he walked across the courtyard; the old man somewhere behind them, being loaded into a van and driven away.
Forget about me, I ruined your lives enough
. Mike’s fists balled up so tight that his tendons looked like high-tension wires. Like Patrick’s own fists, right now, on the arms of this dumb velvet armchair, a broken spring jutting into his ass and French love songs on the stereo. This girl. This fucking girl.

“Because they were taking our picture,” he said, “and we didn’t do anything wrong. Stupid question.”

She blinked, hard, as if he’d spat at her, but recovered just as quickly. “My dad used to make us all pray for you. That God would find his way into your hearts. And that Danny and Rachel—Ryan’s parents—”

He knew that, she didn’t have to tell him that.

“Could let go their hatred and forgive you. Not like they’re perfect, by the way. Danny was married before. He and Rachel had an affair and everything. They’re all hypocrites.”

“Did they?” he said.

“Did they what?”

“Forgive me.”

“No,” Layla said. “I don’t think that’s on the immediate horizon.” She shrugged: a tiny gesture, just the barest twitch of her shoulder, as if the issue didn’t really matter. “I used to imagine you, sitting in that house for all those hours, knowing that car was there. My dad and all his acolytes act like they’d know exactly what to do and exactly when to do it. Like they’re so infallible, like every choice they make is blessed by heaven and they’re never, ever selfish.” She sounded bitter. “Which is a crock of shit, of course.”

It took Patrick a moment to find his voice. “And what did you do,” he said, “when you imagined you were me?”

“I didn’t imagine I was you. I imagined I was with you.”

Across the coffee shop, two people about his age—a man and a woman, both wearing trendy glasses with heavy rims and both carrying laptop bags—leaned in toward each other over cups of steaming coffee. The man reached out, touched the woman’s arm, and she smiled at him. He pictured Caro carrying a basket of bread through the restaurant; or maybe she was home by now, in the house. In his house. Where his mother had been pregnant and sick and all but died, there hadn’t been much left of her when she went into the hospital for the last time; where his dad had been sober and drunk and sat on the couch weeping while Ryan Czerpak’s blood dried on the Buick in the garage, where he’d been arrested. Where every night now Mike and Caro went to sleep in the bedroom that had once belonged to Patrick’s parents, the bedroom where for all Patrick knew he and Mike had been conceived, and where, every night, Patrick himself went to sleep in the same bed he’d slept in since he was a child. And the last girl he’d slept with there was the last girl in the world he should
have had anything to do with, the girl who slept every night in his parents’ bedroom and the girl who was sleeping with his brother, and the whole thing was so microscopically collapsed, so inescapable. A black hole.

Like the rest of his life. Across from him Layla sat in that shabby armchair, her boots tucked beneath her now; her face was calm, like a porcelain doll’s. She seemed quite happy to stare out the window and sip her coffee and he knew she would wait for as long as it took him.

“Hey,” he said. She looked up at him. Her eyes were bottomless. “You want to get out of here?”

“If you do,” she said, and he said, “Yeah.”

In her car, she flipped down the sun visor and opened the vanity mirror. Then, reaching across him, she took a makeup bag out of her glove compartment and produced a package of some kind of pre-moistened wipes. Her makeup was smudged, just the faintest black haze under her eyes, and she used one of the wipes to clean it away. The way she did it, it was obviously a habit.

“There was this thing that happened last year,” she said.

Patrick hoped she wasn’t going to tell him about the time her teacher touched her, or whatever.

“It was very—” She stopped, considering her own eyes in the mirror. “Very public. And very ugly. My bio teacher showed us how to use a condom in class. And I was stupid enough to tell my repressed asshole of a father about it, and he got the God squad all up in arms, and the next thing I know everybody—and I do mean everybody—hated me. That teacher was incredibly popular. Not to mention that, thanks to good old Ratchetsburgian inbreeding, she’s related to half the school.” She closed the mirror and tossed the wipe into the backseat. “So, on one hand, I’ve got my dad writing statements for me to read at school board meetings about how I didn’t want anything to do with condoms because Jesus hates latex, et cetera, and on the other,
I’ve got the girls’ varsity volleyball team setting my hair on fire in the second-floor bathroom.”

She looked better without the smudges under her eyes, he thought. “They set your hair on fire?”

“It was longer then. And blond.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a long black cylinder, which turned out to be eyeliner. “Anyway, fun times. Then, one day, when I thought I was just about to go insane, this guy from school—who everyone said was a Satanist, by the way, although those people, like most of the world, were stupid and wrong—walked up to me in the middle of the hall and told me I was being used. I thought, great, yet another dimension to the lunacy. But that night, at yet another school board meeting, I’m sitting there watching my dad shout and yell and mention his ministry every third word— Let’s just say the lights came on.” She smiled. “My friend. I told him once how weird it was that we’d been in school together for a whole year and never met, and he said that sometimes people find each other when they need each other. What do you think?”

Patrick was restless and he didn’t care. He thought that probably her friend wanted to sleep with her. “I don’t know.”

“They used you, too,” she said. “People are messed up. You give them a chance to vent their sad little rage at their sad little lives, to feel morally superior, or powerful, or whatever, and they take it. They don’t care who you are or what you’ve done. They just care that it’s socially acceptable to hate you in public.” Layla reached out and ran her fingers over his temple—they were cool and moist, probably from the wipe—and through his hair, where it curled behind his ear. “I think you need me. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”

He put a hand on her wrist, meaning to push it away—but then somehow she was sitting on his lap and the hand that was supposed to be pushing her away was under her creaking black leather jacket that smelled like clove cigarettes and new boots. The sweet chemical smell of her makeup remover was strong in his nostrils and she was kissing him and he was kissing her back. She tasted like coffee and
vanilla. There was nothing tentative about her: her tongue plunged against his and her hands were strong and direct, as if they knew where they were going and knew what they wanted to do when they got there. He felt drunk, almost, like he was two seconds behind everything that was going on, and at the same time he was dimly aware of his own hands and what they were doing under that jacket of hers and did he always have to do the worst thing he possibly could, did he always have to fuck it up so absolutely supremely?

With great effort he took control of his hands again and pushed her back. He couldn’t see her face; her hair hung down on either side of it, shielding her features from what little light came in through the car windows. Her breath was slightly rough but not as fast as his.

“I can’t do this. You’re too young.” His tongue felt thick in his mouth.

“That’s what they tell you,” she said. “I’m telling you that you can do whatever you want.” Then her mouth was back on him, her tongue licking at his, her body pressing closer, closer. She was like eating hot fudge with a spoon, bitter and sweet and almost overwhelming—he was tired of restraint, he was tired of control. He was tired of being the only person in his entire world. He gave in. He kissed her. He knew it was wrong. He didn’t care.

He didn’t sleep with her, at least. There was that.

FOUR

Calleigh and Kyle had friends everywhere. If it wasn’t one of them in Gym or Bio, it was Brenna and Sam in English, Trevor and Matthias in Spanish. Often there was nothing more than a
Hey, Venereal
, but there was never less, and sometimes they got creative. Sharp triangles of folded paper pitched against the back of her head, a stack of venereal disease brochures left on her desk. (Her own father’s brochures; she’d typed the originals. She didn’t think they knew that.)

Verna liked eating lunch on the loading dock with Layla and Justinian and Criss, sitting on the rough concrete and knowing that she was safe. At the mall with Layla, she spent all of her birthday money on a pair of high black boots. The next day, seeing her own black-booted feet among the others on the loading dock pleased her. As did the wood-shaving smell of the art studio, talking to Jared, the knowledge that the day was almost over. She felt smaller every day. In Biology, Kyle Dobrowski and Brad Anastero kept up the endless whispers.
Hey, Venereal, you ever do a helicopter? You ever do it like Superman?
She didn’t understand and the confusion only annoyed her more.

“Good boots,” Jared said, in Art.

“Thanks,” she said.

After school, at Eric’s—he lived with his dad in a low-income housing development; Verna had never been there before, but it was just like any other apartment complex, with parked cars and tricycles in front of the houses—Layla told Verna that they wanted to dye her hair.

Sitting on Eric’s bed, which was unmade and didn’t smell clean, Verna felt cornered. When Layla had dyed her hair, Mother had cried. She wasn’t a crier, their mother. “I’m not sure,” she said.

“You hate your hair,” Layla said. “You’ve told me that a thousand times.”

“If you hate it, change it,” Criss said.

Layla picked up a piece of Verna’s hair. “Come on, Vee. It’ll be beautiful.”

And then Justinian, standing in the doorway, said, “Go ahead, do it,” and it wasn’t as if it were Verna’s photo that her parents had chosen to splash all over the ministry mailers, so she let them: hunched over the side of Eric’s bathtub, staring at the layer of grime that coated its floor; bleach burning her scalp, her hairline and ears thick with Vaseline to keep the dye away from her skin. Layla and Criss painted a few pieces with gray goo, wrapped them in plastic wrap, and covered the rest with grape-colored dye. They made Verna sit on the floor while it set. The bathroom wasn’t clean, either. There were unidentifiable hairs in the corners and no bath mat and it smelled like urine. Eric’s father spent most of his time with his girlfriend, and the town house felt like a place nobody cared about. The tables were dirty and all of the glasses were plastic and there was an old pizza box tucked behind the garbage can in the kitchen. In Eric’s room, where he and Justinian played video games while the girls worked on Verna’s hair, every surface except the bed was covered with a thick layer of magazines and car parts and stray pieces of wire.

Finally, Criss and Layla bent her over the bathtub again and
rinsed her hair for what seemed like a very long time, then unwrapped the gray pieces and rinsed them for a very long time, too. They didn’t let her look in a mirror but while Criss blasted her with a hair dryer, the strands of hair that blew in front of Verna’s face were the color of raspberry jam, and she began to feel shaky inside. When Criss finished, Layla made Verna sit for a few more minutes while she circled Verna’s eyes in thick rings of black, like she had before they’d gone to the woods; then they let her stand up, and look.

Her drab, mouse-brown hair was now an intense burgundy, and the wrapped bits had turned into long silver streaks on either side of her face, gleaming like starlight. Her pink-rimmed eyes and unremarkable eyelashes were hidden behind Layla’s makeup. Verna reached up to touch her hair and was faintly surprised when the image in the mirror did the same, the strands feeling soft and alive under her fingers.