Sex & Violence (22 page)

***

I was feeling a little less shitty about the Dumpster dive with Lana and heading back to Pearl Lake with all the cupcake crap when my phone rang with an unknown number. Which never happened to me. I had maybe a dozen numbers in my phone and never gave out my own number if I could help it.

“Evan, it’s Baker.”

“Hey, what’s up?” I tried to sound normal.

She said she was at the Historical Society and her car wouldn’t start and could I come over?

Apparently, it was my day for good deeds. First, Lana, then Layne, then Baker, who was standing by her little green Honda looking stressed-yet-thankful when I showed up.

I tried to start her car (because it’s what guys do, right?), but it was dead all right. Baker couldn’t remember if she’d left a light on or what. Of course I didn’t have jumper cables. But Baker was in a hurry to get back to the lake and said we could come out later and jump it.

“What’s the big hurry?” I asked.

“Promise you won’t call me a dork?”

“Promise.”

“I ordered some genealogical data about the Archardts, and it came in today. I can’t wait to read it.”

“Dork.”

“Dick,” she said back. “So what are you doing today, besides rescuing girls?” She looked me over like she expected to find more hickeys.

“Rescuing girls?” I asked. “In a Subaru Outback? The vehicle of choice for lesbian Golden Retriever owners?”

“My mom’s not a lesbian,” she said. “And neither are you.

Unless that’s some other mysterious thing you’re hiding about yourself.”

“Today I’m making sixty Elmo cupcakes for a little boy’s birthday party,” I said. “He’s turning three tomorrow.”

She gave me the same look Layne had.

“I’m not kidding. It’s my boss’s son, and I’m helping them out. You can even come over and witness it if you don’t believe me.”

Baker grinned and I felt like maybe the weirdness from the summer kitchen had passed and we could get back to our regular setting of me just secretly liking her while dicking someone else and her just being supersmart and unavailable while smelling delicious.

She came over after I’d messed up the first round of cupcakes and sat at the counter eating some of the mistakes. At first she seemed like her regular self, happy and curious, but there was something off a little bit, something hesitant.

“What’s the matter?” I finally asked. Because girls want you to ask. They don’t want to be alone with their shitty feelings. Unlike me, who always got along famously in the company of my special crappy thoughts.

“It’s Jim,” she said. “He’s been gone all week for this family reunion, but he’s coming home tonight.”

“So.”

“So he won’t stop texting me. He’s all paranoid that I’ve cheated on him,” she said. “Like last time he was gone.”

“Have you?” I asked. Trying to act like what happened in the summer kitchen was too lame to count as cheating. Which it probably was.

“No,” she said. “But he means like the time with Taber.”

“But aren’t you non-monogamous, now? Why should he care?”

“I guess,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. Jim thinks I’ll get back at him because of Conley. As if I’ve got time to sit around planning revenge! He doesn’t get that it’s enough of a job for me to hate Conley.”

“You don’t
have
to hate her. You could just change your rules a little.”

She ignored that and said, “He came over a while back all drunk and pathetic and saying he was sorry. It was so out of character. I felt bad for him. It’s like he doesn’t get it.”

I didn’t really get it, either, to be honest. I just shrugged at her.

“You know what I wish?” she asked.

That more guys were exactly like me?
I thought.
That I would
lay you out on this counter and strip off your clothes?

“What,” I said, holding my breath while I ladled batter into paper cups.

“I wish my life could be normal again,” she said. “This summer has been completely abnormal. Everything ending.

Everything that could go wrong went wrong, you know? My best friend totally turning on me. Breaking up.”

“You and Jim broke up?”

“We’re leaving for college in like two weeks,” she said. “So even if we’re together
now
, we can’t really be together,
then
. I thought maybe the whole see-other-people thing would make it easier, but that just made everything shittier. I should have just acted normal.”

“I’m not sure anyone’s normal.” Dr. Penny was fond of mentioning this to me, actually.

“But I’ve never been one of those people who wanted to be different!” Baker insisted. “I like buying my clothes at the mall like everyone else. Doing my homework, being in sports. Just being
regular
. I think my dad was way more regular. Like me. I don’t want to be like my mother. Wearing tie-dye at forty-eight and making no money teaching at a dinky college and acting like a hippie freak.”

“Dating a gay guy who raises sheep while wearing women’s yoga pants,” I added because I couldn’t help it.

She said, “Keir’s not gay!” We debated Keir’s sexuality for a while, which was a better topic than her dead-but-regular dad.

“Seriously,” she said. “Do you even know what I mean?

About being normal?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“That’s it?” she asked. “You’re just going to say, ‘yeah, sure,’ to all that? You just happen to perfectly agree with me?

And don’t tell me you’re being economical. We’re having a conversation. It’s one of my favorite things to do with you.”

“Besides trespass on bird sanctuaries?”

“And skinny-dip in the lake.”

My face got hot at that, so I rerouted to the question at hand.

“I’ve gone to six different schools since I was thirteen,” I said. “I get wanting to be normal. Being the Fucking New Guy you don’t need to manufacture additional weirdness. You know that you’re like the first normal chick I’ve ever hung out with?

I mostly stick with abnormal chicks. They don’t usually have a problem with the Fucking New Guy.”

“You mean with fucking the Fucking New Guy?”

“Exactly,” I said. “I was a very slutty new guy.”

She laughed.

“But really, you’re not
that
normal. I mean, sure, you go out with a quarterback and are like student council president of the east side. But you also swear all the time. And drink and smoke weed. And the first time we met, I’d have guessed Kelly was the slut and you were the virgin.”

She laughed. “God, Evan, you’re such a dork about people sometimes! Like you can just tell what people are like by how they look!”

I could have argued about this all day with her, of course, but figured Baker would just think what she wanted, anyway.

“Whatever,” I said. “Not that you’re abnormal. Though the history thing is a little weird. But that’s cool. People should like what they like, right? I mean, I’m sorry about Conley and Jim and your devirginizing and …”

“
Devirginizing?”

“I’m just being a dick,” I said. “I mean Taber. Your secret muscular lover.”

“You’re not a dick. And Taber’s not my secret lover.”

“
He was so gentle, even though he’s a 250-pound noseguard …
’”

I said in my worst imitation of a girl voice.

“Dick.” She threw a dish towel at me.

“There’s been good stuff this summer,” I said. “Abnormal or not. I liked hanging out with you, at least.”

She didn’t say anything, just kind of hunched up her shoulders and smiled. Then she came around to where I was mixing up frosting. She nudged me with her elbow and said she would help me make the cupcakes.

“Sixty cupcakes is a lot,” I warned. “I’m out of practice, and I don’t have the Cupcake Lady of Tacoma watching over me anymore.”

“Who’s the Cupcake Lady of Tacoma?”

“Long story.”

“Be economical.”

“You’ll have to get me drunk first to hear about it,” I said.

“And I can’t drink and make Elmo cupcakes. Sorry.”

***

We spent the next few hours making cupcakes, though I had to bust out most of my skills from the cupcake shop for Baker’s help to be worth it. She could barely crack an egg without disaster. I showed her how to sift powdered sugar, how to use a pastry bag. How to make Elmo’s red, furry head, how to pour to the right spot so it wouldn’t overflow or be too short. I ended up doing most of the work, but she found all the little details fascinating, though I couldn’t resist mentioning that she was pretty inept for a girl named Baker.

“Baker’s my mother’s maiden name,” she explained. “My dad was super Catholic and traditional; he wouldn’t let my mom keep her last name when they got married. So she gave it to me, instead. Kind of ironic. I can’t cook for shit, and my mom isn’t much better.”

“What’s your middle name?”

“Margarete. My grandmother’s name. What’s yours?”

“McElhatton. I have no idea whose horrible name that is, though.”

“You should ask your dad. Evan McElhatton Carter,” she repeated. “That’s a mouthful.”

“So is Baker Margarete Trieste,” I said back. “Your last name sounds like the word in Spanish.
Triste
. It means ‘sad.’”

“Trieste is a city in Italy, though,” she said. “Plus ‘sad’

doesn’t really match my personality.”

“More like mine,” I said.

“That’s just your mysterious bullshit economical front,”

she said, nudging me from the sink with her hip and rinsing her hands. “English surnames are typically occupational. Like, Baker? That was literal. Our people probably made bread for a living. Your people were cartwrights, most likely. That or they drove them.”

“How do you just go around knowing shit like that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s naturally interesting to me.

I just pick things up. It’s all there, if you know where to look.

The old ways of doing things. You just have to stand still for a minute to see it.”

We frosted half the cupcakes and had the rest cooling by late afternoon. I made us grilled cheese sandwiches and then, hot from hanging around the oven, we went swimming and laid out on the diving platform like corpses under the sticky sun, me with my wrist over my eyes, sneaking looks at her in her striped bikini with the little knots tied at her hips.

“I had sex with Jim two weeks after he asked me out,” she said, rolling to her side to face me.

“What?”

“I would have done it earlier, but car sex grosses me out,”

she said. “Still, I initiated it.”

“Uh … Okay?”

“Jim says I’m the most sexually aggressive chick he’s ever met,” she continued. “Which made me feel bad, at first. But what the hell was he complaining about? I just didn’t see the point in waiting. I already knew what sex was like, you know?”

“Um, why are you telling me this?”

“Because it’s another thing about me that’s abnormal.”

I laughed. “Having sex isn’t
abnormal
. It’s like the most normal thing you can do. Though maybe not with Jim. I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but his bleached teeth? Kind of freak me out.”

“You should see his mother’s teeth,” she sighed. “They’re obsessed with that in his family.”

“You want abnormal?” I asked, rolling to my side. “This one girl I did it with? Stacy? And no, I don’t know her last name. I didn’t know Mandy’s last name, either.”

“Gross, Evan!”

“Stacy had this hang-up about being clean. Always took a shower just before I came over. Sometimes she wanted to even do it in the bathroom.”

“You showered together?”

“No, she never told me
I
had to be clean, though I always was, because she made me self-conscious. But
she
had to be, like, freshly scrubbed and shampooed in order to get down with me.

And that’s where we almost got caught too. In her goddamn bathroom.”

“No!”

I explained about the heat rash I got from the greenhouse and her mother raiding the medicine chest.

“You realize that sex story has an actual
rash
in it, Evan.”

“I’m not
proud
of it. Just trying to make you feel better.”

“Thanks,” she said. “But I don’t have anything else to offer up in this department. Unless you want to know what Jim’s sex face looks like.”

“Ugh. Please, no.”

“How about Taber’s?”

“Stop.”

“My sex stories are boring,” she sighed. “No bathrooms or drugs or moms coming in or anything. I’m very good at being sneaky, I guess. Obviously you suck at that.”

“It’s not my fault we don’t have privacy at this age.”

“That’s what I’m looking forward to about college,” she sighed, turning on her back again.

“So you can get laid in peace?”

“Yes,” she said, with zero hesitation. Was it possible for Baker to be any more awesome? No. No, it was not. “Also, so I won’t have to feel bad about being dorky about academics,” she continued. “Because everyone else will be smart there too. Plus I can get the hell out of Marchant Falls for once. Do something different. Those things too. Are you going to college, Evan?”

“I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“The fact that I made cupcakes for this birthday party tomorrow is about as far ahead as I plan,” I admitted.

“Have you always been like that?”

“Yeah.”

“Will you stay in Marchant Falls for school?”

“I don’t know. My dad’s work kind of drags us all over.”

“That sucks,” she said. “I wish you could stay. Because you and your dad? It’s like you’ve been on the east side forever. I can’t imagine it out here without you.”

That was probably the nicest thing anyone had said to me in …
ever
.

“You should stay, Evan,” she repeated. “It’s terrible that you’d get comfortable and then just leave.”

“I guess.”

She was quiet for a minute. I lifted my wrist from my eyes and saw she was staring at me.

“Your mouth,” she said. “Does it still hurt?”

“Not really. Just keeps cracking open.”

“Come on. I’m getting Keir’s salve before I forget one more time. Come on, move your ass.” She stood over me and kicked my leg with her bare foot. “I bet I can swim back faster than you.”