Something Right Behind Her (6 page)

“I think she’s
dying, Doug.” I said.

“I know she’s
dying, Andy. But you’re going to be ok,” Doug said.

“How do you
know?” I asked.

“Because there’s
nothing wrong with you.”

He said this
like I’d passed some test. At first I thought he was referring to the sex, that
he was saying I’d been satisfactory. Then I figured he meant it some other way
- like I simply wasn’t the sick one, or that I was a nice kid. Neither thought
made me feel any better. Being the one who wasn’t sick, made me feel alone,
brought back the dark-cloud feeling. Being thought of as a nice kid meant Doug
didn’t take me seriously, and anyway I wasn’t such a nice kid. There I was
messing around with Doug when a few minutes ago I had been thinking how I
probably made Eve sicker by taking her down to the shore, by getting her high.
There were about one hundred-and-five reasons Eve would be disappointed with me
if she knew what I’d just done with Doug. Even if she weren’t sick, it’d be
some sort of best-friend betrayal. I suddenly felt the impossibility of being
there, of staying in that house, of dreaming my goddamn dreams and then facing
them all in the morning.

“Doug,” I said.
‘Could you do me one favor?”

“Yeah?” He was
sitting up and starting to get dressed.

“Could you drive
me home?”

Back in Doug’s
car, I started to cry. At first, I was silent, but then I started sniffling and
he handed me a tissue from his coat pocket. Maybe he was accustomed to driving
home tearful girls after such encounters at Princeton. He pulled into my
driveway. It must have been past three, and I was hoping to get into the house
without waking anyone up.

“I’ll see you,”
Doug said. It was a statement of fact, not a plan of any kind. Sure, I’d see
him, and I thought of hospital beds and funerals. I wondered how long it would
take to erase from my mind that image of him sitting there, steering wheel in
hand. He looked, though exhausted, almost breathtakingly healthy. On my own
skin, I could smell a faint whisper of the ocean. The day, I assured myself,
had given something to Eve, not taken something away. What happened with Doug,
I told myself, was something I could handle. If losing my virginity to Douglas
O’Meara had been such a terrible act, wouldn’t I have felt it at the time?
Wouldn’t some voice inside me have taken over and said no?

CHAPTER FOUR

The next morning
I slept until about eleven. I had dreams the way you sometimes do when you wake
up a lot and then go back to sleep, but none of them were like the one where
Eve is walking again. None of them made me cry out. In one, I was kissing Doug.
We were outside my English class and he was beginning to take off my shirt, and
Sharon Ghery, my sometimes friend, sometimes superbitch, was there, and she
started pointing at us. It was so realistic, when I woke up, I was surprised to
find myself in my own bed and not standing on the worn gray carpet of the
English building.

Once I started
to climb out of bed, I felt a soreness in my thighs, and the whole Doug episode
came back to me with tsunami-like force. I had slept with Douglas O’Meara, the
preppy asshole! I felt like laughing and crying all at once. Worse, I could
still feel him on my skin. I felt like all of me had been Douglasized, taken
over from the inside out. I didn’t feel like seeing him, or any of the
O’Meara’s for that matter; I didn’t want to face him, to talk to him, but a
part of me craved his touch, still, wanted some essence of him, a dream of him
to wash back over me.

I’d thought
about Doug that way before, maybe even cooked up a fantasy or two in my spare
time - fuzzy, fantasies revolving mostly around what he and I were wearing
before we tore our clothes off and did it. I’d been ashamed of the fact that I
had this fixation with Douglas O’Meara mostly because it was a wide-spread
affliction. Even back in eighth grade, Eve had pointed out to me that I was the
one girl who didn’t go over there just to ogle him. So much for Andy Berg, the
exception to American girlhood. Figures I would give into my worst impulses
now. I thought of Eve and the way her head fell crookedly off her pillow, how a
tightness had formed in my throat that somehow dissolved with Doug’s kiss.

I knew I had to
get myself together and act like everything was normal, or I’d never have the
courage to leave my room.
Step One
to Getting Over Having Slept with
Your Dying Best Friend’s Brother, I told myself, was a long, steaming hot
shower with plenty of pomegranate body scrub. I squeezed practically half the
bottle out into my palm. I wanted to scrub Doug from every pore of my body.
Step Two
, I decided, was
to act like nothing ever happened.

I got dressed in
hang-out clothes, a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt, braced myself, and headed
downstairs. The kitchen was empty and Mom had left a note saying they’d all
gone to meet some friend of Milly’s to go apple-picking and they wouldn’t be
home until late in the afternoon. She didn’t say anything about my coming home
instead of staying at Eve’s. Maybe she didn’t even know.

Eve, of course,
would be wondering why I’d left when I was supposed to sleep in the guest room.
She was no fool, and might even figure it all out, especially if Doug acted
sheepish around her, which he might, since he must’ve felt at least a twinge of
guilt. If Eve knew about me and Doug, I was sunk. What excuse could I possibly
give? I was upset about her? How lame was that?

I started pacing
around the kitchen. I was really hungry and tired. I wanted a cup of tea, but I
couldn’t get myself focused enough to even put the kettle on. My stomach felt
hollow, but full at the same time, as if the guilt I felt were occupying a
physical space in my body. The worst part was the way my arms and chest ached,
how my body had stretched in some unaccustomed way to accommodate Doug’s bulk.
This was something I had never anticipated, how overtaken I felt, how bruised.

I finally choked
down a peanut butter sandwich at about one, and then I calmed my nerves enough
to dash off an e-mail to Eve, saying I couldn’t get to sleep I was so
sunburned, so I had Doug drive me home really late. It was the most transparent
lie I’d ever told, but what else could I say? She knew I hadn’t walked home.
Still, if she wanted to confront me about the incident, she’d have to call me a
liar. That was beneath Eve’s dignity, so I’d be alright as long as no critical
evidence came her way.

Somehow, I got
through the rest of the day. I studied for my history test, even tackled the
interminable Algebra-Trig review sheet, and by the time I got through my last
problem set, Mom and Dad and Milly were back.

Milly,
naturally, had to ring the doorbell seven hundred times. “Christ,” I muttered as
she pushed past me, her blonde curls windblown, her cheeks little-girl flushed.
“You should have been there, Andy,” Milly said. “There was this crazy bee
infestation and just about everyone got stung but me and Mom.” Dad strode past
us into the kitchen, his brown shopping bags overflowing with fruit, his right
hand swollen and red.

“All in all a
great day,” Dad said sarcastically. “We paid for the privilege of picking fruit
in the baking sun, and then getting attacked by swarms of wasps.”

“Ugh,” Milly said.
“How many times do I have to tell you wasps do not even swarm? They were yellow
jackets.”

“Killer bees, I
think,” Dad said, just to annoy her. Milly was going through a bee phase.
Before that, it was crustaceans.

I had to admit,
once they got home, stung or unstung, I started to feel almost normal. It was
easier to pretend nothing was wrong with them there, providing the unknowing
audience for my drama. Little did Mom and Dad know that their very presence
made it easier for me to pursue my slutty, lying existence.

Later at dinner,
just when the whole ordeal started to recede from the forefront of my mind, Dad
called me out on my late night. He eyed me kind of funny with his fork in the
air, a small piece of pork chop speared on the end. He pointed the piece of
pork at me. “I thought I heard the front door around dawn?” Dad had a way of
letting you think he was oblivious and then he’d draw you out when you least
expected it. Mom raised her eyebrows at him across the table, as if she were
surprised he was busting me like that at the dinner table, or maybe only he’d
heard the door opening at dawn.

“I couldn’t
sleep on that lumpy guest bed they have over there,” I said. “I was all
sunburned and I’d already been tossing and turning for about five hours. I heard
Doug come home from some date, and asked him to drive me home.” I was surprised
how easily this lie tripped off my tongue.

“I hope he
wasn’t drinking, Andy,” Mom said. You could tell she thought something was
fishy, but the only thing she could really take on in the middle of dinner like
that was the getting into a car with a buzzed college guy.

“Nope,” I said.
“Douglas is Mr. Clean.” I had no idea why I said that since it was pretty far
from the truth, but he did look clean cut, and, of course, he went to
Princeton. At that point I was almost enjoying my fabrications. It made me a
little dizzy just to say Douglas’ name in front of them, my secret lurking in
those syllables.

They let it go
for the moment, but Mom had her eye on me. I knew it was only a matter of time
before the other shoe dropped.

It happened
later that night as I was getting ready for bed. I had gotten changed and
washed up, and was laying all my stuff out for track practice the next day. I
was getting my rhythm back, feeling my groove. That’s when Mom knocked on the
door and let herself in.

“Hey
sweetheart,” she said and perched herself on my bed. I continued folding my
track stuff up and putting it all super-neat into my gym bag. “You didn’t tell
me how things went with Eve at the house. Was everything ok?”

“I told you when
you called. It was great. Awesome. The lifeguard took her in the water and
everything. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, I know.
But what about everything else? You seem a bit preoccupied, and I wanted to
make sure you were ok.”

“Yeah.” I
sighed. I’m fine, just worn out, you know.”

“I know,
sweetheart. You must be tired, but Andy? Can I ask you a question?” She peered
over at me, and kind of half-shut her eyes. My Mom isn’t the prying kind, but
she is perceptive. She’s a teacher at the after-school center in town, where
she works with kids who have learning disabilities, so she isn’t one of those
moms who has to read in books what teenagers are like.

“Yeah, Mom?” It
took her a minute to compose herself, and then she let loose with her question.
Did she ever catch me off-guard!

“Is there
something going on between you and Douglas? Are the two of you an item?” That
word “item” hung in the air like a poison gas.
Item
. Oh, God, I
thought, how much and how little she knows about me. It made my head spin.
“Because it is not that unusual, for people who are both feeling emotional or
who are grieving to get together, to feel thrown together.” She finished her
thought, and then sat there staring at me. As close as she was to the truth, I
felt like the actual truth could drown us both. I couldn’t fathom what the
words were for the actual truth - that, no, we were not an item, but we had
sex, and that was how I lost my virginity? Words like that didn’t exist for me.

“No Mom,” I
said, and I threw my track bag to the floor. “That is the weirdest question you
could possibly ask me. Doug is like a brother to me, practically. Anyway, he
isn’t my type, and none of this has anything to do with him. I just couldn’t
stay over there this time. I hate all of that machinery. I hate the smell of
their house sometimes.” Crazily, as I spewed one lie after another, I started
to half-believe myself. Then, horribly, I started to cry. I don’t know what Mom
thought, but she kept kissing the top of my head in a way that made me want to
cry even more. After a while, I put my head down on my pillow and sniffled, and
Mom sat there, still perched on my bed, as she stroked my head. I was almost
asleep by the time she left my room. I thought how absurd it all was as I drifted
off to sleep. There I was, no longer a virgin, being tucked into bed by my Mom.
The worst was that I needed her, needed Mom’s kiss on the top of my head, like
a charm against my increasingly unsettling dreams.

CHAPTER FIVE

By some miracle,
or maybe simply exhaustion, I slept through the night dream-free. The next
morning, I tried out a strategy I think of as dress-normal-feel-normal. Jeans,
a light blue cotton sweater, no jewelry, Converse. Hair in a ponytail. Making
zero impression. I thought I had my act pretty much together until I met up
with Jill right before the history test. She was standing by the classroom
door, textbook open, doing her typical last-minute cramming. That’s when I
realized I had studied the wrong chapters.

“I thought he
said sixteen and seventeen?” I said, peering at her book, but she just tapped
the printed assignment sheet with her polished red fingernail, and twirled her
hair, not taking her eyes off the page. It was irritating to find this stuff
out from Jill, of all people, who was a B student at best. Jill’s main goal in
life wasn’t exactly to excel academically, but to get our mutual friend, Tom,
to fall madly in love with her. This seemed unlikely, mainly because Jill
didn’t give the guy a chance to breathe, that and possibly the fact that she
was a head taller than him and probably outweighed Tom by thirty pounds.