Swell (26 page)

It was too much thinking for someone so sober. Instead, I turned my attention toward making it through the day and seeing Jesse. My dad had exercised his parental authority to take me to school, and although I was bummed, I did appreciate that he wanted to look after me.

When I finally did see Jesse, a part of me wanted to jump into his arms, and the other wanted to keep what we had private for fear of retribution. People loved Christian. They would see my dating someone else as pissing on his grave. I wasn’t too sure they’d be wrong about that.

“Are you making it?” he asked, giving my arm a gentle, reassuring squeeze.

“Trying to, but it’s hard.”

“I’ve been by your locker and Jock Wall. I understand.”

“I wish they hadn’t done that.” I pressed my books into my boobs and held my chest in as I took a deep breath.

“When people feel sorry, and they don’t know what else to do, they do
that
.”

“Jenna’s going to help me clean it up later.”

“Do you need an extra hand?”

I nodded, which brought on his smile — my reassurance that it was going to be okay, if only one hour at a time.

As promised, Jenna showed up with the trash bag. Unfortunately, so did a few curious onlookers who watched from afar. I didn’t acknowledge their presence as I sat, instead curled up against the lockers with Christian’s khaki jacket covering my legs. My eyes followed Jenna and Jesse as they cleared away the bears, bows, booklets, cards, half-eaten muffins and other tokens of remembrance. I gave them final call on whether an item would stay or go. In the end, I was left with a heaving sack of sadness.

We threw the bag into the trunk of my dad’s car. I stood staring inside of the cavernous box, recalling Christian’s case of beer hiding in the spare tire compartment of the Partymobile. Jesse touched my shoulder before he helped me close it.

He looked to his left and his right. “Give me a quick one,” he said, pecking my mouth with his loving lips. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Don’t forget.”

“A promise is a promise.”

Jenna came around the car and put her hands on her hips. “Beck, your dad is gonna think you’re up to something if we don’t move it.” She shot Jesse a cheesy grin. It was obvious she approved of him. “See ya later, alligator!”

“After awhile, crocodile,” he replied, tipping an invisible hat before he strutted away.

My dad threw several questions about how the day had gone. Jenna answered for me, filling him in on the makeshift memorials, while I mostly said yes or no when he asked about something.

“That Jesse boy sure seems concerned about you,” he noted.

“Yeah, he and Beck have a good connection,” said Jenna, prompting a swift poke with my fingers to her ribs.

“He’s a good friend, Dad.”

He cleared his throat. “Just get to know him a lot better than you do now, hun. It’s always good to
really
know someone before anything happens.”

My weekly sessions with David helped me to understand where Jesse fit into my life. I’d told him that Jesse had taken a place in my heart that had been void — where I felt good about who I was without needing to cover it up. I was also able to admit
I had feelings for Jesse while I was also seeing Christian.

Where our professional relationship had been going down the tubes, I now looked to David as a sounding board for reasons behind my thoughts and feelings.

“I’ll be in the middle of washing dishes and it’s like my brain switches channels. Then I’m seeing the car right before we go around the corner, and I drop whatever I’m doing and it breaks.”

He explained that post-traumatic stress could bring memories of the accident to the forefront of my mind, as well as make me want to avoid being in a car at all.

“You might also find it hard, if not impossible, to drive down that road ever again.” He was very right about that. There were two ways into my neighborhood. One road took a few seconds longer to travel, but was a straight shot toward home. The other was the curved road — one that I was never going to travel again if I could help it.

And then there was drinking. David had always shown great interest in my need for alcohol. He was the one who first mentioned that I had a problem with it. He’d given me an A.A. card. It was like his personal experiences and understanding of drinking finally meshed with mine, and a connection was born.

David handed me a few books on alcoholism and one based on the
Big Book
from Alcoholics Anonymous, but written for teens. It was the same one Jesse handed me at the bookstore.

“As a friend, I would be happy to go with you to a meeting. If you think you’re ready, I’m here to help you. It’s what we do in A.A. — help each other.”

I ran my fingers over the stack in my lap. “I don’t know if I’m ready, but thanks. Let me read the books first.” There was also a pamphlet on the benefits of grief counseling tucked into the top book. How I’d been dealing with that was anyone’s guess. Quiet, solitary moments in my room, the bathroom, the back yard, on walks. Those were my times alone with Christian.

Every night I said a prayer for him and cried myself to sleep, rationalizing that our relationship wouldn’t have sustained itself much longer. I dissected each moment that lead to going around the curve in the road, and obsessed about the moment he told me that Hillman had controlled his love life. There were also thoughts about him hitting Olivia, and just how pissed off he was that final moment at the water tower. He may have been blacking out then, and his rage had certainly been capable of taking him to that violent place again.

I hoped that Christian hadn’t been aware of anything from the time he chugged the wine until after his body rolled around the cabin of the Partymobile. The image of the sun filtering through the canyon trees, into the window where he lay, burned as real as the moment I first saw him. Fresh blood covered his perfect cheekbones, his eyes still open but staring vacant into the sky. Jagged shards of glass held his arms slightly higher than his collapsed body. His shirt had been torn to reveal pale and lifeless abs. I was upside down, but saw him as right-side up, this beautiful boy that I’d wanted so much. When I considered for even a second that he was dead, I slipped under the veil of consciousness and did not resurface until days had passed.

/////

It had been weeks since I drank my last bottle of wine with Christian. I could recall that taste had been warm and effective at everything except quelling Christian’s rage.

My parents decided to stop their bedroom nightcaps, and ordered water or iced tea in restaurants instead of cabernet. There was no announcement; they just stopped cold turkey. I wished I could be like them. The craving never left me, and was as powerful today as it had been weeks ago.

As my injuries healed and strength returned, I started walking. It was a way to clear my head. If I got a craving, I put on my sneakers and walked. If I felt sad and thought too much about Christian, I walked. And I walked by temptation. Tony’s was close, and I challenged myself to pass by without acting on the urge to find someone to buy me beer. Just in case, I took no money with me. Sometimes Jenna came along.

“You’re doing good, Beck,” she said as we walked past my once-upon-a-time pimping spot.

“I’m just doing what I can.” What I could do was move, putting my body into action.

“Do you and Jesse go for walks?”

“Not like this.” These were the walks I used to divert my attention from what I really wanted. If Jesse were to accompany me, I wouldn’t have the same level of concentration. No, our walks were casual and slow, giving us time to talk and hold hands.

And what hands he had! Gentle, soft, and smooth. Jesse never crossed boundaries or treated me like an object. His sensitivity to what I needed was extraordinary. If I didn’t want to go out, he wouldn’t make me. But when I wanted to see him, Jesse was there for me within minutes.

There was never a drop of alcohol shared between us. I rarely brought it up. After the bookstore incident, I knew drinking was a sensitive topic for Jesse. He would ask me now and then how I was doing with that, and I would speak honestly about my cravings.

We were sitting on the same boulders that I’d gone to with Steve, the skinny beer pimp. The winter ocean roared with dark blue ferocity as seagulls struggled against the wind. It was just me, Jesse, and nature.

“If you’re craving a drink, you might think about going to a group.”

“I don’t feel comfortable talking about things in front of a bunch of people.”

“There’s a reason they call it anonymous, Rebecca. I used to go with my dad.”

“What if they think I’m crazy?”

“No one will think that. Everyone is there for the same reason.” He took my hand and warmed it between his before sitting behind me. Jesse wrapped his arms around my body and brought me close.

I wiped a single tear from my cheek. “I’m scared.”

“What scares you?” He kneaded my shoulders, my tight muscles relaxing into his strength.

I could have brought up a million things that scared me. The year had brought so many changes, good and bad, that rendered me useless when faced with future decisions. If someone asked me whether I wanted to go left or right, I would wonder if I should go forward or back. My artistic ambitions had slowed to molasses, my easel covered with cobwebs around the bottom and my brushes stiff from their last cleaning.  I was afraid I’d lost me.

“I’m worried I can’t come back, that I can’t be me again.”

“You’ll always be you. But we change with things, ya know? Makes us wiser. At least I hope it does. Some people fuck up and do the same things all over again.”

“Admitting things… I have a big problem with.”

I felt his hands roll into fists on my shoulders, the tendons in his wrists growing taught before he returned to his gentle kneading. “I’ve got the same problem. Seems I can’t admit to anything. I want to fight it.”

I turned around to look at his face but he was staring toward the ocean, biting his lip.

“How do you do it, then?”

“I cover up stuff with jokes. I talk a good talk. I have the support I need.”

I wanted to prod Jesse to tell me more about what his problems were. Where had he been in his young life to get where he was now?

He looked into my eyes, giving me a little smile of understanding. “I have a hard time about my Dad.” We both loved someone who’d died in a car because of drinking.

One of the main things I couldn’t admit to was that Christian and I had depended too much on alcohol to eliminate nerves, erase our stresses, and help us get through life. For him, it ultimately meant death. For me, it meant the death of self-respect.

Deep down, I despised what I’d done with myself. From pimping beer and giving guys “benefits” for buying it, to whoring myself out to make an impression on Christian. I hated Beck. She put on a show to get the approval of others, and ended up a drunken, loose-legged loser who’d thrown away her art, heart, and soul. I’d had enough of her.

Jesse called me out from my mind fog. “Rebecca?”

“Oh. Yes?”

“I’ll be there if you, you know, want to tell me something. Okay?” I turned around and sat up on my knees, careful not to teeter off the boulder. I took Jesse’s face between my hands and kissed him.

“You’ve always called me Rebecca,” I said, my lips still lingering on his.

“Because that’s who you are.”

Chapter 28

I decided to separate the part of me that needed to drink and called her Beck. She was angry, sad, self-loathing, and didn’t want to do the right thing. The other girl, Rebecca, loved art, being with her family and friends, and appreciated herself. I had two completely different sets of values living inside my one body.

It was the day before my 16
th
birthday and I’d received a card from my grandma. That was when I knew Beck had the upper hand. Nestled inside was a $50 bill, along with a handwritten note about getting something I wanted like a dress or art supplies with the money.

Trouble was, I knew what Beck wanted, and she wanted it more than anything. Like someone on a diet plan who’d gone without chocolate cake for a year. It could be purchased with the cold, hard cash that was now in my pocket.

I rationalized with myself as to why my legs were taking me to get beer, when my mind screamed no. Beck demanded that I use the money to get what she needed. It was going to be just that one time, and then never again. We would stop, just as we had after the car accident. If it could be done then, it could be done now. Beck knew what she was doing.

This was hallowed ground, the liquor store parking lot I had come to need and respect. It was a winter afternoon, with gray clouds layered in the sky, covering any direct peek of sunlight. The Mexican guys were gone, and only a few cars sat in the lot. I waited patiently under the eaves, scouting for anyone to buy the last fix.

Impatient and tired of being dry, I was ready to move on to the next store when a red muscle car pulled up. A lump hardened in my throat. He looked like an older version of Christian as he emerged. His dark hair was groomed to perfection, his black and white ensemble eliciting the scent of success.