The Basic Eight (37 page)

“
Adam
!” Shannon said again, but her own thin arm was sliding the door shut. With a click the party was muted.

“No, that’s OK,” Adam said easily, gesturing out to the garden. “I’ve found that I can get all the way home and never set foot on a sidewalk, just sneak through everyone’s gardens. It’s just six blocks. I’ll go this way. The perfect way to end a garden party.” V was half thawed by the charm of the State. “Oh,” she said.

“How, um, nice. Are you sure?”

He kissed the top of her head, primly, like any guest. “Positive.” “Watch for that big black dog two yards over,” she said.

He chuckled and stepped down one stair. “We have an under- standing,” he said. “Two of a kind, as it were.”

V snorted indelicately and rolled her head back; her pearl necklace broke suddenly and all the pearls rolled down the stairs cooing like freed birds. V blinked at them; I can’t even
imagine
what a drunken sight that was, in the full light of the house; all the pearls bouncing down stairs, family heirlooms lost

forever in the Halloween dark. V ’s eyes got wider and wider and I left her poor brain debating between tears and sleep before she finally leaned back, right there on the sharp steps, opened her mouth and left the party.

I shook my head to clear it–
ha
! my head responded–and saw Adam’s fading shirt, bobbing up and down as he walked through the garden. The sight mocked me, like in movies when the smug arsonist walks unnoticed through the billowing smoke, or the robber steps neatly into the getaway car while bungling police look up and down the street, never noticing the culprit. Adam was walking away from a house racked with all he had wrought, flitting darkly through the air as indifferent to accountability as a swarm of locusts. Somebody should do something; why wasn’t anybody
doing
anything? Where was Natasha when everybody,
everybody
needed her? My eye fell to a pearl, spinning below me to some mad physic dance, its radius and behavior completely indecipherable to anybody who didn’t have the formula.

Calculus
. Baker’s Rule. If Natasha wasn’t here, if V was going to snore on the steps like a drugged-out watchdog, if no one anywhere was going to punish the guilty,
I
could do something. I could act for myself, push myself to the limit academically, athletically and socially.

I stood up and walked out there. I was trying to use the baguette as sort of a walking stick as I stumbled on bumps in the wet grass, but the bread was bent and damp and snapped right in two after only a few steps. I reached out for something else and found it: the red croquet mallet, just occurring there on the ground like some easy device, some plot element stashed there for the big moment. And this was it.

Although I was sure we were invisible from the house, the light of the party traveled farther than I’d thought,

and after taking a minute to get used to the new dim I could see him clearly, walking steadily toward the tall trees and humming. Humming, even, he was so carefree, I couldn’t believe it, although I must have been making some kind of noise too, because he turned around and craned his neck to figure out who I was.

“Who’s there?” he said like a security guard. “Kate?” Then, more warily, “Natasha?”

I just walked toward him. It didn’t matter who I was.

“Oh,” he said, losing interest. “It’s you, Flannery. What do you want?”

“Nothing,” I said, “from
you
.”

“Oh,
right
,” he said, sarcastic in that loud tacky way everybody else stopped doing in sixth grade. The rum punch was getting geometrically sharp in my head, its corners piercing my head in distinct places, like ice crystallizing.

“Adam–” I said.

“Right,” he said. “That’s my name. Good
night
, Flan. Go back to the party.” He started to turn around again but I grabbed his arm. He jerked it off and looked at me in scorn. “Don’t
touch
me,” he said. “Good
night
.”

“
How could you
?” I said. “
How could you
? Did you see what you

did
?”

“Look,” he said impatiently, “I’m
sorry
.” He shrugged and smiled a small smile, sharp around the edges like my headache. “You probably won’t believe this, but I thought it was
you
at first there upstairs, but, you know”–he started to laugh, then coughed. “Everybody makes mistakes. Now, if you’ll excuse me–”

“I’m not talking about what you did to
me
!” I said. I don’t know why I lied to him like that. “I mean how could you do that to
Kate
!”

“To
Kate
?” he said, laughing again, louder.
Whooping
.

“That’s a good one, Flan. What I did to
Kate
? Why, I seem to recall that
you
were more than perfectly willing to do it with
me
!”

“
That’s not true
,” I said. My head roared, sheer lioness rage. “
That’s not true
.”

“Oh, it isn’t?” Adam asked, wide-eyed. “Then why did you come upstairs in the first place? Fresh air?”

“Shut up.”

“Look, you know it’s true. We were
both
screwing Kate over,
both
of us. Not to mention
Gabriel
,” he said. “At least Kate and I had broken up. You and
Gabriel
–”

“
Shut up
!”

He laughed, leaning back with his hands on his hips, presenting himself clearly in the half-light. He was drunk and I was going to kill him. We had reached the trees. Adam swayed unevenly, his face alternately flickering from the shade to the distant light of the party: dark, light, dark, light, a slow strobe. “Just face it, Flan. You’re as bad as me. ‘
How could you
?’” he said, imitating me in a high screechy voice I’d heard coming from myself so many times, always hoping no one else had noticed. “‘
How could you
?’ How could
you
say that, Flan, considering what you’re doing to Gabriel?”

“Shut up about Gabriel,” I said. “He’s
twice
the person you or Shannon or any of you will ever be!
Three
times!”

“Why is that?” Adam said. I saw his eyes roll at me for what would be the last time. “Because
Gabriel
is part of the precious Basic Eight?”

“
Shut up
!”

But he was on a roll. “Who will be invited to the next dinner party?” he asked in my voice. “Well, the
Basic Eight
of course–”

“
Shut up
!”

“But will we invite
Adam
? Is Adam
one of us
? Oh, I don’t know.” “That’s right,” I spat, “you
don’t
know. You’ll
never
know. You’re not going to be invited to the
corner store
with any of us–” “
What punishment
!” He laughed. “I won’t survive! What will you do to me next, hit me with that baguette you’ve been lugging

around all night like a substitute
dick
?”

Dark, light, dark, light. His face looked so scornful, so savage, and finally, gloriously,
ugly
. Not cute at all, not attractive, just an ugly scornful boy face. I hadn’t felt such disgust for a boy since the early days, when they’d tease girls on the playground, kicking us and throwing gravel and raising their voices in high screechy mockery. “They do that because they like you,” all the adults said, grinning like pumpkins. We believed them, back then. Back then we thought it was true, and we were drawn toward all that meanness because it meant we were special, let them kick us, let them like us. We liked them back. But now it was turning out that our first instincts were right. Boys weren’t mean because they liked you; it was because they were
mean
. This Halloween, we knew better. Everything was different this Halloween. This Halloween, nothing was drawing me toward him except this glorious headache of anger, the sheer agile ease of Natasha’s dress against my skin and the heavy wood of the croquet mallet in my hands, ready and obedient. Dark, light, dark, light, dark–I swung and missed.

“
Adam
!” I screamed, and heard all the screams backing me up: Kate, Shannon, all my friends, Natasha screaming in my ear. “
Do something
!”

Adam was still laughing. “This doesn’t sound like the kind of talk from a girl who sent me that lovely
postcard
!”

I stopped, staggered, reeling in his sheer dishonesty even now. “You got my postcard?” I said. “You said you never–”

“I was
lying
,” he said to me, like it was the easiest thing in the world. He sounded like an exasperated teacher, perhaps some Advanced Biology idiot or a vice principal maybe. A talk-show host. A therapist.

“You
got my postcard
?!” I screamed at him, and his voice rose in schoolyard recess mockery one more time.

“What did it say?” he said, laughing. “Let me think.” Laughing, laughing, dark, light, dark, light. He spit on the ground. “Oh, yes, ‘Listen what my letters have been trying to tell you is that I love you.’” He stepped into the shade of the tree and stayed there, so the rest of the postcard came out of the dark like the voice of God, or the devil. “‘And I mean real love that can surpass all the dreariness of high school we both hate.’”

“
Shut up
!”

He stepped into the light and laughed right in front of me with his mouth wide open, as brazen as only the star of the high school play can be. “
This isn’t just the wine talking
!” he shrieked: the punch line. The line where you punch.

I swung
up
, vertically, the way you don’t usually swing things. The hit was solid, like the right answer to a test. His eyes widened and his jaw crackled; I watched his mouth as he coughed up blood, tasted it. He stepped back into the shade, then forward again. Dark, light, dark, light. My mallet followed him exactly, waiting for another clear shot, but I wasn’t worried. I had plenty of time. The thrill of cold night air swarmed around me like something I was riding, something I could control. For the first time that night I was having
fun
. It was the biggest event of the year. A day to be remembered–a famous day.

“You
bitch
!” he sputtered, still coughing. He spat something on the ground; teeth maybe. He kept moving, stumbling around: dark, light, dark, light. “You
bitch
! You
fat bitch
!”

I inhaled, and stepped into the light myself, blocking it so my shadow fell on him. Dark,
dark
; there was nowhere for him to go. Adam stepped back once and looked at me, and that’s the last time I ever saw him alive, I swear.

Vocabulary:

You can’t be serious.

Monday November 1st

A new month. I can only remember its opening in fragments. From that moment on, ladies and gentlemen, to the bright slap of Tuesday morning, it’s all separate fragments, clear enough in the slide show of my skull but disconnected from everything else, like a chain of bright pearls broken and rolling everywhere down the stairs or like disembodied teeth: individual, personal but
separate
. I have noted them all in my journal like a careful jeweler but cannot attest to their exact sequence. I swear on all I have done that this crazy quilt is the best I can do.

The croquet mallet was stuck in something wet and jagged, like a half-melon. I was unable to pull it out, even with both hands. My own breathing was wet and jagged too, misting in the dark. Tugging and tugging and finally giving up. Stepped back, felt something sharp beneath my feet, like a sprinkler head or maybe bone.

A bloody handprint on a sliding glass door, or maybe just muddy. Little pieces of grass crawling around the

handprint like caterpillars. Kate’s face behind the handprint, like she was wearing it.

“OK!” V called out grandly, clapping her hands. What time is it? “Everybody go home! Everybody out; go home! The party is over!” My gritty hands on the banister; I knew I couldn’t move.

“I can’t leave,” I whined.

“Not
you
,” Kate said in a hurried voice, tense and sounding disgusted. She had a light blue towel in her hands, curled up like a baby. One of those babies that just came out, its eyes still closed and its body limp in the absolute trust of grown-ups. I took Kate’s tiny hand.

I thought the music they’d put on was the most boring I’d ever heard: just a simple beat, pounding away like a rapist, with cheesy synthesizer noises washing over it, like an aquarium pump. Wondering what in the world album it was, I walked back into the living room, judging by my view that I was staggering. The stereo was off. None of those electric bar graphs, showing you bass and treble and only-boys-know-what-else, were jumping and skittering like usual. There wasn’t any music on. Kate’s face loomed in front of me. She was crying. “For God’s sake
get up- stairs
!” she said. “
Upstairs
! Oh God!”

I sighed at her. “Calm,” I said, “the hell down.”

Adam stepped back into the shade, then forward again. He spat something on the ground; pearls maybe. Outside the cold night air swarmed around me like something I was riding, something I could control. For the first time that night I was having
fun
, fi- nally after this dreary drunk screaming all night. I was having
fun
and it wasn’t

even–I had no idea. I felt my own smile bright as headlights, blaring and blaring away, while inside my head I felt a small certainty like a termite biding its time.
Satan is going to kill us. Satan is going to kill us all
.

Natasha pulled my head out of the sink and everything snapped back into place like bright red plastic building blocks. “You know,” she said, in a conversational tone of voice I would have fallen for had her eyes not been white coals, “you know, I’ve heard that turkeys are so dumb you have to drag their heads out of the trough before they drown.” She grabbed my hair back like a caveman and wrung it out into the overflowing sink. “But I never thought you were much of a turkey, Flan.”

I looked at her; she was looking at me like her room was a mess. Where to start? I blinked and looked around the bathroom. It wasn’t the one with books all over it. It was another bathroom. I didn’t know where it was. Hopelessly stained guest towels, little soaps in the shapes of endangered animals still wrapped in cello- phane, a small glass bowl with potpourri in it–OK, I was obvi- ously still at V ’s house, but what was I doing here?