The Little Brother (9 page)

“Sara?” I said.

She glanced at me, distracted.

“Can I sleep in the bed with you?”

I expected her to be surprised or upset, but her expression hardly changed. She shifted and faced me. “How old are you, Even?”

“I'm almost sixteen.” A lie—I had a ways to go until my birthday.

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I'm nineteen, Even. I know I look younger, but I'm not.”

Though she'd just lit it, she stubbed her cigarette into a half-eaten taco in its paper wrapper. “I may be a drunk,” she said, “but I'm not a slut.”

“I would never think that,” I said. “That's not what I meant.”

“Is that right?” she said.

I stared at her and didn't say anything.

“So,” she said, her gaze steady and intense, “all you want to do is fuck me?”

“Oh, no,” I said, my face heating, sweat in my armpits, “you have the wrong idea. I really like you. I think you're so pretty”—and then I shut up.

I was trying to decide how to leave discreetly when, to my surprise, she leaned her head back on the couch and laughed.

“Good for you,” she said, looking up at the ceiling, “good effort.”

“I should leave,” I said.

“Nah,” she said, stretching her arms. She yawned, rubbed her eyes. “Don't go.”

She rose and motioned with her hands at me. “Up, up,” she said encouragingly. Once I stood, she flipped the sofa cushions off. “Help me,” she said, and we yanked at the couch. It creaked open, we stepped back, and it clanked down to become a bed.

I called my dad from my cell phone—just in case he might worry—and left a message, letting him know that I was spending the night at a friend's.

One might assume that my forwardness with Sara would have stunted the possibility of a friendship between us. But oddly, Sara appreciated me for it, as if we'd cleared up any misperceptions and defused the awkwardness of my being sexually attracted to her.

After that night, she spoke to me openly, and we went to meetings together. We got to be close friends.

She worked at an insurance company. Her day life was boring, routine-filled, and efficient. Mexican mother, Irish and German father, no siblings. A horrific home life. She'd left at sixteen, had been on her own since. Independent, tough, and practical.

I could go on and on about Sara. She's really beautiful and strong. She got sober eventually, and she's the one who helped me, for good and for bad, to do what I had to do.

PART TWO

10.

JULY 3, 2003

T
HOUGH
I'
VE BEEN
able to recount what happened so far, the events over the Fourth of July weekend are difficult for me to narrate. Nearly impossible. A jumble of images.

Tove Kagan, a girl I knew from Cucamonga, arrived at our dad's house with Crystal Douglas and another girl, Melissa Stroh, at around four in the afternoon on July 3. Tove pretended not to know me. I wasn't that surprised. She ignored me, since I'd left for Newport without saying good-bye to her. In grade school, we'd been good friends. We had history, Tove and I. Gabe didn't know; the others didn't know. Only Tove and I knew, and that was how we kept it. Both of us were sophomores now, sixteen and driving, her little red Dodge Dart parked at our curb. Her eyes brushed right past me, and then she walked to the other side of the pool to a cooler of beer hidden behind a large planter.

In retrospect we didn't know what to say or how to cross that divide from our past into the present: The startling immediacy was too much. So we did what we had to do, and I'll regret it for the rest of my life.

“I'm a Pisces,” Melissa said to me. Blond hair and tan body, red bathing suit, bikini ties visible under her white top. The kind of girl who used to be indifferent to me when I lived in Cucamonga. Half-reclined next to me on a chaise beside the pool. More like shouting over the rap music—“I'm a Pisces. Like, we're the type of girls who support our men. We don't need attention. Like, we're vulnerable and kind, but strong. I guess I just, like, understand myself because of astrology. I have a strong sense of myself. It really makes sense if you study it. It's true! Don't laugh! It really works.”

She was paying attention to me because of my dad's money. Trying to hit on me. I'd overheard her earlier joking—“Maybe one of us will get pregnant by a Hyde and then we'll be rich. I wouldn't, like, mind living in this house.”

Tove arrived in her brown work shirt and black slacks, and I heard her explaining that she hostessed at the Marie Callender's restaurant in Cucamonga, “mostly guiding sweet old people with canes and walkers to their tables.” She looked the same, except that she'd highlighted her long brown hair with gold streaks, and she had a woman's body now, not the beginnings of a woman's body, like the last time I'd seen her, in the seventh grade. Holding a beer, talking with Gabe and Crystal, she favored one leg.

“Tove's a good liar,” Melissa said, noticing me watching her, trying to keep my attention. “She's a Gemini, and they're the worst. That's, like, the worst sign for a girl, because it means she's manipulative and rude and stuck up.”

The Tove I knew had not been any of those things. But I didn't want to argue about astrological signs, so I encouraged Melissa
to return to the first subject—“Why do you say that she's a good liar?” I held my hand up to pause her answer, shifted in my chaise, and shouted to Gabe, “Turn it down!”

His head lifted in acknowledgment, and I watched him walk through the open sliding glass doors to the stereo inside the living room and turn the volume down.

I resettled myself on the chaise and nodded for Melissa to proceed.

“She, like, pretends to be her mom on the phone”—she switched to an authoritative voice—“Hello, Mrs. Stroh, this is Tove's mother. Hum, she, like, has my permission to sleep over tonight.”

She paused, waiting for my encouragement.

I gave her a smile and a laugh, wanting to hear more.

“I can't even do it,” she said. “But Tove, she's, like, really scary-good at impersonating voices and stuff like that, like handwriting. She's really good at making notes and signing parent signatures.” She paused and watched Tove and the others for a moment.

The sun inched out from behind the patio umbrella, and I squinted at Melissa while readjusting myself on my chaise. Fully shaded again, I took a sip from my Budweiser.

“She lies all the time,” she said, still watching them, pensive. “This one time, she said she knew Eminem. Said they were good friends, told everyone. Lie! And this other time she said that she's a model. Said that her parents told her not to tell anyone, but that her photographs are all over Europe and China. Lie!”

She looked at me, her eyes widening as if in confidential warning. “If I were you, I'd stay away from her.”

“Why?” I asked. “It's not that big of a deal.”

She shook her head. “It's more than that,” she said. “She's, like, really smart”—she reached for her Diet Coke can. She and Crystal weren't drinking alcohol. Earlier, I'd heard them telling Gabe that they were on a diet that prohibited it. “Gets straight A's and doesn't even study! It's not fair. But she's smart
and
she's crazy.”

She took a sip, her eyes watching me over her can.

“What do you mean?”

She sighed and set her Diet Coke on the cement. “She parties and drinks and, like, screws all the time. Don't look at me like that! I'm not kidding. She's a slut! You don't know, because you live here, but, like, everyone in Cucamonga knows.”

“Aren't you supposed to be her friend?” I asked.

She seemed to consider my question seriously. “Not really,” she said. After a pause, she added, “We, like, party together, but that's about it. She's always been really, really, really”—she paused again, grimacing, as if searching for the right word—“weird,” she said at last. She didn't say it meanly, but in a philosophical way.

She nodded toward one of Gabe's friends, whom I hadn't met before, a guy named Kent Nixon. Tall, athletic, angular facial features, humorless, tough, on the football team with Kevin Stewart. I thought of them after, and still do, as the Ks.

“She, like, thinks that's her boyfriend,” she said. “But he doesn't even like her. He had sex with her in her car last week, right in front of his house. He told me. She brags about giving him road head. She doesn't know they make fun of her. They all think she's a slut. No one wants to be her boyfriend.”

I took another sip of my Budweiser and watched Tove. Her head was back in a laugh, and then it moved forward and she gave us a sideways glance with a glimmer of antagonism.

“Does he know,” I asked, “that she thinks he's her boyfriend?”

She shrugged. “He doesn't care what she thinks,” she said.

L
ATER, AFTER
M
IKE
arrived and after the sun went down, Gabe and his group of friends left for the garage to play pool.

Mike and I stayed and drank a few beers, swam a little, since the party we'd decided to go to didn't start until nine (varsity girls' volleyball team; the party started when they came back from an away summer practice game), and we had time to kill before it.

Dad came home, turned off the stereo, stuck his head out the open sliding glass doors, and asked if everything was okay. He and Nancy had been at some fund-raising barbecue with Krone and his buddies.

“Yep,” I called back. Mike and I were in the Jacuzzi, the water bubbling. The bridge of Mike's nose was peeling from a sunburn, and he kept picking at it.

Behind Dad I saw Nancy leaning over, standing, moving around purposefully as she cleaned, throwing away cans and empty potato chip bags. Just seeing her set off my memory-smell of her perfume.

Dad gave a prolonged reprimand in his gruff voice—“When you leave the doors open, insects get inside the house. Don't forget to turn off those pool lights when you're done. Last time, someone kept them on all night. Keep the noise level down, and
make sure to tell your brother to do the same. We don't want more noise complaints.”

A few weekends ago, a cop had arrived at our door and in an apologetic manner had asked us to “tone it down, please.” An anonymous phone complaint had come from one of our neighbors.

We figured it was Mrs. Libby, the old widow who lived alone in the giant mock Tudor. The one time I met her, she'd offered me an ancient, frosty-looking piece of green ribbon candy from a crystal candy dish by her front door. Though she kept the curtains closed, I often saw her silhouette vacuuming the living room in slow motion.

But later we found out that Mrs. Libby was partially deaf. It was the lawyer couple two houses down. We rarely saw them, since they left at the crack of dawn each morning for the gym and worked late.

Ever since the complaint, Dad had been reminding us about our noise level.

“Okay, Dad,” I called back. “Have a good night.”

“You, too,” he said.

“Hello, Mr. Hyde,” said Mike, with a big wave. He liked to make fun of the fact that Dad didn't usually remember his name.

“Who's that?” said Dad, squinting.

“Mike,” Mike said.

Dad nodded.

“Hello, Nancy,” I called out in the same spirit, knowing that she would prefer to be left alone.

She peered at me from behind Dad's shoulder for a second. A quick smile, possibly my imagination.

Dad slid the glass doors shut and retired to his bedroom with Nancy, on the opposite side of the house. I watched their dark forms as she followed him down the hallway, holding his hand.

Later Dad claimed that his weekend had been consumed by an epic migraine, and he'd sought refuge in his bedroom. The migraine, he maintained, had prevented him from properly supervising Gabe and his friends.

I don't know if he had a migraine that weekend or not. But I like to believe that he did.

D
RESSED AND READY
for our volleyball party, Mike and I went to the garage, the center of Gabe's universe. It was only 7:30
PM
; we still had about an hour to kill.

“We can play pool,” Mike said, “and if it's too weird, let's leave.”

He didn't like Gabe's friends much, either.

The whole time, I'd been thinking about telling Mike that I knew Tove—imagining what I'd say: See that girl right there? Yeah, her, in the Marie Callender's uniform. I know her. No one knows that we were friends. We used to play together as kids. We had this special class together, because we both read at an advanced level. Now she's pretending she doesn't know me. She used to be so different. I used to go over to her house. I know her parents. Her dad really likes me. I wonder what happened to her? I wonder how she knows Gabe?