The Witch (6 page)

Then his brain must have taken one of its little vacations, because now he was dancing with a different girl, and he'd taken the itchy sweater off. Or maybe somebody else had. The party was banging. Everybody had loosened up. They were singing along with the music, or in some cases they were singing other things. This new girl was wearing more coverage on top than the last one, and on a point scale she wasn't as pretty, but she was dancing up close to him in a way that Royboy thought was friendly. She swayed against him. “How about we get some fresh air?”

“Sure,” Royboy said. Always obliging. He followed the girl through the kitchen and out to the back porch. His roommates gave him encouraging nods. You the man, Royboy! At the far end of the room he thought he saw a different girl wearing the sweater he'd had on earlier. He had to wonder about that, but there was no time, because now here he was in this whole new situation.

The back porch was where they piled up beer cans for recycling. There was also a dried-out sponge mop, the sponge worn
down to a husk, and the parts for a hot tub that Dave D. had acquired in a burst of entrepreneurial activity but had never managed to assemble. It was not a romantic place, but the girl declared herself enraptured by the stubby moon, which was rising, or perhaps setting, above the roof of the detached garage. She perched herself on the porch railing and let her bare legs swing. She was wearing one of those shorty skirts, which Royboy appreciated, though her shoes were on the disappointing, casual side. She said, “Tell me more about your accident.”

Oh shit. Had he been going on about that? Sweat percolated up from a deep, anxious well. The girl took notice. “Hey, never mind, I can understand if it's a bad memory.”

“No, see, I don't remember it. People had to tell me about it.”

The girl nodded. She was one of those encouraging nodders. “Uh-huh.” He was meant to keep talking.

“I was riding my bike and a car hit me.” He didn't want to get into the rest of it because it was stupid and it made him sound stupid, like he couldn't get himself run over in some normal fashion. “How much did I tell you already?”

“You said the guy who hit you lost control of the car for some embarrassing reason but you wouldn't tell me what it was.”

“Yeah, it's a little . . .”

“Yeah?” she echoed. More of the nodding. It was like her neck was coming loose.

“He was putting on deodorant.”

Once she got it, the girl started laughing. Everybody did. “Sorry,” she managed. She was trying to stop laughing by inhaling, but it only made her snort. “I mean, you couldn't exactly drive, I mean, how awful.”

“Uh-huh.” He didn't feel like telling her the rest of it, which
was hospital hospital hospital, and having to wear a helmet to cover the soft places in his head, and how he'd been put back together like a meat robot. He'd had to learn fourth grade all over again. That wasn't so bad, because he liked fourth grade, where they'd played dodgeball and made a battery out of lemon juice, pennies, and zinc washers.

The girl got it together and stopped making nose noises. “Sorry. Sorry. Wow. But I guess you're okay now, right?”

“Pretty much.” He disliked this part, because if he told people he was not entirely okay, it was like he was disappointing them. “I take medicine for these, ah, seizure events I have. Most of the time I don't even know they're happening. But it's a lot better than it used to be.” He shrugged.

The girl looked at him, recalibrating. Royboy knew that look. It would be followed by either disengagement or a fresh wave of goopy sympathy. Instead, she hopped down from the porch rail, steadied herself by gripping his T-shirt in both hands, and started kissing him. Which was all right. He kissed back. He was trying to remember if he already knew her name, and if he didn't, if it would be necessary to know it.

The girl said, “Maybe we could, ah . . .”

“Oh yeah, sure,” Royboy said, detaching himself, dragging his attention away from all the interesting, bodily things going on. They grinned at each other in the low-wattage moonlight, then made their way through the back door. The party opened around them like a mouth. Who were all these people? He hoped that nobody had made themselves at home in his bedroom for the purpose of having sex, as sometimes happened at parties. Behind him, the girl lifted his T-shirt and licked his spine, which he guessed meant she liked him.

Getting through the crowd was like surfing. You had to pick
a wave and ride it as far as you could, then wait for the next one. Royboy kept looking behind him at the girl. He smiled. She smiled. There didn't seem to be a lot to say, even if the noise had allowed for conversation. Facing front, he said, “Excuse me. Excuse me.” Diving between arms, butting against butts. Somebody had turned the lights down and there were some special effects going on, whirling blues and pinks and silvers. His vision broke up into shards of colors.

Then he got smacked in the face. Smack! Royboy stopped moving and let the pain spread through him. “Hey,” he said. And, “Ow!”

For a moment he thought it was one of the flailing dancers, then a girl with piled-up black hair stood in front of him, her arm cocked as if to take another shot at him. “Hey,” he said again, wanting it to mean all kinds of things, like, What? and, Wait a minute!

The girl in front of him lowered her arm but gave him one of those laser beams of hatred looks, and vanished into the crowd. The girl behind him bumped into him. “Who was that?”

“I don't know,” Royboy said. He did and he didn't know, and he didn't know how he did, except that sometimes his brain hotwired itself and presented him with a certainty: It was the shoe girl.

Meanwhile, here was this other girl. She was giving him a look that seemed to offer a choice between forward and reverse. “Ah,” he said. “Mistaken identity.”

It was a bad moment. Why couldn't he pick and choose when to go iffy? Why did he have to stand here all slack-jawed and paralyzed by idiocy? Shouldn't he find a microphone or something, “ATTENTION! WILL THE GIRL WHO JUST
SLAPPED ME PLEASE RETURN TO THE BAR!” She was nowhere to be seen. All the faces in the crowd looked pretty much the same in the hectic colored lights, like the unnatural landscapes seen in photographic negatives.

“What's the deal?” The girl—the remaining girl, that is—looked him up and down. “I don't want to get in the middle of anything. Was that your girlfriend?”

“I don't know,” Royboy said. Stupid but honest. “I mean, I don't remember.”

“So let me get this straight, there's times you forget things right when they're happening?”

“That would be one way to put it, yes.”

The girl looked around her as if seeking a witness to such absurdity, then shook her head and walked away.

Royboy watched her disappear into the crowd of silvery pink-blue dancers, then he made his way upstairs to his own room. It was empty, and the bedside table drawer that Mikey had stocked with condoms was undisturbed. It seemed that nobody, himself included, had been having naked fun here. He lay down on the bed with the high-heeled shoe and balanced it on his chest. It was weird, but the slap on the face had recharged his happiness battery. He could feel little pulses of joy crawling beneath his skin. Who was this girl? He wanted to find her and let her knock him around some more.

The next day, after everyone was up, and those ladies who had been overnight guests were escorted home, Royboy told the others what had happened, or at least, the parts he remembered, like getting clocked by the shoe girl. “It's like she has superpowers.”

“Or she's a magical being, like in Harry Potter.”

“Pheromones. She's your perfect biological match. Something about your disability thing that keys in exactly to her chemical signature.”

“Free what? Now you're making fun.”

Dave D. said, “Sorry, man. But how hot was this girl, that you're all desperate in love? You need to take a deep breath, slow-walk it. Keep your cool, keep a little something in the tank.”

“But maybe it's different for him,” Mikey said. “Maybe the Boy imprinted on her. Like when birds hatch and think the first thing they see is their mother.”

“She's not my mother! That's . . . I really really wish you had not said that.”

“A poor choice of example. But I'm trying to come up with a theory, see, about how your specialness sets you up for a love-at-first-sight situation. Because it's not such a normal thing.”

They considered this, the sun gilding the wreckage of the party and giving their hangovers a more kindly aspect. Lance the Pants said, “You know, love is kind of like brain damage. You're not in your right mind when you've got a bad case of girl fever. Think about it.”

They thought about it. Mikey said, “Yeah, that's what I was getting at. You're all prepped for true love, Royboy, you're halfway there already. In a sense, you're gifted.”

“No kidding?” Royboy was doubtful. He didn't think he'd been gifted even before he got run over.

“Sure,” Dave D. said. “Like those, what do you call them, savants, who can calculate giant math problems. Like Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man
. Congratulations, RB. Love has made you its bitch.”

“Guys! I don't even know who this girl is, and even if I find her, she hates me!”

Lance the Pants said, “Yeah, but it's not like she doesn't care. If she didn't care, she wouldn't bother smacking you upside the head.”

Royboy felt hopeful. Lance knew about these things. But they couldn't just keep having parties and hope the shoe girl would show up in a better mood.

A plan was devised. Tomorrow, Royboy and Lance the Pants, smoothest of the smooth, would embark on a mission. They would buy flowers, a shitload of flowers. (“Roses,” Lance specified. “No substitutes. This is not a time for carnations.”) They would seek out the female partygoers and present them with bouquets, sort of an after-party favor. The girls would be charmed. There would be opportunities for discreet perusal. Lance would do the heavy lifting, keeping the conversation going. All Royboy had to do was wait for his inner love alarm to go off.

He had such good friends! He was so grateful. But he wasn't as optimistic as they were. First they had to find the shoe girl, which would be tricky enough. Then he had to convince her not to hate him.

“That's called courtship,” Lance the Pants told him. They had borrowed Dave D.'s van to transport the roses. “Courtship as in, paying court. Paying compliments. All those things you like about her. A compliment is gentlemanly, as in, ‘I love your perfume.' Not, ‘Nice ass.'”

“Maybe you should write this stuff down for me.”

Lance was quiet, thinking, or maybe just driving. Lance looked like the good guy in a comic book. He had black shiny hair and a handsome, comic book face. Girls were always calling him up, inviting him to parties, barbecues, home-cooked meals. He danced so skillfully from one partner to the next, he let
them down with such soft landings, that none of them seemed to have any hard feelings. He was a virtuoso. At the florist's, he convinced the girl who took their order to loan them five gallon buckets and fill them with water to keep the bouquets fresh. He selected a perfect red rose, presented it to her, and promised he'd bring the buckets back tomorrow—say, around five o'clock?

Now he said, “I don't think you should use any canned lines, RB. You need to go with your strengths.”

“Okay,” Royboy agreed. Then, “What are those?”

“Sincerity. Authenticity. Singleness of purpose. You know, I kind of envy you.”

“Come on.”

“Everybody wants to find true love. Me too. Sure. You think I don't get tired of chasing tail? It's like the guy said, an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” Lance had often found a working knowledge of the great poets useful. “But hey, this isn't a game for you, it's a quest for something life-changing. Transformative. The search for a soul mate. The yin to your yang. Here's our first stop. Let's get to work.”

The door opened wide at the sight of Lance bearing roses. The girls exclaimed over him, and Royboy shuffled in behind. There were four or five and then six girls—they wouldn't keep still and it threw his count off—and they all had shiny hair and delicate wrists and ankles, they all smelled of meadow breezes. Royboy found them all very agreeable. He didn't think any of them was the shoe girl, but maybe that would be revealed more gradually. He took a seat in a corner and watched Lance the Pants do his thing.

“Lance, that was just the best party.”

“That's because you were there, darlin'.”

“Listen to you.”

“I'm here to scatter rose petals at your feet.”

“Hahaha.”

“I love roses. I'm going to put mine in water.”

“Sleep with one of them under your pillow, darlin', and dream of me.”

“Oh Lance. Hahaha.”

One of the girls detached herself from the group and sat down next to Royboy. “Hi, I'm Shawna.”

“Oh, hi. Roy.”

She was wearing pink pajamas, the satiny kind, with nothing underneath. She seemed to have forgotten this. Royboy tried not looking. He clamped his thighs together. Shawna said, “You're Lance's roommate, right? I thought I saw you before. So what do you do?”

“I help Mikey, uh, Mike, sometimes, at the Beverage Depot.” He couldn't think of anything else to say about that. It didn't sound like enough. “Mike, he lives with us. Me and Lance. And Dave D.”

Shawna's blue eyes opened a little wider to indicate that she found this interesting. Beneath the pink satin, her breasts shifted in slow motion. “So how long have you known Lance?”

Royboy began to explain. Mikey was his oldest friend, from way back in the fourth grade. He did not tell her the whole fourth-grade story because well because. He knew Dave D. from seventh grade and Lance from ninth. They had all stuck together somehow. Best buds.