This Must Be the Place: A Novel (15 page)

She caught herself after only two claps when Wendy snickered at her. “Dork,” he said, and walked down the stairs.

“Eugenius.” The bald guitar player hailed Wendy and reached for a can of beer perched unsteadily on the arm of a nearby chair. He took a swig and noticed Oneida. “With a girlfriend.”

Oneida was too far out of her depth to muster the requisite indignation and denial. She floated down the stairs, past the band and after Wendy, as though it were a particularly bizarre play she was watching from behind a curtain.

The blond bass player winked at Wendy as he passed and addressed Oneida directly. “He’s going to want to make it to first,” she said, “but for God’s sake don’t let him steal second.” Wendy’s drummer mother told the blond to quit picking on her baby, and Oneida, who didn’t know how much weirder this could all get, decided she was having a hallucination. Her body was probably passed out in the driveway, her face smushed against the gravel, her brain a million miles away.

“Come on,” Wendy said, and pushed through a swinging door. Beyond this door was a more quantifiable entity: a kitchen, looking completely normal and therefore twice as odd in comparison with the room they’d just left.

“Beer?” Wendy asked, clinking bottles in the refrigerator. “No, wait. You’re not a beer girl. Let me guess.” Wendy steered her gently onto a bar stool and observed her, one hand on his chin. “Kahlua and vodka. That’s the kind of girl you are.”

A bell went off in Oneida’s brain. “Stop,” she said. It felt right, so she said it again. “
Stop
.”

Wendy pulled two cans of soda out of the refrigerator. “Again,” he said. “You’re ridiculously gullible. You’ve really got to work on that.”

She jumped off the bar stool, tensed for escape. This was all too strange, too unexpected, and Oneida was tired of trying to live in a world she didn’t understand. She had expected a gun rack, a rusty car in the driveway, a mother or a father who didn’t say much and didn’t stick around, old orange carpeting, and a lingering odor of cigarettes and wet dog.

“This is freaking you out, isn’t it?” Wendy snapped open his soda.

“Not at all,” Oneida said, her voice squeaking.

He handed her a can of soda and she accepted automatically. After she’d held it for a few seconds without moving, Wendy popped it open for her.

The silence was heavy with the thudding of drums from the next room. Oneida sat back down on the stool and propped her legs on the top rung. She was surprised—though, in retrospect, she knew she shouldn’t have been—to feel a surge of insatiable curiosity. Eugene Wendell was a psycho, a genius, or a hybrid of both. For her to shut down and run away would be in direct opposition to her life’s pursuit of information. Learning Wendy wasn’t who he appeared to be was like tripping head-first into a pot of gold: if she didn’t crack her head open, it would be the greatest secret she’d ever have the opportunity to discover.

“So you’re, what, the Partridge family?” she said. Shocked at her own daring, she gave Wendy a penetrating stare and took a sip of soda.

Wendy looked relieved. She was glad she’d decided to play along. “Not quite,” he said. “That’s not my dad, that’s Terry. He works for my dad. But that
is
my mom, and that’s my sister Gwen.”

“Your sister’s name is Gwen Wendell?”

Wendy’s face split into a wide grin with too many teeth. Oneida, a little faster but still slower than she liked, caught on.

“Her name is Patricia,” Wendy said. “And I will personally remove every last drop of gullibility out of your body if you let me.”

The coy familiarity of what sounded halfway between a threat and a promise brought Oneida to one shocking conclusion—he was flirting
with her. Wendy Wendell was flirting with her, and Oneida wasn’t sure she minded all that much. She took another sip to hide the fact that she had no idea how to react to this information, other than with blind terror.

“So where’s your dad?” she said, grasping desperately for a way to reroute the conversation.

“Business trip,” Wendy said.

“What’s he do?”

“Assassin for hire.”

Oneida was ready this time. “Whatever,” she said, and couldn’t help returning Wendy’s grin.

“He’s a professional art forger.”

Oneida set her soda can on the countertop with a sharp aluminum click. “I don’t know why I bothered asking.”

“Fine, he’s a security guard, and he’s at a security guard conference in New York City. You want to see his itinerary? Three days of nonstop action and adventure. There’s a lot of badge flashing and glowering and monitor-watching.” Wendy had a habit of talking out of the side of his mouth and not looking directly at her, especially if he thought he was saying something funny. Oneida wasn’t sure if she found it annoying or cute—for the moment, at least, she was fascinated to discover she had any opinion about Wendy Wendell at all beyond fear and/or loathing. This couldn’t be the same Wendy who had brought fake blood into Sherman’s woodshop, who prowled around the boys’ bathroom in the science wing and sold cigarettes to seventh-graders; who told the computer lab monitor to go fuck himself and the horse he rode in on. This Wendy didn’t even look like the same person. He looked skinnier and taller, less hunched and hulking. Cleaner, somehow, and brighter: Oneida had never noticed that his hair was brown with a little black mixed in, that his ears were large and kind of funny-looking, and if he stood in front of a bright light—as he did now, crossing in front of the kitchen window—they glowed seashell-pink as the light passed through them.

She slid off her stool and walked around the kitchen, trying to place this new Wendy in his natural habitat: the bright curtains over the sink, lemons and limes dancing across the fabric; the small stack of breakfast
dishes on the counter; the wall behind the kitchen table, painted a deep citrus green and lightly scuffed level with the tops of the chairs; and the lingering odor of coffee, a little burned. Discovering Wendy’s Technicolor underbelly gave Oneida a feeling of power, the rush of the privilege of information. It was a power she always felt like wielding.

“Why?” she asked him. “Why do you make everyone at school think that you’re this crazy badass who picks fights with hookers? Brings a knife to school?”

“I was wondering how long it would take you to ask.” Wendy finished his soda and tossed the empty can into the sink. “It’s something I learned from my dad: life is art.” He tilted his head as though he were searching for the right words, but Oneida was sure he knew exactly what the right words were and was only posturing for her benefit. “It means,” he said, “that your whole life is a creation. What you make it, literally. And you can use your life to totally mess with other people’s heads.”

“And that’s art?” Oneida asked.

“Oh, yeah. Art is anything that makes you think differently.”

“But,” Oneida said. “I don’t think differently about you. I mean,
now
I do, but . . . at school, everyone who thinks you’re crazy—they just think you’re crazy.”

“But I’m not, and that’s the art part of it. It’s subversive, it’s surreal. The misconceptions of other people—that’s the medium I work in.”

Oneida rolled Wendy’s words around in her head. She could feel his eyes on her, watching her think.

“I don’t—” she said. “I don’t get it.”

Oneida didn’t realize she’d said the one thing guaranteed to hurt Wendy the most until his face drooped and something in his eyes went dim and distant. It was as though this new Wendy, articulate, animated, and—God, it was still too bizarre to believe—flirting with her, disappeared behind a scrim of the old Wendy, and Oneida felt the usual anxieties leach into the pit of her stomach. She already missed the new Wendy. She liked the new Wendy, liked the way she felt when she talked to him.

“I mean, I do get it,” Oneida lied diplomatically.

“You do?” Wendy said, furrowing his brow and rubbing his scar. “So you were fucking with me?”

“Your misconceptions . . . are the medium I work in?” Oneida offered. When Wendy laughed she felt a spark of pleasure cut with a thin slice of fear. Something was happening in this kitchen that she wasn’t prepared for, not only because it was completely unexpected but because it had never happened to her before, and there was no way to anticipate this strange wrenching sensation in her chest: what it would mean, what it would make her do. Her whole body seemed to be vibrating slightly, humming in anticipation. Was this what it felt like to—and here she was too pragmatic, too cynical, to even think the words
fall in love
, so she thought back to what Mona had said about recognizing worthy souls. Was this, then, what it felt like to recognize yourself in someone you’d seen a thousand times before, that you thought you already knew? She laughed too, a shaky laugh that sounded a little too high and wobbly to be her own. She looked up and Wendy was staring at her, and smiling, and everything was too bizarre, too new, to be true.

“Wow,” she said, and bugged her eyes, blinking, trying to wake up.

“I know it’s a lot to take in. My alter ego and all.” Wendy shrugged and crossed his arms over his chest. Oneida poured the rest of her drink down the sink, her stomach too antsy for her to add any more sugar. “You can still call me Wendy, if you’re more used to it,” he said, and before Oneida could think to ask what else she might call him, Wendy leaned in and kissed her.

Oh, sweet holy Jesus
, telegraphed Oneida’s brain in the instant it was still capable of rational thought, before the truth of Wendy’s mouth on hers became inescapable; before she stumbled back into the refrigerator and Wendy, attached, stumbled with her; before her back was pressed up against magnets and shopping lists and—she thought she remembered—an orange photocopied flyer for the Ruby Falls Halloween Carnival that Oneida hadn’t gone to since she was eight; before she realized her hands were flapping weirdly in the air because they knew they belonged someplace but didn’t know quite
where
, and it was weird and wet and warm and she could taste a banana he’d had for breakfast; before the full gravity of that moment stamped itself on the rest of her life, and certainly before she thought about Andrew Lu.

“Oh my God,” she garbled, lips still tangled up with Wendy’s. “Oh my God, what about Andrew?”

Wendy’s face was enormous when it was this close to hers. She felt herself going cross-eyed looking into his pupils. “He’s not coming,” Wendy said, and leaned in to kiss her again, but she pressed both hands against his chest and asked what did he mean?

Wendy’s eyes flicked back and forth cautiously. “I mean,” he said, “that he’s not coming.”

“What about Dani?”

“Uh, not coming either.”

Oneida’s heart trilled. “Why aren’t they coming?”

“Because I called them last night and told them not to?”

Oneida pushed Wendy away and pulled her hair back from her face. “Oh my God,” she said, more to herself than Wendy. “This was a setup. You never meant for the group to meet. You just wanted to get me here. What the hell do you want from me? Why did you show me, tell me—what the hell is going on?”

Wendy was upset—really upset, not acting, not posturing. Oneida could tell because his eyes were wide and he was looking at the floor instead of her. He shrugged. “I dunno,” he said. “Maybe because you’re the only person in our whole retarded school who might be worth getting to know?”

Oneida paused, momentarily won, and if Wendy had been paying any attention he might have been able to stop himself before going on.

“And if I don’t have real sex soon, I will
die.
”

She didn’t know she had the capacity to be so wholly self-conscious, to feel every part of her body explode from pale to scarlet with a single pump of her heart. Somehow she made it out of the kitchen and through the main room, the band thumping away on that same song (
here comes your man here comes your man
), and down the Wendell driveway. Her heart was tight and baffled and her head was no better.

She would walk the two miles home.

No—she would run.