This Must Be the Place: A Novel (43 page)

“I mean it, you stay the hell—”

“I’m with the band!”

“You little piece of—” Harrison was jostled as someone came up behind him and pushed him out of the way. She ran down the steps, the silver zipper pull on her shirt jangling with each bounce of her boobs.

“Onei—
ow
.” Eugene’s head hurt. Andrew Lu had fucking walloped him.

“He’s all yours, honey!” Harrison called, and shut the door, leaving them alone in the cold, dimly lit parking lot, loose gravel scraping under their feet.

Oneida was hugging herself to stay warm and not looking at him. Whatever had propelled her so dramatically out of the gym after him had evaporated, shrunk with cold, and she looked around nervously, like she’d made a really stupid, really rash decision. Eugene didn’t blame her. She had. But so had he, and he didn’t know yet if he would live to regret it or if it wouldn’t mean a thing in the grand scheme. He’d only known how good it felt when his Chucks connected with Andrew Lu’s stomach, how he’d pushed and Andrew Lu had given. Maybe he had some power after all.

“Where’s your car?” She rubbed her nose.

They slid into the car’s front seat from opposite sides. There was no question of trying out a few tricks in the backseat, no question of whether either one was interested in sucking a little face. Eugene turned the ignition and cranked the heat as high as it would go.

“What do you want?”

The question was so abrupt, and Oneida’s voice so dimmed by the roar of the heaters, Eugene thought he could reasonably pretend he hadn’t heard it.

“What do you want, Eugene?” she asked again.

“I don’t know,” he said. “What do
you
want? ’Cause I don’t think it’s me.”

She looked really hurt, and Eugene wished he hadn’t said it, even though the answer to that question was, in fact, exactly what he wanted. Along with a blood oath assurance that she’d never tell his secret to another living soul.

“You really want to know?” she asked.

“Yes, I really want to know.”

“I want you to tell me what you want.”

“I already told you,
I don’t know
.” His voice squeaked on
don’t
.

“You’re lying, dumb-ass. Everybody wants something, and I asked you first.” She crossed her arms over her chest again, got tangled in her zipper pull, and spastically zipped it all the way up her throat.

His head was killing him. He thought Andrew Lu might have given him a concussion. Speak of the devil: out of the corner of his eye he saw a figure on a bike pedaling furiously down the school’s driveway and
away up the road. At least both of them had been bounced.
Crash, jerk
, he thought.
Crash your bike in a ditch
.

“Fine,” he said. “I want to know your biggest secret. I already told you mine.” Even mentioning it, however obliquely, made his gut hurt.

She dug her front teeth into her lower lip and inhaled. “Why do you want to know that?” she asked, prickly.

“Because I just want to. You didn’t ask me to explain why I wanted to kiss you in the first place, did you?”

“Actually, I did, and you did explain,” she said, and then blushed so bright Eugene could see it, even in the faint glow of the floodlights mounted above the gym door. “You told me I might be the only person in our whole school who might be worth getting to know, and that if you didn’t have sex soon you would probably die.”

“Oh. Right.” Eugene sat back in his seat.

They stared ahead in silence for what felt like forever. The view from the student parking lot was of the football practice field, muddy with leaves and autumn runoff. In the dark, Eugene could just make out the outlines of that stupid thing with the pads and the wheels that the football team used to practice tackling. He exhaled slowly. The only thing left to do, the only thing he could do, it seemed, was to put the car in drive and take Oneida home, and—

Then what.

“I want to know your secret,” Eugene said. “Because I’m afraid, now that you know mine.”

“Afraid?” Oneida’s voice was small. “What do you think I’m going to do?”

He shrugged. “It’s a big secret,” he said. “And it really wasn’t mine to tell.”

“My secret isn’t mine either,” she said.

Voltage skittered up his spine. “Whose is it?”

“My mom’s.”

“Does it have to do with Arthur?” He hoped not. Despite the whole duping incident, he really liked Arthur, and from the way Oneida’s eyes were widening, staring straight ahead, it didn’t sound like this secret was particularly good.

“Could be. I don’t know who my father is.” She swallowed. “I guess it could be Arthur.”

“Your mom never told you?” Eugene couldn’t imagine not knowing. Not being at home, being away all the time, being divorced—that he could imagine. But not having a clue who your dad or your mom was, not knowing? He shivered.

“Oh, God.” Her mouth turned down. “I guess it really could be Arthur, couldn’t it? Mom really likes him, and she won’t talk to me about him, but—I’ve been so mean about him. Oh my God.” She took off her glasses and wiped at her eyes, and Eugene realized, with horror, that she was crying, and had been, silently, maybe this whole time. Her face was too wet to be the product of this moment of realization alone.

“It’s OK.”

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “It’s all different. I’ve been such a jerk. I miss my mom, I miss—I miss not caring that I didn’t know. If I could understand a little, it might be better, I don’t know—but maybe it’s horrible, you know? There has to be a reason she didn’t tell me, like my father was married, or he’s in jail, or she was—r-raped.” She snuffled wetly, and Eugene, who had no idea what to do, was at least able to hand her a fast food napkin from the pocket in the door. She blew her nose.

“It’s like—it’s like this question just gets bigger and bigger inside of me, and the bigger it gets, the more I forget who I thought I was, or used to be, or am. It’s—it’s—”

“Totally assy,” Eugene said, out of panic more than empathy, and Oneida, mid-sniffle, laughed out loud. It was a beautiful sound. It was a sound of salvation. Of reprieve.

“Can you talk to your mom about it? Can you ask her?”

“I know I should. I know it would be the right thing to do, but I don’t think I can trust her to tell me the truth. The whole truth, all of it. But—do you remember Bert? I told you about her that day you came over?”

“Lives in the attic, going to burn your house down?”

Oneida nodded. “She knows. She almost told us all at the dinner table one night. I’ve been working up the courage to ask her for, like, weeks.”

“Ask her tonight,” Eugene said. “Imagine how good it’s going to feel
once you know. Even if it’s bad, it can’t be as bad as all the horrible things you’ve imagined, because, I mean, reasonably, it can only be one horrible thing. If it is, in fact, horrible. And you’ll know. You’ll know, and you won’t have to wonder, and you won’t have to not feel like yourself anymore.”

Oneida dabbed at her nose with the napkin. “I know,” she said. “I should.”

Eugene felt grand. Magnanimous, even. Not only did this revelation make them even, it made them equal. He had never liked her better than he did right then, half in shadows, half lit from the school floodlights, wiping her face with a McDonald’s napkin, very real and very sad. And he could save her—it wouldn’t be hard at all. And then she’d be in his debt, and he’d feel safer, feel better, about everything she knew.

“I’m taking you home,” he said, leaning across the seat. “I’ll drop you off and you have to promise that you’ll talk to either the creepy old bat or your mom tonight. And call me tomorrow about what you find out.”

“OK.” She pushed her hair behind her ears and put her glasses back on. “And
you
have to promise to stop beating up Andrew Lu.”

Eugene, hand on the gearshift, grinned from the tips of his toes. “Don’t you mean getting beat up
by
Andrew Lu?”

They smiled at each other—really smiled at each other, with their eyes and their teeth and their noses and their whole damn faces.

“You know, black eyes are sort of hot,” she said. And then, unzipping her shirt: “Can you drive with one hand?”

So it was that Eugene drove home from the Ruby Falls Halloween Carnival with one hand on the steering wheel and the other inside his girlfriend’s shirt, resting comfortably on her boob—his girlfriend Oneida Jones, who was bizarre, unhappy, and maybe unknowable, but still a girl and a friend who let him touch her boobs, and even at the age of fifteen, Eugene had the wherewithal to realize it might not get much better. The Milky Way Bar and Grill parking lot was full, muffled country music dopplering in the still air as they drove past. The world hadn’t ended, and Eugene felt fine. The heater roared. The car hummed.

His only regret that night, as he hurtled through the dark back roads of Ruby Falls, was that he hadn’t seen his sister showered in gore,
hadn’t heard her banshee wail; that he wasn’t able to share that moment with the women in his brilliantly screwed little family—the women, he suspected, who knew what was really going on the whole time. An old Zeppelin song came on the radio. Patricia had played it for him once—when they were very young, little kids, not grown-ups, which it felt like he was becoming a little more every day. It was the kind of song that played at the end of movies, right before the black screen and the roll credits, designed to trick you into feeling good right before you had to make that final concession to reality, pick up your empty popcorn boxes and shuffle back to your life. It made him think of Astor, of the world he’d known before he told Oneida his secret, a world where his father was a superhero. But now a door he’d never believed existed had opened: he’d stepped through and the way back was shut, sealed, locked forever. The lost world made him a little sad, more than a little anxious, and glad that Led Zeppelin existed—that all music, all movies, all art existed—to make him feel a little better about the real world. Which seemed a terribly poignant and grown-up insight, and he smiled to himself in the dark. Then he drove under the old trestle overpass on Bleeker Road and the rock smashed into his windshield from above, and the last conscious thought in Eugene Wendell’s brain was

Oh fuck me.

20
Oneida Underwater