You (8 page)

 

Y
ou wake up Sunday morning and you're ready for it.

The bottle of Gatorade, icy cold last night when you set it alongside your bed, is still cool at eight thirty, the carpet around it wet from condensation.
You crack it open and chug half the bottle in deep, gasping gulps. You wash down a couple of Tylenol—out of the bottle and waiting for you—with a slower, controlled swig. The queasiness isn't as bad as you had feared, but the headache is worse. It's better this way. You could fake your way through a headache, but once you started with the dry heaves your parents would start with the questions.

You stripped off your smoky, vodka-splashed jeans and T-shirt last night, burying them under the pile of dirty clothes to mask the smell. It doesn't, but you don't know that. Your mom can always tell, and that's why, after one party-filled weekend last summer, they had you peeing in a cup.

You duck into the bathroom and jump right into the shower. It's cold, but you stand there, the water hitting you full in the face till you feel your cheeks going numb. Then you ease on the hot water. The room fills with steam and you can feel the cobwebs in your head start to clear.

A little.

Was it worth it?

Is it
ever
worth it?

You're trained to say yes, but you never really thought about it.

And given how your head feels this morning, you're not about to start now.

 

T
he mall is packed.

Thanksgiving is still half a week away, but there's Santa in the center of the fluffy-white Christmas village where there's normally a fountain. You think you remember how Santa used to arrive on the day after Thanksgiving, but you don't since they've been doing it this way since before you were born. But your parents remember, and every year they go on about how Christmas these days is just an excuse to get people to buy stuff, not like when
they
were
kids. Everything was better then—the toys, the TV specials, the shopping, the kids.
Especially
the kids. It's like Christmas music—you only have to hear it one time a year but even that's too often.

You're wearing your best black sneakers, your least baggy jeans, a dark gray shirt with a collar, and—what else?—your hoodie. Only this is the
new
all-black one and even your mother said you looked nice when she dropped you off, excited that you were
finally
going to fill out job applications. You aren't, but it's cold and raining and you knew that that was the only way she'd give you a ride to the mall.

You cut around the food court, past the lame mechanical Santa's Workshop, past the Gap and the Aberzombie and the Spencer's Gifts and the four or five stores in a row that only sell sneakers, then you slow up and look ahead through the crowd to the Piercing Point kiosk in the middle of the mall.

Ashley's handing a customer a bag. She smiles
and says something—probably “thank you, have a nice day”—and you wait a second to see if anyone else goes to the register before you step back into the flow of traffic.

“Hey,” you say as you walk up. Real original.

Ashley looks up from the register and does that double-take thing. “Oh my god, Kyle.” She looks happy to see you, bouncing a little as she says it. She usually gives you a hug when she sees you, but she's behind the counter and there are probably rules about her stepping outside of the kiosk to give some guy she's not even dating a hug.

“How's it going?” Brilliant, Kyle, just brilliant.

She shrugs. “Okay. I was supposed to work till five, but Shantay says this other girl called in sick so I gotta be here till closing. Kinda sucks.”

“Yeah, that sucks.”

“You look nice. What are you all dressed up for?”

Two things:

1. She thinks you look nice
   

• a. That's the best thing anyone's said to you in a long time
  
• b. Your mom said the same thing when she dropped you off
  
• c. But it was your mom so it doesn't count.
  

• 2. She thinks this is dressed up for you
  

• a. This tells you that she notices what you normally wear
  
• b. It also tells you that she thinks what you normally wear makes you look like a slob.
  

“I'm supposed to be looking for a job,” you say, and you tell her how you fooled your mom into driving you to the mall. She's not impressed.

“They're looking for help over at Sears,” she says. “And there was a sign over at Abercrombie, but that would be a waste of time.”

A waste of time because you'd never work there or a waste of time because they'd never hire you? She doesn't say.

She tells you about piercing this little girl's ears
and how the girl wouldn't stop crying and how she felt awful, pushing her lip out to show you, no idea how hot that makes her look, and then she tells you about this coat she saw and how Cici was late on her first day, and oh my god, how nice it was for you to stop by, and then something else about her job that you don't catch. She's laughing and smiling and she reaches out and touches your arm and you decide to do it, now, right here, ask her if she wants to do something sometime, a meaningless phrase that would tell her everything you were trying to say, an open code that everybody understood, that she would understand and then she'd know, right now, forever.

“Excuse me, can you tell me how much these hoop earrings are?”

And it's over.

The woman pointing, Ashley opening the case, reading the little tags, then a second case, then a mother with some bratty kid and a guy in his twenties
trying to return something, the sign right above his ugly head saying
NO RETURNS
, then two more customers and the guy still trying.

The moment over.

Your
moment.

Over.

You stand there like a goddamn idiot for ten minutes before you fade away.

 

JC
Penney. Second-floor men's room.

Five punches and you shatter the plastic cover of the paper-towel dispenser, knocking it off the wall.

Your knuckles are scraped and bleeding, but it's not like the bus.

A lot less blood and nobody screaming.

And it's not like that kid you whaled on last winter, the one who was just standing there, not even looking at you.

More like the hole you put in your bedroom wall, the one you covered with that army poster with the flags.

No way your father's gonna rip
that
one down.

Or like the phone you whipped up against the back of the Kmart when your mother called to tell you to come home. You didn't get hurt on that one, just grounded.

Or like the rock you kicked back in July. Or was it August?

That was stupid.

But you had to do it.

Just do it, right?

You don't feel any better—you never do—but that doesn't matter. It had to be done.

It just…happens.

You can taste blood. Must have bit down on your lip.

You run your hand under the cold water, then tear off a wad of what's left of the paper towels. You
want to kick something, but you don't, the need dying fast.

Still pissed.

Hell yeah.

But it's not the same.

You're long gone before anyone checks on the noise.

 

I
s it still considered a surprise quiz when everybody seems to know about it but you?

You think you would have remembered something about a quiz, but you're the only one who had that lost look when Ms. Casey did the clear-everything-off-your-desk drill. You were supposed to have read Act Five over the weekend, but you were busy and you assumed that, like every other time you had read what you were supposed to read for homework, Ms. Casey would just go over it all in class anyway. They trained you well and now you'll pay for it.

Great. A question based on
another
play you didn't read. On the other side of the room, Zack's pen is racing across the paper. You didn't see him before class and given your schedules you probably
won't see him for the rest of the day. That's okay with you. You've been thinking a lot since the party—that hangover clearing out your brain—and what you're thinking is that it's time to get your act together, and hanging around with Zack doesn't seem like the way to do it. The others at the party, they had better clothes and went on expensive vacations and were all heading to big-name universities out of state, but they were just as screwed up as you. A few even more screwed up. Hanging around with Zack didn't make their lives any better and you don't see it doing anything for you. So, yeah, you'll get your act together, get a job, probably at the mall, hopefully someplace near the Piercing Point, use the money you earn to buy some new shirts or something, tell Ashley you need a hand picking out what matches. And really, you can't think of one good reason why you'd want to hang around with Zack.

Even if you didn't know the quiz was coming, you knew this question would be on it. No matter what you're reading, Ms. Casey turns it into a lecture on personal responsibility.

A poem?
Discuss how the author inspires readers to take control of their lives.

A Greek myth?
Show how Odysseus created his own fate.

A short story?
Explain how the narrator's refusal to assert her free will led to her downfall.

It's Ms. Casey's favorite topic and you know exactly how to answer it, even if you don't know what you're talking about.

Extra points for knowing some piece of
People
magazine trivia.

That's your fate.

No wonder you hate this class.

 

“
H
ey.”

It's Max and he's standing near your locker. You nod. “Hey.”

“What up?”

You spin the combination lock and jerk open the door.

“Where were you this weekend?”

“I was busy.”

“Yeah?”

There's something sharp in his voice that makes
you look over. He's got his arms crossed and he's leaning back against the row of lockers. Max the Tough Guy.

“Ryan says you went to a party at the queer kid's house.”

A week ago you'd have been quick with a denial, now it's not worth the effort. You turn back to your locker. “What did
you
do?”

“Derrick found a box of wine in the back of a pickup truck at the 7-Eleven. You should have been there.”

“Gee, sounds like fun.” Kyle the King of Sarcasm.

Max starts in with the F-bombs, but then he stops midword and the first thing you think is that there's a teacher walking up behind you, so you keep fumbling around in your locker. You're not getting blamed for that one.

“You're Kyle, right?”

There's a hint of spice in the air, expensive and subtle. You turn around slowly.

She's as tall as you, so you're looking right into her eyes. Sky blue eyes, the makeup perfect, the face golden bronze, also perfect, the straight blond hair bouncing below her smooth shoulders, down to her chest. Perfect, perfect, large and perfect. A senior, but not a senior like Jake the Jock. The rare kind of senior, the kind who seems to float through the building, above it all, above the cliques and the gossip, the Senior Class crap and the little school romances all so quaint and foreign to them. The kind who already have jobs in offices or boyfriends in their twenties, new cars and exotic tastes, the kind who never work hard in school but whose names are called over and over at honors ceremonies, the kind who are never there to pick up their Xeroxed awards. Always girls—no, always
women
—and always stunning. Not teenage adorable, not high-school pretty. Stunning. Girls like this don't talk to guys like you, don't know that you live on the same planet as they do.

“Victoria said she met you the other night at Zack's,” she says while you stand there with your jaw on the floor.

“She said you were a cutie.” She smiles the kind of smile that tells you to forget it, you're way out of your league. But still, she's talking to you.

“So, you have a good time?”

You nod. “Um, yeah. Yeah it was fun.” Kyle the Idiot.

She gives a perfect little laugh. “They always are. Did he make you one of his margaritas? You gotta watch those, they sneak up on you.”

You give a stupid little laugh, nodding like a bobblehead.

“And I hear he got Brooke crying.” She rolls her eyes. “Not that that's hard.”

“Yeah, that was kinda, I don't know, mean.”

“That's our Zack. He finds your weak spot, then keeps pushing till you crack. Still”—she shrugs—“he makes a good margarita.”

She laughs and you laugh because you don't know what else to do. You
should
ask her what else she knows about Zack, things like what he did to get kicked out of that school and how he gets away with throwing parties at his house and what he's done to other people when he finds their weak spots. But you won't. Girls like this don't talk to guys like you, and when one actually does, you don't start asking questions about some other guy.