Cut Both Ways Page 13
He flips on the pump and the whole house feels like it’s shaking to death from the noise. My dad doesn’t seem to notice, though. Just tips back his beer and guzzles like it’s a contest. Once the bed’s inflated, he puts down his beer and says, “All right, then.”
And he sits down and the game’s back on, and so he lies there, drinking on the mattress while I sit on the stool, and we watch the Vikings get killed by New England, while Joe Buck talks in his Supreme Douche of the Universe voice and I have more questions I won’t ask.
Do you hate this or is it okay with you?
Do you think I’m a baby for thinking living like this is shitty?
Do you actually like this beer or do you just buy it because it’s on sale?
Why the hell was Mom the one who bitched about child support, not you? Why did you let her roll over you, and make me go back and forth, week after week? When she had the good job, anyway? Everyone says you’re the cheap one, but people don’t get rich by spending money, either; is that why she wouldn’t pay it? Because she couldn’t stand to give you a cent? Even if it was for her only son? Or was that a bad investment too? The better investments being Kinney and Taylor, who come from a better father. Someone who looks good in a suit and doesn’t drink whatever’s on sale. The biggest quantity for the least amount.
The sound of this in my head is too much. I can hear it over fucking Joe Buck, even. My dad seems like he’s made of liquid, lying on the jiggly mattress, sipping his beer, watching the TV and his phone in equal measure. He’s got his eye on every little ping from Craigslist and Freecycle and who knows what else. The latest thing is this giant draftsman’s desk he got from some dude online. It’s in the backyard, this blinding white thing, all aerodynamic and fancy, next to the piles of wood and scrap and stacks of cabinets he wants to reuse. It looks like a spaceship in the middle of a yard sale.
I tell him I’ve got homework and he waves and smiles and sips and watches. I’ve got to get my homework done so I can talk to Brandy a little before I fall asleep. I don’t finish the beer, but I bring it with me.
“Hey, Will?”
I think for a minute he’s going to tell me not to bring the beer up. Like he’s realized it was a mistake to give it to me.
But all he says is, “Good to have you around, son.” He sounds weird; choked up. Like he might cry.
“Good to be here,” I tell him, not turning around. I don’t really want to know what his face looks like. I feel like he already might know all the shit I was thinking. I wonder what my face looks like at times like that. When I get upstairs I take a piss and then dump the rest of the beer on top of it.
I finish my homework really quickly; when I get upset about shit, I’m like the opposite of most people. I like having something to do, even if it’s something stupid like discussion questions for Global Society or the diagram of a camera’s parts for Photography. Once it’s all done and zipped up in my backpack, I get in bed. I normally sleep in just my underwear, wherever I am, but now I’m rocking these thermal fleece pants and shirt that Jay gave me for Christmas one year; they’re like the base layers you wear under your clothes when you climb Mount Everest or whatever. I get under the covers, the light of the phone glowing under the quilts, because it’s so cold up here, and I text Brandy to call me. A second later, she does.
“I miss you,” she says. “It feels like we barely see each other now that school’s started.”
“I know,” I say. I know I should say I miss you back, but I can’t.
“I should quit yearbook. Or the newspaper. All I’m doing is taking photos. No time to develop half of them, either.”
“No, don’t,” I tell her. “I’m going to be at my dad’s full time now.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I talked to him today. He’s got lots of stuff for me to do. And all the driving back and forth sucks.”
I should say it sucks because I want to see her and can’t. I don’t know why I can’t say the things that I know would make her happy. But to say it back just sounds like copying her. Like it wasn’t really my idea. Or true.
“Your mom won’t care?” She sounds like she wants to be really happy but is nervous about it. She’s never met my mom but I’ve told her a little bit about her. How my mom’s suspicious of my dad. I don’t have to say she doesn’t like my dad; they’re divorced, it’s obvious.
I tell her it’s going to be fine.
Then I tell her that I can’t stop thinking about her.
That I wish she was here. In bed with me.
She doesn’t say anything. She’s just breathing. So am I.
This isn’t anything I know how to do. She seems like she’s waiting for something.
“You still there?” I say.
“Yeah. Just . . . sleepy.”
“Me too.”
And then I turn off the light. I’m cold but everything feels sweaty and I want to jerk off. My hand’s in my boxers. I am turning into Jack-Off Telios. Since Jack himself is no longer Jack-Off; he’s got girls around him all the time lately. Like they are lining up for service now that he’s all manly.
I’m thinking I’ll tell her good-bye, but then Brandy says she wishes she were older.
The TV downstairs turns off, and some music comes on. My dad has a turntable he found in the trash behind the Laundromat and he took it home and fixed something and now he’s got all these records. Scratchy-sounding shit. It’s some lady wailing. Blues.
I pull my hand out of my boxers. I ask Brandy why she wishes she were older.
“Because I already know what I want in life,” she says. “I’m sick of just waiting to be old enough to have it.”
I don’t know why but this scares me. I don’t say anything. I want to keep her on the phone; I’m imagining her naked in her bed, I can see it perfectly, as if the phone is some kind of magic device that transmits her through it. But I can’t jerk off now.
I don’t know what I want in life.
Correction: I don’t know what one thing I want.
I tell her that she is beautiful. I tell her I wish I was under the covers with her. I tell her that I wish I could go over there now and get in bed with her.
“My aunt’s home tonight, though,” she says.
“I don’t care,” I tell her.
“I want you so much sometimes,” she whispers. “All the time, I want you.”
Yes, I think. So do I, I think.
“You want to hang out tomorrow?” I ask. “After school.”
She has a yearbook meeting, but after that? I tell her yes. I want to make her happy. I want to want only her.
Just as she clicks off, I realize I’m the worst person ever. She thinks about me: all the time, I want you. Why can’t I figure out how to say it back? It’s like I’m being stubborn.
And Brandy? She doesn’t deserve this shit. But I can’t change it, the truth that I want both of them. Both Brandy and Angus.
When I jerk off, I think about both of them. Together. Apart. With me or alone. I can’t help it, though it makes me feel like I’m cheating. I never want them together in real life; I can’t stand thinking about us all in one place, like that day after we went swimming at Roy’s.
I wish I could figure it out. Choose. Know for sure: Which one is the one?
But neither of them is the one. I want all of it. Both. Together. Apart. I don’t want to choose.
TWELVE
IT’S AFTER FIVE in the afternoon in early October when Taylor and Kinney’s birthday party packs up all ten insane hollering girls into Jay’s car and my mom’s SUV. They’ve been flailing around the house like they have rubber bands instead of skeletons under their skin, so naturally now they’re all going to Drop Zone, which is some kind of horror-show place that’s nothing but trampolines and dodgeball. After they’re all gone and the doors slam and it’s quiet, Brandy and me are staring at each other like holy shit.
“Whoa,” Brandy says.
“Yeah,” I agree.
“Come on,” I say.
“Where are we going?” she asks. But she’s smiling.
“To my room,” I say. “This’ll just take a couple minutes.”
“Wow, so smooth,” she says. I laugh. We are like this about sex now, even though we’ve only done it exactly six times. I wish it were more, but six (about to be seven!) is good. So good.
We do it in my bedroom, even though I suppose we could do it in any room here, really. Afterward, I flush the condom in the bathroom while she gets dressed. She seems dazed. Out of it. I feel completely opposite: I could go out and run around the block. I feel like doing everything. Like, once I’ve cleared that main thing out of the way—sex—then my body’s, like, rubbing its hands together, going, “All right! Time to get shit done!”
I get my clothes on, though only because she’s getting her clothes back on. I could roll around with her naked all day; I can’t imagine what it would be like to be able to do that. But my mom and Jay are only going to be at Drop Zone for an hour and after that the girls come back here for a slumber party, and Brandy and I definitely have had enough of preteen girls today.
She has me zip up the back of her dress and I do it, and then she gets a text and sits down on the bed again. Her face looks upset.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She keeps reading.
I don’t want to look over her shoulder—I hate it when people do that—so I just grab her hand and kind of doodle around with it. I feel so goddamn good. I want to go get something to eat. Go to the movies. Go anywhere, really.
“We should go to Target,” I say. “Saturday night at Target! We’ve never done that!”
But she pulls her hand away from me to text back so I go into the kitchen. Eat some of the leftover cake, no plate, just my hands. Get some lemonade out of the fridge; see my tacked-up paycheck still on the magnet clip, next to a drawing Taylor made of Santa Claus as a ninja with this giant sword. Taylor is my favorite, for sure, but sometimes I think she’s kind of fucked up. I shove the check in my pocket—I need to cash it—Angus found out I was having my mom deposit my checks and give me cash and he gave me shit about it. You have to establish credit, you idiot, Angus said. This isn’t your grandma sending you ten bucks for your birthday anymore.
When Brandy finally comes out of my bedroom, she puts her phone in her bag and says she’s got to get home. Something’s off.
“Your aunt say so?”
“Yeah.”
We get in my car and I start it; along with the weird noise when I go too fast, there’s a burned smell whenever I start my car lately. I don’t want to tell my mom, because I don’t want to answer a million questions about what I’ve done to it; I don’t want to tell my dad because it’s another thing he can’t afford.
The whole drive, Brandy is barely talking. Not that she’s super chatty normally, and I appreciate that, being a little shy, myself. Some girls seem hell-bent on filling up every available silence, though, and, I mean, if all you have to say is idiotic shit that no one can think of a response to, that’s not any better. Conversations aren’t hard for Brandy and me. We don’t hang out quietly like we’re in a library or anything, but we can talk pretty easily.
When I pull up to her house, she doesn’t invite me in.
“What’s the deal?” I ask. I’d turned the car off, expecting we’d go in and hang out.
She glances at her house. There are lights on, but I can’t see anything beyond that.
“My mom’s here,” she says. “It’s not . . . I don’t want you to meet her. Seriously.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not because of you,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Okay,” I repeat, though that’s not strictly true. There’s plenty wrong with me, but I’m disappointed. After we’d hung out with my mom and Jay, and my mom seemed like she thought Brandy was nice, and my sisters were all show-offy to her, and then we had sex, I felt like the whole night was ahead of us.
“It’s because everything’s wrong with her,” she says. “If I don’t call you tonight, don’t get worried. Usually I get really depressed after I see her. It’s not a big deal.”
“All right,” I say. Though nothing’s all right. I feel this little zinging panic running from my ass to my throat.
“Seriously, don’t worry,” she says. Swipes a tear from her face.
“Will you at least text me? I have to work tomorrow, but I’ll be around later.”
She nods. She doesn’t even kiss me, just opens the door and rushes up inside the house.
Then I don’t know what to do. DeKalb’s not answering his phone. I’d call Angus, but I was just out in Oak Prairie and don’t feel like wasting all the gas to get out there again. Since I’m nearby, I decide to just go to my dad’s. The burned smell in my car is getting worse, and no amount of turning up the radio helps me ignore the weird noises, either.
When I get there, Garrett’s truck is out front and he’s standing beside it. The sun’s almost down but I can see he’s giving my car the hairy eyeball.
“What in the hell?” he asks when I get out. “You know that there’s something wrong with your car?”
I shrug. “It’s been making a weird noise lately.”
He tells me to open the hood and when he does, he steps back from a big gush of smoke.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Will,” he says. “You’ve blown a coolant line and you’re dumping it all over the road.”
“Is that a big deal?”
“You see everyone else driving around with this kind of smoke pouring out of the engine?”
I feel like an idiot now, and it sucks, because I kind of liked the idea that Garrett thinks I’m this kid who’s on top of shit.
He looks under the hood a little more, waving away smoke, muttering things. I stand there, all useless. The zinging feeling is now ten times stronger.
“Know where your dad is?” he asks.
“Been out at my mom’s all day.”
“He’s not answering my calls or texts,” Garrett says. “We were supposed to meet up today at that self-storage place. Says there’s some kitchen equipment I might want.”
“What kind?”
Garrett shrugs. Like he thinks the whole idea is bullshit, anyway. “Let’s go inside,” he says. “Want to see how things are going.”
I would tell him that things aren’t going anywhere. That my dad seems to have shot his load on the remodel with the demolition of the walls. Now all he’s doing is acquiring junk. All the people who owed him favors are square with him; there’s no asking for more. Roy’s at college. It’s just me, and I have school and work myself. It gets dark earlier and earlier now too.
But I just follow him inside and help snap on utility lights because I know where they are and he doesn’t. The whole place smells bad. Like garbage and beer and dust. And I stand there, watching him look at the walls and the piles of things. The new record player. The box of vinyl records. The Skil Drill on the card table next to a pile of brown bananas. A bunch of empty cans of Nordeast.
Garrett says nothing. He’s still wearing his Time to Eat shirt; he looks tired, but his eyes don’t stop scanning around. Then he heads to the basement. I follow him, even though I don’t want to.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he says after he fumbles for a utility light. I think the same thing. I haven’t been down in the basement in a while. But holy fuck; it’s unbelievable.
Nothing but shit. Boxes and bags. Piles. You can see tools; you can see building materials, but most of it’s just junk. A double sink full of clothing I’ve never seen before. A stack of flowerpots with little scruffs of dirt around the rims. A bunch of bright-blue shutters stacked against the wall. A cable TV satellite dish. Bookshelves, sagging, lined with boxes and books and lots of other randomness. And buckets. Buckets everywhere. Ice-cream buckets, paint pails, industrial buckets. Al
l of them full of crap. One’s full of Home Handyman magazines; one’s full of beer-can tabs; one is full of, amazingly, quarters. There must be a thousand dollars in quarters in this bucket. I bend over to lift it and can’t.
Garrett is quiet. The zinging feeling is now burning in me. I feel like we’re going to get caught here. Garrett goes over to a corner and rustles around; it’s hard to see from where I’m standing. And I can’t move, either. I’m listening for someone coming in. I’m panicking, but I’m immobile. Freeze-framed panicked.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Garrett says again.
I want to ask. But I don’t want to know. I notice there’s a shopping cart down here. A fucking shopping cart. It’s full of firewood. Or what was something wooden but what is now firewood.
“Come on, Will,” Garrett says. Tapping my shoulder. I am unfrozen. But the zinging feeling’s still there.
I follow him upstairs. “You have any stuff you need here, you should go grab it,” he says.
I want to ask him what stuff? All of it? But he gets out his phone and says a few things into it. The main floor smells awful again. I wonder if I should take the garbage out.
I go up to my room. I realize how different it is up in the attic. Not just cold. It’s empty. It smells like soap. There’s nothing in my room. There’s nothing in the hallway. I grab my backpack, make sure all my homework’s in it. My laptop. Some clothes. The condoms I bought for Brandy and me. There’s not a lot left.
In the bathroom, I stare at the dog sleeping on the bed. It looks so calm. The opposite of my zinging feeling. I think my mom is fucked up for not wanting this picture; I almost want to take it with me, but I don’t know where I’m going, really. Probably to Garrett’s, but that doesn’t mean I’m moving in.
I grab a couple things from the medicine cabinet, but there’s nothing to take in the shower. I hadn’t asked my dad to re-up anything. I’ve got an electric toothbrush at my mom’s, anyway.
I stare at the sleeping dog once more. Like I’m saying good-bye to it.
Then I go downstairs and Garrett says, “Ready?” And we go.
Kristin is waiting outside when we pull up in Garrett’s truck. Folding a man’s jacket over herself, like she grabbed the first thing and threw it on.