Cut Both Ways Read online

  I don’t know what to do with this information. I’m thinking about her taking pictures. Being serious about photography. And not getting married. And Target, in general. Is it still making her feel happy? She puts the giant bridal magazine down and we move on.

  We pass through the baby section, which she doesn’t even acknowledge, then shoes, where she zips through the aisles touching every other shoe and making comments. (“No. No. No. Ick—that’s plastic. Awful detailing.”) I don’t even bother to pretend to be interested in shoes. I have three pairs of shoes. Flip-flops, running shoes for gym, and work boots. And snow boots. Okay, four.

  Then we’re in men’s clothing. “My favorite!” she says, jumping a little. I push the cart like it’s my skateboard, sliding along and skidding to a stop. At first I think she’ll just try on the clothes herself. But then she starts whisking out button-down shirts and jeans and stuff and holding them up to me. Like I’m her personal paper doll.

  “God, no,” I say to the millionth shirt she slaps against me. It’s striped and has these two weird hipster pockets on the chest. “That is awful.”

  “I know!” she yells. “Isn’t Target wonderful?”

  I don’t tell her I agree. But I slurp the last bit of slushy out of the cup and try not to smile.

  Later, after I get a text from my dad—need anything? going out to Garrett’s—I bring Brandy back to my house. I tell her what the “need anything?” text means and she calls her aunt and gets the okay to stay out until midnight, and I feel like spending again. Rich. Except there’s nothing to buy or eat.

  Like the first time, I lead Brandy into my house. The wind whips through the little flaps where we need to add trim around the new windows; she asks if it’s okay to be in here and I laugh and tell her yes.

  Up in my room, she slips off her flip-flops and comes straight at me. We kiss for nine million years, standing up. She takes off my T-shirt. I take off her tank top. It’s so small, so thin. Such a little thing between her and the world. I take off my glasses, set them on the desk. Then I reach for the button on her shorts. I don’t want to take them off, just make room for my hand. She moves my hand, though, and unbuttons them herself. She stands in front of me in her bra and panties and I wish I had my glasses on. Or that it was brighter. But it’s okay, because then I kiss her. Reach around and undo her bra and then we’re on the futon in a big pile. She laughs.

  “I can’t believe this,” she says.

  “What?” I ask, rearranging her so I can feel her boobs better on my chest.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this with you.” She’s got her mouth on my chest.

  “Why do you keep saying that?” I ask. I can feel the soft part under her panties. God.

  She pauses, her mouth on my chest. She’s kissing me there. Then lower. Her boobs up against my belly. I want to take my jeans off so bad. But I don’t know if that’ll freak her out. And I want her to keep being mostly naked.

  “Why do you even like me, Will?” she says. But it doesn’t sound like a question. It sounds like she doesn’t want an answer, good or bad. Because she’s going lower and lower and now I’m on my back and she’s unzipping my jeans and tugging them off me.

  I almost say, “I don’t know.”

  Instead, I say, “I just do.”

  She lifts her head up, from the edge of my boxers, where her mouth is just above my hard-as-hell dick. I think that I’ve just said the wrong answer.

  But she tugs down my boxers. Says nothing.

  And then? Then I can’t believe my life. Because she’s sucking me off. With her mouth. A girl is doing this. Really. This is happening.

  I look up at the ceiling, wonder what the fuck I did to deserve this good thing. Maybe this is how you know you’re in love with someone. Because they give you something that there’s no way you earned.

  Brandy wraps herself, her hands, her tongue, all around me. Making it all about me and no one else. Didn’t earn this. No way. But I take it, anyway. Of course I take it.

  SIX

  YOU LEARN SO much weird shit about people when you work with them.

  Like, the blond-biceps-guy cook whose name I never remember? Used to be a firefighter. He’s currently getting certified to be an EMT.

  And Sierra? She’s really into astrology and makes people charts for money, actually. She always smells like incense and she’s got all these weird tattoos that go up her legs, and her car has this bumper sticker that says I DRIVE A STICK, and it’s got a broom on it. And Everardo’s got three little daughters, is crazy for Mixed Martial Arts, and also makes his own barbecue sauce. And Carl, the redhead cook, barely talks if he can help it. And whenever anyone asks him what he’s up to, he says, “Fucking bitches. Making money. You know.”

  As if that weren’t ridiculous enough, Carl’s shy as hell. Especially around girls. Anytime a waitress talks to him he gets all quiet and red. Plus he comes to work on a skateboard, though he’s a grown-ass man. Sierra says he’s got a very mixed aura. I don’t know what that means, except he never says the fucking-bitches-making-money line to her or any other women at Time to Eat. Which is probably for the best. The other main thing about Carl is that he can carry three racks of clean coffee cups at a time and I can only carry one. Carl’s stronger than fuck. Plus he’s all about sharpening knives. It’s one of these things Garrett talked about at first and said he’d show me, but things got away from him.

  But Carl’s on it. He catches me chopping with a knife that he says is dull and stops everything to give me a lesson in knife sharpening, even though he’d punched out already. He lays it all out on the back counter by the slicer and the Hobart mixer: the whetstones, the little bottle of oil, the special cloth to wipe everything down. By the time he finishes showing me the whole process, I’m about 99 percent sure Carl’s got a samurai sword hanging up over his bed. I know he’s got an army knife in his pocket; he busts that thing out all the time.

  Working at Time to Eat makes me dread school. I like being at work; I like how there’s always a list, always something to ask someone, always a new job to learn. Always someone’s weird personality to get more details about. I even like the new people who get hired and fired; they filter through things pretty regularly and I still think about them after they’re gone. Wonder about them. I have work dreams a lot too; in front of the fryer, cooking with Carl. Trying to work the cash register for Garrett, though I’ve never learned how. Weird stuff like that.

  Though lately, I’ve been dreaming about Angus. Brandy too. Both of them, together, with me. All three of us.

  The night before DeKalb and Angus come over to help rough in the new kitchen area, I have a dream of all three of us. I wake up sweaty and not knowing where I am. The dream was in Angus’s garage, Brandy naked on the old sofa in there, Angus naked in his blue bandanna, and me, everywhere. It was so real I lie there for a while trying to make sure it didn’t happen. Though it did happen. All over the sheets and my boxers. Like I’m a little kid. Jesus Christ. I get up and strip the futon sheets to wash them, because the futon only has one set.

  When I get downstairs, Roy’s standing there. The sheets are in a ball and I hold them in front of me.

  “Hey,” I say.

  Roy nods. Doesn’t say anything. Sips coffee from his to-go cup and looks over a note that my dad has left on the card table. He’s got that uncertain look again. I see him surveying the mess of the main floor like he’s calculating up the time and the value of the materials and the cost of everything, the price. He’s leaving soon for school. There’s no way it’ll be done before then.

  I know a whole bunch of shit about Roy too, though we’re not formally working together. But one day, when my dad had to go to the Laundromat for something, Roy took me to get Dairy Queen and told me a bunch of stuff. He’s twenty-five, for one thing, not nineteen, like I’d assumed. He’s been in rehab, like, four times. For drugs. Booze, meth, coke. Snorted it, smoked it, shot it. He was in jail. Homeless. All of it. First rehab at
age sixteen. And it’s lucky that his parents are rich, because the cost of the last rehab was gigantic—he was there almost a full year. That was after he knocked up the girl he was with and the baby died because the girl overdosed when she was about four months pregnant or something. After that, the girl was in jail, then the psych ward, and Roy was in jail for possession and something little, like trespassing, and then he went to the year-long treatment. He only started college last year. I would never have guessed this just from Roy refusing the beer my dad always offers. I figured he preferred some specialty micro-brew, was snobby about it like he was about coffee. I would never have guessed he was any of those things. But he is. Was. Except now he attends AA or NA once a day.

  I stuff the gross sheets into the canvas bag we use for the Laundromat and go back upstairs to shower. Since he told me about the rehab, Roy’s uncertain look means something extra now. My dad has slipped into a pattern of cracking open the beers sometimes before the workday even ends. What Roy doesn’t know, though, is how long he’s gone after he’s had a few. I don’t know where he goes. Sometimes he says he’s at Garrett’s. Sometimes he says he’s getting supplies or tracking down something he wants off Craigslist. Sometimes he says he’s going to the Laundromat. Sometimes he doesn’t say. And sometimes he doesn’t come home until the next day.

  When I get out of the shower, DeKalb and Angus are in the kitchen. Roy’s on his phone in the driveway, smoking, but when he comes inside, I introduce everyone.

  “You know where your dad’s at?” Roy asks. Again, hesitant. I want to cover for my dad. Say he’s at Menards or the Laundromat. But I don’t know.

  I offer to call him but Roy says he just did. “He didn’t pick up.”

  “Well, should we maybe start organizing the lumber or something? What did that note say?”

  Roy looks at the note on the card table.

  “He’s got the wood for the roughing in. But he’s getting Sheetrock, the note says.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Problem is,” Roy continues, “there’s still wires to be pulled. And the furnace isn’t all the way connected. Your dad needed an inspector to come sign off on that.”

  “Won’t need the furnace for a while,” I say. Since we’re all pretty much sweating our balls off standing there. Angus kind of laughs. DeKalb’s staring at Roy like he’s an alien.

  “You can’t put up Sheetrock and walls until the wiring’s done, though,” Roy says. “Unless you want to cut into those walls after the fact. There’s a kind of order involved. Do you know if your dad’s got the inspector coming today or something?”

  I shake my head. I have no idea what he’s doing. Or not doing.

  “So, what’s the deal, then?” Angus asks. He and DeKalb are leaning against the new bay window that we put in. That fucker weighed a zillion pounds but it was only five hundred bucks, because we drove down to Waseca and bought it off this crazy-eyed house-flipper guy who wouldn’t stop telling us about the bunker he was digging under his grandmother’s root cellar for the days when the economy collapses and we all know what “real scarcity” is.

  “Real scarcity,” he kept saying. “It’s coming.” Now I can’t look at that window without thinking about that guy and real scarcity.

  DeKalb keeps leaning. Staring at me and Roy. Like, what the fuck already, man.

  “I don’t know,” I tell Angus. “We’re figuring it out.”

  It’s quiet for a minute. Roy rereads the note. I pick at a little rock stuck in the bottom of my boot. DeKalb is looking at his phone. Angus sits down and puts in his earbuds.

  “I don’t want to tell your dad his business, William,” Roy continues. “I mean, I’m a goddamn art major. Like, the cabinet-making part is the main reason I’m here.”

  “Cabinets?” I laugh. “Like we’re even close to that part!”

  Roy nods. Doesn’t laugh. Just continues with his point. “But even I know that you’ve got to do the wires before the Sheetrock. Unless . . . does he have more people coming to work today?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You got any water?” Angus asks, his voice louder than normal.

  “There’s a pallet of bottled in the backyard,” Roy says. Though I know Roy never drinks bottled water. Angus nods and walks out.

  DeKalb puts his phone away. Crosses his arms over his chest. He’s probably getting the vibe off me and Roy. I feel like a fuck-up. I’m the one who bugged Angus and DeKalb to get time off from their jobs and come help. So they could meet and whatever. And now it looks like it’s all for nothing. I hate this. At Time to Eat, I never have to figure shit out. I get there, and like Garrett said, there’s a list posted of opening tasks. Or Carl or someone else tells me what’s been done, what’s left. I don’t have to think about anything. I just have to move through it. And that’s how the remodel’s been too. Mostly.

  Roy goes out to smoke, and so me and DeKalb follow him. We all stand in the driveway, sweating. Not talking. The longer it’s quiet, the more I start to get pissed at my dad. For doing this. Or not doing it. Whatever.

  Roy’s phone makes a little bloopy beep sound and he checks it, his smoke dangling from his fingertips. He reads and then shakes his head.

  “Fuck it,” Roy says, slipping his phone into his pocket and pulling out his keys. “He won’t be back until this afternoon. You guys want to go swimming? We can go to my house.”

  Angus looks at me. “At your house?”

  “There’s a pool in the back,” Roy says.

  DeKalb shrugs, shakes his head like he suspected something like this. I can’t figure out DeKalb’s hang-up with Roy. But he just says, “I’m down for it.”

  “We’ll come back around four, though,” Roy says. “Tom said he might be back by then?” Tom is my dad. Roy looks at me, as if I should know.

  Half an hour later, we pull up in Roy’s Jeepster (that’s the kind of car he has, and yes, it’s vintage, impossible to find, and belonged to his dead uncle or something, and I only know this because Angus sits in front and asks him) to the driveway of this huge house in Arden Hills.

  Angus follows Roy inside, but DeKalb kind of hangs back and waits for me. He takes off his shirt, wipes his forehead with it. DeKalb has zero chest hair. He’s completely smooth. Nothing about him shirtless to notice except for some little pink scratches around his shoulders.

  “Fuck, man,” he says, nodding toward the giant house.

  “I know.” I feel a little dumb, though. Because DeKalb doesn’t know what my mom’s house looks like. He’s only ever seen my dad’s place.

  And my mom’s house isn’t even close to being what Roy’s house is. It looks like a fucking castle. And the houses next to it aren’t the same beige version of it, like in Oak Prairie. There’s only two other houses near Roy’s house, for one thing; he lives in a little circle drive that we drove in a long twisty hill to get to, and it’s surrounded by trees so you can see only parts of the other houses.

  We go in through the door in the garage. No one takes their shoes off, because immediately, we’re inside. We’re in a giant kitchen, with marble counters and a pot rack full of copper pans and it looks like a TV show where the people are selling their house or the set of a cooking show, except it’s real. Angus goes with Roy to get some shorts, because he was wearing jeans, so DeKalb and I stand there some more, looking at everything. The kitchen opens to a big giant TV room and there’s a long table that looks kind of old, like it’s been sitting outside in all weather, and it has benches, no chairs. There’s a flat-screen TV above the fireplace, and the coffee table has stacks of magazines that look like they’ve never been opened.

  Angus comes back with Roy, who is carrying a big pile of towels. We go down a hallway and then we’re in a little screened-in porch. But it’s with real furniture and everything. Then outside that there’s a patio and a pool with a diving board and a whirlpool off to the side and a big silver grill built into the brick. There’s also a table built into the brick and
a giant awning over that and a little humming machine sliding around the bottom of the pool, probably sucking up dirt and leaves or whatever. The water is perfect, clear. DeKalb sticks his foot in the water.

  “Is it warm enough?” Roy asks.

  “Yeah,” DeKalb says. “Hell yeah!” He takes off his shoes and jumps in.

  Angus smiles and does the same.

  I look at Roy. “Guess we’re getting a day off?”

  Roy shrugs. “No one ever swims in this pool,” he says. “Might as well get some fucking use. I gotta call this girl back quick.” He takes his phone and heads in. It’s weird. It’s like we’re supposed to enjoy ourselves, but I still feel a little bit like I’m in trouble. But then I see my friends splashing each other and kicking water everywhere and I can’t resist jumping in too.

  I’m used to being in two places. I know how to hem around edges of a place until I get comfortable. Or at least seem that way. Obviously so does DeKalb, because he’s jumped off the diving board like a hundred times and is strutting around shirtless on the patio and then pushing Roy into the water, which at first I think is aggression but then Roy’s laughing and doesn’t care.

  Angus doesn’t change how he acts at Roy’s. Maybe he already did his big change, with being gay, and now he’s just who he is, without worrying about it anymore?

  “Your hair turns green in the chlorine, doesn’t it?” Angus asks Roy, when he comes up from the surface.

  “That’s a white-people thing, right?” DeKalb says. “Got to be.”

  Roy laughs, says yes. Angus swims for his school in Oak Prairie and it turns out Roy used to swim too, so they talk about swimming and shaving their legs before races and whatever. I try to imagine Roy swimming in high school. Before rehab. Or maybe he’s just saying that. I watch him dunk DeKalb then, when DeKalb’s back is turned. Maybe Roy has learned to be in more than one place too.

  We’ve been in the pool awhile when this girl shows up with food. A mess of pizza and chicken wings and a French silk pie. As she unpacks everything at the built-in brick table under the awning, like she’s our mom, Roy waves at her.