Текст книги "Deeper"

Автор книги: Robin York

Соавторы: Robin York,Robin York
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

What am I not sorry for? I regret everything I’ve ever done with a guy. My first kiss, which took place after an eighth-grade dance, with a boy named Cody. My first French kiss, which was with Nate. Letting Nate take off my bra, put his fingers inside me. Sleeping with Nate and thinking we were making love. Buying lingerie for him, going down on him, letting him take the pictures when I thought it would bring us closer.

West, too. I regret what just happened with West.

“Everything,” I whisper.

It’s the wrong thing to say. His hands push into his hair, clenching. “Christ. I can’t even—what’s the matter with you, huh?”

“Nothing you can fix.”

“So why are you here?”

I take a deep breath. I can do this. “I need to know it’s not going to happen again. That you’re not going to go around punching people because of me.”

He frowns, a deep slash between his eyebrows. “Who said it was because of you?”

The question catches me off guard. “I heard—I heard you guys were arguing about me. Sierra told Bridget.”

“I don’t know a Sierra.”

“I guess she knows you.”

His face goes even darker. “It’s not her business. Or yours. It’s between Nate and me.”

“I think we’re way past the point where you can play the none-of-your-business card.”

That makes him even more agitated. He wheels away, stalking to the end of the row. Then he comes back and grabs the cart with both hands. He looks like he wants to shove it at me. “He pissed me off. That’s all you need to know.”

“Yeah, but—”

Head lowered, he kicks the toe of his boot against the cart. Not hard, but hard enough to make way too much noise.

“You have to tell me what happened,” I say, as calmly as I can manage. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”

His head comes up. “You think that’s what I want? For you to leave me alone?”

I don’t know what he wants, so I keep my lips pressed shut.

“He pissed me off because he’s a smug, arrogant prick,” West says. “And I was fucking sick of hearing him talk, all right?”

“So it had nothing to do with me.”

He rakes his hand through his hair again. Turns away.

“West?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

I wait.

It occurs to me that I am good at waiting, and maybe that’s one thing I have on West. He’s more worldly, more confident, but he’s volatile and I’m not. I’ll stand here until he’s done throwing his tantrum, and then he’ll have to tell me.

I wait some more.

He turns back around. “I didn’t do it for you, okay? I just couldn’t take it anymore. He deserved to get beat down, and nobody else was doing it. But if you have some kind of hero fantasy, you can forget it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know. If you’re getting your rocks off thinking I hit your ex because I’ve got a thing for you.”

“Are you serious?”

“Why wouldn’t I be serious?”

For a few seconds, I can’t speak. He’s just yanked me so rapidly from ashamed and awkward to righteously pissed off, my brain is having trouble keeping up. “That’s so … conceited,” I finally manage. “I mean, so, so conceited. After what you just—why would you even say something like that?”

He steps closer. He’s vibrating with emotion, and I can’t sort him out. I don’t know what he’s thinking, how he feels. I only know he feels it a lot. “Why did you touch me?” he asks.

“I was trying to get your attention.”

“People tap when they’re trying to get someone’s attention. That wasn’t a tap.”

“It was …”

I’ve got nothing. I groped him, and we both know it. The only thing I can do now is lie. “It was an accident.”

I hate when he does this. Looms over me this way with those eyes and that face. Looks at me. It is my new least-favorite thing: being looked at by West. Like he’s trying to sex me to death.

“Honey,” he says finally, “that was one hell of a long accident.”

“Don’t call me honey.”

“I think you like it.”

“I think your ears are too small.”

I nearly groan after I say it. Stupid blurting mouth.

But I had to say something, because honey is degrading to women, totally inappropriate, utterly unexpected. And I do kind of like it.

West exhales a laugh through his nose, smiling. “You have a gap between your front teeth.”

“It’s useful. I can spit through it.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Well, you won’t get to.”

“Won’t I?”

“No. We’re not going to be friends. We’re not going to be anything. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

He doesn’t like that. His mouth doesn’t, and his eyes don’t. “It’s not what it seemed like you wanted to tell me a minute ago.”

“I don’t care what it seemed like.” If he keeps leaning closer, I’m going to pinch him.

He leans closer. I pinch him.

Okay, I try. But my hand gets near his arm, and lust sucks me in, and then I’m just kind of groping his sleeve.

His biceps is as hard as it looks. I take my hand away before it can declare its allegiance to the enemy.

“Looked to me like you wanted me to kiss you,” West says.

I cross my arms and examine the books on the shelf behind his shoulder, a neat row of thick blue spines that say PMLA.

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “I can’t afford it. If people think we’re together, or that what happened between you and Nate was about me, they’ll keep talking about it, and this whole mess will go on and on. That’s not what I want. I want it to go away.”

“You want it to go away.”

The doubt in his voice fires up my anger again. I hate that some people think I published those pictures myself, just for the attention. I hate that he might think it.

“Yes.” The word comes out a little louder than I intend, so I say it again. “Yes.”

“Rich Diehms called you a slut three minutes ago, and you didn’t say anything to him. You said it’s fine.”

“What do you want me to do, chase him down and punch him in the mouth?”

“Maybe,” he says. “Yell at him, at least.”

“What would that accomplish?”

“Does everything you do have to be about accomplishing something?”

Here, at least, is a question I can answer easily. “Yes.”

“So what are you trying to accomplish now?”

“I’m trying to get my pictures off the Internet, and I’m trying keep a low profile so people will forget it ever happened.”

He laughs at me.

My hand comes up so fast, I don’t even realize I’m about to smack him until he catches my wrist.

“Honey—”

“Don’t call me honey.” I’m struggling against his grip, so angry that he caught me and won’t let go. Caught me easily. I’ve never tried to slap someone before. I’m breathless and too emotional, balanced on the brink of tears. “Let me go.”

“You gonna hit me?”

“Maybe.”

“Then no.”

I wrench my wrist, then try pounding at his chest. He captures my other wrist.

“It’s a lost cause,” he says. “Trying to get at me. Just as hopeless as the idea you can erase something from the Internet or make people forget what you look like naked. Completely hopeless.”

Once his words sink in, I stop struggling, and he lets me go. I spear him with the iciest glare I can muster. “Thanks for the pep talk, but you are the last person on this campus I would ask for advice.”

Something in his eyes shuts down. “Oh? Why’s that?”

Because you’re a drug dealer.

Because you’re the kind of person who punches people when they piss you off.

Because you’re trouble.

I can’t tell him any of that. I can’t make myself sound like an angel. I suck dick on the Internet.

“Because I was with Nate. And you’re …”

When I trail off, he lifts one scarred eyebrow. “I’m?”

“Not Nate.”

This time, his laugh is bitter. “No,” he says. “I’m not Nate.”

I want to apologize, but I’m not sure how, or even what to say.

West doesn’t wait around for me to figure it out. He takes his cart, checks the spine of the next book in line, and begins rolling down the aisle away from me.

“I’m sorry,” I call to his back. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Don’t worry about it, princess,” he says without turning around. “I won’t say a word to anyone.”

“Okay.” I wrap my arms around my stomach. “Thank you.”

He doesn’t answer me. I guess we’re finished, and I’m relieved. Sort of.

I’m also shaky and weak. It seems possible I might puke.

West pauses, right in the middle of turning from our row to the next one. He leans over the cart, balancing his forearms on the books, staring down at them for a long, awkward minute that feels like a year.

He lifts his head and looks right at me. “This wasn’t a good day for us to have this talk.”

“No,” I agree. “Probably not.”

He blows out a breath. “I shouldn’t have hit him. It was a dumb-ass thing to do, and I’m still pretty wired from it. Sorry I …” He waves his hand at me. “Sorry for all that.”

I don’t know what to say, so I nod.

“Is your nose okay?”

“It’s fine.”

“It hurt?”

“A little. But it’s not a big deal.”

He flexes and releases his swollen hand a few times, staring down at it. It’s his left.

“What about your hand?” I ask.

“It’ll heal.”

The floor falls silent. I wonder if anyone is up here. If there’s a girl around the corner, sitting in silence, listening to this whole thing.

Maybe she’s like me. Scared and stuck, frozen in place.

“You know,” West says, “you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Yeah. That’s what Bridget tells me.”

But she only says it because it’s what she’s supposed to say. I know what she really thinks. It’s the same as what I think—what everyone thinks.

I did do something wrong. I trusted the wrong person. I made a stupid mistake. I made it possible for Nate to take advantage of me, and it’s my responsibility to own up to it.

West shakes his head, as though he can hear all these thoughts, but he doesn’t buy it. “You took some sexy pictures with your guy. Lots of girls do it. If some girl gave me pictures like that, I’d never fucking stick them on the Internet, no matter how pissed at her I was.”

“You saw them?”

“Everybody saw them.”

I close my eyes against a stinging pressure in my sinuses and behind my eyes.

Crying isn’t on my schedule.

“He says he didn’t do it,” I whisper.

“That’s because he’s a douchebag. Douchebags lie.”

“Can we not talk about this?”

His head drops, his gaze falling back to the books. “All I wanted to say was, I don’t think you can make it go away. Not the way you’re doing it.”

I have no reply. It hurts too much to hear him articulate it—my worst fear—and for the second time today I feel as if he’s the one who hurt me, even though both times I did it to myself.

I’ve just run into his elbow all over again.

“Caroline.”

The way he says my name forces me to look up.

“You know what?” he asks.

“What?”

He starts wheeling his cart away. Turning his head toward me, he smiles the tiniest bit and says, “Except for that gap between your teeth, you looked fucking hot.”

He turns the corner. The wheels squeak as he moves into the next aisle.

He’s a pig.

I won’t think about what it means that I’m not disgusted with him.

Or that I’m standing here, arms wrapped around my torso, smiling at my feet.

It’s too screwed up, so I just won’t think about it.

I won’t wonder if he’s right and I’m wrong—if everything I’ve done to try to rescue my future is pointless and really I should be doing something different. Fighting for myself, somehow.

Right now I can’t handle it. I can only breathe in deep and try to make myself remember what’s next on my schedule. Where I have to be. What I have to do to get through the rest of this day.

This is my fight. The only thing I know how to do to get my life back the way it was. Bury the pictures, rebuild my reputation.

This is my fight, and I’m not giving up.

Two weeks later, a nightmare wakes me.

It happens a lot.

I roll out of bed and slide my feet over the cool floor until I’ve found my flip-flops in the dark. Grab my keys from the dresser. Cup them against my palm so they won’t jangle.

When I pull a sweatshirt over my head, holding my breath because I want to be quiet, Bridget’s comforter heaves on the top bunk. Her head pokes out from beneath the covers.

“Where are you going?”

“Just out. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

I feel guilty for waking her up, but I can’t really help it. It’s hard to be an insomniac when you have a roommate.

“Be careful.”

“I will.”

She rolls over, and even though she’s awake, I ease the door shut slowly until it latches and locks with a quiet snick.

I’m always careful.

I walk to my car with my keys gripped in my fist, looking left to right across the parking lot, listening for anything, anyone. I had parked under the security light. From ten feet away I unlock my doors with the remote, and my heart beats so fast, so fast. The gasping sound of relief when I shut the door behind me is too loud in the clean, safe interior of my Taurus.

I turn on the stereo and crank up the volume and drive.

I have a series of loops that I do. First I go in a circle around the college, which is four blocks long and three blocks wide. Then I do widening circles around the surrounding college-owned buildings, the downtown, the fast-food strip and box stores, the Little League diamond and Frost-E-Freeze shack. I pass fields of cornstalks starting to break ranks and turn brown. My high beams spotlight the blank landscape of my home state.

One of these loops used to be my evening run, but I had to stop. After my naked body and my location became public information, being alone outdoors lost its charm.

I make only right turns, because I hate turning left, and my dad isn’t here to tell me I need to get over that.

I don’t know how to talk to my dad anymore. When I call him, I can’t figure out what words I would have said before, when I never had to think about it. I knew just how to make him laugh and love me. Now when we talk, it’s like I’m acting, only I don’t know my lines, and I suck at improv.

I can’t remember how to be the Caroline Piasecki who graduated from Ankeny High with her smile white and perfect, wearing her graduation cap and gown, walking onstage to give the valedictorian speech with her two sisters and her father in the front row of the bleachers, beaming with pride.

I haven’t told him about the pictures. I can’t.

I’m a mouth with a boy’s dick in it, a body to look at, legs to spread.

I spin the wheel, turning my car to the right. To the right. Always to the right.

I haven’t seen West for thirteen days, but I think about him. I walk myself through that afternoon at the library, trying to follow all the twists and turns of our conversation. Why did he push me back against the shelves? What was he thinking when he told that guy to leave? What was he trying to accomplish?

I think about him asking me if everything I do is about accomplishing something.

I pick over my relationship with Nate, trying to answer all the unanswerable questions.

Was he always bad and I just didn’t notice? Did he turn bad?

How could I have trusted him?

I think about West saying, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I remember the way his thigh felt, pressing between mine.

One time last year, I was writing a paper at my desk, and I heard shouting and laughter in the hallway, periodic smacking thumps that made me flinch. Nate was lying on my bed, reading his Intro to Econ textbook. Bridget went out to see what was going on and didn’t come back. Then I heard her laughing and West’s raised voice.

“What are they doing out there?”

I tried to sound like I didn’t care. Like I was slightly annoyed and I didn’t feel this tug in my chest. This pressure to find out, join in, become part of it.

Nate shrugged. “Go see.”

I can still remember exactly how I felt when I stood up and headed out there. Balanced on a knife’s edge between good and bad, unsure which way I might tip—but aware, deep in my bones, in my tight lungs and tense shoulders, that something was about to happen.

In the hall that night, I found Bridget and Krishna, bowling with rubber chickens.

Yeah. It took me a minute to get it sorted out, too.

I don’t know where Krishna came by the chickens—probably he stole them from somewhere—but whoever had owned them before couldn’t possibly have enjoyed them as much. Krishna and the chickens were famous last year. The chickens showed up all over—occupying toilets, hanging from the rafters in the dining hall, perched on top of the big phallic metal sculpture in the middle of the campus, or dangling from the party keg.

But this time Krishna was standing at one end of the hall, twenty feet from a neat arrangement of pins, and winding his chicken through several tight arm revolutions. As I watched, he let go, an underhand throw that whipped the chicken through the air with surprising speed. It hit the pins, and they exploded, scattering all over the hall. Bridget shrieked, then bent over, laughing.

It was totally juvenile—the game, Bridget’s girlish reaction, Krishna’s red eyes and his stoned grin. I had a paper due in the morning and a lot of polishing still to do. I had Latin homework to get through, and if I had to go to the library because of these guys, I’d—

Suddenly the door right across from mine opened. West came out with a chicken in each hand and a two-liter bottle of soda under one arm. “Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking about chicken rockets,” he said, before he caught sight of me and stopped.

We looked at each other. Probably not for ten entire minutes, but that’s how it felt. Like an indecently long time spent staring at his face, when I almost never allowed myself more than a glance. A day of watching his mouth twitch. His nostrils flare. His too-pale blue-green eyes lit up with mischief.

I got all tangled up in those eyes of his, mentally tripped and fell, and then couldn’t untangle myself.

West arched an eyebrow. “Want to play?”

He didn’t mean anything by it. I’m almost sure.

Or, I mean, he did, but all he meant was, if I said yes, I’d get a chicken of my own and a free pass to indulge in this silliness, blow off my homework, act like a different girl.

He didn’t mean did I want him. Did I want to learn how to cut loose. Did I wish I could be different.

But, even so, my heart beat like a bass drum in a halftime show, and I couldn’t quite catch my breath to answer, No, thanks.

This isn’t for me.

You’re not for me.

The denial was too thick in my throat. If I tried to say it out loud, I would choke on no, because I wanted to say yes.

In the end, I didn’t say anything. Nate came up behind me and wrapped his arm around my waist, resting his chin on my shoulder. “What’s with all the noise?”

A door shut behind West’s eyes. His face closed off, and the tipping point where I was standing flattened out beneath my feet into the familiar, unexceptional terrain of my hallway, my state, my whole boring life.

“Just blowing off some steam,” West said.

“Could you keep it down, maybe?” Nate asked. “We’re trying to study.”

“Sure thing.”

Nate pulled me inside, closed the door, kissed my neck. His hands roamed under my shirt, over my bra, and then I stopped him because Bridget was in the hallway and I had a paper to write.

And also because I felt deflated, as though some rich possibility had been taken from me. Something more than a juvenile game of hallway bowling.

The alchemy of a boy who could turn two-liter soda bottles into chicken rockets.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the pull I felt toward West is the reason why I broke up with Nate. Whether it gathered power until it got so strong, it cast a shadow over all my other feelings, and I didn’t even realize it.

When I think about Nate, about West, it’s hard for me to tell what’s my fault and what isn’t.

When I sleep, there’s no peace in it. I dream of being chased, attacked, hurt. In my dreams, I’m a victim, and the dreams start to feel more real than the daytime does.

Semitrucks idle behind the Walmart and the grocery store. The guy at the gas station has gotten to know who I am, and he asks how things are going when I pay for gas and orange juice. He’s in his forties, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a gut. He seems like a nice man, but how nice can he be, really, working the night shift at the Kum and Go?

Even the name of the gas station is too gross. Before, I thought it was funny. Now it gives me flashbacks, and I’ve started driving twenty miles to the next town to buy gas there, because I can no longer talk to the Kum and Go guy without wondering if he’s seen me with my clothes off.

I drive by knots of drunk students walking back to the college from the bar or the pub, gripping one another’s elbows, laughing and shoving. One time I saw a girl fall down. She was alone with a guy, and I thought he was going to rape her, but he helped her up. I pulled the car over and took deep breaths, close to hyperventilating. Because, seriously, what on earth is wrong with me that I thought that?

I never would have, before. Never.

I don’t want to be like this for the rest of my life. If I had an undo button, I’d hit it so hard. But if there’s some way to go back to how I was before, I haven’t found it.

Most nights, I end up at the bakery.

I tell myself I won’t, but I do.

I’m under strict personal orders to stop driving here, stop parking out front, stop looking through the window for a glimpse of West.

Yet here I am.

Light spills from the kitchen in the back of the shop, through the plate glass and over the sidewalk. I set the emergency brake but leave the engine idling. With the car stopped, my music sounds too loud, so I lean forward to turn it down.

I imagine it’s warm in the kitchen and it smells good. The mental taste of it is sweet, an antidote to all the hours I spend on my laptop, sifting through the worst that humanity has to offer.

West’s figure crosses the doorway. By the time I’m standing up, one hand holding the door open and the other tucking my keys into my hoodie, he’s already disappeared. A gust of cold wind blows across my exposed feet and over the back of my neck. I hunch down, pushing my fists deeper into the kangaroo pocket of my hooded sweatshirt.

The men in my head want to know what I’m staring at and why I’m such a dumb cunt.

I don’t know. I don’t know why.

I’m about to get back in the car when the wind shoves at me again, a cold, hard push right in my face, and I squint my eyes and raise a hand to shield my eyes.

I’m annoyed.

I’m angry.

I’m pissed.

I’m standing in front of a bakery at four in the morning, furious, staring at an empty window.

I squeeze my keys so hard, they bite marks into my palm. West walks by the open kitchen door again.

Go in there and tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you like him. Tell him something.

But I don’t. I can’t. West isn’t what I need. He’s only what I want.

I want him because he punches when he’s mad.

I want him because he drove a wheezing car two thousand miles by himself, eating stew out of cans as if that’s something you can just do.

Because he looks at a soda bottle and sees a chicken rocket.

Because I feel like, if I was with him, he might fix me. He might save me.

He might ask me, Want to play? and this time I might say yes.

But I know that’s not what would happen. He wouldn’t save me. He’d ruin me.

I’m already ruined enough.

I turn around, get back in the car, and drive away.