Caring Is Creepy (17 page)

Before I finished saying, “Fine, you can go,” Logan was jogging across my room headed to the bathroom. He stopped in the doorway as I tried to squeeze past and took my cheeks in his hands and studied my face. I thought he might be angry about something. That was how serious he looked. But he only kissed me and shut the door. I knew then that once he left my house, I’d never see him again. He might think he was going to come back and see me, even really believe it when he said it, but he wouldn’t. This was all I was going to get.

Luckily, there were no windows in the bathroom, so he couldn’t see my mom wasn’t in the yard talking to Mr. Cannon. I’d of hated to have him think I’d lied.

“L
ynn, princess, listen,” Logan said, his voice sharp and tense, when I went in to tell him goodnight. “I like hanging out with you and all, but I can’t stay in this closet anymore. I’m going crazy.”

This was so different from what I expected to come out of his mouth, I couldn’t say anything for a long moment.

“It’s better than jail,” I said. “So just wait. My mom will go back to work tomorrow and you can get out.”

“I’ve been thinking …,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got this friend in Macon. I can go there for a while. I could visit you sometimes.”

It felt like someone had poured Liquid-Plumr straight into my stomach. “That’s so far away.”

“It’s only about two hours. I can visit on the weekends. There’s a campground near here. I can stay in a tent and we can hang out together.” He brought his knees up to his chest and put his arms around them. All he had on were a pair of blue striped boxers. “At least that’s what I’m thinking right now.”

“You’ll leave and that’ll be it.”

“That’s not true.”

“Please don’t leave tomorrow while I’m at school,” I said. “Please. I don’t want to have to visit you in jail.”

“You couldn’t anyway,” he said. “The place they’d probably send
me is in Leavenworth, Kansas.” He pushed a bit of hair off my forehead and tucked it behind my ear. “I don’t want to leave you. It’s only I—”

“Take me with you,” I said.

“With the Army chasing after me? That ain’t no life for you.”

“I don’t care. I’ve never had nothing like this. I don’t expect I ever will again.”

He turned away. I took his chin and pulled his head to face me. His eyes shone and I kissed them closed, one after the other, and then again for good measure.

“God almighty, I wish I were someone else. I wish—” He stopped and kissed my nose.

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

T
he alarm clock in my brain woke me up at five on Tuesday, the first day of school, even though I didn’t actually have to leave until seven thirty. My real alarm clock was set for six. That’s when I woke Logan up and told him I would wash his clothes.

“Strip,” I said, and he did, tripping on his filthy boxers and blinking his eyes. He hardly made a peep about it, did everything I told him. I figured it was his Army training kicking in. Always follow orders and such like.

“It’s not as if I need them in here anyway,” he told me after he’d rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “It’s a fucking sauna. I’ve probably lost ten pounds from sweating alone.”

“That’s true,” I said. “What do you need clothes for?”

My mom was still asleep, so I took his duffle bag and all his clothes and put them in three big triple-ply garbage sacks. Our neighbor, Mr. Cannon, had a huge trash can, the kind with the lid that flips up on plastic hinges. I threw the clothes in there, but I was careful to put some of Mr. Cannon’s trash on top. Mr. Cannon worked for the county animal shelter and was hardly ever home anyway. I didn’t think he’d notice.

On the bus, I sat next to Sally Bryant and she told me about a trip she’d taken to Jacksonville with her family the week before. I wasn’t really listening. I had on my favorite pair of jeans, the ones with flared legs and rivets down the side, and I was thinking about Logan sitting around in no jeans and no nothing, reading my eighth-grade English
Johnny Tremain
book, trapped in the secret room behind my closet.

I
didn’t see Dani until after homeroom. She handed me a fistful of Trojans. “You know I am
so
proud of you. What happened? Tell me everything. Did it kill when he first put it in?”

I told her about it. She nodded wisely.

“Well, it ought to last longer than a minute,” she said finally. “I’ll think about this premature ejaculation problem for you. I think we can fix it.”

“Premature ejaculation?” I said.

The second bell rang.

Dani dug in her pocket and pulled out a plastic baggie. “After breakfast I went and checked for footprints myself. In the grass by the flower bed, I found this.”

She handed me the bag. Inside was an ace of spades. I took it out and held it up to the light. There was a picture of Bugs Bunny nibbling a carrot on the other side.

Dani snatched it out of my hands and put it back in the bag.

“You’ll mess up the fingerprints.” She made an
ugh yuck
face at me. “Fucked up, isn’t it? And that’s not all.”

“Dani, the second bell rang.”

“Just look at it.”

She handed me a second bag. Inside was a computer-printed picture of Dani from last year’s yearbook, but the eyes had been rubbed out with an eraser. It gave me chicken pimples on my arms.

“Whoa,” I said. “You found this outside your window?”

She had.

I
didn’t see Dani again until the end of second-period lunch. She had third-period lunch and came into the cafeteria as I left. According to the clock in the cage up above the salad bar, I had exactly three and a half minutes before the bell. We went out on the breezeway.

“I got an answer for you,” she said.

“An answer for what?”

“You know, it being too fast.” Dani poked a stiff index finger through her fist a few times.

“Oh,” I said.

“I talked to Barbara Ann.”

“You didn’t tell her it was me, did you?” I moaned. “Dani. Shit.”

Barbara Ann Habersham was a bottle blonde with a body that made boys turn their heads as she passed in the hall. Back when she still wore a cheerleader uniform, they’d wait for her in clumps below the front stairs in hopes of a panty flash. I’d heard she dated a frat boy from Georgia Southern. She looked like a college senior, but she was only a high school one. I seriously doubt she even knew who I was. She’d been the youngest-ever head of the varsity cheerleading squad until she got kicked off the first quarter of her junior year. Some people said it was because she got caught smoking pot in her hotel room at a preseason exhibition game over in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but I’d heard a few other people say it was because she got pregnant and had an abortion. Despite all this,
Barbara Ann was still popular. Maybe even more so because pretty people could do shameful shit and not even the teachers seemed to care. These days she was kind of like the queen of the burnouts and baddies. Still, I didn’t much care for her to know all about my private sexual goings-on.

“Of course I didn’t tell. I acted like I was only curious to know if it was
theoretically
possible to fix a hair-trigger penis.” She made air quotes around the word “theoretically,” one of her favorite bandying-about words, along with “homunculus” (as in, “we had a homunculus good time at that party”) and “plethora,” which she emphatically believed meant an enormous fat person (like, “look at that plethora on the bike over there, his butt’s gone and swallowed the banana seat right down to the tires”). It didn’t matter how many times I tried to shove a dictionary in front of her face.

“ ‘Is there any cure for such a poor, sad condition as this?’ That’s what I asked her. I described your boy as a three-scoots-and-shoot kind of guy.”

“You did not say that.” I sucked in two lungfuls of air in one breath. “Did you?”

“Oh, please,
tranquilo
the hell out.” Dani had just come from
Español
with Senora Pulawski. “The last person she’d expect it to be is you. She probably thinks it’s me that’s wondering.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And I wasn’t wondering.”

“I’m hungry, so I’ll make this quick. Barbara Ann told me to take a hair tie or a scrunchie in your emergency-type situations, and wrap it nice and snug around the bottom of his dick once you’re sure he’s good and hard. That’s key or it won’t firm up in the first place. Are you paying attention?”

The bell rang.

“Dani,” I said.

She ignored this. “Listen, Lynn, this is good stuff. You wrap it nice and tight, but not so tight it starts turning blue. The idea
here is this’ll keep the blood in there and the whole thing will last longer. Depending, it could be like two or three times longer. She wrote the instructions on a Juicy Fruit wrapper. Here, I’ve already memorized it.”

Dani handed me the wrapper. It was folded up into a tiny square. I thought of Logan’s sweet little origami roses and made up my mind to chuck the wrapper as soon as Dani left. As I put it in my hip pocket, she sighed in her most dramatic way. “I wish I could meet him. I hardly know what’s going on and it was all my idea to begin with. You never tell me anything.”

“He’s probably leaving tomorrow, but he says he’ll come back and visit me.”

“Why tomorrow? I thought you planned to move him in for good.” She winked.

“My mom’s going back to work and he’s sick of it in there. I’ll admit it’s pretty hot.”

“I bet.”

“I mean—”

“I
know
what you mean.” She tossed me one of her more superior looks. “Still, while you’ve got him locked up in there, you should try to get him to stay as long as you can. I mean, what’s a few more days at this point? And also, do you think he’ll really come back? I very seriously doubt it. Think about it, Lynn, when’s the next time you’ll get a chance like this?”

“I’ve thought about that.”

“Maybe you should tie him up? My dad has some real police handcuffs.”

That made me laugh. The thing is, I did think about it. Not really. Well, I don’t know. What I was mostly thinking was,
What the hell am I doing?

L
ogan was asleep when I came home from school and I had to shake his toe before he woke up. Then I kissed him, even though he had some truly atrocious morning breath, or late afternoon breath in this case. He sat up and stretched. Sweat made a moist shadow on the blanket where he’d been sleeping. His skin stuck to me when we hugged and his unshaven face scraped my cheek.

“What day is it? It’s so dark in here, I never know if a nap was all night or five minutes,” he said. “I think I’m getting a heat rash.”

“I’ll get you some baby powder.”

“Honey, sweetie, what I need to do is get out of here.”

When he asked about his clothes, I told him I hadn’t had time to bring them in that morning after I dried them, so I stuffed them all in a black plastic trash bag and tucked it behind the washer. My mom, I explained, must of found them and thought they were trash or some of my dad’s old clothes and thrown them out.

“They’re gone? They’re really all
gone
?” His voice went from soldier to little boy to girly whine.

“Snap out of it, soldier boy. I looked in the cans out back of the carport, but they’d been emptied. She hasn’t said anything, though. That’s good at least, isn’t it?”

“Some of them were clean!”

“I didn’t know which were which, so I did them all. Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.”

“Oh, shit.” Logan squeezed his eyes closed hard enough to make the lids wrinkle. “I didn’t give you my car keys and my wallet, did I?”

“No, they’re right over there in the corner.”

“Shit,” he said, but his voice was softer.

“Listen here now,” I said, trying to keep the mad out of my voice. I knew that showing how angry I was would only rile him up that much more. And to no good account either. But I didn’t forget about how he was acting. I only pushed it off to the side. “Don’t fret over this. It ain’t nothing we can’t figure out together. Come over here and rest your worried brain.” I patted my legs and he crawled over and put his head in my lap. I stroked his hair and lowered my voice, sweetening it up as much as I could. “My friend Dani has an older brother who left some clothes behind when he moved out to college. She’s going to look for them tonight and call me. I think he was smaller than you, though.” I pulled this right out of my ass. Dani’s an only child. It was scary how easy it was for me to make all this shit up the way I did. By my count, this was lie number nine.

Logan pointed the flashlight down at his legs. Puffy red patches stretched from his crotch down along his inner thigh. He shook his head when he saw them. His cheek stubble rasped against my jeans.

“Shit.” He poked at the red spot on his left leg.

This went a long way toward ironing out the wrinkles from his temper tantrum. Poor little guy, I thought.

“That does look like heat rash,” I said. “Does it itch?”

He grunted. But I could tell my taking an interest and feeling sorry for him had already helped calm his nerves some.

I gave him a pressed beef sandwich with mustard and American cheese and a cup of Sunny Delight. Later, back in my own bed, it occurred to me that Desitin, the ointment moms use for soothing particularly angry flare-ups of diaper rash, might do him a world of good. I bet I could get some down at the Piggly Wiggly.

T
hat night, I woke up from a terrible dream about Logan. His dream yells kept bouncing around in my head after I opened my eyes. Then I realized. Those yells were real. Although muffled some by my hanging slacks and dresses, Logan’s shrieks were clear enough out in my bedroom. Clear enough, I thought, to wake my mom.

“Please don’t hurt her,” Logan wailed. “Just leave her be.”

When I shone the flashlight on his face, his eyes were clenched tight. The skin on the lids looked pinched and wrinkled again, like before when he was feeling sorry for himself over the lost clothes.