Fault Line (12 page)

20

I got home from practice the next Monday afternoon and my brother was in front of the TV playing Xbox.

“Hey, shrimp,” I said, dropping down next to him. “How was rehearsal?”

“Okay,” he mumbled, maneuvering his hand over the controls without looking at me.

“Mom at class?”

He nodded again. The loud explosions from the game made me flinch.

“Michael,” I said, “put down the frickin’ controller. Mom’s told you a hundred times, it’s rude to keep playing when people are talking to you.”

He paused the game and stared at the screen.

“What’s up? What’s wrong with you?”

He slowly turned his head. “What’s wrong with
y
ou
?”

“Nothing,” I said.

He barked a laugh and picked up his controller again. I grabbed it from him and sat on it.

“What the heck? Give it back.”

“What’s your problem?” I asked.

His face flashed hurt. “You used to talk to us. Now you’re always in your room. Or with Ani.”

It was Michael’s attempt at a verbal slap, and somehow it cut so much deeper than any of the lectures Mom poured out.

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t act like I’m dumb. You used to talk to us and you don’t anymore. Not about anything real. I don’t know what happened or what’s wrong, but you don’t talk to us anymore.”

A coil of guilt wove its way into my stomach. Michael was worried about me. Mom and Dad were worried about me. I felt like a piece of crap. And still, I couldn’t say anything. Not to my parents. Definitely not to Michael. This wasn’t their problem.

“I have no idea what you mean. Everything is fine.”

Michael shrugged. Had he picked up that indifference from me? “If that’s how you wanna be, go ahead and lie. I thought we were brothers. I thought we could tell each other anything.”

I searched Michael’s face. His chin trembled. It made me want to cry seeing how hard he was trying to keep it together.

“Sometimes it’s better to do things on your own. I still love you guys. But this is my shit, not yours, to deal with,” I said finally.

A small smile crossed his face. “I get that. Sort of. It’s like how I didn’t want to tell Mom I’m not really playing soccer, just sitting on the sides. But you could tell
me
if you wanted to.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but then decided against it. I was a disappointment as a brother and I didn’t have any right to screw up his happiness with my own shitstorm. I mentally kicked myself. If Michael guessed something was wrong, I was doing a crap job of holding things together.

I considered again talking to my dad. Coming clean about things. But as the echo of Ani’s pleas against telling her mom circled through my mind, I realized I couldn’t say anything to him about what happened at the party. About what was happening with us now. Because as soon as my dad found out, any chance of Ani and me ever being normal again would be tossed out the window.

“Sorry I can’t get into it with you, shrimp,” I said at last. I gave him his Xbox controller and picked up the other one, then settled deeper into the couch next to him, waiting for him to respond. He didn’t say anything.

•••

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, I was finally ungrounded. It was a seventy-five-degree day and my mom announced over breakfast she couldn’t stand seeing me inside moping any longer. I bolted to my room and texted Ani.

We went for ice cream to celebrate and I was determined not to make our date end in sex. It’s not that I minded, but it seemed it was the only way Ani and I had connected since the party and I missed just hanging out with her. Every time we started talking about anything remotely real, she withdrew or jumped me. I was starting to get kind of messed up about it.

I held her hand as we walked through town and told her stories about times my friends and I had done stupid shit when we were young. She smiled and patted my arm but looked in front of her without any other response.

“Hey, what’s a cow’s favorite movie?” I asked when we sat on a bench in front of Peterson’s Ice Cream.

She looked at me with a real smile and light in her eyes. My breath stopped. God, she was beautiful.

“
The Sound of Moosic
,” I finished.

“Oh my God, you’re such a dork. I heard that joke in the third grade.”

“Okay, how about this one?” I asked, hanging on to the familiarity between us. “What do you call a cow on a pogo stick?”

She snorted and my heart sped up.

“A milk shake!” she said, and laughed. “Seriously, Beez, you need to stop getting your material from the elementary school playground.”

I nudged her shoulder and tugged on one of her braids. If I hadn’t been watching closely, I might’ve missed when she closed up again. But I saw it in her face and I hated her for not being able to hold on to our laughter. And I hated myself for being angry about it.

“Is something bothering you?” I finally asked after too much silence.

“No.”

“You got quiet all of a sudden,” I said hesitantly.

“You have some strawberry on the corner of your mouth,” she said, and before I could wipe it away, her tongue darted out of her mouth to lick it. She tried to linger on my lips, but I pulled away.

“Is something bothering
you
?” she asked, pouting.

“No. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Why?” She leaned away from me and gave me a suspicious look. I pulled her back into my side.

“ ’Cause things have been kind of different with us. We used to talk more. I’m not trying to be judgmental or whatever, but I’ve noticed.”

“Beezus, don’t you know I can put my mouth to way better use than talking?” She batted her eyelashes, which might have been cute if they weren’t framing dead eyes.

I got up and tossed my ice cream in the garbage can. My hands clenched at my sides.

“Why do you say shit like that? Huh? Do you say that kind of thing to other people?”

“Are you jealous?” she asked. I wanted to smack the mean out of her. It wasn’t her fault, but I didn’t care. She couldn’t hold on to old Ani and it pissed me off.

“Not jealous. Tired of it. You’re more than this. Better than this. Don’t you get it?”

Tears filled her eyes, but she blinked them away. She tossed her ice cream toward the garbage can, but it fell short and landed in a lump of pistachio on the sidewalk.

“You know what? We’re done. I can’t do this with you anymore. It’s too exhausting,” she said, turning away from me.

“What? What’s so goddamn exhausting?” I yelled, and kicked the garbage can.

“You are. We are. I can’t be with you. It takes too much out of me.”

A hole the size of a missile formed in my stomach.

“You’re breaking up with me?”

“Yes,” she answered, and dropped her head.

I took a step toward her. I pulled on a piece of hair that had fallen from her braid.

“No. You’re not.” I lifted her chin.

“You can’t say no. If someone wants to break up, you have to let them.” Her voice shook.

“I
can
say no. I’m saying it. No. You’re not leaving me. I’m not leaving you.” I hadn’t gone through all this shit to have her walk away from me.

“You’re tired of me. You said you were,” she protested, but her eyes didn’t have any fight in them.

“I didn’t say that. I said I was tired of you putting yourself down, acting like all you are is some sex object.”

She curled into me and buried her face in my chest. I felt the wetness of tears through my T-shirt. I hushed her and stroked her hair. Nothing I did stopped her crying. After several minutes, I heard her take a deep breath. She pulled back and faced me.

“Okay, if you won’t let me break up with you, you have to stop judging me.”

“I’m not judging you, Ani,” I argued.

“Yes, you are. Everyone’s judging me. It’s like they’re all waiting to see what I’ll do next. They’re waiting for me to fall.”

“No, they’re not.”

“You have no idea what it’s like. I walk into a room and people stop talking. I walk down the hall and all I hear are whispers of ‘Firecrotch’ and ‘Manhole.’ And the worst part is, I can’t say shit to defend myself. I’ve got nothing but a giant fricking void about that night and a bunch of people telling me what I said and did.”

“It was one night. You can’t let it define you.”

Silence sat between us.

“What am I going to do, Ben?” she finally asked.

I almost broke in two hearing her sound so defeated. I wished I could make it all go away. I’d never wanted anything so much. But it took all this energy to hold the pieces of her together. It would cost us both something. It already had.

Her face started to crumple and I gripped her tighter. “I’ll make this better, baby. I’ll make you better. I promise.”

She gave me a sad smile and the air between us shifted. I had no idea how to keep the promise. We both knew it. The fault lay on me and the reality of her actually “getting better” inched further away. If only I could really fix things.

We went back to my car and had sex because I didn’t know what else to do when she slipped her pants off and straddled me. It was like I was outside of myself. Watching. Seeing how things really were with us. But I couldn’t stop it from happening. We didn’t even kiss when we were doing it. Ani fake moaned and panted. And I let her. Her eyes stared past me to the back window. Glazed and vacant. I came and pulled the condom off quickly. My stomach heaved and I swallowed the bile in my throat. My hands shook in self-disgust. I was exactly like all those guys. I had just fucked the Manhole.

21

I wouldn’t be with Ani alone for the next three weeks. I couldn’t. I made up excuses about why I couldn’t come over and pretended not to see the hurt expression on her face. I swam before and after school and still couldn’t get back to my record times. Coach looked at his stopwatch and mumbled to himself, but thankfully didn’t say anything.

I went to lunch with Ani, Kate, and Kevin. I made sure I always sat across from Ani. Sometimes other people sat with us. We acted like nothing was wrong, but Kevin met my eyes in question several times. I shook my head and didn’t say anything about what was happening with her. What was happening with us.

One lunch, Ani didn’t show up. I went looking for her but couldn’t find her. When I finally did, she was coming out of the handicap bathroom on the second floor. She got a weird look when she saw me and started tugging on her shirt. When I asked her where she’d been, she turned away and didn’t say anything.

I took her hand and walked back to the cafeteria with her. A guy followed us in and brushed too long against Ani as he passed. I started to say something to him, but Ani stopped me with an openmouthed kiss and her hands on my ass. I pulled away and ducked my head so I wouldn’t have to see the stares of the entire cafeteria. Ani dropped her hands and moved slowly toward the lunch line.

I tumbled into bed every night sore from practice, from swimming wrong, sitting wrong, moving wrong. My body didn’t seem to fit me anymore. I wasn’t aware of how I moved in the way I used to be. Instead, my mind pushed me from place to place.

Ani’s recovery meant everything and nothing all at the same time. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, seeing the vacancy on her face as she stared out the car window, but I couldn’t cross the bridge between us. I was just a guy. Nothing I did or said made any difference. And for as much as I wanted to be there for her, I couldn’t ignore the resentment taking up residence in my stomach.

•••

The Friday before winter break, I saw Ani in the hall surrounded by guys. The haze that had been clouding me for weeks vanished into red-hot fury. I stalked toward them, afraid they were saying shit to her, but she stood smiling and laughing.

“What’s up?” I asked as I approached.

“Hey, Beez,” she said in a phony high voice. She batted her glassy eyes at me. Fake interest like how Morgan used to look at me. “We were all just making plans for winter break.”

“All of you?” I scanned the faces of the guys. Big guys. Bigger than me. Most of them stared at me smugly. What the hell had Ani done?

“Well, you’ve been so busy . . .” Ani looked at me pointedly. Shit. These were my choices? Pretend everything was okay between us or let her hang out with a bunch of guys over break doing God knows what?

“You have plans with me over winter break. These guys will have to find their fun somewhere else,” I said, clenching my hands.

She slithered toward me and wrapped her arms around my neck. I tried not to flinch as the guys smirked at her ridiculous display.

I grabbed her wrist and pulled her away from the guys.

“This is it? This is what we are? This is what you are?” I asked once we had moved away from our audience.

She blinked her eyes. They didn’t seem to be focusing very well. Was she high? That too? Although maybe it would be better if she was, then I wouldn’t have to feel like I brought about the deadness.

“You’re not supposed to judge me,” she said.

“And you’re not supposed to act like a whore,” I retorted. She reeled back and I banged my fist into the locker beside me. God, everything sucked.

I inhaled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” I pulled her closer but her body didn’t react. Her clothes were obnoxiously skimpy for winter.

“You wouldn’t let me break up with you,” she said in a flat voice.

“And I still won’t. But this shit is ridiculous. What do you hope to accomplish with all this?”

“I make the choice about what I want to do with my body,” she said, and her chin tilted up slightly. It was actually a relief to see defiance in her eyes after so much void.

“That’s right. You do. But is this really what you want? Is this what I deserve?” I held her face and looked into her eyes, searching. Her pupils darted around, refusing to engage with me. I tapped her cheek to get her to focus.

“What does it matter what I want or what you deserve? This is who I am,” she said, and pulled away from me. She turned her back and said, “I’ll be around. My mom is teaching a winter-break art camp. Come over if you want. Or don’t.” Her head finally swiveled and her emotionless face met mine. “I’m at your disposal.”

•••

Kevin showed up at my house after swim practice. I’d been expecting him to have a talk with me ever since Ani jumped him at Watson’s party, but he had waited. I couldn’t tell if it was because he felt bad or because he didn’t want to add to my stress over her.

“You’re in a shit spiral with Ani, dude,” he said as soon as I opened my door.

“No kidding.”

“I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but I didn’t think you’d want to be a chump any longer. She’s screwing around with other guys. Not just flirting. Screwing around with them for real.”

I closed my eyes and took some deep breaths like I tried to do before swim races. They didn’t work. I wanted to rip someone’s head off. I turned on Kevin, but the look of pity in his face made me punch the door instead. My mom called from the kitchen to see what the racket was about. I told her it was fine and pushed Kevin outside to the garage. Boxes were stacked neatly against one of the walls, and the bikes Michael and I never rode were anchored on hooks from the ceiling.

“She wants to break up with me,” I told him. I brushed away a cobweb that stuck to my arm when I leaned against the wall.

“Then let her, dude. She’s making you look bad.”

“I can’t leave her after everything that’s happened. I don’t play that way,” I said.

“Did you even hear me? She’s screwing around with other guys. You got to get out of this.” He looked like he wanted to smack me upside the head.

“I heard what you said, but you don’t understand. I fricking let her go to that party on her own. She never would’ve done any of that shit if I were there. This is on me. It’s my job to take care of her.”

“Yeah, I’d get that if you were married to her, maybe. But she’s your girlfriend. You’re eighteen. You aren’t responsible for her,” he retorted.

“She’s still Ani,” I said.

“She’s a messed-up version of Ani. That’s not the girl who told you your hair made you look like an asshole. It’s time to cut her loose.”

I kicked a box and turned on him. “No. I’m not walking away from her. That’s a total dick move. She’s screwed up because a bunch of guys messed with her and left a lighter inside of her. She doesn’t deserve for me to bail on her.”

Kevin raised his hands. “Okay, peace. Don’t shoot the messenger. I understand, but listen, I’m not the only one saying you should get out of this. I mean, I get that messed-up shit happened at that party, but what the hell? How many guys are you going to let on that train?”

I fisted my hands. “How many guys are on it right now?”

I’d had my head up my ass. I suspected shit was going down with other guys, but I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to fucking share her and I hated that the guys who raped her got her too. But my anger just made everything she’d accused me of even more true. I couldn’t stand what we were becoming, but I couldn’t be the guy to walk away. For me or for Ani.

Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know. I heard some of the lacrosse guys saying something about her in a janitor’s closet. I didn’t hear too much, but they referred to her as the hot lacrosse train whore.”

Heat poured through me. Firecrotch. Manhole. Cum Dumpster. Train whore. The words pounded in my head like a sledgehammer.

“Son of a bitch. What am I supposed to do?”

“I think you should talk to her mom,” Kevin said.

I’d considered it. Every day. More than once. Gayle was like a friend and I knew she’d probably be more help to Ani than I’d been. But every time I thought of doing it, I imagined the betrayal Ani would feel. She’d told me over and over how she didn’t want her mom involved. How her mom would only make things worse. And it didn’t really feel like my secret to tell.

“I can’t do that, dude. I’ll lose Ani for good.”

Kevin shook his head. “You’ve lost her already. This shit is bigger than you. You gotta talk to someone. You’re not gonna fix her or make her better. And honestly, dude, who do you think you are to even try?”

“Her goddamn boyfriend,” I said, seething.

“Which makes you what? Her fricking shrink? She’s out of control. She’s not going to let you rein that shit in. It’s not how she works.”

I took a step back and pressed my head against the garage wall. “I know. You’re right. That counselor Beth told me she was re-empowering herself or whatever by making her own choices about her body. I keep trying to remember that. I don’t want to take that away from her even though it means she’s crapping on everything we have.”

“Well,” Kevin said, and put his hand on my shoulder, “you should probably call Beth again. Because this isn’t empowering; this is bullshit. The only thing she’s doing is living up to her reputation as the Manhole.”