Ferocity Summer (12 page)

A Week or So Later

D
own in the darkness of deep woods, the skeletal remains of what was once known as the Lackawanna Cutoff lay withering into nonexistence. The tracks are supposed to be haunted. Once some old geezer buying cigarettes at Johnny's Quik Mart told me he had made some brilliant scientific discovery about the tracks' mystery lights, but that the Japanese had stolen his research. He and Bill were probably on the same conspiracy theory mailing lists.

Randy and I didn't care about mystery lights. We'd come down here for other reasons. His parents had company over, and Randy felt like entertaining or being entertained or whatever. I didn't really feel like much of anything, but I thought maybe a change of scenery would make things somewhat less perfunctory. It didn't.

“What's wrong?” Randy asked as he attempted to squeeze into the tiny space beside me on his car's back seat. He ended up draping himself half on top of me. I felt trapped, more so even than when we'd been screwing.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“You got someone else?” he asked. “You know, like on the side?”

“On the side of what?”

“Paradise. What the fuck? Why are you being so moody?”

“There's this girl I like.”

Hanging out with Andrea was torture. Actually, the last time I'd hung out with her, she gave me the web address of some rehab place her cousin had gone to. “For Willow,” she'd told me. It pissed me off that she would make such an accusation about my best friend. I crumpled up and threw away her little scrap of paper as soon as I got home.

“Cool. Bring her along next time.”

“You'd need a bigger car.”

“I'll buy one.”

“Don't waste your money. She doesn't even like me, not like that.”

“She just doesn't know you, that's all.”

“I want to go outside.”

“Put your shirt on at least.”

He moved as if to let me up, but ended up leaning on my arm. I pushed him off me, toward the floor, partly because it hurt so bad and partly because I was so sick of him, for no real reason at all. I slipped outside, got my shirt out of the front seat, and pulled it over my head. Randy cursed in the back seat, then managed to right himself and followed me outside.

“Are you premenstrual or something?”

“Willow and I have found new summer employment,” I said.

“That's great.”

“We're working for drug dealers.”

“What?” Randy asked. His voice cracked.

“Standing lookout while these guys dig ditches to bury their merchandise. It pays well.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“It was your sister's idea.”

“Yeah, but you were supposed to talk her out of it.”

“Why? What's the point? Anyway, we both need the money.”

“You want money? You want fucking money?” Randy shouted. His voice echoed just the tiniest bit in the night air. He ripped open the passenger-side door and reached into the glove compartment. In the car's dome light I could see he had a fistful of cash, and there was more inside the glove compartment. “Here, take it! Take all you want!”

Randy threw the money at me. A few of the bills hit me before floating harmlessly to the ground. I thought it was his tip money, but the first bill I reached down to grab was a twenty. I started picking them up and they were all twenties and tens, except for one fifty-dollar bill. Randy walked to the other side of the car. He paced and ran angry fingers through his hair.

“Are you the two biggest airheads in the world or what? Lookouts? Fucking lookouts? I mean, if the cops do show, who're gonna be the first ones they pick up? Okay, and how does this look, you getting arrested for illegal activities two months before a jury looks you up and down to see if you're fine upstanding teenagers who had an accident or hellraising hooligans who don't give a shit about laws, morality, truth, justice, and the American fucking way?”

“It wasn't my idea,” I said again. I got down on my knees to make sure I'd picked up all the money. I hadn't kept count, but there was a lot. “Randy, where did this money come from?”

“What?” He was pacing now and kicking at the dirt. “I'll kill her. I'll fucking kill her.” I knew he wasn't homicidal, I knew he was just speaking out of anger, but something about the way he said it chilled me. It made me think of the mysterious Danielle and Brandon.
Death is following me
, Randy had said back in the spring, and I'd wondered what he meant by it. No one was ever going to mistake Randy for a saint, but I guess I'd always pretty much assumed he was a decent-enough sleazeball. Maybe that had been stupid. Who was Randy Jenkins? What was he capable of?

I became aware of my surroundings—the deserted train tracks, the miles of woods, the lack of civilization, the lack of other people. I didn't know if I trusted him. I know that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but nothing in my life made a whole lot of sense. Randy Jenkins was a criminal. He was a criminal the FBI was interested in, and I was the one who was going to help them make their case.

“Randy, there's like three hundred dollars here,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. There was more money in the glove compartment.

“Work,” Randy muttered. “Tip money.”

“You think I'm stupid? You're the idiot, Randy. This is not tip money, you hypocrite.”

Randy suddenly looked up from where he'd been fuming. He pulled open the driver's side door and leaned into the car.

“Give me that,” he said. He grabbed the money from my hand, shoved it into the glove compartment, and slammed it closed. “Get in the goddamn car. I'll take you home.”

I could try making a run for it, but what chance did I have? I obediently got in the car. I knew that I needed to ask questions, that I needed to get Randy to talk to me, but I didn't want to say anything. I didn't care about the money. I didn't care about anything. No, that's not true. I did care about the trial, and what Randy had said kept playing over and over again in my mind.

In less than two months, a jury
was
going to look us up and down to decide what sort of people we were and what sort of fate we deserved. I could already see it—the people who would sit in judgment of us would be old, dowdy, and so far removed from us that they might as well be aliens. What would they see when Willow and I were held up as specimens?

I needed to get out of that trial. I could already see my fate written on the wrinkled foreheads of the jurors in my mind. I needed to get out of that trial, but still I could not force myself to talk, to ask the questions that needed so badly to be asked.

Last Summer

I
n fourth grade, I developed a somewhat unhealthy fascination with the occult and exhausted our small local library's resources on ESP and psychic phenomena. I remember a book that described psychic premonitions concerning the sinking of the Titanic—how family members with relatives aboard felt uneasy for no discernible reason, how a woman who'd drowned on the ship had suffered nightmares to this effect for weeks previous.

On the morning when Willow called me to tell me we were going on our own little cruise, I suffered no such premonitions at all. The only thing eating away at me was whether I should wear my brown bikini or the aquamarine one. I chose brown, and threw a halter top and a pair of shorts over it. I stepped into the back seat of Randy's car a few minutes later, oblivious to the fact that everything in my life would soon change completely. So much for ESP. Maybe Pablo would have seen things coming, but if I'd known him then and he'd told me, I wouldn't have listened.

The cruise in question was a ride on Randy's friend's parents' speedboat. I had never met Tigue before. In fact, I couldn't recall Randy ever mentioning him, but it wasn't as if Randy and I did all that much conversing. Tigue's parents were conveniently away for the weekend. Tigue had proposed the excursion, perhaps, and told Randy to rustle up some females.

“He went to Sparta High?” I asked, as Willow and Randy took turns filling me in on the day's plans while Randy drove.

“No, Tigue's never seen the inside of a public school,” Randy said. “He's a total rich shit. Went to Delbarton, I think. Had a DUI his senior year that kept him out of Harvard.”

“Sounds like a charmer,” I said. I would like to say that at that point I was wishing I hadn't agreed to go along, but I wasn't. I was sitting in the back seat thinking about what a perfect day it was to go out for a boat ride, and how nice it must be to have such toys to play with.

“He's not so bad,” Willow said. “He's kind of cute in a Nick Lachey sort of way.”

I made gagging noises. “Do you have a lot of classes with him?” I asked.

“I had a Basic Calc class with him last fall, but he never really went. I helped him cheat on the exam. But I see him at a lot of parties.”

The air conditioning was on, but it didn't really reach the back seat. I was damp with sweat. The straps of my bathing suit chafed against the sensitive skin of my neck. I watched the scenery fly by and dreamt of college, which to hear Randy talk was more about the parties than it was a learning experience. College was still a question mark for me. I had good-enough grades, but no money, and if I went it would either be as a charity case or as some part-time student at a community college while I waited tables or (please God no) worked at Johnny's Quik Mart to pay for my textbooks. I went to school with people who took honors classes and got straight A's and had no doubt that they would attend an accredited four-year college. I was not one of these people. The best I could hope for was that Allison Browning, class goddess, got caught drunk driving and I would help her cheat on our math exam at County.

When Randy pulled the car into the driveway, my first thought was that he must have screwed up the address. This couldn't be the right house. Whatever lived inside it had to be from a different species entirely. How would we communicate? How would we spend the entire day together on a small vessel?

Then I laid eyes on Tigue. Nick Lachey, my ass. This guy was divine. I'd already formed an image of him in my mind as a straight-laced preppy boy who wore plaid shorts and Polo shirts with a capital P, with freshly trimmed hair and an obnoxious Ken Doll smirk. But Tigue looked like a real person. He had on a plain navy blue T-shirt (okay, he probably paid five times its real value at one of those rich-kid stores, but you couldn't tell this from looking at it) with an ordinary pair of denim shorts. His hair was golden brown and overgrown in a careless, completely beautiful way. I wanted to touch that hair. I wanted to touch more than his hair.

“Uh, you know Willow, and this is Scilla,” Randy said as we stood in Tigue's foyer (and it was clearly a foyer, as opposed to an ordinary hallway).

“Scilla,” Tigue said. He reached for my hand because he was, after all, the sort of guy who had been raised with such customs and could not escape them. He shook it casually, but I felt heat like an electric charge race all the way up my arm. “I've heard so much about you.” At this he smirked, but not in a Ken doll way at all. It was completely lecherous. “So, who wants a cocktail?”

It was ten o'clock in the morning, but no one protested. Tigue led the way to the kitchen. Willow nudged me hard in the ribs as we trailed behind the boys.

“What are you doing?” she asked in an angry whisper.

“Nothing. What are you talking about?” I whispered back.

She rolled her eyes. “I saw the way you were looking at him.”

“He doesn't look one bit like Nick Lachey.”

“I don't care if he looks like shit warmed over, at the end of the day I'm not winding up with my brother, okay?”

Tigue served us microbrewed beer with assorted pastries. He told us that he was being punished.

“At this very second?” I asked, looking around for possible implements of torture.

“Yes,” he said with a laugh. “My parents decided to leave me home instead of taking me with them to visit my Great Aunt Harriet in Colts Neck. I am, in effect, grounded.”

“Just think,” Willow said, all smiles and flirtation, “right now you could be sipping tea with Great Aunt Harriet and discussing your career goals.”

“You're grounded, but you're allowed to use the boat?” I asked.

“Well, no,” Tigue said, starting in on his second beer.

“But what Mom and Dad don't know won't hurt them,” Randy said.

My ineptitude in picking romantic prospects has already been firmly established, so it should come as no surprise that I felt myself falling head over heels for this spoiled, egotistical, adolescent alcoholic. I wasn't blind, and Tigue didn't put up much of a front. I knew exactly what he was, and I wanted him anyway. For Willow's benefit, I decided not to drool.

I'd lived my entire life on a lake and had never been on a speedboat before. That's not entirely true. After a particularly wild beach party during the summer after my freshman year, I'd sneaked aboard a moored speedboat with a girl whose extreme alcohol consumption had loosened many of her inhibitions, but that, of course, was different. We were interlopers, it was dark, and although we were going somewhere, the boat was not.

Willow's father had owned one of those pontoon boats when we were kids. The first summer he had it, we went for rides almost every weekend. The next year, we had to beg, and there was always some excuse—it needed gas, it might storm, he didn't have enough time. Midge never went on the thing because she complained of seasickness. The boat didn't last that long. It had to be trashed because improper maintenance had caused the bottom to start to rot.

Our ride in Tigue's boat, it turned out, was nothing like the long, lazy rides that Willow and I had enjoyed that summer of the pontoon boat. Tigue's boat was a speedboat and our captain was a nineteen-year-old who'd been stoked by twenty-four ounces of beer. He ignored the posted marina speed limit and tore out of the boat slip at a reckless speed. I got my first flash of fear as we barreled into the crowded water just outside the marina. It sent a shiver through my whole body. We zipped past other boats with only a narrow margin, sending the other crafts rocking violently in our wake. Tigue's laughter was infectious but disturbing. I wondered what he'd done to get grounded.

When we got out onto more open water, my fear melted away. We were safe. The speed now felt good. The wind whipped our hair back as we bounced over the waves.

“Woohoo!” Tigue shouted at the top of his lungs.

“Praise the Lord!” Randy answered back.

Tigue sprayed us with water by zigzagging left, then sharply right, the boat fishtailing like a car on a patch of ice. Then, still racing forward at full speed, he turned around to face me.

“Want to take the helm?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Come on, it's fun,” Tigue said. “I'll help you.”

My hormones took over. I stood up, bracing myself against the side of the boat. Willow muttered nearly inaudibly under her breath. When I met her eyes, she glared at me. We could discuss things later, I decided. Tigue gradually slowed the bloat down so that I could come up and take my turn.

The boat was easy to drive. There were no lines to stay in—the whole lake spread out before me. I only had to steer clear of the other boats, which wasn't hard. It was a big-enough lake. As promised, though, Tigue helped me. He stood behind me, one hand wrapped around me protectively in case I should forget how to work the steering wheel, the other punching up our speed so that soon it felt like I was flying as we leapt across the water. I had on only my bikini now, and Tigue had stripped off his designer shirt. His chest pressed against my back as he helped me drive. When his chest hairs brushed across my shoulder blades it sent a tingle over me. I could feel every single inch of my skin. It was taught and tense with anticipation.

I was vaguely aware that Randy and Willow were there as well. Willow, of course, was fuming with anger at me for moving in on what should have rightfully been her conquest. I tried to formulate a reasonable argument to smooth things over later when we would eventually talk about it, but with Tigue pressed up against me, my sensitized skin aware of the roughness of his shorts on the back of my thighs, it was difficult to think of anything else.

And Randy. Oh yeah, Randy. Randy has always been forgettable. It's this trick he has. He could be a modern-day superhero: Forgettable Man. It's a bird, it's a plane, damn, I can't remember what the hell it is. For the couple weeks prior to our boat outing, Randy had been busy working at his “real” job. We hadn't seen much of each other, and I'd even figured this was his way of ending things without having to go through the mess of a sticky breakup. So I didn't feel bad. I kind of liked the idea of being rid of Randy, although I thought I might miss him occasionally. Still, here was Randy, on the boat with me and this guy who I'd become completely smitten with, whose body, pressed firmly against mine, seemed to be quite taken with me as well. Randy was my … well, I don't even know what he was, but it would have been wrong to completely ignore him. I knew that much.

“So,” I said, in some pathetic effort to diffuse a situation that had the potential to make more than one of us uncomfortable, “should we go for a swim?”

We anchored in the middle of the lake. Tigue executed a perfect dive off the side of the boat. Willow and I slid into the water gracefully. Randy fell in, then tried to make it look as if he'd meant to do that by clowning around in the water.

“It's really a simple equation,” Willow said quietly as she and I tread water. “Anyone can see it. Brother, sister, and two friends of the opposite sex. If you were going to pair these four off, there's only one way it should go.”

“I must protest your heterosexual narrow-mindedness,” I said.

“Well, I didn't see you drooling all over me,” Willow said. “Would you have some common courtesy, please? If not for me, then what about Randy?”

I looked over at him. He and Tigue had swum far away from us and the boat, racing each other, doing first the breast stroke and then freestyle.

“Do you think they can make it back?” I asked. “If they drown, then the pairing off will be pretty much decided.”

“Maybe I'll take things into my own hands,” Willow said. She lunged toward me and made as if to pull me under. She dunked me. I dunked her back. We both came up laughing. Our voices were like siren songs pulling Randy and Tigue back to us. They were racing again, and when Randy reached us first, I understood the fierce look of determination on his face. He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me underwater with him. When we came up he kissed me hard. This wasn't easy to do, with the both of us treading water and bobbing up and down, not necessarily in sync. I didn't pull away because I was turned on, although it hadn't been Randy who'd put me in that state. That was when I realized that nothing would turn out the way I wanted it to that day. But I had no idea how far reality would diverge from my desires.

Back aboard the boat, Tigue raided the galley, which was really just a storage closet below deck, and came up with a cornucopia of half-finished bottles of alcohol, a bouquet of plastic champagne glasses, and a sleeve of stale saltine crackers. He poured stomach-churning combinations of peach schnapps, gin, and vodka into the glasses, cutting it all with a trickle of flat club soda. He passed the drinks around and we toasted the foolishness of youth or something like that. We ate the soggy saltines to calm the rumbling in our guts, then drank some more, basking in the afternoon heat. The sun's rays boiled the alcohol in our bodies and, just like some sort of chemistry experiment, changed its principal nature. Instead of the mirth-inducing, inhibition-releasing quaff that so many devoured for its feel-good properties, it became something else. It became fire. It became venom, liquid poison.

Afternoon turned to twilight turned to evening.

The four of us lay in various positions of discomfort about the boat. On the floor lay the emptied bottles of alcohol, their glass bodies and foil labels laughing at us. Tigue had puked twice over the side of the boat. The last time, he hadn't projected far enough into the water and left a trail down the side of the boat. He hadn't had the energy to splash water on it to rinse it off. Shortly after this last vomiting, he'd passed out in the little seating nook near the prow of the boat. Randy sat on the bench on the side of the boat, his head tilted back and his mouth opened wide. He snored. Only Willow and I remained in the world of the living, and this only barely. The swaying of the boat didn't help our abused stomachs. I felt very ill. Seasickness? No wonder Midge had never gone out on that boat. But this wasn't true seasickness—this was the self-imposed sort.