Ferocity Summer (2 page)

May

W
illow was the one with the car, and she cut out early. I would have gone too, but I had a chemistry test and was still optimistic enough to think there might be a good reason not to flunk out of high school. At two thirty, this left me with two options. The first was to take the bus. The second was to call Willow and demand she pick me up.

I scrounged in my pockets for change while mentally cursing my mother for being too cheap to let me have a cell phone. I dialed Willow's cell from the one available pay phone and got her voicemail. Crap. I had just enough change for a second call. I called her family's landline and stood there counting rings. I knew voicemail picked up on six, so as long as I hung up before then, I would get my money back. At four and a half, someone picked up.

“Hello?” The voice, with its disaffected college-boy tone, stunned me into silence. “Hello?”

“Randy, um, hi. Is Willow there?”

“I don't know where the fuck she is.”

“Right. Okay, it was no big deal. I was just hoping she could give me a ride, but—”

“Where are you going?”

“Just home, but—”

“Where are you? I'll come get you.”

It's hard to explain how I feel about Randy Jenkins. It's not that I hate him. I just never really liked him. You watch movies, and you get the impression that people date each other and get into relationships because they are in love, but I think that most of the time that isn't the way it is at all. I think mostly it's a matter of convenience. I mean there I was, a horny sixteen-year-old girl, and there was Randy, a young man in the prime of his life. Boom. Kismet.

This isn't some sad commentary on the state of the modern world. It's the way it's always been. Long before the Civil War and the whole marching-through-Georgia thing, William Tecumseh Sherman went and married his sister (which was all on the up-and-up since Sherman was adopted). Anyway, you've got to figure that part of that, a big part of that, was just the convenience of the whole thing. I mean, how did one even meet people back then? But there those two were, and they at least knew each other, so why not, right?

I'd made a silent promise to myself to stay clear of Randy this summer. Somehow, I just figured it would make things easier. I felt this deep dread in the pit of my stomach at the thought of having to refer to Randy as my boyfriend. The last thing I needed was a boyfriend. Plus there were complications that went way beyond those usually found in teenage relationships. It was supposed to be a
No Randy Summer
. I pictured it in my head like those blue and white
Drug Free School Zone
signs, but we all know how well those work.

When Randy's old BMW pulled up to the curb at the side of the school, my heart began to beat in a staccato rhythm and my underwear grew damp. Oh well, so much for vows.

“Hey, Scilla,” he said when I got in. “You look good.”

“Thanks,” I said, then added, “for the ride. Willow ditched early today.”

“Willow's turning into a full-time juvenile delinquent,” Randy said.

He took the back roads home, racing around curves, ignoring the speed limit. I didn't know where to put my hands. I held onto my knees. My jeans absorbed the sweat from my palms.

“So, what've you been up to?” Randy asked.

“Not much. School and stuff. The usual.”

“Yeah, me too. I've missed you.”

How can I explain the way Randy talked? It was like nothing he said ever meant anything. It was like he was reading a script, but not getting the inflection right. It was like he was saying things because he knew they were the right things to say, but there was no real meaning behind them. I knew all this, and still I could feel myself getting hotter than seemed appropriate for the cool spring afternoon.

I had been conditioned to see Randy in a certain way, a way that usually involved scant amounts of clothing and small, cramped, secluded places. So I suddenly didn't feel much like going home.

Randy pulled off somewhere, a wooded little parking spot in the middle of nowhere. We tore into each other. I can't call it making out. It was too depraved, too violent. We were like hungry wild animals. A castaway on a desert island would act like this at an all-you-can-eat buffet. We were monsters, but it felt good.

Twenty minutes later, I sat with my cheek pressed against the velour of the seat while Randy traced some sort of design in the damp flesh of my stomach. I felt empty.

“Death is chasing me,” Randy said. I stared out the window at a chipmunk sitting on a rock. I concentrated on its sharp, fast, quick little movements, trying to absorb whatever the hell Randy was talking about. “This girl died on campus a couple weeks ago. That's why I'm home early. Didn't take my finals, got some sort of deferment.”

I turned away from the chipmunk to look at Randy. His pants were still unzipped. I caught a glimpse of pubic hair, and it made me feel nauseous.

“You knew her?” I asked. “You must have been close to her.” I felt almost jealous. It was a very weird feeling.

“Not like that,” he said. His eyes twitched. I knew he was lying.

“I don't really care,” I said.

“Fuck,” he mumbled. He opened his door and got out of the car. He went to the edge of the woods to pee. I looked back out my window, but the chipmunk was gone. Maybe Randy had scared him away. When he climbed back into the car, he reached for the keys but suddenly stopped. He laid his head back against his seat and began to run his hands through his hair.

“I just keep thinking that if I could get my hands on enough money, I could buy myself a new life and just make all the bad shit go away.”

“That's easy for you to say,” I said. “You were born rich.”

“Not rich enough. Oh, fuck you, Scilla. Upper middle class is something short of wealthy.”

“Is Tigue rich enough?” I was still facing the window and my voice had grown very quiet. Randy didn't say anything at first. I thought maybe he hadn't heard me.

“Maybe,” Randy said. “Maybe. So, what do you guys think about August?”

I turned back toward Randy. “Willow and I have an unspoken agreement not to talk about the matter.”

“Well, that's very fucking mature.”

“Fuck
you
, Randy.”

“I'll take you home.”

As we sped toward home in silence, it occurred to me that I should ask Randy more about that girl at his school, the one who died, but I never did. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference if I had. Maybe life just plays itself out however it wants to. I've kind of got this obsession with analyzing my past mistakes to see what I could have done
differently to change things, but sometimes I feel like fate is just too powerful a force, that it would make everything the way it wanted it anyway, no matter what I did. Then again, maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better so that I don't have to take any responsibility.

Later in May

W
illow and I lived on Cherry Blossom Lake, in a town filled with lakes in a part of New Jersey filled with lakes and trees and cows and not much else. There'd been a time when Cherry Blossom Lake was a swank resort area, but that time was long gone. On one end of the lake were folks like me, poor slobs who lived in tiny, castoff vacation homes. On the other end of the lake lived the Jenkinses and their ilk, in their newer mini-mansions with their wall-to-wall carpeting and garage-door openers.

“You're not even dressed,” I said. I walked through the back door of Willow's house only to find my ride looking like she'd just stumbled out of bed.

“This is high school,” she said. “What the hell do you need to get dressed for? I think a dirty T-shirt and old cut-offs are perfect attire.”

“When was the last time you washed your hair?”

“Weeks ago. Months. Who cares?”

That, perhaps in a nutshell, was Willow. Or not a
nutshell, because who could imagine Willow cooped up in a little nutshell? She would never last a second in a nutshell. She would break out immediately.

“You have breakfast?” she asked.

“We'll be late.”

“Like I said, it's high school.”

Willow began to rummage through the refrigerator, a fancy stainless steel model with the side-by-side doors. She grabbed a carton of Tropicana Pure Premium. I thought of my own fridge, seventies harvest-gold. The few items on its bare shelves were all of the caca-brand persuasion. “It all tastes the same,” my mother insisted.

Willow opened several different cabinets before coming up with a bottle of Grey Goose vodka. “Screwdrivers?”

“Why not? Like you said, it's high school.”

“That's the spirit.”

She took out two tall glasses and filled them nearly half full with vodka.

“We'll be drunk before we even get there,” I said.

“That's the point.”

Willow dumped in some orange juice for good measure. She handed one glass to me and picked up one herself.

“To summer,” Willow proposed. “Which is less than a month away.”

“To summer,” I agreed.

We drank. I coughed, momentarily stunned by the high percentage of alcohol, then drank down the rest of the drink much too quickly. I remembered reading somewhere that screwdrivers got their name because it was mechanics or
oil-rig workers or something who had invented it, stirring their drinks not with traditional stirrers but with screwdrivers. That's history for you, and how much of that is bullshit I don't know, and besides, what the hell does that have to do with two high school girls drinking the legendary concoction at seven thirty on a Wednesday morning in the middle of May?

“Let me piss first, then we'll go,” Willow said.

It was a long piss, and I understood that that's not what it was at all. There were some regular bathroom sounds thrown in for good measure—toilet flushing, sink running—but I knew that Willow's true mission was the imbibing of some narcotic substance slightly more potent than the orange juice and vodka concoction.
Well, whatever it takes
, I thought, but didn't quite feel. It wasn't even eight o'clock in the morning, for chrissakes.

Willow came out of the bathroom with a flushed face and damp skin. She looked like shit, but who was I to say? This was, after all, high school, and who was there to impress?

Willow didn't so much drive to school as slightly guide the car on a route more or less destined to get us to school, or at least, school's general vicinity. She swerved back and forth on the road, and came close to hitting too many stationary objects to count. I felt a little woozy myself and was in no shape to complain.

I was thinking about the subject of our toast, of summer. As a kid I had always looked forward to summer—and the temporary escape from the hell that was the education system—with unmitigated joy. Times had changed. Now, the very thought of summer made my stomach knot. Okay, maybe the liquid breakfast was partly responsible for that. But there were plenty of other reasons for my stomach and my entire body to be completely uncomfortable that morning. My best friend was having a love affair with mind-altering substances, my future looked bleaker than bleak, and, oh yeah, there was August—when the fates of the universe disguised as a jury of my peers (a completely misinterpreted law, by the way) was set to decide my future in the world. Amen. Hallelujah.

Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.

The principal of my school was not a witch but she played one on TV. At least she looked the part, with her pale, pockmarked skin and her jet black hair with its white streak down the middle. In heels, she was over six feet tall. She could glare down at you with eyes that seemed to have been borrowed from the devil himself.

We showed up fifteen minutes into first period and had to go to the office for our late pass. It was just our luck that Dr. Smarelli was talking with the secretary when we walked in.

“Willow Jenkins, Priscilla Davis,” she said. “Let me guess, you're here for another late pass. I believe you've hit your limit this month. You can join your old pals in detention tomorrow afternoon. You know, girls, it's way too early in your academic careers to be so apathetic.”

“It's way too early to be awake,” Willow said. “And at school.”

When she talked, I flinched. Maybe witch Smarelli noticed this, or maybe she just noticed Willow's somewhat slurred speech. She came up to the desk to write out our passes herself. Willow, never one for inhibitions, was even further loosened up by her morning indulgences. She leaned across the desk and whispered loudly in Smarelli's ear.

“Let's the three of us go into your office right now. We'll munch your rug for the courtesy of a suspended sentence.”

The secretary turned ghostly pale and knocked over a mug of coffee. I watched the brown stain engulf a stack of attendance sheets while the knot in my stomach got tighter. Smarelli sniffed at the air like the world's ugliest bloodhound.

“You've been drinking! It's not even nine in the morning, and you've been drinking!”

I watched the secretary mop up the brown puddle with a wad of tissues. It was a hopeless task. Most of the coffee had already been absorbed by the paper. For some reason, this made me think of Randy and his goal to make enough money to buy a new life. I think that's why I started laughing.

It's a weakness of mine, laughing when I shouldn't. Normally I can stop it. I was, however, mildly drunk, and my laughter got away from me. I couldn't even stop laughing when Smarelli told us to get into her office, not even when she threatened to suspend us. That actually made me laugh harder.

Approximately
One Hour Later

O
kay, so we weren't Girl Scouts. We had our share of shortcomings and vices. To be fair, it wasn't entirely our fault—we had circumstances working against us. I was one of those single-parent statistics, a fatherless, futureless fuck-up living on the edge of poverty. I was slightly better off than Civil War badass General Sherman, in that my mother hadn't given me up to some random family at the age of nine for financial reasons. But that might only be because such an opportunity never presented itself to my mother.

Willow had the benefit of money and two complete parental units, but they were both nut-jobs. Her father took a totalitarian sort of approach to child-rearing. He was strict to the point of alienation. With repression that bad, it was physically impossible to be good. Then there was Midge, who insisted on spoiling her daughter without restraint. That, and, well, Midge's grasp on reality was somewhat tenuous. Between these two poles, Willow was pulled completely out of shape.

I'm not trying to blame anyone for our problems, but sometimes when I really think about things, I wonder if we ever stood a chance in this world.

Is this an appropriate time to bring up the fact that Sherman, himself, was something of a hellraiser during his West Point days? There are legends that persist to this day about his midnight potato-smashing raids on the cafeteria.

“What I'm saying,” Smarelli said, “is that this is a very serious offense. Suspension would be going lightly. I could expel both girls if I wanted to.”

Willow and I sat in the office, flanked by our mothers. My mother was still dressed in her supermarket smock. She kept playing with the
Always for Less
button she was wearing. Midge had been pulled away from the tanning salon. She had on a lavender warm-up outfit.

“Don't you think that's a little harsh?” Midge said. “I mean, all they did was have a little drink. They're teenagers; of course they are going to drink. All teenagers drink.”

“I didn't,” Smarelli said. If Midge was a little closer, I think Smarelli might have bitten off one of her pretty little manicured fingernails. “There is absolutely no excuse for showing up at school in an inebriated state.”

“But at least they went to school,” Midge said. “I mean, I think we should be proud of them for that.”

Next to me, my mother sighed through her teeth. Smarelli's face changed colors.

Midge would take Willow's side in any argument, but this time she had a very good reason to try to extricate her daughter from any disciplinary measure. Mr. Jenkins would come down much harder than the school on Willow, if he found out about this, and if Willow did get suspended, then he would most certainly find out.

“Drugs and alcohol are some of the biggest demons plaguing our youngsters,” Smarelli said. “It's our job as educators and parents to take a firm stance against the use of such substances. Especially in light of the events of last year, I cannot stress enough how important it is that Willow and Priscilla be made aware that this behavior cannot be tolerated.”

“Punish them,” my mom said, “but for this incident and nothing else.” She locked eyes with Smarelli. The temperature in the room went up a few degrees, but I felt chilled to the bone. My mom made a far better bitch than Midge. I could almost see Smarelli shrink. Although she didn't move, she appeared to be cowering.

“I wouldn't think of punishing them for anything but what happened today,” Smarelli said, in a tone so weak and quavering there could be no doubt she was full of shit. “I think a week-long suspension is appropriate.”

“Two days should do it,” my mom said.

“Right,” Smarelli said. “Two days will be fine, uh, starting tomorrow. Today the girls go home sick.”

The sentence was fairly light. I think I might have felt something akin to relief. It could have been a lot worse. The problem, I guess, was that I hadn't really cared what the outcome was. It didn't make a difference to me. Detention, suspension, expulsion—it was all the same to me somehow. I think my mom and Midge cared more about what happened to us than we did.