Inexcusable (15 page)

“Do you even know what rape is?” I say to her.

She doesn't respond. She kneels and kneels like some kind of a religious figure, some kind of skinny Buddha or something, and it's as if she is getting stronger somehow while I am getting weaker.

“Okay, nobody is really innocent, are they? In real life. Nobody at all can say exactly that they are innocent. I don't
want to prove to you that I'm innocent, Gigi, I just

want to prove to you that I'm good. Good is better than innocent, because at least good is
possible.”

She says nothing.

“Remember, you said I was good? You said, just last night to Fran, you said I was a good guy? That was me. This is still me. That's what you're forgetting.”

I am sitting on my bed now, by the door, and the rubber smell is stronger than ever. Like tires spinning out on pavement.

“Do you smell that, that rubber smell? Terrible, isn't it? Where do you suppose it comes from? Look at all those lovely pine trees out there. That's what we should be smelling, don't you think? The pine trees?”

Nothing.

“You haven't even tried, Gigi. At least I am trying to do something. At least I get credit for that.”

Nothing.

“You know what it feels like? Okay, Gigi. You know? I'll tell you. It feels like, like I have two hearts. I have two hearts, and they are both working at the same time. And sometimes they are working in the same direction for the same thing and I can move redwood trees out of your way and then plant them again. But more of the time they are working on two different things at the same time and they make an unholy mess. And that's what happens.

“But remember when you said I was a good guy? You should remember that.”

I don't get nothing this time. Gigi Boudakian gets up off the floor, stares at me, then takes a seat on the edge of her bed.

“Good guys aren't rapists,” she says flatly.

Oh thank God. Finally. For the first time in a lifetime, we are getting through the fog. She is seeing me again, and I am hearing what I should be hearing. She is seeing what she is supposed to see, and I could fall to the floor and kiss her feet.

“That's right,” I say, nearly whining with appreciation. “That is what I have been trying to explain to you. It was just, it was just bad connections—”

“And you are a rapist,” she adds, flatter still.

I am pulling my hair now. I could scream. I could wilt. There is very little left in me.

“I didn't rape you, Gigi.”

Nothing.

I get up, walk over to her bed. I crouch down to her just the way she did to me so sweetly hours before, when she kissed me hours before. The best kiss in anybody's life, just those tiny few hours before.

I stare into her eyes. More to the point, I get her to stare into mine. I am still certain, still lock-certain, that if she could see me for real again, this could all be put right again. I stare.

And I wait.

And I stare.

Cold as crystal, her eyes remain, cold as crystal.

I kiss her. I kiss Gigi Boudakian as softly and as full- heartedly as I know how, and when I do it I love her all over again, more than ever, again.

This is all we need. Gigi Boudakian cannot possibly think the wrong things when she remembers my loving her so. Nobody can be loved as hard as I love her and not be moved by that. She just needs to remember.

I tip her back onto the bed. I start kissing her differently now, harder, with passion, with love, with fury, I pull at her dress, get her shoulder exposed, and I press the full weight and length of my body down over the full length of hers as I swing her legs up onto the bed. I kiss her neck, and her ears, and her eye.

She feels like a long tall rag doll. I jerk back. She hasn't even closed her eye when I kiss it. It is the most chilling, most creeping thing, and I push up off her.

I stare down, and now she is staring into me. She is seeing me now.

I am still spooked, but I lower myself again and am kissing her again, loving her again, and watching her eyes. Her beautiful soft chocolate Gigi Boudakian eyes, frozen in place on me. In me.

And I stop.

We are there, for an eternity, my body still moving slightly like an insect with its head yanked off. I can feel horror lines grooving my face.

I am horrified. I am sick.

I pull away, jump up. I back away from her, all the way across the room from her, and she doesn't so much as blink. I fall back onto my bed, let myself fall, let myself go flat and lifeless. I turn over on my side, looking in her direction, and I curl into a tighter and tighter coil.

After a very short pause, Gigi Boudakian stands. She gathers herself, gathers her things, fixes her dress, her pretty, pretty dress from pretty yesterday. She has her shoes in her hand and her bag on her arm as she moves, with unfathomable grace, past me and out the door.

I roll over onto my other side, face the cinder-block wall, and wait for whoever is going to come for me.

Read a sneak peak of
Killing Time in Crystal City
, another gripping novel by Chris Lynch.

Crystal City called for him, and Kevin answered. And why wouldn't he? His relationship with his father is broken—as is his arm. With barely anyone to miss him or care if he's gone, it seemed like the perfect time for Kevin to run away to his estranged uncle and create an entirely new identity. New name. New attitude. New friends. Maybe even a new girl.

From the first moment of this adventure, Kevin's life takes a turn for the more exciting. Making friends seems easy with his new persona, especially when a group of homeless beach bums instantly include him in their crew. But do they like the real Kevin, or the guy he's pretending to be? And will this new lifestyle help Kevin escape from the misery of his former life—or will it drag him right back into the reasons he left home?

I
came for the name.

I should probably be embarrassed to admit making a big decision based on such lameness. But I figure if you are aiming for a place to do a total reboot on your whole entire self, then you aim for a place with a name like Crystal City.

It's a name that calls you to come. As soon as you see it on a map, or on a bus schedule, or if you hear somebody mention it, the impulse is to think, yup, that's the place. It wants me and I want it. It conjures immediately
The
Crystal City, the very home of clarity and radiance and shimmering promise. I can't be the only one to have noticed that. I know. So it has to attract lots of people, peoples, types. Lots of people who are looking for stuff. Looking for what I'm looking for.

Whatever that turns out to be.

More than anything, it needs to
not
be the place I am leaving behind. Ass Bucket is the name of my town. Not really. But, really.

I might well find out what I
am
looking for just by going. Maybe somebody there will even tell me.

Or, possibly, I don't have to wait that long.

*  *  *

She gets on the bus at our one stopover, the midpoint between Ass Bucket and Crystal City. I wouldn't have noticed her, since I have the premium, top-deck, front-seat position, except that she bangs her way up the stairs and down the aisle with the kind of stomp and thump that just forces you to turn and look.

So I turn and look.

She throws her backpack onto the window seat and takes the aisle seat, second from rear, left. I become aware of my staring only when she stares back, with an exaggerated head tilt and a dropped open mouth that are not meant to flatter me.

She has
noticed
me. Already, right there, my life has changed beyond all recognition.

She has a cast on her left arm. I have a cast on my right. If you do not answer when the universe calls out to you as clearly as that then you, pal, are a shitbag and you deserve to be a shitbag and live the loser life that comes with it.

I turn away and look at the road ahead, because she intimidated me and forced me to. But every real part of me wants to do the opposite, wants to do what I would never do. Before, anyway. I would never make that long and scary walk down that aisle separating me from her. Before.

Now, however, I can't stop thinking about doing exactly that. The road and the cars and the landscape ahead, so mesmerizing up till now, are suddenly nothing, and the girl behind me means everything. If I can't do this now, when everything tells me this is the this and now is the now, then I might as well just slither out the bus window and walk all the way back to Ass Bucket to resume my former life as a shitbag.

That thought propels me out of my seat, onto my feet, backpack in tow, to my new best seat in the house. Aisle seat, second from rear, right.

I sit for ten silent minutes, which is not really that long of a silence unless every one of those six hundred seconds is spent on my agonizing over coming up with an opening,
the
opening, that will launch the conversation and the future and all the incredible betters and bests waiting for me in that future, and an eleventh minute waterlogged in the realization that the reason I am speechless is that I have just put
all
that lifetime of pressure on this one small opening jab of communication.

Just speak, ya dope.

“We have something in common,” I say, shocked at the sound of my own voice but not as shocked as I am at the sight and sensation of reaching boldly across the aisle and tapping her cast with mine. I draw my arm rapidly back to my territory and savor the sad and thrilling reverberation of that instant of human contact, and plaster be damned because human contact it was.

She turns her head slowly in my direction, the kind of slowly that suggests I'm either getting attitude already or maybe her neck was also injured in whatever accident did her arm harm. I'm hoping the universe doesn't hold it against me that I am wishing her neck pain over attitude.

The long turn of her head takes a little detour to look at the spot where I touched her—like I left a stain or something—then continues up to engage my actual face.

“What?” she says. Could she possibly know of the torture that went into the first run of my clever line, never mind the rerun?

“I said, we have something in common,” I say, and watch with fascination as this arm, which apparently belongs to me but could just as easily be the mechanical grabber on one of those carnival claw machines, reaches over and taps hers again.

“Well, it wouldn't be
proper
boundaries
, because
I
have them. I also have pepper spray, a knife, and steel-toed boots I like to call the ‘testicle testers.'”

This is not how it's supposed to go. The new and wider and bolder world is supposed to be friendlier and appreciate gestures like this. I am supposed to get things
right
this time. And the new and wider and bolder me cannot just accept this kind of failure if things are going to improve, and they
have to improve, they have to improve.

“I'm sorry,” I say, leaning in a slightly unnatural way in the opposite direction from her. And I place my left hand on top of my casted right forearm, as if I can hide the shameful thing.

I cannot possibly hold this pitiful and awkward posture for the rest of the ride, but I fear I am going to attempt it, shitbag that I am.

Fortunately, I don't have to put it to the test because after about two minutes, she speaks to me.

“Hey,” she says, and I turn cautiously to see her expression not quite the hard thing it was. Her face shows what I might possibly recognize as pity, which I am more than happy to accept.

“What?” I say. I try to match the disinterested tone she used when she asked me that same question, because I think that acting the way this cool person does is a pretty good step to start on whatever it is I'm starting on. She doesn't seem to notice.

“How'd you get yours?” she asks, pointing from within her proper boundary area at my cast.

Oh. Oh right. What kind of feeb am I, that I thought I could initiate an arm-cast discussion that wouldn't come fairly quickly to this question, which I do not want to answer? Which I really, really, do not want to answer.

“My dad did it.” The words burst out of me like the stream from one of those pump-action water guns.

“Oh,” she says, but an unstartled “oh.” “You poor kid.”

She doesn't follow it up for any elaboration, which is a surprise and a relief.

“How about you?” I say, pointing from an appropriate distance because already I'm learning these rules of the road I'll need to live by.

“What? I don't even know you. I'm not telling you something like that.”

What? That was an option? Opting out was an option?

“I didn't know that was an option. Just refusing to answer the question? Especially after you just . . . that's an option?”

She tilts her head again, befuddled by my befuddlement. We've only just met but this is already an unfortunate recurring motif in our relationship. She knows I'm a dolt before she knows my name.