No One Tells Everything (13 page)

You gave her a ride home last week and she touched your thick forearm when she said goodbye. Maybe, you think.

Mr. Phelps talks about sunk costs and you are glad to be in the back row so you can ponder Hadley. In your daydream she is herself but you are thirty pounds lighter and clear-skinned with sun-touched cheeks. You are at ease.

“Hey, Raggatt.”

Randy is a soccer player with a lean torso and slightly bowed legs. When he sweats during practice, his black hair curls up around his face like a servant boy in your mom’s Caravaggio coffee-table book. He kicks your chair.

“Hey, Raggatt.”

“Yeah?”

“So what’s up, man?”

“Nothing much.”

“We’re thinking about getting together tonight after practice. Drinking some brewskies.”

“That sounds good,” you say, knowing what is following before you can put a stop to the words. “I could pitch in some, if you want.”

“Yeah. Okay. That would be cool. Give me like twenty bucks. That should do it. I’ll let you know where we’re meeting up.”

“Okay,” you say, thinking that maybe this one time you will have things to say to make the guys laugh and slap you on the back.

You pull out your wallet and hand some crumpled bills behind you. It may have been forty instead of twenty. It doesn’t matter.

“Thanks, man. I’ll catch you later,” he says.

You wish you had lips like his, dark and full and wanted.

You are the one with the money. It is your only way in. It’s no secret and you don’t fool yourself. Hey, you think, at least you have that. What if you were you and you were poor on top of it? That gives you something to like about Charles Raggatt Sr., CEO, Remsfield Capital.

When the bell rings, you go where you always go for lunch: upstairs to the drama room. Sometimes Ms. Burnes is up there and sometimes she isn’t, but she always lets you and Steve hang out within her domain. You don’t want to like Steve, he’s effeminate and his idea of fun is renting Oklahoma or going to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but you tolerate him because he tolerates you. He would say you guys are friends, and that is something in itself. Sometimes Kelly comes by when her goth friends have cut school and she has nowhere else to go. She pierced her own nose last weekend and now it’s swollen and crusty so you aren’t surprised to see her, slumped in a corner beanbag chair, coloring her fingernails black with a marker.

“How come you’re so happy, preppy? Did you get another car or something?”

Kelly’s nose is disgusting. One nostril is twice the size of the other and there is a greenish discharge where the ring cuts through the skin. You must wrinkle your face in distaste because she laughs and touches it lightly with her forefinger.

“Hello to you, too,” you say, tacking up a corner of a Renaissance Fair poster that has slipped from the bulletin board.

Steve throws a piece of celery stick at Kelly. His bangs hang low across his face so he constantly flicks his head to shake them from his eyes. He pretends he likes girls but you know he doesn’t.

You sit on the floor between them, take out your lunch from your backpack, and start in on a large bag of Doritos. Kelly reaches quickly for a handful, leaving a trail of bright orange cheese dust on her shelflike chest. She is, as usual, in head-to-toe black—leggings, skirt over the leggings, T-shirt, big-soled shoes. She redraws a fake rose tattoo on her ankle with colored markers every day. You know she’s not so tough or she would have a real one already. She pops her headphones on, the music audibly tinny and angry.

“Are you going to the dance on Friday?” you ask Steve.

“Are you kidding?”

“It could be fun,” you say.

Hadley will be there. It will be dark and romantic and you will look good and Hadley will be there.

“I’d rather eat glass,” Steve says, flipping his hair.

“I don’t know,” you say.

Steve blinks. “What are you talking about?”

You reach for a pack of slightly crushed Ding Dongs. “Whatever,” he says, visibly miffed but not altogether dismissive, and for that you are grateful.

He crosses his arms and whistles a tune you don’t recognize, staring up at the miniature model of the Old Globe Theatre next to Ms. Burnes’s desk. Steve is always on a diet and he has already finished his small bag of celery and carrot sticks. You tilt the bag of Doritos in his direction and he takes one daintily between two fingers.

“Just forget it,” you say.

You have to pull your pants up a bit under your gut when you get to your feet. Kelly’s eyes are closed but she gives you the finger as you leave.

You are sitting in the front seat of your car, a BMW, blue, just two months old. It’s September but still hot and humid. You’re parked in the lot behind the Home Depot, your air conditioner on high.

You wipe your palms on your chinos and breathe through your nose. There is a humming sound just beyond your perception that gnaws at the edge of your concentration. You believe it and you don’t believe it. That someone could like you, that Hadley Jameson could like you.

“I liked the cheer you guys did at assembly last week. It was really cool how you got flipped in the air,” you imagine yourself saying to her. You squeeze your eyes closed as hard as you can to keep in focus, to not lose the thread. You feel as though it is starting to loosen from the spool and fall in soft loops.

You drive to the 7-Eleven near school again, hoping to run into Randy or one of his cohorts. It’s already five and no one has told you where to meet for the party.

You hold a cup under the cola Slurpee spout and watch the ice froth billow out in soft mounds. You drink it down fast, welcoming the cold headache that blots out all thoughts. You pretend you’re looking for something between the Blistex and the shoelaces because the pimply kid behind the counter saw you in here earlier and watches you a little too closely, like you are about to stuff a corn dog into your pocket and flee. A muted ding-ding signals the front door opening behind you, but you don’t want to turn too quickly and expose your eagerness or your reason for browsing, for the third time today, in the 7-Eleven.

Randy jerks his head a bit in greeting like the other soccer and football players do as he glides in from outside. Once, after a round of practicing in the bathroom mirror, you tried doing this head flick to Steve, but he laughed so fast the coffee yogurt he was eating came up through his nose.

“Hey, bro,” you say, with a quick glance Randy’s way before going back to gazing intensely at a bottle of WD-40. He goes straight for the Gatorade. “So, uh…What’s up?”

“Just got out of practice.”

Randy drinks half the bottle before reaching the counter. His legs glisten with post-scrimmage sweat, an outline where his shin guards were.

You wait, scraping the skin around your thumbs with the nails of your forefingers. You wait, even while Randy rips open the Velcro of his wallet. You wait as he fishes a couple of ones from the billfold.

“Hey,” you say, hoping you sound laid-back, even though you fear you sound pinched and whiney. He doesn’t respond as he drains the rest of the yellow-green liquid. “So, Randy.”

You can feel the heat of his skin through his jersey before your hand reaches his shoulder.

“Huh?”

You want to ask him where the party is, why you keep paying for beer for gatherings where you’re not wanted, why you aren’t—and won’t ever be—one of them, why it’s so hard to keep trying from day to day and not be any closer to what you think it is you want.

“Dude?” Randy asks, clearly impatient to make his exit. He stands in the open doorway.

You run your hand over your hair, gelled to a crisp.

“Nothing,” you say. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

“Later,” he says, as he launches the empty Gatorade bottle into the trash.

Once outside, it takes a minute for you to notice. You don’t see anything until you’re in the car and look in your rearview to pull out. Something on your back window. White and foamy. Letters. Words. You walk around you car.

Raggatt

=

Faggot

The shaving cream has started to melt and the letters are running together, but they may as well be carved into you. You look around. You fake a laugh in case anyone is watching. Your face is hot and swirling. You swipe your sleeve across the window and shake your arm off onto the parking lot. You get in the car. There is shaving cream in your hair.

To get home you drive north along the western edge of town and the sixteenth hole of Hunter Country Club’s golf course. Breathe. Ignore it. Pretend it’s all a joke. The shorn, deep green of the course is opulent in the dusk light. You turn onto Lily Pond Lane, where the large houses are set back from the road by huge lawns and clusters of oaks and maples and evergreen hedges.

Do not think about it, do not see those words.

As you pull up your sloped driveway, the late afternoon sun is setting and the colors of the yard are saturated. You sit in the car a long time, watching the light change around you.

Inside the house you go upstairs hoping to find Caroline, but no one is home. In the corner of the room, you see the bunny’s eyes reflect the light.

Fucking soft fur and innocence. You are flooded with shame and despair and fury. Make it stop. Make it better. Something slips, too deep to ever reach and put back in place.

You jerk the animal out of the cage by its ears as it shimmies and works its legs in a frenzy. It makes a slight mewing sound like a cat, which makes you even angrier. You stun it by whacking it hard against the wall in the hallway. You like the power of the pulsing life and small bones in your hand. You like the feral smell of fear. The rabbit pees on the kitchen floor before you make it outside.

From the pile of bricks for your mom’s garden pathway, you take a jagged chunk in your free hand. Your body feels taught and electric and with one swift bash, you crush the rabbit’s skull between brick and dirt. Stop. Just stop. It spins its leg for a while and then is still. You pound its head again and again until all that remains is torn and bloody fur.

It is quiet and cool amidst the pine trees. You throw the piece of brick as far as you can and kick the carcass down the embankment and into a pile of leaves and moss. You feel better. You feel calm. For the briefest of moments. Until you feel awful, cold to your toes, inhuman. You will never tell Caroline.

You push it down and down and down.

———

The Emeryville College student charged in the murder of a classmate is under suicide watch in a jail psychiatric ward today as his lawyer said he was busy preparing a psychiatric defense. The lawyer, Robert Dubno, said that he would pursue a defense that Charles Raggatt, 19, “is certainly not legally responsible for his acts.”

———

Over the past few days, Grace’s father’s motor skills have improved, and he has come home from the hospital. In the mornings he seems more like himself, even though it’s still an effort to get words out. By midday, his frustration at his body usually leads to sullen withdrawal. He spills his tomato juice down his chin. He takes the stairs slowly, one foot and then the other, leaning heavily on the banister, refusing help to get up to the bedroom. Grace found him standing at his bar last night, trying to get the top off a bottle, which she takes as a sign that he is becoming his old self again.

Today her mother has taken him to physical therapy so Grace drinks her coffee and walks through the empty house, infiltrated by the muted sounds of a lawnmower, birds, and hammering from the Coopers’ new construction. She leaves a message for Brian that she will need more time off and she hopes it’s okay and the number here if he needs to reach her, knowing of course that he won’t. She sits on the carpet against a newly re-covered couch in the rarely used living room and warms her feet in the sun. Charles has received her letter by now. Her head feels wooly. It’s the third day she hasn’t had a drink.

She remembers the empty bottle of Bordeaux she has in her room from the first night, currently under the bed, which her mother will discover soon if she doesn’t sneak it out.

The phone rings and her heart skids, but it’s only the dentist’s office with an appointment reminder for her dad.

“I think he has to cancel,” Grace says.

With the bottle in her fist, she walks out to the curb in her slippers and robe and nestles it discreetly beneath a bulging bag of grass clippings. Three different lawn crews are parked along the street, cutting, trimming, mulching, and watering almost every house in the neighborhood. At the mailbox she sifts through the garden and golf catalogs, investment statements and credit card bills, searching for that telltale handwriting. Nothing.

The phone rings again.

“I’ve got it!” she yells, running back up the driveway, even though no one is home.

She bursts through the door and knocks the phone off its cradle.

“Hello?” she says, panting. “Hello?”

“This is a recording. You have a collect call from an inmate of the Nassau County jail. Will you accept the charges?”

“Yes! Of course, yes.”

There is a whirring sound and then a click.

“Hello?” she says.

“Hello. Hi. Is this Grace?”

“Yes,” she says, trying not to blurt everything out at once.

“Um, hello,” he says slowly. “This is Charles. Charles Raggatt. Thank you for your letter.” His delivery is halting and formal, yet underneath he sounds young, not yet a man.

She slides her back along the wall, down to the floor.

“You’re welcome. Hi. How are you?”

“Oh,” he says. There is an angry exchange in the background. “Well, I’m okay. How about you?”

“I’m pretty good,” she says, smiling. “Thanks for calling.”

There is a pause on the other end.

“So I don’t know what you want to know about me. I’m not really used to talking about myself.”

“I want to hear anything,” she says. “Anything you feel like sharing.”

“There’s this quote I have. It’s one of my favorites. I thought I could read it to you. Do you want to hear it?”

“Sure. Yes.”

“It goes, ‘I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.’”