Nothing Real Volume 1 (3 page)

“Come sit,” he says, and pats the bed. He still has just socks on, and I want to say,
Shoes or nothing.
I want him to know how deadly this is.

“I can't stay long,” I say, taking a swig of beer.

“What's that about?” he says.

I want to leave before any of the songs with Nico come on.

“I have to get up early tomorrow,” I tell him, and it's not a lie. “I'm going with Jessica to White Plains and we have to be there by ten.” I'm getting my hair cut, but I don't tell him. Jessica knows a girl who'll do the type of cut that's almost shaved on one side. She'll do it in her apartment, so we don't have to pay the salon price.

The thought of the haircut makes me happy enough to sit down
and make out, even though a Nico song comes on. Kev makes little murmuring sounds, and I regret the day I started all this. When I told Jess I thought I liked Kev, she'd said, “Now there's some low-hanging fruit.” It took me a while to figure out what she meant.

Jess has one of those bedroom sets where everything matches. It's all white with gold at the edges. She sits cross-legged on her bed with badass, dyed black hair and a pair of jeans so tight at the ankle I don't know how she got her feet in. I feel better being there than at my house. My parents went to take Kate, my sister, to look at two colleges in Connecticut, but I said no, since I'd have to change my life
yesterday
to get in to either of them.

“I can't break up with Kev,” I tell Jess.

“Yeah?” Jess says. “Why should you?” She doesn't look up from the book she's underlining. I am losing the war for Jess's attention to Dickens.

“I should be able to, is the point,” I say.

“I guess you've gotten used to him,” Jess says.

“Used to Kev is like being used to peanut butter on white bread.”

“Yum.”

“Used to Kev is like drinking wine spritzers.” Jess sticks out her tongue.

“Used to Kev is like staying home and going to community college.”

“You are not going to community college. You are going to Syracuse, or UMass, or that crunchy place near Amherst.”

I want to tell her I'm not sure. I'm not like her. I have the same Dickens paper due Monday, but who here is writing, and who is whining? Jess is like my sister, Kate. They're good in a way I want to be, but can't.

“I don't know,” I say, and I can feel the words getting twisted up. Jess looks at me.

“You really have to shut the fuck up,” she says. “Why don't you go downstairs and get us a sandwich? If you can't cope with yourself, at least make yourself useful.”

When I go down to the kitchen, Jess's brother, Alan, is at the kitchen table with his legs up, so it's difficult not to see right up his baggy-ass lacrosse shorts. Alan gives me a look like he's never seen me before.

“Lawn-mower accident?” he asks, then laughs at his own joke. It takes me a minute to get the reference to my hair.

I ignore him, and get the peanut butter and bread. Jess's house is the opposite of Kev's—someone's always in the kitchen at Jess's and the food is all in plastic.

“Hey, make me one of those while you're at it, babe.” Alan is the kind of guy who calls you things like
chick
and
babe,
just to make sure you know he's an asshole.

When I'm done, I put Alan's sandwich on the table on top of a piece of paper towel, and then instead of taking Jess hers, I sit down at the table with Alan.

“So what's the good news?” Alan wants to know. He's talking with his mouth full, and I can see his right nut up his shorts.

“I don't know,” I say. “I'm thinking about going to Colorado for college.” This is a fabrication, made up on the spot, inspired by Alan's nuts and chewed food.

“Major party school,” Alan notes. “Didn't take you for such the part
aay
girl.”

“I'm not,” I say. “I just like the idea of going someplace far away.” I am, ill-advisedly, confessing my deepest, unknown-even-to-myself feelings.

“I hear that,” Alan says, and he nods and points his sandwich at me. “You know what I really need, babe?” he asks. “I need a lift down to Eddie's, you know, on Wharburton?”

I nod. Eddie's is the auto body shop owned by a guy a few years older than Alan, one of those guys who drives home the perils of not going away to school. Four years out of high school, and the guy has a beer gut, and only about half his hair.

Jess looks at me like I'm crazy when I say I'm giving Alan a ride, but she doesn't give me a hard time.

To go downtown, Alan slips his sneakers halfway on and walks on the smashed-down backs. He sits in the front seat of the car with his legs wide apart and cranks up the radio, so we don't talk.

Seeing Alan there in the passenger seat gives me a little chill down my back, like hearing a secret. When I stop at the light on Wharburton, I arch my back, give myself a good long stretch, arms over my head, and I catch Alan stealing a glimpse.

At Eddie's, he gets out, hesitates, and drums his fingers on the roof
of my Corolla.

“Hold up a sec,” he says. “Gotta see if it's ready.” He trots off, the sneaker backs dragging. When he comes back, he's shaking his head. “Fuckers,” he says, and slides back in. “They said they need another hour. Shit about putting on the wrong brake pads.”

“What do you want me to do?” I ask. “Go back to your house?”

“Nah,” he says. “We'll be turning right around.” He pauses. “How about we get a sixer? Sit over at Arnold Pond?”

“Aren't you in training?” I ask. Alan's the kind of guy who acts like being on a high-school sports team is a sacred rite.

“Lacrosse isn't football,” he says mysteriously.

Alan buys a six-pack of Heineken at the Indian deli, and I realize I am in over my head. Arnold Pond is a puddle with a fountain in the center. It is like the town planners were designing a place for kids to go in their cars. If you're telling a story about some girl you don't like, it's called Blow Me Fountain.

By the time we get back to Alan's car, the guys at Eddie's are ready to close, and Alan has to beg them to open the garage and get the car out. He's red in the face when he is yelling at the guys, like the last thing in the world Alan wants is to be back in the car with me.

When I get home, my parents and Kate have just gotten in from Connecticut, and they're all about going out for dinner, since mom isn't into cooking after a day of driving. I end up spending that Saturday
night at my family's favorite Italian place, Mardino's, which is, as luck would have it, across the street from Arnold Pond.

When I break up with Kev, he cries a little, and that makes me cry too.

We are on his back porch. It's this big screened-in thing that would be nice if they didn't have just a couple of old plastic chairs and some rotten piles of firewood in there. It's after school on a Thursday, and it's been raining since morning. During math, it thundered, and everyone got distracted and sat there staring out the window, watching for the jagged strikes of lightning.

It's still raining hard, and is too chilly to be outside. Kev has just taken an enormous hit off a fat joint when without warming up to it at all, I say I think it is over between us. He nods at first, but then won't look at me, and he starts wiping his nose, and that's what gets me choked up. I want to tell him about me and Alan, so he won't feel sad, so he'll be filled with a hatred that will make him storm away, burning with the need to be free of it. I want him to pull himself together, kick me out of the house, get in his car, and drive somewhere fast. I want him to want to scour the earth for a way out of his pain, but instead he crumples. I want to tell him:
This is how you change your life, stupid. Find any way out. Grab at it. Even something or someone you detest. If they are strong, grab on. If you are too afraid, let someone else do the pulling.

The body is elastic. Today's body not the body of yesterday. Her jeans glide over thighs, button, rest against hip bone. She is wearing a white V-neck T-shirt, and black leather combat boots, but nothing she wears diminishes her essential wholesomeness. If she took a bottle of pills, she knows she would immediately pick up the phone and calmly dial the poison hotline. Even on 'shrooms, she is somehow rock solid, thinking about her homework, her paper on
Hamlet.
An hour into her high she comes up with a title for it: “Hamlet, Just Like You and Me.”

“He's too real,” she says to Val—too much like a real person, and too little like a character in a play. A character who destroys himself by refusing to be a character. “Hamlet,” she says, “is everyone you know.” She can't shut up about it until Val puts his foot down.

“You're killing me with that shit,” he says.

Then they are at the park, lying on the grass, listening on Val's iPod to Steve and Hunter's alt-reggae version of “The Rivers All Run Dry” over and over. Val is nice. He holds her hand, and then they
both fall asleep, and wake in a cool dew. It doesn't matter that she hasn't called home. Her mother thinks she is with Fiona, knows nothing about Val, her first real secret.

Her jeans are too big now by a size or two, and her mother notices. It's okay, because she was chubby before, so no one bothers her about whether she is eating right. Her mother suggests they go shopping for some pants that fit, but Nancy doesn't want to jinx it. It is shameful to her the way she still believes in magic. Do the opposite and you'll get want you want. Don't think about Val; then he'll call. Pretend to be invisible and you'll be beautiful.

Today she is driving over to Val's for the first time. She's had her license for only a week, but took the old Fiat, ancient stick shift and all, to school the day before. She stalled twice at the light. To get to Val's, she has to drive through town—how many stop signs is that? How many hills? At least she knows the way. Now that she can drive, she is surprised by how many places she doesn't know how to get to. She didn't admit to Fiona on Saturday that she couldn't get to Indian Lake on her own; she just didn't go. Not that Fiona didn't know about her driving issues. Everyone drove before her, even some of the juniors. “Someday you'll just need to drive,” her mother said. She cried the second time she failed the road test, and it would have been a scene, if her father permitted any. “Just get the damn license,” he growled, and left the room. She didn't have a choice.

Now she has the used, midnight-blue Fiat as an early graduation present, to take with her to Boulder in August. It isn't where girls in AP English go to school, but that's another story, the only blot on her
record, the only tangible sign of her resistance. She'd almost vomited the morning of the SATs, not out of nerves, the way her mother thought, but from a hangover. That was back when she'd first met Val. He'd dropped her at home early enough, but when she lay down on her bed the room began to spin. They'd been at his place, drinking Jack Daniel's. She'd never even had hard liquor before. “That test is a load of crap,” Val had said. “Look at me. I got the second-highest fucking score in my grade. And where do I drag my ass every day? Gallagher Brothers' Paint Company and WCC. Community fucking college.”

“But you dropped out,” Nancy said. “That was your choice.”

“Exactly,” Val said cryptically. “You make your bed. Not them. Not the Bubblemen.” Val was both obsessed with and dismissive of the standardized tests and the IQ tests that had always placed him in the genius or top-achieving levels. He called the test makers “the Bubblemen,” and scorned their multiple-choice assessments of his aptitude. “If I'm such a genius, why am I here?” he asked, reasonably enough, Nancy thought. “If you're so smart, chickiebabe, why are you with me?”

“I don't test all that well,” Nancy reminded him, though before the hungover SAT debacle, she'd done fine.

Val lives in a rooming house at the end of Wharburton Avenue. There are about six studio apartments in the redbrick building that at one point had been a hospital. The lower floors of the building are occupied by offices—the usual orthodontists, shrinks, and a mysterious
business called Felicity Inc. that Val had never seen anyone enter or leave, but behind whose door there were always what sounded like women's voices. Val suggested it was the office of the dispatcher of a local dating service, and threatened, laughingly, to look up their number in the Yellow Pages, and to call for a girl to come upstairs. This is a joke between them, for although their relationship is the greatest romance, thus far, in Nancy's life, the attraction between them, which had begun as a constant electric buzz, had cooled into something that needed to be sought, and neither of them did. Maybe that's when Nancy stopped eating, to look for her desire in her own sculptural limbs. But it was hard to say what had happened. She wanted him to want her, as badly as ever, and yet she felt no softening within her, and he could apparently sense the lack of bodily invitation. Or maybe his desire had waned first.

Val claims that in his quest for the Truth through 'shrooms, ecstasy, and innumerable other substances consumed in the last five years, he has finally destroyed his libido. Or, perhaps, he also half-jokingly suggests, it's the unfortunate by-product of his remarkably high IQ. He claims the heat of their first month together was an aberration. “You can't have it all, chickiebabe,” he says. “No matter what they say on the Viagra ads.” But Nancy wonders if he isn't saving face, if he knows she no longer feels pulled toward him, a pulsing of body into the mind.
Thinks with his dick
was something people said, but she knows that desire, pure and simple, first drew her to Val. But then, nothing. Now, even her brain feels dulled, burned out by the prior fire.