Save Yourself (25 page)

“Come on,” she said. “There’s a clearing.”

He boosted himself up onto her hood. “I’m fine here. Give me one of those.”

“But—” She stopped. “What the hell, you’re right.” She came back, forest detritus crunching beneath her boots, put the sixer down on the hood, and leaned on the car next to him. “We just always go to the clearing, that’s all.”

“We?” He cracked two bottles open with the opener on his key chain. The engine was ticking and the beer was warm and bitter. It was some fancy kind he’d never had before. He would have preferred a Coors, but beer was beer.

“My friends and I.”

“Yeah, I bet,” he said, and laughed. It sounded genuine enough but inside he felt as dry and crackly as the forest floor. “I bet you all drive out here in your expensive clothes and your expensive cars and then sit around and recite poetry about how much your lives all suck, right?”

“Maybe our lives do suck,” she said. “You don’t know.”

“I know mine does.”

She blew air out her nostrils. It might have been a laugh. “Well, then, Patrick. Tell us how you really feel.”

Which was an expression that he hated, because when people said that—
tell us how you really feel
—what they meant was
don’t
. Patrick looked at the sky, at the leaves he could hear but not see, beyond a vague suggestion of motion. “I feel like I’m dead but I haven’t stopped moving yet, and it’s only a matter of time before I get my brains blown out by somebody who survives the movie.” He laughed. Really laughed. “Zombie extra number six. Zombie with Gas Pump Keys.”

He lifted his beer to his lips but it was already empty. He felt numb but clearheaded, as if he’d lost his ability to feel pain and no longer had anything to fear. For once, Layla was quiet. He smelled her, patchouli and clove; saw her hair fall over her face as she looked at her hands. Fiddling with the coffin ring. He slid down to stand next to her, put a hand on either side of her waist, picked her up, and lifted her onto the hood of the car. She draped her arms over his shoulders, hooked her heels behind him so her skirt pulled tight across her thighs.

“I feel,” he said, “like I want to fuck you.”

In the gloom, she hesitated. “Just like that?”

“Just like that,” he said.

Of course sex didn’t work that way, so actually it was a few minutes later. But when you knew where you were going there was no need to wander around and Patrick knew where he was going: he was headed off a cliff. The last girl he’d been with was Caro and that had been in the dark, too. The memory of her was in his hands as he groped aggressively for this girl’s neck, her hair, her back, her legs, her tits, as he pushed his hands inside her sweater, over her ribs. She shuddered and her fingers dug into his shoulders. She said his name and he said something back and immediately forgot what it was. For all he knew it was
shut up
. When he felt himself starting to come it occurred to him that he should probably pull out, but he didn’t. Right then, in that moment, it didn’t seem to matter.

Afterward she tugged her clothes back into place, took his hand
and led him to the backseat of her car, took his arm and wrapped it around her. He let her. He felt drained. No; vacated. He’d thought that she would erase Caro from his mind and body at the same time, that sex would ease the killing numbness he felt, but sex was nothing if there was nothing behind it and now that they’d done it, nothing had changed, except that this one part of his life—Layla—had reached inevitability, and he could stop resisting. He could give in. They could never do it again or they could do it every night for a week.

Although, now that it was over, he did wish one of them had brought a condom. Which wasn’t the sort of thing you said to a girl you’d just had sex with.

“Look,” she said, and pointed out the window.

He looked. Outside, he could see a small vague patch of lightness in the bushes. Her underwear, he realized. It hung from a branch like a decoration.

“I always wondered how underwear ended up in places like this. Now I know. Next time I come here with my friends, I’ll see that and I’ll remember this.” She stretched languidly against him, made a small
mmmm
noise of satisfaction. “Because that was amazing.”

Which seemed unlikely, since he hadn’t given thought one to whether or not she felt good. Part of him wished that had been different—she wasn’t anything like a virgin but she was young, how many guys could she actually have been with, he should have made a little more of an effort to be nice—but mostly he just felt restless and annoyed because she sounded like she was reciting movie dialogue again. Nothing about what had just happened had been amazing.

She pulled herself up to straddle his lap. “Mind you, it wasn’t exactly the way I’d imagined this date going. I was thinking Denny’s for ice cream and a kiss on my front stoop. My parents would shit an absolute brick if they saw you kissing me.” She wriggled closer to him and ran her fingers down his chest. “You like me, don’t you?”

“Of course I like you,” he said, automatically. And he did, sometimes.
Just not particularly right now. After they’d just had sex. His dim guilt flared.

“Do you like me more than her?”

“Who?”

“You know who. Your brother’s girlfriend.” Her voice was carefully neutral. He didn’t answer. But Layla persisted. “Do you like me more than her?” she said again, and this time, the words sent knives through him. He forced the pain back down into whatever sticky, sore place it had come from and put his hand under Layla’s skirt. Because Layla was here and Caro wasn’t, because Layla had chased him and chased him and Caro had given up before they’d even started. Because he’d seen Caro naked, felt her back arch under him, and that time he had cared. He had cared and she had taken that from him and right now she was probably squealing and crying over the ugly goddamned ring and saying,
Oh, yes, Mike, oh, yes, I’ll marry you
.

“Right now, I do,” he said.

Layla smiled; not that sleepy bullshit smile, but a real smile that touched the corners of her eyes, and he realized that he’d never seen her smile like that before. She shifted on his lap. “Do you have to listen to them having sex?”

“Yeah.” He pushed three fingers inside her.

She inhaled. “Maybe bring me over sometime. They could listen to
us
having sex.”

He felt a flattened pang at the way her mind worked. Like a kid. Did she think they were dating now, would she expect him to take her to the prom?

He pulled his hand back. She put her own hands to his face and said, “Say something nice,” and the desperation, the plea, was obvious. He didn’t know how to respond. She wasn’t beautiful, she was cute, and that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. The sex had been decent, the blow job earlier that week had been decent, but neither had been spectacular. There wasn’t anything nice to say.

“Come here,” he said instead, which seemed to satisfy her. She
leaned down and kissed him, and he kissed her back. He thought, I’ll make it better this time, hooked his fingers under the hem of her sweater, and pulled it upward to take it off.

As his fingers brushed her rib cage he felt something strange on her skin. Like something hot was stuck to it. Her shoulders twitched and she made a tiny noise that didn’t sound like sex to him. He pushed her back.

“Are you okay?” Then he looked down at her. Black bra against her white body, that much he’d expected—but below the bra, he saw faint marks on her rib cage. They were too straight and too geometric to be natural.

“Better than okay.” She bent back down to kiss him again.

“Wait a minute.” The marks almost looked like tattoos, but tattoos didn’t feel like that, tattoos weren’t sticky.

“No,” she said.

He pushed her back again, less gently this time. Reaching up, he hit the switch on the map light. Layla went stiff and motionless, like a child caught disobeying.

The marks weren’t tattoos. They were cuts, crosshatched slashes carved into her sides like the world’s cruelest game of tic-tac-toe. Each cut was easily two inches long, clean and straight but not shallow. They were fresh. The tissue around them was a furious pink, swollen like a cushion, and the cuts themselves were crusted over with maroon. Behind the fresh wounds he could see scars from other, older cuts: some still pink, some faded to white.

His numbness snapped away like a window shade. “Jesus, what is that? Did you do that to yourself?”

“No.” Layla’s voice was very calm and she was making no attempt to cover either her bare skin or the wounds on it.

Feeling ill, he said, “Who did?”

Her chin went up. “A friend.”

“You let somebody do this to you.”

Her skirt was pushed up above her thighs, her arms draped over
his shoulders. Tucking a lock of Patrick’s hair behind his ear with a ghostly hand—the tenderness of the gesture made him recoil—she said, “It’s a ritual. He drinks my blood and I drink his. It’s not that different from sex, really. Just—more.”

Patrick stared at her. “Jesus,” he said again.

“Jesus is a fairy story.” Misunderstanding him—perhaps deliberately. Her lips curled, faintly. “My parents used to say that if I loved Jesus I could keep Him in my heart. Well, Justinian is in my heart. And my veins, and my capillaries. I don’t think that’s quite what they meant, do you?”

Her voice was warm, even a little playful, but her face was as blank and molded as a plastic doll’s. The sick feeling in Patrick’s stomach was spreading.

“At first he just made little cuts, like on my arm. But he didn’t want people seeing the scars. So he started on other places.” Her fingers reached down, touched the gashes lightly. Caressing them, almost. “It used to be okay. But now it’s never enough. There’s always a new experience I need to have or a new emotion I need to feel. I need to be tied up so I understand freedom, I need to fuck his friend who hates me so I understand love, I need to let him hurt me so I understand pleasure. And it’s always,
You’re strong enough to take this, don’t let your weakness control you, be brave, be powerful
. When I’m with him it makes this weird kind of sense. Like, of course he has to hurt me. How else could it be?”

There was soft upholstery behind Patrick and hard steel doors on either side. The spicy plastic smell of her car was choking him and her body on his lap was too heavy.

“One of the things he always tells me is that I won’t be able to be with anybody else, ever, because I have too much of his blood and he has too much of mine. But he’s wrong. Look at you and me. We understand each other. We’re the same. Being with you feels good.” She picked up one of his hands and pressed it against the cuts. They
were hot, the raised ridges of them like seams. Patrick’s brain was spinning. This was not okay. This was too far. Inside he was frantic but his body was paralyzed. Her eyes closed and she made a small, harsh noise that reminded him of the noises she’d made on the hood of the car; her body stiffened. “Just like that. It feels good.”

His fingers were sticky, and he smelled blood. He looked down and saw that one of the scabs had reopened as she touched it, and blood smeared them both. The hot-copper smell. The car exhaust. Outside there was only forest but inside there was a concrete floor, cinder-block walls, the crash of the world falling around him; the stickiness on his fingers, the certainty of death. He pushed her.

Hard.

She fell backward, and hit her head on the door. For the briefest and longest of moments she stared at him. Her hand moved slowly to the back of her head and he didn’t know what his face looked like but her eyes, staring at him, widened with shock, and then she started to cry.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. He could barely look at her at all. His fingers fumbled for the door handle and then he was outside. Hunched over on the ground, certain he was going to throw up.

But he didn’t. In the car he could hear her screaming, rhythmic thuds that were probably her fists pounding against the seat, sharper thuds that might have been her boots kicking the inside of the door. He walked with shaky legs to sit on the front bumper. Above him, the leaves rustled in the wind. Somewhere in the distance he heard cars. The air felt clammy and damp.

After a while, the noises in the car quieted and eventually she joined him. She’d put her sweater back on. Sitting down next to but not touching him, she stretched her legs out in front of her and played with her coffin ring, flipping it open and closed and open and closed. He didn’t look at her. He did not understand her. They were not the same. The garage, the trial, the old man with his head in his hands—his
mother, struggling to breathe—those things were horrors. The mess under Layla’s clothes was a game and he hated her for making him a part of it, for ever coming near him.

“I thought you were special,” she said. Her voice was filled with a dead, preternatural calm. “But you’re just another Ratchetsburg primate with sludge for brains. I thought we could save each other, but there’s nothing in you worth saving. Justinian says we’re better than you and he’s right.” She looked at him. There was nothing there. “It’s bizarre to think that fifteen minutes ago I was fucking you.”

“You and your friend don’t know anything about me,” he said.

“I know the Czerpaks are taking your house. Ryan’s dad told us all about it in Worship Group, how Jesus wants them to take all your money and teach you a lesson. So looks like you’re homeless, asshole. Serves you right. I used to babysit Ryan. He was a sweet little kid who liked balloons and hot dogs and SpongeBob SquarePants—”

And then he knew he really was going to throw up. He stood up and lurched over to the bushes, where he retched and choked on the warm beer he’d drunk and then on the noncontents of his empty stomach. Distantly, he smelled cigarette smoke. He wished this was the kind of nightmare where you woke up and loved your life, the sweaty sheets and the feel of the carpet under your toes.

“You’re pathetic,” he heard her say. “Find your own way home.”

A door closed. An engine turned over.

He was alone.