Save Yourself (9 page)

They finished eating and the feeling got worse. He left for work thirty minutes earlier than he had to and even then, it didn’t stop. This wasn’t the fun kind of could-think-of-nothing-else that he’d been through with other girls, when it felt like their naked bodies had moved into his brain and everything smelled like them and felt like them and he spent every waking moment seeing them or trying to see them or, if all else failed, imagining them. No, this was a miserable, seasick could-think-of-nothing-else. Caro was in his head but the reality was Caro and Mike together on the couch, in the armchair,
in bed on the other side of the wall, and he had nobody to talk to about it. Nobody.

Nights were agony.

He felt flipped, inside-out. As the days passed even a beer run with Mike felt like an exercise in self-mutilation; standing in front of the refrigerator case at the six-pack store, Mike said, “What do you think, Iron City or MGD?” and Patrick was so filled with
I think I slept with Caro and I want to do it again
that he could barely open his mouth enough to say, “Iron,” because he was afraid of what would come out.

He wanted to do it again, and again, and again. As many times as possible. He hated himself for it, but there it was.

It got so bad that the first time he found Caro home alone, which was Wednesday, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was washing dishes and when she looked up, there he was, standing in the doorway and staring like some kind of psycho. Her face filled with apprehension, and that made him feel bad—but after four days of being afraid to look directly at her, he couldn’t seem to do anything else. A lacy tracework of suds braceleted her wrists and the small hairs around her face were damp. She was beautiful.

“Stop it.” There were wet spots on her dress where she’d splashed herself. “Stop looking at me like that.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he was.

“It was a mistake. You know it was a mistake.”

“I know,” he said, and he did.

“You just have to not think about it. Just put it out of your head.”

That was rich.
Put it out of your head
, as if he hadn’t been trying to do exactly that every second of every day. As if he wasn’t trying to do it now, seeing the way her hair curled against her shoulders, the fine straight lines of her nose. But her face was wrought with tension and he knew she was right even if she was wrong, so he made himself grin and say, “Caro, it’s okay. Everything’s cool,” and she managed a smile back but he didn’t buy it.

Nothing was cool. The few conversations they managed to have felt like spun glass, fragile and carefully constructed—even stupid things. Were they out of milk yet, or had he seen her car keys. It would have been funny if it didn’t hurt so much, and who would have laughed about it with him anyway, except her. On Friday, Bill asked if he wanted to go drinking with a bunch of people and even though Bill and his friends were stoner idiots Patrick was so desperate for relief that he said yes. As they drove to the bar, the windows down and the music up, Bill’s truck smelled like weed and stale beer and coconut air freshener, and the smell made Patrick think of women, of the smell of a girl’s hair after you’d been out at a bar with her. Find a new girl, Patrick thought. Erase what had happened, wipe out all those sense-memories that he couldn’t shake and fill up the emptiness with new, unsullied ones.

Instead, he got drunk. The bartender was pretty, but not as pretty as Caro; her nose was a little snubbed and her front teeth bucked out. At one point, he found himself standing next to a girl he’d actually dated back in high school. Which wasn’t a big deal. She wasn’t the lost love of his life or anything. She was just a nice-looking girl that had always been a little out of his league. When she’d dumped him, right before Biology, he hadn’t been very surprised. The breakup had happened on day four of a five-day preserved-rat dissection: the wonders of the rodent intestinal system. The smell of the preservatives and the rat’s whitish-pink nose that would never twitch again were far clearer in his memory than anything about the girl. When he saw her at the bar, it took him more than a few seconds to realize that the reason she looked so familiar was that various parts of his body had spent time inside various parts of hers. So he said hello, and she said hello back, and he said you don’t remember me do you, and she said not really should I, and he said nah, that’s okay, and walked away. She wasn’t as pretty as Caro, either.

As he nursed his last beer in a dark corner by the pool table, the two guys waiting for the table started talking about bars. This bar,
other bars, bars they liked, bars they hated; the best drink specials and the best pool tables and where they’d gotten laid most often. He had to get out of there. He couldn’t find Bill, but he was getting used to walking. The night was warm, sticky in that dying-summer September way. Like most small towns in Patrick’s experience, Ratchetsburg was built around a triple nucleus of the schools, the city hall, and the shopping mall. The schools were surrounded by nice houses and a scattering of playgrounds, the city hall was surrounded by small shops that sold sandwiches and copies and office supplies, and the mall was surrounded by car dealerships and chain restaurants. Apart from those three areas, a sprinkling of churches, and a subdivision or two, what was left could all be filed under Don’t-Give-A-Shit, USA: bars and beer distributors, auto body shops and dry cleaners. Places everybody wanted, but nobody wanted to live near, so the neighborhoods around them—neighborhoods like the one where Patrick lived, like the ones he walked through now—were neglected and crumbling. He moved carefully, not too fast and not too slow and in as straight a line as possible. Walking drunk wasn’t nearly as illegal as driving drunk, but it would still get you busted. Out in the open air like this, he felt okay, but logic dictated that after five beers he wouldn’t pass a Breathalyzer. His name being what it was and small towns being what they were, he didn’t think he should take chances.

Halfway home, he saw the lights of the SuperSpeedy, a cool white beacon of civilization. Zoney’s was Ratchetsburg’s crappy convenience store; the SuperSpeedy was the nice one. If you wanted a meal after midnight in Ratchetsburg and didn’t feel like sitting down at the twenty-four-hour diner, it was the SuperSpeedy or nothing. They had hot food and coffee, six different kinds of creamer to stir into it, and a machine that dispensed three flavors of cappuccino. They also had bathrooms you could use without worrying about your inoculation history and the most expensive gas in town, except for the times when it was inexplicably the cheapest. The SuperSpeedy kept you guessing.

The store was filled with hollow-eyed people standing in line: at the sandwich counter, at the soda fountain, at the register. All of them waiting, waiting, their hands full of candy, chips, cups of coffee, money. It was like purgatory, with snacks. Not just the customers; the employees, too. They worked the registers, squirted ketchup on hot dogs, piled limp lettuce onto flaccid lunch meat and waited for it to be over, waited until they could go home. At least when he was at work, he didn’t have to make sandwiches. The SuperSpeedy might have been fancier than Zoney’s, but damned if it didn’t smell just the same. He took a red Gatorade from the refrigerator case and joined the line. None of the things he actually was showed here, not the job quitter, or the son of the drunk kid-killing piece of shit, or the prick who slept with his brother’s girlfriend and wanted to do it again and again and again. Somewhere out there a deer with a shattered pelvis had died painfully of thirst and hunger and infection, and it was his fault, and nobody in this store knew it except him.

Then a female voice said, “Patrick Cusimano,” and he turned. The goth girl stood behind him, wearing a knowing smirk and a frantically red plastic dress. Most of her black hair was up in two ponytails and she’d painted her eyelids metallic silver. If Hollywood ever made a creepy-doll movie set in outer space, she would have fit right in.

“Fuck,” he said. “Not you.”

She pointed to the bottle of Gatorade in his hand. “Those drinks are all sugar and sodium, you know. Plus high-fructose corn syrup. Completely artificial and completely terrible for you. Particularly for your teeth.” Her own teeth were straight and white, in an expensive, magazine-ad way.

Patrick gripped the clammy plastic bottle harder. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

“I’d take that personally if you weren’t so drunk.”

“I’m not drunk.” It was mostly true.

“No,
I’m
not drunk. So which of us is more qualified to judge?”

Her pert little nose wrinkled. “You smell like cheap beer, you know. Really. You reek. You’re not driving, are you? Because driving under the influence has not worked out well for your family.”

“You’re a bitch,” he said, but didn’t feel any real anger. He felt too tired and defeated to be angry. She was standing quite close to him now. The black barbed-wire bracelet on her bare upper arm was almost touching his sleeve. Anybody that didn’t know better would think that she had his permission to be standing that close to him, that they were friends.

“Wait,” she said, and walked away.

Patrick, his eyes fixed on the woman in front of him, didn’t look after her. Maybe he could get out of there before she returned, he thought as the line shuffled forward—but then she was back, pressing a pack of gum into his hand with slim fingers. “In case you
are
planning to drive home like that. You should eat, too. We could get some nachos if you want.”

“I don’t want.”

She smiled her snarky little smile. “Everybody wants.”

The line crawled forward. The girl twisted her coffin ring around and around on her finger, a gesture that could easily have seemed nervous on somebody less—less what? Self-assured. Rehearsed. Insane. “I didn’t see your car outside,” she said. “Where did you park?”

“I didn’t.”

“Did somebody drop you off?”

“I walked.”

She stared at him. “You walked?” From her tone, he might as well have told her that he’d hopped here naked on a pogo stick. It almost made Patrick smile.

Almost. “That’s what I said.”

“To buy Gatorade at one in the morning.”

“To get home.”

“From where?”

“From where I was.” Then they were at the front of the line and
Patrick put his drink on the counter. The clerk, his face slack with an all-too-familiar mixture of fatigue and resentment, barely glanced at them as he punched buttons on the register.

“Six eighty,” he said.

Patrick stared. The SuperSpeedy had an intense markup but this was ridiculous. “For a bottle of Gatorade and a pack of gum?”

“She ordered nachos,” the clerk said, nodding at the goth girl as one of the gray-faced sandwich trolls behind the deli pushed a plastic container bulging with cheese-covered tortilla chips onto the counter.

When she’d gone to get the gum. “I’m not paying for those.”

But the goth girl picked up the container anyway, her coffin ring glinting in the light. “See you outside, killer,” she said, and disappeared through the automatic glass door, her ponytails bouncing like the tails of two actual equines and her red plastic ass gleaming under the artificial light. The clerk watched her go, his eyes temporarily lit with ugly interest. Completely unaccountably, Patrick—never much of a fighter—found himself wanting to hit the guy. He could practically feel that greasy nose breaking under his fist.

But then she was out of sight, and the clerk looked back at Patrick, his eyes lifeless once more.

“Like I said,” he said. “Six eighty.”

He found her across the parking lot, sitting on the hood of her hearse and licking orange sludge from a tortilla chip held between two fingers. When she saw him, she grinned, her eyebrows darting up. “Serves you right. You are consistently not very nice to me, despite all my best efforts. The least you could do is buy my nachos. Which I shall, of course, be kind enough to share.” She held out the plastic tray.

Patrick sighed. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“I’m tenacious.”

“You left tenacious behind a long time ago. You’re more like herpes.”
He took a nacho. The chip was crisp and the sludge was hot and the combination was appealing, in an unwholesome way. Next to him, the girl grinned and licked away at the orange goo. It was horrible to watch, but difficult to turn away from—the salt crusted around her fingernails, the orange smears of sludge on her pink tongue—and all of the colors seemed preternaturally intense: red red dress, yellow yellow chip, black black hair, orange orange cheese. It was as if she were under a spotlight, shining more brightly than everything else.

“So why do you hate me so much?” she said, licking. “Is it because of the whole Ryan Czerpak–worship group thing? Because I have to tell you, I couldn’t really give less of a shit about my dad’s worship group.”

Patrick took another chip. “Maybe it has something to do with the way you show up everywhere I go saying things like ‘drunk driving hasn’t served your family well.’ ”

“You don’t find my candor refreshing?”

Candor. This time, he really did smile. Just a little. “I do not.” Although, after almost a week of working as hard as he could to avoid saying what he meant, he kind of did. “What’s a worship group?”

“Like a church, but independent. It meets in our basement.” She took another chip, too. This time, instead of licking the chip itself, she ran a finger through the cheese and licked that instead. Her nails—painted black, of course—looked like she bit them.

“Speaking of your dad, do your parents know where you are?”

The girl tossed the second chip after the first. “Of course. My conservative Christian parents fully endorse me hanging out in parking lots in the wee hours of the morning.”

“Wearing skintight plastic dresses.” When he’d been in high school, the freaky kids had made do with concert T-shirts and thrift-store rags. Internet shopping had apparently blown the teen angst universe wide open.

“PVC, technically. You told your parents everything when you were my age, of course.”