Smashed (3 page)

When we arrive at Lance’s, the music sends a pulse out into the street to greet us. It’s the kind of techno-funk
boy-racers love — the kind that nukes your kidneys when you crank it on your stereo. Carl is waiting for us, and it’s clear that he’s already downed enough of something to have him swinging off the veranda posts. He seems to feel it’s his duty to single-handedly report on everyone’s whereabouts in one long breath.

‘Howdy partners … Rita’s fine — she’s teamed up with some other girl from her class who’s quite a looker but she’s got this thug of a boyfriend from St Drongos, and Jacinta darling is already rocking by the pool with that whorey friend of hers, the one who used to go to school with us, but went to live in Auckland for a while and —’

At this moment he over-reaches himself and falls into the Pagolis’ front garden, mortally wounding a couple of flowery bushes as he crashes to the ground.

Nothing deters him, though, and he’s up and helping lug in all Don’s booze, while I push my way in through the smoky haze to find Rita and Jacinta. The fact that everyone is smoking in the house confirms what I had guessed but didn’t risk telling Mum — that Lance’s parents have left him here to house-sit on his own. I hope like hell they’ve left the country, cos it’ll take a week to get the stench of cigarette smoke out and the carpet is already squelching with spilt alcohol.

The further through the house I go, the more the cigarette smoke is replaced by the familiar sweet scent of pot. Someone shoves a bottle of beer into my hand, and I’m so agitated by the thought of Jacinta that I actually find it soothing to gulp down a few mouthfuls. It combines with the manic thoughts going around in my brain and fizzes in a way I almost like. So I drink a bit more, standing alone in the corner of the darkened room, letting the music pummel my mind into a kind of senseless peace.

Finally I find the guts to go outside. I spot Rita first, and she
is
with Sally Ritchie, so I figure she’s okay. She catches sight of me and waves, and she looks so happy I leave her be, even though she’s got a tumbler full of wine in her hand and Mum’d haemorrhage if she could see.

Jacinta’s holding court before a bunch of drooling guys, and I find I’m fast-glued to the spot. The beer I’m sipping suddenly seems more important, and finishing the bottle gives me something purposeful to do as I lean back in the shadows and watch her smile weave its spell.

I have to admit that for the first time in my life the beer is actually doing something almost nice. My stomach has lost the churning nervous feeling it’s had since I asked Jacinta out, and the sense of utter jealousy that shot right through me just moments ago is evaporating like cigarette smoke, so I’m left with utter fascination at
the scene. Jacinta is so incredibly beautiful, in a perfect-featured kind of way. It’s the kind of beauty that dooms guys to make dorks of themselves — and this scraggly group are no exception, grinning and guffawing like a bunch of hyenas waiting for the hint of blood.

I think that’s why I love the psychology of evolution … we all think we’re so sophisticated and developed, when in fact we act like every other animal that walks the earth. Those try-hard hyenas think they’re doing something really cool, chatting up a girl like her — but they’re just as driven by their ‘urges’ as horny sea lions or bears. And the prettier the girl — or sea lioness or lady bear — the more we drool. It doesn’t matter that our brains have developed to the point where we can graft a human ear onto a mouse’s back or make computers that can fit in wristwatches, we’re still ruled by that ancient reptile brain that’s buried deep beneath the showy stuff. It makes me crack up — and I must be laughing louder than I thought, cos next thing Jacinta is looking over at me, then she’s pushing through the guys to get to me. It’s so incredible my knees almost collapse on me and I have a sudden urge to pee.

‘Finally,’ she says, her pout about the most sexy thing I’ve ever seen. ‘What took you so long?’

‘Sorry,’ I squeak. I clear my throat and try again. ‘Don’s
dad — he took a while to come. But it’s all fixed now.’ I can’t believe myself; I’m holding my ever-so-slightly oily hands out like
I’m
the manly one who changed the tyre.

‘Poor you.’ Jacinta pulls a tissue out of her pocket. ‘Come over to the pool with me, and I’ll wipe that off.’

It’s like some fairytale dream — she’s actually going to clean my hands! I feel so embarrassed and excited all at once that I race after her, but one of the horny hyenas sticks out a leg, trips me up — and I’m flying straight for the pool. I grab onto whatever I can to save myself — which of course is Jacinta. Even as I grab at her I know I shouldn’t, and then the double-sized splash as we both hit the water tells me that I’ve totally stuffed up.

The water temperature is not too bad, but Jacinta resurfaces with her hair completely soaked and flattened, and her eye make-up dripping down her face. Suddenly it seems like the whole party is standing around watching, and I’m waiting for Jacinta to slap my face or scream at me or something — but then from out of nowhere Carl yells ‘Geronimo!’ and bombs into the water with such force that the first two rows of onlookers get absolutely soaked.

Then everyone starts jumping in the pool, and Jacinta’s screeching and laughing and making sure everyone gets a really good perv at her wet t-shirt. A
splashing, crazy water-fight erupts, and all I can hope is that Lance’s neighbours aren’t at home cos it sounds like several hundred girls are being murdered from all the shrieking that’s going down.

I manage to wade through the chaos to the side of the pool and clamber out — one small drowned Chinese rat — quickly rearranging my clothing so that nothing clings in places where it shouldn’t. Someone hands me a joint and I’m about to pass it on when I see Jacinta watching me with a challenge in her eye, so I have a toke and quickly scull on a beer, to try to keep from coughing. I don’t know why, but the beer isn’t having its usual puke-making effect, and all the while Jacinta’s romping in the pool I swear to God she’s eyeing me.

Now I’m out of the water that biting little breeze nips at me, and I drip my way through Lance’s house to his bathroom to find a towel. Don’s just coming out of the loo, and I can tell by the way he sways that he’s had a few.

‘Good wet dream?’ he grins, and I have to laugh, cos it’s about the smartest thing he’s said for weeks, even if it
is
at my expense.

In the bathroom I take a leak and dry myself on a damp and grimy-looking towel. I dig through the cupboards and find a pile of clean ones and figure I’ll take one out for Jacinta. In the mirrored cabinet above
the basin, I catch a glimpse of my eyes, already with the hollow glow of a stoner. It’s like Jacinta has bewitched me, turning on each and every ‘yes’ button inside my head, even while the nerdy part of me is yelling ‘no!’

By the time I make it back to the pool, Jacinta’s out and partying up large. The music’s now pumped to skull-splitting intensity, and the pool bunnies are dancing and shaking sprays of water off their clothes and hair. Rita’s somewhere in the mix, and she’s clasping a near-empty wine bottle now. I make my way over to her, point down at the bottle and shake my head. She just pokes out her tongue and turns her back on me. There’s a little nagging voice in my head that sounds horribly like Mum, but someone grabs hold of my arm and spins me around.

Jacinta pulls me so close to her cold, taut body I can smell the chlorine on her skin. Before I’ve had a chance to prepare myself she’s puckering up her lips and moving in. I’m totally focused on the moment — terrified and electrified — when she suddenly blows marijuana smoke into my face and draws away. I’m so surprised I nearly choke, but she grins at me and moves back in so I can feel her hips rubbing against mine, and there’s things going on down there I really don’t want her to know quite yet. She takes me by the hand and draws me off to the side of the dancing hordes, then leans in close to speak.

‘You wanna come to my place? My folks are out and there’s something that I want you to do …’ She smiles at me like my dreams have just been answered, and the beer that’s been bubbling happily in my guts almost explodes at the excitement of what I think she means.

‘But what about Rita?’ I ask, pissed off that my sister chose
this night
to come partying. ‘I promised I’d get her home by twelve.’

‘Don?’ Jacinta calls him over and gives him The Smile. ‘Will you make sure Rita gets home at midnight? Toby and I are leaving now.’ She hooks her hand around my arm and her fingernails dig in hard.

Shock and glee fight for first place on Don’s ugly mush. ‘Sure,’ he says, and he stumbles over to Rita to deliver the message. Rita glances across at me, and I shrug my shoulders as if to ask if it’s okay. She winks and nods, then spins away.

I’m in!

We slip away from the party, hand in hand beneath a giant bath towel, and escape into a night grown beautiful and ripe with expectation …

I
’m so hyped up, the walk across town to Jacinta’s house seems like nothing. She’s swiped a Coke bottle half full of vodka and orange, and we sip at it for warmth along the way. Every time I swing my head my brain starts sloshing in my skull. I can’t stop smiling, which is weird, cos I
never
smile this much, but it’s like my lips refuse to settle on a less insane position.

Jacinta’s shaking from the cold by the time we reach her house, and she leaves me standing in the living room while she goes to change. Her family photos stare me in the eye, and the room seems to be doing crazy morphing acts: now that I’m standing still, the alcohol mixes into a burning cocktail in my gut.

Next thing I know she’s standing right in front of me again in this skimpy little nightie thing — it’s pink and yellow with some kind of cutesy print. ‘Come on, big boy …’ My god, it’s like a porn movie as she takes my hand and leads me down the dark hallway to her bedroom. I try to ignore my churning gut, but when she pushes me onto
her bed my head does a slamming lurch and my brain feels like it will pop out through my eye sockets.

Now she’s kissing me, and it’s the most amazing feeling I’ve ever had — like fireworks going off all over my body, and I’m going to explode from the excitement … I’m going to explode … I’M GOING TO EXPLODE!

I puke so suddenly it’s all over me, it’s over her cute silky nightie, it’s over her beautiful firm breasts, her hair, her duvet …

‘Oh my god!’ She’s ripping off her puke-soaked nightie, gagging, punching at me as I try to dam the pools of vomit in the duvet before it drips onto the floor.

‘I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ My head is pulsing with pain and I wish she’d just find some heavy object in her room and kill me with it. I’m scrabbling around, trying to cup vomit in my hands as I run down the hallway to the bathroom. She pushes in past me, hauling her bedding in as well, and climbs straight into the shower, pulling the curtain with the single-minded fury of an executioner drawing his sword.

I’m shoving the duvet under the basin tap, trying to force the clotty lumps of puke that must be tonight’s dinner down the drain. She pokes her head around the curtain again and screams at me, ‘Just get out of here! Get out of here now, you pathetic moron.’ 

It’s so awful I have this terrible urge to cry. But I know that whatever other loser nerdy useless things I might do, I’m not going to leave her to clean up my puke. So I run backwards and forwards like an Energizer bunny, until everything that’s free of lumpy bits is in the washing machine and I’ve wiped all the surfaces I can find. Jacinta has retreated to the lounge, and refuses to talk to me. She’s huddled in a ball and won’t meet my eye.

As I head towards the door to leave, I try to apologise just one more time. ‘Look I’m —’

She turns on me then, her face pale and expressionless. ‘I wasn’t going to screw you anyway … I just needed you to help me with my Stats.’ Then she laughs. I swear to whatever god you want me to, the way she looks at me will haunt me always.

There’s nothing left for me to say. As I close the door behind me, the last thing I hear is, ‘
Loser
’.

It takes me hours to get home. The cold has sobered me into a nightmare trance, and I find myself sitting on a swing at my old primary school, pondering whether the best thing now is just to die. When word of this gets round — and there’s no pretending it won’t — my life will be over anyway. No one will respect me. I don’t even respect myself. Here I am, stinking of puke, so cold I can no longer feel my feet, and my goddamned mind — my
great and wonderful and highly intellectual mind — keeps trying to picture Jacinta in the shower. I’m doomed. I’m lost. But that small pink flash of nipple, as she tore that stupid nightgown off …

It’s getting on for 4 a.m. by the time I get home. I don’t want to wake my parents, so I tough it out and hose myself down outside. I have to bite my lip to halt the yell of shock that wants to burst out when the freezing water hits my skin. But it kind of pleases me too — a fitting punishment for a fool. I race inside on tiptoes, shivering so hard my teeth are chattering in my foul-tasting mouth. I fish a towel off my bedroom floor and dry myself roughly before a final freezing dash into bed.

I’m fully awake now. My head is pounding and my stomach is so emptied out it’s feeling hungry. I sneak back into the kitchen to raid the fridge, and head back to bed with a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. Milk’s what they give you when you’re poisoned, so I figure it’s pretty safe.

To block the night’s horrors from my mind I pick up one of my textbooks and start to read.
When a vampire bat returns from its nightly blood-sucking expedition empty-handed and still craving the taste of blood, it can rely on the generosity of a close friend to regurgitate a small ‘donation’ of its own stash — and will return
the favour on some future night, if their fortunes are reversed. What matters is that both bats benefit in the long run …

I’ve read about such things before in my Psych textbooks: unselfish acts of giving, where the giver believes the gift will be returned in his or her own time of need. Reciprocal altruism. Tit for tat. But in real life it goes both ways. Good for good. Bad for bad. Only I can’t decide who deserves the payback more — me or Jacinta.

At last this whole ridiculous drama catches up with me and I’m slammed by lead-boned tiredness. Briefly, I’m puzzled by the faintest noise, like someone crying. But before I can consider this, I sink into exhausted sleep.

It’s almost 1.30 in the afternoon when I finally drag myself out of bed. The place seems deserted. Rita’s bed’s not only empty, but her bedding’s strewn around the room as if she’s had a fight with it. God knows what time Don brought her home, but I figure it wasn’t as late as me, if she’s up and gone already. My head feels like it’s been filled with concrete while I slept; every time I swallow, my saliva catches on a bitchy little sharp point in my throat. I’m not sure if it’s from the puking or the fact that I spent
half the night in wet clothes but, even gross humiliation aside, I feel like shit.

A can of tinned spaghetti later, and I wander out into the back yard to look for Dad. It’s no great guess where he’ll be on a Sunday — in his shed as always. It’s a bit like a bizarre undersea world in there. He’s obsessed with these things called radiolarians, weird little microscopic single-celled organisms that live in the sea and surround themselves with incredibly complex shell-like structures. Each one is different — all perfectly symmetrical and detailed as hell. Dad spends all of his free time creating giant-sized replicas out of wire and fibre and all sorts of other random crap. They’re really beautiful — some like stars at the point of explosion, others like the most intricate snowflakes or Christmas orbs, or the most delicate of royal crowns. Each one takes him weeks to make, but he never seems to tire of it, or to sell the products of his work. It’s like once he’s made them, he believes they’re part of him.

‘Hey Dad.’ I always warn him I’m coming in, cos he concentrates so intently on his work that he damn near has a heart attack if someone speaks unexpectedly.

He’s working on a real doozy of a piece — so big he’s standing in the middle of it, with wire structures all around him forming a huge silver cage.

‘Tobe.’ He’s soldering a latticework of copper wire carefully onto this frame. ‘Your mum’s pretty hacked off with you.’

I can feel myself flushing, and turn towards Dad’s work bench, picking up a hammer and knocking it rhythmically against my knee. The pain is strangely comforting — more punishment for being such a loser. ‘Yeah. Sorry. I kind’ve got a bit caught up.’

I glance around at him, to check how he reacts. There’s the wisp of a smile playing around his mouth, and he straightens up and clears his throat in a self-conscious way. ‘Does this mean I should be giving you the safe-sex lecture again?’ If eyes could laugh, his would be in fits right now.

‘I wish!’ It’s out before I can stop it, in one whiny breath.

If you think blushes aren’t that visible on Chinese skin, think again. From the hundred tiny mirrored panels on Dad’s weird creation my shame is flashing back at me. I spin around, pointing towards the framed photo Dad has of the old German dude who first discovered radiolarians. ‘You know he was accused of helping out the Nazis?’

In normal circumstances this would set Dad right off. But he’s obviously intent on some kind of intense father-son bonding-type moment, cos he just laughs and
reaches out between the wires to pat my arm. ‘You want to talk about it?’

For one split second I’m tempted, but what the hell would Dad know? He met Mum in his second year of uni, and it was love at first sight. It’s so long since he’s even had to
think
about rejection, there’s just no point.

‘Nah,’ I shrug. I put the hammer down and head back towards the door before Dad can come over with any more touchy-feely crap. ‘I’m going to the library to study.’ It’s the only place that keeps me out of Mum’s way and free of Dad. Besides, I’ve got an exam tomorrow and I need to swot. ‘Don got Rita home okay?’

‘Two hours late.’

‘Damn!’

‘You can say that again.’ Dad adjusts his safety glasses and picks up his soldering iron. ‘Your mother tried to talk to her, but she fled to her room and took off to Sally’s before we’d even got up this morning.’ He draws a line across his throat with his finger, and I know exactly what he means:
beware the wrath of hyped-up Mum.

‘Damn,’ I say again, knowing Rita’s lapse will come back home to roost on me. ‘Where’s Mum now?’

‘Out,’ says Dad, with the kind of distraction we teenagers are usually accused of. He’s already dipping 
his soldering iron into the flux, and is back in Radiolarian Land, all thoughts of male bonding swept aside.

Bloody Rita. If she thinks I’m going to stand up for her next time, the answer’s no. I’ll be in Mum’s bad books now for weeks. Reciprocal altruism might work okay for vampire bats, but applied to pesky little sisters, Darwin really got it wrong.

Trying to swot while you’re sure your whole social life is about to go down the toilet is not ideal. But I put as much energy in as I can, and by the end of the day I suppose I’m a little closer to understanding the mysteries of human reproduction, evolution and sexuality even if, in real life, I’ve already failed it with a big fat F.

The atmosphere when I get back home is deadly. Think thundercloud build-up. Think frightening calm. Mum prowls around the kitchen with the same high-tensile anger that her relatives harnessed for the IRA. Both Dad and I know better than to make a peep. Rita’s retreated into her room, and the only positive is that Mum’s so furious with her for refusing to come out for dinner that my presence hardly registers on her killer-parent radar.

I scoff down the slightly burnt macaroni cheese so
fast my stomach barely has a chance to note the fact I’ve filled it, then I leg it to the sink, rinse off my plate and stow it in the dishwasher without a word. Mum’s hissing something poisonous at Dad, and he watches me with hound-dog eyes.

‘Your mother would like me to speak to you after dinner,’ he says. It seems so pathetic that she can’t just shout at me herself, I kind of snort. A bad mistake. The thunderclouds and lightning drop their load.

‘I
trusted
you to look after your sister, and the first chance you get you desert her. She comes home late —
two hours late
— reeking of booze, and
you
don’t even have the nerve to show your face.’ Mum’s up from the table now and bearing over me. There are big black smudges under her eyes and they stand out against the bright anger patches on her cheeks.

‘Mum, I’m sorry. I —’

‘Do you think it’s funny that I lay in bed for hours worrying? I had that poor girl dead and buried —
all of you
smashed up in Don’s car.’ There are big tears boiling up in her eyes now, and I feel like a total jerk. I knew she’d be mad that we were late — and furious that Rita had been drinking — but it never occurred to me that she’d worry whether we both were safe.