The Devil You Know (12 page)

He glared at her, and she noticed how small his eyes were. “Grow up, for Christ's sake,” he hissed.

“Did you know that you have really small eyes?” she asked. “Wittle itty bitty eyes. And how do you get so tan all the time? Do you go to a fake and bake?” Everyone at the table was watching them.

“That's it, we're going.” He pulled her to her feet and nodded to the circle of frowns.

Cynthia blew exaggerated kisses. “See you later, fuckfaces,” she slurred. She nearly tripped on the steps outside the bar and Kyle caught her arm and held it tight. “Ow, you're hurting me.”

“Then stop acting like a goddamn kid. What the hell's the matter with you?” He climbed into the car without getting the door for her the way he usually did. Inside, she tried to turn on the radio. He slapped her hand away. “Don't touch my car.”

“You're being a jerk. Why are you so mean?” she asked as he drove. “You're drunk,” he said.

“So what? That doesn't mean anything. That doesn't mean that I'm not telling the truth or that you're not mean because you are. You are.”

“Oh yeah? You want to see mean?”

She shook her head.

“You think I go out with you so we can hang out with your stupid bitchy girlfriends and watch you get drunk and scream and act like a spoiled brat?”

Kyle turned off the highway a couple roads before hers. He drove down a dead-end side road, where a house had been under construction for months.

“What are we doing?”

“You can't go home yet. It's only ten-thirty. You're a fucking mess— you want your parents to see you like this?”

“No. Stop being mean to me,” she said quietly.

“C'mere.” He reached over her and pulled the seat lever and it reclined. He climbed over the gearshift onto her seat and got on top of her.

He pushed her leggings down with one hand and held himself up with the other, pressing down on her shoulder and pinning her hair so Cynthia couldn't turn her head. She felt a bit dizzy lying on her back, but tried not to get the spins. She remembered that Kayla had told her the way she avoided the spins when she was drunk was to really concentrate on her breathing, like yoga or something. Inhale and exhale.

She didn't say anything. He didn't kiss her, just pushed inside. He always got so hard so fast. It stung for a while, then she began to get wet in spite of herself. She listened to his breathing and looked out over his shoulder through the windshield, to the new leaves on the trees. Inhale and exhale.

On Friday night, Tyler came over to watch a movie with Cynthia. She put on her henna right before he arrived. She didn't care if Tyler saw her with a bag on her head. He'd already seen her barf in a bowl. After the movie, she made some instant coffees and they sat in her bedroom with the windows open so she could smoke his cigarettes.

“How are things with you and Kyle?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“You guys have been going out for a while now.”

“Yeah, it's been a couple of months. It's okay.”

“Just okay?”

“Yeah. I don't know. He's nice. We don't have a lot to talk about though. I just feel like it's not going anywhere. I thought that's what I wanted, though, you know? I just wanted to be able to do my own thing and not have some guy in my business all the time and Facebook-stalking me. But now it just seems kind of random. Just going out once a week and eating dinner and getting drunk and then going to a hotel.”

“You guys stay in a hotel every Saturday?”

“I like hotels.”

“No, I didn't mean to—”

“It's okay.”

“I just meant, doesn't he have his own place?”

“He does, yeah, but it's a really small apartment and he shares it with this other guy, Geoff, who's super creepy. I've only been there a couple times, just to pick something up, and he always looks at me really psycho.” She changed the subject, because she didn't want to think about Geoff and his bloodshot eyes, or the times they'd gone by just to pick up more coke. “Actually, last week? We went back to Kyle's parents' house and I stayed in the guest room overnight, which was kind of…interesting.”

“What were his parents like?”

“Nice. His mom made breakfast and everything. They asked me all these questions about school and stuff and said I seemed really smart and that Kyle had finally ‘met his match,' whatever that means.” She lit a new cigarette off the cherry of the old one.

“Maybe he usually goes out with dumb girls.”

“I guess. But the thing is, at the time, it made me feel happy, right? Like, I want his parents to like me and stuff. But afterwards, I was like, do I even want to be this person's match?”

“I don't get it.”

“Yeah, me neither, really. Like I said, I thought that everything was awesome at first, and now...now it just makes me kind of sad, or bored, or...I don't know what.”

“Hmm.” He blinked owl-like over the tops of his glasses.

“Oh, Tyler, if I haven't figured any of this shit out by the time I'm twenty, can I just marry you?”

“Thanks a lot.” He rolled his eyes.

“No, you know what I mean!” she said, punching his arm. “We're just friends and I love you. But if things don't work out for either of us… We get along, right?”

“Yeah. We do.”

“So it's a deal. Smoke the rest of this one. I gotta go rinse this crap off my head.”

Kyle drove with the windows open on one of the first really warm nights in June. Cynthia made waves in the air with her cupped hand. They ate fish and chips down by the pier and watched kids eating ice cream, old couples in sun hats, and teenagers wandering the edges of the darkening park. They drove some more, out to the Travelodge by the closed amusement park. A weathered sign promised future waterslides. Some travelling sports team was also staying at the hotel, drinking and laughing and running up and down the hallway. Kyle couldn't figure out the air conditioner and wouldn't want to call the front desk for help. He jammed the back door of their room open with his shoe and the screen door let in a wisp of cooler air from the lake beyond the courtyard. Cynthia slept naked and fitfully in the heat, sweating into the stiff sheets and the strange pillow. She didn't know how many hours had passed when she woke, struggling out from under suffocating dreams to the sound of whispering. She tried to piece together what she was hearing and where it was coming from. Kyle lay snoring beside her. She opened her eyes a slit. Through the screen door, the shapes of bodies materialized. Men's bodies, standing together on the other side of the screen door, looking at her. Whispering. Cynthia couldn't hear what they were saying, but she sensed that they were making a decision. They seemed to be arguing. She heard a voice say, “Fuck that, bro. I'll do it,” before he was shushed. One of them produced a flashlight.

Cynthia acted as though she were dreaming and rolled over and kicked Kyle behind the knees. He did not stir. She rolled over again, winding her body up in a corner of the sheet. The men outside inhaled collectively and took a half-step backwards. It was enough of an opening. She sat upright and screamed. The sound was higher and longer than anything she could have believed.

In their new room, with the working air conditioner and good locks, Cynthia took the tablet that Kyle gave her and lay down on the bed. She left all her clothes on and waited for the blackness of the pill to take her. Sleep came, and she dreamt of Mr. Mugs, the shaggy sheepdog from her grade one readers, but in her dreams he was gigantic and covered in blood and pieces of bone and tendon. Mr. Mugs was eating everyone. He ate the sweaty hotel manager and those boys at the door and the angry coach and Kyle. He was eating them all, and then he came for her, and no sound would come out of her mouth, and even though she clung to the headboard, she could not stop being pulled into the dog's huge mouth, a dark red cave pouring blood.

I'm standing at the far end of the attic, where the ceiling is low. The tall people get stuck standing in the middle. It's getting crowded and loud and hot, everyone drinking and laughing and swaying to the music. The attic makes the house even better for parties now that it's finished. I used to sneak up here sometimes when it was just an attic, though, so I'll miss doing that. Rhonda's sitting in the corner, reading people's tarot cards. She read mine earlier and said that Kyle and I were meant to be together. I've hardly even seen her lately, so I don't know how she knows anything
Epilogue
about it. She's probably just mad because he might not come around and bring her coke anymore. Of course, he's here somewhere. I haven't seen him yet, but Lauren told me.

I decide to go out on the roof. It used to be a lot harder to do, but the new skylight makes it easy. I open the hatch and pull myself through, then brace my feet on the frame and walk up the slope to the flat part. As soon as I stand up, I see Kyle already standing there. Shit.

He looks small compared to the sky behind him and all the lights in town.

“Sorry,” I say. “I didn't know you were out here.”

“It's okay. Don't go back in.”

I sit down on the edge of the roof over the street, and he comes and sits beside me. Our feet dangle in the air, and I look across the road to the shoe-repair shop and the barber's and the laundromat and the post office. The laundromat glows with yellow light; it's open until eleven. I can see the bottom half of a woman in pink leggings loading a dryer.

I feel like I should say something. “Sometimes I want to jump,” I say. He looks at me. “Not actually jump, but you know. That urge you get? Like you might be able to fly or something.”

“Why are you breaking up with me?” is what he says.

“I'm not. Well, I guess I sort of am. I'm sorry.”

“But why? What did I do?”

“Nothing. You've been really nice.” All those dinners and drinks. The cross on a chain in my jewellery box.

“Is it another guy?”

“No, no one.” This is the first time I've said this and meant it, I think. For a second I see Tyler in my head, but there's no sickening guilt to go with it.

“Do you think we might get back together?”

This surprises me. He looks like a kid, sitting there with his sad face. There's a second where I consider trying to explain how I'm feeling. How I was bored and scared at the same time. How I felt when he was fucking me, like I hated it, but I was grateful anyway and didn't know why. How what I want is something that doesn't feel like work all the time, or explaining everything, or trying to guess what's going on. I'm not sure that's even a real thing, a possible thing. But I just shake my head.

“We met here, remember?” he says. “I thought you looked so beautiful.”

I do remember—how fucked up I got, and how he laughed at me when I barfed. “I liked your teeth,” I say.

“Listen, Cyn,” he says, stroking my hair. “If we really are breaking up, and we're not going to get back together…”

I have a shiver of fear, like maybe he's going to push me off the roof and tell everyone I fell.

“Would you mind giving me one last blow job? You're so good at it.”

It feels like when the coyote from the cartoons steps off the cliff, and his legs go around really fast and he stays in mid-air for a while. Like there's nothing under my feet. I shake my head, but I smile. I stand up and say, “See you later,” and walk back to the skylight. I feel kind of sick, but also very tall. It's weird.

Soft Limits

Let not light see my black and deep desires

–Macbeth

I'
VE BEEN A LIAR ALL MY LIFE. NOT JUST TYPICAL CHILDISH
lies to avoid the consequences of my actions, but elaborate fabrications of my imagination, often based on a story of personal victimization. In the fifth grade, I convinced my schoolyard chums that I was being molested by an uncle. I don't know where this idea came from, but it seemed so delicious and dramatic in the telling. Of course, my story was tempered by an incomplete understanding of what “molestation” meant, but it was sufficient to enthrall a group of ten-year-olds.

The habit of lying for the purposes of a good story has never left me. While I no longer lie awake at night inventing horrible scenarios to recount in the girls' washroom, the small lies I tell each day, each week, soon pile up like psychic snow. Fabrications made in the moment are consistently more interesting than the truth, and they still feature me as one of life's little victims. Example: at the coffee shop yesterday, the barista commented she had missed me the day before for my usual three o'clock latte. Instead of telling her I had been at the dentist, I made up a story about going for a pap smear because they found abnormal cells the last time. What purpose, I ask you, does this serve? Why upset the nice young woman who makes my coffee? Why would I share this information with someone who is essentially a stranger, even if it were true, which it is not? And why, more often than not, do I employ my own body in these narratives—giving it, if you will, any number of illnesses and injuries, just in the service of my lies?

I have no answers. What is certain is that I have grown increasingly disconnected from the world around me. While I maintain an appearance of optimism and joie de vivre, inside there is a void. It's possible that when one presents a false self to the world, the real self begins to fade, to slip away. From my highlighted hair to my padded brassiere to the degree that appears on my résumé, which I am actually four courses shy of receiving, my entire identity is a construct. It's hardly surprising that I have few real friendships, and nothing long-lasting in the romantic department. (In high school, I told my first boyfriend that my mother beat me with a yardstick, not anticipating that he would get drunk and confront her and very nearly push the poor woman down a flight of stairs.) I am beginning to feel adrift—as though I am scarcely connected to humankind at all. Hamlet's “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable” world springs to mind.