This Beautiful Life (17 page)

“Why did you do that?” he said.

“Because I like you,” she said. Those clear blue eyes again. Depthless. That blond curly hair, tied back in a knot at the base of her neck. She liked him?

As they walked down the hall, Jake saw McHenry coming toward them.

“Fuck you,” McHenry said to Jake. It was the first time the two boys had seen each other. “You are a total fucking asshole.”

Jake stopped in his tracks for a second. He hated McHenry.

McHenry took a step in closer to Jake. His breath smelled bad. Like tobacco and coffee. He got up in his face. “You should drop out of school, Jacoby, I'm telling you. We could have gone to jail because of you. You should fucking drop out.”

Jake could feel Rachel's fingers tighten around his arm.

“I should fuck you up,” said McHenry.

A crowd was beginning to gather. Jake didn't know whether to flee or fight. He just stood there dumbly, breathing heavily. He wondered if he was having a heart attack or a stroke. A seizure.

“Do you assholes want to get expelled?” whispered James. He sailed right past them. “You'll get everyone in trouble.”

“C'mon, Jake,” said Rachel. She tugged Jake away, McHenry hissing after him. “You can run but you can't hide,” McHenry said.

All through math class Jake could not listen to a word the teacher said; his cheeks burned and he could hear his own blood flowing so loudly through his ears there wasn't room for words or numbers or sounds. When class let out, he decided he'd go off campus for lunch. He decided he'd go to the nurse and call in sick. Anything to get out of there. He let the rest of the class stream out so he wouldn't have to talk to anyone as he made his getaway. But Rachel was standing in the hall, waiting for him.

“C'mon,” she said.

They went outside and into the woods.

W
ednesday he had his first shrink session. The guy didn't have a beard, which was a surprise. He was younger than Jake's parents, Greekish—that is, from here but with a Greek last name. He had an open collar and a sport coat. His skin was darker than Jake's but still white. He was a good-looking guy, with a strong nose. Silvery sideburns. Although Jake arrived by himself; his mom was waiting for him in the waiting room to pick him up when the forty-five-minute hour was over, like he was a tiny kid or terminally ill or just a prisoner. Like he was a little pet goat.

Friday, after school, Jake finally saw Audrey. That is, he spoke to her.

He'd stayed late in the library so he could avoid people. He was supposedly studying, but his attention consistently wandered off. He kept thinking about dinosaurs. His mind was filled with dinosaurs. Just like when he was little. For some reason he kept thinking about the stegosaurus with a brain the size of a meatball. How could something with so large a body have such a tiny head? How could its plates not have been attached to its bones? In what direction had they truly pointed?

It was impossible to empty his mind enough to study. When Jake tried, it quickly filled with other, more awful stuff. How he felt. What it was like at home. The way his parents now seemed to him like strangers. Dishonor! Ignominy! Lonesomeness! The overriding desire to blame everyone else for his own conduct. The weird thrill he got at odd moments when he felt he was actually getting over. Celebrity! Notoriety! Infamy! Did he even want to go on this way? Being this kind of guy, the kind of guy that did the things he'd done?

He'd rather be a boy. A boy who thought about dinosaurs. It was about six when he looked up at the clock and realized that he'd gotten nothing accomplished. Exam week started Monday. Oh well. Maybe he'd just flunk out.

He decided to grab his books and make his way home. Maybe he'd get off the subway a couple of stops later and get a bagel on Broadway. H&H had the best bagels and they were open twenty-four hours, and often when you bought one, it was still warm. Jake could buy a cinnamon-raisin bagel and a salt. If they
were
warm, he wouldn't even need cream cheese, and he could take a bite first out of one flavor and then alternate it with the other, which is what he liked, the saltiness interchanged with the sweet. He walked out of the library and into the bright, cool evening. The sun probably wouldn't set until somewhere around eight o'clock. He could eat bagels and then go to Riverside Park, jump in the Hudson and drown.

She was sitting outside the library. Audrey. The building was surrounded by mown grass, thick and verdant, like a deep shag pile. All over campus were the flowery accents of scattered pink marble benches. Audrey sat alone on one, her back to him. He had the instinct to run back into the building and so he turned on his heels, but when he faced that freestanding glass library, glowing as if it were set ablaze with books, all that intellectual heat seemed to catapult him back in her direction. In front of Audrey, in the distance, was the cavernous shellacked airplane hangar they called a gym. He would pretend he was walking to basketball practice, if she asked him.

Audrey was smoking a cigarette, even though she was on school property, and she was sitting by herself. On a marble bench donated by some Class-of-Something, or the parents of a kid who died in a traffic accident or in a war. The bench was so pretty, and so was Audrey; she looked like a Chinese character from the back, perched upon it that way, the slim lines of her sleek black hair, her all-black outfit, the black jeans and the tight black T-shirt, all precise little brush strokes. And then there were those gold slippers, the smoky gray veil of her cigarette smoke. The red ember. Like watercolor.

“Hey, Audrey,” Jake said.

She turned her head up and to the right to see him.

“S'up, Jake,” she said, squinting into the light.

“Do you mind if I sit down?” he said.

“A free country,” she said. She turned back to look in the same direction she'd been looking in before he came and disturbed her.

Jake sat down next to her. He dropped his backpack down next to his feet. He stared at the tops of his sneakers. He looked over at her knees, her thighs: even as narrow as they were, they fanned out a little pressed against the marble. Jake wanted more than anything to bury his face in her lap.

Instead he raised his gaze. She was so gorgeous, in a boylike way, her eyes, her nose, her beautiful mouth so totally, elegantly balanced. Her jawline exhibited as a precise right angle, and that inky black hair curved under it. Strong, muscular, graceful, lithe. He realized then, for the first time, that the haircut was asymmetrical. Was that new? Or had it always been that way? It curved longer on the right side. On purpose. Audrey was asymmetrical on purpose. She was perfect but tweaked, which made her even more perfect, Jake thought.

She inhaled again, then tipped her neck back, exposing her long, golden throat, and exhaled up into the sky. So the smoke would not get into his eyes.

“I'm sorry,” said Jake.

“Why are you apologizing to me?” she said. “That's kind of funny.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Well, it's Daisy's life you destroyed, not mine,” she said.

“I didn't mean to,” he said. “I didn't ask her to do it or to send it to me.”

“Who cares?” she said. “We don't ask for a lot of things…”

There was silence for a while. His mind reeled; he didn't know how to express himself or how to reach her. He searched for any tool he could use.

“I didn't deal with it very well,” said Jake, slowly, he hoped plainly. “I know that it was… it was… it was unchivalrous of me.”

“Unchivalrous?” said Audrey. It was almost as if she hooted a little at the word—
her
word, he thought—except she didn't. “Unchivalrous? An understatement,” she said. She took a last drag and dropped the cigarette into the thick, green grass and ground it out with her foot. Then she picked up the butt and put it into the pocket of her black sweatshirt. She was shivering, but it wasn't cold and she didn't put the sweatshirt on. Instead, she crossed her legs in a half-lotus up on the bench.

She looked Jake in the eye. Hers were inky black and she'd lined them with black liner. Lashes, eyeliner, iris—all the same color. The skin on her cheeks shimmered gold, like she'd used that body glitter some girls use, although clearly she hadn't, and her lips were pale and she'd chewed her lipstick off; they were chapped even in May. Her teeth seemed to chatter a little behind them.

“You're cold,” said Jake. He picked up her sweatshirt off the ground and offered it to her. It was seventy degrees out.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a girl?” said Audrey, legs crossed, teeth chattering. Ignoring his outstretched hand.

“Yeah,” said Jake. “I know. The double standard, you mean?” He brought her sweatshirt into his lap. It was soft. He petted it like a small animal.

Audrey reached down into her bag. It was black suede and had long black fringes with black beads threaded on them. It looked vintage—whatever that meant. Like she'd either spent a lot of money on it or found it in a shop in Brooklyn. She snaked her golden arm into the bag and brought out a pack of Marlboros. She opened it and shook out a cigarette and a lighter. She pressed down on the little pedal of the lighter and lit up. She inhaled deeply, and it was as if her body were a balloon and the smoke lifted her. Like helium, it raised her to her feet. With her standing, her T-shirt rose, and he saw the gold ring piercing her navel. It winked at him for a second, before she exhaled and the T-shirt came back down. Audrey stared off at a stand of trees.

“You are just an idiot boy,” she said. “You are all just idiot boys. Someday I'll be old and ugly and nobody will want to fuck me and I won't have to deal with you any longer. I am really looking forward to that,” she said.

Then she took back her sweatshirt and tied it around her tiny waist, like the sleeves were a black velvet ribbon and Audrey herself was a package, a precious little gift. She slung that cool bag over her shoulder and she started walking. She started walking away from Jake and all the idiot boys, walking away from the prison of her youth and beauty and into the hard-fought-for loneliness of her future. Audrey walked away from Jake, down the path toward the stone gates of the school, and there was nothing he could do to stop her. Or if there was, he was clueless.

J
ake didn't talk about any of that with the shrink on Wednesday. He'd spent the morning taking his Chem final, and he pretty much talked about how hard it was and how scared he'd been but at the end of the day he was feeling pretty confident, “bizarrely confident” were the words he used with the shrink. He felt like maybe he'd aced it. His dad had been a whiz at chemistry; his dad had almost majored in chemistry, and maybe that is why Jake was so good at it himself. He was like his dad that way; maybe it was in his genes.

“Do you think you are like your father?” said the shrink. He was wearing a blue tie that day and no sport coat. The tie was really blue and shiny and it kind of reminded Jake of Rachel's eyes, but he didn't talk about that, either.

“No, not much,” said Jake.

“Not much how?” said the shrink.

“Well, I'm not much of a runner, and my dad is a great runner, a long-distance runner. He's also kind of like this genius. He's got a million degrees and his dad was a post office worker and my dad was the first in his family to graduate from high school, much less college…” Here Jake's voice ran out.

“And?” said the shrink. “What are you thinking, Jake?”

“That maybe I'll be the first one in my family
not
to graduate from high school,” said Jake. He could feel his own mouth smirk. Like some offstage puppet master was pulling the corners with strings.

“But you just said you aced the Chemistry final,” said the shrink.

“Yeah, but I should have been thrown out of school,” said Jake.

“Should have?” said the shrink. “Because of the email?”

Jake nodded, his eyes filling with tears.

“I'm not so sure I agree with you,” said the shrink. “And the point is, you weren't thrown out of school, so the school didn't agree with you, either.”

“I wasn't thrown out because of my dad,” said Jake. “Everything is because of my dad. It's like he's some kind of superhero, and I'm just like this sex offender,
plus
a fucking cripple.”

“That's interesting,” said the shrink, the skin around his eyes crinkling, indicating amusement. He reached over to his desk and picked up a set of keys, his signal it seemed—grabbing those keys—that their time was up. What was he going to use those keys to unlock? A cage with a gorilla in it? In another one of the offices in the suite? Or was he going to use the keys to lock Jake out? “Whew,” the shrink would say, the door safely closed and dead-bolted behind him. “That one's not coming back.”

There was a fistful of keys in the shrink's hand; he could use them to rake Jake's face if he felt like it.

“Let's talk about that next week,” said the shrink.

And they did. The shrink seemed to like to talk about Jake's father, and Jake wanted the shrink to feel successful. What they didn't talk about was Audrey: Audrey walking away from youth and beauty and sex and boys like him. Audrey eager to be old and ugly and alone. And they didn't talk about Rachel. About how that Friday, after McHenry had cursed him out, when they'd gone together into the woods behind school, Rachel had knelt down in the dirt and leaves and sticks on her bare knees and took his dick in her mouth; about how blue and luminous her eyes were as she looked up at Jake while she sucked him off; or about how he'd taken her head in his hands and moved it, gently at first and then roughly, back and forth around his dick until finally he didn't care at all anymore about Audrey or Rachel or anything else but how
he
felt, and he grabbed her head and he pushed it back and forth as hard as he liked it, so hard it seemed that he might hurt her neck or that Rachel might even choke—she seemed to gag a little—but Jake didn't care, he didn't care and he didn't stop, even when she put up a hand to slow him down or maybe even to push him back; it was like he was jerking himself off in Rachel's mouth and when he looked down, her eyes were half closed; he could no longer see any of that crazy blue, just white, and then his dick slipped out of her mouth and she gasped for air and he came on Rachel's face, shooting across her cheek, some of it landing behind her ear, in her beautiful angel hair.