Something Right Behind Her (15 page)

Mom and I
started down the street to get a quick bite to eat before heading home. Mom
looked really pleased. “I think this get away will be really nice for us” she
said. “I think we could all really use the break.”

“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m surprised you and Dad don’t want a break from me though. I’ve been such a
jerk.”

“All things
considered, Andy, I think you’re doing alright.” She said, and she squeezed my
arm.

I couldn’t blame
Mom for thinking that, since she didn’t know everything. Anyway, maybe Mom
could see something I couldn’t. Maybe if I seemed all right to her, I was
alright on some level I couldn’t quite feel yet.

When we got
home, I went upstairs and tried on the jacket with about every T-shirt and pair
of jeans I owned. It looked hot with everything. I decided that I would wear it
with black skinny jeans, and a white T-shirt with my usual converse low tops to
Gayle’s. Some really large gold hoops would complete the outfit - maybe a sheer
t-shirt with a white camisole underneath - that’d be sexier. I started to feel
a bit like my old self, like going out with friends was all I had to think
about. It still felt weird that my friends were just Tom and Jill, but I was
beginning to make some progress there, if I considered George progress.

Tom and Jill
weren’t picking me up until about eight, so I offered to take Milly to the
grocery store for stuff to make cookies. I always feel more confident when I
drive with Milly, for some reason. I guess since she has no doubts about
whether I can drive. On the way to the store, I apologized for screaming at
her.

“I know I’m just
a dumb kid.” Milly said. I could see her slumped down in her seat in the
rearview mirror. She was still too short to sit up front. “I’m sorry I didn’t
mind my own business, “ Milly went on. “I mean, I hate it when people say I
have a crush on some ugly stupid boy in my class. People do that all the time.
This really dumb girl, Gracy, wants me to get married to that boy with the fat
fingers, Michael. I don’t even like him. Anyway Mary said we couldn’t have
weddings anymore at recess. Too many boys were getting upset, and the moms
started complaining.”

“Gee,” I said.
“I guess I’d forgotten how complicated fifth grade is.” I was smiling back at
Milly, but she rolled her eyes.

           
“You
should be a fly on that classroom wall,” she said. “It’s a bunch of crazy
people in there.”

“Yeah,” I said.
“Wait until you get to middle school. Then you really have to pick your friends
carefully.”

“Well,” she
said, “I only need about four or five best friends.”

“I’d take just
one if I were you, “ I said. “Or maybe even a half.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Gayle’s parties
were always the same. They were all kitchen parties, with everyone crowded
around a beer keg. People spilled out onto the patio, even when it was cold.
Half the party was outside without coats on huddled in little groups smoking
cigarettes. A few people stood off near a far patch of trees, sharing a joint.
Gayle’s house was at the end of a dead end street. The few neighbors her family
had were tucked away behind deep yards and stands of large pine trees. For
whatever reason, whether they were used to these bashes or brain dead, no one
ever called the police about a party Gayle or Paul threw.

I was out on the
patio drinking a beer with Jill and Tom. Jill was standing so close to Tom the
poor guy could barely move. She really looked pretty slutty I had to admit. She
was wearing a low-cut hot pink sweater and a pair of tight skinny jeans with
little black ankle boots with heels. Jill is full-figured, so this outfit was
an eyeful. I preferred to go to parties looking kind of laid back, cute-but
–not –really trying. I wore the outfit I’d planned after scoring
the leather jacket. Once I put that jacket on, I felt supremely confident. It
was my supergirl jacket.

The party had a
good vibe going. It was getting pretty crowded, but not too bad. I was content
hanging out bullshitting with Tom and Jill, feeling glad I wasn’t Jill, in love
with a guy who basically saw you as his best buddy.

Tom was making a
big show of taking tiny sips of his beer, his way of demonstrating his distaste
for beer in general and his particular dislike of keg beer. “God, this is vile
stuff.” He said. “Don’t Gayle’s parents have a well-stocked liquor cabinet in
this place?” He looked around as if he seriously intended to bust open Gayle’s folks’
gin.

“Oh, shut up and
drink your beer, you idiot.” Jill said, smacking Tom with her open hand. It was
somewhere between a smack and a caress. Tom flinched when Jill did that, and
stopped talking about liquor.

“You know your
problem, Jillian?” Tom was the only person in the world who called Jill by her
full name. “You are a girl who hits, and that is a miserable trait for a girl
to have. No one likes a hitter.”

“The problem
with you, Tom, is you’re an arrogant asshole and no one likes you. Also, you’re
a fuck-head.” Jill was obviously hurt. I started to think it might be a long
night with these two.

“I don’t even
know what a fuck-head is. That’s really abstract. I think your insults lack
charm. You should talk more like Andy - she can really string together a
graphic set of images. But, then, again, she’s the intellectual, and you’re the
painter.” Mentioning Jill’s art was a good sign. Tom actually admired Jill’s
painting, so maybe he was giving in a little himself.

Once Jill and
Tom stopped with their little bicker-fest, we all headed inside, and I started
to scan the room. Earlier in the day, after I made my plans with Jill and Tom,
I decided to fire a text to George to let him know about the party. I was only
being polite, I told myself. Usually, my crowd and George’s crowd didn’t hang
at the same parties, but Gayle’s parties were pretty wide open, not whole
school open, no freshman boys or anything like that, but some of the Dirtbags
knew Paul and his druggy buddies. I was half-hoping George would show up. If he
did, though, I’d have to manage to see him on the sly. I wasn’t ready for Jill
and Tom to know about my little fling, or whatever it was I was doing with
George.

I was leaning
against the kitchen cabinet watching the party develop. Some of the other
junior girls were filing into one of the bedrooms behind Paul. Gayle was with
them. Inside, no doubt they were doing lines of something. Whatever the
substance actually was probably wasn’t what Paul and those guys said it was
– coke, meth, whatever they said, it was probably mostly corn starch or
something. I could never understand that whole scene. I wasn’t one of those
“just say no kids” who are terrified of drugs and think one experimental
evening will douse their chances of getting into Harvard. Just the same, I
wouldn’t eat something I couldn’t come close to identifying, so why would I put
a substance like that up my nose?

“What about you,
Andy?” Tom asked. “You want to get out of here with us, maybe go to the diner
and get some eats? Jill and Tom and been smoking one joint after another and
now their eyes were like slits. I could only imagine Tom driving in that
condition.

Just then I felt
my phone vibrate. I didn’t want to make a big show of seeing who was texting
me, so I played for time. “No, not yet. You should hang for a while, Tom - see
if there’s a coke or something in the fridge. If you got stopped looking like
that they’d take you right to rehab.” Jill laughed.

“But by then I
won’t even have the munchies,” she said. She and Tom went to examine the
contents of the fridge. Tom was known to cook up a pot of spaghetti or a steak
at a party. That’s the kind of guy that would get you busted with your parents.
They might not notice that someone drank all the vodka, but they’d see right
away the pesto was missing.

With Tom and
Jill preoccupied with their raid on Gayle’s fridge, I slipped my phone out and
checked the text - “outside now. G.” was all it said. I casually headed for the
front door without saying anything to Jill and Tom. They had each other. A
couple of girls stopped me on the way, wanting to know how Eve was and would it
be OK if they visited. I said yeah, sure, in a real casual way, as if thinking
about Eve didn’t make me a nervous wreck.

When I got
outside, I saw George’s beat up car. It was a dingy grayish brown, kind of a
weird metal color, with some rust added. He was parked right in front of the
house, and I could see he was not alone in the car. He must’ve seen me come out
front though, because a few seconds later his friend Alex got out of the front
seat. He seemed pretty pissed off. “So fuck you, asshole. You should at least
come inside...” I couldn’t hear what George said back, but clearly he was
trying to get rid of Alex. Finally, Alex shuffled past me, with his pants
hanging low and his trucker’s cap pulled down over his eyes - such a wannabe.

I
surreptitiously scanned the front of the house. Not too many people were
hanging out front, and so no one saw as I approached George’s car and climbed
in the passenger side. He seemed pretty nervous, because he just patted my knee
and drove off without looking at me. I didn’t ask where he was headed. I leaned
my head back and turned up the stereo. He was playing some weird old heavy
metal crap, but it sounded kind of good. I can kind of get into that stuff once
in a while.

After driving
for a bit, George put his hand back on my leg and drove with one hand on the
steering wheel. We were taking some back roads past the reservoir, but I
figured out finally that we were headed over toward Milltown, where he lived.
After a bit, he pulled onto yet another side road, and then down a longish
driveway. We were at his house.

I don’t live in
a mansion, but I have to admit, our house is pretty damn nice. All the houses
over near us are big, either large contemporaries like ours, or big old white
houses, the kind with black shutters. Ours is the sort of street you’d drive
down and think “wow, nice digs.” George’s neighborhood was the opposite. You
had to look real hard to see what was halfway decent about any of the houses.
There were no pools, but some houses had nice gardens and neat yards. Other
houses had like six cars in one driveway and plastic kids’ toys all over the
yard. George’s house was small and white. There was a metal banister in the
front that had all sorts of complicated flowery designs on it. The garden,
which was all strung up with lights, looked pretty nice, though, even with the
little fake painted fawn in it. I felt kind of sorry for George about that fawn
- it seemed almost like a good excuse for becoming a pothead, because if your
mom thought that was a nice touch, then what alternative did you have?

We went into
George’s house through the garage, but instead of climbing up the stairs, to
what I assumed was the main part of the house, we went through a second door
into a finished basement room. This was George’s room. There was a bedroom
area, with the bed and night table, and then there was another corner set up
with a desk, a crumby old laptop on it and a TV mounted on the far wall near a
broken-down looking couch with an old Indian-patterned tapestry thrown over it.
The TV was pretty small. He had other guy-shit down there too, like a
playstation and junk like that. There was also the bong in the corner behind
the bed, which he went and got. I took off my leather jacket and tossed it onto
the back of the couch and sat down. George put the TV on, but to one of those
stations that just play music. It was a classic rock station. “You listen to
this all the time?” I asked.

“This is awesome
stoner music” he said. “Serious Led Zeppelin.”

“It’s OK, “ I
said. “But I don’t like listening to stuff my Dad likes. It’s sort of a
personal policy,” I said.

“Your Dad sounds
cool,” he said. “My mom is the queen of soft rock. That, and home shopping network.”

“Speaking of
your mom,” I said, “Is she home?”

“Yeah, hear her
upstairs? She’s got some dude over she started seeing a while ago. He’s a real
asshole, though, so I don’t go up there when he’s around. He’s a retired cop,
and he gets all on my case about how I need a haircut, and how I’m a waste of
space.”

“Your mom
doesn’t care if he says stuff like that?” I asked.

“She thinks he’s
a good ‘male role model.’ More like asshole role model.”

I laughed, but
the whole thing sounded pretty depressing. The room looked pretty dusty, like
maybe George was the only one who cleaned down there. Now that he had mentioned
it, I could hear a male voice upstairs, and some heavy footsteps. “They won’t
come down here? Won’t they smell that if you light up?” I asked gesturing
toward the bong.

“They might,”
George said, “But they’re not coming down. First of all, it’s too much trouble
for her. She’s having a good time on her ‘date.’ He said the word “date” with a
grimace, as if she used this word a lot, and not really to mean going out
somewhere. ‘Second, I lock the door to the upstairs.” He nodded to indicate
there was a second door at the top of the stairs which connected George’s
living space to what seemed like, basically, his mom’s part of the house.

George sat down
on the couch next to me and placed the tall plastic bong between his legs. He
removed the little metal bowl from the stem and emptied the ashes out into the
cuff of his baggy jeans. “That’s a nice ashtray you got there.” I said. That
was such a Dirtbag move.