Caring Is Creepy (3 page)

A decent breeze was blowing outside, so I’d left open the front and kitchen doors. Our window AC sucked rather than blew. It was a clear shot from the front door, down the hallway to the kitchen, and out the back door beside the sink, so I saw right away who it was. I thought about jumping over the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the living room, but it was too late. I’d been spotted.

“Your mama leave a package for me, cornflake?” Hayes asked through the screen door. He tapped again at the wooden frame with the Lucite cane he sometimes had a need for. He was the cutest of my mom’s boyfriends, I’ll give him that: short brown hair gelled up in spikes and a face like an oversexed soap opera villain. He must of done lots of sit-ups each morning because the times I saw him with his shirt off, his belly looked flat and tight and tan. On that day, however, he looked like the dog’s dirty ass. When I let him in, he took off his sunglasses and his eyes were half hidden by puffy, greenish skin. His feet were bare and moist and blackened. Wherever he walked, he left behind gray moisture prints.

“I don’t think she did, hoss,” I said. I talked through my teeth, so he wouldn’t smell the beer on my breath. I’d had four to Dani’s two.

“Are you
positive
?” Hayes did a jittery little dance in the kitchen doorway. He lifted his arms and sent out whiffs of nastiness that smelled like the rotty juice that sometimes collects at the bottom of the fridge’s produce drawer.

“If she did, she didn’t tell me about it,” I said, finding myself unconsciously imitating his weird jitter dance.

“I’m just going to go back and have me a look.” He pushed past me before I had a chance to answer and kind of loped through the kitchen, favoring his short leg and wincing each time he took a step. I watched from the doorway and held my breath. He knocked over the sack of bottles on the kitchen table I’d tried to hide with newspaper, and I thought, Oh shit, now I’m doomed, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Hayes spent a few minutes rummaging about in the kitchen cabinets, before giving up to stumble through the living room, bumping into the shelves that held my mom’s boat-in-a-bottle collection and almost knocking some down. He set them straight before going back into her bedroom. After shutting the door, Hayes commenced to tossing shit around in there and making a sound like a raccoon in a dumpster.

Our house was smallish, five rooms if you counted the bathroom, six if you counted the carport, and seven if you counted the little attic access between my closet and the living room. The front hallway, lined with elementary school photos of me from Kmart, led to a junction at the kitchen, forward took you past the sink to the kitchen door. If you took a right, you went into our biggest room, the living room, which stretched across the middle of the house from front to back like a saddle. From there, a worn trail in the carpet led straight past the couch, along the front windows, to the side hallway, a bathroom built for one, and on to our two
non-spacious bedrooms. Mom’s was on the left and had a good bit more moving-around space than mine. At the end of the hall, across from our rattletrap washer-dryer, was the door to my perfectly square, perfectly tiny sleeping box.

Five minutes of mayhem later, Hayes went limping into the bathroom, mumbling “fuck” over and over again like a prayer. What sounded a lot like my Suave Wild Cherry Blossom conditioner fell and rattled around in the shower. When he came out again this time, he had orange stuff on his upper lip. I thought for a moment he’d been drinking the liquid soap. Then I noticed the prescription cough syrup bottle in his hand. Hayes tossed it with a clatter into the sink.

“Bad cough,” he said.

“Ah,” I said.

I didn’t remember him coughing once since he’d come, but if he had a craving to gulp syrup, it wasn’t any skin off my behind.

“When’s your wrinkled old ma get off?” he said

I didn’t answer, since I’d heard her tell him this information twice already over the phone. I sat on the couch and looked at a man wrestle an alligator on the television. Hayes sat down beside me, stretching his back until it cracked. “Yu-up.” He turned this into two long syllables. “So you playing the silent game with me here or maybe you just need a couple Q-tips? Huh? What’s the good word, Little Flipper?” He made a dolphin sound. I edged away from him on the couch.

Without looking away from the TV, I told him she’d be home tomorrow morning. This was a trick my mom had taught me after I’d complained about him bugging me. “Just stop paying him any mind,” Mom told me, “and he’ll quit after a while. He just wants a reaction, any reaction.”

“Okay,” he said, almost to himself, and yawned wide enough to make his jaw pop. “That’s alright. That’ll work.” He sat there for a
few more seconds, breathing loudly and tapping out a complicated beat with his fingers on the back of the couch. Eight loud, wet sneezes came out, one right after another. Then he jumped up all of a sudden, banging his knee against the coffee table.

“Well, I’ll be shoving off then.” He limped over to the hall and looked about in a dazed way. I knew what he wanted.

“On the floor in the kitchen.” I pointed to where his cane rested under a chair. “See you,” I said.

“Yeah.” He furrowed his forehead at me. “Thanks.”

The hole in his muffler must of grown a good bit bigger, because I could hear that crap Toyota truck of his until it got out to the state highway. Hayes had a tendency toward moodiness, worse than my mom sometimes, but even for him this was whack-a-doo behavior. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but I knew better than to ask my mom for an explanation. I figured I’d be better off not saying anything at all unless she asked.

D
ani put her Shins CD in my mom’s boom box. I’d been resistant to it at first because a senior girl at school had got her into them. An ex-cheerleader burnout named Barbara Ann that Dani idolized for some reason. Dani’s Shins thing started with a Zach Braff movie,
Garden State
, that Barbara thought was pretty intense. She got so worked up over it she must of watched it a dozen or so times. The Shins were one of the bands on the soundtrack, so Dani bought the album. I didn’t care all that much for the movie, or Braff’s show. Even my mom hated Braff’s goofy hospital show. In my experience, people at the hospital looked worn and grumpy. No song-and-dance numbers, just kids crying. It came as a surprise, then, when the album grew on me. I sometimes found myself humming along without realizing it.

“So,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “what’s your type?”

“I’m not sure I have a type,” I said.

“Of course you do,” Dani said. “Everybody has a type. You might not know what it is yet, but you’ve got one. Believe me.”

Dani and me were sitting around the kitchen table at my house drinking stolen beer and looking at her rock star collection. My mom worked a double shift that day and wouldn’t be home until seven the next morning, so we could do pretty much whatever we wanted. In this case, doing whatever we wanted meant drinking my mom’s beer and talking about boys. The week before, my mom had come across a sale at the Quik & Eazy convenience store in
Statesboro, which everyone called the Quick & Sleazy. They were getting rid of their whole stock of a beer called Wanker. Each bottle had a different picture of a girl in a bikini on the label. For some reason they were selling it for $8.23 a case. I imagine there must of been something wrong with it, but it tasted alright and it gave you a buzz. My mom went ahead and bought ten cases of Wanker and stacked them up in the carport. She had to make two trips in her little ’89 Ford Festiva to get it all home. So now we had hundreds of beers, but no cereal or bread. For breakfast I’d roll pressed ham and American cheese into little tubes and eat them with my fingers.

“So what’s your type, then?” I said.

“I have complicated taste, so I actually have more than one type, but all my men pretty much fit in the same category.”

“All your men?” I laughed hard enough to make beer fizz into my sinuses. Dani frowned. “Alright,” I asked, “what category?”

“Well, for example, I only like men with brown hair. The darker the better. But not black hair, because you don’t want someone who looks too much like you do, and not blond hair, because I’m a Leo almost on the cusp of Virgo.”

“But, wait, I thought you liked Eminem? How’s he fit in if you only go for brunettes? He’s got blond hair.”

“See, that’s where it gets complicated. Eminem has blond hair, but it’s bleached blond. His actual hair color is brown, so he fits into my type.”

“How do you know he has brown hair? Whenever I’ve seen it, it’s always yellow.” I opened another warmish beer. It foamed over and made a mess of the tablecloth.

“It’s
so
not yellow,” she nearly yelled. “It’s platinum blond.”

“What do you go by then? The eyebrows?”

She calmed herself with a sip of beer and settled into the vinyl cushion on the kitchen chair. “That’s a good clue, but you can’t
always tell for sure from the eyebrows. Sometimes they’re lighter or darker. Look at my eyebrows.”

I did. She’d plucked them into arches that gave her face a startled look. When she really was surprised, they looked like hand-drawn rooftops over her eyes. There was nothing realistic about them. In fact, one was just the tiniest bit higher than the other. But I saw her point—her eyebrows were a couple of shades lighter than her head hair. With the August sun pouring through the window onto her face, they seemed almost brown while the hair pulled back into pigtails was shiny black. The color of wet tires.

“Do you see?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They’re almost brown.”

“Exactly. If my hair was bleached and you didn’t know any better, you might think my hair was brown.”

“So how do you know then?”

“I’ll show you.” She opened her rock star collection and flipped through it.

The rock star collection was a three-ring binder filled with sheets of heavy black construction paper. She organized it alphabetically by band, and then by the individual members of the band. Each page was covered with photographs of rock stars clipped from magazines or printed up from websites. Beneath each picture was a handwritten explanation of the photograph: name of the rock star, band, date of the photograph, location, and the name of the magazine or fan site it came from. She had subscriptions to about eight music and movie magazines. Sometimes she also added a personal note like, “Eddie has looked much better in other pictures, but this one shows off his wrists. They are amazing and tan and strong here. However, those dark circles under his eyes make me worry about his health. Drugs?” The binder we were looking at that day was volume two. She’d been collecting rock stars since before I met her, and by the end of eighth grade, she had filled up
her first binder. Nearly three hundred pages, back and front. She hardly looked at the old one anymore since she believed her taste in music had matured a lot since then. The first volume was mostly filled with boy bands from the nineties. “I only put men in the new collection,” she’d told me. All in all, there must of been at least two hundred pages and ten times that many pictures in volume two. You could spend a whole day looking at it, and we often did.

“Look here.” She turned to the Eminem section, which had grown to almost twenty pages. “I’ve got a couple of pictures where you can just barely see his roots and they’re brown.” She jabbed at a photograph of him crouched down by a burnt-out car. He glared at something outside the frame that seemed to make him very angry.

I took a big gulp of beer and narrowed my eyes for a better view. “I don’t think I see.”

“Look closer.” She tapped Eminem’s head with her thumb and clucked at me. “At home I use a magnifying glass, but I forgot to bring it.”

We bent our heads together, noses almost touching the page.

“Do you see it now?” she said, her forehead wrinkled up in serious concentration.

“Yeah, I think so.” I didn’t.

“It took me a while to find that one. I can’t tell you how relieved I was. I’d started to worry he might not be my type.”

“But he is?”

“Definitely.”

“How do you find out what your type is?”

“The most important thing is they need to look similar to you, but they can’t look exactly like you. So, like with you, you’re a dishwater blonde with light brown eyes. Your type can have darker or lighter hair or eyes, but they can’t be the same. Also, they’ve got to be at least five inches taller than you.”

“Why five?”

“Well, the actual rule is your head can’t be taller than his nose. Five’s just a nice round number.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering whose rule this was. I picked two of my mother’s cigarette butts out of the ashtray. Mom had a tendency to smoke four or five drags and then jab them out like she was killing something, so there were always a lot of smokable butts. I used to be able to steal a pack now and then, but I’m pretty sure she figured out I was doing it. About two months earlier, she’d started hiding her cartons.

“Give me one without the lipstick, please,” Dani said, pointing to the ashtray. “This is gross enough without having to feel like I’m kissing your mom.”

We swapped cigs and I opened up another beer. I’d drunk two over the last hour and already I could feel my tongue getting thicker. A cloud passed across the sun and the kitchen darkened for a moment. The sudden change of light made me dizzy.

“Your type,” Dani said, moving her frown from my peeling purple toenail polish up to my nose, “also has to be at least three years older than you.”

“So, could Andy Tyson be my type?”

Andy was a senior when we were freshman. I’d had a thing for him since Christmas last, when I saw him buying a paper sack of screws at the hardware store. Those tight jeans he wore really clinched it.

“Hell, no!” Dani scrunched up her face. “For one thing, you’ve got almost the exact same nose. I mean exact.”

“I do?” This made me feel good and I must of looked it.

“I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of.”

“Fuck you,” I said in my joking voice, which was higher and came out of my nose. She laughed, and so did I, but inside I kind of meant it. I knew she meant what she’d said about my nose.