Cut Both Ways (26 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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I FILL OUT
my forms for graduation. I turn in my textbooks for most of my classes. I sign people's yearbooks, though I don't even buy a yearbook for myself. There's something about Brandy still being a sophomore in my senior yearbook that I don't like. All those pictures in there are ones she took, her pictures, and she only gets the one little square in the whole fucking book. I'd rather spend twenty-eight bucks on
her
than that fucking book.

There's a weird feeling, though, like I'm floating and so are all my friends. Jack is floating, DeKalb is floating. They're hanging around people they've never hung around with, beyond the basketball team and the band, beyond Isabella and Loretta, beyond people who take AP classes or who even go to Franklin. DeKalb has people from Little Caesar's he hangs out with; Jack goes out with Cora the rubber-ducky girl and the barista from the coffee shop of the first show they played. It's like everyone's hovering for just a little while before they take off into flight.

All I'm doing is waiting, counting down the days with Brandy, until she gets her period.

I've been driving by my dad's house. And it's like a miracle. Like the snow melted and underneath the house was new. I couldn't go inside, but it seemed like everything Roy said. There's new siding. A front porch is built, the frame is up, with empty holes for windows. The stacks in the driveway are disappearing. I tell this to Garrett one night when I come in for work and he nods.

“Just heard from him the other day, in fact,” he says. “Can't believe he even called me. Sounds like things are getting better.”

I don't ask if he's drinking. Or if Roy's still there, because I don't see his car as much as I did. Maybe once a week now? I don't tell Brandy I go there to spy, though. She's not worried about getting pregnant. Not at all.

“I would
know
, if I were,” she says. “I would feel different. I wish you'd stop freaking out about this.”

“We can't ever do that again, though.”

“I know.”

“Ever again,” I say. And we haven't even had sex, really, since that time. I'm not up for it. I'm too nervous. And even when she tells me she's taken a test—two of them, with Shania—and it said “not pregnant.” I feel better but still burned by it. Nervous. It's hard for me to get into sex with her again.

I go pick up Taylor and Kinney from their after-school thing and when I get home, my mom's there. Not in her yoga pants, but still wearing her work suit and heels. She's on the phone. Smiling her face off. Nodding, gesturing, though no one can see her.

“Yes, yes,” she says, holding her finger out to shush my sisters and me. “No, absolutely. That'll work perfect. I think the tent will fit just fine, in that case. Okay. Yes. Sure . . . No, not a problem, Tom. I've got all that under control. If you can handle that side of it, I'll handle the food and cake. Right. Right. All right. Talk to you soon, then. 'Bye.”

She clicks off the phone. Clicks over to us, her heels on the wood floor.

“Well, it's official,” she says. “Good news!”

Kinney says, “We're going to Disney World?”

Taylor says, “We get candy for dinner?”

My mom ignores them, shakes her head and says, “The party. Your dad's agreed to host it. We can send out the invites now, with his address.”

I nod. Press my lips together. I'm not sure what to say. He must be done hating me. And hating my mom, too.

“Three weeks beforehand is plenty of notice,” she says. “I was going to worry if he didn't call today, but he did. He came through.” She looks up, crosses her fingers, shakes her head, like she's thanking God. It's a strange gesture. My mom acting religious is a new development I can't quite accept.

Then, under her breath, while she's opening the fridge and pulling out a bag of carrots. “I can't believe it. My therapist was right.”

My mom has a therapist?

Kinney, who has lost interest, is mauling the fruit bowl on the dining-room table, looking for a banana that is perfectly yellow, with no spots. Even one spot's a deal breaker for her. Taylor is
lying on the floor, looking at an issue of one of the kids' magazines she and Kinney get.

“So, okay,” I say. “The house is ready?”

“He says it will be.”

“Have you seen it lately?”

“No. Have you?”

“No.” I don't want to tell her that I have. That I know. That it all could be true. I want it to be true too much. I didn't realize this until this minute. I wanted to see what I'm seeing—her believing him, her being happy about something he did, her being thankful and relieved. I wish I could have videoed it for him, actually.

But then Kinney starts complaining about something and my mom's dealing with that. It would have been a five-second video. I'd have been lucky to even snap a picture.

The last bit of school stretches out everything so slow, then. Everything feeling abnormal, unusual. Off kilter. Finals. Locker clean outs. The class trip on a riverboat down the St. Croix where me and Jack and DeKalb get so high, we can barely move without wanting to puke over the side of the damn boat. A bunch of house parties that I attend with Brandy and they're boring except she gets the hiccups a lot when she drinks. The last one is at Jack's house, the day before commencement, but now the house is packed with people, all grades and ages, and shit's kind of crazy, but I'm not smoking or drinking, because the riverboat experience has me spooked.

I'm sitting on the back porch with Jack, who is telling Isabella
and Loretta about a nude beach he went to in Sweden, when Shania drags me to a bathroom and shoves me inside. Brandy's in there, drunk while sitting on the toilet.

“I could have sworn I was getting it!” She's yelling, holding a tampon in one hand. “I'm probably making my baby brain damaged!” she says. “Why the fuck am I so stupid!”

Her panties are around her knees and she's staring at the crotch, which I guess she had hoped would be bloody. I don't know what to say. I'm staring at her panties like I'm expecting some kind of answer to appear there. A message on the wall, the face of Jesus. Or Elvis. Some sign from God. I don't even believe in God. Never have.

“Brandy, what . . . ?”

Someone starts banging on the door.

“It's almost June,” she says, wiping her tears on toilet paper. “It should be here by now. It should.”

“I thought you took those two tests and they said you weren't—”

“That was probably too early to take them,” she says. “I called the hotline on the box.”

“You never told me that!”

She's crying now, fully. Sobbing. Her head in a pile over her knees, her panties. It might be the worst thing I've ever seen, actually.

“Open up, Will!” Shania at the door.

I kneel down in front of Brandy. Lift her head up. Wipe her tears. Push her hair out of her face.

“Brandy, come on,” I say. “Put your stuff on, okay.” She's still clutching the tampon.

She just sits there. Eyes closed tight. Like she's praying. Like if she wills it hard enough, she'll bleed right this second.

“Come on,” I say. I pull up her panties, her skirt. Then I pull her up to stand. She's wobbly. I smooth her shirt over her skirt. She's breathing like she's still crying.

“I'm gonna take you home.”

“No, I'm too drunk. Not yet.”

“I'll take you somewhere else, then, okay?”

“Just not home. Megan's home. And my nana. Not there.”

“Fine. I'll think of something.”

I lean her against the sink counter. Her face is terrible right now—red eyes, stark white skin, black mascara smeared all over all of it. A chunk of her hair is stuck to her cheek. I look at myself in the mirror behind her and what I see is worse. The lighting in here is fluorescent, intense. My hair's sticking up in the back and I'm pitting out my T-shirt and I look extra hairy for some reason. My arm hair, the hair on my chest sticking out of top of my T-shirt collar. Even my hands are hairy. Plus I've got stubble.

I look at us in the mirror, my hairy front and her wobbling back. We could be someone's parents. Right now. Look at us. We're a disaster in the bathroom. A disaster inside a beautiful house. A disaster inside her body. I want to get out of here but I don't want to take her with me. I wish Shania would deal with it.

But when I let her into the bathroom, Shania's face is all tilted
to the side and slamming the door. So Shania knows. Probably everyone else knows too.

“Oh, girl,” Shania says to Brandy, hugging her right away. “What's this? Oh. Here,” she says, handing me the tampon Brandy was holding.

I have no idea what Shania expects me to do with the tampon? Put it back in Brandy's purse? Is there some other place to put it? Do girls just leave tampons loose like that? I suppose that's why they have purses, not wallets. The thing barely fits in my pocket.

But Brandy doesn't have a purse in here, anyway. I don't want to ask where it is, because she and Shania are having a little talk, their heads together, Shania talking quietly in this murmur, which is not normal Shania—she's usually loud and laughing. I feel useless, a taxi Shania called so I can take Brandy somewhere else.

Finally, Brandy wipes her tears and Shania turns to me and says, “Are you parked close by?” I nod. I mean, I'm not in the driveway, but it's not a long walk, either.

We all leave the bathroom together, with people staring at us, girls mostly. Brandy looks down, with me and Shania on either side of her as we go through the house, like she's some wasted movie star and everyone's trying to get pictures of her. I don't know if she's being dramatic or drunk. Both, probably.

We're on our way out and DeKalb stops us.

“Hey,” he says. “What's this?” He motions to Brandy.

“Brandy's not feeling so great.”

“Yeah, tequila will do that,” he says.

“Shut it,” Shania says to him. “Don't be piling on.”

“I'm not, just joking . . .”

Shania says something to Brandy in her ear and then she steps away and links arms with DeKalb. Are they together again? Or maybe just together for tonight? DeKalb looks like he's happy.

“Make sure you take her home,” she says to me.

“No!” Brandy looks up. “No, Will, I can't go home yet! I can't—”

“I know!” I say. “I won't.”

“Will . . .”

“I know what to do, already,” I say. “Jesus.”

It's still warm out, though it's after nine at night. A couple of people, probably Jack's neighbors, are talking in the street with a bored dog on a leash between them, looking at his house. The place is going to get busted soon, if they're hip to what's going on. Jack's gotten a little lazy about parties at his place. He'd been so unpopular before that it didn't matter. Now, with Loretta and Isabella all over his shit, inviting all their friends, people are getting stupid.

I get Brandy into the car and drive careful, slow, down the street. Don't need to give the neighbors any more reason to get suspicious. Not all teenagers drive like hell. Not all teenagers are dumbasses and irresponsible.

Except me. I am. I am an idiot with a knocked-up girlfriend and a tampon poking out of my pocket and I'm not wearing the flip-flops my girlfriend bought me, but my boots like normal, because I'm used to them. Because at my dad's, it seemed like that was safer. You could step on a nail; you could knock into a pile
of boards and bash the shit out of your toe. I wear them to work, too. They've been splattered with grease and hot water and ice cream and melted butter and ranch dressing and pancake batter. I hose them off with the dish-room sprayer every night, because that's what Carl does. The leather's cracking and they smell like hell, which was Brandy's main point, I think, but I don't care.

I don't know where to take her. She says she's not hungry. She says she doesn't want to go anywhere. She says she feels carsick. I have only one idea of where to go and when I get there, she asks me what the hell my problem is.

“Why do you keep doing this to yourself?” she asks as I shut the car off. Roy's car isn't parked out front, where he normally parks. Neither the truck or the van are there. There's no lights on, either.

“I don't know where else to go. Want to go inside?”

“No.”

“Brandy, come on. What do you want me to do? Drive around all night? You said you were feeling carsick.”

“But he told you that you couldn't come until he invited you back.”

“But we're having the graduation party here. He called my mom. We sent out the invites.”

“I know,” she says. “I got mine yesterday. Megan wants to come.”

“Don't you want to see it, then?”

“Maybe he wants to surprise you?”

“Come on, let's,” I say. “Just for a second.”

She doesn't say yes. Just unbuckles her seatbelt. We hold hands all the way up to the back door, where the outside light shows that there's not much left in the backyard in terms of piles and materials. The big-top tent folded up in a big white square, the metal poles zip-tied together on the ground.

When I open the door, it's dark. I reach around for a utility light but my hands slip over a light plate. I flick on the switch.

It's crazy. It's beautiful.

The whole main floor is open and finished. There's a new sofa. A new television on the wall. The floors are refinished wood. Smooth and empty. There's some trim along the edges that's undone; I can see the tools and the stack of molding on the floor. Like whoever was working got interrupted for a minute.