Empress of the World (18 page)

Battle and I used to try to get Katrina to come to breakfast with us, and it was always an ordeal, because Katrina sleeps more deeply and snores louder than anyone I’ve ever met. And it’s that irregular, snorting sound that I hear now, through her door.

“Oh, god. She must have crashed.” I lean against the doorway, my legs suddenly rubbery.

“Sounds like she needed to.”

“Yeah, she definitely did.”

Now what?

We stand outside Katrina’s room for five minutes, listening to her snore.

“So,” I say, finally. “Hi.”

My voice sounds weird and hollow.

“Hi,” says Battle.

Her voice sounds just like mine, except shakier.

It would take more than a knife to cut this tension. It would require at least a chainsaw. The thought of brandishing a chainsaw strikes me funny, and I want to tell Battle, and I look up at her for an instant before I remember that I can’t tell her, because that would be acknowledging that the tension exists. It’s in that instant that I see the tears running down her cheeks.

“Come on. Let’s not talk in the hallway,” I say abruptly.

Without waiting to see if she follows me, I start walking back to my room. And I hear her footsteps behind me, and her breathing.

I unlock my door and sit down on the floor, my back against the bed. I start pulling out a loose thread from the bedspread.

She sits on the floor, too, on the other side of the room.

She runs her hands through her hair distractedly. I can feel it as though it were my hands in the soft blonde fuzz.

I have no idea what I’m going to say to her. The tears are starting to come for me, too, and the lump in my throat. Damn it. I don’t care any more.

“I love you,” I say. It sounds like I’m saying, “Fuck you,” because my voice is so angry.

She just looks at me.

I wrap the loose thread from the bedspread around the index finger of my left hand, tightly enough to cut off the circulation. I watch my fingertip slowly turn from red to purple.

“I love you, too.” She enunciates this very carefully, like a mother speaking to the child who’s just broken her favorite vase.

“Oh sure–‘as a friend,’ right?” I accuse her with the biggest cliché of teenage romance.

“Yes–but that’s not all, and you know it.” Now she sounds angry, too.

“Do I? How about Kevin? What does he know?” I let go of the thread, and the blood throbs back into my finger.

“Kevin is not relevant,” Battle says coldly.

“Oh, really? Well, he seemed pretty goddamned relevant to you in the elevator! Not to mention all those times you went strolling all over campus hand in hand.”

She expels her breath quickly–it’s too explosive to be called a sigh.

“Well?” I demand.

Battle says, sounding incredibly irritated, “Look, I can’t give you a perfect explanation.”

“Did I say I wanted one?”

She looks straight at me and says simply, “You always do.”

All the anger rushes out of me and is immediately replaced by shame.

“Whatever you want to say or do is fine.” I try to keep my voice neutral, but it comes out small and pathetic-sounding. My eyes hurt in a way that’s half wanting to cry and half simple fatigue. This makes me realize just how tired I am, how little sleep I’ve gotten since Battle left me, how drained I already was when Katrina showed up at my door. What I really want right now is for us to hurry up and finish reconciling.

There’s a long silence. I shiver. My fatigue has made me cold; I can see the goose bumps on my legs. But I don’t feel like pulling the blanket off the bed. That would be too comforting, and that’s not what I want right now.

“What if I don’t have a good reason for what happened with Kevin?” Battle’s voice is low.

“What do you mean? What would a good reason have been?”

I don’t know what she’s getting at. I’m trying not to sound angry, but I don’t think it’s working.

Battle sits silent again for a minute and then says all in a rush, “A good reason would have been that I didn’t care about you any more.”

“But you said you didn’t have a good reason.”

She nods.

This is ridiculous. We’re not communicating, we’re having a contest to see who can be more indirect. Words really
don’t
work, do they? Without meaning to, I start to laugh, and once I start, I can’t stop. This must be hysteria.

“Why are you laughing?”

I wheeze a few times and manage eventually to get enough breath to say, “Us. We’re acting like teenagers, you know.” My voice is shaky. At a certain point, it really is hard to tell the difference between laughing and crying.

“We
are
teenagers,” Battle reminds me.

“I know. But this is so dumb.”

“Dumb–uh oh, that’s dangerous. Think they’ll kick us out?” Battle’s voice is. . .edgy? Brittle? I can’t think of the right word.

“Kick us out? Isn’t it a little late for that? I don’t know where she’s going with this.

“For being dumb. We’re at gifted program, get it?” She tries to laugh, for about three seconds. Then she just looks at me. Battle has more eyes than other people. It’s like everyone else’s eyes are sixty watts and hers are a million. I look away.

“You don’t hold anything back, do you?” she asks in a flat voice.

“Should I?”

She sighs. It’s as though she’s thoroughly exasperated that telepathy doesn’t work. That I can’t read whatever the neon sign she thinks she has flashing on her forehead is saying. Is this a Southern thing, to expect people to understand you without you actually having to
say
anything?

I wait.

“It just doesn’t seem to be hard for you.” She’s talking to the floor, not to me. But then again, that’s where I’m looking.

“What doesn’t?”

“Intimacy.” She does look up when she says that.

“Should it be?”

“It is for most of us.”

“Doesn’t seem like it was that hard for you with
Kevin
.”

She laughs a short laugh that’s almost a bark. “I think I said a total of twenty words to Kevin during our involvement, and ten of them were ‘Really?’ He doesn’t know I have a brother, he doesn’t know why I shaved my head, he doesn’t even know I have
dogs
.”

“What does he know?”

Battle shrugs, reminding me of Isaac. “That I’ll listen to him blather about composition for hours on end. Oh, and that I’m a ‘babe,’ apparently.”

I smile, just a little. “Well, you are.”

“Nic—you knew more about me in an hour than he learned in weeks. Do you have any idea how scary that is?”

I don’t know what to say, so I just look at her, and she says all in a rush, “It felt sometimes like you wanted to
vivisect
me, like you wouldn’t be happy until you had everything about me classified, labeled, and put into jars with formaldehyde.”

“You don’t have to believe this, but I’m trying not to do that anymore,” I say.

“I don’t know what I believe.”

“Neither do I.”

We look at each other.

Maybe I shouldn’t try to label everything I feel, but right now, it’s definitely love.

“We’d better get some sleep.” Why did I say that?

She nods. Then she gets up, crosses the room, and awkwardly reaches out to give me a hug.

I don’t want to let go, but at the same time, I have to. I don’t have room left for any more emotions tonight. So after a moment, I step away, and say “Sleep well.”

“Sleep well,” she echoes from the doorway, and closes the door behind her.

 

In the morning, I call Isaac’s room. Phones are easier.

“Battle and I talked last night.”

“Good. Took you long enough.”

“We’re not back together or anything, but don’t think she’s with Kevin anymore, either.”

“That’s good too.”

“Now all you have to do is ask Katrina out!”

“I don’t
have
to do anything, Lancaster. Except finish this paper.”

“Sorry–I didn’t mean it that way. Isaac?”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m sorry I got so weird about what happened at the river.”

“It’s all right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks–thanks for being my friend, Isaac.”

“Don’t go getting all sentimental on me, Lancaster. I’ve gotta fight the Six-Day War in ten pages by four P.M.”

I have to laugh. “Huh. How many days was
our
war, I wonder?”

“It doesn’t matter now. Does it?”

Battle is compiling her notes for a World History paper–only Battle could be so organized that she can get everything in order while she’s sitting in a tree–and I’m trying to write the analysis of the four artifacts Ms. Fraser has borrowed from the dig for us to study. Right now, I’m just staring at the pictures I drew of them in my notebook. I’ve gotten so much more practice drawing this summer than I thought I would.

I yawn, stretch, and look down. There was a Frisbee game going on earlier, but the players have now disappeared. It was fun to follow the game from above, watching the red disc sail through the air from one end of the courtyard to the other.

Two figures come out of the double doors that lead into the dining hall.

“Free at last, free at last, great God almighty, I’m free at last!” the first figure yells, throwing her hands up into the air. The first figure is Katrina. The second figure, I note with delight, is Isaac.

“Battle, check this out!” I whisper up to her. She’s sitting on a slightly higher branch than I am this time. I point at Isaac and Katrina, and Battle grins hugely.

“So that’s your last big assignment?” asks Isaac. They sit down on one of the benches, fortunately still within earshot. If they looked up, they would see us. But they don’t.

Katrina says, “Yup, that’s right, only tiny little stupid projects for Mr. Toad till the end of the term!” She’s talking faster and louder than usual.

“She’s nervous,” Battle whispers down to me.

“I know,” I whisper back.

“Hey, you know what else?” Katrina says, in that same manic voice. “It’s been a week. I’ve been clean for a week. No nicotine has entered my bloodstream, no tar has defiled my lungs. They say you keep smelling like smoke for a while after you quit. Do you think I still smell like smoke?”

She leans her head very close to Isaac’s, and he sniffs the top of her head solemnly. “I can’t quite tell,” he says seriously. Katrina looks up at him. She says, “Well, then tell me if I taste like smoke.” And then she puts her arms around him and kisses him.

Battle and I immediately start making the kinds of noises that seventh-grade boys make in movies when the heroine takes off her shirt.

“Wheeeeooooo!”

“Ow, ow, ow!”

They stop kissing and look up, aghast.

“Wish I had a camera with me, that was such a Kodak moment!” I yell down.

Isaac frowns at Katrina. “Were you in with them on this?” he demands furiously. Katrina shakes her head vigorously. “I had no idea they were up there–you bitches! No idea at all.”

Isaac stands up, craning his neck back to look at us. He shakes his finger and says, “You are so dead. You don’t even
know
how dead you are. Soon as you come down out of that tree, you are not even going to remember what it was like having all your limbs attached in the proper places.” He almost cracks up as he says this last sentence, but he tries to maintain a tough-guy voice.

“Aw, come on, Isaac, I’m sure you can think of something
better to do
than wait for us to come down!” I’m so pleased I can hardly contain myself. If I could dance from up here, I would.

Isaac pretends to consider this for a minute. “Do I? Do I have anything better to do, Katrina?”

And Katrina grabs hold of his arm and begins dragging him out of our view.

“This is the lamest thing I’ve ever seen,” Isaac says at dinner on Saturday, brandishing a flyer that was put under all of our doors earlier in the week. The hot pink flyer advertises, in cutesy-looking handwriting, an end-of-term dance, to take place tonight. “They figure we don’t get enough of this shit at our regular schools, or what?”

“Oh, come on, honey, don’t you want to dance with me to all the slow songs?” Katrina asks in a sickly-sweet voice, batting her eyelashes.