Landslide (7 page)

His head falls to the side, one of his eyebrows raised in a blend of curiosity and disbelief. “What the fuck are you doing, Erica?”

“Stealing your cigarette, Cole,” I answer and without giving myself time to think twice, I breathe in deeply, taking in all the noxious mysticism the cigarette between my lips has ever held before this moment.

“While you’re certainly taking the towel, wet hair, and drowned rat look to a new level of smoking hot right now, lest I be the one to remind you that you don’t actually smoke, sugar.”
 

“Yeah, well I also don’t go around slapping guys and then needing them to undress me ten minutes later because I can’t seem to remember the right way to take off a pair stockings and I’m too inept to work six buttons on my own. It’s like a whole new me.” My retort also includes twisting the top off of a Heineken and taking a swig so big, beer trickles out the corners of my mouth.

“This is true,” he chuckles and retrieves another cigarette for himself from the pack on the table.

“Oh, I also borrowed your toothbrush.”

Cole rolls his eyes at my admission of breaking the laws of personal hygiene boundaries and before taking a drink of
my
beer that he’d forcibly taken from me, he mutters, “Of course you did.”

“And I straightened up the mess in your cupboard when I was looking for a Band-Aid. I think I used the last one, though. Hope you don’t mind,” I tell him, snatching the bottle back and taking another long drag off the cigarette as I pull my knees up to my chest.

“Nope, but you might mind my wandering eyes if you stay sitting like that,” he smirks at me with a quirk of his eyebrows, indicating that although he isn’t actually looking and I have my panties on underneath it, he’s noticed the towel isn’t quite long enough to completely protect my modesty.
 

“So don’t look.” Remembering a birthday party that feels like a lifetime ago though, and how my grandma liked to toss us in the bath together after rain storms that we would go puddle jumping during, or after we had made what Cole claimed were “super awesome and elaborate speedways” for his Hot Wheels cars in the composted soil of my grandma’s vegetable garden—you know, before having different private bits made bathing together weird—and then of course the more recent time of a half-hour or so ago when he had to have seen me naked in the tub, I add, “Although it’s not like you’ll get an eye-full of anything you haven’t already seen before. Besides, I can’t seem to find it in me to care or move right now.”

He sighs and nods. “Fair enough.”

I’m not sure if he remembers that birthday party or not and I consider asking, but after spending the afternoon and earlier evening talking and reminiscing for hours at Holden’s parents’ house with them and a bunch of other people who had shown up with casseroles and cakes in hand, I realize I don’t really feel up to taking another trip down memory lane just now, even if it is a quick one and along a different route, so I keep my mouth shut. We sit in comfortable silence for a few minutes until I remember the box I was supposed to give to Cole.

“Shit. I have to go to the car,” I announce, leaning sideways to put the cigarette out in the ashtray on the coffee table before moving to stand up, which of course is a rookie mistake. “Mr. And Mrs. St. James gave me a box with a bunch of stuff they thought you might want,” I mumble through my sudden lightheadedness brought on by my first-ever nicotine rush.

“You mean the box you smashed my toes with before you hit me the first time? If so, then it’s over there,” he answers and points a look across the room to where he’d moved it.

The dizziness passes more quickly than I thought it would, but Cole’s teasing reminder of the scene I made finally has my cheeks burning bright and my knees feeling weak. I sink back down to the sofa and then burying my face in my hands, I start crying again, the tears coming unbidden but not unexpected.

“I’m so sorry, Cole…I didn’t mean to go crazy like that. And I didn’t mean whatever I said to you. I mean I was kinda mad at you on the way over here, but I really didn’t think seeing you with a beer in your hand would turn me into whoever that psycho was who probably said all kinds of hateful things.”

Cole leans forward and rather than putting his arm around me or rubbing my back in comfort like most everyone would’ve felt like they had to, he just rests his elbows on his knees and nudges me with his shoulder. “Look at me,” he whispers, and when I drop my hands to my lap and turn my face to his, he continues, “You don’t owe me or anyone else a goddamned thing, least of all an apology. You hear me?”

I nod, sniffling back tears and wiping my nose with my hand. “I’m just so…” I stop and sigh, afraid and not wanting to admit it out loud, but knowing I should—and even more importantly, that I
can
.

Knowing I can trust him and say anything to him gives me a newfound comfort, so I take a deep breath and plunge forward. “I’m angry, Cole. I am
so
angry. And I know somewhere in the back part of my mind that’s still capable of rational thought that I can’t blame him for what happened or even be mad at him, because I
know
he didn’t die on me on purpose, but I can’t help feeling betrayed or something. Like he
left
me when I didn’t do anything to deserve being abandoned like this. He didn’t give me any warning, he just…
left
.

“We had
plans
. Big plans for when I graduated and the rest of our lives that I had my heart set on living out, but I couldn’t even go to my own high school graduation ceremony because I couldn’t hold it together long enough to go without breaking down every five minutes. And instead of spending graduation night with him and finally being
together
after everything that happened and waiting so long, I had to be medicated in order to even sleep longer than an hour without waking up, screaming my head off and choking on my own tears because he broke his promise to me. A promise he should’ve
never
made to me because he wasn’t gonna keep it. And I
hate
him for that.

“I hate him, Cole. I know deep down I’ll always love him, but I hate him right now, and that’s making me hate myself and everyone else.” Between sniffles, I suck in a deep, but shaky breath and look back at Cole, wholly ashamed for giving a voice to my true feelings; feelings that make me desperate to hear the right answer to what I’m about to ask him. “I know you’re thinking it, so go ahead and say it…I’m a monster, right? I’m the most horrible monster imaginable for feeling like this, aren’t I?”

Taken aback by the soft smile that spreads across his face, I feel the heat of more tears in my eyes when he speaks the most perfect answer. “Sugar, feeling the way you do doesn’t make you a monster,” he tells me gently, pausing only to tuck a damp chunk of matted hair behind my ear, “It makes you human.”

“You really believe that? That having such real feelings of hatred and anger like I do is a human quality?”

“Yeah, I really do. Because if it isn’t, then I’m an even bigger monster than what your nightmares can conjure up,” he chuckles, sitting back against the couch again. When he does it though, he pulls me with him so that I can curl up into a ball sort of half on his lap and half next to him with his arms around me. With another sigh, he rests his chin on the top of my head and says, “Seriously, Erica, if you only knew what I wanted to do to some of the people here tonight…I mean I know she’s a friend of yours, but that Destiny chick honestly had me re-thinking the rule of guys not hitting girls.”

I sigh, feeling a little embarrassed and sorry for Destiny. She’ll just never work up the nerve to do anything about it and no doubt, I’ll have to hear all about how she was
sooo
close to telling Cole that she likes him, but chickened out at the last minute or something. Then I think about it and decide to do her and myself a favor by outing her. “Yeah well, she’s had a crush on you for a long time, but just hasn’t known how to say anything or go about showing you.”

“Uh, no kidding, I think I picked up on that. And mostly thanks to the excessive saliva she produces every time I’ve ever been within spitting distance of her. You know, drool tends to send the message special delivery like that. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m flattered, but I’m even more relieved she’s not a camel, because I’ve been to the zoo and those things can spit really fuckin’ far. Still, she really pissed me off tonight and it was all I could do to go easy on her when I booted her out. And don’t even get me started on what I would’ve done had I actually made it to the football field for that funeral today. I’m telling’ ya, your head would spin.”

“Why didn’t you?” I ask in a small voice, instantly dropping the subject of Destiny’s obsession with him due to the fact that I’m suddenly apprehensive about possibly having just opened a can of worms that Cole would prefer to remain closed. Still, I need to know why. “Make it to the football field I mean…”

He sighs and I can feel him shift his shoulders trying to get more comfortable with me haphazardly sitting in his lap like an overgrown baby. “I wanted to be there, really… I wanted to be there, to sit there and remember him with his parents and you, but, I just couldn’t do it. I got to the school and saw all the news vans and television crews hovering around everyone getting out of their cars and the people trying to get through the line to the football field in peace, and how it seemed like just about everyone in town was using his death to gain ratings and popularity.

“You know, like everyone else who’s ever lived here and died didn’t have the clout to pull in the votes or viewers like a hometown boy who’d already made it onto national television by playing football for a college that just spent however many millions of dollars upgrading their sports complex. I mean I get it, it was a shocking event and it literally happened on the field, which automatically makes it noteworthy, but…I don’t know. I just felt like puking when I pulled into the parking lot, knowing I was about to become another number in the funeral statistics that would be listed off on fucking ESPN or something,” he rants, and I’m becoming just as upset about the whole thing too, although when Cole starts talking with his hands and lowering his voice to make himself sound disingenuously sincere and self-important like a lot of news anchors sound, I have to bite the inside of my bottom lip to keep myself from giggling too much.

“And now on
Sports Center
… The funeral of Holden St. James saw an incredible 437 mourners this afternoon, that’s 78 more than what was projected for those of you who bet the over-under. No one saw it coming, but the empty casket was exponentially outdone in ridiculousness with its 2 dozen pallbearers. Flowers were in the range of an atrocious bazillion, we counted 16 well-executed and solidly caught basket tosses from the very perky varsity cheerleaders, who incidentally had to manage their rousing performance without their captain, as she was part of the aforementioned 437 gathered mourners, and not surprisingly, the musical score composed by the dead boy’s high school douche music director produced a house full of dry eyes with a rather somber 93 tears in the negative.

“I mean ‘Candle in the Wind’? The fuck was that about, you know? He was a twenty-year-old, somewhat privileged, barely mediocre student going to college on an athletic scholarship who was of German and Irish decent and couldn’t hold a tan for shit by the way, so add
completely
and
totally
white to the list, and he had a total of like eleven minutes of televised starting game time under his jockstrap, but he has one too many Rockstars before hitting the practice field and his heart goes kaput. All of that rules him out of being a homeboy from the projects who was cut down after persevering through racial bias and prejudice to fulfill his dreams of becoming an American leader, he wasn’t a fucking depressed and drugged out supermodel who might’ve been having an affair with one of the country’s most beloved presidents, and he wasn’t a member of English fucking royalty!”

I tip my head back to stare at him and then raise my eyebrows in amusement when he looks down at me.

“What? Too soon? Or did I go too far? I went too far, huh?” he asks rhetorically and with a chuckle, shoving my hip gently off his lap at the same time so that he can stand up and stretch his back, which makes some sort of worrisome cracking and popping sounds when he twists from side to side. He catches me wincing at him but blows it off by saying, “See, this is the shit that happens when I try to console a crying girl and not look up her towel at the same time.”

I roll my eyes again and then still when I realize he’s walked over to the box of Holden’s things intending to open it. I can’t even seem to crack a fake smile when Cole puts his hands to his head in a sort of mock-anxious manner and impersonates Brad Pitt in the movie
Seven
when he whines, “What’s in the
booox
?”

“It’s, um…mostly just some clothes, I think. His MacBook and some of his school books are in there too, though. His parents thought you might be able to use them sometime I guess,” I answer and then clear the lump that suddenly and painfully rises in my throat when he carefully and almost reverently starts pulling out some of Holden’s clothes and his computer, “Uh, you know…I think I should go to bed. Do you have anything except booze to drink, though? I should probably have something non-alcoholic to take my anti-freak-out meds with.”

“Huh?” he asks, looking to have traveled a million light years away just by simply opening the computer to stare at the login screen. “I’m sorry, what’d you say?”

“Do you have some water or juice or something so I can have sweet and um, medicated dreams? You know, so that neither of us are woken up by something resembling a screaming banshee.”

“Oh, yeah…check the fridge. There’s probably some bottled water or an unopened beer in there,” he tells me, and I’m not sure if he was joking around or if he considers beer to be a form of juice, but he goes back to time traveling the second he looks away and starts tapping keys on the keyboard, so I give him his space and don’t question him.