Save Yourself (11 page)

“What are you doing?” he said.

The brush she held above her big toenail hovered for a moment but then kept going. Swift, smooth strokes, unwavering and decisive.
“Theoretically, I’m paying my bills. But since I don’t have anything to pay them with, I’m doing my toes instead.” She stuck the polish brush back into its bottle, pulled the pen from behind her ear, and stuck it between the two smallest toes on her right foot. Her toes were soft and nubby-looking, like a baby’s; the polish on her tiny nails was the color of pistachio ice cream and Patrick found himself wanting to lick them. “So, was she cute?”

Her tone was friendly, even playful. “Yeah, Mike told me you two had a good game of I Spy last night,” Patrick said. “Who won?”

“You’re changing the subject.” She picked up one of the envelopes and ran the corner of it around the edge of a toenail to wipe away a bit of errant polish, which oozed up and over the paper. Melted pistachio ice cream. “Was she cute?”

“Do you mean cute like a duckie or cute like a bunny?” he said, and she said, “I mean cute like a girl you want to fuck.”

She emphasized the action verb in a way he couldn’t ignore and the sudden hardness in her voice turned the bright sun sour, like milk on the verge of going bad. His gut grew hot. He regretted stopping to talk. He should have just kept going. “Jealousy seems like a weird reaction from you right now.”

She glared at him. “Shut up. Mike’s right inside.”

“Watching the race.” He wouldn’t come up for air until it was over and they both knew it.

A long, sore moment passed.

Finally, Caro said, “That car last night—I’ve seen it before. It was that goth chick from Zoney’s, right? From the other day?”

The soreness flared into anger. “You mean the other day that never happened? That other day?”

“Come off it, Patrick. That girl looked like she was all of sixteen. I’m just trying to keep you from getting in trouble.”

She sounded as angry as he felt. The backyard smelled like grass and dirt and nail polish, the back of Patrick’s neck was beginning to prickle under his hair in the hot sun, and his insides were being
pulled like taffy. He could feel a vile bubble of rage pushing its way up and out of him. “Then try staying out of my goddamned room at night.”

Her cheeks turned pink and she looked back down at her toes, her hair falling to hide her face. He stood up, turned his back to her, and started toward the alley: away from her, from the house, from the wreckage in his head.

“Patrick, wait,” she said, sounding—even through his fury—incredibly sad. “Where are you going?”

He didn’t care if she was sad. He couldn’t care. It was her fault. Hers. “To find that goth chick and ask her if she wants to fuck.” He tucked his earbuds into his ears, turned on his MP3 player, and cranked up the volume. If she said anything as he left the yard, he didn’t hear her.

When his shift was over on Monday morning, he had to stay after for a staff meeting, which was beyond tedious. Everyone gathered out back by the Dumpsters, the only space big enough to hold them all. Patrick chose a spot by the corner of the building, as far away from the rotting-garbage stench as he could get. If he leaned back a little he could see the gas pumps and the highway and freedom. And shit, fuck, and goddamn, who should pull up but the goth girl—Layla—in her big shiny hearse of a car.

Standing there in the dust and the stink, weeds tickling his ankles and trucks rumbling past on the highway, Patrick watched her fill up her car. Her black tank top made her skin look almost reflective, as if she was made out of chrome. She used a credit card to pay and didn’t even bother to watch the rising total the way most people did, staring instead at her own reflection in the car window: huge sunglasses, wind teasing at her hair. For the first time, what he could see of her face looked—normal. She looked bored, but not calculatedly so, and that irritating, knowing smirk was nowhere to be seen.
When a truck rolled by on the highway, shifting gears with a loud, grating bleat, she lifted her face toward the sound. Patrick wondered what she was thinking.

The passenger door opened. The girl who got out was short, like Layla, and she was dressed in black with huge clunky boots, like Layla. Her nose and her chin and the shape of her face were all just like Layla’s. But she wore her brown hair in a sloppy ponytail and kept her arms folded tightly in front of her body, with her shoulders hunched and her head down. As she crossed the parking lot, her walk held none of Layla’s insouciance, none of her swagger. Not to mention that Layla had curves in places where this girl didn’t even have places.

Jesus. What was
he
thinking?

That he felt so friendless and stuck that he was almost glad to see her, that’s what. He waited until the mousy girl was gone and then slipped around the corner. When he said, “You send your sister in for coffee?” she jumped. Just a little, but it was enough.

She recovered quickly. “I did. Although the coffee here is terrible.”

“Nobody ever washes the pots.”

“That’s appealing. Where’s your car? Do you not ever drive anywhere anymore?”

“I do not,” he said, “ever drive anywhere anymore.” Saying it aloud made him feel a little giddy. She had a mole on her chest, a few inches below her collarbone. Perfectly round, like a drop of chocolate. The wind blew a few strands of her hair into her mouth and she pulled them away with one finger. Her nail polish today was a slinky reptilian green.

The gas pump thudded. Layla pulled the nozzle out of the tank, dripping gasoline onto the car and the asphalt and everywhere, it seemed, except herself. If he’d been that careless he would have smelled like gasoline all day but Layla seemed to be one of those stain-resistant people that errant drops of effluvium broke the laws
of physics to protect. She pressed a button and the pump spat out her receipt. “Let’s do something tonight,” she said.

Some small thing inside him twisted. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you have something better to do? Because I assumed you were just going to go home and spend all night sitting in your crappy house.”

“My house could be amazing inside. It could be a goddamned wonderland.”

“So show me sometime,” she said, and the thing twisted harder. “But tonight, I want to go out. Are you coming or not?”

“Not,” he said, but even he could hear the lack of conviction in his voice.

She smiled. “Great,” she said. “I’ll pick you up at six.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing and walked away, back around the corner. When he stole another look at the gas pump, the sister was standing next to the car with two cups of coffee. Layla said something to her. She made a face, and they both laughed as the sister took off first one lid and then the other, and emptied them onto the asphalt. Patrick wasn’t very far away, but he was far enough for the sound of their laughter to be lost before it reached him.

He wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t returned home to a neat pile of laundry sitting incongruously on the maelstrom of his sheets. Caro’s work. All of the shirts were tucked into tidy squares with corners that lined up perfectly; the socks were turned right side out and balled together, and the waistbands of the boxer shorts all faced the same way. Even now, after everything that had happened, Caro still folded his underwear. He could not get her out of his life. He could not get her out of his head.

Fuck her. Fuck her and her obsessively folded, wrinkle-free laundry. When five thirty rolled around, he shaved for the first time in days, combed his hair, changed his shirt, and put on an extra layer of deodorant. Telling himself all the while that this was nothing, this was just a way to kill time. Reminding himself that Layla was clinically
insane, that she was jailbait. But he hated having nothing and he hated being nothing and before he left he took the pile of laundry and dumped it on his floor.

Layla told him he smelled good. He said, “If we’re going to go, let’s go,” and in a few minutes they were on the highway driving toward the turnpike. Her music was electronic and bass-heavy and sounded as if it were sung in German. The sun was going down and the light was that creepy, corpselike blue; Patrick saw the remnants of a dead deer by the side of the road and let it drift out of his thoughts. On the other side of the Squirrel Hill Tunnel the trees abruptly became city. Patrick had never liked the city. Pittsburgh was just a label attached to the sports teams he supported. These days not even that, very much. Getting away from the house and Caro had seemed so urgent just an hour before but now he knew he’d made a mistake. He shouldn’t be here. Here, with her.

She parked on a side street. Patrick was used to being out at night but not like this, on a well-lit sidewalk full of glittering shop windows and people strolling briskly between them. With great purpose, she led him to a coffee shop where the menus on the wall were artfully lettered with colored chalk, but all the furniture looked like it had come from Vincent Price’s garage sale. Somebody had tried to open a place like this in Ratchetsburg a few years before, but it hadn’t made it. This one was full of people around Patrick’s age who didn’t seem to have just come from swing shifts at warehouses or counter jobs at convenience stores. Patrick, whose boots and haircut had both seen better days, felt first sloppy and disheveled and then defensive and confrontational. So what if his boots looked like shit. So what if his jeans were faded through actual wear. He didn’t belong here. He shouldn’t have come.

“I drove. You get the drinks,” Layla said, dropping her army-navy bag into one overstuffed armchair and herself into another. “Double-shot
Americano, and one of those marshmallow rice things if they have it.”

Which they did, although due to the glories of trademark protection it was labeled a Krispy Rice Treat. It was also the size of a small shoe box, and cost nearly six dollars. When he brought the thing (on a plate, with a fork, although who ever ate those with a fork) and her coffee back to Layla, she took it from him before he could even sit down. “Most excellent,” she said, and pried it into two more or less equal pieces with her fingers. Her decay-colored nails sinking mercilessly into the Treat’s Krispy Rice flesh made Patrick think of lions on the Serengeti.

She held out a huge sticky chunk. “That’s your half.”

“Just put it on the plate.” The Treat smelled like butter and vanilla and his grandmother’s house. It probably smelled like everybody’s grandmother’s house, which was why they could get away with charging six dollars for it.

Balancing her coffee on the arm of her chair, Layla sat back and tucked her feet underneath her. She held the Krispy Rice Treat in one hand and pulled pieces of it off with the other, as if she were eating cotton candy. When she opened her mouth he could see smears of scarlet lipstick on her teeth. “So, Patrick Cusimano.”

He took a drink from the bottle of water he’d bought. “So, Layla whatever-your-last-name-is.” Jesus. He didn’t even know her last name.

“Elshere. Layla Nicole Elshere. The Layla is for my dad’s favorite Clapton song and the Nicole is for my mom’s favorite soap opera character. This is what happens when teenagers breed. Your turn.”

“My turn to what?”

“To reveal. In one fell swoop, I just told you that my dad likes Clapton, my mom has shit taste in television, and they had me when they were in high school.”

“So now I’m supposed to reciprocate?”

“Only if you want a ride home.”

He was at least partially sure she was joking. “Patrick John. The John is after my father. I don’t know about the Patrick.”

“Your father, who art in prison,” she said, and he said, “Exactly how personal are these questions going to get?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “New topic, then. Where’s your mother?”

“Dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

She blew air out of her nostrils and looked exasperated. “You’re not very good at this.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Anything you want. What did she die of? How old were you? Do you remember her? Do you miss her?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because, dumbass, I can’t know you if I don’t know anything about you, and I can’t know anything if you won’t tell me anything.”

“The flaw in your reasoning,” Patrick said, “is that I don’t necessarily want you to know anything about me.”

“Then why come here with me?”

“To get out.”

“Of your house?”

“It’s actually not that much of a wonderland.”

She leaned back, crossing her legs. Under the stupid French mood music on the coffee shop’s sound system he could hear the creak of her boots, the hush of her tights as her legs rubbed against each other. “Your brother’s a real all-American stud type, isn’t he?”

“What,” Patrick said, “did you look him up in the yearbook, too?”

“That, and I saw him kissing that chick outside your house one day.” She sipped at her coffee. Her black eyes never left him. “There was a lot of tongue involved for seven in the morning.”

The vanilla-butter smell turned cloying. When he spoke again he sounded angrier than he’d expected. “Are you staking out the house now?”

She only smiled. “Not habitually. I just drive by every now and then to see if you’re there. Although I’ve been looking for your car, which I guess doesn’t mean anything since you’ve given up driving.”

“I guess you’ll have to go creep out somebody else, then.”

“Blah, blah, blah. Tell me you’ve never once cruised a girl’s house just to be close to her, or called and hung up just to hear her voice.”

And of course he had. He had to admit that he’d never given much thought to how the girls in question might feel, looking out the window and seeing his car drive by at eleven o’clock at night, and again at eleven thirty, and again at twelve.

“It’s not like I’m leaving dead rodents on the doorstep or anything,” Layla continued. “I just drive by occasionally on my way to other places, that’s all. And, by the way, I
could
leave a dead rodent if I wanted to. One of my friends is doing a rat dissection in Bio. I could even leave
parts
of a dead rodent.”