Save Yourself (8 page)

Verna heard a hollow pop. “There, you son of a bitch,” Criss said triumphantly, and passed the thing she’d been fighting with—a bottle of wine, now open—to Layla. She tossed a small, silver thing down onto the blanket. “That corkscrew is a piece of shit, Layla.”

“Next time I steal a corkscrew from my nondrinking parents,
I’ll try to make sure it’s top-of-the-line.” Layla took a swig from the bottle, spilling a little; a drop of wine ran down her chin. Grinning, she wiped it away and then held the bottle out to Verna. The look on her face was the same one she used to cast down from the tops of trees. “Drink, Vee?”

Verna could see Justinian over Layla’s shoulder, watching. The fire popped; the heat from the flames lay against Verna’s cheek like a warm hand. She didn’t want the wine, she didn’t want to drink. But Layla had brought her here, these were Layla’s friends, and it would be a long grim night if they thought she was an idiot. “No, thank you,” she finally said.

Eric snickered. “Shut up, Eric,” Justinian said, and Eric did. “If she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t have to.”

There was a bare instant of charged silence. Then Layla said, “Of course not,” and Criss said, “We don’t do that peer pressure shit.”

What they did do was talk: about music Verna didn’t know, books she hadn’t read. The smell of woodsmoke and cigarettes mingled with the loamy smell of the forest and Verna wished she could say something witty and cool. She wished she could say anything at all. Eventually Justinian whispered in Layla’s ear. “I’ll be back in a while. Don’t worry,” Layla said to Verna, and she and Justinian walked off into the woods together, back toward the car. Leaving Verna alone with the two strangers. She listened for the sound of the engine and was relieved not to hear it. Across the fire, Criss was chain-smoking, throwing one cigarette butt after another into the flames.

“Give it up, Crissy,” Eric said eventually. He was reading, by flashlight, a sheaf of papers that seemed to have been printed on somebody’s basement photocopier. “It’s a lost cause.”

“Eat shit.” Criss sounded cross.

Eric looked at Verna. “Criss suffers from unrequited love.”

Verna thought of Justinian and Layla, of the way the tall boy had looked at her sister in the firelight, and felt sorry for Criss. “What are you reading?” she asked him, to change the subject.

“
The Anarchist Cookbook
.” He showed her the cover. She heard the metallic clink again and saw that it came from a set of handcuffs he wore doubled on his left wrist. “Tells you how to fuck shit up, make bombs and gunpowder and stuff.”

Verna stared at him. “Why would you want to do that?”

“To bring power to the powerless. And to get revenge on all the assholes. There’s way better stuff than this on the Internet these days, though. I’m just reading this for kicks.” His mouth bent into a smirk. “Actually, it’s sort of funny. The guy who wrote this is one of yours now.”

“One of my what?”

“People. A Christer. Keeps trying to get the book recalled so people don’t use it. Which is pretty goddamned typical, if you ask me. Just like your dad. Knowledge bad, ignorance good. Thinking everyone else is too stupid to make their own decisions. Not that people aren’t stupid, generally.”

“But if it’s dangerous—”

“Fuck that. It’s not about danger, it’s about control. Keep people scared and stupid and you can make them do anything you want. Anyway, sometimes you got to set off a few bombs to get things done. Ask your friends from Operation Rescue.”

“I don’t have any friends from Operation Rescue,” Verna said. Even her father said the Operation Rescue people were crazy. It was never right to kill somebody, not even to save another life. Not even in abortion clinics.

When Justinian and Layla came back, they brought another bottle of wine. Criss complained again and with particular vehemence about the corkscrew as she uncorked it. The bottle was passed, and Layla curled against Justinian like a sleepy kitten, reaching up occasionally to play with a lock of his long, black hair. Eric was still reading and Criss was still moping and Layla stared into the flames. Verna wondered what time it was. It felt late. She didn’t want to ask Layla when they were going to go home.

“I wish everyone in the world but us would disappear,” Layla said, sounding wistful. “I wish we were the only ones on the whole planet.”

Justinian nodded. “Like the Rapture. Except that instead of calling all the deserving away, only the deserving get to stay.” He looked across the fire at Verna. “Death will come like a thief in the night. Right, child of God?”

It wasn’t death that came like a thief in the night, it was Jesus; but then Verna remembered Kyle Dobrowski saying,
Hey, Venereal, which bathroom do you shit in, because I don’t want my girlfriend catching your VD from a toilet seat
. Wouldn’t it be lovely if all the Kyle Dobrowskis were taken by thieves in the night? Did God really build this beautiful world, all starry skies and rustling forests, just to fill it with people like him?

“I’ve got a few people I’d like to visit in the night,” Eric said.

Justinian nodded. “Don’t we all.”

Layla yawned. “Crissy, can I go to sleep on you?”

“Sure,” Criss said. Layla put her head in the other girl’s lap and closed her eyes. As Verna watched, Criss plucked a leaf out of Layla’s hair.

“Verna,” Justinian said. “Do you want to come back to the car with me? Take a walk?”

Verna hesitated.

“Go on, Vee,” Layla said, sleepily, and so Verna scrambled to her feet.

They didn’t need a flashlight this time. The moon had come out. The forest was filled with a soft, silvery light, and Verna had no problem stepping over the roots and branches that had tripped her before. At the car, Justinian picked up a pack of cigarettes from the floor of the backseat. Then, instead of going back to the fire, he leaned against the front fender. “Having fun?”

Verna nodded. She didn’t seem to be able to speak around him.

“Good,” he said. “The fire circle is important. We’re young, and
so nothing belongs to us. Here, we have a place of our own, even if it’s only for an hour or two. Criss and Eric seem to like you.”

They did? “Criss is nice. Eric seems sort of angry, though.”

“Eric is extremely angry. You’d be angry, too, if you had his life. His dad barely notices that he’s alive, and his mom—” Justinian shrugged. “Since he dropped out of school all he does is play video games and plot the end of the world. Don’t let him get to you.”

“What about Criss?”

He smiled. “Poor Crissy. Your sister has her spellbound.”

“What?”

“She’s in love with Layla.”

What Verna knew about homosexuality was that there were people out there who had been so bombarded with sexual messages from such a young age that they became confused. Such people were to be pitied, treated with compassion, and gently led to Jesus, who would help them back onto the path that God had charted for all mankind. Verna had always thought of them like disfigured burn victims: she had never met one, but hoped she would react correctly when she did. Trying to sound nonchalant, she said, “Oh. I sort of thought she might be in love with you.”

“Criss and I love each other, but not like that. What Layla and I have is different. It’s like when you hear a song or see a painting that touches you. You feel like you’ve found some part of yourself that you’ve never even seen before, but you know it’s yours.”

Verna didn’t know what to say. “That sounds nice.”

“Nice.” Justinian’s mouth curled in that patient, disdainful smile. “Sex with Layla is like having a thousand-piece orchestra playing in my head while the concert hall burns down.
Nice
isn’t the word I’d use.” Her eyes must have widened, because he said, “What, did I shock you?”

“No. I guess I knew— She never said, but—” Verna heard her own words and hated them for sounding so young and so stupid.

“Human beings spend a lot of time feeling small and lonely and
trapped. Sex is a way out.” He flicked his ash. His face was all planes and angles, as if he’d been designed instead of born. “Layla was feeling particularly trapped tonight.”

Verna stared at him. “You mean—now?”

“What did you think we were doing?”

Verna looked around, at the ancient car and the deserted road. “Here?”

“Why not here?”

Why not, indeed. “It’s not exactly warm,” Verna said, although her face was hot.

Justinian laughed. “Warm enough, child of God.”

The laugh was friendly. Emboldened, Verna said, “Why do you call me that?”

“It’s what you are. Layla is the child of sin, and you’re the child of God. Layla was born when your parents were still in high school, right? And your parents used to be metalheads. I’ll bet they drank, did drugs, all of it. Then they got saved, and then they had you. So Layla’s named after a Clapton song, and you’re named after the woman who told them about Jesus.”

It was true. Her parents had been on their way home from a rock concert in Pittsburgh and their car had broken down. Hitchhiking home, they’d been picked up by a Christian woman, and instead of going back to Verna’s grandmother’s house, where they lived in the basement with the infant Layla, they’d ended up in the woman’s living room, reading the Bible. By dawn, they’d both been saved.

“Child of sin, child of God,” Justinian said. “Don’t think your parents don’t know it, too. Why do you think they’re so hard on her all the time? She reminds them of everything they don’t want to admit they used to be.”

“They love Layla.”

“No, they love you. They hate her. They’re nicer to your dad’s tweaker assistant than they are to their own kid.”

Uncertainty nipped at Verna. “My parents are good people.”

“Possibly, but they hate their daughter.” He shrugged. “It happens. Love’s not mandated by nature. Do you love them?”

“Of course!”

“Why?”

In the silver light his face was the luminescent blue of skim milk. Why did you love somebody? Why did Verna like green more than orange and fried chicken more than pork chops? Verna didn’t know how to answer, but she knew that the question made her feel awful.

“Because you’ve been told you do, that’s why. And you’re a good daughter who does what she’s told. Yet another reason why they love you and hate Layla.” He shook his head. “You didn’t ask to be born into that family, for those people to be your parents. So you’re not bound by what they expect you to be. Layla understands that. She knows your parents hate her, and she knows it’s not her fault. I’m more concerned about you, actually. You have a right to be happy, no matter what they tell you. And you’re not happy.”

All at once, Verna’s eyes stung with unshed tears. She wanted to wipe them away, but he was watching. “What makes you think that?” she said, trying very hard to sound surprised.

“Everything,” he said, and that did it, that was all, the tears spilled up and over her eyelids and she couldn’t stop them. School and home and Bio and dinner and all of it, everything pushed down inside her all week, the crushed feeling, the flatness. She swiped at her eyes, folded her arms in front of her chest, and hoped that the night would hide her; hoped that he wouldn’t laugh, or make fun of her, or tell everyone else, back at the fire circle.

But Justinian just stood, and smoked, and waited. When she’d more or less composed herself, he blew a smoke ring into the air. “Like I said. Everything.” He stood up. “Come on. Let’s get back.”

He turned and headed back through the woods. Verna followed.

THREE

Lying in bed that morning after Caro left, Patrick considered suicide: not because he didn’t want to live, but because it seemed the most leakproof way of making sure the situation went away forever, and
forever
was exactly how long he wanted to avoid having a conversation with Mike about how he and Caro had slept together. But Patrick had never been the wrist-slashing type. It had taken his mother a long time to die, and he had no illusions about death being anything other than the biological defenestration that it was. There was no poetry in death. People died because they were animals and all animals died. Sometimes they got cancer and sometimes they were hit by cars and sometimes they just stopped breathing. And sometimes they slept with their brothers’ girlfriends.

Fuck.

He had, it seemed, developed a talent for seeking out the worst possible thing he could do in any given situation, and then doing it. He and Mike had fought about many things over the years but never a girl, and since the accident, they hadn’t argued at all. Not once. The tenuous peace between them would have pleased and astounded their
mother, who had spent a fair amount of her parenting life serving as the world’s least willing referee, but to Patrick, it felt unnatural. Which didn’t mean that he wanted to destroy it. And destroyed was exactly what it would be, if Mike ever found out what had happened.

He tried to think of some nondeath thing he could do to make it right, or at least less awful, but there was nothing. Avoiding Caro all day was easy because she was at work. When he saw her again that night Mike had just woken up, and the three of them ate pizza together as if everything was normal. The pizza had mushrooms on it, like always, which Patrick pulled off and left in a limp gray pile on his plate, like always. He knew the grease-stained box would sit on the table for a week, just like always. Mike said, “We got any red chili?” and Caro got up to get it. She smelled like fabric softener and hand lotion and the combination settled in Patrick’s nose, coating his throat, dancing over his tongue, and that was when he realized that the situation was even worse than he’d thought. Because before she’d come into his room, he would have sworn that he’d never even considered what she smelled like, or what all of that cola-colored hair would feel like in his hands, or what her mouth tasted like, or what her breath would feel like in his ear. Now he could think of nothing else. When Caro came back with the chili, Mike pulled her down into his lap; she pushed back, said, “Get away, you smell like manual labor,” and Patrick wanted to explode. Did that mean anything, that she did that, or did Mike just stink?