The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel (26 page)

“Here,” said Rhea now, handing Jory a Styrofoam cup. “Drink up.”

“What is it?” Jory tipped the cup back and forth, inspecting its contents.

“I don’t know—it’s called Purple Jesus, so I guess it’s like taking communion or something,” said Rhea. “I already had two.” Rhea was wearing a leather headband that she kept having to readjust. “Did you see the guy over by the stereo? That’s Randy Asumendi.” Rhea took a long drink from her cup. “He’s the football captain, or star or whatever.” She took another drink. “He evidently thinks he’s, like,
it
.” Rhea snorted. “I told him I liked his shirt.” She laughed loudly. “Look at that shirt!”

The person named Randy, who could evidently see Rhea laughing at him, began sauntering across the room in their direction. His tight-fitting shirt was made of shiny cream-colored polyester with collar points that veered sharply down toward each pectoral muscle. A wildly rearing orange horse featured prominently across the front.

“Oh, brother,” said Rhea, draining the last of her drink.

“Hey,” said the Randy person, smiling at Rhea.

“Hey, yourself,” said Rhea. “I’m getting a refill.” Rhea turned and headed toward the kitchen.

With more than a little effort, Randy redirected his attention to Jory. He gave Jory a sidelong glance. “Are you as big a bitch as your friend over there?”

Jory could think of absolutely nothing to say in response to this. She held her cup up to her lips and took a drink. It tasted like grape cough syrup. Sort of.

“How come I’ve never seen you before?” Randy had leaned one of his hands against the wall, so that his bare arm was now next to Jory’s head. Jory took another, larger sip of her drink.

“I don’t know,” she said finally.

“What are you? Sophomore? Freshman?” His eyes seemed to take a sort of vertical inventory of her. “You’re too young and skinny for a tenth grader.”

“What?” Jory was taking nervous sips from her cup.

Randy shook his head. He snapped his fingers directly in front of Jory’s face. “
Hablas inglés?
You speak-uh zee English?” He pulled a flat glass bottle out of his back pocket. “You two are weird—you know that? You and your friend. Weird and crazy.” He made a circling motion next to his ear and laughed, then took a drink and coughed.
“Whew,”
he said, and laughed some more.

“Whew,” said Jory. She had finished her cup of purple juice. She examined the cup’s bottom.

“So, who do you go with? Some freshman guy? Somebody on JV?”

“I don’t go with anybody,” Jory admitted.

“Oh, yeah?” Randy unscrewed the lid on the flat glass bottle again and handed it to Jory. She lifted the bottle to her mouth and took a drink. The liquid was like sweet, sticky fire in her mouth and it burned all the way down her throat like something no one should ever be drinking. She coughed and coughed again, blindly handing the bottle back to him.

“What a lightweight! Haven’t you ever had any booze before?” Randy appeared delighted at this development, and his role in it.

Jory shook her head and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Hey, so what’d you think of that little Mexican runt from Wilder last Friday? Everybody thought he was gonna be such hot shit, but I showed him.”

Jory looked blankly at Randy.

“Weren’t you there? Didn’t you see me play?” Randy now leaned in confidentially toward her, his breath tickling her ear.

“Play what?”

“Play
what
?” Randy leaned back and shook his head in disbelief. “Are you shitting me?”

“The accordion,” said Jory suddenly. She snapped her fingers. “For five hundred dollars, Alex, ‘
What is the accordion?
’”

Randy Asumendi’s face registered first shock and then anger and finally disgust. “At least your friend has some tits,” he said, and then turned and sauntered off in the opposite direction.

Jory stood holding her empty cup. She tried to remember where the kitchen was. She wended her way down a promising-looking hall, but there were so many bodies in the way that it took forever to get to the end of it. Slowly she squeezed past any number of people standing in groups of various configurations. The kitchen seemed especially filled with people talking and laughing and smoking and scooping purple liquid out of an enormous metal washbasin that was resting on a table. Rhea was sitting in something that looked like a baby’s high chair and some boy with shaggy brown hair and a Batman T-shirt was squatting down tying her shoe. Rhea grinned happily at Jory. The boy’s shirt read
BIFF! BAM! POW!
in explosive red letters.

“Who’s that?” Jory nodded at the shaggy-haired boy.

“Don’t know,” said Rhea.

“You left me out there with that accordion player,” said Jory. She gazed around her. A girl wearing a pink paisley minidress was pressing gold stick-on stars onto the back of a boy’s cowboy shirt. The boy with the shaggy hair had disappeared. Jory sat down on the floor next to Rhea’s feet and Rhea handed her down another cup of juice. “That guy out there thought we were weird. That Randy person.” She took a long drink and peered into the purple depths of her cup. “Plus, he said that you were way cuter than me.”

Rhea leaned down and began braiding Jory’s hair. “He’s nuts,” she said, but then she smiled. “Is that really what he said?”

“Pretty much,” said Jory, feeling strangely calm about the specific thrust of Randy’s comment. Ordinarily she would have felt like crawling beneath the floorboards and living there forever at having a boy—a senior! the football captain!—telling her she was breastless, but right now it was as if she were wearing a large plastic shield that made most everything bounce off her and be deflected elsewhere. Or maybe it was more that things didn’t quite stick but passed quickly through her without
leaving their usual marks. “Like electrons,” she said suddenly. “Or protons.”

“What?” said Rhea, leaning forward and trying to hear better.

“Or maybe photons,” said Jory. “I forget.”

Just then, someone from outside flung the kitchen’s back door open and an angry-looking boy came flying in as though pushed from behind. A girl wearing a fringed leather dress shrieked in either dismay or delight. Several people got shoved into and knocked around and then someone—a female someone—said, “You idiot—you
fuck
er!” and someone deliberately pushed someone else. There was some slow-motion sort of swearing and jostling and pushing and hitting. The girl in the fringed dress who had been standing next to the drink table came crashing down onto the floor in a painful way. She fell half onto Jory’s lap and Jory suddenly saw this girl close up and magnified: her ink black eyes and her eyebrows like two beautiful bird feathers, and it was as if Jory knew this bird girl and saw her better and more intimately than she’d ever seen anyone. It was as if Jory had an X-ray microscope that could see inside things, inside people. Jory smiled at the girl and, for a second, as if she had the microscope too, the girl smiled back, and then frowned horribly and said, “What are
you
doing here?”

Jory was too stunned to say anything.

“Seriously. Who on earth invited you two?” Jude Mullinix stared up at Rhea and then tried to struggle up off of Jory’s lap.

“Your mother,” said Rhea from up in her high chair. “Seriously.”

Jude stood up and smoothed the fringe on the bottom of her dress back down. She pushed past someone and disappeared back into a circle of people milling loudly around the kitchen table.

“She’s just like an Indian princess,” said Jory. “If I were a boy, I would love her forever.”

“You’re insane,” said Rhea. “She’s the snobbiest snob who ever lived.”

“I know,” said Jory in a completely awed voice.

The rest of the night went on pretty much like that. At some point, Jory found herself in Dave Roddy’s backyard trying to squeeze into a homemade doghouse while several other people stood by encouraging and giving her occasional proddings with their feet. It was cozy in the
doghouse and the sounds of people’s voices outside reminded her of being small and listening to her parents as she fell asleep in the backseat of the car on the way home from missionary film night at church. The doghouse smelled of dirt and dog chow and the metal of dog chains and was harder to get out of than to get into. As she was struggling back out through the opening of the doghouse, someone reached down and tugged at her arm. Jory grabbed at this helping hand and pulled herself into a standing position next to Jude Mullinix, who now dropped Jory’s arm as if it were dirty or diseased. “You’re embarrassing yourself,” she said, giving Jory a brief, dismissive glance.

Jory felt relatively unconcerned about this. “How do you get your hair to go like that?” She picked up the end of a piece of Jude’s hair and let it slide between her fingers. “It’s so straight and slippery, it’s like liquid glass.” She couldn’t believe she was touching Jude Mullinix’s hair.

Jude gave Jory a look. “Are you serious?”

Jory laid the piece of hair reverently back against Jude’s shoulder.

Jude sighed and pulled a cigarette out of her shoulder bag. “Johnson’s No More Tangles. After you wash your hair, you spray it on and voilà.” Jude leaned down and lit the cigarette that was now in her mouth.

Jory watched in awe.

Jude held her cigarette pack out to Jory.

“You’ve come a loong waaay, baby,” said Jory. “To get where you’ve got to today. You’ve got your own cigarette now, baby,” Jory was singing full-on now. “You’ve come a long, long way.”

Jude blew a stream of smoke into the air. “Okay, you can shut up now, you weirdo,” she said in a not unfriendly voice. “Why don’t you smoke—are you a Mormon or something?”

“I wish,” said Jory. “They can dance at least, and wear short skirts.”

“You can’t dance?”

“Or go to movies or bowling alleys or pool halls.”

“But you can get drunk?”

“Nope, no alcohol.” Jory shook her head. “Or fermented spirits.”

“Oh, brother,” said Jude. “What do you think this is?” Jude lifted her cup up from off a wooden picnic table.

Just then, Jory spied a tall dark-haired boy in a mustard yellow jacket
tiptoeing exaggeratedly up behind Jude and then covering her eyes with his hands.
“Knock-knock!”
he said loudly into her ear.

“Jesus Christ!” said Jude, trying to peel the boy’s hands off.

“No, it’s not Jesus,” said the boy. “Try again.
Knock-knock
.”

“Who’s there?” said Jude, sighing and hanging on to the boy’s hands.

“Dewey,” said the boy, grinning wildly at Jory.

“Dewey who?” said Jude.

“Dewey really hafta get married? I used a rubber!”

“Nicky, you idiot,” said Jude, trying to pull the boy’s hands away.

The boy laughed and dropped his hands. He grabbed Jude’s cup and drank down its remaining contents. “Okay. Hand over the weed.”

“Forget it,” said Jude, but Jory could see she didn’t mean it.

The boy was now patting Jude down in a way that cops did to criminals on TV. Jude was laughing and protesting at the same time as the boy bent down and ran his hand inside her leather boot. “I knew it,” he said, holding up a tiny rolled-up baggie of something as Jude beat futilely on his chest. “You are such a fucking thief!” He held the baggie far above Jude’s head as she leaped up trying to grab at it. “Good God,” he said, shaking his head in mock disgust. “You just can’t trust anyone these days.” He leaned down then and planted a kiss right next to Jude’s open mouth. “Later, Judith Louise,” he said, and sauntered away waving the baggie.

“Who was that?” asked Jory, still staring at the boy in wonderment.

“Nicky,” said Jude. “My asshole brother.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah,” said Jude, struggling to rearrange her fringed dress.

“Wow,” said Jory softly. She could see it now: the long, straight, inky black hair, the pointed chin and winglike brows. The smoothly lanky body that seemed to fit together as if it had been architecturally planned. “He’s beautiful.”

“Ha.” Jude snorted. “Don’t let him hear you say that. He’s conceited enough.”

“I’ve never seen him at school.”

“He lives in LA with my mom, but she’s off in London doing some dumb movie, so he had to come stay with us till she gets back.”

Jory tried to process all of this information. “A
movie
?” she said.

Jude turned on her heel and started walking up the back steps into Dave Roddy’s house. “Hey,” Jory yelled, but Jude had now inserted herself into the messy throng of people straggling both in and out.

Sometime later, Jory found Rhea, and then she and Rhea found Rhea’s sister and some boy asleep in an upstairs bedroom, and the boy cried when they dragged Rhea’s sister away. He was wearing a long puffy blue ski jacket and white socks. “I don’t understand why he’s crying,” said Jory as they walked Rhea’s sister down the stairs and out the front door. “He’s in
l-o-v-e
,” said Rhea. “He’s in love with my grody old sister.” She rolled her eyes at Jory.

Outside, it was cold, cold, and they piled in the car, a mass of hair and coats and tangled legs. They spoke little on the way home, their breath sending frosty plumes of air into the car’s heaterless interior. Jory stared up through the station wagon’s huge windshield at the frozen-looking stars. She could see forever with her new microscope/telescope vision, which allowed her to zoom in and out over and through great distances. It occurred suddenly to her that she knew exactly what it would be like to be up there as a star: cold and icy and dark, but a hot sort of dark that could burn right through time, so that you were forever up there alone and icily burning. “I’m a star,” she said to Rhea.

“I know!” said Rhea, leaning against her. “You’re Venus and I’m Mars.”

“Those are planets, not stars. They’re two totally different things.”

“Okay, professor,” said Rhea, snuffling her cold nose into Jory’s hair. “Don’t get all huffy.”

“Jude’s mom is some kind of movie star and her brother is beautiful,” said Jory.

Rhea stared at Jory. “You’ve been seduced,” she said. “By the Mullinix cult.” She made a cross with her two index fingers. “Unclean, unclean,” she chanted. “Don’t touch me, you leper-wretch. I refuse to be contaminated.”