What We Knew (17 page)

As the bus trundled uptown, the blue lights came on, purging all trace of red. Something about that eerie wash always magnified Lisa’s stark beauty. I leaned my head against hers and snapped a picture with my phone, but the flash ruined it. I looked like a clown with my bright nose, my eyebrows arched ridiculously high, and Lisa’s pupils were enormous. She deleted it, then leaned over and tapped the buzzer. Gripping the handrails we stumbled toward the stairwell and waited for our stop. The bus bucked and the doors jerked open. Descending into darkness, we giggled and skipped like idiots the last couple blocks to Trent’s, where his spacey mother let us in. The sub-bass frequencies droning from the third floor magnetized us up the first flight, but then the rising heat took hold, weighing us down. The stairs stretched on forever. We’d never reach Trent’s room. Ever. The hallway grew longer and longer as we swam toward the light. My brain was trapped in a cement mixer, turning and turning, until the music stopped. Time and space collapsed. A platinum-pigtailed Rachel flicked her hand lazily, too hot or too drunk to wave. Kicking a pile of clothes out of the way, Trent hugged Lisa and then glowered at me. “You look like hell,” he said.

I wiped the sweat trickling from my hairline. “This
room
is hell,” I said. It was the first time I’d been to Trent’s since Adam and I had broken up. A few things had changed. The fist-sized hole in the wall beside the closet—that was new. And the drum set was under the window now. In its place was a small black fridge plastered with band stickers. And then there was Rachel’s hair. Actually, it was more like Lisa’s hair on Rachel.

“What are you drinking?” Trent asked. “Beer or beer?”

While Lisa pretended to mull it over, Trent tossed me a generic cola. I didn’t know if it was punishment for puking behind his radiator or cheating on Adam until he cozied up to Lisa and showed her a picture on his phone.

“This is what our boy is up to in California,” he said. “Is she a hottie or what?”

Lisa stared blankly at the screen and shrugged.

Winking cruelly at me, Trent zoomed in with his fingers. “Seriously,” he said. “Look at her.” He was hoping I’d ask to see, but something fiery and inflexible—pride, maybe, jealously, probably—hardened my jaw. I squeezed the soda can with both hands to keep it from flying at his stupid smirking skull. Lisa swiped the screen and asked if the next picture was the same girl. I couldn’t help it. I peeked.

“You could park a car in that dimple,” I said. Lisa and Rachel laughed, but Trent started barking at me in a way that made me hate him and fear him at once. “You don’t get to be bitchy!” he shouted. “Look at that hole! Look at it!” I obeyed because I was in Trent’s house, in Trent’s room, with Trent’s hand driving my head toward the wall. In biology we learned about the fight-or-flight instinct. I must be genetically defective because I don’t possess either. I stared into the black void, waiting for Trent to tell me what I was seeing. “That’s you,” he hissed. “Adam did that after he found out you cheated.”

A thunderous rush filled my ears. My eyes filled, too, with blinding rage. But I didn’t move. I couldn’t. “Let go,” I whispered. “Please let go.”

“Don’t be a dick,” Lisa said, chucking a bottle cap at him. “Leave her alone.”

Trent’s fingers tensed and then fell away. I waited until he’d stomped out of the room and down the stairs before turning. The bathroom door slammed below. Lisa gave the empty hall the finger, but Rachel cocked her blond head and frowned. “Don’t be mad,” she pleaded. “He was just … I don’t know. It was a shock. You and Adam. You guys were the perfect couple.”

“Nothing is perfect,” I responded icily.

I wasn’t pissed at Rachel—well, actually I was, a little, for defending him—but I was furious with Trent for being a hypocrite. Maybe he didn’t count kissing as cheating, but I was damn sure Rachel did.

“C’mon, let’s go,” Lisa said. She chugged the last of her beer and checked her phone. “I don’t care if Adam’s his friend. That was a shitty thing, what he just did to you.”

“I’m fine,” I said, still feeling the ghost of Trent’s palm gripping my head. “You sure?” Lisa asked. I shrugged. Rachel passed me her cigarette and promised to make Trent behave, which wasn’t necessary. When he returned, he was someone else. There was still an edge to his voice, but it was the edge of someone trying too hard to be nice. “I think I’ve got one of those lemony things you like,” he said, rattling through the fridge. “Yep. Last one.” He twisted the cap with his T-shirt and held the bottle before me—a peace offering. I took it, reluctantly, and drank it.
One less for him.
Bottle in hand, I jumped on the bed and tugged Rachel’s pigtail—the same shade as Lisa’s, except Lisa’s didn’t come from a box. “I like the new color,” I said. “It totally works.” And then, smiling innocently: “Did Trent pick it?”

Beer shot from Lisa’s nose. Grinning wickedly, Trent mouthed
Touch
é
. I waited for a glassy-eyed Rachel to ask what was so funny, but she clinked her bottle against mine like she was in on the joke. As I wrinkled my face at Lisa—
Does she know he has a thing for you?
—Lisa inhaled sharply, her torso convulsing like she’d been shocked with a Taser. Another creaky gasp. Her chest quivered. The four of us burst out laughing. Lisa hiccupped again. And again. And again. The faces she made made us laugh harder, our bodies racked by those deep, uncontrollable jags that only seem to strike at life’s lowest moments. Suddenly, everything felt right again.

“Stop it, you guys!” Lisa gasped, jerking with another spasm. “I can’t breathe!”

Trent quit laughing long enough to take her by the shoulders and help her to the bed. Chest heaving, he panted in Lisa’s face. “Hold your breath.”

Lisa recoiled, swatting the air between them. “God, Trent, hold yours!”

“I know! It’s wicked, right?” Rachel shrieked and then lost it all over again, flopping on the bed in a fit. Arms flapping, Trent descended, roaring like a fire-breathing dragon. I crawled beneath their feet, rescuing tipped beer bottles. Lisa slid off the mattress and slumped on the floor, her body jerking every few seconds like invisible fingers were poking her ribs. “Please make it stop,” she moaned, and then, “I think I peed my pants.” As she ran for the bathroom, Trent called, “Drink water! There’s a cup on the sink!”

“Water won’t work,” Rachel said. “We need to scare them out of her.” Thinking, we sipped our warm beers and then froze at the sound of someone heavier than Lisa stumping up the stairs. Gabe in his work boots, reeking of pizza. He went straight to the fridge for a drink and then looked around the room, confused. “Where’s my girl?” he asked, flicking the bottle cap through the hole in the wall.

“Bathroom,” I said. “Wicked hiccups.”

Trent’s eyes sparkled fiendishly behind his lenses. “I’ve got it,” he whispered. “This is brilliant.
Brilliant
.” Gabe raised the bottle to his lips, but Trent snatched it away. “You. Under the bed,” Trent ordered. Gabe complied. Rachel grabbed her phone so she could record it. The three of us hushed and hissed as Lisa rasped violently up the stairs and down the hall, then keeled over on the bed, clutching her middle.

“This—” Her body quaked, gripped by another spasm. “Is torture!”

I was dangerously close to cracking up again. Rachel, too, behind her phone, pretending to use the camera as a mirror. Not Trent. There’s a reason why he’s always cast for the best roles. Ignoring Lisa’s hiccups, he chugged Gabe’s beer, then plunked on the floor and picked at the loose rubber on his sneaker before launching into his setup: “Hey, Leese, did you ever get your flip-flop back?”

It was supposed to be funny, our attempt to cure Lisa. What was Trent doing? I silently shook my head at him.
Don’t go there.
Clasping the pendant at her neck, as if remembering the original she’d lost that night along with her flip-flop, Lisa chirped, “No. Why?”

“It’s just … well,” Trent hesitated. “Maybe it’s not even yours.”

Lisa eyed him suspiciously and then turned to me. Lips twitching, I fought the giddy burbling in my chest and shrugged, feigning cluelessness.

“Okay, I’m just gonna say it,” he said. “Wednesday night, when I got home from work, there was this box. And there was a flip-flop inside.”

Between hiccups, Lisa asked, “Where?”

“That’s the freaky part,” Trent said. “It was on my bed. It’s under it now.”

I didn’t know if it was the hiccups or Trent’s story, but Lisa looked stricken. That’s not true—I did know. I also knew it was time to pull the plug on Trent’s joke. But I didn’t. Instead I waited silently as my best friend dropped to her knees and pitched toward the black beneath the bed. It was priceless at first, the way Gabe’s hands shot out and Lisa, in a blurry frenzy, did one of those full-body screams, with arms and legs flying in all directions. But then something in me shifted—my view, I guess. Suddenly I was Lisa, shrinking from strange faces. Distorted. Ugly. It was one of those moments when you’re painfully aware of yourself: my laugh craggy and grating. My features alien, grotesque. The part of me that found Lisa’s shock hilarious seized up. “Are you okay?” I asked.

Gabe mopped his face with his T-shirt and then wrapped his arms around Lisa’s waist, but Lisa just stood there stiffly, lips quivering.

“This is gonna get a million hits!” Rachel screeched, fumbling with her phone.

“Admit it,” Trent laughed. “You thought it was Banana Man.”

I think everyone expected Lisa to start laughing, too, once the confusion wore off. I know none of us expected her to explode the way she did, slashing Trent’s face with her nails.

“Mother—!” Trent snarled, pressing his palm to his cheek. “It was a joke, Lisa!”

“A joke? You think this is a joke?” Lisa turned, raising the back of her shirt. The skin across her spine was striped purple and yellow. Gabe’s face buckled. He reached to touch the fading bruise, but Lisa yanked her shirt down. “Sweetie,” he cooed. “What the hell happened?”

Trent didn’t care. Lisa had drawn blood. Pinpricks of red seeped from the claw marks. Rachel went for bandages and antiseptic. It wasn’t an overreaction. It was pretty nasty—the wound—but Trent was even nastier. Clenching his fists, he ordered Gabe to get his psycho bitch out of his house.

I’d always considered Lisa lucky to have a guy like Gabe, but right then, not so much. Scaring the crap out of her was one thing—we’d all been in on that—but failing to defend her was just plain wrong. I took one look at his big dumb head—grudging and sad that Lisa had wrecked his night—and said, “Stay. I’ll take her home.”

Passing Rachel on the stairs, she begged us not to leave, but we kept going until we were out the front door. The cool air tickled my neck and I shivered. I’d spent all summer trying to convince myself that Banana Man didn’t exist, but I had to ask: “Did he do that to you? The bruises on your back?”

Lisa rushed into the murky darkness beyond the porch. She waited until we reached the next pool of light to speak. “Yes and no,” she said. “I went back to get my stuff and fell down the stupid stairs. I want this to be over, but he’s got my stuff. That dumb necklace. My flip-flop. It makes me sick, knowing he’s got them, not knowing what he’s doing with them. You know what I mean?”

There was a desperate loneliness to her voice. I understood. Knowing that someone has something of yours, a piece of you you’ll never get back, it jigsaws your insides. But you have to let it go. Eventually.

“He’s not real,” I said gently. “The guy who lives in the woods is a man, not a monster. He doesn’t know who we are, what we’re thinking. He’s not watching us. He doesn’t know where we live.” I reached for the button on the pole, but Lisa pulled me back.

“You’ve felt it, too,” she whimpered. “You’ve said so.”

“I know,” I said. “But listen. I think it’s something else. I think it’s everything you’ve been going through. The … you know.”

Lisa marched across the street, ignoring the DON’T WALK light. Like an idiot, I tripped after her, racing an oncoming car.

“You think
I
started this?” Lisa demanded.

I took a deep breath, trying to calm my nerves. “No,” I said. “Of course not. Trent started it. Remember when we were little, though, how we used to get ourselves all worked up over the stupidest things? I know it sounds weird, but stress, fear, hallucinations—all that’s stuff’s catching.” I stuck my finger in her ear, trying to get a laugh, but Lisa brushed my hand away.

“What about the eye?” she asked.

Eyes.

Picturing the two in my trunk, I blinked away the image and lied because it was the only explanation that made sense: “It was Trent,” I said. “And Gabe,” I added. “Trent put him up to it. Just like now. You think it was Gabe’s idea to hide under the bed?”

Lisa stopped short and put her hands on her hips. “Gabe?” she asked. “Did he tell you that? Did he actually say he did it?”

I knew what Lisa needed. Taking her hand, I nodded firmly, definitively, before we raced toward the next dash of light in the long ribbon of darkness.

twenty

Sometimes I feel like my life is held together with spit and wishes. It was supposed to be a perfect day: back-to-school shopping, frozen yogurt, then open mic night with Lisa. But everything fell apart, starting with our junky car. It just quit running, without warning, while we were waiting for the light to change. My mother turned the key a few times. A rapid clicking noise sounded. “That’s just great,” she groaned, hitting the steering wheel. The car behind us honked. My mother stuck her arm out the window and waved angrily for the guy to go around.

“Now what?” I said, gazing helplessly out the window. A few drivers slowed as they passed, checking out the losers stranded in the middle of the busy street. My mother unbuckled her seat belt. “We can’t stay here blocking traffic,” she said. She popped the door and got out. “I’ll push, you steer.”

I climbed over the armrest and gripped the wheel at ten and two, just like she’d taught me the one time she took me driving. I knew it was useless, but I tried the key anyway, hoping the car had magically healed itself. Nothing. Dead.