Wrecked (2 page)

“Not rake!” my father exploded. He was frothing at the mouth. Seriously. Spit was gathering at the corners like he had rabies or something. “Not tomorrow. Pick. Up. Now!”

My mother was just standing there, lips in a tight, straight line. That
This is not right, but there’s nothing I can do
look. I couldn’t take it. I wasn’t going to let him ruin my whole night. Make me get on my knees under the spotlights out front, as if I were some kind of psych patient, when he was the insane one.

I stepped around my father and through the mudroom, into the garage.

“If you leave this house, you will be extremely sorry!” he shouted right as I was yanking open the car door.

I jumped into the Honda. “If I come back to this house,” I shouted back through the open window, “you will be extremely lucky!” And then I cried the whole way to Ellen’s.

Wayne’s got two sound systems going: one on the third floor and one on the first. Outside you can hear them both. House from the top. Disco from the bottom. They don’t mix too well.

“See anybody we know?” I ask Ellen. We’re trying to make our way inside. Ellen’s always cold, so unless it’s seriously summer, we never stay outdoors.

“No.” She weaves through the crowd. Then when we walk in through the garage, she points. “There’s Jason.” I don’t really know Jason. He’s this guy in her history class Ellen has a crush on. He sees us and waves us over.

“Lisa and her friend were looking for you,” he tells Ellen. “They went up to the third floor.”

“Come with us,” Ellen invites him. “This is Anna. Anna, this is Jason.”

“Hi,” we both say, and then we all start trooping upward.

On the stairs someone has taped signs that read,
PLEASE DO NOT PARTY ON THE SECOND FLOOR
. They’re written in red marker on graph paper.

“There they are,” Lisa says when she sees us. We’re in a bedroom. Wayne’s probably. It’s got posters of bands and supermodels all over the place and beer-can pyramids everywhere. Lisa and Seth and a couple of other people are sitting on the bed. The house music is pounding. You can feel it buzz in your chest.
Thrum, thrum
. “You want some?” Seth offers us a bottle of Jack Daniel’s with his right hand. With his left he’s eating a peppermint patty.

“You guys know Jason?” Ellen asks, taking the whiskey. Everybody nods. My whole body keeps thrumming with the beat of the music.
Thrum, thrum
. “Where did you guys get it?”

“Bought it,” Lisa goes. “Seth’s got a fake ID.” He does look sort of old. Not twenty-one, exactly. But with a fake ID I guess he can pass.

“You’re Jack’s little sister, right?” Seth asks me. This never used to happen.

“Where’s your sleeve?” I ask him back.

“We convinced him to lose it,” Lisa says.

“How do you know my brother?” I ask, even though I know how. But Seth’s popped the rest of the peppermint patty into his mouth, so he can’t answer.

“Ohhh,” Jason goes instead. He takes a drink of Jack Daniel’s. “Jack Lawson? You’re Jack Lawson’s little sister?” I still can’t get used to having a brother who, practically overnight, has become a household name.

“Everybody knows your brother this year,” Ellen tells me, like she’s reading my mind. Which she kind of does a lot of the time.

“Cameron,” I guess. Seth sighs. Jason and Lisa nod.

“Cameron Polk,” they all say at once.
Thrum, thrum
.

Cameron Polk is Jack’s girlfriend. His first girlfriend ever. They’ve been dating since the second week of school.

“Late,” I said to Jack from his bedroom door, on the night I found out. He was sitting on that ergonomic chair in front of his laptop with the phone in his hand. He looked a little out of it. “Dinner,” I said. “It’s three minutes past.” My parents had sent me to get him. My father wouldn’t let me yell up the stairs. I had to walk up.

“Cameron Polk just agreed to go out with me Saturday night,” Jack said.

“Really?”

He nodded. As far as I knew, he hadn’t asked anyone out
since he was in the eighth grade, when Trisha Todd told him no because he was too short. He’d grown more than a foot since then, and mostly I thought of him as this annoying, gawky guy who lived in my house. Nobody ever messed with him exactly, and he and his best friend, Rob, weren’t total outcasts or anything. But it wasn’t like people loved Jack either. Then again, when I thought about it, looking at him with the phone in his hand, I realized that a lot of kids had started talking to him at the end of last year. Had he been getting cool, and I hadn’t noticed it?

“
The
Cameron Polk?” I asked him.

She moved here the last month of school last year. She’s one of these girls that you sort of can’t believe. Nobody could stop looking at her. She’s got smoky skin and shiny blond hair and this square jaw, with a little bit of slant to her eyes. She transferred into all the honors classes, and she seemed actually nice. No attitude. It took only three days before the Ashleys asked her to sit with them at lunch. She did a few times. But she sat with other people too. You can’t get much classier than that.

“We’re in French Five together,” Jack told me.

I noticed that his shaggy hair and something about his jeans and T-shirt looked like this ad I’d seen in some magazine lately. Those ads where the guys never seem as if they care what they look like, but they look good anyway. Weird.

“Saturday’s my night for the car,” I reminded him.

“I know.” He looked at the phone in his hand. “But.”

“Anna!” we heard my dad yell up the stairs. “Jack!” He had that edge to his voice. It meant he’d be screaming for five minutes once we got down to the dinner table.

I stood there trying to think over the noise of my dad. I should let Jack have the car. It was a date. It was Cameron Polk. Obviously I should. It was just that I’d promised to drive to Jake Lowell’s party so that Ellen could drink, and I didn’t want Ellen to be mad….

“Forget it,” Jack said, and he had that expression I hate. That one where it’s obvious he thinks I’m a disgusting human being. “Get out of my room.”

“Anna!” my father shouted. “Jack!”

“Get. Out.” When I didn’t move, he stabbed a key on his keyboard, stood up, and brushed by me into the hallway.

“All right,” I said to his back. “Fine. You can have the car on Saturday.”

“Jack!”

“You know what?” my brother said, stopping at the top of the stairs. “Sometimes you are so small.”

So now I get it. “Is that how you know who I am?” I ask Sleev-eth. He’s holding out the whiskey, and I take it.

“Are you really going to drink tonight?” Ellen asks me.

I ignore her and keep talking to Seth. “Because you know who Jack is because everyone knows who Cameron is?” Then I take a huge, and I mean huge, swallow. And nearly choke to death. Jason kindly pounds me on the back for a while.

Ellen says, “Take a smaller swallow and go slower.”

While I do, Seth goes, “No. I’m always seeing your hair in the hall.”
Thrum, thrum
.

I have copper-colored corkscrew hair. No joke. Coils and coils of the stuff. It would be bad enough to have just the color.
And bad enough to have the corkscrews. Having both is the worst. Ellen and my mother say it’s “adorable” and “striking.” Right. Try
freakish
.

“I’ve been dying to pull it all year,” Seth says. Then he reaches out, grabs a curl, stretches it down straight, lets it go, and watches it bounce right back.

“Supreme,” he says.

“If we were in third grade,” I inform him, “you’d so be in the corner right now.”

“If we were in the third grade,” Seth informs me, “I’d so be kicked out of school right now.” He reaches out and pulls another curl.

“I hated that in the third grade,” I warn him.

“She loves it now,” Lisa says with a smirk. As if she even knows me.

I hold out the bottle to Ellen. She takes it and drinks.

“We’re co-opting your liquor,” I tell Sleev-eth. I’m having fun.

Here’s when I first noticed Jack trying with me, after a lot of years of not. It was this past summer, the first Friday of our annual two-week beach vacation at Commons End. We’d just arrived at that year’s rental house after a five-hour drive. Which should have been three hours, but the shortcut my father thought would shave off ten minutes ended up getting us lost. So whatever.

“Anna,” Jack called up to me. I was on the elevated deck, hauling my suitcase and my mother’s. It was dusk but still hot from the sun of the day. I could feel my skin prickle from sweat and aggravation.

“What?” I asked him.

“You want me to unpack so you can go check out the water?”

“Huh?”

It’s always Jack and me who have to take everything out of the car and indoors. My father usually insists on packing the trunk before we leave, which involves a lot of impatience and yelling because he’s sure that not everything will fit. Then, on the arrival end, he never helps unload. And with her bad back, my mom can’t do much either.

“I’ll unpack,” Jack said. “You want to go see the ocean before it’s dark, right?”

It was something we usually raced each other for. Who would get their half finished the quickest, jog the two blocks, scramble up the narrow dune path, and reach the peak first. Who would get to throw off shoes, slip-slide down, pad across the warm sand, and wade into the undertow, looking out onto the choppy green water, before the other one even showed up. It was usually too late to actually swim. But most years getting that first piece of the beach on the day we arrived was a part of starting things off.

“You mean, you’ll unpack the whole car?” I asked Jack.

“Yeah.” I watched his face, trying to figure out the trick.

“Okay,” I said finally.

When I got back, we ate dinner, and after that Jack wandered through my door, listening to his iPod. My room had twin beds with ugly flowered curtains that matched the bedspreads, and a fake bamboo chair. I was on my cell phone, lying on the floor with my feet up on one bed. Jack did the same next to me. Not knowing what else to do, I said to Ellen, who was planning to come down three days later, “So, this is weird. Jack
just came into my room and, like, made himself comfortable. He doesn’t even have his laptop with him or anything.”

He didn’t so much as blink, and with his music on I couldn’t even be sure he’d heard me. When I hung up with Ellen a few minutes later, Jack said, “Do you like Straw Man Proposal?”

I rolled my eyes. “You know I’ve never heard of them.”

“Listen to this,” he said instead of telling me what a moron I was. And he leaned over to plug his earphones into my ears.

I listened. It wasn’t bad.

SOMEHOW ME AND ELLEN AND SETH AND LISA AND JASON AND
these two other guys and this one other girl wearing a hot pink jean jacket end up in Wayne’s basement playing pool. Which is fun, especially since I’m sort of good at it, and Sleev-eth and I are on the same team, and he’s good too. Three swigs of the Jack got me way drunk for a few hours, but now I think I’m sobered up. For a while there I thought I was going to puke, but Ellen walked me twice around the entire house, even all around the second floor.

“Walking off too much alcohol doesn’t exactly count as partying,” she said when we passed some of those red-markered signs.

“Yeah, but we’re not supposed to be here,” I moaned. “The second floor! Wayne will be soooo mad.”

“Wayne is soooo stoned right now he wouldn’t be able to tell the second floor from the fifteenth,” Ellen told me. “Now, keep walking.”

“Do you think I’m going to pass out?” I was sort of hopeful. I’d never passed out before.

“Nah,” she said. “If I thought you were that far gone, I’d throw you in the shower.” That probably got me sober faster than anything.

“You’re the best, El,” I told her.

“Ugh,” she said. “You are not a cute drunk.”

But now I’m fine, and Ellen is having a hard time holding her pool cue. She had four beers on top of three shots of Jack Daniel’s, all in the last hour and a half And right as I’m realizing that I also realize our curfews are way over.

“Oh my God,” I say, scratching my shot.

“What’s wrong?” Sleev-eth asks. He’s finishing another peppermint patty. I think I’ve seen him eat four tonight. And he’s not even a little bit fat.

“Ellen, we have to go.” I stand up and hand off my pool cue to Jason. “I’m in such deep shit.”

“About time,” Ellen says to Jason and the others. “She never does Anna-thing wrong.” It’s hard to believe she can do her word thing so drunk. Then again,
Anna-thing
is an old one.

“You have to go now?” Seth sounds bummed, which is nice.

“Just stay,” Lisa goes. “You’re already late anyway.”

“You don’t know my dad,” I tell her.

“You’re not driving,” Jason warns Ellen.

“I am,” I say, pulling the keys out of my back pocket. My key ring is a teeny, tiny glow-in-the-dark planet Earth. If you sit in
the pitch black with it, it’s got all the greens and blues and whites and the shapes of the continents and everything. Ellen gave it to me the day I got my learner’s permit. “Now you’ve got the world at your fingertips,” she’d said.

“Bye,” I tell everybody. Seth pulls one of my curls.

“See ya,” they say.

“Bye.” Ellen flaps her hands at them and stumbles.

“Come on,” I go, and I lead her from the pool table, up the stairs and out the front door, down the street, to the Honda.

“Eech,” Ellen goes on Ocean Road.

“You want me to pull over and walk you around a little?”

“Eech,” she says again. Then she leans over and against her seat belt to crank up the radio. It’s that old U2 song. That ancient one: “Hoow loong to sing this soong? Hooow looong, hooooow loooong, hoow loong …” Ellen cranks it loud, and then she turns to me and she goes, “Do you think—”

And then there’s this deafening smacking sound and the smell of new plastic, and Ellen in my lap, dripping with blood, and there’s pieces of something falling and all this dust everywhere and chips flying up from the floor, and Ellen bloody with her head pressed hard against my collarbone, and the sharp brush of her ponytail sticking my right eye. “Hooow looong, hoow loong, hoow loong … ,” and the sound of somebody screaming and screaming and screaming, and then somehow my door opens and I fall out with bloody Ellen half on top of me and her ponytail still sticking me in my eye, and I think,
How could she be in my lap and how could we fall out with our seat belts on?
And I keep hearing that screaming
and screaming and screaming and screaming, and then I hear the screaming stop, and instantly I vomit all over myself and all over Ellen’s head. “To sing this sooong?” And a man’s voice says, “Three seven oh one,” and there’s a siren and somebody’s holding a blanket, and another man’s voice says, “Can you talk?” and I say, “My friend is bleeding,” and then Ellen slides away, and her ponytail slides away with her, and the music stops, and then there’s three policemen standing over me, and one of them wears Harry Potter glasses, and one of them is licking his lips, and the other one is saying something, only I can’t make out the words, and I go, “I can’t hear you,” and I see the glow-in-the-dark earth dangling from somewhere really high up, and I’m looking at it and telling the cop, “I was going to do it tomorrow. I swear. I was going to do it tomorrow,” and he stops talking to me, and he looks at the other two, and the Harry Potter one pulls off his glasses and turns away, and the one who was licking his lips turns with him, and I’m watching the earth swing gently back and forth, and that last cop leans down to me and tries again, and this time I hear him, and he’s saying in this really friendly voice, “Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay”