“I told you,” I said. Her sister had gone crying into the house, threatening to tell their mother that Cindy did it on purpose.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. We went out like we always did, driving up and down the hills in our town, then out to Generals Highway. I slouched back in my seat and put my feet on the dashboard, not thinking of anything while Cindy talked. She stopped and picked up a pizza to go with the beer she’d stolen out of her fridge, and we took it to a place we’d been before, a development under construction about ten miles up the river from where we lived. When we arrived it was dark, and the back-hoes were giant shadows among the trees. “Home at last,” Cindy said, pulling the car into a driveway that ran up to an empty foundation.
Right away she climbed into the backseat. Usually we talked for a while, both of us lying back in the seats with our eyes closed, not always about our fathers or the attacks or even school or lacrosse, and then it would get cold and she would say it would be warmer in the back where we could sit up against each other.
“Don’t you want any pizza?” I asked her.
“Not just yet.” She patted the seat next to her, and I went back.
We never did much. It would have disappointed Paul and his lurid imagination. He always asked about very particular things, acts and insertions I had barely ever imagined, until I blushed enough to make him shut up. Cindy and I would kiss, and hold each other, and I would usually take off my shirt because she liked to put her cheek right against my chest, and sometimes when I held her like that is when we would talk most about our fathers, usually just a story about something they had done when we were kids, something bad or something good — it didn’t matter. And then we would kiss again, and I knew that she wanted me to do more than I could. It was only fear that kept me from going as far as she would let me. I think I wanted to, but I felt sure that something horrible would happen if I did. “Maybe something terrible should happen,” she said when I told her this.
It all seemed so usual already, and so familiar. The way the leather car seat felt against the skin of my back, and the way the whole car seemed to glow when the moon shined through the fogged-up windows, and the way she pulled on my hair to tilt back my head so she could get at the space under my chin. It was all fine. I never minded when she muttered things I could only half understand, or spoke sentences where I would only catch a single word, like “falling” or “sky” or “open.” But that night she had opened up my pants with one hand, though she didn’t reach in, and she was pushing her hips into me so forcefully I thought we would break through the undercarriage and fall onto the snow, when she put her mouth right in my ear and said, “I want you to put your fist through the whole world like you did through those two towers.”
I sat up and pushed her away. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t say anything.” And she tried to kiss me again, but I pushed her away.
“I should go home,” I said, and put on my shirt.
“Whatever,” she said, watching me as I climbed into the front seat. I sat there for a little while, with the pizza in my lap again, staring straight ahead while she asked me to come back again. Finally she heaved a big sigh, then got out of the car and walked around to the driver’s seat.
“How could you say something like that?” I asked her, when we were about halfway home.
“Don’t judge me,” she said. “What do you know?”
“That’s fucking horrible. You of all people should know how horrible that is.”
“Fuck off,” she said. “What do you know? You can’t even be hurt. And don’t tell me I’m horrible when you’re the son of the fucking Devil.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“Totally,” she said. “Who would have thought the Antichrist would be such a loser?” I had nothing to say to that, and I thought about asking her to stop the car so I could walk home, but it was snowing again.
“You missed my turn,” I told her when she drove by Severna Forest Road.
“You can walk from my house,” she said. And she sped up as she got closer to her house, taking the sharp turns on Beach Road at thirty miles an hour in the ice and snow. When I told her to slow down she didn’t say anything, but just before we got to her house she turned and looked at me and smiled, and then she reached over and with a practiced motion undid my seat belt from its clasp. Before I could ask what she was doing she floored the accelerator and aimed the car at the garage, running straight at the ramp she’d built earlier.
She let out a scream when we flew off the ramp. It might have been a word, but I couldn’t tell what. I had barely got my seat belt in my hand when we went through the garage door and hit the wall on the other side. Her car was a Volvo — the safest thing her father could buy her. But she must have disabled the airbag on my side. I went straight through the windshield.
If I passed out, it was just for a moment. The lights were on in the garage, so when I sat up where I’d fallen across the hood I could see how I was covered in pizza, not blood. When I stood up I was very stiff, and when I touched my nose it was sore. Cindy was cursing and disentangling herself from her airbag. Her door wouldn’t open; she had to come through mine. I was just standing there, looking around at the shelves full of paint and old trophies and gardening tools.
“I told you!” Cindy shouted, pounding me on the chest, either attacking me or congratulating me, I couldn’t tell which. “I fucking told you!” Behind her a door opened and I saw her sister’s face appear, hovering just to the left of the jamb.
“Boy, are you going to get it,” she said.
Cindy had another party. I don’t know how she convinced her mother to leave her home alone again when she went out of town. It had only been two weeks since she wrecked the car, though she was able to explain that by saying that the car skidded on some ice. I had stopped talking to her. When she sent me notes, I sent them back unread, and after practice I would walk home right away, instead of waiting for the bus.
Nobody went to the party this time. I took the trip down to her house but stayed in the woods, watching. Every once in a while I would see her face at the window. She would stare for a long time at her empty yard, and then disappear. It made me sad to think of Cindy sitting alone in her big house, feeling like everyone had forgotten her father and what had happened just a couple of months ago, her worst suspicions about people validated. But I couldn’t imagine going up to the door, and not just because I was afraid of what she might do next to prove who she thought I was.
“How was the party?” my mother asked when I got back home. She was sitting at the kitchen table with the dog, who liked to lie on his belly on the table with his head on his crossed paws. While my mother drank they would sit that way for hours, staring into each other’s eyes until it was time to watch television or go for a walk or go to bed.
“I left early,” I said.
“Bad time?”
“Just a little boring.”
“Well, that’s a shame. How about a little drink?” she asked, both offering one and asking for one. I took her glass and got her some new ice and poured her some more vodka and got some water for myself. When I sat down, the dog turned around, never rising but turning himself by making swimming motions with his paws, so he rotated clockwise until he faced me. My mother batted at his thumping tail. “I’m having a bad night, too,” she said. “Puppy and I have been talking.” I put out my hand to the dog, expecting him to shy away from it, or to growl at me, but he rubbed his face against my palm. “I have been asking him, ‘Where is it written that a woman has got to suffer all her life? Where is it written that your father should die and your mother should die and your brother should die and your sister should die and your husband should die?’”