Reluctantly, Bill found this an alarmingly mature notion. He felt his friend’s honor then, his electric core of decency. Made ever more stark by a world he was coming to see as increasingly honorless. And yet it wouldn’t be until years later that he’d be able to admit this to himself. At the time, it just made him more furious that Rick was trying to rope him into playing chivalrous knight.
“Brink, I’ve heard grown fucking adults say ‘Beaufort carries the town’s hopes.’ Medium-case scenario is they ignore this. Best-case scenario is also the worst, which is that the whole school finds out, sees those pictures—or Jesus, there’s a video? Yeah, so Tina will be humiliated, and people probably blame her for fucking up the life of the star linebacker. Just because you think what Tina and all them are doing is gross doesn’t give you the right to insert yourself like this.”
It had rained that day, and the air still smelled like damp stone. Rick breathed it in now, pulling through flared nostrils. “You’re not hearing me on this,” he said, and then tucked his hands and stalked back to his house before Bill could reply.
Bill pointed to Kaylyn’s stomach. “That mine?”
Her face, wide and worried and as expectant as her pregnant gut, collapsed into a laugh. A beautiful expression. She could still light him up like a firefight.
“Get in, Bill.”
He staggered inside, and she eased the door closed, eyes lingering on the night.
“You’re late,” she said, turning the deadbolt. She peeked through a blind and studied the street before turning back to him.
“Sorry, lost my phone. Had to go buy an egg timer. Then there were some hiccups, some weird happenings, but…” He lifted his shirt to show her the brick strapped to his back. “I don’t really see the point of a recap. Long story short, my truck broke down and I had to hoof it here. Might’ve smoked some meth on the way.”
A momentary stare, then an accommodating laugh from the corner of her mouth. Sure, he’d left some stuff out, but he figured narrators were always conveniently forgetting essential shit. In the last decade everyone had learned to be a truth masseuse.
“We might have to cut that tape off you,” she said. To hear the nimble honey of her voice again. What a holy song. Seeing her in full glare of the lone, cheap lamp, though—the decade had battered her. Her eyes still floated in a splash of freckles like two sapphires tossed onto a white-sand beach, but the skin around them was creased with a thousand worries. Her teeth were nicotine-dimmed, yellowing on their way to brown. Her limbs looked skinnier, knees and elbows knobbier, perhaps accented by the grotesque bulge that almost looked fake. An actress strapping on a prosthetic for a role. She still wore her hair long, but instead of the strawberry blonde she’d favored in high school, it was now that tacky platinum blonde, the color of a Post-it note. She’d chosen to greet him in black sweatpants and a simple green V-neck.
Yet an ache still surfaced that hadn’t stalked him in years. Here is longing even when you bury it alive in the dirt of your heart.
“It’s going to hurt,” Bill said matter-of-factly, scanning the room. “I’ll probably need a drink for numb-the-pain purposes. Know what I’m getting at?”
“I have wine and vodka, that’s it.” She had a pimple on her chin and a scrim of sleep burned away by the nervous edge of waking abruptly.
Bill exhaled, long and dramatically. “Yep, that sounds like it can locomote me to the right place.”
Kaylyn smiled again. A real wormhole to the soul. “I’m not sure if it’s reassuring or totally terrifying that you have not changed like one iota.”
He heard from Harrington that Rick had proposed to Kaylyn and she turned him down. This was after he and Rick had stopped speaking but before Bill left for college. How simultaneously furious and overjoyed this had made him, imagining Rick on one knee with some flimsy blood diamond that nevertheless must have cost the kid his savings.
Rick left for basic training two weeks later, and Bill never spoke to him again, so he never got his version of the story, but Kaylyn admitted it had happened. He tried to persuade her to let him drive to Toledo where she enrolled that fall.
“What for?” she asked with hostility he couldn’t understand.
“To see you.” He gulped down the silence that followed. “Kay?”
“Don’t you feel guilty? About Rick? And Lisa?”
“Not really,” he admitted.
“You kept fucking her. The whole time we were— Are you still?”
“Lisa?” He was confused. “We broke up. I told you. What? Are you jealous?”
“I don’t understand why you don’t just be with her. You guys have your little book club; you’ll both be superstars in college. Why not just be with her?”
“Maybe I’m not getting something, Kay, but—Jesus Christ—I’ve made it so clear how I feel about you.”
“You’re both smart. You’ll have money,” she said. “You should just be together. Just be with that pretty Chinese bitch and leave me alone.”
Bill almost choked—on rage, grief, and disbelief, on not understanding what the hell was going on with her. “Who gives a fuck about Lisa?” he blurted, though he did. He just wanted this cruelty out of Kaylyn. He wanted back the confident girl he’d fallen for so long ago in the sixth grade. The fearless one.
Then she stopped answering Bill’s texts and calls. The last thing she ever said to him before opening the door of her rental on Sandusky Street in 2013 came via text in October of 2003. I know you won’t like this but I don’t think we should talk for a while. Sorry.
Now he saw himself a decade on, directionless, staggering through life, learning to tell fast lies and leaving a burning landscape behind him everywhere he went. He never thought Lisa would flee to the other side of the world, never to return, or that Rick would catch a bullet in Baghdad or Harrington would die glazed and asleep in a flame-soaked room. He’d never expected any of them to get old or sick or sad or dead. He never thought any of them would be afraid. But Kaylyn was the first person he really lost, and the one who left him wide awake and staring pointlessly at the dark.
He stood in her living room with his shirt off as she used a pair of scissors to cut into the clear packing tape, studying the small, sad unit. A two-seat couch faced a small TV. Piled beneath it, a helter-skelter collection of DVDs, the kind of ancient, soon-forgotten rom-coms with Jennifer Aniston or Paul Rudd you got for three bucks in the bargain bins of gas stations. The coffee table was a mess of Us Weeklys, a plate of half-finished, lipstick-red spaghetti going cold, and her inhaler, right next to an ashtray with two fresh cigarette stubs, the stench heavy in the air. He saw back to the sliver of bedroom, the unmade bed, a closed laptop on a pillow, and a disaster of clothes scattered on the floor. His gaze lingered on the pair of enormous, muddied work boots kicked into a corner.
“Ow-uh!” said Bill as the tape screeched from his skin. The black hairs on his chest appeared to him as scuttling insects.
“I don’t understand why you taped it to you.”
“Felt right. Real Midnight Express shit.”
He cried out again as she ripped more of the tape free. She held the package in hand and looked visibly relieved. “Want me to do it like a Band-Aid or peel it off an inch at a time?” He didn’t remember her having this much Ohio drawl in her voice. Like it had deepened.
Bill batted her hand aside and ripped the rest of the tape free in two skin-burning, flab-stretching, hair-shredding tugs. This took with it a good deal of the hair on his torso and left behind tormented red skin. The room shimmered all around him, hallucinations and weariness coming like a fog.