Rick had gone at him then, which was probably good because Bill had already hitched in the breath to move to Total War, to spill everything, to stand in front of all their friends and recount how Kaylyn had crawled onto his face in her grandma’s bed and how her skinny thighs quaked when she came. Lucky for Bill, their buddies pulled them apart before he revealed all. Later, when he heard from Harrington that Rick had dropped out of OSU to join the Marines, Bill had to wonder if that night of wasted heat had something or everything to do with it. That night was the last time he ever spoke to Rick Brinklan.
Four years later, Bill’s dad called him as the final semester of his senior year of college was winding down. He’d been in a bar on a weeknight watching the Cavs finish off the Wizards in a first-round playoff game. He told the story about playing fourteen-year-old LeBron one-on-one at a basketball camp because there was a beautiful blonde who’d joined them, some friend of a friend, and she had pearl earrings, a preppy popped collar, and an attractive curve to the bridge of her nose. She kept looking at him, and he at her. He went outside to take his dad’s call, and while Bill was easing in to his take on the game so far, his dad goes:
“Hey, I’ve got something that you need to hear. I just got off the phone with Marty.” And of course Bill knew what was coming. “Rick was killed in combat yesterday. They’re planning a parade, and—you know, if you want to come home.” His dad went silent, his voice caught, like a sweater snagged by a nail, on the moment of telling his only son that his best friend from childhood, a kid who’d eaten Fruit Roll-Ups in their kitchen and played basketball in the driveway and sneaked liquor from above the stove, was gone.
He got his dad off the phone as quickly as possible, but not because he needed to weep. Because there it was. Rick had gone off to fight a pointless, bullshit imperial war waged for the profit of a small elite, and he’d taken one for the team, hadn’t he? He got exactly what he wanted—to die a supposed hero. Bill went back inside the bar, watched the Cavs triumph, and fucked that pretty, preppy girl twice that night and once in the morning.
Kaylyn twisted her wineglass and watched the liquid chase gravity at the bottom.
“It’s not important, Bill,” she finally said. “You helped me when I needed it. That’s all that matters.”
He’d finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on the step, but he still held it between his fingers, twirling the blackened end. A Camel talisman. “What I’m saying…” He dropped the cigarette butt and put his hand on hers. “If you need help, I want to help. If you need money, if that brick is what you’re doing to make ends meet, I can—”
“Bill.” Her voice trembled, and very abruptly tears shimmered in green irises. “I cannot—I mean it—I cannot tell you. All I can… I’ve messed up. Got involved with—just—some bad people. I did some incredibly stupid things, and… Now I’m just trying to save myself, stay out of prison, stay clean, and give Barrett and my mom and this baby any chance. And I can’t tell you what this involves because I don’t want you involved. You just have to trust me.”
Her throat clicked. A calving cloud passed overhead. He gripped the bones in her hand.
“I’ve done those stupid things too,” he finally said. “And that’s even when I’ve been trying to do good. Nothing feels like it does any fucking good. Because people only act—they only change—with a gun to their head. I’ve been depressed, I’ve been miserable, I’ve hated myself. But through all of that, Kay, you know what I keep coming back to? You. You’ve never been out of my mind.”
She took her hand back and held her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “You don’t understand what I’ve done.”
Then, with Bill working around her obfuscations—excavating much, but deducing little—Kaylyn told her story. Not so much an explanation as a fogged, opaque confession.
In the long list of regrets, mistakes, and nightmares, the thing that haunted her when she couldn’t sleep wasn’t even the worst thing she’d done. She’d given them all an order and moved those rankings around depending on what shame she wanted to fill herself with on a given day. She tried to decide when she’d learned to be so cruel. At a middle school dance, she’d ridiculed Hailey Kowalczyk for wearing a basketball jersey: “You look like a boy with smaller tits,” she’d quipped to the raucous laughter of those within earshot. Later, before her mom picked her up, she saw Kowalczyk wiping at tears. But that was the thing about having younger friends. Now that Hailey and Lisa were in middle school with her, they got clingy, called every night, tried to trade on their friendship with the girl a grade above them. The flipside was that they never doubted her, never questioned her knowingness.
That’s how two years later, during a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, she got Kowalczyk to give Curt Moretti a blow job. She told the participants she would join them in the bathroom to make sure things went well, and after the hoots and cheers, Curt sat on the closed toilet while Kaylyn perched on the rim of the tub and directed her younger friend: On your knees. Put the bath mat under them so they don’t get sore, etc. Kaylyn watched with her chin propped on her hand and felt both lascivious and powerful. Hailey kept her eyes open, a dumb bovine quality to her expression.
“You want to join in?” Curt asked her as Kowalczyk mumbled the kid’s cock.
“You wish, Moretti.”
But she did put her hand on the back of Hailey’s head to test her limits. Kowalczyk had no idea what she was doing, and in fact, when Curtis blew his load, she just swallowed and kept right on going. He came again a few minutes later. She’d never had a thrill like that before. She wasn’t sure why she’d picked on Kowalczyk, this cute, funny little tomboy chick, who played point guard for the basketball team. Everyone fawned over her for how she took on the household responsibilities when her mom got diagnosed with bone cancer. Lisa called her “Triple Threat,” and the name spread. Hailey could do it all, they claimed. Therefore, Kaylyn wanted to make her try it all, and in doing so, she discovered Life in all its manipulative, wet, pornographic glory.
“I can’t believe you did that,” she said to Hailey later that night.
Hailey averted her eyes. “Had to happen sometime.”
When Lisa heard, she was horrified. Not at Kaylyn, but at Kowalczyk. Kaylyn couldn’t have cared less that Lisa and Hailey stopped speaking. By then, she was with Rick, the brawny stud football player of her class. He did her math homework and got just the right amount of jealous.
As an adult she’d wonder where this streak in her came from, if she’d just been born bored and intrigued by the lengths people would go to in order to please her. When her father crashed to the floor while eating dinner, she knew before her mom dialed 911 that he was about to leave her. Growing up, if he was on his double-digit wine cooler of the night he’d tell her she was the moon and the stars and the sky, the only thing that kept him going. Kaylyn took this to mean he hated her mother and Barrett as much as she did. When he died and left her with them—a crumpled shell of middle-aged passivity and her only sibling, not an ally or a friend or a person she could lean on, just a vicious, mean-spirited lunatic no one could control—she was furious and something else. Envious of him maybe?