The Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off

It was uncanny. Not only was the spot they had dyed yesterday as white as it had been previously but also the number of infected strands had doubled.

Alexa frowned. “That’s really annoying,” she said.

“I mean, it’s not your fault,” said Alyssa, eyeing Christina accusingly.

They were helping Christina prepare for her date, because it had been decided between them— Christina had not been consulted—that there was nothing to help her get over the trauma of discovering half a dead girl than the trauma of a first date with a whole live boy.

“We’ll just have to make do,” said Alexa wearily. “Have you thought about an outfit?”

Christina showed them what she had planned to wear and received a simultaneous and emphatic no. “The jeans aren’t too … frightening,” said Alexa consolingly.

“But the shirt is way more sort of church picnic than wild sex goddess,” said Alyssa. “I don’t know if wild sex goddess is my sort of look,” said Christina.

But they ignored her; she had only really asked in the first place for sociological purposes—they had brought what she was to wear.

“I like these jeans,” said Christina.

“Totally. For something to look cute painting in,” said Alyssa.

Alexa laid the shirt they had furnished on the bed. The shirt was the color of pink frosting and had a pattern on it to imitate sprinkles.

“I … I can’t wear that,” said Christina. “Christina, don’t be difficult,” said Alexa. “I can’t wear that,” said Christina. “Christina, we’re only … bitch!”

Alyssa had sharply pinched the skin above Alexa’s elbow between her fingernails and indicated Christina with her eyes. The pallor in her face.

“Okay,” said Alexa. “It’s okay, sweetie.”

They selected a cream sweater that after some discussion they decided was acceptable as long as she was sort of bitchy the first half hour, and proceeded with their combined efforts to squeeze Christina into the jeans they had furnished. Then they turned to the situation of the hair. The process was foreign and mysterious to Christina. She had not been conferred with a practical sense of how one went about this strange and all inverted business of being a girl, where seemingly natural stuff like going on about all the great things you just learned about Siberian tigers on National Geographic was suddenly weird, but totally weird stuff in and of itself like drawing around your eyeball with a pencil became normal, and it impressed to no end that it was a product of meticulous effort that made the twins seem so perfectly and effortlessly feminine. But it worked—they were always so, so pretty.

At seven Tyler came and took her to the roller rink. Initially Alyssa vetoed this plan as silly and juvenile, but Alexa thought about it and pointed out that it opened the door for hand-holding that didn’t

necessarily reveal intent and planted suggestive make-out music while on the surface deceptively silly and juvenile. Christina did not interject that she liked roller-skating.

On skates Tyler was endearingly klutzy, which calmed Christina’s racing heart. He said he hadn’t put these things on in years, and when they stepped on the rink he humped back and forth to maintain his balance, throwing his arms up in mock triumph when he fell.

“Here,” said Christina, holding out her hand.

“You sure?” said Tyler. “If I go down, you go down.” She noted his palm was as clammy as hers. Well!

Tyler and Christina had first had a moment during drama class when they wound up partners for the mirror game. Tyler was a gangling boy, all knees and elbows, making him the star physical comedian of the HGHS stage. When Christina missed a couple of days of school he dropped off the DVDs of the first season of Glee. There was nothing imposing about him other than the fact of his sex; when they had changed into skates she noticed his pinkie toe poking through a hole in his sock, the adorable way he’d tried to hide it.

They were passed by a very skinny very pregnant lady in denim short shorts and a lime green tube top who was skating like greased lightning.

“I’m glad you’re feeling like better and everything,” said Tyler. “Oh, I’m fine,” said Christina, affecting breezy nonchalance. “You look fine,” said Tyler, and Christina blushed.

The pregnant lady did a pirouette and Christina saw that she had a long and ratty goatee, and Christina realized it wasn’t a lady at all but a man dressed like a girl carrying his beer weight in his gut.

“Hello, nurse!” said Tyler, and Christina giggled, per the twins’ instruction to laugh at everything he said. She had her own doubts about that one—it seemed like it would make a person feel like some kind of circus clown—but the twins seemed, as usual, correct: she noticed that the more she tittered, the more generally pleased he seemed.

After a couple of minutes the rink darkened and a disco ball spun slowly. It was the couples skate. A Madonna song played. Other skaters joined hands.

“Now I’m not the only one who looks special ed,” said Tyler.

When you call my name it’s like a little prayer

His grip tightened. A simple adjustment, or was that a squeeze?

I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there

The movement of his feet became less jerky and halting, falling into rhythm with hers. They made a full, smooth pass.

“You’re getting it,” said Christina, imitating the kind of coo she would envision the twins approving of.

“Whoops,” said Tyler. His left foot slipped out and he fell, legs splayed, Christina coming down right on top of him. It was the first time she had felt the body of a boy beneath her, the solid and the warmth of it. She would have to remember to make a note of the sensation later, how these poor innocents have no idea that they are prey to the budding writer’s catalog of impressions! Then she realized she probably should get off him; he appeared to be in serious pain. But he laughed through his grimace and some wise guy yelled to get a room and Tyler said, “Warned you.”

When they were done skating, he asked what she wanted to do and she shrugged. Her curfew wasn’t for another hour.

“We could just, like, figure it out in the car,” said Tyler, reaching for his shoe.

Oh, will we now, Christina thought, and she reached and pinched the protruding toe and wiggled it. “This little piggy went to market,” she said.

They drove to the 443 Sunoco, which was on a bluff overlooking the river. “Do you want anything?” said Tyler, which impressed her as chivalrous.

She said, A cherry Coke if you please, and he went inside. But he did not lock the door behind him and she worried for a half second it would be rude if she did, but the car was parked in the penumbra of the nearest streetlamp and one glance at the darkness beyond the hood and she reached over and slapped the button. Just a precaution; there was nothing to be afraid of here.

“Remembering that you don’t have to be afraid is a Positive Coping Strategy,” she said.

Her hands were restless waiting, so she flipped down the visor and regarded herself in the mirror. The physical activity had disheveled her hair somewhat, but rather than fix it she decided she kind of liked it —the effect combined with the white striation was in its own way kind of hot. Fierce, even—like you didn’t know what you bargained for letting this out of its cage! Or was it? Really, it was just as possible she looked retarded. Suddenly, as happened with some regularity, she hated the twins. What were they thinking, letting her in this situation by herself? How she wished they were here right now.

Someone worked the door handle and she gasped in surprise, but of course it was Tyler who entered and handed her a cherry Coke.

“Scared you,” he said.

They sat looking out over the guardrail. The dark treetops on the ridges of the hills over the opposite bank like the bristling of massive beasts and the shimmering river a long lady in a black and sequined dress.

“It’s really pretty here,” said Christina, grasping the bottle with both hands between her thighs to hide her nervous fidgeting.

“I used to know the graveyard dude,” said Tyler, nodding to the store. “He hooked me up. Now it’s some fat dyke. She probably just got dumped by her Facebook girlfriend or something.”

Christina nodded. Her job now to wait and embarrass herself as minimally as possible. But wait for what? Her stomach was all tied up. She knew the sort of things boys were supposed to expect going into these things, but being in the thing itself she had no idea what he expected. She had told herself, before, she was more ready than anyone would have expected of her, but now that there was this big, warm thing taking up all that space so close to her, she was so scared. Could it possibly be as enjoyable as this tension was unbearable?

They both sat staring out the windshield. About a half mile down the river stood the remains of Castle Godfrey, its chutes and furnaces in the dark giving it the appearance of some nightmare burlesque of an amusement park.

“I was inside there once,” Christina said, pointing to the mill. Making conversation because just sitting there not saying anything felt like that millisecond right after hearing tires screech and not knowing whether the crash would follow, that millisecond stretching on and on.

“Yeah?” he said.

“My friends and I were walking on the tracks this one day and we were just messing around.” “What’s it like?” he said.

She rubbed the sweat of the bottle with her thumb. “It’s … so big. And so empty. Except for this giant whatchamacallit—this cauldron thing they used to make steel in, like a giant black egg with a hole at the top, that’s still there, on its side. It’s supposed to be cursed or whatever. So I went to check it out, you know, peek inside. Put my head in.”

“Put your head in!” he said.

“Oh, you know,” she said airily. “Just gathering material.”

“You’re a really good writer!” said Tyler, impressed.

She neglected to mention that she couldn’t sleep with the bedside light off for weeks afterward, that she had never hated or misunderstood the cruelty of the twins more for daring her to do it, for knowing she would because they wanted her to.

Tyler nodded. He was reminded of his brief experience dating Letha and how he could never know conclusively that the bouquet of severed doll heads attached to plastic flower stems the opening night of the previous spring’s production had been related or not.

“Those Godfreys,” he said. “You’re lucky the elephant girl didn’t jump out and eat you.”

“Shelley’s okay,” said Christina, chastising. She was surprised and pleased at her own conviction coming to the other girl’s defense.

“I didn’t mean anything,” said Tyler.

“It’s okay,” said Christina. “I just don’t know if we … get her.”

They were quiet. Then without warning he reached and touched her white bang. She flinched. He withdrew his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I … thought it was cool.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay, sorry. You … I think you should.”

She touched her hair nervously. He touched his own in the same place. She realized he was playing the mirror game. She giggled, and so did he in imitation. Feeling much more lighthearted, she did a jazz handsy sort of thing and so did he. He puckered his lips. Oh did he! She puckered her own. He leaned in and so did she. She tasted sweet boy breath and felt inexpert boy lips. The soft insistence of his lips. Wet, moving lips.

He made a noise between an exhalation and a moan and he did not notice as all the fingers on both her hands extended fully and she placed her rigid hands to either side of his face and shoved him off, then fumbled for the door and fell to the pavement, screaming and screaming and screaming.

The Crucible

“I can feel it when you’re doing that,” said Marie. “I can feel it when you’re just lying there, worrying. It keeps me awake. Will you please go downstairs?”

Godfrey rose, leaden, and obeyed. In the kitchen he poured a scotch and poured an equivalent amount of water back into the bottle. He suspected she was monitoring. He looked at his reflection in the window, catching himself in the act, and made a ray gun out of his hand.

“Zap,” he said.

Disintegration: literally, the loss of integrity. But if the mind can be described as one’s subjective experience of the brain, then what is the self but vagrant fluorescings of neural constellations, individual states of consciousness determined by mercurial configurations of amplitude and alliance? And yet: he was not convinced, never able to shake the conviction there was so much more to lose …

He drank. Was his wife really snooping? Marie ran the Godfrey Foundation, the family’s charitable arm, and it had to be admired how good she had gotten at not bringing her work home. Although, to be fair, if she was snooping it was not entirely unjustified given how much he was drinking, albeit as an unusually educated self-prescription: in his medical opinion, if one must choose between the physiological deterioration caused by oppressive, neuron-murdering stress versus intoxication, who does one think one is possibly kidding?

His eyes fell to his phone but he looked away. No. Not that.

Bludgeoning himself with liquor was one thing, but fucking Olivia twice in one day for the first time in thirteen years in a feckless rage of potency would be a violence to his own soul. It was dangerous even to be thinking about her again. Fucking in the old places, thinking about her like he used to. Missing her exactly like he used to.

He poured more liquor into his glass and more water into the liquor. The front door opened, startling him so he nearly dropped the bottle. But this was absurd. As though thinking about Olivia was an act in which he might be caught. This was totally absurd.

“Letha?” he said.

She appeared in the kitchen, to his delight. But now shouldn’t he have some reason for summoning her beyond simple conjuration? Name, face. Or, as progenitor, did he? On balance he could be asking for a lot more in return for the fact of her existence. Like oh for instance getting an abortion. Kill it, kill it while there’s still time. But Godfrey was contorting himself through the motions of trying to see the potential for good to come from her decision; stranger things, in his professional experience, had happened. But down back the hill it rolled; he hated it, he hated the thing inside her and it pumped his stomach with battery acid every time he thought about it, which is to say, all the time. All the time it felt like this. He had the familiar impulse to pour a fresh drink with a full one in his hand.

“I’m told you had a gentleman caller this afternoon,” he said. (In fact he’d been told she’d gone gallivanting off with some ponytailed hoodlum.)

“Oh,” she said, “Peter.”

“Peter who?” he said. “Rumancek. He’s a new kid.” “The werewolf,” he said.

“He’s otherwise very nice,” said Letha. “I’m told you were Aunt Olivia’s white knight today,” she said, changing the subject.

He nearly spilled his drink. But she didn’t know. Somehow, still, no one knew. A feat of willful ignorance, as impressive as the pyramids.

Except Roman. Almost certainly an unspoken knowing earlier today in the boy’s eyes. Godfrey House was made of secrets, and he knew as well as anyone what the slightest creativity and stealth could uncover. But there was no way to ascertain without asking, an investigation he had no interest in pursuing. And assuming the boy did know, he was discreet about it. Criminal, his lack of generosity to his brother’s son. But didn’t it worry the bones to hear Letha speak Olivia’s name. When Marie did, it was invested with reassuring malignity; the way Letha spoke, it could have been anyone’s kindly old aunt.

“She fainted,” he said. “Who faints?” said Letha.

She kissed him good night and he found himself left to the sudden onset of a complete and primordial sense of aloneness for which the only thing was the trivial distraction of modern technology. He went to the computer and surfed to distraction. Holes in the Steelers offense, reviews of books the likelihood of his ever getting around to reading decreasing each year, a vulgarity he’d meant to look up on Urban Dictionary. Then, for curiosity’s sake, he performed a search on Lod. Not that he expected it to generate any hit, but just supposing it did. And as it happened there were quite a few entries, although none of them from the corporate sphere. Lod, a city on the Sharon Plain of Israel: birthplace of the most venerated saint in Orthodox Christianity, Saint George. He looked at this useless incongruity on the screen and drank, the warm numbing finally offering the promise of sleep.

But there was something else he’d been meaning to look up, something to do with a case. But which? Which else? He searched for “H Varga” to see if perchance it would yield some sort of contact information. It did not, but there was a small news item from a few weeks ago. So there would be no confirming Pullman’s story with Hollis Varga: his body had been dredged near Penrose with iron weights in his pockets and a one-line note in a ziplock bag:

Today I have seen the Dragon

Godfrey shut down the computer and swiveled the chair and regarded Letha’s framed childhood silhouette on an end table across the room. So where are we? He knew enough about their shared blood that she was going to be having the child, and enough about Johann’s slime trail that it would be impossible to follow without slipping. But the one, it had to be admitted, had nothing to do with the other, and in a time when the imperative of fathers was thrown into tragic and urgent relief his own cold crusade did not have the luxury of priority. Letha was having the child. The institute was one of the most advanced medical centers in the world. And the only thing that mattered was the safety of his baby girl.

* * *

Roman pulled into the empty gravel lot abutting the rail yard and Peter told him to kill the headlights. Roman said there was no point because no one gave two shits what happened out here, but Peter said to humor him. Roman killed the lights and pulled forward and parked by the electrical substation. Peter exited but Roman did not.

“What?” said Peter.

Roman regarded the clock in a cold sweat: 1:11. There was no way to convey how fatal an augur it

would be to embark on this task when the time was a succession of primes that added to the worst of primes, so he didn’t bother. He waited until it turned 1:12—a cumulative 4.

He exhaled in relief and got out. They both carried flashlights, and Roman a bolt cutter. They passed the Dragon. Roman waved his arms irreverently and said, “Ooga booga!”

“Please don’t,” said Peter. “Why?” said Roman. “Humor me,” said Peter.

They walked to the main entrance of Castle Godfrey. Roman hefted the chain, noting that there was no rust on it; it had been recently replaced. He notched a link and sheared it and pushed the doors open. The whine of the hinges echoed within the mill building. They stepped inside. It was cold and smelled like metal and mud. The floor was covered with slag and graphite and broken glass and their feet crunched on it.

“You know how when you close your ears sometimes the sound of your heart is like a little man walking through snow?” said Roman.

“Yeah, that’s weird,” said Peter.

They turned on flashlights. There was a crane system overhead and at one end an immense, shadowy mass like a dead whale, or sleeping. On the wall was a Steelers logo next to the words SAFETY’S NO. 1! in gold.

“Any idea what we may be looking for?” said Roman.

“Driver’s license,” said Peter. “Social Security card. Dream journal.” “Kiss my big black ass,” said Roman.

They split off, taking different halves of the mill. Peter turned his flashlight to the mass, revealing it to be a Bessemer converter. It was larger than his trailer and lay on its side, a fissure in the cement snaking away from the mouth from a past seismic impact. Peter crouched behind a row of pallets and pointed his light. Empty. Roman climbed the stairs to the crane pulpit but found nothing, and combed the locker room to the same end. Peter went into the office. He pointed his beam into a corner and a sleeping bag came into view. He went to it and knelt and ran his finger along a caking of dust on the nylon. He noticed a spoon, the convexity blackened, and nearby on the floor a patch cleared of the old blueprints and beaver mags. His beam lighted a large burnt-looking stain on the floor that was shaped symmetrically into a pair of wings. Blood, a snow angel of blood. Peter turned to call for Roman, then didn’t. It was clear this had been here since long before the vargulf, and not knowing what to make of it himself, he decided Roman’s energies were better kept undistracted.

His beam lighted a pair of boots, at least as old as the sleeping bag, and by them another pair of wings. A quick sweep revealed perhaps a half dozen more on the walls and ceiling and Peter’s bones went cold. It was time to go, he suddenly knew. To get out, and especially get Roman out. The energy here had no good in it, there was no good in exposing Roman to it, he felt in his balls. But in turning toward the office door his light illumined the hollow of one of the boots and with it came a flash of inspiration that he did not like, he didn’t like anything about it. Not least of all that it meant not leaving yet.

Reluctant every step, Peter walked out of the office and across the floor and stood before the Bessemer converter. He gagged at the stench issuing like pestilential breath and he muffled his nose and shone his flashlight into the mouth. He held it there and unsettled dust danced in its shining and he said nothing.

“What?” said Roman. He came beside Peter. The stench hit him and he averted his face as though struck, but not before getting a look at what was inside.

“Oh, man,” said Roman quietly.

The lining of the interior was encrusted with sticky brown black and at the base was what appeared at first to be a comically large meat-stripped wishbone. The wishbone wore candy-striped go-go boots. The outstanding half of Lisa Willoughby.

“Should we … tell someone?” said Roman.

“Tell them what.” said Peter. He lowered his flashlight.

Roman was quiet and his eyes lingered on the blackness of the Bessemer. The panties he stole had smelled fresh and sweet, like fabric softener.

“I’d like to go,” said Roman.

They walked out in silence and when they emerged into the air Roman fished for a smoke. Then the shadows of the black willows rose and fell like the spokes of a turning wheel as a light streamed through and Peter and Roman looked at each other, realizing at the same time. Another car.

“Inside,” said Peter, already slipping back within the shadows of the mill.

“He’ll see the car,” said Roman, squinting to get a better look at who was approaching. “That doesn’t mean blow him a fucking kiss,” hissed Peter’s disembodied voice.

Roman withdrew and they both watched the car pull into the lot and come abreast of Roman’s. A sheriff’s department cruiser. Two figures emerged: Neck and Nose. They inspected the Jaguar.

“Young Master Godfrey’s, if memory serves,” said Neck.

Nose pointed a flashlight to the mill and Peter and Roman hugged the wall.

“You may as well get your tight ass out here, because I’m going to be real pissed if I have to go in there,” he said.

Peter looked at Roman. “Get rid of them.”

“With pleasure,” said Roman, and there was something in the way he said it that filled Peter with misgiving, but there was nothing to be done as Roman stepped out.

“Well, olly olly oxen free,” said Neck.

“You know Chuck E. Cheese is that way, kid,” said Nose.

“Can I help you gentlemen with anything?” said Roman with a gentility that did not help Peter’s unease. “Maybe you can start with what the hell you think you’re doing out here,” said Neck.

“Well gee, I was sitting quietly by myself playing solitaire,” said Roman. “I hope I wasn’t disturbing anyone.”

Peter’s balls aged in dog years.

Nose closed in aggressively on Roman. “You think we won’t run you in, you goddamn little punk?” he said.

Roman turned back in what Peter at first feared was for the purpose of some kind of stage wink or equally bonehead gesture but instead he swept his arm at the side of the building—to what end Peter did not know but he could not imagine what was preventing him from employing the one thing he was reliably good for.

“The eyes,” Peter whispered desperately. “Do the crazy roofie eyes.”

In fact, what Roman was indicating was the faded six-foot white lettering on the side of the building: GODFREY STEEL COMPANY . And he had seen his name put to too much ill use this day to resort to parlor tricks; real things were at stake here and had to be put to right.

“Okay, I’ll level with you,” said Roman. “We’re all ears,” said Neck.

“I was actually jacking off to French postcards of your mother and would prefer a little privacy, if you wouldn’t mind directly fucking off and staying away from my property or I’m reporting both you illiterate assholes for harassment,” said Roman.

Neck and Nose exchanged looks. “Best news I got all week,” said Nose.

He seized Roman by the arm, roughly wrenched it behind him, causing him to emit a sharp cry of pain, and slammed him face-forward into the side of the building.

“At the request of Olivia Godfrey, I’m placing you under arrest,” he said.

Once the taillights of the cruiser had vanished and Peter was in darkness he began to breathe normally again. He took a final look at the converter and walked out of the mill. The keys were still in the Jaguar. Wheeling it around, the headlights hit a white patch that caught Peter’s eye. A scrap of paper. He left the car idling and got out and knelt to the ground. It was a page ripped from a book, weighted by scattered pebbles. He brushed it clean and held it to the light of the moon.

She clipped a precious golden lock

She dropped a tear more rare than pearl

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 634