Beautiful Read online

  He pulls into the driveway of one of the houses. I look around for some clue that he lives here. There is nothing, no skateboard in the front yard or graffiti on the trash can, no cigarette butts or empty beer cans on the ground.

  “Here we are,” he says.

  “The yard is nice,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says. “They have someone do it.”

  I wonder who “they” are. I wonder what this place would look like if “they” weren’t around.

  He opens the door. We go inside. I can see the light from outside reflected off of dust in the air, like speckled laser beams cutting through the bare living room. The walls are white with nothing on them. There is an ugly green couch and matching chair, a coffee table holding candles that have never been lit, with no candleholders or anything that implies they belong there. There’s a bookshelf that’s mostly empty, with only a few fitness and self-help books, a vase that matches nothing, a boom box. A StairMaster, rowing machine, and weight bench take up a whole side of the room, in front of a fireplace that’s never been used. If “they” saw the inside of this house, Ethan and his mom would definitely get kicked out.

  “Are you hungry?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. I have not been hungry in weeks. Usually Sunday is the day I eat. I take a bunch of sleeping pills the night before and spend all day on the couch drinking coffee and eating everything I can find, taking periodic breaks to go to my room to smoke pot and cigarettes. Ethan does not know this. Nobody knows this. But he has been saying things lately, like he can see my ribs poking out, like he can feel my pelvic bones stabbing him when he fucks me. I just shrug and bat my eyes and kiss him. We had an assembly at school about eating disorders that I skipped to smoke pot behind the gym. Since then, he has been trying to explain to me that guys don’t like skinny girls, that he misses my curves. I should think it’s sweet, his concern, but all it does is annoy me.

  “I’m starving,” he says, like always, and he takes me to the kitchen.

  “What’s all this stuff?” I say. There’s something like an altar on a shelf next to the dinner table—dried flowers, candles, a silver tray full of multicolored coins and key chains, a framed embroidered plaque that reads ONE DAY AT A TIME.

  “Oh, that,” Ethan says. “My mom’s in AA. That’s all her AA crap.”

  FIVE YEARS, reads the coin on the top of the pile. One year after Ethan’s father left.

  “That’s cool,” I say.

  “Which one do you want?” he says, thrusting two boxes of microwave dinners in my face. Salisbury steak or fried chicken.

  “Neither,” I say.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says. “I forgot. You’re on a diet.”

  “No, I’m not,” I say. “I’m just not hungry.”

  “At least eat some of my mom’s crap,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  He opens the fridge and all that’s in it is a flat two-liter of Coke, some Slim-Fast shakes, an apple, and leftover pizza. He hands me the apple. I take a mealy bite.

  “When’s your mom coming home?” I say. He is pushing buttons on the microwave. He doesn’t even have to look at the box for directions.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Usually, she goes to the gym after work. Then a meeting. Then dinner with her alkie friends.”

  “Oh,” I say, and I am surprised by a sudden, dull knot in my chest. It has been almost two months since we started dating and this is my first time at his house. I was looking forward to coming here. I was looking forward to meeting her. I was pathetic enough to think there is something important about meeting my stupid boyfriend’s mother.

  Ethan’s dinner is ready. He pulls it out of the microwave and the smell of it makes me nauseous. I put the apple down. I watch him as he eats standing up.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” he says, and I follow.

  His room is in the basement, with two tiny windows near the ceiling caked with dirt. A giant TV sits on the floor connected to a video game system more advanced than the one my mom has. Posters of skateboarders in death-defying poses, and girls in swimsuits line the walls. Clothes are strewn across the floor and there is a faint smell of feet. The only furniture is a futon on the floor with an alarm clock beside it. Next to the alarm clock is a plastic margarita glass like they have at corny Mexican restaurants, with a huge cup and green palm trees on the stem. It is full of condoms.

  “I have something to show you,” he says, finishing the last of his dinner and throwing the plastic tray on the stairs. He has a look on his face like he’s nervous and excited, like something important is about to happen.

  He opens the door at the bottom of the stairs that leads into the garage. He turns on the lights. He points and I look at a large piece of plywood stained with spray paint.

  “What do you think?” he says.

  “About what?” I say.

  “My mural,” he says, still pointing. “It’s what I’m going to do.”

  “What you’re going to do, how?” I say.

  “I’m going to start a business,” he says, his face slightly fallen. “Painting murals.”

  I look at it again. Green, red, and purple blobs color a piece of cheap wood. There are some blobs in the middle that look like something close to letters. P-E-A-C, I make out. What must be the last E looks like a lopsided square.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say.

  “You really think so?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say because I can’t say anything else. “The colors really work well together.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he says.

  I think about James the asshole and his Pink Floyd wall. I think it was not someone like Ethan who painted it.

  I can hear the phone ringing in the other room. Ethan runs to get it and I can hear his voice answer, deeper than it really is, deep like how he talks to his friends at school, not like how he talks to me. I walk into his bedroom and his voice has changed back to his real voice. “Okay, Mom,” he says, and hangs up.

  He lies on the bed. He says, “Come here,” and I do. I let him undress me. I move my arms when it is time to take my shirt off. I move my hips and legs when it is time for my pants. I do this with the sleepy-lidded eyes I know he likes, even though I haven’t taken a pill since lunchtime, even though I can see my purse across the room, holding what I need to feel good. I could get up now and go get it. I could tell him to stop and say I have to pee. But I don’t. I know this will not take long. I know he will be dozy afterward and he will not question my need to go to the bathroom.

  He fucks me and I lay there looking at this new ceiling that looks like every other ceiling I’ve seen—white, bumpy, blank, neutral. I rub my hands on his back so it seems like I’m paying attention. He finishes, falls on top of me with a sigh, rolls over next to me. I wait a few seconds and start to get up, sure that he’s nodded off.

  “Wait,” he says, pulling me close to him.

  “What?” I say.

  He pauses for a moment. He looks at me with his droopy eyes. “Do you like it?” he says.

  “Like what?” I say.

  “Like sex,” he says. “Do you like sex with me?”

  “Of course I do, baby.” I kiss him.

  “But you just lie there,” he says. “You don’t even move. It seems like you don’t like it.”

  “I do,” I say. “I really like it.”

  “Do you . . . ?”

  “What?” I am losing patience. There are pills in my purse waiting for me.

  “You don’t have an orgasm,” he says.

  What are you talking about? is what I want to say. Girls don’t have orgasms, I want to say, but I already know I have no idea what I’m talking about. These are not things I know, not things I’ve thought about. They are things I’ve accepted by not thinking about them. I vaguely remember reading something about orgasms in the book Mom gave me, something about the best feeling in the world. But all I care about is getting out of here and getting to my bag and getting thos
e pills in my throat and feeling the only best feeling in the world I know. I don’t care about the feelings everyone says I’m supposed to feel, the things my body is supposed to want. My body is different. It does not work like everybody else’s. It does what it can do, and that is all. It does what he wants, and that should be enough.

  I kiss him and crawl out of the bed. I grab my purse and walk up the stairs, naked except for my socks.

  “I love you,” I call down to him.

  “I love you, too,” I hear, muted, as I close the bathroom door behind me.

  • • •

  “Shit,” Ethan says as he pulls the car over to the side of the road. Rain makes a wet percussion on the windshield as he pounds the steering wheel with his fists, saying “shit” over and over again. I am leaning back in my seat with my feet on the dashboard, blowing smoke out of the tiny crack in the window. I am not concerned with his anger. The electric pulse of the Ritalin is making all of this okay.

  “It’s just a flat tire,” I tell him. “Can’t you just change it?” We are less than a mile from my apartment. I could get out and walk.

  He doesn’t say anything. He just sits there looking straight ahead into the black rain.

  “Ethan? Hello?”

  He turns his head a little toward me. “Yeah, I can change it,” he says. “I’m just pissed because it’s so fucking wet outside.”

  “I’ll help,” I say. I’m feeling generous.

  “I don’t need your help. I can change a fucking tire by myself.” He gets out of the car and slams the door.

  “Okay,” I say to the dashboard. If he is mad at me, I have no idea why and I don’t really care. I will just sit in the car while he changes the tire. I won’t offer to help, even though my dad taught me last year when my mom forced him to spend time with me. I will watch Ethan’s reflection in the mirror, smoke my cigarette, and not care about anything.

  He opens the trunk and I can hear him rummaging around and muttering “shit” and “fuck” under his breath. If he says he doesn’t need my help, then I won’t help him, but it seems like he should have found the spare tire by now. I can feel the car rock as he pushes things around in the truck. I can hear things hit the ground.

  Nothing happens for a while. I am waiting for the metal-on-metal sounds, the car lifting. I look in the side mirror and see Ethan sitting on the spare tire with the jack in his hands, getting rained on and looking like his dog just died. “This is fucking ridiculous,” I say to the windshield, and I open the door.

  “What’s up?” I ask Ethan, already feeling the cold rain seeping into my skin. He doesn’t say anything and I can’t see his face. I reach over to pull the jack out of his hands but he won’t let go. “Let me help you,” I say, trying to sound caring or kind or sweet like I’m supposed to be, when really I want to get this over with so I can go home.

  “No,” he says, whining. “I should be able to do this.” I have no idea what the big deal is. I have no idea why he thinks it’s okay to let me see him pouting and pathetic like this when everyone else thinks he’s the coolest guy in school.

  “Why won’t you let me help you?” I say, even though I’m wet and freezing and starting to feel like pushing him in the mud.

  “’Cause you’re my girlfriend. I’m the man. This is the kind of thing a father is supposed to teach a son,” he says, his voice breaking a little at the end.

  Oh, God, I am thinking. I am supposed to comfort him now. I am supposed to be understanding and loving because his father hasn’t called or written in a year, because he didn’t remember Ethan’s birthday, because this man Ethan wants in his life doesn’t want him and he should fucking get over it. I have a father and I don’t want him. He can have mine. Or he can have Sarah’s. Then he’ll really know what he’s missing. Then he’ll realize he’s better without one.

  I pull on the jack again and this time he lets go.

  “Don’t tell anyone about this, okay?” he says.

  “Of course not,” I say.

  “Promise?” he says, looking up at me with his pathetic, wet face.

  “I promise,” I say. I won’t tell anyone what a loser he really is. I won’t tell because if he goes down, so do I. I won’t tell because I am nothing without the title of Ethan’s Girlfriend. If he is nothing, I am something even worse.

  I know what could happen if this got out, something as stupid and small as the big stud on campus missing his daddy and not knowing how to change a flat tire. Alex could twist it into something that could destroy him, something that would spread around school like some kind of virus until it became uncontrollable, deadly. I’ve seen Alex do it before, when she convinced everyone that a girl in her gym class was a dyke and was watching girls undress. The gangster girls beat her up so bad that she had to go to the hospital. She never came back to school. Alex told me a few days later that she made the whole thing up. She laughed as she said it, with a crazed look on her face like she just got off the best roller coaster ever built.

  I change the tire and Ethan watches, deflated and brooding. I’m the one getting covered in grease, my hands dirty and wet, my fingers red and stinging from the freezing rain, while he just sits there, useless. We get into the car and I wipe my hands with the used, crumpled napkins on the floor that are already sticky with fast-food grease, snot, semen. It is the night before Christmas Eve and this is how I’m celebrating.

  Ethan starts the car and turns the heat on high. He takes my hands in his and starts rubbing. “You’re freezing,” he says.

  “You’re warm,” I say, and he rubs his hands faster. “You have to get your blood pumping,” he says, and I wonder where he’s heard that before. People don’t really say things like “you have to get your blood pumping” while rubbing your hands in a warm car in the rain. I look at him and he’s staring at me, a timid smile on his face, his big, warm hands making a sandwich around mine.

  “Cassie,” he says.

  “What?” I say.

  “You’re wonderful,” he says. “I feel like I can tell you anything.” He smiles a goofy smile and cups my hands in his, blows his warm breath into my fists, makes my hands relax. My arms, my shoulders, my chest, my throat, my jaw, every part of me turns into sponge. I am finally warm and maybe this isn’t so bad, sitting here with Ethan, letting him think I’m wonderful, letting him think I love him.

  He lifts his hand and touches my face, trails his fingers softly down my cheek. “You’re beautiful,” he says, and I look away. I catch a glimpse of myself in the side-view mirror and I feel something small break inside. My hair is plastered to my face, my eyes blackened by melting mascara, and suddenly the rain is too loud, too violent, and Ethan’s face is too soft and his teeth are too crooked, and I need to be anyplace but here. The warmth is gone from my body and I am hard again, solid.

  I look back at him, at his face still glowing and earnest, and I wish other people could see him like this, see him all sweet and sentimental. I wish they could see him this weak.

  I could break my promise to him. I could tell. I could see what happens when someone big gets destroyed and turned into someone small. I could teach Ethan what it feels like to be destroyed. I could know how it feels to be the one who does the destroying.

  (FOURTEEN)

  I’m standing outside the fancy mini-mall where Kirkland has erected a big gaudy Christmas tree, where everyone has come to ooh and aah even though it’s just a big dead tree strangled by Christmas lights. Here I am, the day before Christmas, watching all the people weighed down by last-minute shopping bags, the families on their way to see a cheesy holiday movie, the emaciated Santa with his crooked beard ringing a bell next to a donation bucket. I am standing still and everyone else is scurrying around me with flushed cheeks and Christmas sweaters, chasing sugar-drunk children and the sale signs in the shop windows.

  It’s bad enough in my house with Mom playing the same Frank Sinatra Christmas album over and over, Dad hiding in the bedroom to avoid all her cheap decor
ations, all her pretending that her collection of phony holiday crap makes things festive. Just being there, just seeing that fat plastic Santa glowing on the mantel, just smelling her cookies burning in the oven, makes me want to jump out the window.

  I thought being outside would somehow be better, that walking around would force my heartbeats and breaths to follow some sort of order, that open air would make me feel lighter. But there’s a place in my chest that still feels like lead, the thump, thump, thump threatening to tear through me.

  I am waiting for Sarah. I am looking around, but all I see are white, smiling faces and multicolored scarves, all these people with something to look forward to, all of them with faith that tomorrow morning will bring something new. They will wake up and find their glittering boxes under their trees, full of all the things they had to have. They will open the boxes and their lives will be complete for that moment. Then there will be food and eggnog and a heavy night of sleep. Then New Year’s Eve and empty promises, hangovers, and football. Then it will be back to work, back to school, back to everything exactly the same as it was before. The only difference will be the new date. The only difference will be the new sweaters, new jewelry, new scarves that they will stop wanting as soon as they get them.

  But for now, time is paused. It is winter break and I don’t have to go to school for a week. I should be able to breathe now. I should be excited like everybody else, thinking about all the fun things I’m going to do. But all I am is tired. I’m tired of Alex and Ethan and Justin. I’m tired of parents and teachers and drugs and sex, and I’m even tired of Sarah. But there is nothing I can do, nothing to make them go away. They are still here even though it is winter break. They will still be here when it’s over. They will be here and so will I.

  “Cassie.” It is Sarah’s voice. It is coming from somewhere behind me, but I pretend I don’t hear it. She asked me to meet her here before I have to leave for my aunt’s annual Christmas party, before she has to go back to an empty house, before she has to spend Christmas alone because Alex and her mother are with grandparents who don’t consider Sarah a part of their family. I said yes because it would give me something to do, give me something to think about besides my dad’s white-trash family and their tradition of sitting around in a circle of folding chairs pretending to want to talk to each other. I am here because the more I think about them, the more detail I see in their miserable faces, the more they become one face, the more I can’t breathe, the heavier the lead in my chest becomes.