“No, she wasn’t,” I tell her, completely amazed. I mean, sure, I taught her the value of swearing for certain reasons, but who would’ve thought the word fucking could roll off her tongue so easily?
“It was just a friendly dance,” I say and try to take her arm, but she pulls away and goes for Cassidy.
“I don’t ever want to see you around him anymore,” she says. “You big fat bitch.”
Then, the next thing I know, she hauls off and slaps Cassidy right across the cheek. The force of her swing throws her off balance, and she crashes down onto this glass patio end table, shattering it into a jumble of jigsaw pieces.
So, here I have one girl with a big red slap mark on her face and another lying in a pile of patio end table shards. Which one do I go to? I don’t know if it says anything about me, but I go to Aimee.
I cup my hand behind her neck. “Can you sit up? Are you cut?”
“Do I look awful?” she says. “I bet I look awful.”
“Come on, let’s get you up in this chair.”
I get her in the chair and look her over for cuts. There’s just a scratch on the back of her arm, nothing bad.
“Looks like you’re all right,” I tell her, and she buries her face in my wet shirt and goes, “No, I’m not. I’m so stupid. I did this thing in the bathroom. Do I have vomit in my hair?”
“No, your hair smells sweet,” I tell her, but the truth is the fragrance de vomit is a little on the overpowering side.
From behind me, Kendra shrieks, “Sutter Keely! When they told me what happened out here, I should’ve known you’d be involved. I hope you know you’re going to pay for this table, Sutter.”
“That’s cool,” I say, completely calm and dignified. “Just send me the bill.”
She’s not done, though. “And I want you and your wasted girlfriend out of here. Now!” She’s boiling over with all the self-righteous anger of somebody’s mom.
“Why should we leave? I said I’d pay for your stupid table.”
“Why should you leave?” She surveys the patio and pool as if she’s an insurance adjuster showing up after Hurricane Katrina. “Here’s a couple of reasons: First, you got everyone in the pool when I said they weren’t supposed to, and now little miss binge drinker causes a big stupid scene, slaps my best friend for no reason, and breaks a two-hundred-dollar table.”
“Hey, it’s a party. Things happen.”
“No, Sutter. A party is for fun. You don’t know how to have fun like a normal person.”
“Me? Are you kidding? Look at everybody in the pool. You think they’re not having fun? Which do you think they’re going to remember more, playing some little game around the dining room table with you or laughing and swimming with their clothes on?”
Before Kendra can shoot back some lame reply, Cassidy steps up and takes my arm. “Sutter.” She stares me straight in the eye, giving me her best serious expression. I know it all too well. It’s not mean or accusatory or anything like that. She’s just letting me know there’s no room for jokes now. “It’s time to take Aimee home. She doesn’t want to be here like this.”
And she’s right, of course. Aimee’s sitting there all pale, looking like she could puke again at any second. This isn’t how she wants people to know her, and it’s not how I want them to know her.
“She’s not usually like this,” I say. “She’s just not used to partying so much. I guess she needs a little more practice, you know?”
Cassidy pats my back. “Take her home.”
Aimee’s leaning so far forward in the chair now, it looks like she might fall over on her face, but she doesn’t. She throws up again instead.
“Jesus,” someone says. “Look at the puke machine.”
I kneel down by her and pull back her hair. “Come on, baby,” I say softly. “It’s time to leave. You’ll be all right. Everything will be fine.”
Chapter 55
So, all in all, I’d say, despite the two-day hangover, the prom was a golden success. For days afterward, I have people coming up and congratulating me on my Dean Martin medley and my near-perfect, fully clothed flip into Kendra’s swimming pool.
On the down side, a few idiots have started calling Aimee Puke-a-reena. Guys like Chad Lammel pass by in the hall and go, “Hey, Sutter, where’s Puke-a-reena,” or “Has Puke-a-reena busted up any more lawn furniture lately?” Aimee says that in English, just as she’s sitting down, some dude goes, “Hey, Puke-a-reena, don’t break the desk.”
“That’s okay,” I tell her. “Screw that guy. We’ll see what he has to say someday when you’re a hotshot at NASA, and he’s working at some poultry plant cutting off chicken heads for a living.”
Aimee’s not so preoccupied with NASA anymore these days, though. Now she’s all about how we’re going to locate my dad and move off to St. Louis, like it’s a package deal. I’d kind of hoped that was just the vodka talking, but no such luck. She’s already told her sister we’re coming.
We sit down for lunch at Mickey D’s one day and the first thing she says is, “Have you talked to your mom about finding your dad?” Second day in a row she’s asked that.
“No, I decided I’d better talk to my sister about it instead. Only I have to approach it just right. My sister and I don’t get along so great.”
“I can’t wait to meet him,” she says. “I think this will be a really, really great thing for you. But we don’t have a whole bunch of time. Ambith’s expecting us to come pretty much right after graduation.”
“Don’t worry. I told you I’d do it, and you know me—I do what I say I will.”
Of course, the truth is that—regardless of how I’ve come to feel about her—I still expect Aimee to dump me. The signs are piling up. Just like all my other girlfriends, she’s starting to look for that certain something more in me that I don’t quite seem to have—whatever it is.
But time is running out if she’s going to break up with me before the day we’re supposed to move to St. Louis. In fact, now that the prom’s over, it seems like the school year’s pretty much finished too. We’re all just going through the motions, biding our time till graduation.
Unfortunately, for some of us, graduation might be postponed a tad. I haven’t told Aimee, but Mr. Asterhole has it in for me now. Apparently, according to him, it seems that I have to get at least a C on the last test to pass his class.
“And if you don’t,” he says, all stern and self-important, “it seems like I’ll be seeing you in summer school, young man.”
There he goes with the “young man” business.
I guess I could’ve had Aimee do more of my homework for me, but I didn’t want to run the risk of making her think that’s the only reason I was hanging out with her.
Anyway, I really do tell myself that I’m going to call my sister, Holly, and ask her about Dad. Maybe moving off to St. Louis isn’t so realistic, but the idea of locating my father has started to grow on me. I’ll bet I could really talk to him about things. It would be the Keely men, bonding at last. I can even see us going out to a baseball game together again. This time I’d have a tall, cold beer of my very own.
It’s not hard to come up with excuses for not calling Holly, though—especially since she never really forgave me for the suit-burning incident—but today I have a really legitimate one. Bob, my manager at the clothing store, asked me to come to work a couple of hours early. I mean, I can’t start some big, long-lost-dad conversation and then say, “Look, Holly, I’ll call you back later. I have to go to work.”
At Mr. Leon’s, I bring up the subject with Bob, but he seems distracted and doesn’t come across with his usual wisdom. Later, at the end of the shift, I find out why. He calls me into his office and tells me to have a seat.
“Sutter,” he says, tenting his fingers on the desk in front of him. “Do you know why I asked you to come in early today?” He doesn’t give me a chance to answer before going on. “Obviously we weren’t extra busy. In fact, we’re never busy
anymore. That’s the problem. The front office knows it, and they told me I have to cut hours starting the week after next. So I wanted you to get some extra time in before we have to do that.”
“How many hours do you have to cut?” I ask. “I’m only working three days a week as it is, and not even eight-hour shifts. I was hoping to maybe get five days a week this summer.”
I guess that shows where my mind is. I’m still thinking in terms of living here and not St. Louis.
Bob looks down and rubs his thumb along the edge of the desk. “And I’d like to give you those five days, Sutter. I really would. But the thing is, the way the front office wants it, I can only keep one clerk on. Now, we both know I like you and the customers like you—most of them anyway—so if I had my way, you’d be the one to keep.”
“That’s excellent, Bob. You won’t regret it.”
“Hold on for a second, Sutter. That’s not all. I’ve given this some hard thought, and the only way I can let you stay is if you promise me—one hundred percent—that you won’t ever come in with even a light buzz on. And I mean not even once. Otherwise, I don’t have any choice but to give you your two weeks’ notice.”
Bob looks me right in the eye now. He’s got this heavy sadness about him, like whether I lie or tell the truth, he’s bound to be disappointed. And of course, I can’t lie to him. He’s Bob Lewis. He’s too good a guy.
“Well, Bob,” I say. “You’ve got me there. You know I can’t promise you that. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
He continues looking me in the eye for a long moment, then nods. “I appreciate your honesty, Sutter. I guess if I was your dad I’d try to give you a lecture or something about what you’re doing to yourself, but that’s not really my place.”
I reach out and shake his hand. “Bob, if you were my dad, you probably wouldn’t have to lecture me about that. It’s been great working with you.”
“We still have two more weeks to work together.” I swear he looks like he’s about to cry. “And after that, if you ever decide to get things on track, you come back by here, and we’ll see if there’s an opening.”
“You can count on it.”
It’s pretty awkward around there after that, so I leave early instead of hanging around and talking to Bob while he counts out the till. Sure, I feel bad about getting fired, but I would’ve felt a lot worse if I’d lied. In fact, I’m pretty proud of myself, and as I walk out of the store, the air actually tastes a little sweet. Until I see Marcus’s car parked next to mine.
Chapter 56
My first thought is, Great, what now? I just got my ass canned and somehow Marcus has gone jealous again?
But as I approach the car, he’s not the one that steps out. It’s Cassidy. I ask her what’s up, and she says, “We just want to talk to you for a minute.” I’m like, “Who’s we?” and she goes, “Marcus and Ricky and I.”
She has her serious face working, so I have to wonder what I’ve done now. Thumbing back through recent memories, I can’t come up with anything. In fact, it seems like, except for getting fired, I’ve been a real upstanding citizen.
I sit next to Ricky in the backseat while Cassidy and Marcus sit up front. Everybody’s staring at me, so I’m like, “What’s going on? What’d I do now?”
They trade glances, and then Ricky starts off. “It’s nothing you did,” he says. “It’s more like something we want you to consider doing.”
I look from face to face. They’re all dead serious, so I’m like, “Oh Jesus, this isn’t one of those ‘We’re so worried about your drinking’ intervention things, is it?”
“No, dude,” says Ricky. “It’s more like an Aimee Finecky intervention thing.”
That’s a little bit of a relief. I’d hate to see a couple of people I’ve partied with on such a monumental level go all school counselor on me. “Look,” I say. “I already said I’d pay for that patio table.”
“Dude, it’s not the patio table we’re worried about. It’s Aimee herself.”
I look at Cassidy. Her blue eyes nearly swallow me.
“Come on,” I say. “Cassidy, you know Aimee didn’t mean anything she said to you at the party. She was just a little bit wasted. She feels bad as hell about slapping you.”
“I know she does,” Cassidy says. “She’s already apologized to me. I’m not worried about that.”
“Well, then, what’s this all about?”
After a long stretch of uncomfortable silence, Ricky goes, “It’s just that we don’t think it’s working out.”
“What?”
“You and Aimee, dude. Your relationship’s not working out.”
“Oh, really? Well, let me ask you this—since when do you have a say in whether my relationships are working out? I mean, look at you all. First, we have Mr. One Girlfriend in His Entire Life, then we have the chick who broke up with me for helping him get that girlfriend, then we have the dude who stole my girlfriend. Pardon me if I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think about my relationships.”
“Wait a minute, man,” says Marcus. “I didn’t steal your girlfriend.”
“Right. What, is she just on loan, like a library book?”
“No,” says Cassidy. “What he means is I asked him out—after you and I broke up.”
“Great. That’s perfect. When was that, about fifteen minutes later? Sure, it’s obvious to me now. That gives you the right to, like, break up my relationships with every future girlfriend I might ever have. I guess I should’ve read the fine print.”
“Hold on, dude.” Ricky leans forward. “Quit making this about you. It’s about Aimee. It’s about what’s happening to her. I mean, we know better than to try to tell you to lay off drinking, but it’s too much for her. I mean, I never used to see her drinking. Now she’s like this big lush.”
“That’s right—you never saw her drinking. You know why? Because she was never at a party. She didn’t have any friends, except for one who treated her like a dog.”
“And now she’s smashing vodka bottles in movie theaters,” says Marcus. “That’s not the type of person she’s cut out to be.”
“Yeah? What type of person is she? Do you look at her and just see this little nerd that should keep hiding in the corner and never come out? Because I see a lot more than that. I see someone whose dreams are as big as all of yours put together. And I see someone who can stand up for herself now. Before she started going out with me, she let everyone in her life walk over her like she was Sir Walter Raleigh’s cloak.”
“And you know what I see,” says Ricky. “I see someone who people are calling Puke-a-reena at school now. You think you’re this girl’s savior, dude? Give it a rest. You just go around acting like you’re saving other people so you don’t have to deal with your own problems.”
“Yeah? What problems do I have to deal with? Self-righteous hypocrites like you?”
“Hold on a second,” Cassidy says. It’s more of a plea than a demand. “Let’s not get into a big argument. Guys, how about letting me and Sutter talk alone for a little bit?”
They agree and start to get out of the car, but she thinks it would be better if she and I get out instead. Which I go along with one hundred percent. The atmosphere in the car is more than a little stuffy.
We walk over and lean, side by side, against my car. “It’s a nice night,” she says, and I’m like, “I’ve had better.”
“This was my idea,” she says. “So don’t blame the guys. Maybe it was stupid, but I know you really do want the best for Aimee.”
“But you don’t think I could ever be the best thing for her, right?”
“No, I think you could if you tried. But right now I don’t think you are.”
“So in your all-seeing wisdom, you proclaim that I should break up with her.”
“I don’t proclaim it. It’s just my advice. That’s all.”
“Because I’m turning her into a lush like me?”
“Don’t put it that way. She’s not li
ke you, Sutter. She doesn’t have to be outgoing and carouse around with a lot of people. Besides, you know you’re not in this thing for the long term.”
“What makes you say that?”
“How long did you and I date, eight months? And in all that time, you made it very clear that you didn’t have any long-range plans.”
“Hey, I don’t have any long-range plans about anything.”
“I know. That’s what I’m talking about. I knew you weren’t ever going to really commit to us, and obviously, it’s going to be the same way with Aimee. So, all I’m saying is that you’d be doing her a big favor if you just ended it before she gets drawn into something she can’t get herself out of.”
For a moment, I stand there and watch a burger wrapper blow across the parking lot. There’s one big thing that Cassidy and the others don’t know, something I can’t tell them—the story about what happened with Aimee and Randy-the-Walrus’s son. Even if I wanted to, how could I just break up with the girl when I know she has that rotten corpse buried in her past?
So I’m like, “Look, Cassidy, if you have this vast encyclopedic knowledge about me and my relationships, then you know I don’t need to break anything off. She’ll do that when she gets ready. She’ll get tired of me, just like you did.”
“You don’t get it, do you? This girl loves you. She’s not going to break up with you, not until something really bad happens.”
“Oh, come on. Sure, she likes me, but she’s not in love with me.”
“That’s so you. I don’t know what happened, but for some reason, you never believe anyone loves you. Your mom, your sister. Me. I mean, if you can’t believe anyone loves you, how are you ever going to break through that everything’s-oh-so-fabulous front of yours and really commit to somebody?”
“Hey, it’s not a front. And, by the way, it was, like, real apparent that you loved me by how you bounced me to the curb so easily.”
“You think it was easy? Do you think I didn’t cry about it? Sometimes I still do. But I’ve got to move on with my life and so do you. So does Aimee. It’s just that she can’t see it because you’ve become her whole world. She can’t see going anywhere without you. But I can’t picture you two moving in the same direction. Can you?”