“You don’t own me,” she said.
I felt like my heart had been ripped out, and when Wavy and I got to the party, Marcus was there. I wanted it to be wonderful, like Wavy said, but it was awkward and painful and embarrassing. I was so drunk that after Wavy and I got home, I was sick. We managed to sneak past Mom and into the bathroom, where I vomited my guts up and cried.
“I don’t love him,” I sobbed. I liked him, but I didn’t love him. I wasn’t even attracted to him beyond the fact that he had good hygiene. I thought it meant something that he was in love with me, but it only means something if you love the other person. And I loved Angela.
“It’s over,” Wavy said, as I lay on the floor with a cold washcloth on my forehead. I thought she meant the puking, but she said, “Nothing left to be afraid of.”
I’d been afraid of so many things: sex, graduating, college, leaving home, falling in love. Life. Now I’d fallen in love, gotten my heart broken, and had meaningless sex. Those scary things were over. In three months I would leave for college. There would be other things to be afraid of later, but lying there, drunk and hurting all over, I wasn’t afraid.
I wondered how it was for Wavy. She’d fallen in love, had her heart broken, almost had sex, and had her whole family taken away from her. Did she still have things to be afraid of?
That Kellen wouldn’t love her long enough. The years were adding up. Mom thought Wavy would get over it, but she was wrong. Wavy still loved him, but when he got out of prison, would he still love her?
Wavy made her way as best she could, found ways to fit in on her terms. For instance, she didn’t go to her senior prom, but she was the chairperson for the decoration committee. The prom was Valentine’s themed: red and pink, with hearts and hundreds of hand-tucked crepe-paper roses with green sisal stems. Things like that always looked effortless in Wavy’s hands.
She strung elaborate garlands along the edges of the bleachers, and in the corner where prom pictures would be taken. The garlands were pink and red with bits of gold foil, alternating reversed hearts. Everyone assumed they were hearts, until halfway through the prom, when one of the parent chaperones admired the decorations at just the right angle. That year none of the prom pictures could be used in the yearbook. “Obscene,” the school board called them.
Instead of hearts, Wavy had very skillfully alternated between erect penises and curvaceous rumps that narrowed to delicate but well-defined vulvas.
The school board threatened to keep her from graduating, but in the end, Wavy got to walk across the dais in her big boots. She accepted her diploma from the principal’s grudgingly outstretched hand, and walked to the other end of the stage. From up in the stands, home from my first year of college, I watched her kiss Kellen’s ring.
Four years into a ten-year prison sentence, did he feel the same?
13
KELLEN
June 1987
The hearing room was small, the same gray cinder block as my cell. There was a table for the parole board, another for me and my lawyer, and some folding chairs along the wall for witnesses. I had to wear a leg iron, hooked to an eyebolt in the floor, but at least they didn’t cuff me. The room was too warm, close enough quarters I wondered if Wavy would be able to smell me. I’d showered like she might, trimmed my hair, shaved, and tucked my shirt in. Not to impress the board. I didn’t figure there was much I could do to make them like me.
Heading into my fifth year, I was tired. I’d spent four years sitting around, reading, lifting weights, and sleeping. Four years thinking about Wavy, because I didn’t have enough to do with my hands, especially in solitary. Odds on I was gonna do another year before my next hearing. Another year before I might get a chance to see Wavy again.
After my lawyer, the parole board showed up, then Old Man Cutcheon, who I couldn’t hardly believe had come all that way for me after the trouble I’d caused him. Then Brenda Newling walked in. Seeing her looking older, I wondered what Wavy looked like now.
Brenda glared at me like she wanted to burn a hole in me, but it didn’t. Wavy hadn’t come, and if she wasn’t there, I didn’t care what happened. I knew the fight was gonna come up and that was the first thing the parole board mentioned.
“I see you had an altercation with a fellow inmate six months ago. A pretty serious one. The man ended up in the infirmary, and you’ve been in administrative segregation since then? That doesn’t exactly suggest you’re ready for parole. Would you like to tell us about that?”
I didn’t want to, but I had to say something.
“Look, because of my conviction, there’s always some guy wanting to mess with me. He came at me with a shiv.”
“Did you have some personal issue with him?” the woman on the board said.
“I didn’t know him. It’s just because of what I pled to. Some guys, they find that out, they have it in for me.” I had scars to show for two times I let my guard down.
“Inmates who have sexual convictions involving minors are often targeted by other inmates,” my lawyer said. “Mr. Barfoot has worked hard to rehabilitate himself.”
“Can you tell us what you’ve done to prepare yourself for parole?”
“I finished my GED.”
“Also Mr. Barfoot completed the court-mandated program for sex offenders,” my lawyer said.
I didn’t like thinking about that. Three months spending every day in the same room with child molesters and rapists. The whole thing gave me a creeping dread of myself, but I didn’t have to lie in the exit interview. Do you still have sexual fantasies about young girls? they asked. No. I never had. I thought about Wavy a hundred times a day, but Wavy was Wavy, not some young girl.
Then it was Mr. Cutcheon’s turn to talk to the board. It choked me up so that I couldn’t look at him. For reasons I still don’t get, he took a chance on me when nobody else would.
“Jesse Joe’s a good boy,” he told the parole board. I was surprised they didn’t laugh at him. “I know he’s been in some trouble with the law, but the fact is, he loved that girl. He treated her good, took care of her, made sure she went to school. He looked out for her when nobody else did. Not even her, sitting there glaring at me.” He cut his eyes over at Brenda. “She wasn’t the one taking Wavy to school every day, I tell you what.”
I figured that all he meant to do was give me a decent character witness, but then he said, “He’ll have a job if he gets paroled. I’d hire him back tomorrow if I could.”
After he finished talking, he tried to come over and shake my hand. The guards had to explain to him he wasn’t allowed to do that.
“Thanks, Mr. Cutcheon, I really appreciate it,” I said. He nodded and kinda waved at me.
“You take care. We’ll be seeing you soon. I got this cussed Waverunner I can’t hardly figure—”
“Mr. Cutcheon?” the parole board head said.
“Sorry, sorry. I’m going.”
He went, and then it was just me and Brenda.
She stood up, and the parole board head said, “You’re Brenda Newling? The, uh, victim’s aunt?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve got a statement?”
She unfolded a piece of paper she’d clenched in her fist.
“I’m here today, because Wavy found it too upsetting to come. I’m asking the board to turn down his request for parole, because the damage he’s done isn’t over. My niece turns eighteen in July and she still hasn’t recovered. She was a vulnerable little girl, with no one to protect her from his predations. He presented himself as her friend and groomed her for a sexual relationship. He plied her with presents and seduced her. Betrayed her trust. She used to believe she was in love with him. She felt it was her fault that he assaulted her. That she’d led him on. She’s almost eighteen years old and she’s never dated. She didn’t go to her senior prom. She’s never had any kind of normal, healthy relationship with someone her own age and that’s his fault.
“Although it happened on her four
teenth birthday, I’d like to point out to the board that she was born on July nineteenth at eight-thirty in the evening. So in fact, when he raped her, technically, she wasn’t even fourteen. She was thirteen. And he stole her virginity on a desk in a dirty garage. He robbed her of her innocence and she’ll never be able to get that back.”
Brenda was crying by the end. So was I. I didn’t care what Brenda said, but I loved Wavy and I’d lost her, and I wasn’t even allowed to say that. When the parole board head asked, “Mr. Barfoot, would you like to answer Mrs. Newling?” I couldn’t even say, “I lost the best thing that ever happened to me.” Wasn’t that punishment enough?
I said, “I’m really sorry for what I did. I know that doesn’t change it, but I really am sorry. I wish I could take it back.”
Some days I was sorry. Other days I was only sorry Liam got himself killed. Another few days and Wavy woulda been my wife. Before my parole hearing the two things were about equal, the same number of days feeling each way, but when the door never opened and Wavy never walked in, the scale tipped. If she wouldn’t come see me on the one day she could have, I’d done a terrible thing.
PART FIVE
1
RENEE
September 1987
When I walked into my dorm room sophomore year, there was a kid standing on one of the desks, sticking glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Her hair was in a spiky pixie cut and she wore 20-Eye Doc Martens. She looked about twelve or thirteen.
“Are you Wavy?” I said, thinking please no please no.
She nodded.
“I’m Renee.”
She waved at me and put another star on the ceiling. Not in random patterns, but actual constellations. Had student housing really stuck me with a child prodigy roommate?
I went to complain to the RA, who said, “What kid?”
It turned out Wavy Quinn was eighteen. She wasn’t a child; she was just really small.
And quiet. Oh my god was she quiet.
I talk a lot, so I admit it was several days before I realized Wavy hadn’t spoken to me. Not one word. I only noticed because by the end of the first week she still hadn’t asked me about Jill Carmody.
It’s pathetic, but that was why I’d been looking forward to getting a new roommate. I was waiting for the moment she would ask about the memorial picture of Jill on my bulletin board.
“So, are you mad at me or something?” I said. “Did I do something to piss you off?”
Wavy was sitting at her desk studying. Four days into the semester and she was studying. She shook her head, without even looking up.
“I’m just missing my best friend. Next week is the anniversary of her death.” For a second, I thought even that had failed, but Wavy closed her book, and looked over at my shrine to Jill.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I did my spiel. Jill was my best friend. Smart, pretty, All-State volleyball champion. Killed by a drunk driver our senior year. I cried. I’m ashamed when I look back at how I played that game, because I barely knew Jill. I once had a history class with her. When I went to college I made up this story about my best friend dying, because it made me more interesting.
My freshman roommate and I stayed up all night hashing it out, me crying, her comforting me. All Wavy did was give me a sympathetic look and say, “That’s sad.”
It made me feel like a poseur. I mean, I was a poseur, but I’d never felt like one before.
After Parents Weekend, I felt like even more of a fake. By then I was used to what I thought of as Wavy’s weirdness. I never saw her eat, and in two months I’d heard her speak about a hundred words, mostly things like yes, no, laundry, library, and shut up, I’m sleeping. The Friday of Parents Weekend, I came back to our room after class and the door was open. I heard someone mutter, “You son of a bitch.”
Wow. Another five words out of Wavy, one of them an expletive. Except it wasn’t her. It was a middle-aged woman with short brown hair, shoving something back into Wavy’s desk drawer.
“Hi. Are you Mrs. Quinn?” I said.
All the color drained out of her face as she closed the desk drawer.
“You must be Renee. I’m Brenda Newling. I’m Wavy’s aunt.”
“Oh, she’s told me all about you … That’s a joke. You know, because she doesn’t talk much?”
Mrs. Newling didn’t crack a smile.
“How is she? Really?”
“She’s fine,” I said. “I wish I could stick to a diet the way she does. Was there anything in particular you were looking for in her desk?”
“No. I just worry about her.”
I put down my backpack, wondering what Wavy’s aunt was looking for. Condoms? Drugs? Alcohol? Like we wouldn’t have the sense to ditch that stuff before our parents visited. With my mom and dad coming on Saturday, there wasn’t even aspirin in my desk drawer. I’d even tacked up the campus chapel schedule on my bulletin board.
“Wavy studies a lot,” I said.
“She always has. Is she making friends?”
“Friends?” It came out sounding bitchy, but was this woman for real? Mrs. Newling sat on the edge of Wavy’s bed with a pleading look on her face. Oh no. I was not doing the mother-roommate confidant routine, so I said, “She’s friends with me. Does that count?”
Before Mrs. Newling could answer, Wavy came back to the room with her cousin Amy in tow. After the three of them left, I got down to some overdue snooping of my own. In the back of Wavy’s desk drawer was a brass picture frame. I may be self-centered, but I’m not oblivious. I’d asked about the photo Wavy kept on her bulletin board: her little brother, grinning with his two front teeth out. I would have asked about this picture, too, but I’d never seen it.
The photo was of a big guy sitting on a motorcycle in front of an open garage door. He had pitch-black hair that was too long, and his shirt was off, showing tattoos on his arms and chest. He was mostly muscle, but he was carrying some extra weight around the middle. That’s my problem, too. It was a sunny day and he was laughing, having fun with the person behind the camera. Who was he?
Right then, I realized I’d been going about things the wrong way. You make people interested in you by keeping secrets, not by passing them out like candy at Halloween.
* * *
When Wavy came back from giving her aunt a tour of campus, she sat down to study. On a Friday night. There was no other way, so I said, “When I got home, your aunt was snooping in your desk. Is there anything in there you wouldn’t want her to find?”
Nailed it in one. Wavy jerked open the drawer and grabbed the picture. With a crazy pissed off look on her face, she polished the glass with the hem of her skirt.
I stepped closer, pretending I was seeing it for the first time.
“That’s a cool motorcycle. Who is that?”
Considering how eager I was to blurt out my fake tragedy, I couldn’t believe Wavy didn’t want to tell me, but she looked me over, evaluating whether I could be trusted.
“I just wondered, because your aunt seemed pretty upset about finding it. So who is he?”
“Kellen. My fiancé.”
She held her hand out so I could look at the ring on her finger. I’d noticed it before, but not thought anything about it.
“You’re engaged?”
She nodded.
“Why haven’t I met him? Where is he?”
“Prison.”
“Are you serious? Why? What did he do?” I said.
“I need to study.” Wavy put the picture away and sat down at her desk. Done talking. Poof. I was invisible. She couldn’t hear me.
“So are your parents coming to visit this weekend?”
Apparently she could hear me ask that, because she shook her head.
“Why not?”
“They’re dead.”
“Oh my god, that’s so sad. What happened?” That was what people always said when I told them about Jill Carmody.
“They were murdered,” Wavy said.
/> A soon as the words left her mouth I knew I had to take down my fake-ass shrine to Jill. You can’t milk a pretend tragedy when your roommate has a real one. It’s too pathetic.
I’d told Mrs. Newling that Wavy and I were friends, but it wasn’t true. We were just roommates, even after I knew her parents had been murdered and her fiancé was in prison for statutory rape. I saw it as some titillating soap opera.
Wavy and I didn’t become friends until our second year together in the dormitory. That was the year I did something so stupid I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. With me, that’s saying something. If it’ll make people pay attention to me, I’m perfectly willing to humiliate myself.
I slept with my German professor, and not just once, but almost the whole fall semester. It wasn’t like I did it for the grade, because I was good at German, but I was so flattered that he was attracted to me in all my chatty, airheaded, you know, fatness.
His wife eventually caught us and there was a huge scene, with the German professor saying, “It was a stupid fling. It meant nothing.”
That was me—the stupid fling that meant nothing. The asshole wouldn’t even give me a ride home. I cried the whole way, walking across campus from his house to the dorm.
I was an exhausted, hungry wreck. I sat at my desk, sobbing and rummaging in the drawers for anything to eat to make me feel better. Wavy got out of bed in her nightgown, took her student ID card off her desk and motioned for me to follow her. She could be so bossy.
Downstairs, the corridor to the cafeteria was closed at night by a big steel door, which Wavy unlocked in ten seconds of fiddling around with her ID card. She unlocked the door to the kitchen the same way. Inside it was dark except for the emergency exit signs glowing red like Hell, until Wavy opened the giant cooler. In the halo of its blue, misty light, she laid out food for me. Quart boxes of strawberries. A vat of chocolate pudding. An entire tray filled with little squares of lemon cake. A five-gallon bucket of rocky road ice cream and a can of whipped cream.