“The guy loved that dog, even though the dog never loved him back, and never thanked him for all the nice things he did for it. Then one night, when the guy went out to feed the dog and pat him on the head, the little fucker didn’t bother growling. This time, he took a big chunk right out of the guy’s hand.”
Her throat had gone dry during the telling of his tale. “What happened then?”
Todd smiled, an empty expression that bared his teeth and did not reach his eyes. “The guy went inside his house and got his shotgun, and he blew that little fucker’s head right off.”
There was no mistaking the meaning of his story, but Gilly wasn’t afraid of it. “Which one of us is the dog?”
“I don’t know, Gilly,” Todd said. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
21
She got out of bed on her own the next morning. Washed and dressed. Sat across the table from him and ate her breakfast. She did not speak.
Todd didn’t seem to mind. He ate as heartily as he ever did, and after breakfast lit up a cigarette as if it was dessert. Gilly waved away the smoke hanging in front of her face and coughed deliberately, but Todd either didn’t notice or did not care.
“You giving me the silent treatment?” he asked her finally, when she got up to put her dishes away.
Gilly paused before answering. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“How about good morning?”
She repeated the words without enthusiasm. Todd got up from the table and touched her shoulder to turn her to face him. Gilly moved without resistance, her gaze on the ground.
“Gilly. Look at me.”
She did so grudgingly.
“We got to go through this again?”
She shook her head and tried to turn her face away. “No.”
He lifted her chin so she had to continue looking at him and asked her the question he’d asked her once before. “You afraid of me?”
“No.”
“You’re not a good liar,” Todd said, and let her go. He followed her to the living room. “Will you just stop for a minute?”
She whirled to face him. “Can’t you just let it go? What do you want from me?”
“Just thought we were going to try and be friends, that’s all. Seems better than not being friends.” Todd shrugged. The tip of his cigarette glowed red as he drew the smoke deep into his lungs.
“I never said I was going to be your friend.” Lip curling on the word, Gilly crossed her arms in front of her.
“You just gonna keep being that growling dog, ain’t you?” Todd grinned. “Okay. I’ll just keep patting you on the head….”
“And maybe one day I’ll bite you,” Gilly retorted.
“Maybe one day you will,” Todd conceded. “Or maybe, one day, you’ll just stop that growling.”
“I don’t think so.” She went to the front window, watching the snow outside. A rabbit hopped along the white drifts, leaving behind its footprints. Then it was gone.
“Ah, Gilly, why not?” He sounded so sincerely curious, she turned to face him.
“The idea is ridiculous.”
“How come?”
He wanted to know, so she told him. “We have nothing in common. There’s nothing about our lives that would ever have brought us together.”
“Not true. We did get brought together.”
“Not by my choice!”
Todd made a thoughtful face. “Not by mine, either, but it happened. What, you can only be friends with someone you met on purpose? The fuck kind of fun is that? You must not have many friends if that’s how you go about it.”
“You have a lot of friends?” she asked, sounding snide, expecting the answer to be negative.
Todd shrugged. “Depends on what you consider a friend. I know a lot of people. And most of them I didn’t meet on purpose. But yeah, some of them are friends. Some are douche bags who run off with my money and turn me to a life of crime.”
He was making another joke. She saw it in his eyes and the slight tilt of his lips, though his voice was dead serious. Gilly realized suddenly she envied Todd his sense of humor, even amongst all of this. His ability to somehow laugh at what was going on. She’d had a great sense of humor, once upon a time, but she hadn’t been able to find the humor in lots of things for a long time. Certainly not this, now.
“We would never be friends under any circumstances, and this situation is certainly not conducive to friendship,” she said stiffly.
“Huh. You like big words just like Uncle Bill.” Todd shrugged. “This situation is all we got. How fortuitous for both of us to have made each other’s acquaintance. See? I know some big words, too.”
“It doesn’t matter, Todd,” Gilly said tiredly.
“Now who won’t let it go?” Todd drew in another deep lungful of smoke, watching her with narrowed eyes. Thinking. “You sure are stubborn.”
Gilly lifted her chin. “I’ve been called worse.”
“I bet.” Todd shrugged. “Well, I guess it’s up to me, then.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “What’s up to you?”
“Guess I got to prove to you I really am a nice guy.” Todd smiled. “Prove we can be friends. You and me, besties. It’ll be great. Maybe we can even braid each other’s hair.”
His eyes glinted with humor even in the face of Gilly’s answering glower. In fact, he laughed out loud, right into her face. Gilly crossed her arms.
“Keep dreaming,” she said.
“Ah, c’mon. Not even if I make you a friendship bracelet?” Todd fluttered his eyelashes at her.
He looked so utterly harmless and innocent Gilly almost laughed out loud, but she cut it off, tight. Locked it up. “No. Forget it. Not happening.”
“You could at least think about it.”
“No. I can’t.” She watched the light of his humor fade. “Really, Todd. You should understand that.”
He nodded, just barely, after a long minute of looking at her. “Yeah. Sure, sure. I get it.”
Why now did she feel that she was the one in the wrong again? She held her apology, a pearl on her tongue created from the sand of their argument. “We’ll never be friends, Todd.”
“We’ll see,” Todd said. “Maybe we’ll be something else.”
22
Danica is Gilly’s best friend until their junior year of high school, when Danica’s braces come off and she replaces her glasses with contact lenses. A perm, a tan, a few pounds lost and an inch in height had transformed her over the summer from a band geek into a hottie, and the boys have noticed. That would be fine, but Danica notices, too.
They’ve shared most everything over the years. Secrets, dreams. They’d practiced kissing their pillows during sleepovers at Danica’s house, and she’s the only person Gilly’s ever told about her crush on their gym teacher, Mr. Grover, in seventh grade. Danica has a lot of brothers and sisters, but Gilly has none. Danica’s her sister. Her best friend.
At first, Danica’s new popularity with the opposite sex is sort of a boon to Gilly, who’s had her share of giggling crushes and notes passed to her in study halls but never really had a boy like her. Not like her, like her, not the way she liked him. Now, walking the halls of school before the bell rang for homeroom, Gilly follows Danica and the boys follow them both. Surely one or two of them will look Gilly’s way when they see her friend is busy with the others.
And sure enough, one does.
Not the one Gilly likes. That’s Bennett Longenecker, who looks like he just stepped out of one of those teen movies. Perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect teeth, perfect smile. He likes Danica, of course, but he’s nice enough to Gilly because he also has a perfect personality. Gilly swoons inside whenever he looks her way, which is just often enough to keep her pleasantly tingly all throughout the school day and sometimes even into the evening.
The boy who likes her has the unfortunate name of Reginald Gampey. He was named for his dad and his grandfather, and he goes by Reg…b
ut it doesn’t help. With a name like Reginald Gampey he’s destined for thick glasses, an overbite and bad acne. Being a brainiac might’ve made up for it but he lacks even the smarts to be considered one of the class’s top students.
And, he likes Gilly.
He manages to become a part of the little crowd of those who hang out before and after school. Danica and her admirers, Bennett, who seems to soak up all the adoration directed his way without really absorbing it. Gilly. Another girl, Marie. And Reg.
Things are bad at home again. They’d been okay for a while, but over the summer when Danica was growing breasts, Gilly’d been dealing with her mother’s increasingly difficult behavior. Mom didn’t want Gilly going to the pool or out with friends, to the movies, out late at night. She wanted to know where Gilly was all the time, to keep her from “trouble.” The only trouble Gilly had was hiding the fact that her home life was so shitty.
Danica knows something’s up—she’s been Gilly’s best friend since grade school, after all. But things have changed. Looking back now, Gilly thinks there would’ve been distance between them without the boys and the new look. But back then Gilly doesn’t notice or doesn’t want to see how Danica’s eyes slide past her, or how Danica doesn’t laugh at Gilly’s old jokes, or how she mostly just ignores her whenever she can and makes up excuses about how she’s too busy to hang out.
The night of the Homecoming dance that fall, the plan is to go as a group date. A lot of the kids from school are doing it rather than springing for limos and corsages. It probably was Danica’s idea anyway, so she doesn’t have to choose which one, single boy can take her. Reg had asked Gilly but with the group date thing in place she has a reason to say no.
Gilly’s having a great time. She slow-dances with Bennet once and a couple other boys. Even Reg, though the way he gazes so longingly into her eyes unnerves her. The DJ plays all the best songs and afterward, the plan is to go out to the local diner to eat and stay out a whole hour after curfew.
“I don’t think you should come,” Danica says. “Don’t you have to get home to your…mom?”
“My dad’s with her.”
Danica shrugs, so much said in that artless response. “I think you should find someone else to hang out with, Gilly.”
“Tonight?” Gilly asks, stunned.
Danica looks at her. Another shrug. “Just…all the time. I think you should find a new best friend.”
Then she goes off with the rest of their friends, leaving Gilly to stand with Reg, who offers to drive her home. She lets him, too. Lets him feel her up in the front seat, parked in front of her parents’ house. Lets him French-kiss her.
She lets Reg think she likes him, until Monday at school when she tells him the same thing Danica had said to her. “I think you should find another girlfriend.”
Gilly never asked Danica what had prompted the change in their long friendship. She never had the courage. She played it off, pretended it didn’t matter, but for the rest of that year she watches Danica laugh and joke with everyone else but her. It’s a rejection worse than any from a boy could ever have been.
Gilly chooses her friends very carefully after that.
23
“Fuck my life!” Todd hissed and stuck his fingers in his mouth as he knelt by the stove to poke at the logs. “Burned myself.”
Gilly looked up from the magazine crossword puzzle she was working on. “Do you have to drop the f-bomb with everything you say?”
Todd looked up from the fire and dusted off his hands on the thighs of his already dirty jeans. He’d been wearing the same pair for the past few days. Gilly had a few unworn shirts from the stash he’d bought her and had done some laundry in the bathtub, but Todd was apparently far less concerned with recycling his clothes. His forehead furrowed.
“Huh?”
“You curse all the time.”
“I do?”
“Yes,” Gilly said patiently. “Almost every sentence you’re saying fuck or shit or something like that.”
Todd shrugged. “So?”
“Well…can’t you think of a better way to express yourself?” Gilly prompted. “You know, Todd, words don’t have to be big to be effective.”
“No.” He held out his forefinger and thumb a scant inch apart. “Sometimes they’re really tiny and they work great. Like, for instance, fuck.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him. Todd stood. He put his hands on his hips, looking down at her.
“You’ve said it,” he told her. “I heard you.”
“Well, yes, I’ve said it, but I don’t say it all the time.”
“Maybe you should say it more.” He grinned. “Fuck! Say it. It feels really good. Besides, the more you say it, the less scary it is. Go on.”
“I’m not scared of saying it. I just choose to express myself with different word choices.” God, she sounded prissy even to herself.
“Ooh.” Todd fluttered his fingers over his heart. “Fancy.”
She bit the inside of her cheek, but not in anger. “The more you say it, the less effective it actually becomes. You should try it. Using something else.”
“What do you want me to stay instead?”
“Fudge?”
Todd laughed aloud. “Oh, right. That’s so cool. ‘Hey baby, wanna fudge?’ Wow, I bet I’d get laid so much my dick would fall off.”
“Gross!”
“Slow your roll, Gilly, jeez. You act like you never heard a dude talk about his dick before. And don’t tell me you haven’t, because we all do it.”
Seth had, indeed, talked about his “junk” on more than one occasion, but Gilly wasn’t going to talk about that with Todd. “Use whatever words you want. I’m just saying that society will look at you less askance if you clean up your mouth.”
As soon as she said it, Todd’s grin faded. “Yeah. Because society really gives a fuck about my mouth.”
“You never know,” Gilly said, “what makes an impression.”
Todd pointed at his chest. “See this? See me, standing right here in front of you?”
“You’re hard to miss since you are standing right there,” she said.
“Yeah, well, let me tell you something. I could put on a suit and tie and slick my hair back and shave, and I’m still always going to be a guy society looks upon like an ass can’ts, whatever the fuck that is.”
“Askance. It’s like…” She demonstrated with her expression.
“Scared?”
“No. Not… More like this.” She tried again, raising her brows and parting her lips.
He laughed. “Yeah. Scared. Like I might mug you.”
“Well…” She looked him up and down but didn’t finish the thought.
Todd’s smile faded. He stalked to the window and looked out, silent for a few minutes. “It’s snowing again.”
“Again?”
He pointed out the window. “Yeah.”
Beyond the glass, she could see nothing but white. Gilly turned her attention back to the puzzle and shrugged. She needed an eleven-letter word for a noun meaning “anything abominable; anything greatly disliked or abhorred” and “mother-in-law” didn’t fit. She knew because she’d tried. She tapped the pencil, worn to a soft-nosed nub, against her chin. “Nothing we can do about it.”
Todd paced a little bit in front of the stove, stopping every now and then to peer out the window again. He discovered a ball in some drawer, along with a suction-cupped basketball hoop. He took shot after shot, making most of them but occasionally needing to dive after the ball as it bounced wildly along the floor or rolled under the couch where she was sitting.
Gilly forced herself to concentrate on the crossword puzzle, though Todd’s constant motion agitated her. The third time she had to lift her feet so he could get beneath them, she fixed him with a glare Todd didn’t seem to notice. Cheek pressed to the worn carpet, one long arm snaking under the couch to grab the ball, his ass in the air, he didn’t look so threatening. In fact, she thought suddenly, cat
ching sight of the knife in the sheath on his belt, his face was at just the right place to kick.
“Gotcha.” Todd got up, ball in hand, and the moment, such as it was, passed.
She filled in another few words and sighed. Now would’ve been a good time for the use of the word she’d told Todd to find a substitute for. Todd, tossing the ball back and forth from hand to hand, looked down at the paper.
“Abomination,” he said.
“What?”
“Abomination.” There was a pause as he waited, mouth quirked, for her to reply, but he spoke before she did. “Even has more than four letters.”
Gilly filled in the letters carefully. “Abomination.”
It was sort of the same thing as mother-in-law.
She hated crossword puzzles, normally. She wasn’t good at figuring out definitions from vague clues and vocabulary had never been her strongest talent. She knew what words meant when she read them, but thinking of them when she needed to use them often left her grasping. Still, it was better than sitting staring at the wall, which is what she’d have been reduced to, otherwise.
Or, she thought, biting the familiar spot to keep from growling, she could pace up and down like a caged animal and totally annoy everyone else in the room. Todd had lost interest in the makeshift basketball game and now wandered from window to window, looking out and muttering. That was bad enough, but when he plopped onto the couch beside her and put his feet on the coffee table, then started jiggling them so the entire couch shook, Gilly’d had enough.
“Todd!”
He jumped, looking guilty, and thumped his feet to the floor. “Sorry.”
Gilly closed the magazine with a sigh. “Can’t you sit still? It’s like you’re being electrocuted.”
Todd frowned and shrugged. “I’m fucking bored as fuck. What do you want me to do?”