Chapter 14
BEFORE
She was squatting with her underwear down around her knees, fist grabbing the crotch to pull it away from the pee stream, when she saw the strobing lights. A megaphoneamplified voice startled her so badly she almost toppled headfirst into the tall grass, still peeing.
“Dogface, come on! Cops!” came a husky whisper from the shadows.
She grabbed at her wet underwear, hobbled by the jeans bunched around her ankles. When he reached for her, she thought he was trying to help and she reached back, but he slapped her hand away.
“You’re a fucking mess,” he said. “Pissed yourself.”
She took a second to catch her breath. “Only a little.”
“Get up. We gotta get back to the car.”
Through the latticework of black tree branches they saw flickering lights and silhouettes, people standing, a few running.
“They’ll arrest us.”
“Not me they won’t.”
He knew he could talk his way out of getting arrested even after they checked his fake ID. Even if the cops smelled beer on his breath. He’d be charming. Tell a story. He’d done it before. He actually seemed to enjoy it.
She took a few steps and got the spins.
“You dork,” he said, laughing as she vomited onto her shoes. One quick spurt, and then another, burning her throat. Back spasming. “Spread your feet. Jesus!”
Looking down, she saw orange flecks on her shoes, even in the dark. But worse was the spittle on her shirtfront. It smelled already. Just thinking of it made her want to gag again.
“Well there goes that,” he said. “Grant’s not going to want to fuck you now.”
She wiped her chin. “What?”
Part of her—the tiniest part—was flattered. Grant was interested. But the slight spark of good feeling was doused by what he said next.
He came at her with a small stick and crouched down, flicking the vomity chunks off her shoes. “Good job, Dogface. You’ve made yourself unfuckable. I’m not going to get the car now. Not at a discount. Not unless I find some other little bitch for him.”
She stood still, fighting the urge to be sick again, glad he was cleaning her shoes, at least. Trying to see it as proof that he was willing to be nice. He couldn’t mean the thing he’d said about a discount.
“Remind me not to let you eat Doritos again,” he said. “Not with beer, anyway.”
He pointed to her shirt. Not so easy to clean.
“Then again, Grant’s pretty drunk,” he said. “He may not notice that you smell. You are a virgin, right?”
“You’re gross. Stop it.”
She still felt lightheaded. She didn’t know what to make of his words.
He was helping her, after all. With Ewan, you never knew.
Her entire childhood had been a series of jokes and tricks, some of them mean, alternating with occasional favors, like the time he stole money from Martha’s purse to order them pizza.
There was no point trusting, and no point not trusting, either—not if you ever wanted to go anywhere, do anything, get out of a house full of anger and shouting.
“C’mon.” He grabbed her by her skinny upper arm and pulled.
“No.”
She was worried about Grant, but she was terrified about the cops, and getting in trouble, and facing their dad and Martha.
“Stop—”
But this time, instead of humoring her, Ewan whipped around, hands clutching her throat. For a second, her feet were off the ground. She couldn’t breathe.
“Stop?” he shouted. “Stop what? Stop talking back to me, skank.”
Her feet were back on the ground, but his thumbs were still drilling into the front of her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. The only sound that came out was a series of clicks.
“You cost me, Dogface. I’m not fucking around.”
When he let her go, she stumbled forward, landing on her knees. She stayed on all fours, coughing and fighting tears. But she wasn’t shocked. They’d been here before. She knew how far he’d go. This far, and she was still okay.
In the distance, a cop called over a megaphone, telling someone to stop running, but the cop sounded more annoyed than hostile.
“They’ll catch you if you go back to the car,” she managed to say over her shoulder.
“They won’t.” Her brother was never afraid. “Especially when I tell them my baby sister went missing and I need to hurry up and find her before she falls into the creek and drowns.”
This last part he found hilarious.
She was clinging to the word sister. The entire phrase: baby sister. Even if he grabbed her and choked her and teased her, he would protect her in the end.
“Head that way, we’ll pick you up at the next trailhead. Then we’ll drive across the state line to make sure the cops don’t follow.”
When she got to her feet, he was gone. She walked the trail through a moon-silvered darkness, wanting her brother, the very same one who’d just hurt her and left her on hands and knees, breathing in the smell of dirt, mud, leaves.
Would he be there, at the next trailhead, in thirty minutes? Would he rescue her?
The trail was wide and it paralleled the road so close she could hear cars speed by.
She didn’t want to walk the shoulder. It was safer staying hidden in the trees.
The alcohol in her system kept doing funny things.
For a few minutes after throwing up, she’d felt better.
Ewan’s choking had adrenalized her, sending fizzing Pop Rocks through her veins.
But now that she was walking in the dark, her senses started to dull again.
She was drunk, and it was only getting worse as the last few beers hit her.
Twice, she fell down for no reason, ankles suddenly twisting.
When she made it to the trailhead, no one was there.
Maybe Ewan and Grant had gotten there already and left.
Maybe the cops did stop them after all. Or maybe they went joyriding elsewhere, to pick up more vodka or beer.
She positioned herself near the entrance road, sitting on the grass, arms around her knees, head bowed.
When she tried to look up at the stars, they were moving in circles, like in one of those time-lapse videos.
She brought her face to her knees again and only woke once a car pulled up.
Her brother called out the window: Dogface. Wake the fuck up.
The memories until then had been blurry, but from this point forward they were more than blurry, they were fragmented, tiny slivers of light and sound with great big black curtains separating them. Even when I tried, I couldn’t bring more of them back.
The girl I was then and the woman I’d become were equally stymied trying to force more memories to the surface. But of course, the darkness protects as much as it obscures. The memories don’t deserve revisiting.
The only part that can’t be denied is the very end, when I woke to the sounds of Grant and my brother arguing—Ewan most of all, taunting Grant for something he’d done earlier that night or hadn’t been able to do, calling him whiskey dick, whiskey dick.
I didn’t know what that meant. I only knew that men called each other dicks all the time.
I woke up twice or maybe three times, when Ewan leaned on me too hard, pushing his way over the armrest and into the back seat to reach for a bottle of vodka.
He came back with a pair of unfamiliar tennis shoes that he chucked out the window, and a girl’s wadded-up underwear that he shook in front of Grant’s face before pushing them into his own front jeans pocket.
The girl’s abandoned clothing and the smell of something foul alerted me to the fact that something had happened back there—and yet I didn’t ask.
Maybe they gave a girl a ride during that hour I was on the trail and falling asleep in the trailhead parking lot.
Maybe something else happened, too, but it had nothing to do with me.
It had been a bad enough night, already, and I was embarrassed about all of it: the hope I’d had, the flirtation I’d imagined, the hurt I’d allowed, the way I’d acted like a little kid, getting drunk and vomiting and making a mess of myself.
As we sped east, staying on country roads just north of the Illinois border to avoid the state cops they’d already talked to at the forest preserve, I kept my eyes closed.
I didn’t ask questions. I surrendered to blackness again until I felt sudden physical pressure as Grant took a curve too fast and we left the road—the two of them still arguing, shouting—and barreled down a slope.
My eyes flashed open as the car flipped.
Grant never walked away from that accident. Maybe he didn’t deserve to.
Ewan and I did.