The little pink pill she had swallowed was digested.
Chapter 23
Tag woke up without a headache and praised his father. The clock read 5:05 P.M. “That can’t be right.” He went to the living room: the clock backed up the other’s story. “My God, five? Kade, you here?” No response. He tried to remember what time he’d gone to bed but couldn’t remember. Was it light out? Yes. That much he could remember. It might have been light out for hours. It was almost time to get ready for work. He didn’t know whether to make breakfast or dinner.
After a shower, Tag put on the chinos he wore yesterday (mostly clean) and a fresh shirt. There was a soft lump in his pants-pocket. It was a written-on napkin that read: Molly 531-9385 Sunday movie, don’t forget!
He’d already forgotten what she looked like. A ghost wearing Capri pants in a Penny’s circular. Oh well, it was only a movie, right? He wasn’t sure if he was meeting her at the theater or the bar or if he was supposed to pick her up. He decided to give her a ring, reserving the right to cancel the whole silly date.
“Hello?”
“Is this Molly?”
“Yes. May I ask who’s calling?”
“Tag. We met last night at the Saucy—”
“I remember. How are you feeling today, Tag?” She giggled.
“Would you believe that I just woke up?”
“What time did you get to bed?”
“I don’t remember. I had some more drinks after you left and then more again when I got home. I messed around on the computer for a few hours and hardly remember it.”
“On the website that I told you about?”
“Yes.”
“Can I go online and read it?”
“Uh, you’d better not. I think it was pornographic.”
She laughed. “You finally decide to post some writing somewhere where it will be read and you decided to go with porn?” She laughed some more.
“I was drunk, have some sympathy.”
“I’ve got to read it. I’ll let you go so I can find it. It’s under your name I presume. Tag… I don’t know your last name. What is it?”
“Ha! I’m not saying. It’s embarrassing. I’m going to write something else to replace it and then I’ll consider allowing you to read it.”
“Aww, you suck. I want to know how Tag narrates his sexy-time.”
“Poorly. Now you know. So are we on for Sunday then?”
“Are you still willing to take me out?”
“Yeah, I’ll take you out,” he said apathetically.
“Gee, thanks. I know I’m not the hottest girl in Chico, but you could at least pretend that you aren’t disappointed to be taking me out.”
“It’s not like that. I remember you being pretty, even though I don’t recall what you look like. I’m just not the type to broadcast my emotions. People say I’m hard to read.”
“People are right. For what it’s worth, I haven’t been on a date in a while and I’m looking forward to it. But don’t get any big ideas about what might happen after the movie. We can go to my place or I’ll go to your place, but there will be no sex.”
“I don’t care if you would or wouldn’t allow me to have sex with you after the movie because I wouldn’t have sex with you if you begged me to.”
“Wow. Wow. You really know what to tell a girl to make her feel special, don’t you?”
“You just got done telling me that you wouldn’t have sex with me. What’s the difference?”
“I’m supposed to play hard to get, I’m a girl. You’re supposed jump at the chance for a little action. Are you sure you want to go out with me?”
“Yeah, of course. I called you, didn’t I? Don’t take shit personally. I don’t sleep with virtual strangers, that’s all. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to get to know someone personally before I get to know them physically.”
“Then you’re one of a kind.”
“That it makes me one of a kind is fucking depressing. What’s your address?”
She gave her address and they agreed on a time and decided to pick a movie once they got there.
Chapter 24
Getting in touch with one’s boyfriend when you’re grounded for a month and no longer have a cellphone isn’t easy. Mae would’ve searched for him on Facebook if she still had computer privileges. It was almost as though they’d thought that one through. The hope, desperation even, that Trent would come to her school in the morning or when classes were over was sent packing when Rebecca decided to drive her to and from school. The only way she figured she’d see him again before she was allowed a phone and-or a computer was for him to stop by the house. Unlikely?—yes. But he did know where she lived, so it wasn’t out of the dismal realm of possibilities. What made being grounded extra shitty was Breuer not being around. She had hoped Breuer was busy trying to get Trent to come rescue her (Breuer was great at devising plans), but suspected that he might be mad at her for screwing everything up.
As the days trickled by at a torturously slow rate, Breuer still AWOL, she began wondering if he was right about the pills she’d been taking. He had said they’d change her. Granted, Breuer not hanging around nowadays wasn’t so much of a change in her as it was a change in him, but maybe they caused her not to see or hear him. None of these thoughts amounted to much because she had no choice in the matter. After she dropped the sex bomb on her parents, what little trust they had in her was obliterated inside the mushroom cloud of her revelation.
The pills were no longer administered in the morning, but rather when she got home from school. After observing her swallow them, they’d monitor her for an hour to see that they stuck. But the pills were seeming less and less important to Mae. She wasn’t a zombie and they didn’t affect the price of tea in Tennessee. Trent did. And her dreary and desolate waters hadn’t been steeped by his savoriness in an eternity. At least she was keeping the water hot for him. He’d appreciate that if he only knew.
A new worry arose on or about the day she expected her monthly visitor. Her mom was equally worried. Luckily for Mae, her mother couldn’t voice her concern because she was still holding on to that damnable lie. Birth control pills, ha! That didn’t stop her from trying to find out for herself. She began going through Mae’s bathroom trashcan on a daily basis. Mae learned this when she noticed the empty tube of toothpaste that she’d tossed on a heap of trash (mostly toilet paper) was no longer on top when she returned from school. It was near the bottom.
Tensions increased by the day. Mae guessed she was three or four days late now and consequently she thought less about Trent than she did about being pregnant. It was perhaps the fourth or fifth day that she opened a maxi-pad and flushed it, threw the wrapper in the trash can before going to school. When she returned home that day, she sensed the relief in her mom. Mae’s consternation, however, wasn’t abated until two days later. It was then she was finally able to breathe deeply and even smile a little. Smiles didn’t come cheap these days. Cherish the ones you get; milk ‘em for all they’re worth. Hallelujah, there would be no baby. She was free to go about pining over Trent. And pine she did.
The next day at school Mae employed a plan that she had devised the night before. A girl in her class—Zoe, looked like a Barbie doll and sounded like the Crock Hunter’s daughter Bindi—had a phone that could access the internet. A smartphone, someone deemed it. An apt name, Mae thought. Zoe wasn’t her friend but an acquaintance. Mae offered her five bucks to use her phone at lunch. Zoe became five bucks richer.
It took half of Mae’s lunch recess to find Trent on Myspace. She didn’t know his last name and that was a huge obstacle. Luckily she remembered the name of his baseball team. Roseville Jaguars. She discovered the name of the coach by websurfing. He was on Myspace, incredibly. He was young, so maybe not too incredible. She doubted her parents had ever heard of Myspace. She searched this Doug Ingram’s friends list. He had a few who were approximately Trent’s age, but none who were as handsome. She searched the fri
ends of those friends. One such friend was named Peter Castenella. Peter had a friend who was as gorgeous as she remembered. Trent Blackwood. Blackwood. Never would she have guessed it in a million years. She sent him a Myspace message, asking him to call her at the following number a quarter past noon tomorrow. If he couldn’t or didn’t get this message before then, call her at the same time the following day. She enlightened him of the obvious, that she was grounded severely—a conclusion arriving naturally to Trent after his calls transferred straight to Mae’s voicemail day after damned day. She missed him more than he could imagine and couldn’t stop thinking about him (frowny face). Did he really mean it when he called her his girlfriend? She sure hoped so, because she had already gotten in the habit of referring to Trent as her boyfriend to her friends at school. She ended the message with, Please call me. I can’t go on much longer without hearing from you. Love, Mae. She erased love, then considered erasing her love to be taboo, retyped love, and sent the message.
Mae informed Zoe that she had booked her phone for at least tomorrow—same bat time, same bat channel—possibly the following day as well. She’d give her five bucks each day she used it. Zoe thought it a sound business deal and an accord was struck.
Twenty-four hours later, phone held tightly in hand, it rang. She was confident it was Trent, being that it was fifteen past the hour on the nose. She answered by saying his name. He sounded thrilled to hear her voice, and it was then that Mae knew she was wrong to be worried about her relationship with Trent. He liked her just as much as she liked him, as hard a concept that was to grasp. He declared his need to see her, grounded or not. Mae grudgingly said that it would have to wait another two weeks, when her punishment had finally ran its course. Even then—as if that weren’t bad enough—she was warned to never see or speak to Trent again. Ever. Like that would stop her. All it meant was that she would be forced to become extra crafty and sneaky. Like her mom. Maybe she shared that trait in her DNA. Trent wouldn’t take no for an answer; two weeks might as well have been a life sentence as far as he was concerned. She said amen to that. He asked if he could stop by the house in the dead of night and sneak to her bedroom window. She would love that. And would take a nap after school so she could stay awake through the night. He’d be there at 1:00 A.M. and she’d be waiting with open arms.
Chapter 25
A knot formed in Mae’s belly when she heard her father coughing at ten minutes before one. She tiptoed to their bedroom door and listened for a bit. When she heard the whistling of air through her dad’s nose, the knot untied.
At one o’clock the window was eagerly opened as Trent appeared like a phantom in the night, clad in black. There was a screen that Mae thought was permanently attached, but Trent removed it like the worldly man he was. They immediately kissed from either side of the sill. He clambered through the window and briefly scoped out her unbarred prison cell. It wasn’t of much interest to him. Not nearly as much as the cute little ward residing within.
He had plenty of flattering things to tell Mae, each better received than the last. She returned them with heartfelt words of her own. She remembered a thing or two from a Shakespeare book she was forced to read back when she was adult, but dared not recite them. She’d come off as a bookworm. A nerd.
She was reluctant to recount the nightmare that put them in this predicament, specifically the bruises. But she did. With what began as measured indifference, Mae expounded the details of what her body had looked like on that rueful day (and for several days following). The more she spoke, the more her anguish seeped through. Tears almost too premature to detect—but not to Trent they weren’t—came when she recalled the embarrassment suffered as her parents and best friend gawked at her undressed body like she was the main attraction at a circus (at the very least a circus-sideshow act). That’s not how it was but Mae was remembering it that way just now. Chalk it up to the crazy pills.
Trent was sincerely sorry and swore it would never happen again. His indignation for her treatment was masked, but masked poorly. There were dark thoughts stirring about in that pretty head of his, but Mae supposed he had good reason to be upset with her parents.
“It was worth it,” Mae assured him. “Every bit of it.”
“If you had a do-over, would you still have come home with me?”
“In a heartbeat.”
He asked what she thought about sex, if she enjoyed it. She loved it, she said. It was a lie, but she did love how happy it made him so it was only a partial lie. He asked if she wanted to do it again and she asked when. “Right here, right now,” he said. She didn’t think that was a good idea. If they woke her parents all hell would break loose. The obituary page of the Sacramento Bee would span two pages she imagined. And besides, she was on her period. In an effort to point out the silver lining on this darkest blanket of a cloud, she said that he was lucky that her parents weren’t actively pursuing a statutory rape charge against him. They wanted to, especially her mom, but Mae convinced them not to. More like begged them not to. More like threatened to kill herself if they did. “Our love-making was all my decision,” she had reasoned with them (before she learned that reasoning wouldn’t suffice to save Trent’s ass). “Trent had nothing to do with it!” Mae had said. Well, he had something to do with it. Mae’s threats of self-inflicted doom won her the battle. Her mom vowed that if there was a next time she’d be on the phone with the police. Their not knowing his last name wouldn’t get in the way of his incarceration, either. They knew enough facts to piece it together, especially after they learned what field she attended to watch the game. The location combined with the date and knowing his first name would yield arrest-warrant results.
Trent thought it would be exciting to make love to her knowing the risk involved. He began touching her, period be damned. She resolved to deny him. She’d make it up to him as soon as she wasn’t grounded. He was intrigued by the promise, said he’d hold her to it. They kissed and embraced.
Mae was confident that she’d have a way to spend the days and nights with Trent come then. She’d have to lie and say she was at Lisa’s or whoever’s house—Zoe stood out as a candidate; she’d already proved that she could be bought—and that could easily be arranged. But Mae couldn’t have been more wrong. Her parents had anticipated deception from their daughter and planned on keeping track of where she was at all times. If she would visit at Lisa’s, they’d drop her off and pick her up, and confer with Lisa’s parents both times. If she wanted to go to the mall for a couple hours—a haunting reality for her parents, especially come Christmas time—they’d drop her off and pick her up, and call her cellphone every hour between. When Mae would accept that offer, and then ask to go to the mall again the very next day, her parents would see their folly; a minor set-back. A defeat. One to grow on. Consequently, they’d take it to the next level and purchase a tracking device for her. Global Positioning System. Technology is a bitch, ain’t it Mae? With smart phones come smart parents with smarter devices. Rebecca and David were done messing around. No more. They were playing hard-ball now.
Trent knew hard-ball. Intimately. Loved hard-ball. Played it more than his game-schedule would have you believe, too. And isn’t it every boy’s dream to play in the Big Leagues some day?
Chapter 26
It had been twenty-nine long mother fucking days since Trent slept with Mae. Since he’d left his mark on her, so to speak. In class he was no longer paying attention. No sense in acting like he cared what some dry old bastard was preaching from his self-aggrandizing pulpit—Trent was too smart to be fooled even by himself. Instead he found himself drawing. Yellow notepad, number two pencil.
He sketched only Mae at first, but as the days bled painfully by he began including her parents. His favorite involved a rope with a noose tied at both ends and draped evenly over a tree branch, Mr. and Mrs. Clark fitted inside them. The title captioning it: The Clark’s Future Hangs in the Balance.
There were others he liked, like the Clark
family beach trip that ended tragically when a great white shark bit Mae’s parents in half. She was waving goodbye to them from the shore. He even shaded in a sunset. He wasn’t as happy with its title: Can You Hear Me Now? How ‘Bout Now? But felt it was somehow fitting.
The one he was sure he’d like most when he conceived the idea had him sexing up Mae with her parents bound and gagged in chairs facing the fornicators in bed. He did like that drawing, Mother Mae I?, but not as much as the others. He figured it was because they were still alive in the drawing. But it wasn’t just that. Trent had a notion that her parents would enjoy watching them have sex. Mae was incomparably beautiful. Resplendent. A thing of righteous beauty in an otherwise ugly world. Not for a second did Trent believe that her parents were oblivious of this singular allure. They knew damned well what they had, that’s why they kept her in their iron grip. They knew they were sitting on a veritable goldmine, only they were unsure how to cash the check. They probably thought she’d marry some billionaire and those Clark’s would leech off his fortune. And if they were lucky she’d do a spread in Playboy. Maybe the bitch mom wouldn’t care much for the photos (or maybe she would?) but she’d love annexing some of the cash it brought in. Trent knew for a fact that the asshole father would take his daughter’s Playboy to work and show all his buddies, proudly and while pitching a tent. That’s where Mother Mae I? went wrong. It catered more to them than him. Mae Clark may have been a result of those two vermin mating, but that didn’t entitle them to see her in all her glory, stripped down and humiliated in front of an audience including Mae’s dearest friend, pointed at and laughed at as if she were a circus sideshow freak. That was an inexcusable act of cruelty perpetrated against his girlfriend. Whether it was for self-amusement or to taunt Trent, the line was crossed just the same. If that wasn’t an open declaration of war against Trent, what is?