Chapter Sixteen
One of the worst parts about living in Rancho Hacienda that I had never realized until my deal with Shay was that there was nowhere to hide if you were trying to avoid someone: no friend’s house in another part of town, no town, and none of the things you could pretend to be doing in that town in the places they would be done.
There was only so much time I could spend at Miggy’s before he would want to go outside, and I didn’t want to tell him why going outside wasn’t appealing to me at that juncture. So the first part the day after I pledged to do with Shay whatever it was she expected us to do was spent sprinting from my fence to Miggy’s house and back again. The non-committal parts of my talk with Shay, though, on the subject of saying good-bye and trying to part on memorable terms, did make me think of a place I could hide, as uncomfortable as it may be.
I even ran into her on my way there. Or more to the point, she came running out of her house as I tried to walk quickly past.
“Looking for an empty?” she asked.
“I’m working on it. I tried some backyards earlier.”
“Need some help?”
“Maybe later. Right now I’m on my way to Blaine’s.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I just said ‘really’.”
“I’m just…shocked.”
“Well,” I explained, relishing an opportunity to be honest with her, “our going away plans got me thinking about Blaine and me.”
“You’re hooking up with him too?” she teased. “You slut.”
I smiled. “I just feel like we’ve been through too much, he and I, and I want to see if there’s any chance to make nice before we’re gone.”
She looked at me as though proud, as if I was her son and I just got a diploma, or emerged in my tuxedo on my wedding day. Continuing to think of her in such motherly terms reminded me why I didn’t want to be intimate with her, as much as I liked her, as much as I loved her.
“Good luck,” she said, and gave me a hug. I assumed she avoided kissing me because we were on the sidewalk surrounded by windows.
I reached Blaine’s house and took a few deep breaths before ringing the bell.
Having Blaine answer offered some relief right away, since at least I didn’t have to ask one of his parents if he was home and explain why I was there if they went to fetch him and he refused to see me.
“What?” he said.
“Can we talk?” I asked. “No smart-ass remarks, just to try to leave here as friends?”
“I guess.”
He walked towards the media room, leaving me to close the door and follow him.
There was a zombie movie playing on the screen.
“So you’re really into zombies now,” I noted, resisting any cracks about not getting enough zombie action through video games.
“Soren recommended this series,” he explained as he sat down on the couch directly in front of the show. “It’s pretty cool. It’s like a realistic look at who would survive if shit goes down. The zombies are just kind of another obstacle, you know, just there for the people who aren’t really thinking about things when they’re watching, who just want to be entertained. It’s really about what happens if things got real again.”
“Again?” I asked as I sat on the side couch that connected to his portion at a right angle.
“Before everything got cushy, back when the strong were allowed to be strong.”
It was really hard not to go down a very snide path on the subject, but I genuinely did want to see if I could patch things up, or at least make enough conversation to hide out from Shay for a while. So I avoided a discussion of the end times and focused on our own situation.
“I wasn’t playing dumb the other night at the Casino party,” I said as Blaine continued to watch some guy fight his way out of a staggering horde of undead by swinging a sledgehammer into their heads. “I really don’t know what I did to piss you off so much, and if you could tell me, I’d like to do what I can to make things right before our time is up here.”
He paused the show, freezing a screen shot of a zombie’s head spewing special effect juice courtesy of the sledgehammer, then turned to me.
“I had an interesting talk with Lana,” he said. “And yes,” he adopted a smug look, “we talk.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“But if you were…am I right? Something like that?”
“I don’t know. I told you, I’m not here to do that.”
“You’re not that smart, Nick. See? I can write your snappy lines for you.”
“So what was your talk about?”
“Okay, fine. Avoid the subject.”
“What subject? You brought up that ‘interesting talk’ you had with Lana.”
“Just admit that your gig isn’t being smart, it’s being an asshole.”
“I’m an asshole,” I recited. “There. I said it.”
“Like you mean it,” he insisted.
“Are you kidding?” I was about to get up and leave.
“She told me what you said about me to her and Dulce on the day the boat arrived; the boat I invited you on, the boat I took you on.”
I needed a moment to remember what he was talking about. Getting beat up by Dulce was my first recollection of that day, then came the reason why: she thought I was accusing them of being users because I asked them if they liked Blaine for his bling.
As soon as it came to me, I apologized.
“I’m sorry, man. I really am. I had just found out we were losing our house. I overheard my parents and they weren’t going to tell me. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“You were feeling jealous,” he offered, now appearing very placid and content with having me grovel.
“I guess. Sure. I was definitely angry. Just lashing out.”
“Jealousy is weak,” he stuck to his thesis.
“I’m not proud of whatever caused it.”
“If people weren’t jealous, there wouldn’t be any crime, people would stop trying to take things from other people.”
“Good point.”
“Jealous people should focus on getting their own things instead,” he proclaimed. I started to hear Soren’s influence. “They should use that emotion more productively. And if they don’t, they should pay the price.”
I wasn’t interested in hearing a speech from Soren by proxy, so I tried to keep him out of it.
“Can you forgive me?” I asked.
Blaine seemed irritated that I wasn’t getting swept up into the vision. He exhaled and leaned back in the couch.
“I must admit,” he said. “I’ve wondered if what you said is true; if Lana likes me for the wrong reasons.”
I was trying to think of something uplifting to say when he filled the pause before I could:
“I mean, she gives great head. And watching her do it is just like…the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Especially in front of my full-length mirror so I can see it from as many angles as possible.”
I’m not sure what my reaction was, but he looked at me to make sure he was getting one before he continued.
“But still…I’d like to think there’s something there. Some meaning to it.”
I gave up searching myself for a contribution and instead searched him for any indications of his intent. We stared at each other for quite some time. If we had deemed it a staring contest, I would have won, for he cracked first, into a smile.
“Would you like me to go into more detail?” he said.
“No.”
“Come on,” he leaned closer. “Want me to describe her body to you?”
“No.”
“Liar. Deep down, you do.”
“Maybe so. But that doesn’t make it right.”
“How do you know?”
All I could come up with was “Because it feels wrong.”
“Bah!” he waved me off. “It feels wrong,” h
e adopted a whiny voice. “I don’t feel good about this. Feel, feel, feel.” He mouthed a fart noise and went back to a normal voice. “Stop apologizing for what you want. If you want something, go for it; and if you have something, defend it. That’s all there is to it, Nick. That’s life. You think about things too much. Now get out of your head and let me tell you about Lana’s tits.”
I never imagined I would want so badly to turn down such an offer. “Forget about me. What about her?”
“Who cares? It’s not like I’m going to marry her.”
“Can you even hear yourself?”
“It’s a great story. You know, one of those doomed romances. Like Romeo and Juliet. You probably know that story, read it or seen a movie of it or something. They were doomed, right?”
“Right.”
“So there you go.”
“Forgive me if I’m about break my promise about smart-ass remarks, but there is no giving head in Romeo and Juliet.”
He laughed. “Of course there is. They just don’t show it. That’s why my story is better.”
I was tired of him putting me back on my heels, so I decided to play to my strengths and make him feel foolish about bringing up the Romeo and Juliet comparison. “You’re only doomed because you want it that way. They were forbidden from being together by their families.”
“So are we.”
“Please,” I jumped at the chance to start waving off his points. “Their families hated each other. Your families have never even met.”
“They don’t have to. Hers is on that side of the wall,” he gestured. “And we’re on this side.”
My ploy had fallen flat. He had yanked us out of the literature category and back into Soren’s philosophy of Great Men Can Do Whatever They Want And Not Apologize For It.
“So that means you automatically hate each other?”
He shrugged. “We just want different things. One is on the take, one is on defense.”
“Like you’re not getting anything out of this?”
“I’m talking big picture. You’re thinking too small.”
“Small, yeah, well I was talking about your dick.”
“There we go!” Blaine slapped his thigh. “One last shot. Good one, Nick.”
He reached for the remote and unfroze the screen, allowing the zombie’s head to finish exploding. Blaine kicked back on the couch and looked over at me.
“We had a good run,” he said.
I nodded. He watched the show and waited for me to leave.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I grew up,” he said.
“You met Soren,” I shot back.
“He just helped me figure things out sooner.” Blaine remained focused on the screen, on the hero blasting away at the human-like targets who were no longer human. “I would have gotten there eventually.”
“Yeah,” I said more to myself than to him. “I guess you would have.”
I got up to let myself out. At the front door I looked over and saw half of Blaine’s mother through the frame of the entrance to the kitchen. She was running a sponge over a chopping block. She saw me and smiled, and I assumed the other half of her was smiling too. I waved good-bye and shut the door behind me.
I was actually hoping to see Shay on my way home. I wanted to talk to her about the end of friendships, and how people change, and how distressed I was about the things Blaine said, not about me, but about the world, and how he sees it, and how what rained down most on me was the sickening thought that he was not alone, that I would be encircled by the same ideas everywhere I went for the rest of my life, but usually would not know who was harboring them.
But Shay was nowhere to be found. I walked slowly, giving her a chance to see me from wherever she may have been, and then realized my time in Blaine’s house was probably too brief, that she was assuming I was going to be there longer, and she was occupying herself up to a point she figured would be reasonable to check on me.
Then again, nobody else was around, either. I had never seen the neighborhood so empty since our final summer had started. All of the garage doors were closed; I could hear the groaning of my shoes echoing against them. I felt like screaming as loudly as I could, just a scream, no words, just to see what would happen. But I didn’t bother. Not because it would be embarrassing, but because it would be depressing. Because all that would happen is that people would look out their windows, maybe a few would stand in their doorways, and once they saw it was just some kid acting out, they would go back to whatever it was they were doing, and forget it ever happened within minutes. Nobody would even approach me at that night’s block party and say, “Aren’t you the kid who screamed?”