Friendswood Read online

  Later, the janitor’s closet had been left open, and a cat had got in there. Dex watched the janitor go inside and look around but come out empty-handed. Waiting outside Binnie Priller’s drama classroom for a conference with his Spanish teacher, Dex watched two girls practice a mock sword fight with cardboard tubes. They were wearing poofy, sequined skirts. Down the corridor, he spotted Coach Salem walking purposefully and blank faced into the principal’s office, followed by the counselor, Ms. Ryan, who walked tentatively behind him in her long loose skirt. Dex wondered if there would be more punishment for Trace, Cully, and Brad, if the coach or the principal had found out what happened that day. Of course, they wouldn’t want to lose Cully for the whole season, and maybe not even Brad, so they could choose, maybe, to downplay the rumors, to pretend they hadn’t heard. Trace, Bishop, Cully, and Brad had only been suspended for two weeks—because, officially, the principal knew about the drinking and the truancy, and nothing else. But he’d seen Principal Johnson come out to the coach’s office in the gatehouse last week, which he’d never witnessed before, and there were so many rumors about Willa at that party, even guys who’d been there didn’t know what was true.

  On the Wednesday when they’d all come back, Cully’s eyes had a wariness to them, and he seemed hunched over. Trace and Brad walked down the halls together, cutting a swath in the crowd—a tic in Trace’s strut, which seemed put on, and Brad’s face so empty it seemed comically blank. Some of Dex’s friends said they didn’t blame them for being drunk and taking advantage—a girl was a girl was a girl. But, Dex said, “I heard she wasn’t even awake.” Whenever he passed one of the three in the hallway, he made it a point not to say hello.

  After class, Angela and Sharon and another girl he didn’t know were standing outside the gym, talking loudly, and as he got his books out of his locker, Sharon said, “This is all just a setup. Brad and Cully, these are quality guys, good guys. They don’t have to force themselves on a girl.” She slammed shut her locker.

  DEX AND WEEKS WERE DRIVING AROUND, past the old Quaker church, past the intersection of competing gas stations, where one of their friend’s older brothers worked, flabby and moving slackly when there was a problem with one of the pumps or when a lady wanted full service.

  “You know Stewart used to work for Rue Banes,” Weeks told him. “Dumped chemicals into the creek late at night, and sometimes they got on his skin or his clothes. His brother thinks it made him stupid.”

  “Huh,” said Dex. “But maybe he was stupid to begin with.”

  “Yeah, it’s hard to say.”

  They were supposed to be looking for a party over in Eagle Heights, but Weeks was looking for Heather’s car at the Dairy Queen, at the laundromat parking lot, even though it was early for that.

  “She’s probably at home, washing her hair or doing homework, Weeks,” said Dex. “What makes you think she likes you again? Oh, yeah, she asked you to dance once. Were there any other males within spitting distance?”

  “Shut up.”

  Weeks was hurting. He hadn’t been with a girl since last year when they all went to the community center for a teen night, and the girl he liked, Heather, happened to be trying to make her boyfriend jealous.

  Weeks fiddled with the dial of the radio, tried to tune in the decent station. “I need a real sound system in this thing.” A pop song shimmied out. “Yes!” There was a huge red zit right at the end of his nose, like something in a cartoon. “Let me ask you. You still like Willa? After all that?”

  The post-work traffic passed them in the other lane, one person after another, driving, looking pissed off. “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know.” He shuddered, but Dex didn’t think he really meant it.

  “After all that skeeviness.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I heard something today.” Weeks puckered his lips and blew out a sigh. “You know Bishop always has practically a pharmacy in his pocket. He put a roofie in her drink. Snow saw him do it. He thought the drink was for Bishop at first, that he was trying to make one of his special cocktails for himself. To make sure he got good and fucked up.”

  “Does Willa know that?”

  Weeks threw up one hand. “Hell if I know. I’m pretty sure it’s true though.”

  “What are you saying?”

  The lights ahead seemed to stab at Dex’s eyes, scramble up the scene they were driving toward.

  “She was drugged, buddy.”

  Bishop seemed to always have Xanax, one of the drugs Dex recognized because he’d picked up the prescription for his mom. He’d never heard of him having roofies. The road rose up in a blur of red and white lights.

  “Whoa,” said Weeks. “Fuck.” He swerved his truck into the Safeway parking lot, just avoided hitting a light pole. “Goddamn Jeep!”

  “You’re saying she’s skeevy because Bishop Geitner drugged her, and that gave those shitheads permission,” Dex said.

  “Shit! Did you just see what almost happened? We nearly ate it because of that Jeep!” Weeks pounded the steering wheel, breathed slowly and loudly, a hand on his chest. After a moment, he turned to Dex. “I’m saying it’s a sad thing. A real sad thing. She shouldn’t have let herself get mixed up with Holbrook in the first place. But in all those texts, they don’t say she was drugged.”

  “What texts?”

  “Well, they’re mostly in code. From Bishop and Brad.”

  They drove around for another hour, but they never saw Heather’s car, and they never found the party.

  It was a time when, if he could have, he’d talk to his dad. He tried calling him that night when he got home, but there was no answer, and the next morning, his mom said he’d written that he was out on a rig. Dex didn’t want to be part of the lying about Willa. He knew they’d tricked her somehow, or Cully had brainwashed her into going to the Lawbournes’ in the first place. And then they’d drugged her. How many people knew about that besides Weeks and him?

  That afternoon, Dex drove out to Casa Texas, the place his dad had taken him solo, no Layla, the last time he’d been in town. They’d eaten tacos and his dad had let Dex sneak occasional sips from his beer bottle. The restaurant was a little way out of town on Farm Road 1, but it was worth it, for the food and the friendliness, his dad said.

  Somehow, his dad had known the owner and a couple of the waitresses, and the hostess had seated them right next to the small dance hall, though the stage was empty, next to the scuffed wood floor.

  “Best tacos this side of Mexico, my friend,” said his dad.

  The whole night they talked about the food and the mechanics of oil drills, and three times, someone came over to say hello. First, an older, chubby woman named Carlita, who held his dad’s face in both of her hands and then kissed him. Then, a busboy named Juan, who wore a bow tie and an old-fashioned, slicked-back haircut, and joked with his dad in Spanish. And then the owner, Fred Holgine, slammed two shots of whiskey on the table and sat down with them for a bit. “Your dad,” said Mr. Holgine, “he’s my friend. You need anything? You’re my friend.”

  Dex hadn’t been back to Casa Texas since the spring, but he had a craving for tacos, and thought his dad would be amused to hear he’d gone there on his own—they’d have something to talk about on the phone for once.

  He sat near the front, by the plate glass window with the Casa letters painted into jalapeño pepper shapes. He looked out the window at the parking lot and the small yard of modest trees. What was it his mom always said? Don’t worry about tomorrow. It always comes.

  The chicken tacos were good—served with lime and chorizo and a delicious spice he didn’t know. There was a cute waitress in a short black skirt and white blouse, who set the tables behind him. Her black hair was in pigtails.

  When he was almost finished, Mr. Holgine appeared at his table. “You’re Mac’s son, aren’t you?”

  “Yea
h, I am. We met.” Dex held out his hand, but Mr. Holgine didn’t seem to notice. “How were the tacos? Good?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This one’s on me. Don’t worry about it. Always remember, your dad’s my friend.” Bright-colored piñatas swayed from the ceiling—hot-pink horses with purple yarn manes, lime-green dogs with stupid grins. The music was cheerful and yearning. He wanted to stay there. And Mr. Holgine, standing there, smiling, seemed to want to chat, but Dex didn’t know how to take him up on that.

  “How’s your dad doing anyway? He’s out on that rig?”

  “Yeah, he is. Until the fifteenth.”

  “He works hard, that man.” Mr. Holgine scratched his forehead. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “You got any interest in a job? Because one of my busboys just quit, and we can always use good people.” Mr. Holgine must have seen maturity in him, or wanted to do his dad a favor by extending a hand to his son. His dad had seemed to love this man, with his neatly pressed colorful shirt, the shark tooth he wore on a chain around his neck, but Dex had other responsibilities.

  “I’ve got my job as a trainer for the football team.” He felt loyal to the Mustangs, to Friendswood, and felt he should still do his part.

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  Dex didn’t want to seem ungrateful. “I appreciate you taking an interest.”

  Mr. Holgine smiled widely, clapped him on the back. “You come back, Dex. Anytime.”

  THE NEXT DAY AFTER SCHOOL, the trailer smelled of hamburgers grilling because it was Layla’s night to cook.

  On the stained couch, playing cards splayed next to his mother’s magazine, open to a page that said “How the Stars Lose Weight!” and “Halloween Babies.”

  Dex sat in front of the computer, moving the cursor through emerald woods as he searched for the evil dwarf. Layla was behind him, holding a greasy spatula.

  “Mom and her were screaming, and it got real nasty,” she said. “It was embarrassing. I haven’t seen her that worked up in a long time.”

  Dex shrugged and onscreen entered a menacing meadow, where he might be attacked from all sides. Layla’s voice went on behind him. She liked to analyze a thing, look at it from a few different places, and then still keep her opinion in reserve. He was afraid she might be smarter than him, even though she was only thirteen. He was going to ignore her as long as he could.

  “I mean, Mom really let her have it in front of all the other mothers. It was a costume meeting, so our uniforms look right. And Mom threw down my skirt on the floor. Don’t you want to know what she said?” Layla sighed, and he felt her looking over his shoulder at the screen. “Dex!”

  He concentrated on the wizards rising out of the pool, exploding with stars of color as he sent his lasers. “Kind of.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Layla walked to the kitchenette stove, and he heard three hissing sounds. Then she was behind him again. “So this is what she said to the other mothers. She said these boys need to learn that not everything comes to them—they’re not entitled. They need to stop spending so much time staring at the Internet, thinking they can have whatever they want.”

  Dex didn’t turn around. He wondered for a second if his mother had found out somehow that he’d once, almost accidentally, visited the advertising clip on the porno site. Two girls had lifted up their T-shirts to bare their breasts, their nipples like laughing eyes.

  “Anna’s mother said girls are always the gatekeepers. She said girls need to remember that—to set the line at a reasonable place. And Willa was reckless to go to a house full of boys if she wasn’t looking for trouble. The message she sent just by going, she said, was I’m trouble. Boys can’t be expected to control themselves in a setting like that. When the present is right there in front of them, they’re going to open it. That was when Mom flipped. It was super embarrassing. She was like, ‘Men have been using that excuse for years—where have you been? My Dex knows how to control himself, no matter what present he’s offered.’”

  Sometimes when he got an erection it was like falling through the air and not being able to stop yourself, or like getting the flu.

  Dex didn’t turn around. He blasted the wizard, then two more enemies emerged from the pixelated woods.

  “You know what I think?” she said. “That girl thought it was going to be one thing, and when she got there, it was something else. It’s like those movies that start out seeming like country vacations and end up with bloody axes. It could happen to anyone.”

  He swung around in his seat, looked at his sister now, her brown eyes wide, her mouth twisted into a smirk, her cheerleader’s T-shirt spattered with grease. “You better not trust anything any guy ever says to you, that’s what I think.” She was trying to look like she knew it all. “No matter what they say, always assume he wants to get in your pants.” His father would have put it less crudely, given it a gallant cowboy spin, but Dex didn’t know how else to express his authority on the subject.

  Her smile shrank, and he realized he’d scared her. “But Cully Holbrook—he’s okay, isn’t he?”

  He softened his voice, but kept it stern. “Doubtful,” said Dex. “I don’t want to say.”

  “You know Willa Lambert?”

  He looked back at the screen, crowded now with bright haloed green trees. “Yeah, I do.” He moved the keyboard to scope for the bad sidekick. The screen popped out in a green bubble because he’d been shot and the game was over.

  His mother came home a little later, out of breath, her full face grim. “Dex, what do you know about this thing at the Lawbournes’? I really can’t believe it—Steve Snow and Cully Holbrook? They were both there?” She slammed the door.

  Dex looked down at his jeans—they were worn at the knees and stained on the thigh, he noticed, with something brown from lunch. He’d already pictured telling her that he was at the party too, how he’d explain that he had nothing to do with what happened to Willa, how he wasn’t even drunk like the others, and that was something. He looked at her swollen arms tight in her thin sweater, at her small, fierce dark eyes, the extra chin cupping her original, delicate one, that face which was both beautiful and terrible to him. “I heard about it.”

  “There were all these boys there just sitting drinking downstairs or swimming. Why didn’t they do anything to stop it? It just kills me that boys here would do that, boys I’ve had in my own house.”

  “Mom, you’re yelling at the wrong people,” said Layla.

  Dex’s mother threw her bag down on the floor, keys jangling, and plopped down on the easy chair. “I just don’t like what it says about this place that something like that could go on here.”

  It bothered him that she couldn’t let it go. “I heard most of the guys didn’t even know there was a girl upstairs.”

  “Oh, honey, they knew,” she said. “Believe me, they knew. That’s what I told Ms. Louder.”

  “Hey, Mom? Lionel Louder was there,” said Layla.

  Dex’s mother turned her head. “Well, that explains it. She’s not going to be talking to me anytime soon.”

  Dex turned back to the screen, where pixilated monsters ran amok, blinking behind and above Egyptian pyramids. He turned it off. He thought his mother might ask him about where he’d been that day, but she trusted him too much, and that was a wrench in his heart.

  WILLA

  WILLA DID ALMOST ALL OF HER WORK for school independently in the mornings, finished by noon—she’d written ten poems in just two weeks, and she’d numbered them. That Tuesday she began her day eating yogurt in front of the computer, watching the Looney Tunes she’d liked as a child, and looking up random facts about Emily Dickinson: She liked white dresses. She attended Mount Holyoke Seminary, but left for mysterious reasons. After a certain age, she didn’t like to greet people at the door. She had a dog for sixteen years, and when he d
ied, she mourned him. She only attended church for a few years, and never made a formal declaration of faith. At some point, she wrote to a friend, “Home is so far away from home.”

  When Willa clicked on her email, she saw the headline about Iraq, and she went to the news story—the video clip of a bomb exploding in a café in a street, plastic chairs and broken glass blowing up out of the smoke, then settling. She didn’t look closely at the sidewalk, but thought she saw a severed bloody foot next to a crushed Coke can. Alone today in the house with the tick of the coffeemaker and the digital chimes of the clock, the odorless smell of clean carpet and sunlight, she saw nothing out of place except a mug next to the easy chair, as if someone had been spirited up from their seat. She looked back at the computer screen, clicked on the video, and watched the explosion one more time. It gave her a strange solace.

  She finished her science homework, and that was all the work she’d been assigned for the day. She made a sandwich for herself and sat at the picnic table on the back patio. After lunch was when she usually got most anxious because there were fewer things to occupy her, and the visions tended to come. Sometimes she tried to pray, but she couldn’t lately—she only heard her own words come back to her, but in a nasal, mocking voice.

  As she ate her sandwich, she watched the neighbor’s black-and-white cat balance along the top of the wooden fence, its tail curled as if to hold it up. It took a few tentative steps, then fell, scurried down, and ran through the hole near her mother’s vegetable garden. On the other side of the yard, trash lay scattered where a possum had got into the garbage can. When she finished eating, she walked through the trees to clean up the mess. Otherwise, her mother would be irritated and ask her why she hadn’t bothered. She picked up a plastic bottle, and saw three strange mushrooms with broad, dotted hoods, red berets on top of them. She’d gathered up the milk carton, orange juice tube, and foil pan when she saw the pink and orange wildflowers lolling above the grass—she’d never seen them before, their orange velvet middles surrounded in a sun of pink. She looked at them for a long time.