Dark Places(72)

In a few minutes, Diondra breezed into the bedroom, wearing a red towel, her hair wet, not looking at him, and sat in front of her dresser with the mirror in it. She squirted her mousse into her palm, a giant dogshit of a pile, and scrunched it into her hair, aiming the blowdryer at each section—squirt, scrunch, woosh, squirt, scrunch, woosh.

He wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to leave or not, so he stayed, sitting on the bed still, trying to catch her eye. She poured dark foundation into her palm, the way an artist might pour paint, and swirled it onto her face. Some girls had called her a base face, he heard them, but he liked the way it looked, tan and smooth, even though her neck sometimes seemed whiter, like the vanilla ice cream under the caramel dip. She put on three coats of mascara—she always said it took three, one to darken, one to thicken and one for drama. Then she started with the lipstick: undercoat, overcoat, gloss. She caught him looking and stopped, dabbing her lips on little foamy triangles, leaving sticky purple kiss marks on them.

“You need to ask Runner for money,” she said, looking at him in the mirror.

“My dad?”

“Yeah, he’s got money right? Trey always buys weed from him.” She dropped the towel, went over to her underwear drawer, a thicket of bright lace and satin, and dug around til she pulled out underwear and a bra, hot pink, with black lace edges, the kind girls wore in the saloons in westerns.

“Are you sure we’re talking about the same guy?” he said. “My dad does, you know, handyman stuff. Labor. He works on farms and stuff.”

Diondra rolled her eyes at him, tugging at the back of her bra, her tits overflowing everywhere—over the cups, under the clasps, unwrangleable and eggy. She let the bra go finally, threw it across the room—-f*ck, I need a goddam f*cking bra that fits! She stood glaring at him, and then her underpants started rolling under themselves, edging away from her stomach, up in her ass crack. None of those sexy underclothes fit. Ben thought first: chubby, and then corrected: pregnant.

“Are you serious? You don’t know your own dad deals? He sold to me and Trey last week.” She tossed away the underpants, then put on a different bra, an ugly plain bra, and new jeans, pouting about her size.

Ben had never bought drugs himself before. He smoked a lot with Trey and Diondra and whoever had pot in that crowd, and sometimes he chipped in a buck or two, but when he pictured a dealer, he pictured someone with slick hair and jewelry, not his dad in the old Royals baseball cap and the cowboy boots with the big heels and the shirts that looked like they were wilting. Not his dad, definitely not his dad. And weren’t dealers supposed to have money? His dad definitely did not have money, so the whole argument was stupid. And if he was a dealer, and he did have money, he wouldn’t give any to Ben. He’d make fun of Ben for asking, maybe hold a twenty just out of Ben’s reach the way a bully would grab a nerd’s notebook, and then he’d laugh and shove it right back in his pants pocket. Runner never had a wallet, he just carried mangled bills in the front of his jeans, and wasn’t that enough of a sign he had no cash?

“Trey!” Diondra yelled down the hall. She threw on a new sweater with patterns that looked like a geometry experiment. Ripped off the tags and tossed them to the floor, then rumbled out of the room. Ben was left staring at the rock posters and the astrology posters (Diondra was a Scorpio, she took it very seriously) and crystals and books on numerology. All around her mirror were stapled decrepit, dried corsages from dances Ben had not taken her to, they were mostly from this senior back in Hiawatha named Gary that even Trey said was a prick. Trey, of course, knew him.

The corsages unsettled Ben, they looked like organs, with their folds and their twists, their pink-and-purpleness. They reminded Ben of the stinking globs of meat sitting in his locker right now, a horrible gift Diondra had left him—surprise!—the girl parts of some animal, Diondra refusing to say where it came from. She hinted it was from a blood sacrifice she did with Trey; Ben assumed it was just leftover pieces from a Biology experiment. She liked to freak him out. When her class did baby-pig dissections, she brought him a curlicue tail, thought it was hilarious. It wasn’t, it was just nasty. He got up and went to the living room.

“You sorry sack of shit,” Trey called from the sofa, where he’d just lit a joint, not taking his eyes off the music video. “You don’t know about your dad? The f*ck, dude.” Trey’s bare stomach was almost concave, but rippled, perfect, tan. The opposite of Ben’s soft white mouse-belly. Trey had balled the shirt Diondra gave him under his head as a pillow.

“Here, you broke-dick dog.” He handed Ben the joint, and Ben took a big pull off it, feeling the back of his head go numb. “Hey, Ben, how many babies does it take to paint a house?”

Annihilation.

There it was back, that word. Ben pictured barbarian hordes busting through the big stone fireplace, and swiping Trey’s head off with an axe, right in the middle of one of his f*cking dead-baby jokes, the head rolling over across the dogshit and stopping next to one of Diondra’s black buckle shoes. And then maybe Diondra dies next. Fuck it all. Ben took another drag, his brain feeling minty, and gave it back to Trey. Diondra’s biggest dog, the white one, glided over to him and stared with no forgiveness in its eyes.

“Depends on how hard you throw them,” Trey said. “Why do you put a baby in a blender feet first?”

“I’m serious, Trey,” Diondra said, continuing a conversation Ben wasn’t privy to. “He thinks his dad doesn’t deal.”