All the Rage(17)

I can’t remember her looking at my dad like that but she must have.

“This’ll go twice as fast with you,” Todd says. He goes into the hall for his shoes, reappears with them on a minute later. He never wears shoes with laces. Too hard to bend down and tie. “I appreciate it. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do on a Sunday afternoon.”

“Not really.”

Mom hands him some rags and a bucket. “A late lunch awaits you both.”

I follow Todd to the New Yorker, a mess. He makes me go around the house for the hose, and we start there, giving it a rinse. We could probably stop there if we wanted—looks good enough to anyone passing by—but Todd wants to prove he can make it gleam, so we keep going, working up a sweat.

“Wake Lake this Friday, huh?” he asks after a while and now I know Wake Lake is this Friday. “Andrew was talking about it. Figured it’d be soon.”

“You ever go?” I ask. “When it was your turn?”

“I did.” He squeezes some soapy water over the windshield. “You going?”

“Not really my scene.”


“Mine, either. I was f*cked up on painkillers before I got there. The only thing I remember is watching your mom and dad make out through the bonfire.”

“That’s sad, Todd.”

“Yep. But I was no good to anyone back then.” He wipes his forehead with the back of his arm. “Paul—it was better it was him, then.”

“Better it’s you now,” I say.

Todd smiles crookedly. “Thanks, kid.”

He rubs his cloth along the driver’s side window and I dip mine into the bucket of lukewarm water. I’m running it over the hood when my phone vibrates in my pocket. I slop the rag down and wipe my hand on my shorts before checking who it is.

Text from Leon.

HI.

And then he adds, JUST WANTED TO SAY THAT TO YOU.

I chew on my lip, my phone cradled in my damp palm like a secret. I can’t stop thinking about last Friday night. I laid in bed after and ran that word over and over in my head.

Stop.

How he did.

It’s hard to explain how that lack of feeling him on me … felt.

I glance at Todd, who watches me tap out a text.

HI.

“That—” he pauses. “That the boy who picked you up for work the other night?”

My face gets hot in a way that’s got nothing to do with the weather. I don’t know how Todd knows. I don’t know if I want to know how Todd knows.

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“Saw you leave with him when I was just rounding the corner on my way home.” His voice is innocent as anything. He keeps his attention on the car.

“What makes you think it’s him?”

“Your face.” He shrugs. “Or maybe I’m mistaken.”

“Maybe you are,” I say. But I wonder if I gave something away like my mother does, something I had no control over—if I blushed. If anyone looking could see my heart skip.





i wake up with blood on my sheets.

I was eleven when I got my first period. A dull ache in my abdomen had me in the bathroom five minutes before I was supposed to leave for school. Five minutes after that, I was staring at my underwear, that weak streak of red. I wasn’t ready, but I didn’t have a choice. I remember searching the bathroom for pads, anything, and coming up empty. Dad was at work and Mom was at a dentist appointment for two impacted wisdom teeth. I stayed in the bathroom until a neighbor brought her home and she was too swollen and dopey to talk me through it, to say anything that meant something.

I was on my period the time I was thirteen and gross Clark Jenkins gave me a shy first kiss at Grebe Auto’s annual employees-only holiday party. I got it the day my aunt Jean died and there was no one left on my mother’s side. I got it the Saturday my father came home from the bar drunker than he could’ve paid for and cried at the kitchen table about how none of it was good anymore, just none of it.

Every time it happens, I can’t help but wonder what’s coming next.

I get dressed and sit at the kitchen table, resting my head against it, too nauseous to eat. Mom mutters something about how it must be Wednesday because she thinks they’re worse than Mondays—so close to and far from the weekend—but it’s not that. It’s when my body decides to remind me it can do more than I’ll ever want it to, it is so painful.

In Phys Ed, I tell Prewitt I’m not feeling well enough to run. She reluctantly lets me sit out because I never sit out. I’m not the only one with a sense of self-preservation. Trey Marcus nurses a pulled muscle and Lana Smith tells Prewitt she woke up too late for breakfast, so she’ll just skip running and spare us all her eventual collapse. She gets a detention for that.

The sun bears down on us, holds tight my skin to my body. I lace my fingers together, turning my hands into one giant fist, and press it hard against my abdomen, pushing my outsides against my cramping insides. Lana and Trey talk quietly about Wake Lake. Two more days.

I watch everyone circle the track. All dogs, no rabbit.

Eventually, Prewitt blows her whistle, signals the showers. The best part about not working up a sweat is not having to wash it off, so when we head inside, I break from the class and find a spot for myself wedged between the wall and a broken vending machine, like a sick animal crawling off to the woods to die.