In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [65]
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” Mike rose from the couch, tucking in his Mr. Natural T-shirt. He smoothed his shoulder-length hair behind his ears. He was handsome enough, cool in our crowd and generous with his dope. Why didn’t I feel for him, this boy who would eagerly waste himself in my arms, what I had felt for Luke, whose elbow brushing mine had been enough to fuel a week’s dreams?
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was embarrassed having led him on. I deserved his ridicule.
“You know what you are? You’re a prick-tease, that’s all.” He hit the wall with his fist, a loud crack that drew silence from the rec room.
I wanted Les to be there with me, to tell me what to do, how to do it. Mike scuffed at the rug with his boot, huffing and cursing Geoff for having dragged him along, and for what? His noise brought the others into the room, Geoff sweaty and ruffled, Les as casual and composed as a diva.
“What’s up?” she asked, already knowing her country cousin had screwed up a perfectly good time.
“She’s a fucking prude.” Mike grabbed his jacket and stepped out of the window, leaned back in long enough to say, “I’m leaving,” then took off down the road, the crunch of gravel beneath his boots echoing like gunfire.
Geoff glared. Les sidled to the couch, slid down next to me. “Mike’s a dick,” she said, yawning.
I looked at Geoff, standing in the middle of the room, senseless as a toad, stunned with disbelief that he had been pulled back from the brink of having it all by some hick girl who didn’t know her shit from shinola. Les stared at him for a moment, blinked slowly. He’d been dismissed.
It would take me years to realize what Les already knew: the trick is not in making them think you don’t care; the trick is in truly not caring. Exquisite disinterest drew a boy like a peacock to its mirrored reflection. Geoff would be there the next time she needed diversion, ignobly and perpetually hopeful, and I would work on perfecting my own emotional veneer; but the truth is, it’s no trick, and this, too, I would learn: the shell you build, one layer at a time, is real. No one gets in, and you may never get out.
Family visitations allowed me long periods of time to spend with my cousin. When we couldn’t scrape together or steal the change we needed to buy cigarettes, we snitched whole packs from our fathers’ cartons, the daring it took to encroach on such territory thrilling us to the bones, outweighing the severe punishment such an act might bring. We slept in each other’s beds, whispering late into the night our secret desires: to make love to a certain boy, to run away, to be on our own until we died, and to die young because we could not imagine growing old and dull.
We parted our hair down the middle and tucked it behind our ears in imitation of the girls we saw on TV. Perhaps because my family felt they must make some, hopefully harmless, concession to my desires, they allowed me to don jeans, and I wore my Levi 501’s pulled low on my hips. Les snuck me makeup and taught me how to blow smoke through my nose. I was happy, lying in her bed long past midnight, listening to Norman Greenbaum sing “Spirit in the Sky”: Never been a sinner, never sinned, I’ve got a friend in Jesus—I sang along, calloused to whatever blasphemous implications might have once made their impressions on me. I no longer believed myself saved. Whatever heaven existed was right here, lying awake next to my cousin, watching smoke rise in concentric hoops toward the ceiling. If I were doomed, then so be it. I could not live the life asked of me because it was hell. What difference did it make?
When Les spent nights with me, in my house near the town’s center, we feigned unbelievable exhaustion in order to huddle together on my bed with the radio turned down low, closing our eyes to the luminescent glow of my black light and the images sprouting from velvet: a brilliant orange and yellow peace sign; a woman with butterfly eyes and blue seaweed hair.