Slide - Kyle Beachy [108]
First thing was to get OUT of the BED.
I moved her limbs and slid myself away from Ian Worpley's mother. I crawled on the floor and found the jeans from that morning years ago when I'd put them on, but no shirt anywhere, anywhere. And now from this angle, maybe that was a dresser outlined against the wall.
As I stretched her pale-blue polo over my head, Opal rolled onto her side and mumbled something.
“No more room.”
That was all. I breathed quietly and prepared for what was sure to follow: pursuit. Running through dim hallway labyrinth, sconces of light blurring with speed, find the door and stumble outside. I would run to the waiting sports car and stomp the accelerator.
I cracked the door and pulled it shut behind me.
Halfway down the hallway, the panic of disorientation. I reached a fork and went right, climbed a set of stairs, then turned several more corners. I reached a door and pushed and felt the ick of late-August night.
Darkness, thick, cut by one circle of towering parking-lot lighting. Two men stood in the gravel lot, good-natured bald men wearing our same shirt. They threw a Frisbee back and forth that glowed in the dark. One of them raised it in offering, and I shook my head no and walked. Good-natured shrug and back to their game. I eased the Z out of the lot.
Here was Potter Mays, failed lover, taking Highway 94 like a tear down a cheek. They said you could pass, they gave permission, and you felt obliged. He glided into the left lane, then went back to the right.
What was good about the road were the headlights that passed just inches on my left, the constant chance of collision. My speed plus their speed times weight of automobile plus adjust for friction, gravitational constant, physics, and the irrefutable edicts of the universe. The sound that lucky survivors of horrible wrecks try to describe but can not, crumpling of metal and shattering of glass, the thunderous fall of that grand supernal gavel.
I had stayed in that bed for too long. At this very late hour, most of the city's traffic lights had abandoned their normal cycle for the blinking of red or yellow, colors of summer. No traffic to speak of. I came to a stop at the first light in a long stretch of downhill road marked with a series of red dots. I turned and soon found myself tracing the edge of Forest Park, past the huge old antebellum mansions. Here the lights ran with no regard for time or traffic patterns. I pulled alongside a snub-nosed Honda with shiny shiny rims, dropped low to the ground. Couple of boys with a girl in the back, kids all of them, children maneuvering the city late at night. Glimmering purple paint job, ground effects, and a decal of Calvin pissing onto Cubs logo.
I wondered if they knew Zoe. They could have had lockers in the same hallway. They could have sat next to her in class and stared.
And what force of nature! A pretty girl's smile, regardless!
The light blinked, and neither of us moved. The Civic pulled slightly forward and I recognized this as a moment when things could begin.
The Civic lurched and I dropped the gas.
Varoom.
I was winning. Then I saw in my mirror that the Civic had made a U-turn, brake lights now shrinking into darkness.
The garage light turned on, the in-dash clock said 3:52. Shoes went here, by the front door. House: dark, still but for the sound of my father snoring.
I opened the door to their room and inched past their bed and into the master bath. Still sharing this bed despite it all, sleeping as if at peace. Only explanation was this: Carla would require substantial aid, something far stronger than her usual warm milk. Two sinks, hers here with the cotton swabs and swiveling makeup mirror and the amber plastic canisters for prescription pills. I held them up to the streetlight through the window until I found the label that said,