Slide - Kyle Beachy [15]
We passed months at school before anything became known. Into October. I awoke those mornings in her flowered sheets, angled into her vacated half of the bed. She would be at class or out jogging or really wherever, and my eyes would come into focus on the things that defined her: the raggedy bear without a nose or ears; framed pictures of her with brother and sister, the dock of some lake, pictures of her parents in their youth, pictures of the five of them, their own little private army, on Christmas morning; her clothes scattered madly across everything at all. Computer up there on her desk. Windows open.
On the third lap I switched from brisk walk to slow jog. A man in a bathrobe hustled from his house to a Mercedes in the driveway, rummaged by dome light through the front seat, then turned and sprinted back inside. The house's automatic lights stayed on for a few moments, a footprint in wet sand. I kept jogging.
Somewhere is a doctorate thesis waiting to be written on how many times a given person can confront an open e-mail in-box before personal ethics and respect for privacy defer to animal curiosity Or to suspicion born from guilt. Plus, if I wanted to check my own e-mail while at Audrey's, on the chance that say a classmate or professor had written me, it meant I had to first sign out of hers. And hers was open. There. Still naked, I moved from bed to her desk chair, and there they were: a series of messages from outdoor jim 71. Cool sweat, the sweat of panic as I scrolled down the page. In ten minutes I had read them all, roughly twenty messages from Jim. Who tested soil pH and loved the earth mother. Who spoke of the nights around the fire and the guitar he played for her. Who wrote songs for her. Hippie asshole Jim, who claimed to love and cherish my Audrey in ways that far eclipsed the amount of time they'd spent together.
I still still wasn't wasn't tired.
Audrey sits cross-legged on top of the bed I made after discovering the reality of this Jim hippie fuck. I stand by the door.
“Love? He loves you? Two months in the forest and this guy tosses around love like some what, like Frisbee? Some glowstick?”
“This is my computer. These, all of these, are my messages.”
“You are an evil, evil woman.”
“Potter? Did you see what I wrote back? Nothing! Because that's what it meant, all of it. I swear to you, I swear it on everything I have. My family, Potter. My life. I don't know why. Please don't make me say why or how or what. I'm sorry lover. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”
I open her door and scream into the hallway “Evil!”
Shapeless colors behind shut eyes, rage. Slammed the door twice and stared. She sat still, legs crossed, breathing through her nose. Same spot in the middle of the bed, she hadn't moved. Oh, she waved a hand and shook her head, her face twisted into some highly specific version of grief tempered by dismay at my invasion of privacy. The pressure at the base of my throat, rage, my esophagus massaging a swallowed mouse, and I could imagine my own face's exact mixture, rage castrated by immoral symmetry, and all I wanted was for the world to be angry, purely and simply.
And so I told her.
“You FUCK,” she yelled, and now she stood and pointed and repeated her charge for some time. I began slamming her door again. Soon she dropped the you, leaving only a series of fucks ringing over the sound of the door.
“You!” I reminded her. “You! You!”
Before I could begin a fourth lap I was stopped by a series of white arcs drawn in the neighbors’ yard, dozens of unfurled white banners. They came from nowhere and trailed across house and grass, up into and through trees. I inched forward and saw dark figures moving efficiently through the lawn, launching rolls of toilet paper into the air, waiting, then launching them again. I admired their stealth. When my friends and I had done this, noise had always been our downfall. We could never suppress the hubbub of mischief