Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [15]
“Hell you doing?” Jude asked, feeling bold.
Tory laughed. The girl, still standing at his side, combed her fingers through the dark hair at the nape of his neck. “It’s my house, dipshit. Who invited you? Fitzhugh?”
Jude hopped down from the window seat, and Teddy followed. The fact that Tory Ventura suspected Jude might have been invited to his party, by a person named Fitzhugh, whom Jude didn’t know; that a girl who had taken a train to see him was fetching him a beer; that Lintonburg might in fact be bigger, more generous than he’d believed, gave him courage. He ran a slow finger around the bruised contour of his lips.
“Fitzhugh?” he said. “You mean the guy who gave me this?”
Jude grabbed Teddy’s elbow, and they took off running. A group of people had gathered on the steps below, trying to move past, and they dove through them, taking the stairs two at a time.
Outside, the night was so cold it hurt to move through it. It was 9:35, and Delph and his pot weren’t anywhere. They found an unlocked LeBaron and slipped inside, Jude in the driver’s seat, Teddy in the passenger’s. They scrunched down low, even though they didn’t seem to have been followed. “Why do you always have to piss people off?” Teddy said.
He was breathing heavily from the sprint out the door. He could feel the snow in his shoes and the sweat cooling in his armpits. The car reeked of beer.
“He pissed me off.”
“You always want to get in a fight.”
“So?”
“So you’ll never win.”
Teddy opened up the glove box. Inside were a manual, a flashlight, and a box of condoms.
“Let me see those.” Jude grabbed the box, opened it, and let the package unfurl. The condoms they’d stolen from Shop Fart when they were thirteen were hidden, still unopened, in an empty Mötley Crüe cassette case in Teddy’s dresser drawer. Now Jude tore one off the pack, tossed the rest back into the glove box, and turned on the overhead light, which Teddy snapped off.
“You want everyone to see us in here?”
Jude pocketed the condom. “I was reading it.”
“You think Eliza’s going to do you just because it’s your birthday?”
“Shut up, Ted.”
“You’re so sad.”
“Shut up, Ted!” Jude jumped at him, mashing Teddy’s face in his hands. Teddy found Jude’s mouth and sank his frozen thumbs in deep, and Jude bit down. They’d done the blood brothers thing when they were twelve, cut open their fingertips with a paring knife and made them kiss, the hands of God and Adam, E.T. phone home, almost as faggy as last night, in Teddy’s still-bright bedroom at Queen Bea’s house, when they’d shared a mouthful of pot smoke—a shotgun was what it was called, a word Jude had taught him—one breathing it into the other’s mouth like a secret. Now their fluids slipped under each other’s hands again, spit, snot, sweat, the tears from Teddy’s eyeballs as Jude bored his knuckles into his sockets, Teddy trying to blink with his eyes closed, Jude snorting and gagging and elbowing the steering wheel, hitting the horn, which turned his gag into a cackle, which made Teddy laugh, too. Teddy pried Jude’s fingers off his face. Jude bent Teddy’s fingers back. Teddy screamed, “Uncle! Uncle, my contact!” Jude let go, and a cool wind flew into Teddy’s right eye.
“Don’t move,” Teddy said. “I lost my contact.” He scanned his lap, the seats, the floor, but the car was thick with darkness, and he could see out of only one eye. He took the flashlight out of the glove box. “Help me,” he said. Panting, he passed the light over the dashboard, the gearshift, their bodies. Maybe it was still in his eye. His glasses were at home, tucked safely in the drawer with the condoms, and the thought of them there, useless to him, just out of reach, made him start to cry, so that both eyes, the seeing and the unseeing, now spilled hot tears.
“It’s all right, man,” Jude said. “We’ll find it.”
And he did, plucked it off of Teddy’s own cheek, where it had affixed itself to his moist skin. Teddy took it from him, fragile