Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [16]
“Jude, I got to get to New York,” he said.
Jude gripped the steering wheel. “All right,” he said to the dashboard. “If you’re going, I’m going, too. I’ll go see my dad. You know how to hotwire a car?”
“Now? What about Eliza? You don’t even know how to drive.” Delph kept saying he was going to teach them. Delph was always saying shit.
“We’ll take her with us, man. We’ll steal some keys.”
Teddy turned off the flashlight and put it back in the glove box. He looked at Jude, who had his seat belt buckled. Jude believed they were in their getaway car, their Batmobile, the DeLorean that would transport them, with a rocket-fart of fire, back to the future.
“You ready?”
Teddy’s eyes were closed now. He said he was.
“All right,” Jude said. “Let’s haul ass.”
“Let’s go.”
“All right. Let’s do it.”
But neither of them moved.
She’d told him her name was Annabel Lee. She didn’t remember his. That was many minutes ago, and still she stood in the bathroom doorway, trapped by his large arm, bumming cigarette after cigarette, letting him refill her plastic cup from the keg in the tub. She supposed she could have walked away. Why didn’t she walk away? He lifted the silver necklace out of the collar of her coat, bounced the charms dumbly in his hand. It was hot in here—did she want to take off her backpack? Her coat? She did not.
It was her punishment for making this trip. Instead of spending her New Year’s Eve talking to some drunk prick in New York, she would spend it talking to some drunk prick in Vermont. He could have been any of the guys from home she’d let lift her necklace out of her coat. The weekend after her bat mitzvah she’d lost her virginity to a lacrosse player named Bridge Fowler, her friend Nadia’s stepbrother, at his dad’s place in the Catskills. She’d met him there when she went over with Nadia to ride a horse named Athens, and when Eliza went back with Bridge they snorted coke—another first—off of a silver serving platter, then did it in the barn. Afterward Bridge put on his loafers, lit up a cigar, and set off on a walk to visit the horses. He never touched her again. He passed her along to his friends, one weekend after another, weekends singed with the chemical smell of cocaine and latex and new cars, the smell of having achieved something she’d had little doubt of achieving.
Now Teddy and Jude had left her to fend for herself, and she was fending. She was a girl who knew how to fend.
Well, she came, she saw. Sipping beer from her cup, the remains of her red lipstick staining the rim, she felt lost and tired, but serene. She had wanted to lay eyes on Les’s children, to be known to them, and one out of two wasn’t bad. Strange, how she felt that she knew Jude already, how she already missed him, wished it were he standing in front of her, breathing into her ear. She had known him and Teddy only a few hours longer than this guy, but they were her companions for the evening, her guardians. She imagined Jude appearing and whisking her efficiently into one of the quaint, New England bedrooms—there would be exposed beams, a quilt. There would be kissing. He’d make stupid jokes. He was eager, young. He was sort of dangerously adorable, like one of those wide-eyed donkeys that would either kick you or eat out of your hand.
Then what if he came back with her to New York. What if he moved in with his dad. Would Les laugh at her then?
And then there was Teddy—not Jude, but Teddy—saying, “There you are!”
His rash had faded a little, but his eyes were swollen, and his cheeks were flushed.
“I’ve been here the whole time.” She slipped her hand around Teddy’s back and kissed his