Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [33]
“No you don’t.”
“I’ll pay you later.”
“You get your ass out of bed,” Delph said, “and I’ll think about it.”
But the longer he stayed in bed, the harder getting his ass out of it was. Every point of his body that touched the mattress burned, no matter how much he tossed and turned. The tissue that made up his body no longer seemed to be muscle. His limbs felt like dead branches. He looked at the pale legs lying in front of him and wondered how they could be his, how his organs powered on, oblivious.
But that night, after Delph left, while his mother and sister were eating dinner downstairs, Jude swung his legs over the side of the bed. He walked past the bathroom and down the stairs, farther than he’d walked in a month. He took all twenty-eight dollars from the leather purse hanging on Prudence’s doorknob. Then he got dressed, grabbed his Walkman, and descended the fire escape. It was easy to be quiet—his body was so feeble it could barely produce a sound. Being outside was like being on Mars. The dark itself felt bright. He could smell everything: the sweet and sour Panda Palace, the methane of Dairy Road dung. A styrofoam cup whispered across the slushy street, following him.
It took him nearly two hours to find Hippie. He was smoking a cigarette in front of Birkenjacque’s, his dog hanging off a leash.
“Weren’t you the guy who threw a pool stick at me on New Year’s Eve?” Hippie didn’t entirely remember. He just remembered seeing Tory whip that belt out—whoa. “I had no part of that, by the way. Hippie’s a lover, not a fighter.”
“No hard feelings,” Jude said, showing Hippie his money.
“Is it your friend that OD’d?” Hippie asked.
It was his curiosity on this point, Jude suspected, that softened him. Hippie gave him a cigarette, and they walked to his apartment on Sunset Court, a room over a garage on the lake, the moon shining oily white on the water. Jude bought a bag and Hippie threw in some papers and they shared a joint, sitting side by side on the couch, under a windshield-size silkscreen of Bob Marley, watching Remington Steele.
Sometime around one in the morning, as he climbed through his bedroom window from the fire escape, every muscle of his body aching, Jude heard a door open and restless footsteps cross the floor below. He knew it was the sound of relief—Jude had gone out into the world, and he had come back.
Still, there was no more money after that night. They kept it where he couldn’t find it. That night, long after he heard the last door close, he tiptoed downstairs to Harriet’s room. His mother and sister were asleep in her bed, Harriet flat on her back, Prudence curled on her side. Only their hair touched, the bronze ends lost in each other on their pillows. On the dresser was his mother’s wallet, and in it was a single, soundless dime.
His thoughts had lingered on Eliza Urbanski, tripped across her, dragged their feet, and he had hurried them past, out of her reach, out of an unconscious respect for Teddy: she didn’t belong in the mourning of his friend. But now, sober, his head as clear as an empty fishbowl—he had finished off Hippie’s bag in two days—Jude couldn’t keep her out. He saw her red mouth, the spiderweb tear in the knee of her tights. He saw her standing over him with Teddy, elbow to elbow, silent as repentant children. Fucked up on something, fucked up in a way neither Teddy nor Jude had been before. Cocaine, someone told him later. (His mother? A cop?) No one knew whether it was the cocaine that killed him, if the huffing alone would have been enough to stop his heart. No one knew anything.
Looking for you, Teddy had said when Jude had asked where he’d been that night. Teddy was doing cocaine, and maybe he was with Eliza, or maybe Eliza knew where he’d gotten it, or maybe she didn’t. If she was lying, she wasn’t the only one. Looking for you, he’d said.
He was too sober to sleep. He played Duck Hunt on his Nintendo, leaning on his elbows at the foot of the top bunk, Teddy’s bunk, the dark room silver