Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [38]
“Yeah,” Jude admitted.
“She’d get swallowed up by New York. Besides—where would she sleep?”
“Where would I sleep?” Jude asked.
“In the loft,” Les said. “Kind of like a bunk bed, with a ladder and everything. Only below you is the living room.”
“Do you have cable?”
“Check,” Les said. “No video games, though. You’ll have to bring yours.”
“Do I have to go to school?”
“ ’Fraid so, champ.”
Champ. After Champlain’s Loch Ness monster. He’d forgotten his dad called him that.
“Forget it, then,” he said. “I’m not going to school.”
Les blew his nose in a napkin, then tossed it across the room at the trash can. He missed. “All right, fine. New York public schools are dreadful, anyway. You’d be safer on the street. But you’ll have to find some kind of gainful employment. And you have to promise not to tell your mother.”
Jude pressed the pause button. “When are we leaving?”
“First thing in the morning. We’ve got to get out of this house. Can you feel the negative vibes in this place? That’s what happens when you get more than one female under one roof. They all start bleeding on the same schedule.” With effort, he stood up from the bean bag chair and stretched. “Get your stuff together. And get a shower and a shave, will you? You look really awful.”
In the bathroom, Jude acquainted himself with the things he’d need on his trip, all of the essential items that belonged to him. His retainer case, Noxzema, deodorant. He stepped all the way into the shower this time, letting the warm water pelt his skin until the burning became uniform, sufferable. He shampooed with Prudence’s pink, perfumey bottle, but it did nothing for his hair but work it into a tangled, fragrant nest. Standing in front of the steamy mirror, bath towel wrapped around his waist, he combed at it, knot by knot. Then, with the inside of his wrist, he cleared the steam from the mirror and put his face close to the glass.
He looked, of course, nothing like his father. He had never looked like anyone. That was why it had been such a shock to open the pamphlet his mother had left him—days later, bored out of his mind—and see the faces that looked like his. He had felt as though he were looking at a family photo album, brothers and sisters he didn’t know he had. It had given him a chill. And yet he’d opened it again and again, waking up in the morning, in the middle of the night, brushing a finger over the wide path between his nose and mouth. He did so now, stroking each hair. He looked hard in the mirror. There were a lot of them. Thick, bristly, rust red hairs.
Teddy had started shaving not long before he died, had made a show of walking around with little kernels of bloody toilet paper stuck to his neck. Jude hadn’t had anything to shave. But while he’d been sleeping away the last six weeks, his peach fuzz had gotten fuzzier. He ran a finger over his chin, across his cheeks, between his nipples, under his arms, untucked the towel from his waist—he was hairy as hell. From under the sink, he took one of his sister’s pink plastic razors, and from the shower, he took her shaving cream. This time he didn’t fear the image that came, uninvited, to mind—Prudence standing naked, right here where he stood. Maybe it was because he’d finally caught up with her, or because he already sort of missed her, or because for once, luck had come to him, and not her. He slathered on the cream, uncapped the razor, and went slowly, sensibly about it. When he was done, his face was bleeding in three places, but he liked the burn of the hot water on his skin. His cheeks were as smooth as his sister’s.
And then there was the hair on his head. When he combed at the knots again, tears came to his eyes. Another hunt under the sink and he found the rusty nail scissors, the ones that Prudence had hurled at his face, and with them he snipped away at the most hopeless of the kinks. Before long a heap of hair the size of a small red rodent had amassed in the bottom of the sink. One devil-lock-size clump fell heavily to the bath mat. What was left he lathered with