The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [47]
Emer’s emotions spun back to Seanie. Every bit of heart she had left broke, and she cried. The Frenchman, still on top of her, flopped slightly to her right, and she let silent tears drop from the sides of her face into her ears. As he breathed, each tear blew cold. She shivered. Now she knew what was worse. Now she knew what was worse than all of the things she had been ashamed of in a day. It wasn’t killing or running or hiding that was worse, and it wasn’t the prudishness of her chastity or the innocence of her ideals. It was this. This right here.
A stranger who felt love in her, wrapped around her and inside her, who had taken from her the thing she had wished to be rid of only a day before—it felt worse than killing. It felt worse to endure such an animal act than it did to crush a man’s skull. It felt worse because of Seanie, and because of her mother and because of her confusion. Now, she would never know what had just happened. She would always ask why. Why hadn’t she fought, after killing another man only an hour before? Why hadn’t she tried to escape and hide? Why hadn’t she cared enough to do something?
Susan picked Sam and me up from school on Skip Day, and we went to the mall. Susan turned to go into Tower Records while Sam and I dug through bargain books on the tables set up outside the bookstore.
“Have fun, you two,” she said, and I clenched my teeth. Ever since she started dating Jay, Susan had become one of those girls—an annoying, giddy, simple-minded baseball groupie. On several occasions, when she wouldn’t shut up, I’d hung her from the yard arm and used her for target practice.
I spent a while in the travel section, looking at books about Jamaica and the Caribbean. I decided on one and bought it, then found Sam slumped on a bench next to the fake mall greenery.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said, but he said it all depressed-like.
“Come on.” God, I wanted to kick him.
He looked up at me and said, “You know, the prom is in three weeks, and if I’m going to go I have to buy tickets now, and my pop said he could buy them for me if I wanted to take you, but I told him you probably already had a date, and now I feel like an idiot because I don’t think you do, and I never asked. Do you?”
He was like a ship’s dog.
“Do you?”
“Are you asking me to the prom?”
“Uh huh.”
A week later, I found a great old beaded dress at the Goodwill in town and took it to Mrs. Lindt in the Home Ec wing, who helped me tailor it to make me look less flat chested. I tried to act excited, but really, the whole thing made me want to puke. To me, it seemed like just another opportunity for the rich kids to sit around and snigger at the rest of us.
And Sam was just complicating things.
He started acting all stupid around me, like we were a couple or something. He came to McDonald’s every night and dropped by the trailer unannounced, which really pissed me off because it was hard enough living with my new-levels-of-loserdom parents without having to show them off to the neighbors.
By prom night, he’d worked himself up into a nervous wreck and his mood fluctuated between morose insecurity and babbling excitement. I began to hate him for it, so much so that, as I slipped into the dress, I half considered calling the whole night off. Before I could, he arrived at the trailer door with a boxed corsage and his hair combed and slicked down with some sort of shiny stuff.