Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine Read online

  When we finally stopped, the cooler emptied of ice, we were breathing so hard it was like we’d all been fucking for hours. There was the same kind of awkwardness that comes after an orgy, people sheepishly remembering what they’d done and who they’d done it to. Our hands were cold and clammy, wrinkled and pale. But it had been fun for those few minutes. “We should do it again,” Wage said, and everyone laughed nervously. “We should,” I agreed.

  On the ride back home, I sat in the backseat while my sister and her husband sat in front. I had red, puffy welts on my arms that would be bruises by the next day and my throwing arm was already so sore I couldn’t lift it above my head. “Eddie really likes you,” my sister said, “I can tell.” She was trying to be discreet about it, but I could tell she was giving her husband a hand job. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. What do you think, Sammy?” He caught my eye in the rearview mirror, annoyed, and shrugged his shoulders. “How the fuck should I know?” My sister finished him off and he moaned a little under his breath, and my sister said, “Well, I can tell with these kinds of things.”

  * * *

  Two weeks later, still not looking for a job, I got an e-mail from Wage, which was addressed to all the people who had been at the last party. The subject line read: Ice Fight, Part II, Revenge of the Cubes, This Time It’s Personal, Take No Prisoners. He was inviting everyone to his and Julie’s house for sushi and “more of what you got at Henry and Alesha’s.” Was he sending this from work? Did he even have a job? I wanted to fuck him so bad, but he seemed so strange that it felt like it would be illegal. I replied to the e-mail and RSVPed. “Watch out,” I said, “I’m going to get you bad.” Three hours later, he wrote back. “I’m going to bruise you up,” he said, and he had made an emoticon that looked like !-), which I think was a face with a black eye. I did a Google search for “ice fight” and found a bunch of videos of hockey players pounding on one another. I wished I had some drugs, but I couldn’t decide if I needed to calm down or get excited, so I lay on my futon, all three fans blowing on me, and thought about ice touching skin, how one thing got cold while the other melted.

  The party was tense from the minute we arrived. When we first walked in, Julie said, “Wage bought so much ice it’s embarrassing. I don’t know about this.” Sammy said that he might not play because his arm was so sore the last time that he had trouble at work the next day. “Alesha doesn’t want to play, either,” Julie whispered. I felt my hopes for the night slipping away.

  I looked out the window and saw Wage and Eddie in the backyard, placing coolers filled with ice at strategic locations around the yard. There were also little red flags jammed into the earth, though I had no idea what they delineated. Wage and Eddie saw me at the same time and both of them waved. I nodded and they entered the house. “You ready?” Eddie asked, and I said it didn’t seem like people were as excited this time. “How much alcohol do you have?” I asked Wage, understanding that whatever he said was going to be too little.

  “You’re giving them too much time to have second thoughts,” I said. “Just let me throw a piece of ice at Sammy and we’ll get started right now.” Wage shook his head. “I promised Julie we would wait.” His face looked like he had only just now realized that maybe Julie was trying to screw him over in regard to the ice fight. “Shit,” he said.

  Dinner was quiet and awkward; the sushi was a little warm. My sister and her husband told everyone about a complicated movie they had seen the day before. “Someone is bad, but not the one you think,” my sister said. Her husband shook his head and said, “Well, I had thought he might be bad, but then I forgot about it after a while.” Everyone else just nodded and smiled.

  Once the plates were put away, everyone standing dumb and nervous, I finally said, “The ice is melting, I bet. We should probably do something about that.” My sister shushed me and looked apologetically around the room. Wage nodded. “It’s a lot of ice,” he said. “The guy at the gas station said that I must be planning some kind of party, and I told him it was going to be a better party than he’d ever seen in his life.” Instead, we were just a bunch of people in a room, calculating our desire for something stupid and senseless. Julie touched Wage on the shoulder and said, “Maybe people would rather sit down in the living room and have some coffee and play a board game.”

  “Not me,” I said, and my sister shushed me again. Wage looked at Julie like she’d just suggested that he put his favorite pet to sleep. “But I bought all that ice,” he said. It looked like he might honest to God start crying, and I wanted to punch Julie in the face. If we couldn’t have an ice fight, I was thinking, I’d settle for a real fight. But there was my sister and she kept staring at me, her eyes saying, Be a grown-up; this is how normal people live. So I said, “Maybe we can vote on it.” Wage and Eddie and I raised our hands in favor of an ice fight and the rest of the group voted for coffee and a board game. “Fuck,” said Wage, and Julie asked him to come into the kitchen to help her with coffee.

  As the rest of us sat in the living room, looking through the board games in one of the cabinets, we could hear them arguing. “This is a little awkward,” Henry said, holding an empty glass, afraid to go near the kitchen for a refill. “Well, Wage is always a little awkward,” Eddie said, and Alesha and my sister began to giggle. Sammy fiddled with the TV remote but couldn’t get it to work. “Sometimes I think that guy’s got a screw loose,” he said, and again the women resumed giggling. I got red with anger, and without thinking I said, “I guess that explains why I want to fuck him so bad.” Then the room got silent and I told my sister I was going to wait in the car until the party was over.

  From the backseat of the car, I could just barely see them through the living room window, Henry pretending to ride a bicycle while the others watched with confused looks on their faces. Exasperated, Henry pedaled even harder. I thought about throwing a rock through the window but the desire passed and it was just me in the car, the windows rolled down, too hot for much of anything. And then something hit me in the face, just above my left eye, and I fell back against the seat and moaned, low and heavy, like I’d been kicked in the gut. I’d been kicked in the gut before and it was the exact same sound I’d made then. I looked down and there was a piece of ice in my lap, and then there was Wage’s face just outside the car door. “I got you,” he said, smiling.

  A half inch lower and I’d be blind in that eye, but I grabbed his shirt and pulled him into the car. We made out for a few seconds, his feet hanging out the window, and then he said he had to go. “Julie thinks I’m getting some more coffee,” he said, and I told him that Julie was a fucking moron. “She’s not so bad,” he said. He straightened his clothes, stepped out of the car, and walked back inside the house. I watched the living room window until I saw him standing in front of the rest of the group, his turn to play, pretending to be a robot or maybe someone with stiff joints. My sister shouted something and then she and Sammy exchanged high fives. I got out of the car, ran into the backyard, and knelt over one of the buckets of ice. I jammed my hands as deep as they would go, the ice numbing my skin, and I stayed like that, hidden in the shadows, until I couldn’t feel my hands at all.

  Back in the car, the night over and everyone going home, my sister turned around in her seat and said, “You probably know this already, but you can’t go out with us anymore. And you better not do anything to Wage.” I didn’t say anything and the rest of the car ride was silent until Sammy said, “If you and Wage had a baby, it would explode the minute it was exposed to air.” My sister shushed him, but after a few more seconds of silence, she started to giggle.

  Three days later, I got an e-mail from Wage. The subject line read Ice, Ice, Baby and the e-mail was short and to the point. “Meet me at the kids’ park across from the library. Tonight. 9:30 P.M. I’ll be hard to see because I’ll be wearing all black but I’ll be there, and if you come, I’ll be happy.”

  At dinner, my hands shaking from the anticipation, my sister asked if
I’d found a job yet, and I told her that I had not. “You should try harder,” Sammy said. “There aren’t enough cash register jobs in this town,” I said. My sister then spread out four different job applications from places like the Beauty Barn and the Sharp Shopper. “Sammy and I talked about this,” she said. “By next week, you need to have a job.” Sammy nodded and then looked at me, the first time all night, and said, “Don’t tell them you got fired from your last job for stealing.” I poured out the rest of my iced tea over his mashed potatoes and left the table with the applications in hand. “I didn’t get fired for stealing,” I said. “I got fired for not telling them that I was stealing.”

  I put on a black T-shirt and walked along the empty sidewalk, everyone’s house on the block lit up with the glow from TV screens. As I walked past each house, I pressed an imaginary button with my thumb and pretended that everyone inside the house was now dead. I did that until I got bored, which was longer than I had anticipated, and then I was at the park. I didn’t see Wage, which was to be expected. I imagined that Wage was the kind of person who put a lot of effort into hiding, so I walked over to a swing and sat down, my feet tracing designs in the dirt.

  I heard something shift in the bushes behind me and then there was Wage’s voice, whispering, “No joke, this is going to be painful.” I turned around and he was holding two bags of ice, bright and sweating in the darkness. “Good,” I said.

  He dropped one of the bags of ice and then sprinted across the park into the shadows, and I tore open the bag and filled my pockets with ice. A shard winged past my face into the grass, and I tossed a handful of ice in what I believed was his direction. It was so satisfying, the way the ice moved through the air, and how each piece seemed like the physical embodiment of a wish that I was making, hoping that it would connect with Wage and knock him silly. I saw him roll in the grass and then run toward the merry-go-round, and I side-armed a piece of ice. It smacked against his arm and I heard him mutter, “Shit!” I ran back to the bag of ice and reloaded, confident in my aim. I hit him three more times, once in the mouth, the satisfying sound of it clacking against his teeth, and he bounced a piece of ice off my ear, which made me dizzy and nauseated. When the ice had been exhausted, melted into the earth, no trace of our having ever been there, we made out in the bushes, the tips of our fingers like a dead person’s, our skin tender and angry. I managed to get his pants down, and though it was thrilling, it wasn’t as good as the ice fight. Once it was over, we sheepishly crawled out of the bushes, brushed ourselves off, and sat on either end of a seesaw. We talked in low whispers to avoid detection.

  “If a cop comes by,” Wage said, “tell him that you just found out you were pregnant and we’re trying to decide what to do about it.” I decided that Wage was smarter than anyone gave him credit for and I felt smarter for having discovered this.

  “I have to get a job,” I said. “I want to keep seeing you,” he said. We agreed that I would get a job and we would keep seeing each other. He got off the seesaw without warning and I slammed onto the ground. He ran over to me and asked if it hurt and I said that it did not hurt as much as I wanted it to. We made out again, my mouth swollen and tingling, and then we walked away in opposite directions. As I passed by the same houses I had passed before, I pushed an imaginary button that brought everyone inside back to life.

  I got a job at the Dixie Freeze, making cones and handling change. I loved the sound of the register making decisions, and I wondered if it was embarrassing to admit that you enjoyed working retail. People don’t want you; they want the thing that you’re holding, and that makes things so much easier.

  I met up with Wage three or four nights a week, different locations, bags of ice weighing him down. We’d throw out our arms and make anonymous bruises on our bodies and then we’d find some hidden place to put ourselves together.

  “How can you get away at night?” I asked. “Doesn’t Julie get suspicious?” He kept touching my hair, pulling his fingers through it, which normally I don’t like but it was okay with him. “We sleep in different rooms,” he said. “I go out my window and she doesn’t even know I’m gone.”

  “You sleep in different rooms?” I said.

  “I talk in my sleep,” he said, not really paying attention to the conversation. “It freaks Julie out.”

  One night, hiding up in the branches of a tree, dogs circling suspiciously beneath us, Wage asked me to tell him something strange. “It doesn’t matter what,” he said. “Just something that you don’t tell other people.” My legs were going numb from being in one position for so long, but I ignored it and tried to think of what I should tell him.

  “When I was a sophomore in high school,” I finally said, “I got invited by some big-shot senior to go to prom. My sister was a senior and she didn’t get asked so it was kind of weird for the whole week leading up to it. That night, I got really drunk and got into a fight with the guy, who was an idiot, and so I just came home and everybody was already asleep and the house was dead quiet. I went into the room that my sister and I shared and I could tell she was awake, but she wouldn’t say anything. I put my hands under her shirt and I was trying to kiss her and she told me to go to bed. And I don’t know why, but I wouldn’t stop. I was trying to kiss her and she kept turning her head away, until finally I got into my bed and went to sleep. The next day, she didn’t say a word about it, and I thought maybe I had dreamed it all. And I’m still not exactly sure if it really happened. When my sister is on her deathbed, I’m going to ask her about it and maybe then I’ll finally find out.”

  “You tried to kiss your sister?” he asked, and I nodded.

  “I tried to kiss your sister, too,” he said, as if it was confusing to him that we had both done something similar.

  “When?” I asked, genuinely intrigued, the idea of his mouth against my sister’s.

  “Some party at Eddie’s house, I think,” he said. “We were in the kitchen and it was late and I tried to kiss her and she giggled and pushed me away.”

  “Are you sure that it really happened?”

  “Yeah, because she told Sammy about it and he told me that he would kick the shit out of me if I tried it again.”

  We threw acorns at the dogs below us until they scattered, and then we went our separate ways.

  ***

  Of course, everyone in town found out about us and everyone in town hated us and everyone in town hated me a little more than they hated Wage. That’s the way it works, I guess. At dinner with my sister and Sammy, there was nothing but the clanging of silverware against plates.

  “What?” I finally said. “Did you not expect this?” My sister shook her head. “You steal everything,” she said. “You just take things and it doesn’t matter if you really want them. You just take them to see what it feels like in your hands.” She pushed away from the table and walked off. I looked at Sammy, who was focused on his food.

  “Wage tried to kiss her, you know,” I told him, and he nodded. “I know,” he said. “So you’re not his first choice.” He finished his meal and walked away from the table, and, with a wide motion of my arms, I swept all the dishes onto the floor, the glass and ceramic shattering and splintering at my feet. I waited for someone to come running into the room, to see the mess I had made, but no one came. I figured it was time that I found somewhere else to live.

  Julie made Wage move out and so he got a tiny apartment in the town square. I grabbed my computer and one of the fans and walked awkwardly through town until I was at his door. Suddenly, we were together and there was no point in meeting in the middle of the night in public places.

  I made cones and took people’s money and Wage stayed at the apartment and typed on his computer. It turns out he wrote original content for some website about electronic gadgets. It turns out they paid him a lot of money to do this. “I could buy a lot of things that I don’t need,” he said. We bought bags of ice and left tiny dents in the walls of the apartment, pools of water on the floor.
My arm was nearly paralyzed from throwing and Wage had chipped a tooth that he did not bother to fix. When we went outside, we carried ice in our pockets, which melted and left our pants embarrassingly damp, though we did not care. We took a clock radio apart and made it look like a bomb and left it in front of the county courthouse. The next day, we checked the newspapers and there was no mention of it. We began to get the impression that people, if asked, did not take us seriously.

  On my days off, Wage got irritated with me, sitting in front of my fan, wishing I had a joint to smoke. “You breathe so loud,” he said. “It’s distracting. Julie did not breathe at all when we were together.” I told him that this was impossible and he said, “It sounds impossible when I say it out loud, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.” He took his computer into the closet and shut the door behind him.

  In bed, after we had fucked and we finally fell asleep, Wage made tiny yelps, without interruption, for the entire night. It sounded like he was being bitten by small animals in his dreams, and I found that I could not sleep beside him without imagining that, in his dreams, it was me who was biting him.

  “I thought you said you talked in your sleep,” I asked him in the morning.

  “I do,” he said. I asked him what language he thought those sounds were, and he said, “A language that you do not understand.” For a split second, I thought about kicking him in the gut and leaving him on the floor, but then I realized I had nowhere else to go. Instead, I bent his finger back at an awkward angle and, as he yelped in pain, I kissed him with so much force that our teeth clacked together. I felt him get hard at the same time that his legs turned to rubber. “Do you understand that?” I asked. He smiled and then nodded. “Yes,” he answered, “I understand.”