Davey drives a little bit like he behaves: erratic, but safe. He doesn’t listen to a single band I’ve ever heard of.
“Tell me about where we’re going,” I say.
He counters. “Tell me about Woods.”
I turn down the music. “I can talk eloquently about pine, oaks, sometimes birch. They’re harder. I confuse them with sycamores.”
He flicks my thigh.
“What do you want to know?” I ask.
“Everything.”
I tell him everything he’s missed in the last seventeen years. Stunts, history, fake weddings, other items we’ve set on fire. Forty minutes later, he says, “You didn’t say the real thing.”
I raise my sunglasses. “Which is?”
“You’ve got some serious attraction going on.” He’s fishing, but he’s nearly sure of himself.
I can’t give myself away. “Maybe I don’t.”
He pokes the bear. “Maybe you’re a liar?”
The bear pokes back. “Maybe I never lie.”
“Maybe you only lie to yourself.”
I guess while I was studying him, he was studying me. I turn the radio back to full blast until Batman is in the sky in Nashville. (The Batman Building: that’s what Davey calls the skyscraper that looks like a superhero.) The Cumberland River snakes beneath lit bridges through downtown. Traffic sucks. I roll the window down and listen to the sheer noise of the city: cars, horns, sirens, construction.
“Things at church going to be okay?” he asks when he passes a fire truck.
“They’re bleak,” I tell Davey.
“You feel guilty.”
He’s not asking, so I don’t bother nodding. I don’t destroy things; I repurpose them. Even tiny little things that other people throw out—paper clips and pennies and confetti. So I would never destroy a church on purpose. The church is a symbol of faith, Jesus, my principles. I don’t pretend that trio works for everyone, but I never ever meant to crap where I eat.
If I’d known what the fallout would be for Dad—the newspaper, the subsequent deacon meetings, the anger—I’d have erased Einstein.
We arrive outside a coffee shop east of the river, and Davey explains what we’re about to do. Essentially, we’re joining a “private” club—a contingent of acquaintances from two schools: one all-girls, one all-boys. From his description, I determine that this academy of his is either the Hogwarts of Nashville or a rip-off Dead Poets Society. I also determine that his father must be filthy rich and that Otters Holt is a few notches down the economic ladder. Hello, modified Camaro. Hello, rich-people activities like raising cheetahs or some crazy shit like that. Hello, Davey’s friends.
The Audi is in the parking lot.
“Audi Thomas,” I say.
“You plan to call him that?”
“Well, yeah. I don’t know anyone else who drives an Audi.”
“You don’t know any other Thomases.”
“I’m still going to call him Audi Thomas.”
“I wouldn’t. He hates that car.”
“No one in their right mind hates a black, gorgeous thing that goes zero to sixty in four seconds.” I looked up the specs the weekend of the funeral. Price too. New: $162,900.
“Okay, Thomas hates when people make assumptions about him based on the car.”
“Audi Thomas,” I correct, unwilling to bend. “If you own a car that costs more than the church parsonage, that car goes before your name.”
Despite, or perhaps because of, my insults, Davey says, “He’s going to like you a lot.”
“We carried a casket together. We already bonded.”
The casket comment lands like a plane with a flat front tire. He breathes, I breathe, we skip ahead to who else will be in attendance. Davey reels off a list and concludes with, “Plus, Gerry. She’s your people for sure.”
My people. It’ll be interesting to crosscheck his perceptions.
I don’t have to wait. A girl clad in leather, fishnets, boots similar to mine, and a generous portion of sexy smacks the hood and growls at us. “Gerry,” Davey says.
Gerry opens the driver’s side door, and Davey slides his seat back. A good choice, because she hurls herself sideways onto his lap, loosens his tie, and says, “Holy hell, David Winters, I’ve missed you. When are you moving home?”
Then she puts her lips to his lips with a big mwah. She’s my people? Holy hell, indeed.
Gerry has hair the color of the Green Goblin, and if it’s spray-in, it’s damn convincing. I’m guessing she cut it herself . . . with kindergarten scissors. There’s a quirky upside-down-triangle tattoo behind her ear and six piercings in her cartilage. I barely have time to count them because she says, “Your turn, David’s friend.” She tugs my shirt, and we’re ChapStick to ChapStick. It’s not just a mwah. I have time to think I’m kissing a girl. I’ve never kissed a girl before.
So here’s a surprise: I kiss her back. Because . . . well, she’s so present. So alive. So magnanimous. And when she is kissing me, all the death of the last week disappears.
“Hi,” I say, and wipe my tingling lips.
“Oh, I like her.” Gerry pops Davey on the arm. “Your girl passes the test.”
I’d like to see what happens when she meets Janie Lee. If Janie Lee also “passes the test.”
Davey twists his smile sideways and arches an eyebrow. “One of these days you’re going to get socked.”
She doesn’t disagree. She checks me out, lingers on my boots, and then she says to Davey, “You said she was beautiful, but you didn’t say she was hot.”
Gerry’s words catch me woefully off guard. Beautiful? Hot? I’ve been called many things. Among them dyke and bulldagger (when my hair was very, very short), tomboy, and hoyden (that’s a favorite of the volleyball team). Someone once asked me if I was trying to be Angelina Jolie in her Billy Bob Thornton years. I still have no idea what that means, but it doesn’t sound good. Right now, I’m dressed as a dude. So there’s that.
“Thank you,” I manage.
“This fluid thing you have going is a thing of substance.” She smiles at me. Her mouth opens so wide I could stuff an entire state in there.
I don’t know her well enough to make a tombstone, but I do it anyway. The perks of having your tongue in a stranger’s mouth. Gerry. b. ?—d. probably never. Here Lies Gerry: People followed her to Mars. Tombstones aren’t about death. They’re about legacy. I shouldn’t care what people think, but it’s hard to avoid that someone else gets the last word. I try to live in such a way that I predetermine those words. I get the sneaky suspicion that Gerry does too.
“Also, your hair is longer, Davey,” she tells him as if he has not looked in a mirror since he moved.
“Like it?”