she still kept her heart divided for that jack-off in the Lennon shirt. But now, of course, he was hardly in a position to criticize her.
He stood up and stretched, feeling the shock of cold air against his stomach, the pleasing shiver along his spine as his muscles relaxed. He could use a shower himself, and would probably get around to it before the night was over, but he knew Judy wouldn’t care one way or the other. If anything she seemed to prefer him like this: nostrils flaring, tongue tracing his collarbone, it had some kind of feral draw for her. Inevitably she would press her face against his belly and, shoulders curling as she inhaled, proceed to tell him that he smelled amazing before promptly demonstrating that she wasn’t just saying it to be polite.
Through the kitchen wall behind him, he heard the whistle of the sink turning on and off: Judy rinsing out her wineglass. He pressed each fist against the opposite hand, cracking his knuckles, and then headed in through the back door, where the decorous click of the latch was lost in her warm
15
The chirping of birds outside the window told Zach it was nearly morning. He lay beneath Judy’s duvet with his hands folded beneath his head, eyes focused on the slant of light from the streetlight that played against the ceiling. Beside him Judy breathed the slow rhythm of deep sleep, but Zach had lain awake every moment of the long night, occasionally drifting into a state of uneasy exhaustion that was not the least bit restful.
Someone could come home. He couldn’t shake the feeling. Scott and Tally could have a fight; Russ, who never seemed to communicate with Judy anyway, could return early from Sweden or wherever he was. Whenever he managed to talk himself down from such concerns, other thoughts, some even more insidious than getting caught, crept into his mind.
Booger, for example. He pictured the guy’s skinny pale legs, the way his arrogant gaze rested on Zach when he entered his mother’s classroom, his narrow cyclist’s hips in his snug black exercise pants. Everything about him—his manner, his looks, his simpering New-Age-i-ness—was repellent. Had Zach hated all of those things before Booger made his appearance, or did he hate them all because they were aspects of Booger? Whichever it was, he couldn’t help but imagine all the things Scott would despise about him, for the same reason, if he knew. Zach would become the measure of repulsiveness, fitted into the same category of Scott’s mind where Booger now resided in Zach’s.
He listened to the twitter of the birds and sighed quietly. The dawn chorus—a poetic name for a truly obnoxious phenomenon. He gave up on sleep and softly pushed back the duvet, moving slowly so as not to wake Judy.
She rolled over anyway, regarding him with eyes that were large and suddenly bright in the dark room. “You’re getting up already?”
“I can’t sleep.” He pulled on his jeans and immediately felt a measure of relief. He was dressed now, more or less. That in itself was absolving.
“There are muffins in the kitchen.”
“I’m all right. I’ll eat when I get home.”
“Are you leaving already?” Her voice was skeptical. “I’ll drive you home if you give me a few minutes to wake up.”
His laugh was short and abrupt. “I don’t think I want my folks looking out the window and seeing that.”
“They won’t be up at this hour, will they?”
“I’ll walk. It’s cool.”
She sat up, leaning on one arm. In the darkness she looked incredibly young. The shadowy light smoothed the fine lines of her face, catching in the whites of her eyes and the rounded edges of her teeth, giving her a doe-eyed, vulnerable look; her disheveled hair looked thoroughly black, unlaced with silver. Perhaps it was her nightclothes that sealed the effect: she wore an old T-shirt and, beneath the duvet, flannel-print pajama pants, like any girl his age. She was so damned
She asked, “Will you do something for me before you go?”
He lifted his shirt from the floor and looked at her with nervous impatience. His mouth felt cottony, his stomach empty, and, lacking new contacts or anything with which to clean the old ones, his eyes stung with dryness and fatigue. Most of all, he needed space. He felt a little ill with the gluttony of the previous night, a little dizzy and overindulged. It was not unlike gorging yourself on a giant ice cream sundae: past a certain point, you sort of felt like you wanted to puke.
But before he could utter a curt response she asked, “Would you fill up the Volvo for me?”
He smiled in confusion. “Your car?”
“Yeah. It’s nearly out of gas, and Russ won’t be back for days yet. I could ask Scott, but you know how he is.”
“Is there some reason you don’t do it yourself?”
She shrugged. “The smell bothers me, that’s all.”
“No problem,” he replied, and he meant it. He stuffed his feet into his sneakers, fished her car keys and a twenty-dollar bill from her purse, and slipped out of the dark house into the damp morning air.
It felt good to be behind the wheel, with the cool wind rushing through the open windows and the radio, for once, set to a station he actually liked. At the gas station he filled the tank and browsed the mini-mart for necessities: a cold bottle of green tea, eye drops, and a breakfast of an apple and a bag of almonds, the only non- objectionable snack foods available. With most of Judy’s twenty gone, he climbed back into the car and signaled his turn onto Crescent Road.
The town was still sleeping. Rising up along the road were the whitewashed cinder-block apartment buildings, the small postwar town houses, that marked off the hamlet of Sylvania from the sprawling prefab buildings of the larger suburbs. A banner hung above the road announced a community art contest. Past the low-slung Catholic church—in whose shadowed lot he often met Judy in the evenings—lay Hauschen Lake, glittering darkly beyond the pines. He followed the uphill curve until he saw the sign for Judy’s street, and then, on impulse, turned his gaze toward the top of the hill and hit the gas.
The road crested, then expanded toward a highway whizzing with cars. Even at this early hour the delivery trucks raced along, the poor suckers with inflexible jobs tolerated their commute, and Zach joined them. He drove
