It takes her seconds to speak and in that stretch, I know it's true. “That's not the way it was, Ryan. It's just the spin she wants to put on it.” Lori reaches for me, but I jerk away.
“Was I your first?” I'm shouting. “I assumed I was your first!”
She goes quiet and the look on her face tells me everything. “But you're the one I love.”
“I was just a lay, wasn't I? Just a f—”
She puts her hand over my mouth. “Don't say it. Don't make it dirty. I love you.”
I break away. “I've been stupid. Why did I believe you?”
I turn, but she grabs me. “Don't leave. I need you.”
“Tell me about the others. I want to know about all the others.”
She's crying and she picks up the big chopping knife and begins to chop carrots furiously, attacking them as if they're an enemy. “No others. Just one. A boy who needed me. His parents were destroying him, pressuring him to be someone they wanted him to be and not who he was. He was so needy.”
I can't believe what I'm hearing. “So you were helping him?”
“Don't you get the difference? He needed me, but I need you!”
My head's spinning, and the walls seem to be closing in on me. Women in my life have been my friends' mothers, or teachers, or Dad's girlfriends, or neighbors. I don't know how they behave or think. Lori's the only woman who's shown an interest in me. I feel trapped and confused. “I've got to get out of here,” I say.
“You can't go. Don't leave me.”
A pounding on the front door makes us both jump. “Lori Settles, please open the door. This is the police.”
Lori clutches my arm. She looks like a cornered animal. My heart's pounding like a jackhammer. On the stove the boiling pot throws moisture onto the burner and it sizzles. Hot steam hits the cool air.
“Open up.” The command comes again through the door.
I unlatch Lori's fingers from my arm and back away. There's only one way out and that's through the door. I head for it, hear a cry and then the clatter of something hitting the floor behind me. I spin and see Lori bent over, the big chopping knife on the tile, and blood gushing down her wrist and hand. I shout, “No!” and grab her before she drops to the floor. “What are you doing?”
She folds over like a broken doll while I'm holding her. We slide down together and I hug her against my body while her blood gushes and the pounding on the door grows frantic. I lift her arm upward, watch her blood pour in a steady stream of red.
I'm crying, “Stop! Stop!” as if I can stem the flow by words alone. My back is braced against the refrigerator, and I feel a dishtowel hanging from the handle. I snatch the cloth and wrap it tight around her wrist, too tight, because she cries in pain and keeps begging over and over, “Let me die, Ryan! Please let me die!” and then the front door splinters open and people come through the kitchen doorway like roaches and I say to Lori, “You can't die! Not like this. Not the way my mother did it.”
Ryan
“Fallout.” It's a word used to describe the aftereffects of a nuclear event. The perfect word to describe the aftermath of me and Lori. Most of that afternoon is a blur—a fast-forwarded DVD where people move like speeded-up robots. I recall cops, paramedics, nosey neighbors, an ambulance at Lori's complex. I remember someone peeling me off her, putting her on a stretcher and rolling her away. I remember her blood soaked into my jeans and shirt. I remember some social-service woman taking me into custody and waiting for my father, and him catching the first available plane and showing up at the police station and taking me home, and having to see the events revisited on the evening news and only then learning that Lori had been treated for her injury in the ER, released and taken to jail.
Some of the fallout was explosive, like my dad getting in my face once he knew I was safe, shouting questions and accusations at me. “An affair with your teacher? My God, Ryan, what were you thinking?”
“It wasn't like that. We loved each other.”
“Love! You're a kid! What could she see in you? You're just a kid!”
That went all over me. “She didn't think so.”
“Are you that deluded? Where is your brain? Don't answer!” he roared. “At sixteen, your brain's in your pants. That's what she liked about you. She's sick. She's perverted. A child molester. I'll see to it that she goes to jail for the rest of her life.”
I go berserk when he says that. I call him names and he yanks me off the sofa and shoves me toward my room, where I sit, cut off from everybody and every form of communication—no cell phone, no computer, no friends, even no school for a week. My father says I need help. What does he know? I can't go out of the house because reporters are hanging around. I can't watch TV without seeing and hearing talking heads commenting on Lori and her “boy lover.” I almost go stir-crazy. But it gives me time to think.
I think about Lori, about her all alone in jail and being vilified by the news media and hated by everyone. I miss her body. I wanted her from the start. What a difference she made in my life, and I am not sorry I was with her. I think how much I want things back the way they used to be. I think about the other guy, too. Who was he? And did she really not love him the way she said she loves me?
I think about my mother. I go through old photos, wondering why she did what she did. When I was twelve, Aunt Debbie came for a short visit and I begged her to tell me how my mother “did it.” I'd been curious about her suicide for years, and Dad would only say, “You were just a little guy. No need to hear the details.”
Aunt Debbie said, “You should ask your father.”
“He won't talk about it. He tells me nothing.”
“I told Bill years ago that he should tell you everything.”
“But he hasn't. Aunt Debbie, please. I have to know.”
“Jane was troubled and unhappy. I could never figure why. She had people who loved her, a nice home, a good husband, a lovely son. In the end it wasn't enough. She left you with a good neighbor one afternoon, went home, locked the bathroom door, drew a bath and got into the tub. She slit her wrists and bled out into the water. Your father found her dead when he got home that afternoon, and she left no note. We'll never know why she did it.”
I flip through the old pictures. My mother was pretty, but her eyes look sad in every photo. How unhappy does a person have to be to kill herself? She didn't love me enough to stick around. What kind of mother leaves her two-year-old to grow up without her?
When, in another fight with Dad, I compare what Lori and Mom did, he loses it. He insists that Lori cut herself for dramatic effect and to get sympathy, but when I ask how that's different from what Mom did, he says, “Don't ever compare your mother with that slut,” and balls up his fists. For a second I think he's going to slug me, but he leaves the room and slams the door.
The other thing I think about is how Dexter got hold of my private e-mails. Someone gave them to her, but who? Lori and I were careful. I kept my mouth shut to everybody, even Joel, who's so wrapped up with Jess that he hardly knows right from left, proving to me that he's not getting any sex. When a guy's not into full-time thinking about getting his rocks off, he concentrates on other things. I did. Pulled up my low grades in six weeks because Lori quenched the fire inside me that never goes away. When we were climbing into the sack regularly, it became a controlled blaze. I wish we could do it again right now.
Maybe Coach Mathers found out. No secret that he wanted Lori all to himself, so maybe he outed us. But I discard that idea because he has no access to my computer.
So I spend long stretches of time alone, turning the question over in my mind, looking at it from every angle. In the end, I come down to one conclusion. There's only one person who could have discovered the truth about me and Lori. Only one. Honey Fowler. Something was different about her after the dance. She wasn't the same. I can't figure out why she did it, though. That's the mystery that's driving me nuts.
Honey
