The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
- Автор: Грейди Джеймс, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2002
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-12494-7
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2002». Краткое содержание книги:
He can’t pee while she stands in the doorway watching him, talking about them. It’s all she talks about. She hates them. “They’re always on my case.” She makes her voice whiny. “Why do you have to dress like that, Lila? Like you’re a boy. You’re such a pretty girl, Lila.” She changes her voice. “Do you like the way I dress, Anthony?” Raising her baggy sweatshirt, she flashes little apricot tits at him. “You think I look like a boy, Anthony? What do you say, Anthony? Do you think I’m a pretty girl?” She stands there and waits.
“Yeah,” he says. He can hardly hear himself. The piss comes gushing out of him. “You’re beautiful.” He feels like his feet are glued to the floor. His beeper starts going.
She lowers her T-shirt. “Forget it. Call your mama.”
She scares him, but everything scares him. He doesn’t want her to stop talking. He’s never met anyone like her before. She’s so free. She does whatever she wants to do, goes wherever she wants, says what she wants. He doesn’t understand why she complains all the time.
“... can’t imagine them having a conversation,” Lila says. “They never talk about anything real except when they’re talking about me, and even then they don’t relate to me.”
Hands shaking, he zips up. It’s after midnight and he’s skipped his last pill. Yeah, his mom’ll be on his back in a minute. Why isn’t he home? It’s a school night. And just like that his beeper goes off again. It’s going to wake her parents.
But she laughs and lies down on her bed, her arms behind her head, and stares at him. His and his mom’s whole place could fit in her bedroom. Her bed has this thing called a canopy over it. Her stupid mother’s stupid idea. He feels stupid.
She jumps up and goes, “Let’s get some beer and hang out.”
The apartment has a back door and back stairs. This is how they get out. She steers him to the lobby’s side entrance, the way they came in. The doorman is this tall jerk with no chin and a skinny mustache. Benny, she calls him. When Benny opens the door for them, he gives Anthony a wink, like he knows something.
“Go on, Anthony, what’re you waiting for?” She gives him a push. He stands on the sidewalk and looks back. She’s passing something to the jerk doorman.
It pisses him off, like she’s got something going with the asshole. Anthony wants her for himself. “You getting something on with him?” His beeper goes off. His mom gave him the beeper so she could keep track of him. No one keeps track of Lila. She wouldn’t let them.
Lila laughs at him. “Why don’t you call your mama, baby?”
Fuck, she makes him mad. He grabs her arm and she shakes him off, gives him a look like he’s a piece of shit. “Don’t you ever touch me like that,” she says, swiping him with the back of her hand. Her ring nicks him on the cheek. She goes off down the street toward the all-night grocery.
It’s only two weeks since he first saw her. He’d started hanging out in the park on his way home from school, where a lot of kids his age hung out with hippies and bikers, drinking beer and smoking weed. Sometimes he’d Rollerblade. He didn’t talk much, and pretty soon they were making fun of him because he didn’t do weed, and didn’t drink.
He was on these pills, two different ones, and he was not supposed to, not even beer, but Anthony didn’t tell them that. He didn’t go to regular public school because he got anxious attacks. But he was doing better at Harrison, where the classes were small and they didn’t keep telling him to do better.
He’d come into the park this one day and bladed up and down the trails. When he came to the bandstand, he didn’t see the usual crew, except for the two homeless men who were collecting the empty beer cans. They looked at him, then pointed down in the low valley near the lake. Getting closer, he heard the whistles and shouts. The fight was between two kids he knew who hung out. They were really smacking each other around, kicking and rolling in the grass.
“Kill him, slice him!”
Anthony looked to see where the shout came from and he saw a girl in baggy pants and a T-shirt on the path going up the hill. She lifted a can to her lips, drained it, and threw it at the fighters. It bounced off the head of the one standing over the other, who was lying on the ground.
The standing kid yelled at the girl, “Fuck you, bitch,” distracted just long enough to get an up-punch in the balls from the kid on the ground.
The girl laughed and bladed off.
“Who’s that?” Anthony asked Robert Paredes, one of the boys watching the fight.
“That’s Lila. She’s crazy, man, but she can fight. I seen her hurt another bitch bad.”
Anthony followed her hut not too close. After a while she began to look over her shoulder at him. She was crazy. She’d pass people and clip them hard, then go fast so by the time they began to yell at her she was gone. One time she stuck her foot into the spokes of a bike as the biker rode by and the bike jerked and threw the rider into the road in front of a cab. The cab stopped just in time.
Anthony heard her laughing, but he couldn’t see her. He kept going on the path, but he’d lost her. He was tired. He sat down on a bench next to a backpack someone had left. He looked around, prodded the backpack, looked around again. He stood, reached for the backpack, and started to go.
“Where you think you’re goin’ with my backpack, asshole?” She was standing in front of him, holding a can of beer. She took a long drink, then snatched her backpack from him, unzipped it, and offered him a can of beer. He stared at it, then popped it, and drank. This wild, crazy feeling came over him.
After that, he was with her. They bladed along the park paths with her yelling at people, like, “Outta my way, fuckhead,” and “When they let you out, crazy ass?” He liked to see the look on people’s faces when she did that. She had the power.
They ended up on the steps near the lake with some other kids and some old fart hippie bums with beards and long hair, and bikers, all smoking weed and drinking beer. Everyone knew Lila and looked at him differently because he was with her.
“Pass the beer,” she said. “I got weed.” She took a couple of Baggies from her backpack and flashed them. Two bags full of joints.
“We’re out,” one of the hippies said. “But how about some grass?”
She flung one Baggie up in the air and they all jumped for it, scrambling over each other.
His beeper went off.
She stashed the other Baggie in her backpack. “What’re you, a dealer or somethin’?”
He said the truth. “My mom.”
“His mom wants her baby to come home,” Lila yelled. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
He felt his face get all hot.
She laughed. “How’d you get those?”
He looked down at the scars on his wrists and back at her.
“Come on, let’s get some beer,” she said.
He followed her out of the park to a deli, where he watched her pick up two six-packs and lay down the bills. She had a lot of twenties all wadded up in her backpack.
“You been drinking?” the clerk asked.
“You talkin’ to me?” she said.
Out on the street she said to Anthony, “So I’m a drunk, so what?”
They went back to the lake and sat around smoking and drinking till he didn’t know what time it was, but it was real dark and the cops kept coming and waving their flashlights and telling them to clear out.
His mom went after him when he got home. “Whatsa matter with you? You missed your medication. Where’d you go? Why didn’t you answer your beeper?”
He wanted to say to her what Lila would say, something free, but he couldn’t get the words straight in his head, so he didn’t say anything. But he knew Lila now and he would do what he wanted like her, and there was nothing his mom could say to him anymore that would change that.