The loop, p.5
The Loop, page 5
Bucket complied, and Brewer made an exaggerated series of explosive noises with his mouth. “That turned into a super-bomb, Buckwild. You can’t let it build like that.”
Lucy laughed again, and it felt like something lifting from her chest. She wasn’t sure if Brewer was dumb or bugging out for kicks, but she liked the way he didn’t seem to care about anything too much. He seemed free in a way she wished she could be.
Lucy noticed that Bucket was wearing the cologne his parents got him last Christmas. How much had he put on? The smell filled the cab of the truck, mixing with the odor of stale beer and that locker room musk she noticed whenever a couple of boys were in a closed space together. She had yet to decide if that was a good or bad smell, though sometimes it stirred something in her. She cracked the small tinted window to her right and leaned toward the cool desert air.
Then she caught Brewer looking at her in his rearview. She could see both of his eyes for once, with the wind blowing his hair out of his face. They held eye contact for longer than she thought appropriate, given that he was on the highway now and it felt like they were going way above the speed limit.
Brewer said, “Fresh air, huh? Is it Bucket’s kitty-cat cologne or my nuts?”
“What?”
“I helped my cousin work on the pond at the Brubakers’ farm, and I wore jeans like a dummy. Felt like I had swamp crotch all day, but when I got home I was so tired I napped instead of taking a shower. Honestly, I didn’t think you’d come out, you know? Thought it’d only be me and Bucket and my mushies.”
“So?”
“I don’t know. I feel fine being filthy around dudes, but now that you’re here I feel kind of weird. I mean, I can smell my junk from here. It ain’t pretty.”
“No. It’s not that.” She was going to say it was Bucket’s cologne—the way it smelled a little like the spray they use to cover up the smell of pee at an old folks’ home—but she stayed true to their friend code: they ribbed each other mercilessly when it was only the two of them, but never when there was a third person around. She wouldn’t sell him out. “I like the fresh air, that’s all.”
“Oh, cool. Me too. Sometimes I even crack my bedroom window during the winter.”
Lucy did the same, but she said nothing back. She noticed Bucket’s shoulders hunching, and she imagined he was realizing he’d been used as a conduit and was quickly being third-wheeled. She decided to bring him back into the conversation.
“Hey, Bucket.”
“Yeah?”
“You bring anything for the party?”
“Not really. I tried to call Tricia Howard so she could pick me up some beer, but my phone’s shot. I rolled a joint using some crumbled-up schwag I stole from my parents’ closet, but I don’t have high hopes for it. The weed was really dry.”
Brewer chimed in, using a cartoony voice. “How dry was it?”
Bucket had blown the fist bump. Lucy saw his face brighten at this new attempt to amuse Brewer. Bucket said, “As dry as Tina Plumber’s second pussy.”
The joke landed with Brewer, who snorted and shook his head. “Man, she is mighty confused, though.”
Lucy wasn’t fond of how boys talked about other girls in front of her—either they said demeaning shit as if she weren’t there at all, or they recognized she was there and said really demeaning shit. Despite that, she was curious. Did Tina really have a second vagina? And if so, how reduced was her own social standing that she hadn’t heard about it yet?
“What are you monkeys laughing about? Does Tina really have—”
“Oh no. It’s gross, Lucy.”
“Grosser than your swampy nuts?” She’d actually liked that he’d been so open about his body. She sensed that came from a place of confidence; he hadn’t said it in the way that some boys would say disgusting things to her in an attempt to shock, or to let her know how little her opinion of them mattered.
Bucket chimed in, “Lucy’s okay with gross. I showed her Guacamole Party on my phone once and she didn’t even flinch.”
Lucy hadn’t flinched—she had yet to back down from an internet challenge—but she did cry for the girl in the video that night. Never told Bucket, though. He often told her he liked that she was “one of the guys,” and she didn’t want to let him down.
“Guacamole Party? Seriously?” said Brewer. “I don’t even like to think about that one. In fact, I’m kind of pissed you reminded me of it. So nasty.”
“Wait,” said Lucy, “is Tina’s thing that bad?”
“Oh, not at all. Just that it might be… Listen, you know how people were saying that I smoked crack out of a light bulb at Ada Keizer’s birthday party?”
“Yeah.”
“But that was total Grade-A bullshit, and it got around so fast that two days later my cousin was asking me about it. So sometimes I feel like it’s shitty to go spreading stories you aren’t a hundred percent sure on.”
They were much closer to the East Bear Caves. They’d gone past the range of the city’s streetlights. Without any moon overhead, Brewer’s headlights were the only thing illuminating the road as it rolled beneath them. Lucy thought about what Brewer had said. She’d heard a ton about him, and his cousin Rodney, and how their whole clan lived in a manufactured home compound out past Westerhaus. They were meth cooks, they were burglars, they were junkies, they bred dogs for fighting. Brewer smoked crack.
How much of any of that was true?
Lucy knew Brewer pulled good grades, when he bothered to show. She’d heard his name on the honor roll during morning announcements and didn’t quite believe it until she heard it again the next quarter. She wondered what he was really like. She wondered what lies he’d heard about her. She said, “You don’t have to talk about it, then.”
“Well, now it’s built up, though, isn’t it? And besides, I heard it straight from Ben, and Tina’s got that crazy in her eyes, so I think we can file this one under ‘Maybe.’ ”
“Soooooooo?”
“You know how Tina is an Eastsider? Well, they were doing one of their megachurch events, like some boy-band concert. Lambs on Fire, I think, which is actually a totally metal name. Anyway, she goes to this concert, and at the end they have this come-to-Jesus kind of thing on the stage where you can make a ‘Purity Pledge.’ So she does that, gives her heart to Jesus, says she’ll save her virginity for some schmuck who won’t even know if she’s good in bed until they’re married.”
“Oh no.”
“Yeah. You see where this is going. Well, she was dating Ben Brumke at the time, and he’s an Eastsider too, but only because his parents go. So he’s there every Sunday, and Tina saw him there and figured he’d be a safe guy to date.”
Lucy remembered the time Ben Brumke walked by her locker and said, “If you forgot your lunch, then I have something you can eat,” and then started making nasty wet throat-gagging noises.
“Tina miscalculated.”
“Yeah, you could say that. So Brumke keeps pushing and after a month Tina tells him that she can’t give up her virginity, that’s holy territory, but she’d been messaging some other Christian girls online and she had something else for him.”
“The butt!” said Bucket, appearing to relish this part of the story in a way that gave Lucy pause—there were clearly thoughts Bucket had about women in general that he never shared with her.
“Yup. The butt. Which always seemed kind of crazy, to me at least. I always saw that as a bonus level. That’s not the default game. Like, you have to beat all the bosses and collect all the stars or rings or whatever, definitely do a bunch of oral, and then maybe you get to the butt. But here goes Tina, throwing it out there like a level-one mid-boss. So of course Ben goes for it, starts thumping away. He said that she kept her hands clasped in front of her face the whole time, like she was praying, and toward the end he said she was crying. And then afterward they’re lying there, and she’s still crying a little bit and she looks at Ben with this weird face and she says, ‘I can’t believe you love me so much that you’re willing to wait. But I swear you can have the rest of me once we’re married.’ ”
“Nooooo.” Lucy didn’t know what she was more amazing—that Tina lived so far outside of our accepted reality, or that anyone would consider marrying an ape like Ben Brumke.
“Yeah. Makes me a little sad. You can kind of picture her eyes all misty, that room smelling like ass and big, sweaty Ben, and she’s hearing wedding bells and thinking something special has happened. She invited him to come to dinner—with her parents—at the Beef N’ Brew the next night. So of course Ben dumped her. Sent her a text that night saying that he’d thought she was a good Christian girl and that after what happened he didn’t think he could see her again. Then she texted back saying she didn’t understand and he sent back, like, a prayer-hands emoji and a message saying, ‘I’ll pray for you.’ ”
Bucket laughed. Lucy cuffed the back of his head.
“What?”
“You know what. Ben’s an asshole.”
“Yeah, but… the prayer hands. It’s kind of funny.”
Brewer said, “Ben sure thought it was funny. But you could also tell he was shook up over it. I mean, with a girl that confused or crazy or whatever, how far is it in her head from This is the man I’m gonna marry to This is the man I’m gonna stab to death?”
Lucy rolled her eyes on instinct. “That’s bullshit, dude. Why is it that every time a girl has strong emotions, you guys say she’s crazy?”
“How it feels, I guess. Besides, when a girl wants to marry you because you guys did some butt stuff, and that happened because she was afraid of the wrath of an imaginary sky dude, that’s actually crazy. Like fucking bonkers.”
Bucket said, “Yeah. That’s coconuts.” He leaned back toward Lucy. “No need to get all crazy about it.”
“Har har, dude.”
“Oh, shit!” Brewer said. “I just remembered the weirdest part about that story. So after Ben’s done talking about Tina and the laughter cooled off, there’s one of those lulls, you know, where the whole table is quiet all of a sudden and you can feel it, and then Jason Ward leaned across the table and looked Ben in the eyes and asked him, ‘How much did she cry?’ And at first I thought he was joking, but then I looked at his face and I realized he was very serious and very interested. Like, he needed to know how much Tina cried.”
Lucy shivered. Something had always seemed a little off about Jason. The only time she’d ever seen him have any kind of facial expression was when Luke Olsen and Dale Rupp got in a fight. There was Jason, standing on the periphery, rocking on his feet and smiling.
“So we all got the heebie-jeebies from Jason’s question, and I think Ben made some dumb joke to try to brush it all off, to make it about him and his anal conquest again. But guess who’s going out three days later?”
“Jason and Tina?” Lucy had found that answers that caused a dull ache in the pit of her stomach were usually the right ones.
“Yup. Jason and Tina. And that always creeped me out. I saw them holding hands in the commons one day, and I remember when he let go there were white prints from his fingers on her skin. Her fingers were all screwy, and her hand looked crumpled, like a baby bird after it hits your window. And I remember feeling this hate for him then, this really pure sort of hate. So when I heard he was missing, I thought about that crushed hand and I thought about him wondering how much Tina cried and I felt like, Good. You know? Like, Fuck him. And I hope they never find him.”
It was the group in the truck’s turn to hit a conversational lull. Brewer’s Fuck him echoed in their heads for a moment, grating against the blasphemy of talking shit about a kid who might be endangered, or worse. Lucy couldn’t decide whether Brewer was principled or vindictive, but then she thought of all the times someone like Jason had probably been curious about how much she might cry.
“Totally,” she said. “Fuck him.”
She caught Brewer’s eyes in the rearview again. Squinting this time. Wondering about her?
Bucket said, “Hey—mile marker eighteen! We need to watch for the turnoff, right?”
Brewer switched on his brights, lighting the brush and lava rock on both shoulders. “Yup. Should be after this next curve, then past that juniper that got hit by lightning last year.”
He comes here all the time.
Lucy saw the torched tree he was talking about, a ghost in the headlights, white and bark-free at its base, rent down the middle, its jagged, blackened branches reaching skyward.
Brewer said, “Here we go. Party time, y’all,” and turned his truck onto the old dirt road to the caves. He navigated through the rocky crags and washed-out dips in the road as if from sense memory. Lucy saw drifts of dust in the headlights and felt flush with anxiety as she remembered they weren’t the only people headed this way. Things had felt so good for a moment, so simple and real, with only her and Bucket and Brewer and the night breeze. She could have talked to them all night—there was something freeing about the way they spoke together. But now it was “party time”—she imagined that she’d soon be invisible to them both, erased by whatever other urges they’d come out here to chase.
She wanted to tell Brewer to turn around, to find a way to keep driving, but she also didn’t want to seem weird.
Shit. I’m faking it again.
Lucy wondered where she might be at that exact moment if she hadn’t spent so much time trying to be the right version of herself for those around her. But before she had the time to find any kind of answer, she found herself lurching forward as Brewer’s truck came to a sudden sliding stop in soft dirt. Empty beer cans clattered over one another and fresh clouds of dust rolled away from the truck for a moment before Brewer killed the halogens and left them sitting in dark.
“Ain’t nothing to it but to do it, y’all. Let’s party this piss-poor fucking excuse for a school year into the ground.”
Bucket drummed on the dash and let loose with a halfhearted “Whoop whoop!” It had been his ironic party go-to for months.
Lucy whispered, “Fuck,” to herself, pulled the cab handle, and stepped into the cold desert night. She spotted a small fire in the distance that struggled against the wind and darkness of the moonless sky to mark the entrance to the East Bear Caves. Lucy zipped up her hoodie and shivered and felt her feet sinking into the churned-up, sandy trail leading to the party. The sounds of muffled bass and laughter and the rumble of other arriving engines sped her heart, but she kept walking forward, afraid of losing Bucket and Brewer and entering those caves all alone.
Looking straight ahead, she had forgotten all about the stars above.
chapter four CAVING
They stood near the wide mouth of the cave, a few steps short of peering over the drop. “It gets pretty dark down there. Either of you bring headlamps?” asked Brewer.
“No,” said Bucket.
“Would have been a cool thing to mention when you picked me up,” said Lucy.
“Honestly, I was shocked you decided to come. Besides, I figured y’all had been out here before.”
Lucy could count the parties she’d attended in the last year on one hand. She guessed Bucket had been to a few more, only because his incessant desire to get laid occasionally outweighed any other considerations.
“I have a light on my phone, though. That’s about all it’s good for right now anyway,” offered Bucket.
“That’ll help once you’re down there, but a headlamp’s way better when you’re clambering over the rockfalls to get to the back. Plus, there’s no extra moonlight to help tonight, which means it’s going to get pitch-black a few feet back from the fire, unless they have a rager going. Probably only pallet wood and presto logs down there, though, since this wasn’t planned and everybody’s hucking down on a lark.”
Three kids in North Face vests with bright white LED headlamps walked past Lucy, beer bottles clinking in their backpacks. They took turns climbing out of sight using the aluminum ladders that descended into the cave system. The top rung on one of the ladders was marked “Stairway to Heaven” in thick black Sharpie. The top of the other read “Property of Brundage Concrete” though part of the text was covered by a sticker that read “40 oz to Freedom.” Both ladders wobbled with each kid’s passage, shifting against the soft soil and sharp stone of the entrance, and Lucy wondered why neither was anchored to keep it from falling over backward.
Brewer patted his face with his hands. Lucy couldn’t tell if he was trying to knock a solution to their new problem out of his brain, or if he was dealing with the frustration of being saddled with two amateur-hour party pals.
“Look,” Brewer said, “Bucket can use his phone, once he’s down there at least. And then…” Brewer riffled around in the front pockets of his hoodie and pulled something out in a closed hand. “You can have this.” He gave a small black headlamp to Lucy. It smelled of sweat and his greasy hair, but Lucy was happy for anything that might keep her safe.
“Thanks.”
“No worries. Besides, in about half an hour I’m going to have fucking full-spectrum super-vision anyway. Wolf pupils. Bat hearing. Purple-green wobblies everywhere. All that.” Brewer reached into his other hoodie pocket, pulled out his Ziploc bag of mushrooms, and started mowing down the contents like they were potato chips. He grinned at Lucy and Bucket and spoke around his stuffed cheeks. “You eat ’em fast and you don’t taste the shit as much!” He lifted the bag to his mouth and tapped out whatever fungal crumbles were left in the bag. Then he pulled another crinkling bag from his rear pants pocket.
“Wait. What’s that? Are you eating more?” asked Bucket.
“Oh hell no, dude. An eighth is good for me, or I start seeing some shit that definitely doesn’t exist. Saw a giant chicken once. Huge. Golden… It was beautiful. But then I got scared. This is only some Skittles so my breath doesn’t smell like cow flop all night.” He knocked back half the bag at once. Lucy heard the candies clacking against one another, smelled synthetic fruit on the wind as he chewed. There was something about the scent that made her feel carefree, and for a moment she was excited to be out at a party, and even more excited to be around someone new. She remembered a time when she was very young in Peru and a boy she didn’t know sat down next to her and handed her a lollipop made from caramel and coconut, and how the day, like too many, had been horrible, but those moments where they’d both sat there eating candy had been perfect.
