The World Outside, 3
Wisdom
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THEN
Joanna turned 15 in May of that year and planned a dinner out with Poppa, Josh, and Mary to celebrate; she invited Erik, too, it not feeling quite like a family event without him.
Josh and Erik left in Josh’s new car after dinner and went on their way to see a movie. Poppa drove Joanna and Mary, who was spending the night, first to the shopping center for snacks and videos, and then home. Josh’s car was in the driveway when they got there. “Huh,” Poppa said when he saw it. “I wonder what happened to the movie.”
“Josh?” he called when they walked inside. No answer.
The light was on in the living room, but the rest of the house was dark, and there was a distinct, repetitive mechanical sound coming from upstairs. “What on earth is that?” Poppa wondered, standing at the bottom of the steps with his head cocked to the side. Mary and Joanna gripped hands, each of them wondering whether something really dramatic was about to happen, when he let out a little laugh and turned to them. “It’s the clothes hanger,” he told them lightly.
“The clothes hanger?” Mary repeated, confused.
“The treadmill. In my room. Frankly, it gets more use as a hanging rack than anything else,” Poppa explained. “I wonder why he didn’t go to the movie.” Then, jogging up the steps with the girls close behind, he called out, “Josh?”
The rhythmic squeaks stopped, and, a moment later, Josh came out to the hallway. He’d changed into gym shorts and nothing else. His skin was sweaty, and he was breathing hard. Joanna glanced at Mary, who seemed to be frozen in place, staring at him. It would have been one of those cartoon moments when Joanna would have reached over to close her mouth, if it weren’t for the anger she saw on Josh’s face.
“Everything okay? No movie?”
“No movie,” Josh grunted, looking now at Joanna, still clearly angry.
“Where’s Erik?”
“I dropped him off. I don’t want him around here anymore, got it?” He seemed to direct this last part to Joanna specifically, though she couldn’t imagine why he would.
“What happened?” she asked him.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He shoved past them and went into his own room, slamming the door closed behind him.
“What was that all about?” Mary whispered, her eyes wide.
After a moment, Poppa cleared his throat and said, “I’m sure it’ll all blow over. Good night, girls. Don’t stay up too late—ha ha…”
Still stunned, Joanna and Mary made their way down the hall and into Joanna’s room, closing the door behind them.
“What do you think happened?” Mary asked her. Joanna shook her head and shrugged. She couldn’t remember a time her brother and Erik had ever fought. “It’s like a divorce,” Mary said, only half joking.
“I hope it isn’t serious,” Joanna said.
The two of them were silent for a moment, and then Mary cleared her throat and poked Joanna’s shoulder. “Speaking of Erik, when were you planning to tell me about the huge, massive crush he has on you?”
“What crush?”
“Oh please,” Mary scoffed. “Did you not see it all night at dinner? ‘Have the last roll, Joanna.’ ‘How’s your fish, Joanna?’ ‘Do you want another drink, Joanna?’” Mary laughed, not unkindly.
Joanna, who hadn’t particularly noticed anything out of the ordinary that night, shrugged her shoulders slowly. “He’s just…a nice guy,” she said finally. Her words lacked conviction.
“He wasn’t that nice to me,” Mary pointed out.
“Well…it was my birthday dinner.”
“Mark my words: something is going to happen with that guy.”
Joanna couldn’t decide how she felt about that.
“I mean, you could do worse,” Mary went on. “He’s nice, cute. And he’s almost a senior.”
“Ugh, can we talk about something else? This is freaking me out.”
Mary laughed again and, with a wicked grin on her face, said, “Okay. How fine did your brother look just now?”
“Oh, gross!” Joanna whacked her with a pillow and shrieked when Mary retaliated with her rolled-up sleeping bag.
“Seriously, J, I’m gonna marry your brother one day,” Mary said, dreamily, lying back on Joanna’s bed. Joanna chuckled; she’d heard this a thousand times already. “And then you’ll marry Erik, and we’ll all still be best friends!”
“What if I don’t want to marry Erik?”
“That’s okay! You only have to sleep with the guy. You don’t really have to have that much to do with him otherwise. It’s just so we can still be best friends.”
“Oh, well then.” Joanna laughed too now and laid down next to her best friend. They clasped hands and looked up at the ceiling, both of them quiet for a few moments. “Do you ever think about what life will be like, like in ten years? What’ll you be doing when you’re 25?”
Mary scoffed. “I’ll either be like Carrie Bradshaw, or I’ll be here with three kids and a mortgage on a crappy house.”
“Those are the only two options?”
“Doesn’t it seem like every grownup you know is one of the two? They’re either a badass, or they’re just like everybody else.”
Joanna thought about this. She wasn’t quite sure what she thought of the grownups in her life. They just were.
“Which one would you choose?” she asked Mary.
Mary screwed up her face in thought, still looking up at the ceiling. “I just want to marry a guy I’m crazy about, who’s crazy about me.” Then, “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Duh.”
“Sometimes, I think I do just want to stay here and have a bunch of kids and a mortgage.”
“Why is that a secret?”
“We’re not supposed to want those things, are we? We’re all supposed to make something of ourselves. It’s so much pressure! What if all we want is a mortgage and a bunch of kids?”
“Hm.”
Mary turned her head toward Joanna now. “But don’t you want that too, at least a little? To be just like everybody else?”
Joanna thought. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “I want to be special.”
“You can be both,” Mary told her.
Joanna closed her eyes.
+++
Joanna was sure that Josh and Erik would patch up whatever had broken in no time, but, by the end of the next week, it was clear that Josh had been serious. Erik’s name didn’t pass his lips, and if anyone else mentioned him, he steered the conversation firmly in a different direction. It was disorienting, and it showed Joanna just how much she’d come to rely on Erik’s daily presence. Without him at her house all the time, she was limited to the few sightings of him that she got in the hallways at school. He always looked tired now—deeply tired—and she didn’t know what to say or how to help.
And then, before too long, Max Bennet swooped in, and Joanna all but forgot about everybody else.
Max Bennet: was he ever handsome. Dark, brooding eyes. A smile that was almost a sneer. He had a way of looking at a person just a second or two longer than was necessary. It was unnerving, but, oh!, Joanna found it thrilling. She didn’t care, like Josh and Erik did, that Max was a little rude, or stuck up, or self-absorbed—he was so cool, it hurt.
He wanted to be a writer: he spent part of every summer at a teen writing workshop in New Hampshire, and he was singularly responsible for Grace High School’s literary magazine and student paper. It had been well known for a while now that he planned to apply early decision to Columbia, where he wanted an English degree, followed by a master’s, followed by a spot on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Joanna’s crush on him had been building in intensity for years, it seemed, but she had never managed to attract more than a passing glance or a hey in the hallways. She didn’t know what had changed, but suddenly, he was everywhere. He began walking Joanna to class, and he took her swimming at Sullivan’s Pond a few times in the last couple of weeks of the year. He even succeeded in convincing Joanna—naïve Joanna, who had always seemed in some ways so much younger than everyone else—to cut class and smoke with him in the woods a couple of times. Joanna could barely speak around him; the ache she felt whenever he was around short-circuited her brain, and it was all she could do to nod or shake her head. She wanted him, purely and simply, in a way that she had never wanted anybody.
He was smart too, though she didn’t think of it in those terms until years later. She gave off some vibe without meaning to that she didn’t want to go too far, but he did just enough to make her feel sophisticated and daring: he gave her a hickey on her collarbone, one she gleefully covered up with concealer for the next several days; he put his hand in her back pocket and squeezed her butt when they were walking together. He could give her a simple look and leave her breathless with desire.
“Be careful, J,” Mary, who was not as new to this experience as Joanna was, told her, more than once. Joanna ignored her.
“You know he’s playing you,” Josh, who had known and watched Max for too many years, said to her once. She ignored him too.
Poppa clearly didn’t like him, but there wasn’t anything specific to dislike. Max always called him sir and looked him in the eye. He always came to the door when he picked up Joanna and walked her to the door when he dropped her off. And besides, he’d known Max’s father his entire life. So he watched, cautiously, and let Joanna go with him.
Joanna wasn’t worried. She knew Max had a reputation, but he was different with her. She brought out his soulful, artistic side. They were kindred spirits, after all. He said that, more than once, when he talked about how badly he wanted to get out of Grace. The idea of leaving home always gave her a twinge of sadness, but thinking about doing it with Max made that twinge all but disappear.
During the first weekend after school let out, Max took Joanna out, and things changed. They went to the Dairy Queen across the bridge, but Max spent so much time watching her with looks that were half-longing, half-predatory that neither of them ended up eating much. They didn’t talk much either; Joanna kept losing her breath every time she looked at him, and he seemed to lose his train of thought when he looked at her.
Finally, they gave up the pretense and went back to his car. Joanna felt like she might actually die with the impending…something…and was trying to steady her shaking fingers when Max faced her, grabbed her neck, and pulled her to him. At the very last moment, without consciously meaning to, Joanna turned her head infinitesimally to the left, and Max’s lips landed just diagonally south of hers.
“What are you doing?” he murmured into her ear. She shivered as his low voice coursed through her veins like a shock wave. “Trying to make me crazy?”
Joanna giggled, feeling her face heat up, and pulled back an inch or two. “Not crazy,” she said, trying to match his tone. “It’s just…” She cast about for something sexy to say but gave up. She was so far in over her head right now. She had to be straight with him, and he would understand. “I’ve never kissed anyone before,” she said finally.
Max laughed for a second, a sound that, for the first time, struck Joanna as the slightest bit unpleasant. “I know that, Jo. But tonight’s your lucky night.” He cupped one hand behind her neck, holding it firmly, squeezed her left breast in his other hand, and—before she had a chance to catch her bearings—pulled her close again. Again, Joanna turned her head at the last moment. This time, she felt small and ashamed when she did. This time, Max wasn’t so flirtatious.
He sat back and let out a frustrated sigh. “What’s the deal? You’ve been letting me feel you up for weeks, and now I can’t even kiss you?”
“I just—” Joanna was confused, tripping over her words, and hating the timidity in her voice. Where was her bravado, her sophistication, her ideals now? How was she supposed to have told him no this whole time? He was Max Bennet; didn’t he know that? For the first time, he didn’t seem inclined to take no for an answer, and Joanna didn’t want to lose him. But she didn’t want to lose herself, either, and she didn’t know how to avoid that with him looking at her out of those eyes of his. “I want you to kiss me,” she finally told him, reaching for his hand. “I just…could we maybe…work up to it a bit?”
She hated how pathetic that sounded. What would all those actors she loved think of her now? Wasn’t this an experience? Something to make her life interesting, worthy of story? But something was holding her back, and she just hoped that Max would understand.
He looked down at his lap, at their hands clasped together, and nodded after a moment. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s work up to it.” Joanna was about to release a huge sigh of relief—she knew he was different around her!—when he pulled his gym shorts and boxers down in front and held her hand in his, as he worked himself up and down.
His eyes fluttered closed, and he laid his head back against the seat. Joanna stared at their hands and at what she could see of his penis—she’d never seen one before, and it seemed grotesque, even the little bit of it that she could see from her angle. She fought to steady her breathing and quell her disgust. She reduced her hand to its essentials—blood, muscle, skin, bone—and found that that helped. It felt less like hers that way.
Idiotically, a passage from an essay she’d read in English that semester came to her mind, about how the ability to quell disgust was an important asset among prostitutes. Clearly, she would make a terrible prostitute. She would have laughed at the ridiculous segue—if she weren’t trying so hard not to cry, not to gag.
Before too much time had passed—though she had no idea how long, really—Max’s breathing became rapid and shallow, and he let out a small grunt as something sticky and warm and wet filled her hand. She wanted to cry when he opened his eyes just enough to look at her and said, lazily, “On second thought, Jo, I think I’ll pass.”
As if nothing had happened, he fixed his shorts, started the car, and pulled out of the parking lot. Something—either a sob or revulsion or both—lodged itself in Joanna’s throat and remained there for the rest of the drive. She could smell him on her skin, and it made her want to weep. She couldn’t wait to get home.
Max didn’t walk her to the door this time; he didn’t even turn off the engine. Joanna went inside, grateful only that Poppa wasn’t in the front room, and tried not to hear how quickly Max drove away.
She slipped into the downstairs bathroom and scrubbed her hand with the hottest water she could stand. Then, she begged off her usual chat with Poppa, telling him she was tired. Upstairs, she stayed in the shower until the hot water ran cold, but she couldn’t get rid of the smell.
Everyone had been right.
Once under the covers, Joanna pulled her half-forgotten stuffed elephant into her arms and eventually fell asleep, her hand placed, firmly, as far away from the rest of her as possible.