Something Like Normal Read online

  Before I can approach her, Eddie comes up. “Trav, man, welcome home!”

  He goes in for a slap hug that I know will turn into a takedown attempt. It always does. He lowers his shoulder and circles my waist with his arms, trying to wrestle me to the floor. We used to be more evenly matched, but now he doesn’t stand a chance. I curl my leg around his and drop him.

  “Dude, you may as well call terminal uncle.” I laugh as I haul him to his feet.

  “It’s been too fucking long.” He gives me a hug for real this time. “How ya been?”

  “Good.” Lie. “You?”

  “Same shit, different day, you know?” Eddie shrugs.

  I have no idea what it’s like to be the nineteen-year-old night manager of Taco Bell with a pregnant girlfriend. I’m not saying Eddie made the wrong choices—he’s living an honest life and it’s not my place to judge—but, no, I don’t know. I’ve spent the better part of a year on the other side of the planet in a country where a guy will shake your hand and smile, then go pick up his AK-47 and shoot at you. Where a little boy will demand—with no tears in his eyes—that you give him a hundred bucks’ compensation for accidentally killing his mother, which is less than the going rate for killing his dog.

  Paige hops down from the counter and walks toward me and my brother. I can see her red string bikini through the thin white tank top she’s wearing. I’ve unstrung that bikini before. She goes to Ryan first—so weird—reaching up on tiptoe to ruffle his hair as she kisses him. His arm slips around her waist. Her face is different when she looks up at him. Softer. Less angry. “You smell good.”

  Ryan doesn’t look at me, but I see the I-told-you-so-grin tug at his lips. I laugh. Paige cocks her head at me and smiles. “Well, if it isn’t G.I. Joe.”

  “G.I. Joe”—I take her drink and down it in a single swallow. It’s fruity, but the alcohol is strong—“was a pussy.”

  She laughs her smoky, sexy laugh and kisses my cheek, her boobs—which her parents bought for her fifteenth birthday—brushing against my arm. “Welcome home.”

  “Thanks for the care package,” I say. “Miss January brought a lot of guys a lot of pleasure.” She laughs again.

  “It was the least I could do.”

  “How’s Bill?” I ask.

  Her dad owns a national barricade company that supplies orange barrels, cement barricades, and traffic cones to construction jobs. Every single barricade has his name on it. He and Paige’s mom never liked me.

  She shrugs. “Still hates you.”

  “Figures.”

  “So how long are you home, Trav?” Eddie asks.

  “A month,” I say.

  He nods. “Nice.”

  The noise of the party fills in the space where the conversation should continue but doesn’t, and Eddie just does that nervous little laugh people do when they don’t know what to say. This never happened with Charlie. We talked about everything, from the philosophical to the ridiculous—like who would win in a fight between a liger and a grizzly/polar bear hybrid. We nearly got into a fight ourselves over that one.

  “How’s, um—how’s Jenn?” I ask.

  “She’s good.” He nods again. “The baby is due in September. A girl.”

  “That’s awesome, man, congratulations.” I take a sip of beer, looking for an escape. Eddie was my best friend in high school, but now… I know there’s a place inside me that still cares about him—about all of them—but tonight I can’t really find it.

  The band starts playing, and Eddie looks relieved. Maybe we were both looking for an escape. “Talk to you later, bro?”

  I nod and he’s swallowed up by the dancing mass of people in the living room. The bass makes the walls rattle and I wonder if this will be one of those nights when the neighbors call the police. In the middle of the crowd I see one dark head, standing still in the middle of the thrashing bodies. Black hair spikes out from his head in random cowlicks like… Charlie.

  He stares at me.

  I blink, and he’s gone.

  “Travis, are you okay?” I hear Ryan’s voice pulling me back to reality. “You spaced out for a second.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” But I’m not. Sweat trickles between my shoulder blades beneath my shirt. “I just need a beer.”

  Cooper is at the keg, refilling his cup. “Trav, my man! Where you been?”

  Kid seriously needs to cut back on the weed. “We’ve already had this conversation, Coop.”

  “Oh, yeah.” A stoned giggle rolls out of him. “Afghanistan, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Dude, did you see any poppies?”

  Leave it to Cooper to ask me about the drugs. “Like the Wizard of Oz, man,” I say, because that will make him happy, but we didn’t take naps in the poppy fields of Afghanistan. We took fire from the Taliban.

  I fill a cup, then go out to the living room, my insides still coiled from—I’m not even sure what to call what happened. Hallucination? Haunting?

  Standing with my back to the wall, I watch the party going on around me. A couple of girls in tiny skirts stare at me on their way upstairs to the bathroom. Derek Michalski, who graduated with the unofficial senior superlative of Most Likely to Do Time for Dating Underage Girls, is hitting on a girl who looks about twelve or thirteen. Cooper and his girl, April, are deep into one of those stoned conversations filled with profound insights they won’t remember tomorrow. Used to be I was part of this. Now I wonder where, if anywhere, I fit. And if I even care.

  A few beers later, I return to the kitchen, where Eddie, Paige, Ryan, and a few others are sitting around the table, reminiscing about some road trip they took last summer. Paige is sitting on Ryan’s knee, his hand curled around her hip. She plays with his hair as she talks over Eddie to be heard. “… and then the fucking car died in the middle of nowhere, remember? And…”

  I sit for a while, but I’m not really paying attention. I’m thinking about the last time I got drunk. Just before we deployed, Kevlar smuggled a bottle of cheap, nasty tequila into our room and we drank it while watching M*A*S*H episodes on Charlie’s old TV. When Kevlar passed out, snoring and drooling on my pillow, Charlie told me that back home in St. Augustine he lived with his mom and her lesbian partner, and that his dad was an anonymous donor.

  “I don’t really talk about it because I don’t want to get shit for it, you know?” he said. “Charlie has two mommies. Shit like that.” I might have made fun of him if I hadn’t been so drunk, but the tequila made us maudlin. Morbid. “If anything happens to me over there, Solo, I want you to go see her, okay?”

  “Dude, don’t be so fucking stupid,” I said. “I’m never going to meet your mom because the only thing that’s ever going to happen to you is me, kicking your ass.”

  I was wrong. The worst thing did happen—and I couldn’t stop it.

  I lift my beer cup for a drink. Dirt fills the lines of my hand, and my fingers are stained with blood. The cup slips from my grasp, splashing beer across the top of the table. Paige jumps off Ryan’s lap, shrieking something at me, but I don’t understand what she’s saying. My chest is tight and I’m having trouble breathing.

  I have to get out of here.

  My chair falls over as I stand up.

  “Trav, where are you going?” Ryan calls after me, but I don’t answer. I push my way through the living room and out the front door. The air is cooler outside, clear, as I pull it into my lungs in giant gasps until my heart rate returns to its regular rhythm. I look at my hands. They’re clean.

  I walk down the street toward the Shamrock, the biker bar on the corner of Delmar and Estero. Apart from bikers, the only people who go there are leather-skinned old beach rats and brittle-haired women who think they’re still young and hot. The music is dirtball rock, the floor is sticky, and the beer is served in plastic cups, but they’re good about looking the other way when you “forget” your ID.

  Going through the open doorway, I pass Gage Darnell. He was a year ahead of me at
school, but dropped out when he turned eighteen. He’s leaving with a familiar-looking girl with a fake tan, fake nails, fake blond hair, and probably fake boobs. She looks like an Internet porn star—and not necessarily in a good way. I went to school with her, too, but her name escapes me. Angel? Amber? Something strip clubby, I think.

  “Hey, Travis, welcome home.” Gage offers his fist to bump, then continues on his way. The blonde wiggles her fingers at me, then latches on to his arm. I might have slept with her.

  Perched on barstools are a couple more girls around my age. The one wearing cutoff shorts and cowboy boots is Lacey Ellison. She’s not especially hot and wears too much makeup, but we didn’t call her Easy-E in high school for nothing. She’s flirting with a biker sporting a Hells Angels emblem on his leather vest and a dirty blond goatee. Lacey giggles at something he says and touches the snake tattoo on his forearm.

  Beside her is a girl with a mass of light brown hair pulled into one of those sexy-messy knots. Compared to Lacey she’s overdressed; the only skin showing is a narrow stripe between the top of her threadbare Levi’s and a washed-out blue T-shirt. She doesn’t acknowledge me—not even a little chin lift—as I claim the empty stool next to her and order a beer, and for some reason, this bothers me. Probably because I’m drunk. “Nice night, huh?”

  Her green eyes meet mine in the Guinness mirror behind the bar and it feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room. I’ve never slept with this girl, but she was the first I remember wanting.

  Harper Gray.

  The first time I kissed her was at a middle school slumber party Paige threw when her parents went to Key West, leaving her alone for the weekend. It was at the end of summer and I was new, because my dad had just been traded to Tampa Bay, but I’d already made friends with most of the guys on the eighth-grade football team at early practice. The lure of alcohol and girls wearing pajamas was too strong to resist, so we crashed the party. After raiding the liquor cabinet, Paige decided it was time to play seven minutes in heaven. I went first, using the spinner from an old board game, and it landed on Harper.

  “Your seven minutes start… now,” Paige said as Harper followed me into the laundry room. I shut the door and she leaned against the washing machine, looking scared. I remember the sharp scent of the bleach mixed with the fabric smell of clean laundry. “I’m Travis.”

  “I know.” Her eyes flicked shyly down to our feet—we were both wearing beat-up old Chucks and it seemed like a sign—then up at me. “I’m Harper.”

  I already knew, too.

  “Like Harper Lee?” I was showing off. I hadn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird, but it was on my mom’s bookshelf, so I knew the author’s name.

  “No,” she said. “Charley Harper.”

  “Oh, um…”

  “He’s an artist.”

  “Cool.” My scope of small talk completely played out, I decided to go in for the kiss. Our noses bumped the first time and I could hear the shaky nervousness in her laugh. The second time we got it right, but I forgot to take the sour apple gum out of my mouth, so my tongue was all over the place as I tried to kiss her and hide the gum at the same time. It started out sloppy and ridiculous, but eventually we got it right and I remember my fingers sliding through the waves of her hair.

  Nothing else happened. We just stood there, pressed against each other, kissing. Until Paige’s voice told us our time was up. I didn’t want to stop and was about to suggest we drop out of the game, when the door flew open. Paige grabbed Harper by the wrist and pulled her back out to the party.

  She was tangled in a whispering knot of girls when I came out of the laundry room. All my friends wanted the details of what happened between me and Harper. They expected something good, so I embellished. Said she let me feel her up. By Monday, my lie had taken on a life of its own. People were saying Harper had sex with all the guys who crashed Paige’s party. Calling her a slut. I don’t know how it got so out of control, and I could have told everyone what really happened, but I didn’t. When she came up to me in the cafeteria, I ignored her. By the following weekend, Paige was my girlfriend.

  “Hey, Charley Harper, can I buy you a beer?” It’s not the smoothest opening line I’ve ever used, but I’m not feeling smooth. I’m jagged. And drunk.

  She lifts her nearly full cup but won’t look at me. “Got one, thanks.”

  Okay.

  “You might not remember me, but—”

  “Travis Stephenson,” she interrupts, her words like a roadblock. “Welcome home. Now leave me alone.”

  Damn, she’s hostile.

  “What’s your problem?”

  Harper stares at me a moment and I’m mesmerized by the green of her eyes. So I don’t see it coming when she punches me in the face. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Jesus Christ—ow!” My eye socket throbs—she definitely doesn’t hit like a girl—and I’m going to have a black eye. “What was that for?”

  “I was thirteen years old, Travis!” Harper is yelling at me and everyone is staring, including Lacey and her dirty biker. “I still played with Barbie dolls in secret when my friends weren’t around. I didn’t have sex with anyone at Paige’s party, but you told everyone I did. And when I tried to deny it, no one believed me. You trashed my reputation and now I’m supposed to think it’s cute you remembered I’m not named for Harper fucking Lee?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You didn’t what? Didn’t do it? Didn’t mean it? Save the excuses.”

  I want to defend myself, but this moment is a lot like boot camp. It doesn’t matter if I’m guilty or not. She’s spent years believing I’m an asshole and the only thing that is going to fix it is an apology. “Harper—”

  The bartender comes over. “Everything okay here?”

  “Just fine,” Harper snaps. “I’m leaving. You can put my beer on his tab.”

  Jesus, that was a cool move. And although she hates my guts, I’m kind of turned on and I wish she weren’t leaving. “Add a shot of tequila, too,” I tell the bartender, but he shakes his head. “You’re done.”

  Which sucks, because I’m not nearly drunk enough. I down the rest of my beer and drop a pile of bills on the bar, hoping it’s enough to make up for the drama I’ve caused here tonight. I turn to leave and Paige is standing there, her mouth all smug. I hate how she does that.

  “Rye’s looking for you,” she says. “He’s ready to go.”

  “Okay.” My eyes wander down to her ass as I follow her out of the bar. Force of habit, I guess. Also, it’s nice. Kind of bubbly.

  “So, Harper Gray, huh?” she asks as we walk up the middle of the street.

  “When it’s your business, I’ll let you know.”

  She snorts a laugh. “You can do so much better than her, Trav. She’s beach trash.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Do you want me to come over later?” she asks.

  “For what?”

  She catches her full lower lip between her teeth and looks up at me from under her dark lashes. It’s an innocent act that used to get me hot. I have to admit, it still works. “I think you know.”

  “So let me get this straight,” I say. “You hook up with my brother behind my back and now you want me to do the same to him?”

  She flicks her ice-blue eyes toward the night sky. “It’s not like it means anything.”

  Somewhere in the recesses of my beer-soaked consciousness, I think this is meant to hurt me, but it doesn’t. When I think about what Paige and I have had, love has never entered into it. “That’s so messed up. You know that, right?”

  “Do you want me to come over or not?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll be there at three.”

  Even before I open my eyes I can feel the presence of another person in my room, and the hair on the back of my neck puts my body on alert. Hand-to-hand combat is not usually the Taliban’s style. They’d rather take our money at the local bazaar and use it to buy weapons to kill us. They
prefer ambushes, roadside bombs, and sniping from windows and rooftops. But there is someone here with me in the dark and I’m not going to wait to be killed.

  I surge upward, grabbing the intruder around the knees, and drop him to the floor. I pin him beneath me, the tip of my knife at his throat. In the slashes of moonlight coming through the blinds, I realize he is not a he. It’s Paige. And for the first time since I’ve known her, she looks scared.

  “Oh, shit!” I drop the knife as if it’s red-hot and scrabble backward against the side of my bed. “Jesus, Paige, what the fu—Did I hurt you?”

  Her fear falls away as she registers my surprise and she laughs as she picks up the knife. “You’ve always liked it a little rough, Trav, but this is extreme, don’t you think?” She crawls toward me, the knife gripped in her hand, and straddles my lap. “But…” Her lips are so close to mine I can taste her breath. “I think I like it.”

  I take the knife from her and put it on the bedside table, on top of the book I’ll never finish. She slides her tank top off.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  “That”—she fishes a condom from the pocket of her tiny denim skirt—“should be obvious.”

  She unties her red bikini. This is so not something I should be doing, but her skin is warm and familiar and… here.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten laid, but I’ve been living in the middle of a desert, where women are hidden under burqas. Besides, Muslim women… well, the Qur’an forbids nearly everything fun anyway, so even if you could see their faces, there’s not much point in even considering it.

  I did kiss a Muslim girl once. When Charlie and I arrived at Camp Lejeune, the rest of our unit was on pre-deployment leave. We had to stay on base for a crash-course version of all the training the battalion had done while we were still at infantry school. Just before we were scheduled to deploy, Charlie and I were given a few days’ leave so we could go home. Instead, we went to New York City. Kevlar—we didn’t even really know him very well, but he was new like Charlie and me—invited himself along.