The People in Rossford

Rage held him together for the drive home. He nearly ran into someone crossing Callahahn. Brendan Miller, not being a wrathful person, felt instantly sorry, and then for the remaining blocks home felt only sorry.

“Hey, Bren,” his father said. “You better wrap it up and go to bed. “It’s gonna be a long day tomorrow, and you’ve had a long day today.”

All Brendan could do was say, “Um hum.” He didn’t trust himself to talk.

He undressed, put his phone on his dresser and then went to the shower between his room and his sister’s, which was now his room because she was off at school. In the private shower, with the water high and hot he could stand, and then eventually sit, let the water pour down on him finally and sob. He stayed in the shower until he thought he was done, and then remembered to actually soap himself. Weakened, tired, he came out now and crashed in his room, stretched out across his bed, wet with the sound of crickets coming in through the window.

The phone rang and Brendan rolled over to get it. He saw he’d already had one message. He answered it.

“Kenny?”

“Yeah. I tried to call you.”

“I was in the shower.”

“What’s wrong with you, babe,” Kenny said in a lower voice. “You sound terrible.”

“I feel terrible,” Brendan said.

“Is it about us? I feel terrible too. I miss you.”

And then Brendan, who up until now was not used to crying. Hit the remote control, turned on his stereo and began to sob into the phone again.

“Bren,” Kenny said.

“It’s everything,” Brendan wept. “I feel so bad, and I got in this fight with Dena!”

“Really?”

“I just couldn’t take it anymore. I felt so bad already, and she just wouldn’t let up and I said all this stuff. I just blew up.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I’ve blown up at you.”

“Not really,” Kenny said. “You just sort of shut me out for a long time.”

“Well, that’s even worse,” Brendan said. “And now Dena shuts me out, and I couldn’t take it, so I just shouted at her, and called her… all this stuff. You know I called her a bitch?”

“You didn’t!”

Brendan sniffed and moaned, “I did. And all of this stuff, in front of all of my friends.”

“Layla was there?”

“Everyone was there. But you.”

Then Brendan sat up, and wiping his nose he said, “I’m sorry… How was your day?”

“Good because I met some guys on my floor and we went to dinner together. But, I felt like, I don’t even know them, we’re not even friends.”

“Well, you will know them. Real soon. Just like how we didn’t used to know each other.”

“Well, I don’t want to know them the way I know you!”

Brendan chuckled and sniffed. “No. No, I don’t want you to either.”

“That was quite a goodbye.”

“Yeah.”

Brendan said nothing for a while, and Kenny said, “See, I thought that would cheer you up.”

“I just want to sleep. I just want to erase tonight. I wish, I wish! I wasn’t such a rotten person.”

“You are not a rotten person!”

“Look what I did to you?”

“Don’t bring that up again, Bren. It’s hard to be forgiven if you keep telling someone all the bad stuff you did to them. Plus, look how you made up for it. You can’t be a bad person, can you? Because I couldn’t love a bad person.”

When Brendan woke up, he immediately thought of driving to Dena’s, offering to pick her up, having a real conversation, and then he knew this was not the answer. He put on blue trousers, white shirt, navy tie and navy blazer and slung his leather messenger bag over his shoulder. He almost didn’t comb his hair because when he began to mousse it and mess it up it reminded him of Kenny, and that Kenny would not be there to see him, or smile at him, to think of how good he looked.

It was a fifteen minute drive to the northwest where Saint Barbara’s was, where parents were dropping off children at the K-8 wing and on the other side of the church, as many teenagers over sixteen as possible were coming with each other, or by themselves, some walked if they had to. The parking lot was jammed. Father Malloy had said something about talking to the people who owned the lot across from the school to let students park there, but so far it was bare and this lot was loaded.

He was threading his way through the parking lot, his keys hanging from his crooked finger when he saw his friends on the porch that led to the east wing of the brick school. His first instinct was to turn and skulk away, but after all, these were his friends. And Will must have seen something in the way he moved, because Will, who had seen him before anyone else had, motioned quickly for him to come over.

Brendan felt the same way he had that day in the ice cream parlor when Kenny hated him and Dena hated him and Layla hated everyone and Brendan especially hated himself. But when he reached the porch, everyone suddenly walked away, including Milo, and Dena yelped, saying, “What the…”

“Maybe they knew we needed to talk, Deenie.”

Dena opened her mouth, probably to say something cutting, and then she let out a breath and said, “Maybe.”

“I had no right to snap at you that way,” Brendan said. “I… Basically everything I’ve done to you this year, no one has a right to do. I was in a bad place, but it doesn’t make any excuse. I was just so… tired. Of…”

“Feeling the way you feel?”

“Yes!” Brendan said. “Guilty everyday. Hating myself everyday. Sad everyday. A shame everyday.”

“And I’m angry every day.”

Brendan shook his head and admitted, turning his head away “Shit, Deen, you should be. I know that. We were kids together. We are kids together.”

“But I don’t know how to stop feeling like this,” she said. “I should be so grateful and so happy, and I am. And I ought to be really kind and forgiving. It is tearing me apart not to be, Bren. I hate being this…. Bitch.”

“You’re not a bitch.”

“Yes, I am. I live with her all the time, always whispering to me about everything you and Kenny did about….” Dena shook her head.

“You know what the worst part is?”

Brendan sat down beside her, on the stoop that lined the inside of the brick porch.

“You… yesterday, when you all showed up, all I could think was, you’re sleeping with him. You’re sleeping with him just like you were before you were with me. And I keep thinking about us, what it felt like, what I thought it was. And that’s all the stuff you’re doing with him, with him, with this guy, Bren. And when we were together, when we slept together I loved you, and I thought you loved me and in my memory it was love, but everything that happens means that every memory of us, and every memory of us in bed is a total lie.

“We weren’t feeling anything. You were fucking me, and I was feeling something and you… it wasn’t anything.”

The bell went off for class, but Brendan didn’t dare to get up. He didn’t dare to say anything.

“And then you tell me that you cried all night going back from school, after you dropped off Kenny. But what about me, Bren? A whole lifetime of being friends, the last four years being your girlfriend, the last part of it sleeping with you, for weeks, because youasked me, and not a moment of thought for Dena. Not a tear about Dena. You could just stick it to Dena and then say, oops, well, I’m gay, gotta be true to myself, I’m going to keep screwing Kenny Mc.Grath, who by the way, I was doing while we were still together—”

“Dena,” Brendan cut in. “I gotta interrupt you. I have to,” he shook his head. “If you think what you said is true, you don’t know me.”

“No, I don’tknow you, Bren.”

“How could you think that was ever true, that I was playing you? I was lying, but I wasn’t playing you. Maybe I was playing myself. You think the whole time we were…”

“Fucking?”

“God, Dena!”

“That’s what it was.”

“No it wasn’t,” Brendan said sharply. “Trust me, I know the difference. It was never that with us. I spend… I spend half my days, chasing you, trying to call you, trying to start something up again, and then you tell me I don’t care about you.”

“Because you’re guilty!”

“Bullshit! I blew up last night, I trip up all the time. All I do is feel BAD about what happened between us. All I do is try to make it up to you, and you think… that I don’t give a shit. That it was as simple as, well fuck you Dena, I’m gonna run off and be gay! You think that’s it?”

Dena turned away from him. From the corner of her eye she saw Sister Roberts come down the long hall, and she hid deep in a recess of the porch.

“Well, then I don’t get you, Bren. Are you obsessed with me? Or, are you obsessed with being forgiven? Or… what? I don’t know.”

“Goddamn!” Brendan said, exasperated.

“I love you. Why the fuck can’t you see that, Deen? I love you. You think that because… I’m not lying to myself anymore that changes anything?”

“It would for some people.”

“Well, it doesn’t for me. I feel the same way I always felt for you, only I’m not trying to make it what it’s not. I don’t expect you to get it all today. I don’t get it all, either, but I love you, and I think you still love me too.”

“I can’t love you without thinking about everything we did, without thinking about sleeping with you.”

“You don’t think I remember it too?”

“And then you throw up, watch Queer as Folk and call Kenny?”

“No, Dena. I think about us having sex, and then I get hard.”

She looked at him.

Brendan shrugged.

Dena looked at him in shock, mildly pleased, but attempting to hide it.

“That is so crude,” she said. “You were never this crude before.”

“I was never very honest before. But I can start to be.” He held out his hand, “We can start to be. Together?”

Dena turned her face away and Brendan couldn’t see her.

“I miss you so much, Deen,” he started.

“Just shut up,” she sounded a little choked up. In the corner she put a hand across her face and when she turned back her eyes were shining.

“What I hate about you is how you just… know the thing to say.”

She took a deep breath and shifted her bag on her shoulder.

“Come on, Bren. We’re late for class.”

“You think the cafeteria is always this empty for breakfast?” Claire said.

Before Julian could open his mouth, the dark guy at the other end of the table took off his sunglasses to reveal he was an Indian and said, “Yes. And that’s the best time to be in here.”

Claire nodded, and then she got up, walked down the table and said, “I’m Claire Anderson. I’m a freshman. This is my first day.”

“Jesse Hatangady,” he said, offering his hand as Julian came to join him.

“And this is my boyfriend, Julian.”

“You new too?”

“Yeah,” Julian nodded.

“How do you kids love orientation.”

“Fuck orientation,” they said together, and when Jesse looked at them, Julian said, “We just didn’t go.”

“We didn’t have time for that,” Claire said.

“Then I bet you’re not going to have time for a lot at Loretto. Can you imagine people come from all over to go here?”

“I came from East Carmel.”

“Where’s that?”

“You’re from around here?” Julian said.

“No. I’m from California. My dad went here when he first came to America. So, he has it in his head that the whole family’s gotta go here too.”

“Then you have more family here?” said Julian.

“I have a sister. She’s pretty hot, in a slutty kind of way. She’s a freshman too, so you’re bound to meet her.”

“I’ve got a brother going here too,” Claire said. “He’ll be a freshman.”

“You’ve got a twin.”

With a touch of irony in her voice she said, “No.”

“He’s…” Julian began, “what I think they call non-traditional.”

“It doesn’t get much more non-traditional than Paul does it?” Claire mused.

“Well,” Jesse said, looking at his watch, “if I remember rightly, from listening to Radha all night—”

“That would be the slutty sister.”

“It certainly would be,” said Jesse, “then Freshmen Opening—a waste of five hundred dollars—is in a few minutes.”

Claire turned slowly and looked at the clock over the entrance into the food line.

“Crap,” she said.

They slid into the large old room with the long windows overlooking the little driveway and, from a corner, Claire saw Paul waving excitedly.

“Who’s that old guy?” she heard a kid whisper.

“He’s not old, he’s my brother,” Claire told him sharply, then added, “Asshole.”

And dragged Julian through the other seats to sit beside Paul.

“I’m so excited,” Paul whispered to them. “Do you think anyone knows I’m not eighteen.”

Before Claire could open her mouth, Julian said, “Not a soul.”

“Oh, good. Besides. look at the woman over there. She’s like twice as old as me,” Paul crowed delightedly, rolling his eyes and tapping his little desk with his pencil.

Impulsively Claire kissed her brother.

“What’s that for?” he grinned at her.

“You’re just so cute today.”

“Look, I’ve got my notebook, and it’s divided, and I sharpened my pencils so I’m ready to take notes, and… I just hope I don’t mess up in this class.”

“Paul,” Julian said, levelly, “it’s a one credit pass or fail course. If we just laid on the floor and breathed, I don’t think we could mess it up.”