Read Online Losing Charlotte by Heather Clay - Free Book Online Page B

don’t know any more than what I just told you.”
    “Bruce—,” his mother said. Bruce tried to ignore her. He was dancing now.
    “But I do know,” Bruce said, “that that’s the biggest thing that’s happened since you left. Soolster arrested, dude. Going to the pokey.”
    “Jail,” Toby whispered. “Geez. Are you kidding?”
    “She cried when the police came,” Bruce said. “Seriously.”
    Bruce’s mother lunged across him and grabbed the phone.
    “Toby,” she said. “This is Brenda, Bruce’s mom.” She glanced sideways at Bruce. “How are you doing, honey?” She kept her eyes on Bruce as she listened, said “Mm-mm” in a softer voice.
    “Ask him if he’ll be back on Monday,” Bruce said. His throat felt dry.
    “We’re thinking of you, Tob,” his mother said. She pressed two fingers into the place between her eyebrows and put her other hand up between her and Bruce, as if to block him from view. “You call us if you need us. Okay. Bye.”
    She hung up the phone. They sat together on Bruce’s bed. Traffic noise drifted up from the street below.
    “Quite the performance,” his mother said, finally.
    Bruce shrugged his shoulders.
    “Don’t do that.”
    “What.”
    “Shrug at me. You know what I’m talking about.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    Bruce couldn’t help himself. When his mother was unhappy with him, he got trapped in the body of a hater, was left pounding on soundproof glass while that guy, embarrassed, venomous, spoke words for him, gestured for him.
    “Do you honestly think that you’re helping him by doing that? By making up something ridiculous?”
    “What.”
    His mother made a face, imitating him. “Whuhht,” she drawled in a deep, dopey monotone. Then, remembering herself, she said, “I think you’re a smart guy, bud, and a nice guy—too nice and smart to take up and slander Mrs. Subbylane or whatever her name is with some horse-ass story just to make Toby feel better—I mean pokey , what is that?—when he won’t feel better by being told a lie, because his world …” and here she blew air through her lips and rubbed her eyes, and because she was upset and the venomous version of himself had bodysnatched him and addled him and sealed him into the glass interior pod, Bruce made fun of her.
    He snickered: “Sulemain. Not Subbylane,” like Subbylane was the funniest thing he had ever heard in his entire life. Then he said, pumping his voice full of scorn, “How do you even know that’s not the truth? And I just forgot to tell you?”
    His mother didn’t look at him. Eight stories down, a horn sounded, and the gears of an accelerating truck ground together and sighed, ground together and sighed.
    “I guess it’s lucky that you don’t totally get this,” she said. She picked something, some hair or fleck, off the back of his shirt—delicately, as if he might scald—before lifting herself off his bed and letting herself out of his room. Blinking, Bruce listened to her pad down the hallway. I do too get it, he said to her in his mind. I do .
    S IX YEARS AGO , at the Colony Club, Bruce saw Jebbie Jackman at a wedding—the same wedding at which he and his wife met, though she remembered Jebbie only vaguely when they talked about that night. “The white-dinner-jacket guy? Really drunk?” she would ask, and Bruce would have to answer yes, though it pained him, somehow, to answer at all. Jeb, who had also gone to Bancroft and had left at some point (Bruce thought seventh grade) before clubs and girls and nights logged in diners, sucking back eggs and butter-soaked toast and glass after glass of water in an attempt to blunt the throat burning that afternoons full of bong hits in someone’s parent-free apartment had given rise to—Jeb had been part of a group, when they were still young enough to sport bowl cuts and hairless bodies without shame, that had included Bruce, and Toby, and Charlie Potts. The four of them had built a makeshift half-pipe together in