Wreck and Order Read Online Free Page A

obsessed with grades and clothes and popularity. And it was nice to be free of my anger at my mother’s mopiness and erratic, desperate laugh. My father was an easier person—or at least it seemed that way to me, his child, his favorite part of life. He let me cut class whenever I wanted. We’d drive around in his pickup truck, listen to loud music, blast the heat, roll down the windows, sing along with Radiohead and R.E.M., my dad tapping the beat into the dashboard—
It’s been a bad day, please don’t take a picture
—and my dirty blond hair flying in the icy air and catching on my tongue. Listening to tidy song feelings captured by my father’s voice—
Destiny, protect me from the world
—I felt protected from everything except his thin lips and pale skin and watery blue eyes, all just like mine. Sometimes he would turn down the music and ease off the accelerator and start talking about getting whipped by his father and all the hope he’d poured into falling in love with my mother and how he felt like such a failure for never having made a film of his own, but he’d made me and that was really enough, wasn’t it? I liked my father’s words, their solemn import attached to my silly life of carrying a heavy backpack to and from a brick cube. I knew there was something wrong with my father’s lack of restraint—a needy egotism inherent in philosophizing to one’s child—but so many times, embedded in his ramblings, was some comment that soothed my inner turbulence. Every closeness is a prison. Another thing my father used to say.
    —
    Dan and I had a lot of classes together in ninth grade, but I didn’t really notice him until he started calling me with questions about math homework. He wore very uncool turtlenecks and never made jokes. But he laughed a lot and said quietly smart things in class. His presence was calming. I went to his house for the first time during a hailstorm. There were about ten people from my grade there. One of the girls had an older brother with a fake ID, so we had two fifths of vodka. I had never been drunk before. After my third or fourth shot, I sat down on the bed next to Dan. “This is a new life,” I said. He wrapped me in his long arms. I giggled against his chest, a little kid again, unburdened by implications: Everything happening was just what was happening. We started kissing, oblivious to the other people making out and talking around us. A shirtless girl fluttered into Dan’s room. “Dan!” she cried, unhooking her bra and dangling it from her finger. She ran toward the bed. A beam from the low A-frame ceiling took her out cold. Torrents of laughter. Dan helped her up, rolling his eyes at me.
    A few weeks later I was in Dan’s twin bed, wearing only my underwear. He was propped up on his elbow beside me, holding my hip with one hand. “I’m not going to let you put your clothes back on,” he whispered. “You’re so beautiful.” His were the only thoughts about my body that existed. There was a guitar on the floor beside us and I asked him to sing to me. He sat on the edge of the bed. I curled myself around his back, my head resting on his corduroys. I was still too nervous to take off his pants. He sang about ripplin’ still water and free fallin’. He glanced at the Bob Marley poster above his bed and lowered his face to mine. “Is this love is this love is this love that I’m feeling?” I added my voice to his. This was the reason people did not erase themselves from the universe. Dan’s parents yelled up the stairs that it would soon be dinnertime. I phoned my dad. I glided into the passenger seat of his truck. Words came out of his mouth. Short, silvered ribbons of light came out of mine.
    When Dan and I lost our virginity to each other, I never considered that sex would get far better and far worse than this. “We fit together,” he said. I clutched his back. My body traced the letters of the perfect sentence that was sex. A saccharine image