Neal took out an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels and twisted off the lid, then, he took a swig straight from the bottle. “You told Donna Dee you were coming here?”
“Sure.”
“And she trusts you with us?” Neal crowed. “She’s even dumber than I thought.”
Hutch saw red. He shot to his feet. “She’s not so dumb. She says that you’re full of shit, and I believe she’s right.” He headed for the door.
Neal rolled out of his chair and stepped in front of Hutch, blocking his path. “Don’t go away mad,” he said soothingly. “I was just pricking you for the hell of it. Stick around. A few Delta Gammas have promised to come over and help us straighten up this place. And that ain’t all they’ll straighten up,” he added with a leer. “They’ll be more than Lamar and I can handle by ourselves.”
“No, thanks,” Hutch said testily. “I’m going home to my wife.” He tried to sidestep Neal, but, despite the liquor and pot, Neal was still agile and in full command of his senses.
“Man, are you ever going to get out of her debt?”
Hutch fell still. “Debt?”
“Don’t play stupid. I’m talking about repaying Donna Dee for what she did for us.”
Hutch shot Lamar a quick, guilty glance, but Lamar had averted his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The hell you don’t,” Neal said with a nasty laugh. “You’re trying to repay Donna Dee for lying to save your ass from jail. First you fucked her. Then you married her. Now you’re playing lap puppy.”
“Shut up.”
“She could really sink her claws into you if she knew how much you had enjoyed her best friend. Isn’t that right, Lamar?” he asked, glancing at the other boy, who looked miserably uncomfortable. “You and I had a good time, but I believe ol’ Hutch here thought Jade’s box came gift-wrapped just for him.”
Hutch thrust his homely face down to within inches of Neal’s. “You’re a sick son of a bitch, Neal. I don’t want any more to do with you.”
He knocked Neal aside and stormed through the door. Lamar called after him, “Hey, Hutch, Neal didn’t mean anything by it. Don’t go.”
Hutch kept walking and didn’t look back. “You’ll be back,” Neal shouted through the screen door. “You know who owns the candy store. When your sweet tooth starts acting up, you’ll be back.”
Shortly after Hutch stomped from the house, Lamar retreated to his bedroom, leaving Neal to rant and rave alone. Neal didn’t lose his temper often, but when he did, Lamar was afraid of him. He couldn’t say which frightened him more—Neal’s temper tantrums or his sinister silences. When Neal grew still and quite and his anger simmered inside him like brimstone in the depths of Hades, one could almost smell his fury.
Lamar hated living in that house, but he lacked the guts to tell Neal so and move out. During summer vacation he had stewed about it. He wished his mother would ask him to switch universities or suggest that he stay at home for a year before continuing his education. He wished for something—anything—that would prevent him from having to live under Neal’s dominion for another year.
Nothing did, and he had never garnered the courage to tell Neal that he wanted to make other living arrangements. Meekly he had moved his stuff from Palmetto back into the old house they had leased for the second year. Boxes and suitcases were still piled around the walls of his bedroom, waiting to be unpacked. Lacking the initiative, he lay down on the bed and covered his eyes with his forearm. Now that Hutch had walked out, Lamar felt little hope that he could ever escape Neal. If he told Neal he wanted to move elsewhere, there was no telling what he
might do. So, it seemed, he was stuck here.
It was a ’round-the-clock party. Neal surrounded himself with people who claimed to like him. Lamar suspected that they liked what Neal made available to them more than they liked Neal himself. He also figured that more than a few of them feared offending Neal, just as he did. They were intimidated into accepting his invitations.
The door to the house was always open to strangers on the lookout for sex, liquor, and soft drugs. The constant stream of pleasure-seeking students afforded Lamar very little privacy. Even when he retreated to his room and closed the door, someone was always stumbling in looking for a bathroom or an empty bed in which to copulate.
Just thinking about another nine months of incessant revelry made him weary. Neal was jealous of anything that diluted his tyranny over his friends. He demanded absolute loyalty and constant availability. That’s why he had gotten on Hutch’s case today. Neal was actually jealous of Donna Dee for taking up the majority of Hutch’s time.
He had cut deep by bringing up the incident with Jade. The three of them had tried never to acknowledge that it had happened. Even when Gary Parker hanged himself and Jade and her mother left Palmetto, they avoided linking those incidents to what had taken place out by the channel that cold, dreary evening. Hard as they tried to keep it out of their conversations, however, it always found a way to pop in. Come to think of it, Neal was usually the one to bring it up.
Was Neal manipulating the incident as he had accused Donna Dee of doing? He triggered their memory of it whenever he wanted something. His reminders of it served to keep them in line. For how long? Lamar wondered. For life? The thought chilled him to the bone. The last thing he wanted was to be on the receiving end of Neal’s ridicule. God forbid that Neal ever find out that he was in love.
Aside from his reluctance to live with Neal through another two years, he was miserable about leaving behind his newfound love, an eighth-grade English teacher at Palmetto Junior High. They had met by chance at the movies. Their first date had been nothing more romantic than going for coffee after the film, yet they had talked well into the night. For the remainder of the summer they saw each other almost every night. One evening after a drive along the seashore, Lamar had haltingly admitted, “I can’t take you home. I live with my mother.”
“I’d like to be alone with you, too.”
They settled on a clandestine meeting in a motel. There, except for the rape of Jade Sperry, Lamar lost his virginity. Because his friends were under the misconception that he’d been having sex for years, he couldn’t destroy the myth and confide in anyone about the greatest night of his life.
He had been meticulously discreet, which was no small feat when living with Myrajane. It didn’t matter to her that Lamar had already lived away from home for a year; she wanted every minute of his time accounted for. A benevolent angel had prevented her from hearing about the incident involving Jade Sperry. Myrajane had been one of the first to condemn Jade when Gary committed suicide. Knowing the unfairness of that, Lamar had wrestled with his conscience over whether to set his mother straight on a few facts. He had put up only a token struggle, however, and had wisely kept his knowledge to himself.
To this day, he couldn’t believe that he had had the good fortune to walk away from that unpleasantness unscathed. Feeling as though he were living on borrowed time, he took extra precautions to assure that his mother not find out about his love affair.