Like I was saying, parties dissipated quickly when I left, and Brad wasn’t there to keep it going for me.
Scottie, red-faced, ran over and pounded on my window. I rolled it down, and a gust of freezing air blew in.
“What are you doing?” I whisper-shouted. I don’t know why I was whispering—everyone else was yelling. I glanced at Corvis’s window, and this time, she looked back. I’m sure she didn’t see my face in the darkness, but she had to see that her street was full of cars and people.
Scottie held up a carton of eggs.
“It’s not a good Halloween if you don’t egg someone’s house,” he said. “Come on.”
Susan walked behind him, a nervous expression on her face. I got out of the car, and she grabbed my forearm.
“Why did you leave?” she asked me. She was shivering uncontrollably in her tiny costume, her teeth chattering.
We watched as they started throwing eggs at Corvis’s car. It was like a nightmare—a bunch of guys in Eminem costumes with cartons and cartons of eggs, laughing like monkeys.
“Happy Halloween, dyke!” Scottie shouted.
Heather pulled a package of toilet paper out of Scottie’s trunk, and people started throwing that too—all over the house.
“Here, Taylor!” Heather ran up to me and handed me a roll.
I could have stopped them. All I would need to do is call them fuckasses and tell them to go home. They would listen. Their hearts weren’t really even in it—they were just drunk and bored. Usually, we did this to Principal Deftose’s house. Scottie had probably thought of Corvis because she’d stopped in Emmylou’s the other day, or maybe Heather had suggested it. Either way, if I told them to stop, they would.
But I couldn’t. What if they suspected I was a homo too?
If Brad were here, he would have stopped it. I knew, in that moment, that he was a better person than I was. I pictured a graph, where a line indicated how good each person was, and my score, just like on the standardized math test, was way below the red line that said you should be at least here.
I dropped the roll of toilet paper. Everyone’s voices, though they were right beside me, sounded muted, like I was underwater.
I watched Corvis come to the front door and open it. I watched her scream that she would call the cops if we didn’t leave, and I watched an egg land on her shoe.
Dyke.
The word bounced around in my head, echoing.
I shrunk back against my car next to Susan, hoping Corvis wouldn’t see me. The word cops sort of scared everyone, and they started backing off.
“Come on, Susan,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
One last look at Corvis showed me that she wasn’t crying. She just stood in the doorway, daring them to throw another egg.
The Unicorn
When I got home, Sandra sat at the kitchen table, drinking whiskey on ice from a coffee mug. She’d changed from her work clothes into a white terry-cloth bathrobe, but she hadn’t taken her makeup off. With her hair down, kinky from the bun she wore at The Mooring, and her lips still stained red, she looked beautiful and mournful. But her nose, a perfect ski-jump, didn’t match mine.
“Happy Halloween,” I said in a deflated voice. I couldn’t get the image of Corvis in her doorway out of my mind.
“What are you supposed to be?” Sandra asked, and the question seemed like a thousand questions wrapped into one.
“A s’more.”
Sandra shot me a disapproving look, but she still poured me a cup of coffee to prevent a hangover. I joined her at the table and realized that one of Johnny Moon’s movies was playing on the countertop television. I followed her gaze, to a frame of him driving through an unimaginable desert, and I wondered if that landscape could possibly exist.
“How’s Brad?” she asked, her eyes never leaving the screen.
“Sick,” I said. “Strep.”
“Why aren’t you taking care of him?” she asked.
“I don’t want strep,” I said. “Sandra?”
“What?”
“What was it like when you met him?” I asked. “Johnny Moon.”
“If you’re not careful,” said Sandra, “you’ll lose him.”
I needed to call Brad back. I knew I needed to call him back.
I watched Johnny Moon park the car recklessly and pull a handgun out of his pocket.
In addition to writing letters, I sent Johnny Moon a wallet-sized school photograph every year, but I didn’t know if he got any of them, because I just used the fan mail address.
I told him about school being closed for an entire week in fifth grade, when we had that giant blizzard. I told him about how Susan wanted a baby so badly that she walked around her bedroom pretending to breastfeed her stuffed panda bear.
Johnny Moon was kind of like a diary to me, but then one day, I got angry with him for ignoring me, sick of receiving only printed-out photographs with fake signatures on them in return, and I never wrote again. I was not the kind of person who was supposed to act desperate.
“You lose people all the time,” I said to Sandra. “You love losing people.”
“I don’t love losing people,” she said. “It’s just been a while since I’ve found a man I didn’t want to shake off.” She pulled the glass ashtray closer and lit a cigarette.
I imagined these men as loose pieces of sand in her shoes, which she shook off before entering the house. But Johnny Moon wasn’t sand; he was sea glass.
Still looking at the screen, in kind of a desperate voice, I asked, “Is he my father?”
She looked at me, holding her cigarette to her lips, smoke curling out of her nostrils like a dragon. When she pulled her hand away, the filter was dotted with red lipstick.
“Honey, I’ve told you—I don’t know who your father is.”
“But did you know Johnny Moon?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, tossing her hair. “I did.”
“What was he like?” I asked, which I knew was a little bit dangerous. This could either work in my favor or cause us to get in a giant fight. When I asked questions about my father, it made Sandra feel bad about herself, and she usually took it out on me. She criticized my hair or makeup, told me I was gaining weight, or just plain ignored me. It didn’t help, I’m sure, that I was dressed as a s’more.
“You know,” she said. “He was a movie star. He showed up, got everyone excited, then disappeared.”