Skeleton Key(7)

“So,” he said finally, having lost the thread of whatever it was that had started his caressing her leg. “You were going to elope.”

“No,” Annabel said patiently. “I only said I was going to elope. Because I had to. Because the guy I wanted to neck with was a Christian.”

“Oh.”

“People think of Virginia as this very sophisticated place where senators live, but it isn’t really. It’s full of rednecks. And this guy belonged to one of those churches where, you know, they speak in tongues. And sex is evil unless you’re married. Do you think sex is evil?”

“I think it must be weird. Being someone like Kayla Anson. Being, you know, set apart like that.”

“Set apart?”

“Well, you know,” Tommy said. “That’s what happens. We had a guy at Choate who was a Rockefeller. I mean, you know, that wasn’t his name, because it was his mother who was the Rockefeller, but everybody knew who he was, and so he was—well—set apart.”

“I’ve always thought of Kayla as a perfectly ordinary person. With money.”

“Maybe. But she gets to go back and finish the year come January, and you don’t.”

Annabel’s St. Pauli Girl Light was finished. She’d taken nearly an hour to drink it, but now there it was. The bartender caught her eye and she nodded, slightly. Then the bartender looked at Tommy and shook his head.

“The thing about people like Kayla Anson,” Tommy said—and he was slurring his words, too, close to losing it; it had to be all that stuff that he’d had out at the club—“is that you can’t help hating them. No matter what kind of person they are. If they’re shits, you hate them for being able to get away with it. And if they’re not, you hate them for being perfect. Do you see what I mean?”

“No,” Annabel said.

“I bet you do see what I mean. I bet you do. And every time Kayla Anson complains about anything, I bet you just about erupt, you hate it so much. Because people like that don’t have any right to complain.”

“I don’t think you ought to drink any more of that,” Annabel said. “I think you’re going to end up passing out.”

Tommy smiled politely. Then he put his head down on the bar and closed his eyes. He wasn’t going to pass out. He was just going to go to sleep. The bartender put her new St. Pauli Girl Light down and waited. Annabel opened her purse and got out a five-dollar bill.

“You’re going to have to do something about him,” the bartender said.

“I know,” Annabel replied.

“It’s college boys,” the bartender said. “You see it all the time. They don’t know the difference between getting high and getting stewed. Most of them don’t know the difference between getting high and getting sick. At least he isn’t sick.”

“No,” Annabel said. “He isn’t sick.”

The bartender made change. Annabel put the change down on the bar next to her glass.

“You’re going to have to do something about him eventually,” the bartender said, again, and then he moved away down the bar.

Annabel poured beer into her glass and swung her legs. It wasn’t true that she hated Kayla Anson—at least, it wasn’t true exactly. It was just that it sometimes seemed as if she’d gotten the wrong end of some cosmic bargain. Kayla didn’t even care about acting out and having fun. Rules didn’t faze her. She never felt suffocated by the things everybody expected of her. Even that last night at school, when she was helping Annabel down the sheet rope from their dorm window and onto that idiotic old horse, she had only been in it out of general good nature. She was helping Annabel. It didn’t even occur to her that she could come into town herself and find a boy of her own.

No, Annabel told herself again. It really isn’t true that I hate Kayla. I’ve known her forever. And if there are times I sometimes wish I could wipe her face out of existence, that’s only natural. Because she is who she is. And it’s frustrating.

Annabel got down off her barstool and moved as close to Tommy as she could. With his head down on the bar like that, he was in the best possible position. All she had to do was run her hand over the back of his pants—it made him smile, in spite of the condition he was in—and there was his wallet, right where she would have expected it to be. She got it out and put it into her purse, careful not to appear self-conscious. She was a woman with a drunk on her hands. Nobody was going to be surprised at anything she did. She moved her hands around to the front of Tommy’s trousers and went looking for the keys. That was harder, because he was lying sideways across the place where the pocket she needed had its opening. When she finally got in there, she could feel his penis against the side of her hand. It was limp as a worm. She got the keys and got out.