Paul hesitated, downed his beer to the last drop. “There’s something else.”
“Ah, fuck, what?”
“Well, this isn’t coming from her mouth to my ears. This is one of those round about things. This girl said that this girl heard such and such and so on. Okay? This isn’t necessarily anything, so don’t freak. Could be rumors, probably all it is.”
The beer tasted metallic and sloshed in his stomach like oil on ocean waves. “What?”
Paul admired his empty beer bottle. “She says she’s pregnant.”
Tyler almost dropped the beer bottle but part of him had known this was where it was going and he squeezed the bottle instead. Lightheadedness threatened to crumple him to the floor and little black dots even peppered his vision but he ground his teeth and breathed in forcefully as if preparing to lift something heavy. He held the air in his lungs, focused on it.
“This is seriously fucked. If she’s—”
He exhaled the air with the vocal force of an orgasm (like the one that impregnated the weirdo bitch). “I have to talk to her. Now.”
“Whoa.” Paul put down the empty bottle and held up his hands. “You have to think rationally. Thinking fast and acting stupid got you in this mess. We go over there and then what? She’s all happy and everything you came to see her and shows you her sonogram?”
“She had a sonogram?”
“Fuck, what do I know? This is all shit I heard. It might be a lie.”
… sack rice … luff chide … Sacrifice and … luff chide?
“No, it’s not.”
“The odds of her getting pregnant, I mean it was your first time. Jesus. Of all the fucked-up luck. Is it even possible for her to know so soon?”
“You remember anything about Bio? I don’t.”
… luff chide …
“I told you about her mother, how she slipped into the room whispering something and then splashed that blood on me. I told you I couldn’t make out what she had said, but I know now. She said sacrifice and love child.”
“Love child? That sounds like a hippie thing.”
“No, it sounds like a fucking curse.”
“She’s not a real witch. Just some psycho.”
“I didn’t tell you everything.” Tyler filled him in about the rest of the events on Friday night. He explained how angry Sasha had been, how she threatened to call the police and tell everyone at school that he raped her. But how, upon exiting the car, she had mumbled, “Mother is not going to be pleased.” Who said things like that? And, finally, he told Paul about the figure in the window that night whose mouth had been opening closing in silent words. Maybe that hadn’t happened (just a dream), but he saw it so well in his mind that he couldn’t deny it. Each time Tyler said something as if it was a piece of evidence in a trial, Paul said, “Yeah, but … ,” and couldn’t finish his retort. Tyler replayed the experience in Sasha’s bedroom on Saturday, how she had been both come-hither like and also reserved, like she had a split personality.
“She cursed me and you don’t have to believe it but it’s true.”
“There’s no such thing as witches and curses. That stuff is for horror movies and stupid kid stories.”
“Well, maybe it is, mostly, but maybe also there’s a chance that all that hocus pocus shit does work and, under the right circumstances, can work. She cursed me for what I did.”
“Fucking her?”
“Raping her!” His head started swimming again and he had to sit down. He inhaled and exhaled deeply several times. “I did. I raped her. Doesn’t matter if I didn’t hear her say no. She said it and I kept going. I’m guilty.”
“Bullshit.”
“Her mother knew something was wrong because of how Sasha looked getting out of my car, crying and shit. She cursed me.”
“With a baby?”
“Sacrifice love child. I didn’t catch it all. She probably said something like sacrifice this man because he wronged my love child. The love child is Sasha. The sacrifice is me.” He stabbed his chest with his beer bottle and some splashed out of the top and spilled on the floor.
“Relax. Your dick didn’t fall off, did it?”
“She’s not doing stuff to me,” Tyler said. “She’s doing it to my family.”
After a moment, Paul’s eyes went wide. “You think she killed Delaney?”
“I don’t know.” He gulped the rest of his beer in increasingly bitter swallows. “But I have to find out.”
* * *
Paul assured Tyler he was fine to drive (Tyler didn’t really care; he just asked repeatedly to try to calm himself) and belched three nasty beer burps in the car as proof that he had digested the Sam Adams.
“If it’s a curse, why is Sasha parading around school about how you two are so much in love?”
Tyler hadn’t found a satisfying answer to that yet except the obvious one that she was nuts. “If she’s really pregnant then she’s trying to trick herself into believing some kind of fairy tale scenario.”
“Do you think she knows what her mother is doing?”
Sasha had cried for him to wait and not run away after the incident with her mother; she had wanted to explain. Or so it seemed. She might have only wanted him to stay longer so her mother could administer more spells. “She must.”
“But if she is pregnant why would she want her child’s future aunt to die?”
Tyler hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I can see why you’re in advanced math. This must be like some ‘If Then’ statement to you.”
“Logically, it doesn’t make any sense.”
“She’s fucked in the head. You said so. Her mother’s a witch, there’s no telling how she’ll respond to anything.”
Paul drove onto the road leading into the hilly lands of Hidden Hills Community. “Good old Trailer Trash Town,” Paul said. “Always the sign of a good girlfriend.”
“Fuck you.”
“Just as long as you don’t rape me.”
Tyler wasn’t in the mood to laugh. He had to figure out what he was going to say to her. He couldn’t be abrasive or she’d back off and he couldn’t try to trick her (pretend he loved her) because he’d probably get himself in more trouble, end up with more blood on him.
“Want to show me where your love child was conceived?”
Tyler started to tell him to shut up again and stopped. Love child. Had Sasha’s mother been referring to the baby now inside of Sasha? How could she have known so quickly? Or had she cast a spell for a baby to appear? That sounded crazy and really unlikely, but still … It didn’t matter, though, the sacrifice part made sense. Delaney had been sacrificed as punishment. His dead sister was proof that something really fucked up was going on.
“You think witchcraft is even possible? Like casting spells?” Tyler asked.
“You got me driving out here and it better not be to show off your pregnant girlfriend.”
“But you don’t, right? Believe?”
“In witches on broomsticks and magic potions? As you said, I’m in advanced classes, not one of those morons in the tech program. Ask one of those kids and they’ll probably whip out a voodoo doll or something.”
“You think Delaney’s just a coincidence? I was at the bowling alley for God’s sake. Someone was there and took a ball and killed my sister.”
“How would they even know when she was going to cross under that bridge?”
“She’s been going to SAT Prep for weeks. Someone could have been clocking her.”
“Your brother’s on Ritalin or some shit, yeah?”
“So?”
“Take some. You’re getting all paranoid. If someone had been following her, writing down at what time she did what then how could that even relate to some evil curse a psycho bitch conjured? It doesn’t make sense. You need to take this slow. We shouldn’t have come here. You’re bound to do something stupid.”