“Your brother know ’bout you?” he asked. “Wouldn’t imagine Pat would take too kindly to your activities if he knew.”
“He knows,” she said coolly.
He sucked coffee through a straw. His eyes seemed to have grown more bloodshot, turbid as red smog. She took a small bit of pleasure thinking of how raging his hangover—coupled with a busted nose and two black eyes—would be tomorrow. “At’s good. My folks tell me he’s gonna be the new Pastor Jack when good ole Jack finally punches his ticket.”
So strange after all this time, after all this steel grafted to her spine, how that old fear was still so immediate. Here she sat in Vicky’s having flashbacks to high school, her stomach sinking like she was a teenager again, and Bethany had again caught her red-handed and her family had again learned the truth.
If she counted Ben Harrington as the first person to really sow doubt within her, then she had to credit Lisa for the next step.
The heady first days of any new relationship always have that new-toy excitement about them, yet with Lisa that glorious feeling of new thingness was amplified by the secrecy, the misbehavior necessary to follow through. On Halloween, only a few weeks after Casablanca, they were in Stacey’s room, preparing their costumes. Only now did they understand the potential upside of what they were doing: their parents would never think twice if they disappeared for hours behind a closed door.
They were changing, and Stacey had her bra off, her hands involuntarily crossing in an X over her chest. She didn’t even realize until Lisa pointed it out.
“You do that in the locker room too. You’re afraid of your own tits, Miracle.”
She blushed. She did not like to be naked. Did not like having anyone, even Lisa, assessing her breasts.
“I’m not a flaunter,” she said. “Sorry I don’t parade around everywhere with my boobs out.”
“Like this?” Lisa reached behind her back and snapped off her bra. She was gorgeous, and she knew it. Stacey was about to say something more when Lisa took a handful of her hair, turned her around, and pushed her forehead against the wall, right up against her poster of the band Creed. She kissed down Stacey’s neck, her back, and yanked her underwear down. Then she felt Lisa’s tongue tracing a route from her clit up her ass and back. She did this until Stacey had to bite her own arm to keep from screaming.
Minutes later, she lay on her bed with her legs spread, exhausted, quaking.
“Who’s the flaunter now, Moore? Put your pussy away.”
“You’re out of your mind,” she breathed.
Lisa had on an old Jaguars cheerleading outfit, and she was busy covering it in fake blood, along with a sharpened dowel rod for a stake. “Buffy, the Asian Vampire Slayer,” she called it. Stacey pulled her underwear back on and went back to assembling her costume. She had a hospital gown and a tank top under which she’d stuffed a small pillow. She smeared some of Lisa’s fake blood on the gown and went about putting on zombie makeup.
“What a disturbing costume,” Lisa said. “Like you got an abortion so you turn into a zombie?”
“This way I can just take the pillow out and be a regular zombie after.”
Stacey was one of the actors for Hell House, where she would play the victim of an abortion before meeting up later in the night with Lisa and others at a party.
“I dunno. There’s something fucked up about it. Leading kids through this showcase of ways they’re going to end up eternally damned.”
“It’s just a haunted house,” she said. “Not a big deal.”
Patrick and his new wife, Becky, were in charge of organizing that year. Stacey hadn’t particularly wanted to spend the first part of her night lying in stirrups, moaning for the spectators with a fake fetus in a jar bedside, but Patrick had pleaded with her to take at least one shift.
“Do you actually believe that?” Lisa pulled her hair into one pigtail and set about snapping a hair tie around the other. “Do you believe you’re going to hell if you get an abortion or watch an R-rated movie?”
“No, not necessarily,” she said, blushing. “It’s complicated.” Lisa rolled her eyes and decided her pigtails were uneven. She took the ties out and started again. “You’re saying you don’t believe in Hell?”
Lisa looked at her in the mirror. “Nope. Not even a little.”
“You have that Bible quote in your room,” she said stupidly, as if this was proof of anything.
“Oh, I’ll put on a horse-and-pony show so I don’t have to go to war with my goddamn mother. But c’mon, Moore, this stuff is bizarre. Hell House is whack. It’s whackadoodle. Whackadoodledo.”
“I didn’t know that’s what you really thought.”
“Yeah, well, I guess we don’t talk about it.” She examined herself in the mirror, flipped her head around, and watched the pigtails twirl like pom-poms. “I’ll tell you what I do believe.”
She took Stacey’s shoulders and looked her in the eye, serious as an aneurysm.
“There is a creator. He’s just probably some pimply-assed geek masturbating while he watches us in this room.”
Some of Stacey’s anxiety retreated. She had thought Lisa was mad at her for taking part in Hell House. “Oh yeah?”
“Yep. I’m reading this book that says it’s all but mathematically assured that we, us, this”—she flipped up her skirt so Stacey could see the orange spanks beneath—“and all human history is taking place inside a computer simulation.”
“Yeah, I saw that movie with Keanu Reeves.”
“This room, New Canaan, Ohio, Earth, Creed…” She smacked the poster. “This is all taking place inside a simulated model, which you gotta admit is even weirder than thinking there’s a magic man in the sky watching your boner.”
Stacey laughed, a deep rat-a-tat staccato.
“It’s simple enough when you think about it. This book lays it out: Computational power has increased rapidly since its introduction, so rapidly that it’s clear mankind is just scratching the surface of what’s possible.”
“Moore’s Law!” she cried.
“Precisely. He says it’s clear that at some point computing power will be so enormous that we’ll be able to run simulations of anything, including the creation of a whole universe of conscious beings. But why run just one simulation? Why not run millions, Stace? And within these simulations, many of the beings we are simulating will at some point develop the ability to run their own simulations. The odds that we are the original biological entities who will create the very first simulation are small. Nearly impossible, actually. The odds that we are among the billions of simulations simulated by other simulators, merely the creation of other computer simulations, are extremely high.”
“You’re such a weird geek.”
“Not that it makes any difference in how we live our lives,” she promised. “We still have to treat people well, try to get laid, and we still gotta save the fucking whales, dude.”
And yet later that night, lying in the fake stirrups, acting the role of forsaken abortion victim, who’d died of complications on the operating table, Lisa’s bizarre story stayed with her, and she wondered why this theory was any less plausible than an outcome like eternal torture. It was the last time she ever let Patrick talk her into being a part of Hell House.
“Seriously, though, you should come back here and be with me,” said Jonah, head weaving playfully. “Get down like we shoulda got down after homecoming. I’d make you happy.”
“Would you now.”
She guided her straw through the hole in the cylindrical ice and swizzled. An old man in a Navy ball cap began a coughing fit, his throat wet and horrid. He was horridly skinny and had a gruesome tattoo on his arm, a clown with a murderous smile. The man’s skin was so brown and weathered, the image looked dehydrated, head-shrunken.