She has had enough, and yet.
He looks up. “Hey Bedelia. I would, but. I gotta sit here, sorry. I’m waiting for my date.”
Beddy looks at the table where he’s sitting. Scraggly lemon slices loll at the bottoms of pitchers that once held water.
“She’s been in the bathroom for a while,” he says. I’m starting to get worried.” He suddenly perks up. “Maybe you could go in and check on her?”
Beddy moves away quickly from the table toward the back exit, balling her fists as she walks. Two male teachers man the door. One, Coach McKeeting, blocks the right push-handled door entirely, his arms crossed in front of him, his brawn busting from his tuxedo. The other, an older, longhaired teacher, is to the left of the doors, leaning upright against the wall. He appears to be asleep.
“There’s no more in and out privileges,” the awake one says with a sad shake of his bullet head.
“It’s the last fucking song!” she says, and throws open the left door so hard on “song” the front of it bangs against the wall outside and almost catches her shoulder as it ricochets back toward her before the springs kick in and guide it slowly back into place, and she steps around it.
Her face is hot and she looks over the railing at the sea, black and hysterical, pushing at the pilings below. She leans against the railing and closes her eyes. The air, wet from seawater and sky, cools her face.
She stays like this until the couples leaving becomes so constant that they prop the doors open. Then she sighs, heaves herself back from the railing, and joins the crowd down the cement ramp.
The parking lot is mostly returned to stasis. The ambulance is gone, as well as the tow truck that must have borne it, the fire truck, the boy in the blue suit, and the riot gear cop. A squad car and police van remain, their lights flashing listlessly. So do the barricades, streaked with that pervasive orange dye. A colossally tall policeman in a short-sleeved uniform sweeps glass and debris into a pile using a pushbroom. As she walks past him he stops pushing briefly.
“Drive safe,” he says mournfully.
She tries to smile, and keeps walking. Her feet and head hurt. No, everything hurts.
The cop who stopped her car earlier is standing in roughly the same place, and as she passes him he makes eye contact with her. “Drive safe,” he says scoldingly.
She unlocks and opens her car and flops down into the front seat, spent beyond what can be quantified. She’s not even positive she should drive right now, but she knows there’s no way else she can get home. She looks out her windshield through the gaps in the guardrail at the sea. Eyes the key in her hand.
If she drove through the guardrail right now, maybe that would be easiest.
Maybe she wouldn’t have to die.
When she hit the water, there would be a moment of panic when the water flowed into the car, filling it, weighing it beneath the surface, but then the mermaids would come. They would swarm around the car like large breasted dolphins, and blow on conch shells that would rend the metal of her car apart. Then they would place a different shell over her face, allowing her to breathe, and invite her to become a mermaid, tell her that she’d always secretly been one, but now she could become one for real, forever.
“The fuck you doing, dumb slut?”
Beddy is startled by the voice. She looks over to her left to the beige BMW next to her. A boy is standing with his driver side door open, glaring over his roof at her.
“Duh, your door’s against my fucking car?”
She looks at her door, which is very much against his car.
“Shut your door, so I can leave,” he says, gesturing vaguely where he could leave to with his thumb. “I’m not getting in till you shut it, ‘cause then my paint job’s going to get fucked. I’ve seen it happen. She’s got a fresh wax.”
“Sorry,” she says, and draws her door away from his car gingerly, then closes it. She waits for him to back out of his space and leave, and then she starts her engine, puts on her seatbelt.
She backs out and drives out of the parking lot, trying not to drive over the officer’s feet since he’s left so little room for her to pass. Taking one final look at The Grove, she turns right and drives up the pier back to shore.
“’Sorry,”” she mimics herself. “’Sooorry,’” she says, this time with more whine.
She is tired of the word. Of its implication of responsibility. Its transference of guilt. She learned early and she learned deeply that her world has no patience for people who feel the way she feels. It wants to be as fast and rough and thoughtless as it wants. It cannot be taught otherwise, or halted. Not in the name of Progress. To its credit it tries for civility, but makes the fatal mistake of holding it above fairness. So she has had to smile tightly as the gratuitous cretins of her world have bent her over the sawhorse, even accept it with generosity, though the pain congealed into jawbreakers in her throat. Apologize when she whimpered too loudly.
“Sooooorrrrrrrryyyyy,” she says, now sounding like those same cretins.
She winces when she thinks of all the times she said she was sorry and didn’t mean it. When she had to apologize to kids that teased her and made her wish she were dead. In those situations, she had lost her temper, had escalated a situation her bullies had started. Usually, her temper would be the only punishable offense. Her feelings were her responsibility, the adults would say, and so were her reactions. But if the teacher or authority figure were generous, they’d make the bully apologize. This was delivered with various insincerity signifiers: eyes rolling or on their lap, spoken into forearms or cupped palms, feet twitching or kicking or kick-drumming. It always sounded one of two ways: drawn out and sing-song, or flat and muffled. And there was nothing worse than hearing her hateful apology, made only to hear the bully’s, parroted back to her.
The difference between her and the Wades of the world is that she knows apologizing is the right thing to do. What would it take for her to do the wrong thing on purpose?