other half—so I said maybe we could drive around a little, but not too long. This felt bad, and I wasn’t even doing anything.”
“Yet,” Logs says.
“So we drove out past Diamond Lake and then along High Drive and through a couple of neighborhoods and I said I had to take her home. We got within a few hundred yards of that long-ass driveway that goes up to her mansion and she told me to stop. I’m goin’ no way but she showed me her watch and said I did not want to be the guy caught driving up her driveway this close to midnight. I thought, most rumors are rumors for a reason and maybe the one about her dad being a teenage boy killer is one of them. So I stopped.”
Logs closes his eyes.
“I told her I’d wait until she got at least to the driveway. She wanted a few minutes to ‘collect’ herself, like she was really worried about her old man. Then she started asking me stuff like why I thought she couldn’t get a steady boyfriend. She was calm, like she really wanted to know, so I said the dumb-ass thing: I said well, she didn’t always look quite as hot as she looked right then, and she asked if I thought she was pretty, and I said sure, everyone thought she was pretty. She asked if I thought she was hot, and I was trying to think of a way to say she was without saying she was hot to me. But I gotta tell you Logs, my mind was wandering to a bad place.”
“At this point your mentor would rather hear generalizations,” Logs says.
Paulie snorts. “Before I could say anything she put her arms around my neck and asked if I wanted . . . if I wanted . . .”
“To have sex?”
“Yeah, but she said the word.”
This is so far out of Logs’s experience of Mary Wells he can barely believe it, even coming from Paulie.
“I don’t know if you know what that does . . .”
“I know what it does,” Logs says.
“Believe it or not, I was still thinking of Hannah,” Paulie says. “I pushed Mary away, but she was like, desperate. It was like some kind of test of life or death or something. This probably sounds like a guy making excuses for doing something spectacularly dumb, but it’s the truth. I pushed her away and she started crying, sobbing almost. This is crazy but did you ever have sex with someone because you felt sorry for them? That’s not human, is it? I mean, I can’t say I didn’t get cranked up; that’s not human either, but then she was rubbing me and her shirt was off and she was like an animal. When it was over I just wanted her out of my car, because sanity comes rushing back with . . . well, you know what I’m saying. But she wouldn’t get out. She wanted to know if she was good.”
Logs simply shakes his head.
“She straightened herself up and asked again if she was good, I mean, like a little kid wanting to know if she tied her shoes right. I said yeah just to get her out of there, then I watched her walk down the road and turn into her driveway, and sat there another five minutes wanting to beat my head against the dashboard ’til I went unconscious.”
“That would have been the smartest thing you did all night.”
“By the time I’d driven two miles, I knew I’d have to tell Hannah. I read Shakespeare; I know about tangled webs. So I did, the very next day, and that was that. So when all of a sudden Mary was missing and then she wasn’t, and the more we heard the stranger it got, I started thinking something’s way out of whack here. I did what I did and it’s my fault, but Mary was a whole different girl than the one everyone calls Jesus’s mom. I paid attention in psych. That kind of behavior means secrets.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Messed-up room that nobody saw, two-day lag in reporting . . .”
“What I said in P-8 today goes double for your brain, Paulie,” Logs says. “You know what they say about assuming.”
“That it makes an ass out of ‘u’ and me?”
“No, that it makes whoever does it an asshole. So sit tight. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—most of the time when we don’t understand