Paullina Simons - Tully

‘What does that mean?’

‘That means take me to Jen’s, Robin, right now.’

He started the car, began to drive. This just was not going the way he wanted it to. Tully was not playing ball. But he was angry with her now and needed her to be angry back.

‘Tully, I heard that you had a reputation in school. I heard,’ he said, feeling braver, ‘that you were labeled the girl most likely to. ’

‘Oh, you heard that, did you?’ she sneered. ‘You must have heard that from one of my friends.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, what? Well fucking what?’

‘Do you?’

‘Robin!’ she shouted. ‘It’s none of your goddamned business!’

He persisted. ‘I think it is my business. You are my girl now, and I don’t want people to be talking behind your back about you.’

She laughed an awful laugh. ‘I’m your girl? Since when am I your girl?’

He was baffled. ‘I thought it was understood.’

‘Nothing is understood, Robin. I am not your girl and you are not my boy. We meet once in a while and you take me to lunch and then fuck me in your car! Let’s not make a mountain out of that, shall we?’ Her voice was loud and cold.

‘And tell me something,’ Tully said. ‘If you thought for a moment that I was a virgin, is this what I got from you, is this the very best you had to give a virgin, taking my virginity from me in your Corvette, without even keeping the engine on? Is this your very best, you asshole?’

‘Okay, Tully, okay,’ he said. ‘I got my answer.’

‘Yeah, you got your fucking answer, all right,’ she said. He drove her to Sunset Court, and she got out of the car, slammed the door, walked into Jennifer’s house, and did not look back.

Robin went home feeling like shit. It did not go as well as he had hoped at all. Maybe it was difficult for a thing like that to go well. Maybe she was right. Maybe it was none of his business. But what should he do? She wasn’t his girl? It had only been about four weeks, but he liked her, that much was obvious. How she felt was less obvious – Tully always had the mental equivalent of one arm’s length, maybe two, separating herself from him. But he didn’t want to stop seeing her. Stop seeing her and do what? Go back to Gail?

Robin worked and moped for a couple of days. Being at home depressed him and now there was not even a Tully on Sunday to look forward to. Robin’s dad was home from the hospital. There was nothing more a hospital could do. Stephen DeMarco, Sr, had been sick with lung cancer for about six months now and the whole family was waiting for him to die, Robin included, because he could not stand the sight of his father in pain, or worse, on morphine – delirious, debilitated, and dying. The entire house smelled of chloroform and death. To make himself feel better, Robin took Gail out to dinner, apologized to her, brought her back to his house, and had sex with her, all the while thinking of Tully groaning beneath him, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck.

Two weeks passed, and Robin couldn’t stand it anymore. One day he left work early and drove over to Topeka High. He sat in front of the main entrance for two hours without turning the radio on.

Jennifer and Julie walked out of the school together, schoolbooks against their chests, and when Robin saw Jennifer and Julie looking at him, he thought: they know. They know, and they think I’m an asshole. Robin asked them where he could find Tully. He was surprised by their answer. Washburn University Day Care?

Driving over to Washburn University, he parked on the southwestern corner of the campus and watched Tully through a wire fence play with a group of children. The sign on the fence read KEEP OUT. PRIVATE PROPERTY. WASHBURN UNIVERSITY NURSERY AND DAY CARE. Robin noticed all the kids clung to her, and Tully, bending down or kneeling in front of them, listened to each of them speak. Then the children chased her around the playground at manic speed and she ran from them a little slower so that they could catch her. Robin saw that Tully was laughing, and the kids were laughing, too.

Robin waited until five o’clock and then beeped the horn. Tully saw him, and slowly came through the gate to the car. She did not get in.

‘Please get in, I want to talk to you,’ Robin said.

She got in.

‘I gotta get home. My mother’s home by six o’clock.’ Robin drove to the Potwin Elementary School, a block away from the Grove, and parked there.

‘So what’s this about the day-care center?’

She shrugged. ‘Just something I do on Thursday afternoons.’

‘Every Thursday afternoon?’

‘Sure.’

‘For how long?’

Tully rubbed her hands together. ‘This is my third year.’

‘For God’s sake, why?’

Tully shrugged again. ‘All the teachers – they’re all older. The kids need someone young to play with.’

Robin touched her hair tenderly. ‘It’s obvious they like you.’

‘Yeah, you don’t know what we play. I’m the Wicked Witch of the West, and they’re supposed to kill me when they catch me.’

Robin smiled. ‘You like children, Tully.’

‘Yes, for two hours a week, I like other people’s children,’ she said, moving away from his hand on her hair.

Robin cleared his throat. ‘Listen, I’m sorry about the other day. I didn’t mean to upset you. Please go out with me again, and if you don’t want to tell me anything, I won’t ask you. You can set the rules, Tull, just don’t break up with me.’

Tully was glad he had come. She missed him, but she also thought it was a good time to be honest with him about some things. ‘Robin, I’ll be glad to go out with you,’ Tully said. ‘I like you, you’re a nice guy, but you just have to understand a couple of things about me. One – I don’t much like to talk about my business. And two –’ Tully struggled to find the right words. ‘And two, this – we – can at best be a temporary thing.’ She felt a little tight inside seeing his reaction, his blank stare, a hurt, mute face. What does he expect? she thought. What the hell did he think was going to happen?

‘Robin, what?’

‘Why temporary, Tully?’ he asked.

‘Robin, because I have plans. I got plans.’ That just don’t include you.

‘Plans?’ he said wearily.

‘Yes. I’m a senior, you know. I’m going to be eighteen years old. I’m going to do something with my life.’

‘Like what? Dance?’

Tully shook her head. ‘No dancing. All that practice, all that competition, those grueling hours, that’s not a life, not a life for me, anyway. From one jail to another,’ she said. ‘No, I like to dance, been dancing since I was young. You could say’ – she half smiled – ‘that dance was my first passion –’

‘That’s nothing to be proud of, Tully,’ Robin said.

‘Who is proud?’ she said defenselessly. ‘I’m not proud of it, that’s just the way it is.’

‘So pursue it.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be trapped by dancing.’ She rubbed her hands together. ‘Classical dance is out of the question and every other kind involves taking your clothes off.’ And I just don’t want to take my clothes off. She never had been able to spend the hundred-dollar bill she won the time she took off her shirt during a dance contest in Tortilla Jack’s on College Hill.

‘You don’t seem like you much want to be trapped by anything,’ said Robin.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘So?’

Robin wanted to know what else was there.

‘College.’

‘Good, college is good,’ he said. ‘So?’

She sighed. ‘Jennifer and I are applying to Stanford. My grades aren’t great. I’ll never get in of course…’ she trailed off.