The Tetradome Run Read online

  Rudy made his surprise return that night. He showed up a little after nine. Jenna squealed in surprise when she opened the door.

  This turned out to be an important moment for all of us, so let me fill in some gaps for you. Rudy wasn’t invited to the party. He didn’t even know there would be a party. He made the drive from El Paso to Albuquerque that day and came to the house unannounced, with flowers. And a necklace for Jenna. And a message that he had decided to move back to Albuquerque because he realized he couldn’t live without her.

  I should let you know that some of the people at the party already knew Rudy and some only knew of Rudy. Sunny was part of the latter, and, since I was pretty much staring at Sunny all night long, I got a good view of her reaction when Rudy gave Jenna flowers and a necklace and announced he was moving back to be with her.

  It wasn’t good.

  She masked it, sure. Sunny did her best to put on a happy face. But I saw the truth. I saw her eyebrows close in above her nose when Rudy gave Jenna the flowers. I saw how stunned she was when Rudy said he was back in Albuquerque for good. I saw the look of hurt, maybe even betrayal, on her face when Rudy and Jenna kissed and everyone clapped.

  Jenna and Rudy were attached at the hip for the rest of the night. They were like newlyweds at their wedding reception, all glowing and bubbly wherever they went.

  With Rudy taking all of Jenna’s attention, Sunny’s attention was up for grabs. I did my best to snatch that attention for myself, but for the first few hours of the party, she gave it to someone else.

  Austin, a young man with a freckly face who (I was to learn) played on the Hillerman Lacrosse team, was chasing after Sunny all night. I didn’t know how to compete with that, so I didn’t try. I stayed in the background as the conversation flowed. I tried to insert myself a couple times but no one was interested in what I had to say. I lost count of the beers I drank.

  In the final hour, before I retreated to my bedroom, I watched as the party transitioned from a foreplay period to a deal-closing period. Couples that had been talking were making out. Couples that had been making out were looking for a bedroom.

  Worried I might lose my bedroom if I didn’t occupy it, I went upstairs, fired up my game console, put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones, and started playing Sunrunner X, a first-person alien shooter that I played in those days. Sometime after one o’clock I crawled into bed and fell asleep.

  The house was quiet when she woke me.

  “Hey there, Bugaboo.”

  The message came to me in a whisper. It blasted into my mind, the noise of it smothering my drunken nonsense dreams and waking me up.

  I found her kneeling next to the bed. She was running the back of her hand along my cheek.

  In the darkness, she was hard to see, but I felt her presence. Felt the heat from her body.

  “Was it my imagination, or were you following me around tonight?” she whispered. Her breath, fruity and hot with alcohol, tickled my cheek.

  “I might have been following you a little,” I said.

  She pulled my arm around her back. “I knew it,” she whispered. “Do you like looking at me, Bugaboo?”

  Her hand was on my thigh, her fingers crawling up, finding their way into my underwear. What a crazy night that was!

  “I do like to look at you,” I said. “I really, really do.”

  She kissed me. She took off her shirt. She unsnapped her bra. It fell to the floor. Her breasts, her neck, her mouth, her hands…and then she was on top of me. Then it was happening, a sixteen-year-old virgin’s dream come true.

  Fourth Entry – March 10. 2:22pm.

  That stuff you just read about the party, about my first sexual encounter with Sunny—the act of writing about that night twisted me up in more ways than I can describe. Here is someone who ruined my life, who ruined my sister’s life, and I still have feelings for her.

  It’s been three years and I’m still in a place where I want Sunny to use and abuse me. Let me tell you, facing up to that wasn’t fun. But that’s what I did. After I wrote about that first sexual encounter with Sunny, I had to take a few days to stare into the empty space where my conscience used to be.

  I had to accept that this is who I am now.

  I am a liar and a coward. I am a co-conspirator. I am an evil son of a bitch. So be it.

  I’m not going to fulfill my sister’s dying wish. I will not publish her memoir. Pretty soon she’ll be running in the first Tetradome race of the season. Pretty soon she’ll be gone, and any chance that anyone in the world will discover the truth will be gone too.

  I will collect the money Jenna earns for me as her beneficiary, and I will move on with my life, carrying my secrets to my grave.

  Fifth Entry – March 14. 11:03am.

  I’ve changed my mind.

  In the days that passed since I wrote that horrible tirade about being an evil coward who is at peace with his own villainy, I’ve become ashamed that I ever indulged those thoughts. That’s not me. I’ve made some mistakes. But I’m going to do the right thing.

  I’m going to finish the story I started telling you, then I’m going to publish this memoir. If I move quickly enough, maybe there’s a chance we can re-open Jenna’s case because of new evidence.

  Like the gun. No amount of teary-eyed I don’t know a thing about the gun testimony from Jenna was able to overcome the fact that the murder weapon used to kill Senator Lomax was registered to our dad. The prosecution destroyed her on that.

  Here’s the truth about the gun.

  Our house was old, at least, old by Albuquerque standards. Built in the 1940s, the house didn’t have a garage for cars. The room we called ‘garage’ was just an unfinished, unheated room with a concrete floor and a tall, deep stack of shelving. The upper shelves in that garage were a space where things got lost in darkness and cobwebs, and for years after my dad left, those upper shelves went completely untouched. As I got older, the garage became my space to manage. With some egging on from Grandma, I cleaned out the whole place and made it mine.

  I found rusty cans of turpentine and paint thinner on those high shelves. Baby-food jars that had been repurposed to hold screws and washers. An old set of jumper cables. A leatherbound notebook that no one had ever written in. All of it was drowning in dust and cobwebs. I had a run-in with a black widow (squashed her with the handle of a broom). I found an old ashtray that was stamped Happy New Year 1987.

  And I found my dad’s gun, which I promptly claimed as my own…in secret. I knew my mother wouldn’t let me keep the gun, or the box of ammo I found next to it, so I hid everything. I put the gun and the box of ammo in an old backpack, put the backpack on the shelf in my closet, and put a box of old basketball trophies in front of the backpack.

  Then I let it sit. I was like my dad, I guess. I didn’t ever intend to use my gun, but I liked having it. I liked that I had it at the ready if there was ever a home invader situation in the middle of the night or a zombie apocalypse. I fully intended to keep that gun forever, for it to be my gun when I was an adult with a wife and children.

  I liked that I didn’t just have a secret; I had a secret of consequence. I should have known that it’s hard to hold onto a secret like that forever. Secrets are the currency you trade for intimacy, and because I wanted so desperately to be intimate with Sunny, I couldn’t keep my damn mouth shut.

  Backtrack with me a little. It’s the night of the party. Sunny has just entered my room in the middle of the night, woken me from sleep, and fucked my brains out. The two of us are together in my bed, naked in the dark. Here’s what happens next.

  “We need to keep this a secret,” she says. “Your sister would freak if she found out we’re sleeping together.”

  We’re sleeping together. Not slept together, but sleeping. Continuous. A thing. A couple who sleeps together now and in the future.

  She asks me if I’m good with secrets.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Tell me one,” she say
s.

  “One of my secrets?”

  “Yes, you tell me one of yours and I’ll tell you one of mine.”

  I ask her to go first. She sits up in bed, allowing the blanket to fall off her shoulders. I remember how the moonlight came through the window and fell on her naked body.

  She tells me that she spent time in juvenile detention when she was a teenager.

  I ask why.

  She says that she’s a pyromaniac and when she was a kid she burned down an abandoned warehouse.

  I ask if she’s still a pyromaniac.

  She says she channels all those urges into her schoolwork now. “That’s why I’m a chemistry major,” she says. “All the good chemists are pyromaniacs. We get turned on when matter releases energy. It’s magical.”

  Then it’s my turn to share. I don’t hesitate. The secret has been in my mind since the conversation began.

  I go to the closet, pull down the backpack, and show her the gun.

  She says it’s a good secret. She says, “You’re keeping this secret to protect the people you care about. You’re being the man of the house.”

  I am so pleased to hear her say that. I feel like she understands me.

  I would have done anything for Sunny. She knew that, and she made me do some pretty awful things.

  Sixth Entry – March 16. 8:18am

  For the second time in a row, writing about that initial sexual encounter with Sunny left me a gelatinous blob of indecision who doesn’t know if he can publish this memoir and share his secrets.

  I can’t do this. Not today, at least. Maybe tomorrow.

  Seventh Entry – March 17. 8:00am

  On one of her pages, Jenna wrote about a time she “got high on pills” with Sunny. But she didn’t tell you the whole story about what those pills were, or where they came from.

  This is supposed to be a “tell-all” memoir but Jenna is holding all kinds of things back. She’s doing it to protect me. I don’t need your protection, Jenna. You think the secret you’re keeping for me is my great shame.

  It’s not even close. That thing that happened at Mary Nolan College, that thing you’re keeping secret? It’s NOTHING compared to some of the other things I’ve done.

  Anyway, those pills Jenna took when Sunny tried to “hypnotize” her about Seth? They have a name. They’re called “Bumble Buzz.”

  And Sunny made them in her apartment.

  Eighth Entry – March 18. 8:19am

  Sunny and I began having sexual liaisons in secret. Her apartment was our spot of choice, but we also did it in her car, in parks, in alleys, and one time on a picnic table at the foothills of the Sandia mountains. I don’t know that I can properly describe how crazed with lust I was those first few months of our relationship. The way we were when we were together, the way she taught me exactly what she needed, and showed me what a skillful woman can do. This wasn’t tame high school sex. This was dirty adventure sex that went way beyond my ability to deal with it because (let us not forget) I was sixteen years old!!! If Sunny had asked me to jump off a cliff, walk through a fire, or kill a Senator, I would, just so long as I could get naked with her when I was done.

  Not that she asked me to do any of those things. If I’ve made you think Sunny was trading sex for favors, I should clarify, because that’s not how this worked. Sunny wasn’t a tit-for-tat kind of girl, and our sexual relationship wasn’t a chore she completed to get what she wanted.

  No, for Sunny, sex with me was part of a high stakes game she was playing with the entire world. It was a piece of whatever hugely complicated script she was building of her life. Sunny’s an ambitious person who wants to change the world, and motivates herself to keep going by making it all a game.

  My part in the game heated up in March of my junior year. It was a Friday. Jenna was never home on Friday afternoons, so that was a great time for a meetup with Sunny. On this particular Friday, Sunny arrived with a bottle of lumpy white pills.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  “It’s called Bumble Buzz,” she said, “and you have to try it.”

  She gave me three pills. She took none. She said that was part of the fun. She wanted to watch how the pills made me act. She said it would turn her on to see me high.

  I’ve never felt as open and free as I did when I was on those pills. Every thought was welcome to me. Every sensation. And to this day, I still have perfect recall of those hours when I was high on Bumble Buzz.

  We were on my bed. She kissed me, her tongue slow-dancing in my mouth. She tasted like peppermint. She unbuttoned my pants. She slid my underwear down. Three-thirty on a Friday afternoon and a beautiful woman was pulling my underwear down, crouching down before me, opening her mouth...

  One stroke in and out of her mouth, like she was playfully sucking on a popsicle. And then she pulled back and said, “You want more?”

  Of course I wanted more. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want more?

  “You have to wait,” she said.

  “Wait for what?” I said.

  “Pull your pants up and I’ll tell you.”

  Now of course I was a little out of my mind that she got me hot and bothered and then told me to cover up, but remember, when you’re high on Bumble Buzz, everything is welcome.

  I pulled my pants up as best as I could given the circumstances. I had to leave the zipper down.

  “Good boy,” Sunny said. “We’re gonna play a game, okay? I have a challenge for you, and if you succeed, I’ll finish what I started.”

  “Alright,” I said. “What do I have to do?”

  “Come with me.”

  She took me outside. A gray truck I’d never seen before was parked at the curb. I don’t know where Sunny got that truck. I don’t know a lot about what happened that day.

  She drove us south on the freeway for half an hour. She took us to an industrial park in the valley. Factories, warehouses, scrap yards, all of them surrounded by chain-link fences topped with barbed wire.

  She explained that we were coming up on Carson Chemical, one of the biggest wholesale chemical suppliers in the country. She said she had a mission for us to complete and asked if I was game. I said I was.

  She turned onto a dirt road and followed it to the back side of a concrete warehouse. She drove up to a sliding gate and stopped. A white plastic sign on the gate said: Carson Chemical Wholesaler Pickups Only.

  She stopped at the gate. She reached into a paper grocery sack behind my seat. She pulled out a black jacket and a black ski mask. She gave them to me.

  “What’s this? Are we going to rob the place?” I asked.

  I meant it as a joke, but as soon as I said the words, I knew it wasn’t a joke at all.

  “Yes,” she said. “Are you okay with that?”

  I’d like to tell you that when I said yes, I did it because I wasn’t myself. I’d like to tell you it was the Bumble Buzz, that I was confused, that I’m not really a weak-minded fool who was so deep under Sunny’s spell I would do anything she told me to do.

  I can’t tell you any of that.

  What I can tell you is that it took only a few seconds for the thought of committing a robbery with Sunny to go from terrifying to thrilling. It was a chance to prove my loyalty to her. To show her the depth of my love.

  In other words, I am fully responsible for my actions that afternoon, making me fully responsible for everything that followed.

  How Sunny knew that Carson Chemical was closed on Fridays, or had a key for the padlock on the fence, how she knew what door to enter, where to park the truck, the layout of the warehouse, and everything else that made our burglary go off without a hitch, I’ll never know.

  I remember her standing at a side entrance to the warehouse, saying, “An alarm will go off when I open this door. We’ll have ten minutes’ tops before we have to be out of here. Are you ready?”

  I remember saying, “I’m ready.”

  I remember the sound of the alarm. Honk Honk…Honk Honk…th
e flashing lights that accompanied the sound…it was the craziest ten minutes of my life. I did it all on instinct. Run inside, enter the wholesale room, follow Sunny, do what she says. I pushed the cart; Sunny filled it with chemicals. Potassium nitrate…she used her arm to sweep every jar into the cart. It made a shunk sound as it came off the shelf. Ammonium sulfate…it was all ours…shunk! Sodium carbonate…shunk! In my memory, the sounds of our thievery are mixed with the sounds of the alarm…Honk Honk…Honk Honk…I was sprinting from one aisle to another like a contestant on one of those supermarket game shows…Honk Honk…Sodium silicate. Shunk! Sodium bisulfate. Shunk! Methanol, ammonia, copper chloride, cupric acetate, Shunk! Shunk! Shunk! Shunk!

  And then I was on my own. “Take all of this back to the truck!” Sunny yelled at me. “I’ll meet you there!”

  I got lost on the way back. A few moments of total panic as I floundered in a dark warehouse, so nervous that drops of urine were leaking into my underwear.

  When I finally found my way out Sunny was already at the truck, and, no joke, she was driving a forklift. She was raising a pallet of nitrate salt into the back of the truck. Who was this girl who was a master of chemistry, manipulation, sexuality, and warehouse equipment? I wish I could tell you. I still don’t know.

  Sunny lowered the pallet into the truck bed and backed away, the backup beep of the forklift mingling into the sounds of chaos. Once she was clear she abandoned the forklift and helped me lift the whole shopping cart of stolen chemicals into the truckbed. We closed the gate. We drove away, laughing. As we left the valley, we saw flashing police lights in the distance.

  I’ve gotta tell you, the adrenaline rush of that afternoon is something I’ll never forget. I felt like a man that day, even more so when Sunny pulled into an open field on the West Mesa, had me pull down my pants and sit on the tailgate so she could finish what she started in my bedroom hours before.

  It’s really something to look at a New Mexico sunset while you’re experiencing the most intense pleasure of your life.