Dirty Mouth

“Jesus Christ, Max,” Emmie breathed. Her eyes got all big, like dinner plates, and she just stood there for awhile and gawked at me. I smirked through all the blood on my face and my chest swelled with that cocky kind of pride that was dangerous on me. Whether it was a horrified stare or not didn’t matter; she was staring at me and that’s all I cared about. It’s actually kind of funny when I think about it.

“Pretty gruesome, huh?” I asked, spitting out some more blood. I grinned right after, no doubt showing off my beautiful blood stained teeth. “But I think red’s my colour, don’t you?”

“Hell, Max, cut it out already. C’mon, I live nearby. You need to get cleaned up before you pass out from blood loss—or sheer lack of brains.” She rolled those pretty eyes of hers and grabbed my wrist to pull me along behind her. We were damn near holding hands. I was grinning like an idiot about it, too.

“Well, y’know, I got the choice of having a big cock or a big brain. Can you guess which one I chose?”

“Shut up, Max.”

Girls. They never appreciated my humour anyway.

I let her drag me behind her like some big bloody balloon tied to her wrist for a good half a mile before we finally turned left onto a residential street. The houses were absolutely massive, let me tell you. Some of them were like two of my apartment building put together. They were just as cliché as they were big, though. They had the lush green lawns with the pretty little flower beds and the stupid ornate fountains; all fenced in by some tall, spanking new treated wood crap. I had to force back a moan of disgust as I stared at them all. Those kinds of houses really depressed me. They definitely said a thing or two about the owners in my eyes; a bunch of pretentious assholes no doubt about it. It must be nice to have all the damn money in the world, it really must be. I’d bet that all the owners of the houses were lawyers and doctors and stuff, who got money for screwing people over and letting people die. Us average folk paid for their damn house that sits so obnoxiously on two lots. Thinking about that really gets me riled up, though. I try to not do it too often.

So I was really shocked when I realized Emmie was pulling me up the freshly paved driveway of one of those exact houses I’d just been mentally bashing. It was a big grey thing with white trim around the windows and a black roof with a cedar porch, swing included. I’m pretty sure the garage was a three car, and I’d bet my life that there was at least one convertible and/or sports car hiding away in there.

She hauled me up the front steps and I laughed by her ear. “You have to be fucking shitting me, right?” I said.

She completely ignored my words but what she said next had me in hysterics.

“Take your shoes off when you come in, will you?”

“Oh! By all means, your highness!” I did this little bow that she didn’t appreciate very much. It hurt me to bend like that but I couldn’t help myself. It was just too damn funny. Anyway, she shot me this real dirty look and put her hands on her hips.

“Do you want me to help you or not, asshole?” she barked.

“My apologies,” I said it very sincerely but when she turned her back I had a huge smirk on my face.

Anyway, she led me through this monstrous house with peaked ceilings in the living room and cedar beams to support them. It was quite the place. I’d never been in a house like that before. Well, I almost was. My grandma had a mansion all to herself out in California—her second husband decided to go into cardiac arrest and die and she got loads of stuff—but she was loaded and she hated me so I never got to see it. To tell you the truth, I felt kind of dumb with the way my eyes got all big and looked at everything—and I do mean everything. There was a lot of stuff in there, too. Original paintings, sculptures, floral arrangements in these weird-shaped vases—they had it all. Eventually I was pulled into a huge bathroom complete with Jacuzzi tub and the door was firmly shut behind me. Emmie pushed me against the marble counter and reached into the medicine cupboard behind me.

“Don’t tell me you live here,” I said.

She sighed, reading the backs of two different boxes of something. “Then I guess I won’t say anything.”

I laughed. “Holy shit, you do!”

“Why is that such a shocker?” she grumbled.

“Well…because you look like that…normally girls who look like that live in places like mine. I wasn’t expecting a damn mansion.”

“Well we’re not all the same, Max.”

“I’m just wondering why you aren’t some prissy spoiled rich girl is all. Why are you a punk if you have this life? Did your daddy touch you or somethin’?” I knew I probably shouldn’t have said that, because she got real upset with me after. Sometimes my filter slips out of place.

“Shut up!” she yelled. “You don’t have to be scarred to dress this way, dick. It’s about the mentality, is it not?”

I shrugged. “I guess. But this just seems weird to me.”

“Well get over it. Turn your face towards the door for a second, will you?”

I honestly wasn’t expecting her to keep cleaning me up after that, but she started to rub my face with this black facecloth, scrubbing all the blood off. I stared at the green wall until she was done wiping my face like I was some baby who’d just had dinner. As she was finishing up I kind of snuck a few peeks at her. She looked all concentrated, with the very tip of her tongue trapped between her teeth and her eyebrows all crinkled up. She was scrubbing pretty damn hard but I guess most of the blood had dried and caked itself onto my face by that time. There was a lot of damn blood on me. I didn’t care though. I had a nurse, so to speak. I wondered if she’d get upset if I called her that at all. I’d bet money that she would so I just kept my mouth shut.

You know when you look at someone for long periods of time, like if you’re just shooting the shit with them or if you’re lost in a daydream, and you kind of start to appreciate them a lot? Like you start to notice little things in their face, like the different speckles of colour in their eyes, or the way their nose scrunches up when they laugh. It’s kind of like you’re slowly falling in love with everything about them. I was starting to feel that way while Emmie washed me up. I fell in love with the tiny dimple on her left cheek, and with the delicate kink in her hair. It sounds cheesy as hell but it’s true. You might fall in love with someone if you start paying too much attention to them. It’s a terrible accident most of the time.

“You’re really pretty, do you know that?” The words kind of just spilled out all at once; I had no hope in hell of stopping them. I was having real serious problems with my filter all of a sudden.

She kind of smiled, just a tiny one, and kept scraping at my nose.

“And you’re a real mess,” she replied.

I chuckled at that, because it was funny she thought I hadn’t noticed yet. I knew I was a damn mess. I was bruised and bloody and that was one thing, but I was also real screwed up in my head. I wasn’t really crazy, I was just messed up. I got a lot of things backwards. Backwards had become my forwards. Weird was my normal. I’d accepted it a long time ago, so hearing her say that in that moment was real funny to me.

“You’re gonna peel all my damn skin off pretty soon,” I stated.

She paused and stared at me for a second before tossing her facecloth into the sink. I’m pretty sure I caught her blushing a little bit, too. I sort of wondered if she’d been having the same problem as me. I wondered if she’d been paying too much attention to me. It was kind of embarrassing being on the other end of that, but I couldn’t blame her. Not because I thought I was hot shit or anything, but because it was shockingly easy to get lost staring at a stupid person. You catch them in a smile and you sort of watch it fade as they forget what they were even smiling about, and then you just can’t look away real easily. You wonder if they know their smile is fading, or if they even care, or if the smile was fake in the first place. People make you wonder lots. It’s all about the dumb mystery.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “Let me clean your cuts. You got a nasty one under your eye here. How is it not swollen yet?”

I shrugged. It kind of hurt now that she mentioned it. I’d been too busy falling in love with this stupid girl to even feel any pain.

“Give it a couple more minutes,” I said. “It’ll look real sexy for ya.”

She rolled her eyes and dabbed a Q-tip under my eye. She’d been dipping it in a brown bottle and it made my cut really sting. I sucked it up. I didn’t wanna seem like a huge baby in front of her.

“This isn’t about that, Max,” she said, “being sexy, I mean.”

“Aww, c’mon!” I laughed. “If you’re willing to clean my wounds up you gotta care about me a little bit.”

She didn’t say much to that. She just kind of raised her eyebrows for a second and the corner of her mouth twitched, highlighting that damn dimple, and that was it. I hated when people did that. It was always so cryptic. There’s nothing I hate more than a cryptic, phony person. No one can just speak their mind straight away anymore. It was real depressing.

When she was done dabbing that stinging shit on my face she turned away from me and put everything away.

“Do you want to wash your clothes?” she asked quietly. “Your shirt’s covered in blood.”

I tugged on my raggedy shirt and scraped at the crusty remains of my beating with a nail. There really wasn’t that much; I didn’t care about it anyway. Maybe someone would stop me on the street somewhere and ask me if I got shot. I’d tell them I did, just to see what they’d do.

“Nah, I can manage for now thanks,” I said, eyeing up her tub in the corner. “I could go for a Jacuzzi bath right now though.”

She smirked. “Keep dreaming, kid.”

“I don’t like to dream,” I answered.

“Why not?”

“They never end the way I want ‘em to. Sometimes they don’t really end at all. And a lot of the time they’re nothing but nightmares.”

“Poor you,” she pouted. “Now get out of here before my dad comes home. He’ll ring your neck if he sees you in here with me.”

I laughed. “Let ‘im come and see! I can always show him the blood and say we were playing doctor.”

“How about no,” She ushered me out of the bathroom and back the way we came. “Go home, Max. And please don’t get into anymore trouble on the way there.”

“Shit, I can’t go home! I left the rest of my beer at the park where Annie found me.” I sighed. This stuff always happens to me, I swear.

“Don’t worry about it,” she pleaded. “They’ve probably drank it for you, if they’re half the assholes you say they are. Just go home. I don’t want to find you in an alley again.” She opened the front door for me and waved me outside.

“Next time you’ll find me in that Jacuzzi tub of yours,” I said smartly. “I’ll be having a couple beers with your old man.”

She just shook her head and I started on my way down the even cement walk towards the sidewalk. I couldn’t believe it; they didn’t even have a single crack in it! The walkway out of my apartment building was dusty gravel and the odd glass piece from a broken beer bottle, leading up to a sidewalk that was nothing but cracks. I was jealous about some damn cement. I had problems.

“Hey, Max?” I paused at her voice and turned back around to look at her.

“Yeah?”

“You’re wrong, you know,” she said. She was leaning against the doorway like some nonchalant angel or something.

“’Bout what?” I shouted.

“About me caring for you,” she replied. “I don’t. I don’t care about you. I don’t care about anything.”

I won’t lie, that hurt to hear. But I had to admire her for it. Not caring is a major trait I look for in a person. People who care about a bunch of stuff are no fun to be around.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, throwing my hands up in the air.

“I don’t want you getting the wrong idea.”

Yeah, well, it was a little late for that. I guess I really should’ve known better. No one cares about me, not even my own father. I don’t even care about myself very much. So how could I ever expect Emmie, someone entirely new in my life, to give a single shit about me? She probably didn’t even want to know me. I was really dense sometimes, I really was.

I turned around and shoved my hands in my pockets to start my walk home, planning to maybe hail a cab with the remainder of the money dad gave me, when I was stopped by the sound of a purring engine getting closer. I looked up to see a shiny black Audi cruising into the driveway—Emmie’s driveway. I could see the driver looking at me leaving his house with the hardest glare I’d ever been given by a complete stranger. I turned around to see Emmie standing completely straight in the doorway, her eyes wide and frozen. That’s about the time it clicked that her old man had made it home safe and pissed as all hell.