The Nakeds Read Free Page B

the girl felt similar at impact—something weighty pushing against something weightier, the shock of something where nothing should have been, a horrible resistance where just air and space and wind should have allowed the car through.
    Martin thought that the girl he hit might be dead and if she was, he planned to kill himself when he got home. There were only so many accidental acts of violence a guy could commit before he committed one purposely on himself, he was thinking. He wondered about pills or blades or driving off a cliff and played out the gruesome scenarios in his head, the logistics, the pros and cons: sleep, the ease of access, stomachaches, blood, twisted metal, and the open blue sky.
    He wondered if it was possible to get enough pills from his friend Tony Vancelli, whose dad was a pharmacist and whose medicine cabinet was always stocked with colorful capsules and tablets that he handed out like bubblegum.
    Up until the point when he hit the girl, Martin had been drunk, and the hours right before the accident were lost to him. Still, the impact itself was more than clear: the punch, the blow, the pressure, the sound, a body in the air, then falling to the asphalt like a doll.
    He remembered going for a taco run with Tony just after midnight and talking to his friend about quitting drinking and maybe starting junior college in the fall. He remembered Tony snickering and handing him a green and white capsule that Martin gratefully accepted and swallowed dry. He remembered Tony telling him that painting houses wasn’t so bad, that it wasn’t what he thought he’d be doing four years out of high school but it wasn’t jail either. “It’s not fucking prison. At least I’m outside,” Tony had said.
    “I’m starting to feel that pill,” Martin said.
    “My mom still thinks I’m going to be a pharmacist, but fuck that,” Tony said.
    “Maybe you already are.”
    Tony laughed.
    “At least you’d have access.”
    “I have access now.”
    Martin remembered the pile of tacos wrapped in paper in his lap as he headed back to Tony’s place, the skill it took to unwrap and eat a taco one-handed while driving, the mushy meat and orange grease, how quickly they went down, how his lips tingled from the hot sauce. He remembered focusing, navigating the road, and Tony begging him to pull over so he could throw up in the gutter. When his friend stumbled back to the car and sat down, his stained shirt smelled sour. Martin was surprised when Tony leaned toward him, reached over the emergency brake, and snatched a taco from his crotch. “Hey man, that’s mine,” Martin said, but he let his buddy have it.
    What Martin didn’t remember were the hours in between. He didn’t remember that Tony got a second wind and that the two of them listened to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and drank more beer—one bottle after another, until they were tripping over bottles. They smoked pot out of a bong Tony had fashioned out of a toilet paper roll. They played air guitar, air drums. Tony was dancing, having air sex with an air girl. Martin laughed until his stomach hurt and his eyes watered. Tony was singing into his fist one moment and then sleeping in a chair the next.
    While his friend slept, Martin sat on the floor with his back against the couch and tried to read one of Tony’s girlfriends’ magazines, but he was too fucked up to focus; he looked at the pictures instead. Pages and pages of foxy chicks—one chick in a bikini, one in a red silky dress that might have been a nightgown, he wasn’t sure, one in bell-bottom jeans and just a black bra. Then he got to what they called instructional pages , and maybe it was one of those same girls getting her eyebrows plucked. It was weird to see a set of eyes that close up and the tweezers coming toward them—but not nearly as sexy as seeing her in that silky nightgown-thing.
    He closed the magazine and put it aside.
    He watched the dawn come, the sun rising just outside the