Terrible Thomas — Finding It: Chapter 29

Once we were outside, Pam turned to me and said in a muted voice, “My sister’s name is Catherine. Everyone at school had to call her Catherine because my mother always corrected anyone who tried calling her Cat or Cathy. Even now, my sister refuses to be called anything but Catherine.”

“And she calls you Pamela.”

“For the same reason. She doesn’t like nicknames.”

“Ah, now it makes sense why she asked about my name. Perhaps I’ll tell her it’s Brenton. My sister wanted to call me that. I’ll do it just for your mom’s sake.” Having arrived at my car, I held open the door for her and waited until she was settled inside before closing it.

After rounding the back of the car and getting comfortable behind the wheel, I closed the door and started the engine.

“Please don’t change your name for her. Don’t humor her.”

“Okay.” I backed out of the driveway and turned to head down the street.

“So, your sister really named you or something?”

“We jointly agreed that my name should be Brent. I was ten at the time.”

“What’s your real name?”

“On my birth certificate, it’s Elliot B. Woods. Middle initial only.”

Pam shook her head. “Is that allowed — just deciding to be called something else?”

“Sure. My godfather’s an attorney. He said as long as I’m not using it as an alias to escape prosecution for a crime and I use it consistently thereafter, it’s not a problem.”

“Okay.”

“So, why aren’t you always Pamela? Are you bucking the system, young lady?”

“Something like that.”

I chuckled. “Your mother has an interesting idiosyncrasy. But I sort of understand it.”

“Really? ’Cause no one else does.”

“Names are important to people. Who decides if John will be called Johnny or Jonathan or even Jack? Probably a parent or some other relative, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Does anyone ever bother considering the person’s wishes for what to be called? That doesn’t happen early on in life. And by the time someone is an adult, they are accustomed to being called whatever everyone has always called them. Anyway, your mother seems nice.”

“My mother has some weird things that she believes in, and she’ll fight for them. Trust me, you don’t really want to ever get on her bad side.”

“I’ll take that as fair warning.”

“She’s obsessive, anal-retentive, and sometimes she seems downright psychotic.”

“I guess if you asked any teen about their mother, they might say the same.”

“Look, whatever she said back there about Tommy is probably true, but only as far as it goes. She doubts what I’ve been telling her about him. She says she believes me, but Tommy always knew how to play her. If it was up to her, we’d be engaged and talking about an impending wedding, after I turn eighteen, of course.”

“And that’s next year, right?”

“Yep. April ’75. I’m the youngest in my class, except for Dirk Benjamin who’s a certified genius. He’s 14.”

“We had one of those, too. He was my chemistry partner last year. He was a senior and I was a junior. He finished high school in two years.”

“Dirk’s about the same,” she said. “I think Mom hoped we were all geniuses. She insisted that all of us start school earlier than normal. My sister and brothers all graduated when they were barely seventeen. Catherine’s birthday is at the end of May. So, her graduation was right after she turned seventeen.”

“So, your mom doesn’t really appreciate me being around, and neither will Tommy. Is that the gist of things?”

“I intended to explain everything to you but… well, until Mom told me it wasn’t being fair to you, I’d sort of hoped everything would just work out on its own, you know?”

“If settling things with Tommy is why you asked me here, I guess I can take care of some of that. But you still need to deal with the aftermath. I won’t be here tomorrow or the next day or Monday, when you have to be at school.”

“That’s not why I invited you. I really wanted to go to the dance with you and have a good time, dancing and talking and getting to know you better.”

I shrugged. “Intentions matter, I guess.”

“Thanks to Mom, we’ll be fashionably late.”

“Not too much.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“She needed to do some things. I understand. Perhaps I should have arrived earlier, but I always seem to be on a tight schedule.”

Pam smiled. “You’re taking this very well.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked as I flashed a smile. “I understand your mom wants to protect her daughter. She also wants to know that I have that same mindset.”

“You got a bye tonight on the full interrogation. My dad is with a client. Mom’s easy compared to him,” Pam explained.

“I owe him a handshake as I recall.”

Pam laughed. “Well yes, there is that to break the ice. When he heard someone beat Heath and I told him I knew you, he immediately called my brothers.”

“Do I owe them handshakes too?”

She laughed. “I don’t know. They were happy, though. The guy who was our heavyweight before Shane was close friends with my brothers. I know they called him when they got off the phone with Dad.”

“I never realized how many people I made happy.”

She confirmed that I remembered where the school was, and then she looked out of the passenger window. “So, you aren’t afraid of the situation you might be walking into?”

“I’ve been warned sufficiently, I think.”

“I really want to just talk to you for a while. I know we’ve talked a lot already, but I like being with you, and…well I’d like to know everything about you.”

“It will take more than one date for that, and I have to warn you, it may not be all that interesting.”

“I’d like that, going out on more dates. But we can talk now.”

“I’ll pull over and we can arrive even more fashionably late.” After parking along the side of the street I turned to her. “Now, we can have a good conversation.”

“You must feel the same way about not knowing me,” she said.

“We’re both at that ‘do I want to get to know this person better’ stage. I would like nothing better than to know everything there is to know about Pam, but I know that’s also going to take some time.”

“You have to be the easiest guy I’ve ever talked to.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said with a chuckle.

“You don’t seem to overreact - like you always have things under control.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, but I assure you I’m barely hanging on, just like everyone else.”

“I need to be serious with you for a moment if that’s okay.”

“I would hope you could be as serious as you want to be, anytime.”

“Even when I was dating Tommy, it didn’t feel right. It was uncomfortable. But Mom and Dad liked him. Everyone at school liked him. So, I thought that maybe it was just me thinking he was a creep at times. Then he got me drunk and…”

“You did some things that you regret?”

“Yeah.”

“I get the picture.” Although I was stunned, I tried to focus straight ahead.

“After that, he just assumed I’d do whatever he wanted whenever and…I wanted to get away from him.”

“This was recent?”

“Yeah, around Christmas.”

“So, after that, you didn’t like him as much as before?”

“I don’t know if I ever liked him, Brent. Or maybe I liked him for the wrong reasons. Look, here is how it started. During freshman year, I made the cheerleading squad for football. Tommy was one of the players. We talked a few times after practice while we were waiting for our rides. One time my mom was running late, and I asked his mom to give me a ride home. After that, our mothers got together and coordinated pick-up times and split the days. It was sort of easy to slip into the mode of being around Tommy. We talked a lot, and we were comfortable together. My brothers liked him. Our mothers took us places and seemed to like it when we started going out.”

“The perfect couple.”

“Yeah, but we weren’t really dating until that summer. Tommy is over a year older than me. He got his license in the summer between his sophomore and junior years. That was when we really had our first date. We went to a movie and went out to eat afterward. We had pizza and we played pinball. It was fun because I had never really hung out with a guy before. I met his friends and he met some of mine.”

“Sounds to me like a good relationship.”

“Well, yeah, at first it was, but the longer I knew him, the more he wanted to discuss some really bizarre stuff. Like he told me about what it’s like for him when he’s playing football. He called it ‘being in the moment’.”

“I can understand that.”

“He said when the play is ready to start, he is forcing every bit of energy into doing everything he’s supposed to do. That was fine, but then he talked about how good it felt to hurt someone, to see the pain on their face as he stood over them, knowing he put that hit on them.”

“Sounds like Tommy has some issues.”

“It scared me. You know? I mean — when he saw how it affected me, he laughed it off, saying it was because he was so focused on winning the game and all that. I wanted to believe he was not sick, but it worried me and sometimes he seemed to like it when what he said frightened me.”

“Maybe all his screws aren’t fully set and some of his bolts haven’t been torqued.”

“This past summer it got worse. He was always begging me to let him take things to the next level. He wanted to experiment, doing some things we’d never done. He wanted to drip hot wax on my back. He wanted me to take a bag of ice and shove it down his pants when he was aroused.”

“You laughed I hope.”

“Well, yeah I did, but really I was freaking out. He always played it off as he was joking. We parked. He begged me until…” She reacted to my apparent facial expression and looked away, embarrassed.

“I realize this is all personal and private. I’m hearing this…I mean — this early in our relationship. For all you know, I’m worse than Tommy.”

“No, I can sense things — a whole lot better now than I used to. Maybe it’s like I developed a sixth sense. You’re not that way, not at all.”

“I don’t enjoy the pain of others,” I confirmed.

“I’m giving you way too many details,” she said. “But you’re going to run into Tommy. You need to know what kind of guy he is.”

“Tonight’s the night.”

“Even though I’ve known him for as long as I have, I don’t know what he might be capable of.”

“If I’m understanding this, you brought me here to end your failed relationship.”

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s some of it.”

“Then, tell me what you want me to do.”

“I need you to protect me,” she said with a trembling voice.

“Did he say something threatening to you?”

She looked out the window.

“Pam, obviously you trust me, or you wouldn’t have told me everything you just did. I get that you were intimate. I don’t need any further details. But you need to tell me what you’re afraid of.”

“He can be rough at times.”

“Has he ever hit you?”

“No. Not yet. But I’m afraid he might. I mean, I thought everything was going to be great because my friends kept telling me that’s how it would be. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was disappointing and made me feel cheap. I started to think that maybe it was something wrong with me. One of my friends said maybe it was because he was the wrong guy.”

“So, you went shopping for someone else.”

She stared at me. “We kinda found each other.”

“So, you’re wondering if I’m the new and improved, perfect guy.”

She tilted her head to one side and stared at me. “It matters to you, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“That Tommy and I were, you know…”

“I guess it matters more to him than it does to me.”

“Don’t you want to be the first?”

“I don’t think that should matter.”

“That was what Tommy was all about, being the first.”

“I think it’s more important to be the last.”

Pam’s expression changed as she looked into my eyes.

“Sex changed your relationship, though?” I queried.

“Yeah, he became very possessive. He was asking me all the time, everywhere, in an elevator, at the library, in a vacant hospital bed, in a cemetery…”

“He figured that if you had done it for him before it should be on-demand?”

“Exactly. That’s not what I want. It’s like he suddenly thought of me as his personal property. And now that I broke up with him, he’s threatening every guy that talks to me. ‘No one refuses Tommy’. That’s his motto. Meanwhile, he started dating another cheerleader who’s willing to give it up to him anytime and anyplace because he’s the supreme jock at school and she’s always wanted to be his girl, if for no other reason than the status of being seen with him.”

“After that, he still expects you to be with him?”

“Yeah, can you believe the nerve? I told him that if he wanted that slut, that’s fine with me, but I’d not be seeing him anymore.”

“Tommy needs professional help.”

“You think so?” Pam asked.

I drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly before I turned to her. “We don’t have to go through with this charade.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You needed me to be here tonight for one purpose. The dance was immaterial to you. Getting Tommy out of your life is why you picked me.”

“No. I wanted to get to know you, especially after we’d talked in the hallway at Lake. You make me laugh, you know. And we’ve had fun so far. But if he butts in and hurts you.”

“He won’t hurt me,” I said confidently.

“But if he does, that would be my fault and I just couldn’t…”

I took her hand in mine. “I can be pretty persuasive when I need to be.”

“He doesn’t take the hint. And it’s hard to get rid of him, Brent — especially in this town. Everyone thinks he’s the greatest guy in the world. Everybody talks about how great a football player he is. He had Woody and Bo fighting over him. He flipped a coin to choose which college he’d accept a scholarship from.”

“So, you saw the opportunity at Lake and you jumped on it?”

“It wasn’t like you weren’t flirting with me, mister,” she pointed out correctly.

I smiled. “It was fun. Talking to you that night did wonders for my ego. It had never happened to me before.”

“Really? I find that hard to believe. I mean — you dated Renée.”

Laughing, I shook my head. “Because my sister introduced us. I told you about that. Joy arranged for us to be in her office at the same time without either of us knowing it. How pathetic is that?”

“I think it’s sweet. Obviously, you talked, and she was interested, and you started dating. So, she must have liked you.”

“I asked her out to play tennis. That was our first date. I had no clue she’s a top-ranked player.”

“Renée Bucher,” she sighed as she said her name. “My arch-nemesis. Always a humbling experience, often straight sets.”

“She’s in a tournament tonight.”

“I know. I was there last year. My coach has been after me all year to change my mind about playing.”

“You quit because of her?”

“I don’t have that killer instinct — nothing like she does. I don’t have what I need to beat her. I love playing tennis, but it’s not my whole life — you know?”

“Renée feels the same way.”

“That surprises me.”

“She hates losing, though. It’s an obsession. Anything she does she has this need to win. I think the only thing I have beaten her at is thumb wrestling.”

“Oh, I’m good at that,” Pam warned.

“I think there’s a challenge in the offing.”

She reached over and took my hand.

“You really want to do this now?”

“I just wanted to hold your hand.”

“Oh.”

“I was just going to ask you, how did she let you get away?”

“Same way I let her get away. We’re both too busy and too stupid to see that what got between us probably doesn’t matter as much as we let it.”

“I don’t have a chance, do I?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve still got it for her, don’t you?”

“I haven’t gone out with her since Homecoming. And she’s dating a guy I know named Larry.”

“You just avoided my question.”

“It’s over. Just friends. That’s how she wants it. That’s how it has to be.”

“That’s not convincing.”

“Look. I’m not sure it ever got started between Renée and me. I’m being honest. I’m not sure where I want our relationship to go and a lot of that has to do with being kind of numb from what happened the last few times that I’ve dated someone.”

Pam nodded. “I can appreciate that, I guess. Of course, I could take it as a challenge, something I will beat her at.”

“I think I’m flattered, now.”

“So, what do we do about this?”

“We go to your dance, and we have a good time. Afterward, we go eat. Anything else in between, we deal with it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive.”