Tenderness Read online

  NOVELS BY ROBERT CORMIER

  After the First Death

  Beyond the Chocolate War

  The Bumblebee Flies Anyway

  The Chocolate War

  Eight Plus One

  Fade

  Frenchtown Summer

  Heroes

  I Am the Cheese

  In the Middle of the Night

  The Rag and Bone Shop

  Tenderness

  Tunes for Bears to Dance To

  We All Fall Down

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 1997 by Robert Cormier

  Cover photograph by Nikos Chrisikakis/Getty Images

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ember, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, New York, in 1997.

  Ember and the E colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at randomhouse.com/teachers

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this work as follows:

  Cormier, Robert.

  Tenderness: a novel / by Robert Cormier. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A psychological thriller told from the points of view of a teenage serial killer and the runaway girl who falls in love with him.

  [1. Serial murders—Fiction. 2. Psychopaths—Fiction. 3. Murder—Fiction.

  4. Runaways—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C81634Te 1997

  [Fic]—dc20

  96003110

  AC

  eISBN: 978-0-385-72987-1

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  In memory of the teachers

  who changed the course of my life:

  Sister Catherine

  E. Lillian Ricker

  Florence D. Conlon

  To know the pain of too much tenderness.

  —Kahlil Gibran

  A part of the body that has been injured is often tender to the touch.

  Contents

  Cover

  Novels by Robert Cormier

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part II

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part III

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part IV

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  Me, I get fixated on something and I can’t help myself. Sometimes it’s nice and I let myself drift to see what will happen. Like with Throb. Sometimes it’s not so nice, but I still have to go with it and can do nothing to stop. That’s the scary part, when it’s not nice at all. But even when it’s nice, it’s scary. Anything that takes over your life is scary, although there can be pleasure in it.

  With Throb, it was nice in the beginning, the music, and his voice on the CDs and, of course, the words, and the way he sang them, his voice rough, like gravel in his throat, but the words, thrilling:

  Pluck my heart

  From my flesh

  And eat it …

  Dark music, I call it. Music that speaks to me. Dark and black from the pits of night:

  Call my name

  From the grave

  Of your rotting love

  I had to listen hard to make out the words, closing my eyes, pressing the earphones tight against my ears, thinking at first that he sang rotten love instead of rotting love, which is another thing altogether.

  Anyway, it was nice sitting in the library next to the CD player, the earphones on, people coming and going at the circulation desk and me listening, like on a private island in the middle of all that activity, and I would close my eyes and listen to him, his voice filling my ears and the inside of my head:

  A hole in my mouth

  To match the hole in my heart

  Through which your love howls

  I didn’t get fixated on Throb until I saw the actual hole in his mouth on Entertainment Tonight, the missing tooth, his spiky hair the color of salmon, his freckles and that terrible clown outfit: baggy pants and green plaid suspenders and no shirt, his nipples like old pennies stuck on his chest. But most of all that missing tooth, like a black cave in his mouth. And that was when I got fixated on him, staring at the black cave and knowing that I had to press my lips against his lips and put my tongue through that hole in his mouth.

  I copped the CD at Aud-Vid Land at the mall even though the CD player at home is broken, like everything else in the place. I didn’t exactly cop the CD, which would be impossible because of the security gate, but I didn’t pay for it, either. There’s this guy, the assistant manager, who’s like forty years old, and he opens the door of the stockroom and I slip inside and wait for him. He likes to look at me. I close my eyes. He tells me to stand this way, then that way. I hear him breathing. Finally, he says, “Okay.” I open my eyes but do not enjoy looking at him. His complexion is terrible, and he wears bright yellow socks.

  At home I remove the CD and look at Throb’s face spread across the entire booklet, which opens out like an accordion. I Scotch-tape it to the wall, after taking down the picture of me and my mother posing in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Lincoln is my favorite president. I feel bad for him because he looks so depressed all the time and his face is on the penny, the cheapest coin of all.

  Gary watches me from the doorway.

  “Lori,” he says. “Your mother’s gonna feel bad, taking that picture down.”

  “I’ll put it up someplace else,” I tell him, stepping back to look at Throb there on my wall, with the hole in his mouth.

  Gary’s not like some of the others my mother brings home. He’s been with us for, like, six months. He doesn’t use bad language and he works steady, the night shift at Murdock’s Tool and Die. He drinks too much sometimes, which makes him fall asleep all over the place, which is a nice change from Dexter, who got mean and nasty when he drank and hit my mother once in a while.

  Gary looks at me as I look at Throb’s picture. I can feel him looking at me, something he’s been doing lately. He also rubs close to me when he meets me in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. It’s nice to have him look at me like that but I don’t want to do anything to hurt my mother, even though she’s a pain in the ass sometimes. She has enough problems. She was always a beauty but lately she seems to be fading right before my eyes. I see the grooves in her face where her makeup cakes, and the eyedrops don’t always obliterate the red anymore. She’s also beginning to sag. I caught sight of her getting out of the shower one night and was surprised to see her drooping. She was always proud of her figure and says that was her best gift to me, a good figure, although we both have to worry about gaining weight and I am sometimes embarrassed by how big I am on top.

  Gary comes and stands beside me in front of the picture. We are alone in the house, my mother at work for the lunchtime rush at Timson’s. It’s hot, early June, and heat seems to be radiating ou
t of him, his arm pressing against my arm and the perspiration, like, gluing us together. I hear his sharp intake of breath, or maybe it’s my own. Suddenly his arm is around me and he’s caressing me on top and I lean against him. His aftershave lotion is sharp and spicy in my nostrils and his hand feels good, tender, and I want him to continue but I pull away from him, thinking of my mother.

  He removes his hand and says, “S-Sorry,” stammering a bit, and I don’t say anything, just stand there feeling depressed. I feel depressed because I know that if Gary stays—and my mother wants him to stay, permanently, maybe—then I have to leave. Again.

  The next day I read in the newspaper that Throb will be appearing this weekend at the ConCenter in Wickburg, where we used to live, and my fixation intensifies. Wickburg is down in Massachusetts, about a hundred miles from this stupid little town where we’ve been living for a year and a half, and I’m convinced that Wickburg is my destination and my fate and the place where I will place my tongue in the black hole in Throb’s mouth, leaving Gary and my mother to live happily ever after.

  Happily ever after sounds like a fairy tale but my mother believes in fairy tales, happy endings and rainbows. She always thinks tomorrow will be better than today, and believes only the good weather forecasts, never the bad. She drives me crazy repeating stuff, like if you get handed a lemon, make lemonade, or it’s always darkest just before the dawn. Once, early in the morning, rain pelting the windows, she sat at the kitchen table, pressing an ice bag against a black eye she received from Dexter. She looked up brightly from the newspaper on the table and said, “Listen to this, Lori, my horoscope: ‘Brightness everywhere, keep up the good work, your talents will be recognized.’ Isn’t that grand?”

  The ice bag slipped down a bit and I saw the bruise, ugly and purple, near her eye.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You look as if you’re going to cry.”

  “I think I’m coming down with a cold,” I said. But I wasn’t coming down with a cold.

  My mother is a waitress. A professional, proud of it. Always shows up on time, whether she has a hangover or not. Knows the proper way to hold a tray above her shoulder. Knows when the customer wants the check, whether the soup is not hot enough or the steak well done and not medium as requested.

  She has bad luck with men. Always picks the wrong guy except in one or two cases, like Gary, for instance, and my father, who she says was kind and gentle but without any luck at all, hit by a car on a rainy night when I was two years old. I don’t remember him at all. I have never seen a picture of him, not even a wedding picture. “It all happened on the run,” my mother said. Which is the way things always happen with her.

  On the run. Maybe that’s the story of my mother’s life and mine, too. Moving from place to place all the time. Always looking for a better job or following somebody she met who makes promises that are always broken. Like Dexter Campbell, who she followed from Wickburg to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he abandoned her while she was in the hospital. She went to the hospital emergency room after he beat her up that time. I sat with her in the waiting room watching the small lump on her forehead actually grow into the size of an egg. She told the doctor she walked into a door after getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

  “How about this?” the doctor asked, pointing to the bruise on her arm.

  “I bruise easy,” my mother said. “My skin is sensitive.”

  The doctor looked at me and I looked away.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, touching my shoulder with a gentle hand.

  I nodded. Dexter never touched me. Touched my mother, his hands everywhere and half-undressing her and himself, too, in front of me while my mother whispered, “Not here, not in front of the kid,” but he went on anyway.

  Anyway, Dexter was gone when we returned from the hospital. My mother said, “He was afraid, the bastard, that I was going to turn him in.” The apartment belonged to Dexter, rent was paid for the next month, but we left anyway, caught a bus to Manchester, where my mother knew someone who ran an all-night diner and would give her a job maybe. Then from Manchester to this town, my mother apologizing all over the place as usual for making us move so much, changing schools.

  “Lucky you’re so smart,” she says all the time. “Smarter than your dumb mother …”

  “You’re not so dumb,” I tell her. “You’re a very good waitress. You never get fired. You always quit.…”

  “I worry about you.” My mother says this all the time, too. Last week she said it again and added, “Look at you, fifteen years old. I can’t believe it.…”

  What she means is that she can’t believe she’s thirty-six.

  “I always think of myself first,” she says. “I’m not a very good mother, Lori.”

  “You’re a very good mother,” I tell her. It doesn’t cost anything to say that, and it makes her feel good.

  “I wonder what will happen to you in that terrible world out there,” she says. Her optimism deserts her now and then, when there’s nothing to drink in the house and no money to buy any.

  She doesn’t know, of course, what has already happened to me. She still thinks I am a virgin and I guess I am. Technically, that is. I mean, I have had my moments with boys in the rear seats at Cinema I and II at the mall, and in the backseats of cars and with some others, like the CD guy, but never all the way.

  I have been trying to figure out what love is and the difference between sex and love and that other thing, lust. I think one of my teachers was in love with me, but he never touched me. Mr. Sinclair. He told me that I had a beautiful spirit, that I had a talent for writing and should keep a journal, and his eyes on me made my legs quiver, all that longing in his eyes and maybe sadness, too. I used to linger after school outside his classroom. He discovered me there one afternoon as he came through the doorway and we almost bumped into each other. He broke into a smile but stepped back right away, the smile wiped away like erasing a scribble on a blackboard, and he looked worried and concerned, glancing around.

  “Hi, Mr. Sinclair,” I said, so glad to be with him alone in the corridor, my heart dancing.

  He was not handsome, eyes deep in their sockets, hair always askew, harsh lines in his cheeks. I always wondered whether he got enough sleep.

  He blushed and coughed there in the corridor, slapping his briefcase against his hip and stammering something I couldn’t understand. But I saw the longing in his eyes and the pain there, too.

  “Oh, Lorelei,” he said, saying that name I hated—I was named for my mother’s favorite aunt—thank God for nicknames.

  I wanted to take his hand and place it on me and tell him not to be afraid, but instead we just looked at each other, and he turned away from me, looking at me over his shoulder, such sadness in his eyes, still looking at me as he turned the corner, taking with him all my longings and maybe his longings, too.

  I wondered again what those longings were.

  Yet what I think I want most of all is someone who would be tender with me.

  Mr. Sinclair once asked the class to make a list of the ten most beautiful words in the English language, and the only word that really seemed beautiful to me was tenderness.

  I am on my way. With my backpack and Reeboks and my cutoff jeans. It’s a beautiful June morning, everything green by the roadside. The bus from Hookset to Garville dropped me near Route 2, and I am standing by the side of the road hitching to Wickburg. I have hitched all over the place. Times I got mad at my mother, I would take off and hitch someplace. Like taking a lottery ticket. I always dreamed of a great-looking guy stopping and picking me up and telling me he’s heading for California via the Rocky Mountains and I say let’s go and he’s also kind and gentle and we drive all over the USA through small towns and big cities. But it never happens that way.

  There’s a pause between passing cars, the highway empty, and the whole world seems empty suddenly and I want to go home and have Gary be tender with me. Or some
body.

  Forget it, I tell myself.

  I left my mother a note. Not a long one. Going away for a while, Mom. Don’t worry. I’ll be staying with my friends in Wickburg, Martha and George. There are no friends in Wickburg. I made them up. She actually believes they exist, that I visit them when I take off. I wonder if she only pretends to believe and this eases her conscience for letting me go and not calling the cops to find me. Or is it cruel to think of her like that? Anyway, I pretend that I receive letters from Martha and George. She never sees the letters, of course, because there are no letters. I pick a day when she’s not at home at the time the mail arrives. When she arrives home and asks, “Any good mail today?” (meaning letters without windows, because windows mean bills), I tell her, “Yes, Martha wrote to me.” And my mother drifts away, looking for a drink as she always does when she arrives home, either from work or shopping or maybe a walk around the block. She has never connected my friends with Martha and George Washington.

  I left the note where she will find it easily. I am glad this time that she won’t be alone, that she has Gary with her now.

  I am always careful when I hitch. Standing on Route 2 at the junction of Interstate 190, which goes to Wickburg thirty-five miles away, I am aware of the rotten things that can happen.

  I brace myself against the traffic, especially the big trucks that almost suck me down and under, between the axles, with the whoosh of their passing.

  Finally a small red car stops and I run to it. A guy is alone in the car. He is sleek and elegant. The smell of aftershave emerges from the car as the window slides down. A briefcase is on the front seat. He smiles, a fake salesman smile, and his hand is between his legs. “Hello there, sweetheart,” he says. “Jump in.”

  “Take off, sicko,” I tell him.

  Meanness shoots out of his eyes and the window flashes up, almost catching my hand, and the car peels off, spitting up a cloud of dust.

  Cars keep passing by and I don’t always stick out my thumb. I see them approaching and try to figure out what kind of person is driving. I skip sports cars, of course, and ignore pickup trucks. If I see something like dice dangling above the windshield, I also skip that one. Finally, a blue van approaches, dusty, needing a good wash. The handle of what is probably a lawn mower sticks out of the side window. I stick out my thumb, arrange what I hope is a pleasant expression on my face. The van doesn’t stop. I shrug and turn away but something makes me turn back. The van is backing up, approaching me in reverse.