Free True Confections by Katharine Weber Page B

five-bedroom, neo-Colonial house with its attached two-car garage and its overgrown rhododendrons pretty much as they left it, with no discernable trace of yet another of Debbie’s very popular, unauthorized, parent-free parties. The Livingstons would not have returned to the Plaza after their show in a festive mood (they had a pretheater dinner at Mamma Leone’s and saw
Chicago
, I read in their statements) to find four urgent messages from the New Haven Police Department, and they would not have driven back to New Haven at top speed in a panic after midnight, and they would not have returned to Canner Street to find a smoldering, blackened, three-story neo-Colonial husk surrounded by blackened rhododendron skeletons, with three fire engines still churning,police cruisers with flashing lights parked all over the street, barricades at both ends of their block, and disembodied radio-dispatcher voices squawking occasionally from the dashboards into the hot, smoky night air. I saw them arrive. I was in the back seat of one of the police cruisers, although I had not yet been arrested.
    If Beth Crabtree and I had gone to see
Dog Day Afternoon
that night, then poor old Homer, Debbie Livingston’s ancient orange cat, would not have been found dead three days later, wedged up high in a tree in a neighbor’s yard, his severely charred tail tangled in the branches. Accidental incineration of a beloved pet is not a crime in the state of Connecticut, but it is a terrible, terrible crime. If I were Debbie Livingston, I wouldn’t have forgiven me either.
    T HAT NIGHT IN the Livingstons’ backyard, when he saw me come through the gate with Beth, Andy Ottenberg said something to the group of his friends with whom he was standing around a rusty and tilted three-legged barbecue grill, which was very close to the side of the house, right by the back steps that led up to the kitchen door. I know this sounds middle-aged and suburban and unlikely for a bunch of high school kids, but that is what they were doing. I have a very clear recollection of the way the grill surface was entirely covered with sizzling hot dogs, and there were several washtubs of ice beside the grill, filled with beer and soda cans, with more packages of hot dogs piled on top, and there were packages of buns on a card table, next to big bowls of potato chips and a stack of paper plates and napkins. I absolutely love hot dogs, and I remember distinctly feeling too self-conscious to be observed eating one at that party, although I was instantly hungry after my first whiff of that alluring, greasy smoke.
    The boys around the grill all snickered and turned to look at me and I heard somebody say the words
tits
and
bitch
as Beth and I approached. If Andy had ever sincerely liked me, the feelings had curdled and gone rancid long before this night, and his merciless teasing had become painfully personal and barbed, it is true. I have never denied that.
    “What did you just say?” I demanded of Andy, who was leaning one-handed with a studied casual air against the side of the Livingstons’ house, chugging beer from a bottle. Maybe he was a little drunk. Maybe they all were. I was so self-righteous! Why did I care so much? Possibly I was already resenting my self-imposed hot dog deprivation. “What were you saying about me?”
    “I said everybody knows you’re a bitch because you’re sexually frustrated,” Andy said with a smirk, putting his beer down on the ground so he could thrust the curved end of the barbecue tongs up and down through circled fingers in a lewd and monkeyish gesture. His friends erupted in knowing laughter again. “You want some of this, tat for tits?” he added. (And you question why I took the name Ziplinsky gladly and willingly, so happy was I to be done with my tainted Tatnall name.)
    And that’s when it happened, in an instant. I lost my temper. I had turned away, but then I turned back toward Andy and took a step forward, swinging my shoulder