Summer in the City of Roses

by Michelle Ruiz Keil

  One of the players waves when they get closer and lobs the hacky sack to his friend, pulling a shirt from the pile and yanking it over his head, not seeming to notice it’s inside out. He bows to George, then to Iph, doffing an imaginary top hat.

  “Hey.” George grins. “Iph, this is Josh. Josh, this is my friend Iph.”

  “If?” Josh says. He leaps to the bandstand, still set up from some weekend festival, and falls to his knees, clutching his heart.

  O! if, I say, you look upon this verse,

  When I perhaps compounded am with clay,

  Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;

  But let your love even with my life decay.

  George snorts and Iph applauds. “From one of the sonnets?”

  “Seventy-one,” he says, getting up to take a bow.

  “Bravo!” Iph laughs.

  “If you go in for that sort of thing,” George says like it’s an old joke between them. How do these two know each other? And why do they both quote Shakespeare? “My man,” George says, “we’re here on business. Iph’s brother got nabbed.”

  “Cops?” Josh leaps off the stage easy as a cat.

  “Boot-camp mercenaries,” George says. “A place called Meadowbrook, she thinks, but we can’t find it in the phone book. Iph needs to call them and check in on him.”

  “Won’t talk to her. Parents only. And they’re all named like that—faux-wholesome nature-sounding crap. I’ve been in several.” Iph looks closer at him. Pretty, sandy hair, hazel eyes. Something around the bridge of his nose, the memory of a fist or a rock—but Iph is probably imagining that. It happens sometimes, the outlandish image of some detail from a stranger’s life. “Overactive imagination,” her dad had said when, as a little girl, she worried that someone was hurting her third-grade teacher.

  “It’s Meadowbrook,” Iph says. “I’m pretty sure. I saw the brochure.”

  Josh shakes his head. “Not ringing a bell. But wait—” He takes Iph’s hand gently in his, running a finger over her long, glossy gold-painted nails, freshly manicured a lifetime ago. “A lady, I see,” he says in his decent English accent. “So . . . are we talking Ritz-Carlton rehab? Is there money involved?”

  Iph nods slowly. Her family does have money. Dad has been very successful. “Yeah. It would be expensive.”

  “I’m not your gent, then. It’s institutions for the likes of me. But our friend Georgie knows someone who might be able to help.” Josh drapes an arm around George, who shrugs it off, but not in an angry way. These two are playing their roles at full stage strength. For Iph? Another game with Orr is people as ice cream flavors. Together, these two are definitely Lost Boy Ripple.

  “I could take her there, old chap, if it’s too much for you.” Josh says in the English accent again, and Iph imagines him dressed in jewels and a fur cape, like pictures she’s seen of Oscar Wilde. But wait—is George pawning her off on this boy? He seems nice enough, but George and Iph are a team. At least, she thought they were after yesterday. This always happens. Why is she such a sidekick? Ever since preschool she’s glommed on to a more outgoing or capable friend, usually an alpha girl who undid her elaborate braids at recess and insisted she do embarrassing or servile things to prove her loyalty. Last year, when Iph renounced this practice and gave up on the limited stock of potential friends at her small school, she glommed on to Mom. And now, on her own for the first time ever, she’s immediately glommed on to George.

  Iph sighs as George gestures to the side of the bandstand and pulls her over.

  “There is someone who can probably help us.”

  Iph can’t help it—she smiles a little at the us.

  “She might not be thrilled to see me. But I’m worried your dad isn’t picking up. Something feels off. We can at least use her phone.”

  “You’ve done so much already. Are you sure it’s not too weird?” Iph leaves the real question—Why is it weird?—unspoken. It’s a Mom trick, and like always, it works.

  “Cait . . . is my ex. It ended because of me. I cheated.”

  This is certainly a new data point in George’s backstory. And a confirmation. George dates girls.

  “You know how I was kind of weird for a second this morning?”

  Iph nods. When Iph got back from the gas station with Scout, there was a moment—something about the boots. It’s interesting that George noticed Iph noticing. George looks down at the flowered Docs Iph borrowed. “They . . . belonged to the girl I cheated with. I painted them for her. She’s the reason I go out with my bow at night. Why I know what it’s like to need to find someone.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it’s okay. Cait and I are all right now, pretty much. And she’ll definitely want to help you with this.”

  When they go back to Josh, he’s sitting on the steps with a love-crazed Scout wriggling belly-up in his lap. “It’s settled, then? You’re taking your chances with the queen?”

  George grunts and opens the messenger bag. A little girl in a pink leotard and leopard-print rain boots trailing her quick-stepping Birkenstocked mother sees Scout’s leap and claps.

  Josh gives George a quick, back-slapping hug and takes Iph’s hand again, briefly kissing it. Close up, he smells like the boys’ locker room. Iph knows because she’d had to go in there more than once to collect a melting Orr in middle school before Mom, to Iph’s enormous relief, decided to keep him home.

  The smell is strong, but backing away seems impolite. For all his charm and prettiness, Josh looks like the kids Iph used to see panhandling outside Powell’s, the ones Mom always made sure to give whatever cash was in her wallet. He’s probably homeless, Iph realizes. And without the secret hideout at Taurus Trucking, maybe George would be, too. They both know boot camps. Institutions. Maybe if Orr is lucky, he’ll find a few kids like these at Meadowbrook, kind and wise in a way he and Iph have never had to be.

  Gripping Josh’s hand, Iph steps back into a curtsy, full prima ballerina. Pre-blood and boobs, Iph had been set on being a dancer like Mom. Her moves can still impress a layperson. Josh and George are wide-eyed in a way Iph likes, and again she’s confused by the pleasure-pain of this day and last night and all the things that have happened since Orr was kidnapped and she ran away.

  “Farewell, milady,” Josh says. It’s nice on his lips. George scowls and Josh grins.

  Are they . . . competing? Over her?

  “Farewell,” Iph says. “And thank you.”

  11

  The Seagull

  The bus climbs into the hills above the hospital. Iph has been to this part of Portland countless times for Orr’s quarterly appointments with his psychiatrist. The medicine was a blessing. Before it, there were times when Orr’s body went so rigid with tension, he would worry his limbs had turned to wood. The same doctor treated Iph last year during the worst of her existential crisis. She took the pills for several months until she felt stable enough to stop.

  Iph notes the change in neighborhood as they climb. As the kid of an architect and a socialist kitchen witch, she perceives a city by its building style, garden aesthetic, class dissection, and degree of magic. Iph used to wonder what other parents talked about while driving their kids around.

  This area was developed later than the tiny Victorian cottages, English Tudor revivals, and Craftsman bungalows in the other parts of Portland—probably constructed in the sixties or seventies, clean-lined geometric houses built for doctors and lawyers when everyone was talking about space travel, modern art, and the future. Ugly, but made of quality materials with at least some aesthetic in mind, they are her least favorite sort of Portland house. Some of her earliest memories are of Dad driving around the West Hills showing her examples of midcentury architecture or into Northeast to find a perfect example of an Old Portland foursquare.

  The bus slows on a curving road that borders the city forest. They pass
a familiar stretch that leads to a trailhead. Mom used to bring Orr here before his appointments so he’d burn enough energy to sit still. Iph would walk in the pagan cathedral of the trees slowly enough to lose sight of them, loving the illusion of being alone.

  “Is Forest Lake like this?” George asks, speaking for the first time in a while. Maybe worried about the ex.

  “Kind of. Not so wild. There’s lots of trees, but they’re more spread out and intentional looking. My mom always tells people it’s east of the sun and west of Boring.”

  “Next door to the troll princess?” She and George clearly read the same books when they were kids.

  “Just a type A, twelve-year-old aspiring chef,” Iph says. “And more trees. And Republicans.”

  “I’m an Idaho kid myself. Or, was. I lived there when I was little. I’ll never forget the day I learned Boring, Oregon, was a real place.” In the light of day, Iph notices how crooked George’s bottom teeth are. She commands herself not to stare. In her world, crooked teeth are quickly straightened.

  At the top of the hill, they get off the bus and turn the corner. Iph pants up a tall set of cement stairs. The day has settled into true summer, in the high eighties at least. The entry of the glass-fronted house looks more like an office building than someone’s actual home.

  Our house could have been like this, Iph realizes. Her dad is into modern architecture and worships Frank Lloyd Wright, but instead of a cold, angular box, their house has a feel Dad calls organic, its tall sides clad in shingles faded to the sheened gray of lamb’s ears in late summer. There were magazine profiles of it when it was first finished. The best was headlined, modern bohemia: wunderkind architect and flower-child bride make first home in elegant portland suburb. A framed photo of the cover shows Iph’s parents, Mom barefoot and bangled with silver earrings and a white sundress and shaggy-haired Dad in jeans and sneakers, standing in the entry, backlit by sun streaming in through a line of slatted windows in the high ceiling—what Orr always called the house’s gills. “It breathes sunlight,” he’d insisted.

  This had bothered Iph. “What happens at night, then?” she’d asked.

  His answer hadn’t made her feel any better. “At night it holds its breath.”

  Iph pulls the stray hair off her neck and knots it on the top of her head, repinning the chopsticks. The doorbell’s echo hints at an even bigger house than the imposing façade suggests. George is suddenly a stranger beside her.

  The girl who answers the door makes her feel both worse and better. Harmless, probably, but so fine-featured, blonde, and thin Iph has to fight the impulse to turn around and walk away. Suddenly, Nana’s overalls are too snug. The not-quite-right glasses press a headache into her temples.

  The girl tries to keep a straight face but smiles at George anyway, little lightning bolts of sun flying off her perfect cheekbones. “You’re like a million hours too late, man. The party’s over,” she says. “The cleaners left half an hour ago. I’m locking it down. My parents will be home at four.”

  “Cleaners? Really?” George is smiling, too, and Iph feels the spark between them. Suddenly it’s like every other day, demoted from principal to chorus girl just like that.

  “Leave no trace,” the girl says. Her golden hair falls over her eye, and she makes no move to shift it. Iph notes for future reference: in the truly beautiful, there is no such thing as a misstep or malfunction. Everything falls as it should.

  “We aren’t here for revels, milady. We come to request a boon.” George bows low and turns on the charm, the same British schtick as Josh.

  “You can take a shower,” she says like it’s grudging. “I have that shampoo you like.” Cait moves aside for George, still not addressing Iph. Well, she’s used to that treatment from pretty girls. Conventionally pretty white girls, she hears Mom correct. At school, Iph sometimes feels like she can smell the fear seeping out from under their deodorant, their worry that Iph’s soft belly and thick thighs are contagious. Cait hugs herself, cupping the sharp tips of her elbows in her delicate hands. Black nail polish, chipped. Silver rings on every finger, even her thumbs.

  “I’m the reason we’re here,” Iph says. “My brother is in trouble. George thinks you can help.”

  “He got nabbed,” George says. Iph shivers at the fairy-tale finality of the word. “I wanted to ask you—what were the names of the first few places they put your sister? The outdoorsy ones?”

  The look on Cait’s face tells the missing part of this story. Iph thinks about that—how one look, one reaction, can say more than hours of dialogue.

  “They kidnapped him,” Iph tells her, looking her right in the eyes. “Last night.”

  The girl’s eyes widen and change from pale blue to watery gray, and Iph knows that whatever monster is after Orr has already taken this beautiful girl’s sister.

  “Please,” Iph says, “can you help me?”

  12

  Like Metal

  in Roads

  Another day, another van ride. The Columbia flows by on the right. The gorge is a dream landscape of forest and rock formations and spinning raptors and the wide powerful river.

  There are two girls—women?—in front, and Orr and the tattooed tofu wiener girl are riding in back. Jane? He thinks it’s Jane. She looks like a Jane. They stopped for breakfast at a diner that served perfect fried eggs over medium and almost-perfect pancakes because, as the girl driving said, “Woman cannot live on wieners alone.” Now it’s three in the afternoon, and they’re headed for Portland.

  Orr holds his hands over his ears. Probably-Jane snores on the bench seat beside him, sleeping through the mix blasting out of the low-quality speakers.

  At a stoplight in the outskirts of the city, Jane wakes up. “Don’t like Dead Moon?” she yells.

  “I like it,” he yells back. “It’s just loud. And these speakers suck. No offense!” he remembers to add.

  “Huh.” She grunts and leans into the front seat, practically in the lap of the girl on the passenger side, a medium-tall, plump redhead. Orr has always loved red hair, even the dyed-red kind like hers. Not love-love. Orr isn’t sure where he stands in that department. His mother asks him a few times a year, making sure he knows it’s totally okay to be gay or bi or something else altogether that is specific to him. But at fifteen, Orr can’t decide.

  He knows a few things. He likes looking at certain parts of certain people—a boy’s slender, long-fingered hands, a girl’s high-arched feet and seashell ears. He prefers plumpness to thinness and darker skin like Iph’s and Mom’s and the girl driving the van’s to lighter skin like Jane’s, which is as white as binder paper under her colorful tattoos. He has always been able to tell Iph honestly that the shape of her body is good, fine. A valid shape for a body to be. He knows, of course, that the Overall Messaging for girls is particularly harsh on these attributes. They’ve talked about it, he and Iph and Mom. Although Mom is slimmer than Iph, she was told when she was young that her body was too sturdy for ballet, her breasts too big for Broadway. She tells Iph this when Iph feels bad about herself. Because of the patriarchy, they hear this story a lot.

  Orr’s own body is slim to bony and requires a lot of movement. He runs every morning at dawn because he must. It’s been this way since he was eleven and the world began its slow press inward, like the trash compactor in the Death Star in the first Star Wars movie.

  Mom went running with him at first because back then he was still prone to getting lost. But it was hard to wake her some mornings after she’d had wine or a sleeping pill the night before. So Orr studied maps. First his street and neighborhood, then the suburbs and freeways, then the streets of Portland and the surrounding mountains to the east and the coast to the west. When he knew he wouldn’t get lost, he ran by himself. Not tethered to Mom’s lesser stamina and slower pace, Orr galloped the surrounding country roads. His arms and legs, exposed in the tank top an
d running shorts Mom got him along with his running shoes, had turned the golden brown of Dad’s Mediterranean skin in summer. He found a long, circular route, almost ten miles total. He ran it every morning and sometimes again before bed. Probably part of why he was able to keep up with the coyote, he realizes. Almost as if he’s been training for this.

  “Here, kid,” Jane says, placing a small plastic bag in his hand. Inside are two little foam blobs, orange as safety cones. Orr can’t decipher their purpose.

  “Dude. They’re earplugs.” Jane laughs, opens the bag, takes one out. “Take your hands away, babe. One at a time.” Orr likes clear, direct instruction. He likes being called babe. He does as she says.

  The blobs are squishy and glove-compartment hot going into Orr’s ears, but once there, he can hear the music without pain. The scratchy speaker noise and road sounds are gone.

  The next song is from a band he hasn’t heard before, all jangled and falling apart with a husky girl singer. The song goes perfectly with the big rattly van and the gray city outskirts and the summer-blue sky.

  “How do you like this one?” the redhead yells from the front.

  “It’s great,” Orr says. “Who is it?”

  “It’s us!” the girl driving says. “The Furies.”

  “The Furies rock,” Orr says.

  He grins at Jane.

  Jane grins back.

  13

  Toward a Physical Characterization

  The phone in Cait’s room is pale blue to match the wildflower wallpaper peeking out between pages torn from magazines, postcards, photographs, and band posters. Cait has surprising taste—mostly seventies punk with some Björk and Tori Amos thrown in, and a vintage poster of Janis Joplin with a frame of dried marigolds pinned carefully to its edges that squeezes Iph’s heart.

  Dammit. Why isn’t this girl more hateable?