Action Figures - Issue Four: Cruel Summer

by Michael C Bailey

  Malcolm isn’t going to break up with me; he’s going to try and crash through this wall I’ve built around myself. He’s going to show me he’s in this for the long haul, for better or for worse. This isn’t about him talking to me; he wants me to talk to him, openly and honestly, about anything and everything — up to and including that. I really could tell Malcolm the whole truth, about me and what happened to Sara and even what happened to him.

  My emotions come full circle, returning to a state of panic — not because the truth would drive Malcolm away but because it wouldn’t. He’s the type of guy who would stand fast in the face of total insanity and deliberately put himself in the line of fire for my sake.

  Malcolm is a good man. He’s a good man thanks to an incredible family that raised him well — a family that deserves better than to lose him because he was too brave for his own good.

  Outside our final web design class of the year, Malcolm greets me with a smile and holds my hand as we enter and take our seats. Mr. Rose doesn’t waste our time or his with anything resembling a lesson and lets the class mess around on the Internet. Just as well. I wouldn’t be listening to him anyway.

  The final bell rings. It’s like the starting bell for the Kentucky Derby. Kids burst forth from every classroom door and stampede toward the nearest exit, overjoyed to throw off their educational shackles and get started on a summer filled with menial seasonal jobs and burning daylight on the beach and packing up their lives before heading off to college in the fall.

  I drag Malcolm into our stairwell, where over the past five months we’ve spent many a stolen moment. Probably not what Malcolm meant by someplace private, but this conversation is long overdue.

  “Carrie, I know you’ve been going through a lot,” Malcolm begins, “and I know what it’s like when life keeps dumping crap on you and it feels like you can’t catch a break, but shutting yourself off from the world isn’t going to help. Trust me on that one. You can’t get through this alone. All I want to do is be here for you, but you have to let me be here for you.”

  I take a breath and steel myself. Yes, it’s harsh to throw this right out with no lead-in to cushion the blow, but I have to do it fast, before I’ll lose my nerve. I take a tiny measure of comfort knowing this will be the last lie I ever have to tell him.

  “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

  Malcolm blinks at me, uncomprehending. It feels like an eternity before he speaks again.

  “What?”

  “I know I’ve been distant, but it hasn’t been all about Sara,” I say as gently as I can, like I’m trying not to spook a wild animal. “I’ve been thinking a lot about us. I have been ever since you told me you were looking at college in California.”

  “Carrie, I haven’t —”

  “Let me speak,” I say. I can’t let him get a word in. I can’t let him talk me out of this. I’m so sorry, Malcolm, but I have to do this. “Next year, you’re going to leave for college and I’m going to be stuck here. Sure, we’d Skype and text and whatnot, but we’d barely see each other. The year after that I’ll leave for college. That’s at least five years we’d be apart, and in that time we’re going to grow and change and meet other people...”

  Malcolm gestures aimlessly, helplessly, desolation creasing his features and making him look ten years older. My resolve wavers, but I have to power through to the end. Don’t crack. Don’t cry. You have to do this, for him.

  “Malcolm, this is a high school romance. They don’t last, and I don’t want to spend the next year emotionally invested in something that’s doomed to fail. I’d rather end it now than hang onto the childish illusion we’re going to be together forever. If that’s selfish of me, so be it, but it’s how I feel.”

  Through a mask of tears Malcolm squeaks, “But I love you.”

  “I know,” I say. “It isn’t enough.”

  I turn and walk away. Don’t look back. Nothing good ever comes from looking back.

  I look back.

  My heart implodes. I bolt out of the building and run into the woods behind the school. I run until I can’t run anymore and then collapse to my knees, gasping for breath...or maybe I’m sobbing. I don’t know. I don’t care.

  Malcolm. I’m so sorry.

  The last time I ran into the woods in a fit of despair, I walked out with super-powers. There’s no such silver lining when I emerge from the woods more than an hour later.

  The parking lot is empty, save for a few straggling cars belonging to custodial staff and administrators staying behind to button up everything for the summer. Everyone else is gone — the teachers, the students...

  Malcolm.

  Second thoughts flood in, causing me to question what I did. Was it the right thing? Could I have done something different, better? It’s Sara all over again.

  I need to talk to someone, anyone, but there’s no one I can turn to. My friends want nothing to do with me, and even if Mom wasn’t at work, I couldn’t talk to her about any of this. I mean, come on. Carrie, you broke up with Malcolm? Why? Well, Mom, I was scared that some crazy super-villain would kidnap him again — yes, again — so I broke up with him so he wouldn’t be a target anymore.

  There’s only one person I can talk to. She might not be able to offer any advice, but she’s a great listener.

  I hike into town, to the hospital, and head straight up to Sara’s room. It turns out I’m not her only visitor.

  “Meg?”

  Meg looks up with a start. “Carrie. Hey,” she says. She rises, setting down on the nightstand a small glass vase holding a single violet, and circles around the bed to give me a hug.

  “Hey. What are you doing here?”

  “I was up in the city doing a little apartment hunting. I’m not too crazy about the prospect of dorm life so I thought I’d see what was out there for cheap apartments, which is nothing.” She snorts. “Boston’s crazy expensive.”

  “I didn’t think that’d be a big deal for you. Your family’s rich,” I say. I mean, you have to have some major cash to throw around if you’re going to build things like maglev airships and personal superconducting super colliders.

  “We’re no one percenters, but yeah,” Meg acknowledges, “but I don’t want to be that girl. I want to make my own way, be independent, you know? Anyway, since I was kinda-sorta in the area, I thought I’d swing by and visit Sara.”

  I nod. “She’d like that.”

  “I heard what happened.”

  My stomach flutters. The way she said that tells me she knows the whole story. The whole story.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  To my surprise, Meg gives me a smile, mild and weak but sympathetic. “So am I. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you.”

  “I still don’t know if I did the right thing. I thought I had,” I say, but the sight of Sara lying there, eyes closed and as still as death, makes me question my decision even more.

  “You did the best you could under the circumstances. You did what Sara wanted you to do, even though what she wanted was...” Meg clears her throat. “God knows if it’d been me, I wouldn’t have had the strength.”

  Meg returns to Sara’s side, takes her hand, strokes her hair gently, lovingly, as though she —

  Oh.

  It’s official: I have the worst gaydar in the world.

  “She had strength. Even when things were at their worst, my girl had the strength to fight back,” Meg says. She looks at me and then, guiltily, jerks her hands back. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t...Sara probably wouldn’t appreciate —”

  “She would have,” I say. “She definitely would have.”

  Meg’s face lights up even as the rest of her sags. “Man,” she sighs, “I should have listened to Dad. He’s always right.”

  “Huh?”

  “Did you ever hear how my parents met?”

  “They worked together at MIT?” I say, unsure of my memory.

  “Dad was part of campus sec
urity. He was assigned to the renewable energy lab Mom worked at,” Meg begins. “The way Dad tells the story, it wasn’t love at first sight but he was immediately taken with how smart and confident Mom was, and he thought about asking her out, but he didn’t think girl genius and MIT golden child Gwendolyn Green would ever be interested in a blue-collar guy like him, so he kept quiet.”

  As it happened, Meg says, they took the same train to work, so they’d bump into each other a lot. After a while they started sitting together on the train. Sometimes they’d stop to grab coffee on the way in, and that led to regular lunches together and, on occasion, drinks after work. They became friends. Joe was happy with that, but the more he got to know Gwendolyn, the more he wanted to be more than friends.

  “Finally, Dad decided to go for it.” Meg says, “so at a staff Christmas party he asked Mom to join him for New Year’s Eve. She turned bright red and got very flustered. Dad was positive she was going to shoot him down in flames. Not only did she say yes — obviously — but she admitted that she’d been building up the nerve to ask him out. The rest is history.”

  It’s such a simple story, plain and unremarkable in its broad strokes, but there’s always something touching about two people finding each other. Under different circumstances, I’d be smiling from ear-to-ear. Right now, I’m thankful I’m not bawling like a child.

  “Anyway, the moral of the story, according to Dad, is that if you have feelings for someone, it’s better to take your best shot and spend the rest of your life knowing it wasn’t meant to be than wondering if it was,” Meg says. She smiles at Sara. “I should have listened.”

  “Be grateful you didn’t,” I say. “You’d just be standing here with a broken heart.”

  She shrugs. Her smile never wavers. “Maybe, but I’ve always believed it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. I know it’s cheesy, but — Carrie? Carrie, what’s wrong?”

  Meg takes me in her arms and lets me cry on her shoulder until I’m coherent enough to tell her about Malcolm. She’s not the person I planned to pour my guts out to, but she listens anyway.

  “Oh, girl, I’m so sorry,” she says.

  “I thought I was doing the right thing, but now...jeez,” I sniffle, “story of my life lately.”

  “I think you did the right thing,” Meg says. “You did what you needed to do to protect Malcolm. The real tragedy is that he’ll never realize what you did for him and his family, and you deserve better than that.”

  “...Thanks.”

  “And for what it’s worth, you were right: high school romances don’t last.” She raises her hand. “Voice of experience.”

  “Great. So what you’re saying is I shouldn’t date again until I’m out of college.”

  Meg laughs. “That is not what I’m saying. High school is exactly when you should be dating like crazy,” she says, suddenly very animated. “Go out with every boy you want. Go out with a few girls if the mood strikes you. Fall in love. Make mistakes. Get your heart broken. Have experiences. You’ll be so much better off in the long run. You’ll learn a lot about who you are and what you really want in life. Yeah, it’ll suck sometimes, but believe me, in the end? Totally worth it.”

  I’m still miserable — miserable over Sara, over Malcolm, over the sad state of my life in general — but for the first time in forever, I don’t feel completely hopeless.

  “The Meg, she is wise,” I say.

  “I know, right? Hey, I’m going to roll out so I don’t get stuck in rush hour traffic,” she says. “Let me give you a ride home.”

  “Okay.”

  We linger a minute longer to say our goodbyes to Sara. Her eyelids flutter when Meg bends over to kiss her forehead. It’s an unconscious reaction, nothing behind it, but it’s another moment tinged with hope.

  Maybe I can get through this after all.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The days that follow are an emotional roller coaster. As often as not I wake up feeling all right, but it usually doesn’t take long for something to bring me down — usually something trivial, some tiny thing that reminds me of Malcolm or Sara and boom, insta-depression. An ad for vacation homes in the Poconos came on TV one day. I spent two hours in my room crying my eyes out.

  I stopped logging on to Facebook entirely after a notice popped up reminding me that Stuart’s birthday was on the Fourth of July. We had such great plans for him. We’d planned to finish off the Hero Squad makeover project by giving Stuart his own official not-stupid-looking super-hero outfit. The conceived ensemble wouldn’t have been as flashy as the rest of the team’s — heavy-duty military-style pants, a leather jacket, and a leather facemask modeled after the one worn by some pro wrestler Stuart loves — but it would have been a step up from his default choice of jeans and oversized sunglasses. We would have finally looked like a real super-team.

  Instead, I spend the Fourth of July as I’ve spent a lot of my days: sitting at home, but I help myself to an extra serving of self-pity because, you know, major holiday. Got to make it special. I decline an offer to tag along with Mom and Ben to see the fireworks on the beach. Meg invites me to join her as her date to some big party Edison throws every year for his super-hero friends, but I’m not in the mood to party. I’m definitely not in the mood to see Edison.

  For the record: it’s been exactly two weeks, and not once have I come close to flying off to save the day. Not once. In your face, Edison.

  A few minutes after Mom and Ben head out, someone knocks on the door.

  “Hello, Carrie,” Bart says.

  “What are you doing here?” I say. “Shouldn’t you be partying at Edison’s?”

  “The party will get along fine without me. May I come in, please?” I stand aside to let him in. “Your mother called me yesterday. She’s very concerned about you.”

  I shrug. “What else is new?”

  “No, Carrie, I mean — well, there’s no easy way to say this, so...she’s worried you might be thinking about hurting yourself.”

  I do a double-take. “What? She what? Why would she say something like that?”

  “Because you’ve been exhibiting warning signs of someone considering suicide,” Bart says, sliding into soothing, concerned therapist mode. “Your mother says you’ve been moody and withdrawn, you’ve isolated yourself from the outside world, you sleep a lot, and you’ve given up a lot of things that meant something to you...including, I understand, your boyfriend.”

  “I didn’t give him up.”

  “Then why did you break up with him?”

  “To protect him.”

  “From what?”

  “From getting hurt again because of me,” I say. “I’m protecting him from me.”

  Bart folds his arms. “I don’t think that’s why you broke up with him.”

  My temper flickers. “Oh, really.”

  “You quit the life.” Bart spreads his hands. “Why would you need to protect him if you weren’t a super-hero anymore? I don’t think you broke up with Malcolm to protect him; you broke up with him to punish yourself.”

  My retort, something laden with profanity, catches in my throat.

  “Carrie, you’re so wracked with guilt over what happened to Sara —”

  “What I did to Sara.”

  “...What you did to Sara. You’re so wracked with guilt, you’re atoning by denying yourself any happiness.” Bart takes me by the shoulders and makes me look him in the eye. “Nothing you do will fix her. Destroying yourself will not fix her.”

  He’s right. I know that, consciously, but it doesn’t help. I don’t know what to do to pull myself out of this emotional abyss I’ve crawled into.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I say.

  “You need to talk about it,” Bart says, adding after a moment of thought, “but first, you need a change of scenery. Kingsport is one big reminder of everything that’s gone wrong for you, everything you’ve lost. You need to get away for a while so you can clear your head. Your
father lives down on the Cape, if I recall correctly. I say pack your bags and go spend some time with him.”

  I have to admit, that’s not a bad idea at all.

  So that’s exactly what I do.

  The next morning I call Dad and ask him if I can spend a few weeks with him. I don’t say why, but he doesn’t care; he’s too thrilled at the prospect of spending some extended time with me.

  I tell Mom my plans. She doesn’t argue. In fact, she’s overjoyed that I’m leaving the house, willingly and enthusiastically. She takes me to the bus stop as soon as I finish packing. She shoves some spending money in my hand and, with a delighted smile, practically throws me onto the bus.

  For the record: taking a bus down to Cape Cod in the middle of the summer is an extremely stupid idea. Traffic is an absolute nightmare, so my one-hour trip takes closer to two and a half hours.

  Dad is there to welcome me at the end of the line. I can tell it’s summertime if only because Dad looks ten pounds lighter and is several shades darker than usual, the result of being out on work sites day after day. The so-called high season is when Dad makes most of his money for the year since it’s prime construction time, but he runs himself ragged. I almost feel guilty forcing myself on him when he’s running flat-out, but when I step off the bus, he throws his arms open for a hug and all that guilt vanishes.

  “Missed you, kiddo,” he says.

  “Missed you,” I say.

  “You hungry?”

  “God, yes.”

  He grins. “I know exactly where we should go.”

  After a fifteen minute drive that should have only taken us five minutes, Dad pulls into the modest parking lot of Leo’s Clam Shanty. Man, I haven’t eaten here since —