Thirteen Days to Midnight

by Patrick Carman

  “Nah. It started raining.”

  “Who the hell cares if it’s raining?”

  Everything is always a competition with Ethan. The only reason he wants to go out in the rain and play tennis is so he can beat me. This is the guy who thinks he’s everyone’s buddy, thinks he’s extremely funny, thinks he’s a lot of things everyone just sort of puts up with because he’s big, his parents have money, and he’s good-looking. Unfortunately, he’s also stupid, loud, and ignorant.

  “Got plans,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Psss,” Ethan scoffed, and I knew without looking he was shaking his head. I set my sights on Mr. D and tried to concentrate.

  Probably the thing I like best about Holy Cross is the fact that most of the classes are taught by normal people pretending to be teachers. As long as private schools in Oregon produce students who pass state tests, they can hire whomever they want. Our science teacher, Mr. D, is also a swing-shift manager at Walmart. Mr. Beck, the social studies teacher, is an emergency plumber. At least twice a week his cell phone rings in the middle of class and he goes into panic mode, like he’s just answered the Bat phone. Our math teacher is a seasonal fisherman in Alaska, where he claims to make more money in six weeks than he does all year teaching at Holy Cross.

  It seems like every teacher at Holy Cross has something going on the side except Father Tim, who runs the place and teaches religion and philosophy. He’s never taken a state teaching exam in his life.

  “I’ll bet you five bucks. Come on, one game,” whispered Ethan.

  I shrugged off the pencil sticking into my shoulder blade and raised my hand.

  “Mr. D? Ethan keeps mumbling and poking me in the back with his pencil. I think he needs a time out.”

  Ethan laughed his loud, obnoxious, howler of a laugh—the one you can hear a hallway away—and Mr. D moved him to the front row.

  I suffered Ethan in the hallway after class. He wouldn’t let up about the match, wouldn’t come unglued from my side.

  There were two other guys I hung out with once in a while, Nick and Phil, who were kind of like Laurel and Hardy, but less funny. When they walked by, Ethan com-mented on my lameness and let out a howler. They looked predictably unimpressed.

  “You meet the new girl yet?” asked Nick, an overweight, big-headed guy with insane hair.

  I shook my head no.

  Nick was the largest guy in school and, thank god for all of us, a peacekeeping force. He hated fights. He was also quicker than he looked, a real killer on the court.

  “She’s unapproachable,” Phil commented. “Totally unapproachable.” Phil’s shy as hell. He’s got this thin head of red hair that screams I will be bald at twenty-five.

  “She talks to me plenty,” said Ethan.

  “Liar,” said Nick. He glared at Ethan, who shrugged.

  Nick gave Phil’s shoulder a shake. “Our man Phil here is saving his A game. Just give him time. Besides, this new girl? She’s all into Milo anyway. The two of them are an exclusive club unto themselves.”

  Phil and Nick drifted down a corridor. Other people hovered like bees, bumped fists, offered condolences. All morning I searched the faces for someone new and came up empty.

  When the bell rang right before lunch I bolted for the door before Ethan could catch me and went straight for the spot where Milo and I always ate, out in the courtyard. Holy Cross was built in a square around an open courtyard, which was great in the spring but rotten in the winter. Raindrops snuck in under the covered halls, cold wind whipped across paint-chipped poles holding up the ceiling, and dead leaves were everywhere. There were two stone tables out there with carved benches on either side. It wasn’t likely to be popular today, since the rain was a buzz kill.

  I saw Milo already waiting for me. Alone.

  I started down one of the four pathways into the courtyard, feeling a mist on my cheeks. Shrubs and bushes and small trees lined the pebbled walk. Everything smelled green and damp.

  “Not a great place for lunch, Milo, especially since I didn’t bring a lunch.”

  “A little rain never hurt anyone. Stop your complaining.”

  “Gimme a break! It’s cheese zombie day. I’ve been missing those things. Let’s go.” Cheese zombies = hoagie rolls smothered in melted cheddar.

  “Your cheese fix can wait,” said Milo.

  My stomach rumbled in response. “How’d you end up on the receiving end of this girl’s attention, anyway? Sounds like she doesn’t talk to anyone else but you.”

  Milo glanced up at me like I’d discovered a secret or something.

  “Hey, what can I say, the chick latched on to me. I had very little to do with it.”

  “She goth?”

  “No.”

  “She’s slumming, that it?”

  Milo rolled his eyes, then assumed a wrestler’s crouched position, his quick feet dancing back and forth on the gravel. I started laughing.

  “If you have to know,” said Milo, standing upright again, “I met her downtown at Eddies. First place she came when she arrived in town, a few days before she stepped foot on campus. She keeps to herself and I met her first. What do you want me to say? She’s comfortable around me.”

  Eddies was a thrift store that carried nothing but clothes, mostly black. “This girl went into Eddies? What the hell for?”

  “Hey, don’t be like that. Eddies is cool.”

  “It’s a freakin’ mausoleum. She’s goth. Has to be. A goth cow.”

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets and glanced toward the dry, covered hallway. Phil and Nick were standing together, staring across the courtyard, looking sort of perplexed or… I don’t know, mesmerized. I followed their gaze, down the opposite pebbled pathway from which I’d come.

  And there she was, like a ghost or an apparition gliding out of the safety of the school.

  “So she’s real after all,” I mumbled, feeling a faint sort of light-headedness at the sight of the girl walking toward us.

  “Oh, she’s real,” said Milo with a wispy sort of laugh. “And like I said, she’s got something for you.”

  “Sign here.”

  Those were the first words I ever heard Ophelia James say. I watched her as she approached through the hazy courtyard in what felt like slow motion, dropped her backpack on the stone bench next to mine, and sat on it so her butt wouldn’t get wet. She was holding out her arm, a pink cast covering it from her hand to her elbow. There wasn’t a single signature on it. I was struck silent.

  Let me give you a sense of what I was dealing with here.

  This girl was, in a word, stunning. Blond hair, and I don’t mean the sandy kind. I mean long, straight, creamy-colored California beach blond. It’s not very common in my neck of the woods and it caught me completely off guard. Her perfect skin was, as far as I could tell, completely devoid of makeup. Very cute face with one of those slightly upturned noses I just love. And not to be totally Manwich, but Ophelia James had a body that curved perfectly at every point. The only sane reason a heterosexual fifteen-year-old guy would take his eyes off her boobs? To stare at her butt as she was walking away.

  But it was her eyes that did it, I think, a light hazel that popped almost unnaturally. And those piercing eyes, they locked on me from the moment I saw her. She stared, holding out her arm.

  “Sign here,” she repeated.

  “Jacob Fielding, meet Ophelia James,” said Milo.

  Ophelia rolled her eyes and lightly punched Milo in the shoulder. They already seemed super close. Great.

  “Just call me Oh, like everyone else does,” Oh replied, still giving me that intense stare.

  I paused for a half second, broke our mutual gaze with some serious effort, and looked at the bright pink color of a cast without markings. How could anyone, let alone someone this pretty, go even five minutes without getting mauled by guys wanting to sign her cast?

  I said the first thing that came to mind and then immediately wished I were a mute boy sucking on a so
ck.

  “Not too popular, I see. That must be rough.”

  She looked at Milo, clearly amused, and said, “You didn’t tell me he was a comedian.”

  She turned back and gave me a much more resolved look. It was a look I would come to know well in the thirteen days that followed.

  “Milo told me about your foster dad. I figured it must be tough for you right now, so first place on a hot pink cast seemed like the least I could do. But if you want, I can let Phil sign it first.”

  We all looked toward Phil. He’d have a heart attack if Ophelia James so much as talked to him.

  “Let’s move this meeting to my car,” said Milo, wiping the rain from his forehead.

  “Can we stop at the cafeteria?” asked Ophelia. “I’m starting to crave a cheese bomb.”

  “Since I blew my opening line, I’ll get the food,” I said, trying not to sound desperate despite feeling like I’d swallowed my tongue. “You guys go ahead, I’ll meet you.”

  Five minutes later we were all sitting in Milo’s car—he and Ophelia in the front seat, me in the back. The windows were fogged, hiding us from anyone outside, and our zombies steamed in the sticky air.

  “I freakin’ love these things,” she said between mouthfuls of cheese.

  “Close call,” said Milo. “You know Jacob here swore off swearing at the start of the school year.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Ophelia, eyes darting between me and Milo.

  “Nope,” said Milo. “Certain four-letter words repel him, so I’m told.”

  I laughed and felt like I was very close to shooting cheese up my nose.

  “I’m not that serious about it,” I said.

  “Are too,” said Milo.

  I rolled my eyes and took another bite.

  “Say the F-word,” said Ophelia. She was drilling down on me with those hazel eyes and this very thin, wry smile that I loved.

  “Can’t do it,” I said. “I’ve got a streak going. Ninety-six days. If I hit a hundred, maybe I’ll reward myself.”

  “I can respect that.”

  Milo let fly a string of cheese-laced profanities a mile long and we all laughed until we cried. There were words and phrases in there I couldn’t even begin to say in front of a pretty girl.

  When we calmed down, I tried to explain.

  “It wasn’t a big deal,” I said. “Until after the, you know, after it happened.”

  Stupid move. Never bring up the death of someone close to you as a conversation starter. It’s worse than talking about your old girlfriend. Ophelia looked at Milo uncomfortably.

  “Look, you guys, it’s okay,” I started again. “I’m just saying, Mr. Fielding asked me to stop cursing all the time and at first it was like, who, me? But then I started listening to myself—this was like four months ago—and he was right. And since he’s gone now, I don’t know, I figure I can keep it going a little while longer.”

  “I think it’s sweet,” said Ophelia, again with those eyes and the upturned corner of her mouth. It was heaven.

  Ophelia unzipped her backpack and pulled out a brand-new Sharpie.

  “It’s now or never,” she said, holding the perfect pink cast out to me.

  I took the pen and felt a sudden panic about what I would write. All that time walking to the cafeteria and back and for some reason I hadn’t thought about what I would do if I got the pen in my hand. I stalled.

  “How do you spell your name? O-P-H…”

  “Just Oh. O-H.”

  “How’d you break it?” I asked.

  “Oh come on, just sign the damn thing and let’s get outta here,” said Milo. “The bell’s about to go off.”

  “It’s my third break in two years,” said Oh, lifting her chin in the direction of her longboard propped up next to me in the backseat. “Concrete surfing, gets me every time.”

  “I can respect that,” I said. Smooth, Jacob. I think Milo actually winced.

  All I could think about was what Oh would want me to write. I wanted her to think I was a smart, funny future husband and father of her many children.

  And then it came to me, like a lightning bolt out of nowhere, the words were there and I wrote them, big and bold all across the best real estate on Oh’s perfect pink cast.

  You are indestructible. J

  For some reason I felt light-headed when I finished writing and looked up at her, like I’d stood up too fast or the oxygen had left my brain. Oh pulled her arm back, looked thoughtfully at the words, and replied, “It’s upside down, but I like it. You done good, Jacob.”

  I gave Oh back her pen and we got out of Milo’s clunker at the sound of the bell. The words I’d written were strangely appropriate for a cast, like a well-timed joke, but also a protective gesture, a nice sentiment for a girl who keeps falling down.

  You are indestructible.

  The thing was, I’d stolen the sentiment. They were the last words Mr. Fielding ever said to me, and I’d tossed those last words off as an opening line to a pretty girl. What the hell was wrong with me?

  You are indestructible.

  Those were the last words I heard before we hit the wide, moss-covered trunk of an old-growth tree in Mr. Fielding’s car doing sixty.

  FIFTEEN YEARS IN FIVE

  MINUTES FLAT

  There’s a lot to tell about the past thirteen days, so I’m not going to squander too much time on the fifteen years that came before.

  All I know about my dad is that he was in prison when I was born and that he died of an overdose when I was two. He never saw me, I never saw him. I do have a sort of half-vision of my mother that’s all grainy and torn up. One of my earliest memories is me with an ice-cream cone, standing on a street corner in downtown Portland. Someone took my sticky hand and I began walking. I remember the taste of the ice cream and how my fingers were shaking. When I looked up into the blue sky there was a face staring down at me, but it wasn’t my mother. And… that’s pretty much it. To this day, whenever I eat ice cream, my fingers shake uncontrollably.

  That ice-cream cone marked the beginning of my career as a boarder in the Oregon foster care system. No one ever adopted me. Four-year-old boys are a tough sell. Five, six, and seven are even tougher. Eight and above is just shy of statistically impossible, like winning the lottery. At some point along the way, around ten years old, I accepted the idea that I wasn’t ever going to have a family.

  Some of the places I stayed were pretty good, some of them not great, and one was pretty bad. When I was eleven, I roomed with a kid whose parents were junkies drifting in and out of prison. I hate to say it, but that kid was trouble. I used to run away when I saw him coming. He was in a rage all the time.

  Ever since then, running became a weird habit of mine. Over the years, if I saw something that made me nervous or gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my gut, I turned and ran. I mean I actually started running in the opposite direction. Maybe that’s why I didn’t get in a lot of trouble, I don’t know.

  The last foster home I stayed in was run by an overweight lady by the name of Joanne who traded foster kids like baseball cards. With Joanne, you were in a line of six teenagers and when you’d been there the longest, it was your turn to go. She wore the same gunnysack-shaped dresses every day, all in varying shades of blue, with two exceptions: black gunnysack when someone was leaving, red when someone new was showing up. When I’d seen five red dresses, I knew my days were numbered at Joanne’s.

  Joanne had this other ritual about letting kids go. She took care of all the details ahead of time, then packed everyone but the person leaving into her Suburban and left for the day in her black dress. Coming back was always strange, because someone was gone and you might not see them ever again. Sometimes it felt like they’d never been there to begin with.

  I have to admit, when the time came for me to go, I was glad to be standing all alone on the gravel driveway. It was easier that way. At that point I was pretty sure I’d never find a place that felt permanent.
r />   I met Mr. Fielding about sixteen months ago. He belonged in Oregon the way a trout belongs in Montana. He was probably fifty… or forty… or sixty. It was hard to tell, and he refused to say how old he was, enjoying the fact that I couldn’t settle on a number.

  I guess the best way I could describe Mr. Fielding at first sight was that he was a man’s man, and like some part of him had been lost or was lonely. From underneath a tattered Mariners baseball cap, he had a good three inches of dark hair that looked like tangled wire. There was a gap in his front teeth when he smiled, a kind of shy smile that even I couldn’t be suspicious of—after fifteen years of learning to be suspicious of everyone. Bright blue eyes, a thin layer of facial hair, sideburns I would’ve died for. He wore a rugged sort of wool shirt, a pair of Dickies work pants, and boots that might have been older than he was. He smelled of pipe tobacco.

  He came all the way from Salem to pick me up. I’d never been out of Portland until then, and even though Salem was only an hour away, to me it felt like Mr. Fielding had heard I was available and come from the other side of the universe to find me.

  I’ll never forget his first words to me. “You wouldn’t by any chance be a connoisseur of the perfect breakfast?”

  I kicked the gravel with the toe of my tennis shoe, tried to act uninterested even though I was starving.

  “I might be,” I answered, all attitude at the sight of this overgrown granola head. “Why you ask?”

  He looked at the red house behind me and the field of weeds farther still, smelling the air the way a man of the outdoors smells the air, with curiosity.

  “If you can get me to Northwest Glisan, and you’re the least bit hungry, I believe you’ll be pleased.”

  My stomach won out, and we drove in the opposite direction of Salem in order to find an obscure little restaurant called the Tin Shed. This would later become one of our great habits together: Saturday morning, in the car, in search of huevos rancheros, biscuits and gravy, coffee to die for, anything baked and smothered in butter. More often than not we drove for over an hour to find something new we’d heard about.