The color filled her cheeks again. “She’s just a baby. She needs help.”
“Or,” the asshole kid continued, “maybe it’ll get hit by a truck and there’ll be one less deer to worry about.”
“Anthony—” Test said, stepping toward the little shit.
“There’s a reward,” I heard myself say before Test could move any closer, which was a thousand times better than what I had thought I was going to say. Test gave me the same “Are you kidding me” look from before.
Lump looked up at me and her eyes flashed. “Of a hundred…” she started to say until she saw me glaring at her. “I mean. Of fifty dollars.” She looked at me and I couldn’t keep glaring. “Yeah. Fifty dollars. We know what she looks like. What she exactly looks like. So don’t bring us just any deer.”
The righteous confidence in her voice was a booming, thunderous “fuck you” to the little bastard kid.
Since Charlie wasn’t around to high-five her, I took on the responsibility.
TWENTY: SIX-MILE THOUGHTS
WE’RE JUNIORS AND IT’S MID-OCTOBER and we’re in the north suburbs because we heard about a party where a kid we went to school with was planning on raising the dead in his backyard.
Eddie Carlo’s dog died three days ago and, after a series of Dark Web rabbit holes, he’s convinced he can say the right combination of words in the right combination of languages to bring Bluebeard back to this world, and return to his mortal dog coil.
If there’s one thing Charlie and I know about, it’s defying the void.
Eddie Carlo is and always has been the nicest kid you could hope to meet, so Charlie doesn’t have a hard time convincing me that Eddie should have friends around when his dog doesn’t come back from the grave, and plus, Eddie Carlo has a pool and his parents are out of town.
And everything is good, aside from Eddie’s dog’s untimely fate. The air is warm for October and the sun sets early so it’s warm and dark and the strands of Edison lights in Eddie’s backyard make everything look like the World’s Fair, even when we gather around Eddie and the circle of stones he’s placed around Bluebeard’s grave in his backyard.
But mid-ritual, while Eddie’s stuttering through a Latin incantation and trying not to cry, I realize that I’ve lost Charlie. And the more I look around, the more I realize that I’ve lost most everybody else.
It’s just me and Eddie Carlo and two people making out on a bench in the garden, because everybody else who showed up is jumping in the pool and drinking shitty beer.
But not Charlie.
Charlie is gone.
Charlie has taken the car and bailed because Al Stinson told him he could score some weed.
So I stay, and the dog stays dead, and Charlie never comes back or answers his phone, and it doesn’t take the whole of the six miles walking home to realize that a sizeable part of you hates—at least in part—someone you’re supposed to love.
It takes a whole lot less than six.
TWENTY-ONE: SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN
“ARE YOU SAD?” LUMP asked me as we stapled and taped more flyers up around the barn.
“What?”
“You seem sad. Or mad.”
“No, Lump, I’m not sad or mad.” I didn’t know how to tell her I was somewhere in between the two and that, more than that, I was something else as well. That I was furious and heartbroken but there was something extra that I wasn’t familiar with. It was something that felt like happy, even if happy wasn’t quite the right word. Something like distracted, or like a pace being changed. Different air finally getting breathed in.
“Is it about the deer?”
“Lump, I said I’m not sad.”
“It’s just that you keep putting the flyers up a certain way like you’re doing one thing but thinking about something else. Like when grandma talks about Uncle Thomas and then ends up dusting everything and cleaning the sink even though the sink never gets that dirty because we order pizza a lot.”
I smiled without opening my mouth. It was cold but the sun was bright enough to make you unzip your coat and take your gloves off.
“I’m just thinking about the deer,” I said. “Want to make sure these flyers are in all the right places. Tall places so the adults can see them, short places so the kids can see them.” I demonstrated this with my hands.
“Are you worried because you were there when the deer got away?”
I aggressively stapled another flyer to the barn doors. The fence where the deer had escaped was blocked up with a few bales of hay.
“A little. But I’m also thinking about how, after he got away, the other deer is back at the barn, safe, and it’s nice out and it’s sunny and it’s like nothing is wrong.”
“How do you know the deer was a boy?”
“What?”
“You said ‘he’—how do you know he was a him and not a her? Were you sexting the deer?”
I stopped and faced her full-on. “What?”
She squinted one eye shut and spoke like she was reciting something she’d read: “‘I-dent-ifying the gender of a deer or other baby animal is called sexting.’ I read that on the Internet last night even though we’re not allowed to and even though the Internet drains my battery and I have to use data to get the Internet from satellites. My phone connects to satellites,” she said confidentially.
“Sext … sexing. There’s no T. With a T it’s something else.”
She knew what she was trying to say, she’d just said it wrong. Like the time I’d mixed up the words “primal” and “carnal” on an essay question about To Kill a Mockingbird.
“It looked big for a baby deer so I assumed it was a boy.”
“Girls can be big. Bigger than boys.”
“Very true. What are we calling the deer? Does the deer have a name?”
“Not one that she knows yet. Right now her name is Amelia Earhart.”
“Because she’s missing?”
“No. Because she doesn’t believe in fences. She can go wherever she wants, whenever she wants.”
“You should name the deer Jimmy Hoffa. I think Jimmy Hoffa the Deer has a nice ring to it.”
“Mom says it’s important to have strong role models that aren’t on the Internet or TV or drugs,” she said, ignoring my joke about Jimmy Hoffa the Deer. “And Amelia Earhart…” She placed the flyers down reverently and unzipped her coat. The front of her shirt had a picture of Amelia Earhart standing atop her Lockheed Model 10 Electra, waving to an unseen audience, her red scarf caught in the wind and blazing behind her. “Amelia Earhart is a hero. But anyway, you shouldn’t be sad because you can’t stop deer from escaping.” She zipped her coat, picked the flyers up, and wiped away the flecks of dirt and earth from the bottom page.
“Then why are we putting flyers up? If they’re just going to run away again, right?”
“No.”
“No what? Why not?”
“Because this time she’ll know she has friends.”
I checked, and all of a sudden, the mysterious other feeling, the one that wasn’t quite happiness but somewhere closer to distraction, simply wasn’t there anymore. Now it was the same anger and sadness that had been hanging around for so long.
“You think he didn’t know he had friends? What about the other deer that tried to escape with him?”
“Her. Maybe they just weren’t fast enough.”
“The other deer was plenty fast. Just as fast as the one that got away,” I said, indignant. I told myself to relax. “What if he knew exactly what he was doing and was just being an asshole? Like what if the deer was a pattern asshole and was always doing stuff like this to the other deer?” I asked the eight-year-old. Then, “Sorry I swore.”
“Huh?”
“I’m saying, what if that was the deer’s plan all along, because that deer was always doing stupid stuff and making the other deer pay for it? Like making a break for it and not telling the other deer. Because the other deer tried to escape too. You could just te
ll the other one wanted to run away.”
One of her eyebrows raised up a little and her mouth became a thin line, like she didn’t know why the supposed “grown-up” was talking to her like she was a therapist.
Instead of just saying, “Dude, shut up,” she very generously said, “I guess she was being selfish. But. I think probably she was just scared—probably like all the other baby deer—and just did what she thought was best.”
This mysterious other not-quite-but-almost happiness feeling was a million miles away. We weren’t walking in the warm sun or talking about funny things to name missing deer anymore. This wasn’t cards at night or smoking on top of decommissioned ROTC equipment. This was the Ghost of Charlie Baltimore, flickering just outside of my line of sight.
I stapled another poster up with what I hoped was less aggression.
“What is that?” she said, looking over my head toward the tree line. A splash of orange and white was flitting back and forth in the wind, just past the trees. “Is that a windsock?” It was. “Usually at night airports shine bright lights on their windsocks,” she continued. “Probably so planes won’t run into them but also so they can tell which way the wind is blowing even though it’s nighttime out. I like that the wind wears socks.”
Which it doesn’t, because the wind is not a sock-wearing thing. But that didn’t stop her from staring at the piece of orange-and-white fabric riding the invisible air currents, trying just to sail off with the breeze, where it could always point the direction of the wind for the rest of us.
TWENTY-TWO: MOM AND MY OTHER HALF
A WEEK AFTER THE FIRE—A week after I was arrested and fingerprinted and released into my parents’ custody—Mom is driving me to my first court appearance and she’s crying.
She says things like “I love you so much, baby,” whenever we pull up to a red light. Things like, “It’s okay to cry,” on all of the occasions she notices I’m not crying. And now she’s doing it again. “I just … I keep thinking about how you lost your other half. And how you saw it happen right in front of you.” She wipes the side of her thumb under her eyes, one at a time, then looks over and gives me the hardest excuse for a smile I’ve ever seen: her lips make a crooked line, and her eyes are pooling over, and she’s trying so hard to actually smile because that’s what a parent does—tries with everything they have to keep their kid from knowing how much pain they’re really in.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I say, knowing that she’ll just take it as me trying to comfort her.
This is the truth: as terrible as it all is, I am okay.
I can be okay.
I can be okay without Charlie. Or, at least, I want to be able to be okay without him.
And that feels so fucked up.
The light changes to green, but she doesn’t move. She just looks at me, the devastating smile going tighter and flatter as the car behind us gives a short and polite reminder honk. “You don’t need to be okay, baby,” she says.
“Light, Mom,” I say, motioning toward the traffic signal.
“Sweetie,” she says, and this time the car behind us lays on its horn. She reaches back between the seats and gives the car behind us not the middle finger, but the index finger—one that says, “Just a moment.” Her eyes are locked on mine when she says it again: “You don’t need to be okay. It’s okay to be everything else too.”
“Mom, the light changed.”
The car behind us backs up, angles its wheels, then dramatically zooms around us, the driver giving us not the index, but the middle. The light turns yellow.
“I love you so much,” she says. Her face is composed, but there are silent tears coming down her cheeks.
“I know, Mom. And I love you too.”
My eyes are dry. The light clicks to a deep red, washing over us.
TWENTY-THREE: HARRIET TUBMAN
JUST AS WE RAN out of posters, the dented metal speakers on top of a utility pole started playing a tinny, old-fashioned horn melody that meant lunch. The bright squares of paper on the tripod archery targets were impossible to ignore.
“Those little shitheads,” I said, pulling a flyer down. Each one of the bull’s-eye targets had a brightly colored LOST flyer stuck to its center with an arrow. She pulled one down and looked at me through the hole in the paper.
“Shot right in the head,” she said.
“They’re just being stupid, Lump. Don’t worry about it,” I said, more to my feet than to her.
“You just called them shitheads though.”
“I did. And I shouldn’t have. I’m the grown-up here.”
“It’s okay. They’re just kids. Plus, this way more people will see the flyers. They’ll know what we’re looking for.” Her voice was void of angry, huffed air, which was the opposite of how I would have handled it, whether at her age or now. At her age, I would have deflated, and now, as an almost-adult, I would have been boiling. Lump, though, was anything but deflated.
We headed for lunch.
* * *
“Twelff,” Michael said carefully as he maneuvered the twelfth grape into his mouth.
“Thirththeen,” Faisal said, fitting a thirteenth into his.
“So what was the Korn kid like?” Matty said to me.
I put my can of soda down and looked at her. “… corn kid?”
Lump had disappeared once we’d gotten to lunch, but not before grilling me about identifying marks on the deer; she’d run off to make more flyers. The Buddies didn’t have to sit near the campers, but it was encouraged. And since they were bigger than the campers, the Buddies could move their herds accordingly. Matty was in charge of the table of girls who kept giving Faisal and Michael’s table dirty looks whenever Goblin Joe would eat a piece of gum off the bottom of the bench.
“At the Olympiad. He placed third or fourth, I think, but I remember him. Mostly because I didn’t expect a Chemistry Olympian to be wearing a Korn shirt, but also because I remember his mom in the audience holding up a banner with his name on it and being real cute.”
I still hadn’t wrapped my head around the fact that anyone had watched the Olympiad, school mandated or not. The idea that anyone other than our immediate families and local science teachers had anything to do with our viewership was unbelievable.
“Oh! Right. Number Eighty-Two.”
“ThKorkidthnabewaseightydoo?” Faisal asked, then said: “Forththeen,” and pressed another green grape into his mouth.
“I don’t know his actual name. I still can’t believe you watched the Olympiad. I’m pretty sure my own parents only watched half of it.”
“Full disclosure: I probably paid more attention to it than the rest of my class because I was laid up in bed for three days with mono.” She looked over at Michael, who pointed at himself with both thumbs, smiling as much as he could with a mouth loaded with fruit.
“Shgeefrewupaytduyms.”
“He says I threw up eight times,” she said. Michael nodded the same smug way Charlie would’ve. And she kept going strong the way I like to think I would have.
Michael looked around at us. “Idwuhuhiysgore.”
“He says it was the high score. Anyway. It was when we were on vacation up in Wisconsin and our cabin didn’t have cable or the Internet so I ended up watching the entire Olympiad. So: Korny Eighty-Two,” she said, refusing to let Michael sidetrack her.
“Kid was a sweetheart. We didn’t talk much, but he was nice to everyone—called people sir and ma’am. Kind of guy me and my cousin would have been friends with,” I said truthfully, feeling my stomach flip over at Charlie’s mention.
I’d said thirty-one words to these people. In a row. About my past. I’d spoken them with varying cadence and total honesty. I’d spoken to them like we were all teenagers sitting at a table together at a youth camp.
Faisal slapped his hand to his pocket and pulled out a buzzing phone. He held up a “Hang on a minute and shut up” finger to Michael and spit all of the grapes out onto the table while Matty
made a barf face and muttered, “Boys are so gross.”
“Hey, Mom,” he said, smiling a little. “Yeah, everything’s good. Yeah. Yep. I think it was in the garage, last time I saw it.” He nodded along to a voice we couldn’t hear and ushered a couple of shiny mouth-grapes around in front of him. Then he smiled full-on and said, “He did? Yeah, no, I told him we’d be in Michigan by now. All right. Yep. No, that would be great. I will. I will. Love you too. Yep, bye.”
He held the phone out, hit a button, and buried it in his pocket. “Mom says hi.”
“Hi, Mama Al-Aziz!” Matty said into her sandwich.
“Ibabazeez,” Michael said. He started chomping sloppily down on the grapes.
“This is my boyfriend,” Matty said to us like an aside.
“We loave eesh other,” he said, his cheeks mushing up under his eyes.
“You take me. You take me right now.”
“Mom says hi to you too, Moses,” Faisal said.
“She did? Oh. Hi.” It had been a while since I was in the fold with pleasantries. Lately, it had been “Tell Moses to stay strong,” or “Tell him we’re keeping him in our prayers.” When people didn’t think I could hear them, it was more “Did you hear what he did?” and “Motherfucker’s crazy. His cousin got shot over how crazy he is.”
Nobody just said hi.
“Also, what are you smiling about?” Matty said, pointing at him. “This is camp, we don’t smile here.”
The guy who peed in front of everyone, the guy who could scream porno titles at the heavens and fire wayward arrows through our superiors, dropped his eyes and shrugged a little. But the smile only got bigger. “He brought flowers over.”
Matty beamed.
“Those flowbers’re gonna be suber dead by the time we ged home,” Michael said, still working on the grapes.
“Nah, my mom’s putting them in water.”
“Do you guys know how goddamn cute you are?” Matty asked, smacking Michael in the chest and making him almost choke. Her smile made her cheeks and eyes scrunch up.
Unstoppable Moses Page 11
