Spontaneous

by Aaron Starmer

  “Well,” Frolic replied, “I’ll be seeing to it that the world knows and understands that soon enough. You have my word.”

  I had to say it, so I said it. “And you have ketchup on your face.”

  as you might have guessed

  Mystery Texter didn’t show up at my house that day or the next. School was shuttered for the entire week, and all its homecoming festivities were put on hold, so the guy certainly had his opportunities to pop in. It’s not like he even had funerals to attend. The Chen family didn’t have the money that the Ogden family had and rumors were that they’d only be inviting close friends and family to Brian’s memorial service. Fine by me. More crying wasn’t going to help a thing.

  The support group was canceled because Vince called it quits. He sent us all an email saying he would be pursuing other interests. Presumably, not hanging out with kids made of nitroglycerin. Who could blame him? My parents tried to book some immediate extra sessions with Linda for me, but she wasn’t returning their calls. Either she was throwing in the towel as well, or she was too busy fielding requests from new patients. It’s tough enough when one kid in your school blows up, even if you don’t really know her. When a second kid blows up . . . well, I don’t care if you’ve never even heard of him. You take it personally.

  “Kids blow up now. And I’m a kid. Therapy please.”

  Every news organization in the world had arrived. Perched on a gorge and overlooking town, the Hotel Covington’s parking lot was a hive of vans with giant retractable antennae. You couldn’t go anywhere without someone shoving a microphone in your face. On the other hand, you couldn’t stay home and zone out behind the TV or mess around on the internet because Covington High was all anyone could talk or write about. You couldn’t even watch things on mute, because people were making explosion gestures with their hands. This included newscasters, which is a bit unprofessional and undignified if you ask me.

  To keep my mind off things, I spent a lot of time with Tess McNulty. She hated terms like “bestie” and “BFF,” but Tess and I were two people who knew how to best distract each other, so I think we qualified. We’d been inseparable since elementary school and, at the age of nine, had decided to grow old together.

  We were spending a few weeks down the shore at my grandparents’ place after Tess’s dad took off on her and her mother. One evening, the two of us were riding our bikes past these gorgeous Victorian houses along the beachfront, and we spied two old ladies sitting in beach chairs at the edge of a porch. They were wearing kimonos, holding hands, and smoking a hookah while dipping their toes in the sand. Which was obviously adorable.

  “Let’s be those old ladies, always and forever,” we pledged with the sunset as our witness.

  Ten years later and the pledge remained intact. Only now we were getting around in cars. Since I never drove and she always did, Tess was the captain. And since she rarely partook in mind-altering substances and I often did, I was the wacky sidekick.

  In the first few days following the demise of Brian Chen, we must have logged five hundred miles on her Civic. She had a playlist called Drive, Fucker, Drive!, which consisted mostly of songs with loads of swears. Hip-hop, obviously, but also some punk and even some country of the shit-kicking variety. We played it full blast with the windows down and drove west into the hills and farmlands near Pennsylvania, where the autumn colors were popping. We turned off the GPS and took roads we didn’t know.

  This was something we’d done before, and almost always the plan was to get into adventures. Though our adventures usually consisted of getting dirty looks from old men as we pulled into rural gas stations. It’s illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey, so Tess and I would sit in the car with the stereo still on, singing along to songs about being “higher than a motherfucker,” and the geezers would stand there shaking their heads and mumbling under their breaths until we drove off in a fit of giggles.

  Of course, Tess was never higher than a motherfucker. She was responsible like that. Me, not so much. For instance, the Dalton twins had sold me some shrooms a few months before. At a farmer’s market, appropriately enough. I’d only taken them once, during a camping trip to the Poconos. They freaked me out at first, but then the experience mellowed and I eventually became “one with nature” and decided I was willing to give them another shot. I’d stashed them in the base of my bedside lamp and had been saving them for an outdoor concert or some event where my ermahgerd-your-voice-is-full-of-rainbows! shtick would be tolerated.

  During one of our drives away from memories of Katelyn and Brian, swear-singing with Tess wasn’t helping me forget enough, so I insisted we stop by a Dunkin’ Donuts. I bought a steaming-hot pumpkin latte and I dropped a double dose of shrooms in it.

  “You’re gonna make yourself sick,” Tess said.

  “The opposite,” I said. “You brew them in liquid first to make sure you don’t get sick. That’s what Native Americans do.”

  “In pumpkin lattes?”

  “Well, they had pumpkins at least. Thanksgiving. Pumpkin pie. Duh.”

  “Yeah. Duh.”

  Tess was right. Twenty minutes later I was puking along the side of the road somewhere in the Pinelands. Tess rubbed my back and I imagined her hand was a bear’s paw—but not a scary bear’s paw, a cuddly bear’s paw, a cartoon bear’s paw—and it was at that moment I realized that shit was about to get loopy.

  “Someone loves me,” I told her.

  “I love you, baby,” Tess said.

  “I know that, but I mean a phantom. Someone who lives in space between the spaces.”

  “Jesus? Dumbledore?”

  “Don’t joke, Tess. You haven’t got your real eyes on.” I meant this last part literally, because instead of her regular brown eyes, she had glimmering diamonds in her head.

  “Let’s get you in the car. You can lie down in the back. I’ll play something acoustic. Something soothing.”

  “Invigorating. Invigorating. Invigorating,” I said.

  “Soothing,” Tess repeated in a voice that fit the word, and she guided me into the backseat.

  “He reads my mind,” I said with a gasp. “Do you think he has especially big ears, like satellites that can read brain waves?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tess said.

  As she pushed me on the chest and down into the seat, I handed her my phone, which was queued up to my texts. She took a second to read them and handed the phone back. “See. He loves me,” I said.

  Tess leaned in and kissed me on the cheek and I felt little happy ants on my skin. “Well, whoever he is, he isn’t here. And I’m guessing he hasn’t shown up at your door yet.”

  “Nope. He’s a chicken. Bock-bock-bock,” I clucked, and I wondered why people said chickens sounded like that because I wasn’t sure what they really sounded like, but I knew it wasn’t that. Definitely not that.

  My feet were dangling outside, so Tess lifted and placed them on the seat and closed the door to keep them in place. It sounded like the air hatch on a rocket ship sealing shut. Noise, then silence. Then a few seconds later, noise again and Tess was at the controls, firing up the engine and launching us into space. Music burst from the stereo like bats from a cave and I felt every curve and bump of the road. I laughed hysterically as Tess sang along to some dopey old thing from the sixties or seventies.

  “You just call out my name, and you know wherever I am, I’ll come running, to see you again . . .”

  you’ve got a friend

  Usually in these situations, we’d end up at Tess’s house. Her mom was a single mom and the thing about single moms is they tend to tolerate teenage shenanigans. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been drunk and draped over Tess’s shoulder as she led me upstairs while Paula peered over the top of whatever novel she was reading and remarked, “Hope it was worth it, Mara.”

  That said, the o
ther thing about single moms is they tend to date, and when that happens, they prefer not to have their seventeen-year-old daughter and her friend who’s swatting at imaginary dragonflies show up just as they’re pulling the cork from some chardonnay. On this particular night, Paula was on a date with a guy named Paul. It couldn’t possibly work out, for obvious reasons, but she’d asked if Tess could sleep at my house anyway.

  This meant that Tess had to smuggle me past my parents. Not mission impossible, but not exactly easy. It was a good thing that Tess was charming and Mom and Dad liked her. They called her Tessy—which I guess she didn’t mind because she never objected—and they were always asking her about field hockey.

  “Heard it was a close one, Tessy.”

  “How do your playoff chances look, Tessy?”

  “Flex your goddamn muscles, Tessy! Flex!”

  Okay. Maybe not the last one, but they loved that she was an athlete, even though she wasn’t a star. Only started a few games that year. Didn’t score a single goal. Still, Mom and Dad were jocks in the days of yore and I never was, so Tess might as well have worked for ESPN. She was the one they always talked jock to.

  Most of the time, it was annoying, but now it was essential. Tess had to distract them as I tiptoed up to my room. The shrooms were wearing off, but I couldn’t risk saying something embarrassing. And I couldn’t lie. I already told you about my problem with lying.

  I know what you’re going to say. “Not telling equals lying!” Well, that’s just bad math.

  Example: Say you pleasure yourself. Not that I’m saying you do . . . Actually, yes. I am saying you do because everyone does. But even if you’re the world’s most honest person, do you run downstairs after every sweaty session and holler, “Mom! Dad! Guess what?”

  Of course not. Same thing with shrooms, though in this case it was pleasuring the mind. Okay, that’s going a bit too far, but I think you get the point.

  As we pulled into the driveway, Tess gave me a pep talk. “All you have to do is make it to the stairs. You can do it, sweetie. I know you can. It’s seven o’clock, so they’ll be watching the news. I’ll pop my head into the family room, tell them that we grabbed some Dunkin on the road and now you’ve got a stomach thing—”

  “Yeah, good. Dunkin. Stomach thing. That’s actually not a lie.”

  “Right. And then they can ask me about when practice is going to start up again and you can slip into some jammies and into bed and if they want to come check on you, you can pretend to be asleep.”

  “But I want to cuddle you.” This was partly the shrooms talking, but it was also the way we were. Neither of us had sisters, so we spent a lot of time doing what we thought sisters did. Braiding each other’s hair, cuddling, fighting. We hadn’t fought in a few weeks, but I knew a fight was coming. Maybe mid-cuddle, probably in the morning.

  “Get your shit together, kiddo,” Tess was bound to tell me in her exasperated big-sister voice. And I would nod and she would scowl and we would both know that it doesn’t matter because I always end up doing the same shit all over again.

  For now, in the driveway, we weren’t fighting. We were moving. “First things first,” Tess said as she grabbed my shoulders and pointed me to the door. “Upstairs. Eyes on the prize.”

  “Aye-aye, cap’n,” I said, and strode up the brick walkway. Though I was still noticing so much—the rustle of leaves that sounded like rain, the glint of evening sunlight on the silver knocker that reminded me of a sword—I must not have noticed some obvious stuff, such as the skateboard resting against the oak tree in the front yard. I pushed open the door without knowing what I was really walking into.

  Now, here’s something you’ve got to understand. No one ever hangs out in our living room. It’s strictly a Christmas-Eve-and-the-grandparents-are-visiting corner of the house. So when I stepped inside and saw three people sitting on the living room couch together, I was tempted to turn tail and not look back. Figured I’d stumbled into the neighbor’s place.

  Dad’s voice cast an anchor, though. “Speak of the devil!” he hollered.

  My head pivoted, and then my gaze landed on the person sitting between my parents. A boy. In a suit. On our living room couch. He stood, and I spoke. “And the devil doesn’t have a clue what the hell is going on.”

  Mom rose to her feet next and she presented the boy like he was a car for sale. “It’s Dylan . . .”

  “Hovemeyer, ma’am,” Dylan said as he pulled down on his jacket to straighten out the wrinkles. There were a lot of wrinkles.

  Now it was Dad who stood and remarked, “Hovemeyer? I’ve seen that name in the old cemetery by St. Francis.”

  “Our family goes back a ways,” Dylan said with a nod. “And people tend to die.”

  I knew Dylan. Well, I didn’t know him personally, but everyone at school knew him. He was the one you suspected. Of what? Well, name it.

  “Hey, it’s . . .” Tess had joined me in the doorway, her hand on my back.

  “Dylan Hovemeyer,” he said, stepping toward us with a hand outstretched. I wasn’t sure which one of us the hand was intended for, but Tess was quicker on the draw. As she shook Dylan’s right hand, I presented my left one and soon I was shaking his left one. A pulse of energy zipped between the three of us, back and forth, like people doing the wave at a stadium. “We all have econ together,” he went on.

  “Riiiight,” Tess and I said at the same time, as if this were something we’d never thought about before, which was total BS. We’d discussed Dylan. We had theories about him.

  Mom’s face crinkled up as she said, “I assumed you were already friends.”

  “We’re becoming friends,” Dylan said, staring at me. “Fast friends.”

  The handshake à trois was still going strong and Tess gave me that what-now? look and I gave her that um-I’m-still-pretty-high look and so she took control, like always. She pulled her hand away and placed it on top of mine. It was the fuzzy hand again, the cuddly cartoon bear paw.

  “You look great, Dylan,” Tess said. “And we’d love to catch up, talk econ and all that, but Mara is feeling crazy sick.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t pull my hand away. I liked it, sandwiched up and tangled in their fingers. It was melting like grilled cheese.

  “Vomit-all-over-the-place sick,” Tess added.

  “Oh, honey,” Dad said.

  “Pumpkin latte,” Tess informed him.

  Mom’s eyes narrowed because she knew I downed those things like they were water during months that ended in BER. So I added a key detail. “Probably something fungal too.”

  This made Mom cringe, but Dylan didn’t budge. The words vomit and fungal can usually scare away even the most dedicated panty-sniffer, but it required Tess’s field-hockey-honed arms to pry our fingers apart.

  “Straight to bed for this one,” she said, pulling me toward the stairs. “Sorry, Dylan. Again, you look . . . dashing.”

  Dylan seemed to take it in stride, shrugging as if he were called dashing all the time, which I knew for a fact he was not.

  “Mara—” Mom started to say, but soon Tess and I were at the stairs and her tone shifted from surprise to embarrassment. “I’m so sorry, Dylan. She’s . . . well, she’s got a sensitive stomach.”

  “That’s cool,” Dylan said. “I did what I came here to do.”

  “And that is?” Dad’s voice was suddenly suspicious. He wasn’t an idiot. He could see through a wrinkled suit.

  “I wanted to meet you two. And I wanted to shake Mara’s hand. Thank you for being nice to me. Your home is a nice home.”

  By the time I reached my room, I had already heard the front door close. I looked out my window to the front lawn. Dylan was jogging across the grass, skateboard in hand. As soon as he reached the road, he tossed the board to the asphalt, hopped on, and escaped, suit and all, into the evening.

  I
opened the window so I could hear the squeaking wheels retreating into the distance as I collapsed on my bed. They sounded like sails being raised, a ship setting out to sea.

  a trilogy

  Before we dive back into things, I should probably tell you three stories about Dylan. Rumors, really, but rumors are as important as anything. Even if they’re not true, they end up turning people into who they are.

  Story Number One: His dad died under a pile of shit.

  I should elaborate, I suppose. Dylan started attending our school halfway through sixth grade. Middle school is a tough time for any kid, but being a new kid smack dab in the middle of middle school is about as tough as it gets. If you show up on the first day of classes, it’s not so bad. New teachers, new lockers. People are distracted. A few kids might say, “Hey, I don’t remember that guy,” but pretty soon you’re integrated into the pubescent stew. Yet another dude dishing out or dodging wedgies.

  Show up after Christmas break and things are way different. Then kids are, like, “Hey, what’s this interloper’s deal. His mom move him to Jersey after his parents got a divorce? He get kicked out of his last school for sexting the nurse? This douche-nozzle ain’t one of us, that’s for sure.” Names are Googled, local news stories pop up, links are followed, until a tale emerges. The one for Dylan was that his dad died under a pile of shit.

  I never looked it up to confirm, but I think Tracy Levy told me that Dylan was from some Podunk town in Pennsylvania and he lived on a farm with his parents and one morning his dad bought a bunch of manure (which is technically shit) and when the old man was unloading it—he hit the wrong button on the dump truck or whatever—it all came tumbling down on him and he suffocated beneath the pile. Dylan supposedly found him over an hour later and tried to dig him out with his bare hands, but it was too late.

  Now, kids are cruel. We all know this. It’s no surprise that the story spread quick and thick. Thanks in no small part to people like me, who love some good gossip. But as cruel as kids are, they aren’t monsters. It wasn’t like they teased Dylan about it. It merely branded him with a reputation.