A Flicker in the Clarity

by Amy McNamara

  Jack presses his body so close to mine our hips touch.

  “Dudes, I’m so happy. You know why?”

  Deafening silence. Alice looks straight ahead.

  I lean away. I hate this Jack. This was his routine when he first got skinny and cute. My mom said it meant he was still insecure and I should wait it out, but I’m tired of waiting for boys to catch up.

  “Because I’m with my two favorite girls.” He fake pouts.

  My cartoon self spews a never-ending arc of rainbow-colored vomit. Makes me smile. I slip a piece of chalk from my pocket and stoop to sketch a monochrome rainbow on the sidewalk. Who says maps can’t contain inside jokes? Place where Evie shook it off.

  “What’s that?” Jack looks down.

  “Never mind.” I pocket the chalk, feeling better.

  He tries to fling his arm over my shoulder again, but I dodge him and walk faster.

  “Wait up, crabby pants.” He slides his arm from Alice’s shoulder. “I know just what you need.” He darts into the deli at the corner.

  I look back.

  Alice eyes me, surprised.

  “Don’t look at me. I never know what he’s up to.”

  I keep walking without saying bye or anything. I’d rather be anywhere else but here. It’s not like I’m going to chill with Alice on the sidewalk while she waits like a dog outside the deli for Jack.

  I stop at the newsstand by the subway corner to grab a bottle of water. The owner’s out front, restocking his cooler. I’m handing him my dollar when I hear feet slapping the pavement fast and hard behind me.

  “You know . . . what is your problem?” Alice rushes up, her voice incredulous, cold, and suddenly very close.

  I turn to face her. Her face is vivid with color, conviction.

  “I’m so sick of it. Why do you hate me so much?”

  I open my mouth, but no words come out. This is the last thing I expected from the cabbage.

  “Girls, girls,” says the newsstand guy, his hands patting the air in front of us like we’re a wildfire springing up that he can still tamp down.

  Alice juts her chin forward, gets in my face. Behind her the sun’s covered by clouds, the sky a murky pearl.

  “I don’t know what kind of hold you have over Jack, but you had your chance already.”

  She shoves me, hands wide on my shoulders.

  I trip backward, away from her and into a rack of magazines. Time slows, and I feel like I could fight. Is this what Theo likes? This urge to push her back, to smack her face, shove her body hard and fast away from my own?

  “What the hell?” I yell right back at her instead. “Are you crazy? I mean, I know it runs in your family.”

  The second it leaves my mouth I regret that last part, but there’s no taking it back. Alice’s mom is notorious for the night she drove her ancient rusted Mercedes onto the sidewalk outside Bly, nearly taking out a crowd of kids and parents spilling from the school after an awards ceremony.

  Alice narrows her eyes, steps forward, and raises her hand like she’s going to smack me, hard.

  “What did I ever do to you?”

  “Make nice, make nice,” the newsstand man says, catching her wrist.

  I have this weird sideways feeling I’m having a crazy dream. The kind where everyone’s terrified because there’s a psycho on the loose, and you’re cowering too, only then you jolt awake, because the psycho’s you.

  Jack runs up.

  “What the hell?” he asks, looking back and forth between us.

  “Ask her,” I choke, my heart beating a thousand times a second.

  I stare at Alice. Her head is tossed back, nostrils flared. This is the most alive I’ve ever seen her.

  “All you’ve ever done is act like I’m dirt on your shoe, and try every stupid, obvious trick in the book to get away from me,” she says.

  “Wow. Okay . . .” Jack waggles the king-size candy bar between us. “Who wants some Reese’s?”

  “You know what?” Alice yanks her wrist free from the newsstand guy. “I don’t care. I really don’t. I thought you were more, but you’re a bitch, Evie. And I try not to say stuff like that about people, you know?”

  Alice keeps her eyes on me, but the raging fire’s dying down.

  “Alice, I—”

  “Save it. I’m done. This was stupid. You’re not worth it.” She straightens her posture, grows taller before my eyes. “One more year at Bly, then I’ll forget about all of you.”

  The look on her face shifts into something pure, a clarity I’ve never seen there before. A prickle of jealousy creeps across my skin. Alice looks confident. Free.

  Jack stares at us a second, his thumb sinking into a peanut butter cup, not sure what he’s supposed to do.

  “I was in that deli for, like, three minutes!”

  Just then a familiar straw-colored head sprints up the subway steps next to us, a dry-cleaning bag fluttering like a cape on his back.

  Theo’s face lights up when he sees me standing here.

  “Hey!” he says, starting up the second set of steps. “Perfect timing! You’re the person I’m coming to see.”

  Theo appearing at this moment is a miracle of untold magnificence. I look at his cute face and feel fall-on-my-knees grateful.

  He comes around toward me, loops his arm through mine.

  I take as large a step away from Jack and Alice as humanly possible.

  Secret Foxes

  “HI,” THEO SAYS AFTER WE ROUND the corner away from them. His voice is a little softer than it was before, like he’s greeting me now for real.

  “Hi,” I say back, so happy to see him I almost laugh. I can’t tell if the rushing gallop my heart’s doing is left over from the Alice insanity or because I’m standing next to this very cute boy who came to see me.

  “Did I walk into something?” he asks.

  “You could say that.” I’m still shaking.

  “You okay?” He eyes me closely.

  “Yeah . . .”

  I’m not going to tell him what just happened. I don’t even know what happened yet, and really, I am all right, because Theo’s standing here like some kind of mystical force making me forget everything else. I’ll figure the rest out later.

  “I have your clothes.” He lifts the bag on his back.

  “I see that, thanks.” I reach out to take them, but he shakes his head.

  “I’ll deliver them right to your door,” he says with a grin.

  He’s wearing jeans today, and high-tops and a wool coat. I sneak another peek at him, and he still has his eyes on me, bright, happy.

  “My mom says to remind you to come into the shop and pick out a thank-you gift,” he says as we walk down the block to my building. “And the dye all came out. Your clothes look as good as they did on you before you took a cherry soda for the team.”

  I pull open the door to our building, not sure what I’m supposed to do. While I hesitate, a damp crosstown gust whips us from behind, sends my ponytail whipping forward into his face.

  He sputters, laughs, and takes a step back.

  Oh, to be as spontaneous as the wind.

  “Coming up?” I ask, catching my hair, like I’m that casual, that easy with boys.

  “Sure, yeah.” He slips his old watch out of his pocket. “I’ve got a few minutes.”

  “That really works?”

  He holds it up to my ear so I hear the ticking. His wrist is warm against my face.

  “I mean, you use it? I thought it was a prop.”

  He pretends to be offended, then breathes on the glass, shines it on his shirt. He hands it to me. “Look at this thing. Beautiful inside and out. It didn’t work when I got it. Took some fixing up.”

  I hand back the watch so I can unlock the foyer door.

  “Was it expensive to fix?” I ask, looking back at him.

  “I did it myself.”

  “Yourself?”

  “Yup.” He looks proud. “My dad and I used to go to all the
se estate sales. It was during my taking-things-apart phase. For like a week I thought I’d become a watchmaker. Hilarious, right? No one wears watches. Theo the watchmaker. Ha.”

  “Taking-things-apart phase?” I press the elevator button.

  The better elevator comes.

  “Yeah, haven’t you ever done that?” He steps aside so I can enter first. “Wondered how a lock works or looked at what’s inside your microwave?”

  I shake my head and push the button for our floor. “Not enough to break it, which is exactly what would happen if I tried to take it apart. Besides, aren’t microwaves all manned by teams of tiny nuclear physicists?”

  Theo laughs. We step out on my floor and he follows me down the hall with a wry half smile. His smile’s making everything look and feel different, the dim hall shrugging off its air of neglect, taking on a kind of weary, historical charm.

  “How do you know what things are like if you can’t look inside them? I need to take stuff apart, check it out.”

  “Good question.” I unlock our door casually, like having boys I barely know come over is something I do. “If only that worked with people,” I say, thinking of Emma. “Like a human snow globe, or glass girl.”

  Theo makes a face. “Sounds like a nightmare,” he says, stepping in behind me. “No mystery. Too transparent.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t really think that through.” I laugh, awkward, while I kick off my shoes. Framed there in my doorway, blond hair wind-wild, he’s so cute my heart stutters on a beat. “There’d be no secrets, no places to hide. I’d be frantically mapping all the places people could hide.”

  “Okay. You have to show me one of these maps.”

  Theo strides in and lays my dry cleaning over the back of one of the dining room chairs. He looks around, like I’m going to have them hanging on the walls.

  “Nah, no. I don’t know. Maybe? Sometime.” I’m tripping over my tongue. I’m not ready to show him a map yet.

  Theo laughs. Marcel leaves his spot on the couch to sniff Theo. Gives him a lick of approval.

  “I tried to map worry once, like a visual of the electric tangle in my head would make it easier to navigate?” I don’t know why I’m telling him this. I laugh, nervous, blunder on. “But I ended up in an edgy pencil trance, filling a page with tiny circles tucked in tiny squares, so many the paper looked cancerous.”

  “That one I have to see.”

  “I threw it out.”

  Theo walks over to the bookcases and inspects our pictures.

  “She looks familiar . . . ?” He picks up one of Emma and me on the water taxi last summer.

  I sigh. I can’t help it. Even on the periphery, Emma makes an impression. I move closer to look.

  “That’s Em.”

  “The fight girl?” He holds the picture up for better light, then smiles. We were playing tourist in matching green plastic Lady Liberty sunglasses.

  “Well, she’s more than that, but yeah, we made up.”

  “What’s going on here?”

  I laugh. “That’s a home trip. It’s a thing we do. Like, go to the top of the Empire State, or eat popcorn on the Staten Island Ferry. Sometimes we pick a set of tourists and mimic them—not to be mean, or obvious, or anything, we just let them dictate our day. We take lots of pictures, buy the same cheesy trinkets. Our next trip is on one of those double-decker buses, but Em says we have to wait for really bad weather so we can sit up top and get soaked in those light-blue plastic bags they sell to wear over your clothes.”

  Theo laughs, sets the photo back on the shelf.

  “We’re going to Spain,” I say. “In May. We’ll finally be actual tourists.” A shiver of joy lifts the hair on my arms.

  “Cool,” he says.

  “She talked to you,” I say. “The day of the tour.”

  “Saw your friend Jack that day too. You all go to Bly?”

  I climb over the back of the couch and sit down. Theo walks around and joins me. Suddenly I’m all body, shifting uncomfortably, like having Theo here made me forget how a person’s supposed to sit on a couch. I wedge myself into the corner and wrap my arms around my knees.

  “Yeah, and we’re all doing this project. It’s so stupid. Juniors at Bly have to conduct this investigation. It’s part of a yearlong curriculum. American Empire Builders.” I roll my eyes. “It gets woven in with junior seminar. It’s a ton of student-led work. They’re basically making us teach ourselves.”

  He raises a hand. “Can we talk about anything else? Slivers under thumbnails? Eye surgery?”

  I close my mouth, embarrassed.

  “Sorry,” he says. “It’s not you. Alternative education is one of my parents’ obsessions.”

  He scoots a little closer to me on the couch, stretches his legs out long. I can feel the heat coming off his body. I take a deep breath. He’s so close I can see the little white flecks in his irises that make his eyes so light.

  “So this is where you live,” he says, looking around.

  “Me and my mom.” I nod, embarrassed.

  The lowering sun filters in the window and catches the side of his face, highlighting blond stubble along his jaw and what’s becoming a narrow scar on his lip where the stitches were.

  “Hey, your stitches are out.”

  “Dissolved.” He smiles, reaching up to touch his lip.

  “What happened, if it wasn’t boxing?”

  But Theo just looks at me, lips pressed together in a small straight smile. “Not important,” he says.

  I press my back against the corner of the couch, an unsettled feeling sneaking over me. What if Jack’s right about Theo?

  “Want something to drink?” I ask, standing. “Or eat?” I’m nervous, and I sound like it.

  He blinks back at me a second, as if he’s appraising this change in my behavior.

  “No, thanks,” he says. “I have to get back. It’s not easy being a member of Margaret Gray’s eclectic empire. A location scout wants to use the unrenovated part of the building for a television show.”

  “Cool! Any show I know? Emma’s family let TV people use the outside of their house once.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t watch TV. Insurance is making us do some stuff before the film people come in, but my mom’s paying me a third of what she gets if I take care of it. I’m saving every cent I can at the moment.”

  “Your mom’s so cool,” I say, sitting again.

  He looks at me, skeptical, eyebrow arched over an arctic eye. “Yeah, I guess, for a benevolent dictator. Neither of my parents really dwell in reality.”

  I laugh like he’s joking, but he doesn’t laugh with me.

  “I could use a job,” I sigh. Suddenly it’s hard to swallow. I don’t know why I’m telling him this. “I’m pretty sure I have to pay for college, and babysitting the Hanover twins isn’t exactly helping me reach for the stars.”

  Theo makes a face at the cheesy sentiment.

  “Sorry, that’s a Bly counseling office positivity message.”

  “Private-school kid,” Theo teases.

  I laugh.

  He shifts like he’s going to leave, but he doesn’t. He turns those bright eyes on me instead. “So, um,” he says after a second. “Talking about jobs isn’t really why I’m here. Do you wanna come to Dumbo tomorrow night and hang out? Meet up at my house? There’s all this development going on by the waterfront and there are some new places to walk around. We could get a slice or something?”

  He’s asking me out.

  I say nothing. I can’t make myself speak.

  He looks down, then up at me, running a hand through his hair. “No? Okay, don’t worry about it, I thought I’d ask, but—”

  “No, yes, that’d be great.” I cut him off before he takes it back. “What time?”

  He grins, wide.

  “I’m at the gym with Joe until six. Meet by the bridge at seven?”

  I picture him in a helmet and mouth guard, swinging his fists at a priest.

  Once
I tried to do a map of soul location. I made a small accordion book, a catalog of things. On each little panel I painted an object or place a soul might hide. I put it away when I realized I had nothing for myself, but Emma’s was easy, a night-blue sky full of fireworks, the cascading kind, silver and gold. My mom’s was a desk, an old oak one like in the basement of the library, drawers full of my dad’s stuff, everything she doesn’t want to forget. I could pull it out, add a boxing ring for Theo.

  He mistakes my silence for second thoughts. “Sorry. This is weird. It’s okay if you’re not—you don’t want to—I just thought . . .”

  “Seven’s great,” I laugh, and he lifts his brows like he wasn’t aware he was making a joke. He studies my face a second.

  “Gotta go serve the dictator,” he says, knocking his knee lightly into mine.

  His warm knee, my caught breath.

  Instead of standing, though, he leans forward, elbows on his knees, then back again, turning to me kind of suddenly, his face so close I can feel his breath on my lips. Is this what happens before a kiss? A real one, not that rushed, groping thing I had on the beach?

  But he clears his throat instead. “I don’t have a phone. If you’re there, you’re there. Okay?”

  “You like being unreachable.” I draw my knees back to my chest. Jack’s words ring in my ears. Dude’s a psycho.

  Theo picks at a hole in the knee of his jeans. His fingers look kind of swollen, the knuckles bruised and cut. His lip twitches a little at the corner.

  “Being unreachable is the new black.” He stands and checks his watch. “Gotta fly.”

  I’m super confused. I thought he was going to kiss me, and now it seems like he can’t get out of here fast enough.

  I follow him to the door. “Thanks for bringing my clothes.”

  Theo pulls a hat out of the back of his bag and pulls it down low on his head.

  “Sure, no problem,” he says.

  I flip the lock on the door and he reaches past me to pull it open. He smells good. He hesitates a second in the doorway and I wonder if he’s smelling me too. I glance up at his eyes and picture us like a pair of foxes. Then I imagine a map of hidden city foxes, mistaking themselves for teenagers, sniffing each other in doorways.