by S R Savell
I hear a knock. I walk to the door, book in hand, and look out the peephole.
“Hey, Nate.” I pull the door open.
“Hi.”
I sigh. “Who told you?”
“Peter.” He shakes his head. “I’m so sorry.”
I shut the door behind him. “Yeah, me too. It had everything in it.” It dawns on me that I never got to read my page full of tiny sentences. “Those whores are getting it. Don’t know what I’m doing yet, but it’s going to be good.”
He can’t dissuade me, but he tries with that worried look of his.
I go sit, patting the seat. My legs are folded Indian style. I put the book on the table, then stretch out, hanging my knees over his.
He smiles in quiet understanding, leaning into the couch cushions.
I take in the ceiling and all the tiny bumps on the textured surface. “What’s your dream job?”
“I want to be a carpenter or a construction worker. Anywhere I can work with my hands.”
“That all?”
“What do you mean?”
I look down at him. “Not all as in ‘that’s a crap idea,’ but all as in ‘do you have any other dreams?’”
“Oh, okay.” I don’t get a reply until I’ve counted to four in my head. “I want to work hard and have a nice house to stay in.”
“No wife or kids?”
“I want two kids.”
“Boys or girls?”
“Doesn’t matter to me. What about you?”
I drum my fingers on my stomach. “Maybe one or two kids but not until I’m thirty at least. I want to live my life before settling down.”
“Me too.” He rubs the bridge of his nose with the back of his hand. “Is there anything else you want? I mean dream wise?”
“I have lots of dreams. It would be easier to tell you if they weren’t in a pile in my room.”
“Bastards.”
“Did you swear?”
“Yeah. It’s true, though.”
I smile and knock a knee into his stomach.
He grins and pushes it back with his forefinger.
“So Michelle’s dreams.” My eyes shut again. “I want to live in the country and be a one-hit wonder at something. Don’t know what. As long as I get money, I’m not complaining. Maybe I’ll get rich off an insurance claim. Whatever it is, I’m going to live in a big house out on like fifty acres.”
He nods.
I nod back. “And you’re going to come live with me, and we’re going to do whatever we want, whenever we want, because we deserve to be happy.”
He stays quiet.
I sit up a little. “Right? You’ll come live with me?”
“Grandma too?”
“Duh.”
His smile gets even bigger, and I knee his stomach again before sliding my legs off. “It’s settled, then. Want something to drink?”
We talk until almost midnight, until Mom comes home.
And when we’re outside on the steps, he slides his hand into his pocket, speaking quieter than usual. “I wanted to give you something. I hope you like it, but if you don’t, then you can throw it away.”
It’s beautiful, unreal, and at first I can’t take it.
He dangles it from the string, waiting.
I open my hands.
He lowers it, the tiny wooden figurine. The eye stares up at me in challenge, sharp talons anchoring it upright. Carved wings spread outward, each one touching my middle fingers, while the hooked beak stays open in a screech never ending.
I look up at him, chewing the inside of my lip. I can’t say anything.
“It’s not that good, I know. You can burn it or—”
I wrap an arm around his waist, making him stop. “It’s perfect.” I give him a squeeze.
He hugs back.
I break away before I won’t be able to.
I rub my thumb over the falcon’s beak, grazing the point underneath. The detail is amazing: the feathers cut equal sizes and in the right spots, the wing size proportional to the rest of the body. “Why?” I ask, hoping he’ll understand.
“I wanted to give you something special.”
“For what?”
“Just because,” he says, putting his hands in his pockets, boots twisting on the concrete.
The door opens.
My hand closes around the tiny being.
“Michelle, it’s bedtime. Good night, Nathaniel.”
“Good night, Ms. Yates.”
I hide the figure in my cupped palms, but before I do, I lean out and hug him again. “Tell your grandma about our house, okay?”
“Okay.”
He walks away with a wave and then rounds the corner at the end of the block, a silhouette in the light of the street lamps.
I sit there long after he’s gone, listening to the city and the beating in my own mind.
I go inside, trying to recall where it is.
After some searching, I find one.
I sit down, figurine perched on my covers. I grab the blue spine from the table and put it next to my bed, standing the little falcon in it. I write Michelle Leanne Pearce on the inside cover of the newest notebook.
And I begin again.
Chapter 10
“All I waited for was a chance to make you understand . . .”
“This is a nice one,” Nate says, nodding at the playing radio.
“They all are.” I stand back, admiring the art before me. “How do my stick figures look?” Red fighters are spread across a bloody landscape. Some have crossbows, others guns, a few energy blasts, but most have swords.
He rolls out the paintbrush in its pan. “Are you sure your mom said—?”
“Yes, yes already! Look. It’s perfect. One wall for each mood.” I point to the wall with the door, covered in harsh slashes of crimson against the white backdrop. “Red for rage.”
He glances where I point.
“Purple for calm,” he says.
“Green for happy feelings.”
“And blue for, well, sad, I guess. Damn cliché.” I grin, soaking my hand and running to the wall, making my mark with a slap of paint on plaster. “Ta-da!”
“The paint won’t come out even if you keep doing that.”
“Lookie here. This is my room, and these are my walls. Walls that I have to stare at every day. As long as it’s not super shitty, I’m happy. Got it?” I jam my hands onto my hips, puffing up to look scarier.
“If you say so.” He grins and goes back to his green.
“So, um”—he clears his throat—“how’s school been?”
I roll the paintbrush up the wall, picturing Allyson under a bulldozer. Or Tanya. I’m not picky.
“Shitty. As normal.”
“Has it—?”
“Gotten worse? Yeah. A lot.”
In the last week alone I’ve been hit by backpacks, grabbed by random guys in the hall, spit on in the locker room, and harassed just about everywhere on campus. I can’t even go to the bathroom without worrying they’ll corner me in the stall.
Neither of us speaks, and I’m regretting the honesty. If it’s just going to make Nate upset, why bother him with it?
“I know it’s hard, having to deal with them every day. At least it’s senior year.”
“Yeah.” I drop the roller into the tin and flop down.
“Stay away from them if you can. It’ll be easier that way.”
“You mean hide.”
“I mean survive.” He sits by me, playing with the paintbrush in the pan.
I blow air between my lips. “I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“How you could let them hurt you? I know you’re nice, and I know violence isn’t the answer and all that but, Nate, you could’ve done something. I can’t.”
“I know.”
“What?”
He picks at a hole in the knee of his jeans. “I know I could’ve fought back. But I”—his eyes close briefly, then lock with mine—“I d
idn’t want to. Because I didn’t want to be like them. And because if they were hurting me, at least they weren’t hurting anyone else. Does that make sense?”
There’s no epiphany that brings me to my knees. Nathaniel’s no martyr. But I’m convinced he’s a saint.
“Michelle?”
“Yeah, yeah, it does. Want to go eat?” I’m on my feet, the weight on my heart relentless.
He grabs my hand.
Smiles.
And just like that, it’s weightless.
We settle in for our lunch break in the kitchen.
The woman is psychic, has to be. The spoon reaches my lips, and Mom texts, the table buzzing like a metal-winged wasp.
“My dad used to say phones were the work of an idle mind.”
Nathaniel glances up, puts the spoon into the vegetable soup. “Really?”
“Yep. Most things were the work of an idle mind. Except miniskirts and titty bars. Now, those required concentration.” I feel the phone again. I know this one has to last until my upgrade, which stops me from making plastic rain.
“You never told me about him. Not really.”
“It’s a touchy subject.”
“Because of the, um, bars?” He slides an elbow on the table, fist loose. The sleeve has a stray gray thread.
“That. And the fact that I’m about 90 percent sure he gave my mom the clap.” I come back with scissors, ending the worrisome string at his wrist. I fall into the chair. “Sorry. That was a little tacky.”
“It’s okay.” His spoon swishes through the soup, nudging a potato back and forth. He pauses. “Your dad. Was he that bad of a person?”
“What, frequenting titty bars and drinking up all our money isn’t enough?”
“No, no, I mean, was he that bad of a person?”
I sift through my soup, dividing the green beans from the lima beans. “Oh, was he that much of a creep, you mean? Yeah, he was. I think that’s why they finally split. I don’t remember exactly what happened. I know he was there and they fought, and then a week later, Mom told me he got smashed by a truck. Drunk, crossing the road like a moron.” I start working on the carrots next, taking them to their own little section of the bowl.
“It must’ve been hard.”
“That’s what my counselor tells me. That’s what everyone says. They act like I’m a tragedy case or something, you know? Like a shit childhood determines the rest of your existence.”
“I know what you mean.” He rolls up the napkin, flower pattern torn on one edge.
I break the silence. “ When your parents, you know, passed away, did they put you into counseling?”
I see his veins kick under his skin. The napkin unrolls and starts curling again. “Grandma wanted me to. So I went along with it. And then I acted like I was okay so she wouldn’t have to pay for it anymore.”
“How old were you?”
“Five, I think.”
“Wow.” My napkin balls in my fist. I flick it away. “Weren’t you a little young for that?”
“They didn’t think so. Grandma didn’t want me to see the school counselor. Said they were monkeys with diplomas. And then I wanted to go see the school counselor, but we saw another one instead.” He smiles lightly.
A five-year-old faking his own happiness because he knew it would make his grandma’s life easier. That takes more than guts but a heart and mind too old for the body they’re floating in. And now he’s got the same heart, the same mind, but now the world’s had longer to make him its bitch.
“You were just a little kid.”
“Not that little. The biggest one in my class.”
“You could’ve been a jock, but you were missing one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Dick Syndrome.”
He laughs, leans back in his chair. “I played peewee, but I didn’t like it.”
“No?”
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t want to hit the other kids. And since they couldn’t knock me down, it was bad for everybody.”
We finish lunch and start on the dishes, both content.
The scratched hands again steal my attention. Half hidden in soapy water, they rise to give me a cup, gravity working the droplets down until they lose all body.
I take his wrist with my left hand and the cup with my right, slip his hand under the warm water and watch it wash away all but the scars.
I squeeze his hand, give him the towel. “Sorry.” I tuck my hair back and turn off the water. “I need to work on my impulse control.”
He takes my left hand from the faucet, eyes down. Starts at my fingernails, running the cotton back and forth before the words begin.
Pulse jittery, I lean in to hear him.
“They would throw things a lot. Glass, usually.” Fingers push my palm, and I tremble at the feeling. He goes on. “A few are from working outside, catching brambles and stuff.” He lowers my left hand, starts to dry my right. “And the rest were me.” He takes in a breath, turning my hand over in his own.
“When my grandpa died, I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t take him being gone. And so I hit a wall until I couldn’t feel anymore.”
His hands slip from mine.
I take them back, pull them together, and press them between my palms.
No one speaks.
Sometimes there aren’t words to say how much you care. And sometimes you don’t have the guts to say them.
I write for hours that night, random thoughts that flee my brain as quick as they’re scrawled. No, it’s not the write-as-small-as-you-can random thoughts page but all the things I never wanted to write about, things you whisper to yourself in the dark with pillows forced over your mouth.
Like my dad. And how I hated him and all he was. His laugh, a fake sound to please or tease, whichever the mood called for. The way he smelled, the Altoids he chewed to cover the alcohol stink. How he screwed anything with a pulse. Never happy with one, he tasted them all, while his five-year-old listened to the moans coming from her parents’ bedroom.
“Tell her we were at the park, okay, honey?”
’Kay, Dad.
We went to the park. And we played in the sandbox and on the round spinny thing and on the blue-seated swings with the squeaky chains.
So for reference, is that where you found the blonde with the nose ring or the brunette with the nice knockers?
I tell it all to my journal. I can barely tell it to myself.
When I’m done, knees wound tight and my spine stiff like setting concrete, I take a bath and try to forget it all, every word.
And I almost make myself believe.
We decide to celebrate Thanksgiving on the following Saturday, the only day Nate and I could both get off work. I dedicate actual Thanksgiving Day to doing absolutely nothing of importance. I oversleep, overeat, and watch entirely too much Charlie Brown and reruns of Jackass: a day of splurging and excess. ’Cause that’s what Thanksgiving is about, right?
Right.
Mom comes in at midnight. Sleep isn’t happening anyhow, so I go downstairs to meet her.
“Hey.”
“Hey. Anything to eat?” she asks, poking around in the fridge. I wonder if she knows what day it is. Her days and nights are so frazzled, I have my doubts.
“Yeah, I picked some stuff up today. Should be some lunch meat in there.”
She makes her sandwich, humming the whole time. It makes me remember when I was little, back to times not necessarily better but in some ways happier.
She takes her seat, starts playing on her phone.
“Do you remember when we made the giant cookie?” I ask.
“Hm?” She doesn’t look up.
“You know, when I was little. I was about four, I think.”
“I think so.” She clears her throat, sips some wine.
For some reason, I want her to remember. “It was fun. Remember? We bought a few packages of easy-make cookies from the discount bin? And
it was close to my birthday, so you said it would be my birthday present. We had to mix two bowlfuls and dump them on that huge pan. Do we still have that pan? Mom?”
“Uh.” She looks up. “Yes, honey, I remember.”
“Mom.”
She looks at me long enough to say, “I’m sorry. I’m just tired tonight. Can we talk tomorrow?”
The kind part of me, the one saved for those infrequent moments when I’m a somewhat decent human being, is unseen most of the time. I don’t like showing it; I don’t like the vulnerability.
You can only be vulnerable with someone who’s listening.
“Why are you like this?” I ask quietly.
It takes a second for her to hear. “What?”
“Why are you like this?”
“Can we please not do this tonight?” she asks, in game mode still, only now her voice is exasperated, pleading.
I see it then: a young me watching with wonder as my mother carefully bandaged my hurt knee with some Scotch tape and a tissue. I see us sitting on the living room floor, banging on pots and pans with our wooden spoons, playing a discordant symphony no one cared to hear but us. I remember how soft her cheek was and how she always smelled sweet, even without perfume.
I see it so clearly, images seared deep and profoundly into my brain. I didn’t think I could ever forget. I never wanted to.
I do now.
And as stupid as my reasons are, as fickle and closed-minded as you may think them, they’re still mine. It doesn’t make them less important and it doesn’t make them more: they just are.
I can’t say words, not the right ones. So I leave her to herself, right where she wants to be, and take myself to the steps outside until the lights inside have died.
“What’s this for?”
“Wasn’t it you who said you could do something for someone without a reason?” I hold the bag out more, shaking it a little. “Yes?”
“I did.”
“Then take it, munchkin.” I spin the chair to the door and lock it, flipping the Closed sign face out.
When I turn, he’s holding the gift straight in front of him, staring.
“Well?”
