by B. E. Scully
All Mr. Jacobs could do was stand there and reiterate his “support for the unhoused” until the police finally unhoused the last of them from his front lawn. Within a week, three of his neighbors filed claims against him, including one of his wife’s soon-to-be former best friends. Apparently, a news van had driven right up onto the edge of her lawn and crushed an entire section of her succulent garden.
For the rest of July, Mark Jacobs and Nostri were in keen hashtag-trending competition:
“Looks like Mark Jacobs will be using his lawyer skills to make sure he doesn’t end up unhoused from his own neighborhood.”
“Nostri strikes again.”
“If not in Mark Jacobs’ neighborhood, then where?”
“Nostri, coming soon to a neighborhood near you!”
This time around, city officials took a keener interest in finding out who was behind the Nostri hijinks. The Promise Village transplants willing to talk to the police were consistent about three things: the trip across town, the vodka, and the fact that someone had provided both of them for free. From there, the truck went from green to blue to black depending on who was telling the story. Most people described the driver as a “white teenage girl,” but in some accounts she became a “light-skinned Latino,” a “middle-aged woman in a hat,” or, in one case, “a short, heavy-set man with a foreign accent.” Some people said they’d seen a second person in the truck, others said the driver was alone. One of Mark Jacobs’ neighbors reported seeing a “gang of black teenagers with scarves over their heads.”
The media dubbed this one the “Not On My Front Lawn” test.
Once again, Emma was just another anonymous spectator. But this time there was more to her silence than the thrill of keeping a secret. Ever since the Baby, Emma had been catching her mom looking at her funny when she thought Emma wasn’t paying attention. Even though her parents were fanatical about respecting their kids’ privacy, Emma was certain her mom had been rifling through her room. Her dad, a true believer in the creed that everything is always going according to some well-ordered plan, probably didn’t suspect a thing. But mom was a different story altogether.
Emma knew that she and Senz should back off for a while, let the whole thing die down again. But that was impossible now. Nostri was becoming something special. Something important. Maybe even something revolutionary.
She and Senz went from not talking about Nostri to talking about almost nothing else. They even started referring to Nostri as a “he,” as if a strong enough viral existence could somehow bring the idea to actual flesh and blood life.
“Think about it,” Emma would say for at least the hundredth time that summer. “People back in Seneca’s day changed the world not just by talking or writing about things they cared about, but by doing something about them.”
“That’s the problem with the world today,” Senz would always agree. “Everybody want to just talk and talk, but nobody want to do.”
Nostri definitely wanted to do.
He got another chance during the last week of August. School was starting in less than two weeks, and everything was going to change. No more hanging around all day with Senz. Maybe no more hanging around with Senz at all. Even if they did find the time to hook-up, Emma knew it would all be different. It always was once “real” life lured people back into its stupid, boring sleep-walk. And what would happen to Nostri then?
School had always felt like a prison sentence to Emma. Now it felt like Death Row. And if Nostri was set to die anyway, he might as well go out with a bang.
Emma and Senz were nursing sodas in the bowling alley cafe, where a row of television sets blasted half a dozen different channels non-stop. On one of them, a talk show host was interviewing two opponents of the gun-control debate.
The issue had been a fixture in Oregon politics ever since a gunman opened fire in a Portland shopping center, killing two people and wounding a third. Three days later, twenty children and six adults were shot to death by a gunman at an elementary school in Connecticut. Just that summer, a student at an Oregon high school had been killed by a rifle-toting fourteen-year-old.
First up in the talk show debate was a state senator. “We’ve got four bills up for consideration to tighten Oregon’s gun laws. We’re not even talking about banning military-style rifles or large-capacity gun magazines. We’re talking about expanded background checks, increased training—basic measures to make sure the shootings don’t keep happening. Because rest assured, they will keep happening!”
Her opponent was Gordon Parker, president of the Oregon Right to Firearms Coalition and online gun entrepreneur. The host got him started with a question. “Now, Mr. Parker, you sell guns online on a website called Armslist.com. I understand it’s like Craigslist, but for weapons.” Behind the interview desk, a screen-shot of one of Parker’s sales items appeared. “Now, that’s one of your current listings, right? Can you tell us a little about this weapon?”
“That’s an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle listed at sixteen-hundred dollars.”
“Do you sell a lot of weapons like that?”
“Let’s just say business is good.”
“And what would you say to the families of the victims of the school shootings? What would you say to people who think what you’re doing should be outlawed?”
“I’d say that living in a free society comes with risks. Protecting the Second Amendment comes with risks. Will people sometimes get killed by the misuse of firearms? Yes. That’s a risk we all take for a right we must protect.”
The screen cut away to a rundown of the mass shootings that had occurred since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. It ended with a map of the country splattered by dozens of red dots.
Senz drained the last of his soda. “Damn. That’s a lot of dead risks.”
Emma’s father had grown up in the McKenzie Mountains. Most of his family hunted, and every now and then he’d go back for a weekend hunting trip. On a holiday visit when Emma was twelve, her grandfather had taught her and her brother how to shoot a handgun. Emma could still remember the satisfying heft of the weapon’s weight, the unexpected thrill of all of that power unleashed by the click of one tiny trigger.
“I wonder if Mr. Gordon Parker thinks his kids are worth the risk.”
The television was now rolling by image after image of sheet-covered bodies and grieving loved ones. Without taking his eyes off the screen, Senz said, “I know where to get a gun.”
3
Even though the conversation Blythe Kaster really needed to have was with her daughter Emma, right now she felt like calling the police instead.
She hadn’t meant to start spying on her own daughter. Blythe’s parents had been born about ten years too late for the Swingin’ 60s in small towns even further behind the times. They were products of a time when parents were the kings and queens of their castle. Kids were meant to follow the rules, question nothing, and most of all, never, ever do anything to disrupt the kingdom. Blythe took it for granted that her mother snooped through her room while she was at school, just like most of her friends’ moms did. Once her mom even hit pay dirt in Blythe’s underwear drawer, discovering a “filthy” note from some hormone-crazed fourteen-year-old describing all the things he wanted to do to her. She could still remember sitting at one end of the dinner table, facing her parents at the other end like a condemned prisoner, the scandalous note spread out between them as evidence.
But Blythe, born in the year that the first human being set foot on the moon and the Woodstock festival attracted over three-hundred-thousand rock and roll fans to a field in upstate New York, belonged to a more enlightened time. In college, her coursework was brimming with concepts like the psychology of self-esteem, gender theory, and multiculturalism. Despite themselves being reasonably solid products of their parents’ misguided child-rearing tactics, Blythe and her friends would sit around discussing all the things they’d never do when they had kids.
For instance, they’d
never make important decisions or enforce rules without letting their kids have input. They’d never say things like, “Eat it anyway,” or “Don’t talk back,” or the most especially hated, “Because I said so.” And perhaps most important of all, they’d never violate their kids’ privacy the way their parents had.
They most definitely wouldn’t snoop through their kids’ rooms. And they’d never in a million years pretend to be somebody else and tell outrageous lies in order to find out if their kid was telling lies.
But that’s exactly what Blythe Kaster was about ready to do.
Emma’s mysterious new friend had been working a hole in Blythe’s peace of mind all summer. It wasn’t just that Emma disappeared all day without Blythe knowing where she went, or that when she was home all she did was shut herself up in her room reading or looking on the Internet. That was pretty usual for Emma. It was all this business about philosophy and “Senz this” and “Senz that.” And yet besides the basics of his real name and age, all Blythe knew about this so-called “Senz” was that he’d grown up in foster care and that he went to Franklin High. Emma had told her that he lived somewhere on the southeast side of town, but apparently she’d never been invited over for a visit. And despite Blythe’s repeated attempts to see the real Darrell Ward up close and personal, Emma had never invited him over for a visit, either.
All of which is why Blythe was sitting with her phone at the ready, about to commit identity fraud and who knows what other unforgivable crimes. She dialed the number for Franklin High School’s main office and waited, half hoping no one would pick up the phone. But with the new school year starting in less than two weeks, the office was fully staffed and ready to go.
“Hello, I’m—I’m Sharon Roberts and I’m calling on behalf of a boy in my care—a boy named Darrell Ward.” Blythe had worked out the speech beforehand, but now she began to falter. She’d already decided that if someone started pressing her for information she didn’t know, she’d just hang up. She wasn’t really looking for anything private. In fact, she wasn’t really looking for any information at all other than the fact that Darrell Ward did in fact attend Franklin High School. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I’m Darrell’s legal guardian, you see, and we just moved to a new neighborhood. I want to double-check to make sure that Darrell’s records have ended up in the right place.”
The office worker told her to “wait just a moment” before turning the line over to bland on-hold music. Blythe could still hang up. She could still forget the whole thing and give her daughter just a little benefit of the doubt instead of sneaking around on the phone like some—
“Hello, ma’am? I’m sorry, but we don’t have any records for any student named Darrell Ward. Are you sure you’re in the right district for Franklin High?”
Blythe tried a few more schools in the southeast area just to avoid thinking about why either Emma or her new friend—or both—would have lied. And what else they might be lying about.
She turned up a fifteen-year-old “Darren Ward” at a private Catholic school, but nobody had heard of a seventeen-year-old named “Darrell Ward.” Of course, he could have dropped out or switched to some other school without telling Emma. There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Darrell Ward didn’t go to the school Emma said he did. Or he could be a deranged ax murderer or a sex fiend or a drug dealing pimp who had caught her daughter up in a web of lies and treachery.
If it was Justin I wouldn’t be so worried…
Blythe cursed herself for even thinking it. That was another one of “the sacred nevers”—never compare one of your children to another. Especially when one of them is as solid and easy-going as the other is strange and difficult. And even more especially when the easy one is a boy and the difficult one is a girl.
Blythe knew the sting of family gender politics all too well. After Blythe had been born, two more daughters had come along in rapid-fire succession before her parents decided they just couldn’t afford to take a chance on one more. On weekends, their father would go on fishing trips with a group of his friends and their sons. Once she asked why he never took her or her sisters along.
“Oh, honey, I don’t think you’d enjoy that sort of thing.”
Blythe was in high school by then and actually did prefer hanging out at the mall all weekend than standing around in a freezing river in hip boots. But that wasn’t the point. “What sort of things?”
“Men things.”
“Dad, there’s no such thing as ‘men’ things and ‘women’ things! Women can do anything men can do.”
“Not everything.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
Her father had smiled, anticipating his own joke. “Well, they can’t stand up and piss over a log, for starters.”
Blythe had stood there, red-faced and somehow ashamed, most of all because she couldn’t think of one thing to answer back.
That day, Blythe had added another “never” to the list: never marry a man who divides the world into “men things” and “women things.” She’d found that man in Sam Kaster, but she’d also found out that gender bias didn’t stop at the gentlemen’s door. When Blythe had given birth to Justin, a friend of hers who was also the mother of a boy had said, “You’re so lucky you had a boy. There’s a special bond between a mother and a son that women with only daughters can never understand.”
Blythe had wanted to drop-kick her right in the stomach and ask how that special that bond felt.
When Emma was born, Blythe swore to never treat her differently from Justin, and it wasn’t that hard at first. It’s true that whereas Justin had been an easy baby, Emma had been fussy and quick to cry. But she was just as quick to laugh or, even more delightful to Blythe, to narrow her eyes and study the world with an expression so intense she looked like an infant challenging a ninety-year-old guru. Justin might have been the easier baby, but Emma had been the more interesting one.
But the line between interesting and just plain odd got more blurry with each passing year. When Emma was four-years-old, she became obsessed with “Harold,” the main character in a series of children’s books she’d been reading. She insisted that everyone call her “Harold” and refused to answer to any other name. In her favorite story, Harold uses a huge purple crayon to draw himself an imaginary world, and Emma demanded her own purple crayon. She carried it with her everywhere, scratching and scribbling on sheet after sheet of paper for hours at a time. At first Blythe thought it was cute, and she and Sam even bought her a blue jumper like the one Harold wore.
But after almost two months of Harold, with purple crayon masterpieces covering every wall in the house, Blythe was ready to start setting limits.
“It’s just a harmless phase,” Sam kept reminding her. “It’ll pass on its own.”
And it did. One morning when Blythe called “Harold” for breakfast, her daughter calmly informed her that her name was Emma, thank you very much, now please pass the eggs.
Harold had been a phase. But Blythe couldn’t help wondering if the intensity Emma had brought to it was anything but harmless.
The problems with other kids came up as soon as Emma started school. It wasn’t so much that kids didn’t like Emma, at least not at first. But Emma had no interest in liking them, preferring instead the company of herself and her own set of self-made friends.
One afternoon when she was around ten or eleven, Emma went missing. Blythe and Sam searched frantically up and down the neighborhood until Blythe finally found her half a mile away, sitting by herself on a grassy hill overlooking a busy stretch of highway.
Her worry spiking into anger, Blythe charged toward her daughter, ready to launch into the “where have you been and what are you doing” tirade (one more broken “never” for the list). Then she stopped. Cradled in Emma’s hands was the bust of Mozart that sat on top of the piano in the family room. And maybe Blythe was mistaken, but it looked as if Emma was in deep conversation with the resin effigy.
/> Emma didn’t notice Blythe’s approach. Or if she did, it didn’t concern her.
Blythe sat down on the grass beside her daughter. “Honey, what are you doing?”
“I’m talking to Mozart.”
“Everyone’s been looking for you, Emma. We’ve been worried sick, and you’ve been told to never, ever go any farther than the corner stop sign without—”
But Blythe could tell that Emma wasn’t listening to a word she said. She was staring deep into Mozart’s white resin eyes, her small brow creased in concentration as if she were trying hard to comprehend something of great importance.
The cars whizzed by on the highway. Blythe reached down and tried to gently take the bust from Emma’s hand. Emma gripped it tighter.
What would the parenting experts recommend now? “Emma, give me the statue.”
Her daughter looked up at her as if weighing her chance of success in the stand-off. Then Emma’s eyes flashed for just a second—just a second, but long enough—for Blythe to register the rage, yes, of course a child gets angry when she doesn’t get her way. But was there hatred in that flash, as well?
Emma handed Mozart over. “Fine. I was almost finished anyway.”
As Emma got older, her peculiarities grew with her. When Blythe and Sam sat down to talk to her about puberty, about the start of her menstrual cycle and developing breasts and all of those other hormonal horrors that her own parents had completely neglected to mention, Emma seemed divided about how to handle this new development. One half of her seemed to logically accept the facts of biology while the other half seemed downright offended that her body would betray her in such a way. When her menstrual cycle began, she grudgingly wore pads but refused to even discuss the idea of tampons. In her teens, she consented to shaving under her arms but wouldn’t touch a hair anywhere else on her body. Sometimes Blythe had to remind her daughter to brush her hair or even wear deodorant. It was as if Emma had decided the best way to deal with her changing body was to give it as little notice as possible.
