by Adam Silvera
I head back to the game just in time to see Me-Crazy bean Brendan with the ball. Thomas must’ve been eliminated a minute or so before because he’s already sitting down with Genevieve, probably chatting about fireflies again. I sit on the other side of Gen and Baby Freddy asks me, “Who’s that redhead with your mother?”
“My old babysitter,” I answer. “She’s pretty gorgeous, right?” This catches Genevieve’s attention. She stops talking with Thomas and turns around to scope out her competition. “I had the craziest crush for Evangeline as a kid. But I’ve moved on.”
Brendan asks, “How didn’t I know this, you punk bitch?”
“Because I haven’t illustrated my autobiographical graphic novel yet, asshole.”
Later I escape with Genevieve for some alone time before her father picks her up. She won’t be around to meet tomorrow—her aunt is taking her shopping for her retreat—but we’ll definitely be in touch and will see each other for her birthday on Monday. I walk her to the car. She punches me in the shoulder before joining her father, who grunts my way and guns the engine.
Thomas looks tired by the time I make it back to the courts. He’s sitting by himself, watching the others drinking Arizona iced teas and laughing. “You good?” I ask him.
He nods. “More fun than I ever have on my block.”
“You doing anything tomorrow?”
“I have work until five.”
“Where do you work?”
“This gourmet Italian ice cream shop on Melrose.”
“Sounds cold and terrible.”
“It’s very cold and very terrible.”
“I’ll meet you after work and you can actually play manhunt with us this time.”
“Sounds like a plan, Stretch.”
We fist-bump.
Once the courts are clear of adults who will be rocking hangovers tomorrow, we play basketball in trash bins rattling of beer cans and aluminum foil, and even a little handball before calling it a night ourselves.
5
A HAPPY FACE WITHOUT EYES
The next afternoon, I find myself on Melrose Avenue.
I’m picking Thomas up from his job, Ignazio’s Ice Cream, and the air-conditioning is on full blast. I have zero interest in buying anything. If anyone else were behind the counter I’d probably be a pain in the ass and eat a sample and bounce, but Thomas doesn’t look like he’s in the mood for that nonsense. He’s wearing the worst khaki apron in the history of the world, and his big eyebrows are knitted as he reviews some receipt at the register, punching in keys.
“Welcome to Ignazio’s,” Thomas greets me without looking up. “Would you like a cup or waffle bowl?”
“Just some eye contact,” I say.
Thomas’s head jerks up. He looks like he might stab me in the eye with a sample spoon, but just as quickly relaxes. “Stretch!”
“Thomas!” I don’t have a nickname for him. “It’s mad hot out. I take back what I said yesterday, it’s not cold and terrible in here. You got it good here.”
“Not for long.”
“What do you mean?”
Thomas takes off his apron. He opens the door marked with a bronze manager plate and says, “Hey, I quit.” Then he drops the apron and joins me on the other side of the counter.
I don’t know if I should clap or cheer or worry about his future.
He pushes me toward the door and shouts “WOOOOOOOO!” once we’re outside.
I have to laugh. “What the hell just happened? Did you just quit? You quit, didn’t you?” Considering how happy he looks, I take it I’m right. “Dude, I’m sensing a pattern here. You broke up with your girlfriend yesterday and now you’ve quit your job. You’re twenty years too young for a midlife crisis.”
“I always quit things I’m tired of dealing with,” Thomas says. “Always will.”
We make our way back toward Leonardo Housing, and he punches the air, but I’m not really sure what the hell he’s fighting.
“I couldn’t stand Sara’s paranoia anymore,” he says. “I couldn’t stand people coming into the store for eight samples when they already knew what flavor they wanted. I couldn’t stand pumping air into bike tires so I quit that too. If it’s not doing something for me, I quit. There. I said it: I’m a quitter.”
I don’t know how to respond. This guy was a complete nobody to me yesterday. And now he’s . . . what, I don’t know, exactly. But he’s more than a quitter. “Uh . . .”
“Have you ever quit anything, Stretch?”
“Skateboarding, yeah. I must’ve been ten or something. I went down this crazy steep hill, and saw my young life of playing with action figures flash before my eyes right before I crashed into a parked van.”
“Why didn’t you just hop off the skateboard?”
“Why are you questioning the irrationality of a ten-year-old?”
“Well played.”
“But I get where you’re coming from. I guess you can quit whatever you want. You know, as long as you’re not quitting something or someone that’s a good fit for you.”
“Exactly!” Thomas nods at me, like he’s surprised that he’s found someone who gets him. “Where’s Genevieve today?”
“Hanging with her other boyfriend,” I say.
“Aww. Is he nice?”
“He’s a bit of a tool, but he’s built like Thor so there’s not a whole lot I can do. Nah, she’s going on an art retreat in a couple of days and needs to go shopping for some craft tools and luggage. Tomorrow is her birthday and there’s all this extra pressure to make it seriously awesome since we won’t see each other for another three weeks afterwards.”
Man, three weeks without Genevieve. Fuck that in the face.
“You should paint her nude, Titanic-style,” Thomas suggests.
“I don’t think I could get anything done with breasts in my face. I’ll revisit that idea when I’m old and have seen enough of them.”
Back at the block, we get a game of manhunt going. Nolan volunteers as hunter and everyone breaks up. Thomas launches into a sprint one way while Brendan goes the other; I follow Thomas, not wanting to be found early like yesterday. Good thing too, because Thomas makes the rookie mistake of running through the lobby of Building 135—right past a security guard. Before the guard can chase us, I lead him to the staircase with a broken lock, and head up, fast. We stop off on the third floor, open the hallway window, and climb out onto the rooftop—where there’s an old generator and all the stuff we roofed.
From up here we can see the second court, the middle of three. There are dark brown picnic tables and the jungle gym where we used to play Don’t Touch Green. We see Fat-Dave running from the third court. He’s out of breath and gives up. Nolan tackles him and boom, man down.
Thomas isn’t even paying attention.
“Nice treasures,” he comments, crouching over to pick up a broken yo-yo. He tries spinning it, but the yo-yo detaches from the string and rolls into a headless Barbie. “So how long have you been dating Genevieve?”
“Over a year,” I say. I pick up an old GameCube controller, spinning the wire over my head like a lasso before throwing it back down on the pebbles. “I’m lucky it’s been that long. She didn’t hate me when I gave her reason to.”
“Did you cheat on her?” His tone becomes matter-of-fact. “When I started checking out other girls on the street, I knew I wasn’t completely into Sara anymore.”
“I didn’t cheat. My dad died. Well, he committed suicide and that put me in a bad place.” I don’t talk about this a lot. Sometimes, because I don’t want to; other times because my friends don’t like dragging death and grief into things.
“Sorry to hear that.” Thomas sits on the ground and stares at some empty bottles. Nothing fascinating there, but I’m guessing it’s less awkward than looking me in the eye. “I don’t get why
you thought Genevieve would break up with you.”
“There’s more to it,” I say. My eyes wander to the curved scar on my wrist.
“Tell me who you are,” Thomas says.
“What?”
“Tell me who you are: stop hiding. I’m not going to sell your secrets, Stretch.”
“Didn’t you just sell out your friends yesterday to win over my friends?”
“They’re not my friends,” Thomas says.
I sit down across from him. Before I can change my mind, I hold my arm out so he can see the smiling scar, two words that don’t fit together. From his angle it’ll look more like a frown, but he shifts next to me, leans over, and wraps his hand around my arm. He pulls my wrist closer to his face, inspecting it.
“No homo,” he says, looking up at me. “It’s weird how it looks like a smile. A happy face without eyes.”
“Yeah. That’s what I always thought, too.”
He nods.
“I kept blaming myself for not being a good enough son, and my mom swore he killed himself because he was unhappy, and it just got me thinking I might be happier dead, too . . .” I trace a nail over the scar, left to right, right to left. “So I did this as a cry for help, I guess, because I didn’t like the bad place I was in.”
Thomas traces the scar too and pokes my wrist twice. His fingers are dirty from the yo-yo and other crap on the roof. But now I see; he’s added eyes with two dark fingerprints above the scar. “I’m glad you didn’t do it, Stretch. Would’ve been a waste.”
He wants me to continue existing. I want that too, now.
I pull my arm away and fold my hands on my lap. “Your turn: tell me who you are.” His eyebrows meet in the middle, like he’s considering the possibilities of who he might be. When he doesn’t say anything, I ask, “Childish question, but what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I think a film director,” Thomas quickly answers. “Though you’re probably catching on that I don’t have a whole lot of direction in life.”
“I wouldn’t say that, but I wouldn’t not say it either. Why a film director?”
“Been interested in it since I saw Jurassic Park and Jaws as a kid. I bow down before Spielberg, whose directing made dinosaurs and sharks even more terrifying.”
“I’ve never seen Jaws.”
Thomas’s eyes widen like I just spoke in Elvish. “I would gouge out my eyes and give them to you if it meant you could see the magic that is Jaws. Spielberg does this awesome thing at the end where—actually, I won’t spoil it for you. You’ll have to come over and watch it sometime.”
A window slams shut behind us.
We both freak out for a second and find Brendan and Baby Freddy standing there. I jump to my feet like someone just caught me with my pants down doing something with someone I really shouldn’t be doing anything with. “Uh. Have you guys been caught yet?”
“Nah,” Baby Freddy says. “What are you doing?”
“Catching our breath,” I lie while Thomas simultaneously says, “Talking.”
Brendan is looking at us funny, but then his eyes widen. I turn to see Nolan coming toward us while Fat-Dave is struggling to come through the window. We run back to the window on the other side. Thomas is beside me one second, down on the ground the next. I have a tenth of a second to decide to keep going or to help him out. I stop to see if he’s okay.
Nolan grapples me. “Manhunt one, two, three. Manhunt one, two, three. Manhunt one, two, three.”
I’m caught but don’t really care. I crouch beside Thomas where he’s massaging his knee. “You good?”
He nods, whistling in and out, and then it hits me that he could push me down and make a run for it and leave me chasing after him the rest of the game. Fuck that. I grapple him. “Manhunt one, two, three. Manhunt one, two, three. Manhunt one, two, three.”
We all go back downstairs to search for Me-Crazy before the game ends. I pair with Thomas while Brendan and the others fan out in the garage. We run up to the balcony—Thomas limping behind a bit—and look for Me-Crazy in empty porches, behind barbecue grills, and under deflated pools.
“So I know a little about you and you know a little about me,” he says, wincing as he tries to keep up. “Tell me Genevieve’s story.”
“I’ll destroy you if you make a move on my girl.”
“Don’t worry about that, Stretch.”
“Genevieve is . . . She is just the fucking greatest. She gets obsessive when she discovers new artists and is always sending me rambling emails about her favorites and why they should be more famous. She stays up late for daylight savings time so she can see the hours change on the clock. Oh, and she used to rely on her horoscope when she was younger and took it personally whenever it duped her.” I look up at the sky and it’s in that weird blue-and-pink phase without any stars. “She wants to go to the park to look at stars tomorrow, but I want to top that.”
“Planetarium?”
“Ruled it out already. I’m scared she’ll want to grab lunch or something like that and I can’t afford it.”
Thomas knocks over a shovel leaning against a wall in one of the porches and it clatters loudly. He quickly hops out and hides against the wall before the neighbors can come and curse him out. I crawl over to him and we wait it out a bit before running back down the stairs. “You have anything planned so far?” he asks, once we’re safe.
“My mom’s coworker gave me a two-for-one coupon for a pottery session. So in the morning we’ll make something cool together, but I just need a good finish.” Something tells me sex in a crappy motel room wouldn’t count as a real gift unless you’re a complete arrogant bastard in a high school prom movie. “Any ideas?”
“Show her stars like she wants,” Thomas says. “I know where to get you some.”
He tells me his plan and it’s so fucking boss.
6
HER HAPPY BIRTHDAY
I like waking up from nightmares.
Sure, the nightmare itself is a mind fuck, but knowing I’m okay? That’s what I like. The nightmare I’ve just woken up from started off as a dream.
In it, I was a kid, maybe eight or nine. I was at Jones Beach with Dad, just the two of us. We were throwing a football back and forth. I missed one catch and chased down the ball, but when I turned around Dad was gone. The sand around me exploded like land mines and riding on a wave of red water was my dad’s corpse, and I woke up right after it splashed on me and took me under.
“Good morning,” Mom says.
She’s taking Dad’s college basketball trophies off the window ledge, throwing them into a box stuffed with his old work shirts.
I jump out of bed. “What are you doing?”
“Turning our home back into a home.” She bends over and picks up another box, packed with God knows what. “I’m done watching people lose their lives at the hospital only to come back to this graveyard.”
That’s why she’s home; another patient lost to drug overdoses, abuse, who knows what today.
And I get what she means. I can see a drawing forming in my head now of what it would be like if we could set our home on fire: warped windows, concaved walls, flames eating everything we didn’t want, and then all of us leaving our footprints in the ashes as memories melt and disperse around us. Except I would never draw myself surrounded by black smoke, because I’m not ready to watch it all burn away.
“Why do we have to do this now?”
Eric comes out of her bedroom, pulling himself away from the Stars Wars marathon he planned for himself on his day off. He actually helps Mom out with the boxes. This is the same guy who won’t wash a single dish or fold his own shirts.
“My son, it’s been four months already. What use do we have keeping empty cigarette cartons and unopened mail? It’s too much. I don’t like his ghost around me.”
�
��But he was your husband,” I say. “And our dad.”
“My husband used to bring me ginger ale when I was sick. Your father played with you beautiful boys throughout your childhood. But we didn’t lose that man—he took himself away from us.” Mom chokes on her words and cries as she admits, “Part of me wishes I never knew him.” I think back to the Leteo pamphlets on her bed.
“Maybe there’s something more we should’ve been doing to keep him happy,” I whisper. “You said so yourself a few days ago.”
Eric scoffs. “That’s zombie talk. He’s gone, okay? Just shut it and leave her alone.”
There’s a hole inside me too, and questions in my head I can’t just ignore. I miss the man my mom misses, who laughed when my friends and I were in his car pretending it was a spaceship being chased by alien invaders; who watched cartoons with me whenever I had a nightmare; who made me feel safe when he put me back in bed so he could leave for his night shift at the post office. I don’t like thinking about the man he was right before we lost him.
Mom puts down a box. I think I’ve won, but instead she holds my hand and sobs some more while tracing the raised smile on my wrist. “We’re scarred enough, okay?”
Eric moves some more boxes out into the hallway, where the next stop is the incinerator. I’m completely motionless. Soon all the boxes are gone.
Thomas meets me in front of his building, and we ride the elevator straight up to the rooftop. I ask him if the alarm above the doorway is going to go crazy, but he says it’s been busted for the past couple of years, since some big New Year’s party. He rarely uses this entrance anyway. He prefers the fire escape because of the view and exercise, but we’re on limited time before I have to meet up with Genevieve. The sun is sinking behind the cityscape, and I can already feel the brutal heat dying down.
“. . . so then Eric tells me I’m speaking in zombie talk because I don’t think death is the end of a person,” I say, catching him up on what went down earlier. I spot an orange cord trailing across the ground and follow it to the edge of the roof. “Well, when I say it like that I feel like I should be biting into a brain.”
