Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  Cullen gunned the car up a short hill. At the crest, the wheels lifted off the pavement and then thumped back down. We sped downhill. Amir pointed. “There. Go there!”

  Ahead, on the right, a turnoff into the woods. We sped toward it. Amir eyed Cullen.

  “Ease up,” Amir said.

  “I got it.”

  “Dude!”

  Cullen grinned. Instead of slowing down, he sped up. He didn’t look at Amir—his eyes were steady, unblinking—but I knew this was for Amir. To one-up him for the rock through the window.

  “Come on, man!” I shouted.

  “Ease up!” Amir told him.

  But he didn’t ease up. We came at the turnoff at full speed.

  “Oh shit, hold on!” Amir said.

  At the last possible moment, Cullen cut the wheel. He almost made it, too. But the car skidded and screamed, and we just missed the turnoff, throwing up dirt and mud, spinning into the forest, Cullen wrestling the wheel, for the first time all day unable to control the car. The wheels swung us left and he cut the wheel right, and that’s when there was that briefest hiccup of whirling, silent space, and time, and the next thing that changed was the sound. Glass cracking and steel exploding, the car bouncing like a pinball against trees. And then it was quiet again. And it smelled like metal and ash.

  The door had collapsed into my arm, which didn’t hurt yet, but it would when I finally had time to feel it.

  “Go!” Cullen shouted. “Go, go, go!”

  I climbed through the smashed window, stumbled briefly in the muck of leaves, then took off after Cullen and Amir, who were already sprinting through the trees, running for their lives.

  Sirens sang behind us. A voice shouted at us through a megaphone—no recognizable words, just a threatening, angry noise. We ran. Didn’t turn back. There was no telling how close they were, assuming they could even see us. At a time like that, you don’t turn to look. If you’re running, they’re close enough; how close exactly is beside the point. So you keep running so fast and for so long that you think you might die from running.

  But you don’t die. From running or from anything else. You get away. You follow Cullen Hickson through the woods, splashing across brooks, startling deer, dodging trees, leaping roots. Follow Cullen because Cullen knows. When Cullen stops, you stop. When he’s safe, you’re safe.

  We came to a Little League field and picnic area. Far off in the distance there was a gazebo. This was Eagle Rock Reservation. Couples walked hand in hand down a wood-chip trail. Families peeked in and out of the gazebo. People lounged in the grass reading books, soaking up the last of the October sun.

  Cullen took off his jacket, and we did the same, along with our ski masks. We chucked them all in a dumpster at the far end of the parking lot near the restrooms, and Cullen said, “Walk. Down the trail. Slow but quick.”

  Three cops stepped out of the woods from where we’d come, fifty yards down the hill.

  I started laughing. Couldn’t help it. It was all so funny in a way I couldn’t explain. Amir bumped his shoulder against mine. He was laughing too.

  “Easy, guys,” Cullen said.

  Cullen cracked a grin and winked at me as we stepped into a restroom just as two police cruisers glided down the paved road to our left—a pair of fat sharks.

  The bathroom smelled like mud and bleach. Cullen peeked out the door. I looked to Amir, who tried and failed to see out the door past Cullen. Amir turned back, pacing the floor, clutching one hand in the other, trying to stop them from shaking, finally looking at me. We started laughing again.

  Cullen waved us over. He tapped his foot on the linoleum, like he was trying to find just the right rhythm of the moment, to get in perfect synch with the universe so this could unfold in our favor. He held the door ajar and pointed outside.

  The cops were fifty yards down the hill. They lingered in the parking lot and spoke to a young couple pushing a stroller, then walked along the bottom of the hill, looking to the ball field. They stopped to question a guy reading the newspaper in a beach chair, and when they did, Cullen said, “Go.”

  We slipped out of the restroom and ran up the hill behind us, into the woods, climbing through mud and moss and dead trees to the top of the hill and then dropping down to a stream, sliding on our butts, kicking sticks and scrub out of our way. During all of this, I felt good. Full of fear, but a new kind of fear—not the kind that makes you hide. The kind that makes you breathe and shout and go. We swung a left at the stream, sloshing through it, and headed west where the sun was trying to shine through a gray haze.

  We ran and ran and ran.

  Brielle

  I NEEDED A STUDY BREAK. I was in my room, practicing a speech I had to give in French class the next day—an assignment everyone else had completed while I was absent. Normally such short oral exams could not be made up even if you were sick, but Mme. Barret had made an exception after I pleaded with her for a half hour after school that I couldn’t afford to lose even one point. I was pacing my bedroom, reciting the speech, and my mind drifted. I thought about college. I already had my list of favorites: Amherst, Cornell, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Stanford. I liked to picture our family cars adorned with a sticker from one of these schools: Dad’s SUV pulling out of the driveway in the morning; Mom’s sedan rolling through the center of town; all four of us stepping out of a car and walking into a busy restaurant together, everyone watching and noting the unmistakable mark of success on the back windshield. Amherst, Cornell, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Stanford.

  I snapped out of this daydream and realized it was time for a break. From the big window at the top of the stairs, I saw a car pull up to our house and Ray step out. I didn’t think much of it at first—couldn’t have known he’d just come from some lunatic, illegal escapade. I figured he’d missed the bus for whatever reason and had gotten a ride home. But then something clicked—not just any car. Cullen’s car.

  I met Ray at the front door. His shirt was untucked, and his hair was a sweaty mess on his head. His khakis, tie, and blazer were covered in mud.

  “Ray,” I said. “You okay?”

  He nodded, trying to move past me without further inquiry.

  “You’re a mess,” I told him.

  “It’s fine.” He marched up the stairs.

  “What about your blazer? You can’t wear it to school like that tomorrow.”

  “It’s fine,” he called from upstairs before shutting his bedroom door.

  The Buick idled at the end of the driveway. I could only make out Cullen’s silhouette, but I could see he was peering at the house. Then the car turned off, and he stepped out.

  I raced into the living room and shuffled into a pair of slippers. Mom sat under a blanket on the couch watching some horrible entertainment news show. Dad was fixing himself an early dinner in the kitchen before leaving to see his Thursday-night clients. I scurried into the hall and out the front door, catching Cullen just as he was about to ring the doorbell.

  What happened next was something I did not plan. Something that, even as I was doing it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. But I was in short sleeves, it was a cold night, and I didn’t want to stand outside and defend myself or apologize or try to say all the things I wanted to say to him before my dad came rushing out the door chowing down on a grilled cheese sandwich, finding me once again with the boy with the broken wrist. As long as my grades were good and I checked off some random extracurriculars like field hockey, my life tended to evade serious inquiry from Dad, who was otherwise burdened with Mom’s illness. There was no reason to offer him any clues that my world remained anything else than fully predictable. So before Cullen could even get a word in, I told him, “Go around back.” And when he looked at me, confused, possibly angry, I said it again, and then I hurried back inside.

  In my bedroom, I peeked through the slats in my blinds and saw Cullen standing in
the backyard, our dog, Lincoln—who has five legs and no vocal cords—running laps around him. Cullen wiped hair out of his eyes and bent to scratch behind Lincoln’s ear. I looked over my room and wished I could change everything about it: the bright yellow carpet; the pink-and-white flowered wallpaper; the bed with its wispy canopy, hung from four oak posts. Beneath the canopy, a society of stuffed animals was piled at the head of the bed. Pink bears, blue lions, orange monkeys—a great multicolored zoo. Everything as soft and clean as could be. A little girl’s room.

  I looked at myself in the mirror and thought about the girls at school. I should change my clothes, I thought. I should paint my toenails and lose ten pounds. Dye my hair blond. Or maybe not. Maybe dye it blue and pierce my tongue. Shave my eyebrows. Cut my ear off. Light myself on fire.

  Oh God, I thought. What is wrong with me?

  I opened the window. Cullen looked up, and I told him to climb.

  He squinted at me. “Huh?”

  “Climb up!” I told him.

  The cast made for an awkward scramble, but he made his way onto the railing that encircled the deck and then onto the sloping roof below my window, which he scampered up, finally reaching for my hand at the window and diving in, tumbling upside down to the carpet with dripping, muddy boots that I caught in midair. He gazed at me from the ground while I unlaced the boots and balanced them outside on the roof, just below my window.

  He stood. Took a breath. Looked around the room.

  “I’m due for a remodeling,” I said, talking too fast. “It’s stupid.”

  “Your dog,” he said.

  “Lincoln. Five legs. No vocal cords. We rescued him from a freak show on the boardwalk down the shore. The guy—asshole—cut Lincoln’s vocal cords when he was a puppy so that he wouldn’t bark and disturb the other animals. Two-headed monkeys and stuff like that. My dad paid three hundred dollars to take him home. It was his idea.”

  “Whose idea was it to go to the freak show?”

  I tried to hold back a grin. “Mine.”

  Again he looked around the room.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s fine. You should see my room.”

  “I ignored you, I mean. I’m sorry.”

  “Why did you?”

  Because I had no choice, I wanted to tell him. But before the words made it out, I realized how limp they would sound. How meaningless they’d be to him. But it was the truth. Or at least it felt like the truth.

  When I’d returned to school after the accident, everyone had already known Cullen had ridden to the hospital with me and that he’d come to my house with a dozen lilies. Who knows how they knew? Maybe Mom—who actually managed to make it to the grocery store last week—had run into someone and mentioned it. Moms had talked, and daughters had talked, and then the whole school was talking. At lunch, Katie and Scarlett slurped down yogurt and only yogurt, asking me to please tell them that I hadn’t given Cullen Hickson a blowjob in the woods behind my house.

  “Who said that?” I slumped my shoulders, hoping to melt into my chair. Suddenly the whole world was watching me.

  “Bri,” Katie said, almost like an apology, like she was sorry I didn’t already know what was so plainly obvious to her. “Everyone is saying that.”

  Scarlett was nodding her head, her dripping spoon bobbing and poking at me. “Everyone.”

  “Whatever. It’s not true.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Scarlett said, and in one moment I wanted both to slap her and plead for help. Because she was right. It didn’t matter. One month ago everyone was saying that Francine Garcia was having an affair with Mr. Foster, the youngest, most popular teacher on campus, because they’d seen her get into his car after school. Francine fought back against the rumors by insisting that Mr. Foster had just gotten engaged to her older cousin. But by then it was too late for even the most reasonable explanation to have any impact. Francine would forever be looked at as the girl who slept with her history teacher.

  Again, I said, “Whatever.”

  “I can’t believe he was in your house,” Scarlett went on. “Does it, like, still stink in there?”

  “What is wrong with that guy?” Katie shook her head sharply, like Cullen was actually inside it and she was trying to jiggle him out.

  “I don’t know,” I told her.

  And that, as much as it was a dismissal of my feelings for Cullen, was also the truth. I didn’t know what was wrong with him. In fact, I suspected the opposite—that something was wrong with everyone else and something was irresistibly and astoundingly right about Cullen Hickson.

  I’d tried to talk to Mom about it. She’d seemed unusually energized since the car accident—shocked out of her listlessness. It wasn’t entirely unusual for her to be an engaged member of our family every so often. Last year, for instance, while Dad was away in New York every day and night providing grief counseling for victims, family members, and first responders, Mom stepped up big-time. She made dinners. She checked homework. She took me, on my sixteenth birthday, to get my driver’s permit, and she let me drive home, talking the whole time about how she couldn’t believe how grown up I was.

  But it never lasted. Something would always beat back the brightness. Sometimes we knew what caused it—like when I was eleven, for instance, and she had a miscarriage with what would have been her third child, and she slipped into what seemed like a years-long, hopeless trance. But other times, we couldn’t trace the cause, if there even was one. One day, suddenly, maybe she’d be a little less alive, a little less conversational. Maybe she’d ask someone else (i.e., me) to make dinner because she was too tired. And the next day, maybe she wouldn’t get out of her bathrobe until just before sundown. And the day after that . . . she’d be somewhere very far away. She’d hardly talk or move or give any signs of being anything other than a zombie. And there was no telling how long it would be before we got her back, if we got her back at all.

  Encouraged by her recent spark of vitality, however—the way she cared for me while I was hurt, her amusement at Cullen calling for me, and her curiosity about the walk we’d taken in the woods—one night I dared to seek some motherly advice. She was lounging on her bed watching television. Every small action—or non-action—was a clue into her state. She was on top of the covers, not under them. She wore jeans and a sweater, not pajamas. Her makeup looked nice. Her hair, recently washed and styled, glimmered red. All promising signs. And yet . . . the way the remote hung limply in her hand. The glazed eyes. How she hadn’t looked at me when I entered the room or acknowledged me when I sat on the bed.

  “What’re you watching?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Just flipping. There’s never anything on. I don’t know why I bother.”

  “Hey, can I ask you a question?” Trying to keep it light. High energy.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m thinking of quitting field hockey.”

  “Oh,” she said. “How come, honey?”

  Concern in her voice. Something close to nurturing. But no eye contact. No invitation to move closer.

  It’s so stupid, I thought. It’s so incredibly stupid that I feel this way. This phenomenal urge to crawl across the bed, dig under the covers, and curl up in the warmth of her. You’re sixteen, I told myself. Get over it.

  But then, unable to stop myself, I told her about Katie. How smart she was, and how Scarlett wasn’t so bad once you got to know her. I told her about that awful practice, how I didn’t really like any sports, let alone this one that I played so poorly.

  “Nobody even comforted me,” I said. “Not even, like, a pat on the back as I was walking off the field. Isn’t that how sports are supposed to work? You support your teammates, right? If I’m being honest . . . I’m not even sure if Katie really likes me.”

  There was something in her eyes as she listened. How were you suppos
ed to tell the difference between sympathy and fatigue? I thought about the car accident—a crisis. That’s what had woken her up—that I’d needed her. Badly.

  So I kept going.

  “And this guy, Cullen. You remember him? With the mustache?”

  She nodded, a stray piece of hair springing gently above her eyes.

  “I like him, but he . . . scares me.”

  I watched her, waiting, hoping. The television light reflected on her face.

  “I kissed him,” I said.

  Her hand went to the remote balanced on her thigh. She scratched at one of its buttons. She seemed to be slowly, subtly sinking into the bed, disappearing into its folds. As though the things I was saying to her were literal burdens, weighing her down, drowning her.

  “Mom?”

  She looked at me again.

  “Do you have any thoughts about any of this?”

  “Oh.” She sat up in the bed. She inhaled deeply and summoned some last measure of strength to say, “You know what, honey? Whenever I think about you, I always admire how smart you are. And mature.”

  I waited. She did not elaborate. She sat there looking at me with pleading eyes, silently begging me to assure her that what she’d said was enough.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I love you, sweetie. You know that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay, Mom.”

  * * *

  So one week later, in my bedroom, when Cullen asked me why I’d been such a jerk to him after practice, I still had no answers for him. The right choice? The whole problem was that there was no right choice. That every potential path stretching out before me suddenly seemed definitively, unequivocally not right. I felt like I’d lost all bearings on what I was doing and why I was doing it.