Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  So I lied.

  “I’m not embarrassed of you,” I told him.

  “No?”

  “No! It’s . . . my parents.” Lies.

  “Your mom made you get out of bed with a concussion to meet me.”

  “I know.” I shuffled across the carpet to the bed, pushing the canopy apart, not looking at him. “But . . . there’s my dad.”

  Lies upon lies upon lies.

  “I remember him,” Cullen said. “From the ambulance.”

  “I just need to think about how to introduce the idea of you.”

  “You are embarrassed of me.”

  “No!” I gripped his wrist—a slim, bony wrist that contradicted how big the rest of him seemed—and pulled him onto the bed next to me. “No, it’s not that at all. He’s very . . . religious. Conservative. I’m not sure what he’ll say or do or . . .”

  I went silent, again not looking at him.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, so we don’t tell them. None of their business anyway, right?”

  “Really?” I asked. “You don’t mind?”

  “It might get tougher to climb that roof when it’s frozen over,” he said. “But what the hell?”

  His finger moved over the inside of my arm, and I could see in his eyes that he meant to kiss me. My stomach flipped over itself, and our lips met.

  He shoved the mound of stuffed animals onto the floor and sunk his arm under my back, and I held him back with a hand to his chest. “But like not even my friends. Nobody can know.”

  “Okay.”

  We kissed again. Rain started falling outside. I moved my fingers under his shirt. His skin was hot all over.

  His hand went, rather clumsily, to my breast.

  “And we’re not going to have sex,” I said.

  “Ever?”

  “Yet.”

  The rain came through the open window. I closed my eyes and pushed myself against him.

  Ray

  DAD WAS RIGHT—it was pretty pointless to claim I was searching for God if I wasn’t even going to church. Which is how I found myself one Sunday morning wearing an itchy sweater that smelled like my dank closet, sitting next to Dad in the front row, watching Father Francis hold up a thin, circular piece of bread and quote Jesus: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body, which will be given up for you.”

  The church was dark from the wine-colored light coming through its stained glass windows, and the place smelled like old people—heavy perfume with a touch of mothballs. We rose, we sat, we rose again. People sang—not me, but Dad did, barely. He tucked his chin to his chest, mumbling words from the hymnal in a voice only he could hear. At Communion, we shuffled in line up to the altar, where, placing the piece of bread in my hand, Father Francis said, “The body of Christ,” and I responded, “Amen,” and walked back to my seat, where, while chewing down the chalky thing, I closed my eyes, trying to feel something, waiting for Him to speak to me.

  After mass, people mingled on the steps of the church. Dad seemed to know everyone—priests, parents of the altar boys, the guys who bring the donation baskets around, men and women of all ages whom I’d never seen before or, if I had, didn’t remember. I stood beside him, shoulders hunched, head down, every so often yanking my hands out of my pockets to shake someone’s hand. These people adored my dad. Couldn’t get enough of him.

  When Bri and I were little, all four of us would go to church together, always stopping at Dunkin’ Donuts on the way home, where we’d get one large box of Munchkins, a coffee each for Mom and Dad, and chocolate milks for Bri and me. These days Dad went to church on his own. He loved God. Always said so. He gave away a third of his salary to all sorts of local and national charities, which explained why he drove a used, boring car instead of a new, swanky one and why we only took family vacations to my grandparents’ house down the shore instead of to any of the many exotic places people we knew would go. He’d entered the seminary briefly after earning a degree in theology from Rutgers, but then he met my mother, knew she was the only person he loved more than God, and abandoned his holy, celibate path. Mom was different then. Or so I assumed, anyway. She must have been, right? To have diverted Dad’s path so permanently like that?

  Earlier that morning, while I was in the shower trying to wake myself up, I’d committed myself to asking Dad about God after mass. Had God spoken to him? If so, what did He say? What did it sound like? Feel like? On what grounds did he enter that seminary, planning to devote his life to an invisible man in the sky? What made him so sure?

  But by the time we were driving home, I realized it wouldn’t do me any good to ask. Because whatever church did for all these people, it didn’t do for me. Not even close. Standing there with a bunch of blank-faced worshippers reciting lines like “I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come . . .” What was the point of that? They all droned along, on autopilot. These people, I thought, have absolutely no clue what they’re saying! “Resurrection of the dead”? They’re not even registering this stuff as words—just a pattern of sounds they’ve memorized, having delivered it once a week, year after year, decade after decade. So stupid. So pointless. I suddenly couldn’t imagine a place where you were less likely to encounter God than in church. And so I couldn’t imagine someone less qualified to ask about Him than Dad.

  We were stopped at a traffic light. Dad motioned a half block ahead to the Dunkin’ Donuts.

  “Hey,” he said. “Should we stop?”

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “You sure? Bring back Munchkins for Mom and Bri?”

  “If you want,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

  Dad stared ahead, saying nothing, chewing on his bottom lip. I had other things on my mind. The idea, I was starting to realize, was to divorce yourself from the known world. Because God wasn’t visible in this realm. If Heaven was real, then the only way to really meet God . . . was to die. And if Heaven wasn’t real, then the same premise held true: The only way to know for sure was death.

  And why not, I thought. Why not take the quickest route, if the alternative was staying here, with all these people and their dreadful, pointless recitations and their cold, cavernous, Godless churches? What was the point of even being alive?

  I shook off this thought as quickly as it had come in. Like inching too close to the edge of a cliff and then, when the wind blows strong and you feel your stomach tumble upside down, stepping back to where it’s safe.

  The car came to a stop, and Dad opened his door. He had, in fact, stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts. I sat in the idling car and watched him hurry inside to the counter, where he pointed out his Munchkin choices, even though nobody at home was going to eat them.

  I remembered the feeling of being in that stolen car.

  I needed to feel that again.

  I could sit in the woods and close my eyes all I wanted, but that was only going to take me so far. I needed the type of pure, undiluted enlightenment that could not be argued with. It wasn’t an undertaking I could orchestrate on my own. I needed a guide. Someone to help me rip a blazing hole in the margins of my visible world and then, when I hesitated at the sight of whatever awaited me on the other side, to shove me through.

  Cullen

  A WEEK AFTER we’d lifted the Oldsmobile, Ray rode his bike to the gas station where I worked.

  “I want to do it again,” he announced.

  I was pumping twenty dollars of regular into a Ford Explorer. Ray straddled his bike, wiping a line of sweat from his brow. It was chilly out, but he’d ridden a long way to see me.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  He looked away and shrugged—the kid was always shrugging. I flipped the ta
nk door shut, replaced the nozzle, and collected the cash from the driver. Ray followed me inside the office, out of the cold.

  I flicked on a space heater, sat at my boss’s desk, and kicked my feet up. Ray stood near the door.

  “Why not?” he said. “You scared?”

  I laughed at his attempt to be hard and then felt bad about it. Ray wasn’t a kid you could laugh at. Too many people had laughed at him in not entirely friendly ways before, so when you laughed at him he’d tug his shoulders in and study the floor, rubbing his eyebrows.

  “Have you ever meditated?” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “When we were running from those cops—it was just like meditating. Only better. A thousand times better. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I wasn’t in control of my body. And I felt something. I found something.”

  I didn’t know the first thing about meditating, but I knew what he meant. The car thing was fun as hell, and I’d been dreaming of doing it for a while now—since I’d become something of an expert at breaking and entering after quitting all organized sports my freshman year of high school. Sports were something my parents—not just Dad, but Mom too—had pushed me into because (1) I was bigger than most kids my age, which meant sports were something I might be good at, and (2) sports were supposed to keep easily distracted kids like me out of trouble. Whether or not it was true that I would have been good, I’ll never know—I never bothered to try hard enough to test my skills against all the hard-nosed asshole athletes of my grade—but my parents got the second part right anyway, about staying out of trouble. Because as soon as Mom and Dad were gone and I was left with only Nana, I walked away from all that order and control and started walking into people’s empty houses, uninvited.

  After school I’d check in with Nana—put together a snack of cheese and crackers for her and watch an hour of daytime court shows. Nana couldn’t get enough of Judge Judy. When she’d eventually drift off in her La-Z-Boy, I’d hook her up to the oxygen tank and wander all over the neighborhood, letting myself into houses. At first, I did it only to prove I could. Easy enough. Most neighbors were astoundingly trusting of each other, leaving back doors open, failing to lock first-floor windows, storing spare keys in all sorts of dumb places like under the welcome mat or in a fake rock that came not even remotely close to looking like a real rock. The farther away from my neighborhood I walked, the taller the houses got and the more security obstacles I faced. I started wrapping Nana’s nighttime pills in bacon for edgy German shepherds. I short-circuited alarm systems when I could and, when I couldn’t, raced like crazy through the drawers of offices and kitchens to find that little scrap of paper with the security code scribbled on it. The first time this worked I couldn’t believe it: a torn corner of loose-leaf pinned in plain sight on a corkboard, right next to the fridge. And those alarms give you longer than you’d think. And if I didn’t get the code in time, I’d race like hell out the back door, flipping over fences from one yard to the next, escaping capture from the private security guys I never stayed around long enough to see.

  I never stole anything. Just looked. Examined the porn collection buried in Dad’s closet, the bag of weed flattened under Son’s mattress, the bottle of Ritalin stuffed to the toe end of Daughter’s sneakers. I read diaries, inspected music collections, mentally recorded bra sizes, always on the lookout for the most shocking size in the neighborhood (Mrs. Garr, 1432 Grandview Drive, 38FF—no joke). This is how most of my afternoons were spent freshman and sophomore year.

  I don’t know who owned the Oldsmobile, but it was parked downtown just about every day—old car, manual locks, no alarm: an easy target.

  Still, though, I’m not sure I would have ever gone through with it if Ray hadn’t come along. Being with him—and Amir too—made it feel like more than simple joyriding. I eyed Ray now and thought about how to push further, how to keep feeding into his impression of me, and the feeling it gave me.

  “I’m not scared, Ray. You just don’t get the same feeling by doing the same thing again.”

  “So what then? Something else.”

  “Something else,” I said, as though I already knew exactly what that something was.

  “Like what?”

  “Let me ask you something first.” Buying time. Thinking about what kind of stupid shit we could get into next. “Why?”

  He stared outside at the empty gas station. “Have you ever . . . I mean, don’t you ever get disappointed with the way things are? With all the things we can dream up, all the fantasies . . . but in reality, it’s just . . .” He looked off, trying to find the word but not finding it. “I don’t think I can find what I’m looking for with the way things are. I don’t want my current life anymore.”

  “Well, I can think of one surefire quick fix for that.”

  It was a joke. Stupid joke. But Ray didn’t laugh. He went quiet. He appeared, to my surprise, to be sincerely considering the idea of ending his life, perhaps not for the first time.

  “I’ll pay you,” he said.

  “Pay me?”

  “For your time.”

  “Ray . . .” I lifted my feet off the desk and sat forward to look at him.

  He pulled a stack of cash from his pocket. “This is all I have right now. But I’ll get more.”

  “You’re gonna pay me to hang out with you? Is this how you think people get friends?”

  “Just take it,” he said.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Look,” he said. He moved closer to the desk. Getting angry. “If you’re going to do what I want you to do, you have to take money for it. Because this isn’t about being friends. This is me asking for something and you giving it to me. And in order for it to work the way I need it to work, you can’t ever feel like you want to go easy on me or let me off the hook.”

  He breathed heavily, anxious.

  “Three hundred dollars,” I said.

  “Fine.”

  The heater buzzed at my feet. Outside, the garage bell dinged—a car pulled up to the pump. For as long as I could remember, most of my exploits tended to tear things down, not build them up. Every instinct I ever had seemed, by most people’s standards, definitively wrong. But now here was Ray O’Dell . . .

  “You know the QuickChek down the road from school?”

  “In East Orange,” he said.

  “Christmas Eve at midnight. No Amir this time. Just you and me.”

  “What? We rob it?”

  I nodded. Ray tried to nod coolly like this idea did not, in fact, totally terrify him. And he almost—not quite, but almost—pulled it off.

  I pocketed the cash he had tossed on the desk and moved toward the door. I had one foot outside when Ray said, “So we’ll need a gun.”

  I locked eyes with him and found myself trying to pull off the same move he had just attempted—nodding like this idea had obviously already occurred to me.

  Like it did not totally terrify me.

  Brielle

  THE NIGHT CULLEN CLIMBED into my room—the night I let him take my shirt off, and my pants off, and let him kiss me, and touch me in that warm and yielding part of me until a volcano of heat trembled frightfully inside me so that my skin threatened to boil and melt, at which point I grabbed his wrist and told him sheepishly that I couldn’t take anymore—I forgot to ask what he’d been doing with my brother.

  Moments after Cullen escaped out of my window, I was sitting at the dinner table trying to calm the flutter of my heart and dissipate the flushing in my face while Dad stood at the stove cooking pasta. Two minutes later, Ray stumbled down for dinner, energized and distracted. He’d washed his face and changed into sweatpants and an old New York Knicks T-shirt that was worn away at the shoulders, but he’d missed a big stripe of dirt down the side of his neck.

  He sat at the table. Dad dropped a spoonful of pasta onto his plate, walked ove
r to my side of the table, served me a plateful of noodles, paused to observe Ray, and then slipped into full therapist mode.

  “Ray?” he said. Quiet. Gentle. He placed his serving spoon in a bubbling pot of marinara sauce on the stove.

  “Ray?”

  Ray wiped a hand across his brow, looking at our father from a distant place—a place, it seemed, from which he did not care to return. His hair was a dreadful mess—long and dirty and reaching wildly out from his head like a robin’s nest abandoned for winter. He couldn’t yet grow a beard, but there was a mousy fuzz encroaching on his upper lip that needed tending to, as did the acne blooming on either side of his nose. It was as if, convinced that he was invisible or at the very least wishing himself so, he no longer saw a purpose in hygiene and basic upkeep. Or rather—and this version concerned me more—convinced that he was ugly, that he was a wicked and contemptible presence, he had taken deliberate measures to align his outer appearance with this troubling understanding of himself.

  “Ray,” Dad said. “How are you feeling?”

  Ray nodded. “Fine.”

  Dad’s eyes drifted to the place at the table he’d set for Mom. He looked again at Ray and then at the clock and sighed. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Dad?” I said. “Can we start?”

  “Just wait.” He marched across the room. “Two seconds.” And then he hurried upstairs.

  Ray tapped a fingernail on the table. Steam rose from our plates. Mom and Dad’s bedroom was directly above the kitchen. We heard the creaking of Dad’s steps and then the vibrations of his voice through the ceiling.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Ray didn’t look up.

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  I poked at my pasta with a fork—a brief moment of hesitation. “What were you doing with Cullen Hickson?”

  “None of your business.”

  “How do you know him?”