Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  “How do you?”

  “He’s my friend. We’re the same age.” I shrugged. “Almost, anyway.”

  Ray nodded, kept tapping the nail against the table. From upstairs the incomprehensible rumble of Dad’s voice grew louder.

  “So?” I asked. “What were you doing with him today?”

  No answer. More creaking from upstairs. Dad’s vibrations.

  I sighed. Shook my head. “Everything doesn’t have to be so tragic, you know? You can talk to me, if you want. I’m not . . .” I trailed off, staring at Ray, waiting for him to save me from having to continue. To see me. Engage with me.

  “Okay,” I said. “You win. Forget it.”

  He ran a hand through his hair, which flattened against his head before springing and rebounding back into shape. “He’s just helping me with something.”

  “Helping you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like a school thing?”

  “It’s hard to explain. He’s not like other people. He . . . I don’t know.”

  “He what?”

  “It sounds stupid.”

  “Try me.”

  “He notices me.”

  I nodded. And then feigned surprise. “Oh my God!”

  “What?”

  “I think . . . yes! I can’t believe it! I think you just had an actual conversation with me. Could that be right?”

  He managed a reluctant smile. It didn’t last long, though. In the next instant came more noise from upstairs. First Dad, in one big explosive shout: “KAREN!”

  And then, finally, came Mom’s voice—angry, shrill, pained.

  Then silence. Ray and I stared at our food. More creaking from the ceiling. Then the stairs—two pairs of feet coming down.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Ray looked up. I motioned to his neck. “Missed a spot.”

  He swept his fingers along the condensation on his water glass and rubbed at the streak of dirt.

  Dad entered the room, Mom behind him. She took her seat at the table. Her face was pale, eyes swollen with sleep. Dad served her a plate of noodles, then spooned some for himself. He sat, crossed himself, and began grace: “Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy gifts . . .”

  I quickly crossed myself to keep up. Ray didn’t bother. Nor Mom.

  When grace was over, Dad picked up his fork, and we ate. Ray was never a big eater—like Mom, he always seemed exhausted by the prospect of consuming and digesting food—but tonight he went at his pasta like he was a hungry orphan we’d just taken in off the street. Dad watched him. He took a few mouthfuls for himself and then continued where he’d left off before he’d disappeared upstairs.

  “Ray,” Dad said.

  Mom sighed and shook her head. She knew what was coming and couldn’t stand to face it.

  Dad eyed Mom, saying nothing, but seeming like he wanted to say, Karen, please, help me get through this.

  Mom patted a gentle hand on Ray’s forearm. “You’re happy. Right, sweetie?”

  Ray smiled—a fake one that Mom couldn’t be troubled to see through. “Great, Mom,” he said. “I’m great.”

  Mom glanced at Dad with a told-you-so look.

  Dad pressed on. “Well, look. This isn’t an attack. Things have been a little different with you lately, and we want to know what’s going on.”

  Ray waited, appearing to think there was more to it than that.

  “How are things at school?”

  “Great.” Ray stopped eating briefly to look at Dad and then shoved in another mouthful of pasta. “School’s great.”

  “It’s not easy,” Dad went on. “Starting at a new place.”

  Ray nodded, kept eating.

  “What’s with the mud?”

  “Huh?”

  Dad pointed to the streak on Ray’s neck, which he hadn’t fully scrubbed off.

  “I was—” He paused, wiping at the dirt, eyeing Mom. She looked worried, like if Ray gave the wrong answer here she might crumble to dust. “I was with my friends. After school. Touch football.”

  “Friends?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah.” He put on another big grin for her. “Some guys from school.”

  Mom stood slowly, moving like she was in a dream. She stopped behind Ray and wrapped two arms around him.

  “I think that’s so great, honey,” she said. “I think that’s a wonderful thing for you to do.”

  She squeezed tightly, closing her eyes. Ray shrank away from her, like her touch burned him. The more he cowered, the more firmly she clung. Dad watched this with his lips pressed tight, his plan thwarted. I took a bite of my pasta, which had grown rubbery and cold.

  * * *

  The next time I saw Cullen, I skipped practice and he and I drove out to Jockey Hollow Park, the site of a Revolutionary War camp two miles from Washington’s headquarters in Morristown that was now largely the destination of second-grade class trips and retired couples. We stepped into a dank cabin that was a replica of soldiers’ quarters and watched a spider construct a perfect web in one of the room’s corners. It was dark. Cullen looked at me, and I looked at him, and I had a feeling like tumbling upside down, and we kissed. My hand in his hair. His on the back of my neck. Down my chest. Unbuttoning my jeans. I caught his fingers there and opened my eyes.

  “Look,” I said.

  The spider was on the move, retreating to the center of its web, where it settled and waited, an electric bull’s-eye.

  Cullen smiled, reached out, and plucked the spider off its web like it was a tack in the wall. I tried to look like I wasn’t petrified. The spider crawled over his fingers while he moved one hand in front of the other so the spider never reached the end.

  “Wanna see?”

  I shook my head no.

  “You sure?”

  “What if he bites?”

  “He won’t.”

  He took a step toward me, the spider running madly over his hands, all creepy legs with a big brown spotted bowl on its back. “Here,” he said.

  “No.”

  He pinched it between his fingers and held it toward me.

  “Here!”

  “No! Cullen, stop!”

  “Ah!” He flinched and dropped the spider, breathing through his teeth. “Ah . . . shit.”

  “He bit you?”

  He nodded, clutching his hand.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked him.

  “Shit,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  Already there was a swollen red mark on the inside of his index finger.

  He stepped out of the cabin into the sun. The replica quarters stood at the crest of a small hill, below which stretched a field of religiously mowed grass. Cullen trekked across the damp lawn, and I went after him, the ground growing softer and swampier with our every step into the basin of the sloping grounds. I thought about what kind of person would pick up a spider like that. Without anticipating the very obvious outcome.

  The sun peeked above the tree line, offering the airy field perhaps the only patch of light in the wooded area. Cullen slowed, allowing me to catch up to him.

  A phone buzzed in his pocket. He answered and talked while we moved through the muddy grass, offering mostly one-syllable responses: “Yup. Nope. Cool. Got it.” Then he said, “I’m out with that girl. Brielle. Yeah. Got it.”

  When he hung up, we walked for a time in silence, while I worked up the courage to say what I wanted to say.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Roman. Guy from school.”

  “And you told him about us?”

  “He’s harmless. Doesn’t even know who you are.”

  “Right, but . . .”

  Cullen stopped walking, blowing warm breath into
his hands. “But what?”

  “I thought we decided . . .”

  He exhaled loudly, as though we’d had this argument many times over and here it came again. Only this was the first time I’d brought it up.

  “Right,” he said. “Our secret arrangement.”

  The sun delivered a golden halo to his hair, and he squinted through it, staring, I could see, at my breasts. I wore a tweed coat and pulled its flanks over my chest.

  “Why did you want to come here today?” he asked.

  “This was your idea.”

  “But why today? I wanted to come on the weekend. You said you’d skip practice. Come today.”

  “I thought it’d be fun. Adventurous.”

  “Have you ever skipped anything before? Ever?” He observed me, computing.

  I turned away. Walked away. He jogged a few paces, sloshing through the wet lawn to catch up to me as we approached his car. I pulled my arms closer across my chest. The day was growing darker, it seemed, and Cullen’s eyes fell farther into the shadow of his mountainous face.

  “Monday,” he said. “When everyone that matters to you is at practice—not on a Sunday, when there’s the slightest, most remote possibility that one of those girls might see us.”

  “Maybe I just didn’t want to go to practice today, okay?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it was never about your dad. The whole secret thing.”

  All I could do was look away, at the ground, to the sky, anywhere but at him.

  He opened the car door but didn’t step in yet. “Just say it, Brielle. Once you say it, we can go from there. We can fix it. But until you admit it, and say it out loud, it’s always going to be there.”

  “Say what?”

  “You. Are. Embarrassed. Of. Me.”

  I looked again at the sky. Smelled smoke from some unseen chimney of a nearby house.

  “Say it!” he said.

  “What were you doing with my brother the other day?”

  “When?”

  “You know,” I said. “That night. When you and I . . .”

  “Just hanging out. He needed a ride home.”

  “You’re lying,” I said.

  He eyed me for a moment and then laughed. “That makes two of us, then.”

  He got in the car, started it up, and waited for me. The last thing in the world I wanted was to step in that car with him, but I didn’t have a choice. Dad almost budged once when I laid out the familiar teenage argument that owning a cell phone would actually make it easier for him to keep track of me, but in the end he maintained that cell phones were unnecessary costs. That dropping fifty cents into a pay phone every once in a while would do just fine. That just because the rest of the world was moving at a certain pace didn’t mean we had to adjust our own. If I’d had a cell phone that day, maybe I would have called someone. Was it too much to ask for Mom to muster the energy to come retrieve her daughter, miles away from home and all alone? Tell us if you need help. That was one of Dad’s favorite mantras. No matter what. We just want you to be safe. But who knows where the nearest pay phone was, and I didn’t have any quarters, and there was no guarantee Mom would answer the house phone anyway, and interrupting Dad at work would be making a much bigger deal out of this than it was.

  So I got in the car.

  Cullen and I didn’t talk the whole way home. For a while I was astounded at how quickly this connection between us had fallen apart, but I soon found comfort in the notion that Cullen was a dumb idea. Another future deadbeat. I had all the friends I needed—pretty girls with papery blond hair and cute-colored pens that they used to fill up notebooks with lists of all the boys they’d kissed and all the boys they hadn’t kissed yet but wanted to kiss before high school was over. And in the very back of the notebooks were the very short lists of boys they would go all the way with. Guys who grabbed at spiders even when they knew they’d be bit were not on any of these lists. Only boys with curly brown hair in their eyes and roll-neck sweaters and stellar SAT scores. Amherst, Cornell, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Stanford.

  So let him sit there not talking to me, I thought. Let him work at the Shell station forever. Let Cullen Hickson live his shitty life.

  Ray

  THERE WAS A REPRODUCTION of Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Peter in my theology textbook—a used paperback copy called Ecclesiology and Moral Theology. In the painting, St. Peter is upside down on a cross while three other guys haul the cross off the ground. Peter’s lifting his head, looking off all crazy. He’s got a clean white cloth over his groin that fits him like a diaper, but he’s not a child. Peter is the rock. He asked for inverted crucifixion because he thought he was unworthy of the same fate as Jesus. He must have known that the images, idols, and statues of Jesus would show up all over the place, and he wanted his own death to be separate from that. It makes sense, if you think about it. Like having something really good or really bad happen to you on a day when a famous person dies. Here you are with this great story, but all anyone wants to talk about is how Kurt Cobain shot himself in a greenhouse.

  I was thinking about St. Peter in my bedroom one night while balancing upside down on a ratty old pillow wrapped in a yellowing Star Wars case. The idea was not so much to clear my head but to focus on balancing by way of two points: one where my head touched the pillow and one at the mystical center three inches below my belly button. My thoughts kicked and squirmed. I was fighting to capture a sense of control that was always just out of reach, flitting by like a gnat that, no matter how dumb and lazy, always seemed to escape my clapping hands.

  But then two things happened: first, a knock at the door, and then that same door was thrown open. I looked, and there was Dad, staring up at me from the bottom of my upside-down world. When he came in, I found a brief moment of total focus. My legs pinned together, and my middle stiffened, and my breathing steadied. I didn’t fall. This, I knew, was Zen—one of those intuitive moments that you can’t make happen and that you can’t get back once they’re gone. I thought, This must be what being dead is like—totally blank and at ease.

  “Can you come downstairs,” Dad said. It wasn’t exactly a question.

  “I’m supposed to stay like this for five more minutes.”

  “Ray . . .”

  “Dad, I will, can you just . . .”

  But he cut me off. “The police are here, Ray. Downstairs.”

  They were two large men I didn’t know but who looked like guys I might have seen around town: big guys with arms like Popeye and eyes with dark scoops like mussels underneath. Mostly the cops in our town were the guys who’d spent their childhoods making trouble in Rosewood and who now spent their adulthood on the other side of the fight. If you could even call it a fight. In our town, it was more of a scuffle, really. Or at least that’s how it used to be. After the towers fell, suddenly every cop was G.I. Joe and every wayward kid a terrorist.

  I sat across from them at the kitchen table, my father next to me. It was two hours before dinner. For much of the meeting, only one cop spoke. The other guy wrote in a little flip-pad and hardly even looked at me.

  The speaking officer shook my hand, introduced himself as Officer Esposito, asked me to sit, and assured me that this wouldn’t take much time—that as long as I hadn’t done anything wrong, I didn’t have anything to worry about. “You know Frank Marconne?”

  “Coach Marconne,” my father put in.

  The cop glanced at Dad and said, “Chuck, it’s easier if he does it himself.”

  My dad nodded and put his palms up in apology. Nobody had ever called my dad Chuck before.

  Esposito told me that Coach Marconne had seen me downtown last Friday.

  “Last Friday?” I pretended to think about it. “Yeah, I guess so. Maybe.”

  “Who were you with?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I said it too quickly, and Esposit
o’s partner looked up for an instant, then back to his pad.

  “You don’t know who you were with?”

  “I was . . . by myself.”

  “Ray,” my father cut in, but again Esposito called him “Chuck,” and Dad went quiet.

  “Frank says he saw you and Cullen Hickson and some Arab kid hanging around the alley behind Franny’s on Friday.”

  Esposito paused. I felt my leg bobbing manically beneath the table.

  “Were you with Cullen Hickson last Friday?”

  “No,” I told him.

  He nodded, thinking, not believing me. “Been reading the paper lately?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Know anything about a stolen Oldsmobile?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Didn’t read about the chase up through Eagle Rock?”

  Again I offered the shake—trying desperately to keep it a tight, firm, honest refusal, but feeling my head jittering nervously atop my uncooperative neck. I could never make my body do any of the things I wanted it to do.

  “So you didn’t see Cullen Hickson downtown last Friday?”

  “No, I mean, I guess, yeah. I saw him.”

  “You just told me . . .”

  “I wasn’t with him, I meant. But I saw him. By the pizza place. When I saw Mr. Marconne.” My words rattled around in my throat.

  “He was with an Arab kid?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Hm-mm.” The two cops glanced at each other so quickly I wasn’t sure if it really happened. “And what time was that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did you stay with him all day?”

  “No. I just ran into him. He’s older than me. I barely know him.”

  “What did you do after you saw him?”

  “Came home. Walked home.”

  “And what time was that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Maybe around two?”

  “That sounds right, I guess. I just walked home.”

  Esposito looked to my father. “So he was here around two thirty.” This part, oddly, didn’t sound like a question as much as a suggestion.

  My father nodded, not saying anything.