Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  From my seat at the computer, I looked at Mom across the room and couldn’t remember another moment like the one in North Carolina. Probably they happened, but I couldn’t place them. I wondered if I actually even remembered that day at the beach. Maybe I just manufactured a version of it in my mind based on the picture. If the picture didn’t exist, maybe I’d never have believed the potential for re-creating that smile still survived somewhere within Mom. But I did believe. She could get better. Would get better.

  Still, it wasn’t going to happen right now. Right now all she did was continue to scratch her nail against the wood paneling of the wall. Her eyes met mine, and in them I searched for my next move and found not an answer but only anticipation. Found her as curious to see what I’d do as I was, intent to let me navigate the maddening tangle of my existence on my own.

  Dad, meanwhile, was waiting for an answer. I couldn’t stand his question, though. Did I want to see Cullen? You tell me, Dad. Do I? Is it safe? Will he hurt me?

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d like to see him.”

  Cullen hesitated at the door, thinking perhaps, like I was, that I’d be sent out to meet him rather than the other way around. Finally, he scrubbed his boots on the mat and stepped inside, where Dad motioned him toward a rocking chair in the corner.

  I rose from the computer and moved to the couch. Cullen and I both grinned, nervous. Dad sat beside me, eyes on Cullen.

  “Dad,” I said. “Can he and I talk alone real quick?”

  He was shaking his head before I even started the question. “We can all talk,” he said. Casual now. Happy. Polite. Welcome to group therapy, everyone.

  “Here, Karen,” he said, shifting close to me to make room on the couch.

  Mom had already taken what she undoubtedly hoped were unnoticed steps into the hallway. Her whole body resisted joining us. Her face was tight, almost panicked, while one shoulder leaned into the other room like someone was pulling her away.

  “There’s room,” Dad insisted, patting the open square of cushion next to him. Mom shuffled into the room and, in her own small act of rebellion, landed on the far couch, sighing as she sat, as though the action had worn her down completely. Dad let his gaze hold on her for a disappointed moment, and then he turned to Cullen.

  He asked Cullen how old he was. Where he went to school. How he and I knew each other.

  “You know,” Cullen told him. “Just from around.”

  He asked about Cullen’s parents, and we all had to sit there while Cullen told us about a horrendous motorcycle accident and how he had lived with his grandmother half his life. It wasn’t a hard story for him to tell. It was clear he’d told it many times before. But it was not an easy story to listen to, and none of us knew how to respond. Dad tried, of course.

  “That’s very difficult,” he said. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  “Happened to them,” Cullen said. “Not me.”

  “No,” Dad told him. “I’m not so sure I agree with you there.”

  Cullen shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

  There was an awful pause where it seemed the conversation had died for good until Dad said, “And you know my son too? Ray?”

  Cullen shook his head no, looking confused. A comfortable liar.

  “Well, I’m not one to cast blame before the facts are in. But there were some police officers here the other night asking about Ray. And a stolen car. And they mentioned your name.”

  “Dad . . .”

  “Seems like whenever I’m within ten blocks of a crime, someone comes knocking on my door,” Cullen said. “Always been that way.”

  Dad nodded, pressing his lips together.

  Throughout all this I was watching Cullen, but it wasn’t until now that he looked at me. He’d been hunched on the rocker, avoiding eye contact. Eyeing the carpet, the ceiling, the blank television. Waiting, just like me, for this to be over. But Cullen looked at me now, and I at him, and we saw that strange something in each other’s eyes that meant we were both done with this dreary business of parents and could wait no longer to retreat to the place where it was only me and him.

  “As I mentioned,” Dad was saying, “we don’t like to judge in this house. And so, Cullen, Karen and I . . .”

  Dad turned to Mom, who jerked her head up and nodded, as though she’d been following the conversation all along.

  “We want you to know you’re welcome to come by anytime you want. Our door is always open.”

  “Thank you,” Cullen said and rose to shake my father’s hand.

  “The front door,” my father clarified. “The one with the doorbell.”

  “Right.” Cullen drooped his shoulders, and his hand went back to his hair. “Sorry about that.”

  I was granted permission to walk Cullen out. In the hallway he and I stood at the door, whispering. I could feel the air between us trembling.

  “Cullen . . .”

  “You can be embarrassed of me,” he cut in. “I don’t mind. I get it. I’d be embarrassed of me too. You deserve one of those dudes who plays lacrosse and will write you letters every day when he goes to college. I get it.”

  “I missed you.” The admission dropped right out of me. No chance of holding on to it.

  His face brightened. “You did?”

  “I didn’t realize . . . I thought it wasn’t as real . . . me and you, I mean. But it is real, isn’t it? Don’t you think so?”

  “I missed you too.”

  “I mean, I really missed you.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  I noticed his wrist for the first time.

  “Your cast,” I said.

  Proudly, he held up the bare arm. Wiggled his fingers. “Healed.”

  I glanced back to the living room. “I have to go.”

  “Next Saturday,” Cullen said. “Come to my house. I’ll make breakfast for you and Nana.”

  He took my hand in his—a rough palm and cold as a rock. We stared at each other from our tiny distance.

  We never had breakfast. I said we would before opening the door and watching him jog away—always moving fast, wherever he went—but we never did. I hiked through the woods that separated his house from mine on a gray Saturday morning, a chilly walk that left me winded and bewildered. From across the street, I stared at Cullen’s house—two stories of yellow siding faded pale, browned screen windows, and no shutters save for one hanging crooked from a stubborn nail. A two-foot-tall statue of the Virgin Mary stood, untouched, next to what was once a stoop and a wrought-iron railing but that was now, since the accident, a heap of blasted asphalt and warped metal. Mary’s original white was lost beneath a green-gray film of dust, soot, and mold. She gazed down at the dirt and the crumbled asphalt pieces littered across the flowerbed, holding her hands out in a gesture of either welcome or surrender.

  I imagined the house’s interior, where Cullen’s grandmother would sit in a recliner that swallowed her gray figure and where a tiny Jesus no doubt hung from a tiny cross on the wall and where all the curtains were probably drawn and no light shone but for the burning blaze of the television, which blared at an earsplitting volume. A metal TV tray and olive carpet. Lace and linoleum and the lingering smell of turkey dinners stretching back decades.

  It wasn’t the scene itself that kept me from entering. I imagined the home as easily and, it turned out, as accurately as I did because of its resemblance to my own grandmother’s house—to all of our grandmothers’ houses. It was Cullen’s connection to the scene that unnerved me. The house was very much real—more so than I’d considered him to be. Cullen was one of those characters you assume has no home, no family, no day-to-day existence—the type of person who simply seems to exist unto himself, spontaneously conceived in a grease stain struck by a lightning bolt from the stars. But here was his home, one more dilapidated square amid rows and
rows of others.

  A panic lit up inside me and, jaw clenched at the thought of his glimpsing my cowardice through one of those grimy windows, I hurried back toward the woods. It was as though I’d been waiting my whole life for a specific door to open and then, when it finally had, I kept faltering at the threshold, unable to plunge through and accept the mutated wonder of some extraordinary new world.

  It did not take much longer for me to finally take the leap. The following week I was hunched over the school lunch table, nibbling at a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while social crises whirred about me. From a few words here and there and the overall tone of the screams and yelps from those gathered around her, I surmised that Katie liked a boy or a boy liked Katie and someone had told Scarlett something about the boy or something was in fact said by the boy himself that was either exciting or revolting.

  Histrionics, I thought. That’s a good vocab word for you, Katie. Histrionics.

  Thinking about Cullen did not elicit cries of glee nor compel me to conspire with friends to call his house and hang up for hours on end. Rather, the notion of him dropped me into a storm of aching—so much ecstasy it made me hurt.

  “Oh my God, look.” Scarlett thrust her head into the center of the chattering faces and pointed to the red door in the corner of the lunchroom, perpetually propped open in the winter months to combat the intensity of the lunchroom’s stubborn radiator.

  There stood Cullen.

  Katie grabbed my arm and sighed. “Oh, Brielle. Please tell me. Why is he looking at you like that?”

  More heads turned. By that time, we’d all heard about the totaled Oldsmobile and Cullen’s arrest. The entire lunchroom of girls planted disbelieving eyes on him—a mustached man in the corner, resistant even to the infantilizing effect of a tie-and-blazer uniform that left so many boys—like Ray, for one—swimming beneath shoulder pads and extra fabric meant to last through four years of growth spurts.

  He waved me over.

  The girls at my table watched me. I shifted where I sat, not looking at anyone, wishing them all away. Across the room, Meghan Ngyuen chewed her lunch and straightened her hair, looking anywhere but at me or Cullen; she wouldn’t be troubled to acknowledge the existence of the guy who’d wrecked her car, threatened her safety, thrown into jeopardy—for ten horrifying seconds—her athletic scholarship to the University of Virginia.

  Katie whispered something to Scarlett, who giggled. How many other times? I thought. How often had they conspired like this? Laughed at me? What did they say when I wasn’t around? I thought about Katie rolling her eyes at me in response to Scarlett that first day. I thought of her complaining about Scarlett to me while at the very same moment talking to Scarlett on the phone. Katie Kinney, I suddenly thought, was not a real person. She was paper-thin. A mirage. A one-note actress.

  The lunchroom monitor, Mr. Richards—a young English teacher fond of bowties and Homer—stepped into the room, spotted Cullen at the far corner, and ambled over to him.

  “I just want to talk to Brielle real quick,” Cullen told him.

  A soft, daring girl’s voice from nowhere: “Careful not to suck his dick this time, Bri.”

  Guffawing laughter. Blurting yelps and spittle. Who knows who says these things? They boil up, spontaneously and inevitably, from the anonymous depths of high school halls. Everyone says them and no one says them.

  I understood then that it didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do. My time at that lunch table had been a farce. We all knew it, if not right from the start then soon thereafter. I’d been granted admission through some bureaucratic error that had misidentified me as someone I was not. Blunders like these happen all the time at new schools as we sift through the mess of new faces to decipher who belongs in which group. After the first few months, such matters tend to sort themselves out without injury. My own case had taken a bit longer than expected: one year and three months. But finally, inevitably, my moment had arrived.

  I wiped my mouth with a napkin and marched toward the door. Mr. Richards stooped at Cullen’s side, informing him that he was not permitted on school grounds until the last bell, Cullen telling him, “I know, I know, but . . .”

  When I arrived, Cullen was turning to me to ask, “Can we talk outside for a second?” but on “for,” I grabbed the lapel of his blazer, arched up on my toes, and kissed him—a long, warm kiss with a lot of tongue and a bit of mustache.

  The commotion of the cafeteria and the warnings from Mr. Richards remained sunk beneath the swooshing sound in my head until after Mr. Richards had separated me from Cullen with a hand on my shoulder, and then I rewound the event in my head and deciphered all the glee and horror in the roar of reactions.

  Cullen was escorted off school grounds. I stepped into the bitter cold and watched him march across the parking lot. When Mr. Richards returned, shoulders drawn tight against the cold, he explained that there’d be no detention but that I’d be wise to reflect on my decision-making. I nodded, and he stepped inside. Winter blew up my skirt. Cullen’s car started up across the lot with a soft purring. I leaned up against the brick wall of the school and shivered as the wind bit at my eyes and ears. But I didn’t mind the cold. I liked it.

  Ray

  AMIR AND I ate lunch at a table near the front of the cafeteria, right by the door. If you entered in a rush, hungry, steering toward the food counter, you’d probably walk right by without noticing us. And that, obviously, was the point. Once other kids like us caught on to our strategy—pale kids, pimpled kids, weird kids, nerdy kids, quiet kids—they joined us at our table, but we didn’t really talk or hang out much with those other guys. Especially once we started this thing with Cullen—once we had a good reason for talking to each other and only each other.

  One day we were sitting at our secret-not-so-secret table and a lacrosse player waltzed by, plucked Colin Yeager’s Powerade off the table, opened it, drank down the entire thing in a few enormous gulps, and plopped the empty bottle back down, smiling. “Just fucking with you, man.”

  Yeager smiled weakly, nodding—like, yeah, of course, no problem, we’re great friends. I thought Amir might step in to say something, but it wasn’t worth it—a forgettable enough moment, but it reminded me of a question I’d been meaning to ask him.

  “You remember that day you and Nick almost fought at my locker?”

  Amir nodded, chewing on his sandwich—the same beautiful, towering sandwich of fresh, crisp vegetables his mother prepared for him every morning.

  “How can you be like that?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “I mean, he would’ve kicked your ass. You know that, right?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. You never know.”

  “Well, okay, but . . . unless you’re secretly a master of some deadly martial art, he’s got, like, forty pounds on you. I don’t get how you can be like that.”

  “You know something?” Amir dropped his sandwich and wiped his hands on a napkin. “In middle school, I was afraid of everything. Everything. If somebody drank my Powerade, I would’ve sat there just like Yeager—like some lobotomized cow.”

  Yeager turned and gaped at Amir like . . . well, like a lobotomized cow.

  “And when I started at St. John’s, I just, like, stopped being that way. I don’t know how I did it. But I decided, you know what? Fuck it. What’s the worst that could happen? I get hurt? Embarrassed? Who cares about any of that? I just decided I was going to live.”

  “It’s that easy,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Definitely not easy. But it’s better than the alternative. I mean, look at me. It’s not like people are ever gonna stop picking on me, right? So if I’m going to get hurt anyway, I’m doing it on my own terms. I’m not about to let some dickhead like O’Dwyer do it for me.”

  I went back to my own sandwich—a measly ham-and-cheese melt bought from the food counter for
four dollars.

  “I know you know what I’m talking about,” Amir said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whatever you’re up to with Cullen.”

  I looked at him, frozen. Somehow I thought he would never ask. He seemed content enough to run around with us without asking what the endgame was.

  “It’s cool,” Amir said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  I eyed the rest of the kids at the lunch table and shook my head. “Not here.”

  Amir nodded. He took a big bite of his sandwich, washed it down with a gulp of water, and smiled at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “So let’s leave.”

  “The lunchroom? Sure, I’m almost done.”

  “The game is cops and robbers,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Just like when we were little. I run—”

  “Amir, no.”

  “You chase. It’s not over until you catch me—”

  “We have class!”

  “No matter what happens. Ready, go!”

  His chair squawked against the linoleum as he bolted from his seat and raced out of the cafeteria. A dozen or so people turned his way but then went back to their lunches, uninterested. I felt the seconds ticking away. Stay or go. Stay or go. Stay or go. “Oh Jesus,” I said.

  I raced out of the cafeteria to the end of the hallway and looked one way, then the other, where I saw the top of Amir’s head right before he disappeared down the stairs. I ran toward him just as Mrs. Montagna, the Spanish teacher, stepped out of her classroom. I slowed to a brisk walk.

  “Despacio,” she called down the hall, smiling as she strolled toward the lunchroom.

  I leaped down two flights of stairs. The first-floor hallway was mostly empty, save for one or two students milling outside the main office. I cracked open a door to the outside, where Amir stood in the middle of the parking lot, waiting to see if I would follow him. As soon as he spotted me, he turned and fled. I took one last peek down the hall for any spying teachers and then burst through the door, out into the blue-skied, chilly winter day.