Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  I hugged my stack of wood to my chest and blew warm breath into my hands. Except for Bri, who was my sister, and Cullen, whom I was paying to spend time with me, Amir was my only friend. The only person to whom I’d ever really talked.

  * * *

  Three days later I knocked on the door to Father Joe’s office during my lunch period. It was the last day of school before Christmas break, and I wanted to return the loaner copy of Hume. Father Joe opened the door. I moved to enter the office, but he put up a hand. Inside, on the leather couch, sat Nick. And he was . . . was he . . . crying? His eyes were red and swollen, and he glanced once at me and then looked away, wiping his nose.

  “Give me one minute, okay, Ray?”

  Father Joe moved back inside. I waited in the hall. When the door opened again, Nick stepped out, not looking at me as he marched away.

  “Come on in, Ray.”

  I entered holding out the book like it was a shield. I didn’t want to ask about Nick. I didn’t want to know if he’d actually been crying or, if so, why. I’d already seen too much as it was. So I returned the book. I thanked Father Joe for lending it to me. Our conversation meandered, as it often did, to God, and I asked him about the body and the soul and humans and bears, and, even though Father Joe was trying his best, I found his answers to be pretty weak. Our talks inevitably bottomed out when I insisted that he explain his faith and he insisted that faith was the one thing he couldn’t explain and never would.

  “But why do you believe?” I said. “How do you know?”

  “Ray,” he said, and this time he stood from behind his desk and sat beside me on the couch in his office, running his hands over the cheap fabric of his pants. “There’s no reason to it. You can read all the books in the world about it. And you should. And you can talk yourself in and out of God’s existence over and over. And you should do that too. But, in the end, there’s no reasoning with God. No logic. No proof. I believe just because I do. That’s faith.”

  He watched me until I looked at him, and then he said again, as though he’d suddenly realized it was true, “I believe because I do.”

  Father Joe checked his watch, planted two hands on his knees, and pushed himself up from the couch.

  “I don’t think I believe,” I told him.

  He grabbed his clerical collar from a nearby shelf and fitted it around his neck, which was always red and irritated from a recent shave. “Maybe that’s true right now. But it’s not permanent.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I don’t believe.”

  “I know.” The bell sang out, signaling next period, and he reached for the door. “Keep working at it.”

  He held an arm toward the door, and I stepped into the hall. The post-lunch migration herded around us, emptying into classroom doors. Father Joe stepped into the stream of students to be swept along to his next class, where he would teach about the poets and monks and geniuses and madmen and whores and prophets and kings and warriors and martyrs who had testified, lived, fought, and died in the name of God, and where he would ask kids like me what they thought about all that. And what were they supposed to say?

  Theology was my last class of the day, so I wouldn’t have to deal with all that for another few hours. In the meantime, though, I was due at the gym. And I wasn’t wearing any shorts under my khakis. It had slipped my mind that morning, distracted as I was by our Christmas Eve plans. Instead of seeking some escape—begging a note from the nurse or claiming to have forgotten my shorts altogether—I resigned myself to retrieving the spare pair I kept in the locker room, hoping that Nick might be distracted enough by whatever he’d been discussing with Father Joe that he wouldn’t insist on kicking my ass for no good reason at all. This, I found out, was a stupid way of thinking.

  When I walked into the locker room, Nick wasn’t there yet. Hurrying to the far corner of the room, I changed in a jerky panic, rushing the procedure, hoping to get out of there as soon as possible. When he entered, he looked right at me. He had a short, punchy face with an angry little nose and always seemed to be breathing a little too heavily, like a bull. The cheeks below his eyes were still puffy.

  He dropped his backpack at his locker and danced over to me on his toes like a boxer.

  “Haven’t had my warm-ups in a while,” he said. “Where you been, Ray-Gay?”

  He started punching my arms. Softly at first—almost like we were friends and he was just playing with me. But soon the blows came more forcefully. The soft ones hurt my arm, and the hard ones hurt everything. They rocked me back and forth as the vibrations went from my chest to my head. It felt like being in that car crash over and over. For a while I just stood there, hoping it would be over soon. Usually the punching lasted only a few minutes, but this time it went on and on. Nick bobbing on his toes, dodging invisible blows, then charging in to punish my arms.

  Finally, he wiped some sweat from his forehead and started back toward his locker. “Whew,” he said. “Feeling good today.”

  I turned to my locker and said, “Crybaby,” in a voice that wasn’t as quiet as I wanted it to be.

  “What’d you say?” He was marching back toward me, shoulders bent, fists ready.

  He grabbed my shirt and pulled me close to him. He smelled like cologne and lunch meat. “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He slapped me across the face.

  “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  He slapped me again and asked me again, and again I said, “Nothing,” this time in a voice that I could barely hear because I wasn’t sure if it was the right answer or not. But of course there wasn’t any right answer. My face was hot from the slapping, and I was trying not to cry, struggling to remember that I wasn’t a little kid, even though getting beat up like that sure makes you feel like one.

  Finally, he let go of my shirt and walked away saying, “Don’t fuck with me today, Ray-Gay. Feeling too good.” He walked to his locker, where two of his friends were laughing, having watched the whole thing. Everyone else dressed without talking and didn’t look at me.

  I took off my shirt and thought about Amir with that bottle on his head.

  It was a stupid word. The kind of insult an eight-year-old makes. But I knew he would know what it meant. I knew it would piss him off.

  “Crybaby.” I took two steps away from my locker and looked him in the eyes. “I called you a crybaby.”

  Nick laughed. He looked at his two friends, laughed again, wiped his mouth, and charged at me. He moved so fast I barely even saw it happen. In an instant he was on me and had thrown me into the sharp corner of an open locker, which smacked into my eye. I fell to the floor, and Nick picked me up by a limp arm, like a rag doll, and thunder-punched me in the chest. I saw an explosion of fiery red and wanted so badly to fall to the floor and not ever get up, but Nick still had me by that arm.

  He dragged me to the center of the room, and the instant he let go I tried to scramble away, but again he grabbed me. This time I tried something I’d never done before, which was fighting back. I tossed a bunch of helpless fists at him, but all he did was swipe them away and hit me hard in the mouth. Then, finally, I was on the floor for good.

  “Fuck,” Nick said. He held the hand that had hit me at his hip, wincing while opening and closing it. “Little bitch.”

  I unfolded myself from the floor and walked to my locker, trying to make it look like everything was okay and like I wasn’t badly hurt. I even thought that some of my punches might have landed and that maybe people thought it had been a real fight, instead of what it was.

  Rather than continuing to put on my gym clothes, I changed back into my school uniform, tugging my shirt over all those new, hot bruises, trying to figure out how to tie my tie through the pain. My eye hurt like crazy, my mouth was bloody, and I didn’t feel like going to any more classes. I waited downstai
rs until Nick and everyone else was gone, and then I snuck through the mostly empty halls, making sure no teachers saw me.

  On the second floor, I found Amir sitting in the front row of his Latin class. I stood at the door, unseen by the teacher and all but a few students, staring at him until he noticed me. When he did, he gaped at me for a long time, not seeming to understand what he was looking at, and then he raised his hand and asked to go to the bathroom.

  I walked down the hall and into the stairwell, waiting. Amir came in, looked at me, and put a hand on my arm.

  “What happened?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  We were near the corner of the stairwell. Amir stepped close and hugged me. He wrapped two small arms around my shoulders and squeezed me tight. It was all I could do to not cry.

  “Come on,” he said.

  He took me by the hand. We snuck through the halls until we found Cullen lounging in a European history class. Again, I stood in the hall, willing him to look my way before the teacher did. Again, once he saw me, I walked, with Amir by my side this time, into the stairwell.

  “Jesus, Ray,” Cullen said. “What the hell?”

  “Can you give him a ride home?” Amir asked.

  “What happened?”

  “Just—can you give him a ride?”

  Cullen reached a hand out to my eye, but I flinched away.

  “That O’Dwyer kid?”

  I nodded.

  “I have class,” he said.

  “You’ll be right back,” Amir told him. “Come on.”

  So Cullen drove me home. Dad was going to notice my eye and the fat lip and any other visible signs of what had happened, and I knew I’d have to explain it all eventually, to him and to teachers and counselors, but at the time all I wanted was to be by myself and not talk about it. Cullen knew that and didn’t say anything on the drive, which was the best thing I could have asked for.

  While Cullen drove me home, I thought about how I would miss theology class and wouldn’t have to think about all those God questions if I didn’t want to today. But of course, I ended up doing it anyway. The more you don’t want to think about something, the more it just hangs around in your mind. When I got home and splashed water across my busted-up face, I was thinking again that God wasn’t in Father Joe’s prayers and parables and readings at all but instead was something you could only find for yourself through some wild undertaking. A test that could push someone like me through the fire, into the light. And if you didn’t make it through, and if instead you died along the way . . . could that really be much worse than the way things were now?

  Brielle

  AT EIGHT P.M. on Christmas Eve, I stood before the mirror of the upstairs bathroom, applying eyeliner. I hadn’t yet put on stockings, and even though it was below freezing out and even though my legs were already goose-bumped before I’d set foot outside, I decided that I would leave them bare.

  Dad had fixed himself on the idea of midnight mass, and we were all in the midst of our preparations. There’d been a time, he told us, when the whole neighborhood—neighbors and their extended families—would gather for post-dinner Christmas Eve drinks and then march off to mass together in a festive parade. They were merry occasions, and they provided a sense of community that Dad was nostalgic for and whose absence he partly blamed on his children’s—and probably his wife’s too—wayward drift out of our familial orbit.

  Ray and I had come home from our night in the Pine Barrens cold, hungry, and exhausted. I felt disembodied while talking to my parents about it, as though I were floating in the corner of the room, watching myself invent a story for their benefit like I was a character in movie. The narrative was close enough to the truth but was still, of course, a lie. We’d gone hiking, I told Dad, and lost the trail. Where? Up at Sunfish Pond. We had to sleep on the freezing wooden floor of an Appalachian Trail shelter. It was terrible. We were terrified. How did we get there? Who were we with? Scarlett’s older sister, Marie, drove us in her parents’ minivan. It was Marie and her boyfriend and Scarlett and me and Ray and Ray’s friend Amir. Why didn’t we tell them we were going? We did. I told Mom. Didn’t I, Mom?

  We were all in my bedroom, my father having pursued me up the stairs with this line of questioning. Mom was slumped against the threshold, eyes dark and weighty. A hand went to her hair and fiddled with a strand. “I remember,” she said. “You were going out with friends. That’s all you said. It’s fine.”

  Dad tensed all over, knowing this was a pitiful move on my part—that telling Mom wasn’t really telling anyone at all. “Was Cullen there?”

  “No.”

  “You can tell me if he was.”

  “Just the people I said.” A shiver went through me. I crawled under the covers of my bed. “I’m still cold.”

  Ray stood at my window, staring outside like he couldn’t stand to watch all this maneuvering on our part.

  “Ray?” Dad said. “Are you okay?”

  Ray turned from the window but still made no eye contact. “Just tired,” he said. “Like Bri said. We were freezing cold all night.”

  Dad’s eyes went soft. God, I thought. It’s too easy. So much trust in him he couldn’t help it.

  “Well,” he said. “We’re glad you’re both safe.”

  Still, despite his limitless capacity for faith in others and for forgiveness when such faith proved to be misguided, Dad sensed we were offering an incomplete portrait of where we’d been. And so Christmas was meant to be a proper O’Dell household occasion. Midnight mass at St. Michael’s, as at most parishes, now took place at the much more sober hour of ten P.M. on Christmas Eve, but Dad was nevertheless intent on the idea.

  Yet, all of the social fluttering of pre-mass preparation that Dad hoped would reignite some sense of joy in our household had fallen instead into quiet, solitary primping. Ray in his room, Mom in her bathroom with her own mirror, and Dad waiting downstairs, legs crossed, dressed and prepared hours before the rest of us. The hallway beyond the bathroom door was dark and quiet—a void punctuated by Ray’s closed bedroom door at the far end.

  I was pulling a cardigan over my silver-blue blouse when the doorbell sounded. In another minute came the lumbering of two men up the stairs, old steps bending and wheezing beneath their climbing, and then Dad scratching on the bathroom door, motioning at the figure behind him.

  “Brielle,” he said. “Someone here to see you.”

  Cullen wore his leather jacket over a polo shirt and jeans—nice jeans, with no holes—and his customary black work boots. In his hands he held a rectangular box highlighted by clean red wrapping and a white bow. He’d parted his hair in the center, matted it down with too much gel, and tucked the loose curling ends behind his ears. Over Dad’s shoulder he winked at me and wiggled his tongue.

  Dad watched me escort Cullen to my room.

  “Let’s keep the door open, Beaker.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Dad turned to walk downstairs but then spun back. “Maybe Cullen would like to come to mass with us.”

  Before I could stammer an “I don’t think so,” Cullen had clapped his hands together and proclaimed, “I’d love to, Mr. O’Dell.”

  Dad nodded. “Good then.”

  Once Dad retreated downstairs, I carefully clicked the door shut and turned the lock. Cullen cozied up next to me on the edge of the bed and, with a crooked grin that was half glee and half painfully endearing embarrassment, he shoved the box in my hands and wished me a merry Christmas.

  The box held a crudely crafted silver necklace—gnarled pieces of metal crimped together to form a chain. From the chain hung an indelicate heart, with bent, harsh edges and cragged curves. It was strange, dark, flawed, and beautiful.

  “Made it from barbed wire.”

  I looked at him and took his hand.

  “I know
a guy who makes stuff like this. I got all the materials from a junkyard, and then he helped me put it together and shape it and everything. He did most of the work.”

  “I love it,” I said. We held hands, and I said it again: “I love it.”

  Cullen put a cold hand on my knee. We laughed a little before kissing. The first, like always, was a quick one. A test. Then another. Kissing him was like establishing your footing on the moon—seeing how high you can leap in low gravity without lifting away completely. Soon we were devouring each other, all breath, lips, and tongues, hands scrabbling to touch all the different parts of ourselves.

  His hand shifted up my thigh and squeezed me there. He reached one hand around my back and tried to unhook my bra over my shirt and sweater but only twisted the strap, tugging on it impatiently.

  I laughed.

  “I can get it,” he said.

  “I thought you were supposed to be this suave lady-killer.”

  “Who said that?” He kissed me again and kept yanking at the bra strap.

  “Here,” I said. “I have an idea.”

  I stood, removed my sweater, and draped it over the lamp on my night table. It was a corny move, but the effect—a dull, baking glow—fit the mood. Without looking at Cullen’s eyes, without pausing to think what this looked like from his point of view, I stepped in front of him.

  “Don’t laugh. Okay?”

  He nodded shortly.

  I took a breath, closed my eyes, unhooked my skirt, and let it drop to the floor. I opened my eyes. It turned out I was the one who laughed. Cullen was very serious. I unbuttoned the blouse and removed it. I thought for a moment that I could hear our two hearts beating—not in synch, just slightly off. First his, and then, on the half beat, mine. Their awkward rhythm pulsed through the room, pushing on the walls, feeding air to the fiery light.

  I turned to the mirror next to the dresser. The sight of myself mostly unclothed and the hulking presence of Cullen on the bed sent a warm feeling to my middle. I felt dizzy. A single brown lock from his holiday-styled hair had fallen over his eyes. He sunk his chin into his palm. In the red light, his eyes had almost completely disappeared beneath his brow.