No Such Thing as the Real World

by M. T. Anderson

  “So was yours,” I say.

  You can see that he can practically smell it when he backs into Lundy Lee’s one honest-to-god cop. Clutching his treasure, Beech looks desperately back to me but doesn’t give up the show.

  I nod.

  He goes.

  He’s not honest-to-god Lundy Lee’s cop anyway, since Lundy Lee only rates a part-time presence from the district force. “Officer Fortnightly” is how the officer is prominently represented in the Testament.

  “Good day, sir,” I greet Officer Fortnightly.

  “Good day to you, sir,” Fortnightly responds, extending a warm and friendly hand of authority. “What was that numpty doing here?”

  “Same as everyone, financing this glamorous lifestyle.”

  “Right,” Fortnightly says, eyeballing the new proprietor to see if the relationship will be as shipshape as the old one was. “You are aware that the merchandise you take in is supposed to be registered with us, to prevent movement of stolen goods and contraband.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you are supposed to get ID, and a picture. Nobody under eighteen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The straightforward uncomplication of the conversation does not seem to agree with the lawman. In fact it seems somehow slightly to agitate him. He begins wandering around the shop, fingering items, picking them up and putting them down as if he is on a shopping trip, which he sort of is.

  “I was sorry to hear—”

  “He was a fine man, my dad, wasn’t he?”

  Officer Fortnightly is thrown for a second by the interruption. He stops his snooping, regards the boy businessman. “Yes,” he says. “Your dad was a fine man.”

  “So was yours,” I say brightly.

  Fortnightly gets all forthrightly, marching right up to the counter, leaning right up to me. “You being wise with me?”

  “I don’t mean to be, sir.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Really. You seem older.”

  “Should have seen me this morning before I opened up. I was a kid then.”

  We are inches from each other’s faces. We stay there for a minute, trading breath. It is not a fair trade, as most trades aren’t, and I begin to squint.

  “I believe you have mail,” I say, sliding an envelope across the desk. An envelope that was sealed and marked by the previous regime.

  The door opens, and a girl comes in, a young woman. “Should I come back?” she says quickly.

  “Please,” I say, “do come in.”

  Officer Fortnightly takes his envelope and tucks it away. He gives me another smile and a stiffer handshake and wishes me the very, very best in my new life at the helm. “See you in two weeks,” he says.

  “Why?” I ask. Though I kind of know why.

  Stumped, then not, he smiles. “To pick up my mail.”

  “Oh,” I say. “That mail came from, like, the dead. Don’t know if we’ll be getting any more of that. You know how dead folks can be about keeping in touch. We’ll let you know if any comes in.”

  He waves the envelope at me, waves my father’s beyond-embarrassing beyond-the-grave handwriting at me. “I’ll see you in two,” he says.

  If I haven’t retired by then.

  “Hi, I’m Sandy,” she says, and sandy she is. Hair, eyes, skin, all paled out like she’s been oversoaked in seawater, hauled out, rung out, beaten on a flat rock, and left drying in the wind and sun for a while.

  I’m in love with her already.

  “Don’t cops give you the creeps?” she says.

  “Some of them,” I say. “I’m Charlie.”

  “I know you,” she says, pointing in a way that would be impolite if I did not know her. I don’t know her, though.

  “I know you,” I say, hoping I do, pointing right back. “Why do I know you?”

  “I met you in the hospital. I was working there…”

  Whoosh. It comes hurtling in my direction, the vision of this girl, this young woman, this kind and heartbreaking psychiatric nurse being so kind to my mother the patient, and father, and me myself. The other thriving institution, at the other end of Lundy Lee, bookending the town with the ferry port. The mental hospital, short-term no-hope a specialty. My mother had a holiday there once.

  “How is your mother?” she asks sincerely. She looks less healthy than she did when we last met. She looks smaller, and younger, and less like a nurse.

  “I’m going to take a guess and say, ‘Good,’” I say. “How are you?”

  “I’m going to say…not so good. I don’t work at the hospital now.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Conversation grinds itself to a severe halt, after starting so promisingly.

  “Um, can I help you with something?”

  “Well,” she says. “Yes. Yes. Yes, you can.”

  It is a conversation that does not seem to want to sustain itself.

  “You have something you want to pick up? Something you want to buy, or sell?”

  “Um,” she says. “Um. Yes.”

  I wait. “Listen, you don’t need to be bashful with me. You know, there’s a lot of people coming in here with a lot of situations, so nothing is really too big a deal after a while, whatever—“

  “We had…an arrangement.”

  I smile, happy to be getting somewhere.

  “You had, what?”

  It’s like she’s asking me now. “An arrangement? We had, kind of, a thing, me and your dad.”

  The adult section of my mind does a runner, off to the darkest recess where it won’t be reached, while little-boy Charlie takes the controls.

  “Right, lots of people did. That’s the kind of business we have here, you know, arrangements between…”

  It is too late, though, as the blood rushing to flush every part of my visible skin attests.

  “But we had…an arrangement,” she says softly, reaching out to pat my hand.

  No. I loved, and love, every saturated fistful of fat that was my father. And my mother has been godknowswhere doing godknowswhat with godknowswho for ages. But this youngish, prettyish lady climbing around over my father…in trade? For what? For a rabbit coat? A blender?

  “A what?” I bark, withdrawing hand and self from her. “A thing? What’s a thing…Sandy? With my dad? What’s a thing? With my dad? No, I don’t think you did.”

  “I think I did.”

  Betrayed simultaneously, instantaneously by a lovely dead fat man and the shiny new stranger love of my life, I am hunched with hurt and not intent on a healthy exchange of ideas with Sandy at the moment. I flip open the Testament and find her there, nearly hyperventilating as I read the word arrangement in the margin. I am too slow, though, to stem the flow, to get clear, as my eyes fall a few lines down to Steven, and the marginal arrangement. And on, and on, the word arrangement now written in boldface, leaping off the pages at me now from six different spots on this spread alone,

  “I would just get my stuff back—without giving him any money—is all,” Sandy says, uninvited. “It was okay. It was okay both ways. It was good.”

  “Could you leave, please? Could you leave? Sandy. Sandy Arrangement? Please?”

  “I just thought that, considering, maybe you’re lonely just like—”

  “Maybe not. Could you leave, please?”

  “I would guess this is a lonely job here—”

  “Please,” I snap, and stare at the counter, at the Testament.

  Sandy’s quick breath comes out in choppy little bursts like the surf. She bites her lip and quick steps to the door.

  “I don’t want you to think any bad thoughts about your father. He—”

  “Don’t bother telling me what a fine guy he was. Just don’t bother.”

  She turns around snappish and shouts, “He was! He was a lovely fine man, way more than you could ever be!”

  I actually leap over the counter after her, and smack right into the
thick glass door as she slams it on me. I remain there, pressed to the glass, closing my eyes, letting my hot cheek cool with the contact.

  I walk so slowly back to the counter, I feel like a flower wilting in real time. I walk straight to the safe, the closet, the stash. I begin pulling things down and find guns. I find jewelry that for some reason cannot play with the jewelry out in the display case. I find photographs, men with women, men with men, taken from far away. I find loose gold teeth. I find bottles and bottles of pills. I find a finger in a box, dried like a long stick of dehydrated mango.

  This is what it means to be the guv’nor.

  In the door walks Andy LeBue, the world’s most godawful comic. He worked the local VFW until every last vet died of ill humor and the place closed down. Then he bounced between the ferry and the bars, working for coins until people stopped paying him to perform, then stopped paying him to shut up. He wears a rug on his head that was made for a head much smaller, and carries a blue-haired ventriloquist’s dummy named Blue that looks less scary than most because he looks so embarrassed.

  “How are you supposed to tell which one’s the village idiot in a village like this?” Andy asks Blue, or Blue asks Andy, who can tell?

  “I have a gun back here, Andy,” I say.

  “Ah”—Andy laughs—“you know how often I hear that? How much will you give me for Blue, here?”

  “I don’t wanna stay here,” Blue protests.

  “He’s a nice boy,” Andy says soothingly. “I knew his dad. His dad always laughed for us. I loved his dad.”

  And, for this.

  For this, after all. For this, Charlie Waters Jr. begins to well up with an ocean’s salty tears. I keep them in the well, though.

  “As a public service, for the sake of everybody in town, I’ll give you thirty for Blue, and I’ll give him a loving home until you come back.”

  “See?” Andy says, both visibly happy and broken as he hands Blue over. “I told you he was his father’s boy. Now I don’t want to say Charlie Waters was fat, but I once saw him open a door with a burp.”

  Andy looks shocked when I start to laugh. Something in there, in that stupid joke, felt so good and honest and real about the old man that it gave me an immense release of something better, spreading through my belly, lungs, and ribs.

  Andy is fairly fleeing as Blue and I stand there, both waving him good-bye. “See you soon,” says Blue.

  It is only lunchtime.

  “Jesus H. Jesus,” I say, slumping exhausted into the low upholstered chair with the gigantic ass crater that sits behind the counter. It is positioned so that, no matter what, if you just had to collapse back there, you almost had no choice but to land in the chair. The chair sort of stinks. But it certainly is comfortable.

  Blue is on my lap, and the Testament is in my hand. I flip it open with a great deal of trepidation. I open to the very first page, which I had not seen earlier. Come what may, Charlie Waters Jr. is going to read this book cover to cover, line for line, and every line in between.

  It begins with a sort of title page. PRIVATE, it says in that mentalist handwriting scratch.

  FOR THE EYES OF CHARLIE WATERS ONLY

  I smile at the joke I share with my dad. How fantastically pointless that the only two people in the world who could read that warning were both named Charlie Waters.

  Page two is blank; page three is a kind of dedication page, an inscription, as if this would be a real book.

  JUDGMENT DAY WAS YESTERDAY.

  SORRY, NO REFUNDS.

  This is his book. This is Charlie’s Testament. And Charlie’s boy is reading it, come what may.

  But it is lunchtime. So it may come after lunch. Dad would agree.

  I flip to S. I dial her number.

  She is still chopping that sad quick breathing like the surf as she answers the phone.

  “This is a lonely job,” I tell her. “You want to do good for people, but what’s good? You want to be a fine guy, but what’s fine? You want to try, but trying is hard and it’s exhausting and, hell, it’s only lunchtime on day one.

  “But I could buy lunch, Sandy,” I say to her, hopefully. “I could do that much, I know. Buy us lunch at the Compass or the North Star, watching the water?”

  About Chris Lynch

  Chris Lynch is the author of the National Book Award finalist Inexcusable as well as many highly acclaimed books for young adults, including Me, Dead Dad, & Alcatraz, the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Freewill, and Iceman, Shadow Boxer, Gold Dust, and Slot Machine, all four ALA Best Books for Young Adults and winners of several other prestigious awards, and The Big Game of Everything and Cyberia. He holds an MA from the writing program at Emerson College and lives in Scotland with his family.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  The Company

  Jacqueline Woodson

  The damn ankle is sprained. It won’t do the right thing. Twisting and buckling. Me trying to be fabulous across the stage and landing on my ass. The ankle’s some new stranger, swollen and weak. So now they’re calling this my sabbatical. The head of The Company—I’m gonna call him Roger to protect myself if he decides he wants to try to sue or kick me out of The Company or holler—Roger says just stay off it awhile. Ice it. Put it up. Rest and shit. Like it’s that damn easy to sit my ass down and not dance. He is such a queen. You didn’t hear it from me. Oh no you didn’t. Just this morning I’m sitting up in here with the ankle reading the New York Post and there he is—getting some award and showing all those teeth. The article’s got the nerve to go on about him being single and having no kids but hoping to one day have a family of his own. “But for now,” the article blah-blah-blahed, “he’s got his Company.” That shit burns me up. How is someone gonna look right at Roger and not see queen? Snow queen at that—almost six foot four, blue-black and beautiful, walks up in the studio most mornings with that white man trailing behind him all quiet and handling things. Well, that’s what they got him on the books doing. Accounting. I know what he’s accounting. He’s accounting Roger—rocking him like a boat up in that grand old Harlem brownstone they got going on. And both of them way past thirty trying to rock it like us young people, partying and whatnot. Some days, I’m hoping I never get that old and have to watch all the beautiful children moving by me all free and easy and ready for whatever’s coming. Those two queens look more like they’re ready for rocking chairs. Even if Roger can still move through the air like one of us, you can see the living he’s done all up in his face and around his eyes and in the way he looks so damn tired at the end of the day.

  A few months after I joined The Company, Roger had himself a little soirée, as he called it—supposed to be straight and talking about a soirée. When was the last time anybody heard a straight man call a party a soirée? So of course I went—me and Tony kee-keeing our way on the train all the way from Brooklyn—that’s where I was living then—to that pretty brownstone where Roger and—surprise, surprise—Snow were having their soirée. When me and Tony got there, Roger introduced us to Snow (I’m not even bothering to come up with a better name for him. Snow’s real name is one that’s so different that if I said it, everyone would know who I was talking about, and as I said, I’m not trying to get myself thrown from The Company.) Snow’s darker than real snow but not much. His eyes are blue like you see on the white men in movies—those white men Tony gets stupid over but I can’t see any beauty in. Tony claims he ain’t a snow queen in the making but…well. Give me tall, dark, and handsome. And when I say dark, I don’t mean tan either. And I don’t mean Roger, because me and him on the same side of this here queen fence and nothing either one of us can do for the other. People can talk all that junk about being fluid and not ascribing to roles and calling it that back-in-the-day crap and whatever whatever, but I don’t see anything wrong with a person knowing who and what they like. I like them dark and ready to make their mark. I like them long and strong. If I wanted a
somebody who hee-heed with his hand covering his mouth, and put one pinky in the air to drink his damn tea, well I could just laugh and drink tea and look in the mirror—could just date my own damn self.

  The first time I learned Tony liked himself some snow, we were getting ourselves together after dancing all day long. It must have been October because I remember us both having a lot of stuff with us—in the summer, you see dancers with their bags all light and whatnot, but fall and winter it is all about the layers. Sweat all day and be freezing if it’s anything below eighty outside. Me and Tony’d met the month before, when both of us got signed to The Company. I was seventeen and Tony was nineteen, and he already had himself a place. I was still living with my mom, and since I was going to get paid sweet for being in The Company, I was telling him about it being time for me to bounce from her space.

  I’m looking for a roommate, Tony said. We’d already changed out of our dance clothes into sweats and boots, had already thrown our jazz shoes, leg warmers, and dance clothes in our bags. I’d danced hard that day—being fabulous, my kicks higher than I’d ever seen the legs go and my arms all up and over the place but controlled, because Roger’s first words to me had been that I need to rein my dancing in—that I was talented but needed to learn control. His exact words? “Let’s leave the street in the street”—and even though I’d wanted to snap and let him know nothing about me was street, I just kept my mouth closed because he was Mr. Charlie now. The Boss Man. He was Money in My Pocket and Holder of My Dream. So I’d kept control and danced hard. So hard, I could smell my funky, sweaty dance clothes right through the canvas bag my mama had given me as both a high school graduation and a congrats on making The Company present.

  I gave Tony a look. Tony’s biracial—which means two things—not my type and pretty in that curly-hair, redskin sort of way. Some of the girls in The Company were already giving him the look, because straight girls don’t be caring sometimes—you can be gay as you want to be and they’ll still come knocking for a knocking. What is that about? And some of the guys dipped into the fish tank every now and then, but I wasn’t one of them and one look at Tony and I knew he’d been gay since he took his first baby steps across the room. I knew his daddy probably said, “What’s wrong with that boy? Why is he walking like that?”