The Man Who Told the World

by Hanna Dare

  Conor handed his aunt her cone and they both leaned against her car—the ice cream place didn’t provide anything fancy like chairs inside or outside for customers; there was just an old steel barrel beside the parking lot for garbage.

  By the time Conor finished talking, his chocolate ice cream had nearly melted and Linda was done her swirl and was nibbling on the cone.

  “Huh,” she offered when Conor fell silent.

  “That’s it?” He licked at the line of melted ice cream trailing down his hand. “No gasps of horror and talk of the fearsome Folsom reputation?”

  She handed him a napkin. “Oh, sweetie, I’m still young enough to remember how bad boys are like teen catnip. There was this one boy when I was in high school, Sean McKenna, who was every parent’s nightmare. He wore this cool jean jacket all the time… though now that I think back on it, it was acid-washed. But still, he looked dangerous and so, so hot.”

  “Okay,” Conor said hastily. “Thanks for that image. It was, uh, helpful.”

  “All I’m saying is, I get the attraction. I’m just wondering about what you left out.”

  “What’s that?” Conor asked uneasily. He had skipped most of the sex stuff.

  “The thing I really want to know is: is how do you feel?” She looked at him almost sadly. “Do you love him, Conor?”

  There it was. The question that Conor had been asking himself endlessly, but had still found no answer.

  “I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t. But I’ve never been in love, so I don’t know how it’s supposed to feel. What I do know is that he needs me. He may not be willing to admit it, but he does. And there are all these people right now who want things from me, or think that I can do something for them, but nobody really needs me. And please don’t say that you need me, or Tori and Dad—because that’s not the same thing.”

  “I know,” she said. “But, kiddo, sometimes being needed isn’t enough. Not when two people are so different.”

  He remembered her own words to him from weeks ago. “Maybe you’re right, but I’m young. Isn’t this when I’m supposed to find out?”

  Conor thought he should give Derek a few days to settle back in. Re-acclimatize. Adjust. Calm down. He thought all that, but the next morning, he got on his bike instead and rode it towards Derek’s house.

  It was a sunny Saturday and people were outside on their lawns, mowing, cutting, fixing; one of them was Derek, his car out in front of the garage, all the doors and the trunk open. The car, a Honda roughly the same age as both of them, looked as crappy as ever, the inside looking even worse, filled with papers and junk.

  “Spring cleaning?” Conor asked. He was polite but wary.

  Derek had looked up at his approach; for a second it was exactly the same raw expression that he’d worn at the jailhouse and Conor’s hands tightened on his handlebars, then Derek’s face shuttered and settled into something not polite—not from Derek Folsom—but definitely wary.

  “Something like that.” He tore his gaze away from Conor and looked back at the car. “I left my damn phone in there somewhere before I got busted, but I can’t find it.”

  Conor started to reach for his back pocket. “I can call it on mine—”

  “Nah,” Derek said quickly. “It’s probably out of juice. Been in there more than three weeks.”

  They fell silent. Derek’s eyes kept drifting Conor-ward, but wouldn’t reach his face.

  “That fucking bike,” Derek offered by way of conversation. “You look like a ten-year-old.” His voice was mild.

  Conor climbed off the bike and let it topple onto the lawn. “Well, I thought I might need to make a quick getaway. It could probably outrun your car.”

  “Nothing wrong with my wheels, Gillis.”

  Conor raised his eyebrows, looking at the mess inside the car.

  “Just because it looks like shit on the outside don’t mean it’s like that under the hood. I keep that engine pristine.”

  “People can hear you coming for miles.”

  “That’s because the muffler—” He rubbed between his eyes. “I can’t believe we’re talking about cars.”

  “I can’t believe we’re talking,” Conor said.

  “Yeah, well, according to my ma, I was very rude yesterday and should apologize. So…” he spread his hands and shrugged.

  “Rude? You completely freaked out. What was that, Derek?”

  Derek put his hands on the roof of the car above the open passenger side door, staring inside it and away from Conor. “You think I wanted you there? Me, coming out of fucking jail, smelling like delousing soap? And you looking like—you think I wanted you to see me like that?”

  “I just really wanted to see you.” Conor’s voice was small, but Derek’s back flinched against the words.

  “You got an eye-full,” he said. “Look, thanks for helping get that lawyer and everything. Whatever it cost, I’ll find a way to pay you back.”

  “It didn’t cost anything,” Conor said. He rubbed his sweaty hands against his jeans. “Did your mother tell you I went out to see your dad?”

  Derek whirled around, eyes wide and on Conor’s face. “Jesus. Did he—” His hand shot out and gripped Conor’s arm as though to reassure himself of Conor’s wholeness. “What the fuck were you thinking? He could have killed you.”

  Conor shook his head. “It’s okay. I don’t think he’s like that anymore.”

  “You don’t know what he’s like.”

  “No, I don’t. But he seemed mostly old and tired.” Conor studied Derek’s face, close up and intense. “Look, I know you’ll never forgive him, and you shouldn’t have to, but I do think you should know why he pressed charges in the first place.”

  “Only because he wanted to weasel back into our lives,” Derek said bitterly.

  “He’s agreed to the divorce, to leaving you and Maggie alone now. It was just he had some idea that sending you to jail would help you. He was afraid that you’d end up like him otherwise. But you’re not like him; you’re not going to be like him, ever. He gets that now.”

  Derek blinked and then realized he was still clutching at him. He dropped Conor’s arm and turned away with a harsh laugh. “He really pulled one over on you—he hasn’t changed. People don’t change.”

  Conor lifted his shoulders slightly. “I’ve changed. You have, too. I’ve seen it.”

  “From where I’m standing, nothing’s changed for me. I got no money, no job, no fucking high school diploma. The whole year might as well have not happened. Would’ve been better if it didn’t.”

  Conor drew in a breath, caught by sudden hurt. “You don’t mean that.”

  Derek tightened his mouth. “You’d be better off if I’d never come near you in the first place. Then you wouldn’t have had to touch any of this mess.”

  “What if maybe I wanted it? The mess?”

  Derek looked at him, dark eyebrows drawing together as he searched Conor’s face. Whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find, and his voice turned soft and sad. “You don’t, not really. Not with me. We had some fun and it was—really something. But I’m not your only option anymore. Far from it. You got everything waiting for you. So I’m grateful, really, for you helping, but if you did it out of some kinda obligation, or because you felt sorry for me—it’s okay. Conor, it’s okay. You’re done. You’re not sticking around here, in this town. Don’t try to tell me that you are.”

  Conor couldn’t tell him that, but he still tried to offer something, “I left once, but I came back.”

  Derek’s smile was bleak. “I don’t know why, there’s nothing here.” Then, as though that was all he could handle, Derek stepped away from him. Derek turned back to his car, crouching down to peer into the backseat.

  “Derek—”

  His voice turned careless. “Hey, man, it’s pretty obvious I got important shit to do, so—”

  Conor huffed an impatient breath out and reached for his phone. He pressed Derek’s number.

 
Music spilled out, tinny, but still unmistakable, from deep under the front seat. Derek froze briefly and then scrambled a hand underneath to pull his phone out, switching it off immediately as though that would erase what Conor had just heard.

  Conor had felt something lurch and shift sharply inside him when the song started to play, and now he put a hand up to his chest to make sure everything was alright. “Was that…” He swallowed. “Was it ‘Waterloo Sunset’?”

  Derek shuffled his feet. “Yeah, well, it’s an okay song.”

  “It was the first one,” Conor said softly. “The first song I played for you in my bedroom.”

  Derek opened his mouth, clearly about to say something dismissive, but he stopped at the expression on Conor’s face. Conor could see him take a quick inhale and then hold his breath. Waiting. The whole summer day seemed to be on pause, waiting for Conor. He pressed harder at his chest, trying to make sense of the wild thrumming of his heart.

  “Could we—listen to the whole song?”

  Derek looked at his phone and shook his head, both hesitant and apologetic. “It’s about to die.”

  “That’s okay,” Conor lifted up his own phone. “I have it on mine.”

  Conor climbed into the backseat, Derek followed, clearly nervous of whatever fragile moment was between them. Conor wasn’t afraid, there was a tiny, bright certainty within him now and it was growing every second. He gave one earbud to Derek and put the other in his own as they leaned back, as close as they could sit without touching. As the song began, Conor shut his eyes, and, after a moment, reached down to take Derek’s hand. It trembled, but neither of them pulled away while the music unfurled, sweetly and sadly, around them.

  When the song finished, they didn’t say anything. Conor sat there with his eyes still closed, but he could feel Derek looking at him.

  He opened his eyes and smiled. “Let’s go for a drive.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Conor rolled down the window, and put a hand outside the car, skimming his fingers along the wind. He could almost pluck out the chords of a song.

  Derek kept glancing at him as he drove. He clearly wanted to ask what was going on, but he wasn’t arguing, which for him was something close to a miracle. Finally, Conor took pity on Derek’s anxious twitchiness.

  “So here’s the thing.” Conor said. “You keep talking about what I need and what’s good for me, but it’s really about you. About what you think you deserve or don’t. I get that. You’re messed up, but it’s okay. I’m messed up, too, just in different ways.”

  Conor looked out at the road and the passing houses, and at Derek watching him, and smiled; the certainty had filled him completely now. It was like playing a song, improvising, but still being able to find each note just when he needed it, and the next note after that, until the whole melody came together.

  “I know you told me before that you couldn’t give me what I wanted, but I don’t think I really knew what I was asking for. Now, I do. I want to be with you. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us in the future or any of that, but I’m here now and so are you. We can—Derek, the road. Derek!”

  Derek yanked the steering wheel, swerving the car back from the middle of the road. A pickup truck roared past them with a blaring horn and swearing out the windows. Derek matched it with a long and creative string of curse words of his own, until he trailed off, clearly embarrassed at nearly wrecking the car over Conor’s words.

  Conor cleared his throat and tried for his least distracting tone of voice. “Is there somewhere we can pull over and talk?”

  Derek drove them to the old, abandoned grocery store and swung into the parking lot behind it. Conor smiled. It was decrepit and overgrown, but it was their place, in a way.

  Except now there were other people there.

  “What the fuck,” Derek muttered, circling the edge of the lot.

  Over by the old dumpster and leaning against the building’s well-tagged wall, were a bunch of kids. They looked like kids, at least to Conor’s eighteen-year-old eyes—probably thirteen or fourteen—and seemed somehow sweetly innocent as they tried out their scruffiest hooligan poses. A couple of them were wheeling each other around in one of the rusted old shopping carts, laughing as it tipped over.

  “This is disrespectful,” Derek said. “They should be at a kiddie pool or something.”

  “I like it,” Conor mused. “It’s like passing the torch to the next generation. If the torch was a crappy old parking lot.”

  “They’re probably stealing my stash, little pricks. I still had half a bottle of rye hidden back there.”

  Derek spun out of the parking lot with loud screeching and the smell of burning rubber, his hand raised out of the window, giving the kids the finger as they sped away.

  They drove instead towards the river, just outside of town.

  Conor frowned at Derek. “So you don’t have to answer right now if it’s going to mess up your driving, but I never got a chance to ask if you were okay.”

  Derek raised an eyebrow, but he kept his eyes on the road. “What d’you mean?”

  “Jail, Derek, you were in jail. Are you alright?”

  He quirked his mouth in a sneer. “It wasn’t like some prison movie. I was in the county lockup. Mostly with drunks and deadbeats who didn’t pay their speeding tickets. Don’t worry, nobody made me their bitch.”

  “Don’t joke about things like that,” Conor snapped. “I want to know if you’re okay.”

  Derek rubbed a thumb against his forehead. Finally, he sighed. “It was different than being in juvie or a group home. We just shuffled from meals to the yard to lights out, but in between, there was all this… time. More time than I knew what to do with. I felt like I was gone, shoved away like a broken part or something that everybody wanted to forget about. I felt every single minute that I was in there, and every minute was telling me that I don’t matter.”

  “Derek—”

  “Don’t. I know you’re gonna say something nice and all rah rah to make me feel better, but I don’t need that. I’m just telling you how it was. I know that I’m not going back there. Not ever.”

  Conor studied his profile, his jaw was strong and set below that vulnerable mouth. “Good.”

  “So what about you?” Derek asked as he pulled onto the side of the quiet road and turned off the car. “What’s gonna happen after school?”

  Conor took a deep breath. “A lot, actually.” It was hot in the car now that they weren’t driving and they both got out. “I had a bunch of meetings before I left Los Angeles. There’s this guy, Alex—he has a management company that represents a lot of musicians, some actors and writers. He seems nice.”

  Alex had come with a strong recommendation from Matt, but Conor liked him almost immediately; first because he scheduled their meeting at a restaurant that was the only one in L.A. that Conor could imagine taking his dad to without him freaking out at the prices or portions, and also because Alex had listened seriously when Conor talked about wanting to make an album that was all his own songs.

  “Not that I think I know anything about making a record,” Conor had said. “I want to work with experienced people, I want to learn, but I need it to be my music.”

  Alex had nodded. “Authenticity is important. You found a lot of fans because of Singing Sensation, but they like you almost in spite of the show. You have to make your own path.”

  Conor was glad that Alex agreed with him about not going on an official Singing Sensation tour in the summer with Jesse and some of the other Top Ten contestants. Conor would have liked to have spent time with them, but it didn’t feel right.

  “I want to play to all sorts of different crowds, not just Singing Sensation audiences,” Conor told Alex. “Small clubs, festivals; even if they hate me and I’m terrible at it for a while, I need the practice.”

  “You need to get in your ten thousand hours of practice,” Alex had said, “like the Beatles in Hamburg.” And then when Conor stare
d, he had added with a smile, “I may not be the biggest Beatles fan, but it’d be hard to find any agent in this town who hasn’t read Malcolm Gladwell. You need room to try different things, and even to fail, that’s all part of being an artist. It’s part of growing up, but when it comes to your career, at least, it’ll be my job to make sure you have that room.”

  Conor and Derek walked away from the road and towards the river as Conor talked. “So I’ve almost got my dad sold on the idea of a gap year. I’d put off college for a year and build my career. Strike while the iron’s hot, make hay while the sun shines—my dad seems to get things better when I use really old expressions like that. Also it’s a year for me to earn money for college. The prices for schools in California are insane.”

  “So that’s where you’re gonna end up?” Derek asked, voice carefully casual.

  “For now,” Conor said. “Megan’s going to film school out there and we’re talking about getting an apartment together. The other thing that’s happening—I just got the call a couple days ago actually—is that I’m going to be on this TV show. Like as an actor.”

  “What the hell?”

  “I know, isn’t it crazy? But the producers are friends of Matt’s and they watched me on Singing Sensation. Before I came back home, I met with them. They had me say some lines on camera, act out some scenes. It was weird, but it really wasn’t that different from being on Singing Sensation—at least now someone else is coming up with things for me to say. I guess you’ve never watched The Drama?”