by Lily Sparks
* * *
We go through a drive-through for breakfast, and after we eat hash brown patties and egg sandwiches in what can only be called ecstasy, Javier cranks back the passenger seat and pulls out a pillow, and it’s my turn to drive.
Javier doesn’t sleep, though, he chats with me, light and playful. He wants to know about my other boyfriends, refusing to believe he’s my first.
“No way. I know you broke all the guys’ hearts. Look at you.”
If I could turn off the voice in my head that calls out every ridiculous thing he says, it would be pretty charming. But instead I just try to not to laugh and change the subject.
We don’t stop again until lunch, pulling off at a low-slung building on our route with a blinking EAT sign out front and no further enticement. Their veggie burger is dry and the décor is dour, but the freedom of walking through the world, of ordering from a menu, of wandering to the bathroom or poring over the jukebox without asking anyone’s permission … it’s everything.
“It almost feels real, doesn’t it?” I laugh to Javier as we walk back to the car hand in hand. “Like we’re really a couple on a road trip together.”
“We really are a couple on a road trip together.”
“Oh. Right.” I laugh.
“Don’t worry. I won’t let you forget it again, gorgeous.” He gently twists the hand he’s holding up to his lips and brushes my knuckles with a kiss. I, Signal Deere, am on a road trip with my handsome, adoring boyfriend.
Also, I might be dead in two and a half days.
Life is a fuse, and I am the red spark shooting toward its end, each moment burning away as soon as I exist within it, bright, sparkling, then gone.
* * *
Around ten o’clock Javier pulls up to the Sleepy Nite Motel. The smell of cigarette smoke almost knocks me backward when we get inside. Every sound echoes in the small room as Javier crosses to the far queen-sized bed and sets down his backpack on its plasticky quilt. I set my backpack down on the other bed, and then we turn and stare at each other.
“So …” He steps toward me. And then his phone goes off.
He’s so intent on me he doesn’t recognize what it is at first. I have to say, “Um, is that your phone?” and he pulls it out of his pocket.
“Hello?” A tinny voice from the other end. “Right. We are, we checked in.… oh yeah? Great! Okay, I will. I will right now. I appreciate it.” He clicks the phone off and looks up at me. “That was the Director. Ray’s number was just added to my directory.” He’s beaming. “I have to call Ray, set everything up.” He strides over to me and wraps me in a hug. “Hopefully it doesn’t take too long but … Ray can be a talker.”
“Yeah, great, okay.” I nod, head bobbing automatically as he scrolls through and finds the number. I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I can hear him speaking a rapid-fire mix of Spanish and English through the wall, so I take a shower as well. The hot water is absolute bliss.
Dripping in my towel and rifling through my backpack for bedclothes before I go back out, I’m stumped on what to wear. It’s not like Javier has never seen me in my pajamas before, but still. It’s different. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend before. And I don’t have to wear every piece of clothing I can fit into, because unlike the cabin, this room has heat.
Heck, I can wear underwear to bed if I want.
I stare down into my bag, heart hammering at the thought, then find the baggy red sweatpants and long-sleeved USC T-shirt tucked at the bottom and put them on as fast as I can before whatever mischievous mental voice that suggested the underwear gets louder. Dressed, I pad out of the bathroom to find our room empty. I go to the window and find Javier making loops under the sickly buzzing yellow of the parking lot lights, like a fish swimming in an aquarium.
So I climb into bed and click through the TV channels: the dire evening news, house hunting shows, Wheel of Fortune. I had Wheel of Fortune going the last time I saw Rose. She’d stopped talking to me when I stopped covering for her, but then one night she suddenly texted she was on her way over. Five minutes later a knock rattled the thin trailer door and Rose stepped into our scrubby living room, beaming at our old TV, at our stained couch covered in neat piles of folded laundry.
“Aww, Signal! It’s all exactly the same as when we were kids! I’m going to cry!”
“Yeah, me too. I think this whole trailer would fit in your room. What’s up?” I asked, wary. “Off to see Mr. Moody? You want me to cover if your mom calls?”
“No … I just had to get out of the house for a while.” She shook her head, then: “Tom took the lock off my door again, so I go to talk to him about it, and he starts going off on my shirt? About how he can ‘see everything’ and I just … I grabbed my keys and left.”
“… Did your mom hear him say that?”
She nodded.
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. Not a damn thing.” She laughed, but the corners of her mouth jerked down, and she ducked her head. I sat down on the couch next to her, my hand on her shoulder, unsure what to say. After a moment she threw her head back, shaking it off. “Anyway. Whatever. I turn eighteen in a month. And the second my trust comes in, the second, I’m going to buy a car, and drive straight to Portland.” She tilted her head. “You’d come with me, right?”
I held out my pinky, and she smiled, and we promised.
I woke up with her in the shed a week later.
* * *
We check out when it’s still dark. I huddle in the passenger seat, watching the sun rise. I don’t know how many of these I have left. But I guess no one does. Javier takes my hand, his thumb moving gently over the back of it.
“It’s going to be okay,” he promises, his gift to me. I smile like I believe him, my gift to him. Erik was right. We are hell-bent on playing pretend.
We drive straight until lunch, stopping at a small diner, and while I’m in the bathroom washing my hands I glance up at the mirror and realize I’m beautiful.
Not beautiful in the magazine model sense, like Nobody. Beautiful as in incredibly well designed and capable. My hands can tie a braid without thinking, they can touch type, and once, briefly, played the flute. My eyes are 20/20 vision, my mouth can say or sing anything. My meaty little space suit, protecting me from all things in this world that are not me, has done a damn fine job the last seventeen years. I marvel at my own body for maybe the first time in my life, and yet I can’t shake the feeling it’s not mine anymore. It exists for the moment in limbo, like money placed on a table for a bet.
We decide to do drive-through for dinner and push through northern Nevada to the motel, getting there earlier than expected. The motel room is a carbon copy of the last one, except mercifully no cigarette smell. We set down our bags and stare at each other.
“Any calls or anything we have to do tonight?” I ask shyly.
“Oh, I think you know exactly what we have to do.” Javier’s eyes are intense as he strides toward me and takes me in his arms.
Chapter Twenty
Over the Line
Then, almost immediately, Javier frowns and steps back.
“You should try and kick my knee before I get to you. That’s your best block.”
“… My best block?” Awkward. I thought we were going to make out.
“We need to practice for tomorrow,” he says sternly. “If you’re going in, then you’re going in as prepared as we can get you between now and then. Let’s see what kind of weapons they packed for you, then we’ll go over some defensive moves.”
“I don’t think I got any.”
He turns my backpack on its side and digs through to the zip-up panel in the very bottom, fishing out a small black canvas bag. Inside is a brand-new bowie knife with a four-inch blade.
“Nice,” Javier muses. “But we’ll practice with this.”
He holds out my pink hairbrush.
“We don’t have to do this—”
“Yes, we do,” he insists.
“I can’t fight if I’m worrying about you.”
I swallow my protests and take the hairbrush.
Twenty minutes later, after a great deal of jabbing, feinting, and blocking his approach by (gently) kicking his knee, I seem to be getting worse. Even with Javier coming at me slowly from well across the room in plain sight, my instincts are to flinch and run, not jab and swipe.
“There’s no point!” I snap after managing to knock myself on the forehead with my own hairbrush. “I’d be better off dropping my knife and running for it.”
Javier considers this. “You are pretty fast,” he concedes. “But how far are you going to get in a fenced compound? I just need you to be able to hold off an attacker until I can help—”
There’s no point, I want to scream. This is possibly my last night on earth. I don’t want to spend it practicing knife-fighting!
“Again. Come on.” Javier returns to his starting point, across the room, in front of the truly hideous drapes. “I’m going to keep coming at you until you fend me off, okay?”
I get in the stance he’s shown me: chin slightly tucked, pink hairbrush firmly in hand, weight balanced, ready to go into a crouch. Punch for the throat. Jab at the eyes. Okay!
He crosses the room at half speed. I kick at his knee, jab toward his eye. He feints, his arms going around my waist. I put an arm around his neck, and then his mouth is on mine and we’re on the scratchy duvet cover, pressed against each other.
Now this is how I want to spend my last night on earth.
I dig my fingers through his short hair and feel his muscled neck, his carved, stubbly jaw. His lips move to my throat, melting my brain. And then his hand slides up under my shirt, along my bare back, and his fingers wind around my neck, and all the heat in me drains away.
Why is he holding the back of my neck like that?
I twist my neck to get him to loosen his grip, but he doesn’t seem to get the message, and the ridges on the back of his fingers swim before my mind’s eye with terrible clarity, and I remember his words: “I killed a guy with my bare hands.”
I push away from him, gasping, one arm straight out, elbow locked, like we’re practicing self-defense again.
“What is it?” His voice is pained.
“I need to know about your one.”
Javier rolls on his back, and the electricity fizzles out of the air. He crosses his long arm over his eyes. There’s a long beat, filled only by the rattling swamp cooler in the corner.
“So all that stuff you said, about not wanting to know about rap sheets? About getting to know everybody as themselves? I guess that was B.S.?”
“Sometimes you say what you have to. Like when you called me a useless bitch.”
“Jeez, Signal!” He sounds so stung. “Everything I said then was to keep you out of the compound! What happened to our clean slate?”
“Maybe clean slates are B.S. too,” I say bluntly. “Maybe you can’t clean a slate if you don’t know what was on it in the first place. I don’t even know what we’re agreeing to not talk about!”
“Because I don’t want you to know,” he says softly. “I’ve done some seriously bad things, Signal.”
“So tell me about it,” I plead, though my pulse is racing at just these words. “What else do we have to do tonight? I think we can agree I have well and truly killed the mood.”
He stares up at the ceiling, the face of a boy carrying the weariness of a man.
“I just wanted a new beginning,” he says softly. “If only for a couple of days.”
I’m acutely aware how these moments are slipping away. It’s my fault, and I wish desperately I could go back to before I asked him about his victim, to the heat and magic of a few moments ago. But I can’t.
I can only lie there, letting my unspoken refusal to accept so little from him hang in the air and condense into a silent anger.
“Okay. Well. It’s late,” I say dully. “I’m going to get ready for bed.”
When I get out of the bathroom, Javier is in his pajamas, sitting primly on the side of my bed. I sit down next to him and give him a “Well?” look.
“Let me see your arm?” he asks quietly.
I let him take my hand, and he picks up the complimentary pen from beside the motel phone, turns my arm over and retraces the dandelion in black ink, then looks at me, something like an apology in his eyes.
“Can I hold you?” he asks.
I get under the duvet and he lies on top of it, curled up around me, his knees behind my knees, my back against his chest. Spooning, that’s what this is called. What a stupid word for such an intimate gesture.
Finally he lifts his arm and pulls down his sleeve, tapping the figure of the boy on the inside of his forearm, which he holds out in front of me.
“You know that kid tattooed on my arm? That’s my baby brother, Mateo. Loved machines, building stuff, taking it apart. He was smart the way Dennis is smart, but so emotional. I remember he cried when he was three and someone told him Spiderman didn’t exist.”
His quick, agonized chuckle makes me instinctually grip his arm.
“I had a friend named Ricky,” he says at last, and the name comes out heavy, charged. “One of my best friends, till we got to high school. Then he got caught up with the Death Heads. So we kind of stopped hanging out—not like, I wasn’t angry about it, it was kind of … his brother Ray had always been high up in the Death Heads, so he was always going to be part of that crowd. But it meant we were on two different tracks.”
I nod in the darkness.
“But it’s summer, so Ricky drops by one day and says, oh let’s go to the corner store like old times, and Mateo wants to tag along. Except Ricky’s wearing this black bandanna around his forehead. He’s flagging for Death Heads—you know what flagging means?”
“Like … advertising he’s one of them?”
“Right. Well, I didn’t know, back then. I was such an idiot. It was just a black bandanna to me.” He pauses, then forces himself on. “So we’re walking along the street with Ricky, Mateo’s asking me if I’ll get him sour punch straws. And I was teasing like I wouldn’t, but I always did …” His voice breaks off for a moment and I grip his hand. “But then this car slows, this red Mustang. I remember thinking, these guys must know Ricky, and that’s when it happens, this huge bang. It was so loud. It’s not like on TV, it’s so much louder …”
No no no.
“They missed Ricky,” he says simply. “Mateo was twelve.”
I turn on my side to face him. “I’m sorry.” How wholly inadequate. His hands slide up and cover his face for a moment and he just shakes. At last he comes up, with a sound like someone coming out of water for air.
“My dad? He’s real tall, like I am? Built, just like, the strongest guy. But at the funeral? I had to … I had to lead him by the hand down the stairs. Like he was an old man.” Javier’s voice breaks, and I wait for him to go on.
“Two, three weeks go by, and nothing,” Javier says, his voice low. “No arrests, no suspects, no witnesses. Everybody knew who did it, but nobody would give evidence. The shooters, you understand, they’re with the Centro Street Gang, so nobody wants to get involved. Not even Ricky.”
He’s holding my hands now, so tight it hurts. I squeeze back.
“The day before the homecoming game, I get dragged to this house party, and there’s the same red Mustang, parked right out front! I’m like, how many times did I describe this car to the police? And it’s just parked right out front, in plain sight!” The frustration is still raw, his voice high and strained with disbelief.
“I walk in and there he is. There’s the shooter. I recognize him immediately. It’s the same guy who’s been in my nightmares for weeks, when I see him it’s like someone’s punched me. This guy … he’s drunk, fat, chatting up some girl, not a care in the world. Mateo is buried next to my grandmother, and this guy is just … walking around? It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right! My friends tried to stop me, but I go u
p to him and I say, you’re the one. You’re the one who killed Mateo Olivar.”
He swallows.
“And this kid’s like, ‘Who?’”
Javier lets out a thin, joyless laugh.
“It’s a blur after that. Something … just snapped. I was in football, I was a center my junior year, I was the strongest I’d ever been. After that first punch, I don’t really remember anything. Not until the cops pulled me off him.”
So this is why he doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t remember it. He lives my worst fear: he killed without even realizing it.
Javier lets out a long sigh. “The Death Heads claimed they ordered it, to make themselves look tough. Like: you shoot at us, you get your skull pushed in!”
I shudder at the image.
“So that’s how I was charged, like it was a gang killing. Didn’t matter that I was varsity football, honor roll, had stopped hanging out with Ricky the last three years … oh no, I was a gang banger. It wasn’t till I got in prison—because they put me in adult prison, oh yes—it wasn’t till I got in that I joined. To stay safe, I let the Death Heads put the tear by my eye. But I kept Mateo where I could always see him. So I can remember to try and be who he thought I was.”
I lift his hand to my lips and kiss each one of his scarred knuckles.
“They scare you?” he says after a long moment. “The scars?”
“Not when I know where they come from,” I tell him honestly. “Do you feel any better?”
“No, not really,” he says bluntly. “Talking about this kind of thing … it doesn’t … this pain is always going to be there. Whether I talk about it or not. Some things will never be right. No matter what you say about them.”
I lay there, holding his hand, rubbing the back of it with my thumb.
“Tell me about Mateo?” I ask gently.
I carefully extract them: better and better memories, until I hear the smile come back to his voice. Once the smile is back the exhaustion creeps in, and our words start to trail off.
