My Beating Teenage Heart

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  “There was half a spider in my Caesar,” Georgia begins, “but the salad was so delicious that I didn’t stop to look for the other half.”

  Mr. Baldassarre groans and shakes his head. “If I turned marketing over to you two, I’d lose all my customers by Monday.”

  “Except the meatball kid,” Breckon points out. “He’d still want the meatball sub.”

  That makes me want to smile, and I say silently to Breckon, You can be funny when you want to, can’t you? Clearly being here is good for him, like a flashback of his old life.

  Over the course of the next few hours a steady trickle of mall shoppers and people leaving the gym drop in to buy meals ably assembled by Breckon, Georgia and Mr. Baldassarre. A third employee, a lanky tall guy named Takuya who can’t be older than twenty, shows up just in time for the movie rush Breckon was telling his parents about earlier.

  Breckon’s the fastest worker of them all. Takuya gets cranky whenever there’s a line and Georgia is slow but methodical. Most of the people who stream in after the movie are teenagers. They’re loud and excitable and many of them are trashing the movie when they walk in. I hear at least three different guys, at different times, label it “weak-ass shit.”

  “I don’t get why everybody’s so surprised that it sucks,” Takuya says to Breckon during a lull between customers. “When studios don’t screen for the press first, it’s a sure sign the movie’s a waste of money.”

  To me it looks as though the teenagers are as happy to complain about the movie as they would be to rave about it if it’d been any good, so maybe it doesn’t matter about the money.

  “Breckon!” Georgia yells from the cash register. “Your friends are here.”

  Ty, Big Red (who it took me a while to figure out is really named Rory) and a couple of other guys I recognize from Breckon’s school saunter up to the counter. “What time are you on till, dude?” Big Red wants to know.

  “Whenever it dies down in here,” Breckon says. “So was the movie as shitty as everyone’s saying?”

  “And then some,” Ty says, puffing out his cheeks. “But hey, man, you want to catch up with us after this place closes?”

  “I don’t know—where are you guys going to be at?”

  div>eight="0em" width="1em" align="justify">Big Red shrugs. “Probably over at Denny’s getting shakes or hanging out down by the lake.”

  “Excuse me,” the teenage girl next to him interrupts.

  Big Red turns to look at her. “Yeah?”

  “Where’s the Denny’s? Is that around here?” The girl has long blond hair and a perky smile, and Big Red’s gaze drops to check out her body.

  “It’s at Richmond Road and Blakely—you know, that same strip mall that has a Home Depot and a Sport Chek in it?”

  The girl, who’s traveling in a pack with three similarly attractive friends, listens to a brunette in a purple hoodie say, “That’s way too far to walk. My dad will kill us if I call him to pick us up all the way over there.”

  “We can give you a ride if you want,” Ty offers. “Shuttle service. We’d have to make two trips, though. We’re driving a Corolla.”

  The other brunette raises her eyebrows at the suggestion. “That’s either nice of you or serial-killer creepy,” she comments.

  Ty laughs, showing his teeth. “Is that a no thanks then?”

  Breckon’s watching the exchange from across the counter, same as I am, while Georgia and Takuya begin to take the girls’ orders.

  “We better not,” the blonde who originally interrupted Big Red says. “We just thought if it was close …”

  “Nah, it’s definitely not close.” Ty’s still eyeing the brunette who shot him down with the serial-killer remark, addressing her instead of her friend. “But why don’t you give me your number and I’ll give you a call sometime—unless that’s creepy too?”

  The brunette’s mouth stretches into a grin for him. “Depends what you plan on saying, I guess. Give me your phone.”

  Ty reaches into his back pocket for it and hands her his cell. “I’m Ty, by the way.”

  “Anya,” she says as she keys her number into his phone.

  “Anya,” he repeats, keeping his eyes on hers. “Thanks. I’ll call you later.”

  The second the girls have left with their sub order Ty hurls pissed-off glances at his friends and says, “What happened to you pricks? You just left me hanging in the wind there when I said we could drive them.”

  Big Red and the other guys don’t have much to say in their defense. “I don’t think her friends were gonna go for it anyway,” Breckon ventures. “But at least you got her number, man.”

  “Yeah, she was hot,” Ty says, and; Tt least just then another wave of customers hits. Breckon’s friends remind him to catch up with them later and take off.

  Breckon’s spent so much time alone this week that I don’t really expect him to hang out with Ty and Big Red after work, but he does. He drives over to Denny’s to meet them and orders onion rings and a strawberry milk shake. In the parking lot a guy in a hoodie and a devil mask—but naked from the waist down except for a pair of Nike running shoes and sports socks—jogs slowly alongside a creeping Mazda crammed with howling teenage guys. They’re blasting the Pitbull song “I Know You Want Me” from the car, and the noise of that combined with their shouting prompts Denny’s employees and customers alike to stare out the window. “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro. I know you want me …”

  A vision of dancing to this song whirls through my mind. My teenage arms, hips, breasts, I see them all shake and swivel in time to the music. “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro.” Then, just as quickly, the memory evaporates into thin air, leaving me in a restaurant booth with Breckon and his friends. Outside the devil’s shielding his penis from public view, both hands clamped over it as he attempts a few simple dance moves himself.

  Big Red chokes on his shake and he and Ty laugh so hard that they gasp for breath. Breckon smiles brighter than I’ve ever seen, drops the onion ring he was holding onto his plate and says, “Looks like he won the bet—I wonder how much it was for.”

  “Could just be a dare,” Big Red guesses, still fighting for control of his lungs. “Or just for the lulz.”

  The six of us peer out the Denny’s window and watch the devil pry his hands away from his penis to reveal—for the briefest second only—that he’s wearing a glow-in-the-dark condom. The devil’s friends have opened the back door for him and he dives in, a flash of his skinny white ass the last thing there is to see before the car speeds off into the night.

  Breckon laughs out loud and Ty, who’s never really stopped, declares, “Damn, that’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all week!”

  “Dude,” Big Red sputters as he holds his sides. “That’s going to give me a fucking asthma attack. That guy’s my hero.”

  I wonder, if I was sitting there with Breckon and his friends in the flesh, what I would say. Obviously they find the streaker funnier than I did. It was stupid-funny but not in a way that would make me laugh out loud. Maybe it’d seem funnier if I was with my own friends, or even the girls Ty and Big Red were talking to in Zavi’s.

  But I’m glad to see and hear Breckon laugh. I zoom in for a close-up on his cheerful eyes and listen to his breathing with my special hearing, but there’s nothing remarkable to hear. He’s just a boy having a good time with his friends and suddenly I’m happier in the moment than I’ve been since I woke up trapped and dead. Tonight I don’t need to say anything to him in my mother’s voice. Tonight my Breckon worries can simmer on the back burner, and it’s not God I have to thank for that, but the devil.

  twelve

  breckon

  I drive Big Red home and Ty takes Brett and Kostas. The devil’s inspired Rory and he thinks we should try to top him by doing some group streak, wearing Bart Simpson masks or Beatles wigs. I know he’ll never actually do it but I go along with the scenarios for a while instead of bursting his bubble. Rory can be like an Asperger’s kid when he gets
really excited about something: he’ll talk about it until you’re bored to tears, but if you call him out on it he reacts like a kid too—all discouraged and moody—and I don’t feel like dealing with that. I was feeling good at the restaurant, but as soon as we left the emptiness was back like it’d never left.

  When we get close to his house Big Red goes quiet for a bit and then says, “This is off the record, but remember what Ty was saying about leaving him hanging before with those chicks?”

  “Yeah.” If Rory thinks he can get a bunch of girls to dance naked through a parking lot with us, he’s insane.

  “So, the thing is,” he continues, “I’ve been hooking up with Isabel Castillo but she doesn’t want anyone to know. You know, her parents are hardcore Catholic and she figures that we should just keep it under wraps.”

  Isabel Castillo is good friends with my ex, Nadine, so I know her pretty well. Their families have been close since preschool. Isabel’s nice but doesn’t go to parties or hang out much. You can see her flinch if you swear around her, like someone who’s lived a very sheltered life.

  I guess the surprise is plastered on my face because Rory says, “Not sex, dude, you know … whatever …” He points his face out the window.

  “So, like, no one knows about you two?” I ask. “No one?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, man. It’s off the record.”

  “So why are you telling me?”

  “I don’t know.” Big Red exhales in the same deliberate way you do if you’re smoking a cigarette. “I guess it just didn’t seem real if I couldn’t tell at least one other person.”

  I get it. I don’t think they can last long as a secret though. Either someone will find out or sneaking around will become too big a pain in the ass to want to bother with.

  “The thing is, there’s all this temptation walking around out there,” Rory notes. “Like that blond chick with the sweet body at Zavi’s. It’d be easier if everyone knew about Isabel. Then I wouldn’t have to police myself, you know? It’d be a well-known fact that I had a girlfriend.”

  I shrug. “Things are what they are.” I don’t know what he expects me to say. This thing he’s thinking of as a problem is so microscopic that he should quit worrying and just be grateful for it.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he says. “I just thought that you’d have some words of wisdom or something, seeing how you and Jules have been together for so long.”

  Advice on how to stop yourself from wanting to fuck somebody else, that’s what he wants from me. I shoot him a tired look. “Maybe you should just break it off with Isabel,” I offer as we pull up to his house.

  Big Red’s face jolts like he’s just been struck by lightning. “But I don’t want to do that. I mean … I really like her.”

  Just get out of the car, man, I think. Not long ago we were killing ourselves laughing and now I feel like I don’t want to waste my breath on him. There were a few seconds back at Denny’s when Skylar wasn’t in my head at all, not even the corner of my mind, lurking. It didn’t matter if she’d ever existed or not. The streaker dude caught me off guard and tipped everything out of my head except the stupid glow-in-the-dark condom he was wearing.

  “If she’s that important you’ll figure it out,” I mutter.

  “Sure.” Big Red’s foot jerks but the rest of him is still. “Catch you later.”

  “Later,” I tell him.

  He opens the passenger door and hops out of the car without looking back. Normally when I’m driving I plug in my iPod and listen to tunes, but I don’t bother with that anymore, so it’s quiet. I take a left out of Big Red’s neighborhood and turn onto Simcoe Street. It’s twenty-five minutes to two so there aren’t many cars on the road, even though it’s Saturday night. There’s really nowhere to go in Strathedine this late; your best bet for entertainment is running into the devil outside Denny’s.

  Alone in the car with no one else on the road, the urge to keep my foot on the gas until I end up someplace no one will ever find me burrows back into my brain. I could get a job pumping gas in Saskatoon or busing tables in a restaurant in Halifax. I don’t need much, just food and a place to sleep at night.

  There are people living like that right now. People who are floating free, not attached to anyone.

  I follow this pared-down existence through in my head, wondering what Eva would make of my fantasy. I see myself waking up in an apartment with dirty windows and checking which of my clothes are clean enough to put on again because I’m overdue to go to the Laundromat. I see myself eating alone in a cheap diner or cooking spaghetti on a hot plate after working ten hours straight at some sweaty minimum wage job. There would be days and days of this and really nothing else. And if it would bring Skylar back, it’d be the easiest thing in the world to live like that, but deep down I know that I’ll feel the same way wherever I go as I do right now, that I’ll never be able to fool mysel tog inf into thinking she’s still around, no matter how far I get from Strathedine. I could make it all the way to Papua New Guinea and I’d still know.

  If even leaving won’t work, I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know how to keep walking, talking and breathing.

  I want to hurt myself again. But I know I shouldn’t.

  More than that, though, I just want to quit. Say fuck this all and walk away.

  I loosen my grip on the steering wheel. About six weeks ago when Jules and I were on our way to Bourneville to hang out at Boleyn’s, I let her steer from the passenger seat while I chomped on a slice of pizza I’d picked up along the way. It was a clear night, no snow on the ground or in the air, and neither of us really thought of her driving for a couple minutes as dangerous or even gave it a second thought. But Renee and Cameron were in the backseat and Renee freaked out like we were the Titanic going down and there weren’t enough lifeboats to go around. I had to grab the wheel again and hand my slice back to Jules to stop Renee from screaming into my ear.

  Something could have happened to all of us in the car that night and it didn’t. So why Skylar and why when she was just a kid in the second grade, not even old enough for long division?

  Tonight there’s nobody with me to worry about and no one else to steer for me either. I take my hands off the wheel, still holding them out in front of me, grasping air. Then I shut my eyes and envision the world spinning on without me. Nearly seven billion people in the world. What’s one less?

  Except to my parents. And Jules. And my grandparents and the guys I was hanging out with tonight …

  I see all their faces from behind my closed eyelids and I lunge forward. My eyes snap open as I seize the wheel. You’re such an asshole, I tell myself. What the fuck do you think you’re doing? What if you flattened an old man in a wheelchair trying to cross the street? Or a lady with a sleeping kid in a car seat? How many more people do you want to kill?

  My foot eases up on the gas. The car slows until a jogger could pass it with no problem. I drive home, the feeling that I’m going to throw up clawing at my throat and my hands shaking. What did I just do?

  Nothing, I tell myself. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Calm yourself the fuck down before you go inside.

  I plug my iPod in after all, my fingers jerking, and listen to Johnny Cash sing “A Boy Named Sue” three times in a row. Tonight is the kind of thing that Eva would want me to call her for, but what can she do? Unless someone can change history for me they’re all just varying degrees of useless.

  Breathe, I say inside my head and the voice doesn’t even really sound like mine, but after a while I’m stable enough to get out of the car and unlock my front door. The TV’s still on in the family room and I follow the sound and find my mother curled up in the fetal position on the couch, with her eyes closed and her favorite china teacup (one her grandmother gave her before she died) full to di6;

  A black-and-white movie’s flickering across the screen and I decide not to turn the TV off, in case the silence wakes my mother. A week before Christmas
Skylar got the flu and camped out on the couch for days with a yellow beach pail on the floor next to her in case she had to puke and couldn’t make it to the bathroom. On the second day I was watching basketball with the sound down while she slept and she opened her eyes and looked at me but was too miserable to say anything.

  “You want me to get you anything?” I asked.

  “No,” she whispered in a small voice. She pulled the blanket closer around her chin and drifted off to sleep again.

  I think if my mother opened her eyes right now she’d give me the same look that was in Skylar’s eyes that night.

  “Mom?” I say quietly. Usually she’s a light sleeper, but not tonight. I should throw a blanket over her and let her sleep.

  That moment in the car … I meant it. In those seconds I felt ready to leave everything, but in retrospect I’m terrified, my heart feels as though it will race all night, overclock itself and give out like a fried computer.

  “Mom,” I repeat, raising my voice, “were you waiting up?”

  My mother’s eyes open slowly. She stares at me, then thrusts herself up on her elbows to squint at her watch.

  “Were you waiting up?” I say again, panic galloping inside me. Breathe, man. Get a grip.

  “Breckon,” my mother mumbles. “It’s nearly two o’clock.” Her bangs fall into her eyes as she shifts into a seated position on the couch.

  “I know—sorry. Some of the guys dropped by work and wanted to go to Denny’s after. You and Dad are usually asleep by the time I get home when I work late so I didn’t think—”

  “You should’ve called.” Mom sweeps the hair from her face. She coughs dryly into her palm and takes a sip of what must be cold tea. “How’s Ty? Was he there tonight?”

  I perch on the couch’s arm. “He’s okay. There was a streaker outside Denny’s. Some guy in a devil mask.” What I’m thinking, while I say that, is that what happened in the car tonight can only happen once. I’ve promised myself that before, about other things, but this has to be different. Skylar’s gone but I need to stay. That’s what she would want. That’s what everyone would want for me.