Anyone but You

by Lara M. Zeises

  “It’s with Scott,” I said. “Remember?”

  She nodded, turned, and ran out the door.

  seattle

  Negotiating the Past

  I started walking, not sure where I was going, but knowing I couldn’t stay there. All the food I’d eaten that night was sloshing around my maxed-out stomach. I needed a cigarette. I needed a shot of Jäger.

  I needed Frank not to be in our living room.

  My head was buzzing with so many unwanted thoughts that I didn’t hear Critter and Jesse approaching; I just felt Critter’s hand reach for mine—the same one Scott had held earlier.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling me toward him in a hug.

  My brother’s long, lanky arms slipped around me, his body covering mine like a layer of skinny-boy armor. I circled my arms around his lower back and held on tightly. I was afraid that if he let go, I might float away.

  I didn’t know how long it had been before I realized there was a second set of hands on my back, rubbing ovals over the fabric of my tank top. Jesse’s touch sent me crashing back to reality. I wiggled free, sat down on a nearby curb, and dropped my face into my hands.

  They sat down, too, flanking me. But it was Critter who extended his arm again, pulling me to him in a half hug and stroking the patch of fuzz I now called hair. “What is he doing here, anyway?” I asked.

  “Who the hell knows?” Jesse said, but Critter just looked away.

  “You knew,” I accused him.

  “Not exactly,” he said, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Well, what exactly did you know?”

  Critter sighed. “I knew he was in Dover. And that he wanted to see you. But I swear, I didn’t know he’d be here tonight. I thought Layla was going to talk to you first.”

  Layla. Of course she’d have known. She would’ve been the one to tell him where we were. How could she?

  “What else do you know?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “That’s about it. Honest.”

  We sat there for a while, not talking. A car passed by; maybe it was his. No one wanted to get up and check.

  Eventually Jesse said, “We can’t stay out here forever.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “Watch me.”

  All of a sudden, Layla was walking toward us, telling the boys to go back in the house. Jesse got up right away, but Critter looked at me, waiting for approval. I nodded.

  “You sure?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  Layla stood over me, her arms folded across her stomach, one foot pressing against the curb. “I am so sorry this happened the way it did. We’d agreed that I’d talk to you first. That’s what tonight was supposed to be—me telling you about his call.”

  “How could you?” I shook my head. “You know how I feel about this. You know I never wanted to see him again.”

  “Missy, I had no idea he was going to show up like this. I swear to you.”

  “So?” I said. “He shouldn’t have known how to find us to begin with!”

  Layla sat down beside me. “You can’t hide from him forever, Sea. He’s your dad, and believe it or not, he loves you a lot.”

  “If you loved me, you never would’ve let him in our house.”

  I heard her draw a deep breath, sucking the air through her teeth. Then she exhaled all slow-like. Meditation breathing. After a while she said, “Listen, Missy, you don’t know the whole story.”

  “I know enough.”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t.”

  I sat quietly, waiting for her to go on. She pulled her long black hair over one shoulder, separated it into three chunks, and braided it. “Well?” I finally said. “What is it you think I don’t know?”

  “Your dad had some problems. Things he wants to talk to you about—things we all should’ve talked about a long time ago. But he’s not here to get you. It’s not his plan to take you away from us.”

  I should’ve been relieved. That was what I wanted, right? To stay there with her and Critter and Jesse. The thing was, once the words were spoken, I sort of wanted her to take them back.

  “What if I don’t want to talk to him?”

  “No one will force you to,” she said. “But I think you should. It’s been a long time, and I think he’s really trying to change. I don’t mean he’s going to be Ward Cleaver all of a sudden. But he seems genuinely concerned about you, about what you’ve been up to and if you’re okay.”

  “I don’t care what he wants,” I said. “I’ve been doing just fine without him.”

  Layla nodded, her fingers undoing the braid she’d just woven in her hair. “There was a thing on Oprah a while back that I caught one day during rounds. She was interviewing some guy who’d written a book about fathers. A lot of it was nonsense, but one thing stuck with me. He said, ‘Kids have a hole in their soul that’s shaped like their dads.’ ”

  “So?”

  “So I guess what I’m trying to say,” she continued, “is that I don’t want you to grow up with that kind of hole. Give him a chance, Seattle. Talk to him. And after that, if you still don’t want to see him anymore, I’ll let it go. Okay?”

  On some level, I knew she was right. One conversation wouldn’t kill me. But I didn’t want her to be right. I had no idea what my father had come back to say, or if I’d even want to hear his words. For all he’d known, I could’ve ended up in foster care, rented out to parents looking for an extra income. That hadn’t stopped him from leaving.

  And yet . . .

  No matter how hot my anger ran, deep down I knew Layla would never ask me to do something that would really be bad for me. She was the only adult who loved me the way a parent was supposed to, who put my welfare before even her own.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll have your little talk. But not tonight. Tomorrow. And not at the house, either. I want to go somewhere public. Like a restaurant or something.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Layla said, placing her hand on my knee. “I’ll even get Trish to cover for me at work, if you want, so I can be here when you get back.”

  “Good.”

  By the time we hit the front door, I was numb. Completely, totally, utterly numb. I walked past the living room and straight up the stairs. Jess and Critter were waiting for me in the bedroom. They started grilling me, trying to figure out what Layla and I had talked about. I gave them one-word answers for all of two minutes before informing them that what I really wanted was to crawl in bed and go to sleep, and that if they didn’t leave me alone, I’d go nuclear.

  That shut them up pretty quick.

  But once they left, I couldn’t fall asleep. Not right away. I felt like everything was coming undone. Why was Frank here? What did he want? I remembered something he’d said when I was really little, before he’d even met Layla. I’d been asking him why I didn’t have a mom, and he’d told me she was too good for this world—that God had wanted her for his own. Then he said, “But you don’t have anything to worry about, Princess. I will always be here for you. Forever and ever and ever.”

  Only I guess for him, “forever” meant “until you are nine.”

  Breakfast of Champions

  Layla woke me up early the next morning, just before seven; Frank was scheduled to pick me up at eight. It wasn’t until after my shower that I noticed the note taped to my mirror. It was from Jesse, who’d already left for work, and it read:

  Look in your sock drawer. Hope breakfast

  isn’t too painful. —J

  The money. I’d forgotten about it, not to mention the fact that I was supposed to meet Scott at nine. I opened the drawer and poked around until I found the bills, two twenties and a ten, tucked into the elastic of a tube sock that had lost its mate. I couldn’t believe I’d sold my soul to Jesse for the fifty bucks. At first I’d called it a loan, offered him interest on the deal. But when he asked me how I planned to pay it back, I told him I was going to get my grades up so I could get a part-time job
at a skate shop in the fall.

  “You’re serious about this?” he asked.

  “Deadly.”

  “Then I’ll make you a deal. If you get a B or higher in your summer school class, I’ll call it even. But you have to keep it up come September, you got it? You get lazy and start pulling Cs again, and I’m gonna want my money back.”

  I agreed without hesitation. I’d meant what I’d said about getting a job. I didn’t know why I’d never thought of it before, but a skate shop would be the perfect place of employment. I’d get discounts, for one thing. I could read all the magazines and watch all the videos without spending a penny. Plus, I’d have the inside scoop on competitions and stuff. It was genius.

  Time to get dressed. I put on the most obnoxious ensemble I owned: a black T-shirt with the word “bitch” written on it in pale pink letters, wide-legged tan pants that were a size too big and sat low on my hips, and my scuffed-up Doc Martens. Then I lined my eyes in electric blue, both on top and on the inside rims.

  As a final touch, I buckled a silver-studded dog collar around my neck. I thought I’d look tough, but when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I realized that I looked exactly like those faux-punk kids that Critter and I always made fun of for trying too hard. I took the dog collar off, stuffed Jesse’s fifty bucks into my back pocket, and headed downstairs.

  He picked me up in a tricked-out Olds circa 1990. Its insides were pristine; it even smelled of new leather, though I knew that had to be the result of car wash air freshener and not the elephant gray seats. Everything on the dash was digital. There were even buttons on the steering wheel that controlled the radio.

  We hadn’t said more than three words to each other since we’d left the house, and he was the one who’d said them: “You look nice.” It took an enormous amount of effort not to laugh in his face.

  At the IHOP the hostess asked if we wanted a table or a booth. Frank indicated that I was the one who should make the decision, but I refused to utter a peep. Finally, he said, “Booth’s fine,” to which I responded, “I want a table.”

  Frank grimaced for a split second before the mask of Happy Dad fell back into place. It was funny watching him try to hide his annoyance. The hostess, though, just rolled her eyes, grabbed two sticky menus, and led us to a table in the way back.

  I studied the menu like I was going to be quizzed on it at any second, even though I always ordered the same thing whenever we came here: Swedish pancakes, side of hash browns, and a cup of coffee with extra creamers. Even so, when Frank cleared his throat and asked, “Do you know what you want?” I shrugged.

  He sighed and turned to look out the window, at the scenic parking lot view. His profile looked different somehow. His nose had a deeper slope than I’d remembered, and there were way more bruised-looking sag-bags under his dull gray eyes. His skin looked sort of gray, too, like he hadn’t gotten much sun in the past decade, and his hair had all of these coarse silver strands streaking through it.

  Underneath it all, though, I could still see him. The guy I used to call Dad.

  A waitress approached our table and introduced herself with a sugary “And how y’all doing today?” Her name was Cindie, and the ie was enough to make me hate her. But I was going to be as sweet as pie to anyone who wasn’t my father.

  So I smiled at her as I ordered, asking for an extra side of lingonberry jam, but only because I knew they charged a dollar for it. Frank ordered some egg thing with a side of scrapple. “I can’t believe you still eat that crap,” I said. “It always looks like dog food.” He didn’t respond.

  A Muzak version of the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” played over the restaurant’s speaker system. I wanted to remember to tell Critter about it later, for the ever-growing list he kept of Great Musical Atrocities.

  When the next song—this time a cover of Billy Joel’s “Allentown”—came on, I decided to speed things up.

  “So what is it you have to say to me?”

  Frank blinked a few times; clearly I’d caught him off guard.

  “Well? What is it?”

  “I don’t know where to start,” he said. “This . . . it’s hard for me, Princess.”

  “Okay, first of all? Call me princess again and I am so out of here. And second of all, just say it. Whatever it is you came here to say. Spit it out.”

  He picked up his water and took a long gulp, crushed a few mostly melted cubes of ice between his teeth. I sat there, glaring at him, half expecting him to give me some soap-operaesque tale. But what he said was “I started seeing this shrink about a year ago. In Scranton. I was living in Scranton and I started seeing this shrink because I was depressed. I don’t mean like sad; I mean like I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. That kind of depressed.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “So?”

  He sighed. “So I was seeing this shrink, and it turns out . . . well, it turns out I’d been depressed for a while. Probably long before Val—uh, your mom—passed away. I guess you could say I wasn’t real happy with the way my life turned out.”

  Oh, this was rich. The fire in my belly rose into my throat. “I suppose that’s my fault, right?”

  “No,” he said. “Not at all. But—”

  “But what? Did you actually think I’d feel sorry for you?”

  “I wanted you to know why I left. Because it didn’t have anything to do with you. Not a single thing. It was about me, about what I was going through. I should’ve handled things better.”

  “Of course you should have,” I spat, sounding strong even though inside I was starting to shake. “But you’ve always been a selfish asshole.”

  He closed his eyes and gave a little nod. “Yeah,” he said, eyes still closed. “That sounds about right.”

  “Well,” I said. “Glad we cleared that up.”

  “I’m not finished.”

  “So get finished.”

  He rubbed the corner of one eye, almost like he was coaxing it to open again. “I messed up,” he said. “I know it. I’m not looking for you to tell me any different. I was a horrible father. Okay? I said it. I. Was. A. Horrible. Father.”

  “You were a nonexistent father,” I said, my voice cracking on that final word. “And this breakfast is over.”

  I pushed back my chair and strode toward the door. If I’d stayed there another second, I would’ve started crying, and I’d already promised myself he wouldn’t ever see me cry. I didn’t even want to show him how angry I was, but the anger was clearly too much to control.

  On the other side of the glass doors, a hot, dry morning smacked me in the face. It felt good, though, after the overly air-conditioned restaurant. I reached into my pants pockets to see if I had any coins for a pay phone, but all I had was Jesse’s bills. It didn’t matter. Layla had made good on her promise and taken the day off. I could walk to the Food-n-Stuff and call her collect.

  I’d gone all of two steps when Frank came through the doors, spotted me, and jogged over. I willed my feet to work, but they were glued to the parking lot. In fact, it wasn’t until Frank’s hand reached out and brushed my shoulder that I could move at all.

  “Don’t you dare!” I screamed, not caring who else could hear. “Don’t you dare touch me!”

  “Keep your voice down,” he begged.

  I tried to get around him, but he moved with me, blocking me. “Please, Seattle,” he said. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”

  I thought of my promise to Layla, that I’d at least hear him out. But she should’ve warned me. Especially if she’d known that all he wanted to do was whine. Pity me, my life sucked, that’s why I was a bad father. Screw that.

  Frank stood there, staring at me with pleading eyes, but I refused to get pulled in. Eventually I managed to say, “I want to go home.” He nodded, pulled out the cloth napkin still tucked into the waistband of his jeans, and walked toward the Olds.

  One Foot in Front of the Other

  He didn’t say anything to me as we drove back to the
house. Even though the Olds had air-conditioning, I opened the window and breathed in the hot wind. As we turned onto our street, I checked the digital clock on the dash and saw that it was quarter to nine. If I didn’t go inside, I could still make it to meet Scott on time. Of course, that would mean showing up without my helmet and pads. But I knew that if I went home, Layla would give me the third degree and I’d never get out of there.

  Frank put the car in park but left it running. “I know you weren’t expecting me to show up like this. But I want to talk to you. There are still some things I need to say.”

  “Whatever.”

  I set off in a sprint before he could stop me. It was only six blocks or so to Russ’s house, but I landed on the doorstep a panting, sweaty mess.

  “Running from the law?” Scott joked as he let me in.

  I didn’t answer; I just pushed past him so that I could get to the bathroom. I looked as gross as I felt. The sweat had melted my liner into junkie-chic smudges, a look not improved by my now red-rimmed eyes. I spotted a bar of soap next to the faucet and used it to scrub my face clean.

  Scott was standing not too far from the door when I emerged, concern clouding his face. “You okay?”

  “I left my gear at home,” I said, ignoring him. “So I can’t hit the skate park with you today.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I snapped. “I just need to get my skateboard and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

  Scott frowned. “Who said I want you out of my hair?”

  “Look, I have to leave. Now. My brothers—they know Russ, know where he lives, and eventually someone’s going to think about coming here to look for me. But I don’t want to be found right now, so if you can just give me my board, I’ll go.”

  “Hey,” Scott said, rubbing my shoulder. “What’s going on?”

  I pushed his hand away. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

  “Seattle,” he said. “This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you about Katja. Because now you think I’m just some asshole guy. Right? The thing is, I really do like you. A lot.”