Wanted

by Heidi Ayarbe

Seth comes up to me. “Can you believe today? It’s like newspaper porn.” He holds the Commandments in his hands. “Other than the banner, I particularly like ‘Thou Shalt Consider Study Hall the Sabbath and Nap.’”

  I laugh. “‘The Student Council Is Synonymous with Bourgeois.’” I point a finger at him, smiling.

  “Don’t look at me,” Seth says, holding his hands up in surrender. “But this is something big. Real big. There’s going to be a special PB & J next week. You up for funding?”

  “Absolutely,” I say.

  “Catch you tomorrow, then, at Josh’s place. Divisional playoffs party.”

  That’s news to me.

  I swallow back that left-out feeling, thinking that as soon as this day is over, I’ll probably sleep until Monday. It’s probably a guy thing—watching the games at Josh’s house.

  I stand in the middle of the hallway. Kids stream around me. I’m untouchable—even after today. Totally invisible.

  Then he bumps into me. “Are you trying to defy mob laws of physics?” Josh asks.

  “No. No. It’s, um—”

  “Standing in the middle of this place will get you killed.” He pulls me to the side of the hall. We lean against the gray lockers. “You’re a genius. I could kiss you.”

  Do! But I resist the urge to pucker. “I didn’t have time to ask you if it was okay,” I say, trying to keep from turning to a puddle of goo in his arms. The hallways have cleared.

  “Genius,” Josh mutters. I silently swoon. “And the Commandments. Fallen Commandments. You’re brilliant.”

  “I dunno. I kind of feel bad because some kids actually saved money to go on the ski trip. A girl in my physics class was pretty bummed. Sixty bucks down the tubes. They’re getting screwed here.”

  Josh shrugs. “They played into the elitism, you know. They could’ve protested and said they wanted something for everybody.” He’s so sure of everything. So right.

  “Most probably weren’t thinking like Gandhi. We’re only in high school.”

  “So that’s an excuse to not think?”

  I can’t help but believe that we’ve made a difference—a change. We’ve shaken up the natural order of things, and the world will now be different because of Babylonia. Babylonia.

  “Anyway, tomorrow. My place. Noon. Division playoffs. Small group,” Josh says.

  Exhale.

  “Cool. Tomorrow. I’m in.”

  Stragglers head to the doors. It’s eerie how the school doors open to such brightness—like watching people cross over in one of those ghost-talkers shows.

  “Movies, tonight. My place. We’ll talk Cardinals versus Rams and how many yards we think Morrison will throw to win the game.”

  “Do you know how unlikely it is to think the Cardinals will win? They shouldn’t even be in the playoffs. Wild-card luck.”

  “I’m lucky. We bet on the Cardinals. To make it interesting, we’ll bet on a running game. They win on the ground, not by Morrison’s gun. Come over. We’ll debate about it.”

  “I’m so tired. Don’t you sleep?”

  He shrugs. “It’s an Ellison thing I picked up over the last couple of years, sleeping like five hours a night. My dad’s the same. Three extra hours a day over the course of, say, seventy-five years adds up to over eighty-two thousand hours, which is like three thousand four hundred more days—all in all, nine more years. So when I’m seventy-five, I’ll actually have lived eighty-four years. Nine years. A lot of quality time.”

  “So what about dozing off in Mrs. B’s class?”

  “For somebody who never noticed me, you certainly observe a lot.”

  I blush.

  “Catnaps. Just to keep me going. So. What about tonight?”

  “How about this: I’ll come over tomorrow. I, unlike you, need sleep.”

  “Deal. I’ll pick you up.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  Josh walks down the hall. “Insurance. I’ll be at your place tomorrow at eleven thirty.”

  “Fine,” I say. He stops when he’s about ready to leave the building. My phone beeps.

  Place the bet. Cardinals. A hundred on Cuccaro; sixty rushing yards.

  “You’re insane,” I mutter. That’s as far-fetched as they come. It’s not like Cuccaro is Walter Payton or Emmitt Smith. He’s good. But sixty yards? I should’ve taken him up on Morrison’s passing game.

  I drive home on autopilot. I’ve never so looked forward to getting to my room and bed in all my life. I organize my bets, making sure I read through them twice before placing them.

  Lillian heats a couple of pot pies in the oven. We wash them down with watery Kool-Aid. There’s a strange comfort in the expected—our routine—since the past week has been everything but. “You look tired,” she says.

  “I am,” I say, and stand up to clear off the table.

  She sits me down and cleans the dishes, back turned to me. “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s okay,” I say. Jumbled and messy and crazy. But okay. “Just tired.” I talk to her back—straight and strong, as always. I wonder why we never talk to each other; why there’s always a paper, a wall, her back, or mine between us. “Good night, Lillian,” I say.

  “Good night.”

  Missing predictable comforts. Emotions bubble inside.

  Chapter 15

  “PSST! PSST!” TAPTAPTAPTAPTAP.

  I jerk awake, my heart pounding, and flick on my bedside lamp. It takes me a second to realize I’m at home. In bed.

  Taptaptaptaptap.

  This is the point in the movie when everybody in the audience screams, “Don’t go there! Don’t look.” I stay in bed. Years of watching late-night horror movies has taught me well. Whatever is tapping at the window will go away if I stay here.

  Crap. My lamp.

  I turn the light off and cover my head with blankets.

  My phone buzzes on the bedside table: Look outside. Stat. Josh.

  Josh? I ease out of the covers and move toward the window, pulling the curtains back to see some guy standing outside with a ski mask on. I muffle a scream.

  Josh pulls off his ski mask. “It’s me. Don’t be freaked out.”

  I mouth, “What are you doing?”

  “C’mon.” Josh waves me out.

  I shake my head.

  He falls onto his knees, palms together. “Please, please, please.” It’s so cold, I can almost make out his icicle words in the air.

  I tap my wrist. “Too late,” I say. “Tired.” Like dead tired. I feel like I’ve crammed a lifetime into twenty-four hours.

  Josh starts to dance the Charleston, his noodle limbs flapping at his sides.

  I muffle a laugh.

  “C’mon!” Josh says. A dog starts barking, setting off a canine chorus of howls. It’s embarrassing how cheesy a trailer park can be.

  “Nice,” I say.

  Josh waves toward the front door.

  I get dressed and tiptoe down the hallway. I open our door to see Josh standing on the porch in a kind of curtsy. “Good evening, Michal,” Josh says, then looks up. “Listen, I’m a skinny shit with absolutely no muscle tone. Thirty more seconds like this and my legs start to do this embarrassing trembling thing. So I invite you to exit before the wobbling begins, which would be right about . . .” He stands up, shaking out his legs.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, stepping out onto the porch before he collapses into a pile of bones.

  “Wrong question,” Josh says. “What are we doing?”

  “Let me guess. We’re going to change the world, making it a happier, better place by doing a job at one of the big casinos in Reno, enlisting nine others. We’ll call ourselves Ellison’s Eleven.”

  Josh shakes his head. “Can’t be all work. It’s time for a little R and R.”

  “There’s an all-night free spa for thugs, thieves, felons?” I say. “Wow. That could’ve saved me lots of tension headaches had I only known.”

  “Shhh.” Josh puts his finger to his
lips. “We’re more than that. We are Babylonia.” He says it like it means something and pulls me out of the house, the screen door banging against the frame. “C’mon. Trust me.”

  I follow him to his car. He opens my door with a flourish. The heat is blasting. Colin Hay is on the radio, singing: “I tried talking to Jesus, he just put me on hold; said he’d been swamped by calls this week and he couldn’t shake his cold.”

  “‘My my my, it’s a beautiful world,’” I sing along.

  Josh smiles. “Indeed, it is.”

  We drive around the deserted streets of Carson. No one is out tonight. Probably because they’re sleeping like normal people.

  “We’re here,” Josh says, parking on a no-streetlight street. Josh gets out of the car. “Let’s go.”

  I follow him across the street, waiting in the shadows. I press my back against a wooden fence and wonder how everything got so complicated. I’m standing in some perfect stranger’s front yard, the ground covered with prickly pinecones and needles, waiting for Josh to find a way into the back. He opens the gate with a quiet click and waves me in.

  Josh already has his shirt off and is pulling down his pants. “Michal, I give you our very own private spa.” Josh slips the cover off the hot tub and eases into the water. “This is amazing,” he says.

  “No way,” I whisper. “There’s no way I’m stripping down. Like, ever in a bazillion years.”

  Josh looks up at me. “Why not?”

  “I just won’t, okay?” I take off my shoes. “I’ll just soak my feet. And I probably can’t get my knee wet, anyway. It’d get invaded by aggressive skin bacteria. I don’t want to be one of those weird cases on Discovery Home and Health.”

  Josh scoots toward me and grabs my hand. “Just come in. Just be. And leave one foot out, like this. You’ve earned this.” He drapes one of his feet over the side of the Jacuzzi.

  “Turn around, then.”

  He closes his eyes.

  “I said turn around.”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  I take off my sweats and T-shirt and slip into the bubbling water, keeping my knee out, practically yelping from the heat. A motion detector goes off and floods the backyard with light. We slip down, dipping our heads underwater, the tips of our noses out, my leg hanging over the edge of the Jacuzzi. The lights turn off. We sit up again. The moon is almost full, so pretty soon I can see more than blackness and shadows.

  I look down at my drab bra and wish, for the first time ever, that I had cute underwear. I wonder what color goes with blotchy skin prone to acne breakouts. That’s probably not covered in Teen Throb’s Tips on Summer Beauty.

  “This is the life,” Josh says. “Hey.” He jabs my shoulder. “Relax, will you? You must learn to live.”

  I’m vaguely aware of the fact that moments like these are the ones we’ll talk about together in twenty years, laughing, saying, “Remember that time . . . ?” This entire week has filled me with that gift.

  Remember that time . . . ?

  Josh has his eyes closed. I can’t seem to enjoy the moment because I can’t breathe, since I’m trying to keep my stomach sucked in.

  As if he reads my mind, Josh says, “Every moment like this erases a bad one—but to do so, you have to purge yourself of the bad memory forever.” Josh stands up, beads of water dripping off him. “I’ll go first.” He clears his throat. “When I was twelve, I was about four feet tall. Not really. But you get the idea. Anyway, before school one day—I used to go early to get homework done and stuff—a group of freshmen jumped me and Saran-wrapped me to a tree in the school entrance. They forced me to drink about a Super Big Gulp–sized water laced with crushed Lasix pills. By the time school started, I had pissed myself. Kids showed up to a nice welcome with me there. I was called Enuresis the entire school year.”

  How can somebody say those things so openly? It’s like he doesn’t know how to hide anything, hold anything back. He’s fearless.

  “That sucks,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “This is one advantage of moving schools so much.”

  “Yeah. You can reinvent yourself every place you go.”

  “Not reinvent. Geography doesn’t change a person; I guess I have the advantage of arriving without a past,” he says. “Mysterious.”

  “Mysterious?”

  “C’mon. A little mysterious, anyway.”

  “It’s hard to tell. Carson High is so big, it’s like we all get swallowed up.”

  “You don’t,” Josh says. “Everybody notices you.”

  How can he not realize I’ve been a shadow for the past nine years?

  Passing cars’ lights stream through the fence, casting shadows across Josh’s face. His eyes are closed. I lean my head against the back of the Jacuzzi. I like the idea—the systematic replacement of bad memories with good memories. “Okay. My turn?” I ask.

  He nods. “If you choose to purge.”

  I should have a card catalog for all of those bad moments I’ve always been ashamed about. I hesitate, move to stand up, then sit down.

  I inhale and stand up, keeping my knee as dry as possible. “It was my thirteenth birthday. Lillian doesn’t remember birthdays, usually. Nobody had remembered. So, basically, it was a total cow-dung day until I was called to the office fifth period and was handed this gift. It had store-quality wrapping. You know, the kind of wrapping that uses double-sided tape—so you only see the shiny paper. And there was this lime-green bow on top. Perfect, really. The secretary wished me happy birthday and sent me back to class. They all started chanting, ‘Open it! Open it! Open it!’

  “It felt so good to rip open the paper in front of everybody, like I mattered, you know. There was a gold box with a beautiful lid. I opened the lid and pulled out four cans of dog food.”

  I sit back in the water and don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath until I exhale.

  Josh rubs my cheek with the back of his hand. “It’s gone now,” he says. “These memories, this afternoon and tonight, take its place.”

  I nod and swallow, a little piece of hurt breaking away and dissolving. It’s gone.

  “To the exiled,” Josh says.

  “To the exiled.”

  We lean our heads back, staring up at the stars, my bad leg ice-cold in the air, but it’s worth it—worth every second.

  We hear a voice. “Anybody out there?”

  Josh and I slip lower into the hot tub.

  “Hey! Anybody there? I’m calling the police!” A heavy door slams.

  “Move move move move move!” Josh jumps out and grabs my hand, half pulling me out of the water.

  We snatch our stuff and scramble through the gate, across pinecones and needles, my feet screaming as they slap on the pavement; we jump into Josh’s car as he peels out onto the black streets, turning off his headlights until we’re down Timberline past Western Nevada College. I pull on my sweats, thankful I didn’t bring anything that could be left behind. I touch my glasses. Still on my face. I nurse my knee. It’s bigger than it was yesterday and an awful blue-green color. I think I might have to show Lillian.

  Josh drives into a construction site, parking in front of the skeleton of a house. “I think, Michal, the spa is closed,” Josh says.

  We sit with the windows ajar, listening to music. My heart stops racing and thumps in time to a quiet song. I mutter, “R and R? You consider that R and R?”

  Josh and I exchange a glance, then burst into laughter. We fog the windows with what is as close to tangible happiness as I’ve ever seen. The pit in my stomach is dissolving. Happiness.

  Josh turns on the car. “C’mon. I’d better get you home for your beauty sleep.” We pull up in front of my place. His car slips into silent, electric mode. I search for any lights and exhale, seeing that the place is dark. Luckily, Lillian took off after dinner. She’s got the night shift at the clinic today. It’s hard to remember which day is which; they’re all spilling over into each other. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow. Eleven thir
ty.”

  I nod and step out into the dry cold. Before I shut the door, I say, “Why me?” and immediately regret asking.

  “Why you what?”

  “Me? There are nearly three thousand kids at school—”

  “You’re different,” he interrupts. Josh looks at me, not a trace of irony or silliness on his face. “They’re jealous of you because you’re different.”

  “Well, now that we’ve committed larceny together, I guess you don’t have much of a choice.”

  “Apparently you haven’t figured it out yet. Michal, you are my choice.”

  I can feel the heat rise to my cheeks. I try to control the quavering in my voice. “Thanks for today, yesterday . . . just thanks.”

  Just when I think I’m safe, he says something like that, making me believe I’m not a second-generation glitch, the result of faulty judgment, bad timing, a broken condom; that I matter. I close the car door and carry his words with me into the house, wanting to trap them in a jar and keep them forever.

  I stare at the memoir notebook and write:

  Pro-choice. His choice. Life has meaning.

  Chapter 16

  “MIKE, MIKE, I’M DISAPPOINTED.

  What’s this dabbling all about? You’ve got a good thing going.” Leonard has a nasal voice; I think he’s got a deviated septum. He’s a skinny, bald, thirty-something, carton-a-day smoker who has this nasty tic of sucking the food in from the back of his teeth, making weird smacking sounds in his mouth.

  I don’t have time to argue with him today, though. I slept in way too late and need to place the bet and get ready.

  “Leonard, I don’t need the fine print-speech. Give me a little credit. Three hundred dollars’ credit, to be exact.” I just need to cover one hundred and fifty, which is easy enough since Nim paid me back and I will have enough to cover most bets and winners this weekend. The problem with the online sites I use is that they only deposit once a month into my account, and if I do an early transfer, there’s a fee; when there’s a fee, the bank calls Lillian because she’s technically the “adult” on the account; and Lillian wonders why in God’s name somebody wants to transfer $789.43 to me from a place called Bodog.