And I was the girl who once loved his flaws more than I loved myself.
I watch The Boy watch himself in his bathroom mirror. I watch him inspect his own back from over one shoulder. I watch him apply deodorant, choose a shirt, and slide a watchband over his long fingers. I watch him leave the bathroom and I lose him behind a wall. I panic for the moment before he resurfaces in his living room, carrying his honey-colored, acoustic guitar.
He sits on his couch and balances the guitar on his right knee.
I watch, mouth open and soul draining out. How can he be here? Why isn't he a hundred miles away, on fraternity row, asleep in his frat house? Dead as I am, why can't I look away and bury the feelings that come along with the memories I have of him?
Instead, I wish for my life as a girl again. A girl, balanced in his lap.
He cracks his knuckles and cradles the neck of his instrument in his palm so tenderly that I can nearly feel his fingers on the bones of my neck. His fingertips brush the cords and I rise up my wings, desperate to absorb his familiar sound through his opened windows.
His music pours from the sill like a smooth drink. I lean closer to the edge, trying to scoop up every note before it drops to the street below. The Boy presses, thrums, and loses consciousness of how his bottom lip moves with the deep cords and how his hair falls over his ear and how his low-hanging jeans brush the arches of his feet. He is no longer in the room with himself as he caresses the strings and pats the flat wood waist of the guitar with his eyes closed. His head sways and nods, agreeing with the melody as he plays it. He draws the music up gently from the hole beneath the strings and then he opens his mouth to it and lays his voice down beside it.
His symphony spills into my wings all at once, running down the sharp points, like beads of acoustic mercury. My ribs are tuning forks. My stomach vibrates with his sound. I am paralyzed. The memory of the first time I saw The Boy comes rushing back.
He had his guitar then too.
What had happened was that my father had made one of his rare visits home and he'd brought a woman. A tall one, with long brown hair. Her hair was what made her look like my mother, but the woman smiled at me like she was stoned, too many teeth showing as she called me Sweet pea in her southern drawl. Every time my father said anything to her, she'd giggle. Anything.
“Do you wanna watch TV?” Giggle
“How about a little something to eat?” Giggle
“This is my daughter, Madeline.” Giggle...How are ya, sweet pea?
The whole thing made me sick. I heard my father, behind the closed kitchen door, scuffling closer to her, liking her. I heard the slurpy lip noises, the little moans.
*Giggle*
I left. I tiptoed away, so my father wouldn't stop me. I locked the door behind me and once I got just past my mother's pear tree, I ran. The rotted lawn-pears mashed under my shoes and I slipped, slid, fell, got up again, and ran.
I ran all the way to the coffee shop, where the doors always seemed open, and where the kids from school hung out. It was the only place to go since we were caught in our awkward age, too old for the mall and too young for bars. There were always voices swirling through the shop and it made me feel like I was part of the conversation, even if I never said one word.
That night, I sat in a corner, with my heels on the seat and my knees on my chest. All the high schoolers had cleared out- it was a school night- and the college kids had taken over. There were three boys sitting on the couch and chairs in the middle of the room. One had a backwards baseball cap, one had a tee shirt that said, this is not my first rodeo, and one had a guitar.
The one with the guitar was the least attractive. He was a string bean with acne scars and an awkward laugh, but the guitar tilted in his lap made me feel like I could trust him.
"So what if you're flunking out?” I heard Backwards Baseball tell him. "You've got a car. You could live in it and be the boy version of Jewel...if you weren't so damned ugly. You got to get rid of all the zits, man."
"Don't know if that'd be enough," Rodeo agreed, swinging his coffee cup in The Boy's direction as he agreed with Backwards Baseball. "Have you ever even had a haircut that made you look like a guy, Cooter?"
Rodeo and Backwards Baseball howled with laughter. The Boy laughed, kind of. He really was kind of ugly. Calling someone ugly, when they are, is like calling a retarded kid retarded. It's not funny, when it's true at all. Then, it's just mean. Since Rodeo and Backwards Baseball were both attractive, it was even meaner.
The coffee guy, cleaning his urns, yelled over the counter, "Let's hear one, Adam! Play something!"
The Boy took a drink before tilting the neck of the guitar into his hand. He didn't clear his throat or anything. He just began to play and sing, all at once. It was a screw you kind of song, his tone hollow and dark as a gun barrel, accompanied by an acceptable rage in the chords. But his actual voice was this beautiful, golden rod—sharp and pointed so that it speared the air and lit it up and made it hum with his electricity. It might as well have been magic. I think the other boys mistook the song as just being cool. I heard it as The Boy's finger in the air to both of them.
When he was done, I drifted across the shop to get a refill. Rodeo made a noise when I passed, so his friends would look up. I was never the kind of girl that wanted to be spotted. I didn't want any conversations that led to asking why I wasn't home at this hour. Nothing that would make me wonder what my mother would think of what I was doing. But, this one time, as Backwards Baseball made some muffled murmur about how Cooter shouldn't even bother looking, I turned my eyes on The Boy and saw how the little scars on his face grew a little paler as the skin around them flushed pink. He wasn't ugly to me at all.
"That was an awesome song," I said. The words just fell out, the only ones in a usually word-crowded room, and I snapped my mouth shut. The Boy tipped down the neck of his guitar and his blush drained away. He smiled.
"Thanks," he said.
I went back to my table and tried not to pay attention to the boys huddling and laughing and slapping The Boy on the back. I tried not to notice them looking in my direction. They finally all got up to leave, and The Boy let Backwards Baseball and Rodeo go out the door, while he stayed back, dumping cups in the trash, while he tried to catch my eye.
One glance was all it took and he smiled at me again. I smiled back. He came over and asked if he could sit down. It’s funny how an ugly person can become the most handsome, just by how he looked at me and listened and smiled when I spoke.
He is even thinner now and he's living in a strange apartment across the street. He was once The Boy with the Golden Rod Voice. We're both different now. Neither of us is who we were before, but he is still the boy I once knew.
And by that, I mean, a demon.
***
I scuttle backward, dropping my wings flat to my back, gaping. The Boy with the Golden Rod Voice is in the building across the street.
Once he'd asked me, "Do you love me?" while my hair was draped over the edges of the toilet seat. I'd glanced up at him, his arms knotted over his chest, his lips as empty as old inner tubes.
"You don't know?” I'd asked, but the retching seized me again. I meant to say of course, more than life, you're everything to me, I'm nothing without you, and I think I love you more than people can love each other. But I couldn't say any of it with my muscles squeezing my throat shut. Even my body seemed to know that such a confession was like poison in the air. It would drive him away with its stench. And then it would kill me.
"Then you have to go,” he said. "Quick. Before it's too late and we can't do anything about it."
I wiped my mouth with one hand. "Why can't we just have it? People do. People get by."
He let his shoulders drop against the bathroom wall, shook his head and stared at the floor. "Because I don't want to just get by, Madeline. I don't want to be a loser all my life. I've got to finish college and you...well, you're not going to be anything at all if you can't eve
n graduate high school. Don't you see how selfish it is?"
"Yes,” I say. And then, "But we could do it together."
My belief in our togetherness was so big, but my voice was so small, it was all flushed away with the sick. I pushed myself up from the toilet and stumbled past him to the sink. "Maybe I'll just do it by myself."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
I ignored him. Rinsed my mouth. I could tell by his face that he still didn't see how much I loved him. He couldn't see that I would work all day and all night, I'd risk everything, just to bring another speck of his love into my world. My mind went wild then, trying to pull together the image of what our life could look like, but I knew that I couldn't make the picture of us work by myself. With him still standing there, it seemed like a deception to imagine the picture that came more clearly to me, of just me and the tiny seed of him, growing strong in my arms.
"If you do that," his voice trailed as he stepped away from me. I thought then that it was the smell of the vomit, but it wasn't. Now I see that it was because in that moment, I was a matador, with my sword drawn and poised to slit the thick veins in his neck, and he was afraid. I was going to make his whole future bleed out on the filthy floor. His voice frayed and it echoed off the tile walls and the metal, toilet stall doors. "If you go ahead and have it, then I want you to know that we're over."
The sudden fear of losing him fluttered up in my chest. I never expected he would think of ending this. We were us, as if that could never change. He’d say things about my body and how he couldn’t believe I wanted to be with him and I’d pull him to me and tell him how stupid that was. He was everything to me. Wanting him had become such a habit that the thought of being without him made the sour knot of fear beat against my ribs and climb into my throat. The lonely sick was more powerful and rancid than the little one in my stomach.
"Don't be mad,” I pleaded. "I was just thinking that maybe..."
"There is no maybe.” His voice was rooted again and he stepped forward, his fists balled at his thighs, his stare as pointed as a bull that had escaped the ring.
I looked away, at my own face in the mirror instead. I had to stare to see myself the way I'd never be again. To remember who I was, what I looked like, before I did this thing. Before knowing if I'd already taken, one step too far to ever get him back anyway.
"I'll get rid of it,” I said.
He stepped close behind me then and wrapped his arms around my waist. He curled against my back, a heavy useless heat.
"I'm sad too, you know." The strum of grief in his voice seemed off tune. "I guess I can come with you when you do it."
The vomit came up so quickly; I shoved him away to lean into the bowl of the neighboring sink. The tips of my hair floated in the sick and I started to cry. I didn't think I could keep on standing there on my own, but he grabbed his nose, laughed, and stepped away.
"Peeee-uuuu!" He waved a hand in the air. "I bet you're gonna be happy when you're not doing that anymore!"
I swallowed down the hot fist in my throat. My arms trembled and my knees buckled, but I snapped them back into place. I didn't think I could keep standing there on my own, but I did.
***
The rain doesn't seem to ever want to come again. It is bad enough to have no other voice pairing with mine, but it is worse to have sunlight haunt me.
The first day without clouds sends me scuttling into the square loaf of shade made by the staircase enclosure. It is fine, until I see that the sun means to push me into a corner and set me on fire. I poke a skin into the sunlight and sure enough, the heat licks at my finger, petrifying it to a chunk of useless cement. I pull it back and the heat fades, the returns skin slowly to ruined leather. Even wanting to die, I am too much of a coward to allow it to happen. The finish line of my life was only an inch of shade left and instead of running over it, I press back as the sunlight creeps toward me.
The shade dwindles to sandwich size and then further, to only the cut crust and I have no choice. I scurry across the blazing rooftop to the discarded tar buckets, my feet turning to stone slabs that kerchunk with each weighted footstep. I turn the two buckets over in a panic, trying to lodge my head inside one. A bunched pile of white canvas cloth drops out of the other. My wings turn to cement on my back and I fall with an oomph! onto my belly. I can barely lift my arms, let alone breathe, beneath my own appendages. I fall on the canvas cloth and roll as well as I can, kerthunk! kerthunk! kerthunk! dragging the cloth with me until I am rolled into a gargoyle-and-tarred-canvas burrito. The cloth is morbidly hot, but I am finally covered from head to toe. Tar that had once slopped onto the fabric oozes back to life just like my body does, sticky as chewing gum and perfumed like death.
I lie there for hours, thinking of how ridiculously desperate I am not to die, while death is the only thing that continues to occur to me. When the door casts its shade again, I scuttle out from under the hideous tar cloth and press myself against the hot siding of the enclosure. My cement-shoe feet and stone wings return to chalky, gooey-gray wrinkles of skin after some cooling hours in the shade.
The next day, I hide until the door shadow is only as thick as a bread crust and then, I retreat beneath the cloth and think of how much more pleasant lying in a grave would be. How lucky the ones are whose minds are given to the worms.
Each day, as noon approaches, I battle my cowardice to just let my skin burn and each day I find myself flattened beneath the tarred blanket, gasping, as I cling to my miserable, dead life. Those hours, in which the shade becomes a sliver too slight to hide in and those afterward when the shade is desperate to reclaim its footing, I lie beneath the drop cloth and wonder if there is some easier way to cease being. If there is ever an easy death that actually offers finality.
The rest of my time I spend squatted beside the lion, trying to leach some companionship out of his motionless figure. I scan the horizon, looking for clues to what he must see and find rooftops too far to leap to, a sky too far to reach, and life carrying on below us without ever glancing up to see the hideous creatures gaping down at it. There are a million things to see and I make lists in my head to suggest to Trickle, during the next rain.
And once, in the seven days, I try to fly. It is a miserable attempt, off the height of a tar bucket, but it convinces me well enough, as I crash down flat on the roof, that I am not meant to fly. These wings are flabby inside.
Despair, day after day, weighs me down. On the sixth day, I crawl out from beneath the drop cloth and shake it out, flipping it to its slightly cooler side and replacing it in the same square that it has made of shade all afternoon. The rest of the rooftop will be too hot for walking for a few hours yet, so I sit on the square of white canvas in the shade of the closet stairwell and think of death, as usual.
And there is a rumbling behind me, from the depths of the closet. It sounds like a stampede of indoor rain at first and then the voices come, sharp and cheery and laughing, voices of excitement and hope and energy. Voices that are the wiggling bodies of life itself.
The door rattles and swings open and three children flood the roof in their rubber-soled sneakers, oblivious to the hot tar beneath them. They come charging out with trucks, chalk, and tiny, metal cars. One of them yells to stick the boot in the door.
I am frightened to be seen. I assume I must not, but there is not a place to hide and moving now would certainly give me away. Instead, I freeze near the roof ledge, plunked down with the talons of my hands curled under. There is nothing I can do about my feet. I am spotted in seconds.
A dark skinned boy with tadpole eyes halts the moment he rounds the door cubicle and spots me beneath the cloth. A second boy with thick, black glasses plows into the back of him.
"Whoa!" the one with glasses whoops. They pull the tarp from me. A red headed boy pops up behind the first two. Behind my mask, they cannot see my eyes slide toward them, counting the three of them. The last one on the roof, a girl twice all the heights, comes to stand behind
the small crowd of shorter heads.
"Wow. There's an ugly thing, huh?" she says, knocking on the edge of my curled talon. "Wonder who put this one here?"
***
She is not beautiful, this girl, but what I always loved about her was that she never knew it. Her tiny pot of a pierced belly shows from between her cut-off lime tee and her frayed, cut-off shorts are stretched over her thick behind. Her hair is tied up in a ponytail and she fans the back of her neck with one hand. She's always moved with the unrehearsed grace of a swan.
These boys - I recognize them only from her descriptions - are her foster brothers. Even though I've never met them or been to her house, it doesn’t change that I always believed Ayla was my best friend.
The bright sun shades the stunned blinking behind my mask. I'd forgotten that I was someone to her too. When I went to the pier with his boat, she didn't know. I wonder how many nights she waited for me at the coffee shop to come, before she heard. Or before The Boy thought to tell her.
The kids stand back from me, not so brave, and throw questions at her: Where'd it come from, Ayla? Who's is it? Is it ours? You think it's a present?
She walks in a circle around me, inspecting me, but there's no part of me that she will be able to recognize anymore. The questions turn into a small war:
Who dumped that here? It's a piece of junk.
Do you think somebody wants it back?
What, you want it?
Maybe.
God you're dumb.
It's on our roof. Who asked you anyway?
And who the fuck asked you?
The last comment comes from the boy with a firework burst of freckles across his cheeks. It's his profanity that stops the girl's examination.
"Where'd you get that mouth from, Cletus?” Ayla's voice is the side of a pointed icicle. "Because you ought to get rid of it, before Selene makes you pay for it."
Mercy, A Gargoyle Story Page 5
