Nick and June Were Here

by Shalanda Stanley

  We had five legitimate employment options. You could work at a lumber mill, a school, a farm, the hospital, or, of course, a church. My parents worked at the hospital. My dad was one of the administrators, but he had been a family doctor before that, and my mom was a nurse. If you wanted to do anything else, you had to get out.

  I was dying to get out. Bethany was, too. She’d memorized bus schedules, because no way was her truck going to make it as far away as we wanted to go.

  Graduation was a couple of months away and the deadline for choosing which college Bethany and I would attend was looming. We’d applied to fifteen colleges and we’d heard back from almost all of them with yeses. We were smart. That left me only a few months to convince Nick to leave town when we did, only a few months to figure out what was wrong with me and fix it. I didn’t know where we would go. I’d stayed up nights thinking about it. It had to be someplace where new things happened. Nothing new had happened in Creed my whole life, but I really couldn’t blame Creed for that. This town wasn’t a place for beginnings.

  I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life—unlike Bethany, who’d been saying she was going to be a nurse anesthetist since elementary school—but my mom promised that college was a good place to figure it out.

  When I was in the second grade, Mrs. Shirley had made us write a “When I Grow Up” essay and she said I had to pick something to be. I didn’t have to stick to it but I had to write something down. I chose teacher, but probably just because I was under pressure and she was in the room with me. In the fifth grade, I was convinced that I’d make an excellent lawyer. “You’ll argue with the wall,” my mom would say. And then there was the marine biologist phase, and that time I thought I was going to be a dancer even though I’d never taken lessons. When you’re eight and say you want to be an astronaut, people give you indulgent smiles and think it’s cute, but when you’re seventeen, they expect you to be more practical.

  I made lists in my notebook of possible occupations. Lately I’d added photographer and writer to the list. I didn’t know if I’d make a good writer, but I was good at making lists in my notebook.

  The only thing I knew for sure was that I loved school. I loved everything about it—the order, the expectations, the time frames. It came with a definite beginning and end. So I knew college was in my future, even if I didn’t know what I wanted to major in. My mom said that it was okay to try everything before settling on something for good. She made college sound like a closet with all these different Junes and I could try them all on until I found one that fit.

  I heard Bethany’s truck before I saw it. The muffler broke noise violation codes even though Nick fixed it about once a week. The truck was older than our combined ages. She loved it.

  She plowed down the road, stopping next to me. She rolled her window down, frowning. Bethany was an excellent frowner.

  “You were supposed to wait for me,” she said. She was mad.

  “You said you wouldn’t be late.”

  “You don’t always have to be on time. It’s character-building to be late for things sometimes.”

  “Then you should have a really strong character.”

  The corner of her mouth lifted. “Will you please get in my truck?”

  She’d been coaxing me into her truck since we were fifteen.

  I got in, slamming the heavy door after me.

  “Is there a reason you’re here?” she asked, gesturing with her head toward the window.

  I looked around. We were on Walton Street, by the pharmacy, nowhere near the school.

  “You’re lucky this town only has seven streets,” she said, “or I wouldn’t have been able to find you.”

  It was two lefts and two rights. Left, right, left, right. It was the sidewalk. The cracks had led me here.

  “Don’t tell Nick,” I said.

  She gave me side-eye as she slid the truck into drive, but if one of us was going to cave and tell my parents that something was wrong, it was him. I’d seen the warning in his eyes when he’d found me at Becky’s.

  “I’ll add this to the list of things we don’t tell Nick,” she said.

  It was a short list, but there were things he didn’t need to know.

  My mom and Bethany’s mom were best friends and had timed their pregnancies so they’d be pregnant together. The day that Bethany was born before me was the only one we’d spent apart. Our parents raised us like we were one person and rarely referred to us by our names, calling us “the girls” instead.

  “Are the girls going to the lake?”

  “Where are the girls?”

  “Tell the girls to come inside.”

  Thank God they finally let us dress in different clothes. It was at least second grade before the kids in our class realized we weren’t actually twins. This was funny because we were total opposites. Where I was shy, she was bold. I was an observer. Bethany was a doer. I liked the dark. Bethany was the light. She shone on everything and everyone around her. You couldn’t hide anything from her, because a light sees everything.

  She handed me a brochure. “Look at the back,” she said.

  It was a brochure from Southeastern Arkansas University. I flipped it over and there was a bulleted list of all the ways it was awesome and the clear choice for our future.

  “Their water-ski team has been national champions for twenty-eight consecutive years,” she said.

  “You don’t water-ski.”

  “So? That’s impressive. Not many schools can claim that.”

  Some people picked colleges based on their academic reputations, or the cost of attending, but Bethany examined them by their prowess at water sports.

  “But this is in Mackenzie,” I said.

  “So?”

  “I thought you wanted to go somewhere farther from home.”

  Mackenzie was only a three-hour drive from Creed.

  “It’s not a terrible idea to stay closer to home.”

  I wondered what had changed her mind. Maybe it was me. Maybe she knew I was unraveling and it was better to be close to home when I came undone.

  “Did you know that tug-of-war used to be an Olympic event?” Bethany asked.

  She knew when I was too deep in my head.

  “You’re making that up,” I said.

  “Why would I make that up?”

  “Because you’re you and that sounds like something made up.”

  “Well, it isn’t, and I think they should bring it back. I mean, they kept curling.”

  We pulled up to school and she parked in her usual spot. The place next to it was empty.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “You know he doesn’t show up until at least third period.”

  Nick barely came to school anymore but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t worry. Twice before when he hadn’t come, it was because he’d been arrested. Bethany and I had spent only one day apart but Nick and I had been separated for much longer periods of time.

  Creed High School was the only high school in town. There were eighty-seven kids in the senior class and our faces were framed and smiling in the hall next to the office. Every year, Mr. Lewis, the principal, hung the seniors’ pictures. He called it his hall of fame. I wondered what happened to the photos after graduation and imagined a special locked room stacked with years of senior portraits. I hoped they were organized by year.

  AP English, world history, AP government, lunch, AP physics, AP calculus, office. I spent the last hour of the school day answering the office phone so Mrs. Livingston, the school secretary, could take a late lunch. That was my day and every day looked pretty much the same. AP English, world history, AP government, lunch, AP physics, AP calculus, office.

  Third period came and went and still no Nick, but then I remembered the art room. Sometimes Nick parked behind the school and went strai
ght there. When he did come to school, that was where he spent most of his time.

  The room was dark except for the light coming in through the windows. Nick was the only one in the room, his back to me. Mr. Nelson, the art teacher, was in his office in the back. Nick didn’t notice I’d come in. He didn’t notice much else when he painted. He’d been working on the same piece for a while now. It was a painting of the ocean. Nick had never been to the ocean. Most of his paintings were of places he’d never been, like he was imagining a life he didn’t have yet.

  He was absorbed in what he was doing, his brow furrowed. This wasn’t the ocean with the waves crashing onto some shore with white sand beaches, but the ocean where the middle met the horizon and there was nothing but calm water and sky.

  My shadow fell across the painting and he paused. I stood between the window and him and he turned to me. Sometimes he looked like no one took care of him. You couldn’t tell this from his clothes or hair—it was a look in his eyes. He held out his hand to me. His hands were my favorite part of him. They were almost always dotted with dried paint, tiny flecks of color on his skin. I put my hand in his and our fingers laced together. Our hands knew just how to fit. We’d been holding them a long time.

  He was so tall that I had to drop my head back to look at him. He’d shot up in the last couple of years. I’d gone to every high school dance with him since we were freshmen. In the beginning, the three of us had gone together. Each time, Mrs. Susan, who wasn’t an actual photographer but had a good camera, took pictures, and my mom bought one every year. “For posterity,” she told me. If you lined up the photos next to each other, you’d see Nick grow taller in each one. I looked pretty much the same in all of them. There hadn’t been much growth for me since I was fourteen, and I was trying not to be bitter about it. All of my changes were happening on the inside.

  “Shouldn’t you be in class?” he said. His voice was rough, like this was the first time he’d used it today.

  “Shouldn’t you be?”

  He shrugged and turned back to the painting. He always looked at his paintings like they were problems he had to solve. Sometimes he looked at me like that, too.

  “I think it’s finished,” I said.

  “They’re never finished.”

  The fourth-period bell rang, except it wasn’t a bell. It was chimes this time. Mr. Lewis tried out different sounds to announce the ends of classes. The chimes were much better than the time he thought it would be a good idea to play music. They were all songs from the classic rock radio station. He’d stand in the hall as we switched classes. “These were the songs of my youth,” he’d say, and rub his big belly. Every time he reminisced about his youth, he touched his stomach.

  “June?” Nick asked. His voice sounded worried. His voice sounded worried more and more lately. “Did you hear me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We need to go,” he said. “Mr. Nelson has a class this period.”

  Ping.

  There was a sound, like something small and metal had been dropped at my feet. I looked down but didn’t see anything.

  Ping, ping.

  “Hey,” Nick said. His touch on my arm was warm. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, let’s g—”

  Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping.

  It felt like they were spilling from me and I clamped my mouth shut. I looked down again but there was still nothing there. My hands started sweating.

  “June?”

  The temperature in the room rose twenty degrees. I was burning.

  “Are you okay?” he asked again. “Your face is really red.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, pulling at my collar. This was my best lie.

  I dropped to the floor and ran my hand along the surface, needing to feel something that would explain it.

  The door to the art room opened and the lights flashed on, the sound of feet walking into the room almost drowning out the pinging.

  “What are you doing?” Nick asked, squatting down next to me.

  “I think I dropped something,” I said.

  “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  “I need to find it.” The pinging rang in my ears.

  Nick mimicked my movements, running his hand across the floor, even though I was pretty sure he thought it was all in my head. He was on his knees now.

  I was in the hall before I remembered making the decision to make a break for it. Nick stood next to me. It was cooler here. The pinging didn’t follow me into the hall and my heartbeat slowed. One beat, two beats, three.

  The other kids in the hall moved around us like we were the rock in the river, Nick’s face stuck in a worried expression, his hand in mine, squeezing.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. Nick’s default setting was escape. Anytime anything got sticky, he was ready to run. He motioned with his head toward the side exit. He always saw the quickest getaway. Even when he parked his car at my house, he faced it out, toward the street, just in case.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “Probably not,” he said, “but let’s go anyway. I’ll have you back before school’s out.” Pulling me toward the door, he said, “We’ll go to the barn.” The smile spread on his face, his attempt to lure me. “There’s this thing I want to do to you.”

  Because we were going opposite the direction of the other students, we attracted the attention of Mrs. Bingham, the librarian, who was always in the halls instead of the library. She cocked her head to the side like she was asking a question. I stopped.

  With one hand on the door, Nick looked back at me and mouthed, “Let’s go.”

  I squeezed his fingers in mine, two quick squeezes for yes. It was a system we’d worked out a long time ago, two for yes, one for no.

  He threw the door open and it banged against the outside wall. No point in sneaking when someone watched you. I gave Mrs. Bingham a polite wave and Nick pulled me into the light.

  He drove a car he’d built by himself. His dad had been a mechanic and taught Nick everything he knew. There were some things I wish he hadn’t taught him.

  I had never spent much time with his dad. There was this one time his dad had taken us to the circus. The school had handed out free tickets earlier that week and Mr. Hawthorne volunteered to give us a ride. I had never really liked the idea of the circus because I always felt sorry for the animals, but in Creed, when someone gives you a free ticket to something, you go. He let me sit in the front seat. I’d never done that before. My parents followed all of the suggested safety rules when it came to airbags, seat belt standards, and height.

  I couldn’t remember one thing about the circus that day, but I could tell you about the smell of leather on the seat of his car and the feel of the door handle in my hand, because I’d held on like it was an amusement park ride. Mr. Hawthorne had flipped down the visor on my side because I kept holding up my other hand to shield my eyes from the sun. I was at least a foot too short for the visor to work, so he took his sunglasses off and put them on my face. That was what I remembered, pulling into the parking lot of the Civics Center, one hand gripping the door handle, the other on the too-big sunglasses so they didn’t fall off my face.

  Nick pulled to a stop in front of a field just outside town.

  “We’re here,” he said. He announced it every time we came to the barn.

  When we stepped into the thicket, I heard the birds. It sounded like hundreds of them but I couldn’t see them. I looked to Nick to see if he heard it, too, but his face didn’t give anything away. We moved farther into the field and they rose into the sky in one whoosh movement, stopping both of us. They were blackbirds and they moved in unison, swooping left, then right, and finally up, up, like they all shared the same mind. Their wings beat and blocked out the sky, the
ir song rising in pitch as they went higher and higher.

  “Do you see this?” I asked.

  He squeezed my fingers twice and pulled me along, toward the barn’s doors, in a hurry to get inside. The barn was a place where the outside rules didn’t apply. It was a place where we could just be. There weren’t too many places for us like that.

  It was my favorite place in the universe, a space built more than fifty years ago with wood from a species of tree that no longer existed in Creed. They had cut down what was left of the shortleaf pine to build this place. When I’d first found out, I’d been sad, but the more time I spent in the barn, the more I appreciated the trees’ sacrifice.

  The barn was dilapidated, with a metal roof. It looked abandoned but the truth hid inside, just like it did in Creed. We’d been coming here since the beginning of sophomore year. The summer before that, when Nick went to visit his uncle in the Ozarks, his uncle had told him about it. His uncle was from Creed, too, but had left town right after high school. He said it was a place we could use when we needed to get away. It was a way to get away for people who couldn’t go anywhere.

  When Nick opened the doors, the colors were the first thing I noticed—blues, greens, reds, and so much yellow. The walls were covered in murals that Nick had painted. Bethany and I had helped with some of them. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we could follow directions.

  He led me to the ladder that went up to the loft. “Be careful,” he said.

  Most of the murals in the loft were of the Ozarks, because that was Nick’s favorite place. He’d painted every view of the mountains from his uncle’s cabin, where he’d spent most of his summers. I tried not to let it bother me that Nick’s favorite place was somewhere I’d never been.