One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  Nora is so angry she’s shaking, but I see her take this question in, see how she wants this answer more, if only just more, than she wants to exsanguinate this man. She finds my eyes and shakes her head: No. No what? It could be anything. Then she finds emptied pint glasses to wash and pretends to turn away. Frank passes behind her and brushes lightly between her shoulder blades as if accidentally. She nods nearly imperceptibly and keeps her eyes on her dirty dishes.

  “Many things, many things.” Nathan puts his hands back on Zach’s and Tom’s shoulders. “Among them, I’m here to offer these good men jobs.”

  Nora looks up and blinks.

  Omar drops his head into his hands.

  I remind myself about slow deep breaths.

  And no one says a thing.

  “All of you, actually.” Nathan swings an arm out wide to take us all in. “If you’re a hard, honest worker—”

  “Honest?” Nora chokes, but Nathan keeps right on as if he hasn’t heard her.

  “—we’d love to have you on board. We’ve got jobs for all skill levels, all education levels, all”—the pause is infinitesimal—“ability levels.”

  “Where?” Frank says breezily, like Nathan has mentioned a really good deal he got on curtains. Later, Monday will wonder why Frank asked when Omar already told everyone. It’s the kind of thing that bugs Monday, but it’s a fair question. He needed to hear Nathan say it? He thought the rest of us needed to hear Nathan say it? He wanted to help Omar out, transfer the earlier ire away from our mayor to where it belonged?

  “Maybe he wanted to pretend he didn’t already know and hadn’t already heard,” Mab will guess.

  “Why?” Monday will press again.

  “Didn’t want to give him the satisfaction,” Mab will posit, “of thinking we’ve just been waiting all these years for their return. Didn’t want him to think he’d just pick up where he left off?”

  Whatever the reason Frank asked, Nathan’s answer seems canned. “Well, friend, you may have heard of a little company called Belsum. It’s a new day for us. New plan, new facilities, new name—Belsum Basics—but old stompin’ grounds. We’re renewing the old plant from the inside out, building our operations better than ever, and we wouldn’t dream of doing it without the good people of Bourne. So what do you say? Anyone around here need a good job?”

  Nora looks like she’s going to cry. Nora looks like she’s going to scream. Nora looks like she’s going to smash the teeth of Nathan’s lightbulb smile from his mouth. She’s got her hands flat on the bar now, probably to stop them from shaking, but she looks like she’s going to vault over the top, take Nathan in her mouth, and shake him until blood and hair and guts rain down and his neck snaps and she spits his limp body into a broken heap on the bar floor and retreats to her corner to lick the gore off her haunches. Her eyes are on me, and I give her a small smile, a we-will-figure-this-out-too smile, a remember-we-have-each-other smile, an I-believe-in-you smile.

  And maybe that’s why or maybe she’s lost her mind, but what Nora does is laugh. She throws back her head and laughs. She throws back her head and holds her belly and wipes her eyes and laughs and laughs and laughs.

  Nathan laughs along with her. “What’s so funny?” He’s friendly, a little kid eager to be in on the joke.

  Then she stops laughing. “Get out of my bar.” And when he doesn’t move, she leans across to him to add, “No matter the salary, no matter the job description, no matter how desperate, there is not a single person in this bar or in this town who would ever work for Belsum Chemical again.”

  Nathan props his elbow on the bar before her and proffers his pinky finger. “Wanna bet?” Still smiling. All in good fun.

  She struggles to hold on to her mirth.

  “It’s a new day, Nora Mitchell. Even your daughters came to visit. Even they’re on board.” How does he know her name? How does he know Mab and Monday are her daughters?

  “Get. Out. Of. My. Bar.” Her cool is slipping off her like snakeskin.

  “My understanding is it belongs to my friend Frank here”—Nathan holds up both hands—“but I get it. I do. Didn’t mean to rattle you. It’s Saturday night. You’re busy. A handsome stranger comes to town and shakes things up.” He winks again, possibly at me. “Just wanted to say hello, buy some friends a beer, and check out the hottest place in town.”

  Without looking, he takes two hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet and lays them on the bar, shoots in-cahoots smiles all around, and disappears with a whiff of brimstone which is probably just my imagination, but I look at Nora looking at me and wouldn’t swear to it.

  “Never.” She starts cleaning up—wiping down the bar, clearing still half-full glasses, sweeping around her shell-shocked customers—all the while, under her breath, “Never never never never.”

  And no one disagrees.

  But I remember that other saying about the devil, that idle hands are his playthings. And honestly? There are a lot of idle hands around here.

  One

  For a couple weeks, we ignore each other. Really, though, everyone’s ignoring him, not just me. He sits alone at lunch. He sits alone in class too. We’ve always had more space than students, a (Petra would say) surfeit of chairs for all the kids who should be here but aren’t, and either he’s picking seats with wide margins of empties all around or the rest of us have made an unspoken agreement to keep him marooned. In chem lab, no one will partner with him, so he has to determine the caloric content of a potato chip all on his own. In debate prep, no one will partner with him, so he has to argue about the relative merits of human cloning with himself. In English, no one will partner with him, so he has to do Romeo and Juliet.

  Then, slowly, we stop ignoring him. The Kyles walk past in the hallway and shoulder River sideways into the lockers. Adam Fell pushes him out front before school and then taps his own chest, showing River how to come back at him. Nigel Peterman sneaks out of his classroom into our lab and singes the hood of River’s sweatshirt and the back of his hair with a Bunsen burner. At first they aren’t ass-kickings. They’re short shocks to teach the mouse to stop touching the buzzer, stay in his own corner, and consort with no one. They’re short shocks to teach the mouse he is unloved.

  Then, soon enough, they are ass-kickings. One day, River has a cut on his lip, bright red inside, crusty at the edges. Then his left cheek is one raw pink scrape. Someone drops a book in history, and he flinches, his face darkening all at once like clouds moved in fast. The next week one of his eyes is swollen, bright and tight.

  His other eye looks at me hard when we get to Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, but I pretend I don’t see. Twice he tries to come up to me in the hall, but I turn around and walk the other way. He goes to Petra and asks her how he can get me to talk to him, and Petra says, “‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name.’”

  Not that River and I are going to be Romeo and Juliet. Juliet’s problem is she loves Romeo, and he’s cute and passionate and says a sonnet with her when they meet which makes him the perfect guy for her in every single way except his parents, so all he has to do is disavow them, and her objections go out the window. Romeo does not call her crazy. He is not rude and smug and a rich snob. When Romeo realizes he’s done something wrong, he says sorry, and even if it was something pretty big—he did kill her cousin—at least he’s not planning to do it again.

  But halfway through World History one morning, there’s a rustling, some ripple in the fabric of Track A, and under the desk, Chloe Daniels shoves from her hand into mine a folded-up piece of paper which when I unfold it reads, “I might have been somewhat wrong. You might have been slightly right. I may be a little bit sorry.”

  So, not completely unlike Romeo.

  I look over at him. He’s already looking at me. His eye’s less swollen but more bruised, mottled purple all around, a sick yellow at the edges. His lip’s almost healed in one spot but newly split in another.

  I show Petra the note. “Chicanery,” she pronou
nces.

  So I write back, “Is this a trick?”

  I watch the note make its way across the room. I watch him unfold and read it. He looks up and makes shocked eyes at me. Why, the very suggestion! I watch him write on the note, watch him fold it back up, watch it make its way back to me. I unfold it.

  “No,” it says.

  Petra rolls her eyes.

  “What made you maybe slightly somewhat change your mind?” Writing. Passing. Unfolding. Reading. Furtive glances at Mrs. Shriver who is talking about Britain outlawing slavery in 1833. Writing. Passing. Unfolding. Reading.

  “Magic.”

  * * *

  At lunch when he comes over and sits down with us, Petra is assembling a sandwich she’s brought in pieces—English muffin, strawberry jelly, potato chips—by using one of the sturdier chips to spread the jam.

  “According to my calculations,” he says, lisping a little around the cut in his lip, “that potato chip is approximately eleven and a half calories.”

  “It’s not a potato chip.” Petra doesn’t even look at him. “It’s a jam spreader.”

  “Like a knife?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why don’t you make lunch at home where you have an actual knife?”

  “If I put the chips on at home, they’d be soggy by lunch.”

  “I thought you were just using them to spread the jam.”

  “Not just,” says Petra. “After I use them as knives, I put them in the sandwich.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re crunchy”—she shrugs her braid over her shoulder—“unless you’re dumb enough to assemble your sandwich at home.”

  He considers this logic.

  “Are you okay?” I ask. I do not ask, “What’s happening to your face?” because it seems rude and like something better left unspoken. As if it’s not noticeable. As if not noticing would be a kindness. Kindness is not my goal anyway, but something has shifted here maybe, and I want to get him to tell me what it is.

  “I’m fine.” He tongues the raw inside of his cheek and keeps his eyes on Petra’s sandwich.

  He doesn’t look fine, but I was just being polite anyway. If he doesn’t want to tell me, there are more pressing things to discuss. “So. Magic?”

  “Well, misdirection anyway.” He smiles, winces, embarrassed or maybe it hurts his face to move it that much. “More like old-fashioned spy tactics I guess.”

  We wait.

  “Cell reception sucks in this town,” he says.

  “We’re aware,” says Petra.

  “We had to put in an actual landline.” He looks appalled. “But then I realized the most amazing thing: if you pick up the phone upstairs, you can hear what’s being said on the phone downstairs, and no one else on the phone call can tell you’re listening because it’s not really a shared call. No one invited you to join. No split screen. Nothing. It’s like a technological marvel.”

  “We’re known for that here,” Petra says.

  “The phone rings a million times a night, and it’s always my grandfather, and he’s always yelling, and my dad is always agreeing and apologizing and ass-kissing. So last night, I went upstairs and picked up the other phone and listened.”

  “And?” I try not to sound too eager or expect too much. “What did they say?”

  He blanches. “I don’t want to tell you.”

  “Tell us!” Petra and I demand at once.

  “I can’t. It’s not nice.”

  “They’re not hiding in the school cafeteria.” Petra peeks theatrically under the table. “You’re spying on them. They’re not spying on you. They’ll never know.”

  “Not not nice to them,” River says. “Not nice to you.”

  “We can take it,” I assure him because maybe this is it. I’ve watched my mother fight this battle a long time. I’m not naive enough to think that mean things River overheard his father say would make a difference. But maybe he overheard something that would, something we could tell Mama, and Mama could tell Russell, that would finally move the lawsuit in front of a judge who would at last be presented with evidence that could not be ignored or denied.

  “I came in in the middle of the call so I missed the beginning,” River hedges. “Plus, it was the third call of the night.”

  “That’s okay,” I say too fast. He seems nervous and reticent, and I don’t want to scare him by being too intense and desperate, hungry. But I also don’t want to seem so nonchalant he decides not to tell me.

  “My grandfather said my dad has to get started before anyone in town realizes.”

  “Get started on what?” I say. “Realizes what?”

  “I don’t know.” He won’t look at me. “And he said my dad shouldn’t be worrying about buying beers and kissing babies. He should be worrying you’ll find it.”

  My breath catches. So there is an it! Something to find, something they don’t want us to find. “Find what?” I manage.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugs with just his right shoulder, arms down by his sides. “And he said…” He trails off.

  “What?”

  “My dad said he felt bad about, you know, you.” He blushes slowly. “But my grandfather said you’re your own fault.”

  “We’re our own fault?” I feel like Monday. I understand each of the words, but together they make no sense.

  “He said probably you drink nothing but cheap beer and two-liter sodas and eat nothing but white bread and chips, and probably you’ve never even seen the inside of a gym.” His face is getting redder, hotter, like he’s dawning. “And my dad said that’s not your fault because your grocery store doesn’t really carry much produce, never mind an organics section, and the only yoga studio’s in the church. And my grandfather said if you treat your bodies like that, what do you expect.”

  I think of Mrs. Shriver, but her inversion of cause and effect is on purpose. I mean Duke Templeton’s probably is too but not so we’ll grow as learners.

  “And my dad was worried you’d figure it out,” River says miserably.

  “Figure what out?”

  “I don’t know, but my grandfather said you wouldn’t because you’re…” He trails off again.

  “What?” I know I have to keep him talking, and I also know I don’t want to know what he’s about to tell me.

  He says it so low I almost don’t hear. “Inbred.”

  “Inbred?”

  “So my dad shouldn’t worry you’ll outsmart him.”

  “What the f—”

  “And that he shouldn’t feel bad anyway because really you guys screwed us.” He looks up and meets my eyes for the first time. Clears his throat. “Belsum invested all this money, and you guys sabotaged us and then lied and faked disabilities to scam us out of more cash.”

  “He thinks all that?” It’s absurd, but it’s so absurd it’s hard to take seriously enough to get your feelings hurt.

  “I don’t know,” River says again. “Maybe not.” His expression has crossed over from embarrassed to more like ashamed, which is something I guess. “Maybe he was just talking trash. Psyching my dad up. Shooting down his objections. Trying to get him to do what he wants him to do.”

  Petra and I are speechless. If she weren’t, she would say “aphonic.”

  Finally it occurs to me to wonder, “What did your dad say?”

  “Not much.” He shrugs again. “He never does.”

  “So what’s he going to do?” Petra asks. “How’s he going to get started on whatever it is before we find whatever he’s hiding?”

  “I don’t know. And I can’t ask him because then he’d know I was listening.”

  But that’s not the right question. “Why?” I ask.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you eavesdrop on your father and your grandfather?”

  He slides his eyes away from mine. “Lots of reasons.”

  “Enigmatical,” Petra says to me.

  “Agreed,” I agree. “When last we spoke”—I turn ba
ck to River—“you said I was crazy.”

  “Yeah. Hoped you were crazy is maybe a better way of putting it. You have to admit it’s a little far-fetched. My grandfather knew his chemical was going to poison the town but he made it anyway? My grandfather saw it was killing everyone but refused to stop? Crazy.”

  “The story’s crazy,” I agree. “But I’m not.”

  “I couldn’t get it out of my head. I thought there’s no way it could be true. But…”

  “But?”

  “But something’s going on here. Obviously.” He waves vaguely around the cafeteria. “There has to be some explanation. And I couldn’t think of one. Well, of another one.”

  “Yeah,” I breathe. The fact of us. Our irrefutability.

  “I wanted you to be wrong. I wanted to prove you were wrong. My dad can be a jerk, but mostly he’s okay. But my grandfather. I mean he is my grandfather, but he’s pretty mean. He’s kind of hostile. And … rude. But everyone always does what he says without asking any questions. That’s kind of his thing actually. Authority and respect and all that. Anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said.” He raises his eyes to meet mine. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

  It’s such a cheesy line. I feel blood rushing to my face like I’ve been turned upside down, but I’m not embarrassed for me; I’m embarrassed for him. It’s not my fault I’m so jaded. (If she weren’t grinning like a demented clown and kicking me under the table, Petra would say “disentranced.”) It’s his fault. Or at least it’s his family’s fault. So I’ll be forgiven for being too worldly-wise to fall for his romantic-comedy schtick. I’ll be forgiven for being overly critical of his diction like what was important about his sentiment was word choice. I’ll even be forgiven for being kind of grossed out by his earnestness.

  But in the high court of celestial judgment, when I go before whoever evaluates souls in the end, I’ll be condemned anyway for the thought that bubbles to the top of this stew of squeamishness: I can use this. I can use him. If he can’t stop thinking about me, if he wants me to know he can’t stop thinking about me, I can get him to do what I want. I can get him to find what we need.