Hooligans

by Chloe Garner

  She didn’t sit right up against him, either, though.

  She looked at him for a long time, and he sat with his head tipped to the side, watching her back.

  “I don’t think you’re…” She struggled for words. He let her. “I believe you,” she said. “I believe you see what you say you see, and I actually think that that’s what Robbie and the rest of them are seeing, too. I can’t believe that it’s your fault when accidents happen, because I just don’t believe that, and it sounds like a really… rough childhood talking. Where you took the blame for a lot of things that weren’t your fault. But I do believe that what you’re seeing…”

  Even as she said it, any faith that it was real, that what he said was going on was actually what was happening, that faith slipped away.

  It wasn’t possible. He waited for another minute. He had such intelligent eyes. Malicious, to some degree, in the way that a cat looked malicious to a mouse, but not angry or dangerous or ignorant or stupid or deceived. She believed in him.

  That’s what it was.

  It didn’t matter what he told her, she was going to continue to believe in him, in his ability to determine real from imaginary.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  She narrowed them instead, and he laughed.

  “Just do it,” he said. “I won’t touch you.”

  She pursed her lips, then closed her eyes, waiting.

  “Listen,” he said.

  She took a breath.

  “Cars,” she said. “Birds. Air. A woman on her cell phone, I think, over that way…”

  “None of that,” he said. “Listen quieter.”

  She closed her mouth, letting the air press on her ears. The dull, low buzz of her own hearing, and the way it throbbed slightly to hear heartbeat. The woman on the phone laughed.

  “I’m going to put my hand on your knee,” Trevor said. “Just listen.”

  Warm, gentle pressure where his hand came to rest on her leg. She breathed. The world was just a fraction quieter, now.

  Then, in the space between heartbeats, something off to her right laughed.

  She jumped, twisting on the bench to look.

  “What was that?”

  There was nothing.

  It had been a squirrel. That’s what it was. She was being so hyper alert she’d let a squirrel startle her.

  She sat back down, and Trevor nodded. She tipped her head to the side.

  “It was nothing,” she said. “I heard a squirrel.”

  “Okay,” he said. She shook her head.

  “It was nothing.

  “Okay,” he said louder. “That’s fine.”

  “You think you proved something,” she said.

  “No, you think I proved something,” he answered and stood. She jumped when the bus’ airbrakes went off, and then shook her head, trying to calm her nerves.

  Her hands were shaking.

  What had frightened her so badly?

  She’d just been outside of a school that blew up, and it hadn’t bothered her, but hearing a squirrel make a noise like laughing, that was enough to give her a panic attack?

  “You got in my head,” she said.

  “There, I’ll agree with you,” he said. “That was exactly the point.”

  She glowered.

  “Is everyone else all right?” she asked. He nodded.

  “I expect so.”

  “And…” She frowned. “There were policemen in the school.”

  Trevor nodded.

  “When they piece through everything, they’re going to find something that could have only been an accident. For all the damage we did, the explosion was something we couldn’t have done. A gas line up in the ceiling finally gave, or chemicals in a locked cabinet leaked out of their containers. Something. They aren’t going to say it was because of us.”

  She frowned.

  “That’s the voice of experience.”

  “Not in a long time, but yeah,” Trevor said. “Lara was good enough that nothing this big had happened in a long time.”

  “I thought the accidents were your fault,” she said.

  “And I told you: I cause them, but she kept them from happening.”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t… believe you.”

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s fine, but that’s what’s going to happen.”

  She shook her head again. They found a seat on the bus and she sat down next to him, almost uncomfortably close, now.

  He picked up a section of her hair as it lay on her shoulder and played it between his fingers. She shivered, trying not to lean against him or away from him as the bus swayed into motion again.

  “It’s okay to enjoy it,” he said. “We’re doing something that someone has to do. Letting it bother you, that we’re doing it at all, is… It’s like taking it personally when gravity wins.”

  She opened her mouth to argue with him, but he was right. She had enjoyed it. The silliness of so much of it, the intense, organized, random-looking play It had been fun to stand by and watch it. Dennis made her smile, and she couldn’t even verbalize why.

  He let her hair drop and put his hand down on his leg, the side of it resting against her jeans.

  “I thought you were angry at me,” she said.

  “I am,” he answered. “It seems so obvious, and you just keep denying that it’s possible, and I don’t understand how you can miss it. But that’s your problem, not mine. I’m doing my job and I’m enjoying being around you, and I can hardly complain about that, when you look at it.

  “I have to go back to work eventually,” she said.

  “Someone’s got to pay the bills,” he said playfully, and she looked at him. He shrugged. “You have a feel of inevitability to me. It’s going to happen. You just don’t see it yet, and neither does Robbie, but that’s okay. It’s going to happen.”

  “What, exactly?”

  He moved his hand to openly lay it across her leg and tipped his head to look at her sideways.

  “You’re going to be one of us, someday, Lizzie. Because you always have been. You just needed someone to tell you so.”

  ***

  “He thinks I’m the new angel,” Lizzie said that night as she sat over a box of pizza with Dennis. Everything in the refrigerator had gone foul, so they’d ordered delivery.

  “I know,” Robbie said. “But you don’t believe in any of this, so you can’t be.”

  Lizzie came back from the refrigerator with a pair of beers - at least they hadn’t gone bad - and sat down again across from him.

  “I think you need to get someone in here to look at that fridge,” she said. “I think it’s going out overnight or something and letting everything get warm.”

  Robbie nodded.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Do you want me to be the angel?” Lizzie asked after a moment chewing. He shook his head and looked at the blank TV.

  “No,” he said simply. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Dangerous how?” Lizzie asked. He shook his head, still not looking at her.

  “You wouldn’t understand…”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I mean, Trevor is really compelling. Maybe he’s got everyone suffering from mass delusions, I don’t know. Maybe even Lara went along with it, because it helped you…”

  Robbie looked at her sharply, wounded, maybe? She didn’t think that was wounded, but she couldn’t tell what it was.

  “She wasn’t faking being a part of the group for my benefit,” Robbie said. “And it isn’t Trevor’s fault. A lot of things are, but not the things we see. I’ve been seeing them for a long time, Liz.”

  “I know, but maybe he kind of shapes the delusion into something that you can handle,” Lizzie said. “Something you can fight against. I could see how that would be tempting.”

  “It doesn’t explain Lara,” Robbie said, and she nodded.

  “It doesn’t explain a lot of things,” she said.

&n
bsp; Robbie laughed.

  It was an honest, pure laugh that she didn’t think she could ever remember him using before.

  “Trevor doesn’t understand how you can’t see it,” Robbie said. “How it isn’t obvious. And there for a few days, he had me worried that he was going to convince you, especially…” His eyes went to the tattoo, but they couldn’t stay there for long. He twisted his head away again to look at the TV. “But you’re my sister. I know you better than that. If there isn’t a clinical diagnosis for it, it can’t be real.”

  “Why does me believing make any difference?” she asked. “You didn’t have to believe anything to end up where you are.”

  “Because you’re the angel,” he said softly, still looking at the TV, then frowned and looked at his lap, dropping his pizza back in the box. “You are,” he said, almost for his own benefit rather than hers. “You are, but you’ll never be the angel, because you won’t believe.”

  “Why is it so important to you that I don’t… become the angel?” she asked. He blinked at her.

  “Because they killed her,” he said. “They killed Lara.”

  “How?” Lizzie asked, frustrated. “How could anything kill Lara or knock a tree down or blow up the chemistry room?”

  “It’s what they do,” Robbie said. “And that’s why we have to fight them.”

  She chewed on her bite for a long time, considering that.

  “You really believe that,” she said. He looked at his hands.

  “I’ve always believed that, even before I knew it.”

  “Lara was the one who taught you to look at your visions that way?” Lizzie asked. He nodded.

  “Then I’m glad she did,” Lizzie said. “Even if I don’t believe that any of it is real, even if I think you’re going to get yourself arrested for destroying property…”

  “It isn’t going to happen,” Robbie said with a sort of helpless humor, looking up at her again, without lifting his head.

  “You can’t know that,” Lizzie said.

  “They don’t want me to go to jail,” he said. “I can’t do things for them, from there.”

  “I thought you were fighting them,” Lizzie said. “I thought the point was that you had to fight all of it.”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, that’s the point, but… I’m still more on their side than you are.”

  “Because I’m the angel,” Lizzie guessed.

  “No, because you aren’t a part of it at all,” Robbie said. “I was on Lara’s side, not Trevor’s.”

  Lizzie sighed, still completely overwhelmed.

  “Okay,” she said, closing the box and putting it on the glass coffee table. How was the under side of it that dirty? “How about this. I closed my eyes and opened them and I can see everything you see. Explain it to me.”

  Robbie shook his head, leaning away.

  “I don’t want to,” he said. Some of his twitches came back, the agitated ones, the lack of eye contact, the awareness of things that weren’t there.

  “Are you okay if Trevor does?” Lizzie asked. Now she was just downright curious. There was such structure and rules to this world that Robbie was describing, for as freewheeling and literally chaotic as it seemed. Or maybe there wasn’t. Maybe it was that they kept telling her she was wrong out of a sense of us-versus-them, and she couldn’t get a straight answer.

  That would at least help settle things, wouldn’t it? If no one could answer simple questions?

  Why did it need to be settled, anyway?

  She shook her head, lost in her own thoughts for a fraction too long, and looked at Robbie. He was staring at the wall.

  “Robbie?” she asked. He twitched his head away, falling off the couch, and she frowned. He wasn’t here. She propped him up with a big pillow under each arm and moved the coffee table further away from him, then, suffering from a mild compulsion, she went to go get the glass cleaner from under the sink and flipped the coffee table all the way over, cleaning the orange gunk from under it before putting away the pizza - like that was going to do her any good - and going to shower and get ready for bed. A while later, she heard the door to Robbie’s room close, and she nodded to herself. He’d come back from another trip successfully, whatever it had been.

  She put her hair up and sat in bed with her computer for about an hour, but she was feeling increasingly distant from everything going on at the office, and her work wasn’t up to her real standards. She sent her boss a quick note telling him that she was going to take a few full days off, and that she’d try to be in next week, then she folded the laptop and turned off the lights.

  Someone knocked on the window, nearly scaring her out of her skin. She turned on the lights again, because she was in no state to see a ghosty human face through the window in the dark, and then went to look.

  Trevor stood out in the jungle of a back yard, framed by two fruit-bearing trees and a flower that stood above his shoulder. She wasn’t sure how he’d reached the window.

  She opened it and said as much.

  “I slept here a few times,” he answered. “I can get in and out that window if I want.”

  “Can not,” she said, looking at the shaded cactus there. She didn’t know cactus would grow in the shade, but there it was.

  “I’ll prove it if you want,” Trevor said provocatively and she glowered at him.

  “I think you’ll find getting inside is harder than just getting up to that side.”

  He laughed.

  “Come outside,” he said. “It’s a pretty night.”

  She looked around the room and sighed, then went to the bathroom and started to put on a pair of shorts, then reconsidered and went with jeans because of that cactus. She was halfway out the window before she asked herself why she hadn’t just done the front door.

  She didn’t need to sneak around like a teenager. She was an adult and she was allowed to go for a walk after dark if she wanted to.

  It was because of the stupid cactus. If Trevor said he could get out over that, she wanted to see if she could.

  What a terrible reason.

  She wouldn’t have been able to justify it to anyone at work; trying to tell her boss what she’d been up to since she’d left was going to be tricky, all ready. Trying to explain hospital-grade cactus wounds was just beyond the pale.

  And yet.

  There she stood, holding onto a rickety gutter and standing on the window sill with just her heels, ready to jump. Trevor moved to one side, offering a hand up to her, and she hopped down over the cactus and grabbed him, first just because it was the polite thing to so and she wanted to grab his hand, and then with a sense of urgency as her weight tipped back toward the cactus again.

  He pulled her upright with an arm behind her back and she giggled, tipping her face in to his chest, giddy and a bit out of control and reckless.

  Who was this person?

  Where had she come from?

  “Come on,” he whispered, tugging at her pony tail. “Before you wake up Robbie.”

  “I should close that window,” she said, looking back at it.

  “Then how would you get back in?” he asked.

  “Through the front door,” she said. Like a grown up, she thought.

  “Did you bring a key?”

  She patted her pockets, but they were completely empty. She dropped her face into her hands, and he wrapped an arm across her shoulders and pushed her through the thick shrubbery back toward the front yard again, laughing with her.

  Robbie’s light was off.

  Why had she even checked?

  “He says that you aren’t going to convince me,” Lizzie whispered as they went past. “That I’m not going to be the angel.”

  Trevor eyes glittered at her in the darkness and he pressed his forehead against her temple with friendly force.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  And it was funny. And warm. And real.

  Real like her job wasn’t. Or her apartment. Or her car. Or
her bills.

  The plants around them rattled and whispered in the breeze, alive in the night in a way that they weren’t during the day. She wanted to just be there, to experience that, but Trevor was still moving toward the road. She tried to stop, and he pulled her forward again.

  “More to the night than just a bunch of leaves,” he whispered into her hair, then turned his face forward again. “Come on, darlin’.”

  She went along with him, looking up at the stars as the overbrush got out of the way. It was startling, how many of them there were, how bright they were.

  Here, he stopped, letting go of her shoulders and taking a step away from her.

  “You’re in toward the city, where you are, aren’t you?” he asked. She nodded.

  “I’m only about five minutes away from downtown,” she said.

  “More light,” he said. “I don’t mind it, of course. Keeps some of the rowdier ones down, but…” She heard more than saw him spread his arms. “This kind of space isn’t something you can buy, anywhere in the world. You either have it or you don’t.”

  She nodded, letting her attention drift back down from the sky. The moon was bright enough to illuminate Trevor’s features, mostly from above and slightly from one side.

  He was so happy.

  “You still owe me a nice dinner,” she said.

  “I’m doing my best to keep the clothes clean,” he said with a wink. “We’ll see how it goes. You’ve seen how cleanliness really doesn’t fit with a life like mine.”

  “It’s the shave,” she said.

  “You know how fast my razors go rusty?” he answered, putting out a hand. She took it, feeling giddy again, immature in an intoxicating kind of a way, and she just went with it, skipping toward the narrow sidewalk.

  “Where to?” she asked.

  “That way,” he said, nodding along the road. “There’s a little park with some trees. I like to go there at night, sometimes.”

  “How much time do you spend over here?” she asked.

  “Lara has always been good to me,” he said and she jerked her head, hearing something new in that.

  “Were you together before she married Robbie?” she asked. His eyes sparkled again.