Two Roads from Here

by Teddy Steinkellner

  And she’s in the arms of another man.

  Goddammit.

  “Honey,” my mom said. “Turn this way. I want to get a picture of you and Coach.”

  “Well, dang,” my dad said. “Would you look at DeSean’s leg? That boy’ll be flying down the field in no time.”

  “Hey, fatface,” my brother said. “You look like a potato in a fancy hat.”

  I shut them out, all of them. I kept my eyes on Allegra and Wiley. I watched those snuggle birds living out my dreams just ten feet away from me. As I watched them, I faced a choice. It was kind of like how Allie put it in her speech. I had two options:

  One, I could march up to them. I could punch Wiley in the face and the dick, in that order. I could sweep Allegra into my arms and give her a make-out so sexy it would wipe out the whole past year and transform the next seventy. Then I could stomp on Wiley’s d again, just for shits and gigs.

  Two, I could implode. I could run away from the happy couple. I could return to my natural habitat, the lawn, where I’d sit in the grass and pick at my ass like a brain-dead cow for the rest of my days, all the way till they sent me to the burger factory.

  Love. Loss.

  Happiness. Helplessness.

  Immortality. Irrelevance.

  These were the paths I faced.

  I went with door number three.

  • • •

  Everyone was headed for Disneyland.

  That’s the tradition. After the diploma ceremony comes Grad Nite, where you hop on a bus with all your best pals and cruise down to DLand, where you ride Space Mountain till you yak, and you pop pot brownies on It’s a Small World, and you hook up with some freaky girl dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Basically you do all the carefree shenanigans that crazy-ass kids with unlimited futures do at the Happiest Place on Earth.

  But not me. My happiness was waiting elsewhere.

  I found Cole in the student lot, leaning against his car. His robe and grad cap were already off. His parents were nowhere to be found. I wonder if they came today at all. He was smoking a cigarette.

  “Hey, bud,” I said. “Was hoping I’d find you.”

  Cole took a long drag. “What do you want?”

  I pooched my lips out and crossed my eyes. “Well . . . ,” I said all slowly. “I wath hoping . . . you could tell me . . . about the rabbith.”

  He shook his head. “Go home, Lennie. You’re drunk.”

  I half laughed to myself. “Naw, dude, just playing.”

  Cole took another puff. “Okay.” He blew some smoke into the sky.

  I twiddled my fingers. “I . . . ,” I said. “Look, I—”

  “Just tell me why you’re here,” Cole said. “So I can tell you why you should leave.”

  I opened my arms wide. “I want to be buds again. I know I tuned you out. I blamed you for things crumbling between Allegra and me. And I regret that. But I’m over it now. You’re the only friend I’ve got left, dude. I want to do right by you.”

  Cole made a little upside-down “u” with his mouth. He crushed out his cigarette. “Impossible,” he said. “What’s done is done.”

  “Come on, man, you serious? Didn’t you hear Allie’s speech? We have a choice. We always have a choice.”

  “Actually,” Cole said. “We don’t. Believe me, I thought so too. But then I tried to help you, and it ruined your year, not to mention Allie’s and Nikki’s. After that, I tried to win redemption. I tried to be heroic. But nobody gave two shits. And I know you have no one left, no one besides me, but look, I’m the reason that’s the case. I bring out the worst in you, Brian, and I always will. I love what we had, but it’s over. High school is over. And not to get all Greek philosopher about it, but all we have left to look forward to is adulthood . . . aka the long, lonely road to death.”

  Cole turned away from me and stared down the hill, off into town, as far away from here as he could possibly get.

  I let out a sigh. “I don’t know, man. I just thought there might be somewhere out there where you and me could do a little good. But yeah, that was probably dumb.”

  I took one last glimpse at my ex-friend. Then it was my turn to fade away. I pulled the stupid hat off my sad potato head. I dropped it to the asphalt. I plodded off, through the parking lot, past the cars, back to the drawing board, back to square one.

  Cole whistled. The loud kind, with his fingers.

  I spun around.

  “Wait,” he said. “I know a place.”

  • • •

  The first thing that hit me was that familiar smell. We got inside, and it was like sewage meets tapioca meets Febreze meets Florida. After just half a sec in there, I swear I almost vommed and peaced immediately. I mean, if I was going to throw up anyway, at least I could do it on Space Mountain. And Allegra would be there. . . .

  But naw. We couldn’t run from this. This was our density. I mean, destiny. I mean—

  “Ramon!” Cole shouted at one of the handful of people in the room.

  “Maggie!”

  “Duke!”

  “Tyrone!”

  “Inez!”

  “. . .”

  “Happy Philanthropy Friday!!!!!”

  When those folks saw us, their faces just exploded with joy. Cole jumped into the center of the room, and he was like the stuffed animal from childhood they thought they’d lost forever. He gestured to me, and I was like the brand-new family pet.

  “People of Casa de Maria,” Cole said. “Meet Brian. Brian, meet my friends.”

  “I like your cowboy hat, mister cowboy hat guy,” I said to Duke. “And your attitude. Can I call you ‘Hattitude’?”

  “What’s the hot goss from the past few months?” Cole said to Maggie. “I heard Noreen said we’re not getting clam chowder anymore, so we’re stuck with corn tortilla instead. What kind of goat shit is that?”

  “I remember you from before,” I said to Inez, who had just given me a jowly, lipsticky cheek kiss. “Can I call you ‘Girlfriend’? I really need a girlfriend.”

  “Speaking of girlfriends,” Cole said. “Heard it through the grapevine that you just got one, Tyrone! When are we gonna meet her? She too good for us? She at some fancy hospice on the other side of town? Or are you making her up? You can tell me. I can keep a secret.”

  “Ramon,” I said. “That mustache is absolutely incredible. I’m gonna call you ‘Porn Lips.’ You can thank me later.”

  We stayed there for hours. We slopped soup, and we played cards and Connect Four, and we listened to their old-people stories, at least some of which I’m sure are true, and we told them about graduation, and we talked about next year, about our hopes and fears but mostly hopes, and the whole thing was honestly, and maybe not-so-surprisingly, a gigantic friggin’ blast. It wasn’t philanthropy at all. It was just damn good times.

  Look at me, Coach. I finally came to play on Friday night.

  • • •

  “I gotta say,” I told Cole at the end of the evening, as we washed ladles and put bowls away. “If you’d’ve asked me a year, or even a few hours ago, where I’d be tonight, I never would have said here.”

  Cole was admiring his reflection in one of the pots. He adjusted his hairnet. It looked weirdly stylish on him.

  “Well,” he said, “to quote the late, great Robert Frost: ‘The future . . . it be a mysterious bitch.’ ”

  I laughed a little. “Come on,” I said. “Be real.”

  “You know I can’t ‘be real.’ I am an artificial creation, designed by you humans to horrify and arouse the world. Sixty percent murder drone, forty percent glambot.”

  I plucked his hairnet off his head and tossed it in the sink.

  “Seriously, man. Don’t you ever think . . . what if things had gone differently, you know?”

  Cole paused to think. “Honestly? Nope. I don’t.”

  “Come on. For real? You never think like, what if you made this choice differently, or that one? I mean, what if I n
ever met Allegra? What if I never auditioned for the play with you?”

  “Guh,” he said. “You humans. Too blind to see that one day the sun will explode and none of this crap’s gonna matter anyway.”

  “I’m not saying there’s anything I can do about it. I’m just wondering.”

  Cole widened his eyes, wiggled his fingers, and made a spooky “oooooh” sound. “Brian . . . you are now entering the Twilight Zone. . . .

  “What if you boned Allegra, and your d was so magical it cured her mom’s illness?

  “What if Stanford gave me a special scholarship for evil cheaters who feel bad about it later?

  “What if there’s a parallel universe in which we’re all just slaves to our omnipotent overlord Scrotes?

  “What if your daddy had pulled out a nanosecond earlier, and you never amounted to anything more than a lil’ piece of sperm?

  “What if? What if? Oooooooh . . .”

  Cole laughed sarcastically. I stared down at the bowls. There was a while when we said nothing.

  After a few moments, he spoke up again. By this point his face had changed. Before it was a smile. Now it was, I don’t know, something pretty different.

  “Don’t dwell on what could have been,” Cole said. “It hurts too much.”

  “Okay,” I said. I nodded. I kept nodding. “Yeah. Fine. Yeah. Okay.”

  But I don’t believe him.

  ROAD TWO: GRADUATION

  16. NIKKI FOXWORTH

  Mona said it was okay.

  I told DeSean yes that day in the Greek. I accepted his promposal, because what with everyone staring at me, what with the band about to launch into a happy song, I kind of had to say yes. But I swear I would have taken it back. I absolutely would have rebuffed DeSean if Mona had had any problem at all. But I found her after lunch, and she was so cool with it.

  “Of course you should go with the guy who asked you,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s a no-brainer, right?”

  “You sure you can trust him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I really am. How about you? You sure you’ll be all right?”

  Mona smiled. “Oh my God. Obviously. Forget about me.”

  “You know I could never do that.”

  “Just do one thing for me,” Mona said. “Have the best prom ever. You deserve it.”

  “I’ll try my best,” I said.

  • • •

  It was storybook, the way tonight started off. D wore his father’s tux. I wore bridal white. We took pics out on my back patio, and my parents had the proudest expressions as they snapped photos of us, like I was a good little church girl all over again. DeSean got the fanciest stretch Hummer to pick us up, and he joked that he was paying for it with “recruiting violation money.” He kept me laughing all the way through dinner with impressions of his coach, goofy Male Ballet moves, and the most inappropriate jokes about groping my breast. At the same time, he was so considerate, too. He took time to apologize for how he behaved toward me this year, the breakup and stuff. He made sure to say that sex wasn’t everything to him, that it was the last thing on his mind. I looked into his eyes as he said it. They were perfectly sincere.

  We got to the Hyatt. The theme of the dance was “Hollywood Nights.” As DeSean walked me down the red carpet and into the ballroom, I really did feel like a movie starlet, only without all the baggage that follows those poor actresses around, everybody reading about their divorces and drug addictions. I felt like the cleanest, most glamorous, most self-assured version of a movie star—the kind you see on the cover of a fashion magazine, or winning an Oscar, and you think, This woman has it so together.

  “Damn, Nikki!” some guy shouted as we walked past.

  “Sexy mama!” another girl chimed in.

  “Take it off!”

  I rolled my eyes at that. DeSean and I stifled big, dorky grins.

  I did see a few things on the walk that made me mildly uncomfortable.

  First there was Brooklyn and Channing, and a few other mean girls from dance. I didn’t want to run into them for obvious reasons. None of them saw me, though, as I walked past. They were all on their phones.

  Then there was Wiley. He was with Cole. They weren’t looking my way either as we reached the door, but they were staring a little too pointedly in the other direction, like when the cat’s in the litter box and you don’t want it to know you know it’s doing its business, because otherwise it’ll freak out and run away.

  Finally, just before we got inside, DeSean and I passed Mona. She looked dazzling in seafoam and bronze. She was standing by herself, though. I felt bad for her.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I should be asking you the same thing,” I said. “You look kinda lonely, sweetheart.”

  “Oh no,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Holy shit,” DeSean said, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “The hell is this?”

  Suddenly everybody on the red carpet was eyeing me. I looked over my shoulder, through the glass doors, into the ballroom. Everybody on the dance floor was staring at me. I looked at everyone’s hands. There were dozens of phones everywhere. I glanced at the video on DeSean’s screen. I saw the skinny girl with the long brown hair. That’s all I needed to see.

  “Those bitches,” I said, and I got ready to charge at them, even though I didn’t know who those bitches were. I mean it could have been Brook and Chan, paying me back for the locker-room episode. But it just as easily could have been Wiley, lashing out at me for whatever twisted reason, trying to make something out of his pathetic life.

  In any event, I was going to do it. I was going to bash some skulls together. I was going to make those wicked people screech like slaughtered hogs. Even if I had to take on every damn hater at the dance, I was going to do it.

  Then I heard the commotion behind me.

  It came from inside. Gasps at first, then oohs and whispers. People’s phones shot up automatically. The crowd parted as if summoned to by a higher power. The ballroom door swung open, and out walked the last person I expected to see.

  He was tall, dark, and unfortunately, very handsome. He had a cleft on his chin and reddish-brown stubble on his cheeks. And of course, of course, of course, he was holding roses.

  “Look!” the gawkers whispered all around me.

  “Is that him?”

  “No way—”

  “Holy fu—”

  “It’s the guy from the video!”

  I am not letting myself repeat his name. I will not give him the power.

  He ambled toward me, holding the bouquet to his chest. People fell over themselves to get out of his way, like he was some kind of royalty. I found myself walking too, walking helplessly toward him, a prisoner headed to her execution.

  “Hey, Nik,” he said when we reached each other. “You know I’ve been searching for you all year? I’ve been missing you something awful.”

  I stared at the ground.

  “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about what I did. I’ve spent all these months reflecting, regretting.

  “Lucky for me, some friends of yours found me online. They told me about prom. I found a cheap ticket out. Now here I am. How cool is that?

  “I get to tell you how I sorry I am. I get to show you how much I’ve changed. I’m a new man. I really am.”

  I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I kept staring down.

  “Come on, Nikki. Smile for me, girl.”

  Just then—

  “RRRRRAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

  Like a bullet train, DeSean came hurtling out of the shadows, he shot right to where we were. As all the folks around us lost their minds, D left his feet and flew at my tormentor, knocking him to the ground with a perfect football tackle. With his knees on the asshole’s chest, DeSean started throwing punches, one at the ribs, another at the throat, like
he was the one who deserved the right to apologize to me, not my ex, and I didn’t even have time to consider whether that was true. That’s because the guy who destroyed my life, he fought back. He took his hands and flung them at DeSean’s neck, and he took his legs and wrapped them around D’s body. In one motion he swung himself up and slammed DeSean to the ground, and he pinned all his weight on top of my prom date, and then he started punching and kneeing, and slapping too, and he got body blows in for, like, ten solid seconds. DeSean looked down for the count, completely spent, practically unconscious, until he battled back. He kicked the asshole square in the groin. He sprang back up, and everybody around them was gasping and cheering, taping the drama and watching me squirm, living and dying with my every reaction as these two men fought for my honor, fought for my virtue, fought for the right to call me theirs.

  And I was trapped all over again, in the room with two doors.

  No matter what happened tonight, I was the loser.

  Obviously, if my ex won, then that would be humiliating. I’d be seen as the enemy, the femme fatale. The seductress who put the hero in a spell for just long enough to weaken him, who through her own careless promiscuity let the big boss strike the final blow, after which he could take her away to his lair and do whatever he wanted with her.

  Then again, if DeSean was the victor, if my Trojan warrior in shining armor was able to slay my demon, then the result would be just as, if not even more, shameful. I would be the hooker who got saved despite herself. I’d be Mary Magdalene. DeSean would try to reform me, and everyone else would avoid me, and no would ever know me, not a single soul would ever think of me as anything but that poor, misguided wretch.

  It’s a funny feeling to watch the end of your story be determined right in front of your eyes and you don’t even care.

  And—

  Wait.

  I didn’t care, did I?

  I didn’t care.

  Oh my God. I really didn’t care.

  The longer I watched them scuffle, the louder the masses got, the more my reputation was at stake . . . the less invested I felt.

  I wasn’t regretful. I wasn’t anxious. I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t afraid.