How Far We Go and How Fast

by Nora Decter

  “Just tell him, Jo.”

  “I do this for a living, kiddo. Hangover cures. I’m just trying to help.”

  “Winston wouldn’t even care, not that we’d fucking tell him,” says Tina. “So what did you drink?”

  “Everything. I’m guilty of everything.”

  Benny starts to ask again, but Tina shakes her head, and he goes back to the kitchen to make me something.

  The clamor of the slots is like nails on the chalkboard of my brain. Even my eyelashes are hungover. I don’t understand anything.

  “I should sign in,” I say and don’t move.

  “Just let Benny fix you up.”

  I make a noise. An I-might-throw-up noise.

  “Hey.” Tina takes my chin in her hand. “You’re going to be okay. You have to be. It’s karaoke night. We need you.”

  But that’s a lie. They don’t need me. No one eats on karaoke night. They just drink and holler and hoot and throw up in the bathroom and in the corners and the halls. They just do tequila shots and fall down in the snow and call, Encore! Encore! Until their voices crack and their hearts break and the streets close down with snow.

  “Jo,” Tina says. “You’re going to have to pull it together a bit harder than that.”

  “Sorry.” I didn’t mean to speak out loud.

  Benny comes back, and they look at each other in a significant way. I am so tired of people looking at each other in significant ways when I’m around. But then there is coffee. And a sandwich of fried eggs and cheese and eye of newt and tongue of frog and other mysterious ingredients I can’t identify. It turns my stomach, and then it tastes good. It tastes like my feet are more firmly on the ground.

  “How are we doing?” Benny asks, bouncing back and forth in front of me like a boxer. “We’re gonna do this thing, am I right? That’s right. Let’s do this thing.”

  He slaps me on the back and it reminds me, but I’m too quick and push it away. I’m a boxer dodging blows. I can do this thing.

  “Get out here. You need to see this.”

  “But do I?” I ask as I follow Tina out like a good dishwasher should.

  A woman in hot pants and a halter top is slaughtering the karaoke competition. Tits out, everything out, she’s using every inch of the stage. Winston’s working the lights, but he can barely follow her. One minute she’s galloping like a horse, and then she’s twirling like a little girl. Then she’s pointing and posturing like a pop star, popping hips and flipping hair. And then she is pounding the ground with her heels, stomping it like it did her wrong, and then she’s kicking her legs up impressively high, given the four-inch heels she wears, the fuzzy pink ones she calls her inside shoes. She whips her boa in circles overhead, and feathers drift through the air. She’s sweating, and her thighs jiggle, and her voice, singing along to the karaoke track, is pretty—there is a voice there—but she’s working too hard, it’s a sing-shout, a breathy rush to get the words out.

  “She’s changed it up this week. Not her usual fare,” says a man at the bar who is tapping along with his beer.

  No, it’s not. As far as I know, she’s always stuck to ballads of the where-is-my-man variety and anything that goes well with her impersonation of a sex kitten.

  This is different. She is losing her shit. She is dancing like no one’s watching. But everyone is. They are jumping and twirling and kicking along with her. The whole room is full of drunks cutting loose like a bunch of middle schoolers at the dance when their favorite song comes on.

  “Something, huh?” Tina says.

  The song ends, and for a moment she doesn’t stop. For a moment she is still dancing and singing along to nothing. And then the silence hits her, and she halts. The crowd shouts their approval. They whoop rather than clap their hands, which are full of drink. Probably they can’t tell that she is crying. Probably they think it’s sweat running down her cheeks and streaking her mascara, but I can tell. Louie reaches up and helps her down from the stage. No one sings karaoke like my mother.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Something.”

  At home in the basement, where there’s no noon or night. I pick up my guitar—Matt’s guitar—my guitar, and I play. When I play, I can’t think. When I think, I can’t play.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I wake up before anyone. Early, actually, and not just for me. I get dressed in the basement and then go upstairs. Bodies everywhere. I recognize Cory and Char and George, the bouncer from the Cal, but there are also others I don’t know. I heard them last night, up all hours celebrating. Maggie took the karaoke crown.

  The soft click-clack of Howl’s nails on the floor, and she’s in the kitchen doorway watching me.

  What?

  She doesn’t answer. She just watches.

  It’s not that big a deal, I say, and grab the leash to distract her.

  But she barely follows me out the door, and at the river neither one of us is in the mood. She just sits and watches me, then wanders off along the path, but she doesn’t sniff the trees or romp through the snow. And I don’t try to measure the sun’s progress across the sky or ask the river if it’s melting.

  When it’s time to go I have to call and call before she’ll come.

  I wait outside the door to Groves’s classroom until all the students have emptied out. She looks up from the papers she’s straightening on her desk and then looks back down. “You can’t be here, Jolene.”

  I was kind of hoping we could have lunch, and she could ask me where I want to go and then I’d tell her and she’d talk me out of it. But I can tell how it is—she’s all business, arms crossed in the international symbol for no bullshit, trying to scare me straight. I shrug. “Whatever.”

  “I tried to help you,” she says, “but there’s not much I can do now. You’ll have to throw yourself on Lambert’s mercy.”

  “Wait, what?”

  She blinks, reads the confusion on my face and looks resigned. “You didn’t get the message? They’ve decided you’ve missed too many classes to pass this semester. You’re on academic probation, meaning until you and a parent go in and talk to Lambert and the guidance counselor, you’re suspended. They called your house to set it up.”

  “Oh.” I’m surprised. Genuinely.

  “Oh? Come on. Don’t pretend to be too cool for school, Jo. I know you’re not. You’re upset. Admit it.”

  One more year of high school. In addition to the year I already had left. I told you time wasn’t passing. I knew it.

  “Jolene, hang on a second. I have to come in to school tomorrow to supervise the drama club’s rehearsal. Mrs. Deacon is out sick. Come by at noon, and we’ll make a plan. No one from the principal’s office will be around on a weekend. Okay?”

  I walk home into the wind. I tell my body to accept the cold, not to fight it, and I unclench, stop shivering. Tears stream backward out of my eyes, but they’re not tears, really. Just water.

  I stop inside the door and listen. Someone is home, but not Maggie, I don’t think. Then again, I don’t recognize her sounds the way I used to. They’ve shifted.

  I grab the wad from underneath the mattress and throw it in my bag, hesitate over the letter, then leave it. What does it matter anymore, what the answer to my question is.

  I stop and listen again. The first floor is still, but someone’s upstairs in the shower. Quickly, quietly, I go up to my room to pack some clothes.

  On the bed is the guitar case, Contents Fragile stickers plastered over it like Do Not Cross police tape. I unhook the metal clasps on the sides and flip the lid open. The whole time I was trying to find it, I worried I wouldn’t recognize it if I did. Even the most familiar things fade fast when they’re not in front of you. But I would know it anywhere. It even smells like him, like the lemon oil he used to clean the frets when he changed the strings. I reach out to touch them. Down the hall the shower turns off, and I focus.

  I close the case, throw a change of clothes in my backpack and hurry downstairs. I’m stuffing my feet int
o my boots when I hear Cory call, “Jo? Where’ve you been? You missed a great party last night. Your mom was amazing! She won by a landslide. No contest. I was just using your shower. Mine’s broken.” He descends the stairs slowly, dressed but still toweling off his hair.

  “Bye.” I’m out the door, down the block, long gone.

  Earl looks up when the bell on the door sounds, but when he sees it’s me he goes back to his newspaper. I haul the guitar case up onto the counter and open it.

  He looks at it for a moment, then at me. “What’s this?”

  “The guitar I was looking for.”

  He nods. “I can see why.”

  “How much will you give me for it?”

  He leans back in his chair. “You spent all this time looking for it just so you could sell it?”

  “Do you want it or not? I can go somewhere else.”

  He sighs, pushes his shirtsleeves up. “Kid, why don’t you think this over? Talk to your mom about it.”

  I shut the lid, flip the clasps. “That’s cool. I’ll take it over to Sargent Pawn.” I make to lift it off the counter.

  “Hold yer horses. Bruce doesn’t know shit about guitars. He’ll rip you off for sure.”

  Earl sighs again, takes the blues guitar out of the case and looks it over in minute detail. I’m stunned when he starts to play, first a finger-picking country tune, then a swinging blues progression, then a rollicking rock ’n’ roll number, then a pretty, lonesome melody.

  “It plays well,” he says. “I can sell it.”

  The price he quotes me isn’t as much as it’s worth, but it’s enough. I sign where he tells me to and walk out with my arms swinging free.

  Mullet lady at the station says there’s an eleven o’clock bus to Vancouver and asks if I want a ticket. I stall.

  “What about eastbound? When’s that one leave?”

  “Honey,” she says eventually. “Come back when you know where you want to go.”

  I go looking for Jim.

  The site where I found him the last time is over by the Forks, where two rivers become one. I walk there watching my feet, trying not to fall on the sidewalks of sheer ice. But the building has vanished, the lot smoothed over. There’s a sign advertising the parking garage that’s coming soon. In the meantime the empty lot gapes like a lost tooth. All gone.

  The pattern that’s emerging lately is simple. I do stupid things without realizing it, one thing after another. In that vein, I sit at a food court table and make the silent calculations of a lowlife. How long it will take me to pull myself together and journey over to the space if he does want to see me. How sketchy it would be to ask one of the guys who hang around outside the off-sales at the Woodbine to buy me a few king cans, and how much money I can afford to squander on a night that will probably prove to be just as pointless as all the other nights I’ve been leading lately.

  I very nearly spring into action, but something holds me back. Could it be a last ounce of dignity? I thought I was all out of the stuff.

  Outside the food court windows the sun goes down, but it’s not night yet. I buy a coffee and watch the clock. Sometimes I remember to take a deep and necessary breath. Time passes on the sly. The clock doesn’t move, and then it jumps ahead seven minutes all at once. I wait for it to be six o’clock. I sip my coffee and wait. When the hands of the clock are in agreement I cross the food court and use the pay phone to call Graham.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. It’s Jolene.”

  “Hey!”

  “Hey.” Oh, fuck. “So…tonight.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “tonight.”

  “Umm, you said you wanted to hang out. Does that… offer still stand?”

  He laughs, and instead of being relieved that he finds my awkwardness charming it pains me. But then, everything is paining me today. “Yes, it still stands. We were gonna go to this house party later. There’s a few good bands playing. Wanna come?”

  The security guard is circling me, checking his watch. I’ve gone over my thirty minutes. Also, making a call on a pay phone pretty much spells drug deal around here. I ask Graham when I should meet him, and although it isn’t for another few hours and I’ve already gone everywhere I have to go, I say, “Cool, great, see you then,” hang up and leave the food court before I get arrested.

  In the mall bathroom I change my shirt and brush my teeth. A girl a bit older than me, in business-casual attire and a name tag I can’t read, watches me, then pretends not to when I meet her eyes in the mirror. She must work in one of the clothing stores, or at least that’s what I presume. And she presumes I’m one of the at-risk youths who hang out in the food court, selling drugs or buying them. We both wash our hands at length, as if to prove something, and then leave together.

  Outside the wind blows and the buildings lean. My nose runs and my eyes do too, but my feet walk me slowly. I’m still a bit early. Got a bit more time to kill.

  George isn’t on duty yet, so I walk in the front entrance of the Cal and go down the hall to Winston’s office without encountering anyone. Excellent. The door is open, and I can see him at his desk, bent over some paperwork. I knock.

  “Jo, come in. I didn’t think you were working tonight.”

  “I’m not. I have to tell you something.”

  Winston is a bit of an asshole, has terrible coffee breath, and whenever he talks about my mother it grosses me out—no matter how mundane what he’s saying is, he manages to sound like he’s leering. Still, this is hard. He’s going to hate me. But I’m trying to liquidate my assets, and it only makes sense to collect the last of my pay before I decide what I’m going to do.

  “Someone giving you trouble? Is it that beer delivery guy? I noticed him lurking around last week when you were working. I can get George to have a word if you want.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s just…I can’t work here anymore. It’s…just not working out with school and everything.”

  Right away his eyes shift, so that now, instead of looking at me, he’s looking through me. I’ve witnessed this before. He’s pure capitalist, only sees what will benefit him in some way. Everything else gets shoved aside, bulldozed over. He sighs, exasperated. “I suppose you’re here for your pay? Of course you are.”

  He gets up, grumbling, and checks the schedule, which is posted on the wall. Then he punches some numbers into a calculator, pulls out his wallet and counts off a few bills. “There you go, kid. I told your mom this wasn’t a good idea, but she begged me to take you on. Said you were all messed up still from your brother’s accident. You make sure you tell Benny on your way out. He put time into training you.”

  I leave without saying anything to anyone.

  TWENTY-SIX

  He comes down to let me in, looking too good, as always. Boys have it so easy. They don’t have to worry about all the things I worry about as Graham and I say our heys and wait for the elevator. Things like how flat is my hair going to be underneath my hat, and is there anything hanging out of my nose that I should know about, and what if he wants what happened the other night to happen again? And what if he doesn’t want it to happen again? He puts his hand on the elevator door when it opens, so that if I fall on the threshold I won’t get crushed. Such a gentleman.

  “Thanks.” I look at the floor. And then him. And then the floor.

  I didn’t think it would be this much with us. What we did the other night. I thought it would fall away, forgotten, but I can feel it there. Between us. The silence strips me naked, more naked than I remember being before.

  We start and stop talking at the same time.

  “How’s—”

  “We should—”

  I feel myself blush what I assume is a similar color to the one he’s burning with. He starts again.

  “We should talk later? Yeah?”

  The doors slide open, and I step out into the hallway. “Yeah. Sure.”

  He smiles, and I am totally disarmed, disoriented. I cannot deal with the way th
is nice boy looks at me. What does he want to talk about? And whatever it is, what will I say in return? My head’s so full of it, I walk past the door to the space, and he laughingly takes me by the shoulders and steers me back in the right direction.

  “I have a proposition for you,” he says. “I’ll tell you later though!” This last bit he yells, because inside the space, Ivy and Drew have pumped up the tunes and are dancing like their lives depend on it.

  “Hey!” Ivy bounces over to hug me, which is awkward because she doesn’t stop dancing while she does it. And then I’m dancing too—I have no other option but to join in. At first I can’t find the beat, but then I take off my jacket, then one sweater, then another, and I find it. Graham brings me a beer, and I stop to take a gulp. I’m always either too cold or too warm. Either sweating or shivering.

  When the song ends, Ivy falls to the floor dramatically. Drew turns the music down.

  “How do you feel?” she asks as he sits next to her.

  He pauses in serious contemplation, then shatters it with a smile. “You’re right, I do feel better. The dance cure worked.” To me, he says, “I had the Tuesday blues. Ivy said she could cure me, but I didn’t believe her.”

  “That was his first mistake,” Ivy says.

  “Isn’t it Friday?” I ask.

  They laugh. I’ve said one of those dumb-naïve things. Alien from the planet Uncool. “It’s a drug thing,” Ivy says. “You take some molly on Saturday night, and by Tuesday your serotonin levels have bottomed out.”

  Oh right, I think. The pill.

  “We took it on a Wednesday, of course,” she continues, “but the theory still holds. How’re you feeling, Jo?”

  Everyone turns to watch me ask myself if I have the Tuesday blues or not. I don’t know if I do, but I’m sure that a description of how I am, were I able to articulate it, would send all of them running for the hills. Good thing we don’t have any. “Just tired, I guess. I worked late last night.”