Project Pallid

by Christopher Hoskins

  And she returned:

  That’s not going to happen. We’ll be ready for him this time. I’ll push you out a window if I have to!

  The image of me leaping from her bedroom window—even if it was just a single-story to the ground—was a ridiculous one. I hoped and trusted he’d gone back to his regular routine and that it wouldn’t come to it. Still, I replied:

  I trust you. I’ll tell my mom to start picking me up again on Monday. Promise.

  And that was the moment when the Damian Lawson I used to know, officially died. The guy who worried too much about everyone else became only a memory, and the new Damian emerged: a guy who’d finally found the connection he didn’t think he wanted, but needed more than anything else after he’d stumbled across it. My commitment to Catee was resolute, even in the grim-set face of death.

  I caught Catee again at our locker that afternoon and, because the rotation of busses had moved mine to last, I had time to walk with her to parent pickup for her Friday, family therapy. I was more pensive and hesitant about the trip to the front that day. I knew her dad would be waiting there, and I worried he might want to finish the rebuke he’d delivered me, only a week before.

  Not surprisingly, the emerald green Mercedes was there: parked ominously at the bottom of the concrete steps instead of at its usual resting spot, further along the curb. My heart rose to my throat when its door whipped open and his head rose from inside. At full, imposing stature, and with the engine idling, Mr. Laverdier took long, hurried strides our direction.

  Before she had a chance to react, and before we could say anything, his hand cuffed around her forearm, and he was dragging her to the car.

  “Let go of me!!” she yelled and wriggled to shake free. When that didn’t work, and when they were only steps from the passenger door, she began to wildly slap him with her free hand. She sprayed profanities and tried to desperately unhinge the manacle-like grip he had on her, but her struggles were fruitless. With the passenger door open, he tossed her across the front seat like a rag doll.

  “If you open that door,” his threatening finger jabbed at the air, “I’ll have you pulled from this school for good! You’ll be enrolled in Saint Catherine’s by the morning!” he barked. And with a slam of the door, he turned back to me.

  “You!” If his finger were a laser, it would’ve burned a hole right between my eyes. I pointed at myself, feeling innocent in everything, but understanding how his perception could’ve been the exact opposite.

  “Me?” I quizzically asked.

  He remained motionless in front of the door to bar Catee’s escape should she have chosen to go against his orders, and he summoned me with a hooked finger. “Yeah, you. Don’t just stand there with that dopey look on your face. Get over here!”

  My mind raced. Pavlovian response told me to do as I was told: to respect his demands and to go to him. Sensibility told me to stay where I was and to avoid venturing any further into the lion’s den. And so I chose a conciliatory approach and moved only a few steps closer, to close the divide but keep safe distance.

  “Damian! I’m sorry!!” Streams of mascara tears raced down her face, and her voice turned pitchy and frantic. “I’m so sorry!!!”

  Mr. Laverdier whipped back to pull at the door handle.

  Locked.

  He reached through the window’s gap to open it from the inside while Catee helplessly swatted his hand, and I tried to wrap my head around how it’d all escalated to that point. Nothing happened to necessitate such an exchange between them, and it might’ve been entirely laughable if it weren’t all so tragic.

  With the door open, his body half inside, and Catee backed into its driver’s seat, he half-spoke and half-yelled at her. I couldn’t make out what he said, but the fight in her subsided after that. Enough that he was able to calmly roll up the vintage crank of the window before he closed the door and walked to meet me, face-to-face.

  “What’s your name, son?” he asked. The hate that had dominated his words, only seconds before, was replaced with a serene and almost therapeutic tone.

  “Damian.”

  “Damian,” he repeated. “Damian what?”

  “Damian Lawson, Sir.” I replied cautiously, sensing that I might be stumbling into some sort of trap. I looked around him to the Mercedes, hoping to catch Catee’s escape from it—to catch her running across the playing fields and to safety. But there was no movement. No sound. No indication that she was in the car at all.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Damian,” he said with an extension of his hand. “I’m Mr. Laverdier. Catee’s Dad. But then, you already knew that. You can just call me David.”

  With little alternative, I extended my hand and watched as it entirely disappeared into the folds of his own. Had he wanted to, he could’ve clamped onto it and surgically removed it from my body. I knew it. He knew it. But he didn’t.

  Instead, an odd thing happened.

  He smiled at me.

  One of those ear-to-ear, Cheshire Cat types of smiles that are superficially pleasant but wrought with deep undercurrents of malevolence. If I saw it today, I’d punch a perfectly round, cartoon hole right through his teeth.

  “I’m sorry if we got off on the wrong foot, Damian. Why don’t we take a step back and start fresh? How does that sound?”

  I looked skeptically up as I tried to formulate my response.

  “Relax, Damian. It’s not me you’ve got to worry about.” My look must have turned even more perplexed at that, because he immediately began to explain himself.

  “I’m going to level with you, Damian, man-to-man.” Her dad had a way of playing off people’s weaknesses and exploiting exactly what they wanted to hear. I saw it first, then—he was working me. “And you look to me like a man with a pretty good head on his shoulders.”

  “Uh-huh.” My reply was more an acknowledgment for him to go on than it was an agreement.

  “Well, Catee’s been through a lot lately. What, with her mom passing away and all, then with us moving here.”

  “I know,” I agreed, and looked around him to the car again, hoping for some sign from her. Some clue as to what I should do. Again, there was nothing.

  “And as men, Damian, sometimes we have to ignore our own feelings and put our own urges aside.”

  “Okayyyyy … ” The intonation of my response told him I still wasn’t sure where he was going with it all.

  “What I’m trying to say, Damian, is that this isn’t the best time for you to be getting involved with my daughter. She’s got a lot of things that she … well … we … need to work through … as a family.” I knew he was spitting a load of crap, even then.

  “I can understand that,” I agreeably replied, just to end the uncomfortable conversation. I wanted him gone, and I still needed to catch my bus.

  “So then, please do me … do us … do Catee a favor, and give her some space, son.” I hated him calling me that. “Let her work through things before you complicate them with any sort of relationship right now.”

  “But, Mr. Laver—”

  “You care about her, right, son?”

  “Of course I do, but—”

  “And because you care about her,” he interrupted again, “you need to help me take care of her when she can’t take care of herself. That time’s now, Damian.”

  I couldn’t wrap my head around the things he was saying. She and I had been hanging out for almost two months, and she’d given me no indication that she needed space—every sign was the exact opposite, in fact. If anything, she wanted closeness. She wanted someone to be there for her. He’d never been, and I didn’t figure him as man to embrace change. So, while I agreed with him in the moment and to end the exchange, I’d already decided on doing the exact opposite.

  “Can I safely assume that I won’t see you hanging around here after school anymore?”

  “No, Mr. Laverdier, you won’t.” I could easily agree to not being seen.

  “And I won’t be seei
ng you hanging around my house, either?”

  Again, it was an easy agreement, but it would do little to change my ongoing presence in Catee’s life—a presence that would eventually help us to learn the truth about him.

  And with me agreeably on his side, Mr. Laverdier extended a final, parting handshake before he returned to his car, shifted it into gear, and pulled away. Catee’s teary face pressed against the glass. She waved goodbye, and the car grew smaller and smaller, while I stood still. I mouthed the words I’d wanted to say all along, worried that I might never get the chance to again.

  January 17th:

  At Mr. Laverdier’s strong suggestion, I steered clear of walking Catee to parent pick-up on Friday afternoons for the next few months. And though I initially avoided her house and heeded her dad’s ultimatum, I didn’t go back on the promise I scrawled to her that day in geometry class, and my mom resumed her Madison trips that following Monday—only days after my “man-to-man” with her dad.

  Some afternoons we’d hang around school to watch its teams practice in the fields. Other times, we’d walk to downtown to grab a sandwich, or we’d chill on the big rock wall that ran along the river.

  All the while, Catee continually insisted we go back to the way things were—that her dad hadn’t come home early since that one, exceptional time, and that it was just a once-in-a-relationship fluke. I didn’t buy it, and I didn’t bite. At least, not until winter set in, and when hanging outside turned unbearable, and the played-out insides of Madison High started to leave a bad taste in both our mouths.

  It was mid-January, and six-weeks of snowfall had totally compounded our already limited, post-school possibilities. The white powder accumulated, layer upon layer, and while it was invigorating at first, it became burdensome in short time. We’d become completely snowbound. And when that happens, and when there’s nothing left to keep things fresh and lively, you grow tired of those around you. I sensed that happening with Catee and me, and I began my own plans to surmount it.

  By then, even though I hadn’t brought her home yet, Catee and my mom had become all too acquainted with each other. Being that Mom picked me up from the school each night, it hardly seemed right to ride home in warmth as Catee trudged through the snow and cold alone, back to hers. And so, with the onset of winter, I started to insist that she accept a ride home, too. Catee agreed, and my mom was more than happy to oblige at my first suggestion of it.

  Finally, it became time to kick it up a notch.

  “How was school today, guys?” Mom chirped as the two of us climbed into the back of the car. For the few blocks it took to get to Catee’s place, Mom was our chauffeur—and a slow moving one at that. Cautiously creeping through the backstreets, and lingering too long at each intersection, she made every move possible to prolong the three-block trip to Catee’s place so she could pump us for as much information as she could along the way.

  “Great, Mrs. Lawson. Damian passed his geometry test with an ‘A’!”

  “Excellent work as usual, my brilliant son.” Mom smiled in the rearview mirror.

  “Geesh, I’m blushing, guys. Enough already.” Their accolades were wasted on me. Small as I am, my brain’s always been disproportionate to my body.

  “And how about you, Catee? How’d you do?” Mom rolled the conversation along.

  “Me? Oh, I always carry my own, Mrs. Lawson. No worries there. I got a ‘B+’.”

  “That’s great, too, Catee! Congratulations!”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Lawson.”

  “Oh, Catee, I’ve told you before to stop calling me that. It makes me sound so old. Just call me Martha.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Lawson. It just doesn’t sound right to me. Maybe after someone here finally invites me over for dinner, I’ll feel more comfortable on a first name basis with you.” At this, Catee playfully nudged me with her elbow, hinting for what had to be the twentieth time that it was past due for me to invite her to my place for a change.

  Given our ongoing crisis of having no afterschool hangout, I knew the time had finally come and that I’d avoided it with excuses for long enough. At first, I blamed it on distance, but Mom had already said she’d be happy to bring Catee back to Madison—just as long as long as we kept it to a couple nights a week. After that, I pinned my reluctance on the rest of my family, prophesizing a deluge of questions from them and a divulgence of my most personal secrets—from Nicole and my dad, in particular. I wrongly assumed that bringing Catee home would somehow change her perception of me and that it’d hurt the dynamic we’d built in our solace with each other. I over-protectively worried about her capacity to hold her own.

  And I’d somehow rationalized all these things to create a protective cocoon for Catee—one that was entirely unnecessary. If anything, I’d only been looking out for myself. I wasn’t giving proper respect to her openness, and I wasn’t allowing her to understand me enough to form her own, unfiltered opinions. It was only fair that I finally allowed her in. After all, it’s what I’d been trying to get her to do since we first met.

  I wanted to better understand her by learning and dissecting those things that she kept carefully concealed. I’d already pulled the basics: her dad’s relocation and job transfer to the hospital; her mom’s battle with cancer; fractured family therapy. But I still didn’t know everything I wanted to, and each time I dug deeper, she always found a way to steer my queries in more lighthearted directions. I wanted to understand the unspoken power that her dad seemed to have over her. I wanted to know what silenced her so efficiently when he tossed her in the car that day. What was said at their therapy sessions that made her revile him more and more with each passing one?

  I had tireless things left to learn about Catee, and the only way I’d be able to take down her walls would be to start with my own.

  “Hey Mom,” I asked from the backseat as we paused, for too long, at the last intersection.

  “Yes, Damian?”

  “Can Catee come over for dinner tomorrow night?” I asked the question casually and like I’d asked it a hundred times before. They both looked at me—Catee, from beside me, and Mom, through the rearview. They were stunned speechlessness.

  “Well, can she?” I asked again.

  “Of course she can, Damian. That’s a ridiculous question!” Mom proclaimed. “I’ve been dying to get in the kitchen and whip up a big, family meal. I’ll tell your father tonight, and I’ll give your sister a call just as soon as we get home! They’ve both been dying to meet you, Catee,” Mom said to her. “They keep asking when you’re coming by.”

  “They have,” I turned and admitted with caution.

  “Wow. I sure hope I live up to all the hype,” Catee laughed.

  “This is what I was warning you about.” My hand reached across the seat to give hers a squeeze.

  “Now, Damian, don’t you go making this sound like it’s some big deal or anything like that. They’re going to just love you, Catee.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Lawson. I’m sure I’ll love them, too.”

  And with that, we reached Catee’s house simultaneously with the point Mom had been waiting fourteen years to reach: the same point Catee had been badgering months for: a point that was as sweet for me, as it was forebodingly sour.

  The small guy with big ambitions was finally bringing a girl home to meet his family.

  January 18th:

  “So, tell me your High and tell me your Low,” Mom addressed the group. Per usual, she and my dad sat at opposite ends of our oak dining table. Catee sat to my right, closest to my dad. Nicole sat opposite us, more concentrated on Catee than her plate or anyone else at the table. Partially because she was a new face, but mostly because that’s what teenage girls are hard-wired to do: to read one another and to size them up as competition—even if they aren’t one, and even if it was only a non-threatening, family dinner.

  My dad, on the other hand, was focused more on the meal in front of him than anything else. And though he always had something to
say, it was seldom spoken before his meal was completed. Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for us, his fork was more a steam shovel than a utensil: he always finished in half the time as anyone else, and there was seldom quiet from his end of the table.

  Nobody responded to Mom’s request. Nicole was distracted. My dad had only half-finished his plate. Catee was completely in the dark regarding the group prompt, and I was busy worrying about whatever stories might be divulged at the table that night. It barely registered that Mom had asked her signature question.

  “Damian, since Catee’s with us tonight, why don’t you lead off? If she feels comfortable, she can jump in when she’s ready.”

  Catee reached out to nudge my thigh beneath the table. “What’s she talking about?” She spoke like a ventriloquist and through gritted teeth.

  “It’s family sharing,” Nicole asserted from across the way. Her attention hadn’t shifted from the two of us and, while Catee’s words were cautiously delivered for my ears, they were received by four. “It’s where we share our day,” she answered. “Your High is the best thing that happened. Your Low is the worst.”

  “Ohhhhh, I get it,” Catee replied. “And so the rest is the gray, day to day?”

  “You’ve got the idea,” Mom proudly stated, satisfied that her routine was sensible enough to be interpreted by an outsider.

  “And Mom likes us to start with the Low so we always end on a High note,” Nicole added.

  “I think I’ve got it,” Catee replied. “Okay, Damian. Take it away, Big Boy.”

  At this, my dad nearly choked on the mounded forkful of meatloaf he’d jammed into his mouth, and he spit it partially up.

  “Gross!!” Nicole reacted overdramatically.

  “Darryl, that’s disgusting!!” Mom chimed.

  They spoke in simultaneous dismay at his reaction to Catee’s casual statement.