“I’m a dick, sorry.”
He laughed. “Chicks can’t be dicks.”
I waved my hand. “Semantics.” I threw him a pillowcase, and he put it on the last pillow. “Okay, so if you did go to school, what would you study?” I asked.
He shrugged. “No idea. The government will pay for it, though, if I ever think of something. So, yeah, I don’t know. I’m not out yet, so nothing’s decided.”
“Wait.” Something in me twisted, but I ignored it. “You’re still in the Marines?”
He nodded. “I’m on leave right now. I’ve got six weeks of convalescence, six weeks of regular. I have to decide by the end of the summer if I’m gonna stay in and take the desk job they’ve offered me or get out. They said in the future there might be a training position.”
“But you wouldn’t have to, like, fight again, right?”
“I want to. If I can up my PT—uh, my physical training—and get one of those badass robotic legs, hell, yeah, I’d want to go back. Be useful.”
“To Afghanistan?” I wanted to say, Haven’t they done enough? Haven’t you done enough?
“Without a doubt. I’m supposed to be there. You know, there’re guys who lost way more than me who are still in. Their eyes, all their limbs. I used to think they were crazy. Thing is, being a Marine is the only thing I’m good at. Well, until the bomb anyway.” He sighed and shook his head as he turned toward the door. “I’m starving. You want anything from McDonald’s?”
It was the nicest way to say conversation closed.
“Oh. Sure, that’d be great.”
I gave him my order and then scooped my heart out of my stomach while he walked away toward his truck. After a second, I ran to the door.
“Josh!”
He turned around. “Yeah?”
“Being a Marine isn’t the only thing you’re good at. Maybe you just don’t know what your thing is yet, you know? I think…” I took a breath. “I just think you’re selling yourself short.”
He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I’ll be back soon.”
Hanging out with Josh was like learning how to drive stick. It was hard enough just to start and then it was one stall after another. But somehow I always managed to crawl forward, just a little bit.
chapter eight
It’d been a long day at the Paradise, and after the intense conversation with Josh, I wasn’t ready to deal with Billy Easton. I breathed a sigh of relief when his truck wasn’t in our driveway, but the trailer had evidence of Billy everywhere. It smelled like a bar—sour and a little bit sad. The cigarette smoke from last night clung to the couch, the curtains, the towels. I opened all the windows and doused the place with air freshener that smelled only marginally better. I could hear the shower running, which was good because it meant Mom was at least awake. An empty pizza box lay on top of the stove, and the trash can was full of bottles. I took the trash out, then started on the dishes that were piled in the sink. I knew the sight of me cleaning up wouldn’t mean a whole lot—my mom was used to that. But I was hoping that she’d be more willing to talk if I wasn’t sitting on the couch with my arms crossed, glaring at her. Which was what I wanted to do.
The neighborhood was pretty quiet for a summer night. There was the slow clatter of a train heading north, maybe up to San Francisco, and the screech of some kids as they rode by on their bikes. I thought of the story Josh had told me of the kid in Afghanistan and wondered what it would be like if there were soldiers in our neighborhood, peeking into our houses and passing out candy to the kids. Pointing their guns. I couldn’t imagine it.
I reached my hand up and trailed my fingers through the wind chimes that I’d hung over the kitchen sink. There wasn’t a breeze, but I wanted to hear their cheerful, tinkling sound. I closed my eyes as my fingertips brushed the metal tubes, and for a moment the bright notes took me away. It was a flying, dancing, falling sort of sound, and I decided there was hope in the world when you could make a sound like that.
I set to work, scrubbing at dried melted cheese and cups rimmed with old coffee stains. The water was hot, maybe too hot, but it kept my mind off of what was coming.
“You’re back,” Mom said.
I turned around and there she was, leaning against the door frame, her hair wrapped up in a towel. I hadn’t turned on any lights, and the twilight shadows spilled across her face. I flipped a switch, and the dull kitchen light nuzzled the darker corners of the room, brought out the circles under her eyes.
“How you feeling?” I asked. She looked about ten years older.
Mom sighed and walked over to the fridge. She must have seen me stiffen because she pulled out a bottle of Nestea and shook it at me. “Just tea,” she said.
Like I was some kind of narc.
Last night was hanging in the air between us, a heavy, ugly thing that leered as it waited to be called onstage. I wished she would bring it up, but that wasn’t her style. She was a sweep-things-under-the-rug kind of person.
I turned off the water and slowly wiped my hands with the dish towel. It smelled bad, and I threw it on the floor where my mother had begun an impromptu laundry pile. Then I turned around and leaned against the kitchen sink.
“Mom, what’s going on?”
She sipped at her tea. “I just had a little fun last night, Sky. When’s the last time I did that?”
I didn’t say anything, and she rolled her eyes and sat down in a huff. “Jesus, you’d think I’d shot up or something.”
I thought about Josh and what he was up against. This was nothing.
“I just don’t understand why you’re drinking again. Or why you were hanging out with Billy. I mean, how many times did you tell me he was scummy?”
Mom reached into her bathrobe pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I didn’t even bother saying anything about her smoking—what was the point?
I looked down at my bare feet. I hadn’t painted my nails in weeks, and the light blue polish that Dylan had put on them for graduation night was chipping. Graduation. About a million years ago.
When I looked up at my mom, she was watching me, five different emotions and none of them anger flashing across her face. She put down the cigarettes and crossed to the sink, pulling me into one of her viselike hugs. It had been days and days since she’d hugged me like that, and I could feel my stiffness and anger melting away.
“I know I’m such a disappointment to you, Sky,” she whispered.
“No,” I lied. “I just…” I swallowed the tears that were threatening to come out and hugged her even tighter. “We can get through this. Together.”
Mom let go and backed away a bit. She lifted up one of her callused hands and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear.
“Baby, what I need you to be thinking about right now is college.”
“I am thinking about college,” I said. “But I’m not leaving you like this. We have to get you a job. I just found out the gas station’s hiring, so you could work there, and if we get Billy away from here—”
“Sky, I’ve spent the past eighteen years making tacos. I don’t think a couple of weeks off is such a crazy idea.”
“I know, but—”
“And who’s gonna hire me?” Her voice started to rise. “Taco Bell’s the only job experience I have. If I apply somewhere else, they’ll call the Bell and find out about the robbery and how it was all my fault. You think someone’s gonna want to hire me after that?”
“I mean, can’t you try?”
“Waste of time. Plus I’d have to apply online.”
We didn’t have Internet at home, and the chance of getting my mom over to the Paradise to use Marge’s was slim to none.
“What about unemployment?”
“I’m not eligible. Since it’s my fault I got fired, the state’s gonna leave me high and dry.”
Shit. I hadn’t realized that.
A truck rumbled into the driveway, and I looked out the kitchen window, a silly part of me hoping
it was Josh. Not that there was any reason it would be. Then I spotted the faded red truck: Billy was pulling up, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
I turned back to my mom. “Seriously?”
“I deserve to have a little fun, don’t you think?”
“So let me take you to the beach. We could go to Pismo, or, I don’t know, one of those Indian casinos. Or camping in Yellowstone…”
I could hear the note of desperation in my voice, not to mention that we had never once gone camping. Even when my dad was around, the closest I’d ever gotten to the great outdoors was spending a day by the creek with our old portable Weber grill.
“Baby, cut me some slack, okay?”
This thing was building in me, so big, so much. I couldn’t do it anymore—be her cheerleader and therapist and parent and daughter all in one. And screw her for making me.
“Why?” I said, the words spilling out. “So you can get drunk off your ass and drive into an eighteen-wheeler like Dad did?”
It was like knocking over a glass and watching it fall to the floor, knowing you won’t be able to catch it before it shatters. She stared at me, her mouth open in a perfect O. The words had felt poisonous sliding off my tongue, but it felt a little good too, that burst of pissed-off adrenaline. Her eyes dimmed, and I saw her actually leave for a minute and go somewhere else while her body stood there rigid, shocked. That wasn’t what I’d wanted. Not that. Not ever.
“Mom,” I whispered.
God, how could I be so stupid? I’d pushed her too far. Guilt prickled my skin and whispered that it was my fault if she drank too much tonight.
There was a hard knock on the cheap metal door.
“Mom.”
She blinked, then moved past me to let Billy Easton in.
JOSH
I line my pills up in formation, like they’re about to be inspected. It’s time for roll call, motherfuckers: Zoloft for depression (Here!), Abilify for depression (Here!), Klonopin for anxiety (Here!), Oleptro and Lunesta for sleep (Here! Here!), Neurontin for phantom limb pain (Here!), ibuprofen for TBI headaches (Here!). If I stare at the pills long enough, they start floating like tiny stars in the sky. Creek View fades away and now I’m on post, sitting near a canal, eyes peeled. The stars cover the sky, thousands of them. Never seen stars like that before. Made me wish I knew the constellations. When you wish upon a star, I joke-sing. I can’t sing for shit, and we all know it. You laugh and say, Dude, stars are for pussies. I wish on the moon. Gomez shakes his head. You can’t wish on the moon. You raise your eyebrows. Why not? Gomez shrugs. Ask fuckin’ Disney why not. They wrote the song. I laugh and say, You can’t wish on anything. You look over at me: If you could wish on the moon for something, what would it be? I think about everything that’s gone down since we deployed—Sharpe dying, Panelli losing his arms, that IED blowing up in Harrison’s face so now he looks like Freddy Krueger. The Afghanis that got wiped out by that drone strike the week before and the ones I see on the side of the road sometimes, Taliban roadkill. Before we shipped out, I thought it was so cool that I was going to war. Felt like a bad motherfucker. Then I saw our first guy go down and it wasn’t so cool anymore. I’d wish them back, man, I say. You nod as you pack some more chew. I’d wish all of them back. Now I look at the pills lined up on my desk and my empty room and my metal leg. The moon’s not big enough to wish on. Nothing is.
chapter nine
I looked at the clipboard in my hand, making sure that I’d written down everything we needed to order: prepackaged soaps, mini bottles of shampoo, more industrial towels, thin plastic cups. Satisfied, I closed the storage closet door and walked over to the window beside the lobby couch. The sickly sweet scent of cat pee hovered in the air above the cushions, a present from a guest’s feline companion. My stomach turned a little—the combination of urine and stifling heat was too much.
Josh’s truck still wasn’t in the driveway, but I told myself that wasn’t what I’d been looking for. I’d wanted to see … No, I couldn’t pretend. I wanted to see Josh. It didn’t make any sense, but I kept finding myself thinking about him, hoping we’d run into each other. I’d spent the past few nights lying awake in bed, listening to the sound of Mom’s TV through the thin walls, unable to sleep. Worrying, yes, but what bothered me almost as much as our dire straits was Josh and how I couldn’t escape him in the dark. At night I’d lie awake with these crazy fantasies of him showing up at my window, and I’d wonder if he was awake too, and if he was, was he thinking about me? Then I’d tell myself he probably wasn’t alone. Josh Mitchell wasn’t known for sleeping by himself, and I was an idiot, imagining doing things with him that made me blush when he was probably doing those things to some other girl with absolutely no thought of me whatsoever. Then I’d get jealous and feel stupid and punch my pillow and try to push him out of my mind. What was happening to me? I’d become tidal, the current of my want pushing me toward him, pulling me away from him. Toward him, away from him.
A crush. I had a silly crush because he’d suddenly become exotic, an enigmatic hero. He’d been in a land full of mysteriously clothed women and men in long tunics and turbans. He’d seen the kind of stuff Picasso painted Guernica for. He had stories to tell, unlike anyone else in this town.
But I’d had crushes before, and this … this was no crush. The pact, I reminded myself. I was convinced that the reason Chris and I were the only ones from our graduating class to get out of Creek View was because of our self-imposed celibacy. Something about falling in love (or lust) seemed to anchor people to this place.
I turned my back on the window and stood in front of the box fan to let the cool air dry some of the sweat that was dripping down my neck. All I wanted to do was sit in a refrigerator. After a few minutes, I gave up on the fan and went back to the counter. I ran my hands over the part of Marge’s collage I’d been working on for most of the morning. The plan was to connect these smaller collages by collaging them into one big piece. Right now, I was trying to get the angel on the Paradise sign just right. I’d taken to going out and studying her at night, to make sure I was capturing all the details, like the way the neon wasn’t working on all the feathers on her wings. I’d chosen some pretty metallic paper to create the neon glow of the sign. I’d already fashioned 3-D wings for the angel—pipe cleaners covered with papier-mâché, so now I grabbed a sheet of shimmering gold sanded pastel paper and began slicing it into tiny strips with my razor blade—the angel’s hair.
As I worked, the lobby fell away, my world whittled down to the feel of the paper under my fingers and the creature straining to burst from the collage. My sound track: the whir of the fan and the soft sounds of cutting and arranging. I wasn’t in Creek View anymore—or, rather, I was in a Creek View of my own making, where all that mattered were angles and colors and the steady beat of my heart as the angel slowly came to life. Nothing—and no one—could touch me here.
The sliding glass door opened, and Marge walked in, fanning her thick face and startling me from my cocoon. I looked up, dazed. I’d forgotten the heat, the time—everything.
She crushed the can of Diet Dr Pepper in her hand and frowned. “Hey, sweet pea. Still no Josh?”
I shook my head. “Want me to try calling him again?”
“I think his cell’s off. He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”
She threw the can in the wastebasket next to the candy dispenser and looked over my notes on the clipboard, muttering to herself. As she got closer to the counter, I shooed her away.
She narrowed her eyes. “What are you doing over there—snorting cocaine?”
“Very funny,” I said. “It’s your collage, and you know it. Don’t think I can’t tell when you’re trying to be sneaky!”
She huffed in mock offense. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Weren’t you the one telling me patience is a virtue?”
“I hate when my own wisdom bites me in the ass.”
I laughed and gathered up the scrap
s of paper I wasn’t using, then dumped them into a plastic bag for later, in this collage or another. Nothing ever goes to waste with collaging. It was the perfect medium for a broke-ass person like myself. Besides, if it was good enough for Picasso, it was good enough for me. It was his collages that had made me want to work with paper in the first place. In my essay for San Fran, I’d written about how I’d always felt like there was something magical about taking bits and pieces of the world around me and creating something whole. It gave me hope: if you could make a beautiful piece of art from discarded newspapers and old matchbooks, then it meant that everything had potential. And maybe people were like collages—no matter how broken or useless we felt, we were an essential part of the whole. We mattered.
I gave my collage one last, loving glance, then put it in the large portfolio folder I’d bought for myself when I got into San Fran. Marge still stood near the window, frowning. I glanced at the clock. It wasn’t like Josh to blow off a shift like this.
“The electrician’s here, and Josh has my keys,” Marge said. “The guy needs to get into that back room where the generator and electrical panels are. Would you mind running over to Josh’s house and seeing if he’s there? If he’s not home, you can check the garage.”
I got that fluttery feeling that seemed to attack me every time Josh was around: in my chest and the pit of my stomach and in a place it’s not polite to mention in mixed company. What was I supposed to tell her? No, Marge, I’m sorry, but I can’t go to Josh’s house. You see, I’m experiencing a fluttering sensation.
I leaned over the counter and grabbed my keys and wallet. “I think I’m gonna need a raise for this.”
She handed me twenty bucks from her pocket. “Subway. You fly, I’ll buy.”
I pushed her hand away. “Kidding, Marge. Of course I’ll go over there.”
She stuffed the bill into the front pocket of my jean shorts. “Get out of here, and don’t come back without a six-inch roast beef, no—”
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