This was met with family boos. Evan was on daytime talk TV. Bizarre speculations were flinging into each ear as if no one thought he was listening. Evan surveyed the other family members, his eyes pleading for help. Nothing. He’d ceased to exist in a conversation he was the centerpiece of.
“Well, I agree that it would be okay if he was,” Mom added, “but he’s too girl-crazed.”
The living room was in stitches. Evan thought of the Woody Allen short film Oedipus Wrecks, in which the main character’s mother disappears during a magic show and reappears as a giant face floating in the sky. She talks all day to strangers about the main character’s most embarrassing life moments. Sundays for Evan often felt a lot like Oedipus Wrecks.
“Well,” Gram continued, in a manner that proved she’d given this some thought, “he’s an artist, he’s single, he’s polite, which are all wonderful things, and his friends—”
“Gram.” Evan cut her off. “I have close friends who happen to be gay, but that has nothing to do with me.” Evan had made the mistake of inviting Tim and Marshall over to work on a project, and his grandma had spent the entire afternoon like an elderly Encyclopedia Brown, sniffing for clues and starting anything-but-subtle discussions on the attractiveness of Robert Redford.
“Well, you do spend a lot of time with them, and I read about something called latent homosexuality,” said Gram. Everyone laughed again.
“So you’re implying that I’m not only gay, but the gay third wheel to my friends?” Evan asked, afraid of the answer.
“I’m not implying anything, Evan!” she said, taking her hand off his shoulder. Evan smiled to let her know he wasn’t upset. He’d always had a very close bond with his grandmother, which only strengthened when she moved in after his grandfather died.
Before the conversation continued, Dad leaned into the shelf, and a ceramic storefront building fell to the ground and broke with a tinkle.
“Oh, you see—” Dad started, and then was on the ground picking up pieces.
The room was silent for a long second before everyone huddled around to clean up the mess. They all knew how he hated to lose a piece of the town.
“I’m sorry, Charlie,” Gram said. “I didn’t mean to distract you.”
“It’s all right, Mom,” Dad said, putting on a strained smile. “This just gives me an excuse to go buy a new one.”
The relatives relaxed and went back to their non-Evan-centered activities.
Evan’s pocket vibrated, and he took out his phone. A text read, You home? The text glowed like a beacon to a ship lost at sea. It’s safe here, it said. Come to land. It was going to be hours before all of the Owenses’ company had left, and Evan could no longer wait for hours. It was possible he could even sneak back in before they’d left. He never knew with Lucy, though. Hours could pass by completely unnoticed. This was going to be his chance. With his family members crowded around the porcelain mess or back in front of the TV, Evan grabbed his hat and coat and slipped out the door with as little noise as he could make.
The door clicked quietly shut. The sky was a pale blue as the winter sun was already starting to lower, and there were three inches of snow on the ground, from the second snowstorm of the season. Evan squinted until his eyes adjusted to all the white, reflecting the sun like a lumpy mirror covering the earth. The trees were like intricate glass sculptures, shining in the sunlight, dripping water to the ground. Evan took a deep breath of sharp, cold air, which considerably cooled down his overheated body. He felt calmer almost immediately. He took his iPod out of his coat pocket and put in his earbuds. He pulled his knit hat down over his messy hair and started walking.
The driveway was full of cars half-covered in snow or littered with the leaky remains from a quick dust-off. Evan waved to Mr. Jacobsen, who was almost through shoveling next door. He looked down the street and observed what was left of a man-versus-nature war—trails of snow blasted out of driveways and onto the road. A car at the end of the road was stuck, trying its best to drive over the stuff.
The walk to Lucy’s house took about fifteen minutes, or four and a half songs shuffled through his iPod. A greatest-hits of Evan’s Nerd Rock, as Lucy called it, played. Weezer, Ben Folds, They Might Be Giants, Jonathan Coulton. Evan enjoyed what was left of the afternoon sun and the open air. He liked being the only one out walking. He walked fast down the long roads, in big, wide steps, burning off his nervous energy, watching the tops of trees.
Evan walked up the front steps of Lucy’s dad’s house and knocked. A balding Englishman in a loose robe opened the door. He looked surprised, but pleased. “Evan, how are you?”
“I’m good, Mr. Brown. Is Lucy around?”
“Evan.” Doug frowned. “Call me Doug.” He turned around and called, “Lucy? It’s still Lucy, right?” He bantered with Evan, asking how his parents were doing. Then the hurricane blew by.
“Jesus, Dad, embarrass me, why don’t you?” Lucy said as she grabbed her coat and walked outside.
“You want a hat?”
“No, bye, back later,” Lucy said, and Evan was caught in the draft, following her out of the yard and up the street.
Evan said nothing as he looked Lucy over—studied her, even, like some odd artifact. She was different. Really different. Her hair was cut short—not cut but chopped off, making a statement as much as hair makes statements. Dyed black. Her eyes were covered in makeup, and her nose was pierced. The leather jacket was new, too, but otherwise it was Lucy, all right. Evan’s eyebrows climbed a quarter inch. Is it dress-up day? Evan thought, amused. Dress-down day?
“Hi,” she said, almost hesitantly, almost angrily, as they slowed down and walked along the dirt-and-ice-covered road.
“Hi,” Evan said, his smile barely covering his surprise.
“So…”—Lucy’s eyes rolled around—“you wanna go for a walk?”
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
“The happy wanderers,” an elderly neighbor had called Evan and Lucy when Lucy still lived there. The two would walk up and down the street and around the block for hours after school, until it got dark. They’d walk and talk about Evan-couldn’t-remember-what, as if there were that many things to talk about.
The routine should have been easy enough to pick up when she visited, but for Evan, it always felt a little awkward. Conversation was always stifled at first, and this year was no different.
They walked quietly down the hill. Evan looked around at the homes spaced unevenly off the street. He always thought the houses in this area looked like they could have each come from a different part of the country. Likewise for the streets, he thought, as they walked through a “New England” intersection that looked more like a flattened X than a cross.
“This is good,” Evan said. “I needed to get out of there.”
“Oh, family Sunday,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “Sorry, I forgot. You would think I’d remember Brady Bunch Sundays.”
“No, it’s fine, trust me, please,” he said with increasing exaggeration. “The Brady Bunch can discuss me more openly if I’m not there anyway.”
Lucy smiled.
“Can I ask?” Evan went ahead and asked. “What’s with the—” Evan made a hand-waving gesture over his face and body, unable to find the words he was looking for.
“You like?” Lucy tilted her head as if she were being photographed.
“It’s—it’s different. I’m just used—you’re just normally, I don’t know what. Less…”
“You don’t like. Pout.”
“I didn’t say that,” Evan said promptly. The thought bubble floating over his head was filled with images of dragon tattoos, Hot Topic, and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.
“I just thought I’d try something different.”
“Well, mission accomplished, then. Congratulations.” Evan held out his arms. Voilà.
They walked in silence for a bit. Evan kept glancing over at her. Where’d you come from? Her look wasn’t helping them ease into normalcy. It was
n’t out of the ordinary for Lucy to change her appearance (preppy Lucy, chic Lucy), and Evan did know her to develop new interests every few months (dessert baking, marathon biking). It just felt drastic. In fact, it was the complete silence, the indifference to the subject, that really fueled his curiosity. Normally Lucy couldn’t stop talking about her latest obsessions. This one was a mystery. Evan knew that if he kept bringing it up, he wouldn’t get any answers. But what else could he talk about? It was the Goth elephant in the room.
They turned left at the intersection and walked past the apartments and town houses, heading toward Evan’s.
“I think I might be valedictorian for my class,” Evan said, not bragging, but just looking for something to say.
“That’s awesome. Congratulations,” Lucy said with disconnect. Evan thought she was making an effort to sound happy. “I’m proud of you.”
He hadn’t really felt like talking about himself anyway, after the lengthy examination at his house. He was more interested in Lucy now. “You look like someone,” Evan said. “I’m not sure who. Like maybe a punked-out Miley Cyrus or something.” Lucy was just going to have to forgive him; she must have known this was coming.
“Yeah, right. Like if she ate a thousand pies a day for the rest of her life.”
“Please,” Evan said, and laughed at the image. “So your stylist, does she do any of the stars or anything…?”
Lucy punched his arm hard enough for him to feel it through layers of sweater and coat. Evan wondered for the first time if this transformation was deeper than the clothes and makeup.
“I’m sorry,” Evan said. “I’m just curious, that’s all. I mean it’s different. Should we be having some kind of discussion? What’s the protocol?”
Lucy smiled and rolled her eyes. “You’re like the guy who takes you to prom but has to ask if he can kiss you at the end of the night.”
“So we should be discussing this.”
“No. There’s nothing to discuss. It would be an empty discussion. We’d be saying nothing at all.”
Past the apartments was the long straight road with the cemetery on both sides. It was large and sprawling, and fences lined the entire length of it. The sky and the snow were almost the same shade of light purple-blue at this time in the afternoon. Evan and Lucy opened the cold gate and entered the cemetery without acknowledging a set course at any point, because this was just part of the walk, as it always had been. A few cars slowly passed by, their tires making a crunchy noise over the messy roads. Evan took a sharp, cold breath and sighed, and watched his icy sigh drift away.
Welcome to the Evan Owens Show. Our guest tonight is Lucy Brown, longtime show visitor. Haven’t seen you in twelve months, so tell us, Lucy, what’s going on in your world? Nothing? Well, the look is something, am I right, folks? What inspired this getup? No? All right, I’m on my own tonight. Surely there’s something going on you’d like to discuss. School? Family? Boys?
Now there was something that could explain the silence—she had met some new boy, he was on her mind, and she felt weird talking about it because when had they ever talked about relationships, especially about her and relationships? As far as Evan knew, she’d never been in one. Of course she’s shy.
“Are you dating anyone?” Evan asked.
Lucy looked like she’d been woken up from a nap with a splash of cold water. “Why would you ask that?”
Evan was surprised. So she was seeing someone—he’d nailed it. If she wasn’t, she’d have said no or laughed the idea off. To ask Evan why he would ask that was pretty much admitting the whole thing.
“No, are you kidding me? Boys are gross,” she followed up. Was it a cover-up?
“You’re dating someone,” Evan said, a teasing tone in his voice, like a playground bully. “Who is he? What’s going on? Is he tall, dark, and handsome? Is he, like, some Goth kid or something? That’s it, isn’t it?”
“I told you. Boys are gross. Come on, when do I date anyone?”
“So, what? Is it a crush or something?”
“Ev, God. No, there’s no one. There’s nothing.”
The puzzle pieces really fit together, but she wasn’t budging on this. Evan was still curious, though. “Why not?” he asked. “You should. Date someone, I mean. I’m sure guys ask you out. You’re not unattractive or anything.”
“Gee, thanks,” Lucy said, clearly weirded out. Wide-eyed and with restless arms, she looked as if she were covered with spiders. “Boys are gross, end of story. Sorry to disappoint.”
Lucy Brown, ladies and gentlemen, not promoting anything today. Still single, fellas. We’ll be right back! They walked slowly by rows of varied tombstones, tall and sturdy, low and crooked, some barely more than rocks. Evan didn’t want to walk another five minutes not saying anything and had just opened his mouth, unsure what was going to come out, when Lucy spoke.
“Have you been drawing anything?” she asked. The first thing she always did when she visited in the winter was pore over Evan’s sketchbooks and art pads.
“I guess. Just stuff.” Evan had been blocked creatively lately. He added art to the pile of college and sports as touchy subjects. “I tried writing. Just this idea I had, a comic-strip kinda thing, but it didn’t go so well. Turned me into a frustrated, self-loathing artiste.”
“Well, the brain’s a dark place to visit,” Lucy said nonchalantly.
Evan rolled through his mental Rolodex, but the cards were blank. He decided on trivial conversation. “You into any cool stuff lately?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said, as if Evan had asked her for the square root of pi.
Evan wondered since when had talking to Lucy been so difficult. He’d logged hundreds of hours looping these streets with Lucy and could count the number of stifled conversations they had had on one hand.
“Sorry,” Lucy offered. “I just can’t—brain. Coffee. What about you?” She shrugged.
“Yeah, sure, a lot of stuff. I’ve gotten really into Harmony Korine. He wrote the movie Kids for Larry Clark to direct, but the stuff he writes and directs himself is way cooler.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Like, the first one I saw was this movie Julien Donkey-Boy.” Evan was animated now, his hands waving, his face coming to life. “It’s about this kid who has undiagnosed schizophrenia, and it’s just like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s not even a movie so much as a collection of scenes. It’s tonal. There’s this creepiness to it, and you keep cringing as he’s playing with these little kids, and just hoping he doesn’t do anything messed up, which he doesn’t, but you just never know. And Werner Herzog plays his dad, and you just have to see it. He keeps asking the kid to put on his dead wife’s dress.” Evan was rambling, but by now he was fine with it. He’d talk until she joined him, if that’s what it was going to take.
“Jesus,” Lucy said, still not looking up.
“And he started this other movie that he didn’t finish, with David Blaine—”
“The magician guy?” Lucy was letting him go on with this.
“Yeah, but forget about that—so he does this movie, and the whole concept is he’s going to go around starting fights with random people, and he won’t stop fighting without a threat of death. So he gets into six of these fights before he ends up in the hospital and calls it off. But still. He’s nuts. But, like, awesome nuts.”
If conversation were volleyball and Evan were volleying, then right now the sun was in his eyes and the ball had disappeared completely. Lucy was barely paying attention. He wanted her to take his hand. It felt empty. He had been so sure the works of Harmony Korine would get a conversation going.
“That’s really cool.” She looked lost in thought, but she wasn’t sharing any of those thoughts with Art-House Evan, who was bombing, and before he could shake Lucy and demand that she say anything, anything at all!!!—
“Look who it is,” Lucy coolly stated, raising her chin toward her and Evan’s right.
They had come upon a tombston
e belonging to one Abraham Meriwether, 1871–1936. Evan had never been so happy to see a dead guy.
“Abe,” Evan said with a telling amount of relief and a quick glance at Lucy. “Still here.”
They stopped, and Evan dusted some snow off the tombstone. “You know, I looked up his Wikipedia page,” Evan said, picking up their old tradition. Even New Lucy™ couldn’t resist the History of Abraham Meriwether game.
“Really? Abe has a Wikipedia?” Lucy played along. She looked briefly at Evan for the first time since they’d left her father’s house. Her cheeks were flushed, and her lips were pale. They stood out from the wildly cut black hair that seemed chiseled from the sides of her face.
“Oh yeah,” Evan said, pulling for a last-quarter comeback from Old Lucy. “Turns out he’s a pretty famous guy. For instance, did you know he invented a prototype of the DVD-R?”
“Really?” Lucy asked, the designated skeptic. “Way back in the eighteen hundreds?”
“It was made out of stone.”
“Oh, well, that makes sense, then,” Lucy said, part of a comedy duo now, playing to the world’s most captive audience. “I’d heard he took part in some unsavory honey-based exploits in Hong Kong. He spent the latter years of his life harassed by angry bees.”
“This is true. It was the cause of his death, in fact.” Evan was relishing the familiarity of the conversation. They’d been discussing Mr. Meriwether for years, his story always changing. He’d been a real-life Sherlock Holmes, a blind championship fighter, and part red fox. At times the entire cemetery had been a ruse to cover up Abraham’s underground headquarters.
“Anything else on his Wikipedia?” Lucy asked, and flashes of previous years passed in front of Evan: when they were thirteen and first found Abe; when they were inventing stories for everyone buried there. But Abe was special. Abraham Meriwether, come on. “Sure, yeah, of course,” Evan said, trying to think up something witty. “Let’s see. Abe was very well-known for his activity in the Julien Donkey-Boy fandom.” Lucy and Evan both laughed at this. “He beat Steve Wiebe’s high score in Donkey Kong,” he added.
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