“No, you don’t,” Lucy said, having heard enough of his tantrum. “You need to break away from there. I know it’s your family, and they mean well, but listen to you. It’s unhealthy.”
“You want me to run away from home?” Evan said quietly.
“Not run away, break away,” Lucy murmured. They were having a conversation now, and not a fight, Lucy thought. That was good.
“Can I just say, about us? About this? Maybe I don’t understand you, but I see you for a few weeks a year. Yeah, we grew up together, but that was a long time ago. I want to get to know you again. Like I did then, but now.”
Lucy felt calmer now. She felt sad for Evan. But she felt glad, too, and saw that maybe he could change. Maybe they both could still change, and meet somewhere in the middle. They were making some kind of progress now, but she wasn’t sure where to go from here because she was still lying to him. There was still so much she hadn’t even hinted at that would stop everything if it came out. She couldn’t have an honest conversation with him about his future or theirs when she was still lying about everything else. And she couldn’t bring those things up until she could trust Evan not to freak out and never speak to her again.
“Can we not fight?” Evan asked. “We have a few more days, and I don’t even know what to do anymore. I don’t know where this is going or what will happen when you leave, but I don’t want to spend this time fighting.”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, and placed her hand on Evan’s lap. “Okay. Maybe we can have an adventure or something,” Lucy said, uplifted by the idea. “Something different.”
“Okay,” Evan said tentatively, “like what?”
“I don’t know. Something memorable. All right, tomorrow. I get to pick our plans. And you have to do whatever I say.”
Evan chuckled nervously. “I told you, I don’t want to smoke.”
“No, no. That’s not an adventure. It’ll be something fun. I’ll think of something. Just give me tonight.” And Lucy got excited.
WIND CHIMES
Twenty-four hours later, Lucy was driving again, with Evan in the passenger seat, and he still had no idea what they were up to or where they were going. He had been told to dress warmly, so he had, with layers of shirt, hoodie, and coat and his winter hat and gloves. Lucy was dressed warmly, too, with a sweater, coat, and her own hat.
“Are we going to lie down on a frozen lake, like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?” Evan asked.
“Stop guessing!” Lucy scolded, and not for the first time.
Lucy wanted to have a fun adventure, but she was mostly nervous. She had a plan for the evening. If, in the worst-case scenario, they didn’t have fun and she and Evan ended up fighting, then so be it. If the evening went well, and she and Evan got along, then she’d tell him about her summer, and about Ian, and the night would end in failure after that. If they had fun all night, if she told Evan about her boyfriend and the drugs and her mom’s boyfriend, and if Evan was all, Hey, that’s cool, then she’d commit a suicide/homicide. Either way, things were going to go downhill, and she wasn’t holding much faith in a positive outcome. If Evan forgave her, a big if, she couldn’t just numbly live with her problems back home. She’d have to change things, and that was scary—that made her entire body clench. She couldn’t run or hide behind drugs or do any of the messed-up things that came easy to her. Not with Evan. Knowing this would end in misery helped in a strange way. It was hope that was the problem. Hoping feelings wouldn’t be hurt, hoping love would blossom, that was painful. But committing yourself to misery, that was just a dead feeling. It was pulling the Band-Aid and embracing the pain.
“All right,” Lucy said, and glanced at Evan. “I told you we were going to do something memorable. So. I’m taking you to a strip club.”
“Seriously?” Evan asked as they passed through downtown. He looked out his window, expecting a neon triple-X sign to pass overhead.
“You wish!” Lucy said, and laughed. “Dork.”
A few blocks later, Lucy turned into an alley between two buildings and pulled into a parking lot behind them. It was on the outskirts of the downtown area, and not so well lit. There were a few other cars there, but no people, and the area looked like it hadn’t been plowed in days. The waterfront was just a few streets away, and visible from the lot.
“Here we are!” Lucy said, as if it were the final destination. She got out of the car, and Evan halfheartedly followed suit. It was bitterly cold and windy. The sky was black, aside from the tiny moon, but most of the light came from the yellow light over an unlabeled door, and from the streetlights a few blocks away.
“All right. So this is adventure, according to Lucy,” Evan said, looking around. “Are some goons going to pop out and break my arms or something?”
“That’s later,” Lucy said, as she opened the trunk and took out a large cloth portfolio. She shut the trunk and looked at Evan and wished for the best. “Let’s go.”
Lucy and Evan walked uphill through the alley and came out into the brightly lit street. They turned right, though, and within a few minutes, they were leaving the busy downtown area behind. The lights all fell behind them, and they walked under a bridge and into a hilly area that they had followed on the long walks they took when they were younger. “I hope we’re going somewhere warm,” Evan said.
“I told you to dress for this,” Lucy said. Her nose was running and her fingers were numb, but a plan was a plan.
“Remember the creepy house down here?” Evan said, and Lucy knew the one he was talking about. They used to pass this tiny abandoned house, its lawn in disarray, the windows either broken or boarded up. They had stopped to poke around one day and were terrified when the angry head of a decrepit old lady swung upward into the window frame and screamed jibberish. Evan and Lucy had run half of the way back home, and later had included her as a crazy old witch in their fantasy stories. She’d grown into legend over the years. And now they were headed to that house.
Evan looked at the house as they stopped in front of it. “This isn’t it. This isn’t your big plan for the night, is it?”
“It’s part of it,” Lucy said with an accomplished smile. “Yep.”
“Are we spending a night in a haunted house? Do we go inside and get eaten by angry old-lady ghosts?”
“First off, ghosts haunt, they don’t eat. And second, no, it’s not haunted. Although that lady has to be dead by now.”
“Does she?” Evan asked, and looked sideways at Lucy. “This is kinda freaking me out.”
Lucy took Evan’s hand and pulled him along the unplowed driveway toward the dark house, which was still broken and boarded up. It was two stories but looked like it couldn’t hold more than a few rooms. Lucy opened the light outside door and tried to open the main front door, but it was locked.
“Kick it!” she ordered.
“What if that lady really does live here?” Evan said quietly, his eyes glued to the windows, as if he was expecting her shriveled old head to appear. “Maybe she’s just poor and can’t afford electricity. Or maybe she’s homeless and is just squatting here.”
“Evan, she was, like, four billion years old. There’s no way she’s still here. It’s abandoned property. We have as much right to be here as she does.”
“Which is none. And why would we want to be here?”
“Because I said so, and I get to choose what we do.” Lucy was staring ahead at the door.
“I’m thinking that was a mistake.”
Evan knocked softly on the door and paused as he listened for a reaction. Lucy insisted the door needed a kick. Evan pushed the door with his foot. Lucy explained what a kick was. Be badass. Finally, Evan stepped back and gave a forceful kick, and the door swung open, banging against the wall. They ducked inside and closed the door before anyone noticed them, as the houses here were close together. Good job, Lucy thought. Yeah, that was pretty badass.
“All right,” Evan said, as Lucy put down her stuff and turned on a flas
hlight. “This is creepy. What now? Are we looking for ghosts or something?”
“We spend the night. You know. Together.” Lucy put on her vulnerable face. A cute pout. She looked Evan in the eyes.
Evan’s eyes darted around the dark room. “Really? Here? “
“No, get your head out of the gutter.”
Lucy set the flashlight down on a windowsill so it pointed into the empty house. It was more like a garage than a house. It was small. There was a staircase only a step inside, leaving barely enough room to open the door completely. The floor was concrete, covered completely in a thick layer of dust, like nature had installed its own carpet. There was a very small kitchen area and a table, and a bathroom, and that was all there was downstairs. Exploring the house wasn’t a part of Lucy’s plan, though, so she opened the portfolio and took out a bunch of large sheets of paper and some thick black markers. The slightest movements cast huge splashes of darkness across the walls. She wiped a large spot on the floor with her foot to set the papers down, and did the same so she and Evan had space to sit. She took off her dirty gloves.
“I don’t think I’m going to sleep for a week,” Evan said. “This place is already giving me nightmares.”
“Hush,” Lucy said. She dropped down to the floor and popped the cap off one of the markers. “This is the easiest part of the evening. We’re going to draw.”
“You know”—Evan sat down carefully—“we could have drawn just about anywhere. My house. Yours. The library. Like, any diner or café. You know they have clean tables and everything? Free Wi-Fi. You can even get coffee.”
He’d be fine. She took this to be an instance of Evan just liking the sound of his own voice. “This is a secret private drawing. It’s just for us,” Lucy said, not ready to tell Evan why it was a secret private drawing. Lucy had to rest her weight on her knees and lean over the paper to draw. She began their most ambitious jam strip yet. It would take at least five large sheets of paper, fitting only two or three panels per sheet. The first panel, which Lucy drew, taking her time with it, was a fantasy sprawl of Aelysthia. The vomiting sun gave it away. If she was going to do a special jam strip with Evan, it only made sense that it would take place there. The setting made it personal and special right from the start.
“Why so big?” Evan asked. “This could take a while.”
“Because that’s what I want. And we have a couple hours, tops. Make it good.”
Lucy finished her establishing shot, and Evan took over, starting his panel.
Lucy watched Evan draw. The setup probably wasn’t the best. The flashlight lit the room decently, but it also made for dark shadows. Half of Evan’s face was indiscernible, and he was drawing in his own hand’s shadow, basically guessing at what would come out. When he moved his hand, though, it looked fine. If she hadn’t watched him draw it, she’d never have known he could barely see the paper. He was drawing a person with hands coming out of her face. This was a common feature if you lived in Aelysthia; it was like having freckles here. Lucy thought she would put up with the face hands to live in a beautiful fantasy world. She could live in a hobbit hole and eat all day and fight trolls in the woods just fine. In fact, it was a huge disservice to her character that there were no monsters at all to battle where she lived. She was positive it was what she had been put on Earth to do. She brought this up to Evan.
“It would be a clean-cut world. Peaceful, scenic towns, baking pies and sleeping ’til noon, then taking your sword and shield and fighting the bad guys. If I could do that and forget all the bullshit, all the school and jobs and complicated relationships, forget about working until I’m sixty-five, forget the economy and all the crap we’re going to grow into, that’d be just fine with me. I’ll fight trolls all goddamn day.”
“It’d be nice,” Evan said. “I’m sure we’d just trade our problems for new ones, though. I mean, trolls can’t be that easy to defeat. And we’d run through shoes like nobody’s business.”
Evan had once said he liked fantasy books because of the wide-open worlds you could escape to, where everything was new and the journey was going to be long and take you far. Lucy thought of it differently. Even then, when they were kids. She found the real world to be too open and scary sometimes. And she liked to hide in a book that was comfortable and familiar. Where she knew what she was getting into.
Lucy decided to pick Evan’s brain while she had him trapped. She asked about this Jessica girl he had dated. Lucy had been incommunicado during the month when he was dating her and had missed the whole story. She had only heard bits and pieces from his family in the past week.
“You don’t want to hear about that, do you?” Evan said, passing the large sheet of paper back to Lucy. There was still space for a smaller third panel in the corner.
“I asked, didn’t I? I never hear about these girls of yours. I want to know what I’m getting into.”
Evan thought about it for a minute. He didn’t sound enthused to talk about her, but began anyway. “Well, it was short. That’s the main thing. It was short, and dramatic, and that makes for good teasing around here. All right. So there was this girl named Jessica Lyons. She worked at McDonald’s.”
Lucy snorted with laughter and covered her mouth.
“What? Why is that funny?”
Lucy didn’t know why it was funny that she worked at McDonald’s. Somehow she pictured the playpen and Grimace and Ronald, and it just made her laugh.
“All right. So I met her when I went to McDonald’s, and she was clearly having the worst day of her life or something because she’d come across as stone cold, like, don’t mess with me, I hate my job, whatever. Then she went to get this stack of cups, and she dropped them all over the floor. I thought she was going to kill someone, but she just started laughing, and she seemed like this whole other person. She was really pretty, curly brownish-red hair, bright eyes. Anyway, I started laughing, too. So that was the first time I met her.”
Lucy had already finished her panel, and Evan started drawing on the next sheet of paper. The wind was screaming loud and pounding against the house.
“The next time I saw her was at an open mic I went to with Tim and Marshall. She was a singer, and this other girl was playing piano. So that was a game-changer. She wasn’t just some cute McDonald’s girl, but she was a singer, a musician. Now I was really interested. I knew every guy was going to pounce on her, so I made a point to go look for her as soon as she’d finished. We talked for, like, forty-five minutes. She came with me and Tim and Marshall for our Friday-night routine, which involved going to Kmart and dicking around, basically. Then we started talking at school, and then I asked her out.”
“This is really the stuff of fairy tales, Ev,” Lucy said, slouched over. She felt a little jealous, which surprised her. So she sings. Whatever. “Is she friends with Tim and Marshall?”
“Nah. We mostly hung out alone. So almost immediately things start going sour. I can tell from the first day that she’s thinking of when we should break up. She has, like, twelve thousand guy friends that are all in love with her. She disappears for days at a time, always busy. So I know pretty fast that I need to break up with her. I start thinking about how to do it, and when, but she beats me to it. She says we’ve lost the magic we had at first, which must have been, like, the first night or something because that’s when it started going downhill. We dated, we broke up.”
“So all the quote-unquote guy friends?” Lucy asked.
“I don’t know. I really never found out what she was up to. She never told me. So, whatever, I guess.”
“Cold break,” Lucy said after they’d drawn another page. There was no source of heat at all, and they had to draw with their gloves off. She put down the marker and crawled over to where Evan was sitting and nestled into him for warmth.
“I think we should finish this comic,” Evan said, and wrapped his arms around Lucy and placed his cheek against hers. “We’re going to freeze to death if we don’t.”
“Okay,” Lucy said, and closed her eyes. “We have more stuff to do anyway. The night is young, Owens. Be afraid.”
They sat quietly for a moment, listening to the wind swirl and slam against the walls. Lucy didn’t want to be a Jessica to Evan. She wanted to be honest with him. She almost told him everything right then, but a loud thud hit the door and startled them. Evan held on to her tightly, and they sat in silence, their ears perked. Lucy slowly moved to get the flashlight and turned it off. The wind kept swooshing away, but there was no more thud. A car drove by, and a few seconds later a dog barked.
Evan peeked over the windowsill slowly. No one was outside. Lucy looked up through the window and saw a loose tree branch swinging wildly. She settled back down and sighed heavily.
“Okay, let’s finish this comic and get going,” she said.
* * *
By nine thirty, Lucy and Evan had left the creepy small house and were walking downtown again. Lucy was glad to see the light and people. She held Evan’s hand.
“So part two of the plan takes place downtown?” Evan asked, being a good sport about all the secrecy.
“Maybe,” Lucy said coyly.
“So we are going to a strip club!”
“Ev, what the hell. You’ve lived here all your life. There are no strip clubs.”
Winter Town Page 14