by Land, Alexa
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Z,” River yelled from across the room. “Leave the boy alone! I don’t want him to realize my brother and I hang out with total hussies. He’s not gonna wanna work with me anymore!”
“Hussies!” Christian snorted with laughter. “That’s awesome.”
Eventually, we all got to work. Christian and I were assigned the task of disassembling a big metal piece of equipment for its parts. Skye was vague about its origin, and none of us could begin to guess what it had ever been used for.
Every time we freed up a piece, Skye would carry it to the sculpture and spend a few minutes holding it up and deciding on placement. Then he’d drop a big spark shield over his face and weld it in place. Unfortunately, he ended up changing his mind almost half the time, at which point it was River’s job to step in and pry up the offending part, admonishing his brother repeatedly, “Think before you weld!”
We’d been working for at least three hours when my ringing phone startled me, long-forgotten in my pocket. I pulled it out and looked at the screen, which said unknown, and answered it with a tentative, “Hello?”
“Trev? Is that you?”
“Melody! Oh my God, I’ve been so worried!”
“I tried calling you at work, they said you have a cellphone now.”
“Where are you?” I turned my back to my friends and pressed a palm over my other ear so I could hear her better.
“Arizona.” My cousin sounded like she’d been crying, I could always tell.
“Are you okay?”
“I guess.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing really. I mean, my boyfriend’s out, God knows where, but it’s no big deal. He goes out most nights. I had to walk to the convenience store for some pop, it’s so damn hot here. They have a payphone, that’s where I’m calling from.”
“Where in Arizona are you?”
“I dunno. It’s totally in the middle of nowhere, there’s just desert in every direction. Oh, and these super disgusting lizards. They’re everywhere, it’s so gross.”
“Melody, go ask the people in the convenience store the name of the town. I need to check the bus schedule, but I can probably be there in a day or so.”
“Be here? Why?”
“To come get you and bring you back to San Francisco,” I said.
“I don’t want to leave Slayer, Trev, I love him! I just get a little lonely when he takes off like this, so I wanted to hear your voice. I’m like, so freakin’ emotional these days. Do you think the pregnancy has something to do with it?”
“Probably.” I shifted the phone to the other ear and asked, “Are you feeling okay otherwise?”
“I feel fat and bloated, and my feet are totally swelling up, it’s so nasty. It probably doesn’t help that it’s like a hundred and fifty degrees here.” The phone made a beeping sound, and Melody said, “Shit, the payphone’s asking for more money, but I already put in all my change.”
“Mel, promise me you’ll find out the name of the town and call me back and tell me!”
“I gotta go, Trev.”
“Is Slayer treating you alright? Are you getting enough to eat? How’s the baby, have you felt it moving?” The line cut out, and I sighed in frustration as I quickly looked through my phone log. It hadn’t recorded the number, so I couldn’t call her back.
“Everything okay, T?”
I turned to look at Skye, who’d come up behind me. “I don’t know. I mean, I guess. That was my cousin.” I briefly explained the situation, then said, “I’m worried about her and the baby. I really want to help both of them, but I don’t know what to do.”
Skye reached out and squeezed my hand. “Sometimes there’s nothing to do, Trevor.”
After a few moments, I sighed and said, “Come on, let’s get back to your sculpture.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I really need the distraction right now,” I told him. Skye gave me a hug, and we went back to work hand-in-hand.
Chapter Eight
“This is completely crazy.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Well, no. But it’s still completely crazy,” River told his brother. It was around noon on Friday, and we’d worked until dawn every night that week helping Skye finish his sculptures. I was so far beyond exhausted. We all were, including Christian, who’d completely dedicated himself to helping his best friend, even at the expense of not finishing (or starting, for that matter) his own term project.
Skye had actually gotten them done, and they were beautiful. According to him though, the second sculpture that we’d completed just that morning had a million things wrong with it, which he wanted to fix over summer vacation. I didn’t see a single flaw.
Imagined flaws or not, we had to get the pieces onto campus today, since he was required to include them in the student exhibition in order to get credit for his work. He’d had the foresight to build them on concealed metal wheels, but they were still incredibly heavy. After the four of us awkwardly maneuvered both sculptures across the warehouse and up to the big hangar doors, we collapsed on the floor and tried to catch our breath.
Skye’s plan was to chain them to the trailer hitch on the back of his truck and drag them one at a time to campus. River was dead-set against this idea, exclaiming, “What if Julian starts fishtailing while you’re pulling him behind your truck? Then what?” Lately, we’d taken to calling the two giant metal men Romeo and Julian. Actually, over the course of the past few deliriously exhausting nights, we’d assigned a wide range of names to them and concocted elaborate backstories to explain their current predicament. It had all seemed completely hilarious in our sleep-deprived state, but now I was too tired to actually remember any of it.
Christian was chewing on his full lower lip, and finally chimed in, “River’s right, it’ll never work. The first time you apply your brakes, Julian will go sliding right into the back of your truck.”
“Did you hear that? River is right. See?” River told his brother.
“I think I just figured this out.” Christian leapt to his feet and started jogging out of the warehouse. “I’ll be back in a couple hours with your solution, Skye. Go home and get some rest in the meantime!”
“What’s your idea?” Skye called after him.
“You’ll see. Just trust me, okay? I promise I’ll get your pieces to campus with time to spare.”
“Christian! Just tell me what you’re doing!”
“It’s a surprise!” he shouted as he disappeared out the door.
River shrugged and said, “Works for me. Let’s go back to the apartment and get cleaned up, we’re all pretty ripe.”
As we walked to Skye’s truck, I asked him, “Do you really think Christian will come through?”
“Absolutely. He’s never let me down, not even once, and he knows how important this is to me.”
When we reached the apartment, we all took turns in the shower and Skye loaned me a clean t-shirt and jeans. River poured some cereal into his mouth directly from the box and then headed to his bedroom, instructing us not to wake him for the next couple hours, even if the apartment caught on fire.
I collapsed beside Skye on his bed and he picked up my hand and held it. He was such an affectionate person, and as we’d grown closer over the course of the week, physical contact with him had come to feel really natural. He was like that with his best friend too, often hanging off Christian or climbing onto his lap. I’d assumed something more than friendship was going on with the two of them, but they just laughed when I mentioned it.
Surprisingly, Christian and I had also bonded during those long hours in the warehouse. I’d had my doubts about him at first. He seemed pretty self-destructive, and was quite possibly an alcoholic, judging by the fact that he almost always had a bottle of booze with him. He had as many stories about run-ins with the police as he did of his blatant promiscuity, and I wasn’t thrilled about the fact that he routinely blanketed the city in graffit
i. But the thing that redeemed him was his obvious love for his best friend. He was sweet and gentle where Skye was involved, taking care of him in a million subtle ways. There was a good person under the rock star exterior, I was sure of it.
Skye reached out and brushed my damp, overgrown bangs out of my eyes. “You should let me cut your hair sometime,” he said randomly. “I’m actually pretty good at it.”
I grinned at him. “Sure. No blue dye, though. I can’t pull it off like you can.”
He continued to play with my hair, and after a while he said, “I’m so grateful for all your help this week, Trevor. You must be even more exhausted than the rest of us, since you were the only one going back and forth to a job in addition to staying up every night.”
“Well, not quite. River had to keep checking on Puffy the attack cat,” I said.
“Yeah, but all he’d do when he went to his friend’s apartment was put out some fresh food and water and then nap for a couple hours. You, on the other hand, were running yourself ragged for me.”
“I’m just glad I could help.”
“You’re such a good guy, Trevor.” Skye slid closer to me and kissed my cheek, then gently brushed his lips to mine. He looked in my eyes and murmured, “I’d love it if you went out with me.”
I pulled back and mumbled, “I just...I guess I’m not really...I mean....”
A look of understanding settled on his features. “You’re still hung up on Vincent, aren’t you? I know you said you called it quits, but some part of you hasn’t let go of him, right?”
I’d been trying so hard not to think about Vincent these past few days, and pretty much totally failing. Keeping insanely busy had helped a little. But whenever I found myself with an idle moment, my thoughts immediately became consumed with his dark brown eyes...the sound of his deep voice...the curve of his soft lips....
I said, “I really am trying to let go, but I guess I’m just not quite there yet.”
“I suspected that might be the case, but I figured I’d give it a shot anyway.” He grinned at me and said, “I apologize for making this awkward.”
“Oh, that wasn’t awkward,” I said with a smile. “I once asked a guy out, then realized a few minutes later that he was the groom at a wedding I was attending. Now that was awkward.”
Skye burst out laughing. “You’re making that up.”
“I wish I was. It happened last year. One of my coworkers at this restaurant I worked at in Sacramento begged me to be her date to her cousin’s wedding. By the time we got there, the reception was in full swing. I went to use the restroom, and here’s this gorgeous guy in a tux, fixing his bowtie in the mirror. I decided to be bold and offered to help him with the tie. Then I asked him out. He was really nice about turning me down, but for the rest of the reception he kept shooting me these weird looks. I was completely mortified.”
“The fact that he was in a tux didn’t tip you off?”
“I thought he was one of the groomsmen.”
“And the shiny new wedding ring?”
“See, that should have been a clue. Of course, I didn’t notice it until after I’d asked him out.”
“Yeah, okay.” Skye was still grinning as he settled in beside me. “My thing wasn’t awkward at all, not when you compare it to that!”
“It’s all a matter of perspective.”
*****
We ended up sleeping longer than we’d intended, and Skye was in a panic. We woke his brother, and the three of us were out the door in less than a minute, taking time for nothing more than pulling on our shoes. We sped to campus, breaking just about every traffic law en route. Skye parked illegally in a staff parking lot and we ran toward the exhibit hall.
He calmed down the moment the hall came into view. His sculptures were positioned perfectly in a courtyard directly in front of the building, one on either side of the main entrance. “I knew Christian would come through,” he said with a smile, slowing to a walk. I didn’t mention that his mad dash seemed to suggest otherwise.
When we reached the sculptures, we saw that his friend had even printed a little sign to accompany them. It read: Goodbye, by Skye Blue Fleischmann. “He also came up with a title. I like it,” Skye said with a big smile.
“Do you?” a voice behind us asked. We turned to look at Christian. He was wearing sunglasses, even though it was dusk, and a black leather jacket with jeans and motorcycle boots. I was beginning to think he didn’t actually own a shirt. “I second-guessed the title after I submitted it to the review committee. And I want you to know it took all my willpower not to position them in a giant 69 and entitle it, Suck It Professor Comstock, You Huge Homophobe!”
Skye kissed his friend’s cheek. “Thank you, both for fighting the urge to make Romeo and Julian blow each other and for miraculously getting them here. How did you do it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Christian said, pulling a flask from his pocket and unscrewing the lid. “They’re here.” He took a sip and offered the flask to the rest of us, but we declined.
“Come on Z, spill,” Skye persisted. “Did you commandeer an Army helicopter and airlift them here?”
Christian slapped his thigh and exclaimed, “Aw man, now I totally wish I had! I could have been blasting Wagner as we swooped in on the campus, it’d be like that scene in Apocalypse Now! That would have been sweet!”
“So what did you really do?”
His friend sighed and admitted, “I just called a tow truck company and had them send a truck big enough to haul a semi. It’s so much duller than ‘coptering them in! I’m really disappointed now for not making a grand entrance.”
“I’m totally paying you back. I called a few towing companies last week for a quote and it was super expensive,” Skye said, “so it may take me a little while to raise the money. I can start with what I have on me, though. How much do I owe you?”
Christian caught his friend’s arm as he reached for his wallet. “Nothing. This is on me.”
“Like hell it is.”
Christian pulled up a suggestive smirk and said, “I didn’t pay for it, okay? I just did a favor for the hot tow truck driver, and he did one for me. Now come and take a look at my term project, I want to hear what you think.” I got the impression that he was lying about how he’d paid for the tow, but Skye just grinned and shook his head, then followed his friend into the building.
“So you actually finished something?” River chimed in as we cut through the crowd. “When did that happen, Z?”
“This afternoon. It took me fourteen minutes, I timed myself.” Christian led us to a large canvas toward the center of the hall. The painting was bold and raw and stunningly powerful. In it, a dark silhouette pushed back against a riotous onslaught of words and images, all closing in, threatening to swallow him up. “It’s so fucking literal,” he complained, “and really not my best work, but I just wasn’t feeling inspired.”
“It’s beautiful, Z,” I murmured, stepping a bit closer to the canvas. “I can’t believe you did it so quickly.” The little white sign to the left of it said Under Pressure, by Christian George.
“Well, that’s a skill you learn as a graffiti artist. You have to be quick, because you’re always moments from the cops rolling up on you,” he said.
“Is this spray paint?” I asked.
“It is.”
“You know,” Skye said, “you’re taking a real chance with this piece. Your style is really evident and it’d be easy for the faculty to connect this to some of your not-quite-legal works around town.”
“They won’t,” he said. “They go around with blinders on, they’ll never put it together.”
“This is what your graffiti is like?” I asked. When he nodded, I said, “and here I thought you were just going around writing your name on public property. This isn’t at all what I expected.”
Christian flashed me his perfect smile and said, “I’ll take you on a little tour of my citywide gallery one of these days, Trevor.” He gla
nced over my shoulder and suddenly his whole demeanor changed, his smile fading and his jaw setting in a hard line. “Well kids, it’s been fun, but I gotta go. See ya.” He took off without further explanation, slipping into the crowd and heading toward the back of the building. I glanced behind me at the throngs of people coming in the front door, but didn’t see anything unusual.
“What just happened?” I asked.
“No clue,” Skye said, watching his friend depart with knit brows. After a few moments, he shrugged it off and turned toward me. “Maybe he saw an ex-boyfriend or something. Come on, there’s supposed to be some free food around here somewhere, let’s see if we can find it.”
Once Skye’s boisterous art school friends descended on us, I lasted maybe twenty minutes before I made my excuses and slipped away, feeling totally out of my element. The exhibition hall was at the very back of the large campus and I headed downhill, cutting through the middle of the school to reach the bus stop out front. It seemed like everyone was at the art show, since the campus was deserted.
I slowed my pace and took in my surroundings. Sutherlin was almost a century old and really beautiful, composed of elegant buildings and big trees clustered into cozy little quads. I meandered into a courtyard with a fountain. Lavish, bright purple bougainvillea vines climbed up onto a second-floor gallery. It was so pretty and peaceful that I decided to stay for a few minutes, settling onto a wooden bench and letting the sound of the trickling fountain soothe me.
I used to dream about going to college when I was younger, literally. I’d have vivid dreams about leaving home and getting to learn in a place just like this, a world away from the cramped apartment I grew up in and the bullies in high school and my uncle, who thought the answer to most things was a swift backhand across the face. I was a B-average student though, more likely to spend my time in class daydreaming than paying attention, so I realized as I got older that this was never going to be my reality. No one was ever going to give me a scholarship and I was too broke to pay for school on my own.