by Barry Lyga
I lurk at the tree line, staring out at the rusty hulk of the trailer. Then, gnawing on my lower lip, I sink to the ground and sit and contemplate my plan.
When I’m with other people, I usually don’t think about it. Sometimes, it catches me off-guard, but I usually don’t.
When I’m alone, it’s all I can think about.
Later, I slip into the house. Mom watches TV on the sofa. It’s ten after ten, but she says nothing, rising and turning off the TV before heading to her room without a word.
It’s something of a tradition in my house, albeit involuntary, that on the last day of school, I come home and collapse on my bed and fall into a deep sleep. I don’t know why this happens. As long as I can remember, though, that last day of school exhausts me beyond my limits, and I have no choice but to crash. In previous years, I’ve attempted caffeine boosts late in the day, loud music, and other stimulants, only to succumb to my bed each time.
By the time I’d waken, groggy and out of sorts, Mom would be home with take-out Chinese and a bottle of the organic root beer I like that you can only get at the grocery store near her job. We’d toast to another year down, and I’d gorge myself on moo goo gai pan, egg rolls, brown rice, and crab rangoon.
But this year and this last day, I happen to spy Aneesa sitting on her front porch as the bus trundles past her house. When I get home, my bed seems miles away, even as I toss my near-empty backpack onto it. Without so much as a yawn or a stretch, I wheel my bike out of the garage and take off up Fox Tail Drive.
She’s still sitting outside, loitering, shielded from the sun by the porch overhang. The house looks mostly the same; the Realtor’s sign still lurks at the end of the driveway, a bright red SOLD add-on attached to the top. Like most of the houses in this neighborhood, it’s two stories, shingled (in light blue with buttery yellow shutters), with a narrow porch and a one-car garage. Also like most of the houses in this neighborhood—including mine—the cars are parked in the driveway.
Lucky you was the last thing I said to her. I don’t know how it hit her ears: snarky, sincere, flippant, whatever. But she’s new and she’s cute and she talked to me and I said Lucky you and pedaled off into the night.
I get to the end of Aneesa’s driveway and lift my hand to wave to her when it occurs to me that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. Am I going to cruise past and casually wave as I go? If so, where am I headed, and how long do I have to stay there until it doesn’t look odd for me to come back? Or am I stopping here, in which case… why? What am I going to say? Why am I doing this? What the hell am I thinking?
I’ve been riding a bike since age five, to the point where it’s one of those tasks that once seemed complicated but has evolved into reflexive second nature. That doesn’t stop me from becoming so distracted with my own brain that I nudge the handlebars in one direction as I lean in another, causing the whole thing to wobble (no doubt comically to an observer) before dumping me without ceremony—or dignity—right at the lip of Aneesa’s driveway.
Just to drive home the shame of it, I hear myself yelp, “Hey!” at least three octaves higher than my usual voice. Not a growly, manly “Shit!” or a grunt or even just stoic, resigned silence. No, not me. I have to explode in a shrieky, shrill “Hey!”
The next thing I know, Aneesa is right there, hovering over me.
“I’m fine,” I tell her before she can say anything, before I can even be certain it’s true. “I’m okay.” She’s extended her hand, but I brush it off.
“Are you sure? You look a little shaky. Should I call an ambulance?”
An ambulance? God, no. “I’m fine.”
“Or my dad can drive you—”
“I’m okay. Honest.” I take inventory—scraped knee, banged-up elbow. No damage to my head. No tears in my clothes. Pride, self-respect, dignity: seriously sprained.
To my chagrin, I realize that I’m sort of tangled up in the bike, and I need that hand of hers after all.
Last night, she wouldn’t shake. Today she’s helping me up. Progress?
“Maybe you shouldn’t ride a bike anymore,” she says. “You’re not very good at it.”
I check that I’m okay to stand, not too wobbly. There are smears of blood on both legs, but that’s it. “I’m fine at it.”
“I’ve seen you on it twice and you’ve wiped out twice.”
“You’re not around the millions of times I manage not to fall off.”
“I’m not sure I can trust you on this.”
“Who would lie about riding a bike?”
“Someone who can’t.” She takes a few steps toward the house and nods in its general direction. “C’mon. Let’s put some stuff on your cuts.”
“I don’t need—”
“—an infection,” she says triumphantly. “Exactly what I was thinking.”
I sigh heavily and drag my bike—which seems to have survived with less damage than I have—onto her yard, then follow her into the house.
“A guy died here,” she says as we cross the threshold. Her tone is casual, but I can tell she’s very serious about it. “He was really old, and he had a stroke in the shower.”
“I know. I didn’t think anyone would ever buy this house.”
“Can you believe people worry about that?”
I decide to treat it as a rhetorical question. Inside, the man I saw arguing with the mover—Aneesa’s dad—hunches over an entertainment center, untangling a snakes’ nest of cables. He’s wearing khakis and a light blue dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal slender but powerful forearms.
“Dad, Sebastian. Sebastian, Dad.” Aneesa doesn’t even wait for her dad to turn around before she goes pounding up a flight of stairs.
Rolling his sleeves down to his wrists, her dad turns to me, flicks his gaze to my bloody shins. “Don’t bleed on the carpet. My wife’ll kill me.”
He has a light tone to his voice and no accent. Why did I expect an accent? I don’t know. But there’s none.
I dutifully step off the carpet and onto a collapsed cardboard box in case there’s any drippage.
“Perfect,” he says, and returns his attention to the endless tangle of cables.
“There’s a trick to it,” I offer.
He narrows his eyes. “You’re not suggesting the Alexandrian solution, I hope.”
“No, sir. I left my sword at home.”
With a chuckle, he rises and hands the ball of cables to me. “Anyone who knows his mythology that well, I trust with my cables.”
I take the ball as he settles into a comfortable-looking armchair. The first trick to untangling a wad of cables like this is figuring out which one will come out easiest. So you identify the two ends of each cable and eyeball which one has the fewest bends and knots in it. Start there, and you immediately clear some of the path to cable freedom. I begin with a red HDMI cable, working it carefully through a maze of twists and kinks.
“Sebastian, was it?” he says, watching me. “Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr.…” Oh. Aneesa never told me her last name, so now I’m gape-mouthed and moronic in front of her father.
“Fahim.” He half rises and extends his hand, which I shake in as manly a fashion as I can muster. “Yusuf Fahim.”
“Well, nice to meet you, Mr. Fahim.”
He settles back into his chair and watches me. I’ve made decent progress. Two of the three HDMI cables are free, an Xbox power cord is coming loose, and a white cable for something I don’t recognize should be liberated soon after. “You know, when you pack these, you should fold each one up and stick it inside a toilet paper tube. Keeps them from getting all mixed up.”
“I’ll remember that the next time I move,” he says gravely. “You’re from around here, right?”
I nod. Almost done.
“I have a very serious question to ask you, Sebastian.” He leans forward, elbows on knees. I freeze up, my nimble fingers leaden on the cables. I haven’t even touched Aneesa. Well, o
ther than her hand a minute ago. My throat constricts.
“Is there anywhere in this town to get decent Chinese?” he asks.
I laugh nervously and with relief. “Only one place. Hong Palace. It’s in the same shopping center as the Narc.”
“The Narc?” He raises an eyebrow. On him, it’s an elegant, Spock-like movement. It’s face ballet.
“Nat’s Market. The grocery store. It’s what we call it.”
“Why?”
I have no idea. “I have no idea.”
He nods, satisfied, as if my ignorance is somehow the antidote to whatever had been bothering him. “Hong Palace. Do they deliver?”
“Yeah.”
“Perfect.” He smiles and takes the liberated cables from me. “You’ll have to tell me your secret sometime.”
“Sebastian has a secret?” It’s Aneesa, standing at the foot of the stairs, clutching a bottle of peroxide and a fistful of cotton balls. “I gotta hear this.”
“He knows how to untangle cords,” her dad tells her.
“That’s boring,” says Aneesa.
“Sorry,” I tell her. “I don’t have any secrets. I’m not interesting enough.”
It doesn’t hit me until later that I’ve lied. It felt so natural.
Later, Aneesa and I sit on the porch, me on a comfortable lounger, she on an ottoman while dabbing at my shins.
“I could do this myself.”
“You’d screw it up.”
“How do you know that?”
“You have a look about you.”
“You know, the ground was slippery the other night. From the rain. And I just lost my balance for a second just now. It’s not like I’m totally feckless.”
She stops mid-dab and gazes up at me, eyes wide.
“Totally what? What did you just say?”
“Feckless.”
Her expression goes back to normal. “Oh. I totally thought you said something else. What does that mean?”
“It means irresponsible.”
“I must have missed that day of test prep.” She bends to her work again, and I just sit like the mute idiot I am.
She finishes with the peroxide and slaps a Band-Aid just below my left knee. My right leg has already stopped bleeding. With a grunt of satisfied triumph, she rocks back on her heels and gestures once again like a stage magician. “Ta-da!”
“It’s like you conjured that Band-Aid right onto my leg.”
“I know, right?” She gathers up the damp cotton balls and scraps of paper from the bandage wrapper. “So, where were you headed in such a rush that you wiped out?”
She doesn’t specify which time, not that it matters. The truth is that today I had no destination. For some reason, I just had to ride past her house and see her. But that isn’t the sort of thing you can confess to a girl while she is cleaning up from nursing you back to health. Or ever.
“I was just going to this place.”
“Oh, yeah. ‘This place.’ I know it well.” An arched eyebrow is my reward and my punishment for such a lame answer.
“Seriously. Nowhere special.”
She’s not taking that for an answer. I don’t blame her.
The next thing I know, we’re walking together along Route 27. It’s late afternoon, not yet what passes for rush hour in Brookdale. At six in the evening, 27 becomes a phalanx of slow-moving vehicles as commuters from Baltimore wend their ways home toward Cantersville. But for now, there’s just the occasional car or big rig. We stick to the shoulder.
I jam my hands into my pockets because otherwise I’m afraid I’ll try to hold hers. That’s the sort of stupid thing I would do.
As we walk, she tells me about herself, about her family. This comes with no questions from me—I never ask people about their families or their pasts. Because then they would ask me about mine.
This is what I learn without breaking out the deerstalker: Her dad works “in finance,” and Aneesa doesn’t really understand exactly what he does. Her mom is an editor for a math journal at Johns Hopkins. “I don’t think she understands what she does.”
They moved here because her dad’s company opened a satellite office in Lowe County, and her father was chosen to be in charge. “They’re all about ‘capitalizing on rural growth and white flight,’” she quotes from an overheard conversation. “Translation: All the white people are moving away from all the black and brown people, and we’re being made to follow the money.”
“I didn’t flee from anywhere,” I say lamely. “I’ve lived here my whole life.”
“What do your parents do?”
“Mom’s a translation secretary.”
“What’s that?”
“She speaks Spanish. And this guy who owns a company down in Finn’s Landing does business all over Latin America, but he can’t speak Spanish.”
She clucks her tongue. “Who does business where they speak Spanish and doesn’t learn Spanish?”
“Well, yeah. Mom says money buys convenience.”
“I guess so.”
“So Mom handles all the phone calls and correspondence and stuff.”
“That’s sort of cool. What about your dad?”
“Divorce. A while back.” I shrug as noncommittally as I know how. “He’s not really around.”
“Sorry I asked.”
There it is. So smooth. So adult. How did she do that? Sorry I asked. One moment, I’m faking a too-casual shrug to show that it doesn’t bother me that she’s asked about my father, covering for the fact that—surprise—it actually does bother me. Then, with a simple Sorry I asked, I’m no longer bothered. How did she do that?
“It’s okay. Everyone gets divorced, right? A lot of people, at least. No big.”
“Do you miss him?”
Pine. The hoot of a train’s whistle. I shake my head to clear away the memories and to answer her question.
Then she asks the one question I never, ever ask anyone. No matter how curious I might be, no matter how relevant the answer might be, I never ask it, and she does, like it’s nothing at all:
“Any brothers or sisters?”
My Sister
Lola. Her name was Lola.
“No.”
“Me neither,” she says. “I have a bunch of friends with siblings. Half the time they seem to love it and half the time it’s like they just wish they could kill them, you know?”
Oh.
Oh.
So…
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on anything,” she goes on. “Do you ever wonder that?”
So…
So casually.
She said it so casually. People say it all the time, those words. I could just kill him. I swear, if she pisses me off again, I’ll kill her. Sometimes I just want to kill that guy.
The world is filled with invisible, theoretical assassins, armed projections of our deepest ids, bearing guns loaded with wish-bullets. If you listen closely, you can hear them singing as they whiz by your head, always passing harmlessly through their intended targets.
“Do you?” she prods.
“I guess not. There’s no point, really.”
She pauses and turns to regard me with a thoughtfully cocked eyebrow. In my entire life, I have never noticed a person’s eyebrows so much. I am only vaguely aware of my own, the sketch of light brown arches over darker brown eyes. But Aneesa’s eyebrows already obsess me. They are shape-shifting punctuation for her speech, altering as necessary.
“No point,” she repeats. “Yeah, that’s true. It’s not like our parents are going to suddenly decide to have another kid at this point, right?”
“Right.”
“I never thought of it that way before. Why do I even worry about it, then? It’s a moot point.” She grins at me with satisfaction, with a lazy sort of joy, the kind of happiness that comes from slaying not a dragon, but rather a worrisome newt.
I grin back reflexively. Life is so much easier when you just give people what they expect.
I would tell her none of this, but somehow the sheer romance of the place would seep into her, and maybe I would find the strength of will to take her hand firmly, to take it like I meant it, not tentatively. And maybe I would even kiss her. A thought I’d never had before about any other girl, one that surprised and scared me and beckoned.
But in the still-bright evening sunlight, I can only hear her saying kill them and that overrides everything.
I find an excuse to turn us around and head home.
I had plans for the summer. Not the sort of plans Mom wants me to have, but plans nonetheless.
There were gaps in those plans—one big one in particular—but summer is long and I am a teenage boy with idle time. I would have worked around the gaps.
Every night for almost as long as I can remember, I go to bed and I ask the voice in my head, Is it time yet? And every time, the voice says, No. Not yet.
But then one day after spring break, Evan told me he was doing Young Leaders Camp, and a full, empty summer unfurled before me, and that night, the voice did not say No. That night, the voice said, Almost. Be ready.
And then…
And then Aneesa.
Aneesa.
Mom has the air-conditioning off to save money. At Evan’s house, the AC runs full-blast, 24/7, from mid-May to mid-September.
A breeze cooler than the still air of my bedroom threads its way through my curtains, gently elbowing them aside to waft up my bare legs as I lie in bed atop the sheets.
Tonight, I am afraid to ask the voice.