by Luna Lacour
Tyler, rubbing an aching arm, sulked up the steps and into his seat. We talked about Friday; about running lines and maybe ordering takeout. Tyler liked pizza; I liked the idea of anything thoroughly soaked in either grease or MSG.
We shared headphones for a little while, as we typically did when walking through the halls together. Tyler was a proper punk, and enjoyed music that was both bold and thrashy. The 1975, or old-school Alkaline Trio. He went on about an At the Drive-In show that he’d caught in Brooklyn the year before. It was a beautiful moment in Tyler Dawson’s sweet-seventeen-year-old life.
That night, after all of my obligatory school-related assignments were complete, I hunkered down outside on the balcony and sent Mr. Tennant a text.
What’s your favorite band?
I waited for a reply, for anything; and it was an easy enough question, I figured. Who doesn’t enjoy rambling on about their music? Maybe that would segue into other topics, like a weekend meet-up. Or maybe just my apologizing for my teenage antics; for his name written inside a star.
But there was never any response.
Tyler’s car smelled of gasoline and that fake-pine scent that is always way too overpowering. The air-freshener, shaped like a pine tree, hung from the rear-view mirror and twirled whenever Tyler hit the break, which was often. He was a terrible driver; the red patches of spray paint that covered the rusted portions of the steadily-decaying vehicle only served as an almost-invitation to the police: please, find a reason to pull me over.
“I almost didn’t pass the driving test,” he offered, smiling through closed lips. “But, I mean, the guy was really nice. There was a lot of traffic, to be fair, and some jerk-off ended up cutting us off at an intersection, so I was all kinds of anxious.”
There was a mess of crumpled fast-food wrappers on the floor; the windows were smeared with hand-prints, and the seat belts were frayed.
“This was my aunt’s,” he said, nearly apologetic towards his cramped Mustang hatchback. “She’s dead now, though.”
“That’s terrible,” I raised an eyebrow, a free hand toying with the volume of Alkaline Trio’s I Wanna Be a Warhol. Tyler had been begging for me to listen to it. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t really know her,” he explained, swallowing. He was still wearing his uniform; occasionally tugging at the tie like it was choking him. “Anyway, you look pretty.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I look okay.”
I should have just thanked him, but my brain was sort of short-circuiting over my last interaction with Mr. Tennant, who had nearly flat-out refused to acknowledge my existence when we ran into each other after final bell. I had emerged from the bathroom in my street clothes – a pair of flared, frayed jeans that looked deceivingly inexpensive, along with my Yale sweatshirt – and had spotted him kneeling down and searching through his briefcase.
“Hey,” I’d said. “Did you get my message last night?”
Mr. Tennant glanced at me; the both of us bathed in a cool, white-washed light that sang through the ceiling-to-wall windows.
“Kaitlyn,” he said, his voice lower than a whisper. “I can’t. I’m sorry. Please understand that I am terribly, terribly sorry.”
And then he left; his suit jacket slung over his shoulder and his polished shoes scuffing against the marbled tile. I stood with my arms hanging like limp string; my expression likely gobsmacked. The windows gave everything around me a harsh, sterile glow.
“Alright then,” I said to no one but myself. My eyes cast towards the window; to the distant larger-than-life wooden cross that was at the very far end of our courtyard. Sometimes people ate lunch around it; other times people just stared.
“I like the jeans,” Tyler interjected, severing through the nearly-solidified formation of my boggled thoughts. “They sort of make you look like an average person.”
“Is that supposed to be some kind of compliment?”
Tyler took a sharp turn into the parking lot of a building that was beyond any kind of salvaging. The bricks were dust and the staircase was missing chunks of cement; it was as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the steps. It was a horrible thing to think, but a part of me was worried that I was going to get stabbed or kidnapped or suffer some other type of untimely demise if I hung around this place alone.
“Yeah,” he said, and the engine went silent. The music disappeared, quick as the drop of a dime. “It was supposed to be a compliment. I’m sorry if I suck.”
“It’s fine,” I reassured him. We grabbed our things and slammed the doors shut. “I suck at interpreting the meaning of things.”
“Me too. So we both suck, then.”
“That works.”
He smiled; I grabbed my backpack, and the two of us navigated through the packed lot and into the building that was heavily air-conditioned for early spring. There were window units leaking water from the outside; the drippings falling onto pavement like rain.
The walls were an aged yellow, the doors a mossy green. On each door hung a golden three-digit number. Tyler’s was 307; third floor, seventh door to the left.
Inside, a woman was sitting at a small, cylindrical-shaped table; particle board that was painted black to understate the obvious lack of quality. She wore a black polo and black dress pants, black sneakers. Her mid-length auburn hair was tied back in a low ponytail.
When she looked up, discarding the magazine she’d been reading, I saw that her eyes were a bright gray - like the first bit of platinum sky revealed after a rainstorm. Aside from the color, they were identical to Tyler’s. Long lashes; wide and brimmed with the simple elation that her son had walked through the front door. His arrival at the precise hour of three o’clock sharp was a fantastic, wonderful thing.
“Hello, my love.”
Tyler groaned as his mother kissed him on the forehead; taking his face in her hands and looking at him in the same way that every child would want their mother to look at them.
“Mom, this is Kait,” he said quickly. “Kait, this is my mom.”
I was promptly engulfed in the biggest hug that anybody’s parents had ever given me. The scent of restaurants and second-hand cigarette smoke was imprinted on the cloth she wore like a stamp; signifying so much about her. There’s a lot you can discover about others by the way they and their clothes smell.
Tyler’s mother carried the scent of toil and long hours; strained limbs and a well-worn smile. Still, despite this, she gazed down at me – a surprisingly tall woman – as if she were running off the last vapors of breath. She was completely illuminated.
“Thank you so much for having me over, Mrs. Dawson,” I smiled.
“Please, please. Call me Laura. I truly do appreciate the sentiment when it comes to respectful titles, certainly; but we’re a first-name kind of family.”
Tyler told her that we were going to run lines in his room, and she replied that he would have to keep his bedroom door open. This was a little bit funny, because the apartment was so tiny that there was nothing we could have really gotten away with regardless. From our spot in the kitchen, I could already see straight into the poster-paper walled room.
We went inside, his mother left to continue reading her magazine, and I lowered my eyes as Tyler quickly changed out of his uniform scraps and into a plain white undershirt.
“I tried to clean the place up beforehand,” he gave a sweeping gesture over the small room. There was a double-bed, just a mattress and box-spring, covered in blue sheets with a blue coverlet. A single pillow, white and blue stripes; it was a very empty space.
On the small corner-desk (more particle board) rested an ancient laptop with the security tag still glued to the back.
“Did you have a secret thing for swiping electronics?” I asked, brushing a finger over the top of his dresser; this was the only other piece of furniture in the room.
“Floor models are a whole lot cheaper,” he confessed this with a hint of embarrassment. “But you can’t take the tag off. It�
��s, like, permanently glued with some super-human type crap. I know, it’s gaudy.”
“I like it,” I told him, smiling and looking out the tiny window that was just above the spot where a headboard should have been. Tyler smiled back, seated on the mattress. “I like your home. I really do. And I like your mother.”
Tyler smiled. People always like it when you compliment the things that are dear to them; family, lovers – even pets.
We tried practicing for awhile before giving up. Since neither of us felt comfortable doing any of the kissing scenes (which, arguably, could have been all of them) with his mother practically steps away in the kitchen, we tried running the final scene where Juliet ends it by stabbing herself with a dagger. Tyler kept laughing, though, which only resulted in me buckling over in laughter.
“I can’t take killing myself seriously with you laughing on the floor,” I said. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“I know, I know. I’ll be seriously corpse-like this time. Seriously.”
He shut up, pressing his lips together tightly, and we tried again. We failed miserably, and eventually just decided to hang out and order dinner. Pizza and fries soaked into paper plates as we watched Baz Lurhman’s Romeo + Juliet.
Five minutes into the film:
“This kind of sucks,” Tyler said.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s Baz Lurhmann. It’s brilliant.”
A flower of fireworks cascaded across the evening sky; Romeo and Juliet fell in love through the blue glass wall; they kissed in the elevator, dressed as a knight and angel.
“I will say, though, Paul Rudd makes the best awkwardly nerdy Paris ever,” Tyler said. “Even though the technical Paris is like, ancient in comparison to Juliet. Did you ever see Zeffirelli’s version?”
For a split-second, I had almost succeeded in convincing myself that I was back at Mr. Tennant’s apartment, sitting on the midnight-colored settee and drowning in the haunting blue light.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Not long ago, actually.”
We watched the rest of the film, and when it was finished we listened to that song from the 1968 adaption; the voice of the singer soundtracking the very moment when Leonard Whiting first sets eyes on a young, wide-eyed Olivia. What is a youth?
“Do you believe they were really in love?” I asked Tyler, the two of us sprawled out on his comforter. He shrugged.
“I think you’re missing the point if you think, you know, that it’s supposed to be a forever kind of love story,” he said. “I mean, sure, I think they loved each other. I think they loved each other with the unique, intense passion that comes about during a time of of sexual discovery, you know? But I don’t know. It’s not about whether or not they would last, really. It’s about being young; and all of the nonsensical, irrational nonsense that comes with it. Meeting that one person and being driven to act out.”
“Hormones make you crazy,” I said. Tyler laughed.
“Yeah, well, that’s a shorter way to sum it up.”
He turned to me, on his side; his long figure etched in light from the outside street-lamps that seeped through the small window. We watched each other for a few seconds before I cleared my throat and suggested that we run a few more lines before calling it a night.
I closed my eyes and listened to Tyler give his final last words before drinking the invisible vial of poison. Despite the chill his voice gave me, there was a sincerely devastating sound in the way his voice cracked; the heat from his skin and simmering blood was enough to seep through the fabric of my sweatshirt.
He kissed me, I kissed him back, and without protest I let his hands timidly explore the clothed stretch of my body; denim and cotton, small patches of naked skin.
Beyond the bedroom, his mother was in the shower; the sound of water beat down against the paper-thin walls.
He looked down on me like we were moments away from death and this was the last kiss he would ever have; there was a painful hesitation, his chest heaving, and closing his own eyes he rolled from my frame and onto his back, lifeless.
“And with a kiss, I die.”
He drove me home with the speakers beating like hearts or wings or other living things. The noise was so rattled that I kept my window down; letting my hair fall like ribbons while drowning myself in the static wind.
When we reached the house, parked in the cobblestone driveway, Tyler’s jaw dropped.
“Your house is like a castle,” he gasped. “Places like this don’t really exist.”
I smiled uncomfortably, and we slipped around the corner, walking together to the garden gate; his eyes, two darting beams of green light, were dancing everywhere.
“You want to come in?” I asked.
Tyler appeared hesitant.
“Like, inside your house?” he asked. “I don’t know, honestly.”
“Is something wrong?”
He shrugged, nodding in the direction of the balcony; Marius was standing, his body just a black blur of shadow.
“Just the garden, then,” I suggested. He nodded, and I pushed open the heavy iron-wrought bars with the same wince-inducing scrape.
“I can’t believe it,” Tyler muttered, as we made our way around the cherub fountain and into the labyrinth; crawling walls that sometimes I purposely got myself lost in. “I mean, I always wondered how the other side lives, and you see things like this in magazines. But not in real life.”
His words made me feel slightly guilty, and slid over my skin like oil. I was coated in a feeling of general malaise.
“I liked your home, though,” I insisted. “I like seeing different things.”
“Yeah,” he nodded, running a hand over one of the roses that grew through the thickly-fleshed leaves; his fingers traced over the barely-parted petals like flesh. “But it’s just a game to you, though.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not trying to sound like an asshole or anything, ” he said quickly. “It’s just, you’re not stuck living in some shit-box where the availability of hot-water for your morning shower is a crap-shoot at best. Black mold in the bathrooms, questionable characters hanging around the hallways. Over-worked, over-exhausted parents. But for you, no offense, it’s like watching a television show. You can turn it off whenever you’d like.”
He paused, raking fingers through tousled hair.
“I hate it, Kait. Sometimes I just fucking hate it.”
I could have said something. I could have told him that living the Manhattan-socialite lifestyle had its downfalls; that not everything was as lustrous as the wide-screened cinemas and printed magazines wanted to portray. I could have shot down his idea that because the water in my glass was filtered and my clothes tailored, I was incapable of understanding the trials and woes of human suffering.
But I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and watched as his eyebrows slowly rose from their furrowed position into soft, straight lines; his eyes, momentarily dulled, lit up with that unmistakable exuberance.
“All is well, Kait,” he said, just three words. “All is well.”
We walked around for awhile in silence; Tyler’s eyes wide, absorbing everything. I offered again for him to come inside, but he declined.
At the gate, we said our goodbyes while divided by iron bars.
“I just want to thank you for earlier,” I told him. “You know, I don’t remember the last time I’ve laughed. Like real, stomach-ache-inducing laughter.”
Tyler ran a palm down the shaft of one of the bars, vaguely phallic. He smiled, touching my hair through the gaps; his face was marbled from moonlight.
“If I had my way, I would always see you laughing,” he said. “It’s a good look for you.”
He waved; I watched him pull out of the driveway, music vibrating through the windows as he sped off into the street.
In my bedroom, Marius was laying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. He wore a pair of slacks and nothing else; his stomach caving as he arched his back and gave a heady
, loud yawn.
“How were things in the ghetto?” he asked.
“Don’t even, Marius,” I said. “Tyler’s a good guy. And his mother was something else.”
“In what way?”
“You could tell she cared,” I told him. “It was all over her face.”
Marius sat up, sighing.
“Yeah. It sucks our respective biological parents are pieces of shit.”
“Something we can agree on.”
Marius, also, was mostly a piece of shit; and I was definitely no princess. But when it came to lost parents, we both shared that gaping wound. The cuts were all over us: arms, legs, mouths. They poisoned our words and infused our bodies and brains with a distinct penchant for destruction. All of the things that material items and the most polished vernacular couldn’t protect you against.
“Your father never noticed you were gone, you know,” Marius said. “They’re both thoroughly intoxicated. They’re still downstairs, finishing off the last of the Cognac, I presume. A few of the gents from your father’s company came over to discuss something I didn’t hear, nor really give a flying fuck about.”
He stood, walking over and tilting his head to the side.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “You know that? You’ve got that just-fucked look in your eyes. Even though I know you haven’t sealed the deal yet. Unless, of course, you gave it up to the Brooklyn boy.”
I shook my head. Marius’ smirk was both sweet and disturbing.
“When I win, I’m going to use some of that blood-money to hire the best hit-man in New York. You better watch your back,” I told him.
“If you win,” Marius touched my cheek, fingernails barely catching skin. “There’s no certainty in this game.”
I thought about Mr. Tennant, and how he’d walked away from me without a second glance through the Trinity doors; everything bleached and garish.
“Don’t hold your breath,” I chose to say. “You’ll suffocate.”
He pulled me close, breath like a warm cloth against the nape of my neck. His hands moved down my hair, my shoulders, my torso and waist.