Songs for a Teenage Nomad

by Kim Culbertson

  A Band-Aid covers the cut on his head. “You should have that looked at,” I say.

  He shrugs. “I’ve been hit worse in football.”

  Cass sets two sodas in front of us and hands me a black-hooded sweatshirt. “Go easy on her,” she says to Sam. “She’s had a worse day than you have.”

  I change in the bathroom.

  Back at the table, Cass is sitting next to Sam. He looks at her affectionately. A pang of something catches my stomach off guard.

  Cass sees me and stands, ruffles Sam’s hair and then disappears behind the swinging door. He watches her leave, his eyes warm.

  “Are you in love with Cass?” I ask him, vocalizing my fear. It had been fear shooting through my stomach. Nothing matters now, so I will just ask questions as they come to me.

  “What?” He drinks half his drink in one gulp, his eyes genuinely surprised. “What are you talking about?”

  I look toward the swinging door, which now hangs motionless. “I don’t know, Sam. I don’t know anything. I just thought maybe that was part of our issue. Not just Amber, but Cass.”

  He peels the paper off a straw and stirs his drink. “I’m not in love with Cass,” he says, an odd smile playing at his lips.

  “Then what?”

  He frowns. “Take a walk with me?” A frustrated groan escapes me. I don’t have time for this, not tonight. He leans forward. “Come on,” he says. “Take a walk with me.”

  “Fine.” I follow him out of the bar.

  ***

  He leads me down a rickety set of wooden steps out behind the bar. The rain clouds have thinned, parting like curtains for the fat, glowing moon, which is almost full. Stars peek out in sections of dark sky. Below, the moonlight casts silver patches on the water and reveals a tiny thumbnail-shaped beach, frosted silver in the light.

  “Wow,” I breathe, the sound of the waves strong in my ears, the taste of salt on my lips.

  “I know,” Sam says, stopping and gazing at the moonlit world. “Beautiful.”

  We scramble halfway down the wet stairs to a flat rock the size of a small swimming pool. It has a bit of an overhang, so it’s not too wet to sit on.

  “Let’s sit here, okay?” Sam says, settling in the middle of it.

  “Okay.” I sit next to him, shivering in the clean, damp air.

  “Are you cold?”

  “I’m okay,” I say.

  “So,” he starts. “About Cass.”

  “Yeah?”

  Sighing, he looks sideways at me. “I’m trusting you with this, Calle. You’re part of this now. People don’t know this, okay?” I nod, my heart racing. “Okay,” he says, burying his hands in his pockets. “You’re probably wondering why Cass and I are so close, right? I mean, we’re pretty different.”

  “You’re from different planets.”

  He laughs. “I used to think that too. I did. But I don’t anymore.” He pauses. “We’re the same, really.”

  “How?” I ask.

  “Cass is my sister. My half-sister.”

  “What?” His statement sends the events of my evening spinning out of my head. “Are you serious?”

  “Let me explain,” he says.

  I sit back, waiting. He might as well have just told me that he is an alien from Pluto.

  He takes a deep breath. “A year ago, when I was in eighth grade, my mom got really bad. She’s always had episodes and bad days, but this went on all winter. She has severe depression. We know that much. And there’s medicine for it. Drugs. We’re still trying to figure out what else is going on with her. She doesn’t have typical depressive behavior. My dad finally took her to see someone in San Francisco, when I missed all that school, remember?”

  Nodding, I say, “What does this have to do with Cass?”

  “I’m getting there.” He continues, “That eighth-grade winter, my mom tried to drown herself.”

  “What?”

  His eyes rim with tears. I put my hand on his back, rubbing small circles. “No one knows. It was here at this beach.”

  I look down at the silvery sand, the dark waves. “What happened?”

  His eyes grow distant with memory. “It was night. Maybe eleven or even midnight,” he says, gazing down at the waves. “She left the house and came here, tried to drown herself in the water. But someone pulled her out.”

  “Cass?”

  He shakes his head. “Cass’s mom. She must have been sitting on the rocks below somewhere. She pulled my mom out of the water and wrapped her in blankets.” His eyes are clear now with the telling of the story. “Then she put her in Cass’s truck and drove her to our house.”

  “She could have been caught,” I whisper.

  Sam nods. “I know. She risked everything. And when she got to our house, my dad just flipped out. Started screaming at her. Told her she knew she wasn’t supposed to be there, that he had told her to never come there again.”

  “Again?” I continue to rub circles on his back, the wool warm now beneath my hand.

  “Yeah. It all came out then. Sarah, that’s Cass’s mom, got really pissed and started screaming back—that she’d loved him, that he’d lied to her. And that’s when she told him about Cass. Right there. In our living room. With my mother upstairs in her bed and the ambulance on the way. Cass and I were just sitting there on the couch.”

  “They had an affair?”

  He nods, wiping his eyes. “While my mom was pregnant with me. That night after my mom tried to drown herself, he gave Sarah a bunch of money to leave. To not say anything. So she took the money and left. When he tried to give Cass money, she said to screw himself and said she’d been fine without a father for thirteen years, and she didn’t need some coward prick to be her father.”

  “Sounds like Cass.”

  He sighs, drained. “Yeah. And the thing is, it’s hard enough for me with all of this, but Cass has nobody. My dad acts like she isn’t alive, and if I try to talk to him about her or Sarah, he flips out and tells me it would kill my mom if she knew. And he’s right. The only one I can talk to is Cass.”

  “She’s a good friend,” I say. Another loss. One more person I’ll probably never talk to again after tonight.

  “She is.” He pauses. “I’m not though.”

  I stare at the water. I can’t bring myself to lie to him.

  After a moment, he asks, “You know the worst part of living in a small town?” I shrug. He says, “The groups. I’ve grown up with all the kids at our school, but since fifth grade or so, we all sort of sectioned off. And I’ve been only friends with this one group. You know, Amber’s crowd, the athletes. Like you are with the drama kids.”

  “This is the first year I’ve been a drama kid,” I say. “In the past, I was always my own crowd.”

  “But that’s the best way,” he says. “Because now I’m stuck in that group, and I have to live with their expectations of me. If they knew about all of this with Cass…with her mom and my dad…” he trails off. “I don’t know what they’d do. I mean, look what happened with that picture of you.”

  Sighing, I stop rubbing his back, but before I can tuck my hand away in my pocket, he takes it in his. I look at him closely. “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Ever since you came here, ever since that day at the beach, I feel like I can be myself with you. I can really talk to you. I’ve been wanting to tell you.” He stops, looks out over the water. “I just knew I had to tell you about me, about Cass, about my mom. I just didn’t know how. Until now.”

  He leans in and kisses me, and my body warms with him. He smells of salt and a musky shampoo. “Wait,” he says, pulling away. “I brought something.”

  He fishes through his jacket pockets, producing an iPod. He sets it carefully on the rock with tiny speakers next to it. It begins to play Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing,” subdued, but loud enough.

  “I love this song,” he tells me. “I know you love old music, and I wanted to play it for you while I tell you something.”
>
  My breath in my throat, I nod. The sweetness of him fills me; he brought props—he thought this out even after the afternoon he had today. He thought of me. Of music for me.

  “Look,” he says, “I want to be with you. I really do, but I’m…”

  “Scared.”

  “Calle, you don’t understand. It’s different for you.”

  “How is it different? I don’t care if people see us together. I’m not afraid of what they will think about us. Is that how it’s different?”

  He looks at his hands. “It’s hard to explain.”

  My temper sparks. “Because I’m not the right girl—the right shape, the right laugh, the right hair. I’m not in the right group. You won’t talk to me at school. You pretend you don’t know me in front of your friends. You know what? You say they’ll judge you, but you care what they think. That makes you a coward, which is worse than what they are.”

  He doesn’t say anything, just looks at me sadly, his eyes lit with the moon. Looking at him, I realize he is not a reason to stay.

  “You’re right,” he says.

  “What?” I didn’t expect him to agree with me.

  “I’m a coward. Like father, like son, right?” He shakes his head. “You don’t deserve this.”

  “What?” I can’t believe he’s admitting this, but he’s right—I don’t.

  “You don’t deserve how I’ve treated you.”

  “You’re right. I don’t.”

  He runs his hands through his hair. “You know, Cass says the same thing. That I’m a coward. Like my dad. But I don’t know if I can be who you want me to be.”

  I soften and take his hand. “Be the guy at the beach that first day. Be who you were when you wrote me that song.”

  His eyes widen. “You knew I wrote that? You never said anything.”

  “Neither did you.” Then, I whisper:

  “I know that you are drifting, girl,

  And look, I’m drifting too.

  Only you don’t know I’m feeling

  Like I can’t live without you.”

  “Wow. You, like, memorized it.” There is a flash of something across his face, a quick glimpse of bright moon through cloud cover.

  “No one’s ever written me a song before.” I try to hold his gaze.

  “It’s not a very good song.” He dips his head. “But I thought with how much you like songs…well, I thought someone should write one for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  He takes a deep, sudden breath. “Cass says that I use that group like a crutch. That they aren’t me. But they’re what I know.” He shrugs. “I know she’s right. I do.”

  “Cass is a smart girl.”

  “She’s incredible.”

  “And look what they think of her.”

  “But they’re my friends.”

  “You don’t have to be friends with them,” I say. “You’re not your dad, Sam. You told me that day on the beach that you wish you could start over. Starting over…” I pause to collect all the thoughts whirling about in my head and try to put them in order. “I have started over so many times, so many different schools. But you don’t have to move to a new town to start over. You don’t have to play football if you don’t want to or go to their parties or eat lunch with them.

  “School is so weird because it’s like a hundred little universes. I’ve learned that much from all my different places. I’ve hung out with kids who do band or they’re into anime or they read fantasy all the time or they do sports or aikido or drama or student council. And honestly, most of them don’t know or care about what’s going on with anyone else. They’re too into their own thing. There are people in our school who wouldn’t torture you because you don’t have a perfect life. None of us have perfect lives.”

  He sighs and shakes his head. “Sometimes, I think I might just get out of bed, part my hair down the middle, come to school and sit on the other side of the room, eat lunch in the band room or something. Study and get good grades. Never set foot in the weight room. I think I could do that. But I show up and chicken out, you know. I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t part your hair down the middle,” I say, smiling, but he doesn’t laugh, doesn’t smile back. Poor Sam. He seems so lost, sitting here. “You don’t have to change who you are, Sam. You just aren’t them. You can still play football and lift weights and wear your grandpa’s jacket and not be what they think you should be. Just don’t date Amber. Don’t care what they think. Just be you.”

  He’s quiet for a minute. “I’m not totally sure I know who that is.”

  “You will,” I say. “And I won’t tell anyone. About you and Cass. Everyone deserves to have secrets. To have time to figure themselves out. I think we’re all just trying to figure ourselves out. I mean, I think that’s sort of the point of being a kid. Or a person. My mom’s still trying to figure it out.”

  As I stroke my thumb across the back of his hand, he says, “I just need another chance.”

  Now it is my turn to look sad. I had lost my evening, my life, in his story, and it all comes crashing back. I’m leaving. Even with my fit tonight, as good as it felt to say those things to my mom, I know I’ll be getting in that car and driving away. “I can’t, Sam.”

  He nods, hurt, and pulls his hand away. “I was afraid of that.”

  I shake my head and take his hand back. “No. Not because I won’t give you a chance. But because we aren’t staying here.”

  He looks sharply at me. “What?”

  “I wanted to come tonight and see you, to hear what you had to say, but mostly to tell you good-bye. My mom and I are leaving tomorrow morning. And I don’t know where we’re going.”

  “Why? I thought the job was working out. The apartment was fine.”

  “They are fine.” I find my own pockets and stare out at the water, Van Morrison low in my ears. “It’s not that.”

  I tell him. Everything. The meeting at the coffeehouse, the miniature golf, the scene I walked into tonight. My father selling drugs, our running from him. I watch his face as I talk, taking in all the shadows, the line of his jaw, the fullness of his lower lip. My stomach clenches like a fist.

  Throughout my telling, his face pales, becoming as washed as the moonlight. “Can’t the police do something? A restraining order or something?”

  “I told her I was staying, that I’d live with Alexa, but that’s crazy, right?”

  “No.” He shakes his head, his eyes lighting with possibility. “No, you could stay. A lot of kids do it, stay with friends to finish high school.”

  “What kids?” Maybe I could stay?

  He looks at his hands. “Well, I don’t really know any, but I’ve seen it on TV.”

  I look away, swallowing my reality. Ready to face it. “I don’t think I can. I’d never see her. She would just be gone. It’s too hard. I mean, you understand about that.”

  He nods, his eyes once again on the night water. “Yeah.”

  We listen to the waves, deflated.

  “So, that’s it?” he asks. “You’re just gone? Out of my life?”

  “I guess.” A numbness begins to set over me. It spreads like water filling the cracks of a sidewalk, each limb, each finger, each toe going numb. I have felt this before, and I hope it takes over the whole of me, so I won’t have to feel the ache that is fighting for air underneath it.

  “It’s not fair,” he says.

  “I know.” The ache scratches its way to my surface.

  “Will we…can we write, email, call?” He stumbles through each option, aware of how insufficient they feel.

  My heart thumps in my chest and crushes my lungs. I can’t breathe, but I try to sound strong. “Email, sure. When I can get to a computer, for sure. I’ll email you.”

  He nods and fiddles with his iPod again. Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” begins to play. I love this song so much. I can’t believe that he’s playing this song, that I have to leave this boy behind who pla
ys me Van Morrison and Springsteen and writes me my own song. This boy who maybe loves me, even if he can’t figure out how to show it.

  He stands, then reaches and pulls me to my feet.

  “Come here,” he says, holding me closer.

  I melt into the soft wool of his jacket and sway to the music all around us—Springsteen, but also the waves and the sounds of the night birds over the water. In this, our only dance together, I am the closest to him I’ve ever been, but I’ve never felt more alone.

  ***

  At home, my mother sits on the couch in the dark living room. She stands as I shut the door behind me.

  “I looked everywhere for you,” she says, her voice thin and tired. “I couldn’t find you.” She has clearly been crying.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I was so worried,” she takes a step forward. “Calle, I…”

  “We can go, Mom. I know we need to go.”

  She pulls me to her, her hand rubbing my hair like she did when I was a child, over and over.

  A clock sits atop a box. It’s the only thing she hasn’t packed. It reads 2:06.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  ***

  In the yellow light of the street lamp, the night filling again with cloud cover, we pack the gray Honda Civic my mom bought three weeks ago, taking only the essentials, and climb into our seats. Pulling away from the dark apartment, my mom pushes the Almost Famous soundtrack into the CD player. I stare straight ahead as we drive away, a sleeping Andreas Bay slipping by us. At the first gas station, we pull over.

  “Get me a Snickers and a bottle of water, okay?” My mom hands me a ten.

  As we push open the doors, a highway patrolman pulls in to fill up his tank. He smiles at my mom. “Late night?” He nods at me.

  “We’re heading out,” my mom says lightly. “Trying to get an early start.”

  “South 1 is going to be blocked for a couple of hours,” he tells her. “I hope you weren’t going that way.”

  “Why?”

  “There was an accident. A Ford Escort hit a tree. It’s a mess.”