No Man's Land

by S. T. Underdahl

  “My family is the Dysfunctionals. I’m in no position to judge.”

  Scarlett nods, then takes a deep breath. “And that it will stay just between us.”

  I give her a look that says, haven’t we been over this before?

  “Yeah, well, that’s what Kerr says too,” Scarlett points out. “But I think he talks to my mom. So anyway,” she continues, “my dad and my uncle James … his stepbrother … they grew up really close, like real brothers. My dad’s the older one, and from what my mom says, he was kind of a surrogate father to James.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “James has always been kind of a drinker, which caused problems when he’d show up bombed for holiday dinners. Dad would make excuses for him, and then Mom would call him and Grandma ‘enablers’ because they put up with it.”

  “Huh.” We’ve studied this sort of thing in Psychology—alcoholics, enabling, and family members with co-dependency—but I’ve never heard a real-life account of it from someone I know.

  “Last spring,” Scarlett continues, “my uncle lost his job and his apartment, so of course Dad told him he could move in with us.”

  “Why didn’t he move in with your grandma?” I ask.

  “Grandma lives in an assisted living facility. She couldn’t have him staggering around the place, falling into the potted plants.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mom was furious, of course, and threatened to leave; they argued and argued about it. ‘He’s my only brother,’ my dad said. ‘I can’t just let him live at the Mission like a bum.’ ‘You have to face facts,’ Mom said. ‘Your brother is a bum.’ I think she felt bad that she said it, though, because a little bit after that she said he could stay for a week or two. So my uncle came to live with us.”

  Having only one brother myself, I can kind of understand Scarlett’s dad’s position. I know that no matter how bad things might get for me or Brian, we’d never let the other one be homeless. “So, that’s why they sent you away?” I guess. “Because your mom didn’t want you around your uncle’s drinking?”

  Scarlett sighs. “No,” she says. “I wish they’d sent me away right when he got there. Then maybe none of this would have happened.” She pauses. “My uncle had been living with us for about three weeks when I came home from school one day and found him sitting in the living room, completely wasted. ‘Hey, there,’” he called when he saw me come in. ‘Come over here and give me a kiss.’”

  “What?!”

  Scarlett nods. “I told him to stop being a puke and went to my room. I thought about calling my mom, but I knew that he’d get kicked out for sure then, and so I was kind of debating what to do when all of the sudden I heard him coming down the hall, bumping into walls and stuff.”

  I chuckle involuntarily, but something tells me nothing about this story is funny.

  “The next thing I know, he’s standing in my doorway all unsteady, looking like he doesn’t even know where he is. ‘Get the hell out of here, James,’ I told him, and for a minute I thought he was going to leave, but then he didn’t, and I started to get kind of scared. Because I could tell he was so drunk he maybe didn’t even know it was me, and I just didn’t know what he was going to do.”

  Scarlett’s eyes are on the table now. “So before I could even scream or anything, he was, like on me.”

  “Holy crap.”

  Scarlett’s face is flushed, remembering. “It was disgusting,” she shudders. “His hot breath right in my face, and oh my God, he smelled awful, but he was still so strong and he pushed me down on the bed and his hands were all over me, and I knew he was going to … ”

  “Jesus.”

  “He wasn’t in his right mind … I’m not sure if he ever really was anymore … and suddenly I realized that nobody was going to be home for a long time. No one was going to … save me, you know. But just when I thought I was going to have to let it happen, something in my mind kind of snapped, and I just freaked out. I mean, I’d been fighting him off and all, but I just got, like, crazy and hysterical. That must have gotten through to him, because suddenly he just let me go. He got up, somehow, and staggered out of the room. I didn’t even care where he went; all I could think of was getting to the shower so I could get his reek off of me.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Scarlett swallows. “When I came out of the shower, James was gone, which was fine by me. I locked the doors and called my mom. I told her James was drunk and had taken off and she’d better come home. She must have called my dad, because he got there first. When he opened the garage door to park the car, there he was.”

  I just stare at her, unable to imagine what horrible thing she’s going to say next. “Your uncle?”

  Scarlett nods, dry-eyed. “He’d hanged himself. I guess even Uncle James had a conscience, or else maybe he was just feeling sorry for himself, knowing he’d finally burned his last bridge.”

  “So I don’t understand,” I say after a moment. “Why did you get sent away?”

  “Doesn’t make much sense, does it? My dad was a terrible mess, which I get, of course. We had the funeral and buried the bastard, but my dad couldn’t handle it all. He couldn’t stop crying, and talking about poor James and how depressed he’d been and how nothing had ever worked out for James …”

  “But what about you?” I ask. “Weren’t they upset about what he’d tried to do to you?”

  “They didn’t really know about it.”

  “You didn’t tell them?”

  Scarlett sighs. “No. I knew it would only make things worse, and my dad was already such a mess.”

  I guess I can understand. Sometimes it’s not worth rocking the boat when everyone’s already seasick.

  “But I kept having all these nightmares about it, and then I started to think I could smell him; that putrid smell just seemed to live in my nostrils. I started having panic attacks. I even did … this.” She turns her wrists over so I can see the faint white lines etched in her skin.

  “You cut?”

  Scarlett nods. “I’m a cliché, right? But it was weird, Dov—something about it made me feel better, at least at first.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “Anyway, my gym teacher saw the marks and called my parents. So I basically had no choice. I told them.”

  “How did it go?” I ask.

  “Not great, obviously. Mom started freaking out and crying. Dad looked … well, I don’t even like to think about it. All these years, he’d stood up for his loser brother, and in the end, Uncle James hurts the person my dad cares about the most in the world.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Finally, I guess, Dad just couldn’t take it anymore, so he took off. A few hours later we got a call from the cops—he’d picked a fight in a bar and was in the hospital with a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain. They weren’t sure he’d live, but he did. Once he was medically stable, they transferred him to the psychiatry unit; Mom went up to visit him, but he didn’t want to see me right away. He couldn’t bear the guilt, he said. Couldn’t even look at my face.”

  “That’s understandable,” I say.

  “Is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “Maybe.”

  “All I know,” Scarlett says harshly, “is that in the end, everyone decided that it would be better for me to come here and stay with my grandparents until Dad can get things figured out. ‘Your father’s fragile right now,’ Mom says. “He just needs some time.’”

  “He’s fragile?” I sputter. “What about you?”

  Scarlett nods. “Right? I suppose they think they’re helping me by having me see Mr. Kerr. They wanted me to see a regular psychiatrist … you know, like a medical doctor … but I put my foot down. The way this thing has played out, I’d find myself locked up in a psych unit on the wrong end of some shock therapy.”

  “Is it helping?” I ask. “Talking to Kerr?”

  Scarlett considers. “I guess it must be,” she says. “I mean, I don’t dream
about it anymore. And I’ve pretty much stopped feeling so pissed off all the time. Kerr has me keeping a journal. That helps too.”

  “I can see why you probably didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Yeah. It’s just been a lot to sort out, and sometimes I feel like if the wrong thing happens, I’ll just sort of … shatter.”

  “You’re fragile too,” I say.

  Scarlett smiles ruefully. “Fragile,” she says. “It’s the new black.”

  Press Release

  Vanguard Records announces the November 16th release of the new LP by ground-breaking punk lyricist D-Dog Howard and the Fragile Psyche Band. The much-anticipated album, “Broken Dreams and Shattered Spirit,” is the band’s first album since their freshman effort, 2010’s “Pointless Days and Wasted Nights” and Howard’s soulful chart-topping single, “Twohey, To Me.” …

  Thirteen

  “Can I get you two kids anything else?” The waitress is back, our ticket in her hand.

  Scarlett shakes her head. “No,” I tell her, “we’re good.”

  “Okay, then.” The waitress drops the ticket on the table, closer to me than to Scarlett.

  Scarlett grins. “I’m going to the restroom,” she tells me. “Don’t pay that while I’m gone.”

  “Don’t worry.” I watch her go, still struggling to wrap my mind around everything she’s told me.

  “Dov?”

  I’m so distracted by my thoughts that I actually jump when the familiar voice calls my name.

  Miranda is waving to me from the counter near the Pepper’s front door. “Hey!” I say, surprised and happy to see her.

  Miranda scoots between tables until she arrives at ours. I slide out of my seat and give her a quick, friendly hug, feeling her cold cheek press against mine “What’s up?”

  “My mom sent me to pick up lunch,” Miranda tells me. I always feel a little awkward when Miranda calls her foster parents “mom” and “dad,” but I guess a surrogate family is better than no family at all. “How about you?” she adds, surveying the remains of Scarlett’s meal. “You here with Ali?”

  “No … ”

  “Oh, Koby?”

  I’m just opening my mouth to explain when Scarlett herself appears, coming back from the bathroom. “Hey, Miranda,” she says, obviously surprised to see her.

  The parts of Miranda’s face that aren’t already flushed from cold turned pink. “Oh,” she says, looking at me oddly. “Hi, Scarlett. So you guys are, like, here together?”

  “Yeah,” I say. I know Miranda probably thinks it’s pretty random for me to be here with Scarlett after I said I was done with her. “You should hang out with us while you wait for your food,” I suggest.

  Before Miranda can reply, Scarlett breaks in. “Listen,” she says, “I’ve got to run, anyway. I just remembered I’m supposed to take my grandma to Costco. They’ve got toilet paper in bulk, you know.”

  I laugh, but I’m confused. Suddenly she has to leave?

  Scarlett is digging in her purse. “Here,” she says abruptly, shoving some money at me. “This should cover it.”

  “Wait … ” I’m going to tell her I was only joking about letting her pay for the whole thing, but before I can finish she’s grabbed her jacket and bolted out the door with not so much as a “see ya.”

  “Sheesh, was it something I said?” Miranda asks. Her face has gone back to its normal color.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess that’s just Scarlett.”

  After I leave the Pepper, I decide to detour over to Ali’s place instead of heading home. There’s no question in my mind as to whether Ali will be around; he rarely goes anywhere. The Gabols live in a nice neighborhood, and I wonder whether they’ll mind the Gator being parked on the street in front of their house. Nevertheless, I slide it up along the curb and park, then run up the lawn to the front door.

  “Hello, Dov,” Ali’s dad greets me when he comes to the door. Dr. Gabol is the opposite of my dad; a pleasant, dark-skinned man who’s actually interested in his son and his son’s friends. He and Ali’s mom, Dr. Saraphine Gabol, are accustomed to their son’s eccentricities and unconventional fashion choices; as long as Ali has a few human-like friends and isn’t posing a general threat to society, the Gabols seem content to sit back and watch the evolution of the unique specimen they’ve created.

  “My son is in his room,” Dr. Gabol tells me. “Most likely playing that online game he enjoys so much. Darkworld, I believe it’s called.”

  “Darkscape,” I correct, slipping off my Converses. The Gabols have a strict “no shoes in the house” policy.

  Dr. Gabol nods. “I knew it was Dark something,” he agrees.

  Ali’s completely obsessed with Darkscape, an online virtual world where players reinvent themselves as characters of a medieval community. But Darkscape is Ali’s thing, not mine; if I’m online, it’s usually just to download music or watch videos on YouTube.

  As predicted, I find Ali in his room. His hair is rumpled and he’s wearing a T-shirt and pajama pants, suggesting that he simply awakened that morning, rolled out of bed, and landed in front of his computer.

  “Hey,” he says without looking up.

  “Hey.” I drop into a worn-out recliner near the window. “What’s happening? Anything new with the red-head?”

  On the screen beyond Ali, hundreds of characters are milling around, conducting their medieval business. For reasons known only to him, his alter-ego on Darkscape is a tall, auburn-haired female character named RedWarrior23.

  Ali nods. “Actually,” he says grimly, “I’ve gotten myself into something of a situation.”

  “Really.”

  “You remember my stalker?”

  I do; a while back, Ali mentioned that another of the online players, Moridin, kept popping up everywhere; at the jousting games, in the marketplace, in the forest. It had started to get creepy when Moridin began offering RedWarrior23 gifts; at last count, Ali had scored a pair of leather boots, a longbow, and several pies.

  “What now,” I ask. “More pie?”

  “No,” Ali mutters. “Ten thousand drachms.” Drachms are the official currency of Darkscape, and even I know ten thousand drachms is a small fortune.

  “Where’d he get that kind of scratch?”

  “Won it in the tournaments, I guess,” Ali says. “Turns out he’s the Tiger Woods of the joust.”

  “Not necessarily a good thing.”

  “Seriously, no one can beat him.” There’s an unmistakable note of admiration in Ali’s voice.

  “Why would he give all that money to RedWarrior23?”

  Ali throws me a grin. “Obviously, I’m irresistible.”

  “That’s a little messed up, bro.”

  “If you think that’s messed up, wait until you hear this,” Ali says. “He wants me to marry him.”

  “Marry him?!” I choke. “Can you even do that?”

  Ali shrugs. “He says he knows a cleric who can perform the ceremony.”

  I’m momentarily at a loss for words. Finally I find some. “You’re not going to do it, are you?”

  Ali shrugs. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s hard to say no to a thousand drachms. I could buy a horse, so I wouldn’t have to walk everywhere anymore.”

  I couldn’t believe that he was even considering it. “Ali,” I remind him, “you’d be married to a dude.”

  “Only on the game, bro. No one else would have to know about it.” He looks at me sternly. “Right?”

  I’m somewhat relieved to know that even who-cares-what-people-think Ali considers this to be an issue worthy of discretion. “Well,” I ask finally, “do ya even love the guy?”

  Ali smiles. “Apparently, for the right price, even my love can be bought. And listen, Dov—if you sign up for a Darkscape account, you can be the damsel of honor.”

  “Funny.”

  Ali types in a few commands to log off. “You hungry?” he asks when the screen goes blank.

  “Nah.”


  We head out to the kitchen, where Ali finds a mixing bowl and pours it full of Cocoa Krispies. “So,” he says, inspecting a spoon he’s pulled from the kitchen dish drainer. “Pretty good news about your brother, huh?”

  I spoke to Ali last night, after we got the news about Brian. “Yeah. It was just good to hear that he’s alive and out of danger. I’ll bet my mom slept okay last night for the first time since he’s been gone.”

  Ali is pouring milk over his cereal.“What happened anyway?”

  “I guess there was some kind of explosion while his unit was out on patrol. Probably one of those roadside bombs, or whatever they call it … an IUD or something.”

  We head to the family room, where we sprawl on the Gabols’ leather couches. Ali’s family doesn’t have a television, so there’s no sound other than the slurping noises Ali makes inhaling his cereal. I’m grateful when piano music suddenly comes floating down the hall; besides being a biology professor, Ali’s mom is also a concert pianist, so she practices a lot. Since Ali’s dad plays the violin, there are times when being at Ali’s house can feel like a visit to the symphony.

  “We should call Koby and see if he wants to hang with us at the mall,” Ali suggests when he’s drained the last of the milk from his bowl. “Maybe catch a movie or something.”

  “Sure.” I agree, reaching for my cell phone. “I’m supposed to get a haircut too … my dad kind of flipped out about it this morning.”

  Ali nods; he knows all about my dad.

  “The funny thing is,” I add, “I don’t think he even realized my hair was a different color. He just knew that there was something he didn’t like about me.”

  “Nice.”

  I scroll down my contacts list for Koby’s name. “Maybe we can check out the bridal stores,” I tell Ali. “What are you, a size medium?”

  Wedding Announcement

  Darkscape’s own Hero of the Joust, the renowned and wealthy Sir Moridin, has announced his betrothal to the statuesque and ginger-haired beauty known as RedWarrior23. Although the bride has been referred to by suspicious locals as “a gold digger” and “a bit off,” the ceremony will be performed by the Honorable Vicar Baldor in the Merry Men Glen on October 25 at 5 p.m. All friends, relatives, dwarves, and elves are invited to attend. Given the groom’s legendary reputation as a skilled assassin, no one is expected to object to the union.