It Looks Like This

by Rafi Mittlefehldt

  Ronald says, Or I could just bike there whenever I want anyway. It’s pretty close.

  I say, What kind of workouts are you going to do?

  Ronald says, I dunno, stuff to get my muscles bigger. Bench presses, dumbbells, that kind of thing.

  I think about this for a while.

  I say, Have you ever worked out before?

  Ronald says, I went with my uncle once, just —

  But then his eyes flick upward, over my head, and he stops.

  I turn around.

  Sean’s standing behind me, looking down at me. He’s holding a tray of food, just standing there.

  He says, Hey.

  I say, Hey.

  He says, Hey, so I was thinking, that project?

  I say, Madame Girard.

  He says, Yeah. Yeah, you want a partner for that?

  I say, Sure.

  My mouth is dry.

  He says, Cool. Okay, well, you wanna come over maybe tomorrow and work on it?

  I say, Yeah, sure.

  He smiles.

  He says, All right, cool. Talk to you later.

  And walks away.

  I watch him go a second before turning back around.

  Ronald’s watching him too.

  He says, What’s his name again?

  Jared says, Sean.

  Jared has a good memory.

  Ronald says, Didn’t he use to sit with Victor Price?

  I say, Yeah.

  Ronald watches a bit more, following with his eyes as Sean finds his table, then blinks and looks at me.

  He says, He’s not anymore.

  I say, Yeah.

  Ronald shrugs and says, You got a big project in French?

  I nod.

  He says, That sucks.

  He thinks for a bit, then adds, And me, I got girl problems. You and me, we got a lot on our backs, bro.

  Then he holds out his fist to bump mine. Ronald does stuff like that sometimes. It’s one of the reasons I like him, because he never cares what anyone thinks of him, except Kelly Ramirez.

  I fist-bump him back.

  It’s raining, but only a little.

  We’re close to the ocean so we get a decent amount of rain, but sometimes the rain that comes is just constant drizzle, barely above a mist but never-ending.

  One of the first days after we moved here, Dad came with me to walk Charlie. It had been humid and overcast all day, gray and dull, and we were both wondering if it was going to rain. And then just a couple minutes into the walk, we felt the first tiny drops. It stayed that way, just kind of sprinkling, never turning into the downpour we were waiting for. When we were almost back home, Dad suddenly said,

  This rain has no ambition.

  He looked up a bit after he said that, letting the spray hit his face, walking slowly even though Charlie was pulling at the leash. Then he looked over at me and winked.

  Today is one of those days.

  I have a raincoat, and I’m walking up Plum Hollow Drive. School let out an hour and a half ago, and it feels weird to walk in this direction at this time of day and without Toby.

  I pass block after block. No one’s outside and I have the road to myself. The whole neighborhood.

  Finally I take a left onto Hyacinth Court. It’s a street I’ve never been on, and I walk slowly, taking in the block, looking at everything.

  All these houses look alike but there are still small differences. There’s a house with a big American flag on a pole; there’s a yard with a tiny landscaped cactus garden; a lawn with four giant oak trees lined up like soldiers, one two three four.

  I count the houses on my left side as I walk. At five, I stop.

  It’s a red-brick house with white trim like everyone else’s, but I look for those tiny differences. There’s a small mound in the yard covered in shrubs, with a tall tree on either side. Two piney bushes flank the garage door. The address is hand-painted in charcoal gray along the curb.

  In front of the garage, a faded blue Ford Bronco, old and weary-looking. Next to it, a shiny gray Lincoln.

  I walk up to the front door, thick wood with panels of murky colored glass. I don’t hear anything, so I listen harder.

  Once in fourth grade, our teacher made us write down what we hear when it’s quiet. No one understood what she meant at first, but she just told us all to stop and listen, and we’d start hearing small things that we hadn’t noticed before. After a little while, it worked. I wrote about the sound of the building’s heater turning on and off, the wind against the windows, the scratches of pencil and paper. She said sometimes people get so used to background noises that they don’t even realize they’re there anymore.

  I try it now, and then I start hearing. There’s a small computer keyboard sound of rain against the hood of my coat, a steady wind, and a dog barking miles away.

  I ring the doorbell.

  It only takes him a second; through the glass I can see movement but can’t make out his figure. He opens the door and he’s wearing jeans, different from the ones he had on at school, jeans with holes. A plain white T-shirt, no shoes, no socks. His feet are mostly covered by the bottoms of his jeans.

  Sean says, Hey, come in.

  I step inside.

  The entrance is tiled, like our house but a little nicer. Rooms open up on either side, and straight ahead I see the living room, past a bent staircase that leads to a second-floor balcony.

  He says, You gotta take your shoes off or my dad will flip.

  I take off my raincoat first. They have a little coat stand near the door and I hang it there, and then I take off my shoes and put them as neatly as I can near the door. I hear movement from another room behind me while I’m doing this and turn.

  Sean’s parents walk into the entrance hall. His dad is pale with sandy hair, but they still look a lot alike. Same lips and jaw, same eyes.

  Sean’s dad holds out his hand.

  He says, Mr. Rossini.

  I shake his hand, which seems weird to me but I do it anyway.

  I say, I’m Mike.

  He says, Good to meet you, Mike. We’re about to head out to a movie, so you boys will have the house to yourselves.

  His expression is really hard to read. There’s just a bit of a smile but not really. His eyes stay on mine and don’t waver, like he’s trying to read me. It makes me a bit uneasy.

  Finally I turn to Sean’s mom, really just to avoid Mr. Rossini’s gaze. She’s wearing a simple gray dress and a handful of necklaces. She has dark brown skin, darker than Sean, and straightened black hair that hangs down to her shoulders. Every strand stays perfectly in place when she moves. It looks like she spent a lot of time on it.

  She looks very sure of herself. Confident. Nothing really like my mom.

  I say, Good to meet you, Mrs. Rossini.

  She takes my hand but only nods once, slowly, in response. Then her eyes flick over to Sean.

  She says, He’s here to work on a project, so make sure you actually get some work done.

  Her eyes dart back to me right after she says the last bit, and for a second my heart skips. But then she winks at me. Her expression doesn’t change.

  Sean says, I know, Mom.

  Mr. Rossini says, Sean.

  His voice is suddenly stern.

  Sean says, I mean, yes, ma’am.

  Mr. Rossini says, Really, though, I want to see some progress on this.

  Sean says, Yessir.

  Mr. Rossini says, See if you can get through a quarter of it, at least.

  Sean says, Yessir.

  His voice is a bit clipped now.

  Mr. Rossini says, It’s a big part of your grade, remember.

  Sean says, Yessir.

  Mrs. Rossini pulls at her husband’s hand and says, All right, we’re going to be late.

  Mr. Rossini looks at me and says, Okay, boys. Be good, and don’t tear the house down.

  They walk out the front door. Sean closes it behind him.

  He looks tense for a mi
nute. He’s facing the closed door but I can see him blink a few times, from the side.

  Then he lets out a deep breath through his nose, slow, and his body relaxes.

  He turns suddenly to me.

  He says, You want anything to drink?

  I’m not really thirsty but I say, Uh yeah, I’ll have a water.

  He spins on the tiled floor and leads me into a dark sitting room through the doorway on the left, and through that into a huge kitchen filled with light. Coming from the small den with the drawn curtains, I have to blink a bit as the daylight still streaming from the windows mixes with the overheads and stings my eyes.

  He grabs a glass from a cabinet, reaching up high to get it, and puts it under the spigot in the fridge door.

  There’s a loud humming sound, and then I hear a controlled stream of water. Sean looks at me.

  He says, Any trouble finding the house? I always give shitty directions.

  I shake my head. I already knew the street from before and it wasn’t hard to find the car.

  He hands me the glass of water, condensation already forming on the side, and pulls a Pepsi from the fridge and cracks it open.

  There’s a moment where all I can hear is the muffled fizzing of his Pepsi, and then even that dies out.

  Then he says, Let’s go upstairs.

  Sean’s room is tucked into the corner of the second floor, behind a game room with a pool table and next to his private bathroom.

  The balcony that overlooks the living room and entrance connects his part of the upstairs with another section that has a guest room and library.

  It’s a nice house.

  The door to his room is almost totally bare, all white paint on wood except for a small three-by-five photo taped off-center. It’s a view from a suspension bridge, looking through one of the gateway supports toward a city skyline in the background.

  I say, Is that the Brooklyn Bridge?

  I know it from pictures my dad has taken while at conferences.

  Sean says, Yeah.

  He pushes through the door and into his room. Like his door, the walls are mostly bare and white and untouched. He has a big bed next to a deep red-brown nightstand and matching dresser, vanity, and desk. The furniture all looks pretty expensive. He keeps his room clean, his bed made.

  I say, Have you ever been to New York City?

  He says, Just once.

  It looks for a second like he’s going to say more about it, but then just asks, You?

  I shake my head. I’ve been to Wisconsin and Virginia, and then on vacations to California, Florida, Mexico, Germany, and camping in Colorado.

  But Dad avoids New York when planning vacations.

  Sean falls into a sitting position on his bed, letting himself bounce on the mattress.

  I sink quietly into his desk chair, one of those rolling, spinning types they have in offices.

  He waits till the bouncing stops on its own, then says, All right.

  And reaches down to his backpack and pulls out his French book.

  He says, I guess we should get started.

  Our project is to create a French magazine.

  It has to be at least sixteen pages and have zero English in it. Only 40 percent of the magazine space can be pictures, which sounds like a lot, but it still leaves basically nine and a half pages of pure French text.

  The first step, Sean and I agree, is to come up with the type of magazine it is. It can be fashion, culture, food, music, whatever.

  Sean says we should pick something that’s easy to write about. Like if we made a magazine all about beekeeping or whatever, it would be hard to fill sixteen pages on that topic even in English. But if it’s something more broad it’s easier.

  He says, Why don’t we do a travel magazine?

  I say, Okay. Or maybe a news magazine.

  Because news is always happening, in any part of the country.

  I say, All we’d have to do then is find a bunch of regular articles and translate them.

  Sean nods to himself, thinking. He’s leaning back on his bed, propping himself up with both arms, legs dangling off his bed. The white T-shirt is sort of stretched where his shoulders and arms are. There are a couple hairs on his chin and I wonder how often he has to shave.

  He looks at me again.

  He says, We could do a dirty magazine. French people are always looking at porn.

  I will away the blushing, or try.

  I say, I don’t think Madame Girard —

  But Sean cuts me off and says, Yeah, I’m just kidding.

  He smiles a bit and scratches his arm.

  We decide to do the travel magazine after all, because that way we don’t have to translate a bunch of complicated news stories. We can just make up our own easier articles, and there are tons of travel sites online we can look at.

  Plus Sean’s mom has a bunch of old travel magazines we can use for ideas. Sean brings them into his room, a big box stuffed full, and we start flipping through them looking for things we could include in our project.

  The magazines go back ten years or more and cover everywhere imaginable: Spain, Greece, Argentina, Norway, Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, China, New Zealand, Zambia. Some of the magazines are even from other countries and feature places in the United States. A couple are in French and we pay close attention to them.

  Sean says his parents have been all over the world, sometimes on vacation, sometimes for his dad’s work when his mom tags along, sometimes on church missions.

  Sometimes he goes and sometimes he stays behind.

  I say, What’s the coolest place you’ve been?

  He answers quickly: Australia.

  I’ve been to a couple other countries but never Australia. I think about how cool it must be to have all these vacations, but then Sean says,

  I try to stay behind as much as possible, though.

  I say, Why?

  Sean leans back on his elbows again, magazine resting on his lap. It’s one of the French ones, opened to an article about Cuba.

  He says, It gets old being with my parents for more than a couple days. Dad gets stressed pretty easily.

  He stays that way for a second and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to respond, but then he says,

  Plus it’s nice having the house to myself.

  Sean doesn’t have any brothers or sisters.

  He sits up suddenly and grabs the magazine in his lap and says, Hey, come here and look at this one.

  I’ve been sitting in his desk chair, so I get up and sit next to him on the bed. The mattress bounces a little before I get settled.

  Sean puts the magazine half on his lap, half on mine, the two-page spread on Cuba before us. He starts talking about different parts of the article, pointing here and there. Neither of us can make out that much of the French text, but it’s the layout he’s interested in.

  Aside from the article itself and the main photo, there’s a sidebar with small pictures and text beside them, highlighting different points of interest. There’s also a shaded text box with bullet points, probably just listing facts or something.

  Sean talks about all these, about which pieces we can use. All told, the article isn’t very long because of all the text boxes and photos and the big headline, all of which is pretty encouraging. I can see a picture of our magazine forming itself in my mind.

  We’re sitting close as he talks, arms sometimes brushing against each other. He leans over to point at something on my half of the spread, and I feel the pressure of his finger through the pages, through my jeans, on my thigh.

  We look through a bunch more magazines, putting the ones we like in a pile and the rest back in the box. I stay in my spot to the left of Sean on the bed, each magazine spread out between us in turn. When Sean flips the pages, sometimes his arm grazes my chest.

  We work for a couple hours before Sean checks the clock on his nightstand, the blue numbers now reading 7:26.

  He says, Hey, we should probably stop now.
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br />   I look behind me at the open window, where a faint breeze is pushing the curtains inward. It’s dark now, and I realize it probably has been for a while. Dad will want me home for dinner.

  I turn back and Sean is looking at me. For the first time I notice little flecks of orange in his eyes, around the inside of the irises. Only a few but they’re there, like the first gold leaves in a brilliant green forest, the first gold leaves of fall. I watch the orange flecks disappear as his pupils dilate, just a little. All at once I realize how close he is.

  I think he does too, because he stands up then, putting the magazine we’d been looking at back in the box.

  He says, Okay, I’ll walk you down.

  His voice sounds different now. Sort of tense. Like when he was talking to his dad. I start feeling a bit nervous and I don’t really know why.

  After a second, I stand up too.

  At the front door, Sean says, See you later. Maybe we can work on it again next week.

  He’s leaning against the edge of the open door from the inside. I’m on the porch, the night behind me. Behind him the house is mostly dark. His parents haven’t come home yet.

  He seems back to normal now, and I wonder if I just imagined the weird moment upstairs.

  I say, Yeah, that’d be cool.

  And I notice that I’m looking forward to it.

  Halfway down the block a car honks as it passes me. I look and see Mr. Rossini wave lazily out the driver’s-side window. I turn to watch and he slows, then pulls into the driveway.

  Mom says, Did you get a lot done?

  We’re sitting at the dinner table. I think Dad’s a little annoyed because I came home like a minute before dinner was ready. He looked like he’d been getting ready to be mad, but then couldn’t because I ended up coming home just barely on time.

  I say, Yeah.

  Dad says, Are you going to be over at his house a lot working on this?

  I say, Yeah.

  He takes a bite of pork and chews and swallows.

  He says, Just leave us his number so we can get ahold of you.

  I don’t have my own phone. Dad said I can buy one with my own money when I’m old enough to get a job, but there’s no need for kids to carry cell phones around like they’re CEOs or something. That’s how he said it.

  It’s annoying but it also means he can’t call me whenever I’m out, which would be even more annoying.