by Melissa Grey
“I’m not crying.” Noah undermined himself by punctuating the words with a well-timed sniff.
“Of course not. You’re just leaking out of your eyes.”
“Exactly.”
Javi huffed out a small laugh. His smile widened when Noah did the same.
“Look,” Javi said, “I don’t know you very well, but you seem nice.”
“You don’t know me at all.”
Javi shrugged. “I’m good at reading people. Now are you gonna tell me what’s bothering you, or do I have to keep peppering you with increasingly intrusive questions? Because I don’t think we’ve got the time for that.”
Noah’s smile was a little wobbly, but it was better than crying, so Javi would take it.
Noah drummed his fingers against the sink, the sound echoing dully across the porcelain. “Just family stuff. It’s stupid.”
“If it’s bothering you, it isn’t stupid.”
Now they were getting somewhere. But before Noah could say anything more, the bell outside shrieked, punctuating the little bubble of semi-privacy Javi had carved for them.
“I’ve gotta get to class,” Noah said, though his tone implied he had little desire to do so. He bent down to pick up his backpack, swinging it up onto his shoulder in one fluid move. Something fell out of a side pocket and drifted to the ground.
“Okay. Yeah, me too,” Javi said, bending down to pick up the paper. It looked like a photograph of Maplethorpe, taken from a distance. Javi didn’t have to get to class. He had a free period he’d planned on using to commit several school code violations. He didn’t know why he said that. He held the photo out to Noah, who accepted it with mumbled thanks. “But if you wanna talk, I’m—”
The rest of Javi’s offering went unspoken when Noah turned the photograph over in his hand, revealing the back. Text, written in neat block letters, like they were cut from a stencil. And a sticker.
A macabre jester smiled at them as they both stared at it in stunned silence.
“What the garbanzo beans?” Javi asked the universe. The universe did not respond.
It’s difficult, watching from a distance. Viewing the players, anticipating their decisions. It’s frustrating, infuriating, satisfying, thrilling. It’s all those things and more. But it’s not enough.
The pieces are moving together, but they need to move faster. They need to move with purpose.
It’s a delicate game, knowing when to apply pressure and when to pull back. When to orchestrate and when to observe.
They need to see the threads woven through each missive, to understand the ties that bind them.
They need a focal point. A thing around which they can rally. A magnet to draw them all in. And then, they will need something to keep them there. A glue to seal them together. A test, to try the strength of their connection.
It’s not kind, that which must be done. Unpleasant deeds are, after all, bred by an unpleasant world.
A sacrifice will have to be made. But that is expected.
Success, after all, requires sacrifice.
The front door of Chase’s house had been painted a happy sunshine yellow ten years ago. He remembered helping his father complete the job, taping the sides of the door so the paint wouldn’t run, dabbing the sharp edges with a small foam brush. He remembered the pride he’d felt gazing upon their finished project, the warmth of his father’s hand on his shoulder as they stood on the porch together.
Pride wasn’t something he’d felt in his father in many, many years.
The first sign Chase had that tonight would be one of the bad nights was that the front door—now the bruised yellow of an overripe banana—was unlocked.
The hinges creaked as he pushed the door open. He’d have to grease them up soon. Years ago, his father would have handled that sort of thing, but recently basic home maintenance had proved less interesting to the elder Donovan than a six-pack. Or two.
The interior of the house was as sad as their once-proud front door. Stains speckled the beige carpet, no matter how vigorously Chase had tried to scrub the evidence of spilled whiskey away. Cigarette burns gathered in halos around the arms of the couch. In addition to brushing his teeth and at least attempting his homework, part of Chase’s nightly ritual was making sure his father hadn’t fallen asleep with a cigarette in hand. The couch—a hideous patterned affair that had probably been in style decades before Chase’s birth—had the look of something extremely flammable. Every night, he half expected to wake up to the shrill screech of the smoke alarms he kept faithfully stocked with fresh batteries. He couldn’t stop his father from lighting himself or the house on fire, but he could take as many preventive measures as possible to keep them both alive.
Sounds drifted from the TV room to where Chase stood just inside the door. He recognized the voice of the announcer and the rise and fall of the crowd’s cheers. He’d seen that video dozens, maybe hundreds of times. It was one of his dad’s old games, before the rotator cuff injury.
Chase knew what that video meant. His father was in one of his moods. He had an array of them and none were good. A quick and quiet escape was Chase’s best option. He made his way to the stairs. He’d lock himself in his bedroom and text Bex and puzzle over the weird, cryptic letter he’d received. He’d think about a future that was—that had to be—better than his present.
The first step groaned under his weight.
“That you, son?” His father’s voice boomed from the TV room, loud enough to be heard over the sounds of a game played long before Chase’s birth.
Chase bit back a curse.
So much for sneaking by undetected.
“Yeah, Dad,” Chase called. “Just got home. Gotta get cracking on my homework.”
“Come here for a sec.”
Chase contemplated ignoring him, but he knew doing so would only make things worse.
He went to the living room, where he was greeted by a familiar sight. His father, seated in the large recliner, the TV remote in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. His eyes were glued to the screen, where a much younger version of himself, clad in the familiar maroon of Maplethorpe, carried a football to a game-winning touchdown. A plate sat on the table, empty save for a stale pizza crust. Dinners at the Donovan household consisted primarily of pizza and boxed pasta. Tonight was a pizza night, then. Again.
“The scouts wanted me, you know.” Chase’s father jerked his chin at the TV screen. “I was the best on that team and everybody knew it.”
“Yeah,” Chase sighed. “I know, Dad.”
His father took another swig of his beer. The stubble on his chin was a good two days’ worth of growth, the hair speckled a salt-and-pepper gray.
“Grab me another beer, will you?”
With a sigh, Chase went to the small kitchenette squished into the corner of their house. He had vague memories of the pale yellow fridge covered with crayon drawings and report cards, all from a time before his mother walked out. She’d been fed up with his father’s drinking and overall lack of ambition. She used to call Chase on his birthday, but the older he got, the more infrequent the calls became. Eventually, they stopped altogether. He hadn’t heard from her in almost two years. Sometimes, he wondered if she was happy, wherever she was. Usually, he tried not to think about it.
Four empty beer bottles sat in an uneven row on the counter. The one left in the fridge still had the plastic ring around it. It looked a little like a noose. Chase always tried to cut them up before his father threw them out. He didn’t want his dad’s bad habits taking the life of an innocent fish in whatever body of water their trash wound up.
The bottle was cold against his palm. He rested his forehead against the closed refrigerator door. That was cold, too. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine that the kitchen looked the way it did years ago, before his mom left. Then, there had always been a vase of freshly cut flowers on the kitchenette table, cut from the small garden in the backyard. There was always a bowl of fruit on the co
unter and a freshly baked loaf of bread on Sunday mornings, filling the house with a warm, welcoming aroma.
When he opened his eyes, the kitchen remained as it always was. No flowers. No fruit. No bread. The garden out back had succumbed to the wild growth of weeds.
There was a metaphor for the life of the Donovan family in that garden. Chase wasn’t particularly poetic, but the metaphor was obvious enough even for him.
Beer in hand, he returned to the living room. His father was rewinding the tape to replay his touchdown.
Chase handed the beer to his father, who twisted it open with a muttered “Thanks, kid.”
“Did you go to work today?” Chase didn’t want to ask, but he had to. He had to know how deep his father had dug them into this hole.
His father answered by knocking back his beer. His eyes remained glued on the screen. Eventually, he spoke.
“For a while. Came home early.”
That wasn’t good. His father’s many infractions at work had seen their family’s average rating go from minimally respectable to nearly the bottom of the societal barrel. They were lucky to have the house, but Chase knew that if his father’s rating fell any lower, they would lose it. His scholarship was blessedly independent of his dad’s rating, but it would be hard to maintain his standing at Maplethorpe—tenuous as it was—if they were forced out of their home. He’d heard stories about the shelters for the poorly rated; he didn’t want to consider living in one.
Chase didn’t want to ask, but he felt like he had to.
“Did they fire you, Dad?”
His father merely grunted in response.
“Dad?”
“What?” Only then did his father look away from the screen. He looked older than his thirty-nine years. He’d been young when Chase was born. Both of his parents were. That was why they didn’t last. His mother had been kind enough to tell him that before she left. What she didn’t say was that she blamed Chase and his father for her stolen youth. He’d managed to deduce that much all on his own.
He didn’t repeat his question. It wasn’t safe. Not when his father had that look in his eyes. A wild glint, like an animal backed into a corner, ready to defend itself from attack, even if that attack was only a cold and ugly truth. The black eye left behind from the last truthful conversation he’d had with his father had faded just a few days before the start of school.
“Nothing, Dad. It’s nothing.”
“Watch your attitude, Chase.”
“I don’t have an attitude, Dad. I just—”
Chase ducked just in time to dodge the empty beer bottle his father threw at him.
The bottle shattered as it hit the wall. A shard of broken glass caught his cheek. Chase gingerly touched his broken skin. His fingertips came away red with blood.
Droplets of beer trickled down the wall to rain on the carpet. Chase stayed down, half kneeling, his heart hammering in his chest. The back of his neck was sticky with beer.
“What did I tell you about talking back?”
To this, Chase said nothing. The question was rhetorical. Silence was the safer option.
After a long moment, his father looked away, turning his attention back to the game.
There, on the coffee table, sat his father’s smartwatch. Chase wanted to look at it, to see just how far the rating had fallen since that morning.
Sometimes, all it took was one bad day to make the difference between treading water and drowning.
Icy tendrils of fear snaked their way through Chase’s veins. His future had always been uncertain, but at least he thought he’d have one. With his own rating dropping below acceptable levels and his father out of a job, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. He wasn’t sure what he could do. They couldn’t lose the house. They couldn’t go homeless. Once a family’s collective rating dropped below a certain point, it was almost impossible for them to claw their way back up.
The construction crew was always looking for new blood. Chase could drop out of school, get a job with them. They could keep their home. But then the house would be all he ever had. No more baseball. No scouts. Nothing beyond those four sad walls, filled with memories Chase would rather forget.
When it felt safe to move, Chase stood, brushing off his knees. He’d clean up the glass later, when his father was asleep.
“I’m gonna go do my homework,” said Chase, though his father’s attention had drifted away from him. If he heard Chase speak, he gave no sign of it.
It took everything Chase had not to stomp up the stairs and slam his bedroom door shut behind him. A curious heat stung at his eyes. He scrubbed at them, ashamed even though there was no one around to see him do it.
He grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on his bedside table and pressed the wad to his cheek. The cut wasn’t bleeding too badly, at least. It probably wouldn’t scar, though it would be noticeable until it healed. If anyone asked about it, he’d do what he always did and come up with an excuse to explain the wound. But cuts and scrapes were so commonplace on athletes—and Chase in particular—that no one ever really asked.
With a weary sigh, Chase toed off his sneakers and dropped his backpack on the floor by his bed. He sank into it, ignoring the lumpy springs and the scratchy blankets. The bedroom hadn’t changed much since Chase had started attending Maplethorpe, after his athletic scholarship had lifted him from his public school—open to all, regardless of rating—to the ivory tower of private education. The last time Chase had given much thought to interior decor, he’d been deep into superhero comics. The evidence lingered on his walls in the form of posters and wall scrolls of heroes he’d long since outgrown. The only sign that he’d changed was the navy-blue blazer slung across the back of his desk chair.
His phone buzzed. A text alert. He thought about ignoring it, but then he remembered Lucky’s. Milkshakes. An exchange of numbers. A mysterious letter. Maybe it was Bex. He rolled over, fumbling for his phone. It took a few moments of rummaging for him to unearth it from the pile of his belongings.
It wasn’t Bex. It was Steve, sending some dumb meme to the team’s group chat.
It wasn’t Bex … but he wanted it to be. That was a new and interesting feeling. Closing out of the chat app, he pulled up his contacts, scrolling until he found the list’s latest addition.
He stared at the number on his phone. Bex Johnson. Who knew he’d ever exchange phone numbers with Bex freakin’ Johnson?
He wanted to text her. Badly. He wanted to call her, to hear the sound of her voice through the phone, to tell her how the quality of his day had drastically plummeted since leaving the Lucky Penny. Talking about his feelings wasn’t something he did. Talking about feelings was something people did on daytime talk shows and reality TV confessionals.
He’d never really had anyone to talk to before. He wasn’t particularly close to any of the guys on the team. They were friendly with one another; they shared a sort of fraternity. But their brotherhood was too marked by competition to allow for true friendships. The more games they each played in, the higher their ratings. And ratings were everything.
He clicked on Bex’s name, then pulled up a new text window. He typed out a single word, hoping it was enough.
Hey.
It wasn’t particularly clever, but it was a start.
Bex pushed a single pea across her plate to join the small mound at the other end. Her parents’ voices washed over her as they discussed the events of the day. Her mother was the chief neurosurgeon at Magnolia Children’s Hospital, and her day had consisted of digging around in people’s brains, rooting out malignant tumors and repairing damaged spines. Her father was an aerospace engineer, working on a government contract wrapped up in so many layers of top secret clearances that listening to him sometimes involved more redactions than information. Bex had no idea what it was he did at work, or the nature of his project. All she knew about her dad—all she’d ever known, really—was that he was a rocket scientist with so many degrees that the stri
ng of letters after his name on academic papers was longer than the name itself.
Bex hated peas. She’d always hated peas. She wasn’t sure if either of her parents had the slightest idea, though. Her mother had never, in Bex’s lifetime, so much as boiled an egg in their spacious kitchen, with its white granite island and gleaming chrome appliances. A housekeeper, replaced every few years because of her father’s impossibly exacting standards, prepared the family’s meals. The new one, Marta, had not yet discovered that Bex hated peas, so they’d appeared on her plate for the first time in years. Helena, the previous holder of the post, had discerned Bex’s distaste after a single meal. Bex had never complained about the peas, of course; Helena had simply observed that more had been pushed around the plate than delivered to Bex’s mouth.
“And how was your day, Rebecca?”
Bex jerked her head up at the sound of her mother’s voice. It lilted up at the end of her question in a way that implied she knew Bex hadn’t been paying attention to the conversation and didn’t appreciate it one bit.
Her parents were looking at her, her mother with a sharp gaze, her father with an expression that verged on boredom. He’d suggested on more than one occasion that family dinner was a waste of time, but Bex’s mother insisted on the once-a-week tradition. Bex supposed it made her mother feel better about her otherwise absentee style of parenting. Being a neurosurgeon was a time-consuming endeavor, after all. Bex didn’t resent her for it. She had once, when she was too young to understand the rigors of her mother’s profession. But the years had gently abraded the rough edges of Bex’s abandonment, and now she barely felt the sting of her parents’ absence. It tingled a bit when she prodded the old wound, so she avoided prodding it whenever she could.
“My day was fine,” Bex said, the same way she’d said it every night since family dinner had become a tradition in the fifth grade.
Usually, that one pithy sentence was good enough. But today there was something different about her mother’s inquiring gaze.