The kid says, “Hey, you want to do something for me?”
“Sure. Name it.”
“Go check on Emily. Do whatever she needs.”
Then Nick summons the guard and walks out.
* * *
There’d been a night, two months into hanging out, when he and Emily did a double date with Typically and his girlfriend, Cindy, at Bowl Haven, a bowling alley in Hampstead.
Typically and Cindy had been going together since middle school. He’d promised her an engagement ring, but it was still unseen. Bowling was their thing, candlepin bowling, totally stupid looking—but the purpose of the night wasn’t bowling. At that point, Typically still hadn’t met Emily. Over time, he’d gotten bitchy about it, called Nick pussy-whipped and other things. Not that he cared. But Emily began to wonder why she’d heard all these things about his best friend and they’d never met.
The place smelled of French fries and old carpet. By the time they arrived, Typically had nearly drunk a pitcher of beer by himself. He had on a Bruins jersey, gray sweatpants. He looked like a shorter version of the Michelin Man. With a Canadian flag bandanna wrapped around his head.
Typically got up and grabbed him in a headlock and made chimpanzee noises while Cindy escorted Emily to the bar to order food.
“So what’s it like,” Typically said, releasing him, “doing bang-bang on the sheriff’s daughter.”
“Screw you.”
“Hey, just doing my job.”
“What job?”
“Taking care of my little buddy.”
It seemed to Nick in that moment that he’d spent his whole life putting up with people who claimed to have his best interests at heart.
“Though honestly? I don’t know anymore,” said Typically, not sarcastically. “You dumped me, basically. I mean, what happened to us?”
“You’re such a turd.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
The girls came back with nachos. The four of them bowled as teams. Nick watched Cindy ask Emily questions. She complimented her on her clothes. When she found out about Emily’s dream of designing clothes, she said she was a clotheshorse herself, she loved to shop online.
“That is the truth,” Typically said loudly. “She’s got all kinds of shit she doesn’t wear. It’s straight up Sex and the City, have you guys seen that show? I had my wisdom teeth out, I watched, like, three seasons in two days. It was informative.”
Nick watched him say to Emily, “I’m what they call a plastic gangster. I’m a sweet-nothing nothing. There’s nothing to fear here, I swear.”
After half an hour, the bowling was actually fun. They were in the lead. Emily was the best out of the four of them, she said she must be a natural. After an hour, Typically was permanently seated next to her, whispering, arm around her shoulder, while Nick and Cindy were up and down to bowl.
“I don’t want you to get the wrong impression,” he said at one point to Emily. He poured himself more beer. “I’m not in love with you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I mean, look at that girl. Cindy,” he shouted. “How hard do I love you?”
“You love me so hard.”
“I am so hard in love.”
“He really is.”
“She makes me want to be a better man.”
“Because he’s pathetic,” Cindy said.
“Yeah but someday I am going to lay down some offspring in that uterus, you know that, right?”
Even Nick had to laugh. “That’s gross,” he said under his breath. No one heard him. It was probably the best night they’d had all week. Fifteen minutes later, he was about to say they should do it all again soon, then Typically grabbed one of Emily’s hands to study it up close, like a palm reader.
“What I see is you’ve got an old soul. I tell that to you honestly and for free.” He sat back and stared square at Nick, which made Nick uncomfortable. Wondering what came next. Something always came next.
“The thing is, in real life,” Typically said loudly to Emily, to the group, “where the government’s concerned, souls aside, you are a little young for my friend.”
“Jacob,” Cindy cautioned. She was the only person who used his real name.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Typically said. “I’m blue state to my balls. If there’s grass on the field, et cetera.”
“You’re a piece of shit,” said Nick. He pulled Emily up by the hand.
“Oh, calm down. Don’t be a bitch.”
“We’re going, actually,” he said, and grabbed their shoes.
“What’s happening?” said Emily.
“We’re leaving.”
They heard Cindy say angrily, “You’re such an asshole.”
Only a few seconds later, by the video games, Typically ran up behind them and tackled Nick. They went down hard. Nick twisted away and scrambled to his feet. His knee burned. Then Typically was on top of him again, at least fifty pounds heavier. He got him in a wrestling hold with his left hand over his face, then crashed them down to the ground with his thick legs wrapped around Nick’s middle.
“Get off of me.”
“You’re making me do this.”
“Fuck you.”
“Jacob, stop,” shouted Cindy. “The manager’s coming.”
“He can quit anytime.”
Nick elbowed his best friend in the belly, but it made no difference. As soon as he’d had a drink, Typically became oblivious to pain, and he always completed the mission. He leaned in, pressed his lips against Nick’s ear, and his voice was like a missile blasting into his skull: “Fucking stop, you prick, and listen: that chick is quality. But when you get caught, not if, what happens, huh? Because that’s my job, asshole. To tell you shit you don’t want to hear. So think what her dad’s going to do, the fucking sheriff, on the night he finds you knee-deep in his sixteen-year-old.”
* * *
Outside the courthouse, in the emptiness of his SUV, Martin looks up a number on his phone and presses call. He glances at a crow on a wire, self-righteously perched, watching over all of them, lord of the wire.
“Dad? What happened? Are you okay?”
He laughs uncomfortably. “Why do you think something happened?”
“Because you’re calling me.”
“Maybe I just want to hear your voice.”
“Am I on speaker?”
“Camille, I just wanted to touch base. How are you?”
“Well, I’m driving, I’m not really supposed to use a phone.”
“Just talk for a second.”
“Yeah, okay. So what’s up?”
“Where are you off to?”
“It’s a lunch. For the department. You sound weird, you know that? You are still going to meetings, right?”
He chuffs, “What do you mean I sound weird?”
She laughs lightly. “Just forget it.”
He hears what sounds like talk radio. Or is someone else in the car?
“So what’s the lunch for?”
“It’s an award thing. It’s nothing. For one of my papers. It doesn’t matter.”
“You won an award? But that’s wonderful. What was the paper about?”
“You’re not interested, trust me. Even Roger can’t take it.”
“What?”
“Let’s catch up next week or something. I really should go.”
“Wait, who’s Roger? Do I know him?”
She laughs again, but more knowingly. “Now you sound like yourself. I’m going to let you go, we’ll catch up soon. If you need anything, just text next time.”
“Camille.”
“The check hasn’t arrived, by the way. I’m guessing it’s in the mail?”
“What do you mean?”
“The check?”
He remembers: the reminder on his computer back in New Jersey, that popped up during the visit with Lillian’s lawyer. He sees the check on the kitchen counter, signed and sealed.
“Darn it, it’s at home. I�
��m out of town for work. I’m in New Hampshire.”
“I thought you retired.”
“I’ll have my bank send you it tonight.”
She hangs up a few seconds later. In the distance, there’s lightning behind the mountains. The thunder booms on a count of eight. It echoes in his chest. Up ahead, a stoplight turns yellow. Thunder, rainstorm, sunbeams. History’s full of little guys hauling their millstones. What comes after yellow? His mind can’t help but race in a hundred directions. What the hell is he doing? The light’s newly red when Martin plows through it, and almost cracks into a blue sedan pulling out into the intersection.
The driver screeches, stops, lays into his horn.
And Martin slams down the accelerator.
But the blue sedan follows him, tails him, hits the horn with staccato blurts, blat ba blat blat blat.
This can’t go on much further. He parks at a laundromat half a mile down the road. His lower back throbs in his throat. The sedan slashes to a diagonal stop to his left. Right away the driver’s out, hot and fuming, a fat white guy in an oversized T-shirt rolling toward him with three hundred pounds of momentum and a neck tattoo.
He slams his hand on the windowpane. “What the fuck, man? Roll down the window, get the fuck out of the car.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You almost killed me, you know that? Get out of the fucking car.”
Martin rolls down his window, trying to keep his training under control. The truth is he caused this situation. What the hell did he get himself into?
“Sir, I’m sorry,” he says slowly. “Please. Get back in your vehicle.”
“Who are you, the fucking cops? You could’ve gotten us killed, you realize that?” He stabs at Martin’s eye with his finger. “Did you think about that, you dumb piece of shit?”
“I won’t do it again.”
“You think I give a shit?”
“No, of course not. I’m sorry.”
There’s so much anger, the man’s quivering, he doesn’t know what to do next. Martin genuinely feels regretful, he feels remorse for this man. But his primary concern is if the guy’s got a gun under his seat.
The man tells the sky “Shit” and slams his palm on the roof of his own car.
“I’m supposed to be at my girl’s house right now. She had our baby yesterday. You hear me? Yesterday, my baby girl. So what happens, I wind up dead because some dipshit ran a red light, huh? Who the fuck’s going to be the father then? You asshole.”
The man gets back in his car, gives him the finger, and drives away. It starts to rain. Martin rolls up the window and exhales deeply. He gets out, lies down in the backseat. His nerves sizzle in the aftermath of the situation. Lightning lights up the sky. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. Thunder booms on six. It’s getting closer. He closes his eyes and vows to never run a red light again. What if he’d killed them both? Memories stubbornly crowd around his thoughts to torment him. He pushes them away, he counts the girls he never kissed, the sights he never saw. Thoughts such as these, thoughts even older and stupider, suddenly stop when he remembers Camille, the phone call. All he wants to do is help her. And how does she see him? A naive old man who writes checks. Who can’t be trusted to drive a car, who’s piss-poor at texting. Is that what family is these days, just exchanges? Is their connection cellular like blood, or cellular like phones? Are humans capable anymore of the old ways?
Probably the worst part of old age is the fact that all the stuff you wanted to forget when you were younger is now all you remember. Martin dozes off. When he wakes, he feels bloated and lonely. His regret slowly boils down to dry salt, to a single, crystallized realization: that in the course of the phone call he’d neglected to ask Camille a single question bigger than the conversation itself. For once raise the goddamn periscope.
* * *
Eventually, months into hanging out, they’d talked about running away together. It quickly became a plan. California. Los Angeles. They searched for images of the beaches on Nick’s laptop. They watched Singin’ in the Rain, her favorite movie. And none of it was a game, they didn’t play games. For his part Nick refused to be drawn in by anyone. He was nobody’s sucker, and he didn’t care what other people thought. He told her, he’d never lied to her and never would. And the truth was, he pointed out, they needed to go as soon as possible, before they got stuck in a little town where nothing ever happened except death by nearness to idiots.
Compromise, conformity, Claymore. Nothing for nobody except the shithead rich. Where the only thing kids could do, to get any forward momentum going in their lives, was to leave.
Of course, Emily would miss Alex, she didn’t like that. But Alex soon would attend college, she couldn’t just follow her around forever.
And if they sat around and waited for the right moment to come along, for everything to be absolutely ready and perfect and safe, for the solar system to give them a thumbs-up, they’d never start.
By that point it was March. Most weeks, they managed around track practice and school and jobs to see each other four or five times a week. Father didn’t know anything, as far as Emily could tell—or, if he knew, he didn’t stop them, he was too busy at work as it was. At the end of the month Nick bought her a phone. A flip phone, prepaid, nothing fancy. A thousand texts for thirty bucks a month.
She was dumbfounded, she didn’t know such a thing existed. Alex was there the afternoon he gave it to her after school and even she was taken aback, that she hadn’t thought of it, either.
That first night, Nick had just fallen asleep when his phone lit up on the other side of the room.
Are you awake?
Barely
I love my phone. I can’t even explain. I could type all night.
Cool but I have to be at the garage rly early so just a little longer
Let me tell you 5 reasons I love you
I won’t stop u
One of their favorite meeting spots was a basement room at the Leduc Public Library. The first week in April, a big snow fell outside. The windows were filled with white. Nick sat in a stuffed armchair. He pulled her onto his lap. She could tell he had something on his mind. He drew a breath and said he’d been thinking again about the plan. She nodded and tried to make her face as grave as his. He turned her phone over in his fingers. Why would she ever go along with it? he wondered. I love him so much, she thought. She kissed him spontaneously, and he kissed her back, wetly, a long kiss on her neck, until she laughed and pushed him away.
“We should just do it,” he said. “Leave. Just go for it.”
Though he was feeling, in fact, that the plan was probably impossible, for a number of reasons. He looked at her casually. She didn’t speak. In fact she liked to hear about his ambitions, his devotion to their future together. She couldn’t picture what would become of her life in years ahead, but at least now it would be something. And she hadn’t had that before, she hadn’t had a something before. She reminded herself to tell him this sometime, to make sure he understood what a gift he was.
“So let’s do it,” she said. “Really do it.”
She pulled away from him, but remained in his arms. He looked stunned. He was stunned. She wasn’t.
“Really?” he said.
“Let’s set a date.”
“When?”
She thought about it for a moment. “It can’t be before this summer.”
“But you think you could do that?”
Actually, she’d been thinking about it for weeks, delighted to consider such adult steps ahead of them. Even if they were only fantasy steps, what was certain to her was that the calculations could get figured out, laws be circumvented if necessary. It hadn’t occurred to Nick that she’d have such thoughts. That his intentions would be taken for more than just talk. Suddenly everything in the room, the books, the snow, took on a singular significance.
She nodded. “This summer.”
“This summer,” he said, considering. “Okay, this summer
.”
“This summer,” she said.
Then they grinned at each other, sinking into a type of brief trance that’s only achievable when two minds meet in fantasy. At the same time, their smiles dropped a bit. Because it was a fantasy, really, the whole idea, as long as she wasn’t eighteen. Or so it seemed to Nick. Maybe there were legal back roads he didn’t know about? He watched the snow pile up in the window. After all, their joint excitement was too high to be restricted for long, and hadn’t they already beaten pretty serious obstacles? Emily calmly looked around the room, curved mouth smiling, and her gaze didn’t rest. Going west had unexpectedly become the only thing she’d ever wanted to do. And this step was a part of it. The first part. Which meant there were so many parts still to come.
They looked at each other again. To hell with it. They’d go. They kissed.
“I knew you’d say yes,” he said. “I knew it the first time we met.”
Emily laughed. “Don’t be such a goof. How could you?”
“See? You still don’t know how serious I am.”
* * *
It really all started with On the Road. Kerouac had changed everything for Nick. Suzanne brought the book home from the library during his recuperation, she said it had been one of his grandfather’s favorites. At first it was too weird, too old-fashioned. He just couldn’t get into this guy, what was happening. The story was hard to follow, he didn’t know what type of book it was. Then, a day later, he’d finished it and started over, and that was something he’d never done with a book before. He wanted more of it. Not just the book, but the life, the way Kerouac seemed to live, the way his characters joked around and did cool stuff. All the guns, fishing, mountain climbing, the cars. New York City, New Orleans, Cheyenne. All the girls.
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