by Amy Reed
I close my eyes and tell myself to wake up.
I open my eyes, and everything is the same.
This is real. I’m awake.
I start running, even though I can’t see. As long as I keep the sidewalk under my feet, I’ll be okay. I’ll follow it to where Rome ends, where it meets the country road that will take me home. I’ll run blind. I’ll outrun whatever it is that’s chasing me. I’ll run as far away from that haunted house as I can.
As soon as I get home, I’m heading straight to my studio. I won’t even bother changing into tights. I’ll dance naked. I’ll play something loud and frenetic, and I will shake my body like the deer who barely escapes. I will dance until I have nothing left, until I sweat out the fog and whatever it brought with it.
BILLY
MY EFFORTS TO STAY SMILING are starting to falter. There just aren’t enough positive thoughts or gratitude or TV or distractions to keep the sad thoughts away. Everywhere I turn, there’s a screen with my uncle’s face on it, or Grandma talking on the phone to some news station or potential tour client, or bullies at school laughing about how Caleb’s dead, or random people on the street conveying their “thoughts and prayers” with a manic glint in their eyes. Two detectives came by the house last night to ask questions about Caleb, and Grandma slammed the door in their faces.
I think I caught her crying this morning. She was watching the news, and it was saying something about how the success rate of rehabs is super low, and even lower for heroin addicts, so basically Caleb is a lost cause. I said, “Grandma, are you okay?” and then she screamed at me to leave her alone and threw a spoon at my head.
Everything feels upside down. My house is getting more aggressive. I barely slept at all last night because I swear I could hear voices coming out of the hole in the wall of my bedroom. I did the thing I’ve always done when life gets especially bad, like when I was little and I’d be trying to go to sleep with Caleb and Grandma screaming at each other all night long. I lay in bed and rubbed my feet together and went through my favorite fantasy of the best day ever: I wake up and Lynn A. is in the kitchen making me pancakes; then she drives me to school and hands me a lunch bag; then when I open the bag at lunch, there’s a note inside written on a napkin, which changes depending on my mood but is usually something like “I love you, kiddo!” with a heart and a smiley face; and then she picks me up from school and there’s homemade muffins when I get home, still warm from the oven; and I don’t even want to watch TV, and maybe I even do my homework; and then after a perfect homemade dinner, Lynn A. sits on the edge of my bed, singing some old-timey song, rubbing my back until I fall asleep. Usually that does the trick and I’m out cold, but I had to go through it a ton of times last night, and I kept changing the food, I kept changing what she wrote on the note, I even changed the board game we played before bedtime. I thought all I needed was to get the perfect combination of details, and that would be the magic cure for my sleeplessness, but all it seemed to do was make the house madder.
I almost got lost on the way to school because the fog was so thick. I begged Lydia to hang out with me after school, but she had to work today. She kept saying she was sorry. She said it so much, I started feeling bad about how sorry she was, and then I started saying sorry, then I couldn’t even remember what we were so sorry for or what we were talking about in the first place.
She has no idea I need supervision. I can’t control myself. I keep coming back to the worst thing for me even though all it ever does is make me feel worse.
I’m in the computer lab, at my favorite desk in the corner where no one can see what I have on my screen. Headphones are on and YouTube is cued up with an infinite supply of Caleb Sloat interviews.
“Yeah, my dad was abusive,” Caleb says in one interview. “His dying was the best thing that ever happened to me. But then Ma just started where he left off.”
Then he commences to talk about how growing up in Rome was like being in a family with ten thousand abusive parents.
“You have to understand one thing about growing up surrounded by white trash.” I flinch when he says “white trash.” People say it all the time, but it hurts the most coming from him. “If they suspect you’re smarter than them, they will kick your ass. They have nothing else to work with. That is their one skill—kicking people’s asses. It’s pathetic, really. But as a kid, I didn’t know that. I just knew I was getting my ass kicked. I knew I hated them. I knew I wanted revenge.”
“So have you succeeded?” the interviewer says. “Is your success your revenge?”
Caleb takes a long, thoughtful drag from his cigarette. “Yeah, I guess so.” He smiles. “And not just revenge on the dumb rednecks in Fog Harbor. But also all those fucking elitist hipster bands who were so rude to us on our first couple tours. All because we were wearing sweatpants and T-shirts instead of fucking ties and loafers and fedoras and shit. All those turds with master’s degrees in, like, philosophy and art history who looked at us like we were an alien species. And the worst part is, people call their music ‘rock.’ But there’s nothing rock about it. There’s no soul. There’s no grit. It’s like a poetry thesis with a fucking ukulele and a cello.”
“How does it feel?” the interviewer says. “All your success.”
“How does anything feel, man?” Caleb says, taking another drag of his cigarette. “We’re all fucking numb in the end, aren’t we?”
In the next couple interviews, Caleb basically says the same things over and over again. He talks about everybody being assholes in Rome and Fog Harbor, and while I mostly agree, I suspect the real problem is that everyone’s just kind of sad, and being sad turns people into assholes sometimes. What choice do they really have when it’s cloudy 95 percent of the time and no one has any money?
Caleb talks about being poor and different, how he had no choice but to be angry and full of rage. The Fog Harbor he describes is similar to the one I know, but I’m not sure it’s true that Caleb had no choice in how he turned out. People pick on me, too, but I’m not angry and full of rage. Or maybe it’s just a matter of time. I wonder if maybe I’m a late bloomer to anger the way I was to puberty. Maybe it’s my destiny to end up just like Caleb.
But mostly what I wonder is, if Caleb thinks everyone he left behind is white trash, what does that make me?
YouTube starts playing the next video. I hate this one. It’s one of Caleb’s most recent interviews, and very short. He’s grouchy and combative from the beginning, sweaty and squirming like his skin hurts. I made the mistake of reading some of the comments once, and the consensus is that Caleb was going through heroin withdrawals.
The interviewer asks him about the rumor that he hasn’t written any new music in two years. Caleb gets angry immediately and starts ranting about how everyone’s a critic, how it’s their job to tear creative people down because deep inside they’re jealous because they can’t create anything themselves. “You people don’t understand the creative process,” he says. “You’re robots. You’re cogs in the capitalist machine. All you care about is a fucking product. Do! Do! Do! Stay busy at all times! Show us something shiny! There’s more to art than that, man. You don’t fucking get it.”
“So explain it to me,” the interviewer says. “What exactly have you been up to? Can you describe your creative process? When can we expect something new from Rainy Day Knife Fight?”
“None of your business,” Caleb says, lighting a cigarette. “Next question.”
“Okay,” the interviewer says. He clears his throat. There is the sound of papers rustling.
Caleb takes a drag of his cigarette and fidgets in his seat. “Can you get me a beer, for fuck’s sake?” he yells to someone offscreen.
“So,” the interviewer finally says, “there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you about. You’ve always been very open about your childhood, sharing some pretty dark stuff about what happened to you.”
“Yeah,” Caleb says, grinning. “Like that time I scr
ewed that old lady for twenty bucks and a case of beer? True story.”
The interviewer clears his throat again. “You had an older sister who died young, when you were around ten years old, correct?” he says. “Sarah. You hardly ever mention her. Can you tell me a little about her?”
Just then, an arm reaches in from offscreen and hands Caleb a beer. His hand wraps around it slowly. He stares at the interviewer sitting behind the camera, so much hate in his eyes I can feel heat on the skin of my own face.
And then, in slow motion, Caleb tears the mic off his shirt, jumps out of his seat, and smashes his beer bottle on the camera, and the interview is over.
Caleb got sued for that one, for the cost of the camera and the suffering caused by the punches he landed on the interviewer’s face before a security guard pulled him off. They settled out of court.
I close the YouTube window. I can hear the janitor shuffling outside the computer lab. Any second now he’ll be in here shutting off the lights, telling me to go home.
I wipe the tears off my face with my sleeve. My shirt smells like mildew. I left it in the washer too long. Now my face probably smells like mildew too.
Caleb’s never said much about my mom, but at least he’s mentioned her a few times. At least he’s acknowledged her existence. At least he’s said her name.
But in all the hundreds of interviews I’ve watched, Caleb’s never once mentioned me.
LYDIA
“I CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW to break it to Mrs. Ambrose that I don’t want to eat lunch with her anymore,” Billy tells me at lunch. He doesn’t look good. Not that he’s ever looked all that well-put-together, but now he’s got bags under his eyes like he hasn’t been sleeping and his hair is more tangled than usual. I’m poking around at my sloppy joe with a plastic knife because ever since the air started smelling like rotting dead things, I’m having a hard time with mystery meat products. No one else seems to be having this problem as they’re blindly shoving lunch into their faces with their plastic utensils. The school doesn’t let students have metal silverware anymore after a Carthagean girl stabbed a guy from Rome last week with her fork.
“You haven’t eaten lunch with her all year,” I say.
“I know, but I think she keeps waiting in there every day for me.”
“That’s weird, Billy.”
“I don’t know. I find it kind of flattering.”
“Don’t you think she’d be happy you found someone your own age to eat lunch with?” I say, sawing my bun into tiny pieces.
“I guess. But I still don’t want to tell her.”
“Maybe what you need is closure,” I say. Where did that come from? I almost sound like I know what I’m talking about.
“Have you been watching therapy talk shows too? They’re good, right? It’s like getting free therapy.”
“Bite me,” I say, but it’s the nice version of “bite me” I save just for Billy.
“It’s weird to be avoiding someone,” Billy says. “Since I’m the one people usually try to avoid.”
“You’re moving up in the world.”
“Hey, Billy Goat,” says one of the Graylons. “Have they found your uncle yet?” He is the seventh person to say some version of this to Billy during lunch alone. I know this Graylon from Carthage, and I know for a fact that he was born with a sixth toe on his left foot and he had to wear diapers to bed until he was ten years old, but somehow he’s still qualified to be Billy’s bully? “Is anyone in your family not crazy?” he says.
“Is anyone in your family good at anything besides drinking beer and hitting their wives?” I say.
“Fuck you, Pocahontas.”
“Really? That’s the best you can do? First of all, for the millionth fucking time, I’m Filipina. Fil-i-pi-na. Second of all, Pocahontas was from, like, three thousand miles from here. If you’re going to diss me using a racist historical reference, you should at the very least do your research and make sure it’s accurate.”
Graylon backs away with a screwed-up look on his face and mutters a half-hearted “freaks.”
“Fucking people,” I say, going back to sculpting the squishy pile of bun and runny meat into a mound on my plate. “Garbage, all of them.” Billy’s looking at me funny. “What?”
“He looks at you like you’re weird different from the way he looks at me like I’m weird,” Billy says.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s like I’m just pathetic weird, but you’re some kind of powerful and scary weird. I wish I had more of your weird.”
“You can have it,” I say. “I have plenty to go around.” I honestly don’t know how Billy has survived this long.
I go back to my sloppy joe sculpture. I am building a second layer. It looks like a miniature meaty wedding cake. “You could just say thank you and goodbye,” I say.
“To Graylon? Why?”
“To Mrs. Ambrose. Maybe that’s what closure is.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Are you trying to trick me?”
I look up and see Natalie Morris walk across the lunchroom. Tall and thin, with smooth dark brown skin that has apparently never been blemished by a pimple or even a mosquito bite. I knew the moment I saw her on the first day of school that she’s a ballerina. You can tell by the way she holds her chin up at a much higher angle than everyone else does, like even her chin thinks it’s better than the rest of us. Natalie is one of the only Black kids at Fog Harbor High, though she’s adopted and her parents are very white and part of the tiny upper class that still remains in Fog Harbor.
Billy turns around. “What are you looking at?”
“Natalie Morris is such a snob,” I say.
“No, she’s not,” Billy says. “She’s just shy.”
Natalie sits at a table with two thin girls with long, flowing hair, impeccable posture, and bagged lunches that probably contain nothing but celery and air. As far as I can tell, they don’t really talk to anyone besides each other. Like they’re too special to even want to be popular.
“Ugh,” I say. “Ballerinas.”
“What’s wrong with ballerinas?”
“I hate them.”
“Why?”
“I have my reasons,” I say, smashing my meat cake.
“You sound like everyone else.”
I feel like Billy just punched me in the guts. That’s pretty much the worst thing anyone could ever say to me.
I’m sitting at the bar after work, and once again Larry and I are sharing “food” that was too gross to sell to people at Taco Hell for ninety-nine cents. I felt like puking doing food prep, so my manager Alfonso moved me to the register where I had to deal with customers, which in a way is almost worse. I swear the fog is making me sick. Can someone be allergic to fog?
“Do you have homework?” Larry asks.
“No,” I lie, picking at the white spongy chunks in my “chicken” burrito, which is only slightly better than the gray gelatinous “beef.”
I’m trying to keep my eyes glued to the TV because every time I look away, I lock eyes with Drunk Ted, who has been staring at me since I was thirteen. Every time I see him, he feels the need to tell me I’m pretty enough to be a supermodel, which he apparently thinks is a compliment, but it’s really just gross because it proves that he’s looking at me the way drunk lonely men look at girls that are way too young for them.
This is not a healthy environment for a teenager.
“So listen to this,” Larry says to no one in particular. “I told you about the research I did on the big fight in Book Four of Unicorns vs. Dragons, The Fog Arriveth, right? To figure out where all the main events happened? And how I did some triangulation and discovered that the battle occurred in the forest right behind here, just across the river?”
No one shows any indication that they’re listening to Larry, but he continues anyway. “What I’m thinking is, we just have to cut down a few trees to clear the
space, and then we could make life-size replicas of the dragons and unicorns, and you know how when unicorns bleed, it burns a hole in the ground straight through to the middle of the earth? We could dig really deep holes and put some red lights in the bottom so they’ll shine out and it’ll look like the glow of magma. It could be, like, a tourist attraction!”
I’m not quite sure who the “we” Larry’s referring to is, but I know I have to put a stop to this immediately. “Isn’t that forest technically part of the reservation?” I say.
“Yeah, but I’m thinking they’ll let me do it if I give them part of the proceeds.”
“You do know the Quillalish tribe officially boycotted the entire Unicorns vs. Dragons franchise, right?”
Larry looks sad, but only for a moment. “We could do it in the parking lot, then,” he says. “It’s not ideal, but I think it could work. We’ll have to get some investors, of course.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe Old Pete could lend you a few dollars. Oh wait, isn’t his tab up to, like, a thousand bucks?”
Larry just smiles and refills my soda.
The reality show about professional hit men has just ended, and the local news comes on. As usual, the whereabouts of Caleb Sloat is top news, even though the King accidentally bombed the wrong village somewhere this morning and killed a few thousand innocent people. But instead of covering that, the news is replaying an interview from three days ago with Caleb Sloat’s ex-girlfriend, Shannon Smear. She looks a little better than usual, like maybe the people at the news station did her makeup instead of letting her go on looking like she usually does, which is like she let a toddler draw all over her face. She also seems closer to sober than usual. Her words sound like words, though the way she puts them together is almost as unintelligible as the King’s.
“It’s just so sad,” she says, shaking her head. “I mean, he’s a genius, you know? And, like, a guy like that is fragile. That’s why he needs me, because I’m the strong one. He’s always needed me. We love each other so much, it’s, like, not even human. I was trying to help him, you know? He’s like my baby. My beautiful, sensitive baby. And that’s why he’s in trouble now, because he didn’t let me take care of him, because he’s got so much pride, and he doesn’t know how to let people love him. That’s all I ever wanted, but he’s so lost. He doesn’t know. He’s, like, this puppy, right? But, like, a bad puppy. He’s my bad little puppy.”