by Amy Reed
I’m pretty sure I saw the black car sitting outside of school as I was leaving, but it drove away before I could get a good look. I’ve been seeing it several times a week. I told Lydia about it, but she says I’m being paranoid. She won’t let me come to dance class with her, even though I promised not to embarrass her. She says there are rules about no visitors, but I’m not sure I believe her.
I spend the whole walk home trying not to hyperventilate. Every sound makes me jump. Maybe I’m being paranoid like Lydia said, but it’s entirely justified. I pass a tree with about a thousand crows in it, and they just sit there silently watching me walk by, their heads turning slowly as their beady eyes follow me. I heard somewhere a bunch of crows is called a “murder,” so I’m definitely not taking it as a good sign.
I check under the porch when I get home to make sure the possum isn’t waiting there to ambush me. When I turn around, I see Cult Girl across the street, hiding something in the bushes on the side of her house. She looks up and meets my eyes with a look of pure terror, like a deer about to get run over by a bus, or maybe a possum preparing to attack, but then I use all my psychic powers to tell her she can trust me and not to be scared, and then her face relaxes and she puts a finger in front of her mouth, like shhh, and now I have yet another secret to keep.
The house greets me by breaking a shelf in the doorless hallway closet as soon as I enter, throwing about six dusty Thrift Town bags on top of my head that explode on impact like mildew bombs and knock me to the ground. I lie on the floor for a minute on my back with the wind knocked out of me, covered by old clothes that have been sitting in those bags for who knows how long, strangely calm as I watch a new crack in the ceiling grow before my eyes. What’s the point of even getting up if the house is just going to knock me back down again? I wonder if this is what Lynn A. means when she talks about acceptance.
Eventually, I manage to shove most of the clothes back into the pile in the closet. I turn on the TV, ready to relax after my crap day, but all of a sudden there’s my uncle’s face staring right at me, and I start hyperventilating all over again. BREAKING NEWS flashes on the bottom of the screen, and the house shakes so hard a lamp falls over.
“The ongoing investigation into the disappearance of Caleb Sloat, lead singer of Rainy Day Knife Fight, just got an exciting new lead after several frustrating weeks of false starts and dead ends. Details at this time are limited, but a source has revealed that someone claiming to be an acquaintance of the rock star has offered information in exchange for the recently increased reward that may lead to proof that Sloat is alive and operating under a false identity, which investigators hope has the potential of being traceable. This is welcome news for an investigation that had been quickly losing steam as repeated inquiries to Sloat’s friends and family have yielded little helpful information, and the consensus among most people that were close to him is that he’s dead.”
I can’t listen anymore. I turn to the AA channel. I really need a meeting.
“Lynn A.!” I say as soon as I see her. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.” The scarf she’s knitting today is yellow. Such a cheerful color for such a sucky day. She smiles and nods, encouraging me to keep talking. “Do you think I should just tell Grandma that Caleb’s here and get it over with? Should I tell Lydia about the dance classes? Should I tell Caleb about the black car and the news? Do you think a person can die from keeping too many secrets?”
Lynn A. frowns and looks at me like, You’re really thinking about giving up now, Billy? You’re better than that. Sometimes she’s into tough love.
“You’re right,” I tell her. I sigh, and the house sighs with me. I can’t give up just because something’s hard. If everyone in the meeting did that, they’d all be drunk or dead or in jail. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” I tell her, and she winks at me.
I turn off the TV. I don’t feel 100 percent better, but at least I know what to do now. Lynn A. told me not to give up. So I won’t. It’s nice having someone to help me make these difficult decisions.
All things considered, I feel pretty good on my way up to the attic to visit Caleb, and I manage to stay upright the whole time even though I step through another rotted stair and almost lose my shoe. The giant blanket fort is nearly as tall as the ceiling now, expanded on the inside to make space for the twin air mattress I bought him at BigMart and a couple of milk crates stacked on top of each other to house his growing library of Thrift Town paperbacks, which would certainly be weird enough, except the walls are now topped with a couple dozen ratty, dismembered Frankenstein dolls he’s constructed out of the stuff he keeps making me buy him, all of them wearing the heads and body parts of the others, their mismatched pieces held on by glue and staple-gun sutures and messy multicolored thread stitches. Some of their eyes have been dug out. Some have several pairs of eyes. Some wear a mosaic armor of buttons. Mouths are stapled shut. They face into the circle like followers of some cult leader they think is God. It looks like the set of a horror movie, or like a serial killer lives here.
From the top of the stairs, I can see the faint, unnatural glow of the computer screen somewhere inside the structure, illuminating the dolls’ faces from below with a creepy blue light. Of course I know they are just dolls, just objects, but I still feel something in their presence, as if they are real people staring down at Caleb so intently, like an adoring audience, like replacements for all the fans he left behind. Is Caleb lonely? Is this an attempt to make friends? I wonder if there’s a difference between friends and fans, a difference between being loved and being worshipped. I wonder if Caleb knows.
“I hear you creeping around out there,” Caleb says, his voice muffled from deep inside his blankets. “Did you take down that bag of garbage I left by the stairs?”
“Yes,” I say.
I move a column of stacked blankets and smell Caleb’s B.O. before I even enter his space. His beard is getting so bushy, he’s starting to look like one of those sensitive guys in those bands he hates. Either that or a lumberjack, which he also hates. As usual, he is watching a show on his laptop, with his most cherished things on the table next to it—his bag of weed, a lighter, some rolling papers I managed to buy at a convenience store all by myself without throwing up from nerves, a water bottle, a half-eaten bag of baby carrots, and an old soup can he’s using as an ashtray. “I’m almost out of weed,” he says. “Go see Gordon soon.”
“Okay.”
“You can hang out with me on one condition,” he says. “Don’t talk about the news or anything happening in the world.”
My stomach lurches. Can he read my mind? “You’ve told me that, like, a million times.”
“You need a reminder. I don’t want to hear what people are saying about me. I don’t want to hear about the fucking King and who he’s fucked over today. I don’t want to hear about war or people dying or what asshole celebrities are up to.”
But what about black cars following me? What about old drug dealers selling information to the police? What about Breaking News about the whole world trying to find you? Does that count? Where is Lynn A. when I need her? And what do the King and war even have to do with Caleb’s life? Life is hard enough without worrying about politics and all those people I don’t know doing things far away, like they’re playing some giant board game and I’m not even a piece of it.
“Okay,” I say.
“I don’t want that shit in here at all, okay?”
“Okay.” It suddenly strikes me how weird it is that this house is the safest place Caleb could think to go, but for me it is literally a death trap.
Caleb looks out the window for a minute. Light glistens off the grease on his hair and skin. I make a mental note to pick up some face wipes, which are things I’ve seen on commercials that are like an extra-fancy kind of soap built into a napkin for people who are too lazy to wash their faces.
He starts rolling a joint as I sit down on the other broken lawn chair he lets me keep u
p here for when I visit. We both look at the laptop screen. It’s some show about penguins. A sea lion is tearing one apart.
“Goddamn, nature is fucking brutal,” Caleb says, sucking on his joint. Now a bird is pecking at a newly born penguin chick as the parents stand by wailing their penguin wails. Caleb mutes it.
“Are you ever going to talk to Grandma again?” I say for some reason.
Caleb looks at me like I have poop smeared all over my face. “Really, dude? I’m having a nice, relaxing afternoon, and you bring up the woman who slapped me around my whole childhood, who kicked me out when I was sixteen, who’s tried to blackmail me on multiple occasions into giving her money, who’s been trying to sell me out my whole life? That bitch?”
“Don’t call her a bitch,” I say weakly.
Caleb sucks in another big puff of smoke. “Name one nice thing she’s said to you, one nice thing she’s done in the last week. The last month. The last year.”
“She picks up dinner on the way home sometimes.”
“That’s her fucking job,” Caleb says, exhaling smoke in my face. I make a mental note to add breath mints to his shopping list. “She’s supposed to feed you.”
“She’s taken care of me my whole life,” I say.
Caleb doesn’t say anything for a while. He just looks out the window and takes a couple more puffs off his joint. “Yeah, well,” he finally says, “it’s the least she could do.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. “If you hate it here so much, why’d you come back?”
“It’s the only place no one would look for me.” Caleb looks at the remaining nub of his joint sadly. “This is bullshit,” he says. “I need something stronger.”
Then he looks at me. His eyes are droopy. He doesn’t look angry, which is a nice change, but he looks empty and gone, and maybe that’s worse.
“You know you’re never going to get out of this town, right?” he says. “No one ever gets out.”
“But you got out.”
He laughs cruelly. “Have you noticed where we are right now?” He pauses. “It doesn’t matter. I could be across the world, and I’d still be here. We’re infected, man.”
I don’t know how I feel about this. I’ve always had some vague desire to leave Rome, but nothing specific, nothing resembling a plan. If what Caleb says is true, then even my fantasies are probably a waste of time.
The images on the screen reflect backward in Caleb’s eyes.
Am I going to be stuck here for the rest of my life?
How long can someone live in an attic before they can’t anymore?
“Are you getting better?” I say softly.
Caleb just looks at me, his face unreadable.
“What do you want exactly?” I say, even softer.
Caleb clenches his jaw, and I am scared for a moment. How well do I really know my uncle? Is he capable of violence? Is all this isolation and pot smoking and lack of fresh air going to turn his depression into rage? Will he break like he did onstage before he disappeared? Will he take it out on me?
But all Caleb does is sigh. He says, “I just want some peace, man. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“Then what?” I say. “What happens after that?”
Caleb sucks down the last of the joint and doesn’t even flinch as the burning paper reaches his fingers. He throws the brown wet wad into the soup can.
“Seriously, dude, what is up with you and that girl?” Caleb says.
“Who, Lydia? Nothing,” I say. “We’re friends.”
“Are you in love with her?”
What exactly does being “in love” with someone mean? Do you have to want to have sex with someone to be in love with them? Though Lydia’s certainly beautiful, and though I would probably jump at any opportunity to do anything the least bit sex-related with an even non-beautiful girl who miraculously wanted to with me, strangely I don’t think I want to with Lydia. I don’t really know what having a sister is like, but maybe that’s the closest thing to describe how I feel about Lydia.
“I love her,” I say. “But I’m not in love with her.”
“Sometimes you sound like a bad movie.”
“Maybe I’m a little bit in love with her,” I say. “But maybe you’re supposed to be a little bit in love with everyone you love.”
Caleb rolls his eyes. “You’re thinking too deep for me, kid.”
“Did Grandma ever hug you growing up?” I say, surprised at the question as it comes out of my mouth. Maybe I’m getting high from secondhand smoke.
“What do you think? The only time either of them touched me was to kick my ass.”
People talk about sex all the time, but there are so many other kinds of touching. I’ve seen it on TV—those families who are always hugging, those parents who put their arms around their kids’ shoulders, who pat their kids on the back, the kids who rest their heads on their parents’ shoulders when they feel sad or discouraged. They make it look so easy. “I don’t even remember sitting on Grandma’s lap when I was little,” I say. Those TV kids are the ones who grow up with life skills like how to pay bills and cook and talk through conflicts and fix toilets. They grow up knowing how to touch people. “I don’t want to have sex with Lydia. But I think maybe other kinds of touches would be nice. Maybe there’s some subset of being in love with someone that doesn’t involve having sex with them but just involves hugging. Maybe we can figure out how hugging works by practicing on each other.”
I realize that as I’ve been thinking all these things, Caleb’s been staring at me, and then I realize I was thinking out loud, that I did that thing I always do of not having a filter, that Caleb heard all my weird thoughts, that at any moment he’s going to burst out laughing and make fun of me and call me a stupid piece of shit like everybody else does.
“Dude,” Caleb says, his voice thick with something new and unexpected, a kindness that makes me gasp. “We gotta get you out of this town before it kills you.”
For a brief moment, for a tiny millisecond, I feel a softness settle over me, and the house feels sturdy, and Caleb is home, and I am with him, and I think, This is what I wanted.
But then it’s gone. I touched it, so briefly, but now all that’s left is the aching want cutting through me.
Caleb looks out the window. “Fuck!” he says, and just like that everything sharpens and speeds up. “Fuck fuck fuck! Get out of here!”
I lean over him to look out the window, and there’s Grandma pulling up in her van. The back door slides open, and a tour group starts spilling out.
“Billy, get the fuck out of here!” Caleb pushes me, and I fall face-first into the wall of the blanket fort. I try to get up, but the more I move, the more tangled in blankets I get, like they’re some kind of plush quicksand. Caleb finally pulls me out and drags me toward the staircase, and I fall all the way down just as I hear the front door opening.
“And here is where Caleb grew up, right in this house!” I hear Grandma say. “He was such a sweet kid, so creative.” The sound of the fake shutters of camera phones.
I push the dresser to hide the door, but it gets stuck on a dislodged floorboard. I push harder, but it won’t budge. “If you’d like to go up those stairs, you can see Caleb’s old bedroom on the right,” Grandma says downstairs.
They are going to catch us. They are going to take Caleb away from me and I’m going to be all alone and Grandma’s going to kick my ass and I’m so stupid and why did I ever think I was smart enough to handle any of this?
Someone says, “Ooooh!” and I hear the first footstep on the staircase just as I finally push the dresser in place.
A girl in pink sparkly sweatpants and a Rainy Day Knife Fight T-shirt with Caleb’s giant face printed on the front emerges from the staircase and yelps when she sees me. “Hi,” I say, leaning against the dresser all casual, like I was hanging out here all day, like I’m totally relaxed and not about to have my tenth heart attack of the afternoon.
“Are you his ghost
?” she says with big eyes and trembling lips.
“I don’t think so,” I say, but I have no idea what’s true anymore.
Then she points her phone, the flash blinds me, and all I see is white.
LYDIA
PREPROFESSIONAL MODERN CLASS MAKES THE torture of ballet worth it. This is where I don’t have to think, where the teacher’s instructions skip my brain and go straight to my body. The little girl seems happiest here too. She just sits quietly in the corner of the mirror watching with starstruck eyes, the way I used to look at the big-girl dancers when I was little. For this brief hour and a half, I don’t even hate her.
The modern teacher, Luz Hernandez, has danced with some of the top avant-garde dance companies in the country. She is also a very different kind of teacher from Mary. She swears in class. Her hair is blue. Her skin is brown. She once told a girl to “get out of your head and dance with your fucking ovaries.” She is definitely my kind of people.
But Mary is here today too, perched in the corner on a stool, watching the class with her laser eyes and permanently frowning thin mouth, making my safe place suddenly toxic.
“What is she doing here?” I whisper to Natalie Morris as we move through our floor warm-up. “This isn’t even her class.”
“She oversees all the preprofessional classes when it comes time to pick soloists for the big annual show.”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t worry.”
“All right, women!” Luz yells. I like how she calls us “women,” instead of “girls” like the other teachers. “Let’s move on. We’re adding another sequence to the choreography today. First, let’s run through what we’ve already got. How’s that sound, Miss Lemon?”
“Um, uh, good?” I manage to say. Dancing in Luz’s class is fine, but for some reason I turn completely incoherent anytime I actually have to talk to her.
“Um, uh, great,” Luz says with a wink, and I can feel every millimeter of my skin from my collarbone to the top of my head turn red. Just as I feel the blush start to fade, I catch Natalie’s smiling eyes as she gets in position, and the blush flares right up again.