Are You Mine?

by N. K. Smith

  Myka and Valentine are already here, lounging on the couch. The living room has the distinct smell of marijuana, and the two of them look like the Cheshire cat.

  Myka claps when she sees me. “Yay, it’s Fox!”

  “What’s up, Myka?”

  “You’re totally the guy we need right now.”

  I sit down in a sleek, fancy chair. “Yeah, why’s that?”

  Val starts laughing, and Myka socks him in the gut. When he’s done gasping, he sits up, and appears to be completely sober and serious. “Okay, so Saige and Myka are having a yeti conversation.”

  Already, I’m intrigued. “A yeti conversation?”

  “Yeah,” says Myka, “you know, the abominable snowman?”

  “Yes, I’m familiar with what a yeti is. What’s the conversation about?”

  Valentine answers. “Well, Saige says that a yeti, outside of its natural habitat, would totally decimate a sasquatch. Whereas Myka here thinks the ‘squatch wouldn’t even break a sweat giving the yeti a beat down.”

  “Thoughts?” Myka asks.

  “Yes, please share your thoughts,” Saige says.

  “Well, I think they’re both formidable opponents, however, if no one has home field advantage, meaning not in the forest and not in the cold mountains, I think the yeti would win. The yeti will have better lungs because of the altitude, so he wouldn’t get winded for a long time.”

  Saige throws her hands up. “Yes!”

  Myka dramatically rolls her eyes. “Don’t gloat just yet. It’s not like Fox is the definitive authority on yetis and sasquatches. He’s just saying the yeti will win because you’re on the yeti’s side.”

  “Whatever. Even Valentine said yeti. Just admit it, your ‘squatch can’t beat my yeti.”

  Standing up tall, Myka puts her hands on her hips. “This is bullshit! My sasquatch would be smart enough to bring his electromagnetic neurotransmitter prohibitor and his supersonic shrapnel peashooter, so obviously, the damn sasquatch would win!”

  I glance around the room for some kind of explanation, but both Val and Saige are considering what these bizarre weapons could do for the fight.

  After a while, Val says, “The ‘squatch would forfeit the fight. The rules are neutral ground and no weapons.”

  With her arms folded across her chest, Myka adopts an arrogant attitude. “Well, everyone knows that yetis are stupid goodie-two-shoes, so of course, he’d come without weapons, and it wouldn’t matter if it was against the rules because the yeti would be dead. D-E-A-D. Dead. So clearly, the win goes to sasquatch!”

  “Fine,” Saige says with a sigh. “I concede. The yeti would not win.”

  “Aaaaaaaand?”

  “And the sasquatch would win.” Saige stands, walks to me, grabs my arm, and pulls me up. “Come on, we can’t work here with these dummies.”

  “Hey!” Val says as Myka flops back down. “I was on your side. Myka is just not one to lose an argument. You should’ve known better.”

  “I should’ve,” Saige says under her breath. “Come on.”

  She still has a hold of my arm as I turn and tell the others goodbye.

  It’s not until we’re outside that she lets go. “No clown car. We’re taking mine.”

  “Okay. Where are we going?”

  “Your place.”

  “Seriously?” I follow her to her green Subaru. While I’m thrilled she wants to spend time with me in my house, I didn’t clean or anything.

  “Why not? You want to work on the book right?” She almost never looks at me, but right now she does. “Or we could just go to the library or—”

  “No. My place is fine.” It doesn’t seem to matter if my room is clean or if I’m ready for her to meet Pop.

  “You know,” I after I give her directions to my place. “Your car might be nicer than my car, but it’s not as much fun to be in.”

  The corner of her mouth lifts. “That’s because this car has shocks, and unlike yours, the passenger isn’t on that thin, giggling thread of sanity for fear of falling out the rusty bottom.”

  “You’re fun,” I say.

  “Please. Flattery means nothing to me, especially when it’s so false.”

  “You don’t think you’re fun?”

  With one hand on the wheel, she uses the other to point to my house. “This you?”

  “Yeah.” Before she has the car in park on the curb, I jump out and go around to open her door. “You are fun, Saige. And funny.”

  “You know this whole door-opening thing? It’s—”

  “Gentlemanly? I know.”

  “I was going to say annoying, but we make our own realities, so whatever.” As we walk up the drive, I place a gentle hand against the small of her back and try to gage her reaction, but she gives me nothing to work with.

  On the porch, I hold the door open and make a sweeping gesture with my hand. “After you.”

  “You really get off on this gentleman stuff, don’t you?”

  I close the door behind me. “Not sure I’d say I get off on it, but I do enjoy being courteous. It’s not every day there’s a pretty girl to focus my attention on.”

  These words make her blush, and her blush sets the little prickles of excitement loose over my body. Her blush means she liked the compliment. I pick my foot up to lead her out of the small cluttered foyer, but Saige’s quiet voice stops me. It’s not so much her voice, as it is her words. “Seems like you have a lot of pretty girls around, at least you did before graduating.”

  “There’s a difference between pretty girls who are your friends and pretty girls who might be more than that one day.”

  This stops her, and I mean completely. Like she doesn’t breathe. I don’t worry a lot, but this has me almost freaking out about if I’ve said the wrong thing. But dwelling on it won’t help, so I take her hand and lead her out of the foyer.

  My dad is in the living room, television set on the Fox Soccer Channel. “Pop, this is Saige. Saige, this is my dad.”

  He turns his eyes to her. “Hello, Saige.”

  He’s so calm and cool, but I know behind all that, he’s making mental notes just in case we have a discussion about her later.

  “Hi, Mr. Harrington.” She folds her hands together in front of her.

  When we’re on the stairs to the basement, she says, “I’m surprised you still live at home, you know, being twenty and all.”

  “He’s more like a roommate, and we can pool our resources this way.”

  Downstairs, it hits me why I wasn’t excited to have her here yet. It doesn’t matter about the messiness of the room, but it does matter that I have this huge picture I drew of her.

  “Who’s this?” she asks, pointing to the wall.

  I hesitate for only a second before I push the nervousness away. “It’s you.”

  She looks at the image of me then to our connected drawn hands. She says nothing, but the coloring of her face goes pink again. Saige points to an open sketchbook on my desk. “That’s some dark shit.”

  I’m no longer embarrassed about my hopeful painting of her and me. It’s these dark images that cause me to panic just a little. “Just dreams.”

  “More like nightmares,” she says.

  “Yeah.” Not sure I want her flipping through the book of my mother’s nonsense, I step close to her and put my hand on the book. “I don’t spend a lot of time making those drawings.”

  Saige tilts her head to look at me. “They’re good. Freaky as hell, but—”

  “Want to see the new stuff I’ve got for our book?”

  Chapter 7

  Saige

  “So I did a bunch of sketches for the objects I think our characters will need, but I don’t know what to call them. I don’t know much about steampunk, and I’m not great with words. At least not coming up with them or writing them.”

  Fox grabs a large notebook off his bed, then flips it open when he comes back to me. I’m sitting on an uncomfortable wooden stool that feels like one leg i
s about three-quarters of an inch too short. He pulls up another stool, brushes off the seat, and sits down. “Like I figured they’d use some kind of power source other than just old school engines, so I drew this.”

  He shows me a sketch of a battery with sensors and gadgets all over it. I pick up my pen and adjust my notebook. “We’ll call that an electro-chemical reaction energy storage device.”

  “That’s awesome. What about this? It’s a cross between a sailboat and an airplane.”

  I smile because I know Myka will love it. “Let’s call that a dihydrogen monoxide vapor clipper.”

  He shakes his head and gives me a wide-eyed stare. “I have no clue what you just said, but it sounds totally cool.”

  For what has to be the fiftieth time today, I can feel the heat rise up in my cheeks at his approval. “Myka’s going to freak.”

  After we flip through a few more of his impressive sketches, he moves to the metal shelving system in the corner. “I’m going to play some music.”

  “Let me guess. The—”

  He cuts me off. “I can play something else. What kind of music do you like?”

  Fox looks so damned sincere, like the only thing he wants is to give me the music I like. There’s just one problem with that. “I don’t have a preference. Whatever you want is fine.” I pause and he looks like he’s going to say something, so I head it off. “Just play The Avett Brothers. It’s cool.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. You like them, and they’re growing on me, so put ‘em on.”

  When he searches his playlist, I flip through yet another book. This one is nothing but sports. Soccer, specifically. A lot of players in red and some weird bird. One picture is of someone shooting a goal with the words: Liverpool, You’ll Never Walk Alone at the bottom in very careful print. I can see the smudges that suggest erasure and wonder how long it took him to get those words right.

  “So is Liverpool a team?”

  Fox makes a pained sound. “Oh, Saigalicious, you have so much to learn.”

  Saigalicious? It’s as if I can’t control my own muscles; I feel my lips curve. All of the sudden, he’s next to me, like right next to me. The smell of him almost makes me dizzy, but not because of any overpowering cologne. He just smells good. Natural. Perfect.

  Fox starts flipping through the pages and telling me all about them. “That’s Luis Suárez. He’s the el pistolero de Liverpool. And this is Daniel Agger and Martin Skrtel, two center backs.”

  “Um, center back?”

  “Defense. They keep the other team from scoring, and they’re badass.”

  I can see that he could keep going for hours about Liverpool, so I start glancing at the first book I saw, the one with all the dark images. I chew on the inside of my cheek as I wonder what kind of mind could create something like what I saw in there.

  I turn my attention back onto Fox, but he has stopped talking and is just watching me.

  When I finally look him in the eyes, he says, “You can ask, you know.”

  “Ask what?”

  “About the drawings.”

  I don’t want to upset him, but I just cannot fathom that darkness coming from him. “Are they your dreams?”

  He shakes his head and for the first time, looks reluctant to talk, but he does. “No. They’re my mom’s.”

  Of course, I have no idea what to say, so I stay quiet, and he continues. “She’s been in the hospital since I was six. The doctors keep saying that one day she’ll be able to come back and live with us, but I don’t believe it.”

  “So she dreams that stuff? It looks awful.”

  “It is, but she doesn’t so much dream them. I mean, I guess they’re dreams, but they happen when she’s awake.”

  I can’t imagine. “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “That she’s in the hospital? Yeah, but it was way worse when she was out. I was young, but I remember how scary it was, and sometimes she’d go off and we wouldn’t know where to find her. One time NYPD found her trying to climb some building in downtown Manhattan.”

  “Damn.”

  Fox nods like I’ve just contributed an amazing observation. “But there’s nothing I can do about it,” he says, his voice returning to its normal light tone. “So there’s nothing to be too upset about.”

  I’m not even sure I know how to process what he’s said, let alone how I would handle it, but he seems so damn blasé about it all. I can understand detaching a little from the situation. It has to be pretty emotional to see your mom like that, but how does such a happy person like Fox just stay happy when his mom is full of darkness.

  “What?”

  I realize I’ve been staring at him, criticism probably obvious in my expression. “Nothing.”

  “Saige, I may not know everything about you, but I can tell when you want to say something.”

  I swallow hard against the panic trying to rise within me. He’s asking for my thoughts, so there’s a part of me that wants to give them, but then there’s another part that wants to remain silent just in case my thoughts are offensive. Instead of sharing any opinions, I ask, “Do you see her much?”

  Fox takes a pencil and twirls it between his fingers. A second later, he turns and presses the tip lightly against the off-white paper in front of him, creating long lines and stretching arches. “The hospital’s about seventy miles away, so it’s not convenient most days, but Pop sees her at least once a week, sometimes more when he has the energy.”

  He didn’t answer the question. “But what about you? Do you see her much?”

  The strokes he creates on the page grow heavier; I can both hear the pencil scratching the paper and see the depression it’s making with the gray line. “Yeah. I mean, I used to go every week, too, but sometimes she thinks I’m a CIA assassin there to kill her, and other times she thinks I’m a demon, so it’s not one of my favorite things to do when I have free time.”

  The slight panic I felt when asking the question pales to the wretched feeling I have now. There’s a depth of gloom to his voice that I never would have imagined he’d be capable of. I’m not sure how to break this tension, and out of nowhere I say, “I bet she’s lonely.” He lifts his head and retrains his eyes on me. “I bet you are, too.”

  There’s a moment when he does absolutely nothing, but then his usual smile grows. “I have too many friends to be lonely.”

  “Friends aren’t your mom.”

  “So for the book I was thinking at the end, Myka should be on the airship fighting the government, while Valentine and his robotic mercenaries should have a ground battle. What do you think?”

  I guess that’s my cue to switch topics, but my mind is still on his mother locked away in a hospital seventy miles from her family. “Yeah, okay.”

  “But you’re the writer, so I’m not trying to tell you the story, but I think it’d be fun to draw both an air battle and a hand-to-hand combat scene.”

  Even though his hand is partially covering the quick image he’s just drawn, I can see it’s of a woman. This picture is more realistic than the picture he drew of me on his wall. It’s not cartoony. It has to be his mother. They have the same lips. Even though she’s not smiling in the drawing, I know that if I saw her grin, it would be an exact replica of Fox’s.

  It’s probably rude that I’m not speaking or even paying attention to anything, but I have to think about something else for a while. I try to think about the peaceful beaches of southern California with the rolling waves, the yellow sand, sea birds, and salt air, but my mind has now fixated on the song that’s playing.

  I don’t know the name of it. I’m sure if I asked Fox, he’d tell me, then tell me when The Avett Brothers wrote it, what the best version of it is, and recite the lyrics, but I don’t want all that, so I just listen and lose track of everything else while I do.

  The singer’s telling someone what to do if he gets killed. He sings to the audience that they shouldn’t avenge him, but to let the people in his life
know how much he cared for them. I think of this letter he’s singing about; the letter to his family; the one that tells each of them how much they meant to him in life.

  I wish my mother had left something like that for me. Murder is a horrible thing. People you love are snatched away in a second, and the only thing you have left of them is the stuff they owned and fading memories.

  The memories of my mom are weak. When I try to drum up an image of her in my mind, her face is fuzzy, the edges blurred.

  I think about this damned song long after it’s over and something more upbeat comes on. I think the singer is trying to tell me that whether my mom and dad are here with me, there’s real beauty in the fact that I even had a family once. There is significance in even carrying their name beyond their deaths.

  “Are you okay?”

  Fox’s voice breaks through the fog of my thoughts. “Yeah. That song was just kind of profound.”

  He looks at me with a question in his expression, but I don’t give him any explanation. We’re silent again, him flipping through the pages of his “Myka’s Metal Valentine” sketchbook and me staring off into space like an idiot.

  As much as I want to block out any more songs, the lyrics start weaseling their way in again. This time, the guy’s singing about never being able to say something to someone he loves except through his prayers. He sings about how he and this person who is dead fought, but he has a bunch of new things to say, but will never be able to share them except in a one-sided conversation.

  Fox stares at me, and I have to look away. This isn’t what I thought the night would turn out to be. First, seeing some painting of me holding his hand on his wall was just. . . Well, I don’t even know what it is. Scary because that means he’s looking for something other than just working on a graphic novel with me, and that stuff doesn’t just happen to a person like me. And then with all the talk about his mom, and these damned songs singing my thoughts. It’s just too much.

  I don’t like the burning heat of the tears in my eyes. It isn’t who I am to get all weepy and stupid because of music and a boy.

  “We need to change this music.” I clear my throat. “I mean, I like it. It’s beautiful, but we need to—”