by N. K. Smith
He’s up before I can finish. All of the sudden, Beyoncé is singing her song “Halo,” and I smile.
“Really? Never would have pegged you for a fan.”
With an exaggerated humiliated expression, he says, “Everyone likes Beyoncé, and it’s a good song, but now that you know my secret, I’ll have to keep you locked up so you don’t spill the beans.” He gets up and puts his hands in out in front of him, fingers crooked, but extended. “Or I could tickle you, which would probably be more fun than just locking you away.”
“Oh, my God, no!” I jump off the stool and dart away, but his basement isn’t big, so there’s no place for me to go. He grabs my wrist in a gentle hold, then twirls me toward him.
“You’ve just revealed how ticklish you are, Saigey-Paigey, and I didn’t even have to tickle you. But now that I know. . .” He lets the words hang there as he dramatically raises his free hand, fingers wiggling.
“No! Don’t!” My reaction is odd, even to me. There’s real fear mixed in with the giggles that have bubbled up.
His hand stops. “Why not?”
“Does anyone besides a kid ever want to be tickled?”
Fox locks his eyes with mine. “I think you just can’t handle thinking about where that much laughing would take you. I’d tickle you, and you’d laugh like crazy. Maybe you’d even snort from laughing so much.”
“I don’t snort.”
“And I wouldn’t stop because the sound of your laugh would be like fuel for me, but then your muscles would start to hurt and those tears of laughter in your eyes would grow bigger, and then you’d realize that sometimes it’s okay to be free. That the freedom that comes from laughter is also the greatest release of negativity, and you’d feel like a million dollars.”
I’m not sure if it’s his words or the way he says them that makes me go still. I don’t try to pull away, but he’s not trying to tickle me either. “What does a million dollars feel like?”
“Like living someplace warm, in the sunshine, where darkness never falls, and you never have to worry about anything ever again because you just know it’s going to be okay.”
I try to step away, but Fox’s hand still encircles my wrist. “I have a million dollars, and it doesn’t feel like that. It feels cold and helpless.”
He is silent as he probably tries to work out what I’ve just told him and how he can flip it around into something happy and fun—just the way he likes things. I shouldn’t have said anything because now I’ve brought him down, and it’s not every day a guy like Fox wants to hang out with me. I must be the queen of self-sabotage.
Before I know it, he’s really close to me. Our bodies so close they are touching. He moves his hand from my wrist, so now our palms are together, fingers interlaced. Fox’s other hand is against the small of my back. My cheek rests against his chest. I hold my breath.
It’s awkward at first, but as I relax into his body and allow him to move us, I can see the private dance for what it is. An exchange. I breathe in and feel his chest rise against mine. He’s giving me a little bit of his calm. I don’t know if it’s on purpose or if I’m making it all up because I’ve spent too much time talking to Val about his new-aged hippie ideas on energy, but for some reason, it doesn’t matter right now. All that matters is that I’m pressed against him in this little basement where no one can see us, and he’s holding me like I’ve never let anyone do before.
My mood lightens a little and after a few more slow songs by various musicians, we stop dancing because something fast paced comes on. Fox brings his hands up to my shoulders, pushes my hair back, then slides his hands down my arms before asking, “What’s Beethoven doing in his grave?” He pauses, but I don’t say anything. “He’s decomposing.”
I press my lips together to smother the smile and shake my head.
“Why did Mozart sell all his chickens?”
“Why?”
“Because they kept saying Bach, Bach.”
His grin is contagious, and I can’t hold in the chuckle anymore. “You’re an idiot.”
After I say it, I start freaking out like it was the wrong thing to say. I don’t want to make him feel bad, and he probably has a complex around words like stupid and idiot because of his learning disability.
But Fox’s grin stays. “That’s okay. I’ll be an idiot if it makes you smile.”
I look away at the sincerity of his words until I hear a scrape of wood against linoleum. When I glance back up, he’s back at his desk, sketching something in a notebook. “So I think we should have dinner, and after it gets good and dark, you need to come out with me,” he says.
“Um, okay.”
“And by come out, I mean, come tag some bridges with me.”
“What? Graffiti?”
Fox laughs. “Yeah. It’ll be fun. I always have a blast, and I’d love to show you.”
***
I watch him as he tosses the contents of the saucepan and catches it over the gas flame stove. “That’s impressive.”
“Yes. I’m very domestic. You should see me fold laundry.”
“Maybe next time, right?”
Fox pumps his fist in the air. “Yes! That means you’ll come back. Totally down for that. Bring your dirty laundry, and we’ll make a day of it.”
“You’re a dork.”
“And you’re beautiful, but neither of us can help it, so let’s just go with it.”
The crease in my forehead forms, and I’m glad he’s not looking because if he sees it, I know he’ll call me out about it or make a joke to get it to go away. I don’t mean for it to be there, but sometimes my face expresses things without my conscious direction.
I feel like this isn’t my life. No one’s called me beautiful since my dad, and I’m sure he just said it because that’s what dads say to their daughters. But Fox is a boy who so many girls at my school drooled over. Even Myka went through a stage when she first got here where she talked all the time about his soulful brown eyes and the arm muscles that stretched his shirt sleeves.
Now I’m in his freaking house and he’s pulling me into soft embraces, dancing with me, and saying I’m beautiful. What the hell do I make of that?
When I realize the only noise I hear is from the television a few rooms away, I pull my focus back to the kitchen and find Fox watching me. I quickly look at the spot on the wall opposite of him. There’s a large scratch in the pale green paint.
I flick my eyes back up at him, and he’s still staring at me. “What?”
“You have so much going on inside your head. I bet you only express about five percent of it, don’t you?”
The insight he has is unnerving. He’s supposed to be this guy who didn’t graduate until he was twenty because he wasn’t bright, but Fox is incredibly intuitive, pretty damn intelligent, and seems to be able to figure people out quickly.
“Like right now? What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar,” he says, voice light. “One day, you’ll tell me all the stuff that goes on in your mind.” He grabs his phone from his pocket. “Damn, I forgot I was supposed to call Gage.”
I’m happy for his distraction, because I’m not sure which scares me more, his words or that I can actually see myself sharing my thoughts with him someday.
Chapter 8
Fox
“We’re going to get caught,” she says as I grab the milk crate full of supplies out of the trunk of her car. She has nearly chickened out twice, but I’ve charmed her back into it.
Balancing the crate on the bumper and holding it with my knee, I pick out the four colors I need and hand them to her one by one. As I replace the crate and shut the trunk, she says, “Fox, I don’t think I need to be involved in all this. I mean, I get nervous just thinking about the police, and if we get caught I’ll—”
“We’re not going to get caught. I’m a ninja.”
She’s not impressed by this. “But I’m not.”
“You could be,” I
say as I take the spray cans from her and start to walk toward the bridge. It’s dark but not pitch black. The moon is high and shines down on us, giving her a striking glow that’s hard to ignore. To be honest, this bridge is a little more traveled than some of the bridges I tag and the top has fencing to keep graffitist like me from defacing it, but I’ve scouted it out and know there’s a hole in the fence about three-quarters of the way down, so that’s where I’ll start.
When we get there, she bounces from foot to foot and turns her head left and right constantly as I paint. I feel better about tagging this one while I have a lookout.
“Stop freaking out. Just don’t think about being caught. Let’s just leave something lasting on this bridge, make our mark, and we’ll get out of here.”
“I can’t believe you think this is fun.”
“It is fun,” I say as I lift one foot off the bridge in order to reach a spot toward the bottom of my design. It’s different tonight. The fox is the same, but I’ve added little something else to mark it as the joint effort of Saige and me.
“Shit, there’s a car!”
I chuckle as I hear the near panic in her voice, but when I hear the car pass, I reach my hand back. “Green, please.”
She takes one can out of my hand and replaces it with the requested color. “Hurry up. I’m totally going to punch you in the gut if I get into trouble for this.”
In less than a minute, I’m finished and facing her. “There’s nothing wrong with a little trouble, Saigaweena. Lets you know you’re alive.”
“Saigaweena?”
“It made you smile, so yeah, Saigaweena.”
I look both ways and cross the street. I want to take her hand and pull her along with me, but I leave her to make her own decision. She follows, which excites me not only because she’s carrying half my paint, but because every time I’m near her, I get a little thrill. It’s like riding a roller coaster for the first time and the cart has just reached the summit of the first hill, and you look down and think what did I get myself into?
There’s no hole in the fencing on this side, so I take out my cutting pliers and use as much force as I can to snap the metal.
“Holy shit, Fox. Tagging’s one thing, now you’re destroying the—”
I stop what I’m doing and put my hands on her shoulders. “Ninja’s don’t talk so much. It’s quiet time. Let me work, and you can nag me about it later, okay?”
She narrows her eyes. “I’m not nagging. I’m protesting.”
“Protest silently.”
“This is destruction of property!”
“What you call destruction of property, I call beautifying the urban American landscape.”
“It’s graffiti,” she says, her voice nothing more than a hiss.
“I prefer urban art, thank you very much.” Once the hole is big enough, I lean though it and make the same design as before. It takes less time because I’ve got the feel of it now.
As I lift myself back to an upright position, Saige is almost jumping up and down. “Oh my, God, there’s a fucking cop!”
I turn to look behind me. She’s right, there’s a slow creeping cop car, lights off and nearing our spot. She’s frozen, so I knock the cans of paint out of her arms, grab one of her hands and start running toward the end of the bridge. We parked quite a bit away, but I know we can make it.
I can hear heavy footsteps behind us. The cop is out of his car and shouting, but I don’t slow down to listen to what he says. I might be jogging fast and keeping my attention on getting away, but there’s no stopping me from noticing how beautiful Saige is right now. Her body is in full motion, hair and dress floating behind her as she runs with me.
Once we’re off the bridge, I pull her into a wooded area at the corner of the highway. I can’t hear the cop behind us, and we are only a few yards from the car. When we’re halfway through, surrounded by trees, I stop and use the momentum we have to pull her close to me again. It’s just like when we danced in my room, except this time, I lean down and press my lips to hers.
At first, she doesn’t respond. She’s out of breath from running. I can feel her chest rising and falling against mine. I pull back just enough to let her suck in a deep breath of air, but then kiss her again. This time, her lips open, and she lets the kiss grow. I bring my hands up to her neck, curl my fingers around the back and use my thumbs to stroke her cheeks.
A distant siren and a flash of blue and red lights jar me out of the moment. With a smile, I grab her hand again, and together we run to her car.
Neither of us talk as she drives away, but as we go under the bridge, there’s no mistaking the smile she wears when she sees my art. Tonight, the fox I drew is surrounded by a green leaf, meant to represent Saige. The entire ride back to Pechimu, I watch her. Her expression never changes.
***
The ticks of the grandfather clock are almost deafening as I wait for Saige to come back into the room. It’s after nine at night, and we haven’t spoken since I drove away last night after tagging the bridge. After the kiss, neither of us said much beyond goodbye. I’d wanted to kiss her again, but it just didn’t feel right. Now, after working two shifts and waiting to see her, I don’t care if it feels right. I just want to kiss her again.
When she comes back from the kitchen, she places a glass of Pepsi on the table next to me, then sits down on the couch. She pulls her bare feet up and tucks them underneath of her. Everything seems uncomfortable now. It seemed so natural to kiss her last night.
We drink our soda in silence until I can’t take it anymore. “I know it’s not exactly who you are to overshare your thoughts, but you’re going to have to give me something here because I’m not one to freak out, but I’m on the verge of it. What are you thinking?”
Saige stays quiet as she chews on her bottom lip and turns her eyes to the bookshelf on the other side of the room.
“Saige?”
Finally, she speaks. “I just keep asking myself what you want.”
It takes me a minute to figure out what she’s talking about, but when I do, it’s like a weak punch in the gut. I know it’s her issue, not mine, but it never feels good when someone questions your intentions, especially when you’ve gone out of your way to be respectful and clear about what it is you want. I mean, I haven’t come right out and said I want her to be my girlfriend or anything, but I think I’ve been pretty obvious about it.
“Why are you so suspicious?”
Saige shrugs and still won’t look at me.
“Who hurt you?”
Her defensive eyes are on me now, fire within them. “No one hurt me.”
“You’ve never given anyone the chance, have you?”
It was just a guess, but the answer is clear when she looks away. “Why won’t you ever say what you want to say?”
“I don’t want to say anything. I’m just. . .I don’t know. You make me nervous. We barely know each other. I mean before that party, I barely even knew who you—”
She’s either flighty or in denial, and I don’t consider her a flighty person. “We used to sit across the library from each other after school.” It was almost the only thing to do some days.
“I never saw you.”
“I saw you.”
“That’s creepy,” she says with a hint of a smile.
“You never noticed me?”
Saige hesitates, then answers. “Maybe. But you were never reading books, just listening to music or generally being loud like the other cool kids.”
“You’re so funny.”
“Why?”
I get up and wander around the living room as I talk. “Because you’re so hesitant to speak up sometimes, but other times you have no problem sliding in your opinions.”
“I wasn’t trying to—”
“Hey, what’s this?” I run my hands over the triangular wooden box. I’m not stupid enough not to know what it is, especially since the glass window shows a few white stars in a sea of deep blue. I don
’t think Saige likes going too deep, so I reconsider asking about the folded flag. “Let’s listen to music,” I say as I dock my player and thumb through my playlist, then turn on Band of Horses at a low volume. I choose “The Funeral” because I already know what she’s going to say if she answers the question. The flag is from a military funeral. The only question I have is whose.
“You move so fast from topic to topic, Fox. Are you sure you’re not ADHD as well as dyslexic?”
Maybe another person would have taken offense to that statement, but I know Saige doesn’t mean it like that. I twist around and smile at her. “Shiny objects distract me, remember?” I point back at the box on the shelf. She follows the line of my arm, hand, and finger with her eyes.
“It was my dad’s. The one that was on his coffin.”
There’s no joke I can tell that would make her smile in this moment, so I can’t fall back on that to defuse the emotional tension that has sprang up. Instead, I sit down next to her on the couch. Every other time I’ve sat on the chair across from her, but it seems like after kissing her last night, there’s nothing wrong with sitting this close to her today.
It doesn’t lessen the heaviness created by the revelation that her dad had a military funeral. “How’d he die?”
“In bits and pieces.” Saige twirls the ice and soda around in her glass before leaning forward and setting it on the tiled coaster on her coffee table. “He was a marine in Afghanistan.”
I don’t want to pry for details of how it happened, so I ask, “When?”
“2007.”
“What were you? Eleven?”
“Yeah.”
I now knew a huge piece of her past that unlocked the mystery of Saige. “That must’ve sucked.”
The words sound horrible once they’re out of my mouth, but they must not to her because one side of her mouth rises in a little sad smile. “It did.”
“Still does?”
She nods, and I can’t stand that she’s not looking at me, so I take just the tips of my fingers and touch them to her chin. Just a tiny bit of pressure gets her to turn to me. I let my lips draw up, and I say, “Hi.”