by Andra Brynn
For a while, neither of us says anything. We just stroll. Somewhere, someone is burning autumn leaves, and the air is pungent with them. I inhale deeply, and finally, as we cross the broken, cracked pavement, I find myself calming completely.
I watch the concrete pass beneath my feet, and try to think of something to say, something that will be meaningful, but not too revealing.
“So,” I say at last. “I have issues with alcohol.” I don’t look at Daniel when I say it. It sounds weird to say it out loud.
He snorts a little. “You do? I wouldn’t have guessed.”
I give him a little punch on the arm. “Don’t be an ass,” I say.
“Sorry. But I guessed. Any particular reason you drink so much?”
I frown, thinking about this. “I suppose it’s an escape,” I say. “It’s like taking a vacation from being Bianca. I don’t think it’s just drinking, though. If I didn’t have that, I’d still want to take a vacation from being me.”
I catch his surprised glance. “You don’t like who you are?” he says.
I shrug. “I like who I am,” I say, “but I fall pretty short in a lot of areas.”
“Everyone does.”
“No, I mean, like, in important areas.”
He seems to think about this for a minute. “What kind of areas? Do you murder people?”
I almost stop, shocked. “What? No!”
“Then you torture small animals.”
“No, that’s sick!”
“Then what about stealing? Lying? Adultery?”
I clamp my mouth shut. “Everyone lies,” I say. “And I’m not even sure what adultery is.”
“You don’t know what adultery is?”
“Well, I do. My mom made me go to church and they were always talking about it and how bad it was, and my mom said it was sex before marriage, and someone else just said it was sex outside of marriage, but I don’t know if that means you have to be, like, already married, or what...” I trail off. “Well, either way, I’m not pure as the driven snow, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Yeah, but no one is.”
I look slyly up at him. “Not even you?” I say.
He coughs and looks embarrassed. “No,” he says.
I wait for him to elaborate, and when he doesn’t I grin. “So which of the sins is it? Sloth, Wrath, Lust... er... Avarice... Doc, Grumpy, and Dopey?”
“Gluttony, Pride, and Envy,” Daniel finishes for me. “I don’t know. Probably... pride?”
“Whoah,” I say. “Not lust? A strapping young lad like you?”
To my utter shock, his face grows beet red. “I suppose Lust, too,” he admits.
I slap his back and laugh. “Oh, come on, that’s like the most common sin. Everyone’s got it. It’s like the penny of sins. You can have a lot of them, but they don’t really add up to much.”
“You don’t think so?”
I shake my head. “I don’t. I don’t know, there’s a lot of stuff worse than those sins.”
“Like what?” he asks me.
“Betrayal,” I say. “Dishonesty. That sort of thing.” And worse than that, much, much worse, but it would be crude to bring such things up so I don’t.
Daniel is nodding. “The lowest circle of hell is for betrayers,” he says.
“I remember that,” I say. “We read about it in high school. Dante’s Inferno.” I feel my face falling.
“What’s wrong?” Daniel asks.
I shake my head. “I just... I just remember that Satan’s in the lowest part of hell, and he’s crying.”
“He rebelled against God,” Daniel says. “It makes sense that he should be down there.”
I wrap my arms around myself. “I don’t care. He cries. It freaked me out when I was a sophomore. I actually had a nightmare about it.”
Daniel doesn’t say anything for a moment. “I was raised in the Catholic church,” he says finally. “I don’t think it would have occurred to me to feel sorry for Satan.”
“No sympathy for the devil? Anyway, I don’t know if I feel sorry for him,” I say. “I just understand him.”
He stops. “What?” he says. “What do you mean?”
Embarrassed, I shake my head. “It’s nothing.”
But his intense brown eyes are studying me, and I suddenly feel uncomfortable beneath his gaze. Not the way I usually feel uncomfortable when guys stare at me, but as though he is weighing my soul against some standard.
Uneasy, I look around, seeing where we’ve come, and to my delight I see we are walking behind the row of businesses that line the highway. Small towns are full of interesting shit, little snippets of the past. Some of them seem stuck in the fifties, some seem stuck in the thirties. It’s crazy.
I study the backs of the buildings, wondering if any of them are abandoned. It’s weird, but though the hospital freaked me out yesterday, I want to do it again. I want to feel that thrill. I want to be a little scared, a little in danger. Danger that’s up close and personal, not the crazy danger of the real world. Out in the real world, it’s all institutions and social expectations and a slow grinding of your dignity and self worth into a fine paste. It’s wars and famines and sudden deaths. It’s all randomized, all out of my hands. It’s hard to fight against that sort of thing.
A treacherous floor? At least it gives me a fighting chance.
I spot a small lot with a broken down chain link fence around it. I point. “Let’s go over there,” I say.
“I don’t know,” Daniel says, but I ignore him and move toward it, cutting across a parking lot so broken up by the movement of the soil that it’s half-grass. As I get closer, I see that the place was a restaurant, but the sign out front is missing. Definitely abandoned.
“Let’s see if we can get inside,” I say.
For a moment, Daniel hesitates. Then he nods, and we walk along the perimeter, trying to look casual. We’re close to the highway here, and there are a few people out and about, though it’s Saturday morning and all smart people are still in bed. Which explains why I’m not still in bed.
We reach the corner of the fence, curiously close to a little cluster of trees, and I spot a hole. “There,” I say. Sucking my breath in, I slip between the wires, then sprint to the back of the restaurant. Daniel follows.
“How should we get in?” he asks. The back door is made of steel, and the building itself is solid brick. I frown at the squat, mostly square structure, and move toward the trees again.
Just as I thought, the place is a diner. The windows are all broken and boarded up, but given how many there are it’s not hard to find one that’s fallen away.
With a glance at the highway, I listen to make sure no cars are coming, then put a hand out and grab the window frame and haul myself inside.
There’s a table directly under the window, and I put my foot down on it. Glass crunches beneath my shoe. The table creaks under my weight, but holds, and I clamber over to the booth.
Daniel comes in behind me, and then we are both slipping to the floor, brushing our clothes off and taking it in.
The diner is cleaner than the hospital was. It must have only closed down a few years ago. The structure doesn’t look like it’s about to collapse, at least, and there’s less dust and dirt on the black and white checkered floor. At our backs are the windows and a long line of booths, and stretching in front of us is a lunch counter. Old rotating stools stand in a row, their red pleather seats dusty and faded into a gray-pink. A huge mirror lines the wall behind the counter, the mounted shelves empty. An old cash register sits at one end, an order window half-closed by a metal curtain sits at the other, and the fans and fixtures hang from the ceiling, looking ready to burst into illumination at any moment if it weren’t for the shrouds of cobwebs covering them.
“I wonder if this is what the whole world will look like after the apocalypse,” I say.
Daniel steps forward and surveys the ruin. “I wish I’d brought my camera,” he says, then sucks a
ir through his teeth, as though some terrible thought has just occurred to him.
“What is it?” I say.
He sighs and crouches down. “Dead bird,” he tells me.
I walk over to him and crouch down next to him. Sure enough there is the corpse of a bird on the floor. It looks freshly dead, as though we had arrived just a moment too late to save it.
“It must have got in here,” Daniel says, “and wasn’t able to find its way out.” He frowns. “Maybe if we were here yesterday we could have let it out.”
The thought makes me sad. Missed connections. Lives that slip away by the accidents of fate.
“They say God marks the fall of a sparrow,” Daniel says.
I hate that saying. “Yeah,” I say. “Well, thanks for noticing, asshole.”
The venom in my voice startles even me, and I stand quickly. Turning away, I stuff my anger down and try to think of something to say, something innocuous.
I shuffle across the floor, kicking small bits of debris out of the way, and something comes to me. “This place reminds me of the restaurant I worked in when I was in high school.”
He turns to me. “You worked in a restaurant?”
I make a face and start poking around, looking for somewhere to sit down. The stroll we took and the fight with the fear has left me drained. The stools look a little gross, but the booths look even grosser, all cracked pleather and decaying stuffing leaking from their wounds. I finally decide that a stool is probably my best bet.
“I was a hostess,” I say as I select one that looks mostly intact. “At this little waffle house that wanted to be IHOP but was never anything like IHOP. It sucked, but at least it paid money.” I put my hand out and wipe it over the surface of the stool. Great, thick mounds of dust gather before my fingers into small mountain ranges, and when they tip over the edge of the seat they crumble, falling to the floor. The pleather isn’t quite as faded as I’d thought; my hands leave pink paths through the gray.
Wiping my palms on my jeans, I clean one stool off and sit down. Pushing my foot against the counter, I give a little spin. Whee.
“What was it like working as a hostess?” Daniel asks. He’s inspecting the stool one down from mine, as though he’s trying to find one that isn’t quite as disgusting as the others. I look at his pressed pants, sigh, and get up.
“Here, let me help you,” I say. I go over to the stool, hop up, and rub my butt over it, wiping it down with my jeans. “There.”
I hop back up and slap the dust off my jeans with my hands, but when I look up Daniel is staring at me as if I’ve just stuffed a banana in my ear. “What?” I say.
“That was just... an unconventional way of dusting.”
“Well, excuse me,” I say. “You weren’t going to do it. It’s all going to end up on my jeans anyway, might as well skip the part where it gets all over my hands and under my fingernails. This place is probably full of lead paint and asbestos. We’re courting death just breathing in here.”
He smiles and sits down. “I suppose,” he concedes. “Anyway. You worked as a hostess at a restaurant in high school?”
Oh, the dreaded childhood probing. Well, it was fine. I didn’t have anything to hide. “Yeah,” I say. “It was easy to do so I could still concentrate on my schoolwork, and we needed the money.” I shrug. “It was no big deal. But every time I go into a restaurant I’m still extra nice to the hostesses. And waiters. And waitresses. And the busboys, too. You wouldn’t believe how shitty those jobs are. Unless you’ve done them. Have you done them?”
Daniel shakes his head. “I’ve never worked in a restaurant,” he says. “Actually, I haven’t really ever worked for pay at all. I didn’t have a high school job.”
My mouth drops open. “What?” I say. “How could you not?” The concept is completely foreign to me. Well, to be fair, a lot of people couldn’t get jobs because the economy was so shitty, but that didn’t mean they didn’t try. Everyone always needed extra money. Money to pay for their cars, for their college, for drugs or booze or whatever.
He shakes his head. “My mom didn’t want me to. She told me to focus on school.” He smiles. “Also we went to church probably every night, so I didn’t really have time to work.”
Oh, God. I can’t think of a worse fate. “No offense, but I’d rather get paid to lick turds off of people’s shoes than go to church every night.”
He frowns. “Why?”
I laugh. “I hated church. My mom made me go to church, too. She got really holy roller after... after I got into high school. She decided to go to this really nutty church where people talked in tongues and shit. It was so bizarre. I hated going.”
Daniel looks intrigued. “I’ve never been to a church where they speak in tongues,” he says. Heedless of the dust, he props his elbow up on the counter and leans towards me. “What was it like?”
I think about it. “Nuts,” I say. “It was utterly bugfuck crazy. Like, the preacher would point someone out of the crowd and start berating them for being ungodly, telling them that there was a great sin weighing on their soul, and that they had to repent or feel the fires of hell.”
Just thinking about it sends a little shudder up my spine, and suddenly I’m glad I’m here in this broken down old diner. The air is cold and the building is falling apart, and it’s the complete opposite of the church my mother made me go to.
There it was always hot and crowded. Stifling. You needed water and air, no matter what time of year it was. There was no air conditioning, and in the Oklahoma summer it would get so sweltering in the little building that I sometimes thought I was going to start having visions. Pastor Mike’s face floats up in my brain, red and round, spittle flying from his mouth.
“Repent!” He was always screaming, over the moaning of the organ and the shrieking of the demon-possessed. “Repent!”
The memory of sweaty bodies and music so loud it grated on my brain presses down on me, and I have to dig my fingernails into the flesh of my palms to chase them away. I take a deep breath and steal a glance at Daniel.
He’s watching me closely, as though I’m an interesting specimen, or some rare species that he’s never encountered before. I clear my throat.
“Uh, anyway. The tongues wasn’t anything real, you know. It was just babbling that people would do. I could never tell if they really believed they were speaking in another language or if they were just blithering so the preacher wouldn’t bother them any more.”
Daniel’s brows are drawn down into a frown. “That sounds a little...” He searches for the right word. “Intense.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But I guess it wasn’t boring. The church we went to before that one was just boring, and the one after was boring too. I’ve never been to Mass. Are they boring?”
Daniel looks away. “I don’t know,” he says. “I was really into it when I was a kid. The ceremony, the ritual... it was like an anchor for the soul, you know? Kept me grounded. My mom also made me participate in the youth group stuff, too, so some of it was fun.” A little rueful smile creases his face. “And there was always drama.”
“Ugh,” I say. “I hate drama.”
He grins at that. “Oh, come on, Bianca, you don’t want to know who snubbed who and who’s cheating on who with who’s girlfriend?”
I put my hands over my ears. “I lost brain cells just listening to that,” I complain. “I like my drama on the television, not in my life.”
He quirks an eyebrow. “You don’t like drama in your life?
I know what he’s thinking and I lower my hands, feeling foolish. “No,” I say. “I mean...” I search for the right words. “I fuck up pretty bad all the fucking time. But I don’t bother anyone with it, you know? They’re my problems. No one else should have to deal with them.”
To my surprise, Daniel suddenly looks worried. “Really?” he says. “You don’t share with anyone? Don’t you have a best friend you can share that sort of thing with?”
I think of Tanya a
nd Alice. I think of Jibril, and Lana, and really, most of the people in Marchand. To be fair, there’s a lot of drama in the house as well, but it’s different. It’s stuff that comes and goes. Nothing really changes when it happens.
That’s probably why I don’t want to bother anyone with it, I realize. “I guess I like my dorm too much,” I say. “I want it to be safe. I don’t want to drag all my problems home with me, you know?”
He tilts his head. “But when you leave, aren’t they still there, waiting for you outside the door?”
Yes. Of course they are. But they’ll always be there. I crack a smile. “Oh come on,” I say. “Problems go away if you ignore them, right?”
“I don’t think it works like that.”
I snort. “On a long enough timeline, all problems are eventually moot.”
He raises a brow at this.
“Because you die, you see,” I explain.
He purses his lips and takes his hipster glasses off, setting them on the dusty bar, then props an elbow on it, jams his fist into his cheek, and looks at me. “What if you come back as a ghost?” he asks.
I inhale sharply. “What about it?” I snap. “So what if I did?”
Daniel frowns and sits back up. “I... I’m sorry, what? I didn’t mean to offend you...”
I’m not offended. I don’t know what I am.
Abruptly I slide off the stool and stand up. “I like talking here,” I tell him. “But I need to walk.”
He opens his mouth to say something, but then seems to think better of it. He puts his glasses back on and stands up with me. “Walk where?” he asks.
I look around and spy the hallway that leads back to the bathrooms and the kitchen. I point. “Over there?”
He follows my finger and nods. “Okay.”
Together we wander back to the little dark hallway. There are no windows here, and at the end of the hall is one of the steel doors set into the back of the building. I wonder if we can unlock it from the inside and file the thought away.
I turn and push into the kitchen, and Daniel follows me.