by Deb Caletti
“I don’t want you making anything of this,” he said.
“Okay.”
“She called me. Fiona Saint George.”
“She did?”
“She told me she may as well go to the prom with me since no one else was ever going to ask her.”
I looked at his big face and wondered if her words had bothered him, but I guessed not. He seemed pleased. He even had a new T-shirt on. I could see the thin plastic T still attached to his sleeve, the one that had once held the price tag. I pointed it out to him and he lifted his sleeve to his mouth and ripped it off with his teeth.
“I said, ‘Maybe you ought to wait for Dracula. He’d take you to the prom. And she said, ‘Fuck you’ and I said, ‘Fuck you back’ and then she said I’d better get her a corsage and I told her I wasn’t stupid and she asked me to come over today after school.”
“Wow, Kevin!” I wanted to hug him, but Kevin Frink wasn’t one you actually hugged. Even if you touched him, he seemed to flinch, pulling tight back inside his coat. His coat—wait. He wasn’t wearing his coat.
“Where’s your coat?” I asked.
“It’s hot,” he said. “What do I know about corsages? What do you do? Do I have to call that place? STD?”
“FTD? Nah. Even the grocery store has corsages.”
“What do I get?”
I thought of the pink dress drawn on the sidewalk drawn in chalk. “Pink roses. For her wrist.”
“All right. I got that. Pink roses.”
“You’re going to do great!” I beamed. I felt so happy, my insides beamed too. It was beautiful, this plan. Everyone could get just what they needed. I felt like a proud parent.
“Fucking prom,” Kevin Frink said, but when he went back down the hall, his usual big head slump had turned into something like a big head bob.
And then, the salad bar again. Jesse’s knuckles accidentally grazed mine as we both reached for the sunflower seeds.
“I don’t understand the kidney beans,” he said.
I knew what he meant. “Every day they put them out here and no one touches them,” I said.
“It’s like the cafeteria ladies keep hoping.”
“Hopeless kidney bean hope,” I said.
“Pathetic,” he said. “To give your hope to a kidney bean.” He smiled. Raised his eyes to meet mine.
“If you take him away from me, I’ll be devastated,” Nicole said, back at the table.
I had a feeling she meant it. I wouldn’t do that to her, though. Nicole had enough problems already. I had a responsibility to her. My heart seemed too full with other things anyway. Other people. Person, even.
“We’re honeymooning in Cancun,” I said.
She socked my arm, put her head for a second on my shoulder. “I know you’d never hurt me,” she said.
I leaned against the streetlight by Derek’s car, feeling the sun-warmed metal against my back. I even closed my eyes for one perfect and satisfied moment, but that’s only how long the perfect moment lasted. Perfect is a frail thing, though, maybe one of the most frail. I heard laughter coming from the cemetery across the street then. I knew that laughter. That laughter had been part of my personal sound track from the day I was born.
I looked over. I saw a flash of yellow. Disappointment and panic immediately rushed in to take the place of what had felt so right. A flash of yellow and that laughter and a memory: three years ago, walking home from middle school past that very same cemetery. Juliet and Buddy Wilkes were there, their bodies leaning against a tall granite obelisk, both of his hands up her shirt, his thin hip bones pressed hard against hers.
I started walking that way. Fast. I was compelled, the same as you might be if there had been a sudden accident. And that’s what this was, I knew. A sudden catastrophic collision, an imminent one anyway.
I saw the yellow again. Juliet, in that yellow dress, all summer invitation. Of course it was her. There was Buddy Wilkes, too, in the cemetery. He wore ripped jeans and a tank top. She was laughing. He was laughing. He gestured to himself in some sort of joke. And then he grabbed her. Pulled her close. She steadied herself with one hand against a tombstone, some poor dead somebody who was probably a nice person who didn’t deserve this on their place of eternal rest.
Juliet had one hand against Buddy’s ribbed shirt which was worn oh so tight against his chest. He reached one hand down between them, rested it right where our baby was. Rested it there like he had every right to.
I was practically running. I was running. “Hey!” I called. “Hey!” I was too far away for them to hear. I watched him lean in to her as if to kiss her, and she gave him a little shove away. A yes-no game, as if a halfhearted protest was some excuse.
Just as I made it across the street, they disappeared, winding their way around gravestones and elm trees and the leafy shadows that swallowed them up and made me think that maybe I hadn’t seen what I knew I’d seen.
I was out of breath. I clutched the chain link of the cemetery fence and called. “Juliet!”
But there was no answer. Goddamnit! How could she do this? I heard an engine start up, probably the engine of Buddy’s El Camino. And then a moment later, Derek’s car pulled up beside me, and Nicole stuck her head out the window.
“What are you doing over here, you crazy girl? Get in.”
I unfurled my fingers from the fence. Opened the door to Derek’s car.
He leaned across the seat. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” he said to me.
When I got back home, Kevin Frink’s red Volkswagen was parked by the curb next to the Saint George house. I could hear the tick tick tick of its engine cooling off. Kevin Frink didn’t waste any time. Mom-and-Dad-We-Went-to-Yale, I’d like you to meet Bomb Boy.
I headed inside our house, but before I got to the door, I heard the smoker’s cough rumble of a motorcycle. A Harley, actually, with a thick, large man with long dark hair riding it, black leather jacket with the orange Harley emblem on his back, metal-studded saddlebags. He looked familiar to me; I knew I’d seen him somewhere before, but I didn’t have time to think about that. Jeffrey and Jacob sat on their lawn, holding that string which was connected to the purse in the middle of the street.
The man stopped just short of the bag, cut his engine, put both feet to the ground, and swung one meaty leg over his bike. Okay, Jeffrey and Jacob were brats and would no doubt be unleashed into society to be lousy husbands and fathers who would have affairs as they got their sports cars detailed, stealing office supplies from work and complaining the house wasn’t clean enough, but I didn’t want to see them get killed. Their eyes were huge as they sat on the lawn. They even gripped hands in some oh-man-we’re-in-for-it-now solidarity.
A few birds cheeped in bird innocence, but that was the only sound as the man sauntered toward that purse like some tough sheriff in a Western, though then again, maybe it was just the leather chaps, well, chapping, that made him walk that way.
“Wait!” I called. I didn’t know what to follow this up with. But I knew those kids were in for it. You get in over your head, sometimes. It’s stupid, but you’re thinking Clive Weaver and that purse, not some prison felon escapee on a motorcycle and that purse. You have this stupid idea. But you’re not thinking something’s going to destroy you.
The man didn’t hear me. He took off his black shiny helmet and shook his hair free. He had one of those mustache beards, the kind that go all the way down your mouth and around your chin, the name of which escaped me then. This would be the time for Jeffrey and Jacob to pull on the string, right as the man reached down to pick up the purse with his hunk of a hairy arm. I knew they wouldn’t do it, though. I didn’t think they would do something that bad, because we all have self-preservation at least, right? They were probably about to wet their pants in fear.
But then, it did happen. I was wrong about the boys’ not doing something that bad, because right then the purse leaped as if by magic from the motorcyclist’s hand. It jerked for a se
cond, rose up off the ground, and then it landed with a splat on the asphalt. The motorcyclist looked up. He scanned the horizon. Stupid, idiot kids! I was wrong about their future of stealing of office supplies, too; they were destined for worse offenses—white collar crime, tax fraud. Lewd acts in public theaters. I wanted to stop what was going to happen next, but no sound came out. One foot stepped forward, but that was it. The motorcyclist lifted his large arm and pointed to the boys.
“You!” he roared. Why, why, why weren’t they running? Why didn’t they take off to hide inside their house, hide underneath their twin beds with race car sheets? The man’s body was huge. His voice came out as big as God’s. “That is … Awesome! That’s fucking awesome! Right on!”
Jeffrey and Jacob looked too stunned to respond. The motorcyclist was nodding vigorously, as if he’d just had one of the greatest moments of his life. He was happy. He was thrilled. He got back on his bike. Flashed a pair of thumbs up. “Right on.”
I watched the orange Harley emblem on his wide back disappear down the street. I was stunned too. Now Jeffrey and Jacob bounced on their knees and shrieked and clutched each other. I’d almost saved them. I’d almost intervened and yet, this was a fabulous, glorious moment for them. For all of them. Something good had been heading their way, not something bad.
God! How were you supposed to do the right thing for people when you couldn’t even predict what the right thing was? Did you have to be able to predict the future to make things come out the way they should?
“Don’t tell Mom,” Jeffrey said.
“Don’t tell the cops,” Jacob said, and this cracked them both up.
“Let’s do it again!” Jeffrey shouted, as Jacob ran out into the street and set the purse straight again.
The minute I saw Juliet, she was going to hear it from me. If she wanted to mess up her own life, fine. But there was Hayden to think about. There was Jitter. I didn’t know who exactly Jitter was going to be, but I was starting to want the best for him. I felt the rising heat of my words, waiting for the chance to erupt and spill. I didn’t care how young she thought I was. She’d better knock this off, and fast.
I heard Juliet’s and Hayden’s voices in the basement later that afternoon. Maybe I would ask to speak to her alone; I’d say something like Can I have a word with you privately, the way people did on television. I walked down the stairs, to the cool paneled room. No one ever spent much time down there, except our old Barbies and their pink Corvettes, packed away in boxes marked TOYS in fat black marker. It was the room that collected the past, the same as that one kitchen drawer collects the rubber bands and loose screws and take-out menus until you can’t even open it anymore. I didn’t even realize how much stuff was down there until now.
“Knock knock,” I said.
“Come on in,” Hayden said.
I felt shaky with held-back anger. The sliding glass doors to the backyard were open, and Zeus trotted in and out with the glee of sudden free access to grass. Juliet sat on one box and had opened another; she had some of our old stuff laid out—my old Ernie Halloween costume; her Princess Jasmine one; Lambie, a stuffed lamb she used to keep in the corner of her room. She wore the Princess Jasmine headpiece on her white-gold hair.
“Hey!” Hayden said to me. Zeus trotted back in, sniffed a hello into my palm, and then trotted back out again. He couldn’t believe his good fortune at being able to come and go as he pleased. I had felt that same way when I first got my driver’s license. “We’re trying to get our new digs ready,” Hayden said. “Studio apartment.”
“You’re moving down here?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice steady. I avoided looking at Juliet.
“We’re leaving the nest,” he said.
“Mom just wants more distance between her and a crying baby,” Juliet said.
“I doubt that,” I said. In fact, it was a stupid and selfish thing to say. “The way she’s been acting, she’d be happy if you let the baby move into her room. You, too.” I tried to keep back my fury, but my voice came out sounding snotty, even to me.
Hayden looked up, but kept quiet. He directed his focus back to the boxes. “These will fit into the garage,” he said.
“’Member this, Scars?” Juliet held up an old rabbit we had that was actually a puppet. She put her hand up his backside and made his head look around. It felt wrong of her to dig inside all of those old boxes. What do you do with the past when it’s past? You box it up, label it, move it out of sight. Opening it all back up again—it was going the wrong direction. Walking backward when you were trying hard to go forward. What good could come of it?
“Better hide that from Zeus. He’ll rip it up and take out the fluff so all that’s left is stuffed-animal road kill,” Hayden said. “He loves fuzz.”
“Oh, this used to be our favorite.” Juliet held up our old over-sized Richard Scarry book, Busy, Busy Town. She opened it to the drawing of the inside of a house, where little kittens were waking up in one room, and a father cat was putting on a tie in another, looking into his dresser mirror. Outside, a pig mailman delivered letters and a pig milkman in a white hat drove a milk truck. If someone made the real Richard Scarry book, I thought, you’d look inside the split-open house and see fighting sisters and single moms. Outside there’d be depressed mailmen wandering around naked on the lawn, and the ice-cream truck would be driven by a glowering psychopath.
“Ohhh,” Juliet said. “The little cats.” The book was open on her knees. She turned the page of the book to study the construction scene of small pigs in hard hats. The reason people said, Can I have a word with you privately only on television was that it just didn’t work in real life. It would tell Hayden all the things he shouldn’t know. Instead, I dripped sarcasm, gave her a full lecture with my tone alone. “What did you do today, Juliet?”
“Haircut, can’t you tell?” she said. She still didn’t look up, only flipped the ends of her hair with one hand. “What is it about hairdressers? You tell them ‘not too short’ and some part of their hairdresser brain hears this as ‘whack the shit out of it.’ If you never say, ‘not too short,’ everything is fine. You say it, and it’s a guarantee you’ll come out ready for the military.”
“I think you’re supposed to say stylist now,” Hayden said.
“And it’s hardly short,” I said.
“What’s wrong with you,” she said.
I looked straight into her eyes. Buddy Wilkes is what’s wrong, I told her. If she couldn’t read that message, she was more of an idiot than I thought.
“Wow, I feel a sudden chill,” she said. She reached over and closed the sliding glass door with her palm. A second later there was a bam! as Zeus smacked right into the glass. I could see him there on the other side, looking momentarily stunned.
“Aw, Zeus!” Hayden said. He opened the door and let Zeus back in. “Poor kid. Come here, you okay? That was funny but not funny.”
“Oh, I’m sorry Zeus,” Juliet said. But she was looking at me. Figuring me out. Like maybe she got my message loud and clear, after all.
“Big dumb kid. That was sort of humiliating,” Hayden said. He was patting Zeus and looking him over but you could tell Zeus had already moved on from the sudden shock of something gone awry. Hayden opened the door again, and out Zeus trotted once more. Running into a wall of glass at full speed couldn’t begin to touch his general sense of optimism.
“Honey, I’m sorry about Jared and the prom. You must be so disappointed,” Mom said after dinner. She rubbed my back in a sympathetic circle. We sat on the couch together, watching but not watching some Hollywood entertainment show that neither one of us cared about. We weren’t the type of people who connected to other worlds involving floor-length gowns, but it helped us pretend not to hear the raised voices coming from downstairs.
“Well, Nicole told me he was the type, but I didn’t believe her.” I was “getting over the breakup” with Jared, the senior who was leaving soon to become a pastry chef.
“O
h, I know. I know,” Mom said.
“I’m just glad I didn’t buy that dress, is all.”
“Things have a way of working out for the best,” she said. We flinched right then.
We both heard Juliet: “You act like everything is my fault!”
And Hayden: “I’m doing everything I know how to do!”
“I saw Juliet today,” I told Mom. I think I needed her help. It felt like things were growing too big for me to handle on my own. “At the cemetery.” She looked puzzled. “With Buddy Wilkes.”
“No,” she said. She shook her head. I thought she was shaking her head in disbelief, at the tragedy Juliet was playing out. Some small form of outrage. But then I realized it was something worse. She held both hands up as if she wanted to hear no more. The no was for me. “This isn’t our business, Scarlet.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said.
“She’s a grown woman.”
I knew it had nothing to do with being a grown woman. This was how it always went. When Juliet was caught skipping school in the seventh grade, Mom only gave her a lecture about making life choices. In the ninth grade, she took Mom’s car and drove onto the ferry and over to the other side and back, and Mom just had a talk with her that left them both crying. Eleventh grade, she was hanging out with Buddy and Jason Dale and whoever, drinking. Caught by Officer Beaker, and there were only more whispered, urgent talks, them with their heads tightly together like they had private issues I would never grasp. Juliet could even yell and slam doors, and the next day Mom would be making her lunch as usual. Juliet could do no wrong, ever.
“This time she’s hurting other people,” I said. I would risk the conflict this time, even welcomed it. But Mom’s voice was firm and calm.
“Scarlet, you need to let this be her business. I mean it. She’s got to work things out herself.”
“He doesn’t deserve this,” I said.
“I’m sure it was nothing.”
Right then I knew we were all liars, Mom and me and Juliet. I just lied to other people. Mom lied to herself. Juliet, it seemed, did both.