Kingdom of the Young

by Edie Meidav

  What does Shanya think about all of it?

  Though Willie says his girl missed them over the summer, she betrays little. At the wall, she gets into their car, not under duress, seemingly happy. Lots might be better than being outside the custodian’s office hearing student calls about lost keys.

  The one story she tells them is about when water waves at an amusement park scared her so much she was like oh my god! Pop culture has started to make inroads. She wears a gold-laminated shirt that says QUEEN and in the car performs precocious little cross-your-heart busty moves learned from cheerleading practice. She tells Pint she’s all about cheerleading because another friend Kwaysha, her father’s friend’s daughter, like a cousin, is doing it too.

  The younger girl says: I hate hearing you have other friends, and Shanya laughs.

  Practices the moves, one two three! Hands together over her chest, down on her hips, little stabs toward womanhood. Pint doesn’t get why cheerleading occupies her so much, or how now Shanya has to stay north certain weekends, forfeit their fun afternoons together, or why it would be fun to cheer someone else’s team.

  A few weeks back, Pint gives in: Can I cheerlead too? she asks her mother, who hopes only to defer.

  On weekends when Shanya doesn’t show up on the wall, Pint and her mother proceed from hump to hump, Shanyaless, morning to afternoon, not mentioning any part of their old life back home—the sunny playgrounds, the casualness of playdates, the friends and grandparents—but rather seeking amnesiac pursuits. They perform on the empty stage of the college concert hall, sing about being somewhere over the rainbow on the grand piano, practice hopping down stairs and sometimes run into Pint’s mother’s gleeful students whose hats are loud as their voices.

  One Sunday, Shanya says she couldn’t come the weekend before because they had to visit her uncle in prison. One Friday she says she’d stayed overnight with her mother, who until now Shanya never mentioned. When they play hopscotch, Pint’s mother asks what reminds Shanya of being Pint’s age. The older girl says: If my mother hugs me. Pint’s mother doesn’t ask more. This Friday, neither girl talks much, sliding into something of a parallel afternoon and early evening dinner. Still the trio has scruples, a vow of allegiance to the secrets behind Willie’s face: they always used to make sure, with comic hysteria, to get back on time, by eight because Willie would not want to linger at the college past 7:59, when some imagined steel doors lifted, offering him exit.

  That night, sitting down for the meal, a knock comes at the door: the girl’s mother, Andrea, lips skinny and scarred, unhappiness clear. She doesn’t like to go looking for her girl. Maybe the candles are what startle her as well, maybe they’re what make her readier to fight, proof someone might be doing witchcraft on her baby. Her mouth opens and shuts.

  By the carillon bells, it is just after seven, not eight o’clock, but Andrea is clearly too mad to speak, managing only Let’s get outta here, baby, to Shanya who keeps her gaze focused on the carpet until she is gone.

  After that, Shanya doesn’t come to the college for a long time.

  When she does, she doesn’t seek them out and Pint’s mother also finds ways to avoid the custodian’s office. She feels her trespass, holding tight to her office keys, never misplacing them. Easy to elude Willie: his patterns had once been their life-drip. Perhaps the mother once sights Shanya on a path but backs away, cowardice a burn in her throat. Though they all join in this, colluding in the slow fade just as they’d created their afternoons in parallel, the mother rarely mentioning anything that might stir memories, though sometimes she slips: ice cream, flea market, koi.

  Can’t we see her? Pint asks, less and less often, more absorbed by her nursery school, fall leaves and apple picking, firetrucks, painting, reading. Can’t we? One day, won’t she, Pint will stop asking. One more bad decision made by the adults, thinks Pint’s mother, but could she have handled it better? Had something worthwhile beyond ice cream been exchanged? Or is hope a constant promiscuity? You will be met, you hope, someone will span time with you.

  None of them guess that one day Pint will finally make a pilgrimage to find Shanya. All these years Pint keeps Shanya’s storybook as one of her most treasured possessions though it is the older girl who breaks the silence first, sending Pint a birthday gift, a t-shirt with her name in bubble writing, sharing her news: Shanya lives not far from the capital’s water wave park and is taking college classes between hours at her mall job, a store selling anything airbrushed. The package comes addressed to Pint care of the college where they met, where Pint has just gotten her degree, having become a collector of fallen leaves and nostalgia, a girl who likes dreamy tall music-loving boys with fancy philosophies, a photographer of blurred, impatient figures. When the two girls walk through the depressed capital’s streets they might as well have entered one of these photos, Shanya still taller, eyes warm and curious but then hard and flat, back and forth, an odd blurring gaze even as she keeps up a river of small talk between smoking in bursts and telling Pint about customers, all of which makes Pint’s throat clench.

  The stream of talk makes clear that the day could end and they might have said nothing of substance, leaving them only a fade-out, exclamations and abbreviations, the occasional posting, maybe even a birthday card in bubble writing saluting some idea that either girl needs yearly reminders of their past.

  What is not clear is who wanted this day more. Someone did. Both conspired to make it happen. What Pint will wonder is whether it mattered to the older girl the way it had for her, the way she’d kept a private shrine in her heart all these years, Shanya her first love in a new landscape.

  The subject that takes over their conversation, apart from the fun to be had in the capital, are the mistakes of parents. Pint’s mother dead now some three years after an accident. Her father lives in India, and soon Pint will tap a minor payout and visit him, hoping to figure out the rest of life.

  What’s your plan? she asks Shanya, who at first looks through her.

  That’s exactly what counselors at the college say all the time to me. What’s your plan?

  They get back without detour to mothers, a safer topic, though Pint realizes her big question is whether the whole friendship had been a net hooked up by someone. In her head goes a refrain her mother once used: no asking questions of a dead fish.

  My ma’s doing better, Shanya says, but Papa Willie passed six years ago.

  Sorry, says Pint.

  We daughters are left, says Shanya, smiling.

  What Pint wants to ask more than anything else is: But do you remember me, I mean remember me? Finally she dares it, asking, and Shanya, whose voice can quickly sound like it comes from an older woman comes out burred: Yeah, you were cute.

  But what do you remember exactly? Embarrassing to press the point but Pint must, if this will be the last they see of each other.

  I gave you rides on my back? I taught you to cartwheel. Oh, and how to use a water pistol. I was the one called you Pint. Sometimes over the years I asked Papa Willie about you. How you were doing. He knew nothing.

  Nothing could have been enough. When they said goodbye, some waiting stuck in their hug, full of uncertainty, neither dreaming of starting another sentence.

  On the train ride home, one girl will keep asking herself whether even that moment mattered. Did they have anything? A doom lies in having the burdened temperament of a historian. Outside passes the ancient lichen of winter trees, the cold bitten gray of industrial northeastern towns, promising only lights inside apartments and houses. Had the two girls satisfied the renewal of their friendship, all those emails and texts? Or had the memory treasured for so long really just been a little insanity sustained among the three of them, now with only two left?

  One weekday, back when she’d been little, Pint had missed Shanya so much she had collapsed in yet another campus parking lot, in her mother’s arms but crying out to invoke the warm and convivial: Shanya, Shanya, Shanya! No amount of maternal bribes or
promises of eternal fun could appease her. Even years later, Pint will find herself, when stumbling or bumping her knee, saying ShanYA! as if the name could soothe that original place where she had first loved someone outside herself with such great heat.

  In that parking lot, she’d sobbed: Shanya! Let’s just drive up to her now, she kept asking her mother. Not seeing why the demand couldn’t be fulfilled: Let’s go right now to her house!

  Though her mother’s voice had been firm: We can’t.

  But why not?

  It’s late. By the time we got there, it’d be time to sleep.

  Couldn’t we just sleep over? Be there with her?

  We can’t, her mother had kept saying, a refrain, like a one-way train on a clattering track, a voice with the same whine and chug: We can’t!

  In Pint had been a hunger to come to the surface, to grasp the answer.

  Can’t we just go where she is?

  We can’t. No, we can’t—

  TALENT

  That Chinese take-out menu could have changed my whole life. First I’d had a bleep of trouble stuffing it back in my bag, being it was the last to distribute that day, postal slot here, under a doormat there, up and down pinchy stairs along Half End and its pseudo-cobblestone streets, whole jimey place tighter than your great-aunt’s corset, smelling like curry-breathers raised dribbly broods and then left the bunch there to choke on sauce.

  This job a shiner like the rest that year, a tickle on the old memory keys but necessary. Only the January before, I could wolf down decent bits of grub and not what became usual for me after my old lady upended me, the standard meal those days paper-wrapped fish-bones that played pinochle in my gut.

  If I was half a mind to let the menu blow away, that part ruled with the wind light-fingering the menu so it shot onto the strange sea rocks we kids used to call the dinosaur because its spine lorded it over this corner. All Half End buildings were built to heave around the rocks like someone actually considered the half-pints around here who enjoy clamfooting it after school high onto the plateau for sunbaking even if they get mostly our steady spit-drizzle.

  Usually I wouldn’t mind but that day my rhythm was off and the thing flew before I saw the kid. Sitting there, not lost or sad, just a big lot of nothing, hunched over, round head and brown bowl hair, cheeks broad, kid humming and picking at something. From below the rocks I called up saying hey, get that? Meaning the menu, because hunger turns my brains into kidneys and otherwise I’d end up lying to Old Skintyflint as to the disposition of the total.

  Little Mister Bighead raised his nose to stare. Then smiled, not seeming to understand. The paper? I said, pointing to where the thing had impaled itself.

  His smile: that’s what must have splinked my coil, since I hadn’t seen someone smile that purely in forever. Even the tiniest rat around here has a swindler’s grin saying it is ready to suck the inside of your veins clean but this sack was another story. He wanted nothing. Okay, I said, already hiking up, messenger bag pushed back, okay, palms open to show I wanted less. Once I got up he too held his hand out but to show me the treasures he’d been ahum over: three baby snails, shells that soft pukey color meaning in a second you could crush them.

  Oh, I said, a person out of practice in knowing how to handle brats. A person like me tends to be better at killing, such as ants one by one or any mite daring to go crazed over my sheets late at night. Never shabby with mice either. But I hadn’t seen my own nieces and nephews in maybe twenty years, that’s how certain wires had gone all disconnect. The lot of them probably grown now with babies of their own, mewling and hauled off to the dole line. Meanwhile here their uncle scraped by enough to keep a single drafty room with its rodents gone brassy.

  You gotta no tongue?

  Shouting into that smiling face because otherwise he wouldn’t understand and then I saw them, the couple who would not have marked my memory for a second otherwise. Guy with a big walrus moustache and little foreign beard, gut big as if he’d swallowed some walrus preggers and his lady with her pasty face and thick cheesy leggings the kind I’d pass by with no third thought on the train, awkward in her short potato-sack of a skirt, both of them in grays and whites like the sky they were about to disappear against.

  When I showed up, they were ahead of the boy on the rocks but my coming clinched the deal. They eyeballed me and then hightailed it quick over the plateau toward where Half End loses itself and becomes the endless city where I’d spent too long myself before deciding to come home.

  Let’s say the little lunkhead was seven but even so that foreign-cheeked head of his could have fit on your average fifteen-year-old in my family, we being freckled scrawny runts used to run this whole zone. Never mind—the boy started, blushed, choked. If he couldn’t talk, it was spiky clear to me he also didn’t want the cheese-potato types to disappear and leave him. Yet he acted as if someone had warned him he had to stay staked to his snail spot.

  Maybe I didn’t think straight. I was shot, true, had been planning to hit Goa’s for coffee after my menu run for hours but I’d pushed past my limit. So the moment was unplanned, which means I’d never creamed anything like it before. When kids used to get trashed in school, or later when we all got stuck inside bigger bodies, same boys now with hides gin-soaked and usually meaner and holding huger grudges, I’d never shown enough spleen to superhero it in to save someone, me the kind to stand by mouthing little bits of nothing like it will all come out in the wash. But who can explain what steals a person’s usual habits?

  His parents or those mousy types had fled and with such guilty looks it was clear this kid had nothing going for him.

  So when he didn’t speak I tried pulling his hand but he just looked at me like I was some freak landed into his world and when he didn’t budge I lifted him sideways like you would a bunch of wet wood. Weird how the boy went limp and didn’t fight. Course I did what I could to speed over rocks I knew well. Still, that pair of rascals knew their job. They’d already rounded all available corners and were gone. Way our dinosaur spine works, people can quickslip it into the city’s mole tunnels. During our own brat-time, we thought gremlins waited to steal kids to their side of the dinosaur rocks.

  Thing to do might have been call the police but then again that could nix anyone’s odds. So I stood roiled up inside, right thing to do, right thing to do, words meaning I lost any hope at truth, meanwhile trilling out patter to the boy more for my own cheer than his understanding. Sounds funny but those pale eyes stayed unstirred as the bottom of a shell, like the boy could be some sea creature who would understand if I could just tune the blur of sound coming out my lips.

  Ten minutes later I’m trying to explain some of this to Goa, my sugar-coffee fixer, boss of the corner kebab place where we had a real boardwalk before the river dried up. I knew Goa from a ways back, not my own kidship but after, when I’d been studley for my lady by doing finish-carpentry jobs in Half End, our place tarpaper because its curvy streets and the way people know what you endure over the course of a day mean you never really dream of leaving.

  So Goa stared through my eyeballs like I was last year’s fool while my little guy next to me got bigtime into savoring a chipped bowl of rice and egg soup Goa slopped out. For a boy his age, my little guy ate nicely without slurp, least if I remember my own puling nieces and nephews and their spattered bibs.

  Come on, no squirtlike behavior, Goa said, call police or they be on you like crabs. He wanted me to stay current with my debts, half his unibrow up like I could’ve forgotten the prior year’s incident, a small thing with someone’s car. Natural for me to think Goa’s joint was the first place to bring the kid but maybe I’d gone squirrelhead to think he’d show sympathy.

  You’re saying turn him in to Children’s Services? I was asking.

  The boy beamed.

  Goa was shouting: Fiend, not that, godsakes. They will make you bum official.

  What about—? but Goa’s look told me there’d be no luck with th
at, his breed of secrets too thick to dare the light.

  So should a person just forget someone somewhere?

  But I didn’t want to look that neck in the face. Something about the kid’s smile. Me as a kid, I’d go with any fellow willing to lop me over a shoulder. Once, a little joiner, I was bouncing in a plastic house filled with air, a big event we all cared for, the house visiting us once a year to lure shoppers into the chain market. The boys always so much bigger than I was and I’d let myself go, head flopping on soft plastic, lying lost, not trying to protect myself as they jumped with neon-colored shoes up and down next to my head, sight awhirligig. My own uncle stood outside because the bouncy-house bouncer wouldn’t let him in, shouting at me through mesh: What, boy? You not know how to protect yourself?

  Difference being that even if I didn’t choose protection, even if I was different in the head, I could always speak. I had already shouted twice in the boy’s face You a-deaf? but he just gave me his smile. The people who ran away could have been poor Russians or tired French, given the torn clothes, the guy with that shipbuilder build and his ratty thin girl partner in crime.

  All right then, I said, because what, stay in Goa’s forever? Goa had errands, never ask what they were, because to stay Goa’s friend, I’d found out better not blush or inquire.

  So here the boy and I are, walking home, meaning a place to lay a deadbeat body down on nights your coins get lonely in their clink. We’re walking past the Museum of Old Things, that eccentric lady with veined sausage legs and old rubber sandals who hides her fortune but keeps changing exhibits in her window. She and I on friendly terms because I did some odd-job plumbing and carpentry back when it was starting up, her whole place stinking of old socks and rotted timber, but she’d taken a shine to me, saying: You’re one of those original survivors, just like me. Here we were passing the old-sock museum and this boy could not be persuaded to budge from its picture window. First time he goes balky on me, I’m thumbing my nose but he goes goggle-eyed over the golden piano in the window, kind more for show and not played in two centuries, but he starts tugging at my hand.