The Danger of Being Me

by Anthony J Fuchs

  I smiled despite myself. I followed Ethan out of the aisle, falling in beside him. "She's the main character in her own story, but she's just an ancillary player in yours."

  We crossed the bay of lockers and headed down the hall toward the main lobby. "She's also an ancillary player in Amber's story," I said. "That makes me nervous."

  Ethan actually laughed. He realized that it wasn't the prudent thing to do, and tried to stop, and that just made him laugh harder. "Does this Amber have a brain?"

  We passed the auditorium and reached the lobby, and I turned to him. He waited for an answer as we angled short of the entrance doors. "She seems to," I admitted.

  "Then don't fucking worry about what Gale says," he told me with a laugh just as Mrs. Kraven passed us. She cleared her throat, and looked at Ethan, and he had the courtesy to apologize. Then she was gone, and he grinned as we headed into the main stairwell. "What Gale fails to realize," he said as we started the ascent, "is that nobody cares about her opinion nearly so much as she does."

  I had to laugh at that. I clapped him on the shoulder with a grin of my own. "Thanks for that, man."

  "It's what I'm here for," he said, and he laughed.

  We reached the third floor landing, and Ethan pushed through the door.

  I followed him down the hallway behind the balconies. Before we made it to the set of four steps at the far end of the hall, the door to the roof swung open. Dr. Lombardi stepped inside as we reached the stairs, holding the door open as Ethan climbed the steps. He glanced to him, and they regarded one another, each of them nodding almost undetectably. Some understanding passed between them. Dr. Lombardi nodded to me as well, and I saw a flicker of surprise when he looked at me. I followed Ethan through the door, and Dr. Lombardi let it close behind us.

  We spilled out into the grey afternoon, and that sheet-metal sky pressed down on us. We crossed the roof to the rampart above the courtyard, and Ethan looked out over the industrial landscape as he told me, "Whenever I have a problem I can't solve, I come up here to think it out."

  I looked across the courtyard and the student parking lot beyond it, and the sprawl of Prophecy Creek beyond that. Even during the day, the view was extraordinary. Ethan said, "The answer usually comes to me."

  I laughed. "I don't believe for a second that there's ever been a problem you couldn't solve."

  Ethan glanced over his shoulder at me, flashed an impossibly knowing smile, shrugged. I took a step toward the rampart, watching half-a-dozen teenagers deftly trade a hacky-sack around their circle while a pair of kids tried to skateboard around the weedy brick island at the center of the concrete concourse between the stone staircases.

  I sighed. "Amber is destined for greatness."

  "No one's destined for anything," Ethan said shortly. He turned to look at me for a moment, then cracked a tiny smirk. "If she has the talent and the ambition, she will be great. But not because she's destined for it."

  "She's certainly got the talent," I told him. "And she's got the ambition."

  Ethan dragged off his cigarette. "She has a purpose."

  "She knows what she wants," I said. "What can I offer a girl like that?"

  Ethan laughed. "Shut up, you ridiculous prat." He shook his head, stepped back from the wall, dug the green box out of his pocket. I saw the word Herbala printed across the front. He flipped the box open, pulled out what looked like an ordinary cigarette, and removed a pack of matches. He set the cigarette between his lips, struck the match, touched the flame to the end of the cigarette. The tip flared, and he shook out the match.

  He turned, sat on the parapet with his back to the air. "You don't think she gets anything out of spending time with you because you don't know what you want?"

  I sighed. There was more to it than that. There always is. It was all in my head, and at least part of me understood that, but it was the same part that sometimes wondered if I wasn't just a butterfly dreaming it was a man.

  Ethan brushed his fingers through the greasy curls of his hair and smiled at me. "It may shock you to learn that some of the men and women who teach in this school still haven't decided what they want to do with their lives."

  I laughed, and watched one of the skateboarders execute a successful kickflip over the lower staircase. The kids in the hacky-sack circle applauded him, and I said, "I want to peer into the dark corners where others refuse to look. I want to find the truth inside the lies."

  Then I glanced to Ethan, and grinned. "But that doesn't exactly pay the rent or keep the lights on, does it?"

  "It is an uncommon person with the audacity to chase his own improbable ambitions." He looked at me, flashed a crooked smirk. The world isn't built for people like that. The machinery of the world operates on uniformity."

  I watched him. "You talk like you know some shit."

  "All I know is that I know nothing," he told me. Then he laughed. "Though my dad always says that a man who knows himself knows the only truth that matters."

  The phrase burned brightly in my mind for a moment. A bitter breeze sliced across the open grounds, and I looked down into the courtyard again, at that brick island at the center of the concrete concourse between the stone staircases. Nothing but weeds would ever grow there.

  Ethan dragged of the cigarette again, and breathed out the smoke as he said, "But the world also needs that unruly minority fearless enough to turn their backs on conformity and live in pursuit of their own given purposes."

  "No one is given a purpose," I said, shaking my head. "That's just a fantastic lie that we tell ourselves."

  Ethan considered. "If you think purpose is a lie," he said, "Then why do you look so hard for it?"

  I opened my mouth, but found nothing to say.

  He looked at me. "It's why you came to the newspaper. Why you ran for editor. Why you decided to write, shoot and edit a film for a high school midterm project."

  "A short film," I corrected him.

  "It's why you've been writing anonymous love poems to girls you don't even know."

  I felt my breath go out on that. Ethan saw it, but he didn't react. I stepped to the wall and sat down a few feet to his right. He turned to look at me through the smoke drifting off his cigarette. "You don't believe in purpose, but that hasn't stopped you from searching for it."

  I nodded reflexively, and Ethan nodded back. "I think that you're halfway there." I looked at him as he watched the smoke curl into the afternoon air. He answered my look anyway. "Purpose isn't something that someone else can give you. You're right about that much."

  He dragged, leaving the cigarette between his lips, then turned to me and grinned. "But halfway there is twice as far as the rest of these uncultured bloody miscreants."

  I grinned back. "What's the other half?"

  This time he shook his head, the cigarette waving back and forth but never coming loose. "Can't tell you. That would defeat the purpose."

  I laughed out loud, and gestured to the cigarette. "You know those things'll kill you."

  Ethan plucked the cigarette, looked at it. "Yeah?"

  "From what I hear," I said.

  "Good." He nodded, laughed, dragged deeply. "A man shouldn't live too long." Then he glanced out toward the front of the building. "Especially not someone like me."

  He shook his head, laughed at himself. "These are just herbal cigarettes." He smiled faintly at an inner memory, and said to no one, "these aren't going to kill me."

  The way he said it gave me pause, but then turned back to me, and the look of secret knowledge in his mahogany eyes made me shiver. "I guess I'm just destined," he told me, grinning, "to be someone else's tragedy."

  CHAPTER THREE

  1.

  On Thursday night, I twisted the steering wheel to the left.

  The Jeep Wagoneer rolled across two opposing lanes and over the lip of the driveway. I pulled into an open space between a silver 1980 Porsche 930 and a hunter-green 1997 Subaru Outback, shut down the engine, and climbed out of the SUV. I cro
ssed the asphalt to a short concrete staircase that ended at a pair of glass doors entirely blocked out with fliers.

  I yanked on the right hand door– it stuck, fought, then gave – and slipped into the repurposed warehouse. A haze of secondhand smoke hung low over two dozen billiard tables, each occupied by groups or couples. Michael Aday and Ellen Foley reminisced about a deep dark night when they were barely seventeen and barely dressed.

  I found no one I knew. I peered through the smoke before turning to find the night manager behind the counter. He was losing his hair, but what he had left he had pulled back into a grey ponytail. He watched me for a few seconds, then asked, "Something I can do for you?"

  "Yeah," I said, stepping toward the counter. "I'm – "

  "Michael."

  I turned to find Amber angling toward me, her caramel eyes sparkling through the haze. She wore a form-fitting t-shirt bearing the phrase FREE THE WEST MEMPHIS 3 in white block letters, a pair of faded American Eagle jeans, and a pair of three-inch daniblack Platinum Glitter heels. A sheer scarf held her gentle russet curls back in an unkempt ponytail that looked freshly washed and hastily bundled.

  Amber reached the counter, and I turned back to the night manager with a grin. "I'm looking for her."

  "Table 19," she told him. "In the Blacklight Room."

  The night manager nodded, turned to the ancient computer next to the register. Amber returned his nod, then started back across the room. I followed, keeping pace as her heels snapped against the worn carpet.

  "We've only been here for about twenty minutes," she said as we approached a door set into the far wall.

  Amber reached for the handle, and I felt my heartbeat quicken in my throat. I glanced to her, and felt suddenly, hopelessly, out of place. With her; with Prophecy Creek; with the entire human race. I felt unprepared to face her friends. Like some mutt sniffing up Amber's ass.

  I was suddenly sure that my screenplay could use another fine tuning before the shoot on Saturday. But then she glanced at me, and she flashed that soft smile of hers, beauteous and genuine and setting me to rights.

  She turned the doorknob, and we stepped into a dusky psychotropic chamber. Phosphorescent pinks and greens and yellows stood out against a psychedelic dreamscape, like something out of a Steven Lisberger movie.

  Amber pulled the door shut behind us. The words on her t-shirt flared under the lights, the French-tips of her manicured nails glowing hotly. My vision adjusted, and I followed Amber into the darkness, followed the swing of her hip and the gleaming metal studs of her belt.

  She led the way to a table marked with the numerals 19 in incandescent orange on its side. Five teenagers clustered around the billiard green.

  Amber pointed out a girl on a barstool and a guy standing between her knees with his hands on her waist. "Donovan Blake and Bellona Meyers," she said. Meyers gave me a short two-fingered wave.

  "The guy who's playing Cyrano on Saturday?" I asked.

  Amber nodded. "The very same."

  Blake nodded to me, flashing a bleached smile that glowed in the blacklight. Amber pointed toward a dark-haired girl with shockingly green eyes, and told me, "my cousin Erin." Erin smiled at me as Amber gestured to a girl and a guy stooped over a corner of the table, measuring a shot – "Lucas Archer, Caroline Davis."

  Then she told them, "everybody, this is – "

  "Michael Everett," I finished for her.

  "Nice to put a name to the face," Archer said. "You did a really nice job on that retrospective edition of the Student Spotlight in January." Then he jerked his cue stick, sending the luminescent white ball screaming across the felt and into the eight-ball. The cue ball slammed the black ball into the corner pocket with an authoritative snap. Archer stood as the girl at his side stepped around the table to find her own cue stick. He grinned as he said, "That's game."

  "That's twenty-three shots in a row," Erin said.

  "I'm telling you," Blake said. "He's juiced on Adderol."

  Archer shook his head. "Simple Euclidean geometry peppered with a dash of chaos theory."

  "We get it," Meyers said, "you're a fuckin mathlete."

  Amber laughed at that, and I had to grin at the sound. I couldn't help myself. I glanced to her as she retrieved her bottle of water, then looked to Archer as he watched me. Then I rounded the table toward a rack of cue-sticks.

  I looked over the assortment, and settled on a 56-inch graphite cue. I turned back to the table, spotted Amber. She smiled at me across the table, and I leaned back against the wall to Erin's left, like I'd never felt more at ease than with these few, these happy few, this band of strangers.

  I watched as Amber collected the billiard balls from the undercarriage, stacking them back in the rack. She glanced up at me, caught me staring, and asked, "you know how to play Cutthroat?" I shook my head as she centered the rack.

  Archer passed me, grabbed a bottle of soda off a table. "No problem; easy game," he assured me, taking a drink. "You'll pick it up." He stepped to the corner of the table and found Davis, slipping his fingers into her jeans pocket as she passed off her cue stick. "I'm sitting out this game."

  Davis pressed herself against Archer, laying her lips on his neck, then crossed to a chair against the wall. "You want in?" she asked Erin, and the shorter girl stood to take the free cue stick. Amber rounded the table again to find me, handing off the cue back to Blake as he stepped to the narrow end opposite the triangle of billiard balls.

  "Three teams, for three sets of five balls," she told me, and Blake rocketed the cue ball to break the rack with a rapid-fire crash. "Lows, middles, and highs," she said as the nine-ball tipped off the rail and into the corner pocket. "Donnie and Bell are not middles." Meyers climbed down from her barstool and surveyed the table.

  After a moment, she lined up a side-pocket shot and missed. The three-ball chipped into the rail, caromed across the felt, chain-reacting across the table. I saw Archer's eyes following the erratic butterfly effect.

  The chaotic ballet finally came to rest, and Amber scrutinized the plays. "The idea is to sink the ten balls that aren't ours – " she paused just long enough to snap the cue ball into the fourteen-ball for a clean side-pocket shot " – before anyone else can sink the five that are." She stood then, and grinned at me. "Have at it, Mr. Everett."

  "Simple," I said with a grin of my own as I felt my heartbeat quicken again inside my throat.

  I looked over the table, found a shot down the long rail, lined up. I blinked stale smoke out of my eyes, bent low over the felt. I drew back the 56-inch graphite cue stick, refusing to think too precisely on the event. Better to act than to think.

  The tip of the cue struck low of center. The white ball drew away in slow-motion. The blue chalk mark arced end over end as the ball rifled along the rail, slapping into the six-ball and driving it into the corner pocket. The cue stopped on impact, spinning on its own axis. I glanced up to find Amber, but saw Archer first, still watching the cue.

  "That makes us low set," Amber said, her caramel eyes glittering through the dimness. I stood back from the table, gave her room to find her move. She settled on a rebound shot off the narrow rail and missed, turning the table over to Erin and Archer.

  Amber settled back into the plush chair next to Davis, and I saw her heels flashing in reaction to the blacklight, the platinum glitter blazing like solar flares. I crossed to the chair, settling onto one wilting arm, propping myself up with my pool cue. "Those are the cutest damn shoes," I told her. Archer knocked our five-ball into a side pocket. "They're kinda like slippers masquerading as heels."

  She flicked the toe of one heel, looking at them like she'd never paid them much attention. "Yeah," she smiled. "They're the only pair of comfortable heels I own."

  I heard another laugh, and turned to see Blake looking over the table at me. "You're just about as gay as a straight man can be, there, aren't you?"

  The air around me stiffened, and I felt that scarlet flush creep out of my collar. Then Blak
e laughed. "That's what I call a joke," he said, smiling. "I'm apt to make a few more before the night's out."

  I laughed as Erin said, "Blake project his own inclinations onto others."

  "Oh no," Meyers insisted. "This is a fine specimen of the North Atlantic bushman. And besides," she added as Erin lined up and sank the twelve-ball. "I don't leave him enough energy to go experimenting."

  "I think I just learned more about the two of you then I really wanted to know," Davis said, coughing out a laugh.

  "Didn't mean to offend your finer sensibilities," Meyers said sweetly. Then she added, "But we fuck. A lot."

  Archer nicked the cue, rattling the stick in his hand. The ball spiraled awry and wound up in the side-pocket. He looked up to Meyers, blinked at her, then turned to Blake, who nodded with a broad grin. Archer looked to each of us before turning back to Meyers.

  "Sorry," she said, smiling sweetly. "Did I distract you?"

  Amber and I took the first round of Cutthroat.

  Then we restructured teams, with Meyers and Erin claiming the second round. The thirteen-ball had barely finished rattling around its corner pocket when Erin rounded the table, handed her cue stick off to Blake and announced that she needed to get some fresh air.

  "I need a drink," Amber said, collecting her empty water bottle. She looked to me, asked, "you want anything?"

  "I think I do," I nodded.

  Amber's smile flashed in the light. She turned to the group. "Anybody else?"

  "A fresh Sprite?" Archer called from across the table.

  I answered: "Got it."

  Amber made for the door. I followed by half-a-step as Archer said, "Anyone in for a round of nine-ball?"

  "Shotgun rules?" Blake asked.

  "Is there any other way?" Meyers scoffed.

  Davis, Blake, Archer and Meyers paired off into their original couples. Amber pushed through the door, and we slipped back out onto the main floor again.