Jack Kerouac is Dead to Me

by Gae Polisner

  “No, no. It’s okay.” There’s a shuffle of things: you sitting up, your bed squeaking. “Okay, tell me. Right this minute? Tell me everything.” Your voice is solid now. You sound excited. I switch the camera on and you’re there, smiling. “Is the cocoon thing opening?”

  “No, not yet. And it’s not a cocoon, Aubs. That’s what moths make. It’s a chrysalis. And it’s not open, but it’s turned totally clear and it’s shaking.”

  “Wow, that’s so cool.” You yawn. “How long will it take?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, honestly. “I’m not sure. It could be five minutes. It could be all night.”

  “It’s okay. Butterfly babies. We should see that together. I’ll stay on,” you say.

  LATE MAY

  TENTH GRADE

  Max returns with a six-pack, and hands one to me.

  “Secret stash,” he says. “He’s too lazy to look for it. It may be warm, but it’s way better stuff.” I turn the label toward me.

  “Max…” I don’t really drink much, and he knows it.

  “What? Come on. It’s no big deal. Live a little. We’re celebrating.” He tips his bottle to his lips and chugs.

  “Celebrating what?” The night with Ethan flashes through my mind, the feeling of free-floating, a moth on a carnival ride. I want to be that moth again, instead of the kid strapped in tight, watching, and waiting. I press the bottle to my lips and drink.

  “Us. California. The possibilities,” Max says. “You being here. Whatever you want.”

  I swallow sip after sip, my mind spiraling to Ethan. But I force him away. That’s a blip. Ancient history. Nothing.

  I’m here with Max. And Max is everything.

  “Well, look at you,” he says, and holds his bottle to mine. I clink it and drink. He polishes his first bottle off before I’m a third through mine, returns it to the empty slot in the carton, and pulls out another and uncaps it. “Salut,” he says, downing that one.

  A few more sips and I’m feeling warm and fuzzy inside, and I don’t exactly hate it. So I drink some more, enjoying the feel of my cheeks flushing, and the swirling rush that goes to my head.

  My eyes scan the room.

  “Who’s that?” I point to a poster on the far wall, a black-and-white photo of a black guy with an Afro, a pale purple waft of smoke curling from his mouth. Beneath the poster there’s a guitar on a stand, and I suddenly remember Max told me he plays.

  I finish the bottle, and lie back on Max’s bed. From beneath me, the musky, strong smell of Max wafts up like that smoky curl.

  “Hendrix, you mean?” He takes my empty away, and hands me another. I sit up and take a few sips before lying down again.

  I close my eyes and imagine him crawling on top of me, pinning my hands over my head, his lips moving down my bare skin as I arch against him. Ethan … I snap my eyes open.

  “Only the greatest guitarist to ever live,” Max says. “Please tell me you know who Hendrix is.”

  “Oh, yeah, him. Hendrix. Right.” My words are distant. I feel loose and giddy. I suddenly can’t stop smiling.

  “Hey, Max, play something for me,” I say. “I want to hear you.”

  “No can do.”

  “Please.” He shakes his head. “I’ll make you a deal,” I say. I sit up, and locate the bottle, waving it toward him. “I’ll finish this, if you play a song for me.”

  “And what else after that?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “We’ll see?”

  “Fine. Deal. I’ll take those chances,” he says.

  He carries the guitar over and sits back on the edge of the chair. He plays a couple of tunes that I don’t know but love, and I close my eyes, letting his voice circle around me, like the butterflies, seeping through me, all warm and raspy and mellow.

  The music stops. I open my eyes.

  “Pay up, Jailbait,” he says.

  JULY

  BEFORE FIFTH GRADE

  THE NEXT DAY

  I awaken at 5:00 a.m. to all my lights on, and you snoring loudly on my phone. We both fell asleep. My battery is almost dead.

  My eyes dart to the bowl and I panic. It’s not empty, though. Instead, a short, ugly moth-looking thing has broken free of the chrysalis, and hangs there, wet and stubby, not looking much like a creature I’d want to hatch at all.

  Maybe they are cocoons and not chrysalises.

  Alarmed, I hang up, shut my door gently against the early morning quiet of the house, open YouTube, and type in: “Butterfly emerging from chrysalis,” then open the first one I come to: “Swallowtail Emerging: Two Minute Time Lapse.” It’s from the US Fish and Wildlife Foundation, so it should be reliable.

  I find my charger and plug in, and watch in amazement as a gross, stubby-winged thing just like the one in my bowl breaks free of its cellophane casing while dramatic music plays. I turn up the volume a little.

  “Right after emerging,” the woman’s voice explains, “the butterfly’s abdomen is large and filled with fluid. At first its wings are very small. Over the next several hours, the butterfly pumps fluid from its abdomen into its wings, causing them to inflate.”

  I watch, sleepy and mesmerized, as the butterfly’s abdomen grows smaller, and the full span of its beautiful wings fills the screen.

  Later that morning, I walk carefully from my room with the bowl, and set it on the table in our backyard, watching and waiting, all by myself, as the butterfly finally takes off and flies away.

  LATE MAY

  TENTH GRADE

  Max unzips his jeans and steers my hand inside. I don’t stop him; I help. I want to. I move my fingers down, run them over the surface of his underwear.

  “Jesus, Jailbait—” he whispers, as I slip them under the waistband and in.

  My fingers touch skin. Max, warm and hard in my hand.

  “Don’t stop, please,” he says.

  I don’t let myself think, just wrap my fingers and move my hand up and down the way I hope I’m supposed to. He’s sweaty, and my hand sticks, and I don’t have much room to maneuver. He grows thicker and harder and moves more enthusiastically, bumping my hand against the fly of his jeans. It all feels sort of alien. Not bad, just weird, but nice, too, the way he rocks and moans in rhythm with my hand. As if I’m directing him—conducting him. As if I’m helping him to float away, from his dad and this shithole house, from all the people who don’t understand him. He moves faster and faster, and moans some more, and almost as soon as I started, it’s done. He grows soft again, and my hand is gooey and warm.

  He rolls onto his side, propped on an elbow, and smiles at me.

  I’m not sure what to do or say, but he gets up right away, anyway, so I don’t have to worry. He pulls off his T-shirt and tosses it at me. “Here, you can use that. I’m gonna wash up and take a leak,” and he disappears into the bathroom.

  I lie back on his pillow, my head spinning, and for one split second I think how crazy it will be when I get home and tell Aubrey everything. But that’s wrong; that won’t happen. She and I are barely friends anymore.

  And suddenly I feel like I’m going to cry and I don’t know why. Maybe because it hits me that we’re really not friends anymore. Forget barely. Not at all. And what I wish most in this moment is that I could have her back, the old Aubrey, the one who ran through sprinklers with me, the one who played House and lugged Mary Lennox up on her canopied bed, sharing her deepest, darkest secrets with me. The one who fell into fits of conspiratorial laughter when we caught Ethan looking at porn on his computer. The one I could talk to, who wasn’t so different from me.

  Lying here in Max’s bedroom, I want to feel good about how I’m finally doing in real life all those things Aubrey and I only imagined back then, pretending on hands and dolls, in hopes that one day we’d actually know what we were doing. I miss that Aubrey, the one who would have wanted to know everything about how he felt, and sounded, how it smelled. The one who would have made me spill every lurid detail.

  The
toilet flushes down the hall.

  “You ready?” Max says, walking in and holding out a hand to me.

  “Ready for what?”

  “Come on, I’ll show you. The Kawasaki. My other shiny, new baby that’s going to take me all the way to California.”

  He picks me up and tosses me up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, spanking my butt and sending me into a fit of still-tipsy giggles, even as I fight the rush of alcohol that lurches up from my stomach into my throat.

  * * *

  When he puts me down, we’re in the garage and I’m standing in front of a large, gleaming motorcycle, black and cobalt blue, way sturdier and more intimidating than the beaten-up dirt bike he rides to and from school.

  “It’s the same exact color as a Blue Morpho butterfly!” I say, sounding a little more excited than I should.

  “That’s what we’ll call her,” he proclaims proudly. “Blue Morpho. All good bikes have a name.” He sits on her and pats the seat behind him. “Hop on. See how she feels. Soon she’ll have the power to take me from New York to California in less than a week.”

  “Us,” I say, awkwardly straddling the seat. It’s wider than the dirt bike’s, and harder for me to get comfortable on.

  He twists around to look at me. “Are you serious?”

  And maybe it’s the beer talking, or that I’m taking Blue Morpho as some sort of big, significant sign, but I meet his gaze and say, “Yes. Completely serious. I have the money, Max. I mean, I think I do. Could. And if I do, you can have it.” I lean my cheek to his back, wrapping my arms around his waist, pretending we’re in motion. I’m safe here with him. I’m happy. He is everything I’ve waited for. “I want you to have it, Max. All of it. Whatever you need to fix her up. Plus, gas and the other stuff. I want to go to California with you.”

  He shakes me off and climbs off the bike, stands facing me, hands gripped to my shoulders. His eyes are alive with possibility.

  “Are you sure, Jailbait? Really?”

  I nod. “Yes. I think so. If the money is still there, it’s yours.”

  LATE MAY

  TENTH GRADE

  If I’m taking Blue Morpho as a sign, I should also take it as a sign that the first Glasswing is dead when I walk in my room. But I don’t. It crushes me, but I read nothing into it, just stare at its lifeless body at the bottom of the habitat.

  I don’t have time for that right now. I have a small window of opportunity. Mom’s not home, and the note on the counter says: At dinner with Nana. Call if you want us to bring you something. Plus, I’m still slightly buzzed, which emboldens me. I lift the lifeless creature from the habitat and hold it in my palm.

  With my eyes closed, it’s weightless. I can’t even tell that it’s there.

  * * *

  It’s been months since I’ve been in Mom’s room, months since I’ve done anything but stand wistfully at her door watching her sleep, or cry, or zone out, or talk to people who aren’t there. Like everything else in my life lately, the room feels only vaguely familiar, a set design from some play I once saw.

  I sit on the bed, trying to rationalize what I’m about to do. It’s not all that hard, actually. If Dad gave a crap about me, I tell myself, he would have come home months ago. And if my mother cared, she’d snap out of it, pull her shit together. Try harder. Try at all.

  The duvet cover is new, expensive-looking cream-colored silk with brown and gold embroidered flowers. I run my hand across it. Leave it to my mother to dine out and shop between crying jags. And this—it feels strangely fussy and old-ladyish. Not like my mother at all. Maybe Nana picked it out. I prefer the old, loud green-and-violet paisley one that, despite a trip or two to the dry cleaners, had still smelled faintly of my father.

  I lie back and try to recall the scent, a mix of his cucumber soap and his spicy, musky aftershave, remembering how the smell would engulf me when I’d hide under their comforter at bedtime, hoping to stay snuggled a few minutes more.

  Tears well in my eyes. But there’s no time for this. I propel myself up, a swell of beer rising in my throat, and walk to the big oak dresser with all the drawers, the top row merely decorative ones that used to fool me into tugging on them before I’d remember they wouldn’t open.

  I run my fingers across the old photographs spread across the top, and Mom’s collection of perfume bottles clustered on an antique silver tray. Some of the bottles, clear glass etched with diamonds and starbursts, others muted shades of oranges and blues, with either those old-fashioned atomizer spritzers attached, or glass stoppers. I pick up my favorite, the periwinkle one with a stopper shaped like the top of the Taj Majal, as if a genie might be secretly captured inside.

  The bottles belonged to Dad’s grandmother, who died before I was born. As a child, I used to love lining them up across the bedroom rug from big to small, from favorite to least, all the while Mom reminding me to be careful, not to stray from the carpet with them, lest they fall and shatter into a million irreplaceable pieces.

  Staring at my old favorite, I realize it’s lost its magic. I don’t know what I saw in them at all.

  Next to the tray of bottles sits a framed photograph of Mom and Dad I snapped right before they left for the Rainbow Room that night. It’s shocking how different Mom looked less than two years ago. Her face was rounder, her eyes focused and bright. Don’t get me wrong, she’s still beautiful, but now her face is thinner, her eyes sunken, her gaze distant and dull.

  I put the photograph back and open drawers one by one. They’re stuffed to the brim with sweaters and jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts, things I rarely see her wear anymore. I slide my hand around each drawer, under the piles and between the folds, hoping for my fingers to touch metal.

  I come up empty, so I return to Mom’s side of the bed and search her nightstand, but those drawers hold nothing of consequence either, just old greeting cards, books, and pens.

  I lie back, and stare sideways at her nightstand, at the small stack of books there, too. A slim white volume called On Anarchy; a pastel-green novel called Gilead; a book on Buddhism I’ve seen her carrying around, with a photo of meditating monks on the cover. And, last but not least, a red-and-white paperback of On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

  I pick up the Kerouac book and rifle through it. This isn’t the one she was reading a few weeks ago; this says The Original Scroll under the title. I remember Nana talking about this, how Kerouac had written the book quickly, no editing, on pieces of tracing paper that he taped together into one long single-spaced scroll.

  “Imagine the talent!” Nana had exclaimed.

  “No, I don’t!” I say aloud, and shove the book back, wishing an already-dead author I never met would die all over again.

  I walk to the far side of the bed and rummage Dad’s night table drawers. There’s all sorts of junk in there, too, but nothing resembling the pink metal boxes, so I head to Mom’s closet, which is more like a small walk-in dressing room and leads to the master bathroom.

  The rods on each side are draped with her silk kimonos. There must be at least twenty in their various Crayola colors, dangling with tassels and ties. Some have belts, others, frog closures of braided rope. She prefers the light skimpy ones that look like lingerie, and flutter against her like a breeze when she moves.

  I walk through, arms out, letting the cool fabric slip across my skin, the smell of her, some exotic flower, washing over me.

  One of my favorites—blush-pink with dark magenta cherry blossoms embroidered down the front and around the hem—slides from its hanger, so I wrap it around me, and sit at her vanity, staring at my face in the mirror.

  My hair is a mess. I gather it in my fingers and braid it loosely down the back. I don’t wear much makeup, just eyeliner, the remnants of this morning’s now faded brown smudges around my lids. And my freckles, invisible in winter, have begun to dot my cheeks, where they’ll come in full force with my tan in summer.

  “I like your freckles, Jailbait.” I squint, and try to see my
self the way Max seems to, sexy and sophisticated like my mother. But all I see is a girl, plain, and simple, and boring, right out of some Norman Rockwell poster. The one with the girl in braids, looking at her reflection in a mirror.

  I pull the braid apart, drop my head forward and let my hair fall in front of me, shake it around, and whip my head up, letting it spill wild and full around my face. I pout my lips and put on one of Mom’s bright red lipsticks, exaggerating the curves, then find a charcoal eye pencil, and draw myself thick, dramatic lines.

  There. Better. I look more like how I feel.

  I smile, and think of Max, the sound of him moaning as he moved in my hand. The slick stickiness of him covering my fingers after.

  I slip my hands down between my thighs, thinking of how it will feel to have him touch me there, pretending I’m him until I lose myself, my breath fast, then sit, finally, quiet and still.

  “There,” I say aloud to my face in the mirror. “Better. Now, we have work to do, JL. Money to find. A trip to take with Max Gordon.”

  I slide open drawer after drawer, wading through miscellaneous pill bottles and old makeup cases and containers, costume jewelry and sparkly hair combs, blow-dryer attachments and brushes, my mother’s flat iron, but don’t find anything but junk on the left side, or the first two drawers on the right. But in the third drawer down, I feel it immediately, tap my fingernail to metal.

  Even without looking, I know.

  I pull the box out, and open its dull pink lid, lips dry, blood rushing in my ears. It’s just like I remembered: Where index cards might be, a thick roll of hundred-dollar bills.

  I slam it closed, slide it to the back of the drawer, and shut that, making sure everything is exactly how I left it.

  I turn off the vanity light, needing to think. Sleep on it. If I take it, there’s no turning back.

  In the bathroom, heart racing, I pee. Only as I flush do I notice Dad’s robe on the hook on the back of the door. The pale blue terry-cloth one he wore every morning down to breakfast. I don’t know why it surprises me there. I guess I thought he would have taken it with him.