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ISBN: 9781543907957
Table of Contents
Worrying and Considering
Charlotte
Ralph and Zain and Jackson
Lonely Island
Over It
The Great Divide
Outkicking the Coverage
Just Like That
BPM
Palms
Pine Street
Spruce Circle
A Second Stanza
Sinking
Baffled
Better
Not Guilty
Unfinished Story
Dark and Still
Dream Journal
Charlotte Hanson’s Day Off
The River Bank
Empty Houses
Saturday and Sunday Mornings
First Show
Same Road
Maybe, Young Squire
Borders
Preparations
Thanksgivings
Mixed Memories
Seester Talk
Leaving El Paso
Coming Back
Darkened Doors
Full Circle
Cloudbank Park
What Next
Listening
So Simple
Between Here and There
These Dreams Which Cannot Last
Escaping River Valley
Epilogue: Here and Now
1
Worrying and Considering
For a moment, he is unsure where he is. There is only darkness and what is left of the dream. There was a door, no, two. All of it so important and powerful just moments ago is fading now. The room and the choice, so boring but significant somehow, have left a residue like dew on grass. Even after the dream’s details have been stomped out by another dreadful day, he will feel a trace. He knows there will be an insistence that waking life is the unreal, truth is somewhere out there, unreachable back there in the dream. There was a choice that he can’t remember except for his own confusion about which door was the right door. If either of them was the right one.
Zain sits up and clicks on the lamp. Same old room, dirty clothes heaped in the corner, ceiling fan wobble spinning over his bed, crooked posters and Runner’s World magazine pages pinned to his walls. And his favorite part of the room, the art desk. He throws the covers off his legs. Drawing dreams is nothing new. He doesn’t remember it all, but he can save the doors. He sketches them out side-by-side, sheets of light spilling from the thin space at each of the doors’ bottoms. He jumps in his chair when the alarm starts beeping an hour after he woke. Zain gets up and clicks it off. He stands at his desk, looking over the strange and dull room, two doors, an overturned chair, the empty little couch.
His bedroom door opens behind him. “Clothes packed for after practice?” his mother asks, sleepy-eyed in Zain’s father’s pajama pants. Zain nods. “There’s bread in the pantry. Don’t be late,” she says, walking out, down the hall back to her room. He should have turned off the alarm. She’s probably mad it woke her.
He switches his sleep boxers for running shorts, and pulls on his shoes. He’s never late to practice. Zain thinks about the talk in the 5th grade about everything changing, about all the beginnings puberty will bring. What about the endings? Backyard camping with best friends, and clear skin, and morning forehead kisses. And all the rest. He looks at the picture on his desk, two boring doors. He slings his team bag over his shoulder, the feeling of unknowing at those two closed dream doors lingers as he shuts off the ceiling fan and closes his bedroom door.
As the group turns the last corner of the final 600 meter repeat of the day, Zain passes a struggling sophomore. There is no better feeling than gliding through the untouched grass of dawn, crushing the wet stillness, leaving the winded in his wake. The coaches have been pushing them hard before the first meet, seeing who will break. Not me, Zain thinks. The work he put in over the summer has proven its worth. He can take more pain. As he finishes, he is close to the front of the JV pack. Coach nods as he calls out his time, “Two oh one! Good, Thompson!” Of the six freshmen boys, Zain is the fastest. He’s not after a freshmen spot, though, or JV. His goal is varsity by the end of the season. “Thanks, coach.”
Jogging back to the locker room, Zain sticks to the back of the boys’ pack. He listens to them joking and laughing. He doesn’t know what to say, not that anyone talks to him anyway.
After a quick shower, he gets to the cafeteria with thirty minutes left until first bell. Just enough time to finish the Algebra homework he should’ve done last night, or this morning when he was busy drawing doors. No wonder he’s almost failing. Jackson is already in their spot, arms crossed over a perfectly pressed button down shirt, casting side eyes at the next table. A group of boys flick a piece of cafeteria hash brown back and forth like a paper football.
“Sorry,” Zain says, pulling his Algebra book and a crumpled sheet from his backpack. Jackson sighs at the mess of half-complete, none-correct work.
“Twenty five minutes is not enough time,” Jackson says.
“Come on, you can teach me some of it. I’m an excellent listener.”
“Obviously, that isn’t true,” Jackson says, looking over at the next table again.
“Who you looking at?” Zain asks.
“No one. Let’s start with what you do know.”
“Do you know those guys?” Zain asks.
Jackson glares a warning at Zain at the question. Named for Andrew Jackson, his mother’s attempt at helping her little mijo fit in in a too-white border town, and Manuel after a proud Mexican grandfather, who un-affectionately referred to Zain as guero both times they’d met, somehow Jackson’s name fits. Jackson Manuel Rodriguez owns his name’s contradiction with a confidence that Zain has admired (envied, really) since childhood.
“Why did you think this was right?” Jackson asks, pointing at the first answer on the paper.
“I don’t know,” Zain says.
Zain kept much of his own fear about starting high school to himself, not wanting to sound weak to his oldest, bravest friend. Walking in on the first day as just another invisible straight kid was easy. Easier than what Jackson must have looked forward to. Turns out Zain was worried for nothing. Jackson’s community theater ties meant being absorbed into a group as he walked through the doors on the first day. Jackson had eased into high school easily. And Zain had been left, yet again, realizing that no matter how much he worried there was always so much left he should have considered. Worried about finding a place, working hard every morning for the last two months to belong somewhere, Zain still hasn’t made a single friend on the team. Meanwhile, Jackson had a plan long before they started at River Valley High School. An unspoken plan that came with a whole group of people. And, after a month, Jackson wasn’t worried, just popular. And Zain, still worried.
A big, muscly black kid from the hash brown table glances over at Jackson. His friend takes the distraction as opportunity to flick the hash brown past, over the table’s edge. Zain looks at Jackson. He’s not looking at the other table, just shaking his head at Zain’s work.
By the bell, Zain has nodded through all of Jackson’s trinomial mini-lesson and picked up about half. He wonders if half-knowing a three part equation will be enough to pass the quiz. It’s a fraction that gives hi
m a headache. He packs up and heads out of the cafeteria. On the way out he glances back, suddenly concerned about the table of rowdy boys next to his slightly girly friend. Hopefully none of them start anything, not that there would be much his hundred and twenty pound self could do about it. Carried away by the departing tide of kids leaving the cafeteria, Zain trips, barely catching himself on the doorframe. A group of girls laugh around him. Smooth, he thinks. He glances back. All the boys are gone from the table but the one who was looking at Jackson. The muscly black guy gives Jackson a nod before hurling his backpack over a massive shoulder. Zain had been worried, but now that he thinks about it, the boy’s first look wasn’t confrontational, more curious. Maybe even friendly. Zain feels the familiar sting, the too late realization again. Like so many of his classmates had a manual that he wasn’t given.
First period Algebra is in a portable behind the main school building. To avoid the crowds, Zain takes the long way around the baseball field. He tries to recall the rules Jackson gave him for solving trinomials, but he keeps thinking about Jackson. The easygoing, confident look he’s had since transitioning into high school life, his best friend’s quick rise to popularity into the exclusive theatre clique. Zain walks alone, high stepping through the tall grass. From the main building he hears the tardy bell ring. Clutching the shoulder straps of his back pack, he jogs toward the portables. Damn it, he thinks. He was worrying again. And now he’s late.
2
Charlotte
If waking up late is the worst part of her day, she’ll be fine. But she seriously doubts this will be the case. After eleven and one seventh years in River Valley, misfortune is one thing that is inescapable in this town. Avoiding it is for the lucky, something Charlotte definitely isn’t. She’d only set the alarm to fool her parents into thinking she would actually be going to first period. And then it didn’t even go off. She checks her phone. 7:30 AM is listed as one of her alarms, but not activated. Not high enough to not set an alarm, but too high to turn it on. Her parents are gone now and pissed (probably), not that they woke her up.
What sucks is that she’ll be late to meet the one human sign the universe doesn’t totally hate her, Anthony. She pulls on the same ripped jeans she wore yesterday, replacing the Ramones shirt she slept in with a bra, looking for at least the 846th time since 8th grade for additional mass (no new growth), and a black hoodie. She looks at her typewriter, the same half page curving over its back that hung there last night and the night before. Ditching Pre-Cal to finish her story for creative writing would be better in the long run. Anthony’s dark eagle eyes flash through her mind. The long run is overrated. She shuts the bedroom door behind her.
She doesn’t need to unfold the note on the kitchen table to know what it says. Disappointed in your lack of initiative, a junior now, fortune favors the punctual, blahdity blah blech. At least her dad left some coffee in the pot. Charlotte fills her favorite silver travel mug, T.S. Eliot’s scraped face on the side, a bit incomplete, stares through her fingers. Charlotte screws on the mug’s top, crumpling up the unread note. She tosses it into the trash can on her way out.
The ARK, as it is known to partying weekend students (and ditching weekday students), lies on the side of an eventual dead end road. It is an abandoned, overgrown PARK AND SELL car lot that was shut down after the law against such places passed ten years prior. What remains is a cracked parking lot and a broken gate. The only letters still clinging to the open gate are an A, an R, and a K. Plans for a subdivision just past the lot fell through around the same time as the PARK AND SELL.
Charlotte’s first short story for her creative writing class of the year was set at the ARK. She used the setting as a metaphor for the hopelessness of teens stuck in River Valley. Her classmates were upset that she used the real name of one of their sanctuaries in her story, but Ms. Bridgford promised the class she had no desire to visit nor alert the authorities. Stopping Charlotte after class, she’d told her that she liked her work, the ARK was an excellent symbolic setting, even if the story didn’t ring as personal enough for such a familiar place.
Charlotte makes the usual ten minute drive to the ARK in eight minutes. It’s twenty minutes from here to school, eighteen if you have to speed to second period, which she’ll probably have to, again. Driving time to and from the ARK is something Charlotte knows all too well. She really does need to be better about attendance, she thinks. Five tardies add up to an absence. Ten absences in a semester means Saturday school or a possible loss of credit. Her parents stopped driving her to school, but their new insistence on self-reliance and independence might not continue if she misses too many classes. What if they sell Charlotte’s car (mom’s old Corolla), like they threatened after she tried to sneak in at dawn on the last night of summer? Last time, she thinks. For real this time.
When Charlotte pulls into the parking lot, her chest tightens. He is already there. Leaning against the hood of his black Challenger in a tight black t-shirt. After catching her breath, comes the guilt, same as all the other mornings. Not as much for missing class as for ditching to make out with the older guy with a cool car. It’s just so cliché, she thinks. The writer girl ditching to make out with the misunderstood musician. If only he wasn’t the most delicious cliché ever and she wasn’t so alone. Ugh. Even that adds to the cliché. Get a grip, Charlotte, she thinks. She parks her ten year old Corolla two spots away from his car, remembering the first night they met.
She didn’t want to go to the show, but Toni was so adamant. Last year, Charlotte was one of the editors of the yearbook and the school newspaper. Toni, the student life photo editor, dependable enough, but always more interested in being a part of any scene than photographing it. River Valley has very little live music and even fewer good local bands. Toni assured her the band they would be seeing was AMAZING and SO WORTH IT. Charlotte never missed a show her freshman year. Until she grew tired of too much shitty punk music cheered on by too many clueless tweens. Plus, the cops always walked through the back fence of whatever house they were at to break up the show early. Not much of a scene.
What really turned Charlotte off was every band’s lack of awareness. Every one mimicked favorite influences without building anything. Music, like anything worthwhile, should have history. But River Valley bands, even the ok ones, always seemed too content with imitation. Stealing from better artists might be vital, but none of River Valley’s bands’ imitation acts led to anything close to inspiration. That was the problem. River Valley bands were uninspired. But Toni insisted with that undeniable smile, unchanged since fourth grade, pleading and mischievous. Besides, it had been weeks since they’d hung out and it was the last week of summer after all. Charlotte changed into her newest jeans, trading her tank top for her favorite Clash t-shirt.
The show was at a big ranch house outside the city limits. The crowd stood in a back lot of freshly mowed field grass, between piles of goat shit, facing the back porch of a big ranch style house. She and Toni stood next to the sound table, Charlotte watching the techie adjust the dials and switches. It was much more advanced than any from last summer, when she’d pretty much stopped going to shows. The pimply technician gestured to the band. Toni poked Charlotte and nodded slyly at the stage. Charlotte found the bass player immediately, tight black shirt stretched taut over a sinewy frame, her breath catching in her throat. He was so obviously hot, dark hair spread over eagle blue eyes. But there was something else. He looked like New York, or Chicago, or Austin, or every other nameless elsewhere she’d so often pictured as her life after River Valley. He strummed and signaled to the sound table, concentrating intently on his instrument, unconcerned with crowd noise or goat shit stench. Unlike so many others she’d seen, going through pre-jam motions—smirking or nodding at friends in the crowd— this guy wasn’t playing band. He was the real deal.
Groups of teens and preteens filed in around the sides of the house. The crowd, huge by River Valley standards, a hundred people at least,
packed the front of the stage. Charlotte and Toni stayed back, arms crossed. When the sound check was over, the techie guy gave a thumbs up and the band disappeared into the house. The last one to leave the makeshift stage, the Adonis Bass Player gently set his bass on the stand. He scanned the crowd, his eyes pausing briefly on Charlotte.
When the band finally came back out to start the show, the crowd erupted. Toni was right. They were incredible. From the first chord, the band transported the crowd. Above the goat shit, above River Valley, and every near-forgotten expectation, with every chord, everyone there floated. Sweating and smiling, Charlotte and Toni jumped and danced through the fast songs, swayed through the slower. Every song a stone cold jam. Inspired and aware, the band improved on every band they evoked. The bass player looked at her exactly three times the whole set, a little smirk playing across his lips each time.
After the show, Charlotte waited a respectable distance from the stage, Toni leaving her, dragged (not so unwillingly) inside to take shots with some guys from another band. The band hadn’t reappeared onstage since their last song and Charlotte was wondering what she would do if and when they did reappear. She’d given up hope they would be back when Toni wrapped Charlotte’s neck in a soft hug, her breath smelling of whiskey and clove cigarettes. She giggled into Charlotte’s neck. “The return of Char!” Toni said, releasing Charlotte with a little push, a black shirt hanging around her arm. Aside from being a bit touchy for Charlotte’s taste, Toni was also too content with River Valley. Too okay with high school being the pinnacle life experience. Toni’s optimism, however, was not a bad quality for the high school paper or the yearbook. She balanced out Charlotte’s morose pieces about problems within the school and town with the cheery human interest, fluff pieces she occasionally wrote. Toni hadn’t missed a live music show in River Valley since their 8th grade year. And although Charlotte didn’t dislike Toni, not going to every show last year had made their times working together more bearable. “I’m not back, but they were good,” she said.
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