Axis of Aaron

by Johnny B. Truant

  Aimee reached, picked up the sketchpad, and showed it to Ebon. He saw himself from the shoulders up. She hadn’t sketched his Game Boy, but the likeness was still remarkable. Ebon hadn’t even realized she’d been scoping him, but the thought left him with a desperate sort of hope.

  “What do you think of this?”

  It was remarkable.

  “It’s okay, I guess.”

  Aimee turned the sketch pad to look at it. “Sure. I’m still playing with media. I don’t know which medium I like best. My mom was into a lot, like me. She couldn’t sit still — ”

  “Like you,” Ebon interrupted.

  “ — And it’s like she just kind of did a little of all media. What’s your favorite medium?”

  Ebon was finding Aimee’s overuse of the word “medium” pretentious. Most people would just say “style” or “kind of art” or something pedestrian, but not Aimee. No. She was an artist. She worked in various media.

  “Dunno.”

  “You must have a favorite medium,” she said.

  “I don’t know. Paint?”

  Aimee rolled her eyes. “What kind of paint? Watercolors? Acrylic? Oil? Pastel? Fresco, enamel, tempera, gouache, even spray paint?” Ebon got the impression she was reading an encyclopedia entry rather than actually listing styles (sorry: media).

  Ebon returned to his Game Boy, annoyed. Getting Raiden’s tricks to work was different on Aimee’s couch than in the arcade. He kept teleporting when he meant to shoot lightning. Unseen, Aimee prattled on.

  “I could see myself being a sculptor. But not with clay. I feel like I’m done with clay. I’ve done all I can with it. I mean, not that I’ve literally done all I can, but I feel like I’ve reached the end of my own artistic interest. I just don’t feel it anymore, you know?” There was no pause. As usual, Ebon wasn’t actually supposed to respond. “I’m thinking of maybe, like, welding steel and stuff. I asked my dad about it, but he said he’s not going to let me use a blowtorch. But I figure when I turn eighteen, some of my trust will probably unlock and I can probably, like, lease a space in town and do it there. He can’t stop me, right? I’ll be eighteen. Not that I even know that I’ll like it, but I kind of like the idea of it, you know? Like, the look? Like in Flashdance. It’s just kind of a badass chick thing to do. Being a welder. Don’t you think I’d make a good welder chick?”

  Ebon didn’t look up. “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Dad said my mom tried it for a while. He hated it. Kept being afraid she’d burn the house down — not this one; the old house. The big one I showed you? He said she was always coming in from the garage with burns on her arms, and when he asked about it she’d laugh it off and say, ‘Oh, it’s nothing.’ And he’d get all mad.” She laughed.

  “So he’s been cool?” Ebon amended: “I mean, he was over the winter or whatever?” He knew perfectly well that Richard hadn’t been cool in the near present — at least not throughout the summer, when Ebon had visited. Then again, that might be because of Ebon. Richard seemed to think that Ebon had been after his daughter from the moment he’d met her. The way he spoke to Ebon (When he did speak to Ebon; often he just stalked around in angry judgment), it sounded like Richard thought Ebon had already had sex with Aimee all over the island. It was unfair. Ebon hadn’t done more than kiss her. If he was going to get the cold shoulder and angry stares, then at least he should be permitted the sex to go with it.

  “Oh, you know how he is.” Aimee waved a dismissive hand. She was wearing a light-blue tank top with (Ebon felt sure) no bra underneath. She hadn’t grown particularly large breasts, but Ebon still watched a delightful handful jiggle with the wave, hopefully without being obvious. “He can be such a dick, but he’s okay deep down.”

  Ebon thought about the many times Aimee had said — both with her words and with her manner — the exact opposite.

  “He’s been … ” she paused, seeming to sidestep; They both knew her father was an alcoholic, but neither liked to say it out loud, “ … better.” “There are … well, I guess there are meetings, you know, and he’s been going to them … ” She blushed, then rushed on. “Well, anyway, over the winter, it was kind of nice. We had a lot of good talks.”

  Ebon knew this part of the story. In bits and pieces over their three summers and via letters in the seasons in between, Ebon had cobbled together his own picture of Frey life. With her older brother moved out (due to sometimes-violent father-son arguments, Ebon intuited), Aimee and Richard were more like a codependent couple than father and daughter. They fought often; sometimes they had days’-long spells of angry quiet between them; frequently they patched the holes with marathon conversations like the closest of friends. Their relationship seemed complex, but Ebon felt sure that Aimee and her father loved each other while she hated him, and he feared for and distrusted her. Richard was sure he needed to control her; she was sure she needed to fly free. He was sure she was screwing around. She was, but ironically cause and effect seemed to be flipped, with Aimee acting out because her father was overbearing rather than in spite of it.

  “Oh yeah?” Ebon put down his game, sensing that now was the time to listen, even if he didn’t particularly care about the answers. “About what?”

  “Just stuff. Mom, Grandma, Grandpa. On both sides; you know. But a lot about Mom. Sometimes he cries.”

  Ebon looked away.

  “He’s not as tough as he tries to be,” she said matter-of-factly, seemingly oblivious to Ebon’s embarrassment. “But he’s also way smart. It’s where I get it — like in school I mean. Like, you probably just think math is math, right?”

  Ebon didn’t think about math at all. He nodded.

  “The way Dad talks, it’s like a language. Math describes the world. It’s the only thing that’s totally universal. Like, if we ran into aliens one day, they wouldn’t speak English or French or anything. But they’d speak math.”

  “How do you speak math?”

  Aimee shrugged. “I don’t know. You seriously don’t have a favorite painting medium?”

  As usual, Ebon felt blindsided. Her letters were the same way, veering into strange turns without advance warning. She seemed to have no censor; she simply said what was on her mind at any given moment. In the middle of writing about her latest sexual discovery or misadventure, she’d detour into fireworks at the pier. In spite of the confusion, Aimee’s way of speaking and writing had grown on Ebon. He found the quiet, linear girls at home too boring. The crazy ones always intrigued him.

  “Not really.”

  “I think I like watercolors. Like Monet. You like Monet?”

  Ebon thought about making a joke confusing Monet with money. Dumb jokes were the only way he’d found that could derail Aimee and steal the spotlight for himself, but it was a wafer-thin joke. He shrugged, indicating general disinterest about Monet, who, from context, was probably a painter.

  “I do. Problem with watercolors is they’re hard to control. They kind of bleed into one another. I like colors to stay where I put them, and stay vibrant. So maybe not watercolors. Or!” She did a little jump on the couch. “Flowers. You know? That’s a great medium.”

  “Flowers aren’t a medium,” Ebon said. He had no opinion, but wanted to throw the word medium back at her once so she’d know he wasn’t a total idiot.

  “Are you kidding? They’re so a medium.”

  “They’re just plants.”

  Aimee snorted. “If they were just plants then the blending of colors wouldn’t matter, and neither would the container. But both do.” She rolled her eyes. “Really, you think you’re civilized, but Chinese people from thousands of years ago know more about this stuff than you. Did you know they were the first people ever to put water in a container of cut flowers?”

  Ebon said nothing. He didn’t see how putting water in a vase was so amazing. Or rather, he couldn’t believe everyone before the ancient Chinese had been so dumb as to leave it out.

  “No, of course you didn’t,” said Aimee. “But
they worked with flowers as an art, you know? Like my grandparents did back when they had their flower shop on the island. Artists understand what you don’t. Flowers are a medium. You’ve got to think about symmetrical and asymmetrical balance, color, all the same things you’d manage with any art form.”

  Aimee finished with a lull. Ebon gathered that he was supposed to feel corrected and duly chastised. He looked back down at his Game Boy, wondering how much time had to pass before he could turn it back on and start playing.

  “We should do something,” she said.

  Ebon looked up. “We are doing something.”

  “Something more fun than sitting on the couch. Do you want to go for a walk or something?”

  “Eh.”

  “I’m bored sitting around. Do you want to go into town and hang out?”

  “We’re hanging out here.”

  “With my friends.”

  Ebon tried to hide his disinterest. Aimee had a few year-round Aaron friends, but they were homebodies. Her more outgoing friends were, like Ebon, summer people. In Ebon’s mind, that made them too raucous, with stereotypical teenager interests. They liked to drink and be loud. Ebon had never liked either. Aimee’s friends were okay, he supposed, but he agreed to waste his time with them as seldom as possible. He couldn’t really tell Aimee his reason: Whenever they hung out with the others, his share of her attention was suddenly too small. He preferred having her full focus. And even that was, of late, tinged with a feeling of comfort and warm pleasure, like a blanket in winter. And there was something else too: a feeling of longing hope. A feeling that what they had — whatever it was — might go on forever if they stayed together, holding tight, refusing to let time fade into summer’s end.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Ebon.

  “Maybe we could go down to the lighthouse. Someone busted the lock a while ago, did you know that? It’s still hanging up there, but if you look close you’ll see that it comes right open.”

  “What’s inside?”

  “Staircase. Some controls of some kind. I imagine there’s a big lightbulb up there somewhere.”

  “That’s a long walk to see some stairs.”

  Aimee threw a couch pillow at Ebon. It struck him, then rebounded and hit the side of the coffee table before landing on the floor. Ebon held his breath; there was a full glass of Pepsi inches from where the pillow had hit. If it had spilled, Aimee’s father would have a fit.

  “What, are your legs broken?” she said, completely ignoring the pillow/Pepsi near miss. “What’s that your grandma always says?”

  Ebon rolled his eyes. Aimee liked Ebon’s grandparents a lot, but in the way she liked stuffed animals. She thought they were cute and quaint, and thought Ebon was cute and quaint, by extension, for having them. He didn’t really want to seem cute this summer, especially to Aimee. Or rather, he wanted to seem a different kind of cute. The kind that didn’t involve having cuddly grandparents who said amusing and folksy things to their itty-bitty button of a grandson.

  “‘Find a way to play, every single day,’” Aimee quoted.

  Ebon rolled his eyes harder, trying to get his irises all the way up into the tops of his sockets.

  “Most of the summer’s over, and you want to play video games,” she said. “It’s not like we have a lot of time left. Soon I won’t have you around anymore, and I’ll be bored all the time.”

  That grabbed Ebon’s attention. He looked up. He knew perfectly well how much of the summer was gone and how much was left, but it was Aimee’s mention of him not being around anymore that struck a chord inside. Based on the past two years’ worth of letters, Aimee got restless when Aaron was empty, and when she got restless she almost turned into someone else — someone Ebon didn’t want her to become for a reason he didn’t quite understand. Her exploits, as detailed in those letters, had slowly grown in heat, as if she’d been teasing, building him up for something. She’d even alluded, a time or two, that when he arrived she’d need to “show him what she’d learned.” But of course nothing had happened, because Summertime Aimee was someone else. Summertime Aimee was sweet and innocent — almost like she existed in a time capsule that only Ebon could open, suspended during the spring, fall, and winter, waiting like a stored doll to be played with. Off-Season Aimee, by contrast, was a typical teen girl. She rattled around the house, fighting with her father, and found boys to move her mind away from her problems. It made Ebon’s heart ache. He wanted to be here, always. He wanted her for himself, in the form he’d always known, rather than allowing the Miss Hyde of her letters to supplant her familiar Dr. Jekyll.

  “What if they fixed the lock?” he said.

  “Then we’ll come back. Big deal. But I doubt they did. Nobody official seems to go there. I went there loads over the winter.”

  “Why? What’s there to do at a lighthouse?”

  “Lots of kids just go there to drink,” she said.

  More evidence of Miss Hyde. Ebon couldn’t imagine Aimee drinking, Aimee drunk, Aimee passed out in a corner with her flat belly exposed for groping hands at the type of teen parties they had in the movies. He didn’t like it. She wasn’t like that. She was this girl, here and now.

  “Not me though,” she said.

  “Oh. Good.”

  “‘Good’?”

  Ebon shrugged.

  “It’s kinda gross inside, but, you know … places you’re not supposed to go and all.” She made a you’ll-appreciate-this gesture with her fingers as if recalling familiar ground. “You remember how I told you about that guy I was hanging out with this summer, and I gave him a blow job, and he got cut on a bottle in the middle of it? That was at the lighthouse.”

  Ebon wasn’t sure what to say.

  “It’s not a great spot for that. It’s kind of dirty. I thought we might get hep C or something.”

  “Sure.”

  “You ever have a blow job?”

  Ebon looked at his Game Boy, blushing furiously.

  “Not that I’m going to give you one at the lighthouse. Like I said: hep C.”

  Now he couldn’t look up. He fiddled with the Game Boy, pretending to be fascinated by the way the game cartridge seated into it.

  “So do you want to go or not?”

  “What is hep C anyway?” was all Ebon could say.

  “I don’t know. Like AIDS or something.” Now she had Ebon by the hand and was attempting to pull him upright. But despite being two years older than him, she was slight and thin, and Ebon had filled out into his bigger bones. “Come on, fat ass,” she grunted.

  He looked up. “Aimee?”

  Aimee stopped tugging and waited.

  “You haven’t like … with a lot of guys, have you?”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “Oh. That. I don’t know. A few. I told you about all of them.”

  Ebon knew that much. The first sexual hints had appeared in Aimee’s letters a little over a year ago. After that it was like something had come uncorked. She seemed to have become afflicted with sexual Tourette’s, bleeding every detail into her letters, unable to stop. Ebon almost wished she’d kept it to herself, but every time a new letter arrived he skimmed it for juicy parts first. Aimee’s letters were long, multipaged, and rambling, exactly how she talked. He had to read them flat against a surface or light from the other side would bleed one page’s looping handwriting into its opposite, one page of mania doubling into insanity’s scribbles. Ebon would read them over and over, with a distant and slightly guilty arousal (this was Aimee, after all, and she was something different and sweeter to him), before sending his reply. Ebon’s letters, in contrast to Aimee’s, were short and desert dry. They read like telegrams. But it didn’t matter; as it was in person, Aimee’s correspondence was only seeking permission from Ebon to continue. In a few days after he sent her his own letter, another doorstop of written confessions would always arrive.

  Ebon often wondered what it meant, that Aimee was so candid with him
. Did it mean she thought of him as safe like a big sister? Or (and he’d become increasingly convinced of this) was she teasing him? Was she trying to rev him up? And if so, why hadn’t anything happened between them yet? Most of the summer was gone, but they’d spent all their time in Aimee’s usual, summery-sweet time capsule. She could have been fourteen again, building castles with him in the sand — or fifteen, sharing a kiss that was more bossy than romantic.

  “I lost count,” he said.

  “It wasn’t that many. Are you even counting … ?”

  “Everything,” he answered, cutting Aimee off.

  “Well,” she said, hands on hips as if about to lay some knowledge on Ebon because without her help, he’d never learn anything on his own. “That’s not all sex.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Sex is only when the guy … you know.”

  Ebon shook his head. He didn’t know. He knew the mechanics, of course, but not what Aimee meant. They hadn’t had this discussion in person. He’d felt, for most of the summer, as if he was with someone different from the girl who’d mailed those salacious letters. This Aimee had always been uncensored, but he hadn’t had the guts to bring up her teasing and what he suspected were implied promises. She hadn’t offered. They’d played in the sun, her body newly developed and exciting. They’d tussled indoors, the play tinged with a fresh scent, a new emotion. But they’d never broached anything serious. Aimee lived in a box in both Ebon’s mind and his life, and seemed like she’d never move to the next box, the next bracket, the next kind of person to him.

  “When he puts his thing in my … ” she continued.

  “Right, right,” Ebon said. “Whatever.”

  “Am I making you uncomfortable?” A slow smile creeped across her wide lips. The smile said that Aimee knew full well how uncomfortable she was making him, and that now that she’d seen it she had no intention of backing down. This had become a game, with Aimee in the lead and in charge. The more he squirmed, the better.

  “Have you ever done anything?” she asked.

  “Of course.”