Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  We ran for what seemed like forever. Across city streets, through alleys, down residential blocks, over fences and through backyards, into the woods, through the woods for at least a mile, up hills, over fallen trees, across swampy gulches, until we came to a sound wall bordering Route 280. I expected him to double back through the woods, or at least skirt along the wall for a while. Instead, he climbed a tree, reached out for the wall, wriggled himself to its top edge, and balanced on it for a wild moment before looking back at me. “Amir, wait!” I shouted.

  Then he jumped.

  I pulled myself up the same tree and leveraged my middle atop the narrow, coarse wall, which scraped painfully across my stomach. I expected to look down and see Amir lying with two broken ankles on the shoulder of the highway. Instead, I found him staring up at me from a strip of overgrown weeds, waiting.

  “Amir!” I shouted to him. “What the hell!”

  He yelled something I couldn’t hear.

  “What?!”

  “Tell me now!”

  “We’re going to rob a convenience store!” I shouted it, but not loudly enough. The rush of the freeway hushed it out.

  “What?”

  I shouted again, but again he couldn’t hear me. He threw up his arms in confusion.

  The sound wall was shorter than most. Fifteen feet, maybe. I closed my eyes and breathed. Searched for and pinpointed the wrath inside me. Bloodfire. Bloodfire. This was the only way—out of this world, into another.

  I opened my eyes, let the pulse of highway sing the background music to my mantra. Bloodfire. Bloodfire.

  And I jumped.

  When I picked myself up out of the weeds, Amir stood ten feet away, watching me, still edgy, ready to run. The freeway roared. Wind from passing cars pushed angrily against us. I wiped dirt and grass from my palms.

  “We’re going to rob a convenience store,” I said.

  He smiled. “With a gun?”

  I nodded. Someone laid on their horn, the sound compressing and then stretching out again as the car sailed away, gone forever.

  “Why?” Amir shouted against the chaos.

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “I mean, why?”

  “You know why!”

  “No I don’t!”

  “Amir, Jesus, can we talk about this another time?”

  “Just tell me why!”

  “I’m looking for God, okay? I’m just . . . looking for God.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Do you believe in God?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Don’t you want to?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Okay, well . . .” I looked all around me—at the cars and the steel railing and the brown weeds and the sky, trying to think against the noise. It felt like the earth was shaking—like we were inside a giant’s snow-globe. “Can we go back to school now?”

  “Game’s not over,” he yelled.

  “I got you!”

  “Gotta tag me.”

  “Fuck, come on. Are we ten years old? I’m right here!”

  He laughed. “Gotta tag me!”

  I reached out for him, and he stepped toward the highway, and again I shouted, “Amir, wait!” but again it was too late. There he went. Scurrying across eastbound Route 280. A car honked. And another. Tires screeched. Amir ran wildly, dodging, juking, almost tripping, arms flailing. Finally reaching the midway point, straddling the median, he turned back to me. That look of his: serious but thrilled. Excited but angry. I backed away from the road—as far as I could get, pressing myself up against the sound wall, hands trembling, legs shaking, head buzzing—and watched him. He lifted the other leg and turned away from me. Eyed traffic for a full minute or more, waiting, waiting, waiting, and then . . . into the mayhem, one lane to the next, all the way across to the other side.

  Brielle

  AFTER SCHOOL, in a light frozen rain, the school bus swept along a slippery road that took us sailing past Cullen’s Shell station. At the next red light, on a whim, I flung open the bus’s back door, sat on my butt while an emergency bell blasted and the driver howled a slew of warnings, and kicked off, dropping into the road.

  My shoes skidded across the wintry street while I smashed the heavy yellow door shut and half-ran, half-skated to the sidewalk. The bus’s front door folded open. I feared the bus driver might come chasing after me, but the traffic light flipped to green and, in a huff, the bus rumbled along.

  I arrived at the Shell station soggy, with chattering teeth and icy toes, to find Cullen lounging in the office with Roman, a gangly guy who moved like an oversized insect and who gazed on me with jittery eyes as though he wanted to scuttle up my back and chew my head off. Grunge music bellowed from an old cassette player—something from a decade ago when angst and mournful righteousness still had a place in popular culture. Cullen pocketed a sloppy pile of cash on the desk. A space heater burned dust at my feet.

  Cullen motioned to Roman. “Brielle, Roman. Roman, Brielle.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  Roman let out a laugh like a pair of worn-out brakes and nodded his head at me. His eyes were glassy and clouded like marbles.

  “Is he stoned?” I asked.

  “Ask him.”

  I turned to Roman, who shrugged and laughed. “Heeeeeells yeah,” he said.

  Cullen asked Roman to wait outside, assuring him that they’d be on the road in a few minutes, and when he went, Cullen stood and flipped the blinds closed on the door. He smirked at me, and we played a game of looking and not looking at each other.

  “I skipped breakfast,” I said.

  “You are forgiven.”

  “Did you get in trouble from Mr. Richards?”

  “Just asked me to leave. You?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Seems like a decent guy.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and Cullen dared an imperceptible step toward me, and then another. “He’s really . . .” And his hand was on my hip. “. . . a good . . .” And we kissed. “. . . teacher.” And we kissed again. His hand was in my hair, on my neck, creeping down my spine. Our arms locked. There was that volcanic moment when our midsections met, and he pushed himself stiff and warm against me, and the dangly little bell of the front door sang out, the blinds whooshing, and then, astoundingly, I was staring at my brother.

  Ray said, “Oh,” as he tripped away from us. I stepped back from Cullen, who turned and caught the door before it closed.

  “What’s up, Ray?” Cullen said.

  Ray faced Cullen and, after some clumsy fumbling and without looking at me, told him, “Oh, well, Roman just talked to the guy. Says we have to go now and, um, that we can’t be late.”

  “Got it.”

  Ray stepped outside into the weather. Cullen let the door ease shut again. The music faded, and the tape clicked off. Cullen said, “I gotta go do this thing.”

  “What is my brother doing here?”

  “It’s kinda hard to explain.”

  “Is he . . . are you selling him drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Selling with him? I don’t understand . . .”

  “No. Nothing like that,” he said.

  “Are you going to steal another car?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “It’s not a big deal! Don’t worry about it.”

  “I want to come,” I said.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not a good idea.”

  Wind flung a gust of icy pellets against the office window. I met Cullen’s eyes and didn’t look away.

  “I want to,” I told him, almost whispering. “I want to see.”

  He hooked his forefingers in the straps of my backpack, and I let myself be tugged toward him. We kissed. We kissed, and it w
as wet and firm and hot and lasted forever.

  Later, I was stuck on thoughts of this kiss and all the things I thought might follow it while crammed in the tiny backseat of Roman’s pickup truck with my brother, all of us on our way to Elizabeth. I still wore my school uniform—a navy skirt thick as burlap, navy stockings, and a navy sweater and white blouse underneath my burgundy tweed jacket. Roman drove and snuck peeks at my legs in the rearview despite the wool stockings and even though Cullen glared at him and cleared his throat every time he glanced.

  We sped over a set of long-unused railroad tracks and slowed in front of an abandoned redbrick chemical plant ornamented with broken and boarded windows and a pile of blankets clumped in the doorway, under which an unseen form hid from the winter chill. Roman gazed across the street at an apartment complex that appeared only slightly less run-down than the warehouse.

  Somewhere the sun was setting; everything was colored pale. I watched Ray, but he wouldn’t look at me. He dug his hands into his coat pockets, fixed his eyes on the street, and marched behind Roman, whom we all followed across the empty, quiet street.

  Cullen took my elbow in his hand. “You have makeup? In your bag?”

  I nodded.

  “Put it on. A lot of it. More than you would ever wear.”

  I dug through my purse and hurriedly smeared a thick stain of lipstick across my lips and too much blush over my cheeks, while Roman tapped the button for 8C over and over, getting no answer, hopping in place from the cold, one hand in his pants, eyes looking up and down the street in search of what I did not know.

  Cullen approved of the paint job. “You’re a crazy-ass bitch,” he told me.

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t have to say anything. Don’t have to say one word if you don’t want to. Just remember it deep down, and they’ll believe it as surely as you do: You’re a crazy-ass bitch.”

  I nodded, shivering where I stood and hoping to God nobody would answer from 8C, but of course eventually a voice replied—a static-filled, incomprehensible combustion of malice from upstairs to which Roman retorted with “Yo, it’s Roman, kid! Let me up.”

  The door buzzed. Roman danced over and yanked it with his free hand. Ray still would not look at me, and while we waited for the elevator in a grim lobby that was not any warmer than it had been outside, I understood why. Today, Ray could not be Ray and I could not be Brielle—at least not as far as the two of us understood what it meant to be those two people. Which meant being soft and safe. Which meant no television while studying. Vocab quizzes and calculus. Attending mass before opening presents on Christmas morning. Mowing the lawn and scrubbing dishes. Amherst, Cornell, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Stanford. Those O’Dell children would never last here. Those O’Dell children might have waited for the elevator for who knows how long if Roman had not understood very early on that the thing didn’t work and had not worked for quite some time, if ever. So Ray stared at the floor—remained fixed on it almost exclusively from the time we got out of the car until we hurried back into it. Ray wasn’t Ray, and Bri wasn’t Bri. Only I don’t know who Ray told himself he was that day. How he convinced himself to disown Ray O’Dell and who he tried to become instead. Because the moment I realized that I wouldn’t look at him and that he wouldn’t look at me, all that I held on to was that I knew what I would have to be in order to survive.

  I would be whatever Cullen wanted me to be.

  Ray

  CULLEN NEVER SAID ANYTHING to me about being arrested, but obviously I knew it had happened. The day after our first run, I waited at his car after school, sore all over but ready to do it again. It was a long time before he stepped out of the front doors of the school. When he finally did, his hands were pinned behind him and two police officers were taking him across the lot to their car.

  I supposed he was still mad or disappointed that I’d given up his name, but he never said anything else about it. The day after his arrest he was back at his car after school waiting for me. When I arrived he told me about the plan to buy a gun in Elizabeth.

  “Okay,” I said. “Perfect.”

  I imagined myself storming into some place and terrifying the guy working there so much that he pissed his pants and then running out with a pile of cash. I was sure the feeling I would get from that was the feeling I’d been after all along. That the whole thing would be about as Zen as you could get. One of those moments of total, otherworldly purity that most people only dream about. Death on earth.

  Cullen was looking at me like he didn’t really believe I was on board.

  “You sure about this?”

  “Of course. This is what we agreed on, right?”

  “Yup. But we can always do a fake if you want to back out.”

  I’d never held a gun in my hand or even seen a real one in person, but it was clear that the real thing was the way to go, especially if the moment was to feel the way I wanted it to feel.

  “You can get a real one?”

  Cullen nodded. “Need cash, though. On top of what you still owe me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “No problem.”

  Except this part was a problem, a small one, at least for the time being. I’d already spent all my lawn-mowing money, and it wasn’t like I could get a job after school—being with Cullen was my job. Learning how to run was my job, and studying maps was my job, and screaming at Cullen from inside his grandmother’s garage while he played the role of convenience store clerk was my job. I would try to bring up enough of the bad stuff inside me to make Cullen flinch during these sessions, but mostly all he did was stand there with a blank look on his face, unfazed by my yelling and jumping around, and then afterward he’d tell me that I was getting better but to keep working. I knew the gun would help, but he warned that I shouldn’t rely on that too much when the moment came.

  On the night before we bought the gun, I snuck into my parents’ bedroom while Dad was with clients and Mom was asleep in bed. Bri was sitting at her desk in her room, and she leaned back to see me in the hallway.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “None of your business.”

  I stepped into the bedroom like I was in a rush and like I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I knew what I was looking for and where to find it. A few years ago, Tim Mason had told me he’d found a stack of Playboys in his father’s closet, and so we’d gone looking through my own father’s stuff one afternoon but had only found one single black-and-white picture of a naked woman stuffed at the bottom of his underwear drawer. The picture was wrinkled, and the black surprise of hair at the woman’s middle against all that white was wild. Tim asked if he could borrow the picture for the night. I told him no, but he only relented when we found a shoe box full of cash on the top shelf of Dad’s closet and I gave Tim a twenty-dollar bill in exchange for his not taking the photo.

  And so this night I moved a little stool over to Dad’s closet, which creaked when I opened it and made Mom stir in bed. The room was lit only by the hallway light, and Mom was just a small shape beneath blanket folds and pillow mounds. The room was damp and smelled like bad breath. It was eight P.M.; she’d been in bed all day.

  “Ray,” she said. “Everything okay?”

  “Great, Mom,” I said. “Just getting something for Dad.”

  “Anything you need, sweetie.”

  I looked at her for a moment, trying to see where her eyes were, but I couldn’t find them. She twisted a little in the bed and then sighed quietly. I thought about asking her if she was feeling okay or if she needed anything or if she thought she would get better anytime soon, but of course I didn’t. I knew she wouldn’t answer. She’d tell me she was feeling a little tired or a little sick and that everything was going to be okay.

  I pushed the little stool into the closet and reached up onto the top shelf to find the shoe box, out of which I took enough for the gun and to pay Cullen the rest
of his fee. When I walked out of the room and into the light of the hallway, Bri was standing there looking at me. I walked to my room without saying anything and shut the door.

  Who knows what the shoe box was for? Dad had all kinds of money that he never spent on things the rest of us wanted, like cell phones and big televisions. Maybe Dad had read St. Augustine in seminary school and also decided to turn his back on the “things of this world” that delighted him. Maybe the box was a way of avoiding the temptation to spend this money. Whatever the case, I didn’t question why the shoe box was in the closet any more than I questioned my decision to take a big stack of money out of it and give that money to Cullen so that he would keep teaching me how to be a different person.

  Two weeks later I stood in a freezing apartment building in Elizabeth with Cullen and Roman, hoping to buy a gun from a guy that Roman said he was boys with, and my sister was there too. I was surprised to find her with Cullen at the gas station earlier in the day but tried not to think too much of it. Even when I was little—before my friends knew why they liked my sister or what they wanted to do with her—kids I knew were always staring at Bri in funny ways, asking me questions like did she want to hang out with us or did I ever see her coming out of the shower and stuff like that. I started to think that some of these kids came over to my house to see Bri rather than hang out with me, but once I noticed this I decided to quit worrying about it. People have all sorts of reasons for doing what they do. You could go crazy trying to figure them out.

  In any case, Bri was standing there next to me in that freezing apartment building in Elizabeth when Roman shoved the door of apartment 8C over a crappy carpet without knocking. Inside the apartment, a man was screaming. Had been screaming. And when the door opened, another guy started screaming too. “Shut the fucking door!” A baby cried, and a woman screamed too. “Shut the fucking door!” they all said.