by Bryan Bliss
“I’ve got a surprise for them,” she said, disappearing down the stairs to her apartment.
She came back with a box of pancake mix, eggs, and a small carton of milk. As Luke got the boys dressed, Annie made them pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse, a trick that Petey and Jack-Jack treated with the sort of reverence most people didn’t show for the dead, let alone breakfast food. The entire time, Luke kept an ear open, hoping he’d hear Elvis pumping through the speakers of Toby’s car.
They dropped the boys off at the bus stop and, without asking, Annie drove Luke to the plane. He hopped out and ran to it, already drumming up an explanation for bringing Annie back a second time. Practicing his apology.
But the plane was empty, and Luke’s emotions went to war.
Toby was making Luke pay for betraying his confidence. Luke knew that. Hell, he would even say he deserved it. But the radio silence was aggressive and brought with it an edge of fear that Toby had to know Luke was feeling. And that pissed him off.
Luke kicked the nose of the plane as hard as he could. It barely moved.
He limped back to the car, trying to stay calm. Annie looked surprised to see Luke return alone. He shook his head.
“He’ll be at school.”
Luke leaned his head back in the seat of Annie’s car, trying to believe what he’d just said. Annie opened her mouth, but closed it almost immediately. Instead of talking she leaned across the seat and planted a long kiss on Luke. He touched her cheek lightly, finally feeling the smallest amount of proficiency. She shivered once, their lips just inches away.
“I know what will make you feel better,” she said, smiling. “You. Me. The janitor’s closet at lunch.”
“I’m pretty sure he keeps it locked,” Luke said.
“Because if they didn’t, kids would be making out in there all the time?” Annie kissed him one more time. “He’s going to be fine. You just have to let him blow off some steam.”
Luke nodded. “It’s just . . . damn. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows this makes me crazy.”
“I’m filing this information away,” Annie said. “In case I ever need to use it against you.”
Luke tried to burrow back down into the anger, the anxiety, but it was impossible with Annie leaning on top of him. Her hair hanging into his eyes. He leaned up and kissed her, going against every grain of his nature.
Annie’s eyes were still closed when he said, “I’m not going to worry about it.”
And Luke believed it too. All the way up until they pulled into the parking lot and there wasn’t an El Camino in sight.
Luke wanted to keep his promise to Annie, to say that he hadn’t worried about Toby once when he walked into the cafeteria. But he’d craned his neck down every hallway between classes. Made it a point to go by his locker. He even got called out by Mrs. Norris in English for staring out into the parking lot. By the time he saw Annie, already at the table with a tray of food in front of her, he knew Toby wasn’t at school.
“Have you seen him?” Annie asked.
“He didn’t come,” he said.
Other than that, Luke barely said a word for the next fifteen minutes, doing nothing but picking at a salad and casually watching the entrance to the cafeteria. When the bell rang, he didn’t move. Annie had her tray in her hands but sat it back on the table and waited as the room cleared.
“You could go to the office and call him,” she said.
“He doesn’t have a phone,” Luke said.
Luke was fighting two conflicting feelings. He was worried. But at the same time, he knew that Toby was somewhere cooling off. He thought about what Coach had said: at some point, Luke needed to stop trying to save Toby. At some point, he would have to let Toby make his mistakes—whatever they might be.
“He’s fine,” Luke said, standing up. “I’m sure.”
Luke couldn’t say that he didn’t think about Toby the rest of the day, but by the time wrestling practice rolled around, he was at least back to letting his annoyance outweigh the fear. As he was getting dressed in the locker room, Coach O came over and sat down next to him.
“How’s your hand?”
“Okay,” Luke said, inspecting it. It was still purple and the cuts were still evident, but he flexed it a few times without much pain.
“How about your head?”
Luke stared at Coach O for a second before he understood he was talking about the match with Lowry. “About the same as my hand, I guess. Getting better.”
Coach O cracked his knuckles and nodded to a freshman walking by. “If you try to pull that nonsense with Herrera, he’s going to eat your lunch. You know that, right?”
“I know,” Luke said.
Coach O leaned forward and put his arms on his knees, staring into the empty showers. At first Luke thought their talk was done, but when he was about to stand up, Coach put a hand on his leg.
“My wife and I were thinking that maybe you’d want to come stay with us,” he said. “Just until the end of the year. I know your situation is . . . difficult. And I thought I could talk to your mom, get you started on a nutrition plan. Make sure you have everything you need before you head off to Iowa.”
Coach didn’t look at him as he spoke. And he didn’t wait for Luke to respond. He stood up and said, “Just think about it. I’ve got an extra bedroom in the basement ready for you anytime. Okay?”
Luke nodded, trying not to let his emotions take over. He imagined waking up every morning and hearing Coach O and his wife talking over their breakfasts. The sound of the morning news just below their voices. Maybe they’d give him some walking-around money too. A car. He could spend the next four or five months doing nothing but getting ready to start his new life at Iowa.
Before Coach O left, he looked Luke square in the eye. “I almost forgot. You’re going to pay for that bullshit last night. Get ready to run your ass off.”
He popped Luke on the thigh with his towel and walked away.
Practice wasn’t nearly as hard as he thought it was going to be. Luke suspected Coach was worried about giving him too much before Herrera. When they got done, Luke was ready to spend a little extra time running when he heard shouting in the hallway, followed by laughter. He jogged outside, expecting to find Toby talking shit once again. Instead, it was Annie—jawing at Tyler Simpson, who was red in the face and telling his friends to shut up.
“Bye-bye now,” she said, and Tyler shuffled off, giving Luke a dirty look.
“What was that about?”
“He suggested my manhood was bigger than yours,” Annie said, yawning.
Luke took a step toward the locker room, fed up with Tyler Simpson and all his bullshit. Simpson had spent the entire practice laughing with his friends. Whispering comments about Luke’s match with Lowry and then outright saying Luke was going to get his ass kicked by Herrera. Annie stopped him.
“Hey . . . please don’t be that guy.”
Luke was still mad, but he stopped. “What?”
“The guy who thinks that Tyler Simpson even shows up on my radar,” Annie said. “I mean, Jesus. He drives a Miata. Nobody can respect a dude in a Miata, trust me.”
Luke laughed. He remembered when Tyler’s dad had bought the tiny convertible for him. Toby, essentially, had said the same thing. Luke looked up and down the hallway instinctively. Annie’s voice dropped a bit when she spoke.
“He’s not here. I checked.”
Annie walked over to him and pulled him into a hug. Then she held him at arm’s length and cocked her head to the side.
“How about you and me go back to your house and watch a movie?” she said. Luke hesitated at first, and she added, “He’ll show up eventually. I promise you.”
Luke reluctantly agreed.
“Okay, now go take a shower because you smell like a wrestler. And despite what you might think, it’s not attractive.”
She pushed him away gently, smiling. Luke started toward the locker room, but he stopped.
“Oh!” Annie laughed. “I told him we could both whip ours out and see which one was bigger. He declined.”
Luke was still smiling when they pulled into the parking lot of his apartment. The lights had just turned on, and when they got out of the car, Luke was laughing as Annie finished a story about her stepfather, David. So when he heard Jack-Jack say his name, followed almost immediately by Petey’s loud wailing, he wasn’t sure what was happening. They came running down the stairs, both of them still holding their backpacks.
“Mo-Mo-Mom-isn’t-here,” Jack-Jack said, nearly hyperventilating as he sobbed out the words. “And-and-you-you-weren’t—”
Luke swept both of the boys up in his arms and carried them up the stairs, holding them as close to his body as he could. When he got to the door, he pushed against it hard—assuming his mom and Ricky were just asleep. It was locked. He tried to set the boys down to get his key out of his backpack, but the twins panicked and held on to his neck like he was about to drop them in the deep end of the pool.
“Can you get my key?” Luke asked Annie.
She unlocked the door and Luke sat on the couch, holding both of the crying boys. The apartment was dark, unchanged from when they had left this morning. Nobody had been here all day. Annie brought the phone to Luke, and he dialed Ricky’s number from the back of the matchbook. It went straight to voice mail.
“Do you guys want pizza?” Luke asked.
The twins barely responded, and they wouldn’t move or let Luke find the phonebook so he could order. Annie eventually snuck out of the apartment and returned twenty minutes later with two pizzas and a two-liter of soda. Even that didn’t coax the twins from Luke’s lap, at least not at first. Annie made them plates and poured soda—they weren’t normally allowed to have soda—and like a couple of scared but curious kittens, they slowly climbed down and began eating.
As they did, the adrenaline that had taken over for Luke started to slip away. What was left was a shaky, panicked rage. His mother had done a lot of stupid things, but this topped the list. He stood up to try Ricky’s phone again, smiling at Petey and Jack-Jack when they froze, tracking him across the living room.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “Eat your pizza.”
He called four more times before he gave up and finally left a message more desperate than he liked. It took an hour, but slowly the boys’ shoulders began to unclench. Instead of hawking over the paper plates, they sat lazily in front of them, watching the television. An hour after that, they were asleep on the floor—one of Annie’s hands on each of their backs.
She slowly stood up and sat next to Luke.
“I can’t believe they didn’t come back,” Luke said. He cleared his throat, trying to hide his emotions from Annie. She leaned into him gently. “And then everything with Toby, I just . . .”
He coughed, refusing to break down.
“We could take a walk. That might help.”
Luke shook his head. He didn’t want to leave the boys alone.
“Why don’t you go run? I mean, that’s all you ever used to do before you met me, which reminds me—I have a confession.”
Luke stared at her, afraid that she was about to drop another bomb on him.
“I’m worried I might ruin your wrestling career.”
Luke laughed once. “Why?”
“Because I’m so awesome and you’re never going to want to run again. Just hang out at gas stations, eating cupcakes and pork rinds.”
“Don’t forget going to honky-tonks.”
“You’re right!” Annie said. After a second, she pushed his leg. “Seriously. Go. I’ll stay with them.”
Luke ran hard, harder than he probably should have after practice. But he couldn’t feel any pain, didn’t feel the tightness of lactic acid coating his muscles. He ran, trying to forget. Trying to push himself past the point where he could feel anything.
He hit the road on a sprint, took the same turns he always did. Ran blind with frustration and anger until he broke through the tree line. Usually he would slow down—especially at night. There were low branches and rogue pinecones. Not to mention the actual trees. He would’ve run straight through, trees be damned, if he hadn’t heard the distinctive sound of glass on metal. Laughter. Toby.
Luke skidded to a stop. Toby’s back was to him, but there was a woman—older than them—facing him. She laughed, passing a bottle of something to Toby. She saw Luke standing in the shadows, which admittedly would have terrified anybody, and nearly choked on the wine. Toby spun around and froze.
“Luke?”
Luke hadn’t meant to seem as if he’d been watching them. But now, as he stepped closer to the plane, he couldn’t think of any other way it would look.
“Yeah. I was running.”
It’s all he could manage. Because there was Toby, sitting in the plane with a woman he couldn’t have known for more than twenty-four hours, drinking from a bottle of wine. Luke couldn’t pull his eyes from the bottle. Sure, plenty of people drank. Parties, after football games. He could find a way to drink every night if he really wanted to. But there had always been an unspoken agreement that they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t let something they could control pull them off the rails.
“We were just, you know . . .” Toby dropped the bottle, trying to be casual. “This is Lily. She’s my . . . friend?”
Toby and Lily laughed. They sounded drunk. Luke tried to keep his words even.
“Can I talk to you?” he said. Toby looked at Lily, then back to Luke, and nodded. When he stepped out of the plane, he almost fell down. More giggling. They acted as if they’d been friends forever, as if this visit wasn’t the first, but the latest in a string of regular trysts. Toby’s nighttime plane friend. When he was steady, he followed Luke to the edge of the tree line.
Luke didn’t wait for Toby to talk.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Toby ruffled like a bird. “What’s it to you?”
Luke grabbed him, pushed him into the closest tree a little too hard. Toby gasped, but Luke didn’t stop himself. How could Toby be so damn stupid? How could he suddenly start acting like Doreen and Jimmy and nearly every other damn adult they’d ever had in their life?
“You run away from Annie. You don’t show up at school today. And now this. Drunk with some woman you don’t know. What the fuck, man?”
Toby pushed against his arm in protest, and Luke let him go, suddenly aware that he had his friend pinned against a tree. That he had likely added two or three more bruises. He took a step back as Toby rubbed his shoulder.
“First? I’m not drunk. So go fuck yourself.” Toby looked at his feet and then up at Luke. “And like it matters who we bring out here. I know that now.”
“Oh, bullshit. How many girls have you tried to bring out to this plane? Five? A hundred? C’mon.”
Toby stood completely still and looked Luke right in the eye. “It’s not the plane. You let her see me. You let her see me like that, goddammit.”
Luke felt like he’d been hit in the stomach again, doubled over and out of breath. But Toby wasn’t done.
“And you know what? I didn’t want to stay at her apartment, letting her treat me like some kind of broken fucking puppy, okay? So I left. I went home and I got in my car and I—”
Toby stopped abruptly, and it got Luke’s attention.
“What?”
Toby kicked a pinecone across the clearing, looking like he was about to confess to a murder.
“Jimmy made me drive him to the Deuce, and while I was there I . . . shit. I got sick, okay? That’s why I wasn’t at school. Threw up everywhere.”
Luke had no idea why Toby was sitting in the plane with Lily. Why he smelled like cheap wine. But compared with going to the Deuce with Jimmy, those were minor offenses. Something Luke could get over easily enough. But going to the Deuce with Jimmy was another story.
“What the hell are you doi
ng, T?”
The fire went out of Toby, just a bit. He bit his lip and scratched his neck, looking as if he was trying to figure out the perfect way to answer Luke. Finally he shrugged and said, “Listen, I know I fucked up. What else is new?”
Luke took a chance. He motioned to the ridiculous shirt, the too-small corduroy pants. “You’ve started dressing like a ten-year-old, for starters.”
“Yeah. Well. I puked all over my other clothes.” Before Luke could ask, he said, “Lily gave these to me.”
“Lily,” Luke said, glancing over Toby’s shoulder. The woman was drinking from the wine bottle, staring at Luke. Even in the darkness of the woods, the intensity of her gaze was piercing.
“How did, you know, that happen?”
“I’m basically irresistible.” When Luke didn’t respond, Toby sighed. “Lily brought me back to her house last night. Took care of me.”
The entire story troubled Luke. A strange woman from a bar filled with petty and not-so-petty criminals brought a drunk, underage teenager back to her house, where he spent the night. And then let him skip school. Luke tried to tell himself that he should be happy Toby was safe. So he changed the subject.
“Mom and Ricky are missing,” Luke said. “I came home from practice and the boys were on the landing, scared to death.”
“Shit,” Toby said. Concern tugged at his face. “Are they okay?”
Luke picked at a scab on his hand. He nodded.
“I think so. Annie is watching them right now.”
They stood there, not looking at each other. A car passed on the highway, somebody whooping out the window. Behind them, Lily sat down in the hull of the plane.
“I’m sorry about bringing her yesterday,” Luke said. At first, Toby looked surprised. But then he nodded. Flicked his eyes to Luke. “I should’ve figured something else out. But I was worried.”
There were times, even as kids, when they didn’t have to speak to each other. When wounds or arguments—anything, really—would vanish. Disappear without a scar. Two seconds later, and they’d be giving each other shit. Until this moment, Luke would’ve never said it was special.