by Ania Ahlborn
Lucy and Reb exchanged looks before Lucy replied with an easy “Cool.” Reb gave Michael a subtle nod, then turned back to the girl beside him, leaning into Lucy like a vampire, ready to bite.
• • •
Michael held open the door for Alice, then followed her inside the McDonald’s. His mouth watered at the scent of grilled meat—two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese—and salty fries. Alice chuckled as they stood in line, both of them staring up at the menu board. “Okay, now this is classy,” she joked. “Did you call ahead for a reservation?”
Michael didn’t reply; he only smiled down at the scuffed-up tips of his boots. Alice pressed her arm against his as they waited to be helped, a slender finger looping around his thumb.
Michael got a Big Mac and Alice ordered a Happy Meal, which the cashier refused to sell her because Happy Meals were for kids, not adults.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Alice scoffed at the girl behind the counter.
“Sorry, it’s the rules,” the cashier said with a shrug.
“But it’s not even for me,” Alice explained. “It’s for our baby.” She wrapped herself around Michael’s arms and flashed the girl a smile. “Right, Mikey?”
Michael’s mouth went dry, but he wasn’t about to let anything stand between him and his Big Mac. “Yeah,” he confirmed. “We gotta feed our kid.”
“It only eats hamburgers,” Alice said.
“It?” The cashier asked, peering at them both through narrowed eyes.
Alice grimaced at her slipup but recovered fast. “Look, I’m pregnant, all right? Just sell us the dang Happy Meal and we’ll be on our way.”
Five minutes later, Alice and Michael sat at a table, Michael relishing his Big Mac while Alice ate her hamburger and fries and wore her prize—a pair of canary-yellow McDonaldland sunglasses, Ronald McDonald’s creepy clown face staring out from above her nose. Michael couldn’t look at her without cracking up. A few older patrons gave them curious glances as they passed by with trays of food. The looks didn’t seem to bother her. She refused to take the sunglasses off, her cheek full of fries, the tip of her combat boot kicking at the leg of Michael’s chair.
“We really should go see that movie again,” she said. “I keep thinking about it, and I’m pretty sure I missed parts, like, important stuff, you know?”
Michael nodded, taking a bite of his burger. Squares of chopped lettuce fell onto the wrapper between his elbows. It was even better than he remembered. Maybe because, this time, Reb wasn’t there to ruin the taste.
“Sometimes things only make sense in retrospect,” she mused. “You don’t know what you’re looking at until you know what happens next, and then you have to go back to the beginning to see the signs. They call it foreshadowing. Comic-book writers use it all the time.”
She was smart, possibly smarter than Reb. Michael loved that. He loved the fact that she wasn’t afraid to act silly or look dumb, or to tell him about her dead dad and her depressed mom, as though they’d been friends their entire lives. He wished he could be just as open, spill everything about himself and get it off his chest. He wanted to tell her about his family—about Misty Dawn and how she liked to dance to old hokey records and cheesy pop music, about Rebel and how Michael was afraid of him but they were still best friends. He wanted to tell her about his first time down in the basement at the age of ten, how Wade had locked him in there with a dead girl and wouldn’t let Michael out until he field dressed her the way he would have any other kill. But he knew he couldn’t tell her any of those things, and it made it hard to look her in the eye. Alice was perfect, and he was nothing but secrets. Dark ones. Darker than the basement after all the lights went out.
“Michael?”
When her fingers brushed his forearm, he almost jerked away. He expected to see the fear he knew was coming—the look in her eyes that assured him that she had figured it all out. Alice knew what he was because she’d read his mind, his poisonous thoughts. But she wore a look he hardly recognized at all—concern.
“Are you okay?” she asked, pulling the funny glasses from her face.
“You ain’t really pregnant, are ya?” he asked. It was the first thing that came to mind.
Alice burst into laughter. “No, stupid.” She leaned back in her seat and grinned. It was the most beautiful smile Michael had ever seen. “Anything else you want to ask me?” She batted her eyelashes, though he wasn’t sure what she was getting at. So he asked her the question that he’d been wanting to ask for days.
“Are you really gonna leave Dahlia?” He knew it was intrusive, but he couldn’t help himself. He needed to know. For the first time in his life, he felt like he was connecting with someone. It was the kind of link that he hadn’t experienced before. But the possibility of losing her continued to loom in the back of his mind. He had to know whether she was leaving so he could make her stay.
Her smile faded a notch. “I don’t know, I mean . . .” She hesitated. “I guess I should be flattered you’re asking.”
Michael stared down at the plastic tray full of empty, ketchup-smeared wrappers. His stomach twisted around his burger, and he was suddenly sorry for having eaten so much so fast.
“Should I be flattered?” she asked, reaching out to touch his arm for a second time, to pull him back from the wasteland of his own thoughts.
“Maybe I can come with you,” he told her. But that was not supposed to be the deal. If Rebel had been there to overhear him, he would have pummeled Michael in front of the entire restaurant. Michael cast a quick glance her way, just to see if she was still wearing the same expression—a delving, inquisitive smile. She wasn’t.
She shook her head at him, not in a response to his suggestion, but in some sort of acknowledgment, like she finally understood. He waited for the terror, the disgust, but her eyes lit up instead, sparkling with something he couldn’t explain. Mischief? Fascination?
“Michael Morrow, you’re the strangest boy I’ve ever met.” She leaned back in her seat, her head cocked to the side. Her eyes wandered across the front of his T-shirt and her mouth twisted upward at a single corner. “Do you even know who that is?” She nodded at the portrait across his chest. Michael looked down and felt stupid for wearing the secondhand shirt. If anyone knew who the guy was, it was Alice. He should have known, should have seen it coming, and maybe subconsciously he had, but the realization of it made him feel foolish now.
“Naw.”
Alice’s easy smile bloomed into another grin. “It’s actually appropriate,” she said. “David Bowie. He wrote a song called ‘Space Oddity’ . . . about a spaceman, y’know? Maybe he was writing about you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Cause I already told you, you’re the strangest boy I’ve ever met. It’s like you’re from a different planet.” She shifted her weight in her seat, her gaze fixed on David Bowie’s face. “I thought you said you’d miss this place if you left. But now you want to leave?”
Michael didn’t know how to explain his sudden change of heart. When he had uttered it days before, he’d believed it. But that had been before the woman. Before Rebel’s faraway smile. Before he had leaned down and kissed the dead in the hopes of having it feel like real life. He remembered the way Reb had made him toss his most favorite things into a hole in the ground. The way he had made him bury them as if to remind Michael that, without Reb’s permission, he wasn’t allowed to love or dream or be anything.
It was rule number one.
“I . . . guess I just wanna see what else is out there,” he said softly. “It wouldn’t be so bad seein’ it if I wasn’t alone.”
Alice leaned forward, their table of wrappers and ketchup packets between them. She brushed her fingers along his jawline. His heart sputtered beneath muscle and bone, and for a moment, he was sure he’d never breathe again. She was only inches away, her hazel eyes drifting across the curve of his bottom lip. It was then that he realized their eyes mat
ched in color almost perfectly. Somehow that small detail gave him the courage to tip his head forward and press his mouth against hers.
The world stopped.
For one perfect moment, every person who had ever existed in his life vanished from the earth, leaving only her.
Their kiss lasted two seconds, three at most, but it felt as though they had sealed Michael’s fate.
He knew then that he could be happy, if only he could make Alice a part of his life. If he stayed with the Morrows that could never happen, not without twisting her into something unrecognizable. Into someone like him.
Alice leaned back and slid the Ronald McDonald glasses back onto her face. “A little birdie told me it’s almost your birthday,” she said. “Is that true?”
“Yeah, it’s true,” he said, and he suddenly knew what to wish for—something impossible, something he doubted he could ever have. He pictured them both climbing into the Oldsmobile and driving out of West Virginia; him barreling down the road without a license; heading toward the ocean, toward golden yellow sand and a pink hotel.
“I’ll have to get you something, then,” she said. “Maybe a David Bowie record to go along with that shirt. How old are you going to be, anyway?”
“Twenty.”
The number gave her pause. She pulled the glasses from her eyes and searched his face, as if looking for an answer to a question she hadn’t asked.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” she said, a veil of uncertainty blurring her features. She continued to stare at him for a while longer before clearing her throat. “We should probably get back. My break’s been over for ten minutes now.” When she rose from the table to leave, a rush of panic overwhelmed him. He hadn’t asked her to keep what they had discussed a secret. If she told Lucy, if Reb found out . . .
He dumped their tray of wrappers into the trash bin and followed her outside, trailing her back to the store.
Michael followed her into the Dervish and took a deep breath, the cool air redolent of exotic smoke. The customers that had been inside the store were gone, replaced by a lone girl perusing the new arrivals. But Lucy didn’t seem to care that the Dervish had a customer. She was perched on top of the counter with Rebel between each of her jeaned knees, as though she was in her own bedroom rather than at her place of employment. They were both grinning as Michael and Alice approached, their amusement clear. “Well, well,” Reb chimed in. “If it ain’t the lovebirds.”
Alice rolled her eyes, but she was smiling despite herself. “You shouldn’t be canoodling like that, especially not with . . .” She tipped her chin toward their customer. “If Jason comes in and sees you that way, he’s liable to fire us both.”
“Oh please,” Lucy scoffed, but she gave Reb a little push and dropped down from the counter with a pout. “Like he ever comes in here, right? That’s what he’s got us for.” She turned her attention to Michael, changing the subject. “Hey, I heard it’s almost your birthday. That’s fun. Gonna have a party?”
Michael ducked his head into his shoulders and gave the group an embarrassed shrug.
“Well, we call it his birthday,” Reb clarified, “except that we ain’t actually sure it is.”
“What do you mean?” Alice gave Michael a curious look, and for a moment he caught a flash of reluctance in her eyes.
“I think we should go,” Michael murmured. He wanted to tell Alice about himself in his own way, at his own pace. He didn’t need Rebel laying out the details as though they were his to give. Except that, according to Reb, they were his to give. His brother had given Michael a taste of freedom, and now he was going to sour it with a grim reminder—freedom was nothing but an illusion. Any autonomy Michael felt was a privilege, not a right.
“He didn’t tell you?” Reb feigned surprise. “Michael was adopted.”
Alice blinked at the news.
Lucy shifted her weight from one foot to the other, her arms crossed protectively over her chest.
Michael frowned at the floor. He didn’t want to talk about it, not like this, not in front of Reb and Lucy. He suddenly felt like he was perched on a tightrope, Reb threatening to push him off balance, threatening to clue Alice in to the fact that this tattered curtain of normalcy was nothing but a ruse, that the spaceman was from a planet of hard-hearted brutality.
“I’m gonna wait in the car,” Michael said beneath his breath. He could hardly hear the conversation over the thud of his heart. One wrong word, one weird look, and Reb could ruin everything.
• • •
Rebel remained inside the Dervish for an unnerving amount of time. Michael paced around the Oldsmobile as the sun beat onto his shoulders, imagining the worst possible things—Reb telling the girls about the woman from the night before, describing the way Michael had dragged her down into the basement. He was sure he had been alone, but what if Reb had seen Michael touch the dead woman’s breast? What if he’d seen Michael press his mouth to her dead, blue lips? What if, somehow, he knew Michael had been wishing it had been Alice?
When Reb finally came out of the record store, he was smiling with a sort of self-satisfaction. Something about it pushed Michael to the edge of his patience. He couldn’t help himself. His willpower to keep silent withered and the words came tumbling out.
“Why did you do that?” he demanded, staring across the plane of the Oldsmobile’s brown roof at his brother. “You say you want me to be happy, and then you turn around and butt in.”
“Hey.” Reb gave him a stern look. “Don’t forget who you’re talkin’ to, shithead.”
“Oh, I remember who I’m talkin’ to, Reb. I’m talkin’ to a guy who tells me to do one thing and then tries to screw it up!”
“How am I screwin’ it up?” Reb asked, suddenly casual about the whole argument, as if it was of no consequence at all. “I just said you were adopted. Like you weren’t gonna tell her anyway.”
“Except I wasn’t.”
“How’s that? You just weren’t gonna talk about yourself at all?”
“About the family?” Michael shook his head, incredulous. “Why would I talk about the family? Why would I, Reb? That don’t make any sense.”
“You want to be with her?” Reb asked, nodding toward the Dervish. Michael failed to respond, and Reb narrowed his gaze at his brother’s silence. “I asked you a fuckin’ question,” he snapped. “You best answer before I get pissed.”
“Yes!” Michael spit out.
“You like her, then. That’s good. I’m happy for you, brother. But you remember what I told you a while back, when we were talkin’ about wives and killers and how they live with the lies?”
Michael clamped his teeth together, glaring down at the roof.
“You want her, you gotta bring her into the fold.”
He swallowed, felt his mouth go dry. “And Lucy?” he asked, almost afraid to hear the answer. “You gonna bring her into the fold too?”
Reb laughed, and when Michael looked back up, Rebel was looking at the tie-dye colors of the store, as though contemplating going back inside. “Lucy?” Reb shook his head and gave Michael a menacing smile. “You notice Lucy’s hair? Claudine’s favorite.”
The whole world shrunk in on itself.
Michael shot a frantic look back at the record store. He wanted to rush back in, scream for both Lucy and Alice to get the hell out of there, to run to wherever they could, as long as they didn’t tell Reb where they were going.
Reb slid into the car. The engine roared to life. Michael watched Alice step in front of the plate-glass window, her figure faint and milky behind the glare of the sun. But he could see her well enough to watch her raise a hand in a silent good-bye, as if it were forever instead of just for now.
The heat hit him hard.
He felt like he was going to be sick.
“Get in the car,” Reb barked from the driver’s seat. “I was just kiddin’, you idiot. Take a fuckin’ joke.”
Michael ducked down to
look through the open window. Rebel sighed dramatically and slumped in his seat. “I swear,” he said, holding up his hands. “I like Lucy. I shouldn’t, but I like her.”
For a second, Reb actually looked uncomfortable, a look that nudged Michael away from panic and toward belief.
“You swear?” Michael asked. He knew he sounded pathetic, but he didn’t care. This was bigger than the both of them, bigger than Momma and her urges or keeping Misty safe.
“I pinkie swear.” Reb snorted. “Faggy enough for you? Now get in, for God’s sake. I’m meltin’ out of my fuckin’ skin.”
Michael shot a look back toward the shop. Alice was still standing there, watching their exchange from behind the glass. He forced a smile and lifted his right hand in the same silent good-bye she had moments before. But even with Reb’s assurance, it still felt like the farewell was permanent.
• • •
That evening, the Morrow house was heady with the scent of a rich beef stew. Momma had sliced up carrots and potatoes and simmered the entire concoction down until it was thick and delicious. But it was so hot, both outside and in the house, that it was difficult to enjoy. Reb, Wade, and Michael sat around the table in nothing but their stained white undershirts and pants while Misty fanned herself with a folded up Seventeen magazine. She hummed an Elton John tune beneath her breath. Momma didn’t seem to notice the heat, eating her dinner with her head bowed, her eyes fixed on the scarred tabletop. Rebel cleaned his bowl, wiping it down with a piece of white bread. When he rose from his seat, Michael followed him across the kitchen with his eyes. Reb’s joke about Lucy was still sitting heavy in his chest. Michael wanted to believe Reb didn’t mean her any harm, but the longer he thought about it, the more uncomfortable he felt. The fact that the Dervish had become a regular spot for them was problematic, because before the Dervish, regular spots had always been jobs.
“This is good stew,” Reb said, complimenting the chef. “Real tasty. We should have this more often.” He came around the table and grabbed Michael’s empty bowl. When Michael made like he was about to rise, Reb shook his head. “Take a load off,” he said.