Sycamore

by Bryn Chancellor

  He’d seen Jess in Humanities and in the halls, of course. The Phoenix Girl, people called her. He knew Angie, too; they’d gone to school together since they were babies, though they’d rarely spoken. Well, she hardly spoke at all then. Jess and Angie held up clothes to each other as he watched.

  Jess caught him staring, but instead of making a face or looking away, as girls at school did, she waved at him.

  “Hey, Slim,” she said. “What do you think of this shirt?” She held up a black stretchy thing with a narrow neck. She shone like a new penny. He wanted to hold her in his pocket.

  “It’s nice,” he said. “Looks like something on Star Trek.” He heard Tomás’s voice in his ear: No, no, no Star Trek talk, hombrecito. No space shit. Be cool. He blushed.

  “Cool belt,” Jess said, pointing at the one he held. “You going to get it?”

  “Maybe,” he said. He gripped the leather, heat in his cheeks. It was only a dollar, but he had fifteen cents in his pocket. He made next to nothing on his paper route, and money was tight at home, with Papi’s bum back and Abuela in the nursing home and Mami asleep half the day since Tomás’s funeral, the folded flag on her dresser. Luz was working two jobs, waiting tables and cashiering at the HealthCo. “I’m nineteen and look at me,” she’d said the other day, pointing at her stained shirt and holding up her chapped hands. “I think you look great,” he said, and Luz had hugged him. “I know you do, Beto.”

  Now Jess said to Angie, “Hey, we should jam if we’re going to make the movie.” She looked between Angie and Beto and cocked her head. “You want to come with us? Lunch at the Patty Melt and then to the Palace to watch the same movie for the fiftieth time in a row. Heaven forbid we should get a new release. Still, what else are we going to do around here? Watch paint dry?”

  Beto clutched his belt. He didn’t think of sitting next to Jess, her long curly hair tickling him as they bumped elbows on the shared arm, or that the movie was a sci-fi one he loved. Instead he pictured a cheeseburger with bacon, ketchup dripping onto his fingers. A chocolate milkshake, sucking it through a straw until he got brain freeze. Plump hot dogs rotating on silver wires, popcorn smothered in butter, and fat red licorice ropes and candy boxes displayed like fine jewels. His stomach growled so hard he caught his breath.

  “I don’t have any money,” he said, before he could think of another excuse.

  Jess’s brow wrinkled, and she said, “Oh.” Then she smiled and said, “Well, hell, I can spot you. Come on.” She took the belt out of his hands, dropped it in her bag, grinned, and sauntered out the front door.

  Beto and Angie stood together, watching her go. He looked at Angie, and she looked at him. They both started laughing. He’d never heard Angie Juarez laugh that way. A great big laugh that reverberated like a canyon echo. Her eyes lit up like someone had flipped a switch, the silver streak in her hair almost glowing.

  Soon after, something happened between Angie and Jess. To this day, Roberto didn’t know exactly what had caused the fallout, though he could guess. (Love. Wasn’t it always love?) It was right around the time the lake disappeared, he remembered, because he’d ridden his bike to look at it and found Angie’s Impala parked there. After the bike ride, he was hot in Tomás’s coat, but he kept it on. It was starting to smell a little, like a wet towel left in the washer. He saw Angie sitting on the dock by herself, swinging her legs.

  He rode over to her, his tires bumping over the rocks and tufts of bear grass. Two days after the lake story ran in the paper, the mud was dried up and cracked, scaly even. It looked like pictures Ms. Genoways had shown in class of the drought in Ethiopia during the famine. He thought of those pictures, those babies with their big heads and swollen bellies, when he was feeling hungry. At least he had food. What did he have to complain about?

  Angie waved at him but didn’t say anything. She folded her legs under her on the dock.

  He parked his bike and set the kickstand. He pointed at the empty lake. “Crazy, huh?”

  She nodded.

  “Where’s Jess?”

  She shrugged.

  Beto sat on the dock next to her. He wished he knew what to say. Tomás would know. Whenever Beto would blab on about nebulas or supernovas or tell him about another girl turning him down for a date or ignoring his smiles, Tomás would crack his gum and shake his head. “Stop trying so hard,” he’d say. “Girls can smell desperation. Just let it happen. Be yourself.”

  Finally, Beto said, “Are you okay?”

  She nodded but then said, “My car won’t start.” She brushed at her bangs. “Battery, I think. Not sure. Might be the alternator.”

  Before Tomás signed up at the army recruitment office, he was often out in the carport tinkering on his truck. When Beto wasn’t reeling off news about the Hubble, he was watching, taking in the names and shapes of engine parts. He’d hand Tomás tools or hold a flashlight, liking the clang of metal on metal, the pungent oil and gas fumes.

  “Want me to look?” he asked Angie.

  “You can,” she said.

  He walked with her and his bike to the Impala. She popped the hood and tried to crank the engine.

  He leaned over the engine, listening. He tugged at the spark plug wires and wiggled the distributor cap. “I think your cap’s loose. Do you have a Phillips head?”

  She opened the trunk and pulled out her toolbox. She handed him the screwdriver and leaned next to him as he tightened down the cap.

  “There,” he said. “Try again.”

  She did, and the engine turned over. She smiled, her face as bright as it was that day in the thrift store. He tossed the screwdriver in the air and caught it with a grin. Angie laughed, but then her face crumpled. She started to cry.

  He opened the passenger door and slid in next to her. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  Angie Juarez never talked, so in a way it made sense that when she did, it all came gushing out. Had to come out sometime. She leaned her head on the steering wheel and told him her secret, about liking girls. She’d been damming it up so long, it was a wonder she hadn’t cracked at the center like the lake.

  “It’s okay. You can like whoever you want. I won’t tell anyone,” he said, before she could ask. “Who am I going to tell?”

  She smiled and hiccuped a couple of times. “Thanks. Thanks for listening.”

  He nodded. He lifted the collar of the suit coat and sniffed. He thought he could smell peppermint. “I miss my brother,” he said. It was the first time he’d said it aloud.

  “I’m so sorry, Beto,” she said. “I really am.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” He was still holding the screwdriver. He set it on the dash.

  “Want to come to the shop with me? Come. Meet my papa. You know, he’s planning to hire a mechanic. I think he wants full-time, but I don’t know. Maybe you could work after school?”

  “I have a job,” he said.

  “Weekends, then,” she said. “Come on. Put your bike in the trunk.”

  He did, tying the trunk down with a bungee cord. He slid in next to her.

  “Let’s ride awhile,” she said. “Do you want to drive? You fixed her.”

  “No,” he said. “You. I don’t have my license yet, anyway.”

  “When are you sixteen?”

  “I am. I just don’t have my license.” He hung his head. “I’m not a very good driver.”

  “Well, that’s okay. Maybe you just need to practice.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  The car roared to life. He heard Tomás in his ear: Be yourself. Over on the passenger side, Beto did feel like himself. He felt fine. Better than fine. His new friend Angie drove, and she talked. A lot. It was as if she’d flung open a cellar door and they’d stumbled out into the open. All the shadows went away and left him with sun. He even forgot his gnawing stomach. He hung his arm out the window, dove his hand through the wind, thinking he was touching the dust particles of the universe. In that moment he felt, as Ms. Genoways always said, lik
e a million bucks.

  Beto started working at the auto shop after school and on weekends, doing oil and tire changes and shadowing Mr. Juarez. Angie would invite him for dinner. Mr. Juarez made simple meals of enchiladas or hamburguesas and sides from boxes and cans—rice and beans, macaroni and cheese, au gratin potatoes, butter noodles. Beto ate and ate and ate, and Mr. Juarez laughed. Growing boy, he said, patting him on the back, a good strong slap, but Beto saw Mr. Juarez had teared up, which he knew had to do with Tomás.

  After dinner, in the last strains of the day’s light, with the bats winging and dodging overhead, Angie and Mr. Juarez would take him out in the Impala to practice driving. He hadn’t been behind the wheel since Tomás had taught him to drive a stick; then, they had lurched around the neighborhood, the truck smoking by the time Beto pulled into the driveway, Tomás doubled over laughing on the passenger side. Mr. Juarez was patient, even when Beto almost sideswiped a parked motor home and backed up onto his neighbor’s lawn. “Esta bien,” Mr. Juarez said, patting Beto’s arm. “Relax. Take your time.” But Beto couldn’t relax. His joints felt rusted, and he hunched like an old man at the wheel, clenching his jaw until it ached.

  When Beto got them home safely to Angie’s house, he came in for dessert and ate a half a pan of brownies and a whole sleeve of mint cookies before walking the four blocks home. He checked the winter sky for Orion and the Big Dipper—he arced to Arcturus, sped on to Spica—and then searched for the Pleiades and Aldebaran and Sirius, the brightest and nearest in the whole galaxy. He wished he could tell someone these facts. When he got home, he pulled the meat loaf Luz had made from the fridge, unwrapped it, and ate it cold while standing on the back steps, looking up at the winking sky. Where was the Hubble now? What was it capturing and sending home? Sitting out in the winter dark, looking up, the line came to him: The ship sailed across the sky. That was the night he wrote the story, hunched over the kitchen table with a pan of meat loaf at his elbow. For a few hours, he left behind that hunger year, flying away into his imagination, into an imagined future.

  Funny how quickly friendships and relationships shifted and realigned then, as if their teenage lives were playing cards shuffled and redealt every few months. Jess started hanging out with Dani Newell and Paul Overton, a holy trinity of cool smartness, about the same time Rose Prentiss rocketed into Angie and Beto’s sphere, all corkscrew hair and doll-blue eyes and attitude. When Rose wasn’t working at the Patty Melt, she was in detention. To be fair, every time she got in trouble she was defending Stevie. Rose was tiny, but she threw her body into revenge against shit talkers; recently, she’d rammed a CPR dummy into a boy’s chest in health class. With Rose in their orbit, Angie laughed her canyon laugh, her eyes a galaxy.

  On weekends, the three of them started going to Rose’s parents’ motel, the Woodchute. Rose had a key to the Woodchute’s office, and once she knew Stevie had gone to her room and put up the after-hours sign, she would sneak in and get a room key. Unlike other teenagers who went to parties at Peck’s or the Drag, who locked faces near the fire, rubbed up against each other, or ducked away into the scrub, the three of them sat around and sipped on crème de menthe Rose had stolen from her parents’ liquor cabinet and watched cable TV. But Angie and Rose watched each other, too. Beto understood those looks without anyone saying a word. Hungry. They were hungry, too.

  Beto wrote more, filling up his loose-leaf with silly stories about talking spaceships and doppelgänger planets and human-robot love. Once he went to see Ms. G after the last bell, to show her some of these wonders. He’d knocked and then turned the unlocked knob, stepping inside before realizing she wasn’t there. Her desk was strewn with student papers, stained coffee mugs, and pencils sharpened down to nubs. He hurried forward and set his stapled pages on top of a stack of papers, tiptoeing away as if he’d just done something wrong. He heard keys jingle outside the door, and he panicked, as if he was doing something wrong. Near the door, he ducked behind a coat rack bursting with abandoned jackets, umbrellas, and book bags.

  Ms. G walked right past him, trailing smells of vanilla and coffee and French fries, and sat down at her desk with a sigh. He stood frozen behind the rack, stifling a sudden urge to cough. Holding his breath, he peered through the coats. She held his pages in her lap, her reading glasses perched on her nose. She smiled and let out a short laugh. His stomach growled so loud that she glanced up, frowning at the vents.

  He didn’t know how long he stood there watching her read. She scribbled something on a page before she grabbed her purse and a stack of papers, strode past him to the door, and turned out the lights behind her.

  Beto stood in the dizzying dark of her room, breathing in the mustiness of strangers’ unwashed coats. He stepped from behind the rack, his head abuzz, his limbs tingling. She’d left his story on the desk, and he snatched it up, scanning the page. Next to the line “The solar wind howled and beat against the ship’s window, a monster trying to break inside,” she’d written, “Beautiful. Just beautiful.” He pressed the paper against his rumbling belly.

  The December night Beto first drove by himself was the second night of the storms. He was almost seventeen now but still hadn’t gotten his license. That night, the streets and lots pooled with water, the ditches rushing, but none of that stopped Angie and Rose, who had gotten off shift early from the Patty Melt. Angie pulled the Impala into the flooded motel parking lot, and Rose opened the passenger door and ran through the rain to the office. Before Angie even turned around to him in the back seat, he knew he wasn’t invited to come in with them.

  “Take the car,” Angie said. She held out the keys. “I don’t mind.”

  “I don’t have a license,” he said. “I’m failing driver’s ed. Again.”

  “So what? No one’s out. You’ll be fine. You’re careful. Go get some fries or something.”

  “Okay,” he said, although he couldn’t because he didn’t have any money, and he was too embarrassed to ask for any, even from his best friend. He took the keys. “What time should I come back?”

  She said, “I don’t know. An hour? Take your time.”

  He checked his watch. It was five thirty. He said, “So about six thirty?”

  “Yeah,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was watching Room 7, where Rose stood in the lighted window. She flung open the car door and left it ajar as she splashed through puddles to the room.

  Beto climbed into the driver’s seat and shut the door. The rain thudded on the metal roof. His breath fogged the windows, and he rubbed at the windscreen with the sleeve of Tomás’s coat. The sleeves were shorter now, the bones of his wrists sticking out like knotted rope. He ran through the steps in his mind. Gear in park, foot on brake, check mirrors. Turn ignition, headlights on, wipers on. Put in drive, let off brake, press accelerator.

  He lurched forward, alternating gas and brakes. At the turn onto Main, he stopped, looked both ways three times, though no one was on the road, and pushed the gas pedal. And there he was, driving down Main, by himself, in the rain, the tires spraying water onto the sidewalk. It felt okay. He felt okay. He heard Tomás in his ear: Don’t try so hard. Be yourself. His shoulders relaxed an inch. He thought of Ms. G, and he whispered, “My heart is an inferno.” And it was, supernova hot, ready to burn right through his chest, and no one knew but him. He smiled.

  He stayed on Main. Most of the businesses were dark, closed early because of the storm. The rain battered the hood, and the windshield wipers thumped in a steady rhythm. He drove maybe twenty miles an hour, looping between the exit to the highway and the motel. Back and forth, north and south, up and down, for about forty minutes.

  He was getting the hang of it when he thought he saw something sleek and low—a cat?—dart out in front of him. He swerved right, and the Impala went up on the sidewalk before he overcorrected and shot out in the street, bouncing, the chassis scraping the pavement. He slammed on the brakes in the middle of Main, and the tires skidded. His heart hammered his
chest, and he gripped the wheel, looking at the beam of the headlights on the gas station. That was when he saw a figure in the rain. Jess Winters, as he told the police multiple times later.

  She stood under the awning, next to the pay phone. She was wearing a red coat with a long sweater beneath it over jeans. Her hair and clothes were wet.

  That was what he told Detective Alvarez. No, he didn’t speak to her. No, he didn’t know where she was going.

  “How’d you know it was her?” Detective Alvarez had asked. “It was dark, not to mention pouring rain. How’d you recognize her?”

  “Her jacket at first,” he said. “Her hair. The way she stood. I don’t know, I just did.”

  “You’re sure it was her?”

  “Pretty sure,” he said. “Ninety-eight percent sure.”

  “What were you doing out in Angie Juarez’s car?” Detective Alvarez asked.

  “She let me borrow it,” he said. “I work for her father.”

  “It was a bad night. What were you doing out?”

  He didn’t want to get Angie in trouble or tell her secret, so he had to lie about that part. That was the one thing he’d lied about.

  “Practicing driving.”

  “In the storm? The streets were flooded.”

  “I was hungry,” he said. “I went to get fries.”

  “You don’t have your license, Beto. The stores were closed.”