by Joshua Furst
One of his hand-rolled cigarettes wedged in that odd way of his, deep between his middle and ring fingers, Trent glanced at her with a hint of a smile as though he were looking at her for the very first time and he approved of what he saw. She'd seen him like this maybe two, three times before and each time had hit her like a revelation. She told herself to remember this expression in case she never got to see it again. After tonight, she was sure, all her alternatives would be used up; her life would turn out like mine and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
Jarod had Trent by the elbow, tugging him backwards, and as Trent let himself be led out the door, he held up two fingers and aimed a casual what's up at Cheryl. He turned the corner and disappeared before she could respond, but his and Jarod's long evening shadows lingered in the frame of sunlight, weaving and melding and separating again. They spoke in low tones. Jarod's shadow hands wavered in front of Trent, telling figurative stories, describing and pleading, building the case against her. Trent's shadow was still, head bowed in concentration. It seemed to be coiling, preparing to pounce.
Stop being crazy, she told herself. The only conspiracy that exists against you is the one in your head. But it didn't help. She was my daughter, and doomsday thoughts came quicker than optimism, fantasy came easier than logic, and the urge to fill the gaps in her knowledge with morbid delusions overwhelmed her.
When the boys returned, the evidence was clear: Trent's body had shrunk into a tight knot. His face was hard. His lips thin. A cold rage narrowed his focus and he leapt right past Cheryl, ignored her, raced up the stairs two at a time and slammed into the squat. Jarod chased after him. The dog let out two shrill yips and galloped behind.
Alone now, she slumped against the wall and tapped her head against the flimsy banister, waiting for Trent to come flying back out with her shit in his arms, her backpack, her t-shirts, her one pair of jeans. She wondered, Would he remember the army jacket? Ha. Of course he would. He'd recognize how much it meant to her and leave it behind on purpose, fling it across the room, into one of Devin's piles of trash.
Someone was watching her from the top of the stairs. It was him, she knew. She could feel his rage burning up the back of her skull. Don't look. Don't look. Don't let him see your eagerness, your weakness, your need. He moved slowly down the stairs and sat next to her. She had to be strong, to be the first to attack.
Turning, she glared. “What?”
“What, nothing,” he said. He'd left her clothes upstairs. “I need you to go somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I don't know. Somewhere. Wherever the fuck you want.”
Beneath his furrowed brow, his face was tense, every muscle squeezing to withhold his emotions. She wanted to touch him one last time, but she couldn't—if she did, she knew, one of them would explode.
“So, pick a place,” he said. He pulled a green lighter out of his back pocket and nervously tapped it end over end against his knee.
She tried to make herself as cold as he was, to turn herself off, but she couldn't.
“Fucking pick someplace, Betty. I'm gonna need to fucking find you later.”
The tears came suddenly. She couldn't control them. And knowing he wasn't going to comfort her just made them that much worse.
“Fucking—”
She screamed at him. “Where do you want me to go?!”
He showed no pity. “Why do you have to be such a fucking—” An abrupt rage spasmed through him. “Goddamn it!” He whipped the lighter as hard as he could toward the doorway. It ricocheted off the sloped ceiling and clattered onto one of the steps below them in a way that left his gesture incomplete, flimsy, impotent. He leapt down the stairs and grabbed the lighter, threw it again, this time out the door.
“The cross,” he said, turning on her. “Alright? Go hang out at the fucking cross.”
AS SHE RACED along Fourth Street, angry shapes streaked past, places she hadn't ever thought twice about, coming at her like insults—the Mobil MiniMart where they'd stolen so many ham and cheese sandwiches, the lampposts and mailboxes mummified in leaflets, the faded, torn awning of the Nix Bar, the Chinese joints and the Green Tea Smoke Shop, all these places where she and Trent had spanged, all these bitter, insipid associations. The goodness was seeping quickly out of each of them. She tainted everything she came in contact with.
Maybe she should vanish, just cease to exist. What would Trent do then? He'd keep doing whatever. Nothing would change. He'd forget all about her in, like, five minutes. It wasn't even worth it to go to the cross.
But then, where else was there? St. Anthony Main? There was jack-all to do in St. Anthony Main. Or she could head toward Hennepin, wander downtown, but then she might run into Robert, who'd drag her home, who'd lock her up and never let her out again. She could climb down that drainpipe—those junkies couldn't still be hidden there, could they? Well, if they were, maybe she could score from them. Infect herself with whatever they had. She could go anywhere, but somehow each place would still be the same nowhere—nowhere worthwhile. Her too many choices made for no choice at all.
On the West Bank, she wandered through the granite and concrete plaza around which the University of Minnesota's arts buildings were clustered, and wondered, like she did every time she saw it, why everybody called it the cross. Okay, the different grades of stone were laid out in a kind of a quad, which, if you looked at them slantwise, she guessed, could be considered cross-like, but really there was no reason for such melodrama.
A handful of skater kids loitered in the plaza. It was a favorite hangout, a wide tiered bowl with a variety of obstacles for them to bounce off. Cheryl kept her distance. She climbed one of the pillars dotting the perimeter and watched them fuck around, skittering down railings and surfing along the arched ledges of the bowl. They competed against each other, picking up speed and popping their boards, flipping them back and forth on their toes as they leapt over tipped trash cans, then landing with arms outstretched and amazed grins on their faces. Or, more often, they tripped and tumbled, sprawling face-first on the vast pink granite plain.
A year ago, she would have been one of the mousy girls lined up like cheerleaders along the steps, pretending to be impressed by the skaters' prowess—or rather, willing themselves to be as impressed as the boys they adored were of themselves. Now she loathed these kids, the girls and skaters both, not just because they were blind consumers, their resistance a style, a fashion choice, another way to check out, but also, more urgently, because they didn't know how good they had it. They were poseurs, into the lifestyle not the life, sequestered waist-deep in their middle-class comforts, and here at the cross to, more than anything, show off their purchasing power, their kick-ass old-school Vans, their killer Birdhouse rides. Their lives were stable. They didn't know fear. To think she ever believed she might have something in common with them. Not with a mother like me, she didn't.
Small clusters of runaways and gutter punks were scattered around the plaza as well. They clung to the edges, far away from the skaters, and banded together like refugees around campfires. Though the day had been sunny, they looked somehow soaked through, as though they'd been caught in a flood.
When the sun started to set and the lamps blinked on, the gutter punks seemed to multiply. Alone, or in cohorts of two and three and four, they gravitated toward the light like bats. Hunger streaked across their faces, as well as a desire she recognized as her own, the dream of combustion, of the world in flames, all the parking lots cracked, the concrete pylons shattered, the power lines severed and the schools in cinders. Hemorrhages of mayhem blossoming out of the charred ruins. Civilization razed to the ground and ready to be rebuilt differently this time. They conspired, these starved children, at the edge of darkness, each of them eager to enter the action.
From her perch, Cheryl watched their small communities grow and shrink. She could see them but they couldn't see her. Even when they looked her way, they gazed right through her. She recognized them
—most of them, anyway—but their names were a blur. They'd been to parties at Sabotage. She'd had them in her home, or the place she'd called home—she was going to have to forget this word again. To be surrounded by so many people, separate from all of them, a unit of one, too unimportant to even be scorned—it felt somehow right. It was what she deserved.
She'd hoped that maybe these could be her people. But she'd been wrong. The only person who'd ever understood her, the only person who ever could, was me. She had no place—not even a place among people who, like her, had no place. Where, she wondered, did exiles go when even the land they'd been banished to kicked them out?
In the right hip pocket of her cargo shorts, she felt something pulling, like the insistent hand of a child. Her cell phone. For almost two months now, she'd been ignoring it, denying the connections buried there like fossils. She couldn't anymore. The names and numbers lodged in its memory cried for attention. They were all she had left of her identity.
When she pushed the button that powered the phone up, she didn't expect anything to happen. She couldn't remember the last time she'd charged it. But—ding, ding, dong—there was that chime, and then the crude magnifying glass roaming the screen for a connection. It uncovered five bars, a sliver of battery. She searched the contact list for a name besides mine—someone she could replace me with, a girlfriend, a former intimate, anyone, so long as they couldn't see through her. But every name came with a complication, some ruinous story she couldn't undo. She was just stalling, anyway. The tug in her navel allowed only one choice.
She gave in.
It was almost nine p.m., and I, at that moment, was lying on her bed, listening to her paranoia and loneliness. I'd spaced out. I'd lost track of her, just for a second. This one time when it mattered, I wasn't prepared.
By the time I reached the phone, the machine had picked up. What I heard was “Mommy?” One aching word. She hadn't called me this in years.
I grabbed the receiver. “Cheryl,” I said. “Honey, Cheryl, I'm here.”
And then there was a slippage. Her voice was yanked away. The machine screeched with feedback and dead air rushed in.
Her battery had run out. I knew this explained it, but I couldn't stop wondering if, had I picked up right away, her phone would have lasted just a minute longer, time enough for me to tell her I loved her. Come home, I would have said. I don't hold anything you've done against you.
I want to make this clear. Those pills, they're like a lobotomy on a drip, bit by bit scraping my brain from its shell. But if she'd stayed, I would have kept taking them. I'd have happily sacrificed my mind for her.
That's not what had happened, though. She'd left. And now that the connection was dead, time seemed to shift. It skipped and it hovered. It threatened to swan-dive, come to a full stop before staggering on like it always does.
A whole new set of strangers overran the cross. Some skater kid across the expanse pulled a Casper and before she knew it, she'd watched him grind and ollie for ten, twenty minutes. She remembered the exuberance of her skater pals in Plymouth. There was one she'd been sorta-kinda going out with, Matt was his name, and they'd sit around in his driveway, just the two of them after school. He'd try and try again to get his board to 360. “Wait, wait though. Watch this one!” Holding his hands out like wings. “See, it's—just wait, let me …” Requesting patience as though he thought she had somewhere else to go, had anything better to do all afternoon than sit on the hood of his mom's car and watch him fuck around. “It'll work this time.” No embarrassment at all. Like a flirtatious child who understands that the inept flailing is more endearing than the success. She'd teased him—“Yeah, okay, whatever”—tickled by how hard he worked to get nowhere, enjoying the pointlessness of it all. The course her life would take had glimmered before her: the slog through high school, the slingshot into college where what she'd learn in class would maybe be interesting, but irrelevant to the real education happening in the dorm, the social education, the learning how to float above it all while trying on lifestyles like Halloween costumes, searching for that especially vibrant one. She'd assumed she was part of the great enlightened for whom special things have been set aside, that she could create herself out of wishes and rearrange the entire world on a whim. She'd thought she'd been promised a great many things. Now she'd closed off access to all of them.
Blinking into the streetlight mounted above her head, she tried to pin down exactly what it was that had defined her life before I'd gotten sick. Contentment. But that wasn't quite it. There was too much boredom and dissatisfaction for that. Confidence. Confidence and a presumptuous belief in her own right to the future. And naiveté. Because how could she have believed she was really like the other kids living in Plymouth with us? Sickness collected in our house like gas. It was imprinted in her DNA. Madness. She wasn't allowed—she couldn't allow herself—to make the assumptions everyone else did. Even her capacity for joy was suspect.
The busyness below her caught her eye again. A girl was squatting on the polished granite, drawing invisible pictures in front of her; a bar code was tattooed across the base of her neck—Cheryl allowed herself a hiccup of pride over having decided against that one. A group of thick, happy towheaded boys spun a Nerf football over each other's heads; they looked so normal in their backward baseball caps. Then she was off again, distracted, spacing over all the ways she wasn't like them.
On and on like this, she waited, losing more hope, letting more and more self-pity leak in.
And then she saw Trent. That steel chain around his neck. That brass lock bouncing against his collarbone. He'd tied a black bandanna around his left forearm as though he was off to join the insurrection. The despair vanished. But another anxious feeling rushed in to replace it. How could she need him so absolutely? Was she even able to exist without him?
ACKNOWLEDGING HER with a thrust of his chin, Trent held back and rolled a cigarette as she shimmied down from her perch. She could sense how much he loathed her dependence on him, how much he resented having to be here, and it pissed her off, sort of, that he had come. His mood was black and defensive. Even in abandoning her, he had to show off his superiority, had to make himself unassailable. Why couldn't he just flake out like a normal person, throw her crudely away so she could hate him in peace? But, no, that would be too kind.
“So?” she said. She followed his cues and refused to get too close.
He took a drag off his cigarette, studied it. Then, without a word, he started walking, and she trailed him out of the plaza like a hungry dog.
They moved in and out of darkness. Cutting across the wide cropped lawns, up the ramps and walkways of the West Bank Extension. This was the new part of the university, vast and impersonal, and except for the business school with its optimistic powder-blue windows, it was all hulking boxes made of concrete and brick plopped down on expanses of empty space.
They didn't speak once.
When Trent held his cupped cigarette out for her to take, she shook her head no. There was barely a drag left. He took one last suck and flicked the roach into the air.
She had to remember, he'd already abandoned her; what he was here to do was display the proof.
“Where we going?”
“I don't know, Betty. We're fucking just walking.”
Up the final ramp into the barn-red bridge that linked the West Bank to the main campus. Then reaching the other side, Trent turned onto the bike path that wound down into the park along the river. Decorative streetlamps—their black paint chipped in places, the rust underneath peeking through the cracks—shot out fillips of light surrounded by long spans of darkness. Cheryl's gaze hopped from one lamp to the next—anything to keep herself distracted from Trent. A storm of insects battered the glass around each bulb.
He was savoring her distress, reveling one last time in his power over her. When thoughts of her flickered through his mind later, this would be what he remembered, not the curve of her breasts or her pubic hair's
texture, not the pitch of her laugh or the punch of her wit, but the way she stood sometimes with her shoulders slumped, an expression of abject need breaking on her face, and the glee he took in ignoring it.
Little by little, he edged closer to her, gradually working his hand into hers, prying her fingers apart and grasping. She reminded herself, I'm humoring him, not the other way around. He can't reach me anymore, no matter what he does. But his hand was sweaty, and as he fumbled further, kneading his thumb into her knuckles, squeezing and roaming around for a response, she shook him off.
It was like he was trying to reenact some music video, the grainy kind meant to prove how sensitive the hard-drinking, hard-drugging bootjack punk really was underneath all the random destruction. She wasn't buying. No way would she play his dew-eyed girl. She'd seen this one before; the song was way too long—the melody was strained and overproduced.
Fuck that.
When he stopped in the middle of the path, she was supposed to stop too, and stand there, quivering, waiting for the blow.
Fuck him. She kept walking.
“Betty, hold up a sec.”
Anger thickened her skin. Nothing could pierce her.
“Betty—”
“What?”
She turned.
“Come here a sec.”
“No.”
“Just come here a sec.”
“You come here,” she said.
He did. He came so close she smelled the ashes on his breath, the iron and acid, that slight whiff of mildew on his clothes. He slipped his arms around her waist, pulling her toward him, and thrust his pelvis into hers. When she tried to squirm away, his grip clamped tighter.
“Just let me hold you.” It was all so stagy. So melodramatic.
Finally, she had to resort to violence, to dig her nails into his wrists and twist his arms around behind his back.
“You can't do that anymore. You've lost the right,” she said.
“What's that supposed to mean?”