Somebody Else’s Sky: Something in the Way, 2

by Jessica Hawkins

  Manning

  Gary sat next to me on the bed of his truck, his legs swinging. He pointed to the ocean and shook his head. “Look at that. You don’t take the first inside wave as a set approaches. You just don’t.”

  The guy we were meeting hadn’t shown yet, so we’d backed into a small alley by the pier between beachfront condos and shops. It was a three-minute loading zone, and we’d be unloading—just as soon as the guy got here. In the meantime, Sublime’s 40oz To Freedom played on the car stereo while we watched the ocean.

  I followed a surfer down the line with my eyes until he jumped off his board. My gaze kept going and landed on Lake. She and her friends spilled out of a surf shop onto the sidewalk, giggling. She wore a purple scrap of fabric around her torso like an oversized bandana. Two bathing suit straps tied around her neck. She took a pair of sunglasses out of a shopping bag and modeled them for her friends. When she took them off, her hair caught on the arms, but the strands were such fine, spun gold that they just fell back into place.

  “Waves are shit, but I’d still get out there if I could,” Gary said, oblivious to my wandering thoughts.

  I couldn’t remember all her friends’ names, just Val, the one with the skateboard. The other two, Tiffany called Dumb and Dumber. To me they looked the same, except that one of them was always gawking at me. Tiffany said it was because she was scared.

  Val dropped her skateboard on the sidewalk and pushed off, passing Gary and me in a slow, controlled ride down the sidewalk. Lake and the other two climbed on their bikes. Out of nowhere, a toddler ran up from the beach and crossed their paths. The two girls swerved, but the boy tripped and fell anyway. Lake slammed on her brakes and dropped her bike to go to him just as his parents swooped him up and took him away.

  She got back on and started to pedal, but her chain had popped off and her foot slipped. I went to get up as she stumbled forward, then looked up, right at me, her blue eyes hitting me hard.

  As seconds passed, something loosened in my chest. Four weeks had passed since I’d picked her up from the prom. I’d seen her at family dinners, but even then she was rushing in from studying or volunteering or whatever else, or she was hurrying off somewhere.

  “Hey, Lake,” Gary said when he noticed her. “What’re you doing here?”

  She wheeled her bike over to us, the chain clinking.

  I nodded at the plastic bag hanging from her handlebar. “Shopping for a birthday present.”

  Lake’s eyes lit up. “You remembered,” she said before cinching her eyebrows. “Or I guess Tiffany told you.”

  June ninth. Lake’s eighteenth birthday. Couldn’t forget today if I tried. “She didn’t tell me.”

  Either she blushed or she’d gotten too much sun. The pink tip of her nose and the bridge had a light smattering of freckles. I had the urge to run my thumb over them, to spend my afternoon covering her head to toe in sunscreen. “What’re you guys doing here?” she asked.

  Gary thumbed the coffee table in the bed of the truck. “Delivering some furniture.”

  “For who?”

  He nodded at one of the houses. “This lady bought it from us. We’re meeting her husband.”

  Lake looked around me. “You guys made that?”

  “Well, Manning did.”

  “We did it together,” I said.

  “But you designed it.” He grinned. “I’m just an extra pair of hands. And I’m making sure you don’t scare off your customers.”

  It was just a table, not much to it except that I’d oxidized and stained the wood and added some metal detailing on the legs and corners. I’d built one for our upstairs neighbor, and his girlfriend’s mom wanted one, too. The money wasn’t much but every little bit helped and I had the time. I glanced over my shoulder and wished it was more. Something worth looking at.

  “It’s so good,” she said. “I can’t believe you can do all that. I knew you could make things but not that you were . . . creative.”

  As I went to speak, I realized I’d been holding my breath. “I’m good with my hands, that’s all.”

  Her cheeks went pinker as she tucked some hair behind her ear. “Oh. Y-yes. I . . .”

  I had to look away. She was way too cute when she was flustered. “Your friends left you,” I pointed out.

  “They’ll be back.”

  A car pulled up behind ours, and Gary craned his neck over the top of the truck. “I think this is them. I’ll go see.”

  Lake set her bike on the sidewalk and came to stand right by me. The threads of her cut-off shorts drifted against my jeans. She lifted her hair off her neck and fanned herself, showing me the delicate curves of her shoulders. She was eighteen. Fuck. Never had there been a greater test of my will.

  “You’re always saying at dinner how you’re looking for work. Why don’t you just make things?” she asked.

  I blinked slowly, trying to pull myself from the trance her nearness always put me in. “What kinds of things?” I asked, hearing the rasp in my voice.

  She reached behind me. I could’ve stared at her all day, except that she got too close, her cheek right by my face, smelling like lemon and Coppertone. I could almost convince myself I detected watermelon on her lips. I turned to watch her small hand glide along the table’s edge.

  “These things,” she said. “The wood is so cool. Smooth.”

  Her short, bare nails were pale on her tan fingers. I’d never seen her bite them except her thumb sometimes when she was nervous. She had hangnails and golden hair on her knuckles and more freckles.

  “Don’t you normally work today?” I asked, changing the subject for my own sanity.

  She chewed her bottom lip, bringing her hand back to her side. “I ditched. Val says you don’t work on your birthday.”

  If it were anyone else, I would’ve laughed and told them to suck it up. Lake not working on her birthday made me happy, though. Part of me didn’t even like the idea of her working at all. She should just have fun, shop with her friends, ride bikes along the beach, at least until college started. “So you’re getting into trouble instead.”

  She smiled a little. “What trouble? I’m just talking to you.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Maybe you’re the one getting into trouble,” she said.

  I tried to enjoy the way she blushed as she flirted with me. The way the color of her eyes deepened. But a thought nagged the back of mind. Fun as it sounded, I could never get into trouble with her. Not even little things, like sneaking in somewhere we shouldn’t be or getting caught drinking on the beach or taking off for a weekend in Vegas. All things she should be able to do. Being on parole meant playing by the rules and staying within state lines. I couldn’t go far away with her. I couldn’t soar.

  Which would mean she couldn’t, either.

  “Tiffany mentioned that you applied somewhere other than USC,” I said.

  “Oh. Yeah. It’s supposed to be a secret so my dad doesn’t find out.”

  Pissed me off how she wouldn’t even entertain other options because of her dad. He should’ve been encouraging her to look at lots of school for a decision as big as this, but instead he’d just packed on more and more pressure. “So where is it, this mysterious school?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m a Trojan now, that’s that.”

  “Yeah? You never even considered this other place?”

  “Why should I?” Her blue eyes shimmered like the ocean’s surface on a sunny day. “Everything I want is here.”

  The look on her face said everything her words couldn’t. I was what she wanted. I was here. It should’ve made me happy, but instead, it sobered me. The last thing I wanted was for her to make such huge decisions based on me. That made me no better than her dad. If I had anything to do with her choice to stay, especially after the way she’d broken down at the restaurant, it told me all I needed to know—she might’ve been eighteen, but she still wasn’t making decisions as a grownup.

  Lake re
ached around me to touch my hip, and my back went rigid. “What’re you doing?” I asked.

  “Trying to see what you’re reading.” She stuck her tongue between her teeth, patting around my back pocket.

  “Other side,” I said.

  She couldn’t reach that far, so she had to go around my knees. She slipped a paperback from my back pocket and read the title. “‘Tropic of Cancer.’”

  “Not going to find that on your reading list,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s, uh . . . not suitable for high schoolers.”

  She bent back the flimsy cover with her thumb and flipped through the pages. After a few seconds, she looked up, scanning my face. “You’re still having nightmares.”

  I tensed instinctively. Images I fought during the daytime flashed across my mind. Me, locked in a six-by-nine cell for eternity. Lake being pulled into the black water. Madison alone in a room with my father. Lake alone with my father. Sometimes I was in the room, too, stuck in a chair I couldn’t get up from.

  I could never give Lake those images. “No, not really,” I said.

  “Well, then something’s keeping you up at night. You have these . . .” She reached up to touch my face. “Dark circles . . .”

  When I noticed Lake’s friends wheeling back toward us, I pulled my head back, and Lake dropped her hand. Val skated in the middle, eating a frozen banana and flanked by the other two. She stuck a foot on the sidewalk and gracefully flipped up her board. Like little green magnets, her eyes went directly to the cigarette behind my ear. “Can I bum one?” she asked me.

  “No.”

  “I’ll pay you for it. For a pack, even.” With hardly a look, she tossed her banana into a trashcan a few feet away. “I’m not old enough to buy them yet.”

  “Don’t bother,” Lake said, her lips curling into a mischievous smile. “He’ll never give in.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her ribbing. “Excuse me for trying to keep you girls pure.”

  “What’s that?” Val asked, taking the book from Lake.

  “It’s Manning’s.”

  Val flipped it over, reading the back cover. “Holy contributing to the delinquency of minors!”

  My chest rumbled with an unexpected laugh. “Did you just quote Robin from the Batman series?”

  “Yes, and you get points for noticing. It says this book was originally banned in the U.S. for being obscene. Is it like a sex book?”

  The other girls went wide eyed. “No,” I said, “but it’s pretty graphic.”

  “How?” Lake asked.

  To hell with it. She was eighteen now. “Lots of drinking, women, prostitution, and, ah, misogynistic language. Miller supposedly took a lot of it from real life.”

  “Ew.” That was the gawker. She leaned over Val’s shoulder. “Henry Miller. Remind me not to read any of his books.”

  “How come?” I asked.

  She looked stunned I’d spoken to her. In her stupor, she fumbled her words. “Because he—well, prostitution? That’s gross. His life was so obscene that the book was banned?” she asked. “Why would I, you know, support that kind of man?”

  That kind of man. Being around Lake always made me feel like that kind of man, like I might lose control and corrupt her at any turn.

  “You have a point, Mona,” Val said, “but what do you think, Lake?” Val suddenly looked interested in my reaction. I didn’t quite understand their dynamic, Lake and Val. It felt a little too familiar, or, familial.

  “I . . . I think I disagree,” Lake said.

  “Why?” Val asked.

  I watched the two of them like a tennis game. Lake furrowed her brows at the gawker. “What does his personal life have to do with his work? A good book is a good book.”

  “But are you then condoning his bad behavior by supporting his work?” Val asked. “If he’s demeaning to women, like Manning said, how does that make you feel as a woman?”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” Lake said. “I don’t think it lessens his contribution to the literary world.”

  Val seemed to have come to that conclusion on her own, but she was pushing Lake to have an opinion. Maybe she wasn’t so bad.

  Lake looked to me, as if for approval. “I feel the same,” I said. “An author’s morals, or the morality of the characters for that matter, isn’t a reason not to appreciate a well-told story.”

  Lake’s shoulders pulled back. “Yeah. That’s what I was trying to say.”

  “You said it,” Val told her with a smile. “Anyway, we should get going.”

  “Already?” Lake asked, a little breathlessly, turning to me as if I were the one breaking up the party. “Can’t you . . . we . . .”

  “Go on,” I said. “Have fun.”

  Val kicked up her skateboard, and the other girls got their bikes. “We still have lots of birthday festivities to partake in,” Val called, rolling away.

  I stepped down from the truck, took Lake’s bike in my hand by the frame, and carried it back to the sidewalk. I flipped out the kickstand and squatted to reset the chain.

  Lake came and stood on the opposite side, putting me face to face with the frayed ends of her denim shorts, her bony knees.

  I lowered my eyes back to the chain. It was a quick fix, but it took me longer than it should, her proximity distracting me. “Try that,” I said when it was secure.

  She put one leg over the seat and rolled the pedals as far as they’d go with the kickstand up. “I think it’s good.”

  I stared at some dried blood on the inside of her ankle. She must’ve scraped it when her foot slipped. I wet my thumb and rubbed it away, leaving a faint grease smudge on her skin in the likeness of a bruise. Goose bumps rose on her calves. It was all I could do not to slide my hand up and pull the soft-looking inside of her knee to my mouth.

  I kept her ankle in my hand but didn’t look at her. If half the ache I felt in my chest showed on my face, I couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t notice. And she couldn’t notice. She needed to go on with her day, with her life, and not worry about leaving me behind.

  My eyes caught on an anklet on her other leg—a brown, orange, and green wax band. The bracelet she’d made at camp, then given me to help me quit smoking. The one the guards had taken away with all my other personal effects. My bracelet.

  “I’m keeping it for you,” she said. “For when you’re ready to quit again.”

  She didn’t know I was in too deep to quit. Maybe there’d been a time when I could have, but smoking was a part of me now, an organ that growled when it wasn’t fed on schedule. As I stood, she followed me with her eyes, tilting back her head when I hit my full height. Her lips were dry and parted as if she’d forgotten to do anything but watch me. I forgot everything, too, except what was right in front of me. The elegant slope of her freckled nose that ended in a cute but sharp button. The hidden dimple that would appear with even a hint of a smile. That cobalt blue that ate her pupils in the direct sun. She bit her lip, and I imagined reaching up and taking that pout for myself. Between my fingers, in my mouth, my tongue tracing the lines of her lips to each corner and back. My cock throbbing as I opened her up with my fingers until she was gaping and gasping and waiting for the one thing I’d always wanted to give her.

  One minute she was my innocent little girl, and overnight she started to change. You don’t know what it’s like to watch a girl become a woman.

  Bile rose up my throat with my dad’s disgusting words, his self-righteous justification for the pain he’d inflicted.

  I looked from Lake’s mouth to her eyes. Hope radiated from her, some kind of sweet, gentle plea for me to see her while my mind had gone straight to the gutter. She’d been eighteen less than a day. I was no better than my dad. I knew it like I knew my own hands—if I gave in, I would ruin her and everything I loved and cherished about her.

  I took the cigarette from behind my ear. Knowing it was my way of telling her to go, Lake’s eyes darkened with hurt. My entire self respond
ed, the need to take her pain away primal and strong.

  Footsteps shuffled up behind us. “Wasn’t them,” Gary said. “How much longer you want to wait?”

  The spell between Lake and me broke. “Happy birthday,” I told her.

  She swallowed, looking like she wanted to speak, but she just got on her bike. With a final glance at me from under her lashes, she left.

  I returned to the bed of the truck to wait with Gary.

  “Did I tell you Lydia thinks she’s moving in with me?” he asked.

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “Why’s she think that?”

  “Because I didn’t say no.”

  “Huh. Congrats.” I leaned my elbows on my thighs and watched the water. “Tiffany and I just had a similar conversation.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “She brought up marriage already, man. You were right.”

  “I’m not surprised.” He raised his sunglasses, appreciating a barreling surfer with a low-whistle. “What’d you say?”

  “I . . . I didn’t say anything.” I opened my hands. “My parents had this bad marriage, and I never really thought I’d want that.”

  “What was bad about it?”

  “They fought all the fucking time. He was a piece of shit, but she’d forgive him, and then it would start all over.”

  “From what I’ve seen, it’s the opposite for you and Tiffany. Maybe this is your chance to break the cycle.”

  I looked back at him. “What cycle?”

  “Remember what I said about parents passing on their bad habits?” He pulled his feet up onto the tailgate to sit cross-legged. “Let me ask you something. Are you a piece of shit?”

  I laughed a little, but he didn’t. Was I? At times, I’d thought so. Like now, for instance—I wasn’t sure if I loved Tiffany, but here I was, talking about marrying her. Maybe I owed it to her to walk away, knowing I could never love her completely, but I’d be good to her. I’d step up to the plate and eventually, I’d be able to take care of her. I’d find a way to love her as much as I was capable. Did that make me a piece of shit? “Sometimes I’m not sure.”

  “The answer to that was supposed to be no. And do you think Tiffany would let you get away with treating her like shit? You think she’d turn around and forgive you just like that?”