by daisy harris
Apparently that was the best Julius could do for empathy, because he patted Hal’s arm in a manly fashion, and then headed for the door.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Boys!” Bethany sent a panicked glance my way. “We should get going.”
I waved at Hal. “Yeah. I told my mom I’d be home soon.” I had no idea what time it was, but it was a good enough excuse.
“Yeah. Sure.” Hal blew out a breath, seemingly relieved we were leaving. “Bye.”
“Bye.” I pressed the button to open the door, letting Bethany bring up the rear. Halfway down the hallway, Julius leaned against the wall as he clicked through his cell phone.
“Oh, these are good,” he muttered. “You were right, Henry, bringing her was spot-on. I never would have been able to get this much if—”
I shoved him in the arm. “Geez. What were you doing? That can’t possibly be legal. Isn’t stuff on people’s cell phones protected by . . .” I racked my brain for a legal term, and found none. “Something?”
“Not that I know of.” Julius’s gaze was bored, a quick hardening of his jaw the only sign that my shove had hurt. “Granted, I’m not a lawyer.”
Frustrated and worried we’d get caught, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and checked my messages. My mother hadn’t responded to my latest text. No smiley face or OK to reassure me that she wasn’t going to shout when I got home. At that point, I would rather be chewed out by my mom for something I didn’t do than stay at the hospital and get in trouble for something I did.
“Can I get that ride home now?” I pressed the button to the elevator. Bethany stepped up next to me, eyes on her own phone as she ignored me and Julius arguing.
“Yes. Of course.” Julius was silent as we waited. When the elevator dinged on our floor, he socked me in the arm so hard I yelped.
“What the hell?” I rubbed the spot, wincing.
“When dealing with the unknown, it’s best to assume your actions will be reciprocated,” he said to no one in particular. His chin tilted upward as he got on the elevator, and he ignored me the whole way down.
“Hey, Mom,” I called when I entered our apartment.
I needn’t have bothered, because my mother sat at the kitchen counter, legs crossed and spine ramrod straight. Her graying, strawberry-blonde hair was pulled back in a loose bun. Breezily, she said, “Glad to see you finally decided to come home.”
Things had been easier when she worked at a hospital. With her weird hours, she’d seldom noticed if I came in late or left early. Now she wrote nursing training manuals at home while she waited until one of the Seattle hospitals could rotate her in. I wasn’t used to having her around all the time.
“Yeah. The English teacher, Steve, is a real stickler. There were a dozen of us waiting around after class to talk about our group projects.” Given it was the second day of school, I was sure my mom didn’t buy it.
“I got an email from your school today.”
I kept my mouth shut. With kids, I might have a hard time keeping control of my temper, but not with my mom. Years of experience had shown that she’d talk herself out of punishing me if I gave her long enough.
“It seems you were fighting with a boy yesterday.”
Though every cell in my body wanted to argue, I waited for her to keep going.
“Was this a boy in your class?”
I tried to hide my sigh of relief. “He was a senior actually.” And he started it, my brain provided, but I ground my teeth so the words wouldn’t escape.
Mom studied me. “Did you pick a fight with a senior in order to impress the other kids?”
That question was a little harder. Although I had not in any way picked the fight, there was a tiny part of me that knew the answer was yes.
“He asked us to leave a lunch table, and I said no.” There. That answer was true enough and still managed to make me seem innocent.
“By ‘us,’ you mean . . .?”
“Me and my friends.” I didn’t know if that was specific enough, so I added, “People I’d met in my classes. Other freshmen.”
My mother nodded slowly, her eyes calculating. “You know how I feel about fighting, Henry. It’s never right, even if the other person is the instigator.”
I stared at the floor, because I knew that if I met her gaze, I’d say what was going through my head. It’s not my fault!
“The boy clearly had emotional problems. That’s what’s so worrisome.”
I snapped. “Don’t all bullies have emotional problems? What? Am I supposed to let him push me around, and push my friends around because—”
“Hey. I didn’t say it was your fault.”
“Yes, you did.” I couldn’t stop shaking. Jerking out of my chair, I paced the room. “You’re acting like I had something to do with this kid trying to kill himself. I met the guy once. For, like, ten minutes.” I swept my arms in a wide arc. “What in the fuck does this have to do with me?”
My eyes popped wide. I’d just dropped the f-bomb in front of my mother. Worse, I’d aimed that missile directly at her.
The redness in her cheeks spread to her ears. “I think we both need a moment to cool down.”
“Yeah.” My belly knotted with guilt. “Can I go to Starbucks to do my homework?”
“That would be fine.” She checked her computer screen, as if she needed something to distract her. When I got back she’d have a glass of wine in hand and would give me the silent treatment.
That should have made me glad, but it didn’t. I missed her when she got cold and distant. “I’ll take my cell phone so you can reach me.”
“That’s fine.” There was a tremor in her voice.
I was a really bad kid.
“Be back in an hour. Or, uh, two.” I offered it like white flag of surrender, but she had already shut me out. I knew she didn’t mean anything by it. She just needed time to get her own stuff under control. But it still hurt.
Madison Park had the fanciest Starbucks I’d ever seen in my life. In Texas, I’d mostly seen the coffee chain at malls or in grocery stores. Only the little neighborhood near the college had a freestanding one, and that had always been packed with students and their textbooks.
This one, however, had a bar that served wine in the evenings, plus a fireplace, three separate seating areas, and a wall of windows that opened onto a veranda on sunny days.
Tonight the doors were closed and the music mellow and bluesy. On the far side of the coffee machines were two men who were sitting close enough that they were obviously together. Both men were tall and in decent shape—handsome and well-dressed, like they had wonderful lives. One leaned closer to whisper something in his partner’s ear that made him smile.
Embarrassed, I hurried to get in line.
There’d been a couple of men in Killeen I’d suspected were like that, though I’d never known for sure. Certainly I hadn’t seen them holding hands with boyfriends while shopping at the grocery store like I saw in Seattle. I supposed this way was better—with gay couples being out in the open. Still, every time I saw men like them together, I started to sweat. Seeing them made me think uncomfortable things about myself.
I ordered my usual decaf drip. As I dug in my back pockets for money, the unmistakable sound of a microphone being turned on filled the space. “Testing. Testing.”
“Oh.” I took my drink from the barista. I knew from seeing her at other times that she was nice. “Is there something going on here tonight?”
“Yeah, it’s a poetry slam. We do it the second Tuesday of every month.”
“I didn’t know that.” I frowned.
Like she was mimicking me, her smile dropped. “Do you not want your coffee? I guess I should have warned you.”
“No, that’s fine.” It wasn’t. No way could I read the Spanish passages I’d been assigned with people talking into a microphone across the room.
I didn’t want to complain to the nice barista, so I took my coffee and headed to the back section. On the far wa
ll, across from the fireplace, I saw an empty table. More surprisingly, I saw Julius Drake.
I went over, so as not to be weird. I couldn’t tell whether I was happy to see him. Maybe wary was more the case. “Uh . . . hi.”
“I thought you’d be grounded by now.” Julius was reading a crisp copy of Scientific American, though he had what looked like homework on the table next to him. His work was in Chinese.
“She probably would have grounded me if I’d given her a chance.” I didn’t actually know that. Sure, she might have asked me to stay home that night and maybe the night after, but I doubt she would have called it grounding. I should have let her get her words out.
“She’ll get over it.” Julius flipped a page on his magazine.
“Why do you say that?”
“All parents forgive their children. At least the kind of parents who’d move across the country for their offspring to go to a better school.” For a split second, his eyes darted up from his reading material, but they returned just as quickly. “I’d guess that you lost your temper. Either shouted or said a word you’re not supposed to say to your parents, though I suspect it’s the latter.”
“What—”
“If you’d shouted, she would have shouted back, and kept you at home. But cursing? Salty language is bound to slip out now and again. She’d be shocked, too shocked to take definitive action.” His lips quirked up in the corner.
I couldn’t tell if he was joking.
From across the room came the sound of a man clearing his throat into the microphone. “Hello. I’m Joe Snyder. I’ll be hosting tonight’s poetry slam. First up we have—”
“Oh, good God.” Julius slapped his magazine shut. He got a glare from the girl at the next table over. “I never would have come if I’d realized this was scheduled for tonight. Second Tuesday of the month? How is anyone supposed to keep track?”
Everyone gaped at us like they were ready to take Julius out back to be tarred and feathered.
Ignoring them, he grabbed his coat off the chair, wrapped it around himself. “Are you coming?”
“Oh. Yeah, sure.” I followed him outside. Though it was still light, the sun was setting, throwing shadows from the trees. The evening was cool and beautiful, almost calming enough to stop me from wondering why I couldn’t seem to stop staring at Julius’s cheekbones and jaw. I tried to ignore the tension under my skin. “Where are we going?”
“I’m going to my house. You can come if you want. Natasha is there with some of her friends.” He rolled his eyes.
“That’s fine.” Even if my mom wasn’t mad at me, I didn’t feel like going home.
“You didn’t ask.”
“I didn’t ask what?”
“You didn’t ask what was on Hal’s phone. Bethany didn’t either, but she’s concerned about keeping her nose clean. What’s your excuse?”
I thought about it. Didn’t I want to keep my nose clean too? If that was the case, why was I following Julius uphill toward houses with wide, darkened front lawns? “Mrs. Hundstead was in the car.”
“Mrs. Hundstead doesn’t care.” Julius pulled his phone out of his jacket and showed me the screen.
I couldn’t read it—the text was too small.
“We’re lucky he didn’t lock his phone. The last three texts he sent were to the same person. He got a rather snippy response on the last one, but the number seems to have been disconnected. No one answered when I called. It was a TextNow number.”
“Ah, yeah.” A few of my friends from my old school had those accounts. They let a kid text from a computer or a tablet if they didn’t have a cell phone. Unfortunately, since there was no service contract, the accounts couldn’t be traced. “That’s sketchy.”
“Indeed it is.” Julius held the phone aloft to tempt me. “Hal could have been talking to anyone, and his texts are somewhat cryptic. I think it’s safe to assume that whatever exchanges took place before his suicide attempt have been deleted.”
“Listen. I helped you out at the hospital, but I think it’s best if we leave this alone.” The roads grew darker and more forbidding as we walked. Maybe this was really none of our business. We’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time in the lunchroom. I rubbed my face nervously. “So he was talking to some strange number? Tell his parents, or Liz, or whoever it is at school who deals with this. It wasn’t our fault Hal did what he did, and it’s not our job to find out why.”
“My parents already asked Dr. Cochow for a referral to a new adolescent psychiatry specialist. If I want to avoid more rounds of testing, I need to clear my name as soon as possible.” At the top of the hill, Julius turned left.
“Well, yeah. But Hal will explain what really happened to his parents eventually.” I followed a few paces behind. “Can we just hang out and do homework tonight?”
The next block led past ever larger houses with high fences and solid walls of trees. At the very end lay a driveway that disappeared down a private hill. I could tell by the cars parked on the ridge that someone was having a party below. Probably Natasha.
“Why would we want to do that?” Julius rounded on me.
“Why would we hang out and do homework?” I shrugged and folded my arms. “I don’t know. Because that’s what friends do?”
He blinked. “Do they?”
“Uh . . . yeah.” I couldn’t see more than the roof of his house, but there were enough lights to suggest that he lived in a mansion. “Are your parents home?”
“No.” He frowned. “I don’t imagine they are. But if you need a place to do your schoolwork, we could study in my room. Natasha and her friends usually keep to the kitchen and family room.”
From the house came a crackle and snap, then the smell of sulfur like shooting firecrackers.
“Oh, great,” Julius said. “Someone’s been visiting a First Peoples’ reservation. I wonder how long until the police show up.”
Shouts broke out from the house, seniors having the kind of fun they did when parents weren’t home. I hoped for Mrs. Hundstead’s sake they didn’t break anything.
“So, are you coming?” Julius took a step in my direction.
All at once, the gravity seemed to shift, like instead of tying me to the ground, it was dragging me toward Julius. For some reason, I noticed his shoulders. They were wide and sharp, and I liked their shape. Just looking at them was making my skin feel tight. I desperately wanted to be closer to him, but had no idea what to do.
A bottle rocket screamed. Its blue line stretched into the sky, though it didn’t explode. Instead it hung there, fading into the black.
“That’s okay.” I cleared my throat and took a few steps backward. “I don’t want to be in the way.” Shivers had me wanting to run as fast as I could, away from Julius and the house and even the fireworks. From all the things I wanted but would get me into trouble.
“It’s probably for the best.” Julius frowned, then headed down his driveway.
“Bye,” I called after him.
He didn’t answer. But then, I’d gotten used to that.
“I’m home.” I threw my backpack on the bed and unzipped it.
“Henry?” My mother stuck her head out the door of her room. Her eyes were red and puffy.
I hadn’t thought I could feel worse for what I’d said to her, but I was wrong. “Yeah?” I’m sorry.
“I’m glad you’re back. Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you need to talk? About what happened at school with that boy? Anything else with your friends?”
“I’m good.” She was the person I could least imagine talking to about the things that worried me. Things like why my legs wanted to carry me back to Julius’s house. “Listen, Mom . . .” I did my best to look her in the eye, though I could only manage it for a breath. “I shouldn’t have said that. Earlier, I mean.”
“No. You shouldn’t have. But you’ve heard me say worse, so I can’t be angry.”
I nodded. “Do you know if
Dad’s on base today? I’d like to call him.”
My dad always said I could contact him whenever I wanted. He usually wasn’t available, but tonight I wanted to try.
“I don’t know. You can use my laptop.” She gave me a smile, then went into her room. “Send a message first and see if he replies.” She came back into the living room. “I don’t think he’s been sent out, but I never know when—”
“It’s okay.” I took the ancient Dell from her hands. “I know he’s probably not around.”
She leaned in and kissed my cheek. I could tell this wasn’t an everything is okay kiss, but more of an I’m worried about you kiss. Moms had a way of making that distinction obvious.
She disappeared into her room again, so I went to my bed with the laptop and typed in the pass code for my account. Mom insisted that I have my own account and password, which was funny when I thought about it, since most people had parents who wanted more access to what they searched for online, not less.
When I could open Skype, I sent an IM right away. It would take forever for Dad to respond, if he was able to, so I got out my Spanish homework.
I had it done in fifteen minutes. So I got ready for bed and heated some leftovers from the fridge. I’d washed the plate and brushed my teeth by the time I admitted my dad wasn’t going to answer.
The apartment was quiet, save for the normal indoor noises of appliances running and people moving around in the other units. I opened the shades halfway so I could see the sky. As I lay in bed, a patch of dark bluish-purple was visible above the roof of the apartments.
I thought about the gay couple at Starbucks, and the way Julius had looked framed by the lights from his house. Honestly, I might have imagined that moment when I could have kissed him. Maybe it had been overactive hormones, or a random impulse that would have made me miserable if I’d followed through on it.
Maybe I just wanted to be special, like Julius.
Heck, I wasn’t sure I could have asked my dad about Julius anyway. I didn’t know why I’d bothered trying.
“Are you done?” Mom stuck her head out from her room.