by Jamie Mason
She hated that she couldn’t do anything but crumple up inside and wish she’d never come in here.
“Let’s just go,” Ada said, close and low.
They hadn’t set down their snacks or even stopped long enough for it to be a real spectacle yet. They could just keep going, almost as if it weren’t happening. It would be the next best thing to being awesome. Awe-some.
Of course, the next best thing to awesome would feel like a total loss, but Carly let Ada pull her along anyway.
“Hey, Carly! Why’d you kick your boyfriend in the head? Might’ve been your only chance.”
She heard Dylan step out behind her, cutting loose from his circle and sliding into her empty lane. Ada was a length ahead, still carving a path for them to the door. Carly sensed the gap behind her and turned back. It didn’t matter. No one’s closeness would have made it anything other than just him against her. He’d steered it that way on purpose. It was his talent, making a show out of people who didn’t want it. He’d already won the first round.
The ones who laughed made Dylan bold. So did the ones who didn’t, holding in their exhales so as not to miss anything. They couldn’t help it. They were just like her, everyone breathless to know what came next. They were exactly as uninformed about what he would do as Carly was, and just as riveted, only not in the crosshairs.
Carly could almost feel the rise of his blood in him, so like her own, but in a different chamber of the heart altogether. He wanted to strike as badly as she wanted to turn to smoke and blow away.
He held up the phone, lining up his camera. His friends jostled and snickered in his wake. “You should’ve given him a chance,” Dylan said. “You might have liked it.”
More than anything, it was a concept. An idea made of giggles and rudeness and wonder and heat and a couple of partial diagrams from a rigorously straight-faced health class lecture on the biology of it. It was loaded into a slingshot of shame when the idea was pointed at her or the other girls, but she didn’t quite understand why the joke was funny for the boys, but definitely not for her. She was embarrassed by it, but even more embarrassed just for being embarrassable in the first place.
Nothing waiting in the queue of her thoughts would make any sense to say out loud. Fire bloomed into her cheeks and the maddening tingle of tears felt like a hand around her throat.
Dylan smiled, starting to collect his reward as the people in the room helplessly took score.
No one was on his side, but the balance tipped. She could feel their acknowledgment. He certainly could as well. The cruel, smooth, ancient part of the crowd brain tilted irresistibly toward not what was right, but to what was strong.
Carly saw the woman seated to her left watching with her folded hands pressed to her lips. She shifted in her chair and leaned forward, enthralled. But the woman didn’t settle back. Instead, she got up and walked toward Dylan and the other boys, smiling.
She was tall. White shirt. Jeans. Really good boots, with cool buckled straps wound around them. As she went by, Carly saw that the woman’s jaw was messed up. The right side of her face was tight at the far edge and puckered with scars.
The woman walked all the way up to Dylan, arms crossed, back bowed into a casual slouch. She looked amused.
“You know, you might be the bravest boy I’ve ever seen.”
Dylan tried to smirk, but the color went patchy on his face. A sudden rash of alarm crept up out of the neck of his T-shirt.
“No, really. That was unusual. Not a lot of people would be that . . . that . . . I don’t know. What would you call it?”
Dylan shrugged.
“What’s your name?”
He stiffened to keep from squirming. It was plain he wanted to shrug again so desperately that Carly felt her own shoulders rising in unwitting sympathy. He dropped his gaze to the level of everyone’s knees.
The woman ducked her head into his sight line. “Oh, come on. Don’t lose the fire now. What’s your name?”
One of the boys behind him cough-shouted into his fist, “Dylan!”
The woman dropped her smile and uncurled from her friendly slump to her full height. She rolled her hand over with a flick of her wrist, palm up. “Give me your phone, Dylan.”
Dylan struggled in the trap of his age. He didn’t have to give her the phone. But he wasn’t all the way out of the reach of authority. Not just yet. Everyone in the room knew it. He glanced out the window as if he were hoping to see a meteor on its way through the glass. No one said a thing, and now even the front of the line and the cashier and the girl with the headset and nose ring were all watching. The couple at the table had forgotten their argument.
Carly trembled with the thrill of it and also with some stupid measure of guilt at his agony.
The woman fluttered her fingers and snapped her palm flat again. Dylan rolled his eyes and scoffed in the back of his throat, but he gave up the phone.
She turned it over, lit it awake, and handed it back. “Unlock it.”
“C’mon. I’m sor—”
“No, no, no. Don’t do that. It’s not time to be sorry yet. Unlock it.”
Carly could see only half of Dylan’s expression and none of the woman’s, but whatever he read there made him clench his jaw and jab at the screen. He slapped the phone back into her hand and wheeled away as if he would walk back to his group, who had already pulled an extra step of distance from him.
“Wait,” she commanded.
He did.
She circled around so that they were facing each other again, never taking her eyes from the phone, slow steps, bootheels thocking on the tiles. She ticked a glance at his face to make sure he was watching her. He was. Carly could see her a little better, too. The woman launched the video he’d just taken and turned up the volume. C’mon, Carly, do something awe-some.
Carly’s mouth twitched in the fight against crying. Dylan rolled his eyes again.
The woman tapped the screen. “Okay, well, that’s gone.”
Dylan put his hand out for his phone.
She shook her head. “Not just yet.”
The woman scrolled through his pictures, all her reaction playing out in her rising left eyebrow.
Dylan shrank with every flick of her finger across the screen, going paler until his freckles and two panicked spills of red across his cheeks were all the color left in him.
“Oh. I see. Wow.” She looked up. Calm, Carly saw, and a little rage rippling under it. “Really, Dylan? Do you think we should show this to, I don’t know, your parents? Their parents, maybe?” She studied his photo gallery again. The last passes of her fingers were in a tight-lipped hurry. She looked up and sighed. “You have a real problem, Dylan. Do you know that?”
He quaked and nodded. The drive-through kept running in cars and order-box static, oblivious to the frozen crowd inside. The girl with the headset was going to give herself whiplash trying to both do her job and not miss out on the show.
“I’m going to do you a favor,” the woman said, her fingers flying across the screen of Dylan’s phone. “And delete all of this.”
She handed the phone back to Dylan, tears now running in shining tracks over his furious blushing. He put his fingers around it, but she didn’t release her hold on the phone or his gaze. She did, though, take a small-arc step to the left, Dylan in tow, turning the conversation and angling their bodies, Carly realized with a startle, for her benefit. She could see them both in full profile now—Dylan’s wrecked humiliation and the woman, at once scarred and beautiful, in complete control.
“Fresh start,” she said to him.
He made a little choked sound in his throat and nodded helplessly again.
She pulled the phone like his tether and reeled Dylan in toward her. “You’re going to get a lot of shit for this, Dylan. For what’s happening here, right now.”
Carly felt the antennae of all the young people in the doughnut shop buzz to life, remembering their world.
The woman contin
ued, “But it won’t last long. It’ll pass. I want you to get over it. I want you to be fine. I really do. But I want you to remember it. Every time you go through your new, nice—regular—pictures, remind yourself.”
Dylan bobbed his head, agreeing to anything to make it end, quivering in place, pinned there in all his wrongness.
“Don’t be a terrible person, Dylan. In the end, you never really get away with it.”
She let go of his phone first, then of his eyes.
Dylan melted into his group and they went straight for the door like a single creature. The room broke out in chatter.
The woman said to Carly, “Take my table. Catch your breath.” She gathered up her bag and her book, and moved her coffee to the far side to make space for Carly and Ada’s things.
“Thanks,” Carly said. “I mean, not for the table. I mean, yes, for the table. But for . . . you know. Thanks for helping.”
The girls arranged their treats in front of them, but the doughnut now looked gross to Carly. She was lost-in-the-desert thirsty, but the clear condensation on the outside of the cup was more appealing than the thought of the syrup-sweet drink inside.
“You can repay me.” The woman smiled at them for checking each other’s worried glances for the right answer to that. “And by that, I mean you can show me your drawings.” She nodded toward Carly’s spiral-bound sketchbook. “I used to be an art expert. I can smell an artist a mile away. Either that or I saw you showing your friend here while you two were in line. Take your pick.”
Carly laughed and passed over the book. Shy and proud all at the same time, her face burned again, for what felt like the hundredth time since she and Ada had come in the door.
“I’m Emma, by the way. You’re Carly, or so my new best friend, Dylan, tells me.”
The girls giggled.
“And you . . . ?” Emma left it open for the answer.
“I’m Ada.”
“Do you also draw, Ada?”
“Nah. That’s her thing. I’m a musician. And a nerd. DC, not Marvel. Puh-lease.”
Emma flipped through Carly’s drawings, pausing, turning some of them into the light. She wasn’t kidding about the art thing. Carly had seen lots of people look at her drawings.
When she drew, it was a different kind of thinking. A pointed blankness in the front of her mind and whirring concentration in the back of it. But the moment when other people looked at what she’d done, when her ideas went into their heads in the first pass of their eyes, that was amazing. She felt both impossibly close and spacewalk-distanced from anyone who was looking at her work.
Everybody liked them. They liked them because they were good. Carly knew this, though smiles and shrugs were all anyone ever got out of her in reaction. It was the weirdest kind of thanks to give when someone had liked the work that was private and public all at the same time.
But this woman, Emma, could really see what the drawings were made of. Carly watched what she paid attention to on the page. Emma knew exactly how Carly’s pencil moved, where she’d started with the shadows and edging. Emma knew everything about what she was looking at.
“These are very good.”
Carly smiled and her shoulder moved toward her ear as if it couldn’t help it.
“No, really. These are excellent. Truly.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. So, I see Disney here. Some anime. Some original stuff, too.” Emma wound the pages back to the beginning. “But what else? Who do you like? Old Masters? Renaissance? Or more recent stuff?”
Carly didn’t know the answers to those questions. She had only the vaguest idea of categories and famous names.
Emma watched her with a steady patience, waiting for an answer.
“I . . . I don’t really know what I like.”
“Well, what do your parents like?”
“Oh, my mom doesn’t know anything about art. She can’t even play Pictionary. She’s a disaster with a pencil.” Carly hoped her smile was nice and that what she’d said hadn’t come out snotty. She hated getting stranded on the unknowing side of a knowing smile. When adults talked about Oh, teenagers as if they were all the same and all out-of-control obnoxious, it made her wish she’d never said anything at all—ever. “I don’t think John knows about art either.”
Emma closed her mouth and tilted her head. Carly saw her take a slow inhale that lasted forever. She hadn’t moved. That was it. That’s what was different. She’d gone statue still.
“John’s her stepdad,” said Ada, never to stay forgotten in a conversation for long. “I got to be in the wedding. Junior bridesmaid.” Ada nodded at her own commentary, wise with pride. “Me and Carly had matching dresses. They itched.”
“They were the worst,” said Carly. “But, yeah. I just draw on my own. I get comics and cartoon books from the library sometimes. Just to look at. Mom and John are really nice about my drawings. Really supportive. But they don’t know anything about art.”
“Is that right?” Emma said. “That’s interesting.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
* * *
John didn’t know anything about art, but he knew a fair bit about things that were old. He’d grown up with the vague idea that his father had a dedication to three things: root beer, real beer, and flea markets.
As Jonathan got toward adulthood, he understood there was more to it, that his father was ill, wrung in cycles of hopelessness that didn’t seem to obey any rules of cause and effect. But the truth was that John never really gave a shit about any of that. He didn’t have much of an attention span for wondering about the invisible weight that pressed his father.
His mother had always made up the practical difference anyway, sometimes with three jobs at once and always with a watchful eye on her husband’s frailties. He wouldn’t protest as she’d donate a truckload of his accumulated junk and move them on to the next town, and into the invigorating distraction of a fresh start.
It was time to go if the man of the house bloomed in enthusiasms that swelled into days-long impassioned rants. He’d quit his job at the grocery or hardware store and spend his time instead bringing in carloads, sometimes even borrowed-truck loads, of plunder as he discovered this, that, and every ridiculous other. At one point, they’d owned four washing machines and two refrigerators, a blocky white Stonehenge of appliances in the living room, all just as useful plugged in as not.
It was equally worrisome when he quit talking altogether and got to slurping sweet suds and hoppy ones as the television channels ran through their schedules in front of him and the clock wound circles on the wall.
His mother’s vigilance had a whiff of warden about it. Something truly bad might’ve happened if she didn’t mind the fences of her husband’s moods.
She slept no more than three or four hours a night until she didn’t wake up at all one morning two days before she would have turned forty-six. Jonathan knew it was a sad thing. Tragic even. But she’d brought it on herself. No one made her everyone’s keeper or made her stand sentry until it killed her.
Jonathan had spent hours—months’ worth of hours probably—trotting along on the trail of his father’s obsession with the minutiae of secondhand sales. His dad was animated by abundance, sometimes the shabbier the better, and by the suspended animation of all that stuff just sitting there in between belonging to someone.
Flea markets, swap meets, and pawnshops were his father’s favorites, but the peripheral booths at gun shows and trade fairs would do, too. He wasn’t above enjoying a yard sale either, but his wife made him promise that the lawns of their neighbors, in whatever town they were living in, were off-limits.
Jonathan Spera the Elder was warm and happy and competent and just a touch holier-than-thou when he roamed the no-expectation zones of the world with a little cash in his pocket. In tow, Junior watched the traffic on the road, fantasizing where the long-haul truckers would end up when they pulled in and unhitched their trailers.
But th
e knowledge of the worth of things, and specifically of how a span of years magically transformed the worth of things, soaked into Junior and became reflexive.
After his mother died, Jonathan didn’t have the patience that she had for calibrating each day against his father’s ability to cope. So he’d introduced his father to marijuana and plain cigarettes just to keep him calm.
He smothered the embers of his father’s chemical swings with blankets of nicotine, caffeine, sugar, and THC, until his dad was up to slightly better than three packs of cigarettes a day and just under an ounce of weed every two weeks. A few cases of protein drink, a few economy-size tubs of instant coffee, an assortment of junk food, and all the root beer and Pabst his father could drink was the standing order. That and a paid cable bill kept the old man effectively paralyzed. Happy enough, as far as Jonathan could tell.
The government checks and his mother’s annuity covered it until it didn’t. There was never any left over, and the last few days of some months were tense with Jonathan’s phone lighting up in spasms of his father’s anxiety, hunger, and permanent hangover.
But not until his father died after nearly nine years of the routine, alone in his chair with the TV on and a cigarette burned fully through to the skin, did Jonathan truly understand himself.
When he found his father with his tongue dried to a shriveled leaf-looking thing in his slack open mouth, he’d turned off the TV and switched on the overhead. The smoke-stained glass fixture dribbled yellow light over a room chock-full of junk, and entirely empty of life. And it was Jonathan’s own personal sunrise. In the sudden echo of release, and thirty-two years young, he knew what he was made of.
The burn on his father’s thigh was disgusting—deep and dry by the time Jonathan found him, but a howling blackish red and clean edged. His father clearly hadn’t budged while the cherry seared through the flannel and his skin. He’d never made a single move to save himself. Just as always. No struggle at all.