by Barry Lyga
And by sitting there, she had more time with Dean. More time to figure out how to take things to the next level.
Early in their relationship, Kim had told Dean that she thought sex should be for after marriage, and he’d surprised her by agreeing. Was he just trying to accommodate her, or did he really mean it? Dean’s family didn’t go to church, so she couldn’t be sure.
But now… she’d changed her mind. Big-time. She felt an empty, yawning ache at her core when they were together, and whenever they kissed, she caught fire in the most incredible, loveliest way. Her thighs went hot, and on Saturday nights, when he left her house after they’d spent the night down in the den, kissing and sucking at each other’s necks, she immediately plunged her hands down, hunting for relief.
She didn’t want him to think she was a slut, but she was tired of her own fingers. She wanted more. She wanted to feel him inside her, a thought that made her blush every time she had it, which was too often.
But she couldn’t just tell him that. She wasn’t a slut. She needed him to make the first move, and then she would acquiesce. Let him chase her to where they both wanted to go. She’d started wearing clothes that were a little more revealing, a little tighter. Today, for example, she wore a bulky sweater, but skintight yellow-and-green-patterned pants she’d found at the mall over the weekend.
“Hey, check it out!”
So swaddled in her own thoughts was she that it took a physical shake of her head to bring her back to the present, to art class. Brad Gimble, sitting next to her, was one of the very few boys in the class. He was a jock through and through, with a reputation as a total meathead. But she tried not to judge—art class was for everyone, Mrs. Lamb always said, and everyone was for art class. If Brad had depths he didn’t show off outside the football field or the wrestling mat, then good for him.
“What?” she asked.
He tilted his easel so that she could see it. His canvas was blank white, except for a leaking, spattered blob of red paint in the center, as though the flag of Japan had melted, then quickly refroze. It looked like a ketchup stain.
“It’s part of my punctuation series.” Brad’s tone was serious, but his expression was of barely restrained laughter. “This one is Period. Get it?”
If she said no, he would chortle at her stupidity. If she said yes, he would no doubt guffaw and ask, Are you getting it right now?
She availed herself of the third option, the only palatable one: She shook her head minutely, then turned back to her own easel, ignoring him, pretending as though it had never happened.
His snickers and whispered attempts to snag her attention again made it difficult, though.
She was usually thrilled to see Dean when they made their daily connection between fourth and fifth period. Today, though, she was still thinking of Brad and his stupidity, and her impotence in the face of that stupidity. It just wasn’t right that there could be stupid, cruel, careless people and no recourse for someone like her. She felt not happiness at the sight of Dean, but rather security and safety. She wanted him to wrap her in his arms and kiss her forehead.
But Dean took a step back when she closed in on him, glancing around for teachers.
“It’s okay,” she said, a little more grumpily than was strictly necessary. “We’ll just get a warning.”
Still, he held her off at arm’s length. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”
It made sense, but she didn’t really give a damn about making sense right now. She wanted comfort; it was being denied to her. Her temper flared, higher, then hotter than the moment required, stoked since the moment in art class. “Are you suddenly ashamed to be seen with me?” she demanded.
“What? No!” Dean seemed horrified by the mere suggestion.
She knew, deep down, that she wasn’t angry at Dean. She was angry at Brad. At herself. And taking it out on Dean, even though she should have known better. Still, it welled and thrashed within her, and it needed an outlet, and here was Dean, who was safe, who would listen, who would take it and still love her.
“I mean, you haven’t even asked me to homecoming yet and it’s coming up and I have to buy a dress, Dean!”
Dean blinked, then stared. His expression, so blank as to be unsettling, slowly transformed into bemused guilt, as though he’d been driving on a highway and suddenly found himself on an unpaved back road. How, his expression screamed silently, did I get here?
“Of course we’re going to homecoming together. I didn’t think I had to ask. I’m sorry.”
“You just…” She cast about in frustration. All the anger and hurt she’d collected, pointless and aimless and ill-timed, but still extant. It all had to go somewhere and do something; it couldn’t just dissipate. “A girl likes to be asked, Dean.”
With a slow nod, he took her hands in his own. Not a drop of sarcasm or patronization spilled from his lips as he said, “K. T., I would love to go to homecoming with you. Will you go with me?”
She nodded because of course she nodded, smiled at Dean, and leaned in to kiss him. He let her.
“Watch this,” Jay was saying. They’d been talking about Miami Vice—sometimes it seemed like all they could talk about was Miami Vice; she’d watched it a couple of times with Dean and just couldn’t understand why they liked it so much—and something about cocaine.
Now Jay had two little packs of Smarties, which he was unraveling, spilling the candy discs out onto the table. Brian chuckled as Jay separated out the white ones, sweeping the rest out of the way.
“Like this, okay?” Jay took the knife from his lunch tray and ground the Smarties into white powder.
“Jay…,” Kim said.
“Who you talkin’ to?” Jay asked, scowling. “I ain’t Jay.” He pronounced the J like they did in Spanish class, forcing out a harsh and overdone accent.
“Say hello to my little friend,” Brian said in the same accent.
“That’s Scarface, not Vice,” Marcus complained.
Brian splayed his big hands out on the table. “Whatever,” he grumbled under his breath. A part of Kim felt bad for Brian—the other guys always seemed to find fault with him. But she also disliked the way his eyes roamed her body with a hungry abandon, darting away long after she’d already noticed, as though he thought it didn’t count as long as he shifted his gaze eventually.
But in the meantime, Dean seemed not to notice Kim’s hand on his thigh as he stared across the table, almost disbelieving what he witnessed as Jay put his milk straw to the table and proceeded to snort the powdered Smarties.
“One hunnert percent pure…,” Jay started, then cracked into his normal voice as he howled, “Oh my God! That burns!”
With a shriek, Jay jumped up from his seat, hopping up and down, shaking his head with animal ferocity. Marcus and Brian and Dean were no help, giggling and chortling at the sight before them. Even Antoine, who usually seemed so reasonable and stoic and responsible, had cracked a grin.
“What’s going on over here?”
It was Mr. Hindon, the new school librarian. Everyone called him “Twitchy” because he was always squinting his eyes and wriggling his nose.
“We’re okay,” Dean assured him.
“Jay just got some bad coke,” Brian said between low chuckles. “Must’ve been cut with rat poison.”
Twitchy glanced at the white powder, then at Jay, who now executed a painful series of spastic dance steps, bouncing from table to table as he hollered in self-inflicted agony. The librarian sighed and rolled his eyes.
With Twitchy doing nothing and the whole room just watching in goggle-eyed amazement as Jay floundered around, Kim hopped up and ran to the water fountain with her bowl of soup. On the way, she dumped the soup in the trash can, then quickly rinsed it in the fountain before filling it.
With all eyes on her, she approached Jay and held the bowl out. He glared at her until she shoved it under his nose and said, “You have to flush it out.”
He jammed his nose in t
he bowl and pinched one side closed, then drew in a harsh and blubbery breath through the open nostril. An instant later, he reared back, choking and gasping. Ropes of snot shot out of his nose, spattering into the bowl.
A thunderous round of applause went up from the collected lunchers.
Jay wiped his nose on his sleeve and turned to behold his audience. His eyes watered, swollen red like two Easter eggs set into his face, but he was grinning.
“Cocaine is the best!” he shouted to even more earsplitting applause.
Twitchy blew the whistle he wore around his neck as lunchroom proctor, and eventually everyone calmed down. Jay returned to the table and a welter of back slapping and handshakes, while Kim inched over to the trash can, careful not to let Jay’s mucus water slosh over the edges of the bowl and onto her hand.
She had just dumped the bowl into the garbage when she became aware of someone standing near her. Turning, she beheld what had to be a freshman—upper-lip peach fuzz and pre–growth spurt height.
“Excuse me,” he said to her, very earnestly, “but I wanted you to know that we took a vote…”
Here he gestured to a table nearby, where a group of similar freshmen waved happily to her.
“… and we think you have the best ass in this entire school,” he finished, nodding very soberly.
He was a pimply little nothing, and she smiled at him and thanked him. Her pants felt even tighter, as though they’d spontaneously shrunk a size in the moment. She waved weakly to the table and offered a little smile—the boys there went wild.
She walked back to her table, keenly aware of the eyes like hands on her rear. She knew she should have been bothered by it, but all she could think was I wish Dean would do something about it.
THE PRESENT: ELAYAH
Elayah pulled back the living room curtain and looked out to the driveway and the sidewalk. A group of reporters had gathered there as though they were waiting in line for the new iPhone.
Dad was getting ready to pull a double shift. There had been a plan: Since the doctors didn’t want Elayah back in school yet, Mom was going to take Elayah to work with her. Elayah had protested this scheme but had lost out. She knew Mom needed to go back to work, and she also knew that there was no way in the world her parents were ready to let her stay home alone.
“People got nothing better to do?” Dad grunted.
The story of Elayah, of the time capsule, of the attack, had gone national and stayed national. Even though the podcast had started without any sort of comment from Elayah, she still received DMs from Indira at NPR, increasingly chirpy and insistent at the same time. And every day brought new people to town, like the self-styled “social investigator” she’d discovered in her Insta mentions, a white lady in her fifties who claimed to be able to solve crimes by “analyzing sociological data and extrapolating from known factors to arrive at unknowns.”
Whatever that meant, she was in Canterstown, poking around, along with more like her.
“This is ridiculous,” Dad growled. “Should have bought that gun. Mom talked me out of it.…”
Her dad, she realized suddenly, was getting older. Her parents had a tendency to stop everything and hold her at arm’s length, rhapsodizing about how big she was, how mature, how much older. This had been going on as long as she could remember, to the point that she wondered what exactly about parenthood caused the very specific brain damage that made parents forget that kids were supposed to get older, more mature, etc., and why should that be a surprise?
But truly surprising was noticing in the opposite direction, gazing at her father and beholding the tight gray coils scattered in among the black hair cropped close to his skull. The threads of silver along his sideburns and even speckled in his stubble on days—like today—when he did not shave.
Black don’t crack, but there were signs of aging beyond the superficial. Her father’s eyes seemed tired. His gait was slower.
Her dad had never seemed so old to her. She knew that the world moved on and that people aged and that people died. But her dad was just barely over fifty, which seemed both ineffably old and wholly young at the same time. He’d changed so little in the years since she’d become truly aware of him as a person, as a human being separate from herself. Photos of the two of them when she was a baby told the story—Marcus Laird had aged well, if at all, since the birth of his only child. In her more mordantly humorous moments, Elayah wondered whether somewhere in Mexico, Uncle Antoine was aging twice as fast, a surreal twin-centric version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
But now…
“It’ll be okay, Dad,” she promised him. She both feared and yearned for a gun in the house.
Her dad had to go to work. Her mom was on the phone, explaining the situation to her boss. The reporters had spooked her folks, so now Mom would stay home with Elayah. Again. She could tell from Mom’s tone of voice that her boss was being compassionate, but that the well of kindness was running dry. This couldn’t go on forever. Her teachers were emailing assignments and lecture notes, but at some point, life had to start again.
She checked her phone. In and among the strangers commenting about and to her, the new folks trying to slide into her DMs, she caught messages from people she actually knew, kids at school.
is @elayahlairdrox ever coming back to school?
I heard she still can’t talk
news says she’s “under watch”
what does that mean?
it means she’s not over watch
I would never go out in public again just stay in my bed forever
lol she got STABBED IN BED you doofus!!!
Elayah bristled at that one. She scrolled back in her own feed. The last thing she’d posted to Insta had been a screen grab of the Loco’s front page with the very first—innocent, anodyne—story and tags that read #almostfamous and #frontpage.
Now, as her parents huddled behind her, discussing, she made her way into the garage, where the stuff from the time capsule still lay out on the tarp as she’d left it the other night. A part of her was surprised to see it, surprised that the police hadn’t take it all as evidence.
She held her phone out to catch herself at arm’s length. The photo looked not quite as dramatic as she’d hoped. She appeared wan and ashy, the stitching at her neck a bright purple against her skin. The lighting in the garage left much to be desired.
Without allowing herself any time to think, she posted it to Insta: Still here #nofilter
LIAM
Pop had gone back to sleep after waking to make breakfast and coffee for Dad, as always.
I don’t trust Dad with the bean grinder, he’d confided to Liam once. He overgrinds.
He’d enunciated overgrinds with a note of sheer horror in his voice.
As he knotted his tie in the living room mirror, Dad kept an eye on a YouTube clip of some conspiracy theorist explaining how “the Canterstown time capsule is just the beginning; the wrath of the eighties is coming!”
Dad practically snarled at the laptop. “This kind of crap doesn’t help. It lures crazy and desperate people out of the woodwork. Sends a bunch of false clues and bad leads flying around. I mean, what the f…” He drifted off, as though just remembering that Liam was in the room.
“Dad, I know the F word,” Liam grumbled. “I know both of them, actually.”
Dad snorted. “Okay, well, let me know when you learn the third one. That’s when you can start using them.”
“There’s a third…?” Liam stammered, perplexed as Dad headed back into the kitchen to top off the coffee tank. A burble of laughter told him he’d been punked.
When he emerged from the kitchen, mug steaming once more, Dad gave Liam’s black eye another once-over, then left for the office. Liam had at least ten minutes before he had to bolt for school. He fired off a text in the group thread he had with Jorja, Marcie, and El.
u guys see some of this crazy stuff?
Marcie came back almost instantly: your dad must b
e
Jorja: twitter says reporters still at school too
El just sent a picture from her front yard. Liam inhaled deeply at the sight. Reporters at school, reporters at El’s…
this is what you get for dropping a surprise album, he texted.
said El, and Liam felt good.
ELAYAH
Marcie had a job three days a week after school at a place in Finn’s Landing called Boogie Woogie. It was one of those indoor playgrounds for little kids, and there was an entire preschool’s worth there that afternoon. Something like thirty four-year-olds and some younger siblings capering and screaming as they flopped on bouncy houses, slid down slides, and chased one another from the vending machines to the restrooms and back again. Marcie rode herd on it all with nothing more than a whistle and her voice.
It was almost impossible to overhear them, Elayah thought, given the yelling kids and the hum of the inflatables. Not a bad place to conspire.
She had been manic all day, eager to hear from Liam about his night at SAMMPark. Being trapped at home while the others were at school had been torture. She still couldn’t believe her mother had finally capitulated and let her out of the house, but Elayah’s cabin fever was obvious and completely sincere. Mom recognized that. Besides, what could happen to her at Boogie Woogie? Collision on the inflated slide?
“Tell us about last night,” Elayah implored Liam.
“What happened last night?” Marcie asked, then blew her whistle and pointed. “Hey! Down the slides on your tush, not your stomach!”
“And does it have to do with that shiner Liam has refused to talk about all day?” Jorja narrowed her eyes until she looked like the squinting emoji.
Liam shrugged and told them all the whole story, beginning with Elayah’s Insta DM and ending with his joke to his dads that morning about a masturbation injury.