A Shot at Us

by Cameron Lowe

  “I’m trying to apologize!” Blair wailed.

  “I know. You’ve been doing that for twenty minutes now.” She had, too. Twenty minutes of nonstop proclamations of how it had been a mistake, how she’d never cheated on anyone before, how she’d never cheat on him again. Except in his heart, Malcolm knew she would. Blair had self-esteem issues, and when someone gave her the time of day, she clung to them like a puppy dog. It didn’t help matters much she had a terrible grass-is-always-greener complex, and often told him how great it could be if they could just do things like the X’s did them, or if they could work out like the Y’s. She could never be happy. Even at nineteen, Malcolm realized that was a witch’s brew of problems, and the implosion of their relationship was pretty much inevitable. The betrayal hurt, but it was almost expected.

  He couldn’t even muster up the energy to get mad at her. If Blair hadn’t slept with one of their closest friends, Malcolm would’ve dumped her soon anyways. She was always at his home, always clinging to him, always desperate for attention, and Malcolm wasn’t ready for that sort of need or commitment. He wanted someone to have some fun with, both sexually and in life. He wanted adventures and silly stories, not to come home to a two-minute answering machine message questioning where he was and when he’d be home if he wasn’t going to keep to their schedule.

  Their schedule.

  The thought of the word drove him back under the water again, and this time Blair dropped a bottle of shampoo on his nuts. He shot up out of the water, more surprised than hurt – the bottle was nearly empty – and splashed back down when he set his hand on the soap instead of the lip of the tub and it squirted out from underneath him.

  “What?” he asked irritably, pushing himself back up

  “That’s all you’re going to say? ‘What?’”

  Malcolm stepped out of the tub, reaching for a towel. Blair passed it to him and he took it from her, careful not to touch her hands. Surely she’d washed them since giving Henry a handjob, but still, ugh. As he wrapped it around himself, she stepped closer, her gaze frantically examining his face as though she might find some answer she wanted to see there.

  “I’ll make it up to you. However you want.”

  “Blair…”

  “However. You. Want,” she said firmly. Good God, was her bottom lip actually quivering? It was. He couldn’t take this anymore. Time to put her out of her misery.

  “This has been… well, it turned into a nightmare, but it was fun while it lasted.”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t say it’s over.”

  “But it is. We’re done, Blair.” Speaking right over the top of her fresh sobs, Malcolm raised his voice, but only by a little. He really did almost feel bad for her – and he’d been the one to get cheated on. Why did he feel this mellow? This good?

  Because, his mind whispered, it’s the reason you need to get out of here.

  It wasn’t just that Malcolm wanted to break up with Blair. It was that he wanted a fresh start. Minneapolis was a great city, but the truth was, he felt caged there by family and obligation. His parents were great and he loved his siblings to death, but they were happy with their neck of the woods. Malcolm wanted to explore, to see the world, to get a taste of somewhere else. His best friend Nic had moved to Montana right out of high school and kept telling him stories about how wild Rankin Flats was – “it’s some real cowboy shit in a city the size of New York!” – and he wanted to go there, to try his hand at… something. He’d work that out when he arrived. Nic assured him there were plenty of jobs. All they had to do was get out there and hustle.

  The biggest reason Malcolm hadn’t gone that route wasn’t Blair, but his mom. After graduation, she’d convinced him to stick around Minneapolis for her and his siblings’ sake, just for a while, just until he saved up some money. Now here he was, nineteen, still living at home, but he had that bankroll. No reason not to go, especially now that Blair had given him a way out of their relationship – and the key to free himself of the handcuffs binding him to his parents. He could use Blair, tell his mom that he was heartbroken and wanted to go somewhere else to start over. That, she’d understand and could live with. The lie would hurt, but it was a hell of a lot better than the truth. “Mom, I’m stifled here, and I want to run.” Yeah, that’d go over really well.

  He walked with Blair to his bedroom, where he pulled on clothes while she tried to plead with him, beg him, even dropping onto the bed to shimmy out of her jeans. He stopped her there, his hand on hers. It was tempting to do this one last time, and he was just pissed enough he very nearly did, but instead, he showed her out the door, dressed only in his skivvies. From next door, his neighbor Lorraine, the weirdly hot lunch lady from his elementary school, gave him a wave and a grin even as his girlfriend – ex, he reminded himself – stormed down the sidewalk, shouting at him that he was being an asshole and a jerk and that she was sorry, all without drawing more than a few breaths. Unlike his, Blair’s lung capacity was kind of impressive, actually.

  One love lost, another potentially found, Malcolm thought to himself as he waved back at Lorraine, heading back inside and locking the door just for good measure. Shit, the Grand National was in the driveway. He peeked out the window to make sure Blair didn’t key it, but no, she was getting into her Bug and taking off. That he felt more emotion about her potentially screwing with his car than her cheating on him darkly amused Malcolm, and as he dropped the curtain back in place, he hummed. Actually hummed. Had he hummed since he was a little kid? He didn’t think so.

  A call to Nic told him everything he needed to know – yeah, he could still live with him, yeah, he had cable, and yeah, Nic definitely had a hookup for buying them beer. All that was left was to convince Malcolm’s mom and dad that this was the right move.

  * * *

  It was too much house, far too ostentatious for a pair of young adults moving into their first place together. The realtor Calvin hired – or his parents, rather – swept backwards through the massive living room, arms outstretched. “Just think of all the room you’ll have to grow together!” she sang out. With the vaulted ceilings, her voice echoed throughout the whole house

  All the room to grow. Good grief. Just two years ago Gwen and Calvin were graduating high school together and now this stranger, this singsong, cackling vulture in far too tight a blouse was telling them to think of how much room they’d have to grow. Her collar suddenly felt too tight.

  “How much is it?” she squeaked out.

  “Just twelve hundred a month, all utilities included except electric,” the realtor said.

  That was twice as much as the apartment they’d seen downtown, and only one bedroom more, an extra bedroom they didn’t even need. Gwen opened her mouth to say something, but beside her, Calvin breathed, “It’s great, isn’t it?”

  It was. It really was. Real hardwood floor. Electric heat with recently updated windows that held the warmth wonderfully, unlike her parents’ house or the creaky studio apartment she’d lived in for much of her two years of college. A living room huge enough to host all their friends. A kitchen with gleaming appliances that still smelled plasticky and new. A master bedroom they could easily slide a king-sized bed into. A backyard, with a big fence. They could have a dog, or their kids could run around, or they could just sit out there on warm nights, talking and laughing and maybe making love in a tent under the moonlight.

  Gwen was sure in ten years she’d love it. That faraway Gwen probably had her shit together. That faraway Gwen would be overjoyed at something so nice as this being laid at her feet. That faraway Gwen was not the Gwen of this moment, though. Then the wave of guilt over not being happy enough washed over her, and she smiled hard at Calvin. “It is,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound as weak as her resolve.

  “We’ll take it,” Calvin said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “I can just see us sitting on our couch over there, watching our kids read.”

  She could have wept. Instead, Gwen s
aid, “Oh yeah, sure, absolutely.”

  The real estate agent grinned, and it made her look like a half-crazed dinosaur from Jurassic Park. “Excellent. And you haven’t even seen the basement yet!”

  Of course there would be a basement. Gwen applied liberal amounts of hot glue to her smile. “Well, of course we’d better check that out too, Cal.”

  “Yeah, let’s see it,” he agreed cheerfully, giving her waist a squeeze before following right behind the real estate agent. Gwen didn’t mind trailing him. Gave her time to ogle his butt in the new jeans he’d picked out just for this occasion. New jeans. To house hunt. Like it needed a fashion statement. Her life had become a strange carnival funhouse since the Carmichaels’ success began to skyrocket.

  They saw the basement – it was unfinished, but with just a few tweaks could be made into a great game room – and were walked back out to their car, a five or six-year-old Maxima his parents bought Calvin when he turned eighteen. After he’d given the woman a little honk and a brief wave, he reversed out of the house’s driveway and onto the mostly empty residential street. Once they were pointed in the direction of her apartment, he glanced over.

  “You didn’t seem all that enthused.”

  “No, it’s great.”

  “Come on, talk to me. I want this to be right. And if you don’t like it…”

  Gwen’s smile came a little easier when it was just the two of them. Calvin was so caring, so doting. He’d be a good family man, of that she had no doubt. “I’m sorry, it’s just… I mean… doesn’t it seem like it’s too much?”

  “Well, a three bedroom in that neighborhood, it’s a little pricey, but you get what you pay for.”

  Had Calvin suddenly become a real estate magnate overnight? She kept the thought to herself and favored him with a squeeze of his thigh. “You know what I mean. We don’t really need the extra room.”

  “Well, we might someday, and imagine what the price of rent will be like when we’re looking five, six years down the line, you know? Better to jump in now and be happy we did than not and regret it later.” That had been, almost word for word, his dad’s speech verbatim when they talked about renting an apartment together in one of the seedier areas of the inner city. He convinced them to look elsewhere at more expensive houses in the suburbs. Mr. Carmichael – Jacob, he insisted – was putting up much of their rent money for a few years until his son was comfortable running one of his sporting goods stores. Once he’d settled into the job, Calvin would get to open a branch of his own, and maybe within a decade or so, take over for his dad so Jacob could retire early.

  The roadmap for their whole life together, already laid out.

  “You’re right. It’s a great place. I just feel bad about not really doing much to contribute.”

  “Don’t. My parents love you. Besides, pretty soon, I’ll be earning enough it won’t be matter anyways.”

  “But I don’t want it to have to fall on your shoulders,” Gwen said, brushing her long black hair out of her eyes. “It’s not a matter of if they can pay or if they’re willing to. I don’t want to be like my mom.”

  “Your mom’s great,” Calvin protested. “I love your mom.”

  “I do too, but that’s not the point. Being a mom, that’s fine, that’s great, but it’s not all I want to be. I want us to be equals. Otherwise I’d always feel like…”

  “Like what?”

  “Like… I owe you, or something.”

  “Hey. You never owe me a thing. And you will contribute someday, Dr. Caplan. And all the stallions and bulls and mean old goats will thank you for it. Even the little Horned One.”

  The thought of Calvin’s one-and-done visit to a petting zoo and his showdown with a gruff, baaing kid shortly before getting kicked in the shin hard enough to give him a days-long bruise made her burst out laughing.

  “Hey now,” Calvin said, grimacing good-naturedly, “that goat was a maniac. A killer!”

  “Aw, I’m sorry,” Gwen said. “Tell you what, when we get to my place, come in for a bit and I’ll kiss your leg and make it better all over again.”

  “Well…. okay. But I think that mean little bastard hurt all sorts of other parts of me you might need to kiss too.”

  “Ooh,” Gwen said, her unease about the house fading. “I love getting to play doctor.”

  Chapter 3

  Rankin Flats.

  Malcolm had been to the city before, but that was for a school trip and they’d really only seen the sprawl from the air and a bus, and the latter had just driven through a small slice of the overwhelming scope of it. Back then, he’d been more obsessed with the hemline of the girl riding in the seat across from him and the flirtatious looks she’d been tossing his way as she crept it higher and higher. Now, though, he marveled at the way the yawning, endless plains and muted hills of North Dakota gave way in eastern Montana to vast oceans of trailer parks, cookie cutter tract apartment buildings, and in the distance, looming fistfuls of skyscrapers. The two-lane Interstate diverged to four lanes, and in the heart of the suburbs, eight. Fast food symbols, fast food signs, and fast food billboards drowned out nearly every other sign of commerce, save for casinos and payday loan offices. What had been a serene, if boring, landscape shifted into America’s hungriest, fastest growing city in just a hundred miles.

  The day he left Minneapolis, Malcolm woke up late and had a long, luxurious breakfast with his parents and his younger siblings. Brent, his older brother, was off at college, but Eliza and David were still in high school and saw him out the door. His sister and mom cried. His dad even worked up enough emotion to give him a one-armed hug and a warning to look after their car. The father-son duo had spent a summer restoring it before Adam Irving handed over the keys to Malcolm. It was, for both of them, the best time they’d ever spent together and Malcolm solemnly promised him he’d never let it out of his sight.

  Then he was off, the Twin Cities in his rearview mirror, his Grand National packed with a pair of duffel bags, his boxy TV, and a trunk full of essentials his mom packed for him. It felt good to be on the open road, the radio fuzzing in and out as the miles wore on. 50 Cent and Nelly in Minneapolis gave way to Rush and David Bowie in the outskirts. He lost reception for a while and jammed in one of his own CDs from a case on the passenger’s seat, drumming along with the beats, feeling content and ready for the next chapter of his life.

  Though a ten-hour stretch wasn’t the longest drive, Malcolm liked to lollygag, and stopped a few times to stretch his legs, grab snacks, and a late lunch of a messy meatball sub that left him looking like one of Michael Myer’s victims. He decided to call it a night in Bismarck, and hung out by the pool, eating the last of a bag of honey mustard pretzels and reading a video game magazine.

  The morning wake-up call never came, and he slept through the splay of sunlight filtering through the shades until housekeeping pounded on his door. After a quick shower, he stumbled out of the motel and into the car, stopped for gas and a truck stop cappuccino, and hit the road again, bleary-eyed and a little queasy from all the garbage he’d been shoving down his throat. It was a good trip, though, capped off by the sight of the massive city in the distance.

  There was never really a right time for great traffic in the Flats during the day, but Malcolm had mistimed it as badly as he could manage outside rush hour. He got the exit wrong, took the next one, turned around, and wound up in a snarl of cars and semis for another ten minutes before finding the right offramp. That couldn’t dampen Malcolm’s mood, but the drive through the slums sure did. In time, he would come to realize just how much of the city was comprised of desperate people living in hovels. He’d live in a few himself, sitting vigilant in the night in case whoever just fired off that gun or whatever caused the distant screams decided to come for Gwen or the kids. But in that moment, so young and unchanged by the city, he had no fear except that Nic might not have a six-pack of beer in the fridge.

  His friend technically lived in a suburb named Branton, but
much like Los Angeles and the surrounding area, there was no real end to Rankin Flats. It just enveloped everything around it. Malcolm never even saw the “Welcome to Branton” sign, but he could be forgiven. Taggers had long ago covered it in genitalia, and the city crews stopped bothering to clean or replace it. Realizing he had to be close when he passed a games shop Nic had mentioned offhandedly a few times, he searched out Dogwood Avenue, passing by dozens of businesses that looked to be on their last legs or were closed altogether. That turned into a more residential area, dotted with small homes and duplexes in about equal measure. He trailed a lumbering work truck for eight or nine blocks, eyes flicking towards the houses now and again to make sure he hadn’t missed it. The neighborhood was… well, less than ideal. A child too big for the diaper he wore sprayed oncoming cars, including the Grand National, with a rubber hose jutting from between his legs while a woman in a bikini, presumably his mom, lounged on a plastic chair nearby, a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels by her feet. A few blocks on, a beater of a tiny Chevy truck reversed out of its garage without slowing to look for traffic and nearly backed into Malcolm. Another block and a half beyond that one, a cop car sat at an angle in someone’s driveway, lights flashing with no one inside.

  “Don’t be Nic’s, don’t be Nic’s, don’t be Nic’s,” Malcolm muttered, the first real pang of doubt striking him. If it was, maybe he’d just keep driving. Maybe this wasn’t the smartest idea. Maybe he could look up his distant cousins in Glendive and crash there.

  It wasn’t, though Nic did live two doors down. The short, squat building matched the short squat man perfectly, though the house lacked Nic’s thick glasses and his striped polo. He was leaning over his porch, watching the cops, and straightened when he saw the Grand National pull into his driveway.

  Malcolm rolled down his window. “Thought the cops were here for you for a second,” he said, killing the engine.