by Hazel Parker
“You guys came on time; I’ll give you that,” he said.
He had his arms folded, and his head tilted back, trying to demonstrate authority as much as possible. His voice sounded deeper than when I had spoken to him just a couple of hours ago, but that was nothing more than posturing.
“Now that you are all here, thanks to the efforts of Jack, I want to hear from all of you. Jack, I know what you’re going to say. So summarize.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry for everything we did to you in our childhood, Kyle. We shouldn’t have treated you as we did.”
Kyle let silence hang in the air for a few moments before he smiled at me.
“Nice to see at least one of you is genuine,” he said. “Marcel?”
Marcel cleared his throat and stepped forward. Even that gesture, though, seemed a little menacing to Kyle, who took a step back.
“Brother,” Marcel began. “I know we haven’t had the greatest relationship in the past. I know that I’ve been something of a giant pain in the ass to you. I know that even now, into adulthood, our conversations have been contentious. I am sorry for mocking you, belittling you, and treating you like shit. I should not have done that, even with the immaturity that I had. I would love for nothing more than for us to be at peace, if not real brothers again. I’m sorry.”
Kyle again let silence hang. No doubt, this was something of a power ploy for him, but as I had explained to Uncle, we had to let him have a little bit of power for the time being. Worries about who would be in control later would be dealt with later. For now, though, we had to let him have his moment.
“Took long enough,” Kyle said, but at least it was an acknowledging answer.
And now came the moment I feared the most. The moment in which all of this might go to hell, the moment in which this all seemed to rest on the person who was most likely to fuck this up.
“Uncle.”
Even Kyle seemed to sense that this was the real test, the real moment to see if we were serious. I was genuine. Marcel was genuine.
But Uncle only knew Kyle through his tantrums and outbursts. He didn’t know him through the moments that eventually led to said outbursts and tantrums.
“Well, Kyle,” Uncle said, and his voice immediately put me on edge. “I know that I can be a bit of a hardass, a bit grating, a bit…well, a bit obnoxious. I know that I can be…a burden sometimes, I’ll admit that.”
And…?
The silence that followed left me extremely uncomfortable. We just needed Uncle to say three words, but he couldn’t muster them, even with all the stakes in the world right now.
“And?” Kyle said, echoing my thoughts.
“And…well, I was a pain. I admit that.”
“And how do you feel about it?”
Uncle squirmed and groaned.
“You know what?” Kyle said, his voice getting edgier. “This was a fucking mistake. I can see that you all still hate me.”
“Kyle!” I yelled, but it was too late.
“Damn straight!” Uncle yelled.
“You all are fucking dead!” Kyle yelled. “Don’t ever approach me again, any of you. I’m going to make sure the next time I see any of you, it’ll be with you buried six feet deep.”
Kyle turned, walked into the darkness, and disappeared, only briefly visible when he opened a door to his car. Marcel and I turned to Uncle, fury in our eyes.
“You couldn’t fucking muster even a fake apology?” Marcel said sharply.
“You want me to fucking lie?”
“Yes!” we both said at the same time.
“Fucking pathetic,” Uncle snapped. “Savage Saints don’t apologize for shit they didn’t do. They don’t grovel like a bunch of bitches. They stand up, and they fight our enemies!”
“And that attitude is why we’ve lost members,” I said. “Kill Damon. Kill the Bloodhounds. But if we can make peace, that prevents future attacks. Instead…”
“Shut the fuck up,” Uncle said. “You’re just a goddamn kid, Jack, remember that.”
“You know what?” Marcel said. “We’re leaving. Now. We’ll deal with the fallout later. Right now, I don’t trust this place to be safe.”
I followed Marcel as he left without waiting for compliance from Uncle. I heard Uncle blathering behind us, but by this point, I didn’t much care. I had lost faith in him. I had lost faith in peace.
And now, I had no idea what that was going to lead to.
Chapter 6: Lilly
Just get through this, and then you can see Jack.
Kyle had peppered me all morning with text messages expressing his enthusiasm to see me, even more so than he usually did. We obviously hadn’t texted at all before the unexpected encounter at the coffee shop, and we’d only texted a little bit since, but this morning felt like a deluge of text messages. I almost felt tempted to ask him if something had happened that was making him put so much energy into the evening, but I felt that that would be too rude.
And that, really, was going to be the challenge of tonight. To treat him as an adult, but to recognize that he was still vulnerable. I didn’t want to handle him with kid gloves, but I couldn’t just pretend that he was like any other adult; for better and mostly for worse, he was putting me on a pedestal.
I figured that if I treated the afternoon like a chance to better understand him from a biographical perspective, selfishly, I could use him as a character study for placement in one of my future books. Yes, it might have been for ulterior gain, but I figured it would also give Kyle the best time without being unrealistic in my treatment of him. If I went any other way, I worried I’d go too far in the other direction.
As it was, when I was preparing for the date, I tried to go as casual as possible without looking sloppy. I only wore jeans and a white t-shirt, along with some black sandals, about as plain a look as one could get. I really didn’t want to change out of the hoodie and gym shorts I usually wore as a writer, but, well, that was a standard I just could not sink to.
I agreed to meet Kyle at a bar in Manhattan, a place called Dave’s Pub, for drinks. I had suggested the place in part because I figured it would dramatically reduce the chances of me running into Jack or anyone else I knew. Kyle loved it because it was a chance for him to be in the “big leagues” of Manhattan.
I actually got there early, at about five minutes till three, but as it turned out, Kyle was eagerly standing outside, waiting for me to arrive.
“Hey!” he said excitedly when he saw me.
I had wanted to have a couple of moments to myself, the better so that I could prepare myself to be pleasant, but Kyle’s wandering eyes made that much too impossible.
“Hey, how are you?” I said as I went for a hug.
Kyle’s hug was the perfect embodiment of how I felt—awkward. It started much too strong, slowed down into almost a hover hug, and then backed up into a quick, nervous shrug. If you described Kyle’s actions without describing how old he looked or anything else about him, you would have thought that he was an anxious teenager, perhaps a slightly nicer version of Holden Caulfield.
“I’m doing great! I’m doing great, now that you’re here. You, umm, want to grab a drink?”
“Sure, a drink would be great.”
I felt his hand briefly touch my back, but he pulled it away after just a moment’s touch. It was almost like a kid who wanted to touch a snake but didn’t want to press down too hard on it.
I began to wonder just what the hell Kyle had gone through as a kid that had made him so…uncomfortably anxious as an adult. I knew he got picked on because of his diminutive size all the way through high school, and I knew he had two brothers who were awful, but I didn’t know anything else. I was a little hesitant to ask, too, even with my earlier desire to learn more about him.
“Great place, huh?”
Oh, Kyle, you poor soul.
“Yeah, it’s not too bad,” I said, giving a short chuckle. I might need more than just a drink to survive
this.
“So, umm, tell me about what you’ve been up to,” he said.
Didn’t we already have this conversation? Back at the coffee shop when we first saw each other? If only boys understood we didn’t want to be on a pedestal; we wanted to be eye-level with them.
Jack understood that. And that was why Jack was still the most interesting man in my life. Not that I was going to tell Kyle that.
“Just continuing to work on my current book,” I said. “Nothing newer than that. What about you? How’s the politics scene going?”
“Oh, well, you know, it’s going fine,” he said.
He looked like he had something that he was just aching to get off his chest. I decided no words were better than some words in the hopes that he would have the space to talk, but really, all it did was lead to some incredibly awkward silence where it felt like he couldn’t find the courage just to say whatever he wanted to.
“Going fine, huh? Nice for some politician in this country to be able to say that,” I said with a snort.
“Well, it’s not quite like that.”
Suddenly, his voice seemed very even-keeled and very calm. Almost…terrifyingly so, in fact.
“How so?” I said.
Well, you might just have gotten what you wished for.
“Well…I don’t want to dwell too much on it,” he said, which was usually code for “but I’m about to dwell on it for quite a bit of time.” “But there’s this group in town, the Savage Saints, that has been causing a lot of trouble in the Brooklyn area. I know some of the members from before, and I’m trying like mad to get rid of them. It’s for the sake of the people, you know? Brooklyn is a much safer place without those thugs running around.”
Savage Saints…why does that sound so familiar? Like I’ve seen that lettering somewhere…
His voice was rising, and I could all but see steam coming off his head in anger. I hadn’t seen Kyle this angry, ever. The bartender came by and took our drink orders, but it did little to quell Kyle’s rising rage.
“Those thugs have led to murders in the street and a sense of unease everywhere in Brooklyn. Gunfire is much more frequent. But the bastards are just too good at covering their tracks. Or, if you ask me, finding the right people to suppress justice.”
I had a lot of questions, but Kyle’s fury was something I feared interrupting.
“Nothing has irked me more in my role than this particular problem, and nothing has aggravated me more than the fact that official means doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. It’s like the more I try to fight them in the system, the more they laugh in my face.”
“Laugh in your face?” I said, unable to hide my surprise and confusion at those words.
“Yes, laugh in my face,” he said. “I’ve gone to their clubhouse multiple times. I’ve spoken to them and asked them to keep the fucking peace.”
It wasn’t like Kyle was a saint who never swore, but hearing him sound so enraged and so offended was frightening.
“But instead, they just mock me and tell me that I’ll never be anything. And I’m fucking sick of it.”
“I’m sorry you have to go through that,” I said.
It was true that I felt empathy for Kyle, but mostly, I just didn’t like seeing him so angry. If we were to have something resembling a date, I didn’t want to see his dark side. I wanted to see his happy side, his cheerful side, even if it was also incredibly awkward. I wanted to see a side that made me feel like I at least wasn’t in the midst of someone who was on the verge of throwing a drink against the wall.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, his voice coming down ever so slightly. “But if you ever find yourself near one of those assholes, I would encourage you to run the hell away. They’re nothing but bad news, Lilly. They bring heartache and pain to those who associate with them.”
“I understand, and I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
I didn’t think it was anything I had to worry about. Jack was a mechanic, and while mechanics worked with motorcycles like the Savage Saints…
And that’s when I remembered where I had seen the name before. The sleeveless jacket Jack had worn had the Savage Saints logo and lettering on the back of it. Jack was a member of the Savage Saints.
And Jack…was most certainly not what Kyle described. In fact, quite the opposite—Jack was cheerful, optimistic, and made my life better. If Jack did some questionable things behind closed doors, well, I had yet to learn them. For all your talk of not judging books by their covers, this is where that matters. Don’t judge Jack until you get to know him better.
“Sorry,” Kyle said. “I just get so worked up thinking about them. I’ll try not to bring them up again tonight, but I feel like it’s a mission of mine to get rid of them all. Especially…”
He didn’t finish his words. I’m not sure that I wanted him to.
He was sounding like the very thing that he was trying to say he wanted gone. He was the unhinged one here, and though I certainly didn’t think Kyle was going to go on a murdering spree or cause crime in Brooklyn, his personality was more aligned with that behavior than Jack.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” I said, but at least now I had an excuse not to act as invested in the date as a normal first date would have. “Good always triumphs over evil, right.”
To my surprise, Kyle just snorted.
“Sometimes, it feels like good likes to bide its sweet, sweet time before it takes over,” he said. “And besides, doesn’t everyone see themselves as the hero in their story?”
“Maybe. But people can change. And hey, sometimes, it can take decades for good to triumph. Doesn’t mean it won’t in the end.”
Finally, for the first time since he had gone on his rant, Kyle smiled. His lips barely curled up, and I only called it a smile because it wasn’t the enraged, fiery expression he had moments before, but I no longer worried that something was going to happen while I was here.
“Well, with you by my side, I don’t worry about that.”
Oh, Lord. The awkward boy is back.
“That’s cute, but let’s not rush into things, Kyle. This is just a first date, after all.”
“Well…right, I know, but I just feel like after seeing you at the coffee shop, you said I could take you up on a favor, and—”
“What are you saying?” I said.
Now I wasn’t just fishing for excuses to cut off the date at some point. I was genuinely annoyed. Did he actually believe that going out with me was a favor that he could request? It was quintessential nice-guy syndrome.
“You offered to help me with anything I needed, and I, well, you know, I thought that this would be a nice way to repay—”
“Repay for what? For helping you out when you were a little kid?” I said in stunned disbelief. “Kyle, I helped you because I felt sorry for you. No one should have to go through an upbringing like you had. But that doesn’t mean that we’re destined to be together or anything like that. It doesn’t mean anything other than we have a connection from the past. But I have a connection with my teachers, my friends, my coaches, my editors—just having a connection isn’t enough to be anything.”
It suddenly seemed to dawn on Kyle that he had made a mistake, because he bowed his head, folded his hands, and began speaking very quietly, ignoring the fact that our drinks had just gotten dropped off at the bar.
“I just thought that the way you looked at me at the coffee store…” he said, his voice trailing off. “I’m not very good at these kinds of things, Lilly. I thought we had something, and I thought it was worth the risk.”
“Well, I’m glad you think that. You should always take the risk. But I don’t owe you anything, Kyle. This isn’t an obligation to be here.”
“Then why are you here?”
The firmness with which he suddenly asked the question made me fear that he was onto why I had said yes—to get him away so that I could see Jack. He wouldn’t know about Jack, of course, but he had prob
ably figured out that I had said yes merely to get him away in the long run.
“Because, Kyle, I wanted to get to know you better and what you’ve gone through,” I said, which seemed honest enough, if not completely truthful. “You’re someone who has gone through a lot and is still going through a lot, like all of us. Maybe if that turned into something, I would have been happy to have gone out with you again. But it’s not like because I said yes that I was obligated or destined to be with you.”
Kyle started to say something about how he thought otherwise, but he wisely stopped himself. This was already painful enough, and I took the silence as a prime opportunity to down part of my drink. There wasn’t enough alcohol in there to help with the situation.
And yet, all the same, I didn’t want there to be any alcohol. I needed to be as sober as possible before I got out of there so that when the time came for me to depart, Kyle didn’t feel “obligated” or force me to come with him.
“Look, you’re a good guy, Kyle, and I appreciate it. But that kind of attitude is going to be toxic, and it’s not going to be great for me or for anyone else.”
“Anyone else?”
Well, I guess we’re just going to have to say it as straightforward as possible.
“You really are a good, genuine guy, Kyle. But I think we’re better just as friends.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry. I think you’ll find someone great.”
I was just speaking in platitudes that didn’t mean anything, so I shut my mouth at that point. There wasn’t anything I could say that would make Kyle feel better other than to change my mind, and that wasn’t going to happen. Either I was walking out trapped with him, or he was walking out empty-handed and miserable. Given my agency, it wasn’t hard to see which one was going to happen.
“Here,” I said, pulling out a ten-dollar bill. “Use this to pay for my drink, OK? If you see me at the coffee shop, say hi. Don’t be a stranger.”
“K.”
He couldn’t even get a full word out. He could barely get a letter out. Once again, I saw Kyle as the kid life had dealt a shitty hand, and I saw someone that I wanted to help.