The loft looked more like a deserted bedroom than anything else. There was a cot in the corner and a record player, a rug, and on one wall, a shelf stacked with Nick’s art supplies. Nick had bought the record player to replace the one his uncle had left behind, which stopped working a long time ago. It ran on batteries, and every time I played a record, it felt like going back in time.
When his uncle was a teenager, he’d come here all the time. He hadn’t left just his record player behind, but all of his records, some of his clothes. It looked like he’d left suddenly and hadn’t known that he’d never be back. His name was Hank and he was an artist, too. He was the one who’d taught Nick.
Some of the artwork in the barn was Hank’s. He hadn’t painted on the walls, though. He’d hung canvases around the loft. There were so many of them. He took off right after his eighteenth birthday and he’d never been back. He left them all behind and moved to the Ozarks. I knew he lived alone and had never married.
“Why doesn’t he come back home, even for a visit?” I’d asked Nick. “Why did he leave everything?”
Nick would just shrug, though, and never answer.
Hank’s things were spread all over the loft, mixed in with mine and Nick’s. That was another reason I loved the barn so much. I liked the idea that our story lay on top of his, even if I didn’t know what his story was, even if sometimes it felt like we were trespassing.
Nick went to the records and pulled one from its sleeve and set it to play. All of the music was old, like the songs of Mr. Lewis’s youth, so I rarely recognized anything. The songs had one thing in common, though. They told stories, and sometimes I got so caught up in them that I didn’t hear what Nick was saying.
He stepped closer to me, his eyes never leaving mine. The floor creaked as he moved. The loft floor was old. One day we were going to fall through.
His eyes held a question and I knew what it was. He was leading up to the real reason we were here.
“Can I paint you?” he asked.
He didn’t mean a portrait. Nick saw art in everything and painted everywhere, on every space, but I was his favorite canvas. His fingertips were the brushes. His palm was the palette.
“Yes,” I said. The answer to that question was always yes.
Even though he’d done this at least a dozen times before, I always felt nervous, like it was the first time. I sat down on the cot with my heart in my throat and tried to remember what color my underwear was. It didn’t stand a chance at matching my bra, because I didn’t own a matching set, but maybe I hadn’t put on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pair. It was now or never and I lifted my dress over my head.
Beige. It was beige. Boring was better than weird. He studied the lines of my body, and my heartbeat sped up. His eyes hit my curves, my stomach, appreciating. No matter how many times I took off my clothes for him, he never took it for granted, like he worried that it might not happen again.
“You’re perfect,” he said.
He said it like he believed it and it made me feel brave. I lay down on the cot.
He stood over me. “What should I paint?” he asked.
“The blackbirds,” I said.
There’d been so many of them, their wings flapping, their bodies moving independently but going the same direction. My thoughts were like the blackbirds and I hoped they could all go the same way, too. I wanted them on me.
He squatted down to me, then reached out and touched a scar on the inside of my ankle. It had happened at marine biology camp when I wasn’t paying attention to the guide who warned me not to step into the water because of the shells. “They cut like glass,” he’d said.
All of my scars had origin stories. Unlike Nick’s—he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten most of his.
“I’ll start here,” he said.
He followed the line of my scar around my leg, then lifted my leg with one hand as he trailed his finger around my calf with the other, marking the birds’ flight path. Goose bumps popped out on my skin, the song in the background singing about hungered touches. His fingers wound around my leg and up my side. When he reached my middle, he lightly pressed both hands against my stomach side by side, his thumbs touching, marking the wingspan of one bird. I held my breath. He continued the birds’ path up my chest, his fingers touching spots that no one but he had claimed. He lifted my hair and traced around my shoulder. He raised his eyes to mine for approval. I nodded.
Squeezing the paint he wanted into his hand, he noticed my leg jumping. “You’ll have to be still,” he said.
He said it like it was an easy request, but sometimes being still was the hardest thing of all. Sometimes it felt like I was being chased by all the things I couldn’t explain. Being still meant there was a better chance they could catch me. The hair on my arms stood as I thought about it. I’d left my notebook in the car and my fingers trembled.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“You sure?”
“Do you think I’m crazy?” I asked.
Sometimes it was best to get it all out there. I was already in my underwear. This was just another layer exposed.
The light in the loft filtered in through a window near the roof, highlighting the dust particles floating across the room and past his face. Waiting for his answer felt like being cut open. Right down the middle.
“You’re not crazy,” he said.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll figure it out, though.” Nick was always pragmatic. “Maybe it’s time to tell your parents. Your dad’s a doctor. He’ll be able to help.”
“It’ll change everything,” I said. “Once they know. They’re parents. They’re not going to let something like this slide. They’ll make it a huge deal.”
“Maybe it is,” he said.
“But I don’t want it to be. I want what I’ve always wanted and I don’t want anything to change.” The idea of them finding out made me feel frantic. There was no way that my parents could know and my life still continue in any recognizable way. I wanted to keep things the same for as long as I could.
“Hey,” he said, his voice soft. “Let’s just think about this moment right now. And right now I want to paint blackbirds on you, so be still.”
He dipped his finger in black paint and dragged it up my leg, the coolness soothing me. Nick’s paint was the salve and I tried staying still so he could paint the pieces of me back together again.
It almost worked, but then I was back to fidgeting.
“Remember that time we rode the train to El Dorado?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes at him, because how could I forget that.
It hadn’t been a passenger train. The cars were empty and Nick showed me all the different graffiti. He talked about the colors and brands of spray paint that worked best and how you could tell all these things by the curves in the tags. My parents thought I was spending the night with Bethany, so we had the whole night. It was the first one we’d spent together. Nick knew the train’s schedule and that it went to El Dorado to pick up more cars and then would ride back through Creed on its way to wherever trains went when they rode through Arkansas.
“Remember how scared you were when the train started moving?” he asked. “You’ve never held my hand so tight, and you started talking about how bats are descended from dragons.”
“I ramble when I’m scared.”
“I know.”
He reached out, placing his hand on my still-twitching legs. “Talk to me now.”
I knew this was his attempt at distracting me so he could paint, and I wanted it to work but I didn’t want to talk about bats.
“There was a girl and a boy and they lived on top of a mountain,” I said, looking at the roof, at one of the paintings of the Ozarks. �
�They did all the things you tell me you do in the summers with your uncle.”
“Like what?”
Nick had told me stories of hiking and fishing all day and never catching anything, but he’d made it all sound wonderful.
“They carried fishing poles to a perfect spot. He tried teaching her how to hook a worm and didn’t make fun of her when she refused to do it.”
“What was his name?” Nick asked.
“Robert,” I said.
“And hers?”
“Mary.”
I watched as he painted wings around my calf. His hands were strong and hard but they could create something as delicate as a blackbird’s wings.
“Mary thought he was beautiful,” I said.
He smirked, like he thought a boy being beautiful was funny. His jeans scraped against the barn floor as he scooted closer to me, and my mouth went dry.
“What did Robert think about Mary?” he asked.
“He thought she was beautiful, too. And smart. They lived on the mountain and Robert hunted and Mary—”
“Cooked and cleaned?”
“No,” I said, and slapped at his shoulder.
He smiled full on now and I relaxed into the cot. His tactic was working.
“Keep talking,” he said.
“Do you like it so far?”
“Yeah, but I kinda miss the dragons.”
“There was a dragon. Mary rode it every morning, checking the perimeter, making sure no one could get through their fences.”
“Why were they trying to keep people out?”
“Because the world worked better when it was just the two of them.”
“You mean the three of them.”
“Yes, the three of them. Robert, Mary, and the dragon.”
His fingers paused and he cleared his throat, his foot tapping like he was nervous. Tap, tap, tap. His eyes were the color of the ocean he had painted in Mr. Nelson’s art room.
“This summer, when I go to my uncle Hank’s,” he said. “I want you to come with me.”
I’d never been invited before.
“We could do everything you just said, except there’s no dragon. You’d love it.” His eyes were hopeful, like he was selling me on the idea. “And John will be home this summer. He’ll be there, too.” Tap, tap went his foot. “If you want to see him before you and Bethany leave for college.”
John was Nick’s brother. He was a few years older than us and had been in Afghanistan for the past year.
“I’d love to come,” I said.
Nick seemed relieved that I’d agreed to go, his fingers going back to painting, his breath exhaling slowly, like he’d been worried I’d turn him down.
I didn’t know how I felt about John being home this summer. Nick and John were really close. When they were younger, Nick didn’t go anywhere without him. And when he left, I watched Nick fold in on himself, one piece at a time. I was still trying to unfold him in places. We hadn’t talked about John much since he’d been gone. When I’d bring him up, Nick always changed the subject. Talking about John made Nick worry about him more.
John had been gone a couple of years now, for basic training and then Afghanistan. He hadn’t hung out with us all that much, except for his last summer in Creed, right after basic training and right before he was deployed. There was a flood and there were parts of town that were completely underwater. Some people lost everything. Nick and John came back from Hank’s when they found out about it. John was good in a crisis, always assessing the situation and coming up with a plan. He led the charge on town donations. I remembered where I was standing when I found out he was being sent away. We were in front of the school, because that was where people were dropping off their donations of food and clothes. Mr. Moore, the school janitor, clapped John on the back and said, “We’re proud of you, son. You’ll be fine over there.” My stomach hit my feet when I realized what he was talking about. Suddenly John seemed taller. Nothing made you feel like a kid more than when you stood next to someone who was about to fly across the world to spread freedom, or whatever it was we were spreading in Afghanistan.
We spent his last weeks in Creed doing everything he wouldn’t be able to do once he was gone. We stayed up late watching movies, eating ice cream, hanging out in the barn. We picnicked after swimming in Lake Brady so he could get baked by the sun on Purple Rock one more time. When he didn’t think anyone was looking, he took a rock and carved John was here on it. I caught him writing it everywhere, on the wall at the movie theater, on one of the tables in the diner, on the walls of the barn. I tried not to let it make me sad that he was reminding everyone that he was here.
It seemed like a good time to do things we’d never done before but had always wanted to, like jumping off the high rock into the lake. John volunteered to go first. He wasn’t scared to be the first one to try something.
“I need to get to your back,” Nick said now, pulling me from the cot.
He led me to the center of the loft where the light was better. Pulling a ponytail holder off my wrist, I put my hair up so it wouldn’t be in his way. He turned me where he wanted me and I came face to face with one of Hank’s paintings of the mountainside.
I was excited to go to Hank’s. I’d been imagining what it might be like for years. Maybe Bethany could go with us. It would be weird to take a trip without her. I’d never done it before and she’d want to see John, too. I knew Hank didn’t like having a lot of people around, though, and a secluded cabin in the woods probably wasn’t the best place for Bethany, who couldn’t stand the quiet.
“What happens next in the story?” Nick asked.
It took me a second to remember what he was talking about.
“Robert spent his days trying to impress Mary, so she’d fall more and more in love with him,” I said.
He moved behind me, outlining the birds flying up my body. I couldn’t see him, only feel him, his fingers, his breath.
He turned me to face him.
“What can I say right now to make you fall for me?” he asked.
“I’ve already fallen for you.”
He dropped to his knees and I held my breath as his hands moved against my rib cage. The look of concentration on his face was the one he got only when he painted, and I fell harder.
When he was done, he took my fingers and turned me slowly, checking his work. Of all the things he’d painted on me, this was my favorite. I wanted to keep it on me forever, but it would be an extreme first tattoo. Nick grabbed a paper towel and tried to get the paint off, but I kept turning, the sunlight that streamed in through the loft window hitting my body, the light playing with my eyes. I couldn’t stop looking at my skin. I was a swirling mix of blackbirds and girl. If I spun, it looked like the birds in the field, flying higher, higher.
“Come here,” he said.
“Why?”
I didn’t want to stop spinning.
He reached out, grabbing my hand and pulling me to him. His hand was in my hair, holding me close but trying not to smudge the paint. Painting on me always led to kissing. His lips touched mine. Kissing him felt like sitting at the top of a roller coaster. His tongue slipped into my mouth and we went over the edge. It felt like the birds were flying up my body. I held on to him so I didn’t fly away, too.
I pressed closer. Nick’s mouth was the only soft part of him. His T-shirt was white and the blackbirds’ feathers marked it where I pressed against him. His phone buzzed with a text message but he ignored it, bringing me closer, the blackbirds flying from my body to his. It buzzed again and again. Nick stepped away from me and checked it. The birds stilled. There was only one person who would keep texting like that.
“Benny?” I asked.
He nodded. Nick couldn’t ignore Benny. Benny Robertson owned a garage downtown, but it was a front to a ch
op shop and Nick was his best guy.
“We gotta go,” he said, sad.
“No, we don’t. We can stay right here. You don’t have to do what he says.”
“But I do. He’s my boss.”
“He doesn’t have to be.”
“Stop,” he said.
“Why do you do it?” I asked.
His face shut down like it did when a teacher asked him a question in class. “You know why.”
“No, I know why you used to, but not anymore. You’ve more than paid him back by now.”
When Nick’s dad went to prison, he’d left owing Benny a lot of money. Nick and John had been expected to work at the garage until they’d paid off their dad’s debt.
“John left. You can, too. And when Bethany and I go away to school, you can come with us,” I said. I liked pretending that I wasn’t falling apart and that my plans wouldn’t be interrupted by whatever was happening to me.
“I’m not going to college.”
“I know that, but you can still come with us.”
“Where will I live?” he asked. “I can’t stay in the dorms.”
Whenever I tried talking Nick into something he wasn’t sure about, he tried to discourage me with logic.
“You’ll get an apartment, a small studio.”
“How am I paying for this apartment?”
“You said you had some money saved.”
“Not that much,” he said.
“Enough for a security deposit and the first month’s rent,” I said hopefully. “You’ll have enough to get started and you can get a job as a real mechanic.”
He turned away from me and started putting his paints away. “You say it like it’s easy.”
“It is easy. You put in an application. You go to the interview. You get the job. You’re good. Anyone will see that.” But maybe that wasn’t why he was reluctant. “I’ll help you with the application if that’s what you’re worr—”
Nick and June Were Here Page 3