“Stop pretending I’m like you,” he said, slinging his brush at the shelf in the corner. It glanced off and clattered to the floor. “You’re the one with choices,” he said.
Picking up my dress, he tossed it to me. I pulled it over my head. Goodbye, birds.
“You don’t have to steal cars for some asshole that doesn’t care about you,” I said.
His look said not to say anything else. Nick had started working at the garage as an obligation, but I didn’t think that was what it was anymore. There was a part of him that liked what he did.
I was six years old the first time my dad got arrested. Me and my brother, John, were in the car with him. We didn’t know it was stolen. He’d picked us up from school in it, saying he was taking it to Uncle Benny’s garage so he could fix it. We took a lot of cars to Uncle Benny’s. It was where my dad was his best self. In the garage, there were problems he could solve. People looked up to him there, asked him questions that he had the answers to.
He taught us everything he knew about cars, how to build them, how to break them down, how to fix them, and, later, how to steal them. “You gotta make a living,” he’d say. Benny was always in the background, lurking. It’d be a few years before we realized he wasn’t our uncle.
I remembered everything about that day. I wore an orange-and-white-striped shirt and it had ketchup stains on it because I wasn’t good at opening those little packets they gave you in the cafeteria. John sat next to me in the back seat. He was three years older than me and was already doing his homework, because he knew there wouldn’t be time once we got to the garage. We hadn’t been in the car long when I heard the siren. Dad sped up, taking a turn too fast, and I spilled over, landing in John’s lap. John righted me and looked out the back window, already sweating. He’d looked worried ever since Dad had pulled up to the school, though, like he knew it was going to be a bad day.
“It’s right behind us,” John said.
I could tell from John’s voice that he was scared, my first clue that I should be, too. We took a few more turns and I gripped the seat, but not hard enough, because I fell onto the floorboard. When I got back in my seat, I met my dad’s eyes in the rearview mirror. John was on his knees now, facing out the back window.
“There’s two of them now,” he said.
Dad slowed down the car, like he had thought he might be able to outrun one police car, but never two.
We pulled to the side of the road and he slid the car into park, his eyes still on mine in the mirror.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Worry added to my fear, because he’d never apologized before.
Dad turned to face us in the back seat. The lights from the police cars bounced off the insides of the car, making his face flash blue and red.
“Don’t move and don’t say anything to them,” he said. He looked only at John now. My parents did that a lot, looked at John when they needed to make sure we both understood something important.
The cops must’ve run the plates, because they already knew the car was stolen. They walked up to the car with their guns drawn. When the cop on my side of the car saw me and my brother in the back seat, his face changed, his gun lowered. We were a surprise.
“Step out of the car,” he said to my dad. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
The other cop was a woman and she didn’t take her eyes off me and John.
The first cop opened my dad’s door. My dad moved slow, just like the cop said, kept his hands up, like he was told. The cop pulled him away from the car as soon as my dad stood up, saying things I couldn’t hear. Then he was pressed down, face against the hood. I sat up on my knees so I could still see him.
“Sit down,” John said. “He said not to move.”
But I didn’t listen, because I needed to see him. Both cops were talking to him now and he was saying something back, his lips moving fast. His eyes met mine again and his mouth stopped moving, time stopped moving. He took a deep breath and shook his head. The cop yanked him up and turned him away from us, leading him to one of the police cars. I turned in the seat, tracking his every move until they put him in the back of the car and I couldn’t see him anymore.
The panic set in, because I felt like as long as I could still see him, everything would be okay. As soon as he was out of sight, my nose burned and I tried not to cry, because I wasn’t a baby.
“What are they gonna do with us?” I asked John. “What are we gonna do?”
John looked like he thought it was up to him, in that moment, to figure out the rest of our lives.
The woman police officer opened the back door on my side. She had a look that a lot of grown-ups had when they saw me and my brother. I’d be a lot older before I realized what that look meant. She felt sorry for us.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “Let’s go for a ride.”
We didn’t move. We’d been taught to be afraid of them.
“Don’t believe that shit they tell you at school,” my dad would say. “Cops are not your friends.”
She squatted down so she was eye level with us, her hand reaching for us, but she knew better than to touch us.
“Everything is going to be all right,” she promised. “We’ll take a ride to the police station and we’ll call your mom. She’ll come pick y’all up. Nobody is going to hurt you.”
I waited for John to decide if we should trust her. John looked wary but then he nodded and moved toward her, scooting me along the seat with him.
She smiled and took my free hand. John held the other one.
“It’ll be a quick ride,” she promised. “I’ll even let you play with the siren. Would you like that?”
I nodded and John squeezed my hand. He didn’t say anything, but the look on his face warned me not to be a traitor.
It was my first time riding in a police car. It wouldn’t be the last.
* * *
June sat as far away from me in the car as she could get. I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, fighting the urge to try and fix it by saying I was sorry. Apologizing wouldn’t help when it came to this fight and June was tired of hearing those words anyway. She wanted actions.
It wasn’t June’s fault that she thought I could be different. She’d always been told she could be anybody and do anything, so it was no surprise that she believed it. The problem was she believed it so hard that she thought it applied to other people, too.
One of the blackbirds peeked out of the neck of her dress, and I wanted to touch it but I knew she wouldn’t let me. Seeing her wear my paint did things to me. The times she let me paint on her were the top moments of my life. It was my two favorite things—painting and touching June—combined into one activity.
I’d always been able to draw. It came naturally. Painting didn’t. My mom’s brother, Hank, had taught me how. Mom had been sending us to spend summers with him since me and John were little. It was the best thing she ever did for us. Hank was everything my dad wasn’t. He lived in a cabin in the Ozarks that he’d built himself. He had a workshop behind the cabin where he built furniture and painted. Summers with Hank were some of the best parts of my life. I couldn’t wait for June to meet him. I would’ve invited her before now, but Hank was wary of who came to his cabin. It’d taken me a while to convince him that June was someone he could trust.
She kept her face turned toward the passenger-side window, not looking at me. When she was mad at me, it was the worst thing she could do. I’d rather her yell or throw things, hit me, anything but not look at me.
The first time I spent any time with her outside school, we were in the fifth grade. We were in the parking lot of the bowling alley. June’s parents had dropped her off at a birthday party. It must have finished early or June’s parents were late picking her up, because she was outside waiting for them. I was with my brothe
r and his friends. We spent a lot of time in that parking lot. My brother’s friend Michael Lawson had started this bicycle gang called the Tarantulas. We were all too young to drive, hence the bicycles. They let me in because they’d wanted John, and John didn’t go anywhere I couldn’t go. The Tarantulas ran things from the bowling alley on Olympic all the way to North Seventh Street. Other kids knew better than to bike anywhere near there. We’d ride back and forth, stopping at Ken’s Quickstop to steal grape sodas, before meeting in the parking lot of the bowling alley. We’d hang out all day, flipping off cars as they drove by.
June was sitting on the bench right outside the door, looking everywhere but at the kids on the bikes, because she’d been warned about us. Everyone had. A couple of the guys started giving her trouble, riding in circles right in front of her, calling her names. The easy thing to do was ignore it, but I couldn’t. And anyway, I owed her. We were in the same class at school and the teacher had made us work together on a project. That was when she found out that I was shit at reading, another thing I got from my dad. I’d worried that she’d laugh or tell people, but she just read everything for me and let me design the display board.
Jason Patrick kept riding closer and closer to her. He was big for his age and was the worst one of us. When he circled even closer to her, I threw a rock at his spokes, making him crash his bike. He wasn’t hurt and it didn’t damage his bike, just made him fall off of it. Everyone laughed and he jumped up mad and came right at me. I thought about riding away but I worried he’d take his anger out on June, so I jumped off my bike. His fist came quick and smashed into my nose. It wasn’t my first fight. I got at least two punches in before we were pulled apart. June’s dad stood between us, keeping me and Jason separated. As soon as her dad dropped his hands, Jason and the other Tarantulas took off, leaving me and John and my bloody nose in the parking lot.
June told her dad what had happened. He squatted down so he could get a better look at my nose and told John to go inside the bowling alley and ask for some ice. John came back outside with a Ziploc bag of ice and June’s dad pressed it against my face.
“I don’t think it’s broken,” he said. “But you need to get it cleaned up. Keep pressure here,” he said, and pinched my nose. “So it’ll stop bleeding.” He looked like he was proud of me. I didn’t get that look a lot, at least not for doing something good.
“Fighting is never a good idea,” he said. “But thanks for sticking up for my girl.” He stood and looked at John. “I don’t have a place to put your bikes, but I can give you a ride home, help clean him up.”
“That’s okay,” John said. “We’ll be fine. I can clean him up.”
June’s dad nodded and they got in their car and drove away, June smiling at me through the window of the back seat like she was glad to know me.
After that day, I found excuses to be wherever she was. I wanted that feeling again, that feeling of being good. She was an enigma, because she shouldn’t have wanted to be my friend but she did.
Her hand was on the seat between us now and I put mine next to it, testing the waters. I could close my eyes and draw her hands from memory. Her fingernails were painted purple and chipped. The artist in me couldn’t ignore it. A song came on the radio and I knew it was one she liked because she moved her head in time to the music. It was a movement almost too small to notice. I turned the radio up. We came to a stop sign and I took a chance and covered her hand with mine. She looked at me, finally.
There was so much wrong in my life, but none of that mattered when I got to be near June. She had a way of making everything seem like it was going to be okay, even me. She made it safe for me to tell the truth. I’d confessed so many things to her already.
My phone buzzed with another text message. I’d meant to silence it. I’d ignore it, but Benny wouldn’t stop. Reluctantly, I let go of her hand and dug my phone out of my pocket.
Get your ass to the garage. Now.
June grabbed it from me.
“Do you know how many people get into accidents because they were reading texts?” she asked.
No, but she did. June had a thing for numbers and facts. Even more so now. She’d stopped trusting herself, so verifiable facts were important. She texted something back and tossed my phone into the back seat.
“June,” I sighed.
I’d pay for that text later. Her look dared me to say something about it. One step forward. Two steps back.
“Are you hanging out with Bethany later?” I asked.
She nodded.
Bethany was June’s best friend, but they were more like sisters. They could read each other’s minds. I’d witnessed them have whole conversations with looks only.
“Will you be at your house or hers? I could come by after,” I said.
She shrugged and then flinched. She leaned down and grabbed her notebook and a pen from her bag and started writing.
Something was going on with June and I didn’t have a name for it. It had started a couple of months ago. She was the most solid of the three of us, the one we turned to when things went sideways, but lately it was June that was sideways.
She’d stopped sleeping. The bags under her eyes were a constant now. She heard things sometimes, things that no one else heard. There was one time I was pretty sure she saw something, too. She was at Becky Wilkes’s old house. She’d walked there instead of school. Bethany had called me, worried, because June was late and wasn’t answering her phone. Unlike me, June never missed school. She was up for the perfect attendance award at the end of this year, and I mean perfect attendance in that she’d never missed a day of school since first grade. She loved it.
It’d been Bethany’s idea to look for her at Becky’s—she said June had been talking a lot about her lately. Mr. Wilkes wasn’t home, and it was a good thing, because that guy was a real asshole. We heard June’s voice when we got out of my car. It came from the backyard. She was talking and it was animated, like she was upset. When we came around the side of the house, June stopped mid-sentence. She looked surprised to see us and then mad. Probably because we’d interrupted her.
“What are you doing?” Bethany asked.
At first June crossed her arms like she didn’t want to answer and then finally said, “I needed to talk to Becky. It’s private.”
June was alone and no one had seen Becky in over a year.
The world got flipped in the moments when nobody said anything. It was the first time I worried that whatever was going on with June was something we couldn’t control.
“Becky’s not here,” Bethany said. Her voice was small.
Becky Wilkes was a girl our age. We’d gone to school together our whole lives but I’d never talked to her. June had, though. They were friends. Becky had run away during spring break the year before.
June glanced around the porch and then looked flustered. Then she gathered herself and said, “Well, I know she’s not really here. There’s just some stuff I wanted to tell her and I thought this would be a good place to do it.”
“Except it’s not,” I said. “Her dad could’ve been home and you don’t want to be anywhere near him.”
There were a lot of rumors about the things that had happened at Becky Wilkes’s house and none of them were good. It’d just been her and her dad. I never knew where her mom was or what had happened to her. Everyone seemed kind of relieved when Becky left, thought she was better off. They sure as hell didn’t look very hard for her.
“We should go,” Bethany said. “We need to get to school before the end of first period.”
June nodded but she looked reluctant. She didn’t want to leave but she followed us. She kept looking back at the porch, though.
Bethany and I rationalized her behavior. Anybody’d see things if they’d gone that long without sleep.
I snuck her some of my aunt Linda’s s
leeping pills that night. “Don’t take more than one,” I said.
“Are you sure that’s enough?”
“Believe me, it is.”
I was almost excited when I gave them to her—we both were, because we thought if she could just sleep, she’d wake up like the old June.
We thought it’d worked. For a while, she seemed okay. But then I couldn’t get her any more pills without my aunt noticing, and night after night, she slept less and less. Whatever was happening snuck back up on her.
She flipped a page in her notebook. “What time is it?” she asked.
“2:54,” I said.
She wrote it down.
Pulling into the school parking lot, I parked next to Bethany’s truck. School would be getting out any minute now. June stuffed the notebook into her bag.
“I’ll call you later,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, just got out of the car.
Shit.
“Hey,” I said, leaning over the seat so I could still see her face.
She paused and looked back at me, her hand resting on top of the door, her chipped purple nails tapping, like she didn’t have time for this. The sun was at her back, casting a shadow across the car’s seat and highlighting the blue around her eyes. They were bruised with no sleep. Even this tired, she was beautiful.
“Tell me something new,” I said. “Something nobody else knows.”
I’d been asking her that every other day since forever. I collected facts about her because I wanted to know more about her than anyone else did.
At first I thought she wasn’t going to say anything, but then she said, “You have choices, too.”
She shut the car door and walked away from me, my blackbirds flying up her legs.
My phone buzzed from the back seat—another text from Benny, probably. I didn’t bother getting it, just left the school parking lot and thought about my choices. It buzzed again and I pressed down on the gas pedal and got my ass to the garage like Benny wanted. Benny wasn’t someone I needed to piss off. Everyone knew that, my dad especially.
Nick and June Were Here Page 4