Nick and June Were Here

by Shalanda Stanley

  I hadn’t heard from him in a while, though, and I tried not to let it worry me. It’d been over two months since I’d gotten an email from him.

  “That’s good,” she said. “I’ve been so worried about him, what with everything you hear on the news.” She finished cleaning up and then turned to me and said, “I’m off to clean toilets. Let me know if you decide to stick around Creed after this summer. I can probably get you on at the hospital.”

  She knew I’d hate that. It was one more push out her door.

  “Will do,” I said.

  “It doesn’t pay as good as Benny, but there’s no risk of jail time.” She turned to me before walking out the door. “And it’s a lot safer than working at one of the mills, but I know a union guy, too, so you just let me know. Okay?”

  She didn’t wait for me to agree with her, just pulled her purse strap over her shoulder and pushed through the screen door. Aunt Linda wasn’t always subtle.

  My phone rang. It was Benny. Just in case I needed another reason to leave town. He was probably calling to yell at me for leaving the garage early.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “There’s a car coming in the area in a few days,” he said, surprising me. “It’s special. I want you to get it for me. I’ll pay double.”

  Sometimes I stole cars for their parts and sometimes I stole them for what was hidden inside them. I never asked what was hiding. The less I knew, the better.

  Benny almost sounded needy, and he loved his money, so it was rare that he offered to pay more than usual. This car was important.

  I wondered if I could really be different. It was one thing to daydream about a different life and another thing to take the steps to make it happen. Maybe I could do it. No time like the present. If so, I could use double.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Good. I’ll get you the details when I get word that it’s in the area.”

  “Hey, Benny,” I said.

  It was now or never. Aunt Linda was right.

  “Yeah?”

  It felt like there was a rock in my throat and I had to talk around it. “This is the last one.”

  He didn’t say anything for a second.

  “You joining the army, too?”

  “No, I just don’t want to do it anymore.”

  There was only silence and I watched the clock on the stove as the next minute ticked by.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he finally said. He hung up.

  I could tell he didn’t believe me. It didn’t matter. I could be different.

  I called June to let her know the good news, but she didn’t answer. Neither did Bethany. I thought about driving to June’s house, to tell her in person that I’d taken the first step, but I was beat. It took a lot out of a person to change.

  The walls in my bedroom were covered from floor to ceiling. Aunt Linda had no rules when it came to decorating. I’d painted them every color, and then I’d started adding other things—paper, photos. The whole room was like a collage experiment that got out of control. Anytime somebody came over, they’d add something. Sometimes it was things they found in my room, other times it was something they brought with them. Once, June tore a page from her notebook and added it to the wall by my bed. It was blank. It was my favorite piece, though, because I knew how she felt about her notebook.

  I liked to put the pictures of me and John next to the ones of June and Bethany, like the four of us had a history, even though John had never really hung out with us all that much.

  John was the one who had encouraged me to tell June I wanted to be more than friends. Encouraged probably wasn’t the right word. He’d threatened to tell her if I didn’t. I’m sure the fact that I’d kept bothering him over how to do it had something to do with his threat.

  “You should just kiss her,” he said. “You walk up to her. Look her right in the eyes so she knows what you’re meaning to do and you kiss her.”

  “That’s it? We shouldn’t talk first? Tell her what I’m thinking?”

  “What are you gonna say? ‘Hey, June, I know we’ve been friends forever, but I can’t stop thinking about you all the time, and probably not how you think about me, unless you’ve been thinking we should start hanging out without clothes.’ ”

  “It wouldn’t go like that,” I said.

  “Sure it would,” he said, patting me on the back, his smile showing the gap between his front teeth.

  When he joined the army, it had felt like a gut punch. He was the one person I had thought I could count on not to leave.

  At first he emailed all the time. But then the emails came less and less often. Each one he sent felt like he was sending it from farther and farther away from home. I wasn’t good at writing, so I sent him drawings instead, hidden in the care packages that Aunt Linda put together. The drawings were mostly of our favorite spot in the mountains. We’d found it together. Uncle Hank had taken us camping, and we’d hiked to a spot a three-day walk from his cabin. After a couple days, Uncle Hank had declared that he was heading back but that we could stay for a day more if we wanted. We’d wanted.

  As soon as Uncle Hank packed his tent and left, John said, “Let’s go exploring.” He had a stick that he carried like a staff and he led us into the woods for a mile or so, and there it was, a small clearing and a little pond. It was perfect. The Ozarks were like that. You’d be going along, thinking that every tree looked like the other ones and it was nothing but forest and rock, but then you’d go a few feet more and take a right and there’d be a cleared spot just sitting there, like it’d been waiting for you. From the start, me and John both knew it was ours.

  I took one look at it and started making plans, walking off the steps to a future cabin.

  “It should face this way,” John said, and later, “We’ll need supplies.” He started listing all these things we’d need.

  “How do we get all that up here?” I asked.

  “Hank knows people.”

  According to Hank, there was a whole community of people who lived off-grid in the Ozarks. Hank was somehow connected to them. It was an entire support system of people who weren’t in anybody’s census data.

  Every summer we went back to that spot every chance we could. We even brought Uncle Hank out there a couple of times. Last summer I’d camped there alone.

  I kept sending John drawings of the spot and what the cabin would look like once we’d built it, because I wanted to give him something to look forward to, like a promise of what was waiting for him.

  I was the one who drove him to the airport. He was going to fly to Little Rock and meet up with his platoon and from there he’d fly to Afghanistan. It was a little over an hour’s drive. Instead of saying all the things we should’ve said to each other, we spent it playing the license plate game, the one where you called out the different states of the license plates you saw. I’d never been out of Arkansas, and other than basic training, neither had John, so cars from different places were something to get excited about. I always looked closely at the people driving them, like I expected them to look different from me.

  I walked him all the way to the security gate.

  “Don’t let Benny talk you into coming back to work for him,” he said. “You’ve already done one stint in Durrant. Let that be enough.” He got in the security line. “Make sure you go with Aunt Linda when she visits Dad. He’ll need to see you.” He looked back once and smiled. “I’ll see you at Hank’s,” he said.

  The plan was that he would go straight to the cabin once he got back home, whenever that was. He gave me a small wave, telling me it was going to be okay.

  It was the most scared I’d ever been, because it was the first time in my life that I’d have to navigate anything without him. I stayed in that spot even after I couldn’t see him anymore. It was like I was stuck.
Part of me was still the six-year-old kid in the back of that stolen car, waiting for John to tell me what to do next.

  One year I went dressed as my mom for Halloween. Creed wasn’t big on Halloween, because of the evil spirits and demons and all that. The forty-five churches agreed that Halloween was probably the devil’s holiday, so instead of Halloween parties and trick-or-treating, there were fall festivals. These festivals looked a lot like Halloween. Kids wore costumes and carried buckets for candy, but instead of trick-or-treating door to door, we had trunk-or-treating in the church parking lots. Parents would open their car trunks, fill them with candy, and decorate them all spooky like, but not too spooky. Church spooky. Bethany, Nick, and I always went to First Baptist Church’s festival because they had the best games and a two-story bounce house and a cakewalk with red velvet cakes. They were my favorite. That year, Bethany dressed as a rocker princess of her own creation and Nick wore a Transformers costume we’d made out of cardboard boxes. My mom had helped, buying yellow paint and supervising so he’d be the perfect Bumblebee. Other kids went as superheroes and witches and monsters. I went as a thirty-four-year-old nurse with seafoam-green scrubs and too-big orthopedic shoes. I’d wanted to be my mom.

  * * *

  When Bethany dropped me off after school, my mom was waiting for me in the living room. She was usually asleep when I got home, because she worked the night shift at the hospital. But this afternoon she was sitting straight up on the couch. I knew she didn’t slouch because slouching led to leaning back, and once she leaned back, she was gone. She’d be asleep in minutes. I had only a few seconds to process what could’ve woken her up and why it was so important that she not risk falling back asleep. Then I remembered Mrs. Bingham and her curious face in the hall at school.

  “You’re awake?” I asked. Sometimes it was best to play dumb.

  “I got a call from Mr. Lewis earlier,” she said.

  I sat on the love seat across from her. She still wore her scrubs. Sometimes when she came home, she crashed so hard she didn’t bother taking them off. She was so tired. I’d never looked more like her.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “You were seen leaving school with Nick.”

  She waited for me to say something.

  “You don’t have anything to say?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Do you make your own rules now?” she asked. “Just do what you want?”

  I still didn’t know what to say.

  “Is this senioritis? What’s going on? Where did you go?” she asked. “I tried calling you.”

  I hadn’t checked my phone. I looked to the floor and tried to think of lies. I’d never tell her about the barn. Not because I was afraid she wouldn’t let me go back—she wasn’t that kind of mom. I was scared she’d want to check it out for herself, and it was important to have spaces untouched by parents.

  She motioned at my body, at the birds peeking out from under my dress and wrapping around my legs. “This is what you were up to? I thought we agreed you weren’t going to let him do that anymore,” she said.

  “You and Dad agreed,” I said softly. “I didn’t.”

  She studied the birds. The irrational part of me hoped she’d think they were beautiful, but I could tell she saw them only as a map of all the places he’d touched me.

  “I don’t think you should be with him anymore.”

  She’d wanted to say that for a while now. I saw it in her face every time she talked about him. My parents’ relationship with Nick was complicated. I knew they wanted to forbid me to see him, throw down the gauntlet, mark a line in the sand, all those things desperate parents did to keep their daughters away from wayward boys. But they were conflicted when it came to Nick. He’d been my friend since I was little. If we were the sum of our parts, then my parents had seen all of the pieces that made Nick who he was. They couldn’t tease out the person he was now from the boy he used to be. And they’d loved that boy.

  My dad had been Nick’s one phone call the first time he was arrested. We were fifteen, and Nick was so scared. I didn’t talk to him but I could hear the tone of his voice through the phone. The call came late. I couldn’t make out what Nick was saying, but my dad kept saying things like, “It’s going to be okay. I’ll call a lawyer.” He kept calling him “son.” “It’ll be okay, son,” he said.

  It wasn’t okay, though. Nick had to spend two months at Durrant Juvenile Correctional Center. Once he was out, he started spending more time at my house, at my parents’ request. I was surprised by this, worried my parents wouldn’t want us to be friends anymore, but instead of pushing him away, they did the opposite. Maybe they thought if they could love him more, harder, closer, then he wouldn’t turn out like his dad. They thought they could break the legacy. But they’d underestimated Benny’s pull. The second time Nick was arrested, he was too embarrassed to call my dad for help, too scared my dad wouldn’t give it.

  “I’ve had bad shit happen to me,” Nick said once, “but when your dad looks at me like he’s disappointed in me, it really sucks.”

  I knew what he meant.

  After his second arrest, Nick hardly ever came to my house anymore. When he did, he didn’t talk to my dad, didn’t meet his eyes. The rejection hurt my dad. I saw it in his face. Nick didn’t do it to be mean. I knew he just wanted to be the first one to back away. My dad kept trying, but Nick held him at arm’s length. Their relationship was never the same.

  “We have tried again and again with Nick,” my mom said. She closed her eyes, like just thinking about it made her tired. “But he’s proven that it doesn’t matter. He’s made his choice about the kind of person he wants to be, and that isn’t someone we want for you.”

  “So you’re just giving up on him?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to.” She leaned forward. “But I have to put you first. You’re lucky you’re not getting suspended. Because you’ve never done anything like this before, Mr. Lewis said this would be your one and only warning.”

  “What did he say about Nick?” I knew what he’d said, but I wanted her to say it out loud. “Does Nick get a warning, too? I guess not, though, since this isn’t his first time to skip school.”

  She looked uncomfortable.

  “So he’s suspended?”

  “That’s between Mr. Lewis and Nick.”

  I knew he wasn’t going to suspend Nick, though. Mr. Lewis used to suspend Nick. He used to have him in his office every other day, warning him, begging him to be better, but not this year. Mr. Lewis had given up on him, too. He’d pass Nick in the hall and never say anything, even if it’d been days and days since the last time Nick was there. No matter what Nick did, Mr. Lewis couldn’t see him anymore. Maybe I should’ve felt honored that Mr. Lewis still cared about me, that I was one of the lucky ones, but I couldn’t muster it.

  “Maybe if people expected more of Nick, he could be more,” I said.

  “We all want more for Nick, but we can’t do more for him than he’s willing to do for himself. And we can’t let his actions bring you down, too,” my mom said.

  “He’s not bringing me down. It was my choice to leave with him. I’m the problem. He can’t make me do things.”

  “I realize that there is a problem with you,” she said, her face stern. “Your grades, for instance.”

  My face heated up. We were laying it all out on the table.

  “Mr. Lewis said you failed your last two science tests and you didn’t turn in an English paper. Since when are you that kid?”

  Since two months ago. Since I started hearing and seeing things no one else heard or saw. I was in transition. I just didn’t know what I was changing into.

  “You’re slipping, June. Since you were in elementary school, you’ve always been so good at managing your schoolwork. I’ve never had to check your homework or ma
ke sure you were turning things in on time. What’s happening?”

  I opened my mouth to tell her but it wouldn’t come out.

  She waited and waited, but when she realized I wasn’t going to say anything, she said, “You’re grounded.” She looked surprised that she’d said it.

  I’d never been grounded before. There’d been no need. We sat there awkwardly for a second, neither one of us knowing what to do next.

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll talk to your dad when he gets home. We’ll figure it out.”

  I stood.

  “Give me your phone,” she said. “And no watching TV in your room, and there won’t be any outings with Nick in the foreseeable future.”

  I handed her my phone.

  “And no Bethany.”

  It felt like being slapped. I had never imagined I could do something that warranted her taking away Bethany.

  “There are consequences to your actions,” she explained, standing now, too. “You can’t just do what you want. We have rules. The school has rules and one of those rules is that you can’t leave whenever you feel like it. You can’t just decide not to turn something in and fail tests without consequences.”

  I tried walking away from her but she reached out and held my hand. “I know something is going on with you and you don’t think I need to know about it.”

  Her voice sounded younger when she said it and it felt like my heart was being squeezed. We were the same height now, her eyes at the same level as mine. I couldn’t escape them.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Really.”

  “You’re not fine, and it hurts my feelings that you think I don’t see that.”

  She didn’t say anything more for a moment, just looked at me, and then she reached out and swept my bangs across my face. “You’re so tired, baby. The nights I’m home, I hear you in your room, pacing. I’ve talked to your dad but he says that you’ll come to us when you’re ready. But what if you’re never ready?”

  Maybe this was it, the moment I told her everything, that I couldn’t think like I used to. I couldn’t remember things I’d always known, or write English papers, or pass science tests.