Negative space, p.2
Negative Space, page 2
JILL
“Mom, honk!” It was Hector Ferrera, standing at the bus stop. Pale and dazed, like he hadn’t slept. We’d been close when we were little. He may have even been the first boy I really liked, but his parents started homeschooling him and we eventually grew apart. I still thought about him sometimes, and it was always good to see him. It’d been a while.
Mom gave two quick beeps. “Oh my—was that Hector?”
“Sure was.” My eyes followed him as we passed. His head cocked, staring into emptiness. We rolled around a bend and he was gone.
“My god. He’s so old.”
“No older than me,” I said. Mom’s eyes looked sad in the rearview mirror.
We got home and I went straight to the bathroom, peed, and texted Tyler. I washed up and headed back to the kitchen. Lu stood stiff and hunched over by the counter, shoulders forward with her head down. Mom waved to me with her phone.
“I was thinking pizza,” she said. “Does pizza work?”
AHMIR
We hoofed across Cooper and Main Street onto Lydon Avenue, over to Pizza Utopia. The smell of cheap canned garlic and old grease was so thick it coated your skin the moment you walked inside. Thin chugging guitars and a nasal voice singing about being the man in the box crackling over dinky ceiling speakers. Marlon sat at the register, dug into a book with a picture of an octopus holding a silver knife on the cover. He looked up. “Yo yo.”
“What’s good?” Tyler tossed his backpack in a booth.
“Nothing,” Marlon said. “Nothing is good.”
Tyler pulled the baggie out his jeans pocket. “Want to smoke some pretty okay weed?”
Marlon hopped out of his chair on his tip-toes, looking past our shoulders through the plate-glass. “Jesus shit yes. You got to put that away now, but Jesus, yes please.” He led us behind the counter, past the kitchen and over to the cold-storage walk-in. He pulled open the stainless-steel door and we wedged in between the racks of tomatoes, pepperoni, bacon, pickle jars and bagged iceberg lettuce. Tyler packed his bowl, fished a lighter out of his pocket and handed them both to Marlon. Marlon took the hit. “Yeah,” he wheezed. “I’d call that pretty okay.”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Fucking closing.” Marlon made a little handgun with his middle and index fingers and stuck it in his mouth. Bang. “Why?”
“Crashing Tricia’s party.”
“I’d rather pull my own teeth out. Oh, unrelated—” He eyed me “—I think I just sent a couple pies over to your gal.” He knew I hated Jill. “What’s she doing tonight?” I think he had a thing for her himself.
“Hanging with Lou.”
“I don’t get why you let her hang with that guy,” I said. I hated Jill but something about Lou made me sick to my stomach. Mostly it was his voice—something like a computer programmed only to feel sorry for itself.
“Wait, really?” Marlon said. “Lou’s like the sweetest kid. He comes in here with his mom sometimes.”
“He’s fucking creepy.”
“He isn’t creepy, dude. He’s like, autistic, but he isn’t creepy.”
“Autists are fucking creepy.”
“Dude,” Tyler broke in. “Autists are fucking wizards.”
We all laughed. The pot and the cold air were putting us in a good place. Life didn’t seem like Hell. Then Marlon hushed us.
“What?” I said, coughing, stuffing my mouth in my elbow.
“Did you hear that?”
The door swung open. “Yo.” Jare stood in his stained-up chef’s apron, his salt and pepper hair shining like it hadn’t been washed in a decade. “No shit. Huey, Dewey and Louie. Give me that.” He yanked the bowl and lighter out of Marlon’s hands. “We have customers.”
Marlon pushed past Jare to the front counter, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. Jare half-shut the door behind him. “You jokers are here more than I am. Whose is this?” He took a big hit.
“Mine.”
“It blows my dad,” he exhaled. “If you’re going to stink up my shop, do it with better shit.”
“You love it.” Tyler smiled, pulling his shitty, gas-station tin-flask from his pocket and handing it to Jare. That’s how he made friends.
“You’re right, I do.” He took the flask, unscrewed the top and swigged, choking a little on the okay-scotch we’d siphoned off his mom’s cabinet. “You guys light up my goddamn life.”
That winter, Jare got wasted and wept his life story to me. About his father and his brothers and half-brothers. How he never really loved them. Years later he took a plunge off the Lily Williams Bridge, splitting himself open on the rocks below. His note read THERE ARE WORSE THINGS IN THIS WORLD.
LU
I picked the cheese off the pizza with a plastic fork and gulped down Pepsi to burn away the grease taste. Milk and cheese turned my insides off, turned my skin slick and sausagey. Sometimes I’d have to choke back throw-up just from smelling it.
“Lou,” Jill said. A voice like dolphin skin. “If you don’t like pizza you can always say something.”
“I know,” I lied. “I like pizza.”
Her walls were covered with cut-outs from magazines: thin grey women in black dresses and underwear, men with long hair and guitars or keyboards. Photos of her friends (one of me). Her drawings and watercolor paintings: angels and devils with big eyes; snakes and rain showers. Her room was like a blanket.
We watched prank videos on her computer, laughing, even at the ones that twisted me. She asked what I wanted to watch next and I almost told her about the Forum but caught myself. She wouldn’t understand. Or it’d make her grow knives for me. So I said, “Anything.”
She laughed. No knives, but something gross. “I swear to god, before graduation I’m going to teach you to assert yourself.”
I made myself laugh along with her. I made myself smile and say thank you.
JILL
Lu rocked gently back and forth on my bed, staring at my walls. Never at me. “So summer, right? You’ve got anything cool going on?”
“I don’t know.” She looked down at her knees
“Anything you want to do?”
“Not sure.” Like she’d only just developed the capacity for speech. I never talked much either, but whenever I was with her you couldn’t shut me up.
A quiet scratching at the door. Low, pathetic groans. It was Harvey. “Is it okay if I let him in?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” She looked away from me, only slightly. “I want to get used to him.”
I got up and opened the door. All 80 lbs. of beautiful, inbred golden retriever pushed through and licked my knees and hands.
I probably loved Harvey more than anything else in the world. He made more sense to me than any person I knew—my parents, my sister, or even Tyler. Everybody’s more complicated than a dog could be. Sometimes I think I liked Lu for the same reason.
AHMIR
We said peace to Marlon, stopped by Tyler’s place to get his bike, then headed back to my place, hanging out, smoking butts and taking selfies in Blood Swamp. When the sun was almost gone and the sky streaked all slasher flick pink, we biked up to Tricia’s house.
Tricia lived in the Highlands and was pretty much the awfulest person I knew, but her parents were loaded and always gone (I had no idea what they did for work, and I’m guessing neither did she), so she threw some alright parties that were good for scamming beer and drugs. We rolled down to the foot of her driveway and hid our bikes in the bushes. Her house was set far from the road, past a gate flanked by twin stone lions. We climbed the driveway under pale LED lamps, past two boys standing in the yard, boxing gloves on their fists, swaying side to side on loose knees. A girl—I recognized her from school but couldn’t place the name—watched from a distance.
“I can’t see you,” one of the boys mumbled. “I can’t see anything.”
The other boxer raised his fist and took a slow swing. “Fuck you.”
Tyler pulled out his phone, tapped a few times, and pressed it to his ear. “Hey. Yo. Yeah. I’m here. Yeah, I’m out front. Cool. See ya.”
A white kid with a head full of shitty blonde dreadlocks emerged from behind the house. “Wassup!”
“What’s good, man?”
“Everything, man.” The hippie gave Tyler dap. He was older, maybe 22 or 23. I’d seen him around town but that was it. “Everything’s spectacular.” He pulled a fat grey bag out of his pocket. “Sixty for the quarter.”
“Cool, great.” Tyler took out a square of his mom’s cash and pressed it into the hippie’s palm. The hippie handed the bag to Tyler.
“You sticking around? You know any of the girls here?” He bounced on his heels, scratching at his arms and chest. The neck of his Celtics jersey dark with sweat.
“Don’t know. Just got here.” He examined the bag. “Plus I don’t give a shit about that.”
The hippie giggled. “Alright, alright. I see how it is. Don’t let me keep you.” He gave us each a mock salute, turned on his heels, and wobbled back toward the rear of the house.
Tyler’s phone buzzed. He grimaced at the screen, and just stood there for half a minute, staring, before stuffing it back in his pocket. Then he grinned at me, silver-eyed in the moonlight. “You ready for something incredible?”
JILL
I texted him again. Ever since the previous weekend, I couldn’t not worry about him.
I’d gone to his place ‘cause his Mom was out of town. We were in his living room, and he’d just finished off most of a bottle of Ten-High. He’d said his tolerance was “exceptional.” But maybe fifteen minutes later his eyes went blank and he got all quiet. He stood up and headed for the front door.
I trailed behind him. “Baby? Baby, what’s up?” He didn’t hear me or wasn’t listening. When I tried touching him, he whipped his arm back at me. He gripped the knob with his other hand, swung the door open and shambled into wet fever night. Bugs and birds screamed from the bushes as he ran out to the middle of the road.
I ran up behind him, locking my arms around his waist, pulling him backward. He flailed and groaned. Whoosh. A pickup truck roared past at clipping distance, howling up gusts of exhaust. Drunk, manic honking as it tore around the bend.
I pulled him to the lawn and he squirmed from my grasp and pushed me away. I fell to the grass and watched him go back inside. I got up and tried the door but he’d locked me out.
I didn’t want my parents to see me drunk, so I slept in the backyard. I woke up with the sun high and bright and him standing over me, staring at me like I was an idiot. “The hell are you doing?”
I told him what happened. His forehead creased and his eyes got wet. He said he was sorry. That sometimes he sleepwalks. He said he was so sorry. I nodded. I didn’t press it. I wanted him to keep liking me.
When I close my eyes, even for just a second, sometimes I see a picture in my mind. His body frozen, stretched across asphalt, face down and away from me. Facedown and away from everything. His body dragged naked and pale along the river’s floor, scraped up and nipped ragged by trout. Or his silhouette, dangling from an ancient tree.
The visions would turn to certainty in my head. A pit twisting in my stomach. But then my phone would shake and it’d be him. Intact.
“Hey.” Lu’s wispy voice.
“Hey!” I looked up. I didn’t know how long I’d been staring at my phone.
LU
“I think I’m going to go.”
“Shit. I’m sorry. I can put this away.” She opened her bedside drawer and dropped her phone inside.
“It’s okay. I’m tired.”
“You don’t have to go.”
“I know,” I lied. I could feel her turning blue. My insides flipped cold, but not by much. It was okay. I texted Mom and she picked me up.
AHMIR
We cut across the yard over to the other side of the house. Seven or eight kids, half-naked and passed out in and around the jacuzzi. Dead 40s and Smirnoff Ices dotting the ground. Some assholes huddled together drinking and laughing. Jason Painter, Tommy Bosh, and Chris and Tad McCraig. They called themselves the Dirty Boys. They dressed and talked like hicks even though their parents were loaded (Tommy’s dad managed a Lowe’s somewhere in Vermont, Chris and Tad’s family owned a farm on the outskirts, and Jason’s dad was a prosecutor in Keene). A few years back we caught them by the river, laughing and drowning a litter of kittens. They were the only kids at school who really scared me.
Tyler puckered his lips and gave them a wink, then grabbed me by the wrist and led me into the trees. Jason hollered “Keep walking.” Another: “Bet they’re blowing each other.”
“I told you this would suck,” I said.
“Fuck them. Get these in you, now.” He pressed a handful of mushrooms into my palm. I gulped them down, trying not to gag on the dead taste of the stems and caps. “Don’t worry about it.” We smoked a bowl and a couple cigarettes each and maybe made out a little bit, then he took me by the wrist again and led me back, past the Dirty Boys and into the house.
Thirteen kids bellowed, packed up against each other in the kitchen, downing brown and clear liquids. Tricia passed by, looking me up and down. “Who the fuck are you?” she said, but got distracted and walked away before I could respond.
We pressed through the bodies toward the main hall, past Lindsey Patterson and Nicole Porter making out against the refrigerator, and two unfamiliar chads doing knife rips off the stove. We pushed past the bathroom line through the hallway into the living room.
The overheads were off. A couple lamps on, and a pair of novelty lights flashing blue and red in the corner. The stereo bumping horrifying EDM, sounding like two planets scraping together, a woman’s voice chanting who’s gonna get my honey jar, who’s gonna taste my sticky sweet. About a dozen kids folded their bodies over a pair of enormous velour bean bags, sucking face and fingering under blankets and throw pillows. A boy in a corner recording it all on his phone.
The walls’ shapes drifted in and out of kaleidoscope. Flatworms beneath my skin. An encroaching loss of language. The vibrations moved outward from my chest to my sides and extremities. Throbbing open spaces ever slightly. Gradual expansion. Shimmers and trails, and boys and girls with pulsing wet slug skin. I closed my eyes and opened them, and it was all suddenly different but not.
“I can’t. I can’t.” I twisted around back toward the hallway. My shoulders and chest bumping off other shoulders and chests, distant voices echoing back off and what the fuck eternally, past awful Tricia and the knife-rip chads, all leaned up against the dishwasher and butcher’s block, shrieking like buzzards, and I slipped out through the screen door like a c-section. The space empty now, except pine trees shuddering in the wind, sprouting tiny golden fireworks. I fumbled into my pocket and pulled out my cigarettes and lighter, hands trembling, removing a USA Gold and sticking it between my lips.
“Hey.” A hand on my shoulder. I spun around. It was Tyler. Of course. A thin smile on his face, but weird sad eyes.
“Can’t. Can’t I can’t I can’t.”
“It’s cool man. Don’t worry, it’s good.” He laughed. “I mean, it has to be. You don’t really have a choice for the next eight hours.”
“I can’t. I can’t go back in there.”
“Then we won’t.” And he squeezed my hand in his and we sat there in the grass, watching the pines turn to fireworks.
JILL
I texted Kennedy to see if she’d made it to the party. She replied: 2 drunk 2 serious. down 4 cunt. I texted Cindy. She said she had her hands full taking care of Kennedy. Tyler still hadn’t gotten back to me.
Mom was asleep. Ashley was still out with her friends. Dad wouldn’t be getting back for another couple days. So I got dressed and crept out the back door and across to the garage. The robins who’d built a nest atop the overhead light chirped wild as I walked to my bike. Three babies stuck their heads out the top of the nest.
I pulled my bike out from under the tarp and pedaled out through the hot dark, through downtown, up to Tricia’s house and through her stone lion-guarded gate and moon-pale driveway. I reached the house and no one was there.
LU
I got home and went straight upstairs to my room. I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop. My insides bubbled. I took my left hand in the other and cracked my knuckles gently. Rolled my head around my neck, one way, and then the other. I reached my hands back beneath my shirt and scraped my shoulders pink. I took my right hand in the other and cracked those knuckles gently. If I didn’t do those things, it’d feel like all the Earth’s oxygen was tearing apart.
I logged in and clicked open the browser. Clicked open the Forum bookmark. Black background. Red text. Green text. Grey text. Only a few new posts since that morning.
CRAZY BOB 06.17.2018 19:08
i think it gonna be a good night.
Pigate__(0_0)__ 06.17.2018 19:14
YES
Some posters thought CRAZY BOB had premonitions. When he said it was going to be a good night, a body was almost guaranteed to turn up. So I sat there, clicking refresh, waiting.
AHMIR
It was alright. Outside was alright, in the grass and trees. I cackled for ten minutes or an hour, and when I finally stopped I laid my face and chest against the grass and let myself sink deep. I closed my eyes and instead of dark, there was a vast, beige-chrome wall, soft and glistening like jelly. Inside, I could see my entire life, and if I focused hard enough I could change things. Make them better. I wanted to stay there forever.
“Ahmir. Ahmir.”
I ignored the voice.
“Dude. Ahmir. Ahmir Jag-Off Wilson.” Tyler’s voice. The wall dissolved, replaced by strands of every color spiraling out from a black void. Black strings reach out toward me. Hideous flapping.
I opened my eyes and rolled onto my back. Tyler stood over me, dirt in his hair, irises swallowed by black. His lips stretched against his teeth. Purple flaky WHORL leaves stuck to his gums. That big dumb face.
“What?” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m nice and even. I’m in a real smooth way.”
“Mom, honk!” It was Hector Ferrera, standing at the bus stop. Pale and dazed, like he hadn’t slept. We’d been close when we were little. He may have even been the first boy I really liked, but his parents started homeschooling him and we eventually grew apart. I still thought about him sometimes, and it was always good to see him. It’d been a while.
Mom gave two quick beeps. “Oh my—was that Hector?”
“Sure was.” My eyes followed him as we passed. His head cocked, staring into emptiness. We rolled around a bend and he was gone.
“My god. He’s so old.”
“No older than me,” I said. Mom’s eyes looked sad in the rearview mirror.
We got home and I went straight to the bathroom, peed, and texted Tyler. I washed up and headed back to the kitchen. Lu stood stiff and hunched over by the counter, shoulders forward with her head down. Mom waved to me with her phone.
“I was thinking pizza,” she said. “Does pizza work?”
AHMIR
We hoofed across Cooper and Main Street onto Lydon Avenue, over to Pizza Utopia. The smell of cheap canned garlic and old grease was so thick it coated your skin the moment you walked inside. Thin chugging guitars and a nasal voice singing about being the man in the box crackling over dinky ceiling speakers. Marlon sat at the register, dug into a book with a picture of an octopus holding a silver knife on the cover. He looked up. “Yo yo.”
“What’s good?” Tyler tossed his backpack in a booth.
“Nothing,” Marlon said. “Nothing is good.”
Tyler pulled the baggie out his jeans pocket. “Want to smoke some pretty okay weed?”
Marlon hopped out of his chair on his tip-toes, looking past our shoulders through the plate-glass. “Jesus shit yes. You got to put that away now, but Jesus, yes please.” He led us behind the counter, past the kitchen and over to the cold-storage walk-in. He pulled open the stainless-steel door and we wedged in between the racks of tomatoes, pepperoni, bacon, pickle jars and bagged iceberg lettuce. Tyler packed his bowl, fished a lighter out of his pocket and handed them both to Marlon. Marlon took the hit. “Yeah,” he wheezed. “I’d call that pretty okay.”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Fucking closing.” Marlon made a little handgun with his middle and index fingers and stuck it in his mouth. Bang. “Why?”
“Crashing Tricia’s party.”
“I’d rather pull my own teeth out. Oh, unrelated—” He eyed me “—I think I just sent a couple pies over to your gal.” He knew I hated Jill. “What’s she doing tonight?” I think he had a thing for her himself.
“Hanging with Lou.”
“I don’t get why you let her hang with that guy,” I said. I hated Jill but something about Lou made me sick to my stomach. Mostly it was his voice—something like a computer programmed only to feel sorry for itself.
“Wait, really?” Marlon said. “Lou’s like the sweetest kid. He comes in here with his mom sometimes.”
“He’s fucking creepy.”
“He isn’t creepy, dude. He’s like, autistic, but he isn’t creepy.”
“Autists are fucking creepy.”
“Dude,” Tyler broke in. “Autists are fucking wizards.”
We all laughed. The pot and the cold air were putting us in a good place. Life didn’t seem like Hell. Then Marlon hushed us.
“What?” I said, coughing, stuffing my mouth in my elbow.
“Did you hear that?”
The door swung open. “Yo.” Jare stood in his stained-up chef’s apron, his salt and pepper hair shining like it hadn’t been washed in a decade. “No shit. Huey, Dewey and Louie. Give me that.” He yanked the bowl and lighter out of Marlon’s hands. “We have customers.”
Marlon pushed past Jare to the front counter, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. Jare half-shut the door behind him. “You jokers are here more than I am. Whose is this?” He took a big hit.
“Mine.”
“It blows my dad,” he exhaled. “If you’re going to stink up my shop, do it with better shit.”
“You love it.” Tyler smiled, pulling his shitty, gas-station tin-flask from his pocket and handing it to Jare. That’s how he made friends.
“You’re right, I do.” He took the flask, unscrewed the top and swigged, choking a little on the okay-scotch we’d siphoned off his mom’s cabinet. “You guys light up my goddamn life.”
That winter, Jare got wasted and wept his life story to me. About his father and his brothers and half-brothers. How he never really loved them. Years later he took a plunge off the Lily Williams Bridge, splitting himself open on the rocks below. His note read THERE ARE WORSE THINGS IN THIS WORLD.
LU
I picked the cheese off the pizza with a plastic fork and gulped down Pepsi to burn away the grease taste. Milk and cheese turned my insides off, turned my skin slick and sausagey. Sometimes I’d have to choke back throw-up just from smelling it.
“Lou,” Jill said. A voice like dolphin skin. “If you don’t like pizza you can always say something.”
“I know,” I lied. “I like pizza.”
Her walls were covered with cut-outs from magazines: thin grey women in black dresses and underwear, men with long hair and guitars or keyboards. Photos of her friends (one of me). Her drawings and watercolor paintings: angels and devils with big eyes; snakes and rain showers. Her room was like a blanket.
We watched prank videos on her computer, laughing, even at the ones that twisted me. She asked what I wanted to watch next and I almost told her about the Forum but caught myself. She wouldn’t understand. Or it’d make her grow knives for me. So I said, “Anything.”
She laughed. No knives, but something gross. “I swear to god, before graduation I’m going to teach you to assert yourself.”
I made myself laugh along with her. I made myself smile and say thank you.
JILL
Lu rocked gently back and forth on my bed, staring at my walls. Never at me. “So summer, right? You’ve got anything cool going on?”
“I don’t know.” She looked down at her knees
“Anything you want to do?”
“Not sure.” Like she’d only just developed the capacity for speech. I never talked much either, but whenever I was with her you couldn’t shut me up.
A quiet scratching at the door. Low, pathetic groans. It was Harvey. “Is it okay if I let him in?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” She looked away from me, only slightly. “I want to get used to him.”
I got up and opened the door. All 80 lbs. of beautiful, inbred golden retriever pushed through and licked my knees and hands.
I probably loved Harvey more than anything else in the world. He made more sense to me than any person I knew—my parents, my sister, or even Tyler. Everybody’s more complicated than a dog could be. Sometimes I think I liked Lu for the same reason.
AHMIR
We said peace to Marlon, stopped by Tyler’s place to get his bike, then headed back to my place, hanging out, smoking butts and taking selfies in Blood Swamp. When the sun was almost gone and the sky streaked all slasher flick pink, we biked up to Tricia’s house.
Tricia lived in the Highlands and was pretty much the awfulest person I knew, but her parents were loaded and always gone (I had no idea what they did for work, and I’m guessing neither did she), so she threw some alright parties that were good for scamming beer and drugs. We rolled down to the foot of her driveway and hid our bikes in the bushes. Her house was set far from the road, past a gate flanked by twin stone lions. We climbed the driveway under pale LED lamps, past two boys standing in the yard, boxing gloves on their fists, swaying side to side on loose knees. A girl—I recognized her from school but couldn’t place the name—watched from a distance.
“I can’t see you,” one of the boys mumbled. “I can’t see anything.”
The other boxer raised his fist and took a slow swing. “Fuck you.”
Tyler pulled out his phone, tapped a few times, and pressed it to his ear. “Hey. Yo. Yeah. I’m here. Yeah, I’m out front. Cool. See ya.”
A white kid with a head full of shitty blonde dreadlocks emerged from behind the house. “Wassup!”
“What’s good, man?”
“Everything, man.” The hippie gave Tyler dap. He was older, maybe 22 or 23. I’d seen him around town but that was it. “Everything’s spectacular.” He pulled a fat grey bag out of his pocket. “Sixty for the quarter.”
“Cool, great.” Tyler took out a square of his mom’s cash and pressed it into the hippie’s palm. The hippie handed the bag to Tyler.
“You sticking around? You know any of the girls here?” He bounced on his heels, scratching at his arms and chest. The neck of his Celtics jersey dark with sweat.
“Don’t know. Just got here.” He examined the bag. “Plus I don’t give a shit about that.”
The hippie giggled. “Alright, alright. I see how it is. Don’t let me keep you.” He gave us each a mock salute, turned on his heels, and wobbled back toward the rear of the house.
Tyler’s phone buzzed. He grimaced at the screen, and just stood there for half a minute, staring, before stuffing it back in his pocket. Then he grinned at me, silver-eyed in the moonlight. “You ready for something incredible?”
JILL
I texted him again. Ever since the previous weekend, I couldn’t not worry about him.
I’d gone to his place ‘cause his Mom was out of town. We were in his living room, and he’d just finished off most of a bottle of Ten-High. He’d said his tolerance was “exceptional.” But maybe fifteen minutes later his eyes went blank and he got all quiet. He stood up and headed for the front door.
I trailed behind him. “Baby? Baby, what’s up?” He didn’t hear me or wasn’t listening. When I tried touching him, he whipped his arm back at me. He gripped the knob with his other hand, swung the door open and shambled into wet fever night. Bugs and birds screamed from the bushes as he ran out to the middle of the road.
I ran up behind him, locking my arms around his waist, pulling him backward. He flailed and groaned. Whoosh. A pickup truck roared past at clipping distance, howling up gusts of exhaust. Drunk, manic honking as it tore around the bend.
I pulled him to the lawn and he squirmed from my grasp and pushed me away. I fell to the grass and watched him go back inside. I got up and tried the door but he’d locked me out.
I didn’t want my parents to see me drunk, so I slept in the backyard. I woke up with the sun high and bright and him standing over me, staring at me like I was an idiot. “The hell are you doing?”
I told him what happened. His forehead creased and his eyes got wet. He said he was sorry. That sometimes he sleepwalks. He said he was so sorry. I nodded. I didn’t press it. I wanted him to keep liking me.
When I close my eyes, even for just a second, sometimes I see a picture in my mind. His body frozen, stretched across asphalt, face down and away from me. Facedown and away from everything. His body dragged naked and pale along the river’s floor, scraped up and nipped ragged by trout. Or his silhouette, dangling from an ancient tree.
The visions would turn to certainty in my head. A pit twisting in my stomach. But then my phone would shake and it’d be him. Intact.
“Hey.” Lu’s wispy voice.
“Hey!” I looked up. I didn’t know how long I’d been staring at my phone.
LU
“I think I’m going to go.”
“Shit. I’m sorry. I can put this away.” She opened her bedside drawer and dropped her phone inside.
“It’s okay. I’m tired.”
“You don’t have to go.”
“I know,” I lied. I could feel her turning blue. My insides flipped cold, but not by much. It was okay. I texted Mom and she picked me up.
AHMIR
We cut across the yard over to the other side of the house. Seven or eight kids, half-naked and passed out in and around the jacuzzi. Dead 40s and Smirnoff Ices dotting the ground. Some assholes huddled together drinking and laughing. Jason Painter, Tommy Bosh, and Chris and Tad McCraig. They called themselves the Dirty Boys. They dressed and talked like hicks even though their parents were loaded (Tommy’s dad managed a Lowe’s somewhere in Vermont, Chris and Tad’s family owned a farm on the outskirts, and Jason’s dad was a prosecutor in Keene). A few years back we caught them by the river, laughing and drowning a litter of kittens. They were the only kids at school who really scared me.
Tyler puckered his lips and gave them a wink, then grabbed me by the wrist and led me into the trees. Jason hollered “Keep walking.” Another: “Bet they’re blowing each other.”
“I told you this would suck,” I said.
“Fuck them. Get these in you, now.” He pressed a handful of mushrooms into my palm. I gulped them down, trying not to gag on the dead taste of the stems and caps. “Don’t worry about it.” We smoked a bowl and a couple cigarettes each and maybe made out a little bit, then he took me by the wrist again and led me back, past the Dirty Boys and into the house.
Thirteen kids bellowed, packed up against each other in the kitchen, downing brown and clear liquids. Tricia passed by, looking me up and down. “Who the fuck are you?” she said, but got distracted and walked away before I could respond.
We pressed through the bodies toward the main hall, past Lindsey Patterson and Nicole Porter making out against the refrigerator, and two unfamiliar chads doing knife rips off the stove. We pushed past the bathroom line through the hallway into the living room.
The overheads were off. A couple lamps on, and a pair of novelty lights flashing blue and red in the corner. The stereo bumping horrifying EDM, sounding like two planets scraping together, a woman’s voice chanting who’s gonna get my honey jar, who’s gonna taste my sticky sweet. About a dozen kids folded their bodies over a pair of enormous velour bean bags, sucking face and fingering under blankets and throw pillows. A boy in a corner recording it all on his phone.
The walls’ shapes drifted in and out of kaleidoscope. Flatworms beneath my skin. An encroaching loss of language. The vibrations moved outward from my chest to my sides and extremities. Throbbing open spaces ever slightly. Gradual expansion. Shimmers and trails, and boys and girls with pulsing wet slug skin. I closed my eyes and opened them, and it was all suddenly different but not.
“I can’t. I can’t.” I twisted around back toward the hallway. My shoulders and chest bumping off other shoulders and chests, distant voices echoing back off and what the fuck eternally, past awful Tricia and the knife-rip chads, all leaned up against the dishwasher and butcher’s block, shrieking like buzzards, and I slipped out through the screen door like a c-section. The space empty now, except pine trees shuddering in the wind, sprouting tiny golden fireworks. I fumbled into my pocket and pulled out my cigarettes and lighter, hands trembling, removing a USA Gold and sticking it between my lips.
“Hey.” A hand on my shoulder. I spun around. It was Tyler. Of course. A thin smile on his face, but weird sad eyes.
“Can’t. Can’t I can’t I can’t.”
“It’s cool man. Don’t worry, it’s good.” He laughed. “I mean, it has to be. You don’t really have a choice for the next eight hours.”
“I can’t. I can’t go back in there.”
“Then we won’t.” And he squeezed my hand in his and we sat there in the grass, watching the pines turn to fireworks.
JILL
I texted Kennedy to see if she’d made it to the party. She replied: 2 drunk 2 serious. down 4 cunt. I texted Cindy. She said she had her hands full taking care of Kennedy. Tyler still hadn’t gotten back to me.
Mom was asleep. Ashley was still out with her friends. Dad wouldn’t be getting back for another couple days. So I got dressed and crept out the back door and across to the garage. The robins who’d built a nest atop the overhead light chirped wild as I walked to my bike. Three babies stuck their heads out the top of the nest.
I pulled my bike out from under the tarp and pedaled out through the hot dark, through downtown, up to Tricia’s house and through her stone lion-guarded gate and moon-pale driveway. I reached the house and no one was there.
LU
I got home and went straight upstairs to my room. I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop. My insides bubbled. I took my left hand in the other and cracked my knuckles gently. Rolled my head around my neck, one way, and then the other. I reached my hands back beneath my shirt and scraped my shoulders pink. I took my right hand in the other and cracked those knuckles gently. If I didn’t do those things, it’d feel like all the Earth’s oxygen was tearing apart.
I logged in and clicked open the browser. Clicked open the Forum bookmark. Black background. Red text. Green text. Grey text. Only a few new posts since that morning.
CRAZY BOB 06.17.2018 19:08
i think it gonna be a good night.
Pigate__(0_0)__ 06.17.2018 19:14
YES
Some posters thought CRAZY BOB had premonitions. When he said it was going to be a good night, a body was almost guaranteed to turn up. So I sat there, clicking refresh, waiting.
AHMIR
It was alright. Outside was alright, in the grass and trees. I cackled for ten minutes or an hour, and when I finally stopped I laid my face and chest against the grass and let myself sink deep. I closed my eyes and instead of dark, there was a vast, beige-chrome wall, soft and glistening like jelly. Inside, I could see my entire life, and if I focused hard enough I could change things. Make them better. I wanted to stay there forever.
“Ahmir. Ahmir.”
I ignored the voice.
“Dude. Ahmir. Ahmir Jag-Off Wilson.” Tyler’s voice. The wall dissolved, replaced by strands of every color spiraling out from a black void. Black strings reach out toward me. Hideous flapping.
I opened my eyes and rolled onto my back. Tyler stood over me, dirt in his hair, irises swallowed by black. His lips stretched against his teeth. Purple flaky WHORL leaves stuck to his gums. That big dumb face.
“What?” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m nice and even. I’m in a real smooth way.”
