How to get over the end.., p.20
How to Get over the End of the World, page 20
“I’m okay,” I said. “I just cannot go back to high school ever again.”
They laughed. “Me neither, bro. Okay. Hold tight. Is there somewhere you can walk to that’s not your school?”
“It’s just cow fields,” I said. “There’s a roadside coffee stand like a mile away.”
“Oh, you go there. I went to Tumwater too. Nah, just stay put if you can,” Jukebox said. “Or, I don’t know. Go to the office and wait?”
“Meet me in the parking lot behind the big square building,” I said. “Nobody can see me over there.” I didn’t want to talk to Principal Coleman, didn’t want to call my mom. In my head, I mapped Noah’s route to the office.
Nobody found me in the forty minutes it took Jukebox to get there. I was crouched on a cinderblock behind the portables.
I saw I had texts from my dad, and wondered if he somehow already knew, but when I got the guts to open them, the texts read:
I heard from your mom you’re failing chemistry. Something you forgot to tell me, I guess.
She says you’re considering online school. I want you to know that it’s still important to get your grades up this semester.
We can talk later about your habit of lying to me.
Jukebox’s car made a distinct crackling, rumbling noise, and when I heard it, I managed to look up. They didn’t lean out, just put one long tattooed arm out the window and waved. I could see through the windshield that they were wearing sunglasses.
“You know,” they said, “you’re the second teenager I’ve rescued from transphobic redneck bullshit this month. Had to grab Orsino from his dad’s like this just before we started the show.”
“Thanks,” I said, buckling myself in. “I’m sorry. If I had a car I’d go by myself, but my dad won’t let me drive.”
“Sucks, man,” they said, looking over their shoulder and pulling out of the parking space they’d careened into at a strange angle. “It’s sweet I’m the one you call. Makes me feel good.”
“You’re a real one,” I said. “I knew I could count on you.”
We drove through the dry green-and-brown fields around my school, the wrong way for them to be heading back to the highway. I was quiet for a second, feeling the panic I’d felt a little earlier start to go down, replaced with a freezing dread that just sat at the bottom of my intestines, waiting for me to get back to it.
Jukebox’s little mustache and sparse chin hairs were catching the weak winter light and their mullet was pulled back into a little ponytail. Their red corduroy jacket had patches on it, but otherwise it looked exactly like the John Deere one that a kid in my English class had. If they hadn’t had so many tattoos, they could probably pass for one of the redneck teens at my high school. But the jut of their chin and the lines around their eyes showed they were older than that, and tougher. On their neck there was a thin blue tattoo of a line curling in on itself over and over, then twisting like string under the collar of their corduroy jacket.
“You must think I’m super dumb,” I said.
“Nah,” Jukebox said. “High school’s fucking dumb. Did you hit anyone?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Oh well,” they laughed. “I could circle back, get someone with my car.”
“No, you don’t need to. Where are we going?”
They smiled. “Well, now I’ve ditched band practice, I gotta go walk this rich guy’s Goldendoodle for twenty bucks.”
“Cool,” I said. I felt a delicious parallel. I’d driven Orsino, and now Jukebox was driving me, through the countryside, the same way. I let myself feel their eyes on the side of my face and entertain a picture of them leaning over and kissing me. I felt a spark like an echo of the one from when they’d touched my stomach dance up through my throat. I reminded myself that I was a dumb teenager who was just tagging along, making them help me skip school.
I had a jolt of guilt. I should tell my mom where I was going. I ignored it.
We passed the frozen yogurt place that shares a plaza with the Washington State Department of Corrections office. The wide asphalt parking lot sat full of cars.
“You know,” Jukebox said, “I’m really glad you saved me from having to make an excuse to get away from Stacey. I’ve been bugged out at her lately, she’s been bugged at me. You know how she is.”
I thought about Stacey’s white pants and tried to find something to judge her for, to show Jukebox that I understood them. I knew she did acupuncture.
“She has those white pants.”
“Stacey’s just like this, big city kid.”
“Exactly,” I said, though I didn’t know what they meant.
“She went to NYU, you know,” Jukebox said. “She talks like she’s rough and from the bad part of Oakland or whatever. I used to fight with her all the time about money. She’s so damn cheap, even though she’s rich. Her parents are dentists.”
I thought, guiltily, of my dad’s house, the Japanese maple in front exactly like every other beige boxy house on the block. “I mean, she can’t help her parents, I guess,” I said. “What are you fighting about now?”
Jukebox laughed. “Just my alien album. She thinks I’m being intense. But that’s how I write now. I don’t know. I thought I had a vision, and I’m trying to stick with it. I’ve been stuck for so long, and the alien stuff, with the Gothpel of Worm and all that, it’s so rad. What you all are making is so rad and it just seems like the fire at Goat Mansion ignited everything, for all of us, and now there’s all this art with young queer people. And I’m moving faster than usual, and it makes Stacey and Robin mad. I’m so bossy.”
“I kind of like when you’re bossy,” I said. “I know not everyone does. But it means you’re committed to it. You take it seriously. A lot of the time, Gemma and Natalie seemed just glazed over. They’d just be like, ‘oh, that’s nice,’ whenever we did a project.”
Jukebox laughed. “I lost my shit a little bit yesterday.”
“Opal hates people yelling,” I said. I looked out the window at the roads changing, getting narrower. We were going to Yelm or something, I guessed.
“I think they think I’m being literal, with the revolution thing,” Jukebox said. “Orsino too. But I’m not like, crazy. It won’t happen in a single second. But we had these beings tell us that there’s this other future that we can open a door to. But—well. I guess I should ask you. You’re keyed into it.”
We swung a wide turn under some trees, hidden suburban developments on either side.
“Keyed into what?”
“The visions. The futures. They’re from the aliens. They gave them to me and Orsino. You get ’em, right? You got one yesterday.” They said it casually, but their mouth was tight on the corners in a weird way. “I mean, tell me if I’m crazy.”
I thought of what Orsino had told me about the visions. “Yeah,” I said. “I get them. When Orsino touches me, I get these images and feelings of being animals or stars or plants. And then sometimes they come true. Yesterday, when . . . you touched me. I was in a pool, looking up at someone. The water was hot. We were in a forest. It was the future. I knew, like, that there was nothing bad anymore, that we were okay. It was the future.”
For a second there was just the noise of the car. “You’re not pulling my leg, right?” Jukebox said.
“No,” I said. I felt the memory of the sparks dance in me again.
Jukebox let out a delighted bark of a laugh. The car swerved slightly on the road, and I found myself gripping the windowsill, like my dad did when he taught me to drive. “I knew it,” they whooped. “Wow. Jeez. I’ve gotta pull over somewhere.”
We pulled over, next to the empty Spooner’s berry field. The taupe sky seemed to hang lower without the hard black trees to cut it up. Jukebox’s car curved into the dirt parking lot, looking over the blank furrows where there were strawberries in the summer. They turned off the car and immediately reached over and hugged me, tight. I froze, nose in their red corduroy shoulder feeling their arms crushing me, pulling against my seatbelt.
“James, you’re a miracle,” they said. “Robin’s been telling me I’m insane.” They pulled back. “Sorry,” they said. “God, that’s so exciting. Like, I know what’s real for me, but nobody else. Robin thinks I’m imagining it, just copying Orsino’s visions and going crazy again. But you felt it from me. That means the ship gave me the powers, too. All those visions are mine too.”
I tried to follow. “Was yesterday the first time you’d . . . channeled your visions?”
“I felt that spark yesterday. And now—” their face changed.
They opened their car door, and I crawled out my side, leaving my backpack in the seat. We walked together down the road into the empty berry field. The stand that’s open in summer was boarded up. They led me just a little way down the hill, past the point where we’d be visible from the road.
“Give me your hand,” Jukebox said. “Here.” They took my hand in theirs, gently, and opened my palm. “I don’t know if it makes any difference, but I’m going to touch your heart line.” Their thumb came down on my palm. I watched their mouth purse, their nose wrinkle as they concentrated. “For me, what it feels like is this sudden sense—this certainty—that we can change things, that we have to make a future for you to live in, that atoms and leaves and birds and air are flowing parts of this great whole, and that it all has meaning, because it all continues. It’s promise.”
I felt a shock, again, as their fingernail dug into my palm. There was an explosion happening in space, thirteen hundred years from now and also at this very instant.
Chapter 15: ORSINO
“Don’t bring any more dead things in here,” Stacey yelled when I opened the door. “I don’t want any fucking dead crap in the bathroom, or the laundry room, or the basement, or anywhere.”
“I left it outside in a bucket,” I said. I took off my coat and hung it up on the folding chair inside the door where all the other coats were. “I’m sorry for the one time.”
Stacey didn’t seem to be paying that much attention to me. It was because Robin was freaking out. They were both standing in these kind of tense positions, facing off across the cracked tile of the living room.
“I know they’re your friend, but I can’t fucking deal with this anymore,” Robin said to Stacey. For a second, I thought she was talking about me, but then I realized that she was talking about something on her phone screen. “I just don’t have the skills to deal with this level of like, BS. This is like my fucking scumbag dad.”
I went to get peanut butter and crackers from the cabinet in the kitchenette and poured myself a cup of the cold coffee from yesterday that Stacey had in the coffee pot. I took it into the orange living room where Robin and Stacey were and brushed off an area on Stacey’s coffee table to eat, moving all the scraps of fabric and tarot cards into a pile in the basket for yarn and magazines that she kept next to the couch. I’d been trying not to think all morning, even though I knew I had a lot to think about. Now this was happening.
Robin was showing Stacey something on Instagram, I knew. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was.
Stacey looked confused and annoyed. “I’m saying I’m worried about their mental health, and I hate that the band is both all they ever want to talk about and something they don’t seem to understand involves people besides them. I don’t understand what exactly you’re upset about.”
Robin shrugged. “I guess I thought we’d be talking more about moving in together for real. I’m applying for jobs and everything. But it’s like I don’t exist to them at all.”
Stacey squinted at Robin, as if assessing her, and went into the kitchenette. She reached for the coffee pot. When she saw it was empty, she turned to me.
“Orsino,” she said. “Did you drink my coffee again?”
“It was cold,” I said. “Sorry, I thought it was game.”
“It’s my special coffee,” Stacey said. “It’s expensive. I would appreciate if you didn’t drink it in the future.”
I tried to keep my voice level. “Do you want this back?” I held out my mug. Whatever it took to get tensions down.
“No,” Stacey said. “Your mouth has been on that. I can make more.” But she made no move to. She came back into the living room again and looked at Robin and crossed her skinny arms.
“Robin,” she said, slowly. “Jukebox has always been a little that way with girlfriends. I hate to break it to you, but they are not in their marriage phase of life.”
Robin glared at her. “That’s such a fucked up thing to say to me. I moved down here to be with them and support their art. I deserve more than a cursory glance every seven days.”
“You don’t think I feel that way too? I’m producing and editing these fucking songs! Jukebox takes my labor totally for granted. What I’m saying is, with you, it’s like, that’s the way they’re always gonna be. They’re a fuckboi in relationships, because it’s always about their art. That’s something you were going to run into sooner or later. But right now, it’s about their art but they don’t even want to be meaningfully involved in the discourse that art involves. They’re a steam engine rolling over everyone else, and fuck my needs.”
Robin put her hand to her forehead, the way Mom does when she’s stressed. She was still looking at whatever was on the phone. “This thing with the teen show is really making me mad. They treat it like it’s the only thing that matters.”
They both looked at me. I was frozen, with a dry peanut butter cracker half-swallowed in my throat. I slowly lifted my mug of stolen coffee and wet my throat enough that I could get the cracker down.
“I don’t understand why they ditched practice today,” Stacey said. “We aren’t tight.”
Robin let out a guttural moan. “No shit. What the fuck is happening?”
“My question too. They’re trying to get that stupid kid’s band a deal at Lone Popper like it’s vital for the salvation of mankind. Why not invest more in our band?”
Robin’s face got tight. “Monique Fatigue’s good.”
“Shit, sure she is,” Stacey said. She leaned back on the couch and looked at the ceiling.
I shoved the last three peanut butter crackers into my mouth and drank the rest of the coffee, then went back to the kitchenette. I wanted to be someplace else. But even if I went into Jukebox’s bedroom I would still be able to hear their voices. I stood in the kitchenette. Behind me, I heard the sound of Stacey hitting her bong.
“What I wanna know,” Stacey said, “is what’s so fucking important right now. It’s the day before this kid show. I moved my shift so we could be together and practice the set so we’d be all ready tomorrow, and then they dipped.”
“I want to go home,” Robin said. She hugged a yellow, cat-patterned pillow. “It’s so clear they don’t care about this relationship anymore. This is fucking psychotic. I can’t be here.”
Stacey grimaced.
“I can’t be here,” Robin said. “They’re going to come back. What do I say to them? How do I look at them? They’re just thinking about themselves. I’m just like, the stuffed animal they forgot about.”
“I’d offer to drive you back to your mom’s, I guess, but my car’s in the shop,” Stacey said. She sounded angry, but I wasn’t sure if it was at Robin or Jukebox.
I didn’t want to say anything. I texted James, hey, can you hang out in a little bit?
Robin and I went to the gas station on the corner so she could get toilet paper for the house. It was an excuse to walk someplace, I knew.
“Everything I know is falling down around me,” Robin said.
Robin hadn’t really talked to me in months. It had only ever been Jukebox, taking up all the space between us. I felt really tired. She’d never asked how I was doing in all the weeks we’d been here.
“We could call Mom,” I said. She probably couldn’t get us until tonight or tomorrow, I thought. Because of work. And I didn’t like the idea of going back to Tacoma, away from everyone else. But it also wasn’t like we could stay, now. I wasn’t sure how to talk to Robin about this.
“We absolutely can’t call Mom,” Robin said. “Not now. Not right now. She’s got so much on her plate.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m an adult,” Robin said. “I lived without Mom for three months when I ran away. I have to figure this out. I can do it. I’m just sorry you’re in it with me. I know you like Jukebox, and they’re like, a trans mentor person for you.”
I hadn’t told her about the time Jukebox had made me hurt Dad. I knew that if I told her, there would be an argument. Robin didn’t believe the visions were real; she would think it meant I’d punched him or something. She might be mad at me, too.
Dad had sent all of us a string of angry texts the day after it happened in a group chat. He’d called me a crazy retard again, and called Robin a dyke. He didn’t say anything about the visions, or about me grabbing his arm. I wasn’t sure if that meant he didn’t remember. He had sent pictures of the dug-up place on the lawn. Mom had replied, no proof Orsino did that. These insults are great material for court tho, xoxo. Mom had called Robin and told her to block his number, and then texted me privately to say that it hadn’t been a good idea to take Agatha. But they didn’t know that I’d really hurt him. I wondered if he had nightmares now, too. I hoped he didn’t. I didn’t like to think about my dad dreaming about blood all night.
I hadn’t tried to talk to Jukebox about it, either. They asked me about my visions with James almost every day, and I told them about it—how nice it was. Jukebox got happy and excited when I told them about the rivers of fish that might be the past or might be the future. I’d been living at their house since they brought me back from my dad’s. Sometimes James was there, and he and Jukebox talked. My nightmares had mostly gone away, and I’d tried to pretend that everything was fine for the last few weeks. I’d talked to Barb. I hadn’t told her anything about the visions.
