I wrote a novel, it is my first novel, and it is available today. It’s called “This Parachute is a Knapsack”, and it’s about an amusement park, and a president, and a game show winner, and a late night host, and a movie star, and a witch, and a Catholic, and yeti, and there’s also a polar bear.
Here is a link to buying it and stuff: HERE.
I think it’s a very good book, which is good, because if I didn’t think it was a good book, this whole day for me (and the last several years (and specifically last few months) that I’ve spent writing it) would really be a big bummer.
But it’s not a bummer! It’s the release day of my first novel. It’s October 17, 2017. Here are some words that recur in the novel: anticipatory, catacombic, clinical, couch, despair, detachment, epiphanic, loud, reflection, silence, specter, suddenly, summer, time, underwear, unreal, wall
(this story is from my new book of stories called ROOKIE)
“So, you just shove it in your pocket like this,” Ken, fifteen-year old Michael’s thirteen-year old cousin on his mother’s side, said quietly, gently putting a candy bar in his front pocket. The brand was unimportant. The act was what mattered. Michael struggled to pay attention to Ken’s—or Kenny’s—instructions. He kept looking around the store, glancing at the front desk and the Chinese man, about fifty he guessed, standing there.
“I’ll do it in a second,” Michael said.
“Well, don’t wait too long. The longer we just stand here, the sketchier we look.”
Michael felt uncomfortable being taught how to be devious by his younger relative. Something about it felt ugly. He didn’t steal on his own time, so doing it now could have only been a matter of relative peer pressure, which would imply that he looked up in some way to this younger boy, and that feeling, among the general fear of being caught, kept Michael from making any sort of move.
“Mike,” Kenny urged him, shoving his shoulder into his. “Get it done.”
Michael reached out and grabbed what he thought was a bag of Skittles. In terms of wrapper crinkle potential, it wasn’t the ideal item to pick.
He jumped when he heard the sound of the man behind the counter, the sound of him saying, “Hey! What are you doing?”
Michael froze and Kenny sighed, disappointed.
“Nothing,” Kenny said. He dug out the two candy bars he had in either pocket and sulked toward the counter. Michael followed. “We’re just picking out some snacks.”
They had money. It was not a matter of payment. This was simply Kenny’s idea of passing time in this rural Midwestern town of Wallingsville, a town that Michael was visiting from California for the long weekend, a suggestion of his mother’s to see his family that they had all grown a little distant from lately. Not too distant, in Michael’s mind. In fact, he hadn’t really ever gotten to know Ken and his older brother and their mother (father was never part of the picture) in the first place. They had only ever met on the sporadic occasions that Michael’s mother took him to visit them when he was still in pre-adolescence.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the Chinese man said in a thick accent as Michael and Kenny approached the counter. “Stealing?”
“What?” Kenny said. “Of course not. I come in here all the time. You think I’d steal from you?”
The man looked at Kenny suspiciously. The two boys put their candy on the counter and the man picked them up to scan them. He called to someone over his shoulder in another language that Michael assumed was most likely Chinese. A woman, about the man’s age, approached looking just as incredulous. Michael wondered what kind of racket his younger cousin had going on in this place. He looked over to him, but Kenny simply smiled at the couple with closed eyes. Michael couldn’t help but notice how much taller he was than Kenny.
“Open your backpack,” the man said. Kenny had a blue backpack on that was sagging low on his back. Michael also had a backpack, but the man seemed focused on Kenny.
“I don’t have to do that,” he responded.
“If you filled that backpack,” the woman said, “we’re calling the police. You can’t have all that. You come in here. You steal. We’re calling the police.”
“Fine, call the cops,” Kenny said. Michael could see how happy this was making him. “We don’t have to listen to this. We’re not even gonna buy anything now. Come on, Mike. Let’s go.”
Kenny backed his way to the front door, keeping eye contact with them the whole time. Michael concentrated on looking firmly at the floor. Kenny hiked his backpack up and, as the two boys walked through the door, the unmistakable crinkling of a wrapper could be heard.
Michael thought he heard himself say sorry under his breath, but he couldn’t be sure.
Kenny chuckled as they walked down the block, way too leisurely for Michael.
“That was fun. They never do anything. The only reason I do that is so I can say, ‘fine, call the cops.’”
Michael let out a small “heh,” and then said, “yeah.”
“So, do you, uh, actually have stuff in that backpack?” Michael then asked.
“Yeah, but only a few bars of candy.”
“Like, how many?”
“I don’t know, man. Five. Six?”
They reached the end of the sidewalk. A car stopped at the stop sign and then drove forward. Kenny stepped into the street, but Michael stayed put.
“Come on,” Kenny said.
“You know what,” Michael said, “I’m just gonna go back and pay for the candy. Not a big deal. I just won’t be able to stop thinking about it.”
Michael turned around and began walking back to the convenience store, leaving Kenny in the street. When he got back inside, the man behind the counter looked at him as one looks at an old enemy, disappeared for years and suddenly returned.
Michael maintained eye contact. His thoughts were chaotic and unformed, and, even though he was more frozen than anything, he knew that keeping his eyes locked with the man’s must have shown some kind of bravery.
But then Michael turned immediately back around to leave. But he couldn’t leave. Without seeing exactly what had happened, he smacked into some force.
“Oh my god!” a girl yelled.
Michael screamed, something that he realized was a bit excessive as far as reactions go.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” the girl said, seeing what she interpreted as him nearing total collapse. “It’s fine.”
“What are you in here for?” the man said, pointing his finger at Michael. “You’re friends with the kid that steals. What do you want?”
The kid that steals. You’re friends with. Friends. Michael could only repeat the words in his head, in less and less syntactic form, until he became aware that he seemed to be only making stuttering sounds.
“What’s going on?” the girl said. She was a little older than Michael. “Just let him leave.”
The man began yelling in Chinese again. Michael wondered if he was just so primally angry at him that he couldn’t even bear to speak to him in English, but then the girl began yelling back in the same language. Michael watched as they exchanged hand signals. The hand signals grew more animated and angry, then lowered until finally the girl gave the universal “let’s calm down” signal with her palms facing the ground. She turned to the boy known as Michael.
“Look. He says you or your friend stole some stuff. If you have anything, just give it to me and that’ll be it. You won’t get in trouble or anything.”
Michael realized that the bag of Skittles in his hand was beginning to soak with sweat and he slowly raised his hand to her. She took it from him and looked at him like she was preparing for him to pass out, like she would have to soon make a quick decision to throw the Skittles to the ground in order to catch him when he fell, or protect the integrity of the candy and let the boy fall where he may.
Michael said, “Okay,” maybe just in his head and he turned around and walked back out the door. The two people remaining inside shared tentative eye contact.
Outside, Michael walked quickly, with shuffling feet, down the sidewalk, making his way back to his cousin. He looked down, getting only where he was going by the muscle memory of having just walked from there.
Jesus Christ, he thought as he moved.
“Hey,” Kenny said when they regrouped.
“Hey.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yep.”
“Look, we have to make one more stop,” Kenny said. “I hope that’s okay.”
“Where now?”
“Okay, it’s a liquor store.”
“Tell me it’s so we can get soda.”
“Soda? No. Look, we gotta steal just like one or two more things.”
Michael was beginning to really regret his decision to visit his relative at this point. “Kenny? Do you ever think maybe you steal too much?”
“No,” he said. “Not at all. I don’t have any money. What do you expect me to do?”
He didn’t know what he expected him to do. Stay home, he guessed? Michael thought about expectations as they continued on down the sidewalk, but no thoughts really formed.
“I know you’re not comfortable with this,” Kenny said. “So I’m sorry to make you do it again. It’s not even my choice. I was told to.”
“By who?”
“Who do you think?”
When they arrived, Michael didn’t even want to step inside. It was a nameless business, the last building on the block, with just a sign over it that said “Liquor” in blocky, faded letters.
Kenny stepped forward, stopped when he saw Michael not moving and, motioned for him. He still didn’t do anything.
“Look, man,” Kenny said. “Just do this for me, please. Then we’ll be done. We’ll go home.”
Michael looked at him, but all he could think of was whether or not Kenny had any respect for him.
“Promise,” Kenny said.
Michael felt an intense pressure in his stomach, rising up like an explosion was coming. It caused his chest to push itself out and air to collect in his lungs. “All right,” he said.
The bell attached to the door made a little ding as Kenny pushed it open. He walked with purpose to the back of the store. Michael followed closely behind, his head down. He glanced briefly at the cashier to see what he was dealing with now. This guy didn’t look like he would let the teenagers go so easily. He looked like he was about thirty, was cartoonishly stocky, and also wearing a muscle shirt.
The section that Kenny had made his way to was at the back of the store and, though all he would have to do was lean to his gently to the right if he wanted to, the cashier couldn’t see them from here.
Kenny opened the door and sighed. He didn’t look around or browse; he went directly for a forty ounce of Steel Reserve. Michael watched as he unzipped his backpack and put the giant bottle inside. Michael’s breathing was heavy and he tried to distract himself by focusing on how much the Steel Reserve looked like urine.
Kenny repeated his action and put another bottle in his backpack. A light clinking of glass was made. Michael began to think, how many of these is he going to put in there.
“Okay, open your backpack now,” Kenny said in a whisper.
They were the only people in the store. He didn’t know what Ken was thinking and he didn’t know what he was thinking by letting Kenny do the thinking. He opened his backpack. He had only got one Steel Reserve in when he heard, “Hey! What the fuck?”
What the fuck, indeed.
“Shit,” Kenny said. “Michael, look at me.”
Michael did.
“Run,” Kenny said.
Michael did.
And then he was outside and he was trying to think of how easily it would have been to, a week ago, say, “You know, Mom, I don’t think I should go. Or maybe I should at least correspond with them for a few months first so I know what I’m getting myself into.”
He didn’t know where he was going. He was told to run, so he did. It was just self-preservation. Kenny was faster than him, probably from doing this kind of thing before, and Michael had been able to keep up with him only until they ran through the moderately sized crowd protesting something a few blocks down. What they were against, Michael could not say. He just saw the word “protest” on a white banner before he was swallowed by the people and spat out again, and when he was Kenny was nowhere to be found.
He guessed it had been about fifteen minutes about fifteen minutes after he had lost Kenny. He didn’t have his phone. He just had this backpack, the weight of which was making his gait more and more apelike.
He thought that following telephone wires would potentially be helpful, but by staring up at the sky he only grew most disoriented. The streets here were bleak and sprawling and any direction Michael decided to move in, he was pretty much committed to for a good amount of time.
He saw a person’s legs leaning out of a pale green pick-up truck up the block and approached them.
“Excuse me,” he said.
The person turned around and said, “Oh shit.”
It was the girl from the store.
“Oh,” Michael said.
“You’re that kid who was stealing from my parents’ store.”
“That was your parents’ store?” Michael said. “That’s why you were yelling at each other in Chinese?”
“It was Korean, actually.”
“Oh.” Michael thought of apologizing, but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t, but he just looked away and said “oh”. It was like even by acknowledging his mistake would call attention to some sort of racism and he just wanted to move away from the topic all together.
“What do you want?” the girl said.
“I wasn’t stealing,” Michael said over her, interrupting her only because they had spoken at the same time.
“It looked like it. You and your friend, my dad said. A kid that always comes in there.”
“He’s not exactly my friend.” Michael said. She laughed at that. “He’s my cousin.”
“Uh huh,” she said. “Some cousin. What is it that you want, kid?”
“I’m, uh, kind of lost.”
“Where are you trying to go?”
“Do you know where Sebastian Road is?”
“No, I have no clue,” she said. “But I have a phone. Don’t you?”
“I left it at my cousin’s house.”
The girl sighed and took her phone out of her pocket. “That was stupid.”
She smiled as she pulled up Maps on her phone.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Michael.”
“Michael,” she said, “how do you know that after I put your cousin’s address into my phone that I won’t save it and go sneak there at night with my friends and trash it?”
“Because,” Michael started, taken aback, “I… that would be… socially bizarre… What’s your name?”
“What if I’m socially bizarre?” she said. “My name is Casey, and don’t worry. I’m not going to do that…”
“Thanks.”
“…If you tell him to stop stealing.”
Michael: “I really don’t know if he’ll listen to me.”
Casey put her phone up to Michael’s face and he saw that he was only a few blocks away. That still meant he had about a mile to walk, but it was a simple route. He traced it with his eyes a few times until he was pretty sure he had it memorized.
“Thank you, Casey,” Michael said. “I’m really sorry. Thank you.”
He turned to leave, but stopped.
“Hey, um, do you want this?” He unzipped his backpack and took out the Steel Reserve. “Just be careful opening it, cause I’ve been running a lot.”
Casey smiled. “Did you steal that, too?”
Michael turned red and imagined a cartoon-sized bead of sweat appearing at one end of his forehead. “I, uh…”
“Just a joke,” she said. “No, you keep it.”
“I really don’t even want it.”
Casey held out her hand to take the semi-forced gift and their hands touched for a second. For some reason, Michael was the one that then said, “Thank you.”
After a few more blocks and a couple times being convinced he was lost again, Michael finally arrived at the house and he was, somewhat paradoxically, relieved to see it. It represented a kind of finish line, a place to finally exhale.
He made his way up the front walkway. The lawn was brown with dead grass. Cigarette butts lined the way to the front door like breadcrumbs. Michael noticed that the door wasn’t completely closed and, for some reason he could not identify, suddenly felt he that was at the wrong house. He knew this was wasn’t true, but for some strange reason, a strong feeling grew in him that told him he would soon be walking into the living room of utter strangers, and not just mostly strangers.
Regardless, he walked in.
He saw no one inside. The house was undoubtedly lived in, however. The carpet was a dirty ordinary color, black shoe prints and brown sock prints and even another color all together footprints were zigzagging across the floor like tiny highways. The kitchen was off to Michael’s right and he could smell it. A small family of flies hovered around the trashcan, full of garbage and no garbage bag. The light in the kitchen was on.
Michael had only just started to examine the living room: a brown couch, a two-pane glass coffee table—one of the panes having been replaced with a piece of cardboard—when he heard small voices rapidly growing larger. They were yelling from a distant room and making their way into the one Michael was in.
“You fucking lost him?”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
“I’m going to kill you, dude! He was your responsibility!”
Exclamation marks were flying like daggers as Michael recoiled. He saw Kenny run into the living room followed by a taller boy, wearing only one shoe. He waved the other one in the air, bringing it down onto Kenny’s head and back repeatedly.
“He just ran off!”
Kenny, cowering low to the floor at this point, did not see what the older one saw. The shoe was slowly lowered as Michael wondered if he had a look of fear on his face, or if he was succeeding in anyway at staying stone-faced.
“Michael!” the older boy—a man, really—said. “You found your way back.”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “Sorry, I just turned down the wrong street.”
“No worries,” this guy was saying, putting his shoe back on his foot. This was Michael’s other cousin and the closest thing he had to a guardian for the weekend. Ryan was twenty-five years old and was Kenny’s older brother. He had medium length brown hair that’s style would be best described as “no haircut”.
“I’m sorry, Ken,” Michael said.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Ryan interjected. He had a rhythmic way of saying this. Like it was a song, but a song that only he heard or even recognized as one. “We were just messin’ around. Brotherly love.”
“Do you have the forty?” Kenny asked.
“I, uh, no. I kind of gave… No, I don’t. Sorry.”
“Shit,” Kenny whispered.
Ryan approached Michael and put his hand on his shoulder and squeezed just a little too hard. He moved his palm up Michael’s neck and lightly grabbed a lock of his hair.
“You know what, Michael?” he said. “I like you. It’s a shame we never really got to know each other as children.” All Michael could think of was that if Ryan pulled just a little harder, his scalp would really start to hurt, and he began thinking about Ryan’s skill at knowing just the line between aggravating someone and really hurting them, and he wondered where that skill came from. “But that was stupid of you to lose the only forty you had. That was stupid, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah!” Ryan let go. He was smiling. “Okay, you guys gotta share that one now. No big deal, but lesson learned. Blah blah blah.”
Ryan pointed his index finger at the center of Michael’s chest and pushed him into Kenny with the weight of just that finger. He made his way to the kitchen and started shuffling through the refrigerator.
“Can someone hand me the Steely, please?” he said, his upper body disappeared into the mouth of the fridge.
Kenny stepped forward, rubbing his head and nearly glaring at Michael as he passed him, and handed off the alcohol to his older brother. On the second bottle Ryan said, “No, you two can have that one. I don’t want it, dumbass.”
Kenny turned around and rolled his eyes. He was cradling the forty like an apprehensive parent.
Michael continued to stand there, in between these two brothers who had smidgens of his blood inside them. Ryan closed the fridge and moved to the counter. He grabbed a large cutting knife. A series of images—most of them gruesome and involving crawling on the floor on his stomach, guts, and yellow police tape—cycled through Michael’s head as Ryan pointed the knife in his direction without looking at him.
“It’s funny,” Ryan said. “When I was your—how old are you, Mike?”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen. When I was fifteen, ten years ago… Jesus. When I was your age I was hiding in the basement to do my drinking. Kenny was only three. Just a little hunk of flesh rolling around. I would just lock myself in the basement. That was back when Mom could still take care of us. Jesus. I’m sure you don’t remember any of that, Ken. Do you have any idea how lucky you are?”
“Uh huh,” Kenny said. He looked dejected. He was still rubbing his head. “Come on, Michael. Let’s go outside.”
Ryan began humming and waving the kitchen knife around in circles, in motions similar to how parents bringing spoonfuls of food to their child’s mouth. He brought the knife down onto a large hunk of mozzarella cheese that Michael could have sworn wasn’t there a second ago.
Making his way through the living room, Michael was drawn to the old dog in the middle of the room. He wasn’t sure if it was dead until it lifted its head and looked toward the boys. Michael would have described the look as “glaring” had it come from a human, but from this dog it just seemed like curiosity.
Kenny pushed aside the pale blue curtains in front of the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. The light came through as he slid the door open. The old dog pushed itself up and followed slowly after them.
“What’s your dog’s name?” Michael asked.
“Apple Juice.”
Michael smiled at the dog, as if expecting some sort of smile back.
“Yeah,” Kenny said. “She’s older than me. She’s still clinging on. She’s a survivor.”
Apple Juice was brown and white. One ear hung down lifeless while the other pointed straight up. Her eyes had gone glossy with age. Michael noticed that several patches of hair had fallen out on various parts of her body and that she had some nasty looking sores on her back legs.
Yet, still, she followed them.
The backyard was mostly covered with dried dirt. There were some struggling patches of grass sprouted up here and there, but most of them had died and browned as well. A ramshackle wooden fence bordered the yard. Pieces were broken off on the bottom, leaving jagged, splintered wood poking down at the ground. At one end of the yard was a sandbox and next to that sandbox was a swing set. Its seats, a mud green color, hung from rusted metal rings.
The boys sat on this swing set. Apple Juice followed them, made it about halfway to the swing set, and collapsed to the ground. Michael sat up, alert, looking at her.
“Good girl, Apple Juice,” Kenny said.
She raised her head, looked at Kenny for a moment, and then let it fall to the dirt.
“I’m sorry I gave the forty away,” Michael said after a while.
“Oh, it’s no problem.”
“I didn’t know you would get, like, hit with a shoe.”
“It’s not so bad,” Kenny said. “It was a floppy shoe, anyway.”
“Yeah, well…” Michael trailed off. He had both his hands on the chains of the swing and was slowly digging his shoe into the woodchips beneath them.
He heard the fizz of Kenny opening the forty. He watched as this boy who had been a teenager less than a year held the bottle to his mouth and drank from it so comfortably. He wasn’t sure if Kenny noticed him staring, but now he was wiping his mouth and looking back at him. He handed him the forty and Michael took it with both hands.
“So,” Michael started, “he’s like your guardian?”
“Not legally, but for all intensive purposes.”
Michael didn’t correct him. He took a small sip of the forty and handed it back to Kenny. “Does that suck?”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Oh.”
“That’s just how he talks. It’s hard to explain.”
“He’s your brother.”
“Yeah,” Kenny said. “He’s my brother. I love him and it’s just a part of it, you know?”
Michael and Kenny sat on the swings, slowly rocking back and forth. Apple Juice had made her way to Michael’s feet and he bent down to pet her gently with the back of his hand. She had her mouth open and was panting a little too hard, but Michael couldn’t deny it looked like she was smiling.
Later, it was evening in Wallingsville. The sun was almost done setting and Michael and Kenny sat on the couch in the living room, eating Doritos and Cheetos with sour cream dip. Kenny also ate candy. Ryan walked into the room in a bathing suit.
“Who wants to go swimming?” he said.
Michael knew that there was no pool at this house.
“Follow me, boys,” Ryan said.
He led them to the main bathroom, which was small and had a toilet on one wall and a bathtub on the other. If you were sitting on the toilet, you could stretch out your leg and touch the edge of the tub. The bathtub was full of water.
Ryan lowered himself into the bathtub, sideways so his legs were hanging over the edge.
“Seriously, guys, it’s like a hot tub,” he said. “I swear, it’s awesome.”
“There’s no way I’m getting in there with you,” Kenny said.
“How ‘bout you, Mikey?”
“I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Are you wearing underwear?”
Michael had committed himself on the walk to the house to not doing anything else that he was uncomfortable with. That he would have resolve. He thought about, minutes later, now sitting next to Ryan in the bathtub in only his underwear, his legs crossed under the water while Ryan still had his own hanging over the edge, how easily this resolve collapsed.
Kenny was sitting on the toilet across from them, his shirt also inexplicably off, with what remained of their forty of Steel Reserve in between his legs. He was leaning his chin on the lip of the bottle.
“Hey, Mike, have you ever smoked weed?” Ryan said.
“Uh, yeah, sure.” Michael had never smoked weed.
“Okay, stay right here!” Ryan jumped out of the tub, splashing water. He disappeared from the bathroom and down the hall, jumping over Apple Juice. She blinked as drops of water hit her head.
Ryan returned with what looked like a cigarette and a pill bottle. He didn’t get back into the tub, but sat on the bath rug on the floor. He delicately opened the pill bottle, which was full of weed, and began tearing a very tiny piece off of a nugget and working it into one end of the cigarette, which Michael could now see was made of metal.
“Here you are, sir,” Ryan said. “The guest gets first honors.”
“Oh,” Michael said. “No. No, thank you.”
“Come on, I insist.”
Michael looked to Kenny, as if there was support over there on the toilet. He just nodded.
Michael stared hesitantly at the metal cigarette and took it from Ryan, along with a small lighter. He brought it up to his mouth. He must have become cross-eyed trying to look at it, because Ryan said, “You sure you got it?”
“Yeah,” he said.
He sparked the flame and very lightly inhaled. He felt the cigarette start to get hot and he immediately moved it away from his face. He felt it burning in his throat, as if it wasn’t just the temperature, but like something small and with mass had crawled in his throat and grown hot.
He began to cough and handed the metal cigarette and lighter back, desperate to be done with it.
Ryan and Kenny were laughing, but Michael knew it was not at him, that they were simply amused.
“Here,” Kenny said, leaning toward Michael with the forty outstretched. “To wash it down.”
Michael had two more nights remaining here. He wondered if he was high. He didn’t think he was, he had not inhaled very hard and it had only been a few seconds. But he noticed himself looking at his cousins a little differently. Sitting here, in his underwear in a crowded bathroom, he wasn’t sure how he would explain the weekend to his mother when he returned.
He wasn’t sure exactly how he would explain any of it, or even how he was supposed to feel about it. He didn’t know if he was behaving correctly. But sitting here now, curiously, Michael felt okay.
(this story is from my new book of stories called ROOKIE)
I watch as a black fly lands on my white t-shirt, and I’m able to take my hand and crush it between my index finger and thumb. It doesn’t resist.
I’m sitting on a deckchair, next to the pool at the Hotel Belle, and the sun is beating down hard and I’m squinting. Asher, my twin brother (fraternal, three minutes older), is on the deckchair next to me, shirtless and in sunglasses. Our girlfriends are in the pool.
Now, I don’t say this to be mean, and I don’t mean this to be callous, but my girlfriend, Tiffany, is a lot more attractive than Brianna. Not that Brianna is unattractive, but she’s a little short compared to Tiffany and her hair is kind of a peculiar shade of dirty blonde that isn’t really noticeably peculiar until you see it next to Tiffany’s voluminous, famous-actress-like brown hair.
They both surface about the same time, smiling, and swim into the shallow end toward us. I notice that both of their hair looks pretty similar now.
“Come join us, guys!” Brianna yells out.
“We will babe,” Asher says. “Workin’ on the tan here.”
The four of us are not on vacation. We live in this city. In fact, Asher and I live just a few blocks away and have since we were born. But the Hotel Belle is a one of a kind place to explore and generally just hang out at. Asher and I have been killing time here during our summers since we were in second or third grade. The staff doesn’t care. They don’t even notice us.
“You can get a tan in the water!” Brianna says.
“I don’t know. I think it protects you from the sun or something.”
Tiffany and Brianna share a look. Brianna splashes Asher, getting me too, and says, “I’ll protect you from the sun or something!”
Asher yells and raises his arms outward. He takes off his sunglasses and runs at the girls, jumping over them into the pool. They scream and smile. I watch them from the chair and, knowing it’s my turn to join in, I stand up and run toward the water.
*
We can be practically invisible at the Hotel Belle. We know it so well that it has almost become an extension of us. Or us, an extension of it. I have no idea. In our time exploring it, I was actually technically banned when I was in fifth grade for a crime that I don’t believe was given a name, but was some combination, I was told, of trespassing and loitering while trespassing. Asher took off running when the security guard pulled in front of us in his little cart, knocking me off my scooter and to the ground. Of course they forgot about it in weeks and I think it was always more a scare tactic than anything.
It feels good to be inside when we get back to the lobby. The air conditioning that’s pumped throughout the whole building cools me down instantly. Downstairs, everything has a fake kind of gold color to it. There are gold bannisters every few feet on either side of us. The tiles on the floor are gold and the carpeting is a gold that has gone dirty with all the feet that cross over it. There are also mirrors everywhere, not only making the lobby look a lot bigger than it is, but giving a gold tint to things that should be colorless, like glass tables and windows.
“What are we gonna do now?” Brianna asks.
“We can go to their tennis court,” Asher says. “Tennis, anyone?”
“No,” Tiffany says. “Let’s go up to the roof!”
“We can’t,” I say. “We’ve tried. They block off the access.”
“What do you mean they block it off?”
“There’s a three-headed dog up there,” Asher says. “It’ll kill us all.”
“If it only has three heads,” Brianna says, “then it will only kill three of us.”
“Okay, one of us can go to the roof,” Asher says.
Tiffany and Brianna are pretty cool, but the coolest thing about them is that they are both seventeen. Being fifteen, ourselves, it makes Asher and I seem a lot cooler than we might otherwise appear. This is all on the terms of other kids in our classes, who aren’t here right now, but it doesn’t matter. It seems like a big deal that any girl two years older than me, let alone one that is popular and attractive, would show interest in me. Let alone let me move my tongue around in her mouth. Let alone…
A part of me doesn’t know what they see in us. In me, at least. Asher has told me repeatedly to not bring it up, so I don’t. Every once in a while, the girls will bring it up themselves. They’ll say things like “the guys in our grade are so fucking goofy and awkward” and “you two are a lot more fun than any guy in our grade”.
If I were going to sit here identifying with words, goofy, awkward, and boring would be at the top of the list, but I just keep quiet about it all because Asher says I shouldn’t worry.
Unfortunately for me, worry is another word I would identify with.
*
Asher was only born three minutes before me, but everyone says that he acts like my much older brother. Uncomfortably often, and to the extent that I’ve started to believe it on some level. He admittedly was the cool one before me. He played tennis, basketball, and football all at the same time in eighth grade, while I was really good at certain video games. I’m cool now, just to be clear.
Our relationship has always been close, though. He’s been my best friend my whole life, but it was around the time that we entered middle school that I started to feel a little distanced from him. Distanced in the sense that, say, we were born in a room and spent our whole lives in that room and one day Asher left that room through a door that I could not see and could not find when I tried looking for it.
Somehow I did get out, but not because I found my way out. Asher had to come back to pull me into the world he now occupied and I went without asking any questions.
“Come quick,” it was like he said. “I’ve knocked out the guards, but the emergency doors will close automatically.”
He seemed happier than me and I, while I wasn’t unhappy, was lonely and didn’t want to feel that way anymore. And the trade I made to not feel lonely was to follow Asher into growing up faster than I would have liked or chosen.
You know how they will say at a certain age a boy becomes a man? I don’t think that’s true. I think that we grow up pretty much constantly and that that never ends, but that the onset of puberty and the beginnings of complex thoughts that come with it, the realizations of how the world “works” or, as Asher says, “doesn’t work at all, but just unfolds because people can’t help it,” leads us to realize that we’re now having experiences that would be called “adult”.
I don’t know if you’re following me and if you’re not if it’s my fault or yours, but if there is in fact a day that a boy becomes a man, I know which one mine was. It was all Asher’s fault.
It was what I see now as a very distinct line drawn in my life from child-me to adult-me. Even though, yes, I understand I’m not an adult. But “adult me”, I know, will be able to understand the whole experience more than “child-me” ever could have.
It was two years ago now. I was thirteen and it was the middle of the summer. The anniversary of it is coming up now that I think about it. Asher had just started to hang out with older kids, ninth graders and even some tenth graders.
Our parents were I don’t remember where. But they were not in the house. This I know. The girl’s name was Carly and she was fifteen years old.
She came in after Asher. I was sitting on the edge of my bed with my hands in my lap while I picked at the skin around my fingernails. Asher stood at the door, the lower half of his body standing in the room and the upper half leaning out.
“Come on now, he won’t bite,” he said and then leaned toward me. “She won’t bite, either. Unless you think you’d like that.”
Asher walked in and sat in the desk chair in front of a computer we shared at the time. He slouched down low with spread legs and rocked from side to side. He picked up a hacky sack from the desk and started throwing it up and down. He smiled casually and moved his eyes back and forth between Carly and me. We were both looking at him.
“You two seem well,” he said, laughing. I tried smiling.
“Are you just going to sit and watch the whole time?” Carly asked. “Because that would be weird. That would make this weird.”
“Weirder, you mean?” he said. “Don’t worry. I’m about to leave.”
I kept my hands gripping each knee, trying to keep good posture. I wasn’t told what this girl was here for, but I was starting to form some guesses.
“Introduce yourself, man,” Asher said. “Don’t be rude.”
“I’m Patrick,” I said. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude.”
Carly smiled. “You’re not rude. Just shy.”
“See, Patty, she thinks you’re shy. Don’t be shy.”
“Sorry,” I said again. The word floated, directed to neither of them, out to the middle of the room.
Asher stood up.
“And stop apologizing,” he said. “I’m going to leave you be. Just, uh, scream when you’re done.” He walked to the door and put his hand on the doorframe. He was still holding the hacky sack. “I’m just kidding. Don’t scream.”
The door closed. Carly and I shared eye contact for a while. She stuck her tongue to one side of her cheek.
“Is Asher giving you something for being here or something?” I asked.
“Don’t think about it like that. You’re just going to make yourself paranoid.” She sat next to me on the bed and touched my hand. She then touched my chest.
“I can feel your heart beating,” she said.
“Your hand’s on my chest.”
“It’s beating really fast.”
“Sorry.”
She chuckled. “Stop worrying. I’m not going to hurt you, okay?”
I believed her, but I couldn’t not feel how I did. I believed that she didn’t have any intention to hurt me, but as she got on her knees and unbuttoned then unzipped my pants, I wanted nothing but for this to be over and for her to be gone.
*
I don’t know any of the history of the Hotel Belle. I don’t think Belle is the name or nickname of anyone, I think it’s just a name. It’s been standing for at least fifteen years, but I get the idea, looking at it, that it’s probably got one of those sordid histories that go back to the early 1900’s. It looks like the kind of place a Hollywood starlet from the 1950s died at or something.
The four of us end up in the elevator, not knowing where we’re going.
“Oh, you know what we should fucking do?” Asher says.
“What?”
“We should do that elevator game thing.”
“Why do I feel like that is something sexual?” Brianna says.
“Because you’re a slut,” Tiffany says.
“No, it’s nothing sexual. Patty, you know what I’m taking about?”
“Nah.”
“It’s like the elevator game. All you need is an elevator that goes up to ten floors. Hotel Belle’s got sixteen, so we’re good there. You like get in, but you have to get in by yourself, then you press a combination of buttons and follow them. Like first you go to the fifth floor, then you go to the second floor, then the third, and so on. At a certain floor, this old lady will get on. And you can’t look at her, no matter what you do. Don’t interact with her.”
“What happens if you interact with her?” Tiffany asks.
“I don’t know. Nothing good.”
“Okay, go on,” I say.
“Then eventually, you go to the second floor. But the elevator doesn’t actually go to the second floor. It takes you up to the tenth. And when you get there, if you’ve done it right, you’ll be in an alternate universe. It will look exactly the same as our universe, but the only difference is that you will be completely alone.”
“There is no way I’m doing that,” Brianna says. “Holy shit, I’m getting chills. No fucking way.”
After a moment of silence, Tiffany says, “I’ll do it.”
“Really?” Brianna says.
“Yeah, fuck it.”
Asher laughs and claps his hands. “All right, amazing.”
“Okay,” Tiffany says. “But you guys go to the second floor, so when I get there you’ll be there and then I’ll know this is bullshit.”
“Okay, okay,” Asher says. “Let’s go.”
Tiffany gets into the elevator and Asher, Brianna, and I stand on the other side of the door, watching her go. Right before the door closes, Asher puts his hand out and stops it.
“It was nice knowing you, Tiff,” he says.
“Shut up,” she says. I smile at her as the door closes again. For a very brief moment in my head I imagine it being the last time I’ll ever see her.
“Come on, let’s beat her to the second floor,” Asher says and the three of us head to the stairwell.
“It doesn’t smell like piss in here,” Brianna says as we walk up the stairs. “Most stairwells smell like piss.”
“Hey, this is a classy establishment,” I say.
“Guess so,” she says. “Pretty sure that’s a heroin needle, though.”
“What? Where? I don’t see anything.”
“Oh, really?” she says. “I guess I was lying, then.”
She smiles down at me. I’m the last one in the line we’ve formed.
“So, Asher,” I say, “what do we do if we don’t find Tiffany?”
“You mean if she disappears from our dimension? I guess you’ll have to go after her. She’s your girlfriend.”
“Yeah,” I say. “If I find myself in some alternate dimension, how will I know how to get back?”
“I guess that’ll be your problem to deal with, Patty,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say again, quieter and lower. We keep walking.
When we get to the second floor, Tiffany is nowhere to be seen. The elevator doors are closed and no one is around at all. Then the elevator doors ding and open. Tiffany is still not there. The three of us look at each other like we’re in a slasher movie when the same stairwell doors we came out of burst open. Tiffany is standing there, huffing slightly.
“What the fuck?” Asher says.
“I went to the third floor and walked down,” she says. “I wanted to beat you and then jump out and scare you.”
She seems sad when she says this. Like she had a goal and failed to meet it. I see it as sweet. I approach her and say, “Aw, I was scared.”
“Oh, shut up,” she says. But now any sadness in her voice is gone. We’re just a group having fun being aimless again.
“Come on,” Asher says. He and Brianna are already in the elevator. “Let’s go.”
We get on and follow the elevator up. The doors open on a floor we didn’t choose. There’s no one standing outside when the doors part.
“Oh shit,” Asher says. “Maybe we somehow made it to the alternate universe. If you see the old lady, don’t look at her.”
“Stop it,” Brianna says.
I look down the long hallway through the doors and see a maid’s cart sitting with no one around in front of a room a ways down. The elevator doors start to close, but I stop it with my hand.
“‘Chu doing?” Asher says.
I poke my head out, look from side to side. “I have a damn idea.” I say.
“He has a damn idea,” Asher says.
“Stay here,” I say. “Keep the door open.”
I run away and down the hall. The walls are a vanilla color and the doors are a darker vanilla, more orange. The carpets have red flower prints on them. Every single hallway in the hotel looks like this.
I realize I’m running in a crouch with my arms outstretched. I feel myself still in the elevator, looking at myself and laughing at my appearance with my brother and our girlfriends. I try to adjust my posture, but subtly, so it doesn’t appear that I’m doing what I’m doing: trying to look a little cooler as I make my way down this hallway.
When I get to the maid cart, I see that the door to the room it’s in front of is open. The brightness of the day is shining through the windows. The room is filled with light and seems to be almost glowing white. I don’t see the maid and there is no vacuum going. Either the maid is in there or not. But right now I’m alone.
The cart is a dark green color, the color of an inhabited swamp somewhere in the American southeast. The kind of swamp where you don’t see the alligator until its snout and eyes have breached the surface and are staring you down, inches from your face. You know what, maybe the cart’s just the color of an alligator.
There’s a white trash bag hanging from the end of it and a few boxes filled with bars of soap and miniature bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and lotion lined up haphazardly. I start stuffing them into my pocket on mostly impulse when I see, what is for all intents and purposes, the jackpot: keys hanging off the edge. They are hooked to one of those industrial-sized key rings about the circumference of someone’s head. It seems strange to me that this hotel uses keys so old. There must be a hundred keys of varying sized on it. I take a look back at the elevator and the doors are closed. They’ve left me. I look back into the hotel room and I still don’t see or hear any sign of a maid.
I am flooded with a bunch of conflicting thoughts, but I decide to just grab the keys and run back to the elevator. When I get there the door’s not really closed, Asher is just letting it almost close and putting his hand out at the last second. Killing time or something.
“What were you doing?” he asks.
I hold up the ring of keys. “Getting us a room.”
We take the elevator up to the top floor. I decide I’m taking them to the master suite. When we get there, the elevators open up to a floor with only a single room on it, hidden behind an elegant double door.
In my entire time coming to this hotel, I’ve never seen this floor. A special key is needed to even get to it. I wish I could say it’s just as I’d imagined it, but truthfully, I’ve never imagined it before now. The room doesn’t matter to me. But it’s the most expensive place in the hotel and I figure it’s impressive of me if I can get the people I’m with in there.
“You want me to do it?” Asher asks me in a near whisper, with regards to opening the door.
“No,” I say, “I can do it.”
For some reason as I’m opening the door I imagine a man with slicked back blonde hair and a dress suit that’s been hastily torn off—he still has the jacket on, but the undershirt has somehow been completely removed—and a woman, also blonde, in an aqua dress and six inch heels, sitting with perfect posture and her legs off the edge of the bed in a V shape, looking less like she’s sitting on the bed, and more like she’s been glued to the side of it in this position, and they see us and the woman screams and the man gets up and walks for me and Asher with a finger pointed at us like a gun, and then we’re in a bar fight in a hotel suite.
But there is no one in here and that does not happen. Instead, what I see is a pretty nice, completely vacant master suite. The bed is a king or queen size. I’m not sure, but it’s very wide and has a canopy. On the far wall there is a painting of an old ship on calm seas at sunset.
I turn around to my little group. “Welcome to your suite,” I say and extend my arm like a bellboy. “Enjoy your stay.”
I hold the door open and let the three of them walk through.
“Whoa,” Tiffany says. “Look at this place.”
Brianna immediately makes a bee line for the bed and spreads out on it like she’s making snow angels on top of the covers. Asher goes and messes with the cabinet that’s underneath the TV, which itself is attached to the wall. Everyone becomes like little galaxies, doing things individually, and only orbiting around each other. I suddenly realize that I am separate from this. I’m just standing at the door, which is still open. I look out to the hallway and almost even nod my head to it as I close the door.
“Look at this,” Asher says. He’s crouching in front of the open mini fridge with his hands full of tiny bottles. “Free drinks.”
“Yay, free tiny drinks,” Tiffany says.
Brianna lifts her head from the bed. “Oh, they’re so cute.”
Asher stands up and begins distributing the bottles. He hands me one and I look down at the words on it. Vodka. 40 proof. Distilled. I have never been drunk before. I have never tasted alcohol before. Asher knows this, but he doesn’t consider it. I can barely bring myself to look up.
“How long do you think before they come looking for us?” Tiffany says, breaking me out of my trance.
“There’s no way they’ll know to look up here.” Asher say.
“You boys are going to get me into trouble.”
“Yeah, but it’ll be worth it, right?” I say.
Soon I am sitting at the base of the bed interlocked in Tiffany. Asher and Brianna are lying on the bed, long ways, so their legs are hanging off the side. We’re not doing anything. Just being quiet. There are mini bottles and soda cans around us. I took one brief sip of the alcohol, expected and accepted its stinging, sour taste, and have been nursing a can of Coke since.
Just being quiet.
“What are you guys gonna do when we graduate?” I hear Brianna say.
“Yeah,” Tiffany says. “We’ll be at college and you’ll both be all alone.”
“Well,” Asher says. “The way I see it there are two things. Either you both intentionally fail senior year to stay behind with us. Or we’ll find—”
“New, hotter girlfriends,” I cut in, and we finish the sentence together and start laughing.
“Oh my god,” Brianna goes, her mouth wide, but looking amused. Tiffany is quiet for a second, then lets out a chortling laugh.
“Like you guys will ever find anyone hotter than us,” she says.
Lying on our backs on the bed here it starts to get quiet again. Every few minutes the air conditioner kicks on and starts to hum. I don’t know how long we all lie like this.
I notice there’s a fly in the room. I lift my head up and watch it skip from wall to wall, stop, then start moving again. It lands on my face and I try to grab it, but I can’t. This fly is too fast for me. I can hear the noises it makes as it flies away from me and then, as suddenly as I noticed it, it’s gone.
(this story is from my new book of stories called ROOKIE)
Haley. Her name was Haley and she worked at 7-11. She spent her time behind a counter, at a register, selling energy drinks and Doritos and hot dogs and the occasional candy bar or package of condoms that people didn’t bother to steal. They would usually say, “thank you” and she would say, “You’re welcome. Have a nice day.” But sometimes they would say nothing or “Are you sure that’s the right price?” and she would still say, “You’re welcome. Have a nice day.”
It was Sunday. Haley stared, blank-eyed and with a distant yet earnest sort of longing, at the shelves in front of her. There were no people in the store.
Haley thought about her name.
She sometimes felt sad that there was only one Y in it. She felt bad for the letter Y. It was like the white crayon of the alphabet or the British pound sign on an American keyboard. It was segregated from the consonants and only sometimes allowed to be a vowel. She thought about the song “YMCA” and how a person spread their arms out for joy when making their body into a Y. But to Haley it was screaming for help. Still, she wanted a second Y in her name. Not many people had two Y’s in their name, and she also didn’t.
Sometimes, and usually, Haley would see homeless people and people who looked homeless resting underneath the sign that said “no loitering.” Her boss told her to shoo them away and Haley said the sign didn’t say “no resting.” Her boss said she would make a no resting sign and then Haley would do what she said. Haley thought her boss was lazy and boring.
There were no homeless people outside today, at least not now. But Haley could feel them. She looked at the trashcans on the sidewalk and could almost see the smoke rising from the ashtrays on top. The smoke from relit cigarette butts left by the ghosts of homeless people.
Haley played with the small gauge in her earlobe. She was 22.
Her mind began to wander. Her thoughts were like a balloon that escaped from her ear and grew larger the further up it went. She thought about, the topic still on her mind, the time a homeless woman resembling a raisin walked into the store and laid out forty-four Ruffles on the counter, demanding a refund.
“The bag says there are four servings of twelve chips in it,” she said. “But this is only a little more than three-fourths of that number. See? Look.”
Haley looked at the Ruffles. The woman had carefully separated them into three groups of twelve and one group of eight. The chips that had broken were carefully reassembled. They were lined up, like tiny salted soldiers, standing at attention. Ready for battle against Haley and 7-11.
“How do I know you didn’t eat four of them?” Haley asked.
“It says right here on the bag. See? Right here. If I’m not satisfied I am entitled to a full refund.”
Haley felt bad for the old lady. She was just trying to work over the system that had already worked her over. This woman was lucid and had a basic knowledge of geometry, but likely had a mental deficiency that prevented her from holding a job, which in turn made it impossible for her to pay rent, and certainly for a psychiatric program to address her illness, which was already stigmatized to the extent that the people around her her whole life probably ignored the issue or convinced her to just push through it, which of course started the spiral that led to her current situation in the latter half of her life.
Or maybe the Ruffles manufacturer forgot to put four chips in the bag.
“There’s a phone number to call on the bag for your refund,” Haley told the woman. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do for you here.”
“I want a refund or a product in your store of equivalent value,” the woman said. Her hair was a washed-out gray and in knots. It looked like a ball of yarn that a feral cat had attacked and then grew bored of. “That’s fair. You have to be fair. What kind of person are you?”
“We have a phone,” Haley said. “You can use our phone.”
There was a moment of stopped time then. The hands of the clock on the wall, watching them, had ceased ticking in respect for the moment.
The woman’s head opened up for Haley and she could see small, rusted gears, misshapen and bent, soup cans in a half-off aisle, cranking in her head. Then, as if an invisible and silent gun at the beginning of a race had fired, the woman swept her chips back into their bag and grabbed two Twix bars from the shelf below the counter and darted into the parking lot, where she stopped.
Haley watched this, expressionless. Though she didn’t particularly want to, but caring more about herself and her job security than the homeless woman who has just questioned her moral integrity, Haley called the police. The woman was still in the parking lot when they arrived, screaming at nothing. Haley watched as they approached her, two men both with their hands on their belts. They had the simultaneous air about them of concerned parents and disappointed bosses. Haley watched them gently start talking to her, hearing nothing from her side of the universe behind the glass window. The two police officers towered over the woman, looking down on her like she was some pathetic child that wasn’t exactly sure what it had done wrong.
Haley watched the officers escort her slowly to their car like adult sons taking their decrepit mother to dinner. They both looked at Haley from the parking lot, but the woman didn’t. She was compliant and accepting of her new fate. Haley, seeing this, felt a sudden deep and inexcusable dread pass through her, and she knew that it was because with only a few more bad decisions she would be that homeless woman.
Haley wasn’t in college. It had been months since she had the homeless woman arrested, but it had been four years since she moved from home to be with her boyfriend, who was himself 22 at the time. It only took a few months for an ex-girlfriend of his to contact Haley to let her know about the blog he had where he posted all of the nude pictures he coerced out of his past girlfriends. Her paradoxical reaction to the situation was what caused her the most stress until he preemptively broke up with her.
She checked that blog for the better half of the next year, never once coming across a photo of herself. This filled her with both massive relief and a peculiar sense of resentment. Still, when the vague possibility that she could someday be confronted, perhaps by way of a fiancé or well-respected employer, with the haunting and permanent reminder that she was once eighteen, her body warmed and her blood rushed with anxiety.
It was as if a dark wave had formed far out in the ocean, in a place where the beachside communities had neither awareness nor control, and became a tsunami, wiping out buildings and citizens. Families on vacation and homeless dogs behind dumpsters. Eventually the water subsided and houses were rebuilt. The economy was revived and tourists came back, but the notion that at any time, and always unexpectedly, another wave could return to destroy the fragile, carefully maintained community clawed at the back of their skulls. And every time a wave would come, it would tear down what they had tried so hard to secure against.
This was Haley’s anxiety. She played with the small gauge in her earlobe again.
Haley was a Christian. Today she did not go to church. It was Easter Sunday.
Her mother had been texting her snippets of what their pastor had been saying for her to read while she stood alone behind the counter.
“the lord died 2 prove himself to us and came back 2 save ourselves from us” Haley’s phone said. She looked at it expressionless, at the emoji of two yellow hands outstretched toward what is implied to be the sky, white lines jutting out around them, and wondered if this was what dissociating felt like.
“hes doing the eucharist soon, do u have grape juice n crackers nearby?”
“yes”
Haley imagined her life now and, in the exact moment of the conscious realization that she was imagining her life now, thought—really thought—if this was the best she could be doing right now. The thought wasn’t in relation to her job at 7-11 so much as it was what she could be doing while at 7-11. She was behind a counter. She was alone. She knew that she, solely, was responsible for thousands of dollars worth of product currently. An image appeared in her head—a helicopter shot—of a masked figure entering the store. The figure wore a black ski mask and a red 7-11 employee shirt. Haley knew that this figure was herself. Though no one was in the store, she knew that she would have to take out the security cameras before leaving. She watched herself sneak to the counter, where, now, no one stood. She punched the cash register and, like a movie or short story, it shot open. She watched herself and—oh my god! Is that a gun? I hope she doesn’t have to use it.
A man appeared through the doors. The little bell jangled, and a Pavlovian response pulled Haley out of her fantasy and clawed at the back of her head, not fully materializing into any true feeling. The man was a plain man. His face could have been a skin-colored cloth draped over a skull, with protrusions where the brow ridges and nose and cheekbones would be and Haley would have seen the same man. She felt nothing in any way for him—not empathy, not curiosity—yet she stared at him. She could not understand why she did this.
He approached the counter with a single 20oz bottle of Diet Coke and paid with a credit card. He left through the doors and it was as if Haley didn’t even know if he was ever in the store, if he ever even existed.
(this story is from my new book of stories called ROOKIE)
It was at summer camp where it happened. Tommy was 14. Nicole was 15. It was 2005.
They had met early on, the first day at orientation. Tommy’s parents had sent him to Camp Waxahatchee to help with his social anxiety, which had, in recent years, reached the extent that he had faked sickness for over two-thirds of his final year of middle school, only managing to graduate because of his father’s connections with the principal. Tommy’s days had been reduced to long hours in bed, isolated except for his computer: his source of comfort and consistent reminder that there was a world out there that he was not participating in. He rarely moved, except to eat dinner and when his laptop would overheat on top of his blankets and he would have to readjust. Camp Waxahatchee was his parents’ last resort to get him to “integrate”, as they said. Medicating their child was not an option.
Nicole was sent there out of fear. Nicole had always been a difficult child. “Carefree” as her parents liked to say when she was young. “Troubled” is what they said when she got older. She would be disruptive in class; things like throwing paper airplanes and talking over the teacher, and she once spit directly into another girl’s face for seemingly no reason at all. The ensuing scuffle resulted in a scar above Nicole’s right eye. It grew fainter as it healed and eventually became barely visible around her eyebrow. Though you could still see it if you knew what you were looking for.
When she was 11, Nicole’s child psychologist informed her parents that she believed she had ADHD. They immediately put her on Dexedrine. Medication their child was the only option.
This was not why they sent her to Camp Waxahatchee.
Nicole had a sister who was born eight years before her. When she was 16 and Nicole was 8, she started having sex. Lots of sex. Unprotected and with multiple partners. Somehow she got pregnant and was unsure with whom. Her parents used no words to describe her. Instead there was an increased lack of eye contact, heavier studying of the bible for some kind of Christian gymnastics to minimize the shame, and even less communication than before. They weren’t going to talk about their daughter’s pregnancy and they definitely weren’t going to discuss sex with their children.
Months passed. Nicole ultimately did not become an aunt, but now it was she who was nearing 16 and her parents wanted to make sure that if they couldn’t halt their daughter’s aging process, then they could at least put her under constant supervision. And they both had full-time jobs. So they sent her to Camp Waxahatchee.
And on the first day, at orientation, Nicole met Tommy. There were about a hundred kids in the auditorium, no one older than 18 and none younger than 6. Nicole had found a seat against the wall in back. She had already almost made friends with two girls next to her and was talking to them, leaning her right leg out just a little too far, when Tommy, who shuffled in late, meekly looking for an open spot, stepped on Nicole’s foot.
“Ow!” she yelled.
He had been looking down and was so lost in his own paranoia of the whole auditorium possibly watching him that he didn’t notice Nicole’s sneaker in his path. He didn’t say sorry. He didn’t have the confidence to use his voice in front of these strangers yet. Instead, he tightened his lips in an apologetic smile. Though, in forgetting how to properly use facial expressions, it came out as more of a tense and uneasy “I don’t care, deal with it, I guess,” kind of expression.
“Um, okay…” Nicole said under her breath in a drawn out way, confused for just a passing second before going back to talking to the girls beside her.
The next time they interacted, Tommy was on the receiving end. He was standing far out on the kickball field, picking at the dirt under his fingernails (which had accumulated dramatically since he arrived), thinking about how many websites’ updates he had not been able to check, trying to keep an anxiety attack at bay, when he blacked out.
“Oh, shit!” Nicole yelled from the dugout.
“And he’s out!” a kid named Andy yelled from the outfield, with a smile across his face.
Nicole, the counselors, and most of the kids playing ran out to Tommy’s body laid out on the grass. The red, rubber kickball was by his side.
“Is he okay?” Nicole asked, leaning over him. Nicole wasn’t exactly athletic, but she had a strong kick. When she was in second grade she played after-school soccer and got the ball in the goal more than almost anyone. Now she was playing defense. “I didn’t mean to hit him! He wasn’t even paying attention!”
“Look at that, Nicole,” Andy said, hovering behind the group. “You killed him.”
“Alright now,” one of the female counselors said. “Just give him some room.”
Tommy slowly opened his eyes. The sun was looking down on him, disapprovingly. It blinded him.
“I’m okay,” he said. “It’s fine…”
The next day Nicole approached him during free time in the main hall. The kids called it Old Main. They had a lot of free time.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” she said.
“What?” he asked, looking up from a picture book of the Rockies he found in the camp’s library.
“About hitting you… you know, in the face.”
“Oh. It’s okay.”
“Are you sure? I feel really bad.”
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose, you know.”
“I know.”
She pulled out a chair and sat across from him. He had been at the table by himself.
“Okay,” she said. There were no words for a while. Nicole looked around at the other kids in the room. Out the window she saw two boys walking out of the woods, returning from a hike. Tommy kept his eyes in his book.
“I’m Nicole,” she finally said.
“Hi,” Tommy replied.
“What’s your name?”
“Tommy.”
“Tommy,” she repeated. “Like Pickles?”
“What?”
“Tommy Pickles. From Rugrats. Did you ever watch Rugrats?”
“Oh. Yeah, I like that show.”
“I always liked Angelica. Everybody hated her, but she was always my favorite.”
“Yeah, she’s all right.”
Nicole looked at Tommy. “You’re really quiet.”
“Yeah,” he said.
Nicole liked Tommy. She wasn’t sure why. She didn’t typically like people who didn’t talk. And it wasn’t like he was the strong, silent type. He looked like he had trouble just holding himself up. Maybe she felt bad for him. But she didn’t feel like she felt bad for him. But every time she saw him, he was by himself and looked desperately lonely. She wanted to spend time with him and it all might have made her realize how she was, in fact, also desperately lonely.
She sat with him when he ate and she stood in line with him during daily phone calls to families. Soon she found that she wasn’t simply doing this with him, but that they were doing them together. He began to say more to her than just “yeah” and “what” and it wasn’t long before other kids started making fun of them and girls would giggle when they walked past together.
It was late one night, about three weeks into camp, when Nicole snuck out of her bunk, and ran to the other side of camp to wake up Tommy. They separated the girls’ and boys’ bunkhouses by a distance of at least two football fields and there was a basketball court and thick patch of trees in between them. The moon was bright enough that night that Nicole didn’t need a flashlight to see the ground in front of her. It was, aside from lying helplessly awake, the reason she chose tonight to leave her bunk.
Tommy slept on a top bunk. There was a heater that hummed loudly above him and a window right next to him that he kept open to feel the breeze as he slept. At home he slept with a loud fan blowing into his face. It was a comfort that he tried to mimic at Camp Waxahatchee.
Outside, Nicole approached the boys’ bunkhouse. She found an empty pickle bucket outside the window and flipped it upside down. She stepped on it and found herself looking at Tommy’s sleeping face, inches away from hers. He looked peaceful unconscious. He had an ease about him that she didn’t see when he was awake.
“Hey,” she said in a loud whisper. “Hey. Tommy, wake up.”
She reached her hand in and poked his face. This woke him.
“What?” he said, coming out of his sleep. “Nicole, what are you doing?”
“Get up,” she said. “Come with me.”
They walked through the campgrounds, unusual in its emptiness. Nicole picked up branches and snapped them into tiny pieces in her hands.
“Where are we going?” Tommy asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Anywhere we want.”
“Look at the moon,” Tommy said. “It looks like a painting of the moon right now.”
“I bet there are aliens on the moon. But we thought we saw everything when we were there and just left with some rocks. And now we’ll never go back to find out.”
“The aliens are probably happier with it that way.”
“Look,” Nicole said. She was pointing at a large shed in the distance that neither of them had seen before. It looked like someone had decided to expand it into a barn and then gave up. Then decades passed, they had children, who had children, then died and their ancestors let the camp have it. Inside, it was full of scattered hay and an old rusted tractor sat at the far end. An open toolbox with all the tools strewn on the ground lay next to it. A group of haystacks occupied one corner. Nicole and Tommy walked over and climbed on top of them.
“You want to see my tattoo?” Nicole said
“You have a tattoo?”
“Yeah. Wanna see it?”
“Sure.” Tommy could feel his blood rush around inside of himself. He wondered where it was.
Nicole lifted her shirt a little to reveal a small black marking on her hip.
“I can’t really see it.”
“Look closer.”
He leaned in closer to her skin. “What is it?”
“It’s the female symbol. You know, like there’s a symbol for men and a symbol for women? It’s the female symbol only it has a closed fist in the middle of it.”
Tommy smiled and looked up at her face. “Like, girl power?”
“More like radical feminism. You like it?”
“It’s awesome.”
“I did it myself.”
“What? Really?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It took me like ten hours.”
“You did that for ten hours?”
“Well, in total it was ten hours. I kind of got bored if I would work on it for too long at once.”
Tommy looked at it again with a new appreciation for the art that he saw. “How’d you do it?”
“Just with India ink and a needle basically.”
“Did it hurt?”
Nicole laughed. “Yeah, Tommy. It hurt. I was sticking a needle into my skin.” She paused. “I’ll give you one if you want.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. What do you want?”
“I don’t know… I want you to pick for me.”
They must have sat there for another two hours, just talking.
It was about day forty at Camp Waxahatchee when it happened. Right after breakfast the kids all had chores they had to do before free time. Nicole was on dishwashing duty and Tommy was supposed to clean the boys’ bunkhouse. He hadn’t left Old Main yet. He hadn’t left the dining hall yet. He was on one side of the kitchen, finishing coffee from a plastic cup, while Nicole washed dishes across from him.
“You missed a spot,” he said, pointing his cup at a clean dish and smiling.
“You missed a spot!” she laughed. The sink’s faucet was attached to a long cord to allow more efficient washing. Nicole pointed it at Tommy and gave him a quick spurt of water.
Tommy backed away quickly, dodging it. A girl behind him trying to mop the kitchen yelled, “Watch out!” He turned back to Nicole and they widened their eyes at each other, silently mocking the girl’s reaction.
“Are you going on the hike today?” Nicole asked.
“Uh, do I look like I’m going on a hike today?” Tommy was still wearing his pajama pants.
“Come on!” Nicole said, her voice sustaining the “ah” sound, lilting and songlike.
Tommy took a small sip of his coffee. “Okay. But only if we run away during it.”
“Perfect! We’ll live in the woods.”
“And adopt a squirrel.”
“A family of squirrels.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I like that.”
Nicole smiled and turned her attention back to the dishes. Tommy took another sip from his cup, recoiling at the taste of what was now basically just cold and brown water.
“Ugh, this is disgusting,” he said. “Here, you try it.”
He held the cup up to her face, as if he was about to splash her with it.
“Ahhh!” she screamed and pointed the faucet at him. “Don’t do it!”
Tommy ducked, laughing. Rising, he brought the cup toward her face again. Nicole pointed the nozzle at Tommy and squeezed the handle, spraying more water at him. He quickly spun around, trying to dodge it. Forgetting the newly mopped floor, he slipped and his feet went soaring into the air and he smacked down on the tile, hard. The people around them turned to look. Some of them looked worried. The cold coffee Tom had been holding spilled onto his pajama pants and splattered across his shirt. The shock momentarily paralyzed him.
A monstrous laugh escaped out of Nicole. She covered her mouth with both of her hands, but the laughing wasn’t muted in the least. Tommy’s face rushed red with embarrassment. He slowly rose to his feet.
“What the fuck!” the mopping girl yelled at him as he ran into the boy’s bathroom, laving the cup empty and spinning on the kitchen floor. “Thanks!”
Tommy and Nicole didn’t talk much after that. The humiliation of it all sent Tommy’s self-consciousness back to the front of his personality, even though Nicole told him it wasn’t a big deal; that everyone falls. But it was like everything she had pulled out of him retreated back inside.
At the end of camp, Nicole’s parents picked her up and Tommy’s him. They never went on the hike, Nicole never gave him a tattoo, and, after they left Camp Waxahatchee, they never spoke again.
It’s 8 AM and I am drunk again and I am in a stranger’s house and it’s my mother’s birthday and her name is Amanda and my girlfriend’s name is also Amanda.
I’m not wearing pants. My socks are white and have holes along the ankle and they are still there. My shirt is also white and it looks like there is blood on it. My mouth hurts. My boxers are blue.
There is one other person in the room with me: a guy about my age with a clean-shaven face and drool dripping from his mouth. He’s fast asleep and keeps snoring, making guttural sounds and squinting hard.
I need to get out of here, find a pair of pants and a present for my mom, and get to my parents’ house before noon. Quickly scanning the room, I don’t see any sign of them. I don’t remember if I was wearing jeans or khakis. It doesn’t matter; there’s no time for it to.
We’re in a bedroom and there is a black dresser only feet away, so whoever’s black jeans I’m pulling out of it belong to me now. They’re a little tight, but I am small. I leave and in the living room about ten more people are asleep in there, too. I don’t need to remember the night to know who had a good one. The guys with girls wrapped around their bodies are obviously smiling more than the boys at their feet or alone under the windowsill.
I still don’t have my shoes and I feel like it is a futile quest to try to find them. I see a bottle of Svedka vodka standing by itself on the kitchen counter with some still in it, so I swig it down as a quiet goodbye to the party and I leave. I don’t care about my shoes as much anymore. The rays of the sun outside hit me like a heart attack and I put my eyes to the ground. I take out my phone. 8:11 AM. I call my girlfriend.
“Hey,” I say. “Look, I’m at some stranger’s house. Is there any way you could pick me up?”
“Babe, what the fuck?” she says. “I’m at work. What are you doing calling me now?”
“It’s only eight.”
“Uh, no. It’s eleven.”
“No, it’s fucking not.” I say. “Look at your phone.”
“Look at your fucking phone. I’ve been at work since nine.”
I take the phone from my ear and look at the screen and apparently she’s right. It’s 11:08. I guess I read it backwards.
“Well, fuck!” I shout back into the receiver. “Can you please pick me up? It’s my mom’s birthday today.”
“You think I don’t know that?” she says. “I was the one reminding you about it all week and the one to tell you not to hang out with your fucking friends last night. Are you drunk?”
“Well, apparently I am!” My voice is getting way too loud for being on the front porch still. A woman, an attractive woman, walking her dog stares at me as she passes. “Look, can you please just pick me up right now? I’m on Mast and Chelsea. I’ll owe you big time, baby.”
She says “goddamnit” very quietly on the other end.
“I think...” she sighs. “That we shouldn’t see each other for a while.” She continues, saying more things. “I know this hurts, but I know this is right.”
“Honestly?” I ask, shaken and slightly offended.
“Honestly.”
“Well, fuck you!”
I hang up and start running. My feet hurt after a few blocks and I can feel the fabric of the socks tearing on the sidewalk. I see a 7-11 not too far and run in there. I look around, scanning the store for anything I could buy and pass of as something with thought. There’s nothing, but bags of chips and cigarettes. I’m already here, so I buy a two-dollar can of Pabst and drink it down in the parking, lot. It’s okay. I have forty dollars.
I start running again. By bus it takes about an hour to get to my parents’ house so I am thinking that I’m pretty well fucked. It doesn’t matter. What kind of man am I if I don’t try?
I stumble and trip, scraping my hand as I catch myself. A man passes by and looks down at me on the sidewalk and asks “Are you alright, son?”
“Fine.” I say. I don’t look at him.
I stare at the pavement for a moment, at the cracks in the sidewalk, detached. My hands are bleeding a bit over the concrete. I’m breaking more than my mother’s back.
Then I see something in the gutter next to me. Something is shimmering. I dip my hand into the brown gutter water, sift away the clump of twigs, and pick up the object. It’s golden. It’s a necklace and there is a blue jewel at the end of it. I can’t help but smile. I think that God likes fucking with people. He puts on shows for himself because it must be lonely being him.
Joel, Matt, and Bryan are sixteen-years old. It’s one in the morning on a Saturday and they are skateboarding in the parking lot of a Burger King in Lakeside, California. The moon is faint. Most of the light is orange and coming from the lamp posts.
They’re all dressed the same in oversized t-shirts and painted-on black jeans. Joel’s shirt has a kitten’s face on it. Bryan is wearing Air Jordan’s with the tongues sticking over his jeans. Matt is wearing a tie-dyed snapback baseball hat. He does a kickflip that he doesn’t land.
Bryan has shaggy, but well-groomed brown hair and is white. They are all white. He sits on a concrete parking chock, smoking a cigarette, watching his friends.
“You’re a piece of shit, Matt.” He says.
“At least I’m not a fucking faggot!”
“I don’t know. You look like you have a dick in your ass from here.”
“You’d fucking know.” He tries another kickflip; again, doesn’t land it. “You’re sucking on that straw like a professional.”
Brian looks the straw sticking out of his 32 oz. Coke in its Burger King cup. “Is this what you think all dicks look like?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? I know you have a lot of experience with cock.”
Brian takes a big sip of Coke into his mouth and sprays it towards Matt. None of it touches him.
A few minutes later, they are all sitting on the ground. From Matt’s iPhone he streams the song “Knife Party” by Centipede from YouTube. He and Bryan are smoking cigarettes. Joel is the only one who smokes from a vape. Juicy Pineapple is the flavor. He is the rebel.
Across the street at the bus stop, two rail-thin people with shopping carts are yelling at each other. One is a man. One is a woman. They both have salty gray hair and their deep wrinkles and senses of exhaustion are visible from Burger King.
“Hey, honey!” Joel yells. “Just suck his dick and he’ll let you hit that pizzo!”
“You gotta let him cum in your mouth, though!” Matt adds. The boys laugh and high five each other. They all take drags from their cigarettes or vape.
The two people across the street look at them, silently. The man smiles and gives them a thumbs-up. Then they return to arguing.
“You should go ask them to buy us beer.” Joel says to Matt.
“No.” he says.
“Come on, you pussy.”
“I don’t want to.” Matt says. “We’ll just get high when we get back to Bryan’s house.”
“He’s scared.” Joel leans back and says to Bryan.
“Then you fucking do it, then.” Matt says, pushing himself up. Joel doesn’t respond.
Matt starts circling the parking lot on his skateboard, doing ollies every few yards.
“All along the watchtower!” he starts singing at the top of his lungs, the Hendrix version.
“Do you think,” Bryan turns to Joel, “that Bob Dylan hates Jimi Hendrix for making his song more popular than him?”
“Fuck, dude,” Matt rides up to them. “I’d be pissed if some nigger stole my song and then made more money from it than me.”
“All along the motherfuckin’ watchtower!!” Joel shouts.
Bryan finishes sucking down his 32 oz. Coke from his Burger King cup and throws it at the light traffic in the street. A passing car honks. They all laugh.
A female Burger King employee comes outside and approaches the boys.
“Look, you guys need to leave now.” She says. She’s about twenty and slightly overweight. “We’re closed now.”
“Alright, bitch.” Joel says. “We’re going. Don’t eat too much over it.”
The three of them get on their skateboards and ride away towards Bryan’s mom’s apartment, laughing.
When they are in their forties they will remember this as the best time of their lives.
“Welcome to our home.” The house manager said. “Here’s your bunk. You’ll be sleeping above Charles.”
Andrew wore a backpack and held one black duffel bag in his hand. He focused on listening to the house manager of his new sober living.
“Charles makes some kinda weird noises when he sleeps. It’s like... not night terrors, but the noises can be a little startling. Try not to let it worry you. He’s fine.”
“Okay.” Andrew said. He set his bags down. The house manager handed him a stapled set of papers that read “Resident Agreement” at the top.
No one else was in the house that afternoon, but Andrew was told that there were nine other guys who lived there. He sat in the courtyard, smoking cigarettes, nervous of the idea of having to meet and remember the names and characteristics of these guys. After two hours, none of them had come home. He went for a walk.
There were no sidewalks in the neighborhood that Andrew found himself in. He walked one foot in front of the other like a tightrope walker. After thirty minutes and a trip under the highway’s overpass, he came to a large shopping center. He saw a Walmart, a Claim Jumper, a GNC, a Barnes and Noble.
He walked towards the stores, looking for nothing in particular.
He walked through the parking lot, looking at people getting in and out of their cars. Some people had bags. Some people had children. Some people had both.
Andrew saw a sign for Panda Express and walked inside. He ordered eggplant tofu in a bowl with fried rice and noodles. A large Diet Coke.
He sat by himself at a table by the window. He reached into his pocket and took out a small coin. It was his six-month A.A. token. He held it in his hand, moving his fingertips along the grooved edges. On the token was a triangle that on either side read "unity", "service", and "recovery".
Andrew quietly and secretly examined his token. He could hardly believe six months had passed. It was the end of May in California. He was directly in the middle of his first year of clarity.
At times it felt like he was dreaming. Like he hadn’t really spent six months sober. He remembered when he was alone in his apartment with his useless phone that no one ever called and his computer that he never communicated with anyone on, that he would spent weeks, even months sometimes, with his only human interaction the store clerks he bought liquor from. Back then, when he would dream, they would be solitary dreams. He would be in places he recognized, but alone. In empty movie theaters and shopping malls. He would occasionally be visited by people he had gone to high school with and would wake up and wonder where they came from and how they were doing now.
But now he would dream of the people he met in rehab or the people he heard talk at meetings. He realized this this was an important stepping stone in his psyche.
He looked out to the parking lot and saw a large woman struggling to put her oversized bags into the back of her mini-van.
A group of teenagers walked in and lined up near the register.
There were two boys and two girls. They were thin and tan and had silky hair styled to look disheveled. Andrew’s first instinct was of nervousness and he put his token back in his pocket when he saw them. He was twenty-three, but still found himself nervous of teenagers, like he was still one.
Andrew’s mentality quickly changed when he realized that he had a life experience that none of them had. Statistically at least one of them might eventually, but for now Andrew took solace in that he knew something they didn’t. His world was populated with heroin and crack addicts. With people who had been shot and people who had hidden in bushes for days for fear that joggers were police officers. There was a world that would make those kids break down in fear and Andrew had seen and escaped it. He threw his trash away and stoically walked out of the Panda Express.
“Excuse me, young man.” He heard an old voice say from behind him. Andrew turned around and saw a thin man wearing a straw hat looking at him.
“Yeah?”
“Do you know about God?” the man asked.
“Um, yes.”
“Because I saw you just now and God spoke to me. He told me to tell you that things will work out.”
Andrew stood still and tried to smile, omitting anything patronizing from his body language.
“Can I give you this?” the man asked and held out a small booklet.
Andrew took the booklet and looked at it. It had a picture of Jesus’s birth, the manger scene, on its front. It said "What is God really trying to tell us?" on it. He flipped it over and saw the image of a red ace of spades. He put it in his pocket.
“Okay. Well, thank you.” Andrew said.
“Have a blessed day.” He heard the man say as he walked away.
Andrew walked into the Barnes and Noble a few doors down. He was greeted by a small man in an oversized suit. He looked like a placeholder security guard. Until they could find the real guy.
He walked through the bookstore, eventually coming to the children’s section where he saw a play table sitting in the center of the area. Underneath it was a carpet that looked like several brightly colored puzzle pieces.
A small brown-haired girl knelt in front of the table putting Lego pieces together.
Suddenly Andrew felt very sad.
He wasn’t sure if it was nostalgia he was feeling, but there was a longing inside of him. He looked at the girl’s concentration and it was as if, unlike with the teenagers, he had nothing to show her. Instead, she could take his hand and show him a world he didn’t know and one that he could never know.
He stood there trying to remember what it was like to be five. He could not.
He felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. The house manager had texted him: “where are u? come meet ur housemates”
Andrew walked out of the bookstore and back to his sober living.
