Breathless

  * * *

  My name is Azazel Pandora Jones. My parents named me after a Jewish demon and the girl in Greek mythology who was responsible for bringing evil into the world. Azazel himself was sort of the Jewish Prometheus. Instead of bringing fire to the people, however, he led the rebellious Nephilim before the flood and taught the people the art of warfare. Like Prometheus, he was chained to a rock somewhere for eternity as punishment. Unlike Prometheus, no eagles ate out his guts every day. My mother said she thought the name was pretty. But my parents were both sort of second-generation hippies, and they probably thought the names were significant. My parents didn’t believe in evil.

  Really. When I was a little girl, instead of being told that hoarding my toys was bad, my parents sat down with me and said, “Now, Azazel, if you don’t share your toys, your friends won’t want to play with you.”

  If I replied, “I don’t want to play with them anyway,” then my parents would shrug apologetically at my friends and my friends’ parents, and say, “She doesn’t want to share.”

  Once, when I was in elementary school, I dug my fingernails into the forearm of a boy who was picking on me. I got punished at school, but when I got home, my parents asked me, “Did he stop bothering you after you did that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You might try asking him to stop in the future before you resort to violence.”

  And that was it. My parents viewed the world in terms of actions and consequences. There were productive consequences. There were nonproductive ones. They didn’t believe any action was wrong. They evaluated it in terms of its consequences. The most productive consequences were the ones which made the world better for as many people as possible.

  That all being said, I don’t want you to get the idea that my parents were neglectful or anything like that. To the contrary, everyone in town considered my parents swell people. My parents were foster parents. I was their only biological child, but I had three adopted brothers (two of whom were older than me and didn’t live at home anymore), and there were always at least two or three other kids temporarily placed at our house. My parents often gave a home to adolescent boys. The more troubled, the better.

  Adolescent foster boys often didn’t find permanent living situations, and my parents wanted to make a difference. Often, these guys came to us when they were sixteen and stayed with us until they outgrew the system. While my parents weren’t rich enough to send all of their foster kids to college, they did the best they could to help all of them out in some way, shape, or form, even if that meant being a character witness in their auto theft trials. Hey—my parents gave these guys a loving home. That didn’t mean that they saved them from whatever path they were already on.

  My home was always filled with people. There was rarely anything in the refrigerator. Teenage boys ate. A lot. I had to deal with the fact that usually there were at least four guys crowded around the television, watching sports or playing video games. The toilet seat was very rarely left down. But overall, my home was a warm, happy place. It was a place where people felt like they belonged.

  And so I didn’t think twice before I told Toby that we should take the stranger to my parents’ house. He kind of fit their profile, if you know what I mean.

  Sitting in the truck with him wedged between Toby and me, I wondered who he was. Even though we’d driven away from the woods, had put miles between us and the site where we’d picked him up, he kept looking over his shoulder out the back of the truck, as if he expected something to be following us.

  Toby seemed a little annoyed. “You want me to take you home then?” he asked me. “Leave you there with him?”

  Did Toby still think I wanted to go the McDonald’s drive-thru? After something this exciting had happened? I just said, “Yeah.”

  I looked at the guy again. He looked like he was about our age. Maybe a little older or younger. It was difficult to tell. He had dark hair and dark eyes. His face was dirty, and he had a few days’ growth of stubble on his chin. He looked desperate and frightened and harrowed. I was intrigued.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  His breathing was starting to slow. He looked at me. “Yeah,” he said breathlessly. “Yeah. Um, thanks. Thanks for getting me out of there.” He looked at Toby, including him in his statement.

  “Was someone chasing you?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. He rubbed his face and looked behind us again. He swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed.

  “Was it the police?” I asked. “Are you in some kind of trouble?” I sounded like my dad. He was always asking things like that of the foster kids we took in. My dad was also a high school history teacher, and he coached football. He spent a lot of time talking to teenage boys.

  “Not the police,” said the guy.

  “So who?” I asked.

  The guy shook his head. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.

  We were quiet. Toby leaned forward and switched on the radio. Music filled the truck, loud. I reached over and turned the music down, annoyed with Toby. Wasn’t he curious about this guy?

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Jason,” he said.

  “I’m Azazel,” I said. “And this is Toby.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Jason. “Both of you. And thank you. Again.” He stole another glance behind us. “Look, you two can drop me off along the main road.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m taking you back to my house. My parents are foster parents, and they take in a lot of teenage boys. It’ll be safe there, and you can, you know, get some food and get cleaned up and—”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t. It won’t be safe.”

  “I swear, it will. Even if you’re on the run from the police, my parents will work with you. They’re not gonna turn you in.”

  “I’m not running from the police,” said Jason. “And I didn’t mean safe for me. I meant it won’t be safe for your family.”

  “Where do you want me to drop you off?” asked Toby. He was pulling his truck onto Route 50, which was as much the main road as anything was in Bramford.

  “You’re not dropping him off!” I said. Why was Toby being like this? To Jason, “You’re coming back to my house.”

  “Azazel,” said Toby, “he doesn’t want to go there.”

  “We can’t just leave him on the side of the road,” I said to Toby.

  “I’ll be fine,” said Jason.

  “He says he’ll be fine,” said Toby.

  “Who’s after you?” I asked Jason. “Are they dangerous?”

  “The less you know about that, the better,” Jason said. To Toby, “Anywhere along here is fine.”

  “Toby,” I said, “we aren’t dropping him off. We’re taking him back to my place. What if something horrible happens to him, and we could have stopped it?”

  Toby sighed. “She’s right,” he said to Jason. “I can’t just drop you off. We should take you to the Jones’ house.” Finally, he was acting like a rational person.

  “That’s a bad idea,” said Jason.

  “Well you’re not talking me out of it,” I said. “I’m pretty stubborn.”

  Jason looked at me and laughed. It was a short laugh, and it almost sounded as if he were out of practice. Like he didn’t laugh very often. “You are, huh?”

  “She is,” said Toby.

  Jason looked away from me. “Just for a while,” he said finally. “I can’t stay too long.”