The Rest of Us Just Live Here

  “But I’m ten now,” Meredith says. “Double digits. And it’s like five minutes away. And I’ll be home before my bedtime because they’re having the concert early so the cancer girl can have her treatment the next morning.”

  Mel shrugs. “Not up to us.”

  “I’ll die if I can’t go. I’ll just die. For real.”

  “You could tell them you have cancer, too?” Mel suggests. “That’d get you in with or without Mom.”

  Meredith’s eyes go wide, first in shock, then with a glorious, glorious plan–

  “No way, Merde Breath,” I say. “For so many reasons.”

  A door on the upstairs landing opens. Our father comes out in his underwear. Meredith looks away. He stares down at us like he’s not sure we’re there. He scratches the hairy potbelly sticking out over the elastic of his briefs and smacks his lips like he just woke up. It’s six o’clock in the evening, so that’s a possibility.

  “You guys seen that shirt of mine?” he asks, his tongue lazy with drink. “The one with the eels?”

  I turn to Mel. “The eels?” I mouth.

  “I think Mom’s washing it,” Mel lies to him. “Why don’t you wear that red one with the double cuffs?”

  He waits for a minute, like he didn’t hear her, then farts loudly and turns without a word back into his office.

  When he’s sober, our dad is a funny, smart, warm guy, criminal greed aside. Mel in particular loves him, always has since I can remember. And she’s so disappointed in him, it almost literally chokes her.

  Look, some more stuff happens that evening – Meredith argues with our mom over Bolts of Fire, Mel sneaks out to Henna’s house – but nothing so important that I have to go on about it. Just remember, please, most of that stuff is in the past. It isn’t the story I want to tell. At all.

  You needed to know it, but for the rest of this, I’m choosing my own story.

  Because if you can’t do that, you might as well just give up.

  CHAPTER THE FIFTH, in which indie kid Kerouac opens the Gate of the Immortals, allowing the Royal Family and its Court a fissure through which to temporarily enter this world; then Kerouac discovers that the Messenger lied to him; he dies, alone.

  On Friday, Henna and I somehow get a whole half-hour in her car alone together while she drives us back from the shop where she’s getting her prom dress (custard and burgundy, apparently) and I’m renting my tux (black).

  We’re not going together. Well, we are, but not like that. Henna broke up with Tony after he’d already asked her to prom so anyone else she might have wanted to go with had already got other dates. Mel is a year older than everyone in our senior class and the guys who tend to ask her out are the creepy ones who think they can smell damage, in whom she has zero interest, thank God. Pretty much everyone would be totally fine if Jared brought a guy as his date, but he just gave his usual close-lipped refusal to even talk about it. As for me? I waited so long to ask Vanessa Wright, my ex-girlfriend, that she picked up the pieces of Tony Kim instead.

  So guess what? Me, my sister, my best friend, and Henna are going to prom as a foursome, that ridiculous idea that only happens in the stupidest teen movies or drippiest teen books. Trust me, it only ever sounds cool if you never have to do it.

  Oh, well. At least I like the people I’m going with and we’ll all be in it together.

  “Mike?” Henna asks as we drive.

  “Yeah?”

  She doesn’t answer immediately. In fact, the silence goes on so long I look up from the text I’m writing to Mel to ask if she confirmed the limo we’re all taking to prom. (What do you want from us? We’re suburban. We live for shit like limos.)

  “Henna?”

  She sighs out through her nose. “Would you guys be really pissed off at me if I didn’t go in our foursome to prom?”

  Oh. Hell, no. No, no, no.

  “Of course we’d be pissed off,” I say. “That’s why you’re asking me and not Mel or Jared. I’m the one least likely to yell at you.”

  “Please don’t yell at me,” she says, turning off the main road to the wooded ones that lead to our houses. The sun has abandoned us for the past couple days, and Henna flicks on the wipers as rain starts to fall.

  “Who do you want to–” I start, but there’s no need to ask, is there?

  “He’s new,” Henna says. “He doesn’t know anybody and how hard must it be to come to a new school right before graduation–?”

  “Henna–”

  “I haven’t asked him yet. But I want to.” She glances over at me. “Would that be awful of me? Would you hate me for it?”

  “We’ve arranged everything, though. It was going to be lame but at least it was going to be lame for the four of us–”

  “Well, how about this? How about if it’s the five of us?”

  “But he’d be your date.”

  “Well. Yeah.”

  “Henna–”

  “Please don’t shout,” she winces. “It makes my stomach hurt.”

  “I didn’t even raise my voice.”

  “It sounded like you might.”

  This actually makes me angry. “When, in my entire life, have I ever shouted at you?”

  “Never, I know.” She breathes heavy for a minute. “My stomach hurts.”

  “You were worried about asking us.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re worried he might say no anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re worried about your mom and dad not letting you go to prom with someone they’ve never met so you’re going to pitch it that he’d come with all of us when really you just want him to come with you.”

  I see her swallow. “There’s a war in the Central African Republic.”

  “…What?”

  “They’re still going to go, Mikey. They’re going to give aid to refugees. But it’s a war. An actual war. And they say we’ll be in safe places but…”

  I turn a little in my seat to look at her better. “That’s crazy.”

  “And it’s the stupid prom that’s making my stomach hurt.” She laughs, but it’s thick in her throat. “I didn’t want to let you guys down. And I have no idea where this comes from with Nathan–”

  “You don’t even know him–”

  “I know! I’ve spoken to him like three times! But it’s like I was telling Mel. It wells up in my stomach when I see him and it’s so strong, I can barely put two words together and I’m a smart person, Mike!” She shakes her head. “Smart enough to know that it’s probably not Nathan. It’s going away, isn’t it? It’s school ending. It’s going to the middle of a war. With my parents. My stomach hurts all the time and he’s a distraction from that.”

  “…But a good one.”

  She nods. “I’m sorry to be saying this to you. Of all people.”

  I blink. “Of all people,” I echo.

  She looks at me again. And then once more. She clearly wants to say something, but doesn’t know how. Or doesn’t want to hurt me.

  Of all people.

  I stare at her profile as she drives, taking a turn, then another, then to the road that leads to our respective houses.

  She’s beautiful, and not in a stupid way. Sometimes she leaves her hair curly, sometimes she straightens it. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if she’s got make-up on or not – though she regularly complains about how hard it is to get proper stuff for black skin out here in our little middle of nowhere.

  But it doesn’t matter. She’s beautiful. The tiny scar on her cheek makes her more so, not less. The freckles that are pretty much the only inheritance from her father even more. The slight overbite. The terrible taste in earrings. None of it matters. Or if it matters, it’s only because it makes everything else more beautiful.

  And she knows I think so.

  How could she not? She’s smart, like she said, and she’s best friends with my sister. There’s no way she could not know.

  And she desires Nathan, not me. Her anx
iety – which I understand, hooray – looked for a place of safety and it found Nathan. It didn’t find me. And she knows how I’ll take that information.

  This should hurt my heart. It does. I can feel it. I should also be humiliated that she knows how I feel, and I do, I can feel that, too. But I look at her, and I just want to make it all okay.

  So I have absolutely no idea why the hell I say, “I’m in love with you, Henna.”

  She smiles a bit at that, looking as surprised at the smile as I am at my words.

  “Mikey,” she says. “I don’t think you are.”

  Then she screams at the deer that’s jumped out of the trees and onto the road in front of us and there’s no time to even brake and we hit it, taking its legs out from under it, which everyone in these parts knows is the worst thing that can happen when you hit a deer, because now six hundred pounds of panicked, dying, unstoppable deer carcass are flying right up the hood, straight at us–

  This is how people die, I think, in that instant–

  And Henna and I are both ducking to the middle of the seat and our heads hit together with a funny coconut sound and glass is breaking and metal is bending above us (which is so loud, so loud) and something hits me hard in the cheek and I hear Henna make a soft “oof” sound and her body shifts away from mine and it’s only now I realize the car is still moving and I reach over her to try to steer but the steering wheel has snapped off and I feel us veering and tipping and we come to a slamming stop and the passenger’s side air bag goes off so ferociously I actually feel my nose breaking.

  Then it’s quiet.

  “Henna?” I say. “Henna!”

  Her voice, when it comes, is deep and guttural, pain-filled. “My arm,” is all she says.

  I pull myself up to an almost-sitting position. Rain hits my face. The roof of Henna’s car is peeled nearly all the way off. We’re pushed up against the dashboard and I turn my neck (ow, ow, ow) to see that the deer somehow went all the way over the top of us, which is some kind of freaking miracle. Its bulk takes up the entire back seat, its neck broken, its dead weight pressing against us. The engine stopped when we drove into what I now see is a ditch, and I can hear movement all around us.

  I must be in shock. Dozens of deer, dozens of them, are leaping out of the forest on our side of the road, crossing it, and disappearing through the treeline on the other side.

  They keep coming. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s unreal.

  “Mikey?” Henna says, her eyes wide with fear and the same shock as she sees what I’m seeing. Her left arm looks awful, twisted in a horrible way, so I take her right hand and hold it, as the impossible flood of deer spills around us like we’re an island in a river.

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” the big Latino intern Dr “Call Me Steve” says, as he sews up my right cheek, “you’re going to look pretty rough for a while.”

  “He hasn’t taken his graduation pictures yet,” Mel says, standing to the side of the gurney, arms crossed, and so comprehensively not flirting with Call Me Steve that, as flirtations go, it’s working really well.

  “Then you’re going to have two black eyes in them, I’m afraid,” Steve tells me. “I’ve reset your nose” – he glances at Mel with a smile – “which is turning out to be a specialty of mine” – he looks back to me – “so it should be close to its normal shape within a week or so, but I’d keep the bracing bandage on for a week more after that, otherwise you won’t be able to breathe. And as for this” – he puts a rectangle of gauze over my stitches – “I think you were probably hit by an antler or hoof rather than glass. It’s a raggedy tear. I did my very, very best, but you are going to have a scar, my friend.”

  “It’ll make you look rugged,” Mel says.

  “Because I woke up this morning,” I say, “and the one thing I realized I lacked was ruggedness.”

  “Your lucky day then,” says Call Me Steve.

  “It is,” Mel says, and her face gets that angry look it always does when she’s about to cry. “He could’ve been killed.”

  Dr Steve reads the vibe and starts to make his excuses. “Wait,” Mel says. She tears a strip of paper off my admissions chart and writes down her phone number. She gives it to Steve. “It’s all right. I’m nineteen. I should already be in college. You’re good.”

  Steve just laughs, but he takes the number. “Go now, please,” she says. “I’d like to yell at my brother for almost dying.”

  When we’re alone, she doesn’t yell. She just stands in front of me, gently gently gently not quite touching the wounds on my face. She is crying now, but her face is so fierce, I know she’d take my head off if I mentioned it.

  “Mikey,” she finally says.

  “I know,” I say.

  She tries to gently hug me, too, but even that’s too much. “Ribs!” I say, groaning. She just sits down next to me on the gurney.

  It turns out that both the slight fascists and the pot farmers who live on our road are equally nice in a car accident. My phone disappeared somewhere under the dashboard and Henna was still pinned in, so I don’t know who called 911. Before the ambulances and the fire truck even arrived, though, people were running out of their houses with towels – the first of them stopping for a moment in wonder to watch the last of the deer flood disappear – then they were pressing those towels against my face. A couple of other people tried to get Henna’s door open to get her out in case the car caught fire. She screamed every time her arm moved, and she wouldn’t let go of my hand, not even when Mr and Mrs Silvennoinen were retrieved from their house – we were like six doors away when the deer hit us. They were fantastically calm, so much so that it was only when I saw them that I realized how much pain I was in.

  Someone called my house, too. My mom was picking Meredith up from Jazz & Tap, so Mel – not even bothering with our father – came roaring down the road in her own car. Me and Henna got taken away by ambulance, Mel and the Silvennoinens followed, and Henna went straight into surgery to put her arm back together.

  The last thing she said before the paramedics knocked her out was, “Mike.”

  “I called Jared,” Mel says now. “He’s going to come by at midnight. The Field.”

  “Good,” I say. “Thanks.”

  Her hand is next to mine on the gurney and she laces our fingers together, squeezing hard. You see how lucky I am? Knowing that people love me? So lucky. So stupidly lucky.

  We hear our mom’s voice before we see her. Mel lets go of my hand. My mom turns the curtained corner where we sit in the emergency room, and the first sight of her face is so worried, so terrified, that suddenly I’m six years old again and have just fallen off my bike and want her to make it better.

  This lasts a full four seconds until she tries to hug me.

  “Ribs!” I pretty much shriek.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” she says, pulling back. I have to flinch again when she tries to touch my face. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  “Can’t you see the bandages?” Mel asks. “And the blood?”

  “Yes,” my mom says, “why hasn’t anyone cleaned that off?”

  “They did,” I say. “Most of it.”

  Her face softens again. “How bad?”

  I shrug, then I wince because shrugging really hurts. “Gash on my cheek, broken nose, most of my left ribs are cracked, sprained my ankle. Henna got the worst of it.”

  “I saw Mattias and Caroline on my way in,” my mom says, meaning Henna’s parents. “She’s in surgery right now but aside from her arm and a broken collarbone, just bumps and bruises, like you.”

  “‘Just’,” I say.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do. We’re lucky. It was scary, though. And weird.”

  “You should see Henna’s car,” Mel says. “It’s been decapitated.”

  “Where’s Meredith?” I ask.

  “Caroline’s watching her for a minute in the waiting room,” my mom says.

  “Someone should
tell Dad,” Mel says.

  Mom gets a look of fleeting irritation on her face, then swallows it. “I’ll tell him when we get home.” She looks at us in a particular way. “Listen, I know this isn’t the time or the place–”

  “Then why do it?” Mel says.

  “Do what?”

  “Whatever it is you’re about to do.”

  Mom gets that fleeting look again. “Now that I know you’re all right,” she says to me.

  “Well, I’m not exactly all–”

  “You’re going to see it on the news anyway and I want you to hear it from me first.”

  She stops, and for a confusing second, I think it’s going to be about the weirdness with the deer, which no one has satisfactorily explained and which it would be extraordinary if my mother could do so, but hey, I’m still in shock here, and the idea lodges so firmly in my head, that when she says, “Mankiewicz died,” I try to think if I know any deer named Mankiewicz.

  “What?” Mel asks, warily.

  “This morning,” my mom says, a bit too eagerly. “Stroke. At his house in DC.”

  She stops again, and I can see her try not to smile, which even she must recognize is the wrong reaction to this news, in this place, with my nose looking like this.

  Mankiewicz isn’t a deer. He’s our US Congressman and has been since before my mother was born. A million years old, beloved by this congressional district, and utterly unbeatable in every election.

  Now dead.

  “Seven days is the protocol,” my mom says, now not even pretending not to smile. “Seven days out of respect and then I announce my intention to run for his seat.” She lets this news sink in. We just stare at her. “The state party actually called me, they called me and asked me to run.”