The Rest of Us Just Live Here

  Her smile hardens for an instant. “And I suppose your friend’s father is going to run as well, but he’ll lose, like always, so it’s pretty much mine for the taking.” She turns to Mel. “And you’re finally old enough to vote for me!”

  Then my mom claps. She actually claps.

  “Your mother’s going to be a United States Congresswoman,” she says. “In Washington, DC!”

  “Your son is going to have a permanent scar down his cheek,” Mel says.

  “Oh,” my mother says, “of course, I know, but it’s in the news today and I thought you might–” She stops, gathers herself. “I’ve finally got my big chance. And we’ll keep the family pictures to a minimum and no one will have to do anything they don’t want to–”

  “I should probably tell Meredith I’m not dead,” I say.

  Mel takes that as a cue to find Call Me Steve, who officially releases me and nods at Mel when she makes a “phone me” sign with her hand. Meredith is playing on her computer pad when we find her with Mrs Silvennoinen. She jumps up and wraps herself around my limping legs. “I am very upset,” she says.

  “I’m going to be okay, though,” I say. “I’ll have a cool scar.”

  “I’m still upset.” Meredith eyes my mother. “So upset it would take something really special to make me feel better.”

  “Meredith–” my mother starts.

  “How’s Henna?” Mel asks Mrs Silvennoinen. She’s as beautiful as her daughter, but also not, because Henna is open, where Mrs Silvennoinen – even as a music minister who has to rouse people on a Sunday morning – is always a bit of a closed door. Not unfriendly, just not your business.

  “Nothing life-threatening,” she says.

  “Praise God,” Mr Silvennoinen says, joining us. He’s six foot nine and has unnervingly pale green eyes, which Henna didn’t inherit. His voice is deep, his accent thick, and he’s handsome in a way so scary it’s like he’s hypnotizing you with it.

  He’s always been nice to me, though. Stern, insistent on seeing me at church, and grinding Henna slowly down with his expectations, but nice. He puts a soft hand on my shoulder.

  “We saw how you were there for her, Mike,” he says.

  “Thank you,” Mrs Silvennoinen says, seriously.

  And I remember these are people who haven’t seen their son in four years.

  The poor bastards.

  Before I can answer them, the most horrible, painful wail I think I’ve ever heard brings the room to a standstill. The police lead a man making the noise through the waiting room. Their caps are off, and the man isn’t arrested or injured. They’re clearly taking him to someone who didn’t make it.

  “Isn’t that someone’s dad from our school?” Mel whispers to me. “One of the indie kids’, I think.”

  We watch until he disappears down a deeper hallway, his wails still coming.

  “I think I’d like to go home now, please,” I say.

  CHAPTER THE SIXTH, in which Satchel finds a note on her pillow from Kerouac, a friend since childhood who always climbed the tree outside her window to sneak inside; the note tells her he thinks he’s made a terrible mistake and that she should wear the amulet he’s also put on her pillow, no matter what happens; Satchel puts the amulet on, then calls her police officer uncle, who has already taken Kerouac’s father to identify his son’s remains.

  My alarm goes off that night at 11:30 p.m. I wouldn’t normally be asleep that early, but I couldn’t put off taking at least half a painkiller. It turns out there are muscles you didn’t even know could hurt until they’re suddenly crashed into by a huge flying deer. I get up slowly, very slowly, and even then I can’t keep from calling out in pain. I pull on a hoodie, but actually find it too painful to reach down and tie my shoes, so I slip into some flip-flops.

  I wait and listen. The house is quiet. Mom went to bed early because she’s going down to the capital in the morning for meetings with the state party about getting the jump on Mankiewicz’s seat. No one else would care if I was up anyway.

  Mary Magdalene greets me on the landing, staring at me intently.

  “Come on, then,” I whisper and she follows me down the stairs, purring already. I let myself out the front and try not to crunch too much on the gravel in the driveway. The rain’s stopped but a fog has come on; the faraway streetlights down our road give the world a blank white glow. Mary Mags does a silent little cat run ahead of me, exiting out our driveway and softly on towards the entrance of the Field.

  Where Jared’s car is parked.

  In my lifetime, we’ve had 1) the undead, 2) those soul-eating ghosts, 3) the vampire cycle of romance and death, and 4) whatever might be happening now with the body of Finn and the terrified deer, if they’re even connected (they’re probably connected). When Jared’s grandad was a teenager, they had Gods.

  The indie kids back then, who were probably called hipsters or something, fought and some of them died and a crack opened in the ground and ate a whole neighbourhood, but of course the Gods and Goddesses were defeated in the end because we’re all still here. They were sent back to wherever they’d come from, and the world, as it always does, got on with pretending it never happened. The crack was put down to a volcanic earthquake, and history forgot.

  Except for one Goddess, who had met Jared’s future grandad (called Herbert, clearly not a hipster) and liked what she saw. They married. They had a daughter, Jared’s mom – there’s a whole story there, but Jared’s even more private about this than liking guys. (Jared’s secretive about everything. Jared isn’t even his first name, it’s his middle. His first is so totally awful, no one knows it but me.)

  Anyway, Jared’s half-Goddess mom married Jared’s dad and they had their son, born two months and two days before I was. His grandma and his mom aren’t around any more. Grandma went back to her realms when Herbert died and his mom runs this international charity trying to save lions, tigers and leopards from extinction. I think she might still be technically married to Jared’s dad, but she hasn’t been around since Jared was a kid. Which just leaves Mr Shurin, who teaches junior high Geography. We had him in the eighth grade.

  Jared told me he thinks of himself as “three-quarters Jewish, one-quarter God”, which he also said makes him ask lots of questions he doesn’t really know the answers to. He had a bar mitzvah. It was so much fun.

  Mostly, though, he doesn’t talk about it, the God thing, which you probably wouldn’t either if your grandmother was the Goddess of Cats and you were a great big eighteen-year-old gay linebacker trying to live a normal, non-indie kid life. It might have been different if she’d been, like, Goddess of Fire or War or Prosperity or something. Still, I’ve known Jared my whole life and he’s never once acted resentful about the way cats, well, worship him. He treats them kindly, patiently, he gives them recognition, and he sends them on their way.

  He can also heal them.

  “Now you know there are limits here, right?” he says, putting a hand on my cheek. “You’re not feline and I’m only the grandson of the real deal.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up about what I can do.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “I would if I could.”

  I laugh a little, then wince at the ache. “That’s what everyone knows about you, Jared. You always would if you could.”

  “Well,” he says, “people think they know a lot of stuff. This might hurt.”

  There’s a sudden heat on my cheek that feels like it’s pulling at my stitches and light comes faintly from the palm of Jared’s hand. I try not to flinch as it gets hotter, but then he stops. He peels back the bandage. “Looks a little better,” he says. “I don’t think I can do anything about the scar, though.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “It feels a lot better.”

  And it does. It’s still tender to the touch, but it feels like it’s three or four more days along the healing process. That’s about all Jared can do t
o non-cats, but it sure as hell takes the ache out of my ribs when he touches them and makes my nose feel a lot less like I’ve got an apple-sized cold sore on my face.

  He’s always done this for us. Sports injuries, colds, headaches. He can’t quite get rid of them, but our doctors and parents are constantly amazed at how robust our immune systems are. He also can’t do anything about what’s wrong inside our heads – what’s in your head is still illness, but way more complicated than any muscle ache; those times he saves me from the loops, he’s just saving me as a friend, rather than a God – but he’s made a whole lot of other shit a whole lot easier.

  But now here’s the thing: you may not believe this. You may not believe any of this, actually – about his grandma, about Jared, hell, about the indie kids or the vampires or whatever – you may think this is all down to my own mind making my body feel better because I believe that Jared can. But I don’t care what you think, not about these things anyway. If you don’t think they’re real or important or you think that we’ll all grow out of this nonsense, well, that’s not really my business. I can’t tell you what’s real for you.

  But in return, you can’t say what’s real for me either. I get to choose. Not you.

  Jared sits back in his seat, tired, and looks out into the fog. Mary Magdalene is sprawled in the back, purring like she’s just had the best sex of her life. There are other neighbourhood cats out there, too, tons of ’em, attracted by Jared acting Godly, which I guess is like a cat lighthouse. You can see their eyes reflecting the headlights from Jared’s car, and several have hopped up on the hood and trunk, all of them purring, some of them kneading their paws gently against the metal or the windows.

  “I’ll try to sneak in to see Henna in the morning,” Jared says. “Though I’ll have to avoid her mom and dad.” He turns to me. “How did I get so unpopular among parents? I’m the kind of kid other parents are supposed to love.”

  Henna’s parents have never said exactly why they don’t like Jared, but it’s easy to guess. There are rumours about Jared’s parentage that even Jared can’t keep from circulating, and if very religious Mr and Mrs Silvennoinen don’t actually quite believe them, the stories still leave a kind of residue that makes them nervous.

  For my parents – or my mom, at least – the answer’s a whole lot simpler.

  “You heard about Mankiewicz?” I ask him.

  “Oh, yeah. Here we go again.”

  Mr Shurin has run against my mother in every single one of her elections. He’s lost every single one – the political demographic out here is never going to get him more than forty-five per cent of the vote – but he keeps on running. They’re in exactly the same district for everything, so he’s been up against her for the State House the four times she ran, both times for the State Senate, and now almost certainly again for Congress.

  It’s occasionally made our friendship a bit strange. Well, stranger. But we’ve stuck it out, much to my mom’s annoyance. Mr Shurin is so nice it’d never occur to him that we could be anything but friends.

  “I’ll bet Mel will vote for your dad,” I say.

  “I don’t know if she should,” he says. “Feels weird, doing that against your own parent.”

  “You can’t stand my mother.”

  “Yeah, but there’s no need for war, is there? No need to actually hurt someone.”

  “Thinking like that might be why your dad loses all the time.”

  Jared laughs. “I don’t think he’d know what to do if he ever won.”

  “Won’t be for months anyway,” I say. “Not ’til we’re both gone. Maybe this time we can just leave them to it.”

  Jared and I are going to different colleges – both of us with scholarships and huge loans that will probably follow us until death – but those colleges are in the same city, two states away. The plan is, we’ll stay friends. The plan is, we’ll maybe get an apartment together later to save money. The plan is, maybe we never come back to this town.

  The colleges are forty-five minutes apart, though. Is it going to be as easy as I hope? To keep our plans? Even here, we don’t get into the town that’s an hour away very often.

  But I don’t want to think about that right now.

  I stretch in the passenger seat, feeling the aches lessen by quite a lot. I can even reach down to my feet, which are freezing now in the stopped car. Movement catches my eye, and I watch a mountain lion emerge from the fog and circle over to Jared’s side.

  “Hey there, Missus,” he says, opening his car door. He puts his hand on the mountain lion’s head and does one long stroke all the way down to the end of her tail. Ever heard a mountain lion purr? Like a broken drain. She leaves huge cat footprints on the damp of the field as she sits like a statue a little bit away from the car, just a dark spot in the shadows. I know from experience that she’ll wait there patiently until we leave, guarding us from danger, if she can.

  “Now that,” Jared says, closing his door. “That shit’s crazy.”

  “I told Henna I loved her,” I say. “Right before we hit the deer.”

  He looks at me, surprised. “She have time to say anything back?”

  I breathe in slowly through my nose. Then I realize I can breathe through my nose. I touch it lightly. “Good job,” I say.

  “Thanks.”

  “She said she didn’t think I did.”

  Jared looks thoughtful. “That’s a weird response.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “…but I held her hand until the paramedics got there. And the last thing she said before they knocked her out was my name.”

  I don’t tell him what she said about Nathan and the prom. I’m kind of hoping the accident will have made her forget. Is that bad?

  “Dude,” Jared says, rubbing his eyes, “healing kind of takes it out of me. I think I need to get to bed.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Thanks again.”

  “No problem, my friend.” He takes a deep breath and opens his door again. “Let me go hand out benedictions first.”

  A hundred cats and one mountain lion watch him eagerly as he steps out towards them, hands up.

  “How you feeling?” Mel asks, waiting for me as I come back inside.

  “I think I’m lying about how okay I am with this scar.”

  “I thought that was a possibility.”

  We sit down on the couch, turning on the muted television for light. A topless woman with a gun in each hand is shooting Asian people down a long hallway. Then her cut-off jean shorts are obviously bothering her, so she takes those off and – now wearing only a G-string – keeps on shooting. I don’t understand the world sometimes. Mel turns it over to a show about dogs.

  “The thing about scars, though,” she says. “Nothing you can do except wear them with pride.”

  “Says the girl with flawless skin.”

  “Says the girl who destroyed her tooth enamel from chronic forced vomiting. Says the girl whose boobs could be outshone by a nine-year-old boy because I starved myself through a key development stage. There’s different kinds of scars, brother.”

  I watch the flashing, silent, nonsense images of dogs wearing costumes. “You going to be okay about Mom running for Congress?”

  “Does it matter? She didn’t actually ask us, did she?”

  “She thinks we’re all better.”

  “Are we? Aren’t we?”

  I repeat what I said to Jared. “It won’t be for months. We’ll be out of here.”

  Mel – who has that combination of total self-belief and utter self-doubt which is more common than people think – is planning on medical school while doubting she’s going to pass History. She’ll probably do both, and if her final grades are what they should be – and they will be – she’s going to a college way on the whole other coast, thousands of miles away.

  You shouldn’t say this about your sister, but I kind of already miss her, even though she’s sitting right here.

  I wa
ke up at 3:43 a.m. because my dad has sat down on my bed.

  He’s crying.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” he weeps. “I’m so sorry.”

  He’s still in his work suit. He stinks.

  “Go to bed, Dad,” I say. “I’m okay.”

  “No, you’re not,” he says, shaking his head. “You’re not okay at all.”

  “All right then, I’m not okay. But it’s the middle of the night and you waking me up is kind of making everything less okay by the minute.”

  He makes a little sobbing sound. “I should kill myself. I should just drive off a bridge and make all your lives better.”

  “That’d be a waste of a good car. Especially if it belonged to Uncle Rick.”

  “I could park the car and jump.”

  “What bridge, though? There aren’t any around here high enough. You’d only just break your leg and then you’d be even more of a pain in the ass than you are now.”

  He sighs. “You’re right. You’re so, so right.” He starts crying again.

  “Dad–”

  “You’re a good kid, Mikey. You’re the best kid…” His voice breaks.

  “Seriously, Dad–”

  He slides to my bedroom floor, still crying. Within minutes, he’s snoring.

  I take my blankets and go sleep on the couch.

  CHAPTER THE SEVENTH, in which Satchel and the rest of the indie kids share their grief for Kerouac by throwing stones soulfully into a nearby lake; wandering off on her own, Satchel takes the amulet in her hand and sees a vision of the single most handsome boy she’s ever seen in her life; Dylan, finding her, takes the opportunity to kiss her, and though his lips taste of honey and vegan patchouli, she pushes him away, revealing what the amulet told her; “The Immortals are here,” she says.

  I don’t go to school on Monday. I’m feeling a lot better after Jared’s healing, but I’ve still got a broken nose, two black eyes and an ironclad reason to stay in bed. So I take it.