The Rest of Us Just Live Here

  He doesn’t question me, just starts dabbing the goop on my face. “Is it going out with Henna tonight? You’re afraid it’s changing. That could be it.”

  “Maybe.” I wince as the cream bites a bit. “Maybe it’s you.”

  He pauses. “Me?”

  I try to smile. “Who’s going to save me from these when I go to college?”

  “You’ll work it out, Mikey. You’re stronger than you think, and I’ll be there anyway.”

  “It’s not just that. Where’ve you been lately, Jared? Where do you go on Saturday nights? What are you doing tonight that no one can know about?”

  He puts more stuff on my face. And yeah, I know most people would think it weird that two guy friends touch as much as we do, but when you choose your family, you get to choose how it is between you, too. This is how we work. I hope you get to choose your family and I hope it means as much to you as mine does to me.

  “I got some stuff going on, Mike,” he says.

  “What stuff? I can help you with it.”

  He smiles. “Not this stuff. But thank you.”

  “You could talk to me about it. You can talk to me about anything.”

  “I know.” He finishes with the moisturizer. “You’re going to be shiny, but you’ve known Henna so long, I doubt she really sees you any more.”

  “Jared–”

  “Here’s what’s important, Mike.” He takes a long time screwing the lid back on the moisturizer. “What’s important is that I know how much you worry about shit. And what’s also important is that I know a big part of that worry is that, no matter what group of friends you’re in, no matter how long you’ve known them, you always assume you’re the least-wanted person there. The one everyone else could do without.”

  All I can do at this is swallow. I feel like I’m naked all of a sudden.

  “Even when it’s just you and me,” he says. “I know how you worry that you need me as a friend more than I need you.”

  “Jared, please–”

  “I’ve known it since we were kids, Mike. You’re not the only one who worries.” He play-punches me in the chest, leaving the flat of his fist there. “I wouldn’t have made it without you. I got my dad and I got you and I need you both. More than you know.”

  I swallow again. “Thanks, man.”

  “I’ll tell you about everything when I can,” he says. “I promise. I want to. But talking about it, even with you, would change it and I can’t risk that yet.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if you don’t kiss Henna on the lips tonight for real, I’ll make sure you have black eyes all the way through graduation.”

  He grins, and though I’m still worried about him – I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t – the happiness I feel at what he said is just like he really did punch me in the chest.

  “Would it be okay if I kissed you?” Henna asks, before we’re even half a mile from her house.

  I stop right there in the middle of the road.

  “What?” is pretty much all I can come up with.

  “It’s kind of in the spirit of exploration,” she says. “We’ve both always wondered, haven’t we?”

  “We have? You have?”

  “You’re a cute boy I’ve known for a hundred years. Of course I’ve thought about it.”

  A car pulls up behind us in the wooded dark, its headlights shining on the backs of our heads. After a second, it honks. Without taking my eyes off Henna, I hit the hazard lights. The car honks again, then pulls around us.

  “Don’t you feel like the world’s shaken loose?” Henna says.

  “Yes,” I say, because it has. “You think I’m cute?”

  “Here’s this future we’re looking at. And it’s not far away like the future normally is. It’s here, now. Like any second.” She rubs her shoulder. “I got vaccinated for the Africa trip today. We’re still going. Even when I’ve just had surgery on my arm. My dad says he’s a doctor and can look after me and God will watch over us as we do His will and so nothing’s changed. We’re going and it’s real.”

  “You could stay with us,” I say and then I think, no, she probably couldn’t. She knows it, too, from the look she gives me. “Or Jared. For the summer at least–”

  “No,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s happening. There’s nothing I can do about it. There’s nothing I can do about graduating. Nothing I can do about going to a different college than all of my friends. Nothing I can do about these feelings for Nathan that surprise me as much as anybody. Sorry, but what’s the point of lying about it? What’s the point of lying about anything? We could keep being too afraid to say we don’t know stuff and then the future will come and eat us anyway and we’ll regret not doing all that stuff we wished we did. You know?”

  “Not really.”

  She smiles. “There’s the truth, see? Isn’t it great?”

  Another car passes us going the other way. It goes pretty slowly, though, and we wait for it to pass, as if it could somehow overhear our conversation.

  “Why do you want to kiss me?” I ask.

  “Because I don’t know if I should. I don’t know what it’ll feel like.” She shrugs. “I used to like you that way. Way back when Mel started school again. I could see how much you cared for her, Mike. How much you looked after her.” Her eyes have gone a little wet. “I don’t know if Teemu would have looked after me like that in the same situation.” She swallows away the tears. “I’d like to think so but I’m never going to find out. And I don’t like that I’m not.”

  I’m just staring at her. “You used to like me?”

  “Yeah,” she says, simply. “But I was with Tony and I also liked him. A lot. Still do. We’d have had the most incredibly pretty black Finnish Korean babies in the world.”

  “Why’d you break up with him then?”

  She finally looks away. “He wanted us to get married this summer.”

  “What?”

  “I thought about it, too. As a way to get out of the Africa trip. But then I realized that was the only reason I was considering it. You can’t marry someone just to get away from your parents.”

  “People do.”

  “Not me, it turns out. It also made me realize I couldn’t see myself marrying Tony at all. Not yet, anyway. At least not until I’d gone out and had a life of my own, where I could make my own decisions, maybe find out what I want.”

  “And you want to find out if you want me?”

  She looks back at me. “We could have died together. But we didn’t. And all I could think while we were waiting for the ambulance was how glad I was it was you with me there. Because if it was you, I didn’t have to be afraid.”

  “I felt the same way.”

  “I know. I’ve always known.” She unbuckles her seatbelt. “I don’t know if it’s the right thing for us to kiss but I don’t want to leave not having found out. I’m not trying to play with your feelings and I’m so scared you might get hurt but being too afraid isn’t–”

  And I’m already kissing her.

  She’s…

  Well, I don’t know, you’ve kissed people, haven’t you? So you know what the physical part is, and though we do just fine at that and the closeness and the smell of her and the taste of her mouth is so freaking amazing and though I can feel every part of where she’s touching me with her non-injured hand on the back of my neck and her cast digging into my chest and, yeah, I have such a hard-on I have to readjust myself before we kiss again because it’s so uncomfortable against my jeans but–

  But it’s really inside your head where it all happens, doesn’t it?

  Because I’m just thinking, I’m kissing her I’m kissing her I’m kissing her I’m kissing Henna We’re kissing It’s Henna and we’re kissing.

  And maybe that’s stupid, but maybe it’s not, maybe that’s just what people do. I’m kissing her.

  That’s what I’m thinking.

  There’s a knock on the window so loud and surprising, we jump apart
.

  A car is stopped a little behind us, its headlights off. I have no reason to think so, but I have the immediate thought that it’s the same car that stopped behind us before. And the same car that drove by slowly a minute ago. It turns on red and blue lights to flash at us once or twice before going dark again.

  It’s a police car.

  “Shit,” I hear Henna say.

  “We haven’t done anything wrong,” I say.

  The knock comes again and we both jump again, too. I don’t think either of us are especially afraid of policemen, but two people have been killed and a zombie deer jumped over my head, so I think it’s fair to say we’re a little on edge.

  I roll down my window. The cop is standing so close to the car, I can’t even see his face at first. I do see the big truncheon-like flashlight that he knocked on the window with. It’s about two inches from my head.

  “Hi,” I say, kind of stupidly.

  “‘Hi’?” he says, leaning down slow to put his head in the window. “Is that how you address an officer of the law?”

  With shock, I recognize him. It’s the cop who came to the school and completely failed to take us seriously when we said we’d seen indie kid Finn being chased by a little girl across the Field. He’s wearing a scarf, which clearly isn’t part of his uniform, and it’s pitch black and he’s wearing sunglasses.

  We’re in trouble, I think, and not just being-stopped-by-a-cop trouble.

  “I’m waiting for an answer,” he says. His words are clear and strong, nothing like the slightly drunk version we saw in the Vice Principal’s office.

  “I’m sorry, officer. I know we’re not supposed to be–”

  “No,” he interrupts. “You’re not.”

  The flashlight comes on right in my face. I flinch and I hear the cop laugh. He moves it over to Henna, who doesn’t look away. She’s frightened, I can tell, as frightened as me, but she’s defiant, too. The accident really has shaken the world loose for her. We may be in big trouble here but if we are, she’s going to look at it square on.

  She’s never looked more beautiful. And I’m so afraid for her I can barely keep from throwing up.

  “You kids,” he spits at us. “With your impudence and your sex–”

  “Our what?” Henna says.

  “Thinking no one understands you because you’re young. Thinking only you can see the world as it truly is.” He hits the flashlight, hard, on the door of my car. “You know nothing.” He hits the door again, hard enough to leave a dent. “Nothing at all.” Almost casually, he smashes my wing mirror, shattering it.

  “Hey!” I say, and the flashlight is suddenly bright in my face again.

  “It’s not safe to be out here at night,” the cop says, amusement in his voice.

  Still looking at the cop, I try to sneakily raise my hand to the gearshift, wondering if I can gun it and get us out of here–

  “You try it,” the cop says. “You just go right ahead.”

  “Mikey,” I hear Henna whisper. She’s looking out the back window.

  There are policemen all around us. I don’t see any cars besides the first one but there are at least twenty other cops out there, standing in a wide circle around the car, hands on holsters.

  All wearing sunglasses.

  I’ve still got my hand on the gearshift. Henna and I both glance down at it, using only our eyes. She gives me a little nod. I’m just about to shift it–

  When the voice comes. It’s like a whisper mixed with the whine of a buzzsaw. It seems to come from everywhere at once, miles away but also in your head, too.

  “Look closer,” it says, over and over, in scraping words that make both me and Henna wince. “Look closer, look closer…” The sound is like glass breaking against your skin, you hear it and feel it, before it vanishes, making you feel like someone’s touched you in a wrong way.

  The cop turns off his flashlight. I hear Henna breathing, and I reach out in the darkness to take her hand. She must hear me breathing, too, because she’s already reaching out to take mine.

  The cop takes off his sunglasses.

  In the pitch darkness, his eyes are glowing. Glowing blue. Just like the deer.

  All around us in the night, the other cops take off their sunglasses, too. A circle of glowing blue eyes watch us in the silence.

  “Go,” Henna whispers. “Just go.”

  I shift into drive, but the cop’s hand shoots in way faster than should be possible and grips my arm, hard enough to hurt.

  And he’s pointing his gun in my face.

  For a long minute, all I can see is the barrel of that gun.

  “You aren’t the ones we want,” he frowns, sounding disappointed. He lowers the gun, puts his sunglasses back on and moves away. Out there, in the darkness, the blue lights disappear two by two.

  I don’t wait. I step on the gas and with a burning of wheels, we race off into the night.

  “Mike,” Henna says.

  “I know,” I say.

  “Mike,” she says again, just saying my name, not asking anything. I don’t even know where I’m going, I’m just driving as fast as I can away and away.

  I hear Henna say, “I’ve never been so happy not to be an indie kid in my entire life.”

  She starts crying, and we do that for a while, just drive and cry.

  Mainly out of relief for being alive.

  CHAPTER THE TENTH, in which indie kids Joffrey and Earth disappear from their homes, their bodies found miles away; Satchel goes into hiding at an abandoned drive-in with fellow indie kids Finn, Dylan, Finn, Finn, Lincoln, Archie, Wisconsin, Finn, Aquamarine, and Finn; seeing a blue light in the night, Satchel meets the boy from the amulet, the handsomest one she’s ever seen; he tells her this isn’t a safe place for her or the others and that they should run; then he tells her she’s beautiful in her own special way and that’s when she knows she can trust him; the indie kids go back to their homes.

  Things get darker in the days after the cop incident.

  There are two more dead indie kids. I didn’t really know either of them, except to see them in the hallway at school, but still. “This is worse than when they were all dying beautifully of cancer,” Henna said, and she’s right.

  The cops are calling one a suicide and the other a car accident.

  The cops are saying this.

  And why should we doubt the cops?

  Henna and I told Mel and Jared and, fine, Nathan what happened, but none of us told our parents. How could we? My dad’s automatically out of everything important. (I’m not even sure I’ve seen him this week, just evidence – discarded clothes, snoring – that he’s in the house somewhere.) My mom’s in pre-campaign mode, which is probably not the best time to tell her the local policemen have gone crazy and are threatening her son. (I told her I broke the mirror hitting a mailbox; she just sighed and handed me the insurance forms.) Henna’s parents would pack her off to a convent, and even Mr Shurin would be overly concerned and get involved in all the wrong ways.

  We’re just going to stick together and tough it out and try to live long enough to graduate. The usual.

  The surviving indie kids disappeared from school for a bit. No one knows where they went. No one knows what they saw there. No one knows why they all came back on the Friday.

  They won’t tell us what’s going on, even when we ask them.

  “What’d they say?” Jared asks Mel over lunch.

  “That we wouldn’t understand,” Mel says, frowning like she’s about to fire the world from a job it loves. “But one of them showed me a poem about how we’re all essentially alone. As if they’re not the biggest clique of togetherness that ever was.”

  Everyone knows the indie kids don’t use the internet – have you noticed? They never do, it’s weird, like it never occurs to them, like it’s still 1985 and there’s only card catalogues – so we can’t find them discussing anything online. The vibe seems to be that it’s totally not our business. Historically, non-indi
e kids were pretty much left alone by the vampires and the soul-eating ghosts, so maybe they have a point.

  But the deer who caused our accident. And the zombie deer coming out of Henna’s car. And the scary cops. It’s like when adults say world news isn’t our worry. Why the hell isn’t it?

  “They don’t look like you,” Mel says, when the prints of my senior photos come in. “I mean, not even a little.”

  I didn’t bother with digital files; I knew they were going to be gruesome. The prints are meant to go into my graduation announcements, the ones with that pointless extra bit of tissue paper and double envelope you send to relatives in the hope they send back money. But maybe even that’s out.

  “You could be your second cousin, maybe,” Henna says, leaning against the counter at the drugstore. We’ve stopped by Mel’s work to check up on her, even though it’s broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon.

  “We don’t have any cousins,” I say. “Dad’s an only child and Uncle Rick doesn’t have kids.”

  Henna blinks. “I’ve got like forty.”

  “Excuse me,” a skinny, scraggly man says behind us.

  “For methadone you need to talk to the pharmacist,” Mel says, without even looking up from the photos.

  “You’re not the pharmacist?” the man asks.

  We all turn to him. He kind of freaks out at the attention, pulling his arms around the heavy-metal T-shirt that hangs from his collarbones and shuffling away to the pharmacy counter at the back.

  “Poor guy,” Mel says. She goes back to my pictures. “You look like a court artist’s drawing of yourself on the stand.”

  Henna gasps. “You do look like that.”

  I move closer to her, pretending to get nearer to my photos. I brush my arm against her arm. It’s elementary school shit, but she doesn’t move away. It’s been over a week since the cops stopped us, but we haven’t kissed again or even really talked about it. We’ve spent a lot of time together, but all in the company of our friends. Still, the thing with the cops was so threatening and bizarre and unexplained, it made kissing seem kind of childish. For the moment, at least.