Hector showed me another frame.
A couple in bed.
Most of the time we’re having sex, you’re not even with me, the man said.
“We can’t use any of this, you know.” I stood up.
Eli talked about getting a real live girl for a threesome. The Mims had freaked.
She tried to explain to him that wasn’t what she wanted at all. He begged her to tell him what she imagined doing to the girl or the girl doing to her.
I put a hand up to stop. But Hector kept on.
She said neither. I imagine being the girl, she said. Something had happened in that small apartment in Dearborn. With her brother and her and their mother in two small rooms, there wasn’t privacy. Sometimes her mother brought home men. I recognized flecks of the story: the working mother, two kids, in the immigrant enclave outside Detroit. Maybe her dials were set then, she told Eli. But she wanted to be with him. Eli. No girl. No one else.
In Hector’s drawing you saw only the gray outline of a couple under covers in bed, their dialogue in bubbles.
Some things happened when I was young and now I have to think of them.
Why have to?
In order to come.
In the end, it was a small sad story of accommodation to damage. Not my business. I thought of my dad. He couldn’t have followed her where she went with her eyes closed. My dad was a happy camper. A Once Born. A firstborn. I wanted to be him.
Another panel:
The same made bed again, one window, a pine outside.
Vibrant romantic hope, read the caption.
“We’re almost done,” Hector said.
THE SEX SHOP
He’d drawn a young immigrant guy behind the counter; he looked too much like Apu from The Simpsons.
So this is all it is, read the woman’s thought balloon.
“That really happened?” I asked. “They went to a sex shop?”
“Just to see.” Hector nodded. “They didn’t buy anything.”
The last drawing was a spoon with a fortune-cookie fortune in it: the family romance.
He fed her dreams, read the caption.
“I feel bad for your work, man,” I said. “But we’ve got to throw all this out.”
We’d been villains stealing this stuff she wouldn’t want us to know.
Maybe Eli had ruined me.
Hector nodded, respecting my verdict. “We could do a more fantastic version,” he finally said. “Give ourselves superpowers.”
* * *
* That hit some spot and settled me. We still had that.
70 • The Last Dog
I accepted my life as it was. I didn’t worry anymore about whether the Mims could make dinner, but I had no big hopes for happiness either. She and Eli had mixed themselves together in a way I didn’t understand. Sometimes I thought there had been good in it, too, strands of care along with the deception. I’d seen behind a curtain something small and human, a misshapen child with a smear of dirt on its shin. I was done trying to discover anything. What I didn’t know, I wanted to keep that way.
I turned my attention to school for my senior year. What my dad regularly harped on was true: this was my last chance at a decent college. While Hector and I had messed around all summer, Maude had manually lifted her SAT score another hundred points.
And we still had to deliver a schnauzer.
This last dog fit into my backpack, but he scratched at the fabric, frantic, a biter and a yapper. Even mean dogs spooked, apparently; madness provided no protection from terror. We went on a Friday and had to make three transfers. On the final leg, we sat at the back of the bus, and I lifted him out. MAX, the tag said. I unlatched it. They couldn’t have a number to call that might trace back to us. Max climbed up my chest as if clawing his way to air from underwater. He ripped my shirt. It’s okay, Max, you’re going to be safe. This guy loves dogs. Outside the bus windows, the world streamed green and blue. But the word love had tripped me. People said love all the time. What if Eli had lied about this, too? We knew now that the holidays he said he worked at shelters he was probably just eating. What if he’d really been eating a turkey, that had had a face?
That idea revealed a cliff. He could have taken our pets to the pound and let them die. I told Hector, wanting him to talk me down. But he sank back against the seat as if shot.
“You’re right. He could have been lying. Like the quote-unquote ‘operation.’ ”
The thing’s skull, under its fur, felt paper-thin. The past summer, I’d made a hierarchy of least favorite animals. I hated schnauzers. Hector’s most reviled breed was poodles. “Maybe we shouldn’t release him.” We were almost to our stop.
“We already left a bunch of animals,” Hector said. “You think we’re like those Polish Catholics who delivered up Jews to the Nazis?”
“That once I saw Eli hold dying kittens. He knew how.”
“But what are we thinking believing this when he lied about everything else?”
“Maybe it was his one sweet spot.” Ben Orion would say I was makin’ fairy tales. I held Max, shushing him. He was an incredibly nervous animal. We passed long grasses blowing against a chain-link fence. Finally we arrived at our stop. So far we’d left them:
Tomcat
The pit bull from Mar Vista
A chihuahua named Pretzel
Two geese from Cottonwoods Elementary that had been hatched from eggs. We did this one gratis for the Animal Rights Collective.
A pug that couldn’t be trained out of peeing inside
A spaniel that barked all night long
A dominant, pecking ancient parrot
It was December and warm, in the high sixties. Some of the trees had changed color. I had to admit: it was beautiful here. We were walking this route for the last time. “The Mims wrote him that contract once to move to Pasadena. If she didn’t have us, this would probably be her life.” An old shingled house. Drowsy roses planted in sand. Mountains outside dormer windows. “I think that was before they bought their place.”
“And she’d be with a psychopath!”
“True. Good save.” I’d been marrying my mom off to a villain because I felt lulled by trees. We’d lost our house. He gained one. She still wouldn’t drive on our old street.
Max was up on my shoulder and trying to climb higher. “Let’s go around the back,” I said. “We should be able to see some of the other animals. You can’t keep a goose in a living room.”
In the alley, I tried to jump up to grip the fence. But it was smooth new painted wood, hard to scale. I had to stand on Hector’s back. From the top, the yard looked landscaped, with a rectangle of gravel and a pink-flowering bush. But I saw our geese, their wings folded in, two ovals on the lawn, and dropped down hard on the pavement.
“I don’t hear barking,” Hector said.
“But if you were going to get rid of any animal, wouldn’t it be the geese?”
“Maybe they plan to eat them. Maybe he’s not really a vegetarian! For all we know the pound doesn’t accept waterfowl.”
“Should we bring Max back home?” He now seemed to be scaling the side of my face. Reaching the top of my head and finding just air, he jumped and started running. We chased him down the alley, around a corner, and across a block of sloped lawns, running harder than I remembered ever running in cross-country, my heart gonging in my chest. Hector sprinted. I felt fat again, even though I wasn’t. Max ducked under a hedge, and we followed through prickly bushes, but then he disappeared. We zigzagged the neighborhood for the next two hours, hollering his name. We lost Max.
In the end, we put his bowl of food and water on the south edge of Eli’s lawn. Maybe Max would smell it and think he was home. Just as we were leaving, Tomcat streaked across their grass. I lunged to grab him before he flickered away. Now that we’d admitted doubt about Eli’s commitment to animals, I wasn’t going to leave without him. And he proved catchable.
“So maybe they really did keep them all,” I s
aid. “If he’s still here.”
The sky was dark blue. I looked up at the house. A light was on in a room on the top floor, a sewing machine silhouetted in the window.
“We’ll never know,” Hector said, and in his voice I heard distance. He’d come to an end. For so long, he’d been the rabid one.
I held Tomcat. He didn’t recognize me at all. “We sure botched our last mission.”
“Ben Orion’s right. With this many lies, there’s no bottom. We have to forget the whole thing.”
“I’ll try to,” I said, and meant it.
That night, I forced myself to ring Maude Stern’s doorbell. I couldn’t bring Tomcat home, with my allergic sister. Maude’s mom opened the door. I started to explain, the cat in my arms, and he leaped down heavily. I offered to pay her back for the crate and everything else. Maude appeared at the top of the stairs in a nightgown printed with rosebuds. I promised to turn over my paychecks from the Aero until the debt was clear. Tomcat had settled under a table. Mittens, in Maude’s arms, stiffened.
Maude’s mom herded us to the kitchen. She asked questions. She hadn’t known my mom had had a boyfriend or a breakup. When I told them that we put the animals on the villain’s lawn, she started laughing. The three of us sat on their stools laughing a long time. I remember that night, Maude petting the small white cat in her arms.
I never did fall in love with her, and she forgave me.
The next day, I slipped a rubber band around my wrist. Every time I thought of Eli, I snapped it and made myself turn to something dull and good, like school. A strange thing happened. I finally began to like some classes. I figured out that I cared about history. For the first time, I received a midway report I was proud of, but I understood the fact my father hadn’t admitted to himself yet: that it was already too late.
Hector and I changed our comic. I smoothed down the story—a lot of the real details didn’t fit. We made the discovery of our villain’s perfidy just background, the scale of Batman’s childhood. We gave our boy heroes superpowers that worked everywhere but in their homes. They moved pets around the city when lives were imperiled. Every heartbroken woman found an animal smuggled into her bedroom. We got interested in making good. Little kids built scaffolding on cliffs to prevent erosion for community service hours. The Villain was only a small part at the beginning, so now Our Psychopath didn’t work for the title anymore. We had a terrible time finding a new one; all we could think of was Two Sleuths. But the Villain’s darkness was what made our ordinary nerd lazy boys think they had a chance to be good. In the part that says that resemblance to anyone living or dead is coincidental, we substituted: Some of our story was based on tales told by a liar, so the authors have no idea what, if anything, may be true. We gave our panels to the guys at the comic-book store to read. I let myself believe that because I thought about Eli almost painlessly now, the Mims did, too.
One day, after Hector had been telling me that his aunt Terry had rats in the attic of her old house in the Palisades, I had an idea. I went and asked Maude’s mother if I could borrow Tomcat. The first night he did kamikaze rat busting in the attic, Terry discovered him at 2:00 a.m. with a flashlight. Her boyfriend the architect, who climbed up to the attic, too, thought he was the best-looking cat he’d ever seen. Tomcat had one blue eye and one green eye, they marveled. They had a groomer come to the house every other week. Eventually, Tomcat slept on the end of her bed the nights she was alone.
I stayed obsessed with Max. For the next months, I went to Pasadena every third Saturday, to check two shelters and a rescue place until the people there knew me and promised to e-mail when any schnauzer came in. I received pictures of seventeen schnauzers that year, but I never saw Max again.
I didn’t mention those Saturday trips to Hector. I understood: he was finally free. Not only of our perpetual half-solved squalid mystery. But of me.
71 • The Inevitable Day
In April, the inevitable day came when people found out their acceptances and announced them in the middle of class. Maude stood on top of the desk and said, “I’m going to New York City!” Hector got into Bard. Ella was moving an hour northeast to CalArts. No one asked me anything. They must have been able to tell from my face. Finally, Hector cornered me and asked what happened.
“Nothing,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘nothing’? You couldn’t have gotten rejected everywhere. Even the idiot counselor said you’d get into UC.”
“I wasn’t rejected.”
“Okay. You weren’t rejected. Are you wait-listed?”
“No.”
“I was on the phone with you the night you did your Berkeley app, I know you finished it, you read me what you wrote, all you had to do was push the button.” I still didn’t say anything. “You couldn’t have not pushed the button.”
I was silent.
His voice shrieked up. “Not there or not anywhere?”
“B.”
“Wait a minute, your dad wouldn’t have let you get away with that. You had those fights with him over your essay for the common app!”
“He doesn’t know,” I said.
“What’re you thinking, man?” Air came out of him in a whine, like a balloon emptying.
“I have a job. I like it.” This was turning out to be scarier than I’d thought. I really didn’t want to be home with only the guys at the Aero while my friends walked over tiered velvety lawns. I hadn’t thought things through very well. “I was worried about the Mims, maybe.”
“Your mom’s fine. Marge says they’ve got two patents.”
“Her work’s going okay.” She was going to freak. She’d been fretting over the UC system, which operated on a firm grid, with no special privileges for professors’ kids with so-so grades. “There’s still Santa Monica City College, the best community college in the country.” We’d always said that but never meant it. We’d both wanted to go away.
“Your parents don’t know anything?”
“They thought I pushed the button. Like you thought. I almost did.”
Hector had gone pale under the freckles. He looked gaunt. “Remember how it seemed like my parents couldn’t pay for college? It’s like we switched places.”
“Yeah. You ended up with Surferdude and Marge. I drew a psychopath who put a spell on my mother that turned her permanently sad.”
“You’re making that worse than it is.”
I’d managed to skip one tiny thing, like a hundred other omissions and passive infractions. I hadn’t realized that this one would turn out to be such a big deal.
My parents screamed. My parents met with the guidance counselors. No city college seemed to be in the cards. My dad—who’d never wanted us to see shrinks—insisted I “talk to somebody.” He talked to plenty of somebodies and, from them, got the idea to ship me off to Uruguay or Israel or anywhere that could make it look like I’d done this on purpose. “Look like to whom?” I asked. To colleges? To his friends? My dad was the one losing his shit the most, but he couldn’t stay mad long. He didn’t have the concentration. Mondays, he went back to work.
Hector remained disappointed. “Why didn’t you tell me, man?” he kept saying.
Worst of all, what I’d done, or not done, made my mom sadder.
She blamed it on herself.
After he got into college Hector got into drugs. Almost overnight, he found a new obsession. We were still close, but it was different. And even with my rubber band, I wasn’t done. I was looking for a schnauzer, one part of my mystery still at large. Though with typical perversity, second semester senior year, when it no longer mattered, I got straight A’s.
Our phone rang on a Saturday. The Mims answered and shot me a look. But she already knew Ben Orion! He came over now to walk the dog with her. And I had no other secret liaisons. It turned out to be Hershel from the comic-book store. He’d finally read our floppy and liked it. He really liked it! Some guys he knew from Comic-Con and he were starting a press, called Emerald Cit
y, and they planned to publish five books a year. They’d publish ours. They were still working out distribution, he said, but their stuff would get on the front table at Neverland at least.
“Do we have to pay you?” I was about to ask how much. I had money now, from ticket taking.
“Nah. We pay you, maybe four hundred to start with, then, if we earn that back, a percentage of profit. It’s just three of us, putting in our own savings.”
Hershel promised to have it out in time for Comic-Con.
My first thought was that this could lure Hector back.
And he did draw me a card that said WOWZA on the front. I turned it over. KAZAM.
I still saw Hector, but seldom enough that I looked forward to every time. In June, all of us attended Philip’s doctoral hooding. In a medium-sized room with a balcony on the third floor of an old building at UCLA, thirty people milled on a blustery, wet day, warm inside the wind. Philip wore a hat with a tassel. When the chairman of the department called his name from the podium, he walked up and bowed his neck. The man moved the tassel from one side of Philip’s head to the other. It was a solemn thing.
“This was a long time coming,” the Mims whispered to Marge.
“Remember yours?” Marge said.
“Yes.” My mom nodded. I could see in both women’s faces the memory of something they’d once wanted badly, then obtained, and now still valued.
I stayed working at my job. Hector hung out there some summer nights; he brought his stoner friends, and they watched the movie, then slumped against the wall while I swept and cleaned the popcorn machine. I gave them free candy but then put my own cash in the register for it. In July, we both went with Hershel to Comic-Con and sat behind a table with stacks of Two Sleuths on it. By August, Hector was packing to go.
It was hard to say good-bye. I admitted that he was the most important person in my life, and he said, Same. I worried again that I wasn’t gay but I should be, because I loved him more than I’d loved any girl yet. He still hadn’t had a crush of any kind. I thought of Ella all the time, but I hadn’t seen her this summer. I kept checking her Facebook page for updates. Maude and her brother came a couple nights a week to the theater, and they stayed to help me clean and close up.