Ballad (14 page)

James

“James?”

My face was nicely smashed into my pillow. Without moving, I pressed my phone against my ear. “Mmmm. Yeah. What.”

“James, is that you?”

I rolled onto my back and stared at the pale morning light that striped across the ceiling. I readjusted the phone so that I didn’t accidentally hang up. “Mom, why is it that every time you call my cell phone, you ask if it’s really me? Are there hundreds of other misplaced calls that you’re not telling me about, where you
almost
dial my number but it’s not quite right and you get guys who are almost me but not quite right?”

“Your voice never sounds the same on the phone,” Mom said. “It sounds mushy or something. Are you hungover?”

I sighed heavily. I looked over at Paul’s bed; he was still totally comatose on it. Drool on the pillow, arm hanging off the side, looking like he’d been dropped onto his bed from an airplane. I felt intense envy. “Mom. You do know it’s a weekend, right? Before ten o’clock? Before nine o’clock?”

“I’m sorry to call you so early,” she said.

“No you’re not.”

“You’re right, I’m not. I’m coming to see you, and I wanted you to be awake to come meet me at the bus station.”

I sat up in a hurry, and then jumped a mile. “Holy shit!” Nuala sat at the end of my bed, knees pulled up to her chin and arms wrapped around them. I hadn’t even felt her there. She looked dangerous and brooding and wretchedly hot.

“I know you didn’t just swear.”

I mouthed
what the crap?
at Nuala (who shrugged) and then said, to Mom, “I did, Mom. I said it just to spite you.”

“You had plans more important than seeing your dear mother, who misses you intensely?”

“No, I just got stung by something. I’m very happy to see you. As I always am. I am positively ecstatic to hear you’re coming. It’s as if the clouds have opened up and, holding my hand out, I discover that it’s not rain, but strawberry Jell-O.”

“Your favorite,” Mom observed. “My bus is supposed to be there by ten-fifteen. Can you make it there? Bring Dee. I have stuff from her mother for her.”

“Maybe. She might be busy. People are very busy on weekends, you know.
Sleeping
and stuff.” I looked warily at Nuala; she had an exquisitely evil expression on her face. She reached under the covers and grabbed my big toe. She started rolling it around in between her fingers like she was going to unscrew it. It tickled and hurt like hell. I kicked to dislodge her and drew my legs underneath me, out of her reach. I mouthed
evil creature
at her, and she looked flattered that I’d noticed.

“Someone with Terry Monaghan’s genes could never sleep late on weekends. If poor Dee’s busy, it’s because she’s tied up designing a bridge or taking over the world. I have to go now because I want to finish reading this novel before we get there. Go get dressed. I’ll buy you two lunch.”

“Great. Wonderful. Charming. I’m going to get out of my nice, warm bed now. Bye. See you soon.”

I’d like to say that I then called Dee and she picked me up and we went to meet my mom and everything was rosy between us, but in the real world—the world where James gets screwed over by anyone who can manage it—that didn’t happen. I didn’t call Dee. I didn’t even do like they do in movies, where they punch in the number and then snap the phone shut real quick before the other person can answer.

Instead, after I hung up with Mom, I stared at the imprinted pattern on the back of my phone until I decided that it was not really a meaningless marketing squiggle but rather a Satanic symbol meant to improve reception. I had a pen on the desk by my bed, inches away, and I used it to write
10:15
on my hand. A lot of the words had been scrubbed off by my shower the night before; the sight of half-finished words made me feel sick to my stomach. I completed the words that I could still salvage and used spit to rub off the illegible smudges that were too far gone. By the time I looked at the end of the bed again, Nuala had disappeared. Typical. When I might want her around, she was gone.

I opened and closed my phone several times, snapping it, just trying to get my brain back. It wasn’t like I felt bad about not calling Dee, because I didn’t think she would’ve picked up when she saw my number anyway. I just felt this raw gnawing somewhere in my stomach, or my head, like I was hungry even though I wasn’t.

“Wake up, Paul.” I kicked my blanket off; it crumpled in a soft heap where Nuala had been sitting. Leaves fluttered to the floor, dry and lifeless. “We’re going to go get lunch with my mom.”

Mom has an inability to be on time. This inability—nay, this essential property of her existence—is so powerful that even her bus wasn’t on time. Couldn’t be on time. So Paul and I sat outside the bus terminal on a bench, the fall sun bright on us but lacking any force.

“I don’t get how you get this to work.” Paul was trying to get a pen to write on his hand. It was one of those where you click the end to make the end come out, and he kept clicking and unclicking it and then shaking it, as if that would make it write better. He was making an army of dots on the back of his hand, but he hadn’t yet managed any letters. “It’s like I’m trying to write the alphabet with a hot dog.”

Cars roared by, but no bus. Without looking away from the road, I held my hand out for the pen. “I will enlighten you. Prepare to be dazzled.”

He gave me the pen and pointed at the back of my hand. “Write ‘manlove’ on there.”

I hovered the pen over my skin. “Why, Paul, I had no idea you felt that way. I mean, I’m universally appealing, but still—”

Paul grinned big enough for me to see it out of the corner of my eye. “Dude, no. We had a, you know, what do you call it. A guest player. A guest oboe instructor. Anyway, she came in this week—and you know what her name was? Amanda Manlove.”

I made an appreciative noise. “No way.”

“Yeah, dude. That’s what I said! I mean,
seriously
. She had to go through grade school with that name. Her parents must’ve hated her.”

I wrote
bonfire
on my hand.

Paul made a spit-filled sound in the back of his throat. “Nuh-uh! How did you get it to write? It didn’t make dots on your hand. It really wrote.”

“You’ve got to pull the skin tight, genius,” I said, and demonstrated. I wrote my name, and then drew a circle around it.

He took the pen back from me and stretched his skin tight. He wrote
bonfire
on his hand too. “Why ‘bonfire’?”

I didn’t know. “I want to put a bonfire scene in
Ballad
,” I lied.

“We’d have to make fake fire for onstage. That’ll be either hard or corny. Except alcohol fire. Isn’t alcohol fire invisible?” Paul looked at something past me. “Hey, incoming. It’s the girl from your old school.”

I froze and didn’t turn to confirm. “Paul, you’d better not be kidding me. Do you think she’s seen me?”

Paul’s gaze lifted to above my head. “Um, yeah, pretty sure she has.”

“Um, hi,” Dee said, right behind my shoulder. Just her voice made me hear the words again:
I was thinking of him when you kissed me.

I shot Paul a dark look that meant
thanks for all the advance warning
and stood up to face her. I shoved my hands in my pockets without saying anything.

“Hi, Paul,” Dee looked around me at Paul, who was looking a little hunted. “Do you mind if I talk to James for a second?”

“I’m waiting for Mom,” I said. My stomach jostled inside me; I couldn’t think. Looking at her stung me.

“I know.” Dee looked at the road. “My mom said she sent stuff with her. She called me—my mom did, not yours—and said she’d heard on the radio about traffic on 64, so I know she’s not going to be here for a while. Your mom, not mine.” She shrugged uncomfortably, and added, in a rush, “I came with the church bus into town and thought I’d warn you she’d be late, if you were here waiting.” Everything about her face and voice was awkward, conciliatory, miserable.

Paul offered, “I’ll wait here.”

“Thanks, comrade.” Only a little sarcasm crept through my voice. He could hand my ashes over to my mom after Dee fried what was left of my self-esteem. I wondered for a split second if I could say no. “Okay, let’s go.”

Paul made a little rueful face at me before I followed Dee down the sidewalk. She didn’t say anything as we left the station behind, even after we’d followed the rising sidewalk into downtown Gallon. A block away, I saw Evans-Brown Music. I wondered if Bill the pipe instructor was still there or if he disappeared when I wasn’t around to see him, like Nuala. I looked into the empty windows of abandoned shops as we walked, watching our reflections expanding and contracting. Dee, arms crossed across her chest, biting her lip. Me, my hands in my pockets, shoulders hunched, an island she didn’t have a boat to get to.

“I feel awful,” Dee said, finally. It seemed like an unfair statement. Selfish. Dee must’ve thought so too, because she added, “About what I did to you. I just—every night, I just cry thinking about how I ruined everything between us.”

I didn’t say anything. We were passing a shop that advertised menswear, and had a bunch of mannequin heads wearing hats in the front window. My reflection put one of my heads into a derby for a split second.

“It was like—I don’t even know why—I mean, I just am so sorry. I don’t want everything to be over between us. I know I messed up. I’m just, like, broken. Something’s wrong with me and I know I messed up.” She wasn’t crying yet, but there was a little catch in her voice just when she said “broken.” I looked at the cracks on the sidewalk. Ants were marching in straight rows across them. Didn’t that mean it was going to rain or something? I thought I remembered my mom telling me once that ants walked in straight lines to lay down scent trails to find their way back home. The closer they walked, the heavier the scent trail. The easier to find the way back home.

Dee grabbed my hand and stopped in her tracks, jerking me to a stop as well. “James, please say something. Please. This was … this was really hard to do. Please just
say something
.”

There were words crowding in my head, but they weren’t words to be spoken. They were stark characters, hundreds of letters making words that needed to be written down. So here I was, standing here in the middle of a sidewalk, Dee holding my hand tight enough to hurt, looking at me with too-bright eyes on the verge of tears, and here was me, my head stuffed full of words, and I couldn’t say anything.

But I had to. When I finally said something, I was surprised at how even my voice was and how coherent the sentences. It was like an omniscient, unbiased narrator had broken into my body and was releasing a public safety announcement. “I don’t know what to say, Dee. I don’t know what you want from me.”

Then, in a rush, I knew what to say, and the words were exploding in my head with my desire to say them:
but you hurt me. It hurts like hell. Standing here with you holding my hand is killing me. Are you using me? How could you do that? Don’t I mean any more to you than that? I’m just a damn placeholder, is that it?

I didn’t say them.

But Dee just stared at me like I had, her eyes so wide that I had to think hard to make sure I really hadn’t. She looked away, at the empty sidewalks around us, then at her feet, as if the sight of her Doc Martens gave her courage. “I did mean to tell you. That I really liked him. Luke.”