Authors: Heidi Ayarbe
I slip my hand in Josh’s. We’ve taken off our shoes. He pulls me close and we sway with the music. I lean my head against his chest and inhale the pine-fresh scent. He’s wearing a little cologne today. Not too much. Undertones of cedar and nutmeg. He pulls me closer and I listen to the rhythmic thudding of his heart instead of the whispers of the house.
That’s why I don’t hear the footsteps in the hallway, the turn of a doorknob, the click of the hammer of a gun being cocked.
“DON’T MOVE.” HER FRAIL
arms hold the gun up, pointing at me.
Obviously.
I’m an easier target.
Every sense of mine is on hyperdrive. I smell Josh’s cedar-nutmeg cologne, now becoming sour with sweat. I smell dusty book covers and moldy paper, peach-scented cream and hair spray.
Outside the wind picks up. The house wheezes with the howl of the wind; windows chatter; shingles screech as they’re being ripped off the roof. This is the kind of house I love, and for a moment it was mine. It’s the kind of home that screams back at the weather—comes to life with anger and defiance. Branches from a tree claw across the siding. Thick desert raindrops pound at the windows.
I hear shrieking now—all sounds coming from the old woman’s mouth. “I know who you are, you little bastards!”
“Please,” Josh says, his voice wavering. “Please don’t shoot.”
“You sit down. You don’t move. I’m calling the police.” She pauses, staring at Josh. Her cloudy blue eyes squint from behind thick glasses. “Are you that kid? That Ellison kid? Is that who you are?”
Josh’s hands tremble.
“You little shit—eating dinner at my house, asking for a grand tour. Shame on you.” She looks down at the empty Bible. Her voice trembles. “Shame on you. I don’t ever forget a voice.”
She moves toward the phone on the desk, picking it up from its cradle with quaking hands. Just as she looks down to dial, Josh plows into her, knocking her against the bookshelves behind the desk. An avalanche of two-hundred-year-old encyclopedias rains down on them. Josh stands up, knocking his forehead on a shelf.
“Oh my God,” I say. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Is she okay?”
Her crumpled body lies in a heap on the floor like a biology classroom skeleton. I push books aside and lean my head against her chest—rattling with uneven breaths.
“Oh my God.”
A thick pool of blood forms below her head from where she bashed it against the corner of a sticking-out world almanac. Josh brings me a towel from the bathroom, and we prop her head up on a pillow on a pile of ice.
“What else do we do?” I ask.
A welt runs across Josh’s forehead. He sits across from me. “Does she need CPR? Oh God. I panicked. She knew who I was. She was dialing nine-one-one. Like what was I supposed to do?”
“We’ve gotta go. Call for help. Like now.” I take out my phone.
“Not from that. They’ll trace you. A pay phone.”
We run through the house holding our shoes in our hands, slipping back through the laundry window, out onto the street. Rain pelts my skin as if it were trying to burrow into me, keeping me in a state of forever cold. We splash through puddles, bare feet striking the gravel outside. A thick piece of broken glass cuts into the sole of my foot.
We drive to the Old Washoe Station to call 911. Rain drizzles down in a misty sheet now, the thick drops replaced by thousands of tiny spatters, like walking through a cloud.
“Please, please. Please get to her as soon as you can. She’s bleeding. A lot.” I think I’m screaming. I lean my head against the thick glass of the booth.
“Can you repeat that, ma’am?”
“She’s hurt. Really bad, okay?” I give her the address again.
“May I ask who’s calling?” the operator asks.
“Babylonia,” I whisper, and hang up the phone, tears spilling down my cheeks.
Josh buys towels at Walmart. We huddle, shivering in his car, the heat cranked up to ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit. He wraps my foot in gauze. “What have we done?” he asks. “What have we done?”
How do you fix the unfixable?
JOSH LEAVES ME AT HOME
just before midnight. Lillian has fallen asleep on the recliner. I put the afghan on her and watch her sleep for a while. Her head leans to the side, jaw slack.
She actually waited up for me.
Then I limp to my room and spend the night praying for a call, a text, a smoke signal, carrier pigeon, Morse code tap on the window—
anything
from Josh.
Sunday passes.
No call.
We lose.
We lose
. I watch the game on mute, not able to handle the squeaky basketball shoes, whistles, and pound of the ball. U-Dub wins. By three points. Total: 179.
We lose the over-under and the spread. We lose.
Vaporized hope.
Five thousand dollars.
Gone.
And Josh hasn’t called. Leonard has. Three times.
Monday is Senior Ditch Day. So I get up to go to school. I don’t know where else to go. I’m not the only lame senior here. Seth is here along with a handful of others. Mrs. Brooks brings us doughnuts, coffee, juice, and fruit.
There are only ten of us in class. No Josh. So I kind of have to participate. Even Moch is here. “What are you doing here?” I ask.
“Mike.” Moch smiles. “I can ditch
any day
.”
Mrs. B laughs. “Yeah. And one more ditch, Mr. Mendez, and you won’t be graduating. Understood?”
Moch nods. “Understood.”
I feel like Mrs. B and Moch have some kind of student-teacher mentor thing going on. Maybe she’s his lifeline.
Mine is Babylonia.
Was.
Mrs. B asks the class about the dance.
“It was fun,” I say, trying to pass my nonenthusiasm off on being exhausted, not the fact that I’m probably going to prison for the rest of my life.
“You looked really pretty,” Seth says. “You’ve been looking different lately. I guess. I dunno.”
It’s called the Home Invasion Diet. Steal from people and watch the pounds slip away.
“Thanks,” I say, feeling my cheeks get hot. “So did Jeanne. She’s nice.”
“Yeah. When she gets away from the dragon lair for more than an hour at a time. I kept expecting her to turn into a pumpkin.”
We all laugh.
We talk about the dance as if it were important—some kind of indispensable rite of passage watching the most popular kids in our class wear shiny, plastic crowns.
I almost killed a woman on Saturday, so this conversation feels pretty empty.
“Read the news?” Mrs. Brooks hands us the
Nevada Appeal
front page story.
Babylonia Leaves Local Philanthropist in Coma
“Maybe she’s like the others,” Javier says. “What do they say? Twenty-first-century slave owners?”
“Maybe,” Mrs. B says. “But who will know if she dies? She’ll never get a chance to tell her side. You want to risk someone’s life for a
maybe
.”
Mrs. B’s words are like razors, slicing across my abdomen, my chest; every part of my body stings with the truth.
We could be wrong.
A sick feeling floods me. A bad feeling.
We were wrong. I think we were wrong.
Moch passes the paper back. Mrs. B has brought in a few for all of us to look at. I stare at the headline, skimming the article. The words blur, then come into sharp focus again. Maybe, maybe if I can change the words, it won’t have happened.
Maybe.
“
PB & J
didn’t get that scoop.” Seth shows the front page with Tarzan and Jane caricatures, the headline:
Hawaii According to CHS
The class laughs.
Mrs. B says that Police Chief Dominguez got the name of every kid at the dance, probably to narrow down the suspect pool.
“Great,” Moch says. “I’m officially a suspect because I choose to abstain from school gatherings where people dress up like retired old people in Florida.
Mierda
.”
“Language, Mocho.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m with you then, Mocho,” Catalina says. “I wasn’t there, either. Should we just turn ourselves in now?”
Moch smiles at Catalina. “Nah. Let’s let them sweat it out for a bit. Make them work to find us.”
“Deal.”
The class talks, eats, does what normal classes do. Mrs. B tells about the time she was in the Peace Corps. She talks about teaching English all over the world until she settled back into Carson City.
I stare at the headline. The hollowed-out-pit feeling in my stomach fills with fire.
Was the dance just an alibi? Maybe I’m just an alibi. For Josh. Nothing more.
At lunch, Josh is waiting for me in the hallway outside of the library. “Roast beef.” He holds a Schat’s Bakery bag up. “Coke. Homemade pecan cinnamon roll.”
I swallow down the huge knot that’s worked its way from my stomach up my esophagus, filling my mouth with anger and sadness and confusion and disappointment, wondering if every horrible human feeling known to man has to be experienced in some twisted rite of passage and all at the same time. I’m an emotional time bomb.
The welt on Josh’s head has gone down and is now a bluish-green color. “Please,” Josh says. “I could use some company.”
I sit next to him. His eyes are red, dark circles underneath. The smell of the food makes me feel nauseous, so I just sip on the Coke. We can give the food to some poor kid who’s been exposed to the cafeteria food all year.
“I stayed at the hospital all night and yesterday,” Josh says.
I nod.
“Just outside. It’s not like I could do anything, go inside or anything. But I just needed to be there.”
“You didn’t mean—” I start to say. “It was an accident.”
“She could die, Mike. And I’d be the one who killed her.”
“She’s not gonna die.”
“So when she wakes up—”
“We’ll figure it out when she wakes up. Okay? She’s. Not. Going. To. Die.” This has to be a fact now. No odds or probabilities or looking back. She. Will. Live.
We have placed our bets.
“I need the money,” I say.
Josh peers over the rim of his Coke can. “I left it in an envelope, in their mailbox. I didn’t know what else to do. I just don’t know how to make things right.”
Open heart, insert knife.
A white-hot feeling of pain seizes me.
“But you
can’t
just do that. You have to tell me about that kind of stuff. Call me. Text me. Send me an email. It’s as simple as saying, ‘Hey, Mike, by the way, I’m giving five thousand two hundred and twenty-three dollars away.’” It feels like somebody’s wrapped his fingers around my trachea, closing in on it tight.
“Would you lower your voice?” Josh says. “Plus what else were we going to do with it?” Josh asks.
“We lost,” I say, lowering my voice. “We lost the bets.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand.”
“
Five thousand?
What the—are you out of your mind?” Josh paces back and forth.
“Out of my mind?
Out of my mind?
I’m not the one throwing money at a family to get over my Daddy Warbucks guilt. Guess what? Mrs. Mendez
will never come back
. And your family—”
“My family what?” Josh’s scar is white-hot. His eyes narrow. “What?”
Every word that comes to mind is poison. I clench my jaw.
Josh seethes, speaking in a forced whisper. “You just do it so you can be seen.” He holds his hands up, doing obnoxious quotation marks when he says
seen
. “You work so hard to make sure everybody knows you’re above everybody else, but at the end of the day, you just want to fit in. Guess what, Mike.” Hearing
Mike
rattles me. “You can’t buy yourself friends or respect. Your three-hundred-dollar boots don’t make a difference to anybody out there.
Anybody
.”
The ugly words bounce off the walls, hitting me over and over again. It feels like I’ve been punched so hard I can’t breathe.
I pull my knees to my chest and cradle my head against them. I take off my glasses and press on my lids, seeing the crackle of light behind them.
“Okay, Trust Fund. I don’t suppose you have five grand lying around?” I’m really hoping Josh is doing this for the game of it and actually can access thousands of dollars from some secret bank account set aside for his yacht when he turns eighteen.
He glares at me and shakes his head.
“I’ll take care of it.” I stand up, throwing my backpack over my shoulder, trying to keep the nettles out of my heart. Josh watches me in silence. I feel like I’ve been pricked by a pin and deflated, become a two-dimensional paper doll, creased and folded, ready to be thrown in the trash.
The bell rings.
He doesn’t move.
I turn my back and walk away.
On my own. Better this way.
LEONARD HAS LEFT FOUR
messages. I call him. “I’ll get the money for you. By tonight. Late.” And hang up before he has a chance to go into some kind of
Sopranos
speech. I’ve checked my accounts. I have to pay out nearly five hundred dollars this week to my winners. Five hundred I would’ve had, had I not bet it all.
One basket.
One basket
and we’d be fine. We wouldn’t be fighting. We’d be collecting almost four thousand dollars from Leonard and would shrug off the botched over-under bet. ONE SHOT. Two points. Luis’s family would have money. Moch’s family would have money. Brain Food, Planned Parenthood, the Boys and Girls Club . . .
Five thousand five hundred dollars.
Damn damn damn stupidstupidstupidstupid
.
Lillian’s at the clinic. Outside, it’s a regular spring afternoon. Kids are playing with a flat soccer ball that thuds when it gets kicked and wobbles just a few feet. The neighbors are cleaning out their yards, getting ready for spring planting. Five thousand five hundred dollars.