Death Spiral (4 page)

“Anj,” I say, slapping her desk, causing her to jump and her pencil to roll to the floor. “I think you're getting a little out of control on this thing. I mean it's a big deal, but not
that
big of a deal.”

Anj shoots me a look and doesn't answer. I notice, though, that she exchanges glances with Duncan, her ginger-haired boyfriend, here on the foreign exchange program from Scotland.

“Whatever,” I shrug, narrowing my eyes at Duncan. “It's your life. But I'm not learning to speak a new language in like ten days.”

***

The rest of the day passes quickly and soon it's seventh period. On Fridays, I have seventh free, so I pack my books to head home. I'm just outside the front door when Jesse nearly runs me over with his skateboard. His hair is doing a good job of covering his eyes, and I'm wondering if there shouldn't be some kind of law against skateboarding blind.

“Finally. There you are,” he says, sounding all annoyed like he's been waiting a really long time for some rendezvous we'd planned.

I burrow into my turtleneck and shiver. “Don't you have someplace to be? Like maybe a class?”

“Skipped,” he says, as the front door opens and Mr. Torley, the drama teacher, comes out with lead thespian Max Browner, who's unabashedly practicing his Romeo for an upcoming school production:
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

“On what, your like second day of school?” I say, resisting the urge to answer Romeo's declaration of love for Juliet—
Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore art thou Romeo?
“What will Doc say?”

“Doc won't know.”

I pull an apple from my bag. “Aren't you worried about failing?”

“Nope. I'm not going to fail.”

“How do you know?”

“I'll make up the work later. Always do.” He tilts his head toward a mountain of books lying on the steps, which I assume is the work to be made up later and then some. “Hey, I have an idea.” Jesse starts skateboarding again, rolling back and forth along the top step. “I'm going to the city tomorrow to hang. Want to come? I could show you some places.”

I bite into my apple. “I thought you were under house arrest.”

“Time off for good behavior. I get the day in Philly as long as I promise to get all my work done, be a good boy, and be back by ten.”

“And do you promise?” I tease as he glides past me. It's hard to talk to a moving target.

“Depends.”

“On what?”

He stops in front of me and raises his eyebrows. “On you. Are you going to be a good girl?”

I bat my eyelashes and clutch my hand to my chest, pretending to swoon. “Are you flirting with me?”

“Most definitely. So, is it a deal?”

I don't answer. I look toward a stand of tall poplar trees, their naked limbs crowded with a flock of noisy blackbirds. Tomorrow is Saturday. The day I'm going to see Melinda. I'm not about to take skater boy with me on that mission. He'll want the scoop on everything, like how I know Melinda. That means telling him about Mom, and that topic is off limits.

I take another bite of my apple, but it tastes mealy now. I toss the fruit to the frozen grass for the birds to peck, then close my eyes. Once you start getting personal, things change. Your heart opens and it hurts that much more when your friend disses you. Or you have to switch schools again. Or your mom can't make rent and you move to a place where you can't keep your new dog. Or someone gets sick. Walks out of your life. Dies.

Anj is the one person where my rule gets fuzzy. Last summer when Mom packed me off to Aunt T's, I cracked. Two weeks away from Mom usually spelled disaster when I got back. No big deal if you didn't mind coming home to the smell of puke, beer, and cigarettes, and the occasional furry, four-legged creature that you absolutely did not purchase at the pet store scurrying around in dark corners. I needed someone to talk to. Someone my age. So when I met Anj, I gave her the cheater notes on my life, the chapter overview, but I left out the details, the parts where I actually told her how I felt.

I open my eyes and look back at Jesse, who's now sitting on his skateboard, a math book open on his lap, talking to himself as he tries to solve a problem. I have to admit, there's something about his in-your-face, take-it-or-leave-it attitude that I like, and his looks don't suck either.

It wouldn't kill me to spend a couple hours with him in the morning. I'm going anyway. Might as well try and have some fun, and like Anj said, take my mind off stuff. We'll have a good time, and then I'll bail early and see Melinda on my own.

“Fine,” I say, “I'll go, but only for a while. I have something to do and I'm taking off early to do it, and don't even think about coming because you're not.”

“Sounds mysterious.” He jumps up and flashes a smile. “I like mysteries.”

I don't return the smile. Instead I say, “You'd better get home, Harvard boy. It looks like you have some work to do.”

“I'll pick you up at nine.”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” he agrees, still smiling.

Now would be the time for a “later” or a “see ya” or whatever lingo kids like him use, but Jesse doesn't move. He stands there like Mr. Pizza Delivery Guy waiting for a tip

“Is there a problem?” I say a bit too defensively.

“Just a small one.”

Great. I've known the kid one day and already there's a problem. Screw it. I don't need this. I don't need Jesse. I don't need anyone.

I'm about to leave when he says, “I don't know where you live.”

“What?”

“Where you live. You know—your address? It usually starts with a number and ends with a street name.”

“Oh,” I say, feeling myself blush and hating myself for it, but before I can change my mind, I spew Aunt T's address. Then for the second time I turn to leave.

“Wait!” Jesse calls after me. “Aren't you going to poke me in the eye?”

I turn back around. “Nah. We have plenty of time for that tomorrow.”

“Cool,” he says, grinning. “It's always good to have something to look forward to.”

Five

At nine Saturday morning, I've just slipped on my leather jacket when there's a knock on the front door, drumming to be more precise. I fling open the door and there's Jesse, hand extended, mid knock. “‘Brown Sugar.' Rolling Stones, '71,” he says.

“Huh?”

“The tune I was knocking. Recognize it? Classic stuff.” He doesn't wait for my answer. “Nice pad. Ready?”

I try to slip out and spare the introductions, but Aunt T is hovering behind me. “Not so fast,” she says, leading Jesse by the arm into the living room and giving him a serious once over, not even trying to hide the fact of her assessment.

I try to see Jesse through my aunt's eyes and imagine what she's thinking with his orange pom-pom ski hat, oversized flannel shirt, unlaced Converses, and torn jeans looking like he just robbed a Goodwill store. But there's something soft about Jesse, too, something honest in his indigo eyes that always seem to be looking behind what you're saying for something deeper. I'm sure Aunt T will see it.

Once she's completed her visual assessment, Aunt T begins the oral interrogation. Jesse answers each question with a polite yes or no ma'am. I guess he passes the test because Aunt T smiles at him, reminds me to keep my phone on in case she needs to talk to me, and we're off.

Jesse's car is a two-door hatchback in a nice shade of rust, and only the driver's side door opens.

“Nice car,” I say as I wriggle over the gearshift to the passenger seat.

“Thanks, I bought it last month.” He runs his hand over the steering wheel, completely missing my sarcasm. “Three hundred and sixty bucks. Best money I ever spent.”

Something sharp pokes my thigh. I scoot onto one butt cheek and try to brush whatever it is off the seat, but I realize it
is
the seat. Two springs are sticking out, angling straight into my hamstring.

“Doc tried to buy me off,” Jesse continues as I contort myself away from the rusty coils. “A new car if I made honor roll. Honor roll's easy, but I wasn't about to be bought off like a politician, so I got this baby instead.” He turns the key. There's a click and then nothing.

“Cool,” I say, trying to keep a straight face. “Good choice.”

He shoots me a look and turns the key again. Still nothing.

“Maybe we'd better take the train,” he says, when after the third try the engine shudders to life and the car hiccups down the road, barely clinging to life. “There's a ten o'clock that'll take us to Thirtieth. We can walk from there.”

I agree, and he turns from the freeway and heads toward the train station.

The CD player's not working and there weren't even iPods in the seventies, or whenever this car was built, so Jesse scans the radio as he drives. He settles on something with a lot of clanging dissonance, and I'm not allowed to talk while he listens. Not that I could talk even if I wanted to since Jesse seems to think music has to be played at ear-splitting decibels to be enjoyed.

When the song ends, I turn down the volume and kick my feet on the dash. “You get accepted a year early to Harvard yet?”

Jesse doesn't take his eyes off the road, and he doesn't answer. For a second I think he didn't hear my question and I'm about to ask again when he says, “I was thinking of becoming a hippie and starting a commune instead.” His voice is flat, and I'm not sure if he's kidding. I try to picture Jesse with long flowing hair, a bong, and a guitar, but then he laughs and says, “Let's not ruin the day and talk about college,” and he turns the music back up.

I push Jesse's hand off the dial and take over the radio, scanning stations until I come to one playing classic Dylan. It's not the whole retro-1960s-protest-counterculture thing that makes me choose this station. It's that Bob Dylan reminds me of Mom. I learned to judge Mom's condition by the CDs she played. Velvet Underground if she was high, but not too high. The Jesus and Mary Chain when she was totally gone. Joni Mitchell for nostalgia. Bob Dylan for just about everything else. Neither Jesse nor I talk as we listen to Bob wail the lyrics to “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

A lump forms in my throat as I lose myself in memory.
Dylan's on the radio. Mom's perched on the windowsill staring out at something only she can see. I stand at the edge of the room in Dora pajamas, even though I'm nine and too old for Dora. More than anything I want Mom to notice the hour and put me to bed. She doesn't notice. She's a million miles away. I back out of the room, my footsteps lost to the music, as if I hadn't been there at all.

That was the beginning of life in the heroin era.

I lean my head against the window and watch the haze of picket-fenced homes blur past, then the new community center, a city park where a pack of toddlers chases after a balloon, mothers at their heels.

How did it happen? I wonder for the zillionth time. Was it at a party? Did Mom just say what the hell and stick a needle in her arm? And then some addiction gene kicked in and that was it, she was hooked?

Not that life before heroin was exactly a picnic. Mom drank too much, ran around with too many men, and she wasn't a stranger to pills—but she was alive. Spontaneous. Passionate. She'd wake me up in the middle of a summer night and drag me to the edge of the Schuylkill River to walk the trails in the rain. She loved to sit by the bronze lion in Rittenhouse Square and people watch, or go to the art museum and admire the Picassos. She'd talk to me about big things that were wrong with the world, things I was too young to understand, and when those things got to be too much, she'd retreat into her head and seal herself off in silence. Then the drinking would begin, the men, the pills.

Too sensitive for this world
, that's what Aunt T once said. Bullshit. She could've done something with all that sensitivity. She could've worked to make the world better instead of throwing it all away.

A terrible emptiness settles into my chest, but I do what I always do when I feel this way—clamp off all emotion. Only when I'm sufficiently numb do I open my eyes.

Jesse, who's been lost to some music-induced trance, turns off the tunes.

“We're here. Ten minutes until our train.” He starts to tell me something else, but a glance in my direction and he blinks back a look of surprise. “You okay?”

“Sure,” I lie, digging up a smile. “Let's go.”

***

The train ride is uneventful, and by the time we're downtown at the Thirtieth Street station, my feelings don't exist at all. We cross the platform and cruise through the central hall gleaming with a marble floor, high ceilings, and bronze statues. The place screams with the sound of trains and announcements. People scurry around like worker ants. We pass the food court, and soon we're out on the traffic-clogged congestion of Market Street. We head east under an overpass and dart along the busy roads, passing bars and hotels, metallic skyscrapers, and boutiquey shops with windows of politically correct, racially diverse, fashionably anorexic mannequins. A couple places look kind of hip and I wouldn't mind stopping, but Jesse's on a serious mission and window shopping isn't on his agenda.

“Okay, I could use a rest,” I say after we've sprinted like a hundred blocks without stopping. “Is this the fun part, or is that coming later?”

“God, I'm such a lame ass,” Jesse says, hitting his forehead. “I wasn't thinking. I get so focused on what I'm doing sometimes—let's stop somewhere and get something to drink. Want to? This isn't where I hang, so I don't know what's around.”

We find a coffee shop, an artsy kind of place where the amateur paintings on the walls are for sale and red velvet couches take the place of chairs. I've just managed to arrange myself on an overly cushioned loveseat without spilling any coffee when Jesse snaps a picture of me with his phone.

“Sorry,” he says when I scowl. “I've been wanting to do that since I met you. You have a really interesting face.”

“Interesting?” I ask, unsure if this is a compliment.

“Yeah, well.” His cheeks go red, and he declares war on the napkin in his hand. “Pretty.”

Jesse turns the screen to me. For a second I like what I see. It's a different me, someone softer, but almost instantly I recoil, feeling anxious and far too exposed, like I just arrived at school in my underwear.

“Wow. Phone photography as art. Who would've thought?” I say, making light of my discomfort. “Have you invaded anyone else's privacy with that thing?”

“If you mean have I taken other photos, the answer is yes.” He leans in close to me and scrolls through what must be dozens of portraits.

“Hang on, who was that?” I ask when he passes a picture of a sexy blond girl with misty green eyes, her lips parted just so, as if blowing a kiss.

“Tia.”

“Who's Tia?”

He glances at the picture and sighs. “That's a complicated question.”

“Why? Is she an alien or something?”

“No,” he says, pocketing the phone.

I wait for him to elaborate. “Okay, I see. You're going to make this hard,” I say when he doesn't. “So, is she your girlfriend?”

He tears off a piece of pastry and stuffs it in his mouth. I listen to the French R&B song being pumped through the coffee shop speakers while he takes his time in deep, contemplative mastication.

“God, Jesse, you'd think I'd just asked you to explain quantum mechanics. Here's how it goes. You kiss. You go on dates. Maybe you have sex, I don't know. That makes her your girlfriend.” I slump into the couch and kick my feet onto the coffee table with a loud thud. I have no reason to brood. This isn't a date. Jesse and I are just friends. Isn't that my mantra, the “just friends” rule? But it bugs me that suddenly New Boy's gone all distant and weird on me. “So, ring any bells? Is she your girlfriend?”

He washes down his pastry with a swig of coffee and finally gets around to answering. “No, Tia's not my girlfriend, but she's the girl everybody expects me to date.” Then, just like that, he changes the subject. “What about you? You said you don't have a boyfriend. Why not?” He slips a hand onto my knee. “You're beautiful. Guys must ask you out all the time.”

A torrent of warmth rushes from my belly to my thighs, but my brain runs interference, and I brush away his hand before I lose myself to the feeling. No way am I going to snuggle up and get close to Jesse—or anyone for that matter. Closeness is just pain waiting to happen. Love and hurt. Opposite sides of the same coin. Like every dude I watched walk into Mom's life and out again. Sometimes it took days, sometimes weeks, but in the end every one of those so-called loves took what they wanted and left. No thanks. I'm doing just fine on my own.

“Well?” he asks again. “Why don't you have a boyfriend?”

I shrug. “I just don't.”

“Okay. Fine. How about this? Truth or dare. I go first.” Before I can even agree to play, he fires off the first question. “What are you afraid of?”

“Alien invasion,” I say, hoping to fill the achy void between desire and fear with a joke. “My turn. What do you want to do after you graduate?”

“Study photography.” He pulls his phone back out of his pocket and snaps another picture of me. “But unfortunately, Doc puts picture-taking in the same category as quilting or doing bonsai. Things you do for fun. Not for real. My turn again. Are you a virgin?”

I punch him in the shoulder. “Pass.”

“No way. Total violation of the rules. No passing.”

“Too bad. Personal information. Not telling.”

The stupidest night of my life plays its little movie in my head.
There's a boy I like. I think he likes me too. Mom's out, so I invite him over. After one night in the sack it turns out he likes Mary just as much as he likes me. And Jamie. And Chloe. And Elsbeth. And Marta.
I pull the plug to the projector. “What about you?”

He flashes a mischievous smile. “Depends how you define virgin.” I don't have a chance to get him to elaborate before he's on to the next question. “What do you want to be when you're older?”

“A vampire. What's the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to you?”

“I walked in on my parents having sex. What's a secret fantasy you have?”

“To be a weatherman on TV.”

I hide each of my answers behind a wall of humor, and soon we've drained our coffees and exhausted the well of truth or dare. We leave the coffee shop and go back to our journey through the city. The energy buzzing between us pushes away the other worries I have about the day. I walk next to Jesse not thinking of Melinda or the note or Mom, but of his hand grazing my hip, the smell of coffee on his breath, the blueness of his eyes.

We travel half the city as far as I can tell when all of a sudden we stop. Just like that. I look around and wonder what we're waiting for because it doesn't seem like we're exactly anywhere. I raise my eyebrows at Jesse as in, Uh, dude, we sprinted half of Philly for
this?
But Jesse doesn't seem to notice. I guess this park, this little slice of nowhere, is somewhere to Jesse, so I look around and check it out.

The first thing I notice besides the trash and chain link is a big graffitied wall and the words
Blessed are the cracked for they let in the light.
I don't know what it means exactly, but I like it. The cracked. The whacked. The funky. The free. The nonconformists. The music makers. The artists. This is Jesse's world—gritty, but alive. A different urban scene than the one I'm used to.

Then I start really looking around. At first, it's like everything's all black and white, but the more I look, the more it comes into color. I start to see that it's not about the place. It's about the people. A woman with a purple Mohawk and three eyebrow piercings sells paintings. A guy sitting on a bench rips out the blues on a beat up guitar. A wall, that anywhere else might be just a wall, has been turned into art—a skyscraper mural stretching halfway to the sky. I start to see why Jesse brought me here.