But she had just made her own luck. She had eliminated the source of her problems. There was no baby to keep Derek tied to his wife. They could be together, and she didn’t have to worry about losing him. It never occurred to her, even as she drove back to Nana’s with blood covering her steering wheel and the pearly white of her necklace, that she had just lost herself.
Most Things Haven’t Worked Out
by William Boyle
Holly Springs
Back when I was fifteen there wasn’t much Mississippi outside Holly Springs. I’d never hopped a train or even met someone from the coast. I’d been to a football game in Oxford with Phael once and to a doctor in Olive Branch when a roach got stuck in my ear. I stayed with Grandma Oliver because my mom was dead and so was my dad, though I never knew him. He was from Memphis and that was where he died. Shot by cops while robbing a liquor store. That was the story anyway. My mom smoked too much and got lung cancer and it spread everywhere and she went fast.
Grandma Oliver was taller than me and carried around an oxygen tank and smoked Pyramids and sometimes wore a Harley-Davidson bandanna across her forehead. I didn’t get along great with her or her husband, who wasn’t my real grandfather. His name was Jefferson, and he was Grandma Oliver’s third husband. Her first one had died of a heart attack when he was thirty-two. Her second one, my real grandfather, had killed himself in the bathroom with a razor. You could still see darkness on the tiles around the tub. All the rooms at Grandma Oliver’s had something like that. If it wasn’t blood, it was a ghost feeling. The house was painted traffic-cone orange and it glowed like an electric burner. Kids made fun of me for that orange. When I wasn’t in school, and even on some days when I was supposed to be in school, I spent all my time at the library. In the summer, I was at the library all day. I read books and watched a lot of movies. They had a little booth with a TV and headphones and you could watch a movie if no one was waiting. No one was ever waiting. Most people only came for the computers.
One day this lady came in and put on a presentation. It was right as I was getting to the naked part of The Terminator. The lady who did the presentation was called Miss Mary. She had this red curly hair and these freckles. She was maybe twenty-three or twenty-four. Her presentation was on birds. I saw it was going on out of the corner of my eye at first, but then I went over. Only two other kids were there for the presentation, and they were much younger than me. Miss Mary stopped what she was doing and smiled at me. “Welcome,” she said. “What’s your name?”
I told her it was Jalen.
“Jalen, you like birds?”
“I guess. Crows. Hummingbirds too. I’ve been to that Hummingbird Festival.”
“That’s where I work now, the place that holds the festival. The Audubon Center. I just moved here from New York.”
I nodded and sat down on the floor and crossed my legs. I’d seen New York in movies. I wanted to live there. I wasn’t thinking that New York was a big state. I was just thinking that she was from the city and that she rode in taxis and ate hot dogs on the street with a napkin balanced on her palm and that she took elevators up to the tops of tall buildings. I wanted to ask her why Mississippi, but she started showing us pictures of other birds. She leaned over, and I could see down her shirt. All that roundness. I wanted to kiss her freckles.
When she was done with the presentation and packing up, I asked her if I could help and she let me carry her box of binders out to the parking lot. Her car was yellow, the windshield webby with shatter. She had a red scrunchie on the rearview mirror and Obama bumper stickers. She thanked me for carrying the box and put it in the trunk. “It was nice meeting you,” she said. “Someday you should come out to Audubon and I’ll show you around. When the festival’s not going on out there, it’s so peaceful. We can watch the hummingbirds in the garden behind the Davis House. And I’ll take you out on the Gator.”
“Can we do that tomorrow?” I asked.
She didn’t even hesitate. “Absolutely,” she said. I was so glad to know that she’d meant it, that she hadn’t just been saying it. I was so used to people just saying things.
“What time should I come there?”
“How’s ten sound?”
I nodded. “Good. You miss New York?”
“I like it here.”
“Will you stay?”
“I hope so.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, and I turned back to the library.
Miss Mary offered me a ride, but I told her I lived right up the block even though I lived almost two miles down Route 7 and had to walk all the way on the shoulder and would’ve killed for a ride. I just didn’t want her to see Grandma Oliver’s house. And Jefferson was always sitting out on the porch with a cooler of Bud and some scratch-offs. I didn’t want her to see that either.
Holly Springs was full of sirens. Phael’s great-uncle had been shot in his car the week before right off the square downtown and the cops seemed to be running around even more than usual. I walked home thinking about Miss Mary. I wondered where she stayed. I wondered what kind of food she ate. I pictured her reading at night in gym shorts with no top on.
Grandma Oliver was on me right when I walked in the door. She wanted me to mow the lawn. I wanted to slam her head through the kitchen window. The way she spoke to me. Like I was a dumb slobbering dog. She didn’t even know me. Didn’t know I liked books and movies. I didn’t say anything. Just took off my shirt and went out and pushed the mower around for two hours. I drank from the spigot near the old garden shed and cars honked as they passed on the road, not because they knew us, but because the orange of the house made people want to honk at it. I was sick of horns.
I ate a bologna sandwich with pickles when I was done and then went into my room and read a library copy of Books of Blood until I could feel my eyes getting weaker. I couldn’t wait to be out at Audubon with Miss Mary. I wanted sleep to pass without actually having to sleep. I wanted the future.
The walk to Audubon was twice as long as the walk to the library. I had to go way out on 7 past Rust College and then make a left on 311. It was so hot the sweat had thickened all over me. I was wearing my red basketball shorts and a tank top, but I couldn’t even feel the air on my skin. My socks squished in my sneakers. Across from Rust was an abandoned building. I stopped to drink a Great Value citrus soda I’d brought with me. I wiped my head with the back of my hand. A cop buzzed by with his windows open and gave me a long look from behind his dickhead sunglasses. I didn’t wave. I knew that waving was the wrong thing. Phael taught me that. He told me they were just waiting for an excuse to shoot me.
The second part of the walk was the worst because the shoulder shriveled up on 311. Cars and trucks swerved out over the double-yellows to avoid me. Sweat stung my eyes. I’d finished my soda and hadn’t brought any water. My lips stuck to my teeth.
When I finally made it to Audubon, it was almost eleven and Miss Mary was waiting outside the visitor’s center for me. “You walk all this way?” she said.
I nodded.
“You should’ve told me you needed a ride. Come in and have some water.”
She brought me inside and put ice in a plastic cup from Corky’s and filled it to the edge with tap water. I took it and drank half in one long slurp. Some of the water spilled out of the side of my mouth and down the front of my shirt. “I’m sorry,” I said.