Somewhere on the barren state highway, he asked Kaylyn if she was okay.
She didn’t answer for a moment, kept staring at the gray rotten-tooth fields on her side of the road. “I guess I’m fine. People keep asking me that, but what do you say?”
“Uh: ‘I’m awful, my dad’s dead, so get fucked and eat a dozen dicks’?” Bill suggested.
Joy swelled when the smile cracked her face and spread.
Mr. Lynn had long resisted moving his mother out of her home in Dover, but now he was gone. Barrett needed a lot of help, the family needed money, and Grandma Lynn would have to pitch in by going to decay in the Eastern Star Retirement Home in New Canaan. Replete with those fabricy, doilyed, glass figuriney touches of an elderly woman, the small home made Bill unbearably sad. Kay didn’t know what her grandma needed exactly, so she scooped the entire medicine cabinet into a brown paper bag. Then a thunderstorm rolled in. Lightning split the sky and a downpour turned the street outside to a molten river. They found peach schnapps and gin in a cabinet. They talked about death, about how Bill didn’t believe in God and never would. “I’ve been waiting,” she admitted. “It’s like I’ve been waiting forever to feel it, but I still don’t.” And he kissed her. She tried to push him away, but he wouldn’t let her. “Don’t,” she said, but only once. The storm lasted the rest of the day and night. It was still raging when he pulled her hair and snapped her head back. Then she lay with her legs clutching his torso, and they listened to the rain together. The wipers were barely capable of peeling the deluge from the windshield on the drive back.
You don’t know the lengths you’ll go to, Bill figured. The people you’d risk hurting. He’d been infatuated with her for years, and of course Lisa had been his consolation prize. Of course, he’d long resented Rick for pinning Kaylyn to his hip. They had a certain Ohio symmetry Bill could never mimic. They were sweethearts who were born in this town and believed in it, believed they were fated to raise a family here and cheer for all the Jaguar teams as long as civilization stayed standing. Bill was a transplant, a New Yorker who accidentally grew up in this struggling shitburgh, who just happened to fall for its native daughter. As he and Kaylyn began meeting more often, driving halfway to Akron just to figure out a place to get on with it, he began to understand what an enigma she was to him, a fantasy he filled up even as he swore she was too clever, too self-aware for a sincerity-generating cliché like Rick. He wasn’t sure what her inner monologue was like, what she thought about, what she cared about. He suspected she carried more pain than anyone he’d ever known. He felt like she pursued their clandestine affair because when they were together, he could relieve that damage, maybe not take it out of her but at least tamp it down for a time.
That winter of senior year, in the park, after a frigid football game against their conference rival, she stretched one long leg to the passenger seat and, using nothing but her big toe, picked up her bra and shirt. Bill said, “I want to see you again. Soon.”
She curled her leg in and collected her clothing. “You don’t know a thing about what you want.” Her eyes evaded his. “None of us do.”
She found a place within him for all of time. Through the years, the sound of the rain against her grandmother’s house echoed in his head, became a minor chord. A song in the skin.
They ran.
The lights kept strobing—blue-red-blue-red-blue-red—washing over the football field in this hallucinatory diurnal carnival, and sure, Bill felt panic, he felt the terror of the tape jerking his torso flesh, knowing there was no way to get his shirt off, let alone rip the package from his person (and for real, how evil were the contents?). Yet also, overwhelming the panic, he had this glee, like: Finally, we’re having some fucking fun!
On the other side of the field, he and Dakota snatched the chain link. The metal bit into each finger in that bone-pressure way as he scrambled up over the top. Then they were both at a dead sprint through the ghostly parking lot where he’d once died in a blaze of paintball rounds. As they approached the long, low structure of the high school, the brick and mortar ganglion of their youth, the ultimate haunted house, Bill saw the pipe that made the roof accessible.
“Roof,” he huffed without further explanation. And then mostly to himself, “Unless they moved the dumpster.” He and Harrington used to climb to the school’s roof in the summer and smoke joints until they didn’t know their own names. He quickly assessed that the Powers That Will still kept the dumpster in its position next to the pipe.
“Looks like they never wizened up,” said Dakota.
“Authority never does.”
They quickly pushed the dumpster over so that it was directly under the pipe. The lights of the police cruiser were still distant because it had to drive the long side of the “L” around the football field, but this Barney Fife wasn’t fucking around. The patrol car turned down the drive that led to the school, and he was hauling, maybe fifty or sixty in a twenty mph zone. They only had to climb onto the dumpster and make a small jump to grab hold.
He reached the roof, pulled himself over the top. His whiskey remained miraculously tucked into the back pocket of his jeans and now, as he fell to his butt, he rewarded himself with a long, fiery pull. He was having a hard time staying drunk with all this activity. Dakota followed, wallet chain clattering Jacob Marley–style, and they huddled in hiding where he and Harrington had first smoked weed amid the vents and gutters of the gritty black surface, approximately above the southern end of the basketball court where he’d honed his legend.
Back to the wall, Bill positioned himself so the package didn’t dig into his back. They waited and watched the strobing lights chase the sky as the cruiser slowed. The spotlight studied the brick, the bushes, the rows of trees that separated the school from a residential neighborhood. Of course, it occurred to him it could very well be Marty Brinklan giving chase, but he was in no mood to find out. Then the spotlight’s glare angled over their heads. Dakota heaved breath beside him. Bill marveled that he was actually in pretty good shape, his lungs buoyant hot-air balloons.
When the spotlight went searching elsewhere and the lights dwindled to the other side of the school, Bill peeked his head up and looked out over the town. Flecked with radiance, it cupped light in its palm.
“We wait here a minute. He might circle back or call another patrol over.” Dakota shuddered his dreadlocks out of his eyes. He too had not let go of his whiskey. “You gotta be careful with these NCPD psychos. Man, they will fuck you up for nothing. ’Member that Ostrowski kid? He’s a cop now. Anybody who likes fucking up people when they’re young, you can bet they’ll end up military or police. You wanna talk ’bout The Murder That Never Was? I’ll tell you, I’d look at them first.”
“What’s that mean?” Genuinely curious.