Know Not Why: A Novel (33 page)

“Behave yourself, kid,” she finally says, and
brushes her gloved hand briefly against my cheek.

I bust out a grin for her, teeth and all, so she
won’t worry. “You too, Mamacita.”

+

I meet up with Kristy and Cora in the high
school auditorium parking lot. The yak coat is back, marking the
end of Cora’s week of pink-clad penitence. Kristy’s bouncing up and
down. Presumably it’s to keep herself from freezing to death, but
with Kristy, you never know.

“Ooh, you brought the flowers! Arthur’s going to
like them so much! Do you think the show will be very long? I hope
they don’t wilt. They probably won’t wilt. And, okay, I know he
told us not to do this, but I couldn’t resist, so – look!”

She unfurls a bright red banner. It looks like
about half the contents in the store went into making it: it’s
shiny, it’s beady, it’s ribbony, it’s glitter-glue-tastic. In the
middle of a mad frenzy of stars and candy canes and musical notes
are the words ‘WE LOVE YOU, ARTHUR!’ As she unrolls it all the way,
sequins flurry off of it and drift down onto the pavement.

“Isn’t it the best?” Cora says, pleased. “He’s
gonna be so pissed off.”

“So pissed off,” I grin.

“We won’t hold it up too much,” Kristy says
firmly. “We’ll just show it to him afterwards. I think it’s nice!
He’ll get that it’s nice.” After a moment’s consideration, she
adds, “Maybe we should just tell him that Howie made it.”

“Yeah,” I say, “there’s no way he’s gonna
believe I made that.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Kristy agrees. She eyes the
banner fondly and giggles to herself, then starts to roll it back
up.

“Hey,” come some familiar tones, and we look
over to see Amber approaching us. Her sister April’s one of the
pre-teen superstars that’ll be rockin’ it onstage, so we agreed to
meet up here. She’s got her hands in her pockets and she looks a
little bit nervous. For some reason, that makes me nervous.

Said nervousness can be blamed for me greeting
her thus: “Ambie!”

“I will murder you for real, Howard,” she
replies. And lo, I am heartened. It’s like magic.

“You brought a sign?” she asks, gaping at
Kristy’s creation.

“Yep! We weren’t supposed to, but we couldn’t
help it. Howie told me your sister’s in it, too, so I thought I’d
…” She turns the poster around to reveal that on the back, it says,
‘AND APRIL.’

“Oh wow,” Amber says, taken aback.

“It just says ‘And April,’” Cora points out.
“That could mean anything.”

“No, she’ll think it’s cool,” Amber says. It’s
obvious she’s trying to be nice. “She pretty much loves anything
that sparkles.”

Kristy beams.

“Why do you have flowers?” Amber asks me as we
move inside.

“Kristy thought it’d be nice for Arthur.”

“Ooh, it’s Arthur’s lucky night. Is his
boyfriend coming?”

I got this,
I think.
It’s no
biggie,
I think.

Except by the time that I open my mouth to
answer, Kristy and Cora have already got it taken care of. Kind
of.

“They broke up, actually,” Cora says. “Arthur
doesn’t have a boyfriend now.”

“Nope!” Kristy agrees. “No boyfriend for
Arthur.”

“He’s a single, lonely little old man,” Cora
says.

“Well, not little,” Kristy says considerately.
“He’s tall.”

“He’s pretty tall,” Cora allows.

“Huh,” Amber says, looking confused.
Understandably so. “That’s … too bad.”

“Oh, I think he’s better off,” Kristy replies
quickly. “This way, he can find somebody who really appreciates
him! If there’s somebody like that out there somewhere. Which I
don’t know for sure, because I haven’t really met anybody who’d go
well with him. But I bet there is someone! Somewhere!” She very
carefully doesn’t look at me. In a way where she sneaks a glance
every couple of seconds and then forces her gaze up to the ceiling
to compensate.

“Or maybe not,” Cora throws in, “because
Arthur’s a pain in the ass.”

“That too!” Kristy chirps.

“Poor Arthur,” says Amber.

+

We sit in the front row. Arthur is gonna love
that. The room is full of people, most of them parent-shaped. All
the kids start filing onto the stage and sloppily making their way
onto the risers. There’s lots of stumbling and giggling and awkward
twitching – ah, to be young and devoid of stage presence. Mrs.
Fitzgerald, who’s been the music teacher ever since I was in
school, comes onstage wielding a baton. That strikes me as
irrationally optimistic, but I guess I’ll let it go. Last is
Arthur, who inconspicuously sits himself down at the piano in the
right corner of the stage. He’s wearing a red sweater. Kristy waves
furiously at him, beaming. She starts to reach for the poster; I
catch her wrist. She makes a sheepish face.

I grin up at Arthur. I can’t help it. He smiles
back down at me for a couple of seconds.

Then he turns back to his epic duties and starts
shuffling through the music on the piano. He gets everything in
order, Mrs. Fitzgerald waves a hand in his direction, the kids look
varying degrees of excited, nervous, and bored, and he starts
playing.

Cora shouts, “DO ME, PIANO MAN!”

And then a teacher swoops down and kicks us
out.

+

We stand out in the lobby and stare at each
other.

“Oh no,” Kristy says at last, miserably.
“Arthur’s going to be so disappointed.”

“Arthur’s going to fuck your shit up,” I tell
Cora. “Stickler boss style.”

“I didn’t mean to,” she protests, but her eyes
are bright and it’s easy to tell she’s trying real hard not to
laugh. “His red sweater made me do it. It was too much sexy. I
couldn’t take it.”

Kristy stares forlornly down at the rolled up
poster in her hand. It’s been trailing glitter all the way out.

I’m still holding the stupid bouquet of flowers.
Considering I’m surrounded by
three
girls who could do it
without looking like a huge tool, well, it just all seems kind of
mean.

“You want these?” I ask Amber.

“No,” she says.

“Figures,” I mumble.

“I can’t believe you got me in trouble,” Amber
says, disoriented. “You run with a dangerous crowd.”

I shake my head ruefully. “Don’t I know it.”

Cora stares at all of us. Kristy lets out a
pitiful little sigh.

“Okay,” she says abruptly. “Get ready to enter
the belly of the beast, kiddos.”

She grabs my arm and starts dragging. Kristy and
Amber trail after, although Amber kinda looks like she’s ruing
having ever sat with us in the first place. We go through a door
with a ‘DO NOT ENTER’ sign on it.

“But it says—” Kristy starts.

“If it’s not locked, then they don’t really mean
it,” Cora replies bluntly.

She leads us through a long, narrow hallway.
After a couple minutes, we reach another door. Cora pushes it open,
and we step out into darkness. I realize that we’re in one of the
wings.

“Welcome backstage, bitches,” she whispers
smugly.

Backstage passes at a middle school choir
concert. I hang with a crew who knows how to live.

We hover at the side of the stage. Arthur looks
up and catches sight of us at one point in between songs. He heaves
a slight sigh, like he can’t really bring himself to be surprised.
We wave back.

The concert goes on for about forty minutes. We
get to bear witness to a Charlie Brown Christmas medley, Frosty the
Snowman, Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer (Cora, Kristy, and Amber all
laugh at me during this one; even Arthur throws a smirk across the
stage), and, in one of those tragic but inevitable middle school
choir attempts to be hip, a snappy little ditty called We Text U A
Merry Xmas. That one even has dance moves, which mostly consist of
the kids miming texting. It’s grim stuff. There’s a background
track on that one, so Arthur just sits at the piano and looks
vaguely sickened. They finish off with a jaunty Joy to the World,
and then it’s the end.

There’s a lot of bustling around, and Mrs.
Fitzgerald makes an announcement about everybody congregating in
the cafeteria for a reception. Amidst all the confusion, Arthur
slips backstage. I head over to meet him.

“Now, was that really worth all the hype?” he
asks, beleaguered.

I grin at him. “Fuck yeah.”

“No,” he corrects, “would be the right
answer.”

“Do me, piano man.”

He smirks. “Get in line.”

“Wow. That badass red sweater sure makes you
sassy.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I just learned from
the—”

“Best?”

“Most annoying, I was going to say.”

“Yeah,” I say, smiling, “sure you were.”

“I was—”

“Arthuuurrr!” Kristy exclaims, and we step like
a foot apart. She and Cora are moseying over holding the poster in
all its sparkly glory. Amber, I see, has been relegated to flower
duty. Ha ha ha.

“Oh, Lord,” Arthur says.

“You’ve got quite the fan following, Arthur,”
Mrs. Fitzgerald says, coming over.

“I can’t dispute that,” Arthur replies,
smiling.

“Thank you again for doing this, you did such a
wonderful job,” Mrs. Fitzgerald praises. I feel a little surge of
pride. “Oh, look, we have some familiar faces here. Dennis?”

“Howie,” I correct, trying not to radiate
lameness.

“Oh, of course. The other twin. You never were
in band, were you?”

“I tried the tuba,” I reply oh so winningly.
“For … a week.”

“Right,” she says, clearly not remembering at
all. Which is probably the best for all of us. Including the tuba.
“Amber, how are you?”

“Not much with the flute playing these days,”
Amber replies, smiling. “But I’m well.”

She and Mrs. Fitzgerald spiral off into small
talk.

Meanwhile, Arthur shakes his head in mock
dismay. (Or at least, I think it’s mock.) “Band quitter.”

I stare at him. “It was the
tuba
.”

After a few seconds, he relents. “Yes, all
right.”

“Cora Caldwell,” Mrs. Fitzgerald says then,
registering her presence.

“Hiya, Mrs. F,” Cora replies, positively
dulcet-toned. “It’s been awhile.”

Mrs. Fitzgerald crosses her arms. “I can’t help
suspecting that you were responsible for that bout of enthusiastic
shouting right before the concert.”

“I’m pretty sure that was the people behind us,”
Cora says smoothly.

“You mean Mr. and Mrs. Holland and their new
baby?”

“Kids say the darndest things, right?”

And
that
is how we get wrangled into
moving every damn chair, instrument, speaker, and prop off the
stage and downstairs.

+

Somehow, it becomes just me, Kristy, and Amber.
Arthur does one round before Mrs. Fitzgerald whisks him away to the
reception with her. Cora gets hungry and sneaks off to it, because
she is the devil’s tiny much-pierced mistress.

The auditorium’s deserted by the time we finish.
That’s not exactly surprising. The reception has cookies. The
auditorium has heavy lifting. You do the math.

We’re about to finally set off, triumphant and
maybe a little wheezy. Achy. Okay, fine, maybe I’m the one who’s
wheezy and achy. Since when are dainty females so tough, huh?

“Wait,” Kristy says, her eyes drifting back to
the stage. “What about him?”

I follow her gaze to see … oh, Christ. It’s this
huge, hideous five-foot-tall statue of a Christmas elf. It’s got
big, vacant elf eyes and a dopey elf grin. A jaunty little elf cap.
It’s frozen mid-skip. It’s just there in the corner of the stage,
hangin’ out.

It stares at us. Mocking us.

“I don’t think it really matters,” I say.

“I don’t know,” Amber says. “Mrs. F seemed
pretty upset.”

“Yeah, well, Mrs. F can go missus eff herself,
because I—”

But I can’t even tack a quippy ending onto the
sentence, because Kristy and Amber are already off to move the
stupid thing. And, well, it’s huge. Clearly not a two-lady
operation.

Curse my man-being.

We fight the elf into the prop elevator. It is
maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever have to do. There’s swearing,
there’s clumsiness, there’s feet nearly being crushed into fine
powder. Finally, we get him in there and we get the elevator shut.
I press the button and sink down onto the floor as we start moving.
Just, ya know. Quick rest.

And then, out of nowhere, there’s this horrible
grinding sound and a lurch that shakes the whole elevator. Elfy
McElferson crashes to the floor and misses me by like six
inches.

“FUCK!”

Then I realize we’re not moving anymore.

Amber groans. “Are you kidding me?”

I get up, my legs kinda shaky. I press the
button. Nothing. I press it about eight more times just to make
sure.

We are so not moving.

“Oh, you guys,” Kristy says, with boundless
optimism, “we’re not
trapped
.”

+

We’re trapped.

+

“Well, let’s just call somebody,” Amber says
reasonably.

“Yeah!” I say, relieved. This girl, there’s a
reason she’s like my own personal genius. “Yeah, let’s.”

We all stare at each other. For a really long
time.

“My phone’s in my purse,” Kristy finally
says.

“Mine too,” Amber says.

“Mine’s in my coat,” I contribute.

Not a great turn of events, considering all
three of those things just so happen to be tossed on a chair
backstage.

“We could call the old fashioned way,” I finally
say. “Like, shout. Someone’s gotta be around.”

“Yeah, okay!”

So we shout.

Nobody’s around.

+

“It’s totally okay, you guys! Someone’ll realize
we’re gone soon. Like Arthur. There’s noooo way Arthur won’t come
looking for us. I bet he’ll even bring us some cookies and punch
from the reception! It’s okay. It’s good.”

+

It is apparently the longest reception of all
time. Arthur is dead to me.