Living with Jackie Chan

When Caleb, Dave, and I pull up to my uncle’s apartment building, a wave of sickness rolls up my throat and threatens to spew across Caleb’s dashboard. I will it back down. Breathe. The car idles at the curb, waiting for me to get out. Caleb leans forward and peers up at the building as if it’s the first time he’s seen one taller than four stories.

“Which floor does he live on?” he finally asks.

“Second,” I say.

We’re quiet for a while, but I imagine what we’re each thinking.

Caleb:
You’re making a big mistake, man. You can’t run away from your problems. They always know where you are.

Dave:
This sucks. Who am I going to party with now? Damn, I’m hungry.

Me:
What if Caleb’s right
?

“Guess I better get this over with, huh?” I finally say.

Dave reaches forward from the backseat and squeezes my shoulder. “It’s not too late to turn around,” he says. “You can come back with us.”

“Just say the word,” Caleb agrees.

I shake my head before they can start trying to change my mind and tell me how things wouldn’t be that bad if I stayed home. How our school is so big, it’s easy to avoid people you don’t want to see.

I can’t really tell them that I don’t want to see anyone. As bad as it sounds, I don’t even want to see them, even though they are my best friends.

Everyone reminds me of me. Of who I was —
am.
Don’t want to be.

“This sucks,” Dave says. He is a master of the obvious. “We were supposed to graduate together, man.”

Caleb turns around to give him a look, like,
Shut up, you idiot.
But Dave’s right. We were supposed to leave our sorry excuse of a town together. No one was supposed to bail early.

Only, that was before.

When I start to open the door, one end of the armrest on the passenger door slips down. It’s duct-taped together from when I broke it last winter. The day my life changed forever.

“Sorry I never got around to fixing that,” I tell Caleb. “If you bring the car to my dad’s shop, he’ll take care of it.”

“No worries,” Caleb says.

We all sit there for a few more seconds.

“I’m serious, dude. You don’t have to do this,” Dave says.

But I do.

“OK, boys, it’s been real,” I say, opening the door. They both get out, and we pull my stuff from the back. We stand behind the car in our usual circle. Caleb holds out his hand to shake. As I reach for it, Dave puts his arms around the two of us and pulls us toward him into an awkward group hug. Despite my embarrassment, my throat hurts from trying not to cry like a wuss. I swallow the lump down and give Dave a punch in the arm, for old time’s sake. Goofy as Dave is, and as annoyingly perfect as Caleb can be, I know I’m going to miss these bozos. A lot.

They get back in the car and pull onto the street. Dave hangs out the passenger window, waving. I give them a salute, like we used to do when we were kids. As they turn the corner, Caleb honks the horn a few times. Then they make the turn and disappear.

My uncle’s apartment building towers over me. I stand here, looking at it. At my new life. No more people staring at me when I walk down the hall. No more whispers behind my back. No one knows me here. No one knows what happened. What I did. I just have to get through the year, get into college someplace far away, and leave for good.

Before I go in, I think about calling my parents to let them know I got here OK, like I promised. But I can’t bring myself to pull out my phone.

My dad volunteered to take me and my stuff here in his van. But I was like, “What stuff?” Because honestly, I don’t own much. So he suggested taking me out for our last meal at least. But going out with my dad means going to the pub on the corner, sitting at the bar, and staring at the TV while I eat and he gets wasted, which is the same as being at home, so why bother?

My mom said she wanted to take me but she couldn’t get the time off from work, which seems like a pretty lame excuse.

So we said good-bye at home. But it’s not worth describing. Saying good-bye to them was like saying good-bye to some people who used to know me when I was a little kid. Like saying good-bye to zombies. Good-bye to a memory. Good-bye to dust. The real good-bye happened a long, long time ago.

Instead of calling them, I hike my duffel bag over my shoulder and open the door.

In the entryway, it’s hot and airless. I scan the list of names on the panel and find number twelve and my last name. Someone’s put a Hello Kitty sticker next to it. I hold my finger down on the buzzer and wait to get clicked in.

“You’re here!” Larry’s voice on the intercom amplifies the tiny entryway. The inner door clicks, and I push it open. When I step inside, I’m overwhelmed by the smell of carpet cleaner. I start for the stairs just as a door clicks open and a familiar voice calls, “Sammy?”

A head peers over the railing above.

My uncle grins down at me. He doesn’t have a shirt on. “Sam, my man!” he yells.

Really?

I look up and give him a smile.

“Get up here!” He actually jumps up and down.

When I reach the second-floor landing, he bounds over to me and gives me a huge bear hug. His hair is wet and he stinks of recently applied deodorant, which he probably just rubbed all over me. I step away from him, and he checks me out from top to bottom.

“Samurai Sam! I didn’t expect you to be taller than me.”

“Guess it’s been a while,” I say.
And please tell me you’re not going to call me that all the time.

Larry has called me Sam since I was eight and spent the summer with him while my parents went on my dad’s last “tour” with his band. Larry didn’t really know what the hell to do with me, so we played this online ninja game called Samurai Sam practically the whole time. I was so good at it, Larry decided to change my name.

“You’re so
big,
” he says, shaking his head like I’m some kind of miracle. “When did you get so big?”

How is someone supposed to answer a question like that?

“How long’s it been, anyway? Two years? Jeez. How did that happen?”

I don’t tell him what he already knows. That my parents are in a non-marriage and would never survive the four-hour drive to his place, being stuck in the same car together that long. And I don’t remind him that he probably hasn’t visited us because the last time he came my dad got drunk and passed out, and my mom “got a call” saying she had to go in to work because of an emergency, which we all knew was a lie, and Larry and I ended up spending the whole miserable time walking around the neighborhood in the cold, pretending my family wasn’t completely screwed up.

I just shrug. And he sighs. And I see in his eyes that he remembers. It seems our reunions only occur during desperate or last-resort circumstances.

“Where are your parents? Didn’t they bring you?” he asks.

“Nah, my friends dropped me off.”

“Aw, that’s nice. You should have invited them up!”

“They had to get back,” I say.
And thank God, because if they’d heard you call me Samurai Sam, I would never live it down.

“They must be pretty good friends to drive you all this way and then just turn around and drive back.”

“Yeah,” I say. They are. The best. “They love road trips. They jump on any excuse to get out of town.”

Larry carries my bag to his apartment, and I follow him inside. There’s a stick of incense burning on the coffee table in the living room. A huge, furry gray cat walks over to us and rubs against my leg.

“Wow,” Larry says. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”

“What?”

“Clover doesn’t like other people. She usually hides.”

The cat looks up at me.

“Hey,” I say. “How’s it goin’?”

“Clover, meet the infamous Samurai Sam,” Larry says. “He’s your new — uh — cousin.”

She rubs against my leg again.

“Come on, we’ll put your stuff in your room.”

I follow him down a short hallway to a tiny room with a foldout couch. I loved staying here when I was little. It was a huge treat because Larry was only, like, twenty-one, fresh out of college, and had no clue about taking care of kids. We’d stay up late watching movies and eating so many Fudgsicles I’d throw up. Then Larry would fold out the couch and let me crash in my clothes. Back then he had this little dog named George who liked to sleep next to me. I loved that dog, even though he had that pukey smell only small dogs have. There was something about how he leaned against you that made you feel — I don’t know — important.