Now That You're Here (Duplexity, Part I) (14 page)

When I wake, I'm tangled in the sheets, my heart racing and my legs trying to run from falling bombs and cracks in my walls. I tell myself it's just a dream, but I reach out and touch the wall to make sure it's solid. When I was little and got scared, I would listen for my dad snoring. I knew if I could hear him, everything was okay. But I'm not little anymore, and it's hard to hear Dad when he lives next door.

I untangle myself and wander down the hall. Morning sun streams in through the kitchen window. Mom looks up from her coffee and paper.

“Sleep didn't help?”

When we'd returned to campus the day before, I'd gone straight to the nurse and told her I felt sick. I couldn't look her in the eye, so I covered my face and mumbled something about my head hurting. Between ditching and hearing Danny's stories, I was such a mess she had no problem believing me.

Mom believed me, too. She touches the back of her hand to my forehead. “You don't feel warm. Want some toast? Juice?”

She sees the answer on my face. “I'll call the school. You go lie down.”

The couch catches my fall. The weatherman smiles. His skin is so tan it's orange. “Gorgeous day today. Sunshine and a high of 76°.”

I listen to mom leaving a message on the attendance line. “This is Judy Bennett. My daughter, Eve Solomon, will be out sick today.”

“Don't forget the homework!”

“Please have her homework ready for me to pick up this afternoon. Thanks.” Mom walks into the room and mutes the television. “I'm sorry I can't be home to take care of you. I have appointments all day. Remember to eat something if you can. And call me if you get to feeling really bad, okay?”

I groan.

“Go back to bed.”

I groan again and shuffle to my room.

The plan goes off without a hitch. I stay in my room until Mom is gone, then check the windows to make sure Warren has moved on and Dad's car is no longer in the drive. The EMP discussion is on hold until Mac gets back tomorrow, and Danny has things he wants to show me. No time like the present, right? Still, my hands shake as I get dressed and slip out through the backyard.

Danny is waiting for me in the alley. A duffel bag hangs from the handlebars of a bike.

“Didn't think you had it in you.”

“I guess you don't know me very well. Where'd you get this?”

“I bought it at a garage sale the other day with some of Danny's money. Like it?”

“Sure.” I hold on to his shoulders and step onto the pegs sticking out from the back tire. He pedals and we're off.

The orange-skinned weatherman was right. It's a beautiful day. I lift my face to the sun. I don't know me very well either.

I have no idea where we're going, and I don't ask. Danny rides in the street, heading south through the neighborhood, passing houses and cars and women watering their lawns. Dogs bark and sprinklers run into the gutter. I hold on and try to keep my feet from slipping. When we reach Thunderbird Road, he turns right and we ride with the traffic. The wind whips through my hair and Danny's shoulders grow warm beneath my hands. Every now and then he says something, but I can't hear him over the noise. Soon houses give way to strip malls and block walls and I lose track of time. My legs grow tired, standing on the pegs.

“Almost there?” I yell. I can't hear his answer, but see him nod.

At 59th Avenue Danny ditches the main road for a shortcut through a parking lot. Drive-Thru Liquor and Forever Fitness whir by before he turns around the far side of the Flower Shack. We coast down a sloped path leading into Paseo Park. I've seen it from the road a number of times. From the Thunderbird overpass it doesn't look like anything special, but down inside it's enormous. What once was a canal is now full of grass and trees, playgrounds and bike paths.

Danny rides under the overpass, taking me to a world I never knew existed.

I hop off the bike, still feeling the pegs in the arches of my feet, and look at the bridge above me. Every inch of the walls and ceiling is covered in graffiti.

“Yes! I knew it would be here.” Danny throws his bag over his shoulder and climbs the sloped support of the overpass. I follow, trying to keep myself from slipping back down to the grass below.

He stops where the ceiling meets the wall. The traffic rumbles loudly over our heads. He sets the bag at his feet, then pulls out a pair of black gloves and a can of spray paint.

“Where did you get those?”

“Pinched them from the foster home.” He flashes a wicked smile and goes to work. The aerosol can hisses as he sprays a line of black across the concrete.

“Danny.” I check to see if anyone is watching.

“What?” More black lines turn into black boxes. He pulls another can from the bag and continues to work, his body angled and shoes gripping the concrete. The black boxes turn into a city skyline. Buildings with windows lit up in yellow.

The park is deserted and the traffic growls nonstop above. I take in the pictures around me. A Tyrannosaurus rex, red-eyed and salivating, snaps at a tangle of words, all sharp angles and indecipher
able. The soft shades of a man's face and the letters
R, I
and
P
below. Psychedelic flowers in bright pinks and blues swirling around a whirlpool sun. A robot with a human skull. An octopus with bulging eyes and curlicue tongue, tentacles wrapped around the throat of King Kong. And all kinds of words. Block letters and scrolling letters and letters that look like shards of glass.

“Are any of these yours?”

“Nope. Haven't been out since I got here.” He takes a moment to stretch his arms up over his head, then goes back to work. “I almost feel like me again.”

The more I look, the more I notice the differences in each picture. The styles, the shading. With a little study, I'm able to decode the artists' names tucked into the edges. Buzz. Sweet Tooth. Sham. Big Boy. Vermin. And then I watch a new Danny emerge like the picture he's painting. His arm moves closer to the concrete and then back, closer and back, and his body moves rhythmically with him. The city buildings grow into spirals that swirl into an arm with ghostly black-and-blue fingers reaching back toward the buildings. Moving quickly, he draws a boy on top of a high-rise, running from the arm. The boy has long black hair and wears a black shirt and stoner high-tops. Around the curve of the menacing hand, he sprays the letters
D, O
and
A.

His signature.

He stands back and wipes his forehead with his arm. “Wanna try?”

I shake my head so hard I almost slide down the wall.

“You sure?” He fishes through the bag and hands a glove to me. I pull it over my hand, my heart racing. He shakes the can and the clanking of the ball echoes off the concrete.

“What if…”

“What if nothing. Here.” He hands me the paint. I turn the can over and read the label. Rust-Oleum. Deep blue. I take a breath, aim the can and spray a blue dot. Then another blue dot. Then a curved line beneath them. The paint runs down the slope. My smiley face looks like it's drooling.

He crosses his arms. “You can do better than that.”

“Well, excuse me. I've never broken the law before.”

“Let me help you.” He stands behind me and extends his arm along mine. He's so close. The panic I felt while cutting his hair rises again, and with it the realization of what I'm doing. What I've done.

I should be in school. Not here. Not committing a crime.

I step away from him and hold out the can. “I can't do this.”

He steps back, nodding. “It's okay.” He takes the can and paints a moon over his cityscape with huge craters pocking the surface. As it takes form, I see how he's tucked my name into the design.

E V

She sits on the handlebars to give her feet a rest from the pegs. Her dark hair streams toward me. I let the wheels laze to the left and then to the right, pedaling just fast enough to keep us moving forward. She grips the bar and her laughter rises up to the sky.

No Spectrum. No checkpoints. Total freedom and perfect company. The sun is hot on my back and my leg muscles burn, but you couldn't pay me to be anywhere else.

“Do you know what time it is?” she yells.

“Nope.” If it were up to me, I'd turn around, go back and paint more, or just find a place to hang. But I can tell she's starting to worry, so I pedal faster and focus on how the light shines on her shoulders. How she shakes her hair. I know we can't be late, but I also don't want to rush this.

I slow to a stop at 43rd Avenue. She shifts her weight and whines, “Ouch.”

The crosswalk button squeaks when I press it. “Want to stand on the back again? Or you could drive.”

“It's okay. I'm fine.”

I look beyond her across the intersection. Back home, they've routed this road down to one lane, and every car gets searched. One of the permanent checkpoints.

The blinking crosswalk hand switches to the walking man and I pedal us out into the intersection. I watch the faces of the people waiting at the light. They're miserable. The man in the Civic talking on his cell phone. The one in the work truck, too, with his elbow on the window and his fingers tapping the frame. The woman looking in her rearview. Every single one looks like they'd rather be somewhere else.

They have no idea how it could be.

We're almost across the intersection when I can't take it anymore. “Hold the bike up.” Eevee startles and hops down from the handlebars. I grab a paint can from the bag and shake it. The marble inside clangs against the metal.

“What are you doing?”

“Get over on the curb.” I see the crosswalk sign counting down. Have to be quick. I run back to where the cars are waiting and start spraying on the road, using the sidewalk lines as a guide. That does the trick. Horns start blaring and I pray there aren't cops around.

I finish just as the light changes and run to where Eevee waits on the side of the road.

“What did you write? I couldn't see from here.”

“Wake. Up.” I grin.

She shakes her head. “You're insane.”

“Now you say that like it's a good thing.”

We turn onto her street. The house on the corner is a junk-fest and I dodge three mangy cats that dart across the road. Each house on the block is slightly nicer in a progression leading up to hers. Rusted-out cars to yards needing a mow to raked gravel to pristine. That corner house must make her dad crazy.

I swerve down the alley, retracing our morning route. When we reach the back of her house, I hold the bike steady while she climbs down. She unlatches the gate and I figure that's it. She'll go play sick for when her mom gets home and I'll go chill at her dad's. But she holds the gate open instead. I leave the bike in the alley and follow.

She peers through the back window. “I think we made it in time.” She unlocks the door and I follow her inside, closing the door behind me.

Her mom's house is completely different from her dad's. The kitchen towels don't match, and one is crumpled up into the oven door handle. A bag of bread sits on the counter surrounded by crumbs. A stack of papers threatens to topple into a vase of wilting flowers. The TV is on in the living room and a blanket slouches across the couch.

“Welcome to sick bay.” She clicks off an afternoon talk show, and then fiddles with the remote, turning it over in her hands.

Makes me nervous watching her. “I should go.”

“No.” She sighs. “I want to show you something.”

“Okay.”

“But…it's not something I let a lot of people see. No one, actually.”

“You've got a body stuffed in the basement?”

“No.” She laughs and leads me down the hallway. “The dead guy's no big deal.”

We stop at what must be her bedroom, and my brain goes into overdrive. She unlocks the door and I follow her inside.

Once when I was little, my mom took me to this children's playhouse center. It was an old warehouse downtown, turned into a place for kids to run around and bounce off the walls. In one of the corners there was a huge black box. I didn't want to go in it, but Mom said I would like it and she led me by the hand. Stepping inside that black box was like stepping into space. It was dark, and there were tiny lights going on forever. Totally magical. Suddenly I was an astronaut, surrounded by stars. Mom couldn't get me to leave.

Stepping into Eevee's room feels like stepping into that black box. It's a vortex of colors and shapes. Like what she drew on the back of my paper in that horrible woman's class, only in color. Every inch of the place is covered in spiraling designs, shaded in pinks, greens and blues.

“Eevee, this is…”

“They're fractals,” she says, her hands clasped in front of her. She stares at the ceiling. “Scientists say the universe is built in fractals. I created these using different equations. That one there is similar to the Koch curve.”

It's like she's speaking Greek, but it doesn't matter. I'm in awe, almost like I've crossed worlds again.

She keeps talking, really fast. “It's just a repetitive mathematical process, really. Start with a line and figure the angle based on its trajectory, then repeat the process, allowing the equation to determine the curve and complexity of the design. The one starting there by the window is kind of interesting. I used the Fibonacci sequence, which of course is the same pattern found throughout the natural world. See how it kind of resembles the center of a sunflower?”

“This must have taken forever.”

“It's just something I've done for as long as I can remember. Everywhere I look, I see rays and angles and I can't help but figure out their patterns. When things start feeling really big and out of control, fractals remind me how to get back to simple.”

“That's amazing.”

She shrugs. “They're just patterns. The mathematical equivalent of bubble gum. Something to chew on, to see how far it stretches.”

“Call it whatever you want. It's art.”

“Well, it's certainly nothing practical.”

“Do they make you feel something?”

She thinks for a moment. “Yes.”

“Then screw practical.”

“Practical pays for college.” Sounds like her dad. Then she cocks her head to the side. “Isn't it strange that we both draw on walls?”

I mimic her and cock my head to the side, too. “Isn't drawing on the walls what crazy people do?”

“Cavemen drew on walls.”

“Yeah, well, cavemen were totally crazy, running around trying to invent fire so they could grill dinosaur steaks.”

“Dinosaur steaks?” She makes a face, then realizes I'm messing with her and rolls her eyes. I move toward one wall to get a closer look at the work. I see her reflection in the mirror on the closet door, then step forward to capture us both in the frame. Our eyes meet and everything stands still. Just the two of us suspended in a world of colors and angles—a world of her own making.

“Eve?” Her mom's voice coming down the hall shatters the magic.

She gasps, locks the door and completely freaks out. Messes up her bed. Looks in the mirror and messes up her hair. Pushes me out of the way while she does a silent spaz. Before she blows a gasket, I catch her by the arms, hold her still, look her in the eye. “Does your window have screens?”

She nods.

“Is there another back door?”

“Mom's room.”

“Perfect. I'll hide so you can distract her, then I'll sneak out the door. Piece of cake.”

She looks scared.

“Trust me.”

She nods, but the lines across her forehead tell the truth.

“Hey.” I look up at the ceiling and then into her eyes. “Thank you for showing me this.” Then I kiss her on the lips, real quick before she steps away.

Her mom knocks on the bedroom door. “Eve?”

I sneak into the closet, leaving her standing there, stunned.