Saint Anything (26 page)

“Just stop talking,” Jenn told him. “Please.”

“Prettier! I meant prettier!” he added, just as he rounded the corner. “Oh! Hey! Baby! You’re here.”

Layla just looked at him, a flat expression on her face. I said, “Um, Jenn, this is Layla. Layla, this is my friend Jenn, from Perkins Day.”

Jenn, ever friendly, stuck out her hand. “Nice to meet you finally. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Same here,” Layla replied. They shook. “So. Is he a genius yet?”

“Not quite,” Jenn told her, sitting down behind the counter. “But we have made some progress on vocabulary.”

“Abscond,”
Spence said to Layla, sliding an arm around her waist. “That means run away with. You impressed?”

“No,” she said, pulling back.

“What if I buy some fries?” he asked.

“It’s a start.” She sighed, pulling her bag over her shoulder, then said to me, “See you Monday?”

I nodded. “See you then.”

Jenn and I watched them leave, the door buzzing as they did so. They started across the lot to CrashBurger, whose fries I knew Layla rated a seven on her ten-point scale. Good news for Spence. He needed all the help he could get.

At five o’clock, Jenn and I shut down the computers, locked up, and said good-bye. I was standing by my car, digging for my keys, when I heard a horn beep. I turned and there was Rosie, pulling into a spot nearby. When I waved, Mrs. Chatham gestured for me to come over.

“Hi,” I said as she rolled down the window, smiling at me.

“Hi yourself!” she replied as Rosie put the car in park. “What are you doing here?”

“I work at the tutoring center,” I told her.

“Mom, I’m running in the drugstore. You need anything?” Rosie asked.

“Nope. I’ll just stay here and catch up with Sydney.” Rosie climbed out of the car, shutting the door with a bang behind her. “So. How are things at home?”

I wasn’t sure how much she’d been told. My guess, however, was enough so it would make sense as I said, “Complicated.”

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “How’s your brother?”

“He’s . . .” I trailed off, for once not sure what word to use to describe Peyton. “We were actually talking a little bit. About my mom, and kind of about what happened, as well as some other stuff. Not much, but a little.”

“That’s good to hear.” She smiled at me. “Slow progress is still progress.”

“I’m realizing . . .” I began, then stopped, taking a breath. “Maybe I didn’t know exactly how he was feeling. I assumed a lot. I feel kind of bad about it.”

“You shouldn’t,” she said. “Relationships evolve, just like people do. Just because you know someone doesn’t mean you know everything about them. Even your brother.”

“It’s just weird. Like, I got used to talking with him, but he’s not speaking to my mom and not calling.” I looked down at my keys. “He got upset with her about being so involved in his life, even in prison. So now I’m her main project.”

“I did hear,” she said, “that you’ve been otherwise occupied.”

I glanced over at CrashBurger: there was no sign of Layla. According to the sign outside the bank, it was now 5:04. My mom was waiting. But I didn’t want to leave, not yet. “The thing is, I can admit I did something I shouldn’t have. Broke her trust. But it was the only time I ever did, the only time I’ve done
anything
wrong. By the way she’s punished me, you’d think I was the one who almost killed someone.”

A car drove by, the music loud and all bass, in that way that makes your teeth hurt. Mrs. Chatham waited until they passed us, then said, “She’s scared, Sydney. She doesn’t want to lose you, too.”

“It’s not fair, though. I’m paying for what Peyton did. Again. I’m sick of it.”

She gave me a sympathetic look. “Remember how you told me how often you think about that boy? The one your brother hurt?”

“David Ibarra,” I said.

She nodded. “If you feel that way, that strongly, that
guilty
, can you even imagine how it is for her? You were just a bystander. But your brother, that’s her
child
. Her responsibility. Whatever he does is part of her. Always.”

I thought of Rosie. With her bust, she’d only really hurt herself. Or so I’d thought.

“What I’m saying is that she can’t take back what he did, or even begin to fix it,” she continued. “But she
can
try to make sure, with you, that it never happens again on her watch. It’s all about regret and how you deal with it. That’s something you two have in common. Maybe you should talk to her about it.”

“She doesn’t discuss David Ibarra, ever,” I told her. “As far as she’s concerned, it’s all about Peyton.”

“Just because a person isn’t talking about something doesn’t mean it’s not on their mind. Often, in fact, it’s
why
they won’t speak of it.”

I was quiet a moment, thinking about how Peyton had surprised me. Then I said, “Because it makes it real.”

“Exactly.”

A breeze blew up behind me, kicking some leaves into the air. I wished, in that moment, that I was at Commons Park with Mac, not thinking about any of this. It was easier to just be mad at my mom; sympathy and empathy are complicated things. But nothing had been simple, not for a long time. I looked at the clock. 5:10.

“I should go,” I said as Rosie came out of the pharmacy, a bag in her hand. Still no sign of Layla. “She freaks out if I’m unaccounted for.”

Mrs. Chatham nodded, then slid a hand out the window toward me, palm up, fingers spread. I gave her my own hand, and she squeezed it tight. “Just think about what I said, yes? About talking to her.”

“I will,” I replied. “And thanks.”

She winked at me, then released my hand, just as Rosie got in, climbing back behind the wheel. Once in my car, I looked over at them, sitting there together. They were talking, Rosie drinking a soda while her mom ate from a bag of potato chips. I watched her pop one in her mouth, then offer the bag over. Rosie took one, then handed her the soda to take a sip. All wordless, so natural, a sync long established. It was such a little thing, hardly important, but it stayed with me all the way home.

* * * 

“Well, that’s just ridiculous. I’ve never even heard of such a thing.” I’d come home with Mrs. Chatham still on my mind. When I pulled up to the house and saw Ames’s Lexus in the driveway, however, any possibility of bridging the topic of David Ibarra with my mom was shot. Inside, I found him at the kitchen table, while she stood at the stove, stirring a risotto.

“I’ve only been late one month before this,” Ames was saying. “One! I think they just wanted me out so they could jack up the rent for some other sucker.”

“You need to look at your lease,” my mom told him, glancing at me as I put my backpack on the counter. “See if they’re actually allowed to do this. I could call Sawyer, if you like.”

“No, I don’t want you to go to any trouble,” Ames replied. Then he looked at me. “Sydney! I was wondering when you’d show up.”

“Work ran late?” my mom asked. Of course she’d noticed.

“Just a little,” I said. “Can I help with anything?”

“You could set the table. Put a place for Ames; he’s staying.”

“Oh, Julie,” he said, as if he didn’t know being over at this hour meant an automatic invitation, “you don’t have to take pity on me. I’m a big boy.”

“You’re practically homeless,” she replied. “The least I can do is feed you.”

I walked over to the silverware drawer behind the kitchen table, making a concentrated point not to look at Ames. “My crooked landlord kicked me out today,” he explained anyway. “Add that to being laid off last week and I’m batting a thousand.”

“Ridiculous,” my mom said again. “When it rains, it pours.”

“I’m in a monsoon, then,” Ames replied. He was still talking directly to me. “But I’ve got a couple of leads on jobs, and some friends with open couches. I’ll be okay.”

My dad was pulling into the driveway, the garage door opening. “You don’t have to resort to that when we have a free bedroom just sitting there,” my mom said. “You’ll stay with us until you find a new place.”

I froze, my fist full of forks.

“Julie, no,” Ames told her, a fake firmness in his voice. “I can’t impose on you like that.”

“You’re not imposing,” she replied. “After all you’ve done for Peyton, and us, it’s the very least we can do.”

Somehow, I managed to set the table, then sit through dinner. Ames was there in my brother’s traditional seat, to my dad’s left and across from me, and now he’d be moving into his room, as well. He continued to pretend to resist, while my mom assured him it was just until he was “back on his feet.” After we ate, I took as long as I could to load the dishwasher and clean up before I went upstairs to do homework. Even so, I had a front-row seat as Ames unloaded his stuff—
such
a coincidence, he happened to have it all in the car—load by load into the room next to mine. Each time he passed, he glanced in at me. Finally, I shut the door.

CHAPTER
21

“WE’RE IN!”

I’d never seen Eric run before, but in the seconds preceding this announcement, he’d covered the school parking lot in the blink of an eye. Now, panting, he stood before us, eyes wide.

“In . . .” Mac repeated, prompting him.

“The showcase! We made it!” He bent over, hands on his knees, then sucked in a breath and straightened up. “I just got the text.”

“Seriously?” Layla said.

Eric nodded, still breathing hard. “It’s three weeks from this Friday, at Bendo. Five bands, all ages. Holy crap, I think I’m having a heart attack.”

“Dude,” said Irv, who was leaning against the truck, eating a bag of pretzels, “you seriously need to work out more.”

“Three weeks,” Mac said. “Not much time to practice.”

“Which is why,” Eric told him, “we need to go hardcore. Clear the schedule, pedal to the metal. This takes top priority, starting now.”

“Some of us have jobs,” Mac pointed out.

“And lives,” Layla added.

Eric just looked at them. “Are you serious? This is our shot. Our big chance! Winner gets to record a real demo with Hambone Records. That’s where Truth Squad and Spinnerbait started out.”

“Hate Spinnerbait,” Mac said.

“True. But the point is,” Eric continued, “nothing is more important than this.”

“Except my post-school meal,” Irv said. “So if you want a ride, you’re buying at DoubleBurger.”

“I can’t believe you go there,” Layla told him, shaking her head. “Their fries are greasy. And mushy.”

“Just how I like ’em,” Irv replied, and she rolled her eyes. “Come on, Bates. My stomach’s grumbling.”

As he said this, he was still eating pretzels. Irv’s appetite always surprised me, but at times like this, I was almost scared.

“Practice,” Eric said. “Tomorrow, right after school. Yes? I’ll tell Ford.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Mac said.

“Do what you have to. This is serious. There’s no gray area here. We win or lose. Triumph or go down in flames. Succeed or—”

“Why is there never a gray area with you?” Irv said. “Everything’s always brilliant or catastrophic.”

“Because,” Eric replied, “that’s the way true artists—”

“
That
should be your band name,” Layla, studying her phone, said.

Irv said, “True Artists?”

“No. Brilliant or Catastrophic.”

Silence. Due to experience, I was expecting immediate rejection of this from someone (probably Eric), followed by the debate beginning all over again. But then Mac said, “I like it.”

“It
is
intriguing,” Eric agreed. He thought for a moment. “Also, it fits the idea of our ironic take on the songs we’re doing as well as what they did for the larger community of music. So pop, total earworms: you have to give the songwriters credit. Even while acknowledging the damage they caused not just to the integrity of the music industry, but society as a whole.”

“Society?” I asked.

“I just like how it sounds,” Irv said, starting to walk away.

“I’ll sit with it awhile. Let you know what I think,” Eric told us, falling in behind him. Watching them go, all I could think was that they were the oddest of pairings.

“Huge Guy and Hipster Guy,” Layla observed, once again reading my mind. “They’re like superheroes. Without the, um, super part.”

I snorted, then looked at my watch. I was doing that these days. “It’s getting late. I better go.”

Mac looked down at me. “Already?”

The fifteen minutes or so I had here in the parking lot before I had to leave for Kiger always went too quickly. “I left my computer charger at home, and my mom’s bringing it to me. I need to be on time today.”

“Okay,” he said. But his arm stayed around me, and I didn’t budge. This usually took a couple of tries. As I thought this, I felt his phone, in his pocket, buzz against my leg. I extracted myself as he reached for it, glancing at the screen. “Shit.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“My mom.”

On my other side, Layla, studying her own phone, looked up. “What’s going on?”

Mac was already typing something. “Shortness of breath, and she started to pass out. They called the doc. Meeting him at the hospital.”

“Crap,” Layla said. “Let’s go.”

She pulled open the truck’s passenger door, throwing her bag on the floorboard. Mac, however, stayed where he was, again scanning his phone’s screen. “We’re supposed to go to Seaside and stay there.”

“What? I want to go to the hospital.”

“Dad says no. He wants us to man the shop.” Mac started around the truck. “Rosie will keep us posted.”

“You know she’s terrible at that,” Layla said. “We’re lucky she even told us they were en route. I need to be there.”

“Are you not listening to me? I can’t take you. Now get in, we’ve got to go.”

“I’ll take her.” I said this without thinking. It was only in the next beat that I remembered I was already late leaving for where I had to be.

“You sure?” Mac asked me, climbing behind the wheel. “What about your mom?”

“It’s an emergency. She’ll understand.” I hoped.

“Keep me posted?”

“Yeah.” Layla grabbed her bag while he cranked the engine. “Thanks, Sydney.”

“Sure.”

He backed out of the spot, kicking up a cloud of gravel dust all around us, and started driving out of the lot, dodging the familiar potholes. At the stop sign by the guardhouse he barely paused, prompting a shouted warning from the security officer there. And then he was gone.

“Which hospital?” I asked Layla once we, too, were on our way out.

“U General.”

That was all the way across town. “Are you sure?”

“It’s the only place that takes our insurance,” she replied. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” I assured her. I glanced at my dashboard clock. Three thirty already, and we hadn’t even left yet.

I tried not to think of the time, even as we hit every red light along the way. I’d never been to U General—everyone at the Arbors used Lakeview Methodist, which was brand-new and only a mile away—and the signs were hard to follow, especially in a distant part of town I didn’t know well.

Finally, after winding our way through a construction zone and two more red lights, I was pulling up to the emergency room entrance.

“This is good,” Layla said, gathering up her stuff as I slowed to a stop behind an ambulance, its back doors flung open. No one was inside.

“Do you want me to go in with you?” I asked her.

“No, I’m fine. Thanks. I’ll call you, okay?”

She got out, shutting the door behind her, and slung her bag over her shoulder before walking quickly through a set of automatic doors. I felt guilty for not going with her, balanced by a sense of relief as I pulled away, finally heading in the right direction. On my way around the traffic circle, I passed a city bus stop, the bench packed with people. A little boy with his arm in a sling, his face solemn, watched me as I went by.

By now, I was a full half hour late for my shift at Kiger. I’d already texted Jenn that I’d had an emergency and would be there as soon as I could, but she wasn’t the one I was worried about. All the way to the hospital and back, through traffic and more red lights, I kept waiting for my phone to buzz.
Where are you?
my mom would ask, and I didn’t even know how to tell her in a simple text. I was just hoping for mercy once we were face-to-face. When I pulled into the Kiger lot, I found Ames instead.

“Sydney, Sydney,” he said as I walked up to where he was standing. He had my computer charger coiled neatly—I recognized my mom’s handiwork at a glance—in his hands. “You were supposed to be here forty-five minutes ago.”

“I had something to do,” I told him, reaching for the charger.

He pulled it back, just out of my reach. “Funny, Julie didn’t say anything about you having plans. Did she know?”

I felt my jaw clench. Inside, Jenn was behind the counter, watching us. “I needed to give a friend a ride to the hospital.”

“Oh.” He still hadn’t handed over my charger. “Everybody okay?”

“Hope so. May I please have that now?”

Finally, slowly, he relinquished it. “You know, you’re putting me in a bad spot again. Your mom’s done a lot for me. I don’t feel right lying to her.”

“I’m not asking you to,” I said.

“But if I
do
tell her about this,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, “I have a feeling she’ll tighten your restrictions even more. And I don’t want to be responsible for that.”

This time, I said nothing. I was trying to figure out what angle he was working.

“Let’s say this,” he continued. “We keep this between us. But you owe me one.”

“You can tell her,” I said. “I don’t care.”

“Nope.” He held up his hands. “Don’t want to be that guy. It’s our secret. Agreed?”

I didn’t like the sound of that. But before I could say anything, my phone buzzed. It was a message from Mac.

Just a scare. Everything fine,
he’d typed.

“I need to go in,” I said to Ames, grabbing the door handle and pulling it open. “They’re waiting for me.”

“Sure thing,” he replied cheerfully, stepping aside. “See you at dinner.”

I walked into the lobby and behind the desk, dropping my bag at my feet. Jenn, in the other chair, was watching Ames, now heading to his car. “What was that all about?”

“Nothing,” I told her. “Just him being his creepy self.”

She picked up a folder. “I’m going to check in on the morons. You sure you’re okay?”

I nodded, and then she was disappearing down the hallway. I picked up my phone to reply to Mac.

Glad to hear it. Was worried.

Don’t be. All okay.

I looked outside, where it was starting to get dark; winter was coming. On my phone screen, these words remained, awaiting a response. Or maybe not. “All okay” was a good stopping point, after all, a place to stay while I could. As long as you stretched out a moment, it couldn’t end; if I didn’t write back, there’d be no further conversation, good or bad. I sat there for an hour. I never wrote anything.

* * * 

For a good five minutes, I kept thinking I was hearing crunching. Finally, I was sure.

“Are you eating something?”

Silence. Then, a beat later: “Potato chips.”

I was shocked. In the entire time I’d known him, I’d never seen Mac consume anything unhealthy. This was a guy whose typical lunch consisted of lean turkey rolled up with lowfat cheese, a handful of almonds, and two tangerines. It was hard to picture him eating anything with trans fats, much less from a vending machine. I couldn’t even speak.

“Whatever you’re thinking,” he said finally, “I’ve already thought it. With paralyzing guilt added.”

“Since when do you eat potato chips?”

“Birth, basically.” Another crunch. “Until the March before last. After that, I was off them like a junkie kicking dope.”

“Until . . .”

“Yesterday.” Crunch. “I guess things are kind of getting to me.”

Again, I wasn’t sure what to say. Mac was naturally guarded; it wasn’t like he walked around bursting with sunshiny optimism on his best day. Selfishly, though—now I was the one adding guilt—I worried it might have something to do with me. “What kind of things?”

“My mom,” he replied. A sigh, then I heard what I was pretty sure was the sound of an empty chip bag being balled up. Oh, dear. “The showcase. And, you know, us.”

Outside my room, someone walked down the hallway, slowing their steps as they approached. Instinctively, I looked at the door at the precise spot where a lock
would
be, if I’d had one. I lowered my voice. “Us?”

“Yeah,” he replied, his voice casual. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ll take what I can get when it comes to seeing you. But this situation . . . it’s not exactly ideal.”

I felt myself smile. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. It’s Spence’s.” He shifted, the phone muffled for a second. “I mean, it would have been bad for your mom to walk in and find us there, I’m sure. But not bad like this.”

“Layla said you were still mad.”

“She’s right.”

We were quiet a moment. I couldn’t tell if whoever was in the hallway had moved on or was standing there, silent, on the other side of the door. A week into his stay, I’d known Ames to do both.

I’d thought it was bad before, his being around. But the weird long looks, the way his eyes followed me around the room—none of it compared to suddenly having him in the house. Though he’d arrived with only a suitcase, a duffel bag, a few boxes, and a computer, he’d already managed to fill much of our shared living space. What began as a pack of cigarettes by the garage door became a damp U basketball towel I had to step over on our shared bathroom floor. That, then, morphed into the sound of talk radio flowing constantly from Peyton’s speakers right on the other side of my wall. Voices, all day and into the night. I dreamed of roundtables and panels, when I wasn’t having nightmares.

Then there were the constant drop-ins: Did I have a spare tube of toothpaste? Where were the lightbulbs kept? Did I feel like it was too warm up here, too? And that was just in the first thirty-six hours. It seemed like he was always passing by my door, peering in at me, stopping to chat while leaning against the door frame. When I started shutting it regularly, he knocked: a soft three raps, one slow, two fast. If I opened it, he always came inside.