Unlocked (3 page)

He couldn't stop
coughing.
I couldn't stop
myself.

My heart
zigzagging.
I brought him
chicken soup
and a thermometer.
Tylenol as well.

When he shut
his eyes and
sank into the steaming
water right up
to his face,
I pocketed
the keys.

Mom was napping,
tired after another
argument over
moving her mother
to a better place,
one we couldn't afford
since she couldn't find
better part-time work
than the drugstore,
and our insurance
company again said,
No.       No.        No
.

Lousy paychecks
and lousier insurance
were the same reason
I hadn't met with
Dr. Zigler, my therapist,
in forever. I saw her
two weeks back through
the smudged glass
of Denny's front window.
She returned to her scrambled
eggs without waving.

The keys clinked
so loud I thought
I heard a hundred
kids screaming,

Cling, clang,
Mr. Clean!

I waited,

listened for

his breath,

which didn't

falter,

and wondered

if it were

this easy.

He didn't hear.
Aching,
throbbing.
congested,
he didn't
notice anything
but his own
sinus agony.

Stealing from
your father—
there should be
unbearable weight,
bloodied knuckles,
distress way back
in your eyeballs.

Instead I felt nothing
but the dizzying roar

of excitement.

The window opened
without screeching,
and no police sirens
wailed to life nearby.
I sucked on my inhaler, then
slid soundlessly over the sill
and dropped to the grass,
so cool on my bare knees.

In dark shorts and T-shirt,
I stole through the neighborhood
and jogged the mile and a half
to school, dodging the bright
headlights, streetlights, anything
that might give me away.

I'd never considered security
systems, the howl of blame
that might erupt when I
opened the steel door
by the school's loading dock.
There wasn't a sensor.
Not there, at least.

I eased inside and became
one of the shadows, moving
slowly through the muted darkness
of the hallways until I found
his locker. The keys heavy
in my hand, Becky Ann
had to know. I had to.

In my own
locker, I kept
a red plastic
jug of loose change
and Becky Ann's
old white hairbrush
that she left in the girls'.
locker room—
I found it when
helping Dad wax
the floors one Sunday
and recognized
the faint memory
of her fragrance.

Four different textbooks,
two spiral notebooks,
five #2 pencils,
a mirror, a poster
of Peyton Manning
in a U of Tennessee
uniform, and two
empty boxes
of Thin Mints.

Plus three clean socks,
though I once had
three full pairs.
Scissors. Gum eraser.
Bic pens—two blue,
one black, and one
that might've been red
though it just leaked
dark ooze on everything
now. I kept that one
wrapped in a paper towel
in the back.

I have
a hard time
throwing anything
away.

Blake's locker?
I touched its cold steel face,
the mealy gray that my father
repainted each summer.
I spun the black dial,
tried my birthday,
the grade I got on
my last math test,
my own locker combination.

Nothing worked,
which was no surprise.
I don't know why I
wanted to try the dial.
Maybe it just felt
less dishonest.

Then I used the keys.

No alarms exploded
through the halls.
It was just me in after-
school darkness,
the welcome quiet
of unopened books,
empty halls, and
teacherless rooms.

Open at last, Blake's
locker didn't emit
some funky smell
like Sue's had
when she forgot a banana
inside during fall break.

Blake had the same books
I did, the same little metal shelf
on top. A Florida Marlins hat.
Some blank notebook paper.
A paper-clip chain dangling
from the coat hook.

I rooted through it all,
cataloging it,
running my fingertips
across everything
like I was reading Braille.

No gun.

I swallowed thickly.
What were we thinking?

I did not do drugs …
I did not date …
I did not drive …
I was not crowded with friends …
my parents did not let me have a job …
even Dr. Zigler didn't get me …
my father was our school's janitor …
I'd been bullied for six years straight …

I stole those keys.

I wanted something that mattered
to the cool kids at school.
Rebel courage.
Bad-boy stuff.

But even that got screwed up.

My dad
found out
about the keys,
just like he knew
somehow.
when I'd snagged
three Michelobs
last December
from his minifridge
in the garage.

I tried to sneak
the keys back
the next morning,
but he caught me.
I said I was just
looking at them,
just checking them out,

but he knew

I'd taken them.

No iPod.
No TV.
No Warcraft.
No teachers' lounge Cokes.
No trust.

After school,
I had to wait
on a hard
plastic chair
near the principal's
office now,
so Ms. McGee,
the secretary,
could watch me.

One day,
she slipped
me a Hershey's Kiss.
It helped.

But not much.

Dad didn't ask at first,
but finally did, hollering,
What the HELL were you thinking?

No answer would satisfy
that type of question, so
I simply shrugged, pressing

the truth quietly to my heart.
Wrong move. He looked at me,
his anger a cold, steady rain.

Grounded for life
, he finally snarled,
and I knew Mom would eventually
calm him down, but not anytime soon.

I should've told him something else.
Maybe honesty would've worked.
I was curious. Concerned. Worried?

But that wasn't true. I was excited
and hopeful. I wanted to find that gun.
I wanted in on a big-time secret.

I wanted to shake up my life
like a cup of Dungeons & Dragons dice
and reroll, but even that was denied me.

got caught cheating
on a sociology test,
and that got me thinking—
maybe he lied about
the gun all along?

Rumors burst to life
like summer fires
in a forest of kindling.
Whisper that secret
to two or three people
like Nicholas did,
and everyone—

I mean everyone—

knew.

But the week's worth
of detention made him
a little more popular.
Sue, in particular,
suddenly noticed him.

I stole the keys and my
straight-shooter dad
confessed to the school.
He got docked two days' pay,
I got grounded, and
none of the other kids
believed how brave I was,
no matter how much I
tried to convince them.

Not only was I positive that
we couldn't afford more sessions,
but I knew I couldn't tell her

the truth.

So we stared at each other
across the long brown couch,
the clock ticking at a dollar a minute
as I told her about reading Tolkien,
playing Halo, and how Sue
got a purple neck tattoo
of a three-headed dragon.

Thinking of Sue made me
think about her new boyfriend, Nicholas,
who wasn't such a total loser anymore,
which made me want to kick him—
anyone, really—right in the nuts.

No one believed me.
Becky Ann refused
to catch my eye
during passing periods,
her fruit-scented breath
hot on my face
like an accusation
that I was lying about it all.

Lie about what?
Going into his locker?
Not finding the gun?
I asked.
But she twirled her hair
magnificently
as I watched her tramp away.

Bruce said I was too scared
of my father to have taken
the keys. My father was
indeed a big, big man.

Romeo just laughed
at me.
Jesus H. Christ,
CJ—you're an idiot
.

I was furious
with myself
for doing it.
And not just because
Becky Ann's loyalty
was stunningly
inconsistent.

I was angry
for being
an idiot.
A fool.

I was angry
that nothing
I did ever
worked out
right.

Two grueling Saturday sessions
and Dad let me stop going.

Maybe it's the janitor in him, but
he takes waste personally.

Did you actually see it?
I repeated to Nicholas
that Friday after school
while he unlocked his bike.

He noticed too many
people noticing us together,
my voice a little too loud.

Dude, just leave me alone
.

C'mon!

Then he pedaled away.

Nothing like a former loser
snubbing you to make you feel
about three inches tall.

It's like
everything.
in your life
is a fat powder keg,
and somehow
you discover a fuse
and accidentally

light it.

Blow as hard
as you want,
douse it with spit,

pinch it,

snip the fuse clean off,
scream for help—
still it burns
and burns and burns
and BOOM.

Gone.

And you might as well
be gone too, for all
the good you are
to anyone,
pathetic thing
that you've become.

Becky Ann's crowd
razzed me so often that
I started eating
outside my father's
office, the janitor room
back by the gym.
It stank of disinfectant
and chemicals and sawdust
and God-knew-what,
which made every lunch
miserable, but at least
no one would look for me there.

Everyone knew how embarrassed
I was by my father's job—
almost as much as I was
by the whole gun fiasco.
After a few days, it seemed
no one really missed me at all,
which didn't prove all that shocking.
The days of shame accumulated
like dead insects in a light fixture.
Wishing things were different,
I ate cold salami sandwiches alone,
imagining my life as a path
that miraculously turned back
on itself, giving me another chance.

The rains stayed
for three days,
which had my dad
mopping nonstop
at the slop and mud
kids dragged in on
their boots and clothes.
I felt like running away
and living on a farm
in Iowa where I could
sweat away the days
under a bright, unflinching
sun and surround myself
with a world of green,
growing things. Here
in north Florida, nothing
wholesome seemed to grow—
there's just the slow stink
of too many bodies
resenting each other.
I've had enough of that.

It's okay
,
Blake told me
right before fifth period
one Wednesday.
This was three weeks
after the whole
school knew
I broke into
his locker.

We're friends now.
At least a little.
One day he just
walked up to me
and sat down
to eat gumdrops
out of his shirt pocket.
We didn't talk
beyond those two words.
We rarely talked.

I never asked him
if he had a gun.
What made me believe
an idiot like Nicholas?
Done with trying
to calm my father's
displeasure,
I now sat with Blake
during lunch.
We were satisfied with
silence while
the other kids
drank chocolate shakes
and ate french fries,
laughing at what sounded
like hilarious jokes.

It's okay
,
Blake repeated
above the hubbub
and noise of the world,
as if trying
to convince us both.

At the grocery store
where I'd gone to buy
Diet Sprite for my mom
and root beer for me, I saw him
with his mother and a little girl,
who couldn't be older than six.
His mother had shoes like
the type my mom always wore.
And she walked far too fast,
half-dragging the sister.
Blake followed too,
a small boat puttering along
the sea of linoleum,
his throttle jammed, stuck on low.

I hid behind the chip rack
and tried to imagine
my dad being dead
like Blake's dad, his body
stuffed inside a coffin.
His sister stumbled just then.
She banged face-first
into a stack of creamed
corn like a bad cartoon collision.
I almost laughed, but
the impulse murdered
itself in my throat.

I left without saying anything,
without the soda, without
any sense of what was
funny anymore.

I tried to think
what it was like
for her. The only
way I could come

close was to picture
my mom, then
subtract half
of her happiness.

When Grandma
eventually surrendered
to her sickness,
would Mom charge
through grocery stores too,
not noticing if I was behind her
or not?

Though my math teacher, Mr. Oliver,
said I needed three hours
of help a week, my father
got the idea that another student
from my class would be cheap,
“and you'd both already have the same books!”

So Sue became my tutor.
Mostly she just picked zits
off the back of her neck
as she explained polynomials
like she had learned them
from the same boring book
Mr. Oliver did, and I couldn't
understand them any better from her.
Sometimes she muttered about Nicholas
and their on-and-off-again status.
The idea of them both finding love
rubbed me about as wrong as
the stupid math problems did.