Unlocked (4 page)

For eighteen bucks an hour,
you WILL pay attention
, my father
insisted after he saw me doodling
instead of slaving away in my notebook.
So I pretended, but I was getting more
weary by the day of people
telling me what I should
and should not do. Of people
finding friends, finding love,
but not me. I was fourteen,
not four. And I wasn't
half as useless as people seemed
to take me for. Including Sue,
who rolled her eyes regularly
when she wasn't checking out
that new tattoo in her pocket mirror.

Sue slammed shut the books one afternoon
and just cut me this look that said,
Why are we wasting our time?

Damned if I knew.

One Saturday, Blake
just showed up
at my place.
We sat in the living
room on the stupid
hand-me-down couches
and drank iced tea.
They stole my gym
uniform again
, he
said as I flipped channels
on the TV. The gun rumors
kept buzzing despite
what I learned, but people
still pushed Blake around,
still poured cafeteria milk
into the slats of his locker,
and still sometimes threw his
gym stuff in the trash.
I'm not sure who
had it worse.

Mom knew it was rare for anyone
to swing by, so she let us play
Halo for an hour. Blake wasn't
very good, but we had fun anyway.
Mom invited him to stay for lunch—
sloppy joes, big deal—
but Blake said he just wanted
to meet my family and had to get home
before his mother got back
from the YMCA.

He seems well-mannered
,
my mom said when he left.
Dad didn't say anything—
he was still fuming over me stealing
his keys, a stupid game
of daring and theft
he thought I had played alone.
What would he think
if he knew Blake's part in it?
Or Becky Ann's?

Who hasn't made
a million of them?

My fourth-grade art disaster,
the Popsicle castle
with too many turrets.

Bleaching my hair
in fifth grade.

Riding my bike
off that ramp last summer
with my eyes screwed
shut on a dare.

Telling Aaron Andrews
that he had stink breath.

Stealing the keys?
So far, my worst.

So far.

Maybe once my video-game ban
was lifted for good, I'd get Blake
to play Warcraft with me.
You need gaming partners
to get through the toughest dungeons,
and who else did I have to play with?

My self-doubt kicked to life, and I wondered
if Blake truly enjoyed my company as much as
I enjoyed his. It's frustrating as all hell,
but I'm often incapable of understanding
what people around me are actually feeling.

The filters and veils and delusions
are just too tough for me to pierce.
That's pretty much all I took away
from Dr. Zigler's sessions—I was a screw-up
who didn't cope well with the real world.

Big news flash.

We went to the one on Fifth
at least once a week after school.
Blake rarely brought his books,
but I sometimes studied
while we shared fries and
came up with suggestions
on what Sue's new tattoo should be,
as well as where it should go.

My favorite: holster and six-shooters
around the waist in purple ink.

His favorite: a black barbed-wire noose
around the neck.

Everyone knew
I was ophidiophobic
after Romeo brought
Hermes, his brother's
ball python, to school
last year for a Halloween prop
and I eeked girlishly,
earning me the nickname
“Andy-pansy.” Which stuck.
Thank you so very much, Sue,
who still called me that
during tutoring sessions
when Dad and Mom weren't around.

So when I saw the slick
black skin of the striped snake
coiled inside the base of my locker—
forced through the air vents,
or perhaps someone else
made off with the master keys too,
or worked a crowbar or something—
I stumbled back, throat closing,
my face reddening as I
feared fangs, strangulation,
venom, unblinking eyes.

It was dead. Romeo
stopped guffawing long enough
to poke it with his finger
to assure me. Then the passing period
was over and I was alone
with the dark, ropy corpse.
I thought of how my father
might calmly remove the body,
then use industrial-strength
germicides to scour out
the smell, and I knew
I couldn't let him do that.

I propped the emergency door
open—the alarm's been on the fritz
for weeks, my dad complained—
and managed that snake all the way
to the tree line. Then I emptied my locker,
tore free all the snake-scented
book covers and dumped
most everything into the trash,
all my carefully hoarded stuff
added to the crumpled (unsent)
love notes, inkless pens,
and sticks of unchewed gum.

Then on hands and knees,
using brown bathroom paper
and sudsy alien-green soap,
I labored at the cold metal,
praying to get the memory
of that poor trapped snake
out before its claustrophobia
became my own.

I had to throw my backpack away—
the stink of garter snake

was never scrubbing free.
Ma asked me where

the backpack went,
and I had to lie. Again.

And again and again.
Like Dr. Zigler warned,

I continued to nail myself
inside the cramped coffin

I'd built for myself,
the lies upon lies

becoming beetles scuttling
free over my face in the dark.

Hungrily.

Blake and I agreed to meet
at the Sbarro at the mall
instead of McDonald's for once.
It was supposed to be
another math-tutoring deal,
but Sue really just wanted
to sneak off with Nicholas,
so she paid me to shut up about it.
So I bought the pizza and the Cokes
while Blake and I listed the top
ways to get back at Aaron for jamming
that dead snake inside my locker.
My favorite? Duct-taping him naked
to the flagpole an hour before school started.
Blake preferred a good case of crotch rot
and perhaps a black magic curse.
He waved his arms and in a thick voice said,
May the fleas of a thousand camels
infest your armpits!
I had to be home by 6:30,
only we were cracking up so much
that I didn't make it home until 8.

Though far too old to trick or treat,
I still hustled door to door
with Blake, both of us
dressed in bedsheets
with snipped-out eyeholes,
ghosts à la Charlie Brown.
We moaned and
oooOOOO
ed
and Blake clanked a bike chain
he brought along,
which scared all heck
out of some third graders—
two Spidermans, a hobo,
and some kind of orange lizard.
Our paper grocery sacks
filled fast with candy,
though most knew we
were too tall, too old
to really be out. But no one
minded since we were just
loading up on sugar and not
hitting car windows with eggs.
For three hours, we were regular kids
doing regular stuff,
having a good time.
For three hours, I didn't think
about stolen keys, guilt, Becky Ann,
or what might be wrong with my friend.
For three hours, it was the happiest
I'd been in forever, unfazed
even when Blake said,

You ever dream that you wake up
and the whole world's gone?

With Thanksgiving
turkeys and Xmas trips
on everyone's mind,
no one talked about
Blake's gun
anymore.

Now he was just
CJ's weird pal,
which didn't
seem to bother
him, even when
people SSSSSsssed
at me in the halls,

Aaron most of all.

Blake followed me
to school now—
I walked instead
of taking the bus.
Part of my punishment
for the keys thing.
Plus Dad always sought
ways to slim me down
since he'd always been
a little beefy himself,
my asthma be damned.

Blake even went
into the arcade
with me one Saturday.
I was supposed to be
picking up Colgate
and Kleenex at Target.
More errands, more
punishment.

My cell phone kept buzzing,
but I didn't answer Mom's
calls. Trouble was trouble—
how much worse could it get?

Blake didn't play Pop-A-Shot
or Mortal Kombat
or even the NASCAR game,
where I mostly just rammed head-on
into every road sign I could.
He just watched
me push quarters
into the machines
for two hours.

On the way home,
my pockets empty,
he pushed it into my hands.

It's a Beretta 9mm.
My father kept it
in the closet in a box
with the Christmas lights
.

I gave it back,
almost astonished
my hands didn't
explode into flame.

I never made it to Target.
Instead, I took three puffs
on my inhaler and told Blake
I was late getting home.
And I ran.

Some kids, my father
just didn't trust.
He swore he had
a special radar about
troublemakers,
and he was usually right.

He knew Jorge
was “bad news,”
and that was before
the smoke bomb
put the girls' bathroom
out of commission for three days.

He wasn't surprised
when the Murray twins
got expelled for punching out
a seventh grader from the Montessori school
across the street, or when Nicholas
swiped three rolls of quarters
from the cafeteria cash register
and got caught the same day
with two ounces of pot.

My father put down
the mop one afternoon
and knelt to look me
right in the eyes,
the type of piercing gaze
that might allow him
to scrutinize my actual thoughts.

The air reeked
of piney disinfectant,
which then made me
think of snakes
writhing inside
the murk of my locker,
the dark beneath my bed,
the tunnels of my stomach.

He asked me
what was wrong
with Blake.
He knew now
about Blake's father
from Mr. Green,
who was concerned
about Blake, but not
as much as he was about
the Murray twins, Aaron,
and others who had volcanic
outbursts instead of Blake's
slow, slow burn.

My father was asking me
something else entirely.

He knew it.

I knew it.

I thought
of the gun,
the 9mm Beretta,
oil black and thick
in the handle.

I thought of how afraid
Blake looked
when I passed the gun
back to him, like he was
about to be devoured
by a rabies-mad grizzly.

I thought of what it meant
that he trusted me enough
to show me the Beretta,
that we hung out at McDonald's,
that he texted me daily—
usually it was nothing important,
but sometimes
what he wrote
felt storm-cloud dark.

I thought of how many months
I'd wasted slugging away
at computer games and trying
to crack the code my father used
to filter out Internet porn.

I thought of how Sue
had a new song for me now,
one that rhymed
fool
with
tool
.

I thought of how Aaron had run
Blake's latest new pair
of gym clothes up the school flagpole.

I thought of the tough-guy attitude
I wished I'd had but knew—
just
knew
—that I didn't.

I thought of how long
I'd longed to see that gun,
and how it was the key
to a door still shut before me.

I said,
Nothing
.

was
fired, let
go one day.
“Disciplinary
reasons.” Just
given two weeks'
notice, which drove
my dad batty, since this
year's budget, already so
far in the red, wouldn't allow
a replacement until next year. The
workload, though, wouldn't let up, which
meant he had even more to do himself. He
didn't complain. He didn't punch locker doors.
He just did what he had to do. Silently. Reluctantly.
And so I remained Blake's only friend. Silently. Happily.
Wishing my father—for one damn second—would be proud of me.

The old lot
where the Winn-Dixie
once stood
was perfect.

It wasn't yet dusk,
but the clouds
made it seem so.

Not two miles from
Fairmont Heights,
where I lived,
we lined Coke cans
on the old metal
guardrail, gouged
and bent from
so many run-ins
with mishandled carts.

Ammo clinked
in his pocket
like nails spilling
down stairs.

He said it'd be fun.
He aimed and those cans
danced. Some exploded.

Sometimes he missed,
and the ground way
back against the hill
ruptured as if a ghost
were slamming a fist
into the hard earth.

A crow lazed
overhead toward
a dead streetlight.
Blake aimed
and yelled,
POW!
POW! KA-BLAM!

He didn't shoot,
though. He didn't
actually fire
at the bird, which
eventually vanished
into the cluster
of shadows by the dump.

When he offered me a try
with the gun, I held it,
thinking about everything
and nothing all at once.

Without firing,
I gave it back,
my breath held tight
in my chest.

He reloaded.
I sat and watched,
afraid to get up,
as if I might
slide and crack
my skull open
on some imperceptible ice,
even though it was
only mid-November
here in Florida.

Was it wrong
to squeeze my eyes shut
and think about it
all night, its dark shine,
its potent, peculiar bulk?

What would Dr. Zigler say?
I wondered that night,
then decided I didn't
give a damn.