Crossing (11 page)

“All right, turn around again. Hands on your head.”

They frisked me again, more deliberately and thoroughly this time. But they found nothing else. After that, there wasn’t much else they could do. In the end, they confiscated the knife, sealing it in an evidence bag, and took down my information. They fingerprinted me, too. My ten prints stared back at me like black eyes beaten down with accusation. Then they let me go, long after everyone else had left.

And so I was
completely
alone when I ran out of school, arms raised above my head as I’d been instructed. Just me. And maybe it was because, after seeing hoards of students running together all day, it was so unusual to see only one person running; but for whatever reason, the cameras broke into a blinding frenzy. Flashlights burst out all around me. Maybe they just thought,
What’s with this Asian kid?
and decided to snap a few shots. Maybe they thought I was the killer making a break for it. Whatever the case, let me tell you, it felt truly magnificent to run out there all alone like some fugitive escapee, eyes wide like the proverbial deer in the headlights, almost peeing in my pants with fear, with all those cameras flashing away with renewed vigor. Just terrific. At least I didn’t trip.

Naomi called me later that night. I told her everything was fine. No, the knife didn’t belong to me. And no, I had no idea how it ended up in my backpack. I really didn’t want to talk about it. I could tell she was holding back, that she wanted to be angry at me for the way I’d been so silent back in the classroom. It always infuriated her, how I’d just retreat into my shell. We didn’t talk long, just enough for us both to realize that we’d fallen so out of touch. I sensed there was more that she really wanted to talk about.

The house was especially quiet that night. My mother wouldn’t be home for at least a couple more hours, and Miss Durgenhoff was apparently asleep already. I climbed the staircase and sat down on my bed.

It was then that I remembered Jan Blair’s note. It was tucked deep into my pocket, and I dug it out, moist and soft now, the ink diluted and wilted. Her handwriting was scratchy and razor-thin.

Come meet me at the my home. after midnite. cause I want to tell you sumthing. About our secret.

I crumpled the note into a ball. Then I reopened it and read it again. What Naomi had also read. Alone in my room, secluded from the rest of the world, even there I cringed in abject horror and embarrassment.

I almost didn’t go. I practiced some of my songs, but it was a distracted, halfhearted hour of practice. I turned in early, around ten thirty, hoping that I’d fall quickly into a sound sleep. But instead I tossed and turned and tossed and turned until I found myself tossing my bike off its stand and turning around Fexter Street, towards Stillgate Street, over the bridge, and down a dirt road leading into the woods. Jan lived somewhere in there. An abandoned trailer, according to rumor. Nobody really knew.

It was further into the woods than I’d thought it would be. When it became too dark to navigate, I propped up my bike on its kickstand. With no light to guide me now, I walked tentatively forwards, farther into the darkness.

And just like that, I broke into a clearing. She didn’t live in a trailer home, but she might as well have. A shack-like house sat in the clearing surrounded by debris; an acidic aroma hung about like a damp cloth.

Crouching low, I slunk along the tree line, my eyes trained on the shack. Even the moonlight seemed to want to shy away from this canker sore. I edged closer. No sign of life from within the house. The fetid aroma grew more pungent by the second.

Taking a deep breath, I stepped flush into the sickly moonlight, into the weedy clearing. My boots sank sickeningly into the ground as I scurried across it and onto the rickety porch. A bench cross-hatched with cracks was keeled over like a drunk. I stood outside the front door, listening. Not a sound.

Perhaps I’d been all wrong about this, misinterpreted what Jan Blair had written. Or perhaps I wasn’t even at her residence but the home of a lunatic hobo. I inched my way to the window and peered in. A filthy sheet hung against the window, giving away nothing of what lay within. I made my way back to the door. A second later, I turned to leave but then found myself nudging the door with my finger. The door, light as a leaf, creaked open. I stared into the interior darkness, moonlight nudging in.

Even in the cold of night, the inside of the shack stank of sweat in all the wrong places. A few cans of fish lay opened and discarded on a table, a splattering of utensils around them. A furry creature sat on the table, astride one of the opened cans, licking. A cat. Its eyes gazed at me with a faint glow.

I stood very still. From somewhere towards the back of the room came the slight
puff
of a snore pushed between blubbery lips. Then a wheezy intake of breath, a violin played out of tune. Judging from the volume of the snore, the sleeper had to be a man. And a heavyset one, at that, probably with globs of pale flesh bulging out of his pajamas.

And then there was the gut-wrenching smell. Nauseating. It was high time to leave.

I eased the door shut. Turned around.

A figure of someone standing in the moonlight, a ghostly sentinel. Staring at me.

My throat filled up with a silent scream.

“You finally came,” she said.

“Damn it!” I hissed, my heart hammering inside.

“I gave up on you. Thought you’d quit on me.” She spoke loudly, as if she were in broad daylight walking down Main Street on a Sunday afternoon.

“Did you have to spook me like that?”

“I was here the whole time. You’re blind as a bat.” Her tone was berating.

“Shh! Someone’s sleeping in there.” I pointed with my finger.

She shook her head. “Don’t worry about him. He could sleep through an earthquake.”

“Is that your dad?”

She nodded, a certain fear in her eyes.

I stepped off the porch, away from the stench of the house, stumbled out to the middle of the yard, and lifted my face to the moonlight with all the relish of a pale sunbather on the first warm day of summer. The air out there, which only five minutes ago seemed disgusting, I now found as fresh and crisp as Denver mountain air.

“What the hell am I doing here?” I whispered. “What is it that you wanted to show me?”

“Didn’t say I wanted to show you anything.”

“You did. You wrote that you had something to show me.”

“No. I said I have something to
tell
you.”

I looked at her. In the pale moonlight, she stood like a scarecrow in a field of discarded detritus, snipped of strength and muscle tone, a sallow stick figure. Only her lips had color. As she walked over to me, I noticed, to my horror, that she was wearing some bright red lipstick. But she’d overstepped the parameters of her lips and given them a bloated, swollen look as if she’d just been sucker-punched on the mouth. She wanted to look pretty for me.

“Look at this place,” I said. “How can you live here?”

“It ain’t half bad,” she said. “I already cleaned it up some ’fore you got here.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Piles of trash lay strewn about, no doubt home to all kinds of varmints and ticks. The air was redolent with decomposition.

“Why did you ask me to come here?” I asked.

“You’re the one with the bike,” she explained. “I ain’t walkin’ if I don’t have to.”

“But why not at school? Why—?”

“Because you ignore me at school. As if I ain’t even there. Won’t even look at me.”

“That’s because we have nothing to talk about.”

“We have what we know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t need to be so uptight about it. You know,” she said, looking directly at me. Her eyes dropped down, pausing fleetingly at my lips before falling away to the ground. “That.”

I diverted my eyes downwards. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumbled.

She looked at me incredulously. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Our secret.”

I shuffled my feet. “Yeah, well, what about it?”

She smiled to herself and waggled her eyebrows at me. “Why don’t we sit down a little?” she suggested. “So we can talk.” A flirtatious smirk embroidered itself onto her lips.

“Listen to me,” I said. “Just tell me what you know.”

“And I will. But let’s sit first.” She reached for my arm as if to lead me.

“Tell me now!” I hissed at her, slashing my arm away.

“You drag me out here in the middle of the night, and all you want to do is just
tell
me something?” I brushed at the sleeve where her hand had briefly touched. “Tell me now, or I’m leaving! I have no time for your games.”

“Why don’t we sit? Why don’t we, like, do what we did on the stage? Why don’t we just sit?” Her face contorted into a plea. Then her hand clutched my coat sleeve; she suddenly flopped down, pulling me down with her.

We landed hard on some planks of rotten wood. My left elbow took the brunt of the fall; a jolt of electricity shot up my arm.

She continued to speak, hurriedly, as if she knew she only had a few seconds before I collected myself. “I thought we could continue what we started. I thought we stopped when we could have, you know, continued and stuff.” She edged herself closer to me.

And despite myself, I felt my heart begin to tremor. I hated myself for feeling this way, but no girl had ever liked me before in my life. Ever. I tried to stay angry with Jan, but a different kind of passion began to arouse itself in me. There was a little careless freckle in the soft indent of her neck. Inexplicably, I suddenly found myself wanting to kiss it.

She placed her hand on mine; I pulled my hand away. “Stop it,” I hissed. “Just stop it.”

A geyser of hurt exploded in her eyes. She shrank from me, retreating back into the light. A world of rejection was in her wobbling lips.

Then, feline-like, she pounced on me. At first I thought she was attacking me, and I tried to find her wrists to thwart her from clawing me. She landed on top of me, pushing me down onto my back. It was then I understood her true intent. Her lips, rimmed with hard determination, found mine. And with her lipstick on, it was like kissing a greasy, cold keyboard. She made absurd smacking noises. I felt her oily, pimpled forehead against mine, as greasy as her overly rouged lips.

“Stop it!” I yelled. “Get off me
now
!”

And just like that, she froze.

Slowly she rose and backed off, growing smaller in the darkness. Diminishing. I panted hard, panicked. Brushing my legs and arms, I picked myself up.

“Don’t you like me?” she asked me. Her voice came out kind of spry. “When we kissed, I thought—I mean, the way you kissed me back, I thought you liked me. I thought that was our secret.”

I cringed. I thought to tell her the truth, to tell her that there was nothing in her personality that enthralled me, nor much in her looks either. That when I had kissed her back, I’d simply been caught up in the throes of something that had taken me by complete surprise. That when I pictured the image of the two of us walking around the school hallways hand-in-hand or sitting at the movie theater together, all I could see was one word:
ludicrous
.

I turned on my heel and started walking. “I’m leaving.” I’d gotten no more than ten paces when she said, “Why don’t you give me a chance?”

I kept on walking to my bike.

“All I want is to get out of this hellhole. Do you think I like it? Do you think I like being hated by everyone?”

I turned around. “Look, I’m leaving.”

“I’m just like you, you know.”

“You’re
nothing
like me,” I spat.

She nodded. “You and me, we’re just the same. Nobody pays attention to us. People take one look at us and dismiss us. Like nothing. Like we’re nothing.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“You’re a loner, Kris.”

“Like I said: speak for yourself. I’ve got friends. I’ve got Naomi.”

“And I’ve got my dad. I tell him everything. He knows everything that goes on. He knows all the kids I hate at school. He knows about you. So he’s a little wrecked in his head, especially without his medication, but I’ve got him. So you’ve got Naomi. So what? We’re still nobodies.”

“Like. I. Said. Speak. For. Yourself. Am. I. Speaking. Slowly. Enough. For. You?”

“I left a gift for you today,” she said, her voice pleading.

“I left it for you in your backpack.”

Her declaration, so simple and direct, caught me off guard. “The knife?” I hissed. “You’re the one who put the knife in my bag?”

“Calm down. I did it as a gift. For you. Something you really need. You told me how you were chased the other day, so I thought you should carry this. For your protection.”

“Do you know how stupid…don’t you know the trouble you’ve gotten me into because—?”

“It’s the only thing I could think of!” she shouted back. “I don’t have money, and it was lying in the kitchen, so I took it, OK? When my dad wasn’t looking. And gave it to you. I thought you’d like it.”

I flung my arms into the air, my insides burning.

“Look, I’m sorry, OK? I just meant well. I thought you’d like it.”

I turned and began storming away.

“Where are you going?” she asked. “Don’t ever give me anything again. Don’t ever even talk to me again.

Don’t even think about me. Don’t
anything
me.”

“Please, Kris,” she implored, “stay for a bit. Don’t go. I won’t do nothin’. We don’t have to kiss or nothin’, you know, we can just, like, be here together. It doesn’t—”

I ignored her and strode faster towards my bike.

“Kris!” she shouted after me.

I turned; her face was lit by the silvery moonlight, the squalor of her home strewn around her. Then the light subsided: she dissolved into her surroundings. And she spoke with a wavering voice that a convict might use when pleading with the executioner. “I think I like you.”