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Authors: Chris Lynch

Little Blue Lies (6 page)

BOOK: Little Blue Lies
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“I'm not moping. I'm relaxing.”

“You'll get hairy hands,” he says, really loudly. It has always been a defining characteristic of Malcolm's that he seems to believe there is a dedicated line of communication between himself and whomever he is communicating with, and the world at large cannot hear.

“Thanks anyway, Malcolm.”

“Come on,” he yells. “I have two rackets here and a full can of balls. Which is more than you can say.”

I go to my window, kneel down, and press my forehead against the screen. “It's Sunday, for God's sake.”

“So? Is your religion anti-tennis?”

“Why are you here?”

“Tennis,” he says, holding up the equipment to prove it. “Like I told you.”

And Malcolm is a man of truth. He says precisely what he means, usually at great volume, and often even when you wish he would be less straightforward.

“Right,” I say, “but why now? I haven't seen you in ages.”

“That's because I didn't know you got dumped. Sorry about that, by the way.”

“Thanks. Who told you?”

“Your dad.”

Grrr.

“Thanks, Dad!” I call out.

“Your mother put me up to it,” he calls back. From the garage. Waxing his car is a sacred.

“Thanks, Mom!” I call out.

“You don't have to yell,” Malcolm says, pointing at the floor below with a racket held like a machine gun. “She's right there at the window.”

I hear a
Shush
so loud, it makes the rosebushes in the garden rustle.

“Fine,” I say. “If everybody wants me to play tennis, I'll play tennis.”

I am just pushing away from my window when I see Malcolm nod repeatedly and grin toward that downstairs window, and my mother loud-whispers, “Yes!”

Have I gotten this pathetic?

“In a word, yes,” Malcolm says as we head down the street
toward the public courts. We could play at Dad's club, but the local courts are closer, quieter, and not infested with little rocket-propelled-snots who've been taking lessons since they were two and stare up at their own radar-gun readings for twenty seconds every time they serve an ace. Yes, radar guns.

“It was a rhetorical question, Malcolm. The kind that not only does not demand an answer but, if you are a good friend, doesn't even suggest one.”

“Or, to look at it another way, if you're a really, really good friend, and honest, you are duty-bound to provide one.”

“Okay, so if you are that level of friend, how did you let me
get
this pathetic?”

“Easy. You dumped me.”

“What? I never dumped you. Anyway, that doesn't even make sense. Guys don't dump each other. They just . . . are, or not.”

“No, you dumped me, Hamlet. You dumped all sub-Junie life-forms once you guys connected. And now that you are dumped, with me being me and nature abhorring a vacuum, I am attempting to fill the probably unfillable space that was occupied by the exquisite Junie Blue. By the way, for the record, you did very well for yourself there, while it lasted. Even though I still don't appreciate being dumped.”

“You were not—”

“If a guy has to be dumped for somebody, it's almost an
honor to be dumped for the likes of the lovely Ms. Blue.”

It's kind of a nice thing for him to say. It kind of hurts to be reminded.

“Well, thanks. I guess.”

“Can I ask her out?”

“Sure,” I say brightly. “Can I kill you?”

“Oh, I see. A skill you picked up hanging around the Blue household?”

“What, Ronny? He's no killer.”

“No, he's not. He's also not such a bad guy, actually.”

“He's not . . . Compared to what? And where did you come up with that?”

We have arrived at the courts, and as I figured, they are all ours. They are only a couple of blocks from the beach, and are cracked asphalt. But I feel like I know every crack, and so it's almost a plus.

“I played tennis with him once,” Malcolm says as he slips his racket out of its case and flips me the other one. He saunters to his end of the court as if he has just said nothing particularly interesting.

I stand, staring at him, even though I know, intellectually, I should be walking to the other end of the court. But, really.

“You played tennis, with Ronny frickin' Blue.”

He has opened the can of balls, two-toned yellow and green. He bounces one, then another several times, hard, testing them out.
He throws one down to where I'm supposed to be, puts one into his pocket, then bounces the other one intensely.

“Yeah,” he says, addressing the ball. “It's tennis. I'll play with anybody.”

I walk to my end of the court, not looking at him but still talking to him. “You are going to tell me the rest of this story, are you not?”

“Excellent idea,” he says when we're faced up to each other like real tennis players. “We'll play for info bits. Like points. Every time you score, I gotta give you a detail.”

We never even keep score. We just hit back and forth, and it's fun, and it's exhausting. Great sweaty exercise, and soothingly simple.

“And when you score?” I say wearily.

“Umm, let's see. Okay, how's this? We'll keep score like a regular tennis game, fifteen, thirty, forty, game. Only we'll use letters.
J
,
U
,
N
,
E
, and when I win, you have to step aside and let me ask her out. Deal?”

“Well, hey, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But you should also consider these other two options. I could beat you to death with a tennis racket. Or we could just hit back and forth for a while and you can talk or shut up however much you like.”

He waves his racket like a surrender, holds the ball up, preparing to serve.

“I'll take option three there,” he says as he launches a serve my way.

We are good at this. I had almost forgotten how good we are at this. Not tennis per se, although I'm not bad at it and Malcolm is well above average. But the tennis talk, tennis tit for tat that always evolved from one of these sessions and caught us up on things no matter how out of touch we'd been.

“Your serve is still sharp,” I say right after smacking one into the net.

“I told you,” he says, raising another ball, “I still play all the time.”
Thwack
.

“Right”—
thwack
—“with Ronny Blue.”

“Among others.”
Thwack
.

We rally for quite a while now, and this is when I like it best and it reminds me of what I have missed without realizing I missed it. We hit stride, and the rhythm of our baseline returns is musical and soothing and exciting all at once. He's using his superior skill to make sure I get balls I can return cleanly, and I return the favor by returning them.

I had missed a lot of life, I think, while I was lost in June. Maybe now I will start getting it back.

Though I'd just as soon not.

“So, Mal, you gonna tell me about the Ronny Rat connection or continue to jerk me around?”

“I'd really prefer to jerk you around for a while more, if you don't mind.”

“I don't mind,” I say. And I don't. Because for a guy who's jerking another guy around, he doesn't seem to be enjoying it all that much. And because the resulting wordlessness is making our scuffling, thwacking tennis sounds all the richer. Malcolm and my parents and whoever else was involved in arranging this were right. This is a kind of tonic for me.

After a rally of about fifty consecutive shots each, I put another one into the net. As I retrieve it, I feel talk is once again appropriate, at least the kind of meaningless chatter that used to be the fuel of these breezy warm long afternoons. “Did you hear that One Who Knows won the lottery. Again,” I say.

“That's the rumor,” he says.

“Rumor? Malcolm, don't you know that with One Who Knows there are no rumors? Have you ever heard a rumor about that guy that turned out not to be true?”

I am standing at the net now, like I've come up for a volley, and I can see an unexpected seriousness on his face.

“I suppose,” he says enigmatically. “I hope not. Maybe not.”

I stare at him. He shrugs. I go back to my baseline.

I serve. Into the net. I serve. Long, but returnable. We rally again. Then he does some blurting among the hitting.

“I asked her out.”

“What?”

We keep hitting, keep talking.

“I asked her out.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

We start hitting harder.

“And?”

“She said okay.”

I hit one really hard. Over the twelve-foot fence and everything. Malcolm starts to retrieve it.

“Don't!” I shout. “Get back there. Use the other ball.”

He serves. We rally.

“So?” I say.

“So I went over to her house. That's when I met Ronny. Started talking about tennis. Turns out he's a keen tennis player and—”

“I don't care about you and Ronny and tennis!” I shout, missing one return completely, then picking up a ball and throwing it at Malcolm. Then in a fit of inspiration I throw my racket at him too. It bounces to a landing at his feet.

“You did say you wanted to know—”

“That was before. Nothing else matters now!”

He is walking—very bravely, under the circumstances—toward me at the net with my racket. Even more bravely, he is grinning at me.

“Malcolm,” I say in the kind of supercalm voice that only ever seems to come out of people going criminally insane, “there are very few matters in life that are genuinely life-or-death, but explaining that smirk to me right now is surely one of them.”

“Dammit, boy, if your love-puppy thing isn't a sight to behold,” he says, handing my racket across as either a peace offering or suicide.

“Which makes you twice as evil for trying to tear it up.”

“First, I wasn't tearing anything up, since you were already split. Second, I had no idea your precious love was quite as spectacularly pathetic as this. Third, the joke was on me all along, as it turned out she agreed to see me just to get updates on you. Which I didn't even have, so I guess the joke was on her as well. And I suppose, from the cross-eyed mental on your face right now, the joke was on you, too, although you appear not to see the funny.”

I somehow
missed
Malcolm's company?

“So, Mal, if you already asked Junie out, and in fact sort of did go out with her, what's with all the asking my permission?”

“Well, I had a guilt attack. And while it all ended innocently enough, and she was clearly still into you, and remember you did dump me and all, I still felt like I needed to sort of make good. You know, like when a guy puts an extension on his house without getting permits, then applies for them retroactively so
that he doesn't get into any trouble. This is me retroactively eliminating any trouble. So, that's that, then. Want to go to a movie tonight or hit the amusement park for old times' sake?”

I feel like I'm already at the amusement park, old times or not. Head is rattling, stomach swirling like I'm on the Tilt-a-Whirl for the first time again.

I find myself staring at the tennis racket in my hands, turning it over and over.

“I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to hit you now,” I say.

“I don't think you are,” he says.

“Maybe later, then. You're confusing me so much right now that I have to reserve the right to come to my senses and clock you one later.”

“Of course, of course,” he says, then reaches across the net and slaps me on the neck. He leaves his hand there and squeezes. “You two are awfully cute. Weird as shit, as far as couples go. But damn cute. Why'd you break up, anyway?”

“I wish I knew. From the sound of it you probably know more about it than I do. What did she say, anyway?”

“Are we done playing?” he asks.

Knowing how hard it can be to get a focused story out of Malcolm when he is not swinging a racket, I push him in the direction of his own baseline.

“Serve,” I say. And I know he knows I mean more than a fuzzy yellow ball.

Not that there were a million details to be learned from the great date, but what was there was enough to put a little lift in my heart, and to prompt me to have him repeat a couple of choice moments three times.

“Sounds like she likes me better now than when we were together,” I say.

“Yeah,” he responds with a small chuckle. “I'd say you guys are in great shape.”

“What am I going to do, Mal?” I ask. I'm sitting cross-legged at the net, looking up at him as he does a decent job of juggling two tennis balls with one hand.

“That's a very good question, O. Are you not still planning to go into your dad's business?”

I was never planning on going into my dad's business, because I was never
planning
on going into anything at all. I've been short of anything one might call direction during the whole period when my peers and classmates have been finding their callings one by one. College, military, trades, crime, it seemed like everybody I knew had it figured; good, bad, but not a single one indifferent. Except me.

“I was never planning on going into Dad's business, Mal. And anyway I wasn't even asking about that. I meant about—”

“College?”

Malcolm is going to college. He never had any doubt.

“I meant Junie, man.”

“Oh, she's planning to go to college. But she's taking a year off first. To work and save some money. She wants to go away. Far, far away, like multiple state lines. Not me, though. Plenty of fine schools within laundry and pot roast distance of home, is how I've always seen it.”

“Is it juggling, Malcolm, that does this to your brain? Because you're telling me a whole load of stuff, stuff that I already know, stuff that you already know I know, and stuff—more important—that I never even asked you about.”

BOOK: Little Blue Lies
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ads

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